Blood in the Water (3 page)

“But—” the broken-nosed man gaped at Reher, unable to frame a question.

“You’ll know what it means soon enough,” the smith promised him.

“Till then, why don’t you run off and hide up your own arseholes?” Arest menaced the vagrants impersonally with his sword.

The ragged men swiftly melted into the woods. Tathrin could only hope they had the sense to stay lost.

“Come on.” Reher began walking back to the column as Arest reassembled his men for their duties in the vanguard.

The smith glanced at Tathrin. “Your friends need to tell that Parnilesse man, Reniack, to spread his pamphlets and songs towards Carluse as fast as he can.”

“Do you think these strays can read?” But Tathrin knew he was right.

“We can’t afford delay each time we trip over some runaway.” Reher lowered his voice to a rumble. “I could drive them off but I don’t want to show my hand.”

“No,” Tathrin said hastily.

Did anyone suspect the two of them shared more secrets than Carluse blood? If someone did, would explaining that Tathrin’s father and Reher both worked with the Woodsmen suffice?

Tathrin didn’t relish the thought of anyone else knowing he was the conduit for magical communications between Captain-General Evord and Losand and Sharlac, the towns they had already conquered. Because everyone knew magic was forbidden in Lescar’s ceaseless wars. The Archmage Planir was adamant, like all his predecessors. The bold, destructive power of wizardry hadn’t been seen on a Lescari battlefield in time out of mind.

Reher would be in more trouble than him, Tathrin thought guiltily. If the smith hadn’t studied at the Wizards’ Isle of Hadrumal, he was undeniably mageborn with the control over fire that arcane talent granted him. Tathrin was only the passive recipient of information from his friend Aremil. And Aremil was using Artifice, the ancient magic of mind and emotion. Planir had never claimed suzerainty over that.

Few people even remembered this subtle magic existed. It was the scholars of the ancient universities who had rediscovered the lost enchantments. Scholars were still diligently searching for more in the learned halls of Col and Vanam, which was how he and Aremil had heard of it. They had soon seen how it could serve them, as they had sought the best way to truly end Lescar’s enduring misery.

Would such arguments convince anyone outraged by Evord’s use of magic? Wouldn’t the dukes use such an accusation to rally men to their cause?

Tathrin sighed. It had seemed so simple when he and Aremil had discussed all this back in Vanam, merely intent on bringing peace to Lescar.

Chapter Two

Aremil

Losand, in the Lescari Dukedom of Carluse,

Autumn Equinox Festival, Second Day, Morning

He would feel much safer with the door locked. But then he would have to get up and open it when someone knocked, and they would wonder why he’d locked it. Anyway, what was he afraid of? Aremil forced himself to assess the situation as dispassionately as the scholar he claimed to be. With the rigorous logic he and Tathrin had both learned in Vanam’s university halls.

Captain-General Evord’s men had driven Duke Garnot’s foul-mouthed and vicious mercenaries clean out of Losand. The town’s guildmasters were recruiting an honest militia under the guidance of Evord’s lieutenant, Dagaran. He was another mercenary come all the way from Solura, a man of similar mettle to the Captain-General. Aremil himself was safely accommodated on the upper floor of this merchants’ exchange. How could he admit to feeling imperilled in the heart of this solidly walled town with guards on every gate and the fighting moving further away with every passing day? He couldn’t. Not without sounding like an arrant coward, and his pride wouldn’t stand for that.

Aremil looked out of the window, at the mercenary army’s banner flapping in the wind. He smiled crookedly. It wasn’t as bright as Evord’s. Only the captain-general’s banner bore the insignia in cloth of gold.

Trust Master Gruit to spend his coin on such a flamboyant gesture. The wine merchant had a fine instinct for the dramatic. His impassioned denunciation of his fellow merchants in Vanam, attacking those of Lescari blood who let their kinsmen suffer, had been the first toppling rock that set this whole landslide in motion. When Aremil and Tathrin had trusted Gruit with their own longing to see peace in Lescar, he had proved a staunch ally. Now he was invaluable, organising the astonishing quantities of supplies that the marching army needed.

Aremil’s smile faded, his thin face returning to its customary immobility. What would Gruit have to say when the dust had settled? After their careful planning had brought blood and death to Lescar in the name of peace? He would have welcomed the chance to talk to the older man, but Gruit had already left for Abray, the town commanding the crucial junction where the Great West Road crossed from Caladhria into Lescar. Someone had to persuade the merchants and barons of Caladhria to sit on their hands while Captain-General Evord waged this campaign. Gruit was undeniably the best man to do it.

But it was hard on them all, Aremil felt. When everyone’s dearest wish was to celebrate festival with family and loved ones, all those who’d united in Vanam to plot this overthrow of Lescar’s dukes had scattered to the four winds, even before the fires consuming Sharlac Town stopped smouldering.

Gruit was on the road heading west towards Abray, with Failla and Kerith the dour scholar and aetheric adept. Tathrin and Gren were marching with Captain-General Evord’s army. Sorgrad was currently escorting Charoleia and her maid eastwards to Tormalin. The beautiful intelligence broker would use her formidable web of friends and allies there to dissuade the Emperor from interfering.

Branca was with them and Aremil missed her most of all. Did Tathrin know? Aremil felt every pang of his friend’s longing for Failla when he wrought Artifice’s enchantments to reach through the aether to tell Tathrin all the news from the territory they had already conquered, and to find out all that the captain-general’s army was doing.

Aremil missed Branca so sorely. But did she miss him? He couldn’t tell. She was so much more skilled with aetheric enchantment, his teacher in the ancient discipline, even if she was a few years his junior. So her innermost thoughts were always wrapped in veils impenetrable to him. Perhaps that was for the best. He was almost afraid to find out what she truly felt.

Which was ridiculous. Had he spent his life schooling his intellect only for the discipline of rational thought to fail him now? Aremil reminded himself how Vanam’s university mentors rebuked anyone falling prey to unreasoned emotion. Once the source of any unease was identified, they insisted, it could be dismissed with logical argument.

Aremil decided he didn’t mind Tathrin knowing that his respect for Branca was deepening to affection. Though he didn’t particularly want the older scholar Kerith to know, nor yet their younger ally Jettin. He barely knew either man. But Aetheric adepts were thin on the ground, and those with Lescari blood, who could be recruited to their cause, were rarer still.

The advantage they offered this rebellion was beyond price. To be able to communicate across countless leagues in the blink of an eye could make the difference between victory and defeat. Artifice’s enchantments could reach instantly through the aether, that mysterious medium that somehow linked mind to mind, while their foes’ letters were limited to the flight of courier doves or the speed of the fastest horse.

If the price of Kerith’s help, and Jettin’s, was the two men learning more than Aremil cared to share of himself, it would have to be paid. It was little enough to ask, when so many others would pay with blood and pain.

Aremil only hoped Tathrin would come through unscathed. And Jettin, who was riding with a different contingent of the army, he recalled hastily. At least Branca would be safe, well away from any fighting, enjoying Tormalin’s affluent calm. One day, Lescar would benefit from just such prosperity and all this cataclysm would be worth it.

Aremil looked around the room. Losand’s merchants had violently evicted the clerk who’d recorded their dealings for the duke’s reeve. The shelves were empty of all but a few scraps of ribbon. The chest for his ledgers gaped open, its locks smashed.

A draught played across his neck and Aremil shivered. His sitting room in Vanam had been cosy and warm. Lyrlen, ever attentive, would have lit a fire before he got up. He’d be at leisure to pursue his studies, only interrupted by her bringing his meals or by Tathrin visiting to drink a glass of wine.

Perhaps that was why he felt so uncertain. He was simply homesick. Well, he was in Losand by his own choice, so he had better apply himself to the matters in hand. There was plenty to do without sitting here moping.

Aremil looked at the door. He could find out how both Tathrin and Branca fared using his Artifice. But Branca didn’t expect him to contact her before evening. He wasn’t due to send his thoughts in search of Tathrin until the noon chimes, when Evord’s lieutenant would guard the door in person. Of all the secrets their plots depended on, aetheric magic was the most closely guarded. They could not risk any duke’s spies finding out.

He looked at the timepiece on the wall. The brass arrow seemed to have barely moved down the long scale dividing the daylight into ten equal measures. At least at this season, with both For- and Aft-Autumn bracketing the Equinox, the chimes of daylight and darkness were the same. Summer’s long hours would be far greater torment. Winter’s short days need not be contemplated. One way or another, Evord had said, their venture must be concluded before any timepiece’s faceplate was changed with the turn of For-Winter.

Could they do that? True, they had conquered one dukedom already, but Sharlac had been little challenge. Duke Moncan had withdrawn into his castle seasons ago, to mourn his dead son. His vassals and militias had grown soft and complacent. Aremil didn’t think any of the remaining five dukes would be caught unawares, not once news of Sharlac’s fate reached them.

He hurriedly smoothed his expression as the door flew open, crashing against an empty shelf.

“Fair festival.” Reniack bowed with a flourish worthy of the Tormalin Emperor’s court. “What do you think? Not bad for the son of a Carif whore?”

“Fair festival to you.” Aremil inclined his head stiffly. “You look more elegant than last night.”

Reniack wore a blue doublet with silver buttons over a lace-trimmed shirt. Jewels on the knee-buckles of his breeches might be sapphires, though Aremil thought they were more probably glass. His snowy stockings were immaculate.

The burly man chuckled. “Last night I drank to Duke Garnot’s ill-health with the scaff and raff of Losand’s gutters. A ragged shirt and a charcoal-burner’s jerkin made me a prince among the spigot-suckers.”

Aremil refused to react to the vulgarity. “And today?”

Reniack pressed a hand to his barrel chest, his expression lofty, his short beard jutting. “I join the sober elders and goodwives of Losand among the midday rites at Drianon’s shrine.”

“What do you have to share with them?” Aremil asked sardonically.

Reniack grinned and reached inside his doublet for a sheaf of papers. “I honour Drianon as goddess of harvest but let’s not forget her care for hearth and home. Her sacred eagle will always fight for her eaglets.”

Aremil studied the crisply printed pamphlet that Reniack laid on the desk. The engraving showed a ferocious and somehow indefinably female eagle clawing at a polecat which was sneaking along a crag towards a nest of anxious chicks.

He looked up at Reniack. “Is it my imagination or does that polecat look like Duchess Tadira?”

“Women hate her more than they fear her husband. They resent their husbands’ toil buying her silk gowns to drape her bony buttocks, putting jewels around her scrawny neck.” Reniack’s voice thickened with his own loathing. “If we persuade the ordinary women that we’re fighting for their sake, they’ll persuade the men, once the bed curtains are drawn and they’re hoping for open thighs.”

Reniack’s hand strayed to his brown hair, as if to brush it behind his ears. Aremil saw him curb the gesture. The astute pamphleteer wouldn’t want the staid folk of Losand wondering at his ragged earlobes. They wouldn’t be impressed to learn that the Duke of Parnilesse had ordered Reniack’s ears nailed to the wood when he was pilloried for nailing letters to shrine doors in the dead of night, accusing the duke and his brothers of conspiring to poison their father.

The man had spent years stirring up hatred against Parnilesse’s duke, concocting inflammatory pamphlets, writing more measured arguments for market-day broadsheets, even turning tavern songs to his purpose, and recruiting a small army of rabble-rousers to help him. His loathing was implacable. That Carluse’s Duchess Tadira was Duke Orlin’s sister was sufficient to earn her Reniack’s spite.

Aremil was glad he had no cause to reach into Reniack’s thoughts, to learn what prompted such rancour. He was also glad he was so practised at hiding his own emotions. He really didn’t like Reniack, with his coarse language and cynical view of humanity. Though he had no reason to mistrust the pamphleteer. Reniack had proven time and again that he could keep the conspiracy’s secrets as close as his own skin. If any duke’s spies learned they were using Artifice, it wouldn’t be through him.