The crozier brought up the rear, his feminine face a mask of calm, his eyes constantly calculating, no doubt plotting to ensure that it was he, not Quintius, who got the Scytale – and the glory.
Where do we stand in his plans?
Adamus seldom confided in him or Dranid. It looked like he had reached some kind of accommodation with Quintius.
Men like him don’t spread favours beyond those loyal to them personally.
He wished he’d got closer to the crozier.
But not as close as Dom …
Another ridge, another pause, and the Inquisitors bunched up, waiting. Malevorn looked around and spotted Artus Leblanc in the pallid gloom. The Acolyte glanced back, scratching his cheek as if the scar there had suddenly itched. Their eyes met blandly and Leblanc looked away. Somehow that troubled Malevorn more than a confrontational glare.
It’s as if I don’t matter any more.
Adamus Crozier waved them all into a loose circle. ‘The Dokken are over the ridge and down a long slope, about three hundred yards away. Beyond is a watering hole and after that the terrain becomes uneven. There are no guards, and the camp is half-empty. Most of the men are away.’
‘Do they know we’re here?’ asked Dominic in a worried voice.
Quintius looked down his nose at the young Acolyte. ‘They do not. In fact, this is opportune: a divided enemy is more easily destroyed. We will attack as planned. If this Alaron Mercer is their prisoner, he will be held in the camp, and easily seized. If not, we will put the survivors to the question, and see what there is to learn.’
The Acolytes stirred, eager to fight. Malevorn was of the same mind, and so were Raine and Dranid: longing to strike back at these creatures that had humiliated them at the island.
Adamus Crozier took over the briefing. ‘This is what we will do: once we top this final rise, we will see the camp, and they us. We will gallop straight over the top of them, wheel and recharge, except for Brother Dranid’s men, who will guard the perimeter facing the broken lands on the far side while the rest of us seek Mercer.’
Dranid’s eyes narrowed; he was clearly disappointed. Nevertheless he saluted. ‘Understood, Holiness.’
‘Excellent, Brother Dranid. Once through, establish a perimeter point every fifty yards. The rest, wheel on my command. Take a few adults alive and kill the rest.’
The Acolytes struck fists against their left breasts in salute.
Malevorn glanced at Raine.
She picked her teeth, and belched.
They grinned knowingly at each other.
‘Let’s move,’ Quintius said in his crisp voice.
They spurred to the ridge-line, the khurnes as silent as their riders. For a few seconds, everything went still, with just the snorting of the khurnes and the creak and clank of leather and metal providing the backdrop for the thudding of his heart. The camp was a squalling mess of children running about; a few adults were hunched over pots and cooking fires. The sky was empty and no beasts roamed the tents. Quintius was right: most of the Dokken were gone.
Then the Commandant’s mental voice echoed in all of their skulls and the lead khurne leapt forward. The rest followed, and Malevorn focused his attention on guiding his steed. Dust spewed up from the hooves, and the thunder of their advance was like a storm breaking.
Somewhere in the camp, a child cried out.
*
Huriya Makani watched impatiently from the edge of the small gully that marked the edge of the Noose. If Zaqri was victorious, her growing control of the pack might be snatched away; if it had not been for that she might not have overly cared who won this pissing contest.
Only she and Zaqri knew at this stage that they were pursuing more than just Ramita Ankesharan and Alaron Mercer.
If Wornu fails me, I’m sure there will still be dissidents against Zaqri’s leadership, especially once I reveal that the Scytale is at stake …
Zaqri’s fascination with this Cymbellea was aggravating and self-destructive, but her Sabele-memories told her that Zaqri had always had a strongly moralistic streak, and a desire to appear noble and heroic and generous that bordered on narcissism in her eyes.
Tomacz trudged up the slope towards her, his face hostile. Sabele had been a rarity among Souldrinkers: a specialist in the more arcane aspects of the gnosis, when most were hunter-gatherers on the fringes of a more sophisticated world. They resented her as much as they revered her.
‘You could have stopped this,’ the Eldest said accusingly.
She arched an eyebrow. ‘Neither would thank me.’
‘What game are you playing, Seeress?’
‘No games, Tomacz. This is serious business. There is much at stake.’
Tomacz looked sceptical. ‘Really? Why are we chasing a girl across Dhassa for you?’
She put her finger to her lips. ‘I can’t tell you, Tomacz. It’s a secret. Zaqri knows, and the Rimoni – that’s all.’
‘Why? Why not tell us all?’
‘It’s too dangerous. I’ll tell Wornu if he wins, and maybe Hessaz.’
‘Lady, by Brethren law, this pack may not leave our ancestral territory. We are near those borders.’
‘I know. Zaqri told me he would refuse to leave them even if I gave my blessing. Wornu has promised otherwise. This is a war: laws do not exist in such times.’
‘Laws always matter, Seeress. They are what preserve who we are.’
‘No, they are just silly little rules we break when it suits us to do so.’
He scowled at that. ‘You are leading us on a trail of death, Lady.’
‘I have a lot of deaths on my hands, Tomacz.’ She met his eye as something surfaced inside her. ‘I remember your father: blue eyes and long dark hair. Two bodies ago, for Sabele.’ She smiled reflectively. ‘He had a fine voice; he sang beautifully.’
She blinked away memories of people she’d never met with a shudder.
Tomacz peered at her, his face a little pale. ‘How many lives are within you, girl?’
Too many.
Right now, Huriya could pull them out at will, but she could always sense that other presence inside: Sabele, waiting like an old spider. She hadn’t known what she was taking on when she’d consumed Sabele’s soul on the Isle of Glass – it had just been opportunism. But now her greatest fear was not of enemies but of the crone inside her own head.
This is my body. My brain.
I
own it, not her.
Inside her, that spider-presence laughed patiently.
Thunder rolled from the south, where a low ridge flanked the camp site. In the campsite, a child screamed for his mother.
They both turned their heads and as she did so, she saw, beyond the tents and campfires, sunlight strike a line of steel-clad riders rumbling down the slope with lowered lances.
12
Religion: Kore
And thus it was that Corineus ascended unto Heaven, and through his sacrifice, Mankind were gifted the gnosis, and thus their freedom. For this reason Corineus is marked as the holiest of men, and his worship has spread far and wide, in Yuros and even unto Antiopia. In time the praise of Kore and his chosen son Corineus will rise unto the heavens and they will be worshipped in every corner of Urte, and then will Mankind be truly redeemed.
B
OOK OF
K
ORE
Johan Corin led the group who found the gnosis, and thus has been made a god, but he was just a man, and did not even survive the Ritual of Ascendancy. Do I hate him? No, though I hate what has been done in his name.
A
NTONIN
M
EIROS
, H
EBUSALIM, 783
Southern Dhassa, on the continent of Antiopia
Awwal (Martrois) 929
9
th
month of the Moontide
Keeping a lance steady on a galloping khurne was damned hard, especially when it was careering over undulating ground. But the beasts seemed to flow, as if their senses had somehow been enhanced so they could read the ground so perfectly that Malevorn barely had to concentrate. A ragged boy-child ran across his path, chased by a woman. His khurne’s horn tossed the boy aside, momentarily skewered then gone before he had registered the sight, then his lance took the woman in her side as she turned towards him. With a torn shriek she was gone and so was the lance, stuck in her body and wrenched from his grasp. Beside him Raine rode down another woman as she was halfway through transforming: her body was a hideous bone- and flesh-popping mess that burst apart as the khurne’s hooves slammed down on her. Malevorn’s steed leaped a tent and its fore-hooves crushed the skull of a girl cowering behind the canvas without breaking stride. He felt an exultant energy rise inside him: the exhilaration of combat, when your fate depended upon luck and skill in equal measure. His blood sang.
He drew his sword and obeyed, and within seconds they were smashing through a small cluster of half-beasts and their whelps, cutting them down ruthlessly. Behind them, Quintius’ riders had slowed and were hacking at the shrieking women they’d herded into the middle of the camp. In a haze of dust and blood, Malevorn followed Dranid as they peeled off, slowed to a trot and rode towards the edge of the camp, facing the broken land beyond.
When the rest of the Dokken come, it’ll be from here.
He wondered how many were out there, and how far away. He glanced right, and signalled for Dominic to close up. The young Acolyte’s sword was bloody and his eyes wide, but he slowed his khurne and moved parallel to Malevorn, fifty yards away, Raine and Dranid pounded onwards to their allotted positions.
In the broken lands before him, the rising sun blasted into his retinas. He twisted a little to avoid the worst of it, and extended his senses. There were only two figures visible: a grey-haired man in a short tunic and a diminutive young Keshi woman. He’d glimpsed her at the Isle of Glass.
If she knows where Mercer is, we’ll want a word with her
.
He spurred forward as somewhere in the broken lands, a jackal yowled.
For a long moment there was no sound, then what sounded like a hundred voices answered its cry.
*
Cymbellea di Regia sped along a narrow defile, seeking a hiding place. Sunlight punched through the gaps in the land. Every second exposed her more to these hunters with decades of experience in stalking and killing.
There must be somewhere …
A mile wasn’t far: 1760 yards, and easily traversed. She searched frantically, terrified that Wornu might appear before she’d found the refuge she needed.
Hessaz’s skill-set was too much like her own, but Wornu’s was not and that gave her a chance. She and Zaqri had agreed that she had to find Wornu’s blind spot or die. Of course, it also meant she was going up against someone who could crush her with a single blow – but the plan was to not give him the chance, instead, to disorient him with unfamiliar gnosis until Zaqri arrived to finish him off.
My life’s in the hands of the man who killed my mother. Sol et Lune, how did I get into this?
She scrambled over a small rise and couldn’t stop herself from glancing back when she heard a jackal yowl from the north, where Hessaz had started. It sounded horribly near. Then she spotted what she’d been seeking: a crevice just wide enough to slide into. She used Air-gnosis and glided over to it so there would be no tracks, landed at the edge and lowered herself inside. This crack in the land was barely two feet wide and it smelled of dead animal, but she wriggled inside until she was out of the light and lying flat.
The next step was harder. She crossed her arms over her chest and closed her eyes, trying to slow her frantically beating heart. She needed to be calm for this exacting task. It took far too long, minutes when it should take seconds, but she was entirely self-taught in spiritualism, the art of travelling outside the body – she’d only unlocked it by accident, when she’d awakened from a deep sleep to find herself looking down on her own body, lying with the other girls asleep in the maiden’s wagon. Her body had looked so lifeless beneath her she’d thought herself dead and she’d panicked, screaming as her insubstantial astral body flickered about the confined space – but none of the other girls woke; no one else heard a sound she made. She raged and wept and pleaded; she shook them and found their bodies as immovable as stone, her hardest blow unfelt. Only the rising sun had driven her back into her body.
She’d learned a lot since then, all by trial and error, and if she concentrated, she could now leave her body at will. She was too scared this morning to achieve it easily, but finally there came that
tearing
and she pulled free like a seabird rising from the water. Her spiratus flowed upwards, leaving her body behind, unmoving, barely breathing, but alive. She flashed out of the crevice and into the shadow of a rock-fall. Normally she avoided sunlight when doing this – it
burned
, a dreadful searing pain – but this time she had no choice.
By now she could feel Wornu’s approach: he was like a rolling boulder to her gnostic senses, loudly trundling closer and closer. He was making no effort to conceal himself – she guessed he was doing it on purpose to show her how little he feared her. She flitted from shadow to shadow until she was in his path, and prepared to face him.
He came out of the east with the sun behind him, casting him into silhouette. He bore a huge hunting spear, just as Zaqri had predicted, fashioned in a few minutes from stone and wood and the gnosis. No doubt Hessaz and Zaqri had done the same, but she didn’t have the Earth- or sylvanic-gnosis to do the same.
But I have other skills …
She willed a small rock-fall with telekinesis to draw his attention, then stepped into the light as if blundering about helplessly and pulled her spiratus half into the world of substance, allowing him to see her.
The dark shape went still. ‘Cymbellea?’
She froze in surprise. It wasn’t Wornu.
It was Zaqri.
*
The plan wasn’t ideal, but it was the best Zaqri could come up with under the circumstances. In a stand-up fight Cym would be useless, and he was not certain he would prevail one-on-one with Wornu, let alone if Hessaz was involved. They needed an edge: something that would enable them to take down one of their enemies fast. Despite being the stronger, Zaqri believed Wornu was the more vulnerable, especially to the surprising ability Cymbellea had revealed last night.
Cymbellea
. Her name shivered through his spine; her restless face and windblown hair tangled up his thoughts. An unbroken colt with brilliant eyes and a piercing mind. He refused to believe that beneath the armour of her blood vendetta she did not feel for him what he felt. He’d wanted her so badly that he had almost disgraced himself, not once but many times these past few months. And yet the moment of consummation had been spoiled by its necessity, and her coldness to him.
I’ll not lie with her again until she is willing – or until we are together in the grave.
He scooped up a handful of twigs and stones and hurriedly forged them into javelins using sylvan- and Earth-gnosis. No doubt Wornu would have created a war-spear and Hessaz a bow. Once armed, he began to trot southwest in long, loping strides, aiming to intercept Hessaz. It pained him to face her: Hessaz and Ghila had been so alike that she could as easily have been his mate as Ghila. In the end Ghila’s more impish nature had appealed more than her fiery, tenacious sister, and he’d never regretted the choice, for all Ghila’s faults.
I didn’t pick this fight, Hessaz
.
He had run less than half a mile when suddenly there came a rumble like thunder from the southeast. He frowned at the heavens. Thunder usually presaged a dust-storm, which would make this Noose messy indeed. But there was no wind, and the sky was clear all the way to the southern coastal ranges.
If it isn’t thunder, what is it?
He paused as the very earth seemed to go still, opened all his gnostic and natural senses and
listened
. If he really, really concentrated, he could hear a pin drop. Or the cry of a young child, more than two miles away …
No—!
As he realised what was happening he dropped his javelins and fell into lion-shape without breaking stride, pelting back towards camp. The Noose was forgotten in his desperation to protect his people.
The blow was like a punch to his side: an arrow hammered into his flanks, through his ribcage and into his lungs. For about two seconds he barely felt it, then the force of the blow made him stagger sideways. His legs went from under him and his forward momentum threw him into a face-grazing slide. Dust filled his mouth and nostrils and eyes, and all his gasping couldn’t inflate his lungs. Blood bubbled up into his throat and his ribs started grinding in agony against the wooden shaft, each movement sending the jagged stone point ripping deeper inside.
He blinked his eyes clear and tried to stand.
He couldn’t.
Hessaz appeared, another arrow nocked and her face pitiless.
*
‘Cymbellea?’
She waited as Zaqri jogged towards her, his face splitting into a satisfied smile. ‘Wornu didn’t see me coming. I flew low in eagle form and took him from behind unawares.’ He hefted the war-spear, kissed the shaft in his right hand. ‘The big bastard wasn’t the man he thought he was.’
Could it really be so easy?
She sagged in relief, her arms opening as she forgot in the relief of the moment that she hated him, even as some nagging part wondered at his uncharacteristic gloating, and how his voice sounded strange …
He bent back his arm and hurled the spear right at her chest.
She gaped at him, fatally frozen by the sudden violence. The spear took her between the breasts with full force …
… and passed right through her spiratus.
It still hurt like Hel: the spear had substance and she did not, so its passing tore a hole right through her aetheric form and out the other side. She clutched the hole in her spiritus like a death wound.
Then it closed, she staggered, flickered and was whole again.
Wornu! How could I ever have been so stupid?
His true face emerged as he lost concentration and stared at her, baffled.
She silently berated herself.
He can
shape-change,
stupido!
She darted into the shadows again and tried to regain her composure, to keep herself
here
. Thunder rolled in the distance, but neither Cym nor Wornu noticed. Ten feet apart, they locked eyes, and Wornu’s big brutal face went slack as he struggled to reconcile what he had just seen.
Cym threw a burst of light at his face and made herself vanish.
*
Hessaz stared down at Zaqri, a single tear running down her left cheek. ‘You were the only one I wanted,’ she whispered. ‘Did you even know?’
The camp
… He tried to forge the thought into something she could hear, mind to mind, then tried to speak, but all that came was a gurgle and his mouth filled with blood.
‘You made me envy my sister. My own sister.’ She drew the bow to full power, took aim. ‘Then when she died, I thought …
But no
. You’d seen that damned gypsy and it was all her-her-her. You bastard. You’re not worthy of my love.’
He tried again.
This time she heard him. She looked around wildly, then focused. ‘No,’ she whispered, as the realisation struck her. She lost her grip on the arrow and it fell into the sand. ‘
Pernara!
’ she screamed, and in an instant she was gone and a giant raven was tearing out of the dell and across the sky.
Zaqri tried to move again, tried to change, but no matter what he did the shaft remained imbedded in him. His roar of agony came out as a whimper. For a few moments the world was touched with brilliance: a vivid, unbelievable colour. Then as swiftly it turned grey, then black.
*
Cym pressed her spiratus behind a boulder in a deadly game of hide and seek: keep Wornu occupied until Zaqri came, that was the plan. He couldn’t kill her, not unless he caught her full on with a mage-bolt, but Wornu hadn’t figured that out yet. Then an awful howl rose from all about her: a cry of terrible, awful fear and rage.
It was the sound of sixty Souldrinker warriors howling as one.