Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 (61 page)

That was another reason to kill the boy, that insult flung so casually, so contemptuously at him, and in public hearing too. But the tribe's safety lay between them, in this strange and unknowable land; he swallowed his fury and said, 'You need not watch your back, so long as I walk behind you. When I kill you, trust that it will be face to face and blade to blade, as I promised before.'

'That was not my concern; I had not thought to fear my own knife at my back.'
Even from you
was not spoken, it did not need to be; only Bhisrat among all the Sharai, his voice suggested, could be so dishonourable as to conceive of the idea. A murmur among his audience seemed to confirm it, although half these thieves and liars would slit their own brothers' throats for a camel and a press of dates. 'What I fear rather,' the boy went on, raising his voice and looking around, playing to his listeners now, 'is seeing you restored to the trust of your tribe, as you come from the dark to lead them free. A sheikh should be wise and temperate, and you are neither. I care yet for the Saren, and I would not see them endangered at your hands. You have lost them once on this adventure; where will you lead them next? Or send them, rather?'

There was laughter all around. Some surely must be at the very idea of a Sharai sheikh being wise or temperate, that was a known joke, but most of it was purely aimed at Bhisrat.

'Stay, Bhisrat,' Hasan said mildly from the fire. 'Let the boy fetch your people; he has your blade for his authority, they will follow him out of the trap they're in. Stay, and aid our councils here; we need wisdom, we must talk about the threats we face and how we're best to meet them.'

He had no choice; he stepped aside and let the boy slip smiling into the dark. But his voice would be wasted now, as his searching would have been before: every time Hasan mentioned wisdom, he knew, everyone who heard would remember the oathbreaker's jibe and discount Bhisrat as foolish and intemperate. If they had plotted that whole scene between them, they could not have played it better. Already Hasan was talking defensively about meeting threat, not about advance or assault, and already the sheikhs were listening.

And the boy was right, Bhisrat would lose more than the respect of other sheikhs by this nights work. The Saren too would be eyeing him askance, and less inclined to listen or to follow. Tribes had risen against their sheikhs before now, on lesser provocation; and that boy would provoke them mightily as he led them out of the labyrinth, he had the tongue and the knowledge to do it and to do it well.

Oh, they were clever - but there would still come that moment, a circle of bodies and a stretch of
sand, where the boy met Bhisrat’
s steel and choked on it. That would make much worthwhile.

In the meantime, Hasan was tipping the baking-stone towards the fire, brushing the golden dust of crushed stone into the flames like so much wasted flour. It was not such heavy work, but the strain of it showed; another man asked him why he did it.

'The djinni would not come, while even that dust lingered in the air.'

'Djinni? What djinni?' A hundred voices now, hushed by his gesture as they always had been.

'This,' he said; and, 'Esren
..
.'

The djinni came like a break in the darkness, like a fault in a rockface that showed the glitter of hidden wealth, unattainable wealth beneath. Bhisrat heard the rushing whisper on all sides,
where has he been, that he comes back with command over the djinn?

They were fools to be impressed, twice fools to trust him now. He had been with sorcerers, and there were too many spirits in this story; Bhisrat smelled the stink of betrayal in the air, and dared not say it against so many true believers.

'Esren, when Jemel comes out of the fields with the Saren lost, I want you to take him back to the palace.'

'He will not want to go.'

‘I
know that. Marron went with the Ransomers; this is his stubbornness, that he means to go with the Sharai. I mean him to go back, he causes nothing but division here. Tell him Marron will return shortly'

'The djinn do not lie, Hasan.'

‘I
hope that it will not be a lie.'

'Neither do the djinn hope. I cannot see what Marron means to do.'

'Well, tell him nothing, then — but take him anyway. Regardless of his protests. Lisan told you to obey me, not him. Take him away from here, and back to her.'

Ronan de Montclair had expected miracles and wonders

Hasan was speaking to the sheikhs now, speaking of 'ifrit, but Bhisrat would not listen. He had his own thoughts, his own suspicions; he would make his own plans, if he could on
ly find some men to follow him.
ever since he came to the Sanctuary Land, and had been sadly disappointed for more than twenty years already.

He'd learned to live with older men laughing at his fancies, and boys too, boys born in Outremer and wise within their world; before long, he'd learned to keep his dreams private even from his friends. He'd never learned to stop looking. The priests' teachings and the old legends both were burned into the bone of him. He knew that the God had walked this country and blessed it in His passing, and he believed also that there were spirits and demons here that his homeland had never seen. He watched trees and rocks and rivers, he prayed with his eyes on the stars, and - like his homeland - he had never yet seen a shad
ow not cast by the sun, a shim
mer not made by wind on water or a fire not struck from a flint. He had sat on his horse on a hilltop and seen what he thought was the gleam of sunlight on the domes of Ascariel, the God's own city; but he had never come closer than that far view, and even he couldn't read a distant glitter as even the promise of a charm. That had been when he was a youngster still, a squire in his lord's retinue. Now he held his
own land in his own name, directl
y from the Duke. It was what he had come for, but it had made a farmer of him, where he could have been a knight; he had earth under his fingernails and his feet had sprouted invisible roots, which his father might have called a miracle indeed but h
e would not. Married with chil
dren, twice tethered to his holding, he still prayed at all the proper hours and at other times too, when he was abroad in his fields; he still watched for strangeness, for any sign that creatures not mortal had visited his land; he still saw nothing but what he had always seen: the actions of light and weather, the flights of birds, no angels.

It was good land he was granted, fertile and well-watered. It should have gone to a man of better blood than his, but that it lay close to the road north and the northern border of the dukedom, that strange dislocation where lay the Folded Land.

He had never gone that far, either, not though the ride would promise a touch of magic at its end. Some wonders were accursed, and he would not willingly seek them out.

He could face them, though, if the need arose. When messengers rode wildly south from the borders guards, when a small and hasty army came marching north in response —
the way is open, Surayon lies where it always lay; to arms, to arms and march! —
he didn't hesitate to join it. All of Outremer might be vulnerable to the Princip's spellcasting; his own land was vulnerable to any evil that might have been breeding in darkness this thirty years, that might issue forth this night or any. The Church might call him, his liege lord might send him, but he rode for himself and his family, the land he held for his sons and their sons to come.

From the moment they crossed the border, he had expected to see sorceries levied against them, fiends and ghasts and foulness; all day and half the night, he had again been disappointed. He had seen houses, herds and crops, and he had seen them all laid waste. He had seen groves and orchards that reminded him of his childhood home, so much softer the climate seemed in this closed valley; he had seen men at the trees with axes and with fire. There were many years of wrath banked up behind those blades and torches, but he thought that wrath belonged to their masters, their lords and bishops; he thought that wrath unleashed them, but that it was fear that carried the men themselves in their hectic rush to hack and burn. Wrath licensed a destruction that fear compelled.

Nor was it only trees that suffered, or only crops and cattle. Those same axes had hewn at men; those same flames had burned women in their cottages, women and children too. Ronan had no wrath, but his own touch of fear survived; he had watched every death warily, only waiting to see the first strike of evil in response from the dead or dying. After so many years of watching the border road in anticipation of some demon-led invasion, he couldn't believe that these heretics and sorcerers would simply die as they did die, like farmers and families or any mortal folk, as though they had no spells to protect themselves any longer, no magic in the world.

And yet they had done that, they had died and died, and fought with little more than swords and courage first. There had been a few balls of fire flung, that had burned hotter and longer than an oil-flame ought; but he had been a soldier before he became a farmer, and he had seen such things before. If there were magic in these fireballs he couldn't distinguish it from the science of the artificers he'd served with, who could compound pitch, naphtha, sulphur and charcoal into a murderous firepot.

He told himself that he should feel no disappointment in that at least, that this quick-mustered army wasn't having to fight spells and demons on its way. It was hard to rejoice, though, as the priests demanded, where he felt little better than a bandit falling on ill-defended farms. He was a farmer himself now, and recognised the land-love that could set a man with a billhook against a troop of horse; he was married now with children, and recognised the protective terror that could throw man and then wife against a hedge of blades even where there was no hope of turning those blades from the babes they sought to shelter. A part of Ronan was disappointed that his captains had led him to this slaughter, and that he had followed. A smaller pan of him, little more than a whisper in the uttermost privacy of his skull, was disappointed that the Surayonnaise showed no vestige of their much-vaunted powers even in defence. Never mind his lifelong yearning to see signs and wonders, he would have welcomed the sight of women and children vanishing into a veil of mystic smoke, if only to save his having to see them trapped behind a curtain of fire, nothing but their voices rising free.

They'd made camp at sunset, on a low knoll that they could encircle with thorn and brush for a crude palisade. Ronan had tried to eat with the others, but had found fresh-killed meat too hard to swallow. And the fires too hot, too bright with faces and the crackling, snapping voices of the days dead calling to him, asking questions for which he no longer had an answer.

So he had walked away: had made his way past the guards at the cut-thorn hedge and out through the narrow wynd they'd left in case of need. With his back turned to fire and company, he'd walked far enough for folly, and further yet.

And stood now amid the tough grasses of the river's bank, gaping at what he'd been waiting twenty years to see, what he'd been ready for all day until this moment, what he had feared and dreaded and yearned for all at once.

He saw magic, he saw what was impossible, what he'd previously found only in tales that he'd barely more than half believed. It didn't seem so much really moment by moment, it wasn't half as portentous as he thought it ought to be; and yet the whole of it, the thing itself left him shaking, gasping, reduced to a child too stupid to feel terror in the face of what was wonderful and dreadful both together.

It started with a light against the dark, a warm bright glow he should have welcomed, except that it came from no source that he could guess at and burned nothing that he could see. It was just a light, a line of light like a rip in the fabric of the night, that spread wider like a door opening and spilling glory.

It was right in front of him, not ten running paces ahead; it lit all the grass between them, though none beyond, as though there truly were a door in a wall of dark and the light it spilled could fall only towards him.

Th
ere was, of course, a figure outl
ined in the light. There had to be.

A figure of dark it was: a shadow that grew sharper, that loomed larger, that came towards him like a demon rising from the depths, quite unhurried.

Ronan should perhaps have run, but he'd been told all his life that flight was no defence from evil, that wickedness had wings to outspeed a racing horse. This figure had no wings that he could see, and he had never run from men in any guise; courage or ignorance or both held him where he was. He might have cried out for help, he should certainly have prayed to the God to shield him from hellspawned creatures, but there was a weight on his tongue that might have been terror or might have been doubt, though it felt more like simple wonder, untouched by the world and its worries. "Whatever made it, it was heavy enough to hold him silent. His thoughts trembled on a hair, on a razor's edge, toppling between amazement and his long-familiar disappointment. Here was what he'd looked for all his life and what he most dreaded, both together and somehow quieter than he'd ever imagined, a man walking through a door and how could he kneel to that, how could he scream at it, only because the door to his eyes was not there? He'd always thought that magic would be huge and fiery, not cool and small and simple
...