The High King's Vengeance

by Steven Poore

I can do no more. The dragon’s voice was faint, muffled, as though it spoke to her from behind a wall. You must . . .

  Craw!

  It did not reply.

  “Cassia – what do we do?”

  Mist rolled downwards from the crest of the hill. From the castle – the foul breath of the High King himself. And the torch she held . . . it was beginning to fail. She could feel Malessar’s sorcery waning.

  More, grandfather, she thought. She prayed he could hear her. I need more. I need it all.

  “Up!” she called out. “One last push!”

  But even as she spoke the mists reared and surged forward: the amorphous mass pouring over the wrecked stones, and the savage limbs that clawed through the air at the hillside, both forces seeking to overcome the last few invaders of the North.

  Cassia swung her torch with both hands. The air hissed and roared as she fought her way, step by step, towards the very top of the hill. Somebody forced their way up to her side and defended her flank, meaning that for brief seconds she could focus on her own position and balance.

  She saw Lissus plucked from the rock on which he stood, mist coiled about his neck. Even as he struggled, his hands grasping futilely at the noose, the mist drew his life from him and his flesh paled and shrunk against his bones.

  And then she could see the very top of the hill. It was indistinct, but it matched every detail she remembered from her visions. The nightmares.

  “It’s there!” she shouted. She reached out for the man at her side.

  Rais.

  He opened his mouth as if to speak, and the mist struck at him, seizing his wrist. His sword dropped from lifeless fingers and another tendril shot out towards him.

  Cassia severed the tendrils with her torch, screaming wordlessly. No. Her mind raced. No. Not Rais as well. Not after I have lost everybody else. I will not allow it!

  Rais dropped to the ground, clutching at his arm. Already the bones of his hand were visible through the cracking parchment of his skin, the muscles underneath dried and dead. “Burning!” he screamed. “Burning!”

  And though the tendrils themselves had been severed, the effects of their foul touch remained. And worse yet – they were spreading. Like a plague, it would devour the prince’s whole body unless . . .

  Cassia did not even think. There was no time to waste with thought. She shouted to the last man of Guhl’s Company, a scout whose eyes were glassy with horror, but he seemed frozen in place. Unable to wait for him, Cassia thrust her torch into the ground and stepped onto Rais’s arm, pinning him to the rock. She unshipped Meredith’s heavy sword, and as she lifted it high over her head she sent a fever-quick prayer to any gods that might still be listening.

  “No, Cassia! Leave me!”

  She brought the sword down with all the strength she could muster, and the blade split the rock itself in two. Rais’s scream tore through her mind. Blood sprayed up, drenched one side of her face and made the hilt of the sword so slippery she barely noticed it slide from her hand.

  Kneeling upon Rais’s chest – his body bucked beneath her as he fought to free himself – she reached for the torch one more, thankful it was still lit, and rammed it hard against the bloody stump.

  Rais thrashed, and the screaming broke his voice into a hoarse gasp, and then he fell limp. Cassia held the torch against him: his blood fed the sorcery so that the torch no longer guttered, and the fire cauterised the wound in turn. To one side, she noted dimly, lay the bleached bones of a severed hand – as fleshless as any that Caenthell’s spirits had fed upon already.

  The smell of burned flesh made her nauseous. Cassia pushed herself away from the prince and stared up at the sky, sucking air into her lungs. The mists moved overhead – slowly, watchfully, no longer attempting to kill her.

  It took a long moment for her to realise what that meant. She clambered gracelessly back to her feet, her hands and clothes sticky with warm blood, her hair matted and falling about her face. The lone scout lay flat on the ground, moaning prayers into the dirt.

  Cassia looked around. The way back down the hill was clear. It was as if the mists had parted to leave a tunnel of sorts.

  She kicked at the scout’s thigh. “Are you hurt? Can you hear me?”

  His prayers ceased and he lifted his head. “We still live?” he asked in disbelief.

  “For now. Take Rais – go back down the hill. Find Hetch, if he still lives.”

  “But the mists . . .”

  Cassia shook her head. “They’re not interested in you. Or the prince. It’s me the High King wants. It’s me he has wanted all this time.”

  She could not make herself to turn back to Rais. The sight of what she had done to him would shatter her resolve. Instead she gathered up her weapons, picked up her torch once more, and left the two men behind her.

  27

  I’m here,” she said aloud. The words drifted out across the top of the hill, and not a single echo returned to her.

  It was exactly as it had appeared in her dreams. Acres of churned earth and stone; the withered limbs of long-dead trees poking up from between the scattered remnants of Caenthell. There seemed no sense to the debris, no underlying structure for her to follow. If she had unearthed a grave, then she would be able to tell the head from the feet – but here Malessar had done the equivalent of throwing the bones into the air so they landed in profaned chaos.

  Mists curled and seeped through the scene without any wind to move them. They sought her blood-encrusted hands like hounds begging for meat. Cassia scrubbed her palms against the matted furs she still wore, but the stains had etched themselves into her skin and they would not come away. She kicked at the mists instead and jabbed half-heartedly with the guttering torch.

  For a little while Rais’s blood had fed the flame, bringing it back to life, but now it was dying once more, just as her last hopes of beating the High King were also doomed to failure.

  “Stop that,” she commanded. “It will not work.”

  The whispering thoughts disappeared from her mind – and then returned with a vengeance.

  Fear me.

  She shook her head to clear it, jabbing at the mists more vigorously. “No. Never.”

  But it was difficult to concentrate on the task at hand. She was covered in blood – she felt it crawling across her skin, sinking through it, staining her very soul. Every time she blinked Cassia saw the prince’s face, pale and stretched in agony before she brought the sword down.

  Killing him would have been kinder. Caenthell almost sounded sympathetic, but . . .

  Cassia thought what his blood had done for her torch. It did not take much to imagine what Rais’s life blood would have done for the land itself. For the High King. The mists had already devoured so many of her friends and her fellow soldiers. If she had given Rais to Caenthell, then she would have left nothing for herself.

  “Kinder?” She clambered past another tumbled foundation stone. “You think I am kind? I am my father’s daughter. I will not be kind.”

  Fear me.

  The voice was louder, penetrating the few barriers she had been able to raise about herself. She had to pause, leaning against cold stone to keep her balance. As she drew her breath, she scanned what little she could see of the horizon. There was no sign of the tree she had seen in her visions, only the broken limbs of the gardens that had existed so many centuries ago.

  Cassia shook her head again. “You cannot tell me what to do. You have no authority over me.”

  Was it her imagination, or had a shadow flitted overhead, somewhere within the bank of cloud that overwhelmed the sky? Cassia did not allow herself to be distracted. She climbed another bank, past the remnants of a wall buried in the side of a hill, palms and fingertips tearing on shards of pots and strips of metal hidden in the ground.

  You were a fool to come this far.

  “Make up your mind,” Cassia spat. She’d had enough of the taunts. “Either you want me here or you do not. Come on Jedrell, you
dead bastard: let’s see this finished.”

  Nothing happened. The flame guttered further, threatening to extinguish itself completely. Cassia stared at the torch for a moment and muttered a curse under her breath. She held her free hand in a curled fist above the torch, driving her ragged fingernails into her palm until blood welled and began to drip down onto the flame. It would help, just as Rais’s blood had helped, but Cassia already knew it could be little more than a stalling tactic. Unless she could conceive a way to finish the task, then the High King would beat her easily. All he had to do was to wait. And he had already waited for centuries.

  There is a better way. You know it.

  “Oh yes, I know.” Cassia laughed bitterly. “I am the Heir to the North! This land is my birthright! All of Hellea will cower before me or be crushed under my heel! Just as it was in the Age of Talons, so shall it be again! No, Jedrell, I think not.”

  The disembodied spirits of Caenthell made no reply. But a voice came from another quarter instead, and now Cassia’s blood ran cold in her veins.

  “Not just Hellea, girl. The world. The whole world will bow before us.”

  The gaunt figure that emerged from a sorcery-blasted pit in the ground seemed barely alive. Its clothes were tattered, little more than shreds wrapped around a skeletal frame. Dirt plastered matted hair to its skull and the scars of madness shone out through an overgrown yet ragged beard. But Cassia could not mistake that voice. Nor could she fail to recognise the remnants of the patched cloak that hung about the man’s shoulders.

  Hetch had not lied.

  “Father,” she said. She tightened her grip upon the torch and let her other hand drop to the hilt of Pelicos’s sword. “I heard I might find you here.”

  Norrow hauled himself upright against a block of stone. Cassia wondered when he had last eaten. As he stepped closer, she drew away to the left, but she did not dare drop her gaze to see if the ground was firm underfoot.

  “Piss-boiled weakling coward boy,” her father spat. “Ran away. Again. All Almouls are cowards.”

  Under other circumstances she might have been amused by the fact that she had to defend Hetch. “He came here by his own choice. Unlike you.”

  “Unlike you,” Norrow echoed.

  She took another blind step to the left.

  “So, Jedrell sends you to intimidate me.”

  Norrow’s croak must have been intended as a laugh. “Oh no, you stupid girl. You have it all so wrong. No one sends me. No one. It’s mine, you see. All mine.”

  “Baum told me,” Cassia said. “He told me most of it, and now I know the rest too. We’ve been used horribly, father. We’ve been bred like dogs over centuries to bring us to this point. It will not stand.”

  His face twisted savagely. “Like dogs? You dare compare us to beasts? We, who have ruled the whole of the North?”

  The mists swirled at the edge of her vision, reaching out for her . . . Cassia jerked the torch towards them and they retreated again. Even if the magic held out for a little longer, she thought, the High King must surely move against her soon. The warped creature that her father had become had to be Caenthell’s last playing piece.

  “We were brought low, but we are immortal, and our vengeance will be served. Now choose, girl. Will you be an instrument of that vengeance, or a victim of it?”

  “It’s not as simple as that,” Cassia said.

  “Is it not?” Norrow grinned. There was an unsettling hunger in his eyes.

  “The world has moved on,” she said. “You have been forgotten. Perhaps what Malessar did was wrong – but perhaps Jedrell gave him cause—”

  The world shuddered. Unbalanced, Cassia was forced to one knee. Earth shifted and skittered across her feet. When she looked up her father was alarmingly closer to her. She had not even seen him move. More sorcery.

  “That charlatan,” Norrow growled. “Destroyer of lives. Destroyer of history. Traitor to the North, traitor to his god. I will not hear his name!”

  Cassia remained in her low crouch, almost crawling across the broken ground in case the tremors came again. This voice: whoever spoke through him, it was not her father alone. She was not certain if any part of her father actually remained.

  “He had cause,” she repeated. “Or do you deny that your crime came first?”

  The creature’s aspect altered again. “It is no crime for two lovers to follow their hearts. No, no crime to seek companionship amongst those few who understand. It was fated to be, from the first moments. That court trickster . . . he could never have conjured open those secret compartments of her mind . . .”

  Cassia held her breath. Part of her – the part that still thought of herself as a storyteller – yearned to hear more. “What was she like?” she asked at last, when it seemed the creature that inhabited her father would say no more.

  “She was as the ice that caps the mountains, gleaming in the first morning sun,” her father said after another long pause. His voice was quieter, yet stronger, and more composed. “She was the life of every harvest, the soul of every creature. The stars were her crown, and Caenthell was her shield. Next to her, I was nothing – a rough reflection only of her spirit. When she first came to me I held back – I was scared to touch her! But she was so much stronger; she showed me how to find the strength within my own soul . . . she should not have died . . .”

  As he spoke it had dawned on Cassia that she no longer knew exactly who was speaking – or, indeed, of whom they spoke. Was this Jedrell talking through her father, or Norrow himself in a fleeting lucid moment? And did they mean her own mother, or the long-dead Aliciana?

  “She looked like you,” Norrow said.

  Cassia shivered. “Surely this is not a fitting tribute to her. Not if you would describe her in such words. There is no life here in Caenthell now. Would you remember her in this way?”

  Anger flashed in Norrow’s sunken eyes. “I did not do this thing for her. You forget yourself, girl.”

  Another sideways movement. Cassia felt solid stone underfoot – a buried part of the old castle. At least it would not give way under her.

  “But if not her, then who?” she wondered aloud.

  Norrow’s face twisted again. It was as though every time he spoke it was with a different voice – or a different soul. She could no longer tell which belonged to her father.

  “Why, for you, of course,” this aspect said. The smile with which it favoured her was unspeakably unpleasant. This time when she shivered her flesh actually seemed to crawl.

  “I am not who you believe me to be.” It was growing more difficult to hide her discomfort: this confrontation was not what she’d had in mind, and it was plunging into dark waters she had not imagined to exist.

  Norrow lurched forward, apparently unable to fully control his own limbs. He clutched at another fallen block, the torn flesh of his fingers leaving bloody marks on the surface. “Are you sure of that? Eh? Are you?”

  It didn’t make any sense to her. Cassia could not believe she was anybody other than herself. Yet she had seen Jedrell in a vision up on the Hamiardin Pass, she had summoned the spirits from beneath Karakhel to fight for her, she had bargained with dragons. She had even called on a goddess to give aid to Malessar. And she had seen the figurines of Aliciana that the warlock kept in his dhar, and she could not deny the resemblance she bore to those.

  But Aliciana is dead, she told herself. Surely as dead as Jedrell himself . . .

  “You might be the High King, father, but you are not Jedrell.” She tried again. “Jedrell is dead. Long dead. Let him rest. Let them both rest.”

  Norrow shook his head violently. “His blood is my blood. And so is yours. Don’t fight it, girl. Let the North rise within you. Let vengeance pour forth. Extinguish that feeble shield and embrace me.”

  He stepped forward again, this time without support, and Cassia realised he was becoming stronger by the minute, while the torch she still protected was guttering fitfully once more.

&nb
sp; “They are losing, you know.” Norrow grinned. “Can you feel it? The tang of desperation mixed with blood and pain? Death soaks the stones of Karakhel now, and the last of the warlock’s cursed wards gasps like a burst lung. Your shieldmen are broken. It is over, girl. Admit that and it will not hurt.”

  Cassia chanced a look over her shoulder and discovered she had manoeuvred herself to the edge of a precipice. She could not retreat any further, and she knew Norrow would certainly take the opportunity to seize her if she tried to slip past him.

  “Father,” she called out. “Listen to me. This is no victory.”

  “Oh, so wrong, so wrong – this is life, girl. And I have spent so long without it.”

  There was a weight upon her shoulders. If not for the precipice, Cassia would have thought that somebody stood behind her, pressing her down. It would be so much easier to cease struggling, to sit down on the ground and lay down her weapons . . .

  “You don’t have to let Jedrell—”

  Norrow laughed, so close now that he could look down upon her. “Wrong again, girl. He has nothing to do with this. Oh, you were right before – the King is dead, long live the King! – but somehow he is still here, here in my head, whispering, crying, pining for his Queen, just as this weak and wearisome man does!” He bent forward to stare into Cassia’s eyes, and she flinched backwards as she saw the depths of insanity in his gaze. “Why do all Northmen spend their days grieving over dead women, eh?”

  Cassia gasped. The venom in his voice was far beyond anything she had ever heard from her father, even in his worst days. She sank back onto her haunches, almost unaware that she had done so until she felt the cold ground beneath her.

  She was learning to recognise these dreadful leaps of intuition, just as she feared the conclusions she found at the end of them. This time it was a rush akin to falling from the very face of the mountains into the ruins of Caenthell below. Cassia shuddered.

  “But if you are not Jedrell, then . . .”

  Sweet gods above. It cannot be.

  She could not disguise her horror. Fear me, the voice echoed inside her head, and she did. Bowed by the force of his presence, she pressed her head to the cold ground and wept.