The Copper Promise (16 page)

‘We’ll kill your pretty little friend here first though.’

‘No, wait.’ Sebastian sheathed his sword and held up his hands. ‘We have information for you.’

‘Shut up, Sebastian,’ said Frith. The burly guard laughed.

‘What sort of information is that, then?’

Sebastian took a deep breath. ‘The location of the Frith vault.’

Frith swore loudly, the first time Sebastian could recall him doing so. He didn’t look at him, and kept his eyes on the guard instead.

‘You tell me, then, and maybe I’ll let you go.’

Sebastian shook his head. He was very aware of the people in the cages behind him; the fat man, the old woman. He could feel their eyes on his back.

‘I want to speak to Fane. He’s the only person I’ll be telling anything to.’

The guard frowned.

‘You’re not in any position to be bargaining, my son.’

‘Maybe not, but how many of your men do you think I can kill before you kill me? Enough to make them hesitate before they come over here, I’ll bet. Take me to Fane. I’m sure he’ll be anxious to hear what I have to say.’

The guard looked angry then, and for a moment Sebastian thought he’d pushed it too far, until he turned and gestured at a few of his men. Within moments he was forced next to Frith, swords and crossbows at his back as they were marched round to the gate.

‘You are an idiot,’ hissed Frith as their jailors conversed with the guards on the wall. ‘Even worse than her. I should have left you both in Creos.’

‘You
will
tell them, Frith.’ Sebastian spat the words. ‘There are innocent people dying, and for what? Your bloody inheritance.’

The gates opened, revealing the dismal town beyond. Frith leaned in close. His eyes were the colour of storm clouds.

‘I don’t
know
where the vault is, you damned fool. You’ve doomed us all.’

Wydrin walked out of the tavern with the woman Dreyda at her back.

‘He will be in the market at this time of day, if you wish to get a look at him. He likes to parade himself and his personal guard when the town square is at its busiest, so people cannot forget that he is here.’ She laughed. It was a small, bitter sound. ‘At night he retires to the tower, for his
entertainment
.’

‘I would like to see him,’ said Wydrin, as casually as she could. ‘And I have a few supplies to pick up.’ The evening was drawing in now, the grey clouds above soaking up the dark like a sponge in a pool of ink. The sky that she could see was violet.

‘Then I shall walk with you there. Come on.’

The tall priestess took her arm, and they walked up the street at a steady pace.

‘Do not make eye contact, if you can help it,’ said Dreyda of the guards. ‘Pinehold has been like a slow-cooked pot for weeks now, and some of them are just looking for ways to draw the steam off. And believe me, you do not want to be on the receiving end of that.’

‘Why are you helping me?’ said Wydrin. The Regnisse’s grip was quite firm.

‘I had a vision,’ said Dreyda in a matter-of-fact tone. ‘I dreamed of Renethena, the goddess of scrying and fortune. She showed me the words in a surge of boiling lava, and I knew that I would meet a woman with red hair and a trio of sea monsters on her arm, and she would be the saviour of a town caught in the vice grip of—’

‘Oh, piss off.’

‘Not going to work on you?’ Dreyda caught her eye and gave her a very ungodly smirk. ‘It normally goes down so well with the young men I meet. Never mind. I just happen to think you look like a woman who has seen plenty of trouble in the past, and might be up to handling some more. The people here, my child, they have had all the courage shaken from them, and now they cringe their way around their own homes for fear of being fed to the bears. For fear of Fane.’

They had reached the marketplace. It was still lively enough, with wagons and stalls crowded with people doing their last bit of shopping before heading back for the evening. There was a noticeable lack of produce; half the groceries on display looked rather elderly, and there was a great deal of questionable meat for sale. People were still buying it though.

They reached the centre of the square, where a tall, graceful statue stood on a raised stone platform. It depicted a young woman with a longbow at her side, and she was staring off to the tower beyond. Three men sprawled around its base, watching the market.

‘The one in the middle. That’s Fane,’ said Dreyda, although she needn’t have bothered. It was clear who he was.

The man screamed violence. Like the tower, the eyes were drawn to him again and again, as they are drawn to a house fire roaring out of control, or the red tendrils of infection from a diseased wound. He was a tall, powerfully built man with brown hair oiled back from his forehead, and his jaw was square and dark with stubble. Wydrin supposed he was handsome, if you could look past the malevolent gleam in his eyes. And the scars. The scars were something else.

‘What happened to him?’ she asked Dreyda without turning round.

‘No one seems very clear on that point,’ said the fire-priestess. ‘The prevailing rumour is that he did that to himself, or paid someone very skilled with a knife to do it. You see the significance of the red faces on the shields now?’

The broad planes of Fane’s otherwise unmarked face were scored with red, squarish patches, where thick sections of skin had apparently been removed and then the flesh underneath allowed to scar. There was a piece missing from both cheeks, running from just below each eye down to the line of his jaw, a smaller section on his chin, and a horizontal rectangle of scarring on the right side of his forehead. It gave his face an odd, patchwork appearance, as though someone were sewing him together from pieces of old skin and they hadn’t quite finished yet. The sections of raw flesh didn’t appear to cause him any discomfort. As Wydrin watched he turned to trade a joke with the men sharing the space on the platform, and he laughed and grinned just as though he wasn’t missing pieces of his face. He wore black boiled leather armour, turning grey at the elbows and knees from use, and there was a sword at his hip, although that was nothing special; it was the sword of a soldier, sharp and well maintained. In one hand he held a battered half-helm.

‘And what about those two?’ said Wydrin, indicating the men either side of Fane. They looked a lot younger than their employer, no older than sixteen or seventeen. One of them was leaning on the statue in an overtly relaxed posture. ‘What are they supposed to be?’

For a moment, Dreyda didn’t answer, and when Wydrin turned to look at her the older woman pursed her lips, as though she didn’t like to speak the words.

‘What is it?’

‘Ungodly things, is what they are,’ she said shortly. ‘Abominations. The Children of the Fog, he calls them.’

The two young men were certainly nearly as strange as their lord. Clearly brothers or, more accurately, twins, both were tall, as lean as alley cats, and both had long blond hair the colour of honeyed milk. Their armour was light, made from pieces of fine red leather, save for a single gauntlet each, which appeared to be made of a dull black metal.
How sweet
, thought Wydrin,
brothers with matching gloves
. They were so nearly identical that the only way Wydrin could tell them apart was by the weapons they carried; one had a pair of straight-bladed swords, and the other had a curled whip hanging from his waist.

‘Why does he call them that?’ asked Wydrin. All three men looked like trouble.

‘They do magics,’ said Dreyda in a tone of voice that suggested said magics were low and filthy things. ‘And they smile while they kill, like cats.’

‘Hey,’ said Wydrin, absently. ‘Cats aren’t cruel, it’s just their nature.’

‘Cruelty is
their
nature,’ said the Regnisse. Lowering her voice, she took hold of Wydrin’s arm again. ‘Do not stare too long. Come, you said there were supplies you needed.’

Wydrin made to go with the fire-priestess, but a commotion at the edge of the market caught her eye. A number of the black-clad guards were pushing their way through the evening’s crowd, escorting a very familiar pair of figures at their centre.

‘Oh, for the love of all the gods!’ cried Wydrin.

The guards marched Sebastian and Frith and a third man Wydrin didn’t recognise up to the statue, while Fane looked on in lively interest. Around them the people of Pinehold murmured uneasily. Wydrin caught the eye of a young man standing near a fruit and vegetable stall, and he raised his eyebrows at her, as if waiting for her to act. He had untidy brown hair and a finely featured face she was sure she should remember, but she didn’t recognise him. She frowned at him, and shook off Dreyda’s hand.

‘What are you doing?’ hissed the priestess.

‘I have to know what’s going on there,’ said Wydrin, and she slipped to the front of the gathering crowd.

Frith stared at the man who had ruined his life, and found he didn’t know what to say.

They had spoiled everything. When he made his attack on Fane he intended it to be brisk and devastating. He had pictured himself arriving, perhaps at his very own castle, to find Fane relaxed and undefended, secure in the knowledge that he had taken the Blackwood, and then Frith would tear him apart with the elemental forces he now had at his command. Everything he’d inflicted on his family, Fane would suffer tenfold. Instead of that, he had been forced into a confrontation with the man at sword point, in rags, and with little understanding of how the elemental forces he’d taken from the mages worked, let alone how he could best use them against this man. The simmering power he’d felt inside the Citadel was a quiet whisper in his head, and he did not know how to rouse it to a shout. If only Sebastian had kept his mouth shut.

But Fane appeared to have no interest in them. Instead he gestured at Rognor, a broad grin on his face.

‘My friend! You have had enough of skulking around outside the walls of our town, then? I am so pleased you have decided to join us after all.’ He had a warm, affable voice, the sort of voice that might ask if you needed help carrying that pile of firewood.

Rognor frowned deeply, his long face furrowed with anger.

‘I’ll not converse with monsters, I won’t,’ he said. ‘You can ask me whatever you want and I won’t take no notice. I have nothing to say to the likes of you.’

Fane shook his head gently, a faint smile on his face.

‘What did you hope to achieve, my good man?’

‘Just mercy,’ said Rognor. ‘Something a monster like you wouldn’t know nothing of.’

‘Those people, out in the cages, are blessed.’ Fane raised his voice so that everyone gathered in the marketplace could hear. ‘They are offerings to Bezcavar.’ He paused and lifted his half-helm to his face. He kissed the battered metal fondly. ‘They needn’t have been, but they would not give up what they knew and Bezcavar is always hungry. His belly rumbles and we all must heed it.’ He touched his fingers to his scarred face.

‘Ya demon-worshippin’ scum,’ said Rognor. Sebastian muttered a few words at him, trying to get the tall man to calm down, but he either didn’t hear or didn’t care. ‘The lowest, a monster, that’s what you are and no mistake,’ Rognor continued. ‘Can’t be telling me any different or no one else here, no—’

Fane waved a hand at one of his lieutenants.

‘Enri, Bezcavar hungers. Make an offering of this idiot.’

Sebastian stepped forward.

‘No, wait—’

Moving with unsettling speed and grace, the slim blond man to the right of Fane grabbed his whip, shook it out, and flicked it. There was a crack, painfully sharp in the evening air, and suddenly Rognor was on his knees, a length of barbed leather wrapped round his throat. His fingers scrabbled desperately at the coils, trying to find purchase. The man called Enri laughed and tugged sharply on his end of the whip. Rognor fell to the ground, making strangled choking noises. Blood ran from his torn throat as his face began to turn purple.

‘Stop it!’ cried Sebastian. The big knight was straining at his captors, a look of utter horror on his face.

‘Bezcavar requires an offering,’ said Fane in a mild tone of voice. ‘But you are right, the night draws in and I have other business. Enri? Stop it.’

The blond man pouted.

‘But I have only just—’

‘Enri.’

The blond man sighed, and placing one foot on Rognor’s shoulder, heaved on the whip so that it tightened violently on the tall man’s neck. There was a moment of pressure, then his throat seemed to burst apart in a torrent of blood.

Frith winced, stepping away as Rognor slumped onto the dirt. The man called Enri took a moment to retrieve the whip, before tying it back onto his belt, still dripping blood. The people at the marketplace had fallen utterly silent, and Frith thought it likely they had seen many such ‘offerings’.

‘What else have you brought me then, Bruger?’ asked Fane. His eyes crawled over Sebastian, disregarding Frith entirely. ‘These two do not look like the peasants of Pinehold that I have come to know and love.’

The strange identical-looking men standing next to him laughed softly.

‘The big one reckons he knows where the vault is, m’lord,’ said the burly guard, whose name was Bruger. ‘Caught ’em both outside the gate, antagonising the bears.’

Fane raised his eyebrows. The raw red flesh on his forehead stretched and wrinkled.

‘We can’t have that. The bears here are not to be trifled with, isn’t that right, Roki?’ The slim blond man to his right tipped his head, the briefest impression of a nod. ‘Roki and Enri are rather fond of the bears in this forest. In Istria we have bears, but they are smaller, rather more docile. They only present a danger to the fish in our rivers. So what is this about the vault?’ Fane didn’t pause to let him answer but moved on to another line of questioning. ‘You’re a knight, aren’t you? I recognise the badge. One of those mad mountain cults.’

Casting his voice as low as he could, Frith leaned close to Sebastian.

‘You name me now and you shall wish I’d left you to die at the Citadel.’

Sebastian didn’t even look at him.

‘My lord, I do not know the location of the vault, but I know who does. I only ask that you release the man and woman held in the cages outside the town walls.’