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It seemed that Lesha wasn’t going to answer for she rode a hundred yards in silence at our side as we led our animals away from the city.
‘I’m sure my grandmother’s assessment of the expedition is accurate and remains unchanged.’
I still could see nothing of her within the fold of her cloak but something in the way she held herself made me sure she was kind to the eye, maybe beautiful.
‘So why would she send you, Lady Lesha?’ Sunny asked. He broke the silence I’d left for her to fill. Often the lack of a question will prompt an answer, sometimes an answer to a question you might not have thought to ask.
‘She didn’t send me – I decided to come. In any case, she won’t miss me too much. She has plenty of grandchildren and I’m far from being her favourite.’
That left a long silence that none of chose to break. Lesha dismounted and led her horse beside us.
The dawn broke, a gentle fading of greys until the eastern sky grew bright with promise. At last the first brilliant corner of the sun poked above horizon, throwing long shadows our way. I glanced at Lesha then, and lost any sting from when she had touched her cheek to mark my scarring. Each part of her face had been burned as badly as the wound I bore. Her skin held a melted quality, as if it had run like molten rock then frozen once more. The burns surprised me, but less than the fact that she had survived them. She met my gaze. Her eyes were very blue.
‘You’re still sure you want to go to the Iberico?’ She pushed back her hood. The fire had left no hair, her scalp piebald in whites, unhealthy pinks, and beige, holes where her ears lay.
‘Damned if I am,’ Sunny gasped.
I reached out and took her reins so we both stopped in the road. Balky stood shoulder to shoulder with her horse, Sunny a few yards ahead, looking back.
‘And why are you so keen to return, lady?’ I asked. ‘Why not twice shy, for you’ve surely been bitten?’
‘Perhaps I’ve nothing to lose now,’ she said, her lips lumpy lines of gristle. She didn’t look away from me.
I closed my eyes for a second and a point of red light blinked against the back of my eyelids. Fexler’s tiny red dot, drawing me across all these miles.
‘And what desire drew you there in the first place? Did you think to find wealth in the ruins, or to come back to Albaseat a great and famed explorer?’ I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so. Those are bad bets – not for a daughter of the provost’s family. I think the secrets called you there. You wanted answers. To know what the Builders hid there, yes?’
She glanced away then, and spat, like a man. ‘I found no answers.’
‘But that doesn’t mean the place holds none.’ I leaned in toward her. She flinched away, not expecting intimacy. My hand caught her around the back of that bald head, the skin rippled and unpleasant beneath my fingers. ‘It doesn’t mean that asking our questions is not the truest thing that creatures such as you and I can do.’ I drew her very close though she strained against it. She stood tall for a woman. ‘We can’t be trapped by fear. Lives lived within such walls are just slower deaths.’ I spoke in a whisper now, bowing my head until a bare inch stood between our faces. I half-expected her to smell of char, but she had no scent, not perfume, not sweat. ‘Let’s go there and spit in the eye of any who says the old knowledge is forbidden to us, neh?’ I kissed her cheek then, because I feared to do it and though commonsense may occasionally bind me, I’ll be fucked if fear will.
Lesha snatched herself away. ‘You’re just a child. You don’t know what you’re talking about.’ But she didn’t sound displeased.
We rode until noon and took shelter from the sun in the shade of a stand of olive trees. The farmer’s wife proved enterprising enough to delay her own siesta and toil up the slopes to offer us wine, cheeses, and hard brown herb-bread. The old woman crossed herself briefly when she saw Lesha but had the grace not to stare. We set to the meal, and sent her back with an empty basket and a handful of coppers, enough for twice the amount of food were it served in a fine tavern.
‘Tell me about the Moors,’ I said to nobody in particular. The piece of cheese I licked from my finger was soft and crumbly both at once. It smelled like something that shouldn’t ever be eaten, but had a pleasingly complex and pungent taste.
‘Which ones?’ Lesha said. She looked asleep, stretched on the dusty soil, head pillowed on her bundled cloak at the base of the tree shading her.
She had a point. I’d seen at least a dozen Moors in Albaseat, wrapped in white robes, most of them all but hidden inside the hood of a burnoose, some trading, some just bound upon their business.
‘Tell me about the Caliph of Liba.’ It seemed a good place to start.
‘Ibn Fayed,’ Sunny muttered. ‘The thorn in your grandfather’s arse.’
‘Has he many like Qalasadi working for him?’ I asked.
‘Mathmagicians?’ Sunny asked. ‘No.’
‘There aren’t many like that,’ Lesha said. ‘And they don’t work for masters in any case. They follow a pure path. There isn’t much that men like that want.’
‘Not gold?’ I asked.
Lesha raised her ruined head to watch me then sat up against the tree. ‘Only rarities hold interest for their kind. Wonders such as we might find in the Iberico, but just as likely old scrolls from the Builder times, ways of calculating, old lore, the sort of cleverness that never seemed to get written down on anything that lasts, or at least that we can read.’
‘And Ibn Fayed sails against the Horse Coast to raid, or to settle, or is it punishment for not following the Moors’ prophet?’ I had my grandfather and uncle’s views on this but it’s good to look at such things from other angles.
‘His people want to return,’ Lesha said.
This was new. The provost’s granddaughter took her wisdom from the whole book, not just the current page.
‘Return?’ I had seen a Moorish hand behind much that stood in Albaseat though no one seemed eager to admit it.
‘Caliphs have ruled here as many years as kings have ruled. Before the Builders and after. The scribes today call them raiders, burners, heathens, but there’s Moorish cleverness mixed into everything we take pride in.’
‘Not just a pretty face, then,’ I said. She read, this one, for her opinions weren’t ones that could be formed on what others might think it safe to teach. The church held the Horse Coast Kingdoms and the West Ports close – any closer and they’d choke them. Priests kept a low opinion of heathens, and this far south disagreeing with a man of the cloth often proved to be a dangerous pastime. In every town a church scribe busied himself rewriting history – but they couldn’t rewrite what lay written in stone all about them.
Lesha took no offence at my jibe, or at least I think not for her scar tissue couldn’t mirror the emotions below.
We lay quiet for a time then. Almost no sound but for the distant clang of a goat bell. Why the old nanny wasn’t lying in the shade I couldn’t say. The heat wrapped us like a blanket, taking away any inclination to move.
‘You were slow to save that boy, Jorg,’ Sunny said. I thought him asleep for the past quarter hour, but clearly he’d been replaying the morning behind his eyes.
‘I didn’t save him. I saved you. You’re of some use.’
‘You would have let him die?’ Sunny sounded troubled by it.
‘I would,’ I said. ‘He was nothing to me.’ Golden curls and blood, the image played over the back of my eyelids. I opened my eyes and sat up. They broke William’s head on a milestone, swung him by the feet and beat him on the stone. It happened. The world rolled on regardless. And I learned that nothing mattered.
‘I couldn’t stand and let it happen while I watched,’ Sunny said. ‘You can’t kick a child to death in front of Earl Hansa’s guard.’
‘You stepped in for yourself, or for my grandfather?’ I asked.
‘It was my duty.’
I took an olive left at the bottom of the food basket. Firm flesh broke beneath my teeth. The warm and complicated flavour spread as I chewed.
‘Would you have stepped in if it hadn’t been your duty?’ I asked.
Sunny paused. ‘If he hadn’t been so damn big, yes.’
‘Because you couldn’t watch it happen?’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Don’t live by half measures, Greyson.’ I pushed the dusty linen of my sleeve back until the scars from the hook briar showed – pale sigils against tanned skin. ‘I heard a priest once speak of the business of salvation. He urged us not to let the fact that we couldn’t save everyone from their sins stop us trying to save the people in front of us. That’s priests for you. Ready to give up in a moment. Falling over themselves to admit their frailty as if it were a virtue.’ I spat out the olive stone. ‘Either children are worth saving just because they’re children, or they’re not worth saving. Don’t let your actions be dictated by the accident that puts one in front of your eyes and hides the next. If they’re worth saving, save them all, find them, protect them, make it your life’s work. If not, take a different street so you won’t even see the one you might have seen, turn your head aside, put a hand to your eyes. Problem solved.’
‘You’d save them all, would you?’ Lesha spoke on the other side of me, voice soft.
‘I know a man who is trying to,’ I said. ‘And if I hadn’t learned better, then yes, I’d save them all. No half measures. Some things can’t be cut in half. You can’t half-love someone. You can’t half-betray, or half-lie.’
Silence after that. Even the goat slept.
The shade kept us until the shadows started to lengthen and the white blaze of the sun softened into something that could be endured.
We moved on in the afternoon. Night found our party camped in a dry valley ten miles further north, with a roof of stars and the chirp and whirr of insects to serenade us. The olive groves and cork trees lay far behind. Nothing grew in these valleys except unforgiving thorns, mesquite bushes and creosote, making a rich perfume of the night air but offering nothing to burn. We ate hard bread, apples, some oranges from Albaseat market, and washed it down with a jug of wine, so dark a red as to be near black.
I lay in the night watching the stars wheel, listening to the nicker of the horses, Balky’s occasional snort and stamp, Sunny snoring. From time to time Lesha whimpered in her sleep, a soft thing but full of hurt. And rising around it all, the relentless orchestra of night-crawlers, the sound swelling in waves as if an ocean rose about us as the sun fell. I held the copper box in one hand, the other touched the ground, grit beneath my fingertips. Tomorrow we would walk again. It seemed right to walk, and not just to save taking a good horse into poisoned lands. Some places a man needs to have his own two legs take him. Some journeys need a different perspective. The miles mean more if you have travelled them one step at a time and felt the ground change beneath your feet.
At last I closed my eyes and let the multitude of stars be replaced by a single red one. A single star brought the wise men to a cradle in Bethlehem. I wondered if a wise man would follow Fexler’s star.
7 (#ulink_f7421ca4-9a67-549e-8578-3e3ffcc69850)
Chella’s Story (#ulink_f7421ca4-9a67-549e-8578-3e3ffcc69850)
Six Years Ago
Defeated in the Cantanlona Swamps
The smell of soil, of earth that crumbles red in the hand, just so, and lets you know you’re home. The sun that lit a life from baby to headstrong young man arcs between crimson sunrise and crimson sunset. In the dark, lions roar.
‘This is not your place, woman.’
She wants it to be her place. The strength of his longing drew her here, with him, riding the wake of his departure.
‘Go home.’ His voice is deep with command. Everything he says sounds like wisdom.
‘I can tell why he liked you,’ she says. She has no home.
‘You like him too, but you’re too broken to know what to do with that.’
‘Don’t dare to pity me, Kashta.’ Anger she’d thought burned out flares once more. The red soil, white sun, low huts, all seem further away.
‘My name is not yours to conjure with, Chella. Go back.’
‘Don’t order me, Nuban. I could make you my slave again. My toy.’ His world is a bright patch now at the corner of her vision, detail lost in jewelled beauty.
‘I’m not there any more, woman. I’m here. In the drumming circle, in the hut shadow, in the footprint of the lion.’ Each word fainter and deeper.
Chella lifted her face from the stinking mud and spat foul water. Her arms vanished into the mire at the elbows, thick slime dripped from her. She spat again, teeth scraping the mud from her tongue. ‘Jorg Ancrath!’
The web of necromancy that she had spun through the marsh month after month until it pervaded every sucking pool and mire, reaching fathoms deep to even the oldest of the bog-dead, now lay tattered, its strength bleeding away, corrupted once more by the lives of frogs and worms and wading birds. Chella found herself sinking and summoned enough of what strength remained to flounder onto more solid ground, a low mound rising from the mud.
The sky held the memory of blue, faded, as if left too long in the sun. She lay on her back, aware of a thousand prickles beneath her, of being too cold on her sides, too hot on her face. A groan escaped. Pain. When a necromancer has spent too much power, when death has burned out of them, only pain remains to fill the hole. After all, that’s what life is. Pain.
‘Damn him.’ Chella lay panting, more alive than she had been in decades, barely treading the margins of the deadlands. Her teeth ground over each other, muscles iron, the hurt washing across her in waves. ‘Damn him.’
A crow watched her, glossy black, perched on the stone that marked the mound’s highpoint.
The crow spoke, a harsh cawing that took on meaning from one second to the next. ‘It’s not the pain of returning that keeps the necromancer away from life. It’s not that which keeps them so far away – as far as they can go without losing their grip on it. It’s the memories.’
The words came from the crow’s beak but they had been her brother’s, years ago, when he first taught her, first tempted her with what it meant to be death-sworn. In moments of regret she blamed him, as if he had talked her into corruption, as if mere words had parted her from all that was right. Jorg Ancrath had put an end to all her brother’s talking, though. Beheading him beneath Mount Honas, eating his heart, stealing away some part of his strength.
‘Fly away, crow.’ She hissed it past clenched teeth. But memories had started to leak behind her eyes, like pus from a wound, welling up where fingers press.
The crow watched her. Beneath its thin and clutching claws the stone lay lichen spattered, patched in dull orange, faded green, as if diseased. The bird held Chella’s slitted gaze, its eyes bright, black, and glittering. ‘No necromancer truly knows what waits for them as they walk the grey path into the deadlands.’ It cawed then, harsh and brief as the speech of crows should be, before returning to her brother’s voice and to his lessons. ‘Each of them has their reasons, often horrific reasons that would turn the stomachs of their fellow men, but whatever their motivation, however strange and cold their minds, they don’t know what it is that they have begun. If it could be explained to them in advance, shown on one foul canvas, none of them, not even the worst of them, would take the first step.’
He hadn’t lied. He had spoken the whole truth. But words are only words and they seldom turn a person from their path unless they want to be turned.
‘I followed you, Cellan. I took your path.’ She remembered his face, her brother’s face, from a year when they had been young together, children. A happy year. ‘No!’ The pain had been better than this. She tried not to think, to make a stone of her mind, to allow nothing in.
‘It’s just life, Chella.’ The bird sounded amused. ‘Let it in.’
Behind screwed-shut eyes images fought for their moment, to hold her regard if just for an instant before the tide of remembering swept them aside. She saw the crow there, dipping its scarlet head into an open corpse.
‘Life is sweet.’ Again the caw. ‘Taste it.’
She snatched for the crow, lunging, one pain-clawed hand reaching. Only to find it gone. No flap of wings, no scolding voice from high above, just one broken and bedraggled feather, as if that was all that there had ever been.
The sun passed overhead, witness to Chella’s long agony, and at last, in the dark beneath a host of stars, she sat. Her head throbbed with memory. Not a complete mapping of the life she had stepped away from, but enough meat on the skeleton to match with where she stood upon the threshold of death and life. She hugged herself, feeling at once how her ribs stood out, how sunken her belly, how withered her chest. The coldest fact, though – the harshest judgment, came from the sum of all her remembering. No tragedy had driven her along the path she chose. She hadn’t run from any particular horror, no offence too vile to live with, no terror nipping at her heels. Nothing but common greed: greed for power, greed for things, and curiosity, of the everyday cat-killing kind. Such were the needs that had set her walking among the dead, mining depravity, rejecting all humanity. Nothing poetic, dark, or worthy, just the mean little wants of an ordinary little life.
Chella drew a deep breath. She resented having to. Jorg Ancrath had done this to her. She felt her heart thump in her chest. Barely more than a child and he had beaten her twice. Left her lying here more alive than dead. Made her feel!
She picked a leech from her leg, then another, fat with her blood. Her skin itched where mosquitoes had taken their fill. It had been years since she held any interest for such creatures, years since they could even touch her without snuffing out the tiny flickers of life in their soft and fragile bodies.
The marsh stank. It hit her for the first time, though she had spent months in its embrace. It stank, and tasted worse than it smelled. Chella pulled herself up, weak in her legs, trembling. The cool of night on her mud-caked nakedness accounted for some of her shivering, hunger and fatigue for a little more, but most of it was fear. Not of the darkness or the swamp or of the long journey through harsh lands. The Dead King scared her. The thought of his cold regard, of his questions, of standing before him in whatever dead thing he chose to wear, her wrapped in the tatters of her power and speaking of failure.
How had it even come to this? Necromancers had been the masters of death, not its servants. But when the Dead King first rose unbidden amongst the darkest of their workings the necromancers knew fear once more, though they thought it abandoned and forgotten in their path. And not just Chella’s small cabal beneath Mount Honas. She knew that now, though for a year and more she had thought the Dead King a demon woken by her delving into places not meant for men, a creature focused on her alone, then on her brother and the few around them. But the Dead King spoke to all who looked past life. Any who reached through and drew back what could be found beyond the veil to refill the remains of those who had passed. All who reached for such power would find themselves, sooner or later, holding the Dead King’s hand. And he would not ever let them go.
And why had he sent her against this boy? And how had she failed?
‘Damn you, Jorg Ancrath.’ And Chella fell back to her knees and vomited up a dark and sour mess.
8 (#ulink_bd5e9e2d-27d7-5cc9-b677-bdd0e6e635f2)
In the six kingdoms I took from the prince of Arrow there are many cities larger, cleaner, finer, and in every way superior to Hodd Town. There were cities in my domain that I had yet to see, cities where the people called me king and my statue stood in markets and plazas, that I had not been within ten miles of, and even these were finer than Hodd Town. And yet Hodd Town felt more mine. I had held it longer, taken it in person, painted the streets red when Jarco Renar raised it in rebellion. It was not a place where they remembered Orrin of Arrow. None in Hodd Town spoke of his goodness and vision or voiced the common belief that he would be named a saint before his memory grew cold.
All of Hodd Town turned out to greet our arrival. No one lingers at home when the Gilden Guard ride through their city gates. Highlanders lined the streets cheering, and waving whatever flags they had. Of the Hoddites who would whisper in hoarse voices the next day, heads pounding with the echoes of celebration, not one in ten would be able to give a good account of why they cheered, but in a place like the Highlands it’s hard not to get excited over any touch of the exotic or foreign. At least as long as it’s just passing through and doesn’t look at your sister.
I rode at the head of the column and led it to the gates of Lord Holland’s mansion, the grandest building in the city, or at least the grandest complete building. One day the cathedral would outshine it.
Lord Holland came to throw his gates open in person, a beefy man sweating in his finery, his wife wobbling along behind, a fan of silver and pearls to hide her jowls.
‘King Jorg! You honour my house.’ Lord Holland bowed. His face said his hair should be grey with age so I half expected the glossy black wig to fall as he bent to me, but it stayed in place. Perhaps he kept his own hair and used lampblack on it.
‘I do honour you,’ I agreed. ‘I’ve decided to stay the night while I wait on word from the Haunt.
I swung out of my saddle, armour clanking, and waved him to lead on. ‘Captain Harran.’ I turned, holding a hand up to stop his mouth. ‘We’re staying here until dawn tomorrow. There’s no discussion to be had. We will have to make the time up on the road.’
