Path of Revenge (24 page)

Something was not right about this. Stella could feel a dreadful unease boiling in her immortal blood. A
presence
lurked in the storm, a knowing intelligence, enormous and inimical, and it was
searching.
In the back of her mind another presence, normally dull and quiescent, unfolded to full awareness.

Him.

Waiting for permission.

She vacillated for a fraught moment. There were no words between them, never had been; just a tenuous link through their shared blood. What was she being asked to give her assent to?

The thing, storm, whatever it was, bore straight for them, chewing up the swamp as it came. A depthless fear, far beyond any concern for her own death, lowered itself upon her. A howling hunger, a giant maw, gateway to an endless gullet in which waited…something terrible beyond imagining. The presence inside her head waited, patient but anxious, for her response.

Yes.

Something like lightning surged down from her head, along her arms, out from her fingers and up into the roaring darkness. She could feel it but not see it as it discharged from her. There was a great crack and thump, and a searing flash of light. The dark thing above her vanished, and the presence in her mind settled back to the edge of her awareness.

Utter silence fell on the swamp, save for Ma’s perpetual muttering. Then other things started falling, many things, crashing through the foliage some distance from the boat then splashing into the river somewhat nearer. The sounds stopped.

‘What was that?’ the priest, Conal, asked. ‘I’ve never heard anything like that.’

‘Sounded like a—’ the oldest Wodrani boy began, but was interrupted by a series of thumps and splashes all around them. On the deck, in the water, then falling on them were hundreds, thousands of solid objects.

Stella cried out with pain as something hit the back of her neck. She fell to the deck, her hands covering her head. ‘What is it? What is this?’ she screamed. The rain continued.

‘Kingfrogs!’ one of the boys shouted. ‘It’s raining kingfrogs!’

The things were enormous, at least a foot long, though with the splatter they made on the deck and the lack of light it was difficult to tell.

‘Get y’ ‘lowdecks!’ Ma bellowed. ‘Be more’m froggies next!’

Stella half-crawled, half-scrambled over a slimy deck to the hatch, suffering more painful blows to her back and legs. Behind her Robal waited patiently, hands above his head, until the hatchway cleared. He closed it behind him, then moved into the crowded cabin and held out his hand.

‘You were right, Ma,’ he said. ‘Flatfish.’

The thumping continued intermittently above them for a few minutes longer, slowly dying away into silence.

‘Ma says she’s seen this afore,’ the youngest boy explained. ‘On Espumere, not far fr’m here, ‘bout this time a year. Big whirlwind over the lake, she saw, then a rain o’ fish. Whirlwind sucks ‘em up and drops ‘em.’

‘I’ve never heard of it,’ said Robal, a nervous look on his face. ‘I know many who would consider such an event ominous.’

‘They would, were they not of the Koinobia,’ the priest said with a superior air. ‘The Kingdom of Hal will replace such superstition with fact.’

Despite herself, Stella rose to the bait. ‘And respect for others?’

‘Not if they’re wrong.’

She grimaced:
the priest has teeth.

The hatch opened and another of the Wodrani boys—the middle one, Philla—poked his bandaged head into the cabin.

‘Kingfrogs, catfish, swamp snakes, flatfish, pout and eel. Anything livin’ in the swamp now collected on th’ barge. All dead, all squished. Good eating, ‘cept for the frogs.’

Stella made a face as the lad’s brothers climbed up through the hatchway and into the night.

‘I don’t see how the frogs could be any worse than the flatfish,’ Robal said. ‘Everything we eat tastes of swamp. How much longer until we reach Vindicare?’

‘I have no idea,’ she replied. ‘Philla said it can take two or three weeks to navigate the Maremma.’

The burly guardsman put his head in his hands. ‘May Philla be proved wrong, if it please Hal,’ he groaned.

Philla was proved wrong, though Robal was not happy about it. Conal heard him say so many times every day. A full month after they had entered the Maremma the Wodrani barge finally emerged from the swamplands to make the relatively straightforward journey to Vindicare. The river ran lower than Ma, who had travelled the Aleinus for thirty years, had ever seen, making travel extremely hard work. Apart from that one freakish night of thunderstorms, whirlwinds and raining frogs, the days were relentlessly humid and rainless, the nights sultry and almost unbearable. The swamp seemed to dry up around them: large-leaved lilies browning around the edges, the multicoloured, delicate orchids withering, dead fish littering the stagnant pools cut off from their water source, and the Great River Aleinus shrivelling until the travellers could see her bones. And the stink! Rot and decay made the close, stale air of the tiny cabin infinitely preferable to spending time abovedecks, and no one looked forward to the two shifts of poling everyone was required to do daily. Only the cicadas seemed to thrive, if the racket they set up day and night was any guide. The heat was incredible.

‘Never seen weather like it, and I bin up ’n’ down the river fer twelve years,’ the oldest boy, Jarner, told them time and again. ‘Ma disremembers weather like it too, and she’s bin…’

Conal tuned the words out. He had a great deal to think about, having spent at least two hours every day poling the boat in the company of the Destroyer’s Consort. He asked questions, he listened to her answers, and gradually a story emerged worryingly different to Holy Writ. Not necessarily more favourable to the queen, surprisingly. The picture Stella painted of herself was of a self-absorbed girl, one with courage bordering on foolhardiness mixed with contempt for
her family and her village. So many details flatly contradicted the scrolls. ‘She sought to leave the village with them, looking for adventure and to seek her fortune, and none of the Company could stand against her will.’ So read the Second Scroll, line ninety-two. Not so, Stella said. She had thought the Mahnumsen brothers were dead, as did the rest of the village, killed by the Bhrudwan raiders along with their parents. After all, she had been to their funeral. Why would she have sought them out deliberately if she thought they were dead? No, she had stumbled across them and they had forced her to accompany them, fearing she would expose their plan to the village.

The young priest had no answer to this. The queen—Stella—could be deceiving him, but she sounded truthful to his ears. She told him of her attraction to Wira, the formidable young mountain man the Company met along the Westway; and, the way she described it, she had virtually thrown herself at him. Why would she have told him that, knowing it reflected badly on her later behaviour with Deorc, the Destroyer’s lieutenant, and the Destroyer himself, unless it was true? The truth of it counted against her, but her willingness to share it counted in her favour. So confusing. ‘And the girl, the snake among them, bided her time until she could snare a man of power through whom to rule.’ That from the Fourth Scroll, line two hundred and twelve. Again, close to the truth but inside out, Stella responded when he quoted this to her. She had wanted a man of significance, she told him, but only because she felt so insignificant herself.

It made sense, the way she told it.

Day after day of discussion, sometimes tense, often slow and fragmentary, as she made herself relive the events of seventy years ago, and still the story was but a third complete. He knew she intended to part
company with him at Vindicare, but he would think of some way to remain with her until her story was told.

She asked him about his own background. He would not tell her his big secret, of course; there was no knowing what she would make of it, but it was certain that if she found out about his own journey to Andratan her openness would end. Instead he told her of his upbringing, of his large family and elderly parents, of staying at home in Yosse to look after his ailing mother while his siblings found employment in far-flung parts of Faltha. Of the contentment he found in the Koinobia, particularly in the discipline and insight scholarship offered. Of the pride he felt when the Archpriest himself had sought him out. He told her of the day the holy man sat cross-legged on the flaxen floor of their house and asked him to serve the Koinobia as a Halite priest.

She was surprised and somewhat embarrassed when Conal told her that she, Stella Pellwen, had been his specialty. He had studied the Mahnumsen Scrolls and could recite them word for word. Had spoken to anyone he could find who had memories of that time and, though most of the Company were now dead, learned that people held memories at odds with the Writ. The senior clerics were pleased with his progress, and for the last three years he, Conal of Yosse, had been considered the foremost authority on the Destroyer’s Consort—‘begging your pardon,’ he hastily added. That was why, he supposed, the Archpriest had asked Conal to accompany him to the bedside of the dying King Leith.

The woman opposite him—the subject of a decade or more of his most careful research—was clearly uncomfortable with this knowledge. ‘You’re crazy,’ she’d said with her characteristic and strangely endearing bluntness. ‘How can such an obsession possibly be a healthy thing? And if you wanted to
find out what really happened, why did you not simply ask me?’

Conal had shaken his head. ‘It is not simple to ask her majesty anything,’ he had replied. ‘Even with the influence of the Koinobia and a letter written personally by the Archpriest himself I could not secure an interview with you. I was fobbed off with every manner of excuse.’

‘Oh,’ she’d said. ‘It was
you
with the letter. Well, I must apologise. I’m afraid your letter—more specifically, the hand it was written in—ensured you would never be granted an audience.’ She seemed genuinely sorry.

Conal found himself…Well, if he was honest, he found himself developing feelings for her. His studies and interviews had led him to expect a cold, scheming woman, haggard, crippled, full of bitterness and hate. Instead he had found a warm and sensitive person, clearly grieving for the loss of her husband and king. She treated him with respect, which was little short of astonishing given the way she was regarded by the Halites.

She was eighty-eight years old, for Hal’s sake, but it was impossible to remember this when talking with her. Her clear skin and fine-boned elfin features were those of a northern woman in her thirties, certainly no older, though a closer look revealed an old scar across her left cheek, starting from beside her eye and extending down to her neck, perhaps a burn of some kind. Interestingly, her right hand seemed not to function properly: at rest it made a claw. She seemed to have adapted to it, however. She certainly shirked none of her duties. Her hair, silver-edged a month ago, now appeared uniformly black: she must have previously dyed it to look older. Obviously she no longer had access to the dye. And there was something about her eyes, something knowing,
something patient, understanding. Day after day he looked into her dark eyes, weighing her words, and felt himself drawn towards her.

The young priest worried about this. He lay awake on those unbearably hot nights as the barge rocked gently against its mooring, trying to work out whether she had woven a glamour around him. Conal knew himself to be a lonely man, having devoted himself to the priesthood and to his scholarship. While Halites were encouraged to marry, he had never made the time; nor, frankly, had the opportunity ever presented itself. Oh, there had been a shy, plain girl in Yosse, serious and sensible, but her parents sent her away when they realised a priest without prospects courted her interest. So of course he was susceptible to the emotions encouraged by continued intimacy, and grew angry at the thought, the realistic thought, that he might be so desperate for affection he would fall in love with a woman older than his grandmother. So many contradictory thoughts: pleasure that such a famous, formidable figure might confide in him; respect for her courage; excitement at the gradual unfolding of her story; fear that she might be manipulating him for her own ends; apprehension at what the Archpriest would say about his escapades; and self-loathing in the face of his own wilful emotions. Sometimes he thought he could hear cruel laughter in the back of his head.
Please, Most High, don’t let me make a fool of myself.

But the queen was a perceptive woman, and Conal was afraid he already had.

‘WHAT DO YOU WANT WITH THE MAN, anyway?’ Robal said. ‘I don’t like him. Windy, opinionated, full of himself. He’ll cause you trouble, that he will.’

Stella sighed. Her guardsman grew more headstrong by the day as awe faded and responsibility increased. She needed a protector, a companion, not a father figure less than half her age. He ought to be set down, but how?

The two of them stood in the stern, Robal to starboard, Stella to port, using their long poles to push the barge forward against the current. They were positioned either side of Ma who had the tiller, and who never participated in their conversations nor gave any indication she understood them. The youngest Wodrani boy scurried about amidships, checking their cargo, shifting tradable items to more accessible locations and securing their own supplies, while the two older boys poled either side of the cabin. The river, now one wide channel, flowed somewhat more powerfully than in either the multi-channelled Maremma or the tidal range near Instruere, and even four polers earned them only grudging progress. Conal stood alone in the bow, most of his body hidden from Stella behind the cabin, though every now and again she caught sight of
his cloak whipping about in the rising southerly breeze. And ahead of them, visible to all even in the heat haze of late morning, Vindicare sprawled on the southern side of the river, to the right as they looked, like a drunkard sleeping off a bender.