Ascendant's Rite (The Moontide Quartet) (5 page)

Ramita leaned forward. ‘And if we do, what will you do for us?’

Kore’s Blood, she’s bargaining with Corinea!

The ancient woman cackled grimly. ‘You are indeed a daughter of Aruna Nagar market, Ramita Ankesharan. A price for anything, and anything for a price.’ She smiled ruefully. ‘Such is this world, is it not? Well, perhaps it would interest you that I know the master ingredient to the ambrosia? Yes, I know of the notes you still carry, and that you are missing that key fact.’

With huge effort Alaron put that thought aside and asked, ‘How could we tell anyone your story? We’re outlaws, wanted by both sides of the war.’

‘I know this,’ Corinea replied tersely. ‘I’ve been listening to your minds for the past day and a half, ever since I detected you here. You are a failed mage with dangerous ideals, Alaron Mercer. You, Ramita Ankesharan, are the widow of poor Antonin and part of the Ordo Costruo. More than that: if you both regain the Scytale and create a new order of magi, you will have the authority to speak to the world. All I ask is that when you do, you champion my tale.’

They looked at each other, then Ramita said, very formally, ‘Lady Corinea, Al’Rhon and I must speak alone.’

‘Of course. I will wait outside.’

‘No, no, we will go,’ Ramita said quickly, surprising Alaron, until he remembered that Dasra was outside with Yash.

Ramita almost ran to the river. She took her son from Yash and hugged him hard, ignoring his soaked clothing dampening her sari.

Alarmed at her visible distress, the young Zain asked ‘What is wrong? Shall I summon help?’

‘No!’ Alaron said quickly. ‘No, could you just . . . er, give us a moment?’

Yash looked perplexed, but he bowed in acceptance and backed out of earshot. Ramita looked up at Alaron, her face now full of protective resolve. ‘This is the woman who killed your god, if we believe the story she has told us.’ She didn’t mention Corinea’s claim to have slept with her husband and Alaron decided it was probably politic to forget that bit of her tale. ‘Does she really want to help us? Or does she just want the Scytale for herself?’

How would I know?
He’d never been good at dealing with duplicity. ‘I
think
she’s being honest,’ he said after a moment. ‘Everything she said sounds real and true to me, but I really wouldn’t know. If she is Corinea, she’s been very successfully hiding from the most powerful magi in the world for five centuries. Everyone thinks she’s dead. If she wanted the Scytale I don’t think she’d need our help, or our permission.’

‘But why would she need our help to tell her side of the story?’

‘Well, it could be as simple as she says: she needs someone to open the doors for her. But Hanook told us the Ordo Costruo were destroyed at the start of the Crusade. I don’t think she knows that.’

‘If we refuse her, what happens?’

‘That would depend on her,’ Alaron replied. ‘But if we do agree to help her, she says she knows the key ingredient for the ambrosia . . .’

‘What are you thinking, bhaiya?’

‘Well . . . remember when we were trying to figure out how the Scytale worked? We used some of the monks as research subjects, to try out our ideas about the recipe variations? I’ve still got all those notes; all I’m missing is that key ingredient. If she tells us what it is, if we can make up the recipe, perhaps we could return to Khojana Mandira and see if the monks are willing to become Ascendant magi and help us fight Malevorn and Huriya.’

Ramita’s eyes went round as saucers. ‘But they are
Zains
! They are sworn to peace!’

Alaron dropped his voice. ‘Shhh. I know. But Yash would do it, for one – we know he wanted to be a mage before he wanted to be a monk.’

‘But Huriya and Malevorn have the Scytale – they could make
hundreds
of magi.’

‘That’s true, but don’t forget they’d run the risk of losing control of the Scytale if they did that. I suspect they’ll have the same problem we had: they won’t know how to use it, and there’s no one they can trust to help them decode it. I reckon we’ve still got time to hunt them down before they use it, but we’re going to need help.’

Ramita stroked Das’ head, then said decisively, ‘Let us do so then.’

Sweet Heaven above, we’re about to make a deal with Hel’s Whore herself . . .

Ramita seized his hand. ‘Alaron, I’ve not had the chance . . .
Thank you
. You gave up the Scytale for my son, and I’ll never forget that, bhaiya, not for as long as I live. You are a true brother to me.’

He dropped his gaze. ‘No. I failed you.’

‘No, bhaiya,’ she told him earnestly, ‘that you most certainly did not!’

2

The Emperor’s Great Prize

The Ambrosia

The greatest secret of the Empire is the formula for the ambrosia, the potion used to raise the Blessed Three Hundred to the gnosis. It is encrypted into the Scytale of Corineus, which was devised by Baramitius. It is said that the ambrosia will either kill you, or raise you to the ultimate gnostic power, but a third fate exists. Some become Souldrinkers, which is another form of death.

O
RDO
C
OSTRUO
C
OLLEGIATE,
P
ONTUS, 772

Northern Lakh, on the continent of Antiopia

Rami (Septinon) 929

15
^th
month of the Moontide

The slope below Malevorn Andevarion fell toward a barren plain somewhere north of Teshwallabad, where small herds of cattle wandered seeking water or shade, neither of which were evident to his eye. With Huriya’s Dokken, he’d fled the city after the battle for the Scytale of Corineus –
the battle I won
, he crowed silently as he moved his left hand to stroke the travel-worn leather satchel containing the artefact, reassuring himself it was still there. His right hand remained firmly on his sword-hilt as he ran his eye over his travelling companions.

A dozen or more shapeshifters had entered the Mughal Dome, but only he and Huriya had emerged alive to join the six or seven who had been standing guard outside, led by the Lokistani archer-woman Hessaz, now the only other female left. Her hair was barely a stubble, and she was bony with dark, leathery skin. Lokistan was a mountainous land that bred hard, insular people like her. She was freshly widowed, and Malevorn pitied whatever man was stupid enough to go near her next. These few were all who remained of a hundred-strong Dokken shapeshifter pack, and they looked shattered, both physically and mentally.

Huriya Makani was sitting in their midst: a tiny Keshi girl with the Ascendant-strength gnosis she’d gained by drinking the soul of the Dokken seeress Sabele. She might look like a sexy little bint – even if she was a mudskin – but as he had discovered to his cost, looks could be deceptive. She was the only one of the pack he feared. She was holding an infant, one of the twins of Antonin Meiros and his Lakh peasant wife. Mercer had the other, traded for the Scytale.

The weak-minded fool! I’d have fought to the death to keep the Scytale.

It was nightfall, but the temperature remained hot and oppressive, making his costume – he was armed and armoured in the style of a Keshi mercenary – even more uncomfortable. The sun had darkened his visage, and with his new beard and ragged hair he looked the part. But beneath his armour, his skin was pearly-white, unlike the Dokken, who were all darker-skinned, of Vereloni, Sydian or Ahmedhassan descent.
Inferior blood – as the fighting at the mughal’s palace proved. They might have strong gnosis, but they’ve got no idea what to do with it. Even Alaron Mercer was too much for them.

But I’ve got the Scytale now, Mercer, and what have you got?

It was a pity he’d left Mercer still alive, but he doubted that situation would have lasted: even as he and Huriya were escaping, the mughal’s soldiers had been pouring into the Dome, and with gnosis-use suppressed in there, surely Mercer had been captured.
I’ll bet he’s screaming on a rack even now
, he thought, grinning at the image
.

He looked calmly about the ring of dirty, dark faces. Hessaz was fingering her bow, and it didn’t need a visionary to see she was longing to use it on him – she hated him, as they all did, although he wasn’t to blame for their predicament; after all, it was Huriya who’d drawn them from their pathetic lives in the wild into the chaos of the hunt for the Scytale. Admittedly, most of the pack had died at the hands of an Inquisition Fist, and Malevorn himself had been responsible for a good number of those deaths. They’d punished him by forcibly turning him into one of them; they still saw him as an enemy.

I wonder how many of these fools I’ll have to kill before the end?

‘Malevorn?’ He looked round as Huriya gave the infant to Hessaz and walked over to him. She put out a hand for the leather case, tense, as if she thought he’d refuse.

‘Of course, “Heart of my Heart”,’ he said mockingly.

Scowling at his reference to the heart-bind spell that linked their lives – if he died, she did too, and vice versa – Huriya pulled the tooled leather case from the satchel, took off the cap and drew out the legendary artefact. It was a cylinder of metal and ivory, inscribed with runes and studded with domes. The top end had four leather straps attached, with eight domes on each, clearly made to attach to the cylinder in certain configurations.

She turned the Scytale over and over in her hands, her eyes narrowed, her lips moving, and he watched with interest. He wondered belatedly what Sabele – whose memories Huriya now owned – knew of the Scytale, but it couldn’t be much, not judging from the way she was frowning. Reluctantly, she passed it back to him and he peered at the runes himself. He recognised a few, but not many. The tutors at the Arcanum had never talked much of the Scytale, but they’d all agreed that it required specialised knowledge to decipher. He twisted the cylinder’s head thoughtfully, saw the runes change as it swivelled, and began to realise just how little he actually knew.

‘What’s happening?’ one of the Dokken males asked. ‘When will you cure us?’

There it was: the promise that had led them into danger and destruction. Sabele had told the tribe that the Scytale of Corineus could ‘cure’ a Souldrinker, turn them into a normal mage, one who did not have to ingest souls to renew their powers. That was the dream that had led hundreds of them across half the continent and into battle against magi and Inquisitors.

‘How does it work, Inquisitor?’ Huriya asked, interrupting his reverie.

‘I don’t know,’ Malevorn confessed.

‘What? You told me—’

‘I told you that it required special learning. I don’t have that learning.’

One of the males, a bulky Sydian named Tkwir who favoured a boar’s head when in battle, sprang to his feet. ‘You lying glob of pus! I’ll—!’

Tkwir stopped and stared at the curved scimitar that had flashed into Malevorn’s hand, the point of which was now resting against his belly. The others erupted with fury, but the threat of the blade kept them in check.

Hessaz still held the infant, and didn’t appear at all moved by the men’s aggression.

Malevorn kindled blue fire in his left hand. ‘I don’t know how to use the Scytale,’ he said. ‘There are probably fewer than two dozen people in the world who do. But I know one of them.’

‘Who?’ Huriya demanded.

‘Adamus Crozier, the man who led the hunt.’

. . .
and sacrificed me, Raine, Dominic and Dranid. I’ll destroy him for that
.

‘He’ll still be hunting us. Perhaps it’s time he found us: on ground of our own choosing.’

He watched Huriya consider, while Tkwir and the other men backed away.

‘How many men will this Adamus Crozier have?’ Huriya asked.

‘A Fist: ten Inquisitors.’
More than enough to deal with your rabble.

‘Can he be separated from them?’

‘Potentially. We have no chance if we can’t.’

‘Our current weakness isn’t permanent,’ Huriya said. ‘We have other kindred, other packs. Can you find him?’

‘Yes, provided I can use a relay-stave to contact him.’

‘You know we don’t have the skill to make such trinkets.’

‘But I do,’ he said pointedly. ‘I need living wood, two feet long, three inches wide, the straighter the better. Are there any trees at all in this Kore-forsaken land?’

‘There are forests on the slopes of the Nimtaya Mountains, northeast of here,’ Hessaz replied, ‘tall trees that are always green.’ Her harsh voice took on a wistful tone he’d not heard before. ‘Also in the highlands of my country.’

‘We’re not going to rukking Lokistan,’ one of the men grumbled.

‘There is a pack of our Brethren in Gatioch, in the forests south of Ullakesh, near the Valley of Tombs,’ said another man, a greasy-haired Vereloni named Toljin. ‘My sister is mated to one. I could lead us there.’

‘I know the pack,’ Huriya replied. ‘Or Sabele did. If we go there, how long would it take you to create this relay-stave, Inquisitor?’

‘Two weeks? It’s exacting work, you know. But it’s the only way a non-clairvoyant can reach another mage over long distances.’

‘And you really can’t decipher this thing yourself?’

‘In time, perhaps, but I’d need access to an Arcanum library. Have you got one?’

Huriya scowled at him. For a pretty face, it could pull a lot of ugly looks. ‘Then we must go to Gatioch. Tomorrow. Tonight we rest.’ She surveyed the men, appearing to come to the same conclusion as Malevorn: that she’d been left with the dregs of the pack.

‘What of this child?’ Hessaz asked, holding up Nasatya.

Malevorn tried to work out what that
something
was in her voice, then remembered Hessaz had lost a child as well as a husband.

‘We keep him,’ Huriya said. ‘Knowing we have him will keep Ramita in her place. And he will have strong gnosis when he grows into it: that will be a valuable bloodline for us.’ She patted the infant’s head uncomfortably. ‘You tend him. I want nothing to do with the whining thing.’ She lost interest and sashayed away.