The Right Hand of God (43 page)

'Recruiters?' She knew she had to be delicate, but there was so much at stake.

'My master is always looking for people of outstanding intelligence to serve him in Andratan.

My parents were so proud that I had been selected.' He paused, swallowed, then continued. 'I wonder if they are still alive.'

Stella began another question, but the eunuch continued on as though she had not spoken. 'At Andratan we were tested, and all but the most gifted were discarded. It is a place of unimaginable cruelty, my Lady; failure is never forgiven. They gelded me and shaved me, then brought me into the master's presence, where he bonded me to himself.' He opened his eyes. 'It was purest agony. He burns, he burns. Ah, Lady, kill yourself. Don't let him have you!'

A deep chill settled on her at these words. 'He has me already. Look at my prison!' She indicated the white lace and silk surrounding them.

'No, he has only imprisoned your body. Never let him trap your mind!'

Shocked, Stella reached out and took his fleshy hand in her own. 'I am so sorry. What can I do?'

The eunuch leaned forward so she could hear his tortured whisper. 'Kill me. Take my life!

End my suffering. He has set a prohibition in my mind so I cannot lift a finger to harm myself.

My only hope is to anger him enough that he will slay me.'

'What could you do?' she asked, horrified.

'What I have just done. Talked to you.'

'Will he kill you for talking to me?'

'He has dealt death to his servants for much less. Perhaps I will be fed to the fire. I would accept the pain if it will bring me release from his touch.'

Stella released his hand. 'And now he reaches out to touch the world. We must stop him.' She looked into his hopeless eyes. 'What is your name?'

For a moment he said nothing; then he spoke in a voice cracking with pain. 'I - I know it, Lady, but I may not say it. Should it pass my lips he would know, and there are many things he can do to increase suffering without extinguishing life. I have seen them all. I want to end my suffering, not prolong it. Forgive me.'

She nodded, and he put down her bowl. 'I must go,' he said. 'Look for me this evening. We will talk more, if he does not discover us.' He turned and struggled out of the litter.

'Goodbye,' Stella said quietly to his retreating back. 'Goodbye.' Come back soon.

Adolina was a beautiful place. Sheltered under the high plateau of the Nagorj, the northernmost town of Piskasia was a collection of steep-roofed homes separated by high hedges, of poplars and oaks, of gravelled roads and tree-lined lanes, all sparkling in the morning frost. A lump formed in Leith's throat as he rode up the wide road and into the village, at the head of a hundred horse. This looked so much, so very much like home.

Villagers came out of their homes to stare at the men and the horses. Leith stared back. That woman could be Merin, the Haufuth's wife - and the man at her side was large enough to be the Haufuth, if not so tall. There was Rauth from the village council; over here stood Stella's mother Herza. Those children playing around the feet of their elders, they could be Loulea's children.

Leith's gaze lifted from the village scene, following the spiralling chimney smoke up into the cold morning air, refocusing on the steel-blue slopes rising almost sheer behind the smoke, barren heights thrusting up until they met the overbright sky, their meeting a thin grey line.

Over that grey line the Bhrudwans will pour without warning. Down the slope they'll come shouting, obliterating anything not swift enough to get out of their way. Merin and Rauth and Herza will die, as will their children. Listen to them scream! The smoke turns thick and black, fire crackles at the base of the billowing clouds. The stony lanes run red. Then, suddenly, they are gone, as the Bhrudwans' grey shadow moves further down the valley. The village is quiet for a moment, save the groans of the dying and the sobbing of their children. The fires spread, shooting out from windows, licking at the eaves. Houses collapse in on themselves, timbers cracking, falling. Then silence. The snow begins, a light dusting as nature tries to bandage the wound.

It was a kind of double vision. Leith sat quietly on his horse and listened as Jethart spoke to the villagers, warning them of the trouble that might come; and at the same time, as though superimposed, he could see Loulea as well as Adolina and a hundred other villages, as though looking down a long tunnel, all burning, all overrun by the black tide.

The villagers would stay and fight, they informed the Falthans, and could not be deterred no matter what they were told. Some of the younger men had already run off, fetching rusty old swords which they now waved enthusiastically. On the brink of scolding them for their foolishness, Leith remembered the Company waving similarly rusty swords outside the Waybridge Inn at Mjolkbridge. Within a few days, he recalled, those swords were called on to defend against the men from Windrise.

But a few ragged bandits from Windrise cannot be compared to the Bhrudwan horde.

The Falthans were out of time: the difficult climb up the great Nagorj escarpment awaited them, and beyond it many days' hard slog to the Gap. They could debate with the Adolinan villagers no longer. Hopefully the Bhrudwans would never reach this gentle place.

The bulk of the great army passed to the west of the village, filing down narrow lanes or striking out across bare fields. They came together a league north of the town, at the very base of the escarpment, having replenished their wagons. Leith dearly wished he could protect this village, but he could not show favour even if he could afford to weaken his army. They left it behind, a group of homely dwellings in the wrong place.

The Falthan army travelled one of only two ways to enter Sna Vaztha, the largest and most isolated of the Sixteen Kingdoms, more isolated - by mountain and ice - than even desert-bound Sarista a thousand leagues to the south. The path zigzagged up the steep face of the escarpment, clinging on like a vine to a garden wall. The army halted for their midday meal facing the most staggering vista Leith had yet seen, the view owing as much to the crisp, cold air as to the scene itself. To their left the Aleinus River emerged from Sivera Alenskja, a sheer-sided, narrow-throated gorge cut

into the escarpment, a jagged slash into blackness, while ahead and below them the wide Piskasian valley was laid out tike the whole world in miniature. Sunlight and shadow picked out every fold of the land; and, if Leith concentrated, he could make out the thin ribbon of the Aleinus River winding away to the horizon.

All afternoon they climbed the road, spiralling upwards like smoke from a chimney. At the head of the army, Leith could look down and see his men spread out along the road, seemingly almost all the way back to Adolina, which from this height was no more than a tiny dark patch at the foot of the slope. Up and further up they climbed, and by dusk, after seven leagues of hard toil, the escarpment stretched as far above them as ever.

Ten days to go. After a bitterly cold dawn, the beginnings of a west wind began to swirl about them. Tents were packed in silence, whether in awe of the stupendous landscape on which they clung like flies or in trepidation of the prospect of another day's footslogging, Leith did not know. The leaders of the army set a fast pace, determined not to sleep a second night on the great slope, and within the hour fifty thousand men panted and gasped like new recruits on their first march. 'It is the height,' his generals told Leith. 'The air is thinner up here. We must not tax the men too greatly.' But he drove them on, turning right and then left up the escarpment, not allowing even a moment's respite for a midday meal. At last, at the bitter end of the afternoon and just as he was about to give up and call a halt, the road levelled out and deposited them on the Nagorj.

Up here on the wide, featureless tableland the west wind howled as though an army of wolves snapped at their heels. They tried setting up camp, but after the first three tents were carried off into the eastern gloom, it was decided to trek back down the road and shelter just below the level of the plateau. An unpleasant night followed. The constant howling on the tableland above them ensured none but the most exhausted soldiers found sleep. Most lay wide awake on their pallets, longing for the comparative comfort of Adolina two days' march back down the escarpment.

Nine days to go. The target they had set for themselves might not be accurate, but it was all they had until more of their scouts returned. The strategists sent more scouts ahead, to warn the main army in case the Bhrudwans had already won the passage of the Gap. Ninety-one days gone, nine to go. The time saved rafting up the Aleinus had been more than lost in Vulture's Craw, but they had clawed back a few precious days with their hurried journey through Piskasia. Now they were more or less back to their original schedule. The March of a Hundred Days would soon succeed - or fail.

The eunuch did not return that afternoon, nor the next. Food was thrust into the litter through the curtain by servants not seen before, and though Stella scanned the horizons from her confines she saw nothing of him.

The Bhrudwan army now marched through a truly otherworldly landscape. Whenever Stella peered from her litter it was to gaze out on a rocky, greyish plain. Some distance to her right a small stream twisted and turned its way across the rock like a snake in a hurry to get out of the cold wind. It had dug for itself a narrow channel perhaps ten bodylengths wide and five deep.

Where the stream sliced into the rock it exposed virulent layers of poisonous-looking reds and ochres, quite unlike anything she had seen before,

the stream a knife cutting through a rotten onion. With such inimical bedrock, it was no wonder little grew on the dry grey plain. No grass, no trees, nothing - except an extraordinary assortment of sharp-spined plants, some as high as trees, some low and spreading. Their browns and greens were the only relief from the grey tedium stretching into the distance, their spiky fingers thrusting upwards as though to pierce the iron-grey cloud canopy in their quest for water. In a few places rock and plant alike were overrun by what at first sight looked like sandhills, but were clearly made of pale flakes of some strange substance, as she discovered when they passed close enough for her to scoop some up in her hand. The flakes smelled faintly of - she struggled to remember - the sulphur on the slopes of Steffi mountain in Withwestwa Wood. She was about to discard the handful of flakes when they began to move -

and a fat-legged spider bigger than her thumb emerged from under them, pincers clicking.

With a convulsive jerk she sent it on its way back to its grey home, scattering flakes all through her litter.

A strong wind blew up from somewhere ahead of them, raising clouds of abrasive dust that stung the eyes. Within the hour progress slowed to little more than a child's crawl. The litter now shook in an alarming fashion. After a few minutes of worry about her own safety, Stella realised her four bearers undoubtedly suffered in the dust storm outside, but when she tried to see how they fared, the wind and the glass-like shards beat her back. The northern girl pulled her silken curtains tightly closed and prayed for the safety of her bearers, who were almost certainly victims of the Destroyer, undeserving of the treatment they received. Paradoxically, she prayed the wind would continue, even intensify. She

didn't really believe in the Most High any more, not after the falsity of Tanghin of the Ecclesia, but she prayed nonetheless.

It felt to Leith like he travelled with a huge hand on his back, propelling him forward. The horses were restive, spooked by the howling wind, which was even greater today than on each of the preceding four days. According to his generals, his army had made over fifteen leagues on each of the last three days: indeed, they told him, it was almost impossible to make less progress, blown along before the wind like thousands of autumn leaves. It should make things easier, Leith considered, but it has not. The wild calling of the wind wore away at everyone, setting their teeth on edge, shoulders clenched as though warding off the attack of a dangerous beast.

The Nagorj sapped his army. Perhaps it might be a place of beauty in summer, albeit of a harsh, minimalistic kind, but in winter it became a soulless land, cold and cruel, empty .of anything remotely human save the road stretching in front of them. Even the road seemed a bizarre artefact, made of crushed shells - where had the builders gotten shells from with no ocean within five hundred leagues? - and ran arrow-straight ahead of them. Some time in the last day it had turned, unnoticed, and now sped towards Sna Vaztha many days to the north.

The land on either side of the road had been leached of all colour: some small, green and prickly bushes provided the only relief from a tombstone-like greyness matching the overhanging sky. No wonder this place was known as the Eater of Travellers.

'Leith, can you spare me a moment?' A polite but firm voice pulled him away from his thoughts.

'Farr! What is it? How do things go with the losian army? Do they think we're going to make it in time?'

The Vinkullen man laughed, but it sounded strained. 'The Fodhram are exhausted but aren't prepared to admit it. Otherwise, everything is fine - as fine as it can be up here on this awful place. Look, Leith, I haven't come to talk to you about the losian.'

'Oh? What is it then?'

'It's about your brother.' Farr thrust out his chin a fraction, no doubt unconsciously, but to Leith it seemed a prelude to him raising his fists.

'The talk around the campfires and in the tents is that you've treated him too harshly. He goes off by himself in the evenings - no one knows where - and often his bed is not slept in. His eyes are red and he avoids people. Leith. . . well, I can't put it any plainer than this. You spied on Wira and me when we argued over his drinking. No, don't deny it, I know it was you. No matter. You heard what was said. When he died, a heavy weight settled on my shoulders, a weight I can't shake off. Every day I wish I could speak to him, just a few moments would do, to tell him I loved him even though I didn't understand what he was doing.'