Exile (Bloodforge Book 1) (21 page)

He had called her by her
name. He never did that. “And what of you?” Riella asked in a small voice. “Are
you a hero?”

Beccorban laughed. “I’m
no hero, lass. Haven’t you heard? I am the Helhammer and I am damned.”

“What did you do?”

Beccorban pulled the
stick from the flames and held it up so that the glowing tip hovered a few
inches from his face. He blew softly and it glowed white hot, carving deep
orange-limned shadows into the contours of his face. “A man once said to me
that everyone has a demon in them. It tells you to do things sometimes that you
wouldn’t normally do, and you have to keep it in check, because if you don’t,
people die.” He fell silent.

“Did you let your demon
out?” she prompted him.

He shook his head. “I
never said I believed him, did I? I don’t have a demon. I made the decisions I
did because I wanted to.”

“And what happened?” she
asked.

“People died.”

She closed her eyes.

“I have told you enough
about me for one night, lass. Let’s hear about you. Why do you want to join the
Temple Dawn?”

She pictured the dawn
priestess that she had seen in Lanark, how radiant and happy she had been, how
men of all stations had bowed and scraped at her feet and fallen over each
other just to get a glimpse of her. The famous Temple Dawn in Kressel was
probably gone now, melted down into rubble. “It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“Was it the man you
killed? What did he do?”

She smiled mirthlessly
and looked up at him, trying to match that icy gaze with eyes that threatened
to brim over with tears born of guilt. “He tried to take something that wasn’t
his, and I fought for it.”

To her surprise,
Beccorban laughed. “You are a dangerous woman, Riella. Remember that. Nothing
can hurt you if you don’t let it.”

“And you?” she asked.
“Are you as dangerous as people say?”

“Oh, I’m worse than
that, lass. I’m Death itself.”

The forests grew thinner
as they descended from the Dantus, and though the weather did not improve much,
the rain held off. Beccorban looked behind him to make sure Riella was keeping
up. She was wearing that cursed scarf again.

“Not much further,” he
called out. “Another day perhaps, if it stays dry.”

“Won’t you be
recognised?” said Riella, hopping over a rock and skidding down a muddy slope.

“Huh?”

“In Kressel. Won’t
people know you?”

He reached out and
offered his hand for support as she got closer. Her skin was dry and cool, and
despite himself he felt the quickening of spirit that passes between two
people.
Gods, man, she is young enough to
be your daughter!
He eased her down to his level and turned away, striding
on as though to distance himself from her charms. “I don’t think that will be a
problem,” he called over his shoulder. “There are few who would know me by
sight. Illis maybe, though I doubt I will be awarded an audience with the
Empron.”

“What if they saw the
hammer?” she asked.

Beccorban frowned.
“Kreyiss,” he said.

“What?”

“That is her name,
Kreyiss.” He looked over his shoulder at her.

“You gave your hammer a
name?” she asked, arching an eyebrow.

“I did not give her a
name,” he snapped. “She had a name when she came to me.”

“She?” The mockery in
her voice splashed acid on his anger.

“I will not speak to you
of things you do not understand.” He accelerated through the trees and tried to
ignore the tinkling sound of her laughter behind him.

He focused on the forest
in front of him. Soon the trees would end and they would be left exposed and in
the open. He had planned to take the coast road, a finely built stone highway
raised above the surrounding plains. It served as the main link between Kressel
and Vendal, the small nation south of Veria famed for its merchants and their
wealth. However, the smoke on the horizon meant that the coast road was no
longer safe. He could not imagine who would attack Veria’s second city. Whoever
it was would soon face the might of the Dremon, and Beccorban knew what those
grim men could do. Indeed, he had helped create them.

Maybe it
was
just a fire. Kressel was a port city
after all and its seafront was full of old wooden warehouses, each holding
bountiful cargo: bales of silk, timber from Flen and Rindell — the riches
of an empire, taken or traded from a hundred nations in Daegermund and beyond.
Any one of them could have caught light. Such a fire would billow black smoke
into the sky, visible for miles.

But deep down he knew it
was not a fire — not an accidental one anyway. He had watched a city burn
before. Besides, Kressel had precautions against such things: a group of city
watchmen tasked with carrying water in huge sealed carriages to any stricken
areas. Beccorban and Riella had been travelling for two days now, and still the
heavens were scarred with plumes of cloud tainted with smoke. Kressel was dying
but he could not think who was killing her.

He was only thankful he
was too far away to hear the screams.

Riella hugged her arms
about her body and winced as her hand ached. It had swollen badly but luckily
nothing was broken. The weather kept her mind on other things than the pain.
Her clothes were still damp from the rainfall, though if she squeezed hard
enough she could stop herself from shivering. She had learned long ago that a
good remedy for discomfort was distraction.

She took a deep breath
and stumbled on. For so long now, ever since her flight from Kaleni and the
wardens of Lanark, Kressel and its famed Temple Dawn had been her guiding
beacon, her hope on the horizon. Now, if her eyes were to be believed, it was a
city aflame. Her beacon had become a macabre witchlight that promised only
death, and yet still she was driven towards it, compelled by pride or morbid
curiosity — or both. She looked up again at Beccorban’s great bearskin,
shining black as if oiled and swishing back and forth along the ground as it
swayed with the arrogant roll of his shoulders. Maybe it was him? Maybe he was
driving her on? She was content to let that be it and give full responsibility
for the journey to him. That way it would hurt less when she saw what had
become of her dreams.

Ahead of her, Beccorban
slowed to a halt and held out an arm to bar her progress. Pointedly she stepped
around to his other side and glared at the side of his head. She would not be
controlled, damn him. The fact that he did not seem to notice only provoked her
further.

“Look there,” he spoke
softly, pointing out through the rapidly thinning forest to a blue-grey smudge
where the land met the sky.

“Is that…?” she began,
curiosity taking a firm hold over the warring emotions in her head.

“Yes, the Scoldsee,” he
said. “Another two hundred paces and we shall be out in the open until
Kressel.”

The land fell away
before them, shedding the last few bare trees and folding in ever shallower
ripples of sickly brown and grey-green grass towards the sea. From here it
looked about waist height but it was hard to tell. Though they were still in
the foothills, the city was marked by a darker patch of sky that hung over it
like a great black spider pregnant with malice, the myriad chimneys of choking
fume its legs. To Riella it was a scream building in her head.

Beccorban grunted and
continued as though he could not see the evidence of Kressel’s fate. “We must
travel fast and stay low.” He looked at her as if sizing her up, and she could
not help but blush. The rain had made her clothing cling to her like a second
skin, and under the borrowed cloak that she held closed at the neck, it left
little to the imagination.

Beccorban pulled off his
bearskin and began to wring it out, twisting the last moisture from the heavy
fur with fingers like curled iron. Satisfied, he slipped it back on and took
another appraising look at her. “Good thing you chose to dress like a man. In
skirts, the grass would cut you to ribbons.”

Riella pulled her thin
fur cloak about her tighter and scowled behind her scarf.
Dress like a man! Says the person wearing the clothes of a bear.

“You know, if you’re
going to join the Temple Dawn, you might want to consider getting yourself
something more appropriate. A dawn priestess would call you brazen if
she—”

“I’m well aware of what
they would say,” she cut him off. She brushed a fallen lock of dark gold hair
from her forehead and looked out at the wilderness in front of them. She did
not want to speak of her plans to anybody. Even hearing her ambitions out loud
made them seem soiled somehow.

She spotted a ribbon of
pale against pale, a winding grey worm that slid towards Kressel from the
south. “What’s that?”

“The coast road,” he
said grimly. “We need to follow it but we cannot travel on it. We have no idea
what walks it these days. Come, let us go.” He stepped forward into the shade
of the last few trees between her and the ashes of her dreams.

“Stay down,” hissed
Beccorban, pressing his weight on her so that she was sandwiched between the
rubbery muscle of his chest and the damp grass. Riella struggled to breathe and
just managed to fill her lungs before the big man clapped a large, calloused
hand over her mouth. She felt panic threaten but she ignored it and breathed
out slowly past the mask his fingers made.

She had not seen what he
had seen but his reaction had been so quick that she wouldn’t have had time to
move anyway. Now he lay atop her in a shallow ditch some three hundred paces
from the coast road, hiding her from she knew not what. As she lay there
accompanied only by the sound of his hot breath in her ear, she toyed with the
idea that this was a clumsy attempt to rut with her. Then as she felt his
heartbeat quicken against her own and remembered the cloud of smoke in the
distance, she dismissed such nonsense. This man, a complete stranger days
before, was protecting her. Every now and then as his boots slid in the mud, he
leant into her to flatten them both against the wall of their hiding place.
Even then there was no lust in him, no telling hardness in the part of him that
pushed against her stomach. Riella cursed herself for a fool and strained her
ears to listen.

At first she could hear
nothing but the light wind that carved foam from the distant Scoldsee and the
sound of Beccorban’s breathing. Despairing, she turned her head to the side,
and in so doing her ear came into contact with the earth. Then she heard it.

Doom
doom, doom doom, doom doom
. The harsh metallic rhythm of armoured soldiers
marching in perfect step.
Doom doom, doom
doom, doom doom
. She flicked her eyes up to Beccorban but he was peering
over the edge of the ditch and his face was grim.

They stayed like that
for an hour while the hellish staccato stamped past. The mud seeped through her
breeches, and the small of her back grew wet and uncomfortable where her cloak
had gotten trapped beneath her. Were it not for Beccorban’s warmth, she would
have been shivering. She found his weight strangely comforting, and the
woodsmoke smell of him reminded her of something she should have known, a
fatherly smell. However, before long the muscles of her neck burned with
fatigue, whilst cramp drove its cruel knives into the meat of her legs. She
drew in a shuddering breath to protest but just then Beccorban rolled off of
her.

“They’re gone,” he said
simply and stared after them towards the dark cloud on the horizon.

Riella pulled herself up
and stretched her legs, rubbing at the sore muscles and glowering at her
erstwhile shelter. “Who were they?” she asked.

He shrugged. “I’ve never
seen their like before. We need to get closer.”

They walked in silence,
cold and miserable and haunted.
If I had
any sense I would have stayed in the Dantus,
thought Beccorban. Green boys
in crimson armour make for better foes than those that walk the coast road.
Twice more they had hidden from groups of strange soldiers, all marching
towards Kressel.

Beccorban thought again
of those dark grey helms and the unnaturally tall men that wore them. Each was
well over half as tall as him again, and he was considered a large man in most
parts. The soldiers had been weirdly lean, each clad in dark grey plate armour
that neither shone nor sparkled in the wan light that filtered through clouds
heavy with death. At first Beccorban had thought his eyes were playing him false,
old organs playing games on an old mind. However, once he had seen their
prisoner, he knew he still had his wits. Blood did not lie.

The lead soldier carried
a thin silver chain that ended in a collar looped around the neck of what had
once been a man. They had taken his arms, and black gore stained the sides of
his body. Tattered flesh hung from the stumps that waggled as he walked, like
the stubby wings of a newborn bird. Beccorban had been far enough from the road
to remain unseen but the wind had carried the wretched man’s choked moans and
whimpers to his ears, so that he was sure that they must have taken the
prisoner’s tongue.