The Bloodstained God (Book 2) (17 page)

“You’re dead,” Tilian said. “And the rest of you, if you come one at a time this is going to be too easy.” He saw them look at one another, saw a small nod. Friends then, and agreeing to share the gold. He stepped back again and took guard.

Three of them came at once, but they were too cautious at first, stood too far apart and too far from him. He moved quickly to his left and drew a hurried stroke from the man on that side; he deflected it and turned his body, hitting the man a resounding smack on the side of the head.

“Dead,” he said.

The other two came in behind him as he’d expected. He moved from side to side as they swung at him, forcing them to time their strokes wrong, never being there for both to swing at once. He worked them round until one was too far to attack altogether, and then stepped inside the closer man’s blade and struck him above the heart with the point of his wooden sword. He tripped the man he’d just struck and jumped over the top of him, beating the next man’s sword down and pushing him over with a blow to the chest.

“Dead and dead,” he said.

He didn’t wait for the others to come, but went after them. They gave way, backing away in different directions, making it easy. He tripped the first, tapped his chest as he struck the ground, got the second with a classic feint, and knocked the sword out of the last man’s hand with a blow to the wrist, and then tapped him on the top of his head.

He was breathing hard, but it had been easier than he’d expected. None of these men had natural ability. Lucky for him, but bad for them.

“All dead,” he told them. “Seven of you, and all beaten by a wooden blade.”

“You made your point, Captain,” one of the men said, still rubbing his ear.

“Did I? You know I’m not an expert with this?” He held up the wooden blade. “If just one Seth Yarra sword got in among you lot you’d not be coming home. Gods, the Lady Sara would do better than any of you. At least she got a counter in.”

They looked at each other, sheepish. The other two groups had stopped what they were doing to watch the fight, and he moved to where he could see them all, and turned again.

“I’m not trying to make you look like fools,” he said.

“Not doing very well then,” one of the men called out. Some of the others laughed, and Tilian himself grinned. He couldn’t help it.

“You have to learn this,” he said. “It’s serious. You have to be able to defend yourselves, at least enough for you and your mates to gang up on one of them.”

They’d stopped laughing. The first man he’d beaten was sitting to one side, but he’d got his wind back now. “We’re all going to die, ain’t we?” he said.

Tilian glanced at Welcart, and he saw the old man was looking at him, staring almost, waiting for his answer.

“Some of you might,” he said. “It’s a war, and people die in war. My job is to see that as few of you as possible die. I’ll try to keep you out of the line, but at some point you’re going to have to face another man and kill him, or he’ll kill you.”

“We’re not cowards,” the man with the sore ear said. “If there’s fighting that must be done, then we’ll do our part. That’s why we come here today.” There was a murmur of agreement from the other men.

“Oh, you’ll fight,” Tilian assured him. “I’ve seen what some of you can do with a bow, and that’ll be your job, but lines break, those bastards come at you too quick for an arrow, and you can’t run.”

“Can’t kill ‘em if and he can’t see ‘em,” Welcart suggested.

“Can they become invisible, then, like ghosts?” Tilian kept the scorn out of his voice with difficulty.

“Aye, they can,” Welcart said. “In a wood they can.”

“Battles aren’t fought in woods,” Tilian told them.

“Why not? High time they were, if you’re asking me, which I know you’re not,” the old man said.

Tilian was about to reply, to argue again, but he suddenly had a vision of fifty thousand Seth Yarra marching through the great forest, as he knew they must to reach the White Road. Fifty thousand men and twenty foresters with arrows, foresters who could shoot a squirrel at fifty paces, who couldn’t be found; a tiny army of invisible death. He wondered how many arrows a man could carry. Fifty? Twenty men and fifty arrows could be a thousand dead Seth Yarra.

“Can you use a quarter staff?” he asked.

“It’s a country skill,” Welcart said. “Any man here can use one.”

Quarter staffs, bows and knives; could they be enough? A good man with a staff could stand alone against a sword, but in a line? He had no idea. He would have thought a man needed space to fight with a staff, and there was none of that in a line.

“That’s good,” he said. “That’ll help, but a staff is defensive. You need to kill a man quick, before another arrives to help him. You need the swords.”

“Then we’d best learn how, best as we can” Welcart said, and Tilian was gratified to see a chorus of nodding among the men. It would be easier now. They would try harder.

It was like a drum, pounding in his head. The firm stamp of ten thousand synchronised feet on the rock floor, over and over and over again. He stood and watched as a division, a regiment, he knew not what to call it, of Bren warriors return
ed from feeding to stand in their allotted positions in a cave. It was a picture of order and discipline. They marched three abreast down the passageway and turned neatly into their barracks cave, left two files to the left and right file to the right, then right two and left one until the cave was filled.

The noise stopped. The movement stopped. A taste of dust in the air was the only clue that these glittering ranks had ever moved at all. To Narak they seemed hardly alive. He was dreaming again. He thought of it as dreaming, but he knew by now that it must be something else; a vision perhaps, some magic that permitted him to see through the eyes of the Bren Ashet in all its multitude of presences.

Their numbers had grown since the last time he had seen them. More of the barracks caves were full. The army must now exceed a hundred thousand. If they struck now they could wipe out the Seth Yarra armies and purge the land. He suspected that they were waiting until that last moment permitted by Pelion’s law, hoping that Seth Yarra would win, but that did not explain the growing numbers of Bren Morain. They could sweep the six kingdoms if they continued to grow at this rate. There would be… he calculated swiftly in his mind… two million.

Two million.

It was an unthinkable number. Forty Bren for every Seth Yarra soldier on the other side of the Dragon’s Back. It was far too great a number, but if these dreams that were not dreams were to be trusted, then that the numbers pointed that way. Two million. Narak tried to imagine what such an army would look like. He balked at the image. Imagine a square mile of land covered by Bren. How could they be fed?

The vision changed. Abruptly the cavern barracks and its shining darkness vanished and was replaced by a starlit night. He felt a warm and humid breeze. Trees rustled and unleashed an unfamiliar scent of flowers. It was a sweet perfume. There was a noise of insects, chirping and buzzing here and there in the dark.

He stood among trees on a hillside. They were big, spreading trees, branches sweeping low to the ground, and even by starlight he could see the flowers, white and huge, a profligate display of blooms that told him he was not in the six kingdoms; not even in the isles.

He moved through the trees. Stopped because there was a noise, and waited in complete stillness as a dark shadow, big and smelling like a cow, passed within twenty feet. He saw the beast’s horns, the way they curved two ways, and knew that it was familiar to him. His progress continued. As usual he was a passenger, a presence behind the eyes of one body of the Bren Ashet.

The Ashet came out of the trees and stopped on an outcrop of rock that allowed a spectacular view. The land dropped away before it, a long, concave slope that revealed a great river valley. He could see the river, a black, sinuous snake roaming to and fro across the valley on its way to the sea. He could smell a thousand things, smoke and food and men, almost as though he was a wolf, but it was his eyes that amazed him.

The river embraced a city, the like of which Narak had never seen. A vast loop curved away from him, almost touched the other side of the valley, at least three miles away, and then curved back again, capturing ten square miles, and the whole thing was an imitation of the stars, lamps in streets, glowing curtains in windows, the slow procession of wagon lamps. It went on and on. It was three times the size of Bas Erinor. Mostly it was uniform, a sea of small houses and flat roofs, but in the distance he could see three clusters of great buildings, stone towers and windowed walls, all alight with habitation.

What place was this? What was he being shown?

For once he was not aware of anything else. The vision of the unnamed city held him as nothing else had the power to. He stared. He breathed the catalogue of foreign scents. He was filled by the river, the stars and ten thousand tiny flames that flickered in the homes of men and women. Surely this was the greatest city in the world, but where was it?

He remembered the cow, the ox that had passed the Ashet in the wood. He had seen such an ox before, many of them. They pulled Seth Yarra wagons.

This was a Seth Yarra city.

He woke with a start, and sat on his bed in the dark staring at the faint light filtering through the curtain door of the guest hut.

Dawn found him still awake.

Cain sat on his accustomed stool at the end of the bar in the Seventh Friend and struggled to stay awake. He was tired. This was his duty, or one of them: to greet his customers for the first hour that the inn was open. To speak to the men and women that he knew, to nod at the ones he didn’t, to be there in case he was needed to resolve some issue.
He had not changed this practice since his blood had been raised up, and so the lord of Waterhill sat and greeted the carpenters, the masons, the potters and smiths, the market sellers and clerks who poured over his threshold with the first ink of night.

He was more than a month back from his new estates, but still they lived vividly in his mind, the house, the people, and the land. His place. His and Sheyani’s. That was something that he could still not believe. They were to be married. In spite of the war, and the prospect of death in the spring which leant a certain melancholy to everything, in spite of the desperate work upon which he was engaged he was happier than he had ever been. He went about his tasks each day in the certainty that he would see her in the evening, that she would play for him, and that they would spend the night together. His mood was unbreakable.

This day he had been going through the city from smithy to smithy checking on the progress of the wire making, the first step in his temporary wall. He had organised new labour for each of them, and every skilled man had more helping hands than he knew what to do with. At midday there had been a rider from the forests on the plateau north of the city. He had two hundred men out there felling and dressing trees, and all was going well. It was carnage for the forest, of course, but there were other forests and he needed five thousand stout logs.

Even now there were wagons loaded with logs rolling through Berash, getting as close to the White Road as snows would allow, stacking and covering the wood, heading back again for more. Those same wagons would carry the wire frames in the spring.

He held a growing conviction that he would succeed. He would get to the pass, build the wall, and hold it.

“Sir, there is a problem at the door.”

Cain looked up from his reverie and saw that it was one of Bargil’s doormen. The man stood respectfully distant.

“A problem?”

The Duke of Carillon is without, sir. He had four men with him and they are armed. They will not give up their swords.”

Carillon. It was a place to the north, a domain close to the Afaeli border. Skal had mentioned that the man had been watching them train, that he had been critical. What had he called him? Bizmael. That was the family name.

“I will come,” he said. The doorman looked relieved. Cain understood that. The nobility often refused to abide by rules made by others, and it was perilous for common men to oppose them.

He levered himself from his stool and followed to the inn’s door. This was one of the few occasions he was glad to be a lord. Even if he was so far below Carillon as to be barely acknowledged he could not be brushed aside with impunity.

Outside the door there was some sort of standoff. Cain identified Carillon almost at once. He was dressed almost like a clown, so colourful and extravagant was his garb. He stood in the middle of the road with four guardsmen dressed in blue and gold livery, each and every one of them bearing a sword, and hands on hilts. Opposite them stood Bargil, Cain’s ex-dragon guard doorkeeper. His hand was close to his hilt, but not resting on it. He was half a head taller than the guardsmen, and to Cain it looked like the lesser men were afraid. He did not think the less of them for that. Despite his limp Tane Bargil was a formidable man.

“There you are, innkeeper,” Carillon said. “This foreigner bars my way. Have him stand aside at once.”

To call him innkeeper was an insult, and Cain guessed intended to be so. He should be addressed by one of his ranks; either colonel or lord would have been polite. Cain wasn’t pricked by it, though. He was an innkeeper, and unashamed of it.

“Forgive me, my lord Carillon, but he is merely enforcing the rules of the house. No swords to be carried within. I do not make exceptions.”

The Duke turned a scornful eye on him. “I am a duke of Avilian, you surely do not expect me to go unprotected in this den of thieves?”

Another insult – but Cain smiled. The man’s taunts were as clumsy as his fashion sense.

“This is a well behaved house, my lord,” he replied. “The lord Quinnial did not feel the need of escort when he visited us.”

“Quinnial is a boy and knows no better,” Carillon scoffed. Cain would have given a hundred guineas to hear him say that in Duke Aidon’s hearing, or even Quinnial’s. Cain’s statement, that Quinnial, the Duke of Bas Erinor’s brother and currently heir to the seat, had needed no escort should have satisfied any man. Carillon knew who Cain was, that he had shed blood for Avilian, that he commanded a regiment. He knew all this, and so the performance was a deliberate provocation. This lord was part of that faction that objected to his rapid rise, to the honorific of ‘general’, to his close association with foreigners.

“I would be happy to escort you myself, my lord,” Cain said. It was a handsome offer; almost a debasement of his own status, and Carillon looked at him sharply, as though he thought some joke was being made at his expense, but Cain smiled pleasantly and held a hand out to the door.

Suddenly the duke was flustered. “No,” he said. “I have changed my mind. I will seek entertainment elsewhere tonight.”

“As you wish, my lord,” Cain said. He watched as the duke withdrew, walking away with his escort. When they turned the corner and were lost from sight he turned to Bargil. “Pity,” he said.

“Pity? The man’s an ass,” Bargil said.

“The ass is a duke, Tane,” Cain admonished him. “At least pretend to respect the rank, if not the man.”

Bargil shook his head. “I can’t separate them, my lord,” he said. Bargil never called him lord, so he was making a point. “And I don’t know why you should put up with such behaviour.”

“I don’t feel insulted,” Cain said. “And just think what an hour or two of Sheyani’s music would have done to him.”

“Aye, that’s a fair point,” Bargil agreed.

Cain went back into the Seventh Friend. The friendly noise of the tavern washed over him. From the other side of the room Sheyani caught his eye, lifted a brow in enquiry, but Cain just smiled at her and nodded. Nothing amiss. He took the copper disc from around his neck, the charm that made him immune to her magic, and allowed the power of the music to wash his cares away.

How fortunate to have this release, he thought. How sweet life is.