Exile (Bloodforge Book 1) (18 page)

Loster finished his
inspection, knowing it seemed arrogant and cocky, but also knowing that it gave
him time to think. The man stared back with a grim expression that suggested he
had just eaten something unpleasant. There was steel in his eyes and his hand
hovered near the dagger hanging from his belt.

Loster turned back to
the soldiers with what he thought was casual disdain. “What is happening here?”
he tried to keep his voice level.

“Nothing we can’t
handle,” said the first speaker, before adding, “milord,” without any real
feeling.

Loster breathed in
slowly and adjusted his feet so that his stance seemed firmer. “That’s not what
I asked, soldier.”

The first man spat a
fleshy lump of phlegm on to the road. He was a lanky, ginger-haired man, in
cheap battered armour, probably passed down from family members whom it had
failed to save. “I ain’t no soldier. I’m a guardsman.” Loster noted that most
of the other men had the good grace to shift uncomfortably and avert their
eyes.

“That’s not what I
asked,
guardsman
,” Loster added just
enough edge to that last word to sound vaguely menacing, but it had no apparent
effect on the man in front of him. He continued, “I asked what was going on.”

“I need these wagons out
from my way,” said a thick foreign accent behind Loster. “You’re blocking the
road.”

“So are you, you fat
oaf,” said the self-appointed spokesman. “Stand aside, milord. We’ll tip his
wagon into the muck and stick on him on one of ‘is majesty’s sticking poles.”
The guardsman pointed at a rotten stump of wood that thrust upwards out of the
earth some yards from the road. It was no tree and had clearly been cut by
human hands. Loster knew the story, as did most people under Illis’ rule. After
the Helhammer had freed the Empron from the dungeons of Fend, he had ordered
every Respini prisoner to be impaled on great wooden poles, all along the road
to Ruum. It was to serve as a warning that any who crossed him would die in agony.
Loster had no desire to recreate something so dark and terrible. 

“No,” he said softly.

“But your Lord
father—”

“Is not here,” Loster finished
for him, surprised at his own courage. The guardsman’s face flushed with anger.
“What is your name?”

“He’s Dilitch, milord,”
said one of the others with a humoured lilt in his voice, earning an evil glare
from the man he had identified.

Loster nodded
thoughtfully and turned back to the foreigner. “And you?”

“Faro,” he said.

Loster looked over the
stocky man’s shoulder, past the two females who hugged each other against the
cold. A mist was beginning to form, which seemed strange to Loster, but then he
was unused to life in the low country of the Heartlands. He had spent all of
his fourteen years in the shadow of the Widowpeak and any fog there tended to
end up speared atop the great mountain. He looked back down the length of
the convoy and then returned his gaze to Faro, trying hard to look lordly and
stern but afraid he might appear constipated instead. He spread his hands in a
gesture of helplessness. “We have many wagons, and you have but one.”

“You don’t understand.”

“My Lord!” corrected a
guardsman in an angry roar. Loster, grateful for the support, tried to ignore
the sound of Dilitch hawking another gobbet of phlegm on to the damp stone.

“Yeah, he’s a lord,”
said the surly guardsman, though his tone suggested he believed otherwise.

“Lord or no,” drawled
Faro, “I need to get past.”

“Why the hurry, fat man?
We thought your daughter would wanna stop for a play,” said one of Malix’s men.

The others laughed and
Loster flushed with the prudishness of one who had not known a woman. “Enough
of that.”

“Come on, milord, she’s
about your age. Reckon you could get your tip wet.”

“What is going on here?”
cried a shrill voice, and the small group of armoured men split apart to reveal
the crooked form of Aifayne shambling forward with purpose. “Come away, my Lord.
Let the soldiers deal with this. What is it? Broken axle?” He peered over
Loster’s shoulder at Faro.

“Broken head, more like.
Thinks we should move, milord,” Dilitch spoke in a calmer, more respectful tone
reserved for the elderly or the pious. Aifayne was both.

“Move?” crowed Aifayne
with a raspy chuckle. “Very good, very good. Oh, and I am no lord, master
soldier, just a simple man of the gods.”

 Dilitch bowed his
head respectfully as Aifayne passed. The priest reached Loster and plucked at
the sleeve of his pristine white tunic. “Come, my Lord. You will catch a chill
out here. Come.” He tugged insistently.

“Wouldn’t wanna catch
chill, milord,” said Dilitch wickedly, head still bowed.

Loster scowled and felt
an unfamiliar anger rising within him. He yanked his arm away from his minder.
“No, Aifayne. I have business here.”

“Business? What
business?”

“Faro here—”

“Faro where?” said
Aifayne.

Loster looked behind him
to see that Faro was by his wagon, helping his wife and daughter down from the
wooden bench seat. Loster strode to his side.

“What are you doing?” he
demanded, uncomfortably aware that Faro’s daughter was watching him intently.

“Leaving,” he said
simply. “I need to get out of here.”

“But we can’t move the
wagons,” Loster protested. “Your things…”

“Keep them.” Faro turned
to look at him grimly and ran his eyes over the young acolyte of the Temple
Dawn in an inspection of his own. When his face did not soften, Loster could
only guess that he did not like what he saw. The foreign man — a merchant?
— jogged forward to the carthorse that had pulled his wagon. He freed it
from the traces and then lifted his daughter on to its back.

“You don’t have a
saddle,” said Loster dumbly, too unsure of what to say to say nothing. Faro
ignored him and formed a stirrup with his hands for his wife to step into. The
older woman slipped and clutched at the horse’s mane to steady herself. Faro
caught her considerable bulk and pushed her up roughly, heaving with his hands
on her rump. The men jeered but he ignored them too and began to lead his
family away, walking alongside the horse. When Dilitch tried to provoke him
with the thrust of a shoulder, he deftly sidestepped the challenge and
continued on his way.

The guardsman set his
jaw and probed the root of a black tooth with the tip of his tongue. “You just
gonna let ‘em go?” he asked accusingly.

“What?” said Loster,
snapping out of his confused reverie. The mist had thickened and it was making
his tunic damp.

“Your father wouldn’t
have done that,” said Dilitch with the confidence of a man facing a boy. The
fiery-haired guardsman took a menacing step forward.

“Come, Lord Loster,”
said Aifayne, shuffling past the swaggering guardsman. “Let the soldiers handle
this.”

“There ain’t nothing to
handle now he’s gone an’ stuck his nose in where it don’t belong.” Dilitch was
growing bolder as he saw the uncertainty and fear on the face of the boy in
front of him.

“Be ware,” grumbled one
of the other guardsmen.

“Why should I?” sneered
Dilitch. “’He’s just a jumped up little prick.”

Loster did not react, so
Dilitch stepped closer, revelling in this moment of power. Yet Dilitch was a
lesser son of lesser sons, and he had misread this situation entirely, for
though Loster was afraid — truly afraid — it was not of the skinny,
pockmarked guardsman looming before him. Rather he was looking at the
silhouettes in dark grey armour that were approaching from the mist. They were
still far enough away to make it difficult to identify, but Loster had an
uneasy feeling in his stomach. He couldn’t remember any of his father’s men
being so tall.

Dilitich’s predatory
gaze flicked from Loster to a point over his shoulder — an action that
the young acolyte noticed peripherally. Loster twisted his head to look past
Faro’s abandoned cart at the towering soldier that stalked on to the road
behind the retreating merchant. The soldier stopped and craned his head to the
side, then began to stride towards them on alarmingly long and birdlike legs.

“Oh, your scouts have
returned, master soldier!” said Aifayne delightedly. “Come, Loster, we must
return to your carriage. We will be moving on soon.”

Loster stood frozen to
the spot as he watched the giant approach. The soldier was fully covered in
plate armour the colour of a wet pebble, though it did not glisten like metal.
The armour was hard and angular, lined with geometric etchings and grooves that
resembled the fuller of a sword. Its helm was a flat plate of grim grey, split
by a hair-thin visor. The soldier did not speak, but drew a slim, needle-like
knife from a hidden sheath behind its back and paced forward with purpose.

Then the screams began.

Loster and the men
around him burst into action. The young Lord turned and grabbed Aifayne,
dragging him by the hood of his robe into the spaces between the trees.

“What are you— My
Lord!” Aifayne struggled weakly but Loster had a strength born of fear and the
ancient holy man was no match.

“Run, you old fool!” he
screamed and ran headlong, leaning forward to put his weight into his steps
lest Aifayne’s weight slow him down. His bruised body protested but he put all
thought of discomfort underfoot.

The screams grew more
frequent and mingled with the ring of metal on metal, though the latter was a
sound all too broken and sporadic to convince Loster that any real resistance
was being offered to the strange, stork-legged soldiers.

Aifayne finally turned
the right way around and the pair picked up pace. Nevertheless their going was
still slower than Loster would have liked, and he had to try and ignore the
nagging suggestion to run with all the speed his youth could muster. The mist
was a cloying blanket now and they had lost the sight of the wagons. Instead
they were surrounded by the tall silhouettes of the trees and every now and
again the threat of a mysterious soldier flitting in and out of their bubble of
visibility.

“Your father’s men,”
muttered Aifayne, his breath a too-loud wheeze that would surely betray them,
“why are they doing this?”

“They’re not my father’s
men,” said Loster, stopping to catch his breath. Aifayne sank gratefully down
on to a fallen log. “Did you see how tall they were?”

“I am not a tall man, my
Lord. Everybody is tall to me.”

“Not like that. They’re
like demons.”

“No, my Lord,” Aifayne
breathed in raggedly. “Do not speak of such ills. Leave them to the stories
where they belong.”

“But I saw them!” Loster
said incredulously, his heart hammering in his chest like a trapped bird.

“Maybe they were
rebels?” Aifayne offered. The old man had found a portion of his breath again
and now his voice took flight on one of its interminable journeys. “The
Heartlands are at war, you know. It is not unbelievable that they mistook us
for soldiers of Illis.”

“Ssshh!!” Loster hissed
at the elderly priest to be silent, and Aifayne did stop, though he looked
offended at the interruption.

The forest was a miasma
of vapour and tension, striped here and there with the dark vertical of a tree.
The silence that had once seemed so welcome and peaceful was now ripe with the
unnerving promise of something horrible. Loster wished to all the gods that he
held a weapon in his hands, though he knew he would not be able to use it to
much effect. His Lord father had made certain that he focus on his studies
rather than anything practical, if only to protect his bloodline. Now he was off
to the Temple Dawn, and the Temple Dawn was not a place for weapons.

Loster scanned the
undergrowth, glad that his itchy white tunic served as camouflage in the mist.
He could see no more than twenty paces all around and was fast losing memory of
which way he had come. He turned to whisper to Aifayne but the priest was
staring wide-eyed at a spot over Loster’s right shoulder. Loster spun around
and threw himself backwards as a spider-fingered gauntlet of barbed metal
closed on the air where he had been. Loster landed on his back and the air flew
from his lungs with an
oof
. He
breathed deeply and quickly, and scrabbled backwards, away from the thing that
rose over him.

It was a creature of
nightmare, at least as tall as a bear standing on its hind legs, though slim
and seemingly fragile. The line of its visor was a black, merciless void and
yet Loster could sense something lurking behind that featureless metal face. It
stepped forward again to seize him but Loster found that he could not react. It
was as though his mind alone ran free in a body made of stone, and he could
only watch as a cruel grey gauntlet reached out to take him, for this was a
nightmare he had experienced before. He saw again Barde’s face and the painted
maw of the Unnamed, and finally the huge metal Guardian that had split his
brother in two. The soldier before him now was much smaller, but it was an
almost perfect copy of the monster below the mountain.