by Steven Poore
She did as he instructed, frowning as she struggled to make out details in the greyed-out landscape. The mists had risen again, drifting upwards to obscure the tumbled fields, but the heights of the mountains that surrounded Caenthell on all sides still reached upwards into the heavy, unnatural clouds.
For a moment she was not certain what she saw, but then her memory asserted itself – no, not memory; nightmares – and she realised what it was.
The castle of the High Kings of Caenthell had been elevated from the floor of the valley by a great hill, so that it stood above all but the mountains themselves. It would have been visible even from the road that came through the Hamiardin Pass. Cassia shuddered as she remembered her vision of Jedrell and Malessar looking down upon the kingdom from there. But the hill had been shattered along with the castle. To Cassia it looked just like the torn slopes of Lyriss, where Feyenn and Alcibaber had been awakened, and despite the distance that still remained she could plainly see how the castle and the earth had combined in a single hellish wreck.
The ruined castle dominated the ground to the extent that it seemed to be drawing sustenance from the rest of the kingdom, the land around the hill appearing to have less solidity than the gutted foundations and the tumbled stones.
“Our destination,” Rais said quietly. “Hardly a welcoming sight.”
Off to the other side of her, Arca coughed hard. “Just as well I can’t see the damned thing then, boy. Where’s the devils we have to fight?”
“You’re too eager to die,” Ultess muttered. “It’s bad luck.”
“If I had any good luck, I’d have died years back,” the old man retorted.
Cassia tightened her grip on the reins and tried hard to ignore them. She wondered how Malessar must have felt when he saw the castle intact for the last time, on the night he arrived to deliver his justice and his curse. Had he come through the kingdom like this, to stand at this spot and measure his target? How different might the world have been if Jedrell and Aliciana had not betrayed him? Would the castle still stand, and would the High Kings still rule the North? Would the Age of Talons have given way to a greater empire of Man?
Where would I be? she wondered. Would I be Malessar’s child instead of Jedrell’s? Would I live at all?
She could still find out. She could have the answers to all those questions and more besides, if she wanted them. She was born to power; it was still hers to command.
“Stop it,” she whispered between her teeth. “You cannot sway me.”
“Cassia?” There was an edge of worry in Rais’s voice.
She waved him back, though the movement was an effort. Her bones felt like lead. The torch was beginning to flicker, she noticed. The fire, grandfather, she thought, hoping that he could somehow hear her. Feed the fire. I need more strength.
Cassia concentrated on the flame. The light burned white into her vision, and she felt tears at the corners of her eyes, but after what must have been a whole age the heart of the torch settled again into a solid blue glow.
She drew a breath. “We have to hurry.”
“Do we even know what we are hunting for?” Ultess asked.
Rais broke in before she could answer. “I think Cassia knows,” he said. “Whether or not she will admit it.”
“It is too still,” Lissus said. “The road to that hill must be a trap. It cannot be anything else.”
Rais glanced across at Cassia and shrugged. It was as if he realised that in her own head Cassia was already fighting her battle against the High King, that everything else would only serve to distract her. “Then we spring it. Pass around all the torches we have and light them from the one Cassia has.”
She was aware of the words, aware of the movement behind and around her, but her attention was firmly held by the hill at the centre of Caenthell. The tomb of the last High King – but not only that . . .
Jedrell, my father . . . and more besides. Am I right, Craw?
The dragon’s voice, when it came, sounded faintly amused. Is that a question?
A rhetorical question.
Then you already know the answer, of course.
Cassia took a moment to order her thoughts. Below her, mists flowed like flood-waters through ditches and ploughed fields, leaving behind nothing that men could use.
Of course.
So, Cassia Cat’s-Paw, what will you do?
Is that a question? she asked humourlessly.
This time the dragon did not reply. Cassia stared up at the clouds and wondered, not for the first time, what Craw looked to gain from her success.
The land around her appeared to have been bathed in light. Cassia looked around and saw that each of her surviving shieldmen had swapped their spears for swords and torches, and now Rais and Hetch were finishing the task of igniting them. She had not even noticed when they had used her own torch to get the chain started.
“Now your High King will have to think twice about trying to attack this column,” Rais called from the far end of the ranks. “If one torch can cut a swathe through the mists, then fifty should see us clear to the castle in no time.”
The implications took only a moment to sink in. “Then we have to start now!”
Hetch was nearer to her. “Why? What is wrong, Cassia?”
“If Rais is correct, and we now have fifty times the power we had before, then surely the demands we are placing on the fuel at Karakhel are also fifty times greater,” Cassia snapped. “And we can only defend ourselves for as long as we have that fuel.”
“Oh sweet gods,” Hetch breathed.
“Quite so,” Cassia said. She raised her voice. “To the castle! Now!”
The shieldmen obeyed instantly, launching into a charge down into the valley. Their human counterparts milled in confusion a few moments longer before they gathered around the figure of the prince, but by then Cassia had already urged her own horse into the final assault.
Rais was correct in one respect, at least. The mists were repelled by the force of the sorcery that Guhl’s Company brought to bear upon them. The shieldmen ploughed through them as the prow of a ship would divide the seas, and the mists splashed back into themselves, flailing with desperation at the horses and the implacable stone soldiers. Like an avalanche, the shieldmen had a momentum of their own, and nothing short of another mountain could possibly halt them.
Rais shouted in delight, whirling his own torch around his head like a festival ribbon. Somewhere to her left Lissus and his remaining men held the flank, pushing the mists even further away from her. And Ultess and Arca were away on her right, grim and silent, the only men who had not selected brands – or if they had, they had lost them already.
The castle drew closer. Each pounding second, every thudding heartbeat – Cassia’s vision was jarred with every impact, but she saw the land clearing before them, rising from the murk, pallid and sapped of all life, and the ruined castle sat above everything else, drawing them all in.
“It’s worked!” Rais shouted at one point. “The damned stuff is retreating!”
Cassia could not spare the words to contradict him. The drums might still be silent, but she had no need of them now. She could feel the awful presence entombed within the hill ahead of her. Gods help her, she could almost see the great eye staring out at her . . .
Ceresel, save us if you can, she prayed. Save us, save them. Save anyone. Please. Please . . .
Perhaps she had already died. Perhaps this interminable and hellish ride was the last journey to the gods. Perhaps the last crossing was not over a river, or through the roots of the earth, or even a flight on gossamer wings to the world behind the shroud of the skies. Should she rush to her own judgement? Would it hurt, truly, to slow down and take her time?
“I told you to get out of my head,” Cassia growled between shallow breaths. “Get out and stay out.”
The insidious presence dissipated again.
She looked up at her torch. The flame was still strong, but was that a flick
er at the blue heart of it? How long could Attis keep the sorcery flowing from Malessar’s stored reserves of energy at the fortress?
“Cassia!”
She blinked. Hetch pointed to one side of the castle, where the sorcerous mists had gathered in one place, twisting in the air and solidifying like . . . like a weapon, she thought suddenly. The High King had tired of attempting to turn her aside. Now it seemed he would simply smash Guhl’s Company into the ground with some unnatural hammer. Cassia could not tear her gaze away from it as it formed, rising up to block out part of the sky.
“Scatter!” Rais shouted. “Don’t group together, you fools! Scatter!”
Cassia realised that though the scouts could follow those orders, the shieldmen could not: they were not built for such independent thought. She sought out the nearest soldier, noting with relief that it seemed to be one of the few that had designated themselves her personal guard.
“Split into files! Files and quartets! Send – ”
“Cassia!” Hetch screamed.
She looked up. A solid bank of mist swept down towards her like a hammer of the gods. She had no time to avoid it.
A horse and rider came from nowhere to collide with her and drive her aside. Cassia cried out in shock, struggling to keep her balance.
“Go!” Ultess shouted.
And then the mists hammered both him and his mount hard into the ground.
Even if she could have stopped, Cassia knew she could not help him. Her heart thumping with fear, the torch flaming in her hand, she struck out at an angle across the front of the hillside, hoping she was headed away from the High King’s weapon.
Another hammer came down further along the field, skittling a rank of shieldmen and dousing their lights. Cassia felt the impact as a shiver through her bones.
“This is like brushing off ants!” Rais had found her again, paler than she had ever seen him. “Is that all we are to him?”
She reined in with difficulty – the horse had no intention of remaining here, and she could not blame the poor beast. Not when Ultess – Cassia flinched away from both the thought and the darkened ground in that direction. “It’s desperation!”
“So is this!” Rais shouted back.
The hammers landed again, crushing both stone and flesh. But Guhl’s Company no longer rode bunched together: the High King would not be able to brush them all away so easily, not when they were so close to the castle itself. And there was more besides – the wraithlike weapons were only solid to a point. After each attack they faded, or unravelled, just a bit more . . .
“He can’t keep this up!” she told Rais. “We’re almost there!”
“Call on the dragon!” Hetch pleaded. “Burn this evil away!”
Cassia shook her head. “No! No – Hetch, I have to do this myself if I can.”
“And her debt to that bloody beast is large enough already,” Rais put in. “Come on then Cassia. Before your High King manages to flatten any more of us . . .”
She urged her horse up the hill, cutting across the slope to reduce the harshness of the gradient. Behind her she heard Rais shouting to rally the men, but she could not take the time to see how successful his efforts were. Belatedly she realised she would most likely be faster on foot than in the saddle. Rather than agonise over the decision she merely jumped to the ground, stripped away the remaining torches and her weapons, and set her mount free. It might even distract the High King for a moment, and every moment was important now.
Others struggled up the hillside too, torches flickering amongst the scattered groups, and she made her way towards them. Exhaustion weighed her down more than the load she now carried. And when she stared down at the ground so that she could avoid the ankle-breaking holes there, she realised that wisps of mist curled through the dead grasses. They pushed at her legs, attempting to slow her or even trip her up. Cassia swiped at them with her torch, bursting them and driving them back for a moment before they redoubled their efforts.
When someone took her arm, she almost stuck the torch into Rais’s face too. He flinched back with a shout. “All hells, Cassia! Is it not enough that everything else here is trying to kill me?”
She grabbed at his hand rather than waste words on an apology. “Help me – please.”
To his credit he neither asked nor argued. He tightened his grip and pulled her after him, stabbing at the ground to find purchase as he sought a more direct route to the flickering lights of the other survivors.
There were shouts from ahead and further uphill. Cassia thought she could hear Hetch amongst them. “Here! Up here!”
The torches were definitely not as bright as they should have been, Cassia realised as she looked around at the muddied, bloodied and tattered remnants of Guhl’s Company. Eight, maybe ten men; another dozen or so shieldmen. A bare score in total, all with torches that guttered rather than flared.
Rais stared at her, his shoulders heaving as he breathed hard. “The magic – it’s wearing off?”
“Yes,” she said. “It is.”
She had expected it, but it still made her feel as though she had failed already.
“How far?” Arca rasped. Like the rest of them he’d had to abandon his horse to make it this far up the hill. He must have left the last remnants of his life’s energy down there at the foot of the hill as well. If the dead had walked, they would have looked far more lifelike than Arca.
“The top of the hill,” she said. “I can feel it. It’s close.”
Arca shook his head. “Too far.”
When he shifted Cassia saw that one of the shieldmen was holding him upright. His tunic was dark, and blood ran down his leg on that side.
“I can’t leave you here,” she said, knowing already that her argument was lost.
“You have to,” Arca said. “You vowed.”
“This was not any part of my promise to you!”
Arca spat onto the ground. “You promised. Tell our story. Mine ends here.”
And Ultess was already dead, she thought.
“But not alone,” she said, so firmly that even Arca chose not to argue. Cassia picked the three shieldmen closest to the old soldier. “Guard our path. Let nothing past you.”
She turned back to Arca and found that he was actually smiling, despite the crippling pain that tightened his features. “Arca . . .”
“Run, girl.” He shunned her attempt to embrace him. “Beat this bastard. Don’t look back. Go on, run. And don’t worry.”
He shuffled into place between the shieldmen, using his sword as a crutch. “I’ve done this part before.”
The next part of the climb was more dangerous than it had looked from below. The ground here crumbled unexpectedly underfoot, and even the parts where layers of stone had been forced up through the earth were suddenly treacherous. The shieldmen were unsuited to this terrain, Cassia quickly realised: after one had fallen, limbs outstretched and motionless, from a ledge to shatter into pieces on stones below, and a second had triggered a mini-avalanche of earth that mired two others so that they could not break free, she decided there was no further advantage to be gained by their presence with the company.
“We’ll all die,” Hetch said. “Without your shieldmen we’ll just be picked off one by one and thrown off the hillside.”
Cassia shook her head. “If we go any further with them, then we will not reach the castle before the sorcery at Karakhel ceases to flow. And then it won’t matter at all.”
All eyes went to the torches they carried. The flames wavered in strength from moment to moment, sometimes stronger, sometimes so small that they were barely visible. The bond to Karakhel was tenuous. Cassia was no sorcerer; she was merely using the channel Malessar had left behind him. Whatever strength she had, whatever right she might have to draw upon that pool of energy the warlock had maintained, it was not quite enough to achieve what she wanted. All she could hope to do was distract the High King further. But Caenthell’s strength was being slowly pulled back i
nto the mountains – Jedrell knew he was under attack, and he would defend his position with all the resources at his disposal. That meant Havinal and the others might survive a while longer, perhaps, but it also meant her own time was running out far faster than she had first imagined.
It was like the dreams, she thought. The dreams Jedrell had sent to plague her – the visions of Caenthell where she confronted the High King alone. They were coming true, and there was nothing she could do to halt them.
Except to press forward again. Always forward.
“The shieldmen remain here,” she ordered. “And you may too, if you do not wish to come any further.”
A painful hesitation, during which she felt the mists gathering on the slopes below them. Cassia looked at each of the remaining men in turn, and only Hetch turned away.
“I can’t do it,” he said. There was a strain in his voice that Cassia could not interpret.
Rais stepped across to him and held out his hand. “Stand firm,” he said.
Hetch grimaced. “I don’t know if I can even do that.”
“You can,” Cassia told him softly. “You’re an Almoul after all. Heads like stone, the bloody lot of you.”
“Well then,” Rais said, “he is in good company.”
Shedding the weight of the shieldmen allowed them to move much faster. Cassia felt lighter as she scrambled up the ever-increasing gradient of the hillside. Earth and jutting stone gave way to larger solid blocks, some of which had been melted along one side as if by some terrible fire. Sorcery. Malessar.
Caenthell was close. She was almost inside the castle itself.
Fear me, the voice whispered inside her head.
No, she told it. You should fear me.
“Cassia . . .” Rais called out, and she turned.
The five remaining men, the prince included, were spread across the hillside below her. Rais pointed back into the valley. It was no longer visible, flooded by the regathered powers of the High King. Mist curled up in solid limbs – stretching, reaching . . .
Craw. Craw?