The Fall of the Dagger (The Forsaken Lands) (14 page)

When he glanced around at the rapt audience he could see them nodding in agreement. Worried, he nudged Gerelda, but she didn’t react. He scribbled on his tablet the word
Coercion
, and tilted it for her to read, jabbing her with his elbow, much harder this time. She glanced at the tablet, looked at him for a long moment, then nodded and bit her lip. Hard. He saw a bead of blood form, and knew she was concentrating on the pain in the hope it would enable her to resist.

When the lecture was over and the students were filing out, chatting to one another, he asked in a whisper, “Are you all right?”

“Thanks for snapping me out of it. I spent the rest of the time reciting in my head all the forty-two laws pertaining to land taxation in Vavala and Valance.” She shook her head ruefully. “The utter bastard. He’s dangerous, Perie. Perhaps even more dangerous than the Gaunt Recruiters. He’s recruiting our future generation of clerics and thinkers. Twisting the truth and making them believe something false. Even after you warned me, it took me a while to realise how I’d been drawn in to what he was saying.”

She dropped her tablet and pencil to the floor, and knelt to scrabble around under the pew to pick them up. He guessed she’d done it in order to delay their exit.

“Do we deal with him now?” he asked in a whisper.

“No time like the present. Let’s go up to him, if we can, as if to ask a question. If we get him alone… Worth a try. Otherwise, we’ll leave it for another day.”

By the time the last of the students had left, she’d retrieved her belongings and they and Camber Fox were the only ones left in the room. Fox was still standing in the middle of the platform, regarding them sombrely.

“I have a question, sir, if I may?” Gerelda said, walking towards him down the aisle between the pews. “It’s about witcheries…”

He nodded. “Of course.”

Perie walked immediately behind her, half-hidden, glancing over
his shoulder to make sure they were truly alone. He reached through the slit inside his trouser pocket to grasp the hilt of the spiker where he kept it in the sheath strapped to his thigh. He didn’t pull it out. Not yet.

“I was wondering about the fact that we still have healers,” Gerelda said. “All other folk with witcheries disappeared. Does that mean that healers are somehow exempt from the guilt of interfering with the natural state of things? Is that why they are still with us? And if it is, I’m not sure I understand. I mean, what you said today seemed to imply that even witchery healing would be a sin.”

She sounded hesitant and rubbed a hand across her forehead in a puzzled way. Perie wasn’t sure if she was entirely putting on an act; he’d seen coercion muddle people’s logic before this. He hoped her asking a question was just as an excuse to approach, but it was also a way to draw Camber Fox’s attention to herself rather to him.

Stepping up on to the platform, she casually spread the fingers of her left hand. In the sign language the two of them had developed, it meant,
Kill him when you safely can.

In front of him, the entry door on to the platform was closed. He checked behind once more. They were still alone. With his right hand out of sight behind Gerelda’s back, he pulled the dagger free.

He breathed in a wave of foulness, and gagged, choking.
Sorcery. Coercion.

Gerelda stopped dead, her next words dying half-spoken in her throat. She stood rigidly still, rooted. When Perie stepped up to her side, he could see the panic in her eyes, begging him to hurry up. Another time, he would never have hesitated. The sorcerer would have died before he could even switch his attention from Gerelda to the unremarkable lad who accompanied her.

This time, it was different.

He was reluctant to kill.

“
Y
ou came to kill me,” Camber Fox said, addressing Perie. He spread his arms wide, to show he was unarmed.

Of course he was: sorcerers never had need of a weapon.

“Go ahead,” the man said, the words gently spoken, as if he was asking for an opinion rather than daring him to do it. The coercion was as thick as ever, and Gerelda was mired in it.

Perie hesitated. He halted, his spiker held at the ready in front of him. He wasn’t coerced; Camber wasn’t even trying to coerce him. No, he was snagged by his own indecision and he didn’t even know why.

“I knew that one day someone would come,” Camber said. “Someone who would not respond to my sorcery. I just didn’t realise it would be so soon, or that my… adversary… would be so young.” He continued to ignore Gerelda. “We’ve been hearing about the other deaths. Was that you too?”

“I’ve killed sorcerers, yes,” Perie said. “It’s what I do.”

“And nobody suspected you until it was too late for them. I understand now. They sent a lad who can’t be coerced.” He looked back at Gerelda. “I could kill you though.”

Struggling with the power he was exerting over her will, she was silent.

“Speak,” he ordered.

“Do you know that some of you also die because every time you use your sorcery, it sucks the life out of you?” she asked, directing a glare at Perie as she spoke.

“I know that,” Camber said. “We all know that. But Pontifect Fox has promised to tell the secret to those of us who are loyal, so we too can rejuvenate ourselves.”

She dredged up her best sneer. “And you believe him? He’ll never show you. And I think I can guess why.”

Camber waited, but she didn’t explain, so he sighed and said, “All right. I’ll ask. Why?”

“Because the moment Valerian’s father told him how to do it, Valerian turned around and killed him.”

“You can’t possibly know that.”

“We did a lot of research into your family. We think there’s an excellent chance that’s what happened.”

Camber considered that, then replied with a question. “An extended life span – do you know how enticing that is?”

Perie shrugged. “I don’t expect to make twenty,” he said. “I don’t think about it much.”

“I do,” Camber whispered. “And I want to live.”

A ripple of cold moved down Perie’s spine. His gaze locked on Camber’s. Beside him, he could feel Gerelda struggling to free herself physically from the coercion, but still he didn’t kill the man. This time, it was different. The
sorcerer
was different. “Did you believe what you were teaching them?” he asked, making a gesture at the pews where the students had been sitting. “Do you really think that about Shenat beliefs?”

He shook his head. “No, not really.”

“Then why say it?”

“I’m a Fox. I’m a sorcerer. What else is there left for me? I can’t fight what I am. Unseen guardians, the Ways of the Oak and the Flow – they are my antithesis. My enemy. If they are true and I am not, then kill me, lad. Just kill me.”

Perie felt all the man’s coercion die, the taint fade, the thick blanket of pollution dissipate. The sorcerer still stood with his arms spread away from his body, palms up, hands empty. Defenceless.

And he could not do it. He could not kill him. Even though the man had lied to the students and used coercion, Perie still could not kill him. “I can’t,” he whispered.

“I can,” said Gerelda. And before Perie could say or do anything, her sword was swinging and her two-fisted blow slammed the blade into Camber Fox’s exposed throat. Blood spurted, spattering across Perie’s face and chest like wind spray from a fountain. Thick red
drops trickled down his cheeks as Camber dropped on to his knees in front of him, swaying, his mouth gaping as he tried to draw air into his lungs. One hand reached out towards Perie, who stepped back smartly. Camber toppled sideways to the floor, face-down. His body convulsed once or twice, blood pumping into a widening pool, then diminishing to a trickle.

“Well.” Gerelda poked him with the toe of her boot. “I guess he’s dead.” She glanced across at Perie. “You’re a mess. Blood all over you! Blister it, Perie, how are we going to get you out of here looking like that?” She bent to wipe her sword clean on the skirt of the sorcerer’s gown.

“Hardly my fault.”

She handed him her cloak. “Here, put this on and let’s get out of here before someone comes to see why he’s still in here after the students have gone.”

He did as she asked, without speaking.

For the next hour, when they returned to their student digs so he could change his clothes and they could gather their things, and while they collected their horses from the livery and rode out of Oakwood, he never said another word.

They took the road towards Beck Crossways, intending to head from there to Gromwell and the siege, as had been their original intention. That evening, they paid a farmer for a meal and permission to stable their horses and sleep in his barn. In spite of the chill of the evening air, Perie took the opportunity to wash thoroughly under the farmer’s pump and rinse the blood from his dirty clothing.

When he re-entered the barn, shivering and carrying the wet clothes, Gerelda said, “I’m sorry about that. Getting blood all over you, I mean.”

He shrugged as he spread his washing on the hay pile. “It doesn’t matter.” His voice sounded flat to his ears.

“You’re acting as though it does. Perie – why didn’t you kill him? I was coerced. I was in his power. He could have done anything to me. He could have asked me to kill you, and I would have done it! I couldn’t have stopped myself. He could have asked me to fall on my sword, and I would have done that.” She paused, groping for the
right words while he pulled on his dry shirt and coat. “I have to be able to trust you. And right now, I don’t.”

He tried silence, but she was relentless. “What happened back there?”

“He was different,” he mumbled.

“Well, yes,” she conceded. “He was. Else why did he stop his coercion? I don’t think he expected
me
to kill him, but inexplicably, he appeared quite happy for you to do so. But that’s no reason to have let him live.”

She pointed vaguely in the direction of Oakwood and waggled her finger. “Those students back there might one day have been calling for the axing of the ancient oaks.”

“Coercion doesn’t last for ever.”

“No, probably not. But once an idea is planted, it’s hard to root out. True, he coerced them to believe it. His coercion made it all sound so true, so factual, so logical, that he must have thought that even after he’d gone, the ideas would stick.”

He stared at his feet, ashamed. “You’re right. I should have killed him. I’m glad he’s dead. It was just hard… hard to take the life of someone who – who knew what he was and wanted to die.”

“He said he wanted to live!”

“Yes, but he didn’t want to live
as a sorcerer
. It was horrible, Gerelda. I could…” He groped for words. “It was as if I could see into his soul.”

He raised his head to stare at her miserably and she stared back. Then she did something she had never done before, not even on the day his father had died. She reached out to him and pulled him into the comfort of an embrace.

“Oh, Va help us, Perie,” she whispered. “We are a pair of ninny-heads on a very hard road. You should be in school, or kicking a ball around on a village green. And I should be arguing about taxes with some weaselly goat of a cleric trying to cheat his parishioners, and then at the end of a day, putting my feet up in front of a tavern fire with a mug of mulled wine in my hand. Instead we are walking this unpleasant path. I wish it wasn’t so.”

When she released him, she turned her back and he wondered if he’d really seen tears in her eyes.

“So that’s Gromwell Holdfast,” Perie said. “It looks like any other old castle.”

From where they were standing on the crest of a hill several miles away, separated from the holdfast by a river, the walls appeared toy-like, built of blocks with symmetrical towers at either end.

“That’s because it
is
an old castle.” A distant puff of smoke, followed a moment later by a booming sound and then a thud, made Gerelda add, “Although perhaps not for long. What can you tell me about the people we’re looking at, Perie?”

“The men surrounding it are mostly Grey Lancers.” When she raised an eyebrow, he amended the assertion to fit her lawyerly love of facts. “Well, that’s an assumption. Let’s say, they are folk with a dirty smudge of sorcery rising from them.”

“Are they led by a sorcerer?”

“There’s no sorcerer there.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. There was one a few days back, but he’s gone.”

“Which way?”

“North, I think.”

“Ah.” She frowned as she added, “We’re standing up like scarecrows on a fallow field here. We need to find a place where we can hunker down while we watch what’s happening there for a bit.”

“Gathering information for Pontifect Fritillary?”

She nodded. She was always leaving written reports at shrines, or rather at places where shrines had once been. Luck-letterboxes, she called them, because if you were lucky, the letter found its way to the right recipient. They were actually caskets disguised as stones, always to be found next to a particular red-flowering plant. Neither he nor Gerelda was certain what happened to the reports after that, but sometimes – if she had indicated where they would be next – they would find a reply from Fritillary Reedling. Sometimes there would be letters left for other people as well.

They headed for a copse below them, off the road and closer to the walls of Gromwell. They were still on the far side of the river and all they’d have to do was keep an eye on the bridge to make sure none of the soldiers came their way. As they hid the horses among the trees, he said, “There’s a war going on over there. They are lobbing
cannonballs at the walls. People might be dying inside, or maybe starving.”

She looked at him oddly. “So?”

“In Oakwood, and in Beck Crossways, and along the roads, everything looks normal. People take their produce to market. The farmers plant and harvest. The students go to tutorials.”

“I guess that’s the way with wars sometimes. Some people suffer terribly; for others it’s just an inconvenience, and for still others, an opportunity. I think the oddest thing about this one is that many folk don’t know who their real enemy is. They get it all wrong, and talk about fighting Primordials or Shenat, when they should be looking at their own Prime and his clerics. They say they’ll fight for the king, when it’s their prince who’s on their side.”

“Do you know Prince Ryce?”

She gave a laugh that sounded more despairing than amused. “I’m a cooper’s daughter, Perie, brought up on a dusty, noisy street in the port of Gore. A cooper’s daughter who dreamed high. Who wanted to be a lawyer. That girl never thought to meet a pontifect, let alone a prince.”

“You met the Regala.”

“
Not
the highlight of my life, I assure you.”

“You know what I think the worst thing is about what’s happened? It’s that no one can find the shrines.”

She shrugged. “Really? I can take ’em or leave ’em myself.”

“A lack of shrines means it’s harder to find a connection to the Way.”

“So?”

“That means folk have no…” He thought of his father, and how much shrines had meant to him, especially after Ma had died. “Folk have naught to turn to for comfort. They’ll lose heart. They feel abandoned. Might mean they’ll turn to sorcerers making promises they ought never to believe.”

“Could be,” she admitted, albeit grudgingly.

“Unseen guardians would never abandon us. Never. People should believe that and be patient. If it’s Fritillary Reedling who sent the shrines away, then she ought to bring them back right quick, or it’ll get worse. Folk
need
them.”

“Do
you
?” she asked.

He touched his breastbone. “I have oak in here already. I don’t need a shrine. It is already part of me.”

She stared at him. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

“Without a heart of oak, I couldn’t do this.”

Her stare widened, and then she looked away uneasily. “I don’t know what Fritillary did, or why,” she said. “I can make a guess. Do you remember that Shrine on the Clouds? The lancers tried to cut it down, and when that didn’t work, they tried to burn it.”

“I remember. It wasn’t much damaged.”

“Because none of that lot were sorcerers. Sorcerers are out there now, though, and they
can
destroy shrines and shrine keepers and maybe folk with witcheries too. I think Fritillary has hidden them all to keep them safe.”

“You don’t win a war by hiding.”

“No, but maybe you can by sending a couple of sorcerer-killers.”

He was horrified. “Do you mean –
we
could be the only people who can make it so that the shrines can come back?”

She shrugged. “Do you know of any others tripping around the Va-cherished lands killing sorcerers?”

“Pickle me sour, Gerelda…! Oh. Sorry. Proctor…”

“Oh, for pity’s sake, lad. Considering what we do, I think we’ve got to the stage where you can call me Gerelda.”

“Are you
sure
Pontifect Fritillary had something to do with the disappearance of the shrines?”

“She must have done. Because if she didn’t, it was Valerian Fox. And that is too horrible to contemplate.”

Not a comforting remark. He turned his attention back to the castle.

“That’s the prince’s standard still flying from the tower on the right,” she said. “Which means he still holds the castle.”

They found a patch of brush at the edge of the copse where they could lie down comfortably, out of sight and yet with a fine view of the holdfast’s walls and main gate. It wasn’t an encouraging sight. The gate, built from huge wooden beams, was so battered it was hard to say what held the remaining splinters together. Part of the walls were little more than rubble. One of the towers had been partially
blown away, leaving it looking as if a winter gale would topple it entirely.