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When she reached the wall, she saw the stairs to the ramparts were empty, so she climbed to get a better view of the gate. As she had feared, riots were underway everywhere as terrified people tried to leave, but the remaining Guardians at the gate held them back. No one could leave the city without the King’s writ; and the King was gone. She paused, fearful and undecided.
She turned and looked down on the city of her birth: Das’taas. It had been a place of terrifying majesty, and although it was never truly at rest, it had gradually achieved a state of equipoise, a state almost approaching tranquillity. While the People would never be without their impulses towards bloody violence and destruction, the King and his Guardians had managed to keep it to a minimum, even though there were many with ancient memories which stretched back to the Time Before Time, when the People had lived like the Savages and the Mad Ones; when every individual had been spawned in the birth pits, creatures of frantic need and limited power. Strength had been earned and the price had been bloody. Child had eaten child and the victor had emerged stronger, smarter and more cunning. The subsequent battles were never-ending.
Then Dahun had arisen, as had Maarg, Simote and others, each carving out their empires. Of all these rulers, Dahun had moved farthest from the madness and savagery that marked the People. But his most bitter enemy, Maarg, had been more like the Mad Ones during his rule. Dahun had instituted laws and created the Guardians and the majesty of the People had reached its highest expression, seeking to evolve them in a way unknown before. In the end, Maarg had created a realm in which the chaos of the Mad Ones had been contained, channelled, and used to build a meritocracy, in which merit was defined by strength, cunning, and the ability to recruit allies, vassals, and protectors.
All this Lair’ss knew: her memories, and those of others, flowed through her as she looked at the city, trying to decide what she should do. She crouched to prevent her child and herself from being seen against the sky by those below. Where were the flyers? she wondered.
The child stirred, hunger making her fractious. Lair’ss slapped her lightly, just enough to communicate danger but not hard enough to hurt and the child fell quiet instantly, understanding the warning.
The role of parent was not natural to the People. Yet for generations Dahun had demanded pairs meet, mate, and then rear children. The days of crawling out of the birth pits were behind them and each parent was required to teach a child as well as provide for it. Letting the child die or giving in to rage and killing it brought harsh punishment. Like all of her clan and class, Lair’ss did not fully understand all she had been taught. She had spent most of her youth dreaming of murder and male mates until she had been paired with Dagri. Then she had learned a skill, becoming a mender of garments, working long hours in a room with other females.
Each night she would return to her mate, but he had perished opposing the Final End that was now upon them. Now, she felt an unfamiliar pang at the thought of him; she hadn’t particularly liked Dagri when Dahun’s Masjester had paired them. Still, he had become familiar and the child seemed to find him agreeable. He had been a vassal of a rising servant of the King, and had gained rank and some prestige. He was young and powerful, and the matings had been fun and always rewarding. She had even felt some delight when giving him the news that she would bear a child, which had been an unexpectedly pleasant experience. She was not sure why, but she had found joy in knowing he wanted that child. Now she felt an emptiness inside her when she thought of Dagri. He had left with the King’s army to fight against Maarg, and neither the King nor Dagri had returned. She had often wondered what had happened. Had he died in battle surrounded by comrades and enemies? The image that came to her brought her both sadness and pride. Or was he lost in some distant land, with no way of returning? That image made her grieve.
Yet despite everything coming to ruin around her, she still felt it was her duty to Dagri to care for his child. She glanced down at it now, large enough that its weight was a burden on her arm, and saw those dark eyes regarding her again. What was it thinking? Did it think?
She shook her head, knowing the answer. Of course it thought. She had killed for it and seen it eat, making it stronger and smarter. Even now the child responded to her quiet words or touch, as Lair’ss wished. If anything, the child was cunning enough that if she could feed it one or two more times, it would become more of an ally in this flight and less of a hindrance.
Lair’ss knew it was time. With everything falling apart, the stricture against preying on others of the People would no longer be obeyed. She was certain others had already taken to the old ways and as a result potential enemies, those who would devour her and the child, were growing more powerful and arising at every hand.
She peered in all directions until she saw a furtive figure hiding in the shadows below. A small being, it trembled at being discovered.
In a swift series of moves, Lair’ss put down the child, giving it a warning poke to keep it quiet, leapt from the rampart to the stairs halfway down, and was upon the hiding figure before it knew it. After delivering a quick stunning blow, she carried the limp being up to her child.
No sooner had the unconscious figure been laid on the stones than the child threw herself with astonishing energy upon it. The shock of the attack roused the tiny creature, but Lair’ss was ready for it. A long talon slashed its throat.
Fighting back her own hunger, the mother watched her daughter feed. She could swear she saw the child grow before her eyes. The need to push the child aside and feed upon the creature herself was almost overwhelming, but her mind was still relatively free of animal rage and she knew it was crucial that the child grow quickly. She would be too large to carry now, but after this feast, she should grow large enough that she should be able to keep pace with her mother.
Ignoring her own hunger pangs, Lair’ss watched as the corpse was consumed – bone, sinew, hair, and skin – until nothing was left but the simple robe and sandals it wore. Lair’ss’s brow furrowed. In her haste she had not noticed the design of the robes. The dead creature was an Archivist, a keeper of knowledge.
Now her daughter looked at her, her gaze narrowing for an instant. Then she spoke her first words. ‘Thank you, Mother. That was … enlightening.’
‘You can talk …?’ said Lair’ss, stating the obvious.
‘This one … lacked strength or magic … but he had knowledge.’ The child spoke each word carefully, as if trying them out and judging them before uttering a syllable. Then she rose up on slightly unsteady feet; the growth she had gained from her feasting had changed her balance and she needed a few minutes to adjust. Then she looked at her mother and added, ‘A great deal of knowledge.’
Lair’ss knew fear then. Before her eyes, in a matter of minutes, her daughter had ceased being a mewling infant and was now a young adult, one with memories and knowledge belonging to the most guarded caste of the King’s courts, the Archivists.
The child’s face was now almost on a level with the larger female who sat huddled against the inner wall. ‘I am ready, Mother,’ she said.
Lair’ss accepted that. Her child now had knowledge.
The child glanced around to see if they were still hidden. Then she declared, ‘I know a way.’ She turned, and moved downwards, and unquestioning, Lair’ss followed.
They struggled through the jagged rocks. Over the city wall, down the gullies that ages of wind and rain had carved out along the roadside and through the marshes. Flaming jets of gas had barred their way, but the child knew the route to take. From the moment she had devoured the Archivist, she had become a being unlike any Lair’ss had known.
At one point they huddled beneath an outcrop of rocks as a solitary flyer hovered overhead, seeking prey below. The child would be an easy target, and if Lair’ss’s strength became any more depleted she would be no match for the winged predator.
In the quiet of early morning, as the nocturnal predators were sweeping the mountains one last time before returning to their lairs, the child looked into her mother’s face, barely visible in the faint light from the stars above and the tiny moon nearing the western horizon. Softly she said, ‘I know things, Mother.’
Weak from hunger, Lair’ss replied, ‘Yes, I understand.’
‘Do you?’ The child took her mother’s face gently between her hands. ‘The Archivist’s … knowledge, but not his memories, are mine. I know things, but other things are empty, holes in my mind.’ She tilted her head to one side, her eyes fastened on her mother’s features. ‘Tell me.’
‘What, Daughter?’
‘Tell me those things I do not know.’
‘I do not understand.’
The child gazed out from under the sheltering rock at the setting moon. ‘What is that?’ she said, pointing to the faint light on the western horizon.
‘That is Das’taas, or what is left of it,’ said her mother weakly. ‘It was our home.’
‘Why did we leave?’
‘The Darkness came and our Lord Dahun was gone and no one knew how to fight it.’
‘Darkness?’ asked Child.
Lair’ss was so weak now that she sensed this might be her last conversation with her daughter. ‘I know little, but this much is what is known. The Darkness came from the Centre.’
The child tilted her head as if remembering something. ‘Ah, yes, the Centre. The Ancient Heart.’
‘I do not know it by that name, but the Old Kingdoms, Despaira, Paingor, Mournhome, Abandos and the others held sway since the first days after the Time Before Time. Our lord Dahun paid tribute to the Old Kingdoms, and we stood as a bulwark against the Savages.’ Lair’ss inclined her head behind them. ‘There, to the east, where we go now. But we were told a bad thing happened.’
‘What, Mother?’
‘I do not know,’ Lair’ss said wearily. ‘So much of what has happened is a mystery.’ She stared out towards the distant city. ‘I have been told we once lived like the Savages, spawning in pits, fighting for survival from the first moment. Each death returned us to the pits and the struggle was endless.
‘I have been told that the Kings brought order and taught us how to live a new way, how to build as well as destroy, how to care for one another without constant killing. We were told these were good things.’
‘Why?’
‘Again, I do not know,’ she said with a long sigh. ‘But what the King wills is law.’
The younger female was quiet for a while as the sun to the east grew brighter. ‘Where do we go?’ prodded Child.
After a moment, her mother answered, ‘To the east, towards the lands of the Savages and the Mad Ones.’
‘Why?’ asked Child.
‘Because there is nowhere else to go,’ answered her mother softly.
A smile crossed the child’s lips and she said, ‘No, there is another place to go.’ Suddenly she lunged forward and her fangs closed around her mother’s throat and with one pull, she tore it open. Blood fountained and she drank deeply as the light faded from her mother’s eyes.
Thoughts came with the feeding, not her own, but those of the being whose life she ended.
A time of calm, with a male, by the name of Dagri, who was her father. He had vanished with the King.
Images flashed, some understandable and some not, places, faces, struggles and quiet. And some of the holes in her knowledge were filled in as the more abstract knowledge she had gained from the Archivist blended with her mother’s experiences.
There are been a stable time, a time of Dahun’s dominion. Then word had come of a struggle to the west. Dahun’s kingdom was not one of the Old Kingdoms, but one of the Second Kingdoms, those that ringed the five original Kingdoms.
Then there had been a war, not here, but in some other place, against a king named Maarg, and her father and others had gone with Dahun to fight him. No one had returned, leaving only the City Guardians and those who knew magic to face the Darkness when it appeared. No one knew what had become of the Old Kingdoms.
Bits and pieces of knowledge of those times and places seemed to float around the periphery of her thoughts, almost understood, tantalizingly so, but still not coherent. She knew one thing, though: if she were to survive, she needed more knowledge and power.
She regarded what was left of her mother’s body, then consumed what was left. She kept feeling odd sensations as she did so and tried to put a name to them, but couldn’t. In a strange way she regretted the need to feed on the female who had brought her into this world, but her abstract knowledge of her race’s breeding history made it difficult to understand why she would feel a bond with this female more than any other. She paused; the Archivist thought of their collective society as ‘the race’, but her mother had been taught to consider herself a member of ‘the People’. She understood that this was a distinction, but why it was important eluded her.
She crawled out from under the overhang, peering about for any threat. In the distance she saw a group of flyers frantically beating towards her, so she ducked back under the overhang until she was certain they had passed. Peering to the west, she saw a dark spot on the horizon. From the knowledge she had inherited from her feeding she knew it to be something fundamentally wrong, and a radical and terrible change in the order of her world, yet it remained abstract to her. She had no feelings about that.
Feelings?
She paused. Strange sensations in the pit of her stomach and rising up into her chest and throat visited her, but she had no name for them. For an instant she wondered if she was in danger from them, like poison or exposure to dangerous magics.
Something tickled the edge of her consciousness. She paused and considered this unfathomable material. From the knowledge she had gained from the Archivist, she understood that memories were either there or not. To have memories from those devoured, yet be unable to reach them, was unheard of; so this must be something else.
But if it was something else, then what was it?
Still not enough knowledge, she thought, and certainly not enough power. She must hunt. She must grow stronger, more powerful.
There was a stirring above and suddenly another flyer dropped out of the evening sky. Without thought, she reached out a hand, but not in the clawed defensive position. Instead, her palm faced the attacker and a searing bolt of energy shot from it and slicked cleanly through his neck, severing the head, which dropped at her feet as the body crashed into the rocks a few feet away.
The child felt only mild hunger, but knew she needed more food to become more powerful than she was.
She hunkered down to begin eating the flyer’s head. ‘Magic,’ she said softly to herself. But she had not encountered a spell-caster, let alone devoured one. Even more softly she pondered, ‘Now where did that come from?’
Then she set about eating the creature’s brain.
• CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_134d6de6-8d04-5c40-9065-54636ac6f271) •
Hunt (#ulink_134d6de6-8d04-5c40-9065-54636ac6f271)
THE HORSES REARED.
The two young riders kept them under control, their long hours of training used to good effect in the face of the unexpected attack. From the brush behind them came the shouts of the men-at-arms and the baying of the dogs, signalling that relief would be there in minutes. Until then, the two youthful hunters were on their own. The two riders had come through an upland scrub of gorse and heather, growing in a swathe of sandy soil that had been denuded of trees in ages past.
Searching for wild boar or stag, the brothers from Crydee had stumbled upon something both unexpected and terrifying: a sleeping wyvern.
First cousin to a dragon, the green-scaled beast was far from its usual mountainous hunting grounds, and had been asleep in a deep gully masked from their approach by tall ferns and brush.
Now, disturbed from its rest, the angry beast rose up, snapping its wings wide to take to the sky.
‘What?’ shouted Brendan to his elder brother.
‘Don’t let it get away!’ replied Martin.
‘Why? We can’t eat it!’
‘No, but think of the trophy on the wall!’
With a grunt of resignation, the younger brother dropped his boar spear, threw his leg over his horse’s neck and dropped to the ground, nimbly removing his bow from his shoulder as he did so. His horse, usually a well-trained mare, was all too happy to run off as fast as possible from the large predator. Brendan drew a broad-tipped arrow from his quiver, nocked his bow and drew and fired in a matter of seconds.
The arrow flew truly, striking the emerald creature squarely at the joint of shoulder and wing, and it faltered. Slowly, the wing drooped limply.
Martin leapt off his horse, gripping his boar spear tightly, and his horse sped off after Brendan’s mount. The injured wyvern snarled and reared up and inhaled deeply, making a strange clucking sound.
‘Oh, damn!’ said Brendan.
‘Down!’ shouted his brother, diving to the right.
Brendan leapt to the left as a searing blast of flame cut through the air where he had been standing only a moment before. He could feel the hair on his head singe as the flames missed him by bare inches. He kept rolling, unable to see the wyvern, though he could hear it roar and smell the acrid smoke and blackened soil as it attacked wildly.
Having clutched the spear to his chest, along the same axis as his body so that he could come swiftly to his feet, Martin launched himself upright. The wyvern seemed momentarily confused by having two antagonists moving in different directions. Then it fixed its eyes on Brendan and started to suck in more air. From what Martin knew of wyvern behaviour, his brother was about to be targeted again with another blast of flames. He cast the spear despairingly, but the range was too far: it fell agonizingly close, but short of the creature.
Suddenly, miraculously, an arrow sliced through the space between the brothers, taking the wyvern in the throat. The creature gagged, choked, and staggered backwards, then shuddered and began to thrash in pain. Reprieved, the brothers raced forward. Martin retrieved his spear and impaled the creature upon it, while Brendan took careful aim and loosed an arrow into the exposed joint between the wyvern’s neck and torso, straight at the creature’s heart. It thrashed for another long moment, then fell still in death.
Looking to see the author of the saving shot, the brothers saw a young woman in leather breeches and tunic, knee-high riding boots, standing a little way away from them. She wore a short rider’s cape thrown back over her left shoulder for quick access to the quiver slung across her back. Her bow was a double recurved, compact and easy to shoot from horseback or on foot, evolved from an ancient Tsurani design, but no weapon for a beginner. Only the traditional hunter’s longbow had more power and range.
Brendan’s face lit up at the sight of her. ‘Lady Bethany, a pleasure as always.’ He shouldered his own bow and wiped perspiration from his brow and grinned as he glanced over at his brother and saw how Martin attempted to rein in his expression of annoyance and replace it with a neutral expression.
Born a year apart, the two brothers might as well have been twins. Unlike their older brother, Hal, who looked liked their father, being broad of shoulder and chest, dark of hair and six inches above six feet in height, these two brothers took after their mother. Their hair was a lighter brown, their eyes were blue rather than dark brown and they were lithe in movement, slender of frame, and four inches shorter than both their father and Hal. They had a whipcord strength and resilience rather than brute power.
Bethany’s dark red hair fell to her shoulders and her face was elegant and finely formed. Her smile carried a hint of something akin to condescension as she walked in measured steps, leading her horse towards the fallen beast. ‘You looked as if you could use a little assistance,’ she said with barely veiled humour. Like the brothers she stood on the verge of adulthood, glorious in her youth and taking it for granted. She would be nineteen years old at the next Midsummer Feast, as would Martin. The three of them had been friends since babyhood. Her father was Robert, Earl of Carse, vassal to their father, Lord Henry, Duke of Crydee. She was the tallest woman in either Carse or Crydee at six feet.
Martin frowned. ‘I thought you said you found hunting a bore?’
‘I find most things a bore,’ she said with a laugh. ‘I changed my mind about hunting and decided to catch up with you louts.’
Noise from behind her indicated that the rest of the Duke’s hunting party was closing in. A moment later, three horses burst through the underbrush and the riders reined in as they regarded the three young hunters and the dead wyvern.
The rider in the middle was Duke Henry, known as Harry, since his father had also been named Henry. He grinned at the sight of his two boys and the daughter of his friend standing without injury over the fallen monster. His face was sunburned and weathered, making him look older than his forty-nine years, his dark beard showing shots of grey. ‘What do you think of that, Robert?’ he asked the rider on his right.
Robert, Earl of Carse, reined in. His blond hair had turned grey at an early age, so it looked nearly white in the mid-afternoon sun. Like his companion, his face was sunburned and weather-beaten. That his daughter was as good an archer as any man in the west pleased him. ‘I think my daughter’s arrow did the honours,’ he answered. Then his expression darkened. ‘But riding unattended from the castle was the pinnacle of foolishness!’
The woodlands around Crydee had been pacified for generations, but they were still not without risk. He took a deep breath of resignation; Bethany was his only child and had been much indulged. As a result she was wilful and impetuous at times, much to his despair.
Bethany smiled at her father’s ire; she had been a nettle as often as a balm since her mother had died. Raised in a household of men, she had developed a combative nature. ‘I grew bored with the chatter of the ladies of Crydee.’ She smiled and nodded at the Duke. ‘No offence is intended, my lord, but I have only so much interest in needlework and cooking, to my mother’s chagrin. My limit was reached, so I decided some sport was needed.’ She glanced at the fallen creature. ‘Though this sport did end abruptly.’
‘Ha!’ said the Duke, and he laughed. ‘so one should wish, Lady Bethany. A wounded wyvern is a dangerous beast. Most would give the creature a wide berth.’
The trackers and beaters and dogs had arrived, and Huntmaster Rodney motioned for the beast to be secured.
Brendan said, ‘We all took a hand in killing the wyvern, Father, but I’ll concede honours to Bethany. Her arrow spared me a scorching, I’ll avow.’
Martin nodded in agreement, as if who claimed the kill was of no importance to him.
‘What do you intend to do with it?’ asked Robert. ‘You can’t eat it.’
