The Seventh Friend (Book 1) (6 page)

Seth Yarra

The phrase Seth Yarra has come to epitomise evil throughout the five kingdoms. Strictly speaking it is the name of an outland god, Seth Yarra, the destroyer and creator of all things, or so called by his followers. These people are believed to inhabit a substantial land many days sail to the east of Afael and the headland known as Worlds Tail. There can be no doubt that they are a numerous people, that they have mastered a technology of sailing that is, or was, quite beyond our own.

Their principle beliefs, the ones that led to them having such a terrible impact upon our own lands, are that firstly, only the followers of Seth Yarra are of any consequence, secondly, that all which is not Seth Yarra must be destroyed or converted, and thirdly, that all must be rebuilt according to their god’s dictates. They have even codified this into their priesthood, dividing it between Cleansers and Masters of the Rule. The former are in effect a warrior caste, and the latter are the sole authorities in the building of buildings and the planting of plants. From our limited experience of their ways it seems that they were intent on altering our lands to exactly resemble their own. What evidence we have suggests that they hold our lands to be in aberration from the divine plan, and that as soon as they became aware of us it was necessary to war against us under the dictates of their beliefs.

They are a strictly hierarchical system, highly disciplined and militaristic. Their leader is known by the misleading title of First Servant, and his will is, for all intents and purposes, law. However, it is thought that he is answerable to some degree to a council of priests in matters of orthodoxy. In truth we know very little of their customs and their form of government, as those prisoner that were taken during the war refused to answer questions, and indeed were largely successful in ending their own lives at the earliest opportunity.

Many believe that the defeat suffered by the Seth Yarra was so complete that they will not again attempt to conquer our lands, but others, myself included, take the view that religion will drive them, eventually, to try again.

Extract from Meditations on the Great War

By the Erudite Master Galian Terbustate

Vice Prefect of the
Royal College of Historians at Golt

Keb son of Jarl son of Hern son of Lers son of Nias held himself rigid in the middle of the corridor, held there by his distaste for the stonework, determined not to touch the walls. In his mind he repeated the prayer of purification, again and again as though its words could take him away from this terrible place, take him home.

My eyes are the eyes of the one god, they see for him.

My ears are the ears of the one god, they hear for him.

My hands are the hands of the one god, they act for him.

I give my eyes to Seth Yarra.

I give my ears to Seth Yarra.

I
give my hands to Seth Yarra.

Protect me, Great God, from all that is tainted,

Bathe me in thy will that I may be pure.

He stared at the cold stone of the wall and at the way in which the blocks were laid, and it was
wrong
. It was taint. Everything here was taint. He tried to relax, to open his eyes and be what he was supposed to be, a heretic, a priest of the heretic cult of Ashmaren called Pelas Simal. A friend of this tainted city and this tainted land. He pushed down the fear that had chewed at him since his arrival here, the fear that he would never be free of it, and that the taint would steal his soul.

He allowed his mind to flee to a time before. He had been just a few months from the green cloth, less than a hundred days from the ceremony that would make him a priest, a Master of the Rule. Ten years of study, thirty examinations of his knowledge, fierce scrutiny of his character, and it had all come to this.

We need you, they had said. It is the will of Seth Yarra, they had said. There had been two of them; imposing figures in black and green robes, grey hair, stern eyes; men of status; men that he aspired to be.

So he had gone with them, and they had shown him things that he had never wanted to see, taught him histories that he struggled to believe. A secret war had been fought, so secret that none knew of it save those that had died, and a few that had remained home, privy to its secret. Seth Yarra had lost. Lost! Such a thing was impossible, and yet they said that it was so. There was a place, they told him, where the one god was denied, where the rule was broken. It was an insult. It was a taint upon the world.

Men and ships had gone, all in secret. Twenty thousand men and hundreds of ships had crossed the ocean to put right the wrong, to bring the truth of Seth Yarra’s rule to the dark places, and they had all died.

It was a place of demons, they told him. And they told him he was to go there.

To go here, to this city of abominations, a place of uncounted gods where things were done just as people had a whim to do them. He was comforted by the thought that he would be part of its destruction. He imagined the city built again according to the rule; he imagined one temple; he imagined the graceful towers and orderly buildings that would stand here once all this had been swept away.

It was a comfort.

The people, too, were hateful. They dressed in an appalling welter of colours and styles, and the words they said were just as inconsistent, heretical and contradictory. It was almost impossible to find two people here who agreed on a single matter. Their favourite word seemed to be ‘but’. I agree with you, but… you are right, but… that is true, but…

They had no concept of truth; simple, divine truth.

The place was driving him mad. A few days ago he had been able to stand the heretical chanting of the priests no longer, and had fled out into the rain. By chance he had come across the house of the demon itself, the arch fiend who had slain the First Servant of Seth Yarra on that ill fated expedition, Fenris God Killer, the one they called Narak.

He saw people go in, and it offended him to think that people worshipped the demon, that they honoured it. He stood in the rain, transfixed by the horror of it, thinking back to the choice he had made, so many years ago.

To aspire to the priesthood of Seth Yarra was the highest calling, and only the best were taken, but even then, even when one wore the grey robes of a sworn servant there was a great choice to be made; the choice between black and green, between Seth and Yarra, between cleansing and building.

He had chosen the harder route, the academic discipline of the green robe, and having taken that one step he had looked down upon his black robed brothers with their swords and lances. How much less divine to simply destroy?

Now he wished otherwise.

He watched as the demon’s acolytes left. They were young men and women clothed in good cloth, adorned with jewels. They laughed at the rain, talked merrily among themselves as they minced around the puddles, peered up at the sky as though it might tell them when dry weather would come. But they had not all gone. One stayed in the doorway, called after them, and looked in his direction.

She was a pretty young girl. Like the others she was well dressed, and he guessed she was of noble blood. Now he might strike a blow for Seth Yarra. It could not be wrong to strike down a worshipper of the demon itself. He gripped his dagger, but his hand would not pull it out. He stared at the building, at the girl, unable to act. He spoke the words of a prayer for strength, but nothing changed. She took fright and went within, but still he stood there.

It was the same decision, he realised. For all his pious horror he was still unable to destroy. She was still a pretty girl more than she was a heretic. He was still wedded to the green robe, even faced with a deed suited to his meagre destructive talents he could not use the blade. It was shame that he felt, for all his looking down on the black robe he saw that they did something that he could not do, had a purpose that he was unable to fulfil. Yet the thought of the girl’s death at the hands of one of his brothers did not lift him. In a perfect world it would not be the girl that would die, but her misapprehension, her ignorance.

A voice startled him. A young man approached, cloaked against the rain. He found that his knife had pulled itself, abandoning its earlier reluctance, and the young man stopped, pulled his cloak aside to reveal the hilt of a sword. He did not close, however, but stood and watched. He was warning Keb, telling him that it would not be worth his while to try anything.

Keb ran. He was suddenly afraid that he had put everything in jeopardy. To do anything now would be a greater sin than his inability to strike at the enemies of Seth Yarra. He was not even a soldier, certainly not a cleanser. His duty here was to do certain things, to say certain words in the right ears.

Now he stood apart from the walls, waiting in the passageway, and his grip upon his duty tightened. His faith was his strength, and his duty the staff that he leaned upon when he grew weak.

A door opened. A man stepped out. He was dressed in the robes of a priest of Ashmaren, red and white, the gold chain around his neck his badge of office. Thinning grey hair, cut short, topped his head, and he was clean shaven, his wrinkled face hinting at kindness and arrogance in equal measure. His name was Baltho Hermandis, and in addition to his high standing as high priest, or perhaps because of it, he was a councillor to the Duke of Bas Erinor. He smiled when he saw Keb.

“Have you been waiting long, Pelas?” he asked.

“No, my lord,” Keb said. “I have taken the opportunity to contemplate my duty,” he added.

“Have you indeed? And have you learned anything more from this contemplation?” Baltho leaned forwards peering at Keb with a practiced look of interested condescension.

“Nothing remarkable, my lord, only that my duty is certain.”

“Very pious, very pious indeed,” Baltho muttered. “Are we safe to speak here?”

“Quite safe,” Keb said. “The door leads only to the tower, as you know, and to hear us a man must open one of the doors that we can see at either end of the passage, so we cannot be overheard.”

“There is news,” the older man said. “A rider has come to the Duke, one of his men who watch the border with Berash. They have heard news from the Berashi court that got it from the guardians of the Green Road.”

“What news, my lord?”

“Wolves,” he said. “A pack of wolves has passed through the pass. The word is that they were under compulsion, that they barely spared a glance for the men there, but rushed through the gate without a sideways glance.”

“You think the Wolf God moves against us?”

“I fear it. He is a bloody creature who holds a grudge.”

“I think not,” Keb said. In fact he thought the opposite. He hoped the opposite. “We have done nothing that is not justified.”

“So you say, so you say.”

Keb despised the man. He was indecisive, given to compromise and easily influenced. These were not admirable qualities in a high priest, but made him a perfect tool for Keb, a compliant lever to tip events how he wished.

There was a sickness in Bas Erinor, in the grubby streets of the city that clothed the land below the city of the gods. It was not a plague, and for the most part it did not kill, but it laid people low for days, stopped bakers from baking, smiths from hammering, shopkeepers from selling. It had become a grave concern to the city merchants, and the Duke, and so the priesthood.

Keb had told them the disease came from dogs, that they carried it. He told them it had swept through Telas Alt the year before while he was in that city, and that they had traced the source to dogs. Killing the dogs was the only solution.

It was not true. The illness came from a small bottle that he carried on a thong around his neck. It was a clear liquid, and only a drop or two was required to make a well bad for a couple of days.

It was easier to persuade them than he had expected. There was resentment at the renewed popularity of the Benetheon, and especially of Narak. War threatened, and the folk memory of Avilian remembered the Wolf at the head of their army, not the god of war, they remembered that it was the Benetheon and Narak that protected the forests, not Ashmaren.

Killing dogs, he had hinted to Baltho, would also make the city a blind spot for the Wolf, and what he could not see would not concern him.

“You are worried, my lord,” Keb said; a statement of the obvious.

“You say the Wolf has not been abroad for centuries,” Baltho said. “He did not come to Telas Alt?”

“No, my lord, and almost all the dogs were killed there.”

“Perhaps we should suspend the work,” Baltho murmured, as though to himself. He fingered his chin and adopted a piercing expression, designed to indicate deep thought.

“My lord, the disease is in decline. The merchants are most pleased.”

“Are they? Well, that is good.” The old priest’s eye shifted easily onto the advantage Keb presented, and the distant threat of the wolf god faded. “Best carry on then,” he said. “Best carry on if it pleases them, do you think?”

“As you wish, my lord.”

The high priest nodded, touched Keb absently on the head in blessing and went back through the door, up to his tower room.

Keb shook himself when the man had gone, something between a shudder of disgust and laughter at how easily the doubts had been circumvented.

The Wolf would come. He was certain that the Wolf would come, drawn to Avilian as helpless as Baltho in the grip of the First Servant’s plan. And then we would see.