Rebellion: Tainted Realm: Book 2 (27 page)

The night dragged on, one of the most gut-gnawing of Tali’s life. Every minute she expected the little craft to founder and plunge to the bottom, or to strike one of the many floes and icebergs that littered the sea like white confetti. They were larger, more jagged and more numerous the further south they went.

But whatever else Holm was, he was a master seaman. He handled the little craft with the delicacy of a surgeon, picking his way between the bergs and floes without so much as a scrape in the varnish.

As the hours crept by, her need for sleep became a desperate, all-consuming ache, but the more she tried to sleep the more it eluded her. Whenever she closed her eyes her head spun until she thought she was going to throw up. She hunched in the corner with a blanket wrapped around her sea coat and endured the dizziness and nausea as best she could.

“Drink this,” he said, shaking her by the shoulder.

He was holding a steaming metal cup. “What is it?”

“Ginger tea. It’ll settle your stomach.”

“Stomach isn’t the problem. It’s my spinning head.”

“It’ll do your head some good, too.”

She took the cup and warmed her cold fingers around it. “How do you boil water on a wooden boat?”

“There’s a stove. We have all the comforts here. It’s just like home.”

The boat climbed a monster swell, up and up, revealing terrifying, white-capped waves through the round front window. She shuddered.

“When I was a slave in Cython, home was a tiny cell carved out of rock, with a stone bunk, and my only possession was a loincloth.”

“But it felt like home?”

“When I was little. When my mother was alive. It was all I knew.”

“Well, there you are. And this boat is my home.”

Tali sipped her tea. The sickening motion inside her head eased, though it did not disappear.

“Would you like breakfast? Bacon? Eggs?”

She salivated. “I… don’t think I’ll risk it.”

“You’ve got to eat something.”

He checked all around, lashed the wheel so the boat would run straight, then went down the ladder, returning with a steaming saucepan.

“That was quick,” said Tali.

“I put it on when I made the tea.”

He dropped a knob of butter into the saucepan, spooned in a quarter of a cup of honey and handed her the saucepan and a spoon.

“What is it?” she said, eyeing the grey, buttery mess uneasily.

“Just porridge. It’ll put a healthy lining on your stomach – what there is of it.”

She sampled it. “It’s good!” she exclaimed. “It’s – it’s wonderful.”

He smiled with his eyes. “Compliments, eh? I’ll cook for you any day.”

The porridge settled her stomach and the honey sent a surge of energy through her. The weakness in her knees retreated a little.

They sailed on. Holm went in and out many times, adjusting the little sail. The hot tea delivered a tingling heat and the wonderful coat kept it in. It was the first time she had been truly warm since Caulderon. She dozed.

“Where
are
we going?” she said, as a watery, haloed sun clawed its way over the horizon. She rubbed her sore eyes.

“South to The Cape, then east along the strait between Hightspall and Suden – if we can manage it.”

“Why wouldn’t we?”

“Pack ice. We can’t go far offshore, but close to shore is equally dangerous.”

“Why?” She didn’t know much about the sea. “Are there reefs?”

“Yes, and shoals, and dangerous currents, but they’re not the main dangers. People are.”

“Pirates?” She wasn’t entirely sure that Holm wasn’t one.

“The chancellor controls the land south of Rutherin to The Cape, and he’ll be watching for us. But after we round The Cape, southern Hightspall is now Cythonian territory all the way to Esterlyz.”

“What’s Esterlyz?”

“The south-eastern corner of Hightspall. Why does the enemy want to kill you, anyway?”

“I told you,” Tali muttered, not meeting his eye. These waters were as dangerous to navigate as the ones he was sailing through.

“I don’t believe you did.”

“Well, I would have thought it was obvious.”

“I’m set in my ways and I like things spelled out. Indulge me.”

“Because I was the first slave to escape from Cython. They have to punish me and set an example to the other slaves.”

“That all?”

“I also know Cython’s secrets.”

“What, all of them?” he said, grinning.

Was he mocking her? “Enough to be invaluable if the chancellor ever attacks Cython.”

“I still don’t see why
he
wants you so badly. Didn’t he question you about Cython?”

“At length.”

“And all the enemy prisoners would have been interrogated. The chancellor’s cartographers would have made maps of Cython.”

“A map’s not as good as a guide!” she blurted, then flushed.

“A guide for what? Leading an army into Cython?” For the first time, Holm seemed off-balance.

“How would I know?” she said lamely.

The muscles along his jaw had gone tight. “What the hell is he thinking?”

“He’s preparing the ground; gathering his forces; evaluating all kinds of options.” Why was she defending him?

“While the enemy is seizing the ground and destroying our forces.”

“Well, he’s making alliances…” Tali noticed Holm’s grim smile. “What’s the matter?”

“Why are you apologising for your enemy’s failures?”

“I – I don’t know. We often talked. The chancellor told me things he can’t say to anyone else.”

“If he doesn’t stop talking and start fighting it’ll be too late. Then all the strategies and alliances won’t make a jot of difference —”

Holm broke off, adjusted the sail then took the wheel again, rubbing his jaw.

Tali looked out but saw nothing save ice and heavy seas. “Is something wrong?”

“Thought I saw something in the water, way across to port.”

“What do you mean, ‘to port’?”

He jerked a gnarled thumb to the left. “That way.”

In the morning light, the crisscrossing scars on his fingers stood out against the tanned skin. “Have you been tortured?”

He looked down. “They’re work scars. From clock springs, mostly.”

“I’ve no idea what a clock spring is.”

“It’s a long strip of metal – steel or brass – wound into a tight coil. The tension drives the clock. Some clocks, anyway. But when you have to take a coil out, sometimes it snaps open. Bloody business.”

“How did you come to be a clockmaker?”

“I failed at something important —” His mouth tightened; he looked away. “The opportunity came up. Always been good with my hands.”

He went out and climbed twenty feet up the mast, hanging on with one hand and staring off to port. With every sickening roll of the boat the mast swayed halfway across the sky and she felt sure he was going to be hurled off, to break every bone in his body. Or go over the side and never be seen again.

What would she do if he went into the water? How would she get him out? In her present state she would not have a hope.

Tali imagined being trapped on a boat she had no idea how to sail, frantically trying to work the sail and the rudder without having any idea what she was doing, fighting the wind and the waves at the same time… Then the slow, sickening roll, the monstrous seas coming over the side and the little vessel foundering and carrying her down with it, the icy water flooding into her lungs —

Holm hit the deck with a thump, burst in and spun the wheel.

“What’s the matter?” cried Tali.

“Shell racers.”

“What are shell racers?”

“Long, low racing craft, rowed by four oarsmen. With a scrap of sail they’re faster than anything in the water, downwind. And infinitely manoeuvrable. They can go anywhere, even upwind.”

“I wouldn’t want to be out in these seas on a little rowing boat.”

“Nor I,” said Holm. “I’ve rowed them. They break up too easily.”

“What happens if they break up?”

“Go in water this cold and there’s only one minute to get you out. Beyond a minute, you die.” He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again, studying her face. “But the massive reward the chancellor will be offering for you is worth any risk.”

And Tali still had no idea what Holm wanted from her.

He paused, then went on, slowly, “Time was when I would have thought the same. I was a great risk taker when I was young… though not all of them came off.”

Tali wasn’t sure how to interpret that. “What do we do when they catch us?”

“Can you shoot a bow and arrow?”

“No.”

“But you do know how to fight?”

“Only with my hands.”

“How good are you?”

“Not good enough to beat armed men.”

“Not long now,” said Rix, frowning at the immense range that ran across their path. “Garramide is up there.”

It was raining again. Ten days had passed since they fled Caulderon, and it had snowed or rained every day. Ten days of travelling by night through the wildest country he could find, constantly looking behind, expecting his enemies to be there. Ten days of covering their tracks; ten days of practising with Maloch left-handed until he burst the blisters on his palm over and again. He would never be as good as he had been with his right hand, but he had to be good enough to beat most swordsmen.

The escarpment was covered in thick forest woven with vines and from this vantage point it blocked out half the sky. Inside the forest, the ground, the rocks and fallen trees were carpeted in moss, vivid green in the dull light. Water ran out of the slope in a dozen places, forming little, trickling rivulets only a foot across.

“It looks awfully steep. And wet,” said Glynnie.

“It’s rainforest.”

“Rainforest?”

“
Temperate
rainforest. It rains here two hundred days a year, I’ve heard. And snows for fifty.”

“How do we get up?”

“There’s a road of sorts up the eastern end. They can haul carts up in dry weather, but when it’s wet, or deep in snow as it is now, the only way up is on foot. But we can’t go that way. Their sentinels would see us hours before we got there.”

“But if Garramide is yours —”

“It’s
legally
mine – but since the war began, anything could have happened.”

“So how do
we
get up?”

“According to the letter my great-aunt wrote me before she died, there’s a secret way up the western end. But we’ll have to set the horses free. It’s too steep for them.”

“What’s up there?”

“A volcanic plateau, four thousand feet high.”

“Sounds miserably cold,” said Glynnie.

“It has hard winters, to be sure,” said Rix, “but fertile soil and plenty of rain. There’s a good living to be had. More importantly, with mountains on three sides and this escarpment on the fourth, it’s easily defended.”

They dismounted, set the horses free and turned to the slope. “It’s as high as a mountain,” muttered Glynnie. “This is going to take a week.”

“At least half a day, I’m told, so we’d better get going.”

“It’s desolate,” said Glynnie, when they reached the top in the early afternoon and scaled a rocky hilltop to get a better view.

The plateau was about four miles long by two wide, undulating farmland covered in snow. She made out several manors and half a dozen villages. Black, ice-sheathed mountains defended the far sides.

“Pretty country though,” said Rix. “And the most beautiful fortress I’ve ever seen. One of the strongest, too,” he added approvingly.

Fortress Garramide was only a few hundred yards away. It had been built on a rocky hill at the edge of the plateau, an outcrop cliffed on two sides and surrounded by a thirty-foot-high wall that must have enclosed forty acres. Every fifty yards along the wall was a watchtower.

“The wall is eight feet thick at the top, and solid stone all the way through,” he recalled.

“It’s enormous,” said Glynnie.

The inner fortress arose from the highest point of the hill and contained a great, stepped castle built from golden stone and topped with five towers, four at the corners and a larger one in the centre, surmounted by copper-clad domes tarnished to a rusty green. A tall, narrow tower behind the others had no dome, and neither did a separate tower immediately behind the gates. It ended in a flat war platform a hundred feet up, surrounded by walls with arrow slits through them.

He studied the defences, assessing the fortress’s strengths and weaknesses. “Water should never be a problem with all the rain here. If they’ve got enough cisterns, they could store enough for a thousand people, for a year.”

“Food might be.”

“There’s a lot of land inside the walls, and as long as they keep the barns well stacked with hay, they could feed their stock through a month’s long siege. There’s only one problem I see —”

“The walls are too long,” said Glynnie. “It’d take an army to defend them.”

She constantly surprised him. “Precisely.” He studied the sky, which was a billowing black in the south. “Looks like snow, and lots of it. We’d better move.”

It was heavily overcast by the time they reached the gates of Garramide, and snow was falling, though not thickly enough to disguise the stench, nor the mess of blood and rotting entrails protruding through the crust of last night’s snow.

“What the blazes is going on?” said Rix, covering his nose. “Has the enemy beaten us here as well?”

“Hooves,” said Glynnie, who had ventured closer. “And horns. Looks like they do their butchering here.”

“Outside the main gates of
my
fortress?” cried Rix.

Striding to the gates, he hammered on them with the hilt of his sword. “Garramide, open to your lord.”

A filthy, bewhiskered fellow opened a viewing flap. “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m Rixium Ricinus and I’ve come to claim my estate. Open the gates.”

“The boy lordling,” sneered the guard. He turned away, saying, “Get Arkyz.” He turned back, grinning, to reveal a mouth full of rotten teeth. “Garramide ain’t yours any more, kid. Clear out.”

Rix did not look prepossessing. In his dirty, ragged coat and mud-caked pants, he could have been any miserable vagabond on the road, though he was bigger than most. “Who’s in charge here?” he said evenly.

When the guard’s gaze fell upon Rix’s grey hand, he snorted mucus from his nose and grey slime from his mouth. “Arkyz Leatherhead, and he chops trespassers up into little bits and dumps them in the ditch.”

“Not any more,” said Rix.

He reached in, caught the guard by the throat and dragged him through the flap, tearing the shirt off his back. Hauling him one-handed to the rotting remains, Rix dumped him in a half-frozen heap of entrails.

“Run for your life. If you’re still on the plateau in an hour, I’ll cut you into little pieces and feed you to the crows.”

“Who’s Arkyz Leatherhead?” Glynnie said quietly.

“A murdering, raping bandit. He’s been terrorising these mountains for years with a gang of cutthroats, preying on the weak and the helpless.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“He must’ve broken in and seized Garramide after the war began. Before House Ricinus fell, he wouldn’t have dared.”

Rix was walking back to the gate when Glynnie shrieked, “Look out!”

The guard was racing towards him, swinging a double-edged knife. Rix swayed out of its way, allowing the man to lumber past. He skidded to a stop outside the gates and came racing back. Rix lazily avoided another couple of killing blows then, without seeming to move, punched the guard’s teeth down his throat. He was driven three yards through the air, landed hard, rolled over and vomited up his shattered teeth onto the boots of the man who had thrust the gates wide.

A man so huge that beside him Rix looked like a pup.

“Rix, no,” whispered Glynnie.

I can’t do this, Rix thought. I’ve met my match and I’m going to die.

Arkyz Leatherhead was a vast slab of beef, near to seven feet tall and a yard across the shoulders, with long, swinging arms that came down past his knees. He might have been forty, and looked as though he had spent every minute of that time outdoors, for his hairless skin was as coarse and leathery as cowhide. The top of his bald head, so flat that it might have been sawn off, was covered in freckles and black moles.

Leatherhead was clad in horsehide – a thick leather jerkin with the hair on, laced together across his boulder chest with leather thongs as thick as Rix’s little finger, and baggy leather knee britches. Behind him, grinning and rubbing their grimy hands together, were twenty of the filthiest and foulest ruffians Rix had ever seen.

“Lord Deadhand!” Leatherhead said in a rumble so deep that loose planks in the gate rattled. “Come forward and die.” His meaty hands dropped onto the hilts of twin swords. “Or run like a dog. I’ll give you five minutes to get to your kennel, hur, hur!”

He grinned at his feeble wit and looked back to his men for approval. They roared, clapped their thighs and stamped their feet.

Rix drew Maloch, but as he raised the sword his dead right hand throbbed. Despite all the practice, he wasn’t sure he could beat this giant left-handed, unless Leatherhead’s great size made him slow.

Leatherhead’s matched swords were the longest Rix had ever seen, a handspan longer than his own. With his enormous height and unusually long arms, Leatherhead’s reach was a good two feet more than Rix’s – with either hand.

Then, as Leatherhead slashed with his twin swords and Rix back-pedalled desperately, he knew he was in diabolical danger. The brute was just as good with his left hand as with the right, capable of using both at once, and fast as well.

Rix wasn’t even sure he could have beaten him with his right hand.

He ducked and the blades howled over his head, intersecting like a pair of scissors and clipping off a lock of his black hair. Glynnie gasped. Rix lunged and hacked at Leatherhead’s left kneecap but it wasn’t there – he’d anticipated the stroke and moved too quickly. Despite his age, he was fast and experienced. By the way he fought, he must have been in hundreds of fights. And won them all.

Leatherhead drew back, held a sword out to either side, then paused. But he wasn’t watching Rix. He was staring at Glynnie and a slow smile cracked his beefy face.

“Spoils o’ war, girlie.”

Rix’s skin crawled. Why had he brought her here? She would have been better off as a prisoner in Caulderon than in the hands of these scum. And that’s where she was going to end up, for he was losing hope of beating Leatherhead.

“Run, Glynnie.”

Glynnie let out a little, muffled cry, but did not back away. The lesson in courage stiffened Rix’s own. He had to beat Leatherhead so convincingly that none of the followers would dare take him on. And he had to do it soon.

He feinted to the left, then struck at Leatherhead’s left hand. Leatherhead slipped it aside, hacked at Rix’s throat, and he felt his coat collar give as the tip of the blade cut through it.

The men behind Leatherhead clapped and jeered. Rix raised his sword and swung it with all his strength, down at his opponent’s mole-covered skull. Again Leatherhead anticipated the blow and danced away, and Maloch struck a rock in a shower of sparks. Rix needed to be closer, but when his opponent had a longer reach and a sword in each hand, going in close was a sure way to die.

He backpedalled, checking the blade. Maloch was not a heavy weapon, but the titane blade must have been supremely well forged, for it had not been damaged striking the rock – nor previously, when the chancellor’s captain had hacked through Rix’s wrist and deep into a flagstone.

They matched strokes for several minutes, by which time his legs were tiring. Fighting was the hardest work anyone could do and the exhausting climb up the escarpment had taken its toll. The longer they fought, the more the balance would tip.

Yet he could not rely on Maloch to save him. Its protection was against magery, not might…

Wait – if he could not beat the man, could he beat his weapons?

It was a desperate gamble. If he was wrong, if he damaged Maloch, he would die. But it was the only hope he had. He backpedalled again, luring Leatherhead forwards. The man was enormously strong but had no subtlety; he used the same few strokes over and again.

Rix waited until Leatherhead struck another of those scissoring double blows, then swung Maloch into the path of the swords. It missed his opponent’s left-hand blade by a whisker and struck the right blade side-on, near the hilt.

Maloch rang like a tower bell. A hot shock passed up Rix’s arm and for an awful second he thought his own blade was going to shatter. There was a screech of metal and a red-hot spray that spattered Leatherhead’s jerkin and pants, then Maloch sheared through the other blade, which was hurled sideways to embed itself in the muddy snow.

Leatherhead looked down uncomprehendingly at the semi-molten hilt, then dropped it and began to claw at his chest, trying to tear off the smoking jerkin. But the thick leather thongs did not give, and now smoke was issuing from within. The spray of molten metal had burned through the leather, only to be trapped against Leatherhead’s skin.

His guard was down, and Rix was not one to miss an opportunity. He sprang forwards and, with a stroke of surgical accuracy, lifted Leatherhead’s pumpkin-sized head off his stump of a neck and sent it rolling down the slope to the piled offal. His hands were still clawing at his smouldering chest when his blood-drenched body hit the ground.

Rix fixed his gaze on the goggling brutes in the gateway, then put his right boot on Leatherhead’s chest and raised Maloch high.

“I am Rixium Deadhand, heir to Garramide,” he said in a voice that could have been heard at the top of the highest dome of the fortress. He deliberately did not mention the tainted name, Ricinus. “This sword, Maloch, came to me in direct line from my ancestor – the First Hero, Axil Grandys, who built this fortress.”

He paused to allow that to sink in. Grandys was a legend, the Founding Hero, and the connection meant that any challenge to Rix was a challenge to the legitimacy of Grandys himself. At least, Rix hoped so, though with brainless thugs like these, you couldn’t always tell.

“Garramide is mine and I claim my inheritance. If any here challenge my claim, speak now –
and
die
.”