The Rose of the World (67 page)

There was no sign of the lost horse, not even its hoofprints impressed into the new surface of the desert; but as the sun began its diurnal fall, its red rays limning their right sides like fire, they spotted something on the ground a few hundred yards ahead, something in this monochromatic world which broke the eternal symmetry of the desert.

As they came closer, the shape resolved itself into something smaller than a horse.

A man.

‘Persoa!’

Mam fell from her horse and ran stumbling towards the figure with no care for anything, leaving Katla to grab the reins before they lost a second mount.

It was not the hillman. They found Mam staring puzzledly down at the thing on the sand, one hand up to her mouth. Even face down, it was clear that in life he had been a much bigger man than the eldianna, great of girth, tall of stature. He had been dead for some time: through the ripped fabric of his clothing, it could be seen that the skin was parched and dried to leather. His out-thrown hand had split apart. It was vast: a giant’s hand.

The body was hard to turn over, but at last the dead man fell back with a whoomph, sending out a billow of dust that had them all coughing.

Katla wailed. Mam stared. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen him somewhere before,’ she mused, entirely unaffected by the ghastly sight the corpse presented, now that it was obviously not Persoa.

‘It’s Urse,’ Katla whispered. ‘Urse One-Ear.’

And indeed the dead man had only a single ear; as well as a disfiguring rift which all but bisected his face, a mangled throat, and a torso striped with wounds.

Katla turned a shocked face to Mam. ‘But why is he here? The last I saw of him, he was taking ship with my father on the expedition to Sanctuary.’

Saro knelt and pulled aside the torn clothing. ‘Bëte,’ he said softly. He bent his head.

‘Bet?’ Katla frowned.

‘Bëte. A great cat. One of the Three. I think she must have done this, for I never saw a cat as large as her, and these clawmarks are huge. Was this man a friend of yours?’

The tears in Katla’s eyes spoke for themselves. She nodded dumbly, wondering what could possibly have taken Urse so far from the arctic seas into which the
Long Serpent
had sailed, what had become of the rest of the expedition, to her father and her brother.

There was nothing to be done: no ritual or rite that would suffice, and burial was pointless in a region in which the sands shifted day by day. In the end they arranged Urse in a more dignified position, laid stones upon his eyes, and Katla called upon Sur to accept his wandering spirit into his halls, even though the big man had not died at sea or in war.

The last thing she expected was an answering voice.

I will take him, Katla Aransen; but I need you and the sword you bear. Hurry to me! Hurry south!

Katla looked around, bewildered. ‘Did you say something, Saro?’ she said suspiciously.

Saro gazed back at her, curious. ‘No.’

He had clearly heard nothing, either.

Katla closed her eyes. The voice thrummed through her still, vibrating in the bones of her legs, in her ribcage and skull. She remembered that sensation. She shuddered. Perhaps she was losing her mind; perhaps she had lost it long ago.

Striding over to the bay she had been riding, she laid her hand on the fox-headed pommel of the great blade which was slung across the beast’s flank. The metal was strangely hot to the touch, not sun-warmed, but fiery. She mounted thoughtfully. Even after she had relinquished her hold on it her fingers were still tingling minutes later; and soon she found herself unconsciously cradling the arm which the seither had healed. It had begun to pulse and to burn like a reminder of the pyres. The sensation filled her with dread.

Ahead of her, the Red Peak showed on the horizon as a smoke-shrouded spike.

Urse’s was not the only corpse they found that day; but the next one was odder by far.

This time, Mam would not go near it. Despite all her apparent pragmatism, she was still superstitious at heart, and one gift of luck – which she counted as her reprieve that the first man had not been Persoa – must surely be paid for.

And Katla could not help but dread that where Urse had been there might next be her father or Fent.

So it was left to Saro to approach the hunched figure. He did so cautiously, for it was sitting in a slump, head lowered to its chest, looking as if it was taking a rest from a long and weary walk. Whatever it was, it was not Persoa; not unless the desert had a very strange way with the dead. The man – for such Saro judged it to be, though merely as a result of the remnants of its breeches – had expired long before Urse One-Ear, for the ivory of bone shone through tatters of skin gone black with rot and weathering. It had no eyes left to it, and no nose or lips either, and its hands were skeletal, clasped in its threadbare lap. The boots it wore had been of fine quality once and were still in good condition, but of a fashion so long out of date that Saro had seen a pair only in the library where his father had kept his curios. That pair had belonged to a distant ancestor. They were almost three hundred years old. He frowned and sat back on his haunches.

As he did so, the thing moved, though it might just have been the breeze, or its old bones shifting.

Unnerved, Saro scrabbled backwards as fast as he possibly could, never taking his eyes off the corpse.

‘What?’ demanded Katla. ‘What is it?’

‘Who is it?’ cried Mam. There was an uncharacteristic quaver in her voice.

‘I don’t know –’ Saro hauled himself upright – ‘except that it’s no man who has lived these past three hundred years.’ Pale skin showed around his eyes where it had been a dark golden tan before.

Katla made a face.‘That’s just fanciful,’ she declared grimly. She trudged over to the figure and stared down at it. But Saro was right: it looked ancient, maybe even one of the lost army of which he had spoken; except that it carried no weapon. She hunkered down beside it, relieved that it could not possibly be anyone she knew. Its wind-dried, eyeless face gazed back at her, grinning. She noticed that there was a patch of skin in the centre of its forehead which was a different colour to the rest – a wan pink, where all around was blackish grey, as if that had been the last part of it to die. Most strange.

Curiosity satisfied, she levered herself to her feet and turned to walk back to her companions. Something snagged at her. She reached around behind and her questing fingers met something hard and cool and jointed. Turning in slow horror, she found the thing had hold of her tunic.

‘Aargh!’ She dragged herself free and stared at the corpse.

It stared back. Though it had no extant features she could have sworn it looked disappointed. Then it raised the withered forearm which had grabbed at her and pointed out into the desert, south, towards the Red Peak. It tried to get up, the bones in its legs and hips grinding against one another as it struggled for purchase, then gave up, exhausted.

‘No.’ Katla shook her head. ‘No, that can’t be.’ She backed away, making the sign of Sur’s anchor. ‘Did you see that? Did you?’ she demanded of Mam and Saro.

Saro nodded mutely; Mam just stared, mouth open.

‘I saw it,’ Saro confided, still white around the gills. ‘Katla, I think I know what it is.’

She glared at him. ‘It’s obvious what it is. A dead man, an afterwalker.’

‘Reanimated,’ he said softly. ‘It’s a dead man which has been brought back to some semblance of life. By the death-stone. By Alisha.’

Katla shuddered, remembering Erno Hamson’s words to the Lord of Cantara about a stone which could heal the sick and raise the dead. There was no reason for her to be here, she thought suddenly; she could take one of the horses and return to the north, row back to Rockfall if she had to, away from all this. But that would leave Mam and Saro in this gods-forsaken place, with only a single mount. She knew she could not do it.

As for Saro, he felt his doom approaching.

He braced his shoulders and tried very hard not to think about the vision which had plagued him since the Lord of Cantara had embraced him in Jetra’s Star Chamber.

Then he approached the dead man. ‘Were you raised by the Wanderer, Alisha Skylark?’ he asked it solemnly and waited for a response, although to do so felt absurd – surreal. ‘With the eldistan – the deathstone?’

The thing shifted slightly, cocking its head as if to listen with non-existent ears. Saro repeated his question in the tongue of the hillfolk. Now the dead man moved its bony fingers to the pink spot on its head and touched it thoughtfully. Then it nodded once, almost imperceptibly, then with greater emphasis, its jaws clacking, confirming Saro’s worst fears. Again, it tried to rise, as if the very mention of the eldistan had galvanised it.

Saro stepped quickly away. The company in which he travelled was already peculiar enough, without adding this bizarre newcomer to the band.

They made a broad circle around the straggler from Alisha Skylark’s dead army, and continued south.

Thirty-nine

The Red Peak

It took another day to reach the foothills of the Dragon’s Backbone; but still there was no sign of Persoa or his mount. They did, however, pass three more revived corpses in various states of decomposition and animation, and each time they gave them a very wide berth.

At a small, almost-dried oasis, they tethered the horses to a pair of palm trees within reach of the muddy pool, stashed the packs and carried on afoot, for ahead the ground rose steeply into ashy screes and rocky channels which promised to be both unstable and inhumane: it hardly seemed fair to expect the animals to climb the side of a volcano which they would themselves have problems ascending.

The going was hard even from the start. The air was thick with sulphur, so that the lungs burned with every breath, and although the altitude and the mountains afforded more shade, still it was every bit as hot as the desert, for the volcano was alive with fumes. Sweating out moisture she couldn’t afford to lose, Mam scrambled up the choked defile as if every second lost would result in tragedy.

Katla glanced at Saro and grimaced. The Istrian looked as exhausted as she felt, his eyes red-rimmed through lack of sleep and the constant grit which showered from the sky here. A shadow fell across her and she looked up. Above them, high up, black birds hovered warily, wings outstretched, primary feathers spread like fingers.

‘Lammergeyers,’ Saro said, following her gaze. ‘Carrion birds.’

Katla knew what that meant. She bit her lip. Eschewing the rubble-filled path the mercenary leader was battling up, she opted instead for a slab of smoother rock, sole and palms flat against its surface for the best possible friction. At once, a great jolt of energy flowed through her, inflaming her muscles, filling her head with pounding blood. Voices boomed and jostled for attention, echoing around her skull like bats in a dark cave. She moved up the rock, trying to ignore these sensations, but the voices got louder and more insistent. One of them broke through her concentration altogether.

‘Katla!’

Saro’s warning cry dragged her back to herself, though she could not make out what he was saying.

Disorientated, Katla pushed down on the lip of rock on which she had set her left foot and levered herself into a standing position. She rubbed her hands across her sticky face, breaking the contact with the rock and at once the voices fled away. It was hot, so hot. She was burning up.
I must have become remarkably unfit
, she thought.

‘The sword!’ Saro cried again.

Too late, she understood. By then it was afire. She felt her hair catch in its flame, felt the blade ignite down its length so that her shoulders, her back, her buttocks and thighs felt its dangerous heat. Turning, she wrestled it off with swift instinct and cast it aside.

‘The flaming sword!’

Above her, Mam had stopped in mid-stride and was gazing down at her in awe. ‘It’s the tattoo Persoa has on his back.’

Katla stared at the blade. It was aflame from hilt to point, shooting out its fire in a great swirl of colour. She could feel the heat it gave off from where she stood, a killing heat, like a bone-fire. She reached around and gingerly explored her hair and shoulders, those parts she could reach, fully expecting to find skin and hair and clothing sloughing away beneath her fingers. But she could find no damage. None at all.

She presented her back to Saro. ‘Am I all right?’ she asked nervously. ‘Has it burned me?’

Saro shook his head mutely.

Frowning, Katla approached the sword. The flames guttered as she neared it, clearing from the hilt as if in invitation. The fox in the pommel seemed to grin at her. Her hand wanted to take up the weapon: her right palm itched for it, as if part of itself was missing. She gritted her teeth and darted a finger to the hilt. It was warm, but not hot; it welcomed her touch. She curled her grasp around it, hefted it suddenly. Virid flames gouted amongst the red and orange. Then a great force drew her arm out in front of her and drew her body after it, as if she were a lodestone and the mouth of the Red Peak was the Navigator’s Star.

Mam stood aside to let her pass and for the first time, Katla saw fear on the mercenary’s face.

‘The sword knows,’ Katla said. ‘It heeds the call of its maker.’

How she knew this, she had no idea, but it came to her with all the clarity and compulsion of a fact.

Mam and Saro exchanged harrowed glances, then followed after the flame-haired girl with the flaming sword.

Some hundreds of feet above the desert plateau there came a commotion from above, then a rain of debris. Rocks skittered past the climbers, narrowly missing them. Mam flattened herself against the side of the defile, panting, and scanned above for what had dislodged the detritus. Above, the shape of Katla was suddenly eclipsed by a larger shape entirely, and out of nowhere a huge black horse came plummeting towards them.

Saro stared.

It was Night’s Harbinger.

He called the stallion’s name, watched its ears flick – once, twice, as if in recognition of his voice; then it was past him in a thunder of hooves, its fiery eyes rolling. He watched it disappear into the gloom below, puzzling over the glimpse of red muscle and white bone exposed in haunches which bunched and flowed with a power and grace he remembered well.