She used her walking staff to drag a path through the dust. Fernal peered down at the shape she was drawing, his bony brow looking even more crumpled than usual as he tried to make out the symbols.
‘Will you try to stop it?’
‘Of course. Whether I can or not, I will not stand idly by.’ The witch stopped drawing in the dirt and stared at what she had done for a while before she erased it with her toe. She looked up at Fernal, a rare display of concern showing on her face. ‘I’ve seen enough of Azaer’s deeds to know that it goes against the balance of the Land; that in itself is enough for me to choose a side. In the last town we passed, they swore priests were being beaten in the street, temples were being burned. Tell me, Fernal, without people to worship them, without temples and priests to glorify them, what are the Gods?’
The blue-skinned figure was looking out over the city. Somewhere behind the walls a lambent glow indicated that the riots had begun early that night. ‘Just a voice on the wind,’ he replied.
‘Well this is an evening for the unexpected,’ Koezh commented coolly, walking with Legana on his arm, the perfect nobleman. ‘I almost feel like introducing myself to Lord Isak, just to crown the peculiarity of it all.’
At Koezh’s side, the young Farlan woman, still trying to hide her discomfort, followed his pointing finger to where a tall figure in a cape stood at the head of a squad of guards.
‘I suspect he would not react well to it. Everyone here is somewhat tense; understandable perhaps, after that repulsive travesty we’ve just sat through.’
I shouldn’t tease her by suggesting such things,
Zhia thought as she observed Legana, rather surprised at how fond she was of the prickly Farlan agent,
but it is fun to watch her stepping out like a countess. I suspect she cares less that my brother is a vampire than that he’s a male one!
‘The boy was sufficiently respectful when I last met him,’ Zhia replied. They were taking a turn around the theatre, ostensibly to avoid the confusion of coaches and sedans crowding around its exit. At her side, rather more comfortable than Legana, Doranei stifled a snort. She gave his hand a squeeze and leaned close to his ear. ‘You disagree?’
They stopped at the head of the main street leading into the Shambles. A burning cart illuminated half a dozen Fysthrall soldiers who stood in a nervous knot two hundred yards down the road, flinching behind their shields as stones clattered down on them from every side. Zhia was pleased to notice Doranei couldn’t stop himself breathing in her scent before replying.
‘Having spent a few weeks in Lord Isak’s company, respectful isn’t the first word I’d have used for him,’ Doranei said with a faint grin.
‘Really? I rather believed you thought highly of the man,’ Zhia said. Behind them a handful of guardsmen, Major Amber, Nai and Haipar, shuffled to a halt. She watched the Fysthrall troops huddling under their shields while they tried to edge away, and briefly wondered if she’d brought enough men with her.
‘Oh I do,’ Doranei answered hurriedly, ‘and I wish I could have gone to greet him tonight -if it had been under other circumstances -but he’s a white-eye, and one of the Chosen. I don’t think he feels any great need to be respectful to anyone -and it doesn’t come naturally to him anyway.’ He shot a cautious look at Legana, not wishing to start trouble, but she didn’t appear to take umbrage.
‘Do you know why he is here,’ Koezh asked, ‘pretending to be a mercenary bodyguard instead of at the head of an army? From what you told me of Narkang and the White Circle prophecies, he would have justification enough.’
‘He was lured here by one of Azaer’s agents,’ Doranei said.
‘Azaer?’ said Koezh, a little taken aback. ‘The false daemon-cult? ’
‘Azaer exists,’ Doranei confirmed. ‘It may not be a true daemon, but it’s certainly some sort of immortal, albeit an unusual one - Azaer has no form or physical power, unlike normal daemons, but it does have guile. It exists as a shadow only, teasing out the cruelty and arrogance in men for its own purposes. I doubt you’ll have come into contact with it, or its followers; the shadow is too weak to risk going near either of you.’ He hesitated. ‘Well, so King Emin believes, and he’s come into conflict with Azaer’s followers more than once. Azaer prefers to steal its followers, to use words and magic to turn them against what they once believed in.’
‘Which brings us back to this minstrel of yours,’ Zhia said. ‘I doubt you would have been able to see the wings but he was there tonight, watching the crowd.’ She felt Doranei’s body tense as she spoke, but pressure on his arm stopped the man from turning around to look at the building. She knew they would be watching her closely now.
‘My late arrival has left me without all the facts,’ Koezh interrupted, ‘and if I’m to play, I need to know everything. We have an immortal that is neither God nor daemon, and you tell me the criminal executed on stage tonight was no wrongdoer but a priest?’
‘Exactly so,’ Zhia said, remembering with distaste the final scene of the play they had just watched. It was surely no simple mistake that the theatre troupe had taken the wrong prisoner from the gaol for that night’s performance. ‘The entire play was a bitter mockery of the Gods, and then instead of using a condemned man as they were supposed to, they killed a priest, one I had put in gaol to cool his temper,’ she said bitterly. ‘Fate’s eyes, the priest had been complaining about the execution of men on stage!’
‘And the crowd laughed,’ Koezh finished, dismissing the irony with a shake of his black hair. ‘Azaer wants to turn the people of the city against the Gods? You said the temples have been all but abandoned in recent weeks, and you’ve had to post guards to stop people throwing things at the priests—’
He was interrupted by a terrific crash from somewhere up ahead, followed by the sound of splintering timber and crumpling walls. Screams and shouts were interspersed with cheers and laughter. The orange flicker in the night sky fell away as the burning building collapsed in on itself, but Zhia could hear a low growl swell menacingly, and she knew the light would soon return.
Footsteps echoed from the dark side streets: men skulking in the shadows, looking for easy prey. They must have decided Zhia’s party was not for them, thanks to her guards, and because she was wearing her white shawl, marking her as a woman of the White Circle. They weren’t all mages -only a few had any real ability -but rumour was a powerful tool, and many believed all who wore the shawl had magical powers.
‘But
what
is the goal here?’ she wondered aloud. ‘There is a very patient mind at work behind all this.’
‘It’s pretty obvious the actors are no simple band of travelling players,’ Koezh said. ‘Those albino siblings look like gentry to me, and if they’re here, in a city, they must have been stolen away from the woods they belonged to -and that, to me, is more remarkable than the presence of mages or Raylin.’
The clump of boots made them turn; two columns of soldiers trotted towards them. Seeing Zhia’s shawl, the man leading the troops barked an order in their jagged language and the men clattered to a halt. Some were injured and their scaled armour and fat shields looked rather battered.
Zhia recognised the leader’s facial tattoos marking him as an officer bonded by a Fysthrall woman. There were gaps in the ranks, so they must have seen some fighting already tonight. Zhia was intrigued and worried: a mob would have to be in a frenzy to take on real soldiers, especially troops as uncompromisingly efficient as the Fysthrall.
‘Calling Falcon,’ Zhia called, reading his name from his cheek. She was always a little disappointed that the Fysthrall’s methods of subduing a man’s spirit were so effective - when a soldier was bonded, he was given an animal’s name, for he was no longer a man, but a woman’s property, and his new name, his owner’s and his army unit were then tattooed onto his face.
Crude,
Zhia thought to herself,
that it worked only confirmed their opinion of their menfolk.
The man bobbed his head in acknowledgement and hurried to her, kneeling immediately. ‘Yes, Mistress.’
‘You have lost men already tonight?’
‘Yes, Mistress; two died in an ambush. We killed many before they were driven off.’ His command of the local dialect was excellent, but his accent was thick. He kept his eyes on her feet; this one had been well trained, Zhia realised. He looked about fifty summers - forty parades, in Fysthrall, from the annual ceremony all males performed from the age of ten. She didn’t recognise his face or the owner’s name so she guessed the woman was either dead or of very low family status.
‘Are they attacking anyone, or just soldiers enforcing the curfew?’
‘Anyone, Mistress -several of your Sisters have already disappeared this night, I have heard.’
‘Well then, you will escort us home,’ Zhia said.
‘Mistress, I have orders—’
‘No longer.’ She pointed. ‘It’s that way.’
CHAPTER 21
Fordan Lesarl, Chief Steward of the Farlan, had spent his entire life in the service of his lord. He had been educated from birth to take his father’s place, taught how to use men like disposable tools. His foresight had led to the creation of a network within each city-state that was unrivalled throughout the Land. It was run by Whisper, one of Lesarl’s coterie of unofficial ministers, and based on a web of local agents well-used to dark-eyed men and women looming out of the shadows with a list of requirements.
The Farlan agent in Scree was a corpulent merchant, Shuel Kenn, who had done well to hide his surprise when Lord Isak himself had appeared and demanded a base for his operations. Despite the glitter in his eyes that suggested Kenn was already calculating the profit he might make from playing the dutiful host, he had spared no expense to fulfil his employer’s wishes. The house he provided for Isak was not his principal residence, but it was large and luxurious, and well situated in a quiet street a short distance from the homes of the truly wealthy, so they could enjoy the city guard’s protection whilst maintaining their privacy. A walled courtyard surrounded three sides of the house, and a large old chestnut tree in the middle obscured the view should anyone consider watching the rear, while the street-door was fortified against anything less than a full-on battering ram.
Tila and Vesna sat on a covered balcony at the rear of the house, facing the morning sun and drinking warm tea flavoured with lime and honey. After the horror of the two previous evenings, Scree was peculiarly silent.
‘All night, whenever I closed my eyes, I saw that stage covered in blood,’ Tila whispered, clutching her cup. The shadows around her eyes betrayed her disturbed sleep, and Vesna was worried that what few hours’ rest she had managed had left her even more troubled.
‘I know,’ he told her. ‘I’ve seen prisoners executed in public before, and never found anything in it to entertain me. To execute prisoners on stage, as part of a play -that’s abominable, but to murder a priest, before the whole city? It beggars belief. I haven’t the words.’ Vesna pinched the bridge of his nose against the tired ache building behind his eyes. He was a seasoned campaigner, and his own uneasy rest had taken him by surprise. ‘There was a time when death didn’t move me,’ he said, reflectively. ‘I wonder what happened?’
‘You grew up,’ Tila said, squeezing his hand affectionately. ‘I’ve decided that to survive as a soldier, you have to live like a child -to see everything through the eyes of an adult would be too much to bear.’
Vesna looked down at her fondly. ‘Perhaps you’re right. In Tor Milist, a sergeant told me I was thinking too much. Doing that’ll get you killed, but all I could think about was you. What a pathetic place to die; furthering the cause of a man I’d happily kill. All those who died there . . . for the first time I felt guilty. I’d dragged them somewhere they had no need to be.’ He paused, his voice dropping low. ‘What a pathetic way it would have been to lose you.’
‘Don’t think like that,’ Tila said. ‘Duty took you there. I might not agree with Lord Isak, but he believes it was in the best interests of the tribe, and that decision is now his to make. We must obey our lord.’
Despite his despondency, Vesna smiled at Tila’s sudden vehemence. He frequently forgot the twenty summers between them, until some tiny detail brought him up short, and when that happened, the years sat heavier on his shoulders, even as Tila’s bright smile lifted him up.
‘Aye, we’ll follow his will, though he’s little more than a lad and you’re not much better! Gods, to be that young again.’ He pointed at the chestnut tree that dominated the courtyard. ‘That reminds me of when I was a lad; we had one at Narole Hall and I’d climb it every time I did something wrong.’ Vesna laughed suddenly. ‘It happened so often my father threatened to cut the damned thing down.’
‘And did he?’
‘No, it was an empty threat -he did exactly the same when he was a boy.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ve started missing that house recently, though I’ve not lived there in years.’
‘What happened?’ Tila asked. ‘It’s your family home, isn’t it?’
Vesna gave a weary shrug. ‘I inherited my father’s debts. He was a good father, but a poor manager of estates, and I ran up a few more myself after he died. Don’t think I appreciated the place when I was young; parts of Anvee are beautiful, which is why a lot of old soldiers go there to find a peaceful retirement. Of course, they still need to eat, so they train boys like me, whose parents want them to last beyond their first battle. It’s only now I realise those old veterans found something genuine there. When I was a lad, all I could think about was getting to the city and joining the army.’
‘So you had to sell your home?’
‘Almost. The local magistrate was an old friend of my father’s and he found a merchant who liked the idea of living in an ancestral home. The merchant was a good man: he gave me a fair price, and agreed that if ever I could repay that money, with remarkably modest interest, I’d get my house back.’