Dark Crusade (19 page)

Then came rage.

Let die the heart.

Let die the soul; let die the brain.

No life. No love. Hate is all.

Jarvo never remembered in what manner he fled Ceddi.

A blind man wanders unscathed through a burning city.

A drunken fool laughs in a ditch while thousands battle to the death.

Guards pay no heed to a ghost.

Jarvo wandered away from Ceddi, unheeding as the hue and cry echoed behind him.

He stumbled past drunken guards, besotted revellers, too sunken in debauchery to grasp the significance of the strident tocsin of alarm. A germ of animal cunning guided his reeling course away front those who might halt his flight.

A tragic buffoon. His face a mask too grotesque to be real. Too mindlessly drunk to evoke more than a sneer.

Grovel, little clown. Life spits in your tears.

He lurched through empty hallways, past the snoring revellers and the groping dancers, past the fumbling guards and the blindly rushing priests. The alarm was shouted throughout the spidery corridors, but in the milling chaos no one paid note to the pallid-fleshed dead an who staggered through their midst--glaring with unseeing eye through his grotesque demon's mask.

There was a gate before him, open into the night. Jarvo blundered through, and into the cool darkness--never wondering that the guards who should have barred his way lay in puddles of scarlet, and stared back through glazed eyes. The dead do not challenge the dead.

Jarvo wandered through the darkness, paying no heed and paid no heed. About him in the night, the gods of war danced and howled. Horsemen tore past him. Armed men fled through the streets. Houses hid behind barred doors and shuttered windows. The cries and shouts that usurped the stillness before dawn did not reach his throbbing brain. He neither knew nor cared that death held its crimson revels in Ingoldi this night.

His soul was dead, but rage stirred from the ashes. No instinct of self-preservation guided his blind steps, for the will to live was dead. Rage animated his fever-seared flesh, and the flame of vengeance rose front the cinders of his soul.

He reeled through the fear-drenched streets of Ingoldi, unseen and unseeing in the bleak hour before dawn. Fever clawed at him, lost before the agony of his spirit. Slowly the dullness of his shock left him. The pain grew worse, but his fury left him oblivious to all other sensations. He was like a man who has received his death-wound, feels nothing in his berserk lust to slay his slayer, though his hands are slippery with his own lifeblood and his feet trip upon his dangling entrails.

He was walking along the shadow of the walls of Ceddi, and before him loomed a deeper mass of shadow. It was the Tower of Yslsl.

The door was ajar. He went inside. Within was darkness and silence.

Stairs spiralled upward into the night. Without volition he climbed into the night. He came to the top of the stairs.

Fever and madness stabbed through his faltering consciousness. Jarvo stood upon the ledge at the tower's summit, staring blindly at the crawling sunburst of jet that glowered from the blank wall.

He had a fleeting instant of coherent thought. What had drawn him here? This was no place of refuge.

The writhing sunburst held his chaotic consciousness. In a flash of madness Jarvo saw that it was a doorway, that beyond it something waited, something called to him to open the doorway. Something beyond sensed the intolerable agony of his soul. Something hungered for that agony...

Jarvo stumbled away from the chill stone. The brink was at his heels. He flung himself forward, as his feet shot out from under him, his legs skidded on the edge of the stone.

For an instant his hands clawed at the smooth stone of the ledge, his legs kicked over emptiness. Then his outflung arms threw his balance forward. Clawing and kicking, he scrambled onto the ledge.

For a long while he lay there, too numb from fever and shock to crawl to his feet. His narrow brush with falling to his death cut through the trance that shackled his brain. Fear of falling--the instinctive fear that an infant knows before it draws its first wailing breath--jarred him back to awareness, hauled him forth from the abyss of madness.

The light of dawn was greying the circle above him, when Jarvo finally roused himself from his stupor. He came to his feet as one who awakes from an opium dream--thinking back over the scenes he has witnessed, wondering at the blank intervals in his memory, uncertain where dream and reality impinged. He rubbed his face wearily, tried to take stock.

He was in the Tower of Yslsl. Small wonder no one had come upon him while he lay here. He remembered briefly the strange illusion he had had of the black sunburst of stone. Nightmare born of fever and pain.

The rest of the evening was not nightmare. Grimly, as a man palpates a broken limb to assess whether he can force it to bear weight, Jarvo recalled the events of the night. The memory of Esketra's betrayal was like the pain of a bone as it is set. The pain was unavoidable. Once confronted, his thoughts could move on.

Jarvo swore. They would be combing the city for him now. His disastrous blunder had made Ingoldi a death-trap for him. Escape was imperative--or else certain capture and death.

With the realization of his danger, a new rush of dread made him cry out. He had told Esketra where he was hiding, who had helped him. Orted's vengeance would not be limited to one foot with a scarred face...

Recklessly Jarvo clambered down the spirit stairway. His life was worthless--but he must not allow Erill to share his doom.

Was there time? How long had he lain here? The Prophet would strike swiftly.

He flung back the heavy door and burst into the dawn-lit streets. He had run only a short distance before he encountered the first sprawled corpse.

Dumbly Jarvo gaped at the dead--recognizing guardsmen of the Prophet's army, Defenders of Sataki, and now and again a fallen cavalryman. Parts of the city were aflame, and the trail of death led toward the main gates.

Jarvo was in no state to fathom such mysteries--but it was evident after a glance that the tension between Kane and Orted Ak-Ceddi had passed the breaking point.

Jarvo paused only long enough to strip a dead Defender of his crimson surcoat and hauberk, wind a strip of bloody cloth about the scarred half of his face, clap on steel helmet and buckle on sword. Only a few cautious citizens were stirring from behind bolted doors, and no one challenged the red-bandaged Defender who ran through the corpse-strewn streets.

The Theatre Guild was not distant, and it was obvious to him that smoke was drifting from that quarter. He could see the overturned wagons and ruined stalls as he skidded around the list coiner. A milling crowd of townsfolk was gathered about the smoking carnage. Jarvo felt his belly tense with chill.

A pack of children were scrambling about the wreckage. They paid him no attention, as the adults sidled quickly away.

"What happened here!" he demanded.

"Don't you know?" a small girl wondered. "They raided a noochee hideout here during the night. Then General Kane rode out of the city, and nobody could stop him. But you know that."

"Did any noochees escape?" Jarvo blurted--then stared at the girl.

"Of course not," she said, trying to adjust the fillet of jade beads.

While it was days before Kane fitted all the pieces together of that night, it was Jarvo's unforeseen presence in Ceddi that threw all his plans into chaos.

The uneasy alliance between Kane and Orted Ak-Ceddi could end only in the death of one or the other. Both understood the situation; each had his own view as to whose death it must be.

The potentially explosive balance had existed this long for only two reasons.

Orted was loath to eliminate Kane so long as he depended on the continued victories of the Sword of Sataki. Kane's officers and the majority of his professional cavalry were loyal to Kane. Until the Prophet could supplant Kane's mercenaries with enough of the faithful followers of Sataki, to move against Kane was to risk disastrous mutiny.

Kane, on the other hand, was reluctant to move against Orted openly until he understood the nature of the Prophet's demonstrated sorcerous powers. Initially Kane had misjudged the former bandit, had assumed the man was either a greedy opportunist or a rash zealot. Either way, Kane's design had been to dupe the Prophet into financing an army under Kane's command, and, at the first convenient moment, to send the Prophet to the professed rewards of his afterworld. But there appeared an unknown factor. Orted Ak-Ceddi was not, entirely, a fraud. Kane needed to know more--but the Prophet's growing interference was forcing his hand.

Kane struck first to break the deadlock.

He bad conquered half the southern kingdoms with the Sword of Sataki. Already an empire beyond the dreams of the most avaricious conqueror lay under Kane's heel. Eventually, Kane knew, the whole of the southern kingdoms would fall to him. Coupled with Shapeli, more than a third of the gigantic Great Northern Continent would be under Kane's rule. From there, in time, the old provinces and kingdoms of the Serranthonian Empire. Then the remainder of the supercontinent.

But for the present, Kane's army was overextended. Kane required more men and weapons, and he needed time enough to consolidate his victories. Instead, Orted demanded that he press on against the southern kingdoms, insisted that the conquered populaces be transferred to Shapeli. The latter was incomprehensible madness; the former was to invite military disaster.

Kane struck.

It was to be a straightforward coup d'étàt. During the night of the great banquet, an artful courtesan in Kane's employ would entice Orted to leave at the height of the revels. Then, when the night was far gone and the fortress deep in debauchery, Kane's assassins would burst in upon the Prophet as he lay besotted with drink and drugs.

Orted's flesh might be proof against steel, but Kane's assassins were not so limited in imagination.

Esketra, stung with jealousy when Orted vanished from the festivities, was already on her way to his chambers when Jarvo accosted her. She burst in on the Prophet, even as Kane's assassins were dispatching the guards at a little-used entrance to the fortress. By the time they reached his chambers, Orted was stalking Jarvo with a party of his guardsmen.

Kane, waiting with a core of trusted followers in the great hall, misconstrued the sudden alarm and appearance of armed guards. Assuming that his plot had miscarried, and that the Prophet was moving to bottle him up within Ceddi, Kane and his men bolted. Blades were drawn, challenges and accusations shouted, and in an instant the uneasy balance erupted into open battle.

In a wild melee, Kane cut his way through the bewildered guards, out of Ceddi and through the city. Fierce fighting ensued, as Orted quickly reacted to the long expected crisis, sought to trap Kane within Ingoldi, away from the main force of his army. Kane was not to be entrapped that night. By dawn a wake of Sataki dead marked his passage through Ingoldi, and his camp beyond the city wall was deserted.

Kane examined the limp body that lay on the cot. He looked over at Dolnes and grunted. "She's alive, I'll grant you. What happened?"

His henchman picked at a fresh scab on his dirty forearm. Outside Kane's tent, the sounds of men and horses echoed across the bivouac. Ingoldi lay a hard day's ride behind them, and he had been pressed to catch up with Kane's retreat.

"I'm not at all sure. When we came for her, the mob was tearing the quarter apart. Evidently the Defenders had arrived before us--someone had denounced them as a nest of noochees. There wasn't a lot left."

"So I gather," Kane commented sourly.

"It wasn't anything we could have planned for," Dolnes protested. "We were lucky enough to find her still alive. They'd left her nailed to the side of a wagon when they finished with her. The mob didn't like us pulling her down, and we had to bust a few heads riding clear. By then, all hell was busting loose at the main gate. We came after you, and it was a close thing. I don't guess the ride trying to keep up with you did her much good either."

Kane looked closely at the bruised face. "I'll be damned," he muttered. "Girl, you should have jumped one of those nights."

"What is it?"

"Never mind. See Colonel Alain about your pay. But first call my surgeons to my tent. It may be that you'll earn your gold after all."

If being alive were a good thing, Erill decided she was lucky to be alive.

As from a nightmare, she recalled the assault on the guild by the Defenders of Sataki, remembered shouts and screams in the night, the rending and crashing of broken doors and overturned wagons, the helpless terror as brutal hands caught at her, the unending waves of pain...

Between black intervals of pain and terror, certain indelible visions burst through. Boree, swinging a gory ax, beaten down under a rush of mailed bodies. Her friends struck down without knowing the reason for their murder. An endless succession of leering, grunting, snarling faces. Pain lancing her flesh. The dull wonder as she saw the nails pressed to her pinioned flesh, watched the dreamlike, inexorable swing of the wooden mallet.

Their angry, gloating voices gobbled in her cars. Dimly Erill understood. Jarvo had found Esketra. Esketra had betrayed him. Jarvo was trapped in Ceddi, and Erill was hanging from iron nails. If she was conscious when Kane's men pulled her down, dragged her away from the howling mob, she had no memory of it.

The morning wind from across the sea was cool on her face, and the waves of the Southern Sound washed over her bare feet. Erill glanced down at the fading scars that marred the insteps of her feet. A month ago she could not have walked for the torn flesh and broken bones. She looked at the puckered scars across both her palms, remembering how she had been unable to so much as feed herself for many days. So pain and the memory of pain must fade; given time enough, Erill supposed she could endure any ordeal.

She looked wistfully across the sea. Beyond the waves lay the Great Southern Continent, an easy voyage across the Southern Sound. The ruins of fabled Carsultyal slumbered there--mankind's first great city. Kane spoke of it often. His broadsword was forged in Carsultyal, centuries ago. Such antique blades were worth more than their weight in gold, for never since Carsultyal's fall has such steel been forged. It might be pleasant to journey to Carsultyal, perhaps lose herself in the cold wastes of the Herratlonai, the desert Kane said lay southeast of there. Nothing lived there anymore, nothing at all. The wind-etched wasteland had never heard of the Dark Crusade.