by Steven Poore
Jedrell had countered her charge by attacking with the land itself.
“Cassia!” Rais shouted. He sounded more distant, and for a moment she feared she had outpaced him and left herself stranded, alone, but when she looked around he was there, struggling to control his own mount while he stabbed desperately at the swirling mist. “This is madness, Cassia!”
And it was.
Guhl’s Company was being savaged by the elements: by the mist, by the fire that leaped across the ground, and by the very earth as the High King ripped it up and flung at them. Stones hammered at the soldiers and the shieldmen. Already there were several more empty saddles, and few of the scouts were unmarked.
“We go on!” Cassia shouted back. She emphasised the point with her torch. The flame still burned with a blue aura. “We have to!”
Craw passed over again. More heat – more flames. The earth shuddered, and her horse ducked its head and tried to veer away.
A stone struck Rais’s blade. He flinched back. “Great hells!”
“He knows!” Cassia shouted. She could barely hear her own voice over the drums in her head. “He’s desperate to turn us back!”
“Then he is close to success!” Rais took no trouble to hide his fear.
She urged her horse forward once again, forcing the prince to follow her. The shieldmen marched ahead of her now, their ranks as broken as the ground they crossed. Of the town of Karakhel there was no sign. Craw and Guhl’s Company had driven its remains back into the land.
“And so are we, Rais.”
But as the ranks of shieldmen emerged onto flatter ground Cassia saw they had not beaten back the High King without losses of their own.
Like the vandalised shrine she had encountered far back in Hellea, the shieldmen marched with cracks and chips across their bodies. Multiple impacts had gouged slashes all over the bodies; some of the more intricate details had been smashed beyond redemption. Crests were missing, and several stone blades had been snapped halfway along their length. One figure had lost its nose, and another held its weapon in a hand that now numbered only two fingers alongside the thumb. As she watched a lump of dark slate whirled out of the mist and struck one of the leading shieldmen directly on the shoulder. The soldier staggered, momentarily out of step with its fellows, and then a larger rock hit its knee. The shieldman’s unstable weight cracked the joint and it toppled silently to one side. It did not even reach out to soften the fall.
Cassia had already known the shieldmen were not invulnerable, but she had pushed the thought aside, unwilling to deal with the idea that they might fail. Surely Malessar would not have designed them to fall. But the thickest armour had its faults, she realised now. The shieldmen were made of the mountains, but the mountains had been here first.
She steered her horse past the fallen shieldman. It still lived. No, she corrected herself, it still moved. Unable to stand, it crawled forward instead, leaving the lower half of its leg behind. As damaged as it was, it would crawl on until its task was completed. Or until it was ground into fragments.
And it would not care which end came first.
“Forward!” she shouted, charging her voice with a certainty she did not feel. “Forward for the North!”
Flames tore across the sky, and rippled over the ground. Mists eddied, coalesced, boiled and vanished. Her soldiers – stone and flesh alike – were uncertain silhouettes, following the intense blue flare of her torch. Barely visible limbs slapped her, pummelled her, tried to pull the torch from her hand and Cassia herself from her saddle. She hacked at the air just as Rais did, sensing the High King’s forces gathering first in one direction and then another.
There was a desperation behind this defence, she was sure. The High King was not so free of his prison that he could rely on victory. That meant, Cassia told herself, over-riding the sound of the drums as much as she could, that there was still a chance. She could do this. She could win.
Her head rang as a clod of earth smacked into her temple. Her vision ringed in red, she tasted blood and earth. Cassia squeezed her eyes closed tight, but that did not help. Blinded, she could not compensate for the movements of her horse, and when it swung sharply to the right Cassia toppled to the left.
She tucked her head down as best she could, but with both hands occupied she could not stop her fall. She landed hard, her breath punched from her, and both sword and torch were jarred from her hands as she rolled across the ground.
The torch – the sorcery –
She cast about frantically while she blinked away the dirt and tears. It had to be nearby. She couldn’t let the flame go out. The sorcery had to protect them –
Cassia flinched as she felt something thud into the ground just before her, and then there was the sensation of weight passing close overhead. Earth spattered her hair and back.
A horse –
She stretched, touched something hard, warm – leather. A hilt. Her eyes now half-open, Cassia clawed up onto her hands and knees and looked for the blue flame. It should have stood out, but she found the torch only by accident, sweeping one hand back onto it and scalding her palm.
She sent a quick prayer of thanks to Ceresel. It was still alight, though it guttered fitfully upon the ground. Cassia knew she could not spare the time, but she forced herself to slow down and coax the flame back into full life. A strip from her fox-fur sufficed to feed it back into light and she exhaled in shattered relief. Now, the others . . .
As she stumbled to her feet she realised she had been left behind. Even the last ranks of shieldmen were only blurs in the distance. All around her the earth was churned and broken, strewn with pieces of stone, slate and metal – and flesh too. Scouts and horses alike lay dead or gravely wounded. The men shouted and gasped, their voices lost under the screams of their fallen, thrashing mounts. Of the scouts who had left the fortress with her, perhaps half had already fallen to the mists.
And they were not alone in their agonies. Stone fingers clawed into the earth, limbs searching for the torsos to which they had belonged. One figure, decapitated entirely, marched away alone into the depths of Caenthell, its spear held unwaveringly before it. For an instant Cassia thought of calling out to it, to turn it around, but then she looked away and let it go.
She had envisioned a heroic end to this struggle. Instead it seemed it would end here, in mud and mist, and alone.
The mists were closing in on her. She raised her torch in defiance.
“Cassia! Here!”
She turned, shocked and relieved in equal measures. Hetch – Hetch, of all people! – galloped towards her, barely clinging to the saddle himself, leading her own mount by the reins. Scratched and dirtied just as she was, he appeared once more as the boy she remembered, almost laughing as events flew out of control around him.
“We thought we had lost you!” Hetch plucked a spear from over his shoulder, deftly reversed the grip and jabbed into the air. Cassia could not tell what lurked there, or whether the mists had thickened sufficiently for him to see a target. Instead she forced herself to overcome her surprise and handed the torch to him momentarily to haul herself back into the saddle. The horse was skittish beneath her, ready to bolt, and she gripped the reins tight with one hand once she had taken the torch back. This time, she thought, she would have to leave her weapons sheathed.
“You nearly did,” she replied. “Thank you, Hetch.”
He shrugged and looked away. “I don’t want to die alone.”
Cassia hesitated. “You won’t,” she said. “Come on. Where’s Rais?”
Hetch’s gaze slid from the battlefield where Karakhel had once stood. “This way.”
The High King was regathering his forces. There could be no other explanation for the lull. Caenthell was coated in a haze, rather than the full fog of unquiet spirits. She would have called it a summer haze had there been any chance of sunlight, but she could think of no other way to describe it.
The battle at Karakhel must have forced Jedrell
to expend far more energy than he had to give – after all, the High King was still in the process of emerging from behind the curse wards. He was not yet truly free. That gave her an opportunity she could not afford to waste.
Lissus wanted to pause: to catch breath, to count heads, to reorganise. Despite her own exhaustion and the way her head and spine ached with every step the horse took, Cassia had to refuse him. Time was not on their side. The only concession she could make was to slow the pace of their march.
And the High King himself was not their only consideration. Cassia found herself glancing at the sorcerous flame of the torch more and more often, as though to make certain it had not been extinguished. She prayed there was enough fuel at the fortress to keep the fire there burning; she prayed her grandfather and the remaining shieldmen were strong enough to hold the place against any assault Jedrell might make there. And she prayed that the sudden lull in the fighting here did not mean the mists were pressing in on the fortress to destroy it once and for all.
The odd collection of scouts and retired legionaries that had become Guhl’s Company now numbered less than a score. Another thirty shieldmen, most of them damaged in one way or another, made up the numbers. Part of Cassia’s mind was surprised that so many had survived this far. She focused upon that, rather than on the part she had sealed away at the very back of her thoughts – the part which counted each and every death and marked it on the walls of her soul.
Even Rais was quiet as they marched. He and Hetch rode alongside her, having reached some kind of quiet mutual arrangement. Cassia’s earlier thought came back to nudge at her: neither man was what he had been before. They had both been altered – scarred, perhaps – by their journeys with her. They might even blame her for that, just as she blamed herself for all that had happened.
This was not the sort of place to have such doubts fill her head. The High King’s violence might be held at bay, for now, but Caenthell was still far more cold and unwelcoming than any other land she had seen. Even Karistea, far away across the Antiachas, seemed homely and pleasant by comparison.
This is not a restful place.
Cassia had to stifle a laugh as the phrase rose up through her thoughts. If only the unknown author of that inscription had come here. Then he would have really had something to complain about.
The land sloped upwards again, slowing their pace still further. Only the shieldmen were not affected by the gradient, and their heavily depleted ranks soon outpaced the horses, so that they waded through the eddying haze ahead of the exhausted scouts.
“If there is another attack like that last one, it will be the end of us,” Rais said in low tones. It was the first time any of them had spoken aloud since Cassia denied Lissus his halt.
She nodded. “I know.”
“Look at him.”
Cassia knew who the prince meant. She could hear Arca’s shallow, rattling breath, punctuated ever more frequently by fits of coughing that were surely loud enough to tell the High King exactly where his enemies were. The old man was in worse condition than he had been in Hellea: unfit for any kind of travel, let alone combat. And Ultess, despite his stolid silence, was unhealthily pale, and trying to disguise the fact that he could no longer move his sword-arm. He listed in his saddle, and his horse followed the others, rather than being directed by the reins.
But if there was a point beyond which there was no return, Arca and Guhl’s Company had passed it long ago.
“It was his choice, Rais,” she said softly. “It’s what he needs.”
The prince shook his head. “You can’t say he wanted this. Gods, none of us wanted this.”
“I didn’t say he wanted it.” Cassia offered an apologetic smile as she corrected him. “The gods never give anybody what they want. That would be too dangerous.”
Rais’s lips twisted. It wasn’t quite a smile. “Of course.”
Now the silence had been broken, Cassia realised she did not want it to return. And if Jedrell did indeed know exactly where they were, then there was little sense in remaining quiet.
“So. This is my land.” The light note was not easy to achieve.
“Hardly worth fighting for,” Rais noted. He leaned back and looked up at the hillsides. “I wonder – as Caenthell has been here all this time, why has nobody ever entered before?”
“The curse, plainly,” Hetch said.
“Well yes,” the prince nodded. “But did Malessar intend his wards to keep Jedrell imprisoned within, or to keep others out?”
Hetch frowned. “Would it matter either way?”
“I believe so. I have been thinking on this subject for some time now, since Cassia first induced me to this adventure.”
Cassia snorted. “Induced? You needed no persuasion!”
The prince waved away the correction airily. “The question stands nonetheless. Hellea has enough unpaid mercenary companies for any number of soldiers to have forced their way into the kingdom to hunt for treasure, yet they have not done so. And that puzzles me. What did Malessar tell you about the curse wards, Cassia?”
She thought about the question more soberly. “That they would twist and ruin everything inside them. But Malessar never said the wards could not be breached from outside.”
Rais nodded. “I wonder . . .”
Cassia looked up the slope. They were marching up the main valley, towards where it turned northwards again. At that turn, if she remembered correctly, was the Hamiardin Pass that overlooked the site of the castle.
“Must we discuss such things now?” she asked. “This land has already had the joy and life taken from it.”
To her surprise Hetch agreed. “And if this is our last charge, then I would rather not waste talk on old curses and dead kings.”
There was silence for a long moment as they watched each other. Almost inevitably Rais was the first to speak.
“So, can nobody think of anything at all to say?”
Cassia felt the corners of her mouth twitch into an involuntary smile. Then the fact that they had sat in silence forced its way to the forefront of her mind. In silence, by the gods!
“The drums,” she said. “They’ve stopped.”
26
I don’t understand,” Hetch said. “I can’t hear any drums.”
“I think I would be worried if you did,” Rais said.
Hetch glared at him. He looked as though he wanted to return the insult with interest but was uncertain how far he could carry it. Cassia put herself between them before the feud that had threatened to erupt ever since their first meeting finally came into the open.
“You have heard them,” she said to Hetch. “You told me yourself. The war drums of Caenthell that you heard in Escalia when you met my father again. I have heard them in my head since the curse was broken.”
He turned his gaze back to her. “In your head?”
“All the time. Driving me back here.”
His attention was uncomfortable. Cassia shifted in her saddle and the horse interpreted this as a directive to turn aside.
“I see,” Hetch said at last.
His tone was flat and awkward. Cassia was struck by a sudden fear. Did this mean Hetch had lost his trust in her, and what she did? She exchanged a troubled glance with Rais. The prince wore the mask of polite disinterest that he had perfected in his father’s court, but his eyes were sharp and he ran the fingers of one hand down the hilt of his sword.
“So you were right,” Hetch said. “All along, you were right.”
“And I wish I was not,” Cassia said quietly.
Arca coughed from outside their small circle. “Lissus wants you.”
Glad for the distraction, Cassia turned from them all and looked for the scouts’ captain. Lissus had stationed himself on a small hillock to one side of what might once have been a road. Against the half-visible backdrop of the hillsides that surrounded them, he looked like a ghost himself.
“No wonder the dragons follow you,” Hetch said.
> Cassia felt Rais’s stare on the back of her neck. She did not bother to correct Hetch. There seemed to be little point. Instead she urged her mount into a trot and crossed to join Lissus, aware that the others followed her at a discreet distance.
Drums in her head. She’d heard the tone of Hetch’s voice; there was no mistaking that. She might as well have said she heard voices. That the gods themselves sang lullabies to her every night. Even though he had heard the drums himself as Jedrell cast off his chains and sent his power out from the mountains, Hetch still had trouble believing Cassia was telling the truth about her own experiences.
No, she thought suddenly, as though the sun had shifted to light a statue from a different angle. No, Hetch was his father’s son: even if he did believe what she said, he actually envied her for it. He would say that the Almouls should have been Heirs to the North – that for all the time, effort and money Rann and his sons had expended to attain their positions of influence in the North, they were more deserving of the title than she was. Cassia had not only usurped their rightful place in the order of things, but shown the Almouls up as cowards into the bargain.
Small wonder Hetch had come with her into Caenthell. If Tarves himself had not forced him to make the journey – and Cassia did not discount that – then he would have come anyway, if only to prove to himself that she was not better than him.
Cassia glanced back over her shoulder. Yes, Rais and Hetch still rode side by side, but the more she regarded them the more she realised that whatever accommodation they had reached was weighted heavily in the prince’s favour. Rais might have joked about conquering the North, but he had no interest in the land. Nor did he care – despite the accusation she had thrown at him so long ago now – about whether or not she was the true Heir to the North.
It was a touch late for these sorts of revelations, she told herself.
“There’s a pass of some kind up on the left,” Lissus said as she approached. He pointed with the tip of his sword and Cassia tried to follow the contours of the mountains to the spot he had found. “Now go to the right by two hands and look further down.”