“You want to disband The Raven, the rest of you?” asked Hirad. He was only half surprised to find his eyes moistening. His world was dropping to pieces before him and he couldn't see a way out. Not yet.
“Not necessarily. Perhaps just a rest to take stock.” Sirendor leant back a little and spread his hands wide. “God knows, none of us needs the money any more to be comfortable. I sometimes think we must own half of Korina between us.” He smiled briefly. “Look, the reason I'm bringing this up is that we want to have a meeting when we get back to the City. We need to talk it through, all of us, when we've had a little time to think.”
Hirad stared into his coffee, letting the steam warm his face. Silent again.
“If we go on pretending it's still like it was a few years ago, one day we won't be fast enough. Hirad?” The barbarian looked up. “Hirad, I don't want to lose you the way we lost Ras.” Sirendor sucked his lip, then sighed. “I don't want to see you die.”
“You won't.” Hirad's voice was gruff. He swigged back his coffee and stood up, having to push his lips together to be sure they wouldn't tremble. “I'm going to see to the horses,” he said at length. “We may as well make an early start.” He strode out of the kitchens and through the castle to the courtyard, where he stopped, staring at the place that might have witnessed The Raven's last fight. He wiped angrily at his eyes and headed for the stables.
Ilkar too decided against further rest and went instead to Seran's chambers. The mage from Lystern, smallest of the four College Cities, had been moved to a low table in his study, a sheet covering his body. Ilkar pulled the sheet back from Seran's face. He frowned.
The dead mage's skin was taut across his skull and his hair completely white. He hadn't looked that way the previous evening. And the cut on his forehead, now it was clean, looked as if it had been made with a small claw.
He heard movement behind him and turned to see Denser, the Xetesk mage, standing in the doorway to the bedroom. His pipe smoked gently in his mouth and the cat was in his cloak. Ilkar found the pipe incongruous. Denser was by no means an old man, though his exertions had given him an appearance well beyond his mid-thirties years.
“An unfortunate result, but inevitable,” said Denser. He looked terribly tired. His face was grey and his eyes dark and sunken. He leaned against the door frame.
“What happened to him?”
Denser shrugged. “He was not a young man. We knew he might die.” He shrugged again. “There was no other way. He wanted to stop us.”
“We.” In Ilkar's mind, the coin dropped. “The cat.”
“Yes. He's a Familiar.”
Ilkar pulled the sheet back over Seran's head and moved toward Denser. “Come on, you'd better sit down before you fall down. There's questions I need answering.”
“I didn't think this was a social call.” Denser smiled.
“No.” Ilkar did not.
Once seated, Ilkar looked at Denser sprawled on Seran's bed and didn't have to ask his first question. The Xeteskian wouldn't have had the strength to try leaving the castle last night.
“Overdid it yesterday, did you?” asked the Julatsan.
“There was work to do once I had recovered this,” agreed Denser, pulling the amulet from his cloak, where it hung from its chain round his neck. “I presume this is what you wish to talk about.”
Ilkar inclined his head. “What sort of work?”
“I had to know whether it was the piece we were after.”
“And was it?”
“Yes.”
“Xetesk sent you?”
“Of course.”
“And this battle?” Ilkar waved a hand around vaguely.
“Well, let's just say it was fairly easy to place me in an attack force but it wasn't staged for my benefit, if that's what you mean.”
“So why didn't you just join the garrison defence?”
“With a Dragonene mage in residence? Hardly.” Denser chuckled. “I'm afraid Seran and Xetesk didn't see eye to eye.”
“Surprise, surprise,” muttered Ilkar.
“Come now, Ilkar, we are none of us that different from each other.”
“Bloody hell! Is the conceit of Xetesk that great that your Masters really believe all mages are essentially alike? That is an insult to magic itself and a failing in your teaching.” Ilkar could feel the anger surging in him. His cheeks were hot and his eyes narrowed to slits. The blindness of Xetesk was sometimes staggering. “You know where the power comes from to shape mana for the spells you were casting yesterday. There is no blood on my hands, Denser.”
Denser was quiet for a while. He relit his pipe and picked his cat out of his cloak, dropping it on to the bed. The animal stared at Ilkar while the Dark Mage ruffled its neck. Ilkar's temper frayed further but he held his tongue.
“I think, Ilkar,” said Denser at length, blowing out a series of smoke rings, “that you shouldn't accuse my Masters of failings in their teaching until you are aware of the shortcomings in your own.”
“What are you talking about?”
Denser spread his palms. “Do you see blood on my hands?”
“You know what I mean,” snapped Ilkar.
“Yes, I do. And you should also know that a Xeteskian mage has more than one source for his mana. As, no doubt, have you.”
There was silence between them, though around them the castle corridors were beginning to echo with the sounds of another day.
“I will not discuss College ethics with you, Denser.”
“A pity.”
“Pointless.”
“A shortcoming in your teaching, Ilkar?”
He ignored the jibe. “I need to know two things. How did you know about Seran and that amulet, and what is it?”
Denser considered for a while. “Well, I'm not about to divulge College secrets, but unlike you, apparently, Xetesk has always taken Dragonene lore seriously—patchy though it may be. Our work in dimensional research has led us to develop a spell that can detect the kind of disturbance caused by the opening of an interdimensional portal, like the one we went through yesterday. We suspected Seran—I won't tell you why—we targeted his chambers and got the desired result. I was sent to retrieve Dragonene artefacts and I got this.” He took the amulet from its chain and tossed it to Ilkar, who turned it over a couple of times, shrugged and threw it back.
“It has Dragonene lore on it, written in all four College lore scripts,” said Denser, rehanging it on its chain. A brief smile touched his lips. “It will be incredibly useful to our research and, when we're done with it, we can simply name our price. You would not believe what collectors will pay for a piece like this.”
“And that's it?” asked Ilkar flatly.
Denser nodded. “We all need money. You of all people should know that research is not cheap.”
Ilkar inclined his head. “So what now?”
“I have to get this piece into the right hands, quickly,” said Denser.
“Xetesk?”
Denser shook his head. “Too far and too dangerous. Korina. We can secure it there. You're going that way, I take it?”
“Yes.”
“I would like The Raven to bodyguard me. You will be well paid.”
Ilkar gaped at him, making sure he'd heard correctly. “You have got to be bloody joking, Denser. After what happened yesterday? You've got some nerve, I'll give you that. Hirad still wants to kill you as far as I know. And even if the others didn't mind, do you really think that I would ever stoop to work for Xetesk?”
“I'm sorry you feel that way.”
“But you can't possibly be surprised.” Ilkar got up and dusted himself down. “You'll have to find someone else. There are plenty still here looking for paid passage back to the City.”
“I would prefer The Raven. It seems the least I can do in recompense.”
“We don't want your money,” said Ilkar. “I'll be making a report to Julatsa when I get back to Korina. You understand there will be a representation fro
m the three Colleges to Xetesk over this whole incident.”
“We look forward to it.”
“I'll bet.” Ilkar turned as he reached the door. “You hungry? I'll show you the way to the kitchens.”
“Thank you, brother.”
Ilkar's embryonic smile disappeared. “I am not your brother.”
Erienne sat on the double bed in the isolated tower room, a son cradled beneath each arm. Her body knew peace, however fleeting, and her children had ceased their crying.
But they had doubted her and the moment of their reunion would live with her forever. Left alone at the top of the spiral stairway, she had grasped the handle and opened the door, half expecting to see them dead. Instead, they were sitting together on the edge of their bed, talking in whispers, food and drink ignored and cooling on the table that made up the only other furniture but for two chairs. Even the floor had no covering for its cold stone.
She'd taken them in in an instant, brown bobbed hair a little untidy, round faces, pale blue eyes, small noses, slightly jutting ears and long-fingered hands. Her boys. Her beautiful boys.
Their faces had turned to her in symphony and she'd held out her arms. It was then she knew hatred like she'd never felt before. Because for a moment they hadn't seen her, their mother and protector. They'd seen a betrayer, someone who had let them be taken, let them be afraid.
And as she'd stood in the doorway, dishevelled in her bare feet, her nightgown stained and torn, her face displaying the effects of the brophane and her hair tangled, the tears had flooded her eyes and smeared a clean track on her dust-darkened cheeks.
“I'm here. Mother's here.” They'd run into her arms, the three crying until nothing was left but to hold on in case they should ever be separated again. Now they sat, all three on the bed, the boys nuzzling her chest while her arms bound them and her hands stroked their sides.
“Where are we, Mummy?” asked Thom, sitting to her left.
“We're in a castle far from home, full of bad men,” said Erienne, gripping her boys closer and glaring at the closed door, outside which, she knew, Isman would now be standing. “I've got to help them, answer some questions about magic, and then they'll let us go.”
“Who are they?” Aron looked up into his mother's eyes, lost and confused. She felt his hand grip at her back.
“When we get home, I'll tell you all about them. But they are men trying to understand magic and what men don't understand frightens them. It always has.”
“When will we go home?” Aron again.
Erienne sighed. “I don't know, my loves. I don't know what they want to ask me.” She smiled to ease the tension. “I'll tell you what. When we get home, I'll let you choose what you want to learn about next. What will it be?”
The boys leaned forward, shared a glance, nodded and chimed in concert:
“Communion!”
Erienne laughed. “I knew you'd say that. Bad boys! Just so you can talk without me hearing you.” She tickled their stomachs, the boys giggling and squirming. “Bad boys!” She fluffed their hair then held them close again.
“Now,” she said, eyeing their plates with distaste. “I want you to eat the bread on those plates but nothing else, do you hear? I'm going to go and see about getting us home. I'll be back to teach you later, so I hope you haven't forgotten what I told you last week!” She made to rise but the boys clung on.
“Do you have to go, Mummy?” asked Aron.
“The sooner I do, the sooner we'll all be home with your father.” She hugged them again. “Hey, I won't be gone long, I promise.” They both looked up at her. “I promise,” she repeated.
She unlocked their arms and went to the door, pulling it open on a surprised-looking Isman. The rangy warrior lurched to a standing position from his slouch against the wall, the flaps of his leather tunic clapping together over his worn brown shirt.
“Finished so soon?” he asked.
“Just in a hurry,” said Erienne brusquely. “I'll answer your questions now. My boys need their father and their own beds.”
“And we are just as anxious as you to see you are held here for as short a time as possible,” said Isman smoothly. “The Captain will question you shortly. Until then—”
“Now,” said Erienne, closing the door at her back with one last smile at her boys, who waved at her.
“You are in no position to make demands of us,” sneered Ismam.
Erienne smiled and moved close to Isman. As she did so, her face hardened, the smile seeming to freeze on her cheeks.
“And what if I walk past you now?” she hissed, her face paling. “What are you going to do?” Their faces were scant inches apart, his eyes flickering over her. “Stop me? Kill me?” She laughed. “You're scared of me because we both know I could kill you before your sword left your scabbard. And we're alone, so don't tempt me. Just take me to your Captain right now.”
Isman pursed his lips and nodded.
“He said you'd be trouble. We had you watched for months before we took you. He said your kind knew much but were arrogant.” He pushed past her and led the way down the spiral stairs. He turned at the bottom. “He was right. He always is. Go ahead, kill me if you think you can. There are three men outside this door. You can't get far. We both know that too, don't we?”
“But I'd have the satisfaction of seeing you die,” said Erienne. “And I'd see the fear in your eyes. Think on it. Unless you watch me all the time, you'll never know if I'm about to cast. Never know when you're about to die.”
“We have your children.” The sneer was back on Isman's face.
“Well, you'd better see you look after them, then, hadn't you? Don't turn your back, Isman.”
The warrior let out a contemptuous laugh, but as he turned to open the door, Erienne thought she saw him shudder.
Denser sat at the end of a bench table full of men who, not many hours before, would have killed him. The barbarian, Hirad Coldheart, was not there. Seeing to their horses, Sirendor Larn had said. Denser shivered inwardly, laid down his fork across his half-eaten breakfast of meat, gravy and bread, and sipped at his coffee. His cat purred as it lay on the bench beside him, luxuriating in the warmth cast by the range of fires in the kitchens.
They'd been prepared to die then, at the barbarian's sword. Their inner calm had been complete. And had they died, he in a crush of bone and his cat in a screaming mental explosion, the whole of Balaia might have died with them.
Denser looked up at The Unknown Warrior. They all still had a chance because of him. Him and the simple code The Raven had always followed. The reason why they above all other mercenary teams remained in demand, successful and so very effective. While killing was legal within the rules of battle, and in witnessed defence of self and others, outside of these boundaries it was murder. And The Raven, perhaps alone, had stood in battle lines for ten years with robbers, bandits, bounty hunters and other hired men little better than murderers, with their collective conscience clear.
There were plenty who said it was the total adherence to their code that made them strong and feared by opponents; and Denser had no doubt that the perpetuation of this myth helped them enormously. Mainly, though, he considered it was because while as individuals they were outstanding, if not brilliant, as a team they were simply awesome.
Yet it was the code that swung the balance when the cost of their hire was considered. It meant that their employers could expect the contract to be upheld and the battle to be fought by The Raven within the rules.
The Code: Kill But Never Murder.
So simple that many tried to live by it on taking up the career as a hired warrior or mage. But most lacked the discipline, intelligence, stamina or skill to keep true in the heat of battle, victory or retreat, and aftermath. And certainly none had done so for ten years without blemish.
It would be easy to cast them as heroes, but Denser had seen them fight more than once and what they were was, to him, obvious. They were a team of terribly efficient ki
llers. Killers but not murderers.
But as Denser looked around the table at the men eating in silence, each walking the privacy of his own mind, he thought they looked tired, and a pang of fear flooded his gut lest they should ultimately refuse him.
Because he needed them. Xetesk needed them. Gods, all of Balaia would need them if the information the spies were sending back proved to be the prelude to the rising of the Wytch Lords. But could he convince them of what had to be done, and would Xetesk try to bring the Colleges together?
Despite the knowledge of what could be to come, Denser wondered whether he wasn't facing his most difficult challenge now.
The Raven.
Even if they heard the truth, he was pretty sure it wouldn't make any difference. They didn't take a contract because they believed in the cause. In fact the cause was largely irrelevant. The job had to be made worth their while, worth their reputation and worth their attendance. Worth the risk. That's why the truth was pointless, at least until he could hide it no longer. No compensation could possibly be worth the risks he would be asking them to face.
Denser took another mouthful of food. It was a great pity he hadn't met The Raven in Korina as planned. There he might have been able to conceal his College identity for long enough. Their being part of Taranspike Castle's defence hadn't figured in Xetesk's plans. Now he was truly up against it and right now he couldn't even persuade Ilkar to let him pay them to ride with him to Korina, the City they were headed for anyway.
He glanced up and caught The Unknown's eye. The warrior calmly held his gaze, swallowed his mouthful and pointed his knife at Denser.
“Tell me something,” he said. “Ever see a Dragon before?”
“No,” said Denser.
“No. And what would you have done had Hirad not managed to distract it so effectively while you stole your prize?”
Denser smiled ever so slightly. “That is a very good question. We hadn't planned on a Dragon being there.”
“Clearly. My guess is you would have died.”
“Possibly.” Denser half shrugged. Actually he thought he would have been fine but he could see where the line was leading and it gave him a chance.
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