The Fell Sword (14 page)

Nothing could track him here.

And yet something so powerful that Thorn couldn’t describe it had appeared, pinned him to the ground, invaded him, and vanished.

Just to the left, through the mountain of destroyed foliage, he could see an object sitting on leaves and branches as if the ruined tree was a massive nest.

It was a black egg, the size of a man’s head. But not a true egg, as it was covered in scales, with curious caps on either end – like armour.

An armoured egg.

It radiated power in the
aether
.

It radiated heat in the real.

Thorn put up shield after shield – glowing hemispheres of forest green, layered like a lady’s petticoats. Then he tuned, or created,
phantasmic
instruments to magnify, to probe, to explore. And as he did he used his powers and his massive strength to raise the corpse of the great tree off his body.

The egg – it was too obviously an egg to call it anything else – resisted his investigation.

Thorn had no immediate plans. He was, he suspected, in some sort of shock. He sat in the shelter of the burl, and watched and prodded the egg, and the edges of the raw blackness within himself.

He felt violated.

What was that entity? And what does it want?

An hour passed and it did not return. The armoured egg sat, generating heat, and Thorn was gradually filled with power – filled with purpose. For the first time since his defeat on the fells of Lissen Carrak, he knew what he wanted.

North of the Wall – Giannis Turkos

Giannis Turkos sat watching his Huran wife make him moccasins. He wasn’t really looking at her; instead he was thinking of the council at which he would speak.

She raised her eyes. ‘It is nothing,’ she said. ‘They will listen to you.’

He shook his head. ‘It is more complicated than—’ He paused. Two years among the Outwallers had killed his deep-seated belief that they were children to receive lessons, but some deep-seated prejudices remained. One was that he hated sharing his plans. And the Outwallers were not men of the Empire, nor yet even Albans. They were fickle, even whimsical, in a way that no civilised man would ever allow.

But he loved his wife. And he loved her people. Even when they were bent on a war he believed was pointless and destructive.

‘There’s tea,’ she said, sounding oddly childlike with her mouth full of sinew.

Turkos shrugged. He was too worried to drink tea. He stood, went out of their cabin, and found that many of his political opponents in the village were sitting on the front step of the cabin across the small area of packed earth that Turkos thought of as the Plataea
.
Big Pine waved.

Big Pine was his inveterate enemy at council. Despite that, they had hunted together last fall, killing many deer together and gathering many beaver pelts. Life among Outwallers was a curious mixture of adversarial and cooperative.

So Turkos waved back, and smiled. But being outdoors didn’t offer him sanctuary from his wife’s sharp eyes and sharper tongue – or rather, it only offered sanctuary at the cost of the elusive interrogation of two hundred and fifty other Huran adults. He slipped back through the moose-hide curtain and took the copper teapot off the fire. He poured them both tea in fine, Morean-made cups, and handed one to his wife, who looked at him with a mixture of amusement and gratitude common to wives in every culture when men do exactly what women expect them to. She spat her sinew into her hand, laid it aside, and drank her tea. He put Wild honey in his.

She shook her head. ‘You are like a child,’ she said fondly.

He sat back on his chair, which he’d built with his own hands, as no Outwaller would use such a thing, with a small lamp full of olive oil at his side, and read through the scroll that had come a month ago. Again.

The Logothete of the Drum to his servants in the woodlands and wastes, greeting.
It has come to our ears, and sounded softly on our drum, that the Emperor’s enemies are attempting to use the Outwallers as a weapon against the Empire. The drum whispers of a heavy Outwaller incursion into Alba in the spring; reliable whispers state that the culprits were Sossag and Abonaki. Any conflict between the Huran and the Sossag could spill into Thrake. Such an incursion into Thrake would have the most deleterious of effects on the economy of the Empire, and with God’s will and the Emperor’s beneficence, we hope to avert such calamity. Let all the Logothete’s servants take note and act accordingly. Further, elements within the palace have become less enthusiastic about the Emperor’s policies about land and the Outwallers than before. The Logothete’s servants are required to test every assertion of this office commencing with this message for authenticity.

The message was written in a magicked ink on vellum; it was also coded using a letter-number code that was itself changed every six months, and that code translated into a form of High Archaic little used elsewhere in the world. The message had been carried by one of the Emperor’s messengers; a powerful bird bred for the purpose. Yet under all these layers of protection, the Logothete – the Emperor’s spymaster – had written a message that conveyed very little information and a strong hint of internal betrayal.

Turkos read it again. He’d deciphered it six times, each time looking for a new key or a chance phrase that might lead him to see a different meaning. He’d tried it with last year’s key. He’d tried it with a training key he’d been taught at the University.

It said what it said.

Which was very little.

‘Speak from your heart,’ his wife said. ‘Not from the skin of a dead animal.’

Kailin was small, her slim body hard with muscle and with a strong face, not exactly pretty by Morean standards, a little broad, perhaps, but full of character – happy with laughter, fierce with frowns. He loved her face. It had the slightly slanted eyes and sharp cheekbones that reminded him that some of the Outwallers were not, in fact, escaped peasants – many were a race apart from his own.

She leaned forward, and kissed him.

‘Sinew breath,’ he said, and they both laughed.

He rolled up his parchment and slipped it back into the light bone message tube in which it had come. Then he kissed her again, running a hand down her side, but she swatted him away. ‘Get dressed,’ she said. ‘I’ll have these done by the time you’ve got all your finery on.’

He rose and went to their bed, where they had both laid out his speaking clothes – a carefully chosen mixture of Morean court attire and Huran finery. He had a kaftan of deerskin, cut in the Morean manner but edged in porcupine quill work; instead of hose he wore Huran leggings, with Etruscan beads on every seam. He wore a Morean shirt and braes. As he finished getting the leggings on and tied to his Morean soldier’s belt – some things he couldn’t give up – his wife bent and offered him the new moccasins.

They were magnificent – the flaps were stiff with purple-and-red-dyed porcupine quill and edged in carefully applied purple wampum.

Purple was one of the Outwaller’s favourite colours, but it made Turkos nervous. In the Empire it was a crime to wear purple without the Emperor’s express permission.

Which did not prevent him from admiring his wife’s work. ‘You make me look like a king!’ he said.

‘The Huran spit at kings,’ she said. ‘You look like a hero. Which you are. Go speak your piece.’ She helped him put his heavy
cinqueda
onto his military belt.

She pulled his cloak – which she had also made – from their sleeping pile. It was made of hundreds of black squirrel pelts stitched together invisibly and lined with bright red wool. She draped it around his shoulders and pinned it with the two pins of his Morean military rank: Stheno’s immortal gorgon’s head on his right shoulder in silver; Euryale’s head on his left shoulder in gold.

Then she handed him his axe – a light steel head with a smoking pipe cunningly worked into the back. He had learned to rest it in the crook of his arm with affected nonchalance for the duration of council meetings, even when they lasted for many hours.

She stretched on her tiptoes and kissed him again. ‘When you speak for the Emperor,’ she said, ‘remember that you are also my husband, and a Huran warrior. Remember that no man at the council is your foe – that all of you strive together for the good of the people.’

He smiled at her. ‘Sometimes, I think you are my mother, and I am a small boy.’

She grinned. Took his hand, and felt that it was trembling.

‘Oh, my dear! My strength!’ She pressed his hand to her left breast.

That took his mind off his worries. He smiled. His fingers moved, almost of their own volition.

‘I shouldn’t tell you this, but the matrons have already decided to do as you ask,’ she said. ‘No one wanted war with the Sossag except the Northerners.’ She sighed. ‘Now out!’ she said. ‘Your hand is making promises that the rest of you will not be here to keep!’

He tried to stoop through the deerskin curtain with all the dignity of two years practice and another twenty years at the courts of Morea.

In the street, dressed equally magnificently, was Big Pine. The man was a head taller than Turkos. They nodded to one and other and, as fate had sent them through their cabin doors together, they were forced to walk through the village together.

‘Everyone thinks we’ve come to an agreement,’ Turkos said. They could hear the whispers from every front step.

‘Perhaps we should,’ said the tall warrior. ‘We have a hundred paces. Tell me why we should raid the Northerners and not the Sossag? The Northerners have already struck the Sossag and taken prisoners. And burned villages. They will strike back at us.’

Turkos felt as if one of Christ’s own angels had come down from heaven to open his adversary’s ears. Nothing like this had happened to him in three summers in the village. Usually his words fell flat; at one council, Big Pine had skilfully argued that Turkos did not speak the language of the people well enough to make his case and his wife had been summoned. Only later had Turkos realised this turned his speech into a woman’s words – valuable in the council of matrons, but signifying nothing in the council of men. He’d been laughed at.

Being a laughing stock had not proved as awful as he’d expected – indeed, in the aftermath, he seemed to have more friends in the village, not fewer.

All these thoughts and a hundred like them rode through his head while he walked silently beside Big Pine.

He wasted ten paces thinking.

Then, he shrugged. ‘Peace is better for the Huran than war,’ he said. ‘The Sossag lost warriors this spring but they gained many weapons and much armour. The whisper of the wind is that they have an alliance with a powerful sorcerer.’

Big Pine nodded. ‘It may be as you say,’ he admitted.

‘The Northerners want nothing but an easy victory. Their sources of beaver were hurt by the drought. Their corn crop was poor.’ Understanding struck Turkos like a bolt from the blue. He stopped walking for a moment. He could keep the Huran – at least, his village and the six others that it controlled – out of direct warfare another way.

‘What if we send no war party at all?’ he said. He took a step. He saw from the look on Big Pine’s face that his point had gone home. ‘What if we send a delegation to the Sossag, disclaiming any part of the Northerners’ war? And send our warriors out—’ he tried to find a word to represent the Morean tactical idea of defensive patrolling ‘—to watch and ambush while we harvest our crop?’

The council fire was close.

Big Pine looked at him. ‘No raid at all?’ he asked. ‘But many little parties – like hunting parties – watching every path.’ He scratched the top of his head, where he had a magnificent display of heron feathers. ‘Many little war parties kept close means many leaders – and much practice for the younger bloods.’ He looked at Turkos. ‘If you had come to me with this earlier, this might have long ago been decided.’

Turkos threw caution to the winds. ‘I just this moment thought of it,’ he said.

Big Pine was seen by the whole village to slap hands with Turkos before entering the council house. Both men were laughing.

The Morea – The Red Knight

‘He’s
actually proposing
to pay us by marrying me to his daughter?’ asked the Captain. They’d stopped for a rest, bridles over their shoulders, safely past Middleburgh and deep in the Morean countryside – pale green hills and sandy rock spires stretching away into the sun-drenched distance.

The Captain chuckled and almost choked on the watered wine Ser Alcaeus had offered him.

Ser Gavin grinned. ‘Men say she’s the greatest beauty of our time,’ he said. ‘Not sure what she’d have in resale value, though.’

Ser Alcaeus had become the focus of the whole Imperial messenger service, and daily flights of the great black and white birds kept him up to date on every aspect of the princess’s crisis. ‘That was ill said, Ser Gavin,’ he snapped.

The Captain knocked back the rest of his watered wine. ‘Let me get this right,’ he said. ‘The Duke of Thrake has five thousand men, a powerful magister, an unknown number of traitors inside the city, and more mercenaries coming in from Etrusca, who want the Emperor gone so they can more effectively rape the rest of the Empire. Am I good so far?’

Ser Alcaeus nodded. ‘Yes, my lord,’ he said, his bitterness obvious.

‘We have a hundred lances and our own wagon train. We can’t count on the local peasants or the local lords, and now you are telling me that the princess has declared herself Empress, claims to be our employer in lieu of the Emperor who hired us, and has no money to pay us.’

Ser Alcaeus shrugged. ‘There was never much money.’

Isn’t that the truth
, muttered Harmodius.

‘So her father planned to marry her to me rather than pay us?’ asked the Captain again through a spike of pain. Any conversation with Harmodius carried the possiblity of a blinding headache and a day lost. ‘That was his plan?’

Ser Alcaeus made a face. ‘I agree that it seems odd—’

Gavin laughed, long and loud. He rolled his right shoulder where the healed flesh continued to grow a fine crop of gold-green scales. He scratched at them too often, as if assuring himself they were real. ‘Unless we’re to share her,’ he began.