TWENTY-THREE
Half a mile down the road we found the inn I remembered, The Jolly Marcher, a long timber-framed building with stables and outbuildings, set up to feed, accommodate, and if necessary repair, any traveller with sufficient coin in their pockets.
We chose a table outside. It pays to take advantage of the last warm days of a year when and where you find them. And autumn days, when the sun shines, are made for outdoor dining. Once a few cold snaps have wielded the scythe through the ranks of the bugs that traditionally try to add themselves to your meal, the pleasure in taking your fill beneath the roof of the sky increases immeasurably. And of course the thing that really puts the “great” in the Great Outdoors . . . practically any direction you care to run off in is an escape route.
“So, you led Count Isen right to me?” I gave Kara an accusing look and rubbed my jaw, possibly on the side she slapped me—my face had been so battered of late I couldn’t tell any more.
“Why should I not?” Kara returned my accusatory stare with one of her own. She was better at it. “You had never mentioned the man in my hearing and he’s a noble who swears fealty to your grandmother. Also, he was holding us prisoner and intended to do so until he found you.”
“Well . . .” I took a gulp of wine to buy time in which to think of a riposte. “It’s . . . disloyal! Not the sort of thing friends are supposed to do.”
“But stealing from them is fine?” Kara tore a chunk from the crusty loaf, using the same violence that someone might throttle a chicken with.
“That’s rich coming from a woman who spent three months trying to steal Loki’s key off Snorri!”
“I was trying to stop the key going into Hel. You think what happened to your city was bad? If the Dead King got hold of that key he could do the same to a hundred cities in a year!”
“And how did you lead him to me?” I turned the conversation in a less damning direction.
“Loki’s key leads all sorts of people to it.” Kara turned her angry stare from me to her bread and soup. “Particularly once it settles in one place.”
The speed with which she looked away caught my attention. A practised liar gets good at noticing the failings of those with less practice. I glanced at Snorri, then back at Kara. “Snorri put his blood on the key to bind it to him. That’s why when I used it to open the door there he was standing on the other side.” I rested my chin in my hand, noticing how stubbly it was. A day in Snorri’s company and I was already starting a beard. “But originally it was you who was supposed to help him return, you who tied your piece of string to his toe . . . or whatever it is witches do when they want to find something. And I’ve been in Vermillion for the best part of a month . . .” I pointed a finger at her. “It was Snorri turning up that made you get old Isen to abandon his post, wasn’t it?”
She looked up, scowling and without an answer, but the colour in her cheeks said enough. I looked back at Snorri but he was concentrating on his food and I couldn’t see what expression he wore. “Well.” I paused to finish my wine and wave at the table-boy for some more. “It’s been lovely. And it was nice to see you again, young Hennan. But Snorri and I are on a very dangerous mission where speed is of the essence, so we will have to take our leave.” I snagged a leg from the cold roast chicken set at the middle of the table. “Once we’ve finished our meal.” I let the table-boy fill my goblet. The local red proved highly palatable. “So we must bid you adieu and let you make your own way to your destination.”
“Where are you going?” Hennan asked. It had been less than half a year but he’d sprung up like a summer weed, his face taking on the longer, more angular shape it would keep as a grown man, providing the world didn’t fall to pieces first. “We could come too.”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “I’m not taking a child into mortal danger.”
“But where are you going?” Kara repeated the boy with the same lack of decorum.
“That, I’m afraid to say, is a state secret.” I gave her my best princely smile.
“Osheim,” Snorri said.
“That’s where I was taking Hennan,” Kara replied, not missing a beat. “He has relatives not far from the Wheel.” She nodded to where I’d tied up Murder and Squire. “You have four horses.”
“You don’t know how to ride.” It seemed easier than “no.”
“We’ve spent a rather tedious summer as Count Isen’s prisoners. Though he did insist on referring to us as guests and allowed us some freedoms. Sir Thant taught us both to ride.”
I looked over at Snorri, not expecting any support after his rapid and treacherous disclosure of our destination. “You see? It’s the Wheel. It even gets to völvas in the end. She even thinks it’s her idea . . .” I faced Kara again. “No. You’d slow us down. Besides, we may be hunted—you’d be much safer on your own.”
Kara’s jaw took on a familiar determined set. “You don’t think you’ll have more chance with us? You think we’re useless?”
“Hennan’s just a boy!” I spread my hands. “I don’t think you quite understand what’s at stake—”
“Hennan lived his whole life a day’s walk from the centre of the Wheel. His family lived in that valley for at least four generations, probably forty. Any sons of that line who felt the draw of the Wheel walked in a century ago. What could be more valuable to you than someone who can resist the glamours there when you might be losing your reason?”
“We should take the boy home, Jal.” Snorri said it in the tone of voice that meant the matter had been decided. Combined with Kara’s underhand use of logic, and the fact that I was too exhausted, beaten up, full, drunk, and generally traumatized to want to argue, I let the Northman have his way.
For the next five days we rode east. Autumn continued to do a passable impression of summer, the mornings came crisp and the sunsets flowed warm and golden. Red March unfurled her beauty, dressed in the traditional colours of the season, and while we kept up a sharp pace the opportunity to bed down in good inns and dine at open houses along the roadside took much of the sting from the exercise. In truth there are few better ways to spend a day than riding through the March on a fine day in the fall of the year.
The four of us renewed our acquaintance with various degrees of hesitation. Hennan proved shy at first, keeping his mouth closed and his ears open, but when he finally did reach the point of asking questions they came in a deluge.
Kara kept her reserve longer, clearly not having forgiven me for stealing the key and denying her a triumphant return to Skilfar. I did point out that Count Isen would likely have taken it off her with potentially disastrous consequences, but that logic didn’t seem to placate the völva.
Snorri, true to his word back at the palace, appeared to be at peace, enjoying our company though showing no signs of wanting to talk about what had happened to him. I’d been terrified every moment I spent in Hell: to be left there alone lay beyond my imagination. I was quite happy for it to stay there too.
It didn’t take long though for Hennan’s questions to turn to what happened to Snorri and me when we passed through the door in Kelem’s cavern. I soon found myself sharing Snorri’s desire to let things lie.
“What did you see?”
“I . . .” I really didn’t want to think about it. I certainly didn’t want to put it into words. Somehow saying it out loud would stop it being a nightmare, something unreal and belonging wholly to that other place. Speaking of it in the light of day would bring it firmly into the realm of experience, a real and concrete thing that had to be dealt with. I might have to start thinking about what it all meant: the idea that after a short span on Earth an eternity in such a place might be waiting for us was a deeply depressing one. It’s all very well when death is a mystery that churchmen fritter away the best part of Sunday droning on about. Seeing it for yourself at first hand is a profound horror and not something I wished to inflict on a child, or myself. “It’s too nice a day, Hennan. Ask a different question.”
Try as I might to bury the memories of Vermillion my old talent proved unequal to the task and they kept pace with me on the road, haunting each hedgerow, ready to spring into any quiet moment, or paint themselves across any blank canvas, be it sky or shadow.
My mind kept returning to Darin’s death, to the lichkin in Milano House, to my last glimpse of Martus. Each of those a stepping stone to the cold and ugly fact that my sister had at last emerged into the world so long denied to her. My sister, unborn, ridden by a lichkin, and still hungry for my death to further anchor her against the relentless pull of Hell.
I sought Kara’s wisdom on the subject, hoping the völva might have made some study of our enemy in the time we’d been parted.
“A man in Hell told me it took some holy thing to break an unborn,” I said, nudging Murder up close to Kara’s mare.
She shrugged. “It’s possible. It would have to be something very special. Some relic maybe. Perhaps in the hands of a priest. Sometimes faith moves more of the mountain than magic.”
“Wouldn’t Loki’s key be the best thing to unlock one thing from another? My sister from the beast that wears her? It’s holy—a god made it!”
Kara gave me a bleak grin. “Loki is a god, but who has faith in him?”
“But the key works! It could unlock—”
“The lichkin are monsters of many parts. Not born, not made, but accumulations of the worst parts of men, the filth that falls from souls purged in Hel.” Though the day was bright around us it seemed colder and more brittle as Kara spoke of such things. “When old hatreds sink to the deepest rifts of the underworld sometimes they fit together and interweave, perversions of the most twisted kind, detached from their owners, drift until they become entangled, and slowly over generations, something awful is built. But what is tangled together can be unravelled. Use the key and the lichkin will be undone, but your sister will be torn apart, shredded, still bound to the pieces of its crimes. You need something less destructive— something that will persuade the lichkin to release its hold and let her go.”
I remembered how the lichkin I had inadvertently stabbed with the key in Hell had fallen apart. Kara had it right. Besides, the chances of me driving the key into an unborn on purpose were too remote to bother considering. I needed something sacred and I had nothing. Father’s seal had been reclaimed by Rome and his holy stone had consumed itself in the violence that destroyed Double and his necromancies.
Kara proved no help and my fears continued to stalk me toward the border.
On the fifth day we crossed into Slov. No battles had been fought here, though the passage of so many men of the March had left scars of a different sort. The arrival of Grandmother’s ten thousand must have taken the little fort of Ecan by surprise—certainly the place bore no signs of conflict and the small garrison of Red March soldiers left to hold it looked bored rather than worried.
King Lujan probably heard of the incursion a day or two later. I would not have liked to have been in the same room when he did. I’d never met the man but the stories painted him as possessing the disposition of a wolverine with belly-ache, and a tendency when angered to lash out at those within reach using whatever happened to be handy, be it his dinner plate or a flanged mace.
The Slovs’ unpreparedness could be forgiven to a degree. Invasion is usually preceded by months of bad blood and the progressively loud rattling of sabres. Armies first gather along borders, defences are reinforced against counterattack. Sometimes a battleground is even agreed upon to stop two large armies missing each other and marching in circles for days or months.
Grandmother’s strike, aimed as it was at one target—the fortified town of Blujen—and more specifically at the tower housing the Lady Blue in the city’s eastern quarter, followed none of the rules of war. There had been no threats, no discontent, no border incidents. Her army had been gathered in the midst of Red March, drawing on forces from the western regions, and had then headed east without delay. A sudden and direct blow from deep cover, unexpected and deadly. Perhaps if she had struck at Julana City the Red Queen might have taken Slov’s capital and already have the king’s head on a spike—but what value is there in shading another kingdom red on the war-room chart if the whole map is about to burn?
Any army will make a ruin of the land as they pass through. Grandmother’s army had left its marks on the borderlands of Slov, not through malice or conflict but through sheer numbers. In places where the road could not contain them the troops had marched through fields, though luckily for the farmers the harvest no longer stood there to be trampled. Less luckily however any travelling force of thousands picks the countryside clean as it goes and a newly gathered-in harvest simply makes it more convenient to pick up and take.
“The people will starve come winter. Even in these green lands.” Kara seemed disgusted with me, waving her arm at the hollow-eyed peasants who watched us pass.
“They’re lucky to have homes still standing,” I said. “Hell, they’re lucky to be alive.” Snorri and I had passed through the border region where Rhone and Scorron meet Gelleth—towns there had been reduced to fields of hot embers, others had been left to ghosts and rats, the people long fled. But Kara didn’t seem placated, instead eyeing me as if I’d personally led the invasion.
“Starvation has a crueller edge than any sword, Jal.” Snorri watched the road with a grim set to his mouth.
“I think we’re missing the big picture here.” Ragged children watching us from a roadside tree didn’t help put me in a sympathetic light. “If the Blue Lady isn’t stopped, and if we don’t succeed in Osheim nobody is going to have time to starve: there won’t be a winter, and being hungry will cease to be an option.”
None of them had a reply to that and we rode on in silence, with me still feeling guilty despite my flawless logic. It struck me belatedly that I should have added the way the pair of them made me feel guilty for all sorts of things I normally wouldn’t give a damn about to the case for not taking Kara and Hennan with us.
The next dawn came with a bite, crisp, leaving the hedgerows heavy with dew and us in no doubt that winter was sharpening its teeth.
We rode more cautiously now, scanning the woods and hedgerows for signs of ambush. An invading army leaves dangerous ground in its wake. Add to the desperation of the surviving populace the removal of their ruler’s yoke and you get the perfect mix for armed bands of looters and raiders.
Fortunately Grandmother’s plan called for a quick exit once her goal was accomplished and this required that she keep the roads back to Red March clear. We passed half a dozen checkpoints before the sun set on our first day in Slov, and at each of them I had to argue my case, the volume and confidence of my delivery seeming to be more of a factor in getting us through than Garyus’s ornately worked scroll of authorization.
At Trevi we saw our first true signs of battle. I smelled it first, the bitterness of smoke lacing an evening mist as we rode along the Julana Way, weary and feeling the miles where we sat. The scent of Vermillion’s burning still haunted my nostrils but that had been an inferno billowing out hot clouds that quenched the stars. This was the stink of old fires hiding among ruins, smouldering, chewing slowly through the very last of their fuel beneath thick blankets of ash.
The sun descended toward the western hills, throwing our shadows before us and tingeing the mists with crimson before we saw the ruined fort. The mound it stood upon was too small and isolated to make it a convincing foothill, too large for me to easily believe that men had heaped up so much earth. A small town had grown at the foot of the mound to service the fort’s needs. Little of those homes remained: most lay in ashes; here and there a standing spar. The fort itself had lost a large part of its gatehouse in some devastating explosion, masonry scattered the slope, reaching down to the blackened ribs of the closest buildings. What magics or alchemy the Red Queen had employed I couldn’t guess but she had obviously not been minded to mount a long siege or to leave the garrison secure to threaten her supply line.
“Impressive.” Snorri sat tall in his saddle, eyes on the scene ahead of us.
“Hmmm.” I’d be glad when it was all behind us. The road led on into a tangle of forest a quarter of a mile or so past the fort. It looked like the sort of place survivors might gather and plot revenge. “We’ll steer well clear of it. Stay alert. I don’t like this place.”
The words were scarcely off my lips before Squire started beeping. It wasn’t something she’d done before. The noise was like no sound any horse could make, or any human or instrument for that matter. It held an unnatural quality, too precise, too clean. Hennan looked around in surprise, trying to locate the source. As far as I could tell what he was sitting on was making the sound.
“It’s coming from the saddlebags,” Kara said, nudging her mount closer to the boy’s.
“Ah.” I guessed then what was making the beeps and all at once the day seemed colder than it had a moment before. “Hell.”
Snorri gave me that two-part look of his, the first part being: tell me what you know, and the second part being: or I’ll break your arms. I dismounted and started to undo the straps on Squire’s left saddlebag. It took a bit of digging to get the package out, and then some wrestling with twine and rags to unwrap it. The beeps came every four seconds or so, the gap long enough so you might imagine the last one was the end of it. A few moments later I pulled away the last of the wrapping and held Luntar’s box of ghosts in my hands. In the light of day it looked every bit as unnatural as it had back in the throne room. It seemed as if it were a piece of winter viewed through a box-shaped hole, and it weighed far too little for what I knew it to contain. It beeped again and I nearly dropped it.
“What is it?” Kara and Hennan almost in unison, the boy a fraction ahead.
“A funeral urn,” I said. “Containing the ashes of ten million dead Builders. I opened the lid. A fan of light spread out above the open mouth and coalesced into a pale human figure. A gaunt man. I realized two things simultaneously. Firstly, that I recognized the man. Secondly, that the shock of the first realization had made me drop the box.
Hennan moved as fast as I’ve ever seen another human react. He’d been fleet-footed when I’d tried to catch him the first time we met in Osheim, but half a year had quickened him. He dived forward and, at full stretch, caught the box an inch above the ground. The air left his lungs in a sharp “oooof.”
“Thank you.” I scooped the box from his outstretched hands and set it on a marker stone beside the road. Snorri leant down to help the boy up. I crouched to stare at the ten-inch ghost standing in the air above the box. The phantom wore a long white tunic, buttoned at the front and coming down past his knees, a lean, one might say scrawny man of about my age, a narrow, owlish face beneath an unruly mop of light-coloured hair, a frame hooking over his ears and holding two glass lenses, one immediately before each eye. He looked far too young but I knew him.
“Taproot?”
“Elias Taproot, PhD, at your service.” The figure executed a bow.
“Do you know me, Taproot?”
“Local data suggests you are Prince Jalan Kendeth.”
“And him?” I held the box so he would get a good view of Snorri, now standing in the road, hands resting on Hennan’s shoulders just before him, both of them staring our way.
“Big fellow. Name unknown.” Dr. Taproot frowned, one hand coming up to stroke his chin, fingers sliding toward an absent goatee.
“You don’t remember, Snorri?” I asked.
“I am simply a library record, dear boy. This unit has not been connected to the deepnet for . . . oh my, nearly a thousand years.”
“Why do you look like Dr. Taproot?”
“Who else would I look like? I am Elias Taproot’s data-echo.”
I frowned and considered shaking the box to see if it held more intelligible answers.
“Why have you popped up out of all the ghosts in this box? And—” *beep* “And why is it beeping?”
Taproot frowned for a moment, flexing his hands rapidly in the space between us as if trying to wring out a reply. “A narrow bandwidth emergency signal, broadcast using residual satellite power, has activated all devices in this immediate area.”
“Say that again in words that have meaning or I’m closing this box, digging a hole, and leaving it here under five foot of soil.” I meant it too, except for the digging part.
Taproot’s eyes widened at that. “This is a level 5 sanctioned emergency broadcast. You can’t just walk away from that—it contravenes any number of regulations. You wouldn’t dare!”
“Watch me!” I turned away.
“Wait!” The thing had Taproot’s voice down pat, I had to give it that. He’d had the same mix of outrage and nervousness when dressing me down for bringing an unborn into his circus. “Wait! You wanted to know why I was projected rather than any other record?”
I glanced back. “Well?”
“It’s me that’s in trouble. My flesh. Somewhere close by. The location system is corrupt, orbits have decayed—” He caught my deepening frown and amended his language. “The box will beep more rapidly as you get closer, but it’s only a rough guide.”
I reached over and snapped the box shut. I don’t like ghosts. “So, let’s go.” I picked it up, straightened and turned toward Murder. “While we still have the light.”
“He said Dr. Taproot is in danger.” I could tell without looking that Snorri wasn’t moving.
“The circus man?” Hennan piped up. I must have told him stories at some point.
“There might be more wonders with him . . .” Kara sounded like a starving woman describing a hot roast with gravy. I glanced her way but the box in my hands held her gaze. It beeped again. “That was truly his likeness?”
I shrugged. “Like him, but thirty years younger.” In Grandmother’s childhood memories Taproot had been there at the palace, a man in his forties, head of Gholloth the First’s security. What in hell’s name he was, or what gets a man like that in trouble, I had no interest in discovering.
“Which direction shall we try?” Snorri asked.
I sighed and pointed up the hill without looking at it. “It’s pretty obvious. Where else would it be? A fortress full of corpses, laced with the remnants of some horrendous magic or Builder weapon . . . it’s got to be there, doesn’t it?”
None of them bothered to deny it.