Authors: Tim Akers
The Pagan Night
COMING SOON FROM TIM AKERS AND TITAN BOOKS
The Iron Hound
(January 2017)
The Winter Vow
(January 2018)
THE PAGAN NIGHT
Print edition ISBN: 9781783297375
E-book edition ISBN: 9781783297399
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark St, London SE1 0UP
First edition: January 2016
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This is a work of fiction. Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 Tim Akers. All Rights Reserved.
Maps and illustrations copyright © 2016 David Pope. All Rights Reserved.
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
For Jennifer.
Forever.
A GATHERING OF HERETICS
T
HEY WAITED IN
the gloom. Six men in a small stone hut, warming their hands over the fire pit in the middle of the floor, well armed, well frightened. They didn’t look at one another.
An unexpected cold snap, not uncommon this far north even in the heart of summer, gave them a morning more like autumn. Their breath fogged the air, mixing with the smudgy wood smoke to fill the closed hut with haze. Each man’s face was stitched in the traditional tattoos of the Tenerran spirit warriors of legend. The markings were painted on, muddy blue ink that wrinkled and flaked when they talked.
They were on the south side of the border between Suhdra and Tener, the wrong place to be wearing the ink. They all had friends who had died just for being Tenerran, and family, cold and buried in the mud, who had been murdered by the duke of Greenhall’s men. All risked the same with that ink on their face, even if it was false. A last vestige of the crusade that had taken their religion from them and replaced it with the church, unifying the island under the celestriarch’s rule, putting a doma in every village and priests of Cinder and Strife at every altar.
While the rest of the island had settled into uneasy peace, the marches still saw more than their share of blood and hatred.
“Later than usual,” one of the men said. He was thick, with little neck and an excess of beard.
“He’s always late. You be calm, Tunnie.”
“I’ll be calm when he’s here. Till then, I’ll damn well be what I please.”
“You nag like my mother.”
“Your mother nags like she screws, Mancey,” Tunnie replied. “Everyone.”
They laughed, but it wasn’t a settled laughter. Their voices were blunted by their accents. Deep Tenerran brogues muddied their vowels. They were dressed like farmers, but there was a bundle of clothing on the ground between each man’s feet. A sword lay across each bundle. They didn’t look at those, either. The freshly sharpened steel of the blades danced in the light of the fire.
The men waited, and they stared at the flames.
The door opened, revealing a cloaked man. When he came into the room, they all started to stand, then remembered themselves and settled back onto the bench. He was tall and thin, with delicate wrists and long, narrow fingers, each tipped with a musician’s callus. The man who had grumbled before, Tunnie, spat into the fire.
“Late enough,” he said.
“Early enough, you mean,” the newcomer said. His voice was crisp, the twist of the rural accent more like the notes of a song. It was the kind of voice women loved, and bards cultivated. “Moon’s only now up—and we’re about the moon’s business.”
“You talk like a priest,” Tunnie said.
“No need to be cruel,” the newcomer said. “Now. Let’s get about it, shall we?”
Grumbling, the men stood and lifted their bundles, revealing cloaks like the newcomer wore. All but Tunnie. He kept his hands to the fire.
“I mean it, Allaister. You talk like a priest.” He looked up. “The place we’re going, we don’t need priests.”
“You accuse me of something, Tunnie, but I don’t know what.” Allaister picked up his own bundle and began to unpack it. “Are there things you feel need saying?”
“Just this. You’ve been here four months. We don’t know anything about you, other than that you escaped from Greenhall’s dungeons. We don’t even know what put you in there, much less what broke you out.”
“I broke myself out,” Allaister said. “The gods broke me out. What does it matter? And what does it matter what I was doing there?”
“No one breaks out of that place,” Mancey mumbled, but Allaister ignored him. Tunnie nodded.
“People don’t go to Gabriel Halverdt’s prison for nothing,” he said, “and people don’t just walk out. You could be anyone. A murderer, a rapist… we don’t know enough about you, Allaister.”
“Oh, I assure you. I am a murderer,” he said with a smile and a nod. “Isn’t that what you want?”
“I’ve never seen you at the Frostnight keg. Never seen you drink at the Allfire, and yet you’re the one leading us. I wonder how that happened.”
“You wonder? Have I been anything but honest with you?” He threw back the hood of the traveler’s cloak that he’d been wearing. Allaister’s face was a maze of traditional Tenerran markings, his name and the promises of the Seers etched in woad across his cheeks. True ink, permanent and profane. His face was handsome under the crude markings. His goatee was well trimmed, and his eyes were black. But his voice was calm.
“You’ve been grumbling against Duke Acorn for how long? Years? How often have his men raped your wives? Your daughters? How many of your harvests have gone to his stores, how many young calves pitted for his table? While you starved?” He turned from one man to the next, and then stopped. “This land is occupied, Tunnie, held by a Suhdrin lord when it’s good Tenerran blood that works its fields. We were born on the wrong side of the border, and for that our brothers have died. I came, and I’ve done something about it.”
“Something. You’ve gotten a lot of us killed. We’ve spilled a lot of our own blood for you.”
“Blood is the price,” Allaister answered. The other men nodded and whispered the same phrase in response, like a prayer. It was an old phrase from the liturgies of the shamans—mystical words, words that carried meaning down from the ancient days, their edges worn smooth by repetition and hope. Tunnie grimaced. He had walked into that. Still, he rubbed his hands over the fire and made no move toward his bundle of clothes. By that time the other men had donned their cloaks and penitent’s masks, to hide their ink and identity.
“I know the words, priest. My family has been bleeding into this ground longer than anyone here. Longer than the church. Don’t think you can preach to me.”
“Tunnie.” Allaister tightened the cord of his belt and picked up the simple sword at his feet. “We go tonight to clean the land. We have bled in different soil, you and I. Our families have knelt to different spirits, but they are honest spirits nonetheless, and not the bookish gods these bastards put over us after the crusade. So I ask—” he raised the sword and fitted the tip of the blade into the scabbard, then slapped it home “—what the hell is your problem?”
“I don’t know you,” Tunnie said. “I haven’t prayed with you. Your fathers didn’t sit the midnight vigil with my fathers, nor your sons with my sons. I don’t know what sort of man you are, nor how you bleed when the spirits call.”