Exile (Bloodforge Book 1) (20 page)

Their return went faster
as they gave less thought to caution and more to speed. Loster had no idea of
the way back but Selene seemed to have a route in mind, and that was good
enough for him. It grew lighter still as they walked and the wood brightened to
a rosy hue. The dew steamed from the mossy earth, releasing the pungent aromas
of the forest. Loster drank them in, trying to forget about the horse. If he
closed his eyes, the tall men in ghoulish armour were but a memory trapped in
his nightmares. Loster imagined that if any of them were to step into the
sunlight in front of him they would turn to dust. “Selene?”

“What?” She did not turn
around.

“The men chasing us.
Were they rebels?”

Selene lifted her hood
from her head but even the sun could not warm her raven-coloured hair. “What
have they told you about the war?” she asked over her shoulder. “Did you think
it was Illis’ glorious crimson warriors fighting demons?”

“I was told that you
were responsible. That the Sons of Iss—”

She spun to face him.
“The Sons were not the cause, Loster. The rebels were farmhands and peasants
who had taken their fill of requisitions and conscription. Not those things in
the forest. I’m not even sure they were men.”

A flurry of movement
caught Loster’s eye and he looked up to see a cloud of black birds explode from
their forest perches. Selene followed his gaze and then flinched as a low, mournful
horn sounded close by.

Very close.

“Oh gods. Aifayne.”
Loster broke into a run and shouldered past Selene. She called after him but he
ignored her, running headlong through the trees, looking for the telltale flash
of white that would betray the priest. He heard a crash in the forest behind
him but kept running until he was alone with the sound of his breath and the
rush of blood in his ears.

Something caught his eye
and he veered towards it, catching his shoulder on a tree and grunting as he
felt warm blood bead on his upper arm.

He stepped into a
clearing and froze. There was Aifayne, still prostrate, but he was not alone.
By his side there knelt a tall figure in dark grey armour that drank in the
light. The figure had his back to Loster but his limbs were very thin and he
wore a helm of dark grey. Loster could feel his heart hammering against his
chest and he was paralysed with indecision. “Aifayne!” he cried out, and the
old priest opened his eyes.

And screamed.

Weak as he was, Aifayne
tried to get away, but the kneeling warrior reached over and calmly placed a
gauntleted hand on his face, pushing him back down.

Loster started forward
but the warrior turned and Loster saw his metal face. In an instant, he was
transported back to the Widowpeak, and he felt as weak and as helpless as he
had all those years before.

The smooth, metal face
spoke: a deep, bassy rumble in a language that Loster had never heard before.
Though he could not understand the words, it made every organ inside him quiver
with unease. The creature stood and turned its whole body towards him. It was
over seven feet tall.

Something wrapped around
his legs and yanked backwards so that he fell heavily on to his face. He rolled
on to his back and saw another of the tall creatures. It had caught him with a
rope and was reeling him in as though it was landing a fish. He moaned like a
man waking from a nightmare and thrashed around in a vain attempt to escape.
The warrior knelt to receive him, reaching out with a barbed hand. As it clutched
the front of his tunic it ripped through the fabric and then his flesh. Blood
ran warm down his chest and he looked around for Selene, but this time there
was nobody to save him.

On the third
day, Beccorban allowed them a fire. It was a measly thing of weak flames and
wet wood that gave off more smoke than heat but Riella took it as a sign of
forgiveness and that was good enough. It was getting warmer as they descended
from the mountains, though the nights were still cold and she was not dressed for
this kind of weather. She couldn’t even wear the scarf without Beccorban
telling her she looked like a Ri’eshi pirate.

She stared at the
grizzled warrior now as he dozed against the rock wall. It had stopped raining,
and his wisdom held that the layers of clothing kept out the warmth as well as
the cold, so he had shed his bearskin and now lay reclined against the flat
stone with his hands gathered neatly on his lap and the great hammer within
easy reach. His leather tunic was old and cracked but the wet weather had
served to soften and shape it, so that now it seemed to fit more comfortably.
It covered him from neck to knee and stopped just above his elbows. The sleeves
of the woollen tunic he wore underneath reached down to his forearms where they
stopped short of covering his wrists. Here he wore vambraces instead, also of
boiled leather. Riella had teased him, saying that if his woman made him
clothes with sleeves too short he should get a new woman. His face had grown
dark at that and he had fallen quiet. She knew she had overstepped, but after
an hour of brooding silence, he had made some quip about her scarf and all had
been forgotten. As she was learning, Beccorban’s rage was a summer storm: dark
and terrible but fleeting, without lingering afterthought.

A small log on the fire
split and cracked with a tiny explosion of sparks making her jump. A low
chuckle rolled from Beccorban. She scowled and hurled a small round pebble at
him. It snicked off the stone above his head and he did not even flinch. He
spoke without opening his eyes. “Don’t be so nervous, lass. We’re far from harm
here.” He opened one eye and twisted his neck to squint at the powdery scar on
the stone that the pebble had left. “Also, you may want to get some rest. It’s
affecting your aim.” His closed his eye again.

“My aim is fine, old
man,” she snarled and immediately cursed herself for the insult, but he did not
seem to notice. She waited a few moments and then decided to cushion the blow.
“What’s your secret?”

“You already know enough
of my secrets, girl. I don’t care to share any more with you.”

“Stop calling me
girl
. I’m no girl.”

“Sorry, old men forget
sometimes.”

“Gods! You’re
impossible!” she cried, yet couldn’t help but feel a flutter of something
pleasant in her stomach. Beccorban seemed content to lie as he had been, with
his head against the wall, dozing lightly. “I meant how can you sleep so
easily? Given what’s happened.”

He sighed loudly and sat
forward. “Usually without interruption, but I can see that you’re not going to
let me, are you?” He hooked a long stick from the fire with the toe of his
boot. The flames shimmered and danced as he poked and stirred them to a frenzy
with the wooden limb. “What’s panicking you?”

Riella stared at him,
mouth agape. “Kressel is burning!” she pointed vaguely at where they were
going.

“Cities burn all the
time.” He waved away her incredulous gasps. “What is important is why she is
burning, and how. Kressel is not a small city and her defences are peerless in
this part of the world, unless you count Ruum and possibly Fend as she was. It
is probably an accident.”

“And you believe that?”

“I
hope
that. With all of my heart.”

“You’re afraid.”

He tilted his head and
looked at her. “If Kressel is under attack then you would do well to be afraid
too.”

An uncomfortable silence
fell on the pair and Riella realised how quiet their rocky eyrie truly was. It
was pitch dark and Kressel was a distant glow somewhere below them. She peered
into the soupy shadows all around, but the fire had made her night-blind and
she would have seen as much had she covered her eyes with her hands. She was
suddenly afraid and ached for the soothing rumble of Beccorban’s voice, but he
sat in grim silence with his long, powerful arms draped over his knees, the
stick-poker held loosely between one thick finger and a crooked thumb. She
noted how he never looked directly at the flames, his cool, wintery gaze always
directed at some point behind or to the side of them.

“Do you always see
things so simply?” she asked.

He considered before he
answered. “It helps when you’re a soldier, and that’s all I have ever been.”
She felt sad at his tone. “I never learned to plant crops or grow things like
other men. My father always told me that was for the weak. ‘Sheep sow and
wolves reap,’ he used to say, though now that I think about it, I can’t recall
seeing many sheep tilling fields.”

She laughed and his face
brightened, his scowl smoothing into a wry, distant smile and allowing the fire
to spill across his features with an orange glow, so that to her he looked like
some great benevolent god cast in bronze. “Did you love your father?” she
asked.

“No, lass. Few did.
Brennan was not a man much given to love. He taught me to kill and he did that
well, but everything else I had to learn for myself.” His voice grew quieter.
“He was a pugilist, you see.”

“A what?”

“A pugilist, a man who
fights with his fists for money.”

“Just money?” she asked
archly.

“What else is there?” he
said, grinning.

“Honour, duty, family,
love.” She numbered the list on her fingers.

“Psshht. Men don’t fight
for love, they fight for what’s theirs.”

“What about Capito? He
fought for love.” Capito was a hero from the old stories. He had travelled
across all of Daegermund to free his beloved Irridice from the foul warlock,
Fiego. Riella knew the story from a poem her mother had read to her when she
was young, and even as an adult she had a warm place in her heart for such
stories. Yet now she felt her cheeks grow warm. She had made herself seem
something less: a little girl.

Beccorban shook his
head. “Capito the Red was not fighting for love. Irridice was stolen from him.
He wanted her back because she was his; that he loved her is just a detail.
Also, Fiego took his horse — a damned fine one if the story is true.
Capito wanted it back.”

“Stolen?” Riella’s
cheeks grew warmer still, though this time they flushed with the rosy hue of
anger. “Irridice could not be ‘stolen.’ She is not a horse. The horse was an
afterthought, otherwise the story is meaningless. A man cannot love a horse.”

Beccorban pointed the
glowing end of his makeshift fire poker at her. “That,” he said, “depends
entirely upon the horse.”

“Gods, it’s like arguing
with a stone.” Riella huffed in frustration and folded her arms across her
modest bosom.

“And like stone, men
never change, but they can have many faces. Which side you see depends on where
you’re standing.”

“What does that mean?”

“I’ll tell you a story,”
he began, shifting to find a more comfortable position. “I remember a siege in
Otelune back in 1221—”

“Where’s that?”

“Over the sea.” He waved
a hand. “It does not matter. Anyway, it was a long siege. They held out for
three months and we were beginning to run out of food.”

“What did you do?”

“Me? Very little, if
truth be told. I was young and very foolish — but that is not the story.
One of our number found a postern gate that was unguarded one night and we took
the city with fire and steel. A city that had held us for three months broke in
three minutes, and we were loosed upon the people inside. Wolves in the sheep
pen. That night I saw all manner of terrible things — I even did some
myself — but one moment has stuck with me all these years, and I will
carry the image to my grave.

“There were four men
from my group, and they had captured a little girl. She could not have been any
older than five summers. Her parents had been put to the sword and the men were
throwing her around from person to person, as though she were a ragdoll.
Suddenly one of them grabbed her and lifted up her dress. He bent her over his
knee and began to smack her on the buttocks with the flat of his blade. The
girl was crying like nothing I have ever heard, yet the men, all of them
fathers and husbands, were in hysterics, as though it were the funniest thing
they had ever seen.”

“Did you stop them?”

He twisted his mouth to
the side. “No, lass. I didn’t. I sometimes wish I had, but there were four of
them, and the girl was their spoils, and I had spoils of my own to collect.”

“Were any of them little
girls?”

He shook his head. “No.
That has never been for me.”

“So what was the point
of your little story?” she spat, strangely angry at this man she barely knew.

“That love is relative,
I suppose. Armies cannot fight for love because they don’t all love the same
things. Men fight because it suits them. Greed, revenge, hate. These are things
to fight for.”

“Do you only fight for
money, then?”

“That was true, I
suppose. Before Illis.”

“What’s it like killing
a man for money?” she spat, angry at herself but too riled to control it.

“I should think it’s
similar to killing a man for anything, but then I am not talking to the
uninitiated, am I?”

Riella’s breath died in
her throat and she strained for a response. “What do you mean?”

“Come now, lass. I’ve
met enough killers of men before to know one when I see one. You may be the one
sticking them, but the blade scars you too.” She stared at her hands, folded in
her lap. “First kill?” She nodded. “Did he die well?”

“He choked on his own
blood.” Though she spoke quietly, she was surprised at the venom that seeped
into her words and hardened her voice. It felt good to let some of the poison
out. “He made a noise like a clogged gutter and then he suffocated and I
watched him die. It took a long time.” She looked up at Beccorban and thought
she saw a glimmer of concern — or was it respect? — flicker there
before that wall of impassivity came down again. “Is that dying well?”

Beccorban smiled out of
the corner of his mouth. “There’s no such thing, really. I’ve never understood
the phrase. Some go bravely and quietly, some plead, others lay down and curl
up in a ball like a kitten, but they all die in the end and it’s never pretty
or glorious like your songs say. They all shit themselves, for one.”

“Mine didn’t.”

“He would have
eventually. It’s the muscles relaxing. It just happens.” Silence came again,
but this time it was a comfortable silence accompanied by the pops and crackles
of the fire.

“Will somebody save
Kressel?” asked Riella, knowing what she wished the answer to be.

"Perhaps. Illis is
not a man to sit and do nothing. He has that one virtue at least.”

“You knew him?” she knew
she should ask him about Kressel but the thought of the city burning made her
stomach turn. She sought to turn the conversation elsewhere.

“Of course. I helped to
make him, much to my shame.”

“He’s a good Empron,”
Riella said petulantly.

“Is he? I thought he
would be. We all did.” Riella raised an eyebrow for him to continue and he
looked at her, then blew his breath out through pursed lips. “I met Illis when
we were both young men. I had crossed the Scoldsee to Elios to join a mercenary
band there.”

“Why?”

“Because I was young and
wanted glory and fortune, as all young men do. None of us have the wits to know
that glory comes hard, or that once you have it, it’s already lost its colour.
Veria was still very much under the thumb of Respin in those days.” His face
distorted into an evil-looking grimace and Riella shuddered. “It made me sick
to watch them preen and prance and spit on us.”

“Is that the only
reason?” She was amazed that this man could have started as so many others did:
a disillusioned youth.

“What else was I to do?”
Beccorban said defensively, stirring the fire back to life with the stick.
“Join the Higard? Become one of them?”

“Others did,” she said.

“Ah, well, Bellephon only
went in because he was a criminal. He killed a man in a tavern over a woman,
and the Lord of Darkmist offered him the army or an axe in the neck. He made
the only choice he could.”

“But Bellephon was a
hero,” she said meekly. It felt as though the great Bellephon Hammerfist had
lost his golden aura now that she knew he was a simple criminal.

“Aye, a hero, but only
after he changed sides — changed to the winning side, mind. Ask a Respini
what they think of the Hammerfist. Over there his name is mud.” She knew she
was wearing her disappointment on her face and Beccorban must have noticed for
he softened his tone. “It doesn’t make him any less of a hero, Riella. If he
hadn’t held Ruum, the rebellion would have died before it began. It’s just
important to remember that not everyone sees things the way you do. Your heroes
are yours alone, like your gods.”