The Fall of the Dagger (The Forsaken Lands) (10 page)

“I will go with you,” she said, trying for a cold imperiousness. “You may address me as ‘Your Highness’. Pontifect Fox would be angry if I were treated with disrespect. Your hand, sir, if you be so kind.”

Obediently, he took her hand and his look of confusion told her that her composure and arrogance had dented his confidence. Her moment of success was short-lived. When he touched her, a horrible black tarry finger of wrongness rubbed across her soul, leaving her reeling.

Sorcery.
She wanted to vomit, and had to swallow back the bile that burned her throat. With Garred clutched hard to her shoulder, she was forced to allow the man to help her down. Once on the ground, she grabbed up her small carryall from the cart and handed it to him, her tremble making a lie of the confidence she was trying to impart.

Horntail had thrust his hand into the turnips. She guessed he clutched the hilt of his sword, ready to pull it out of its scabbard. She made a quick gesture of negation and turned to speak to Sprig Campion. “Thank you, kind sirs, for the ride. I trust you will sell your turnips for a good price.”

Turning her back on them, she walked ahead of Endor Fox towards the riderless horse. It bore a woman’s side-saddle and she was thankful for that. Behind her, Fox said something to Sprig and Horntail, but she didn’t catch the words.

She waited beside the horse until he came up, then said, “I’ll need the aid of one of your men to mount up, and another to hold the prince.”

“Give the boy to me,” he said.

“Never.”

He shrugged and gestured for two of his men to dismount. One took Garred from her. He started crying in terror. Aching for him, she turned away to put her foot into the other’s cradled hands so he could lift her into the saddle. When she bent down to take her son back, Garred was trembling, his breath coming in sobbing gasps.

Crooning soothingly and holding him tight, she glanced back to Horntail and Sprig Campion. They did not appear to have moved and there was something odd about their stillness, but there was no
time to consider it. Fox ordered a lancer to take the reins from her and she realised she was going to be led. At least she’d have both arms to attend to Garred, who was gradually calming.

I will not cry
…

Fox turned his mount to lead them all back the way he had come.

“Where are we going?” she asked, but he didn’t bother to reply.

He bent down in the saddle as he passed Sprig and Horntail, saying something to them that she didn’t catch. The air shimmered, and she choked, feeling she’d breathed in something foul. Garred wailed anew, and fought her, throwing himself backwards, as rigid as a board. Terrified he would fling himself out of her grasp, she battled to calm him, and by the time she had, the cart was behind them. When she looked back, it was to see Horntail and Sprigg talking, not even looking her way.

Appalled, she dragged her gaze back to Endor Fox. He was smiling at her.

It was not a nice smile.

“What did you do to them?” she asked, her voice rasping as she tried to make her throat work properly. “
What did you do?
”

“Don’t play games with me,” he said. “Every time you do, you will regret it.”

“Your Highness? There’s something you need to see.”

Ryce had been looking at the reinforcements for the gate and worrying about the large hole dug in the centre of the outer bailey. Digging a pit to source soil and rock to reinforce the gate and the walls was all very well, but it was a fobbing nuisance having to walk around the hole all the time, not to mention useless now it was filled up with rainwater. He sighed. At least the geese were happy.

“Where?” he asked the young guard who had addressed him.

“Landward Tower,” the guard replied. “Sir Beargold said to come immediately.”

Beargold was the most phlegmatic of men; if he said “immediately”, then something was wrong. Ryce hurried, running up the tower steps. Sir Beargold stepped away from the spyglass on its tripod and gestured for him to take a look, saying, “Brace yourself, cousin. This is not good.”

In spite of the warning, Ryce was in no way prepared for what he saw. On the rise a few hundred paces away, Bealina stood, holding Garred’s hand. The boy was tugging at her and pointing. Next to her was a man in black, his hand gripping her upper arm in a proprietary way, someone he didn’t know. Behind them was an array of Grey Lancers.

His mouth went dry and his hands began to shake.

Black-clad men. Gaunt Recruiters. Pontifect Fritillary had thought they were Fox’s sons.

Va
…
Oh why? Why?

The holdfast was lost.

Minutes passed. No one moved. He waited, eyes misting, expecting the Gaunt Recruiter to send a messenger demanding their surrender, yet he had no idea what he would say when the order came. The men around him, breath bated, said nothing, uttered no advice, no recriminations. Inside, he howled and wondered why there was no sound.

Bealina raised a hand in salute. He waved back. They turned away then, and disappeared with the Gaunt Recruiter over the rise back towards the besiegers’ camp.

Still he did not move and nothing happened. There was no challenge. And the lack of a command was as frightening as one would have been.

He stayed there until the sun set.

“Why didn’t they insist we surrender?” Anthon asked, perplexed.

“I don’t know,” he said.

They wouldn’t kill Garred. He was sure they wouldn’t kill him. They’d take him to Throssel, to the palace, to the king. Fox
needed
Garred.

He had to believe that. If he didn’t, he’d just curl up and die.

T
he sea eagle floated in indolent circles over Hornbeam, regarding the scene below with a cold, yellow-eyed stare. An occasional tilt of its tail feathers or a raised tip of a wing kept it on its circuit of the port area, from the carcass of an ageing carrack propped on its keel in the dry dock, to the Lowmian ship tied up at the wharf nearby, to the warehouses bordering the delivery canals. The bird, indifferent to all it saw, would have preferred to be seeking a mate over a warmer coastline, but it had no choice. Another consciousness within its skull directed its trajectory and it had learned not to fight that other presence. It made life easier.

Half an hour before it had reached Hornbeam, Saker had twinned with it, only to be obliged to wait while it perched on a dead tree along the coast and demolished a freshly caught herring. The jump he’d made had been a long one, and he had an idea he’d been close to losing himself in a fog of non-existence, eternally lost between his own head and the eagle’s. The thought scared him witless.

Now, at his insistence, the eagle spiralled downwards towards the moored Lowmian merchantman: Juster’s prize, the spice-laden fluyt captured in the Spicerie. Saker had long since learned not to interfere with the mechanics of flying. The first time he’d found himself inside the mind of the bird in the Summer Seas, he’d been so panicked he’d almost killed both the sea eagle and himself. It wasn’t something he ever wanted to risk again.

Months had gone by since then, yet he remained enchanted by the extraordinary vision he possessed when he stared out through those golden eyes. He marvelled at the clarity of every tiny detail of the ship below – every splinter in the decking, every frayed fibre of the ropes, every grizzled hair in Finch Aspen’s beard. He sought the
minutiae, revelled in the sharpness of the definition denied him by his human eyesight. Colours were brighter and more radiant; light sometimes shone with a luminous glow that his own eyesight never saw.

He was puzzled now, though, by what was happening on board the docked fluyt. By the look of it, its spice cargo was being unloaded, which was odd, as the instructions to do so were still tied to the bird’s leg. Finch Aspen, whom Juster had asked to take charge of the fluyt and the carrack, was speaking to a man – a merchant if his clothing told the truth – near the open hatches to the hold, while dock lumpers hoisted gunny sacks up from below decks.

Saker cajoled the eagle to land on the cross trees of the mainmast. The smell wafting upwards was a glorious mix of cinnamon and cloves, mace and star anise. One of the sailors saw him land and said something to Finch, who glanced upwards, then broke off his conversation and sent the merchant on his way. Once the man had gone, Finch gestured for the eagle to come down to the deck.

Interrupting the bird’s ruffling of feathers and preening, Saker urged it to fly to the taffrail. Finch came across to its new perch, his back to the stream of dock lumpers, and halted a step or two away from where the bird was settling down to preen once more.

“Saker?” he whispered. The expression on his face implied that he doubted he’d receive a coherent reply. Finch had never accustomed himself to the link between man and bird, and Saker didn’t blame him.

At Saker’s instigation, the eagle nodded in response, a human gesture that must have appeared absurd, and held out its foot with the letter attached.

Finch, nervously eyeing the vicious curve of its beak, untied the oilskin packet and slit the stitching open with his dagger to read the letter inside.

“Rattling pox,” he muttered as he read. When he’d finished, he raised his head to regard the eagle and added, “It’s bad here too. Saker – there are no shrines any more. None! They’ve vanished and in their place there’s nothing but mist and tangled brambles. If people try to cut their way in, they never seem to get anywhere. Most folk
with witcheries, they disappeared when the shrines did. Killed, probably. There are still healers about, praise be. But the others?” He shook his head. “It’s all the fault of them bastards in black.”

Saker cocked the bird’s head in enquiry.

“Gaunt Recruiters, people call ’em. They all look like men with lung-rot. They mostly wear black. They’re the fellows who went around persuading the clay-brained to join the Grey Lancers. Some say they’re sorcerers. They say the new Pontifect – Valerian Fox – is the only fellow who can save us. Others say the Grey Lancers are all his doing.” He snorted. “You hear all sorts of scuttlebutt nowadays: ‘Lancers defend us. No, they’re the murderers. Shrine keepers are evil. No, they were murdered innocents. People with witcheries were slaughtered. No, they are the ones helping Primordials spread the Horned Plague.’”

Finch forgot who might have been watching and flung up his hands in exasperation before continuing. “Tell the cap’n everything’s a mess here in Hornbeam. No one knows what to think. People barricade themselves in their homes mostly.”

Belatedly, he glanced around to make sure no one was listening before adding, “Or they buy spices because some say cinnamon sticks will ward off evil and cloves prevent the plague, or star anise gives you powers to resist a sorcerer. Truth has run away down the gutter here in Ardrone, Saker, since we’ve been gone.”

He made the bird nod again.

Finch took a deep breath. “You going back to the
Petrel
?”

Another nod.

“Tell the cap’n I had to sell the spice anyway, even without his say-so. What with this rumour going about that spices ward off sorcery as well as plague, there was a nasty crowd on the wharves yesterday threatening to sink us if we didn’t offload our cargo. So that’s what I’m doing. Got a good price, tell him. And I got a buyer interested in the carrack, even though it needs new planking on the hull.” He ran a hand through the wind-blown tangle of his salt-laden hair. “Cankers ’n’ galls, Saker. Things are real bad here. How can shrines have
gone
?”

Saker did his best to answer some of Finch’s questions by nods or shakes of the eagle’s head, and shrugs of its shoulders, but there
wasn’t really much he could add to what he knew Juster had already put in the letter.

“All right,” Finch mumbled finally. “Tell him at the moment there are no Grey Lancers in town. The local Gaunt Recruiter died a month back. He got stabbed by someone. His bilge-crawling recruits panicked and disappeared. They’d thought he was invulnerable, you see.”

He stumped away, tucking Juster’s letter into his jacket.

Saker urged the bird into the air. His body felt terrifyingly far away and he longed to return to it, but he had something else he wanted to do.

He took the bird hunting for the main Hornbeam oak shrine.

Many years earlier he’d visited it while on a mission for the Pontifect, so he was able to guide the eagle in the correct general direction. For a while he just gloried in what he was seeing, the land laid out like a map below, so beautiful, so intricate, so…
vast.
There was the river, and the oak had been around that bend… Yes, that was the spot. Or rather, where it had once been. Just as with Throssel’s King’s Oak, he now saw a smudge of obscurity where once there had been a magnificent tree. He set the eagle to circling while he stared at it, and as the bird had eaten well that morning, it obliged him willingly enough.

Each time they passed overhead, he strove to see through that fog. He eased the bird still lower, until they were scraping the top of the blur. Even then, he saw nothing but impenetrable murk. No feeling of wrongness, just a vague… emptiness. The bird remained unworried, and its thoughts exuded nothing more than boredom. He found that comforting, at least, but decided to give up.

The eagle had other ideas. It spilled air out from under its wings, extended its legs – and landed.

On
nothingness
. Nothing Saker could see, anyway. And yet he felt
something
under his claws.

Va rot you, Saker, keep a hold of yourself.
Not his claws. Under the eagle’s claws. Something it gripped, like a tree branch. He bent down to take a look, and still could not see a thing.

Leak on it, for once he and the eagle were not sharing the same vision, that was obvious. What the sweet acorns was going on?

Sorcery?
he wondered.
Aimed at humans, and not felt by other
living creatures?
Yes, that had to be it. The eagle wasn’t affected, but he was.

“He’s been away far too long.” Restless, driven by worry, Sorrel had left the cabin where Saker’s body lay, unmoving, to pace the deck. He’d been gone since morning, and now the sun was setting. “If he doesn’t get back soon, he’ll have to spend the night inside that bird’s head, perched on a tree somewhere.”

Ardhi was the only person within earshot, and in spite of her pacing, she was addressing him.

“That won’t hurt him,” he said calmly.

“You can’t possibly know that,” she snapped.

“No, but I do have faith in Saker. So should you.”

She sighed. “I do, I suppose. Well, maybe.”

“He’s not the same person who once unwisely slept with a king’s daughter.”

She stopped dead, gaped at him, then hurriedly looked around to make sure no one else was within earshot. “How did you know that? Surely he never told you!”

“No more than you did.” He shrugged. “I guessed – before we knew she’d been fathered by your sorcerer – that Saker wondered if he was Piper’s father. But I didn’t know for sure until you just this moment confirmed it.”

“Oh! Oh, you – you – I could wring your neck!”

He gave her one of his broad smiles.

“Very few people know that, Ardhi, and those who do risk losing their head. In two different countries, what’s more.”

His eyes crinkled cheerfully. “By the time we’ve finished, maybe everyone will want us dead, I think.”

“Even Lord Juster doesn’t know what Saker did, although he did guess Piper is the Regala Mathilda’s child.”

“Young men have a tendency to do some very muckle-headed things around women who are – what’s the word I want? Gravy?”

She frowned, doubtful, then laughed. “I think you mean saucy. And Princess Mathilda would
never
consider herself so vulgar as to be saucy.”

“Well, anyway, Saker is not that person any longer.”

“None of us is who we were before all this started.”

“Speak of the wind and it blows – here he is now. You don’t need to worry any more.”

She turned in time to see Saker come up from below, followed by Lord Juster, who had taken a turn keeping watch over his comatose body. “You’re here!” she said in relief. “I mean, you’re back. You’ve been so long. We were worried.”

Ardhi grinned. “No,
we
weren’t.
You
were.”

Saker came and sat on the hatch cover next to her. “I shared part of the return flight with the bird; I felt safer that way. On the journey out, I almost lost myself. The bird was too far away.” The stark horror in his voice warned her not to ask for details. He added, striving to be more light-hearted, “On the way back, I left when he wanted to go fishing again. I
hate
the taste of raw fish.”

“You’re a barbarian,” Ardhi said. “Raw fish is a delicacy where I come from. Wrapped in seaweed, flavoured with lime and eaten with
sambal
, it is delicious. What did you find out in Hornbeam?”

He told them all he had learned from Finch Aspen, then described what had happened at the Hornbeam shrine.

“So you’re saying that the shrine was still there, but you couldn’t see it?” Juster asked. His face reflected his conflict: he wanted to believe, but found it hard.

“I couldn’t see a thing, although I felt the branch under the eagle’s feet. It even sharpened its beak on it! I did hear things though. I think. The twittering of small songbirds in the tree.”

“In this tree that didn’t exist,” Juster said.

“So this is a
sakti
, or a sorcery, that affects people but not birds. The tree is really there, but people can’t see it?” Ardhi asked.

“I’m not convinced it was sorcery. Maybe they did it deliberately. Because they were in dire danger.”

“They?” Juster asked. “Who’s they?”

“The unseen guardian and the shrine keeper of each oak. They feared for themselves, for the health of the tree, for those with witcheries. I suspect people with a witchery were targeted, killed by the lancers. So they used their power to hide the tree and those who sought refuge there.”

Juster gave a snort of disbelief. “Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I do. So I checked on the way back here. Before I left the eagle, we dropped in at another couple of smaller village shrines. Same thing.”

“You knew where to find them?” Juster asked, still dubious.

“Not really. We just flew over places until I saw something. I was looking for large, old oaks, but there weren’t any, not to my eyes, anyway. But I saw the same kind of blur. Each time I asked the bird to perch and it happily did so – in a tree I couldn’t even see.”

Sorrel looked at him with increasing dismay. “So all the shrines have disappeared, everywhere, just as Barklee’s brother said. Maybe even all on the same day, as he thought, along with folk with witcheries.”

“That’s preposterous.” Juster threw up his hands. “I’m more likely to believe Va destroyed the shrines than to accept that people with witcheries are huddled under an oak tree in hiding. Waiting for what? Eating what? Living how?
Where?
”

“The idea that Va would allow shrines to vanish and Shenat belief to be wiped into nothingness is unthinkable,” Saker snapped. “Look, healers are still around apparently. We need to speak to some of them. Perhaps they know more.”

“I don’t know too much about your shrines and beliefs,” Ardhi said in his quiet, understated way, “but if I shared your faith, for a keeper and a guardian to hide their shrine in a time of turmoil would seem like a terrible betrayal. The very people who guard the faith and grant the witcheries deserting me when I was threatened and attacked from all sides? Hiding away, using their faith-granted talents to do so?”