The Stealers' War (16 page)

Carter felt anger at the old man’s insinuation. ‘We are not insects.’

‘To the stealers that is precisely what you are. Worse, perhaps. A plague without end. They regard themselves as your cure.’

‘And are we any more than ants to you?’ said Willow. ‘The way you talk about us.’

‘There once was a colony of red ants that lived in the lush green grasslands of Hirundo,’ said Sariel, by way of an explanation. ‘These ants were regularly preyed on by wasps. The wasps flew down on to the worker ants and paralyzed victims before flying back to their nest to devour the helpless ants. The ants begged their queen for help and so she sent a vast force of soldiers to protect the workers. But the wasps attacked again and paralyzed the column of soldier ants, carrying them away to the nest for supper too. The workers despaired, fearing even to leave the ant hill to gather food. They grew hungry and weak and desperate. Quarrelling with each other and sensing the end of their age. Then one day a female barn swallow took up residence in the woods nearby, and by the next morning, every wasp had simply disappeared. It was a miracle! The worker ants rejoiced. Some ants said they should crown this barn swallow their new queen. Others said the bird was the Supreme Goddess of Red Ants in disguise and required worship. To settle the mystery of the miracle, the ants set out for the barn swallow’s tree. When they reached the bottom of the tree trunk, they yelled upwards, offering thanks and bribes and devotions and begging to know what the barn swallow truly was. Do you know what answer the bird gave to the crimson sea of creatures below?’

Carter shook his head.

‘The barn swallow spat out a half-digested wasp into the grass and called down, “Not hungry in the slightest anymore.” My people oppose the stealers,’ said Sariel. ‘That fact alone should be enough for you.’

‘You’re not telling us the complete truth,’ accused Willow.

‘Oh, but everything you hear from my lips is only a perspective, never completely the truth,’ said Sariel. ‘And thanks to your fine young gentleman here, my mind is now filled with a world of competing perspectives. Memories have been returning to me ever since I departed Vandia. My kind’s place in the world and the enemy’s. I was one of a group of seven sent to thwart the stealers. The party was the last hope of my kind, the final toss of the dice. In many ways, the war we wage against the stealers is already lost. Unfortunately, my party was ambushed by the enemy when we emerged through a portal. I survived, greatly reduced and humbled. Much like the stealers, we ethreaal are very hard to destroy completely. But we can be shattered and wiped of purpose and history. Such was my state when first we met in your library guild hold outside Northhaven, Carter Carnehan. Confused. Lost. Clinging to the broken shards of my purpose on Pellas.’

‘My dreams, the nightmares,’ said Carter. ‘They always belonged to you.’

‘Yes,’ said Sariel. ‘What you discovered below the stratovolcano was an ancient centre of my people. Concealed by magma and poison gas where unwelcome visitors are unlikely to venture. The refuge sensed my touch upon you and realized that I was wandering across Pellas broken. The refuge took you in and altered your body . . . used your mind as a vessel to store what I needed to remember myself again. The refuge was fairly direct in its work. Some might say brutal. But then it is a simple machine with little experience of the subtleties of humanity. Then it released you, trusting that we might meet again. You are more than a simple creature of Pellas, now, Carter Carnehan. You have been remade as a key. And I require you to unlock the other survivors of my expedition. Restore them back to themselves. We need to complete our work before the stealers settle their schemes.’

‘What work?’ asked Carter.

‘We carried with us something we called the great weapon,’ said Sariel. ‘It is the only thing that will stop the stealers and their evil. I need to gather my people to use it.’

‘Why do I get the feeling that there is little great about this weapon?’ said Willow.

‘The stealers will not be stopped by blade and bullet. If we fail, then none of what happens in Rodal or Weyland or even Vandia will matter much. There will be no more histories to record the passions of your age. Instead, your people will be extinct and Pellas will know endless cold and darkness.’ Sariel reached out kindly towards Willow, although Carter noticed she shivered at his touch. ‘That is why I can no longer simply open a gate to some far-called nation millions of miles from Weyland and squirrel you and Carter safely away at the far-called ends of Pellas. It would please me to see you both out of harm’s way. But it would be an utter waste of time. Darkness is descending. There are not leagues enough in the world to out-distance our final conflict. Only two choices remain. Fight and win. Or lose and perish.’

‘So that’s it, then?’ said Willow. ‘You’re going to take Carter and disappear through one of your cursed gates?’

‘Not quite. We need to avoid using the standing stones except in dire emergency or to travel distances that are impractical by other means. And for good reason. Every time I activate a portal, the enemy knows exactly where I have travelled and destroys the gate to put it beyond use. I may as well light a signal fire telling the stealers where to hunt for me. It is no coincidence that the Vandian expeditionary force arrived to help King Marcus after I used a portal inside Weyland to return here. I have arranged for the female skyguard officer who flew you to Hadra-Hareer to be freed. She will fly us into the steppes and when the fuel runs out, we will walk the rest of the way.’

‘Vandia came seeking revenge for the slave revolt,’ said Carter. ‘Not you.’

‘The Imperium is complex enough to have more than one motive for what it does. Emperor Jaelis is heavily under the influence of the stealers,’ said Sariel. ‘He suffers from a sickness of the mind similar to dementia. That is often a sign that the stealers are swaying the emperor’s decisions more directly than offering simple advice. Jaelis’s mind is being eaten away like a rotten apple. An unpleasant end, it must be said, to a particularly unpleasant and violent brute.’

A sudden worry struck Carter. He rubbed his throbbing forehead. ‘And what about my mind?’
Am I going mad?

‘You are only suffering from tension-induced hypochondria, Lord Carnehan,’ said Sariel. ‘Most of a human mind lies still and vacant. Empty corridors. Yours is merely being used to store a few crates that belong to my people.’

‘I thought I was going insane on the sky mines!’ snapped Carter.

‘Oh, but that’s because you were,’ smiled Sariel. ‘When we met in Vandia and you passed me all that was mine, I was very careful to erect a more appropriate wall between the trove of knowledge inside your mind and what you might call your soul. That which makes you,
you
. You will not go mad now. And neither will you become a senile, half-crazed paranoid like Emperor Jaelis.’

‘I’m having your dreams again,’ said Carter. ‘Memories that aren’t mine. Things I can’t even credit as possible.’

‘A little leakage is only to be expected. But nothing like you experienced before, am I correct? As I said, you have been remade as a key . . . the key to all of our survival. And a rusty key could very well snap in the lock. Hence such enhancements as I made to your mind. Your safety is of paramount importance to me.’ Sariel smiled at Willow. ‘You may trust that, Miss Landor, even if you trust little else of what I say.’ Carter heard what the old man whispered to Willow before he departed the chamber. ‘Seek out the deepest quarters in Hadra-Hareer. Quicksilver means to break a king and an empire both on those crags outside.’

‘I’m not sure who’s the craziest here,’ said Willow, taking Carter’s hand and squeezing it as hard as though she was dangling from one of Rodal’s crags. ‘Your father, that devil, you for following him, or me for allowing myself to be abandoned here.’

‘You’re resting here,’ said Carter. ‘And I’ll return.’

‘Make sure you do,’ said Willow. ‘Because without you . . .’

Carter and Willow held each other, clinging tight, attempting to make the moment last forever. Carter felt Willow’s warmth seeping into his. Another memory for him to travel with. A memory that even the god-like stealers and ethreaal and their strange ancient conflict couldn’t impinge on. ‘That’s why I’m coming back.’

‘I don’t trust Sariel,’ said Willow. ‘I know he helped save us from the sky mines and kept your father alive on their voyage to Vandia, but I don’t trust him. Not his mad grand conflict or his intentions or his tall tales. He’s using you and the rest of us. We’re the ants in his story; you know that, don’t you? And a hungry swallow can peck apart an ant hill as easily as a wasps’ nest.’

Carter tried to summon a reassuring smile. He worried it might have come out as a grimace.
We’re caught between rival storms with no choice but to ride them out.
He prayed with every iota of his being that Rodal and the Walls of the World proved strong enough to keep Willow safe.

Alexamir Arinnbold did not question Temmell’s need for a copy of the Rodalian’s holy ledger of the winds. He was a wizard. Sorcerers, like gods and goddesses, often asked for the strangest of gifts, Alexamir understood that from his people’s legends. Had Borty the Bladehearted demanded a precise accounting from Isal of the Plains when the god rode down from heaven on a chariot drawn by twelve flaming steeds?
So, you’ll make me king, will you? But first, why exactly do you need the cloak of the Demon Scarbo? If there’s no good reason for you to have it, you can stick your kingship up your arse and whistle for your cloak. I won’t be stealing it.
Alexamir snorted. It was enough that Temmell had promised to make the gift of Cassandra’s healing permanent. Alexamir was being carried deep into Rodal in one of Temmell’s wooden pigeons, a small two-man flying wing flown by the clans’ most proficient pilot, an old warrior called Zald Mirok. Zald was calm and unflappable, a great horseman in his day, so it was said. But that day had passed long ago. Zald might not be able to ride for two days and nights and win a battle at the other end, but his experience and cold nerve made him the top pilot among the nomads. Admittedly, that was a very small pool to begin with. Temmell’s chosen men had been trained by the aerial equivalent of sell-swords; thin, distrusting pilots from the countries east of Hellin who had, they’d claimed, served on the great aerial carriers which crisscrossed the skies, never landing, always moving. Not skyguards like those they must face among the rice-eaters. But mercenaries who had flown the shuttle planes trading between grass and sky. And the mercenaries had been right to be distrustful. After the initial cadre of nomads’ training was completed, the foreigners had been stabbed to death in their beds on Temmell’s orders, their bodies fed to the camps’ swine. They wouldn’t be complaining of training blue-arsed savages in the art of the sky-saddle in any tavern within a thousand miles of the Lanca; not unless they were carousing those taverns in hell.

At first, Alexamir had been insulted that he wasn’t trusted to fly himself into Rodal. But when he heard the proposed route, he was silently glad that honour had been denied him on the wizard’s orders. It had been easy flying at first, a straight route over the steppes, landing at marked hills where wagons waited with wooden kegs of fuel. After the plains lay behind them, Zald had carried them into Rodal zig-zagging wildly through the Mask Heights. So-called because the rice-eaters who clung to those peaks survived with tanks of air inside their mountainside huts, never seen without strange leather breathing apparatus. It was the least populated part of the mountains. The peaks bore the additional advantage of rising so high that the mountains broke every storm, redirecting them north or south on to the lower ranges. The Mask Heights were, literally, above the weather. So high that raiders from the north couldn’t hope to scale them on foot. What need, then, to set Rodal’s skyguard to patrol the Mask Heights?
A decision they will soon come to regret
.

Alexamir and Zald drifted in at night, their wooden pigeon painted as black as a bat, following the mountain streams down to where they merged into a mighty flow feeding the Yarl River further south-east. Zald landed them in a mudflat between the river and an alpine forest. Then the two interlopers had dragged the wooden pigeon into a small glade, little more than a good-sized circle of wet meadow, covering it with the same green netting which concealed the clans’ aircraft on the steppes. Alexamir gazed into a rock pool alongside the river, watching a strange Rodalian face gaze back at him, features twisted and soft, the skin leeched pale of his proud blue tone. His own face, but as he might have looked if he had been born a miserable rice-eater rather than a free rider.
The glamour is so strong; I look like a rice-eater even to myself !
No wonder Zald had complained how uncomfortable he felt flying his enchanted brother into Rodal, oblivious to the high honour of bearing the Prince of Thieves within his craft. Alexamir was torn between hoping that the infiltration spell would last long enough for his adventures inside the capital, worry that the glamour might misfire leaving him looking like this forever, and fervent prayers that it would wear off before he returned to the steppes – lest one of his people stick a dagger in his side or confused him for a thrall for the taking. He left Zald in the forest setting snares for rabbits, surrounded by silvery white birch, as cold and ugly as raven-picked bones. Some of the trees were left bent at odd angles from the last storm. Forests here had that trick, Temmell had warned him. Roots able to flex and reorient without losing their trunks to a gale.
Sneaky trees. Whole forests of ugly sneaky trees
. He hoped the trees weren’t an omen for his coming theft. The existence of the clans’ new wooden pigeons was a secret so priceless that the risk of the plane’s discovery spoke volumes for the value of Alexamir’s booty. Temmell had tutored Alexamir in the mores and manners of the Rodalians. Long, hard and gruelling had been the thief ’s training, and the sorcerer’s final advice – for Alexamir to keep his mouth shut as much as possible – was hardly a vote of confidence in his ability to pass as one of the mountain people.
The gods must favour me, surely? Otherwise, they would not have given me the Golden Fox. But they broke her after their gift. Was that to humble me? Or prove me worthy by taking on this task for Temmell? On my success lies the future of the clans, or so he says. No rider is ever given a horse he cannot master. What better task for the most talented thief to live for a thousand years? And where stealth will not serve, I have a dagger hungry for my enemies’ hearts
.