Ascendant's Rite (The Moontide Quartet) (22 page)

Ramon’s good mood slipped. Lanna was sweet, but she did exhale melancholy at times. ‘Yuros seems a long way away, but we’ll be home in nine months – provided we can get across this damned river.’

‘As you say,’ Lanna replied. ‘How are Severine and little Julietta?’

He shrugged uncomfortably. Sevvie had been in a foul mood since they’d been denied crossing the Tigrates. She’d been threatening to take Julietta and cross by herself, and part of him thought it wasn’t a bad idea, partly for her safety, but also – though he hated admitting it – because he was getting awfully sick of her tantrums. But Siburnius was across the river, and he knew their names and faces.

‘An army isn’t the place for a mother and a baby. I wanted Seth to ask for permission to have them both transferred across the river and sent home, but discussions broke down before he could ask.’ This was true, but in his heart, he was beginning to wonder if he just didn’t have the emotional stamina for any long-term relationship.

‘Severine isn’t made for this life,’ Lanna observed sagely.

Too damned right
. He looked at the healer thoughtfully. ‘How long have you been in the legions, Lanna?’

‘Twenty years, more or less.’ She looked at him with an air of faint amusement. ‘Yes, I’m twice your age.’

‘But still a creature of light and music, undimmed by time,’ he replied, quoting a well-known poem.

‘Oh la! Harken to the bard! Has Seth converted you to the joys of balladry?’

‘Rukk off! The only thing he’s converted me to is Brician chardo.’

‘You knew him at college, didn’t you?’ she asked, somewhat wistfully. She’d clearly not been impressed with Seth initially, but it sounded like she was coming round.

That didn’t stop him speaking his mind. ‘Yes. He was a nasty, shallow little arse-wipe who thought low-bloods like me didn’t belong in his world.’
Though ironically, I had as much right to that world as him.

‘He’s grown up a lot since then,’ Lanna replied. ‘I expect you have too. He says you’re the last person he thought would have stuck around when things went bad.’

Well that’s rich, coming from the boy who blubbed his way through his swordsmanship testing.
‘Si, maybe.’ He stared out across the river. ‘But I’ve invested myself emotionally.’
As well as every other way
. ‘We all thought this Crusade would be nothing, didn’t we? Just marching and looting and trying to stave off boredom.’

‘Then came Shaliyah.’

‘Si.’ He mused a moment. ‘But this place will be worse. When the Keshi arrive here, we’re in for Hel.’

‘I know. Shaliyah . . . well, there was nothing we could do but get out, and Ardijah: you were clever there. Your plan saved a lot of lives. But this place could get really ugly. If they break into our defences, it will be slaughter.’

He acknowledged her words, then said, ‘Lanna, if they break through, don’t die with your charges, please. You and Carmina use your gnosis and cross. Siburnius isn’t going to execute healers.’

‘He’s an Inquisitor; I’m quite sure he’d be happy to execute anyone who knew too much.’ Lanna looked into his eyes intently. ‘These are all my boys, Ramon. I don’t want to leave even one behind.’

She means it.
And he felt the same, he realised. Somewhere along the road from Shaliyah to Ardijah these men had begun to matter to him too. Part of that was personal pride and competitiveness – he was damned if he was going to let Siburnius and his ilk beat him – but it was also something to do with shared dangers and hardship. They were his boys too.

‘So, shall we have a swim, then?’ he asked, pulling a leering face at her. ‘I’ll strip down if you do?’

‘You think the sight of skinny little nethers like yours is going to impress me? Have you seen the men down there? They put you to shame!’ She laughed. ‘Piss off, Ramon. Have a cold soak, then go and make up to Sevvie.’

He ducked his head. ‘I guess I should.’

Near Vida, Southern Kesh, on the continent of Antiopia

Shawwal (Octen) 929

16
^th
month of the Moontide

While Cym and Zaqri tried to work out how to approach the Keshi army and speak to the Dokken war-leader, whoever that was, they found an old hermit’s cave in a rocky outcrop about four miles from where Salim’s army was camped. The previous inhabitant had died and his skeleton had been reduced to a pile of gnawed bones by jackals. No one appeared to have been here for a long time. Zaqri drove the jackals away, cleaned it, stockpiled dead wood and dried dung for fires and warded it. He made a larder and piled in dried meat and a bag of seeds, used Earth-gnosis to deepen the well until it was usable and even fashioned a bucket.

The rest would be up to Cym.

‘It’s better if I go into camp alone,’ he told her. ‘We know nothing about the dynamics of the army. We must be cautious who we approach, and how.’

‘How will I know what is happening?’

‘I’ll send birds.’ He put his hand on her arm in reassurance. ‘Cym, this is the right thing to do. My brethren are part of this shihad, but the hatred of western magi runs deep. I can’t take you into another camp of my people; I’d end up having to defend you all over again, just as I had to within my own pack. And then I was packleader.’

‘I know.’ She looked away, because looking at him was too hard. So much was unresolved between them.

They’d been trailing Salim’s army west, the opposite direction to where they thought they should be going, though they had no idea where Alaron and the Scytale were; it was the only way they might find sympathetic Dokken prepared to leave the shihad to hunt for the artefact.

And as for what lay between them . . . her body was still recovering from purging her womb of his child, and that act had badly damaged the burgeoning trust that lay between them, but she could no longer see any future that wasn’t with him.

Damn my vendetta pledge . . . I may never entirely forgive him for killing my mother, but there must be a better way. I want to be his. He’s lost a child, and it’s true that he killed Justina in battle, not cold blood. Surely he’s been punished enough? Surely the gods will let us be now . . .

‘Zaqri, must we do this?’ She swallowed. ‘Once we rejoin the hunt for the Scytale, there’ll be no escape, no peace. It could destroy everything we have left.’

Zaqri looked at her curiously, rare indecision on his visage, he who had walked like a god into her life. ‘Cymbellea, the Scytale means
everything
for my people. I cannot walk away from the chance of salvation for them.’

She bit her lower lip, then raised her eyes. ‘Not even for me?’

He stared, surprised. Ever since they’d met, she’d been resisting him. The death of her mother, in combat, but at his hands, had lain like a shadow over them, though he wanted her and she him. She’d fought her instinctual need for him for so long, then succumbed anyway.

‘Stay with me,’ she said, suddenly tired of resisting her heart. She indicated the hearth of the hermit’s cave, and the cot within. ‘Forget the Scytale. Stay, and I’m yours.’ A new future blossomed in her mind, of an impossible love between Souldrinker and mage, made possible because he was perfection, despite his condition.

‘Cymbellea, I don’t understand you. Everything you’ve done since we met has been to find your friends and the Scytale – and now you want to just forget it? I don’t understand.’

She didn’t fully understand herself just now, but she had a vision of another future, vivid as a gnostic Divination: it was full of betrayals and death if they continued to pursue the artefact. ‘You must stay,’ she begged.
‘You must.’
She leant in, inhaled his scent, whispered in his ear, ‘I can feel it. They’re out of our reach. If we go after it, we’ll both die.’ She was suddenly certain that this was so, and her vehemence gave him pause.

‘It is said that the strongest foretelling comes spontaneously,’ he breathed. Then his eyes narrowed. ‘Cymbellea, I would be a traitor to my kind not to follow this through. And I do believe we can find them. Their lives may depend on us finding them first.’

She tried to believe he might be right, but the notion didn’t take root. Instead she did something she’d never done before; she tried to use her body to get what her arguments couldn’t. She seized his face, kissed him hard.

In the past she’d withheld her kiss even when letting him between her legs, but now she held nothing back. Her growing sense of foreboding – that if she let him go, they’d have no future at all – drove her to increasing desperation as she guided him into her, rode him and was ridden, all to try and persuade him to stay.

And still when she woke he was gone.

*

Zaqri saw the skiffs first, their triangular sails quite distinctive from Rondian windcraft as they fluttered lower and vanished with the light. Then he saw riders on pale horses, wrapped in flowing robes, pale against the brown lands. He skirted them in lion form, a dun ghost padding silently to an outcropping where he could overlook the sultan’s army as it approached. After the cavalry came the infantry, who set up camp below him. Unlike the Rondian legionaries there was no fortifying the camp, and far less order. These men weren’t professional soldiers but conscripts.

Their numbers were incredible, though: a sea of men flowing across the ground like a dirty stain, and as twilight fell, the campfires made a river of flame stretching out of sight down the valley. The soldiers looked poorly armed and fed, but there were so many, in dozens of different native attire from all over the continent of Ahmedhassa; it was bewildering.

As the night fell he engaged his senses, seeking the glimmer of gnostic wards that would mark out the Keshi magi and Souldrinkers. He marked out the command pavilions, which were pegged out near the windskiffs, row upon row of them. He shifted to human form, dressed from the satchel he’d carried strapped to his back, then walked into the vast camp. He found the magi first, the Ordo Costruo Bridge-sigils of Rashid Mubarak’s renegades sitting uneasily alongside the Hadishah jackal-head. He skirted them warily, then found what he sought: rough-clad gnosis-users without heraldry, in a camp warded by lines of faint light, invisible to the naked eye. They were erecting a wooden palisade about their tents with sylvan-gnosis: driving staves into the ground then conjuring them to greater heights and shaping them together, sprouting thorns that dripped poison. Some were clearly adept at Animagery and morphic-gnosis too, like Zaqri’s old pack, but the affinities in this group were more varied, and their clothing was of the towns, not the wilds. They were mostly Keshi, and the women wore bekira-shrouds. Many prayed openly to Ahm, on mats facing Hebusalim. Zaqri watched until he saw a familiar face: as a former packleader, he had at times met others of similar rank, to resolve disputes and forge tenuous links.

There were only a few thousand Souldrinkers in all of Ahmedhassa, almost all of them users of elemental or hermetic gnosis, the most tangible forms of magic. His own pack had been chiefly Hermetic and Fire or Air, making Animagery and Morphism their prime attributes: hence the facility for controlling and shifting into animal form. As shapeshifters they’d been drawn to the wilds, but Souldrinkers with more elemental skills were better able to hide in human society. Dokken Earth-magi clans dwelt secretly in most Keshi cities, hiding behind a respectable façade as masons. Fire-, Water- and Air-wielders found similar ways to blend in.

Zaqri paused, recalling the previous night, the hours of increasingly desperate love-making by which Cym had sought to make him stay. She’d given up on the Scytale and saving her friends: her ambitions had collapsed; now it was all about trying to find any kind of life in peace . . . with him.

He couldn’t deny he was tempted to turn around and return to her. No one had ever moved him the way she did, and to have her so passionate and yielding in his arms was a gift from the gods. But somehow, in trying to be everything to him last night, she’d ceased to be herself. The woman he’d fallen in love with didn’t give herself easily; she gave grudgingly, and demanded a price. She made you earn her. This other Cym was a lesser being.

So he’d left her sleeping, to try and save his kindred.

I cannot let the Scytale vanish again. We must seize this chance for our salvation.

He couldn’t put that aside for such a selfish thing as love.

So he stepped to the edge of the camp and called the clan-leader’s name. ‘Prandello!’

*

The Souldrinkers in this camp were Earth and sylvan gnostics. Prandello, their leader, was a builder from a village near Medishar, but he was of Silacian stock. His town was outside the territory of Zaqri’s pack, but they’d met when moving fugitive Dokken. Prandello had lank grey hair; his olive skin was sun-darkened and his eyes so deep-set they were black holes. He’d dwelled all his life in Medishar: his keffi headscarf was bound in the native way, and he embraced Zaqri as a Keshi, kissing both his cheeks and his lips.

‘Sal’Ahm, my friend. How come you here?’ he asked as he ushered him into his tent. Zaqri had been seen by Prandello’s people of course, and some probably recognised him; that couldn’t be helped. But Prandello had been honest in their past dealings. A woman worked within, preparing the bed – a human woman, Zaqri noted in surprise, no longer young, and clearly scared of Prandello as she scuttled away, leaving the two men alone.

‘I had heard that your pack were sitting out the shihad.’ Prandello remarked, without condemnation: many Dokken had regarded the alliance offered by Rashid of Hall’ikut as a trap.

Zaqri grimaced as his first lie approached. How much to reveal was difficult, but it sounded like Prandello didn’t know about This pack’s destruction. ‘I’ve left them to Wornu while I undertake a quest of great importance to our people.’

‘A quest? Quests are for ballads, my friend, not the real world.’ But Prandello still sealed the tent flap closed with a gesture, then sat on a cushion, motioning Zaqri to another. He produced a metal flask and poured them both a thimble of the bittersweet lemon liquor of Silacia. They each took a sip while Zaqri marshalled his story. From outside came the crackle of a fire and someone struck up a traditional Rimoni song that set his heart-strings humming to the tune. He began to feel that he was among kin.