The Right Hand of God (52 page)

Moreover, he knew the lie of the land far better than any of them. Did they think they had deceived him with this clumsy attempt to lure him towards Vulture's Craw? It was the only defensible place west of the Gap, and would suit his purposes admirably. Indeed, the Undying Man had once spent a year living in Aleinus Gates, acting as a river guide, studying the Gates and the country behind them. It had then been his thought to engineer this as the place of the final battle. His decision had been confirmed by what he had learned in the two following years, which he spent

in the far west shadowing an elusive prophecy he'd heard from a Dhaurian's dying lips. The blind Falthans believed they could spy out his land with impunity, and never for a moment thought that he might come to Faltha to learn what he needed to know. And since that time everything that happened was according to his plan.

Looking through the eyes of the eunuch, he smiled down at the face of the girl sleeping uneasily in her litter, and was content.

Once things were organised, the right people paid and other people intimidated or eliminated, it took a surprisingly short time for the City to fall into his hands. Yes, his hands, even though his would not be the hands everyone saw. The citizenry still thought the City governed by the collective of business leaders and worthies appointed by the northerners; but unknown to all but a few, the Guard and the warehouse owners took their orders from him. Soon two of the appointed leaders would suffer tragic accidents, allowing the Escaignian and the Mystic to step in. They, too, would follow his orders, though they did not know it yet, and thus he would control their followers.

The Arkhos of Nemohaim stretched languidly, eyeing the shivering figure in the corner of the well-furnished room. His old room, in fact; the symmetry pleased him. He pursed his lips.

Pleasure could wait. Clasping the vial in his left hand, still unable to use his right - curse the northerners! -he motioned his servants to prepare the blue fire. His old master would be surprised.

The snow lay heavy on Vulture's Craw, deep but frozen, and the Army of Faltha forced themselves a path, after a fashion.

There was no helping the fact this would make it easier for the following Bhrudwans. It had been nearly two months since the loss of the Nagorj. Their strength and conditioning had recovered somewhat, so now was the time to test themselves by an all-out sprint to the narrowest part of the steep-sided valley. They had no time to lay obstacles in the path of their pursuers. The weather offered them no assistance, for it was as settled now as it had been wild when last they had come this way.

Gradually the hills became familiar to Leith. Here is how far east we came on the southern path. The snow here was at its thickest, and occasionally the marchers came across sad reminders of the disaster a season ago: a discarded shield, the carcass of a horse, an abandoned wagon. Leith did not look too hard, so as not to see any frozen bodies, although he heard the talk. His men were unsettled, but he had no choice. This was where he had to be.

They pressed on, perhaps a day's march ahead of the Bhrudwan outriders.

There came a morning when the forward riders, including Leith and Sir Amasian, his ever-present shadow, passed under a high bluff, and the Loulean youth realised that under this cliff Sjenda and the wagoneers had perished. And around the corner the valley opened up a little, revealing the place where the Falthan army had recovered from the untimely snowstorm.

'We have one day,' he said to his generals. 'One day to prepare a defence. We will keep the Bhrudwans from passing this bluff. They must not enter the valley downriver.'

His mother Indrett stared at him. Of late she had been doing a great deal of that. The chief strategist she might be, but he was the Bearer of the Arrow. There could be no argument on this point, for Amasian had been quite specific.

This was the place he had seen. Leith glanced across the river, and noted the presence of a bluff that might have been the twin of that which they stood under. Yes, he thought, the image on the ceiling shining brightly in his mind. This is the place.

THE HUGE GORGE OF the Aleinus River narrowed until the winter sun could not penetrate, not unless it was directly overhead. And cloud-free, of course, the tall, grey-robed man thought as he stood at the head of his army. This place is never cloud'free. He remembered his days as a guide on this river, Faltha's artery of trade and commerce. Boats going east and west, traders making profit from Favony and Redana'a, bringing fish downriver from Turtu Donija and even further north, and sometimes illegal goods traded from the Wodrani: exotic powders or liquor. The shouting of boatsmen echoing from the cliff walls, all quiet now in winter. There were always clouds above the narrow-throated gorge, whipped up by the relentless winds or driven south from the Wodranian Mountains. The river sometimes seemed to breathe the clinging valley mist into existence, he recalled. There was a bluff some distance ahead which used to have every kind of moss growing on its sheer'sided walls.

It would be the place chosen by the Falthans to mount their final defence. The valley widened out downriver, and perhaps a day's ride west of the bluff a bridge crossed the Aleinus. They will not want us to get near the bridge. The valley is perhaps two hundred yards wide by Moss Bluff, and they will wall it off. Perhaps we should approach more slowly, to give them time to complete their construction. Or would that be too obvious? No: the Lord of Bhrudwo knew nothing could be too obvious for those who had charge of the Falthan army.

Not like Conal. That one was clever, cunning and patient. He laughed quietly. But over nine hundred and fifty years dead. Safe in the arms of oblivion...

. . . the huge figure shadowed against the sun. . . the indrawn gasp of the crowd in the Square of Rainbows .. . the swish of the arrow as it flew towards him .. . the thunk as it sliced through his wrist and lodged in the Rock of the Fountain. But above all the burning of the Water as it travelled down his throat! Aaah! The burning! The agony as it touched the place where the embers of the Gift of Fire still lodged, the agony that spread through every joint in his body...

. . . these had been his dreams for two thousand years. Two thousand years and never a moment of oblivion! Always the same dream! But the last two months had been different. He would have brought down the Citadel of the Most High himself, were it accessible to one who was not dead, for one dreamless night's sleep. But for two months! No price would have been too high to pay.

He glanced at the litter beside him and at the four plump figures that bore it. The person in the litter had been responsible. Just seeing the litter reminded him of the nightmares that had finally passed. It was difficult not to feel gratitude.

She had spat in his face, and he struck her an instinctive blow with all of his pent-up power and rage behind it, knocking her some way down the slope. It had been the blow, not the fall, that had almost killed her, but the fall had done further damage, if it was possible to further damage someone who was so close to death. In his fury he had taken her up to his own tent, intent on breathing some life back into her, if only to crush it out of her again, slowly.

But she had been a challenge he could not resist. Her life

' had been all but extinguished, the merest spark remaining

to taunt him, as a challenge to his limitless power. Could he draw her back from the arms of oblivion? Could he let her

escape so easily?

He tried everything he knew, reaching for vials and ointments he seldom used outside of Andratan's cruel confines, but the best of them merely kept death waiting at the door. Finally he had resorted to the most extreme measure of all. To his surprise, it had worked. The cost to her, however, would be enormous.

He had been there when she awakened; not through the eyes and ears of his foolish servant, but in the flesh. He sat there in the shadows of his own tent as she babbled and groaned, as she finally found the strength to run her hands over her numerous wounds, as she rose from the bed and saw herself in the mirror, as she saw what she had become.

Aaah, the screams had been worthy of Andratan. A soul that knew it was truly lost, that it was worse than dead, bound forever to one who would not die. The eunuch had warned her, for which he'd had his tongue cut from his pleading mouth, so she knew what had happened. She knew what he could now do to her.

But she suffered a greater agony still, about which none of his other unwilling servants knew.

Unlike them, she had

already acquired the Gift of Fire. And now, because of what he had done, she would know unremitting pain for the rest of her life.

The rest of? How could the unrelenting span of eternity be called 'the rest'? Soon she would know the truth of the Most High's curse of Life, just as he knew it.

Inside the litter Stella tensed. She could sense the Destroyer close by. Part of what he had done to her had tied them together, as though they were attached by some sort of cord. For the thousandth time she railed at her fate. Why didn't he let me die! How could anything I have done, including running from the Company, merit this punishment?

She had awoken from a sleeping nightmare to a waking horror. Skin broken, body twisted near to ruin all down her right side, it had been all she could do to walk the few steps from the bed to the mirror on the wall, where she beheld what had been done to her, the remaking of Stella in her new master's own dark image. The waxen face staring back at her drooped on one side, lips slack, grey skin hanging loose on her thin neck. Her right hand was a claw, fingers twisted in on themselves, unresponsive to her efforts at straightening them. Her insides seemed to boil as though they had been set afire. Several times since waking she had checked herself, fully expecting to see gouts of flame emerge from her arms and legs.

Over the weeks that followed, she pieced together what had been done to her. Some of the pieces were given to her by the Destroyer himself, who spoke of the lengths he had gone to in order to keep her alive. She had new gifts, he told her, as if he thought she would be grateful for the constant torture her life had become. 'You and I, we are the only ones in the world with both Gifts, Fire and Water,' he said to her. 'You know what that means, don't you?'

He had infused her with the water of the Fountain, for the drinking of which he was cursed by the Most High, driven out of Dona Mihst and rejected by the First Men. There was only one source for such an infusion.

His desperate remedy for her injuries had been to give her some of his own blood.

She felt him draw nearer, then the white curtain opened and the Undying Man entered the litter. She turned her hideous face on him and he laughed. 'Now, now, you have all the time in the world to become used to your new looks. Surely you cannot be vain, not after all that has happened to you? All I saved you from?'

No, not vain. 1 don't care how I look. I'm sick of being saved. Just let me go. Let me crawl off somewhere to die.

'Come with me, Jewel of the North, and watch the destruction of the Falthan army,' he said gaily, as though inviting her to an afternoon's picnicking.

'An invitation you issued months ago, but have not been able to deliver on yet. Can your powers be so limited?'

His eyes flashed momentarily, then a broad smile spread over his false features. She knew what was hidden beneath; she had seen it the day she was taken by the blue flame. The ancient features of a two-thousand-year-old man. She fixed those features in her mind, the better to take the sting from his jibes.

'Still putting up token resistance? You are just like your foolish Falthan friends. They resist long past the time they should sue for peace. What of you, Stella? When will you surrender?'

'Surrender?' She spat the word back in his face. 'Why must you have me surrender?'

The Lord of the Brownlands chose not to answer her, instead extending his hand and his coercion at the same time. She took his arm - not by choice, oh not by choice -and he guided her out into the daylight, where the Falthan sun broke through for a moment, sending a few weak rays of light to illuminate Falthan rocks and scraggly Falthan soil. Stella's heart nearly burst at the purity, the beauty of it. The world outside her litter was so glorious in comparison to the world within.

'Here is why,' he said to her, and extended his handless arm westward. From the slightly elevated vantage point the valley spread in front of them, framed by tall mountains. The River Aleinus ran past them to their left, hugging the southern cliffs: above it a narrow path had been cut into the rock. On it, Stella noted with a frisson of fear, marched company after company of Bhrudwan warriors.

'Bhrudwans are not clever enough to capture boats as they march, according to Falthan wisdom. They would not think of dividing their force and trapping their enemy in the very place he thinks he is strong. They think Bhrudwans are brutes, and so assume we will use brute force.' The Destroyer slammed a boot down on the stony ground. 'They will learn!'

In the distance lay the Falthan encampment. Activity raged all around the tents, Stella noted.

Small figures carried things here and there, while others dug trenches and still others built walls out of whatever they could find.

'I do not want to destroy them, not utterly,' the voice at her side continued. 'I do not wish to rule over a land empty of subjects. I have set myself the much more difficult task of convincing them to surrender.'

'Never!' the girl snarled through her ever-present pain. 'They will never surrender to you!'

'They will be just like you, is that it? They will hold out even though every breath is torture?'

He gazed on her, and for the first time allowed the full force of his power to pour through his eyes, binding her utterly, wiping the slate of her will clean of resistance. 'You surrendered to me a long time ago! You were mine the moment you saw me. It was confirmed when I tricked you into thinking you had escaped me. The only reason you continue to defy me with your lips is as a sop to your own pride. You are mine more completely than anyone else who has ever lived!