Stonewielder (60 page)

Grinning, Carr nodded, wiped his face. ‘Of course. And thank you. You steadied the front enormously … no one wanted to be seen giving way.’

Ivanr waved that aside. ‘Congratulations, Lieutenant. Well done.’

He limped off across the churned slope, heading west. His bodyguard, the remaining two men and two women, followed closely.

As he walked the gentle slope the dark bodies of fallen horses and riders emerged from the mist. The grisly humps gathered in numbers until a swath of butchered cavalry choked the landscape. Ivanr flinched back as one sandal sank into oozing yielding mush.
A marsh?
There had been no such feature here yesterday. Horses thrashed weakly, exhausted and mud-smeared, disturbing the ghostly scene. Every lancer had been cut down by bow-fire right where they’d stuck. A merciless slaughter. Tracing the route, Ivanr saw it all in his mind’s eye: the swooping charge, the sudden lurching massing, the milling confusion. Then from the woods archers emerging to fire at will. And this boggy lowland; Sister Gosh’s skystones abetted by his own blood?

A horse nickered nearby; he turned to see Martal herself coming, followed by a coterie of officers and aides. She stopped her mount next to him. Kicked-up mud dotted her black armour. She drew off her helmet, leaned forward on the pommel of the saddle and peered down at him. He thought she looked pale, her eyes bruised and puffy with exhaustion, her hair matted with sweat.

‘Congratulations,’ he ground out, his voice a croak.

Her gaze flicked to the killing-fields. ‘You disapprove.’

‘They were trapped, helpless. You murdered them all without mercy.’ He eyed her: ‘You’re proud of it?’

The woman visibly controlled herself – bit down a curt retort. ‘This is no duel in some fencing school, Ivanr. This is war. They were prepared to cut down all of us – you included.’

‘Enough died there. We had no support!’

‘It had to be convincing. They had to have control of the field.’

He shook his head, appalled by the chances she’d taken. ‘An awful gamble.’

‘Every battle is.’

Shaking his head he felt hot tears rush to his eyes and wiped them away. ‘I know. That’s why I swore off it all.’ He laughed. ‘Imagine that, yes? Ridiculous.’

Martal cleared her throat, drew off one gauntlet to rub her own sweaty face. ‘Ivanr …’

‘Yes?’

‘Beneth is dead.’

He stared. ‘
What?
When?’

‘During the battle.’

He turned to the forces coming together on the field, troopers embracing, cheering, and he felt desolate. ‘This will break them.’

‘
No it will not
,’ Martal forced through clenched teeth.

He eyed her, unsure. ‘You can’t hope to withhold it …’

Her lips tightened once more against an angry response. ‘I wouldn’t do something like that. And besides, word has already gotten out. No, it won’t break them because they have you.’

He regarded her warily. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean his last wish – his last command to me. That you take his place.’

‘
Me?
That’s ridiculous.’ It seemed to him that Martal privately agreed with the evaluation. He considered her words: ‘his last
command
to me’.
She’s only doing this because of her extraordinary faith in and devotion to that man
.

And what of him? Had he no faith in anything? Anyone?

He examined his hands: bloodied, torn and blistered. He squeezed them together. ‘Well, perhaps I shouldn’t be in the lines now anyway … rather awkward place for someone who’s sworn a vow against killing.’

The foreign woman peered down at him with something new in her gaze. ‘Yes. About that … a rare thing to have done. Beneth did not mention it, but did you know that some fifty years ago he swore the same vow?’

Ivanr could only stare, struck speechless. Martal pulled her helmet back on, twisted a fist in her reins. ‘No matter. You have me to spill the blood. The Black Queen will be the murderess, the scourge.’

He watched her ride off and he wondered: had he also heard in her tone …
the scapegoat?
A mystery there, for certain, that feyness. It occurred to him that perhaps she was no more relishing her role than
he.
And just what is my role? What was it Beneth did? I’ve no idea at all. All the foreign gods … I have to find Sister Gosh
.

*    *    *

The Shadow priest, Warran, led Kiska and Jheval across the dune field out on to a kind of flat desert of shattered black rocks over hardpan. The lightning-lanced storm of the Whorl coursed ahead, seemingly so close Kiska thought she could reach out and touch it.

The two great ravens kept with them. They coursed high overhead, occasionally stooping over the priest, cawing their mocking calls. Warran ignored them, or tried his best to, back taut, shoulders high and tight as if he could wish the birds away.

After a time Jheval finally let out an impatient breath and gestured ahead. ‘All right, priest. There it is. You’ve guided us to a horizon-to-horizon front that we could hardly have missed. You’ve done your job. Now you can go.’

The priest squinted as if seeing the mountain-tall front for the first time. ‘I think I will come along,’ he said.

‘Come along?’ Jheval motioned for Kiska to say something.

‘You don’t have to,’ she offered.

Warran gave a deprecating wave. ‘Oh, it’s quite all right. I want to.’

‘You do?’

‘Oh yes. I’m curious.’

Jheval sent Kiska a this-is-all-your-fault glare.

‘Curious?’ she asked.

‘Oh yes.’ He stroked his unshaven cheeks, his beady eyes narrowed. ‘For one thing – where did all the fish go?’

Jheval made a move as if to cuff the fellow. Kiska glared at the Seven Cities native. ‘I think,’ she said, slowly and gently, ‘they’re probably all dead.’

Warran examined Kiska closely as if gauging her intelligence. ‘Of course they are, you crazy woman! What does that have to do with anything?’

Kiska fell back next to Jheval. They shared a look; Kiska irritated and Jheval knowing.

Curl by curl, mounting clouds over clouds, the Whorl rose higher in the dull sky of the Warren until it was as if it were leaning over them. The closer they came the more it resembled the front of a
churning sandstorm, though seeming immobile. It cut across the landscape as a curtain of hissing, shimmering dust and dirt.

‘Can we cross it?’ Kiska yelled, having to raise her voice to be heard over the waterfall-roar.

‘How should I know?’ the priest answered, annoyed.

The ravens swooped past them then to land to one side where something pale lay half buried in the sands. They pecked at it, scavenging, and Kiska charged. Waving her arms, yelling, she drove them from their perches atop what appeared to be the body of a huge hound.

Jheval ran up, morningstars in his fists. ‘Careful!’

Kiska knelt next to the beast, stroked its head; it was alive, and pale, as white as snow beneath the dirt and dust.

‘A white hound,’ Jheval mused. ‘I’ve never heard of the like.’ He beckoned the priest to them but the man refused to come any closer. He stood alone, hunched and bedraggled, looking like the survivor of a shipwreck. The hound was panting, mouth agape, lips pulled back from black gums, its fearsome finger-long teeth exposed. ‘Is it wounded?’

Kiska was running her hands down its sides. ‘I don’t see any wound. Perhaps it is exhausted.’

‘Well, there’s nothing we can do.’

‘No.’ She stroked its head. ‘I suppose not. A handsome beast.’

Jheval snorted. ‘Deadly.’

The thing in the bag at Kiska’s side was squirming now, as though impatient. She rose. ‘We should pass through.’

Jheval gestured helplessly to the storm. ‘And what is on the other side? Is anything? We’ll be lost in this front, just like at home.’

Kiska freed the cloth from her helmet, wrapped it round her face. ‘There must be something. The hound came from there.’

‘Yes, fleeing!’

A shrug was all she would give to such an unknown.

Glaring his irritation, Jheval undid his sash – it proved to be a very long rope of woven red silk. He offered an end to Kiska and she tied it to her belt, asking, ‘What of the priest?’

The warrior made a face. ‘If we lose him, we lose him. Something tells me, though,’ he added, sour, ‘we won’t be so lucky.’

‘Very well.’ Kiska hunched, raising one arm to her face and clamping her staff under the other like a lance.

Before the wall of churning dust took her, Kiska cast one last glance to the priest. He was motionless, as if torn, peering back into
Shadow, then at them. She urged him on with a wave of the staff and then she had to clench her eyes against the storm of dust.

The passage through the barrier, or front, or whatever it was, took far less time than Kiska anticipated. Within, she was tense, readied for an attack, though none came. All she noticed were voices or notes within the rampaging wind. Calling, or wailing, or just plain gibbering. She did not know what to make of it. At one point she thought she was seeing things as, in the seeming distance, immense shapes grappled: one a rearing amorphous shape with multiple limbs, the two others dark as night. It appeared to her that the two night-black shapes ate the larger monstrosity. Quite soon she stumbled out into clear still air to find herself on naked rock.

She pulled the scarf from her face. Dust sifted from her cloak and armour to drift almost straight down in the dead air.

She flinched as Jheval began untying the rope at her belt, but then she relaxed and allowed him the intimacy. ‘Where are we?’ she breathed, wondering.

The man peered round, narrow-eyed. ‘I don’t know. But I don’t like it.’

‘Is it the Abyss?’

‘No,’ answered a third voice and they turned to see the priest. Dirt layered his robes and grey kinky hair. He shook himself like a dog, raising a cloud of dust. ‘Though it is close, now. Closer than we would like. This is still Emurlahn, now a border region of Chaos. Half unformed, sloughing back into the inchoate.’ The priest’s eyes tightened in anger, almost to closed slits. ‘Lost now to Shadow.’

For an instant Kiska believed she’d seen him somewhere before. Then the man peered about, confused. ‘I see no fish …’

The thing at her side wriggled and pushed at the sides of the burlap bag. She knelt. ‘I suppose now is as good as any time.’ Jheval stepped close – a hand, she noted, on the dagger at his belt. She laid the bag down, now bulging and shifting from whatever was within. She undid the string and straightened up. The thing worked its way free of the coarse cloth. It looked like a sculpture of twigs and cloth, bat-shaped, winged, somehow animate. It launched itself in the air, the wings of tattered cloth flapping.

It flittered about them as agile as a bat or a moth. Then suddenly the two ravens were among them, stooping, black beaks snapping. Kiska raised her arms. ‘
No!
’

The thing pounced on Warran’s head, clutching his hair with its
little twig fingers, chirping angrily. The priest bellowed and leapt into the air. He ran in a blind panic, batting at the thing while the two ravens whirled overhead, harrying him. Kiska and Jheval watched him go, arms waving, to disappear amid the rocks.

She eyed Jheval, uncertain. ‘Sometimes I think that fellow is much more than he seems … at other times, far less.’

‘I think he’s lost his mind,’ Jheval muttered. He scanned the horizon then pointed. ‘There’s something.’

Kiska shaded her eyes though the light was diffuse. There was a smear in the distance, a dark spot low on the horizon like a storm cloud. ‘Well … Warran did run in that direction, more or less.’

Jheval shrugged and started off. She followed, arms draped over the stave across her shoulders.

After a time the bat-thing returned to circle Kiska then flew off again in the general direction of the smear on the horizon. They came across Warran fanning himself on a rock. Of the ravens, she saw no sign. Jheval peered down at the winded sweaty priest for a moment and then said, ‘Perhaps we should rest here.’

‘I’m not tired,’ Kiska said.

‘Perhaps not. But who knows how long it has been. Or,’ and he caught her eye, ‘when we may get another chance.’

She grunted at that, acquiescing. ‘Our guide …’

‘No doubt it will return.’

‘Yes. Sleep,’ Warran enthused, brightening. ‘I will keep watch.’

Jheval and Kiska shared a look. ‘I’ll go first,’ said Jheval.

Kiska arranged her cloak, set her staff and knives on their belt next to her. Then she rolled on to her side and attempted to rest.

It seemed the next instant that someone was shaking her booted foot and she raised her head to see Jheval wave her up. It was darker now – not as night proper, as the light of ‘day’ was not proper either. She sat up as he sat down. There was something in his expression as their gazes met. Wonder? Apprehension? She couldn’t quite tell. In any case with a nod he directed her attention to one side then lay down. She rose, collected her weapons.