Unholy War (8 page)

Zaqri stood and flowed into man-form. ‘Lady Huriya, I—’

‘Hush, dear Zaqri. I’m not going to kill her just yet. I merely have some questions for the
prisoner
.’ Huriya’s gnosis pierced Cym’s brain like a lance.

She couldn’t fight. It was like trying to hold back an avalanche with a blade of grass. She was dimly aware of falling to her knees, and someone big with warm hands holding her up. She tried to scream as all she’d gone through in the past six months or more was ripped from her mind with brutal, overwhelming power: from the discovery of the Scytale, her flight across Yuros, her capture by the barbarian Sfera tribesmen and rescue by Alaron, to the terrifying fight at the Isle of Glass. It felt like Huriya had taken a giant claw and reached inside her head to pull out whatever she wanted. Time and again the Keshi seeress came back to Alaron, searching for some kind of recent contact, but there was nothing to find.

When her vision cleared, she found herself in a small rocky dell, away from the pack: just her, and Huriya and Zaqri. Huriya had moved her and she’d not even been aware. Her skull throbbed from the intrusion, filling her with nausea. She rubbed her temples.

Huriya
tsked
in annoyance. ‘She doesn’t know where this Al’Rhon Mercer has gone.’

‘Please, Seeress,’ Zaqri said, his voice as low. ‘We need her memories to find him. This is an opportunity beyond dreams, and we must move carefully. The Inquisition also hunt this prize.’

Huriya’s face turned cunning. ‘Indeed. For now it must remain our secret.’

‘We should tell Wornu,’ Zaqri argued.

‘No. No others, not yet.’ Huriya turned and snapped at Cym, ‘Girl, I do not like being made a fool of.’ She eyed her speculatively, then looked back at Zaqri. ‘I would like to ensure her loyalty: by giving her Nasette’s choice.’

Zaqri pulled Cym behind him. ‘No. She can and will aid us without that. I take full responsibility.’

Cym wondered what they were talking about. It didn’t sound good, not if Zaqri was so adamantly against it. She felt a real surge of relief when Huriya pouted, but backed down.

‘I will hold you to that, packleader. She may keep her carpet for now, but she is your responsibility.’

*

Adamus Crozier used relay-staves to summon aid, but it was still a week until another windship pulled up alongside their drifting hulk and allowed the remaining Inquisitors of Dranid’s Fist to resume the chase. They didn’t bother with repairs, just set the abandoned craft on fire. As they sailed away it plummeted like a comet into the sea.

Malevorn joined his fellow survivors for the formal introduction to their rescuers. They were all in full dress uniform: over their armour their black and white tunics bore the Sacred Heart, and they carried dragon-helms under their arms. He knew the new Commandant’s name at least; Fronck Quintius’ clan was prominent in Pallas.

Another name was also familiar: a young Acolyte with distinctive duelling scars slashed across his right cheek. Malevorn himself had put them there when Artus Leblanc was fourteen. He’d been twelve.

Commandant Quintius continued the introductions. ‘Acolyte Artus Leblanc,’ he announced.

‘Brother Artus,’ Malevorn chorused with the others, staring into his eyes and seeing that he hadn’t been forgotten. Artus Leblanc glared balefully and stepped back into line.
I guess he hasn’t forgiven me either.

Duels between magi were illegal in Pallas, and doubly so amongst children, but Artus Leblanc’s persistent malice had become unbearable and in the end they’d gone at each other behind the stables, their carving knives hot with gnosis. The magic-burns had made the scars doubly bad; even with gnostic healing, Leblanc’s face had been marred for life.

After the introductions, Adamus Crozier went below with Quintius, leaving the Acolytes free to mingle. Artus made straight for Malevorn. ‘Andevarion. We meet again.’

‘What a treat,’ Malevorn drawled.

‘I’ll admit I’m surprised to see you. I thought you’d have given up and slit your wrists by now. Just like Daddy.’ Malevorn felt Raine’s warning hand on his forearm. Artus took in the gesture and ran his eyes over her. ‘Remind me, what’s this troll’s name again?’

Raine answered for herself, her voice calm.

Artus Leblanc curled his lip. ‘Caladryn? I don’t believe I know your family.’

‘And I don’t know yours,’ she retorted.

Artus snorted.
Everyone
knew the Leblancs. ‘I think you’re possibly the ugliest quim I’ve ever seen in uniform, Raine Caladryn. Are you of pig-farming stock? Did your mother climb into the pen one night?’

Malevorn grasped Leblanc’s collar and yanked him close. ‘You’ll retract that.’

Artus didn’t blink. ‘I can say what I like: “No brother or sister may raise a hand against another. Any insult must be borne.” So say the Scriptures. So you can go fuck yourself and your hog-faced whore too,
Brother
.’

Malevorn glared, knowing he was right: while politeness was expected, it certainly wasn’t enforced, but violence against a fellow Inquisitor was expressly forbidden. He shoved Leblanc away, pushing the edges of those rules. ‘See you in training, Artus. Perhaps we’ll use knives?’

Hands went to sword hilts, but Elath Dranid appeared and the Acolytes, eyeing each other warily, moved apart. Dranid was a legend in battle and still had rank, even in the depleted Eighteenth Fist. ‘Step away, Andevarion,’ he ordered.

Artus Leblanc went to talk to his colleagues at the far end of the windship. Malevorn stayed by Dranid, seething. ‘Where are we going?’ he asked eventually, once he was certain his voice would be steady.

‘Back to that cursed island. If the shifters are still there, we’ll destroy them. If not, we’ll seek clues.’ Dranid was ill at ease: though he’d been recently promoted to Fist Commandant of the Eighteenth, it obviously weighed uncomfortably on him. He hadn’t tried to deal as an equal with Quintius, Malevorn thought. He would have asserted himself, but Dranid was out of his depth in matters that couldn’t be dealt with using a blade.

It took another day to find the Isle of Glass, and when they arrived everything of value had been stolen, destroyed or thrown into the sea. Adamus was visibly disappointed, though unsurprised. He ordered the Acolytes to search for any bits of Dokken fur or feathers so they could resume the search; Brother Geoffram, the new Farseer from Quintius’ Fist, thought he could use Dokken traces to guide the pursuit. It was the only viable option they had left right now.

Hopefully they will lead us to Mercer and the Scytale. But I’ll be damned before I let Artus Leblanc lay hands on it
, Malevorn thought.

The Morals of the Ordo Costruo

Kazim fell asleep some time after midnight as Elena piloted the
Greyhawk
over a featureless plain somewhere northwest of their old lair. His last conscious sight was of mountains to his right, plains on the left. When the rising sun blazed through his eyelids, he woke to find himself surrounded by red rocks, carved by millennia of sun and wind and rain into strange shapes, like clay moulded by a blind sculptor. He stared at them for a few bleary seconds until he realised that they weren’t moving, that they had landed. He glanced back at her, his mouth forming the question.

‘Yes, we’ve arrived,’ Elena told him cheerily, baring her teeth and crinkling up her eyes. Her hair was tied against the wind. It was gleaming blonde from days in the sun practising combat and gnosis together in the monastery. It had felt like an idle pursuit then, training for the sake of excellence or personal enlightenment, like the original Zain monastics who’d built the place. Now they were going to war for real.

‘Where are we?’ he asked blearily, looking around. They were in a little hollow, sheltering below a rock wall that had been split aeons ago by a dried-up river. A goat-path jinked away out of sight above the banks. The air was cool and hazy. ‘Is this the place we discussed?’

‘It is. We hit the northern road from Brochena to Hytel during the night, and I’ve been following it until an hour ago.’

‘I don’t know Javon at all,’ he confessed.

‘I’ll draw you a map. I’ve brought a little parchment and ink.’ She looked at him steadily. ‘Are you ready for this, Kazim? We’re going to war.’

‘You know I can fight,’ he said soberly.

‘Of course! You’re the best young swordsman I’ve ever seen. But this won’t feel like fighting. We’ll be killing with the gnosis – most of those we face won’t stand a chance.’

He flinched at that. Using the gnosis against ordinary men felt somehow wrong,
unsporting
. He knew he shouldn’t be thinking like that but he couldn’t help himself. He’d played too many kalikiti games in Aruna Nagar; fairness
mattered
.

‘I can kill,’ he said quietly. He’d proven that too. ‘I can do what you require.’
Because it is
you
who requires it.
‘This is the holy war,’ he added.

‘War is never holy.’ She looked away, exhaled heavily. ‘Come, we need to hide the skiff and get settled in before dark.’ She gestured towards the crack in the rock face. ‘Through there. Sorry, it’s not as nice as the monastery.’

They dragged the skiff up the dried riverbed and draped it in its dun-coloured sails before throwing sand over the top so that it would be invisible from the air. Then they hefted their packs and entered the narrow defile. It twisted and turned for a hundred yards, until they reached a flat area with a little three-sided mudbrick building, barely twelve paces square, at the centre. It looked deserted.

‘It’s a shepherd’s hut,’ Elena said, shrugging off her pack. Sweat clung to her back and Kazim saw the bloodstains had run; they’d had no chance to wash after the battle at the monastery. ‘I set it up as an alternative bolt-hole two years ago. There’s some equipment buried nearby. The river fills for three months or so after monsoon, but there’s a cave further upstream with a pool. The shepherd only uses the hut at midsummer, so we’re safe until Junesse, should we need to stay that long.’

He put down his pack and looked around: no windows, but a recess in the wall for a cooking fire with a smoke outlet in the roof above. The floor was filthy with dried dung, dirt and dead insects. There was a blackened metal tripod holding a battered pot, a bucket, a wooden bowl and a couple of spoons on the hearth, and a wooden bed-frame. Nothing else.

‘I guess I’ll fit, but where will you be?’

Elena chuckled. ‘We’ll make it work. We’ve got a cot, a fireplace and a cooking pot, and I’ve got stores buried behind the hut. There’s water in the next cave, about a hundred yards upstream.’

It didn’t take them long to get set up. Elena drove a family of cobras from their lair behind the hut, killed them with mage-bolts and gutted them so they’d be ready to roast, while Kazim used Air-gnosis to scour the hut of loose debris. Then he took the bucket to find the water cave Elena had mentioned. He found jackals lurking there, but a quick blast of Fire-gnosis was all it took to drive them off. The cave wasn’t deep, more like a deep overhang, but it sloped inwards to a pool that looked to be fed by a slow drip from the walls. The level was not high enough now to reach the narrow race into the riverbed, but from the way the rock was worn, Kazim guessed it would overflow in the rainy season and almost fill the gully. He lowered his bucket into the water, which was pleasantly cool.

He took it back, and while Elena washed the floor he dug up the stores. He found rice, lentils, nuts and chickpeas wrapped in greased canvas bags, and cured meat and dried fruits too, as well as various spices. Exploring further, he found a good pile of dried dung cakes stored behind a narrow cleft which the shepherd evidently used as a pen for his flock.

Finally, Elena showed him her watch-point, a place above the pool-cave that offered views over all the possible approaches. The day was beginning to heat up and in the distance the land shimmered.

‘I’m going to go and wash,’ she announced, her voice still husky from an old throat wound. She complained that she hardly knew her own voice, but to Kazim it was just the way she sounded and he couldn’t imagine her sounding any other way. ‘I’ve been dreaming of just being clean again,’ she added.

Kazim understood just how soiled she must feel – and he knew she wasn’t just talking about blood and sweat. She’d not had the chance to wash since she’d been almost raped by Gatoz, the fanatical Hadishah captain. And they had not yet even talked about that.

‘Elena,’ he said awkwardly, ‘what Gatoz was going to do … you must believe me when I say there is nothing in the
Kalistham
that justifies that. He was wrong and evil – please do not judge all Amteh by one man.’

‘Kaz, I’ve met men like Gatoz before – most of them Kore-worshippers, actually. Not surprising, I guess, as I’ve lived most of my life in Yuros. No religion has the monopoly on evil or good.’ She shuddered a little. ‘I’ve survived worse. But thank you for arriving on time. What he was going to do … I’ll never forget how much I owe you.’

He bowed his head, a lump in his throat because he didn’t know how to have someone feel indebted to him. He owed her too, in ways he couldn’t express. So he changed the subject. ‘Can we both drink and bathe in the pool?’

She understood, and also let the subject go.

‘I’m a Water-mage: I’ll purify our water before drinking.’ She flashed him a wan smile. ‘Your turn after me.’

She returned almost an hour later, hair tied up and her damp clothes clinging to her. She smiled as he passed her and climbed to the cave. He too was relieved to finally remove the days of sweat, grime and blood from his skin. It was blissful, to enter the cool water and feel it soak into him. He floated on his back and closed his eyes, just as he used to do when bathing in the Imuna River at Baranasi, seeking peace amidst the clamour of ten thousand Lakh praying and washing and laundering all round him. He felt human again: his gnosis fully replenished after all the killing at the monastery, erasing the gnawing hunger he felt when it was low. He felt at peace …
almost
…

*

Elena brought the rice to the boil and added some of the cured meat and the last of their greens. Her time in Brochena and Forensa as Royal Protector to the Nesti family, when all her meals had been prepared for her and she had been waited on hand and foot, felt like another life. She glanced up to see Kazim walking back from the pool-cave, his wet clothing clinging to his damp skin, and her throat went dry.

For four months they’d been living and training together, trying to find a way through all the cultural and religious barriers that divided them: Yurosian and Ahmedhassan; skin colour; religion; Crusade and shihad; mage and Souldrinker; youth and age; man and woman … She could not imagine two more opposite people, and yet here they were. They’d argued, sulked, fought, laughed and cried. They’d found compromises when others might have come to real blows; they’d worked out what mattered to them both and what they could work round. They’d found a cause they could both believe in. They’d saved each other’s lives. But every day still brought new challenges.

Think of all the common ground
, she reminded herself.
I speak his tongue. And we’re both warriors. We understand the language of blades. We have a cause, to free Javon from the invaders. We have common enemies.

She admired his smooth, powerful gait. With the hunger of his condition currently abated, his aura was quiescent, almost normal; if you didn’t know what to look for you wouldn’t know he was a Souldrinker.

Damn Nasette and her rukking transformation.

He put his back against the hut and sat, facing her, his gaze direct and straightforward. It was one of the many traits she liked in him. Not to mention looking like an eastern demi-god and having an honest heart. He might be no courtier – he had neither sophistication nor a Western education – but he was smart. And too young for her, really …

But since when has any lover of mine been perfect?

Lover.

That was the crux of it. He wanted her, and she wanted him.

Damn Nasette to Hel.

‘What are we going to do?’ he asked.

It could have been a question about their next move, or their long-term goals, but it wasn’t.

‘Nasette was wounded when the two Dokken shifters captured her,’ she said. ‘That could have been the source of the infection, if it was an infection that made her change. Alternatively, one of them got her with child – if a human woman becomes pregnant to a high-blooded mage she can develop the gnosis, so it’s not unreasonable to think that being impregnated by a Dokken could have altered her gnostic abilities. It might have been a temporary thing, but she was put to death so we’ll never know.’
Poor cow. What kind of father butchers his own daughter?
‘Or there might have been some other factor at play. We just don’t know.’

He listened to her quietly, then pointed at the cot. ‘That’s too small for me. I can sleep outside.’ His voice had an adult maturity that showed the type of man he was becoming.

She shook her head, shuffled closer to him, threw a leg over his hip and straddled him. He went utterly still, as if afraid that if he reacted, she’d stop. She cradled his head and whispered, ‘Here’s what I think. The wound is a red herring—’ She stopped, then said with a snigger, ‘Pardon the pun.’

‘What has a red fish to do with anything?’ Tentatively, he put his arms about her. She felt her skin flush and her breath quicken.

‘Nothing. Forget the herring.’ She laughed nervously, feeling like a young woman again, the girl she had been before the Noros Revolt, before she’d met Gurvon Gyle. She had almost forgotten that girl: earnest, determined, straightforward, all innocent single-mindedness. That girl was a lot like the young man in her arms. ‘I think the pregnancy caused Nasette to alter. So I think we just need to be careful.’

‘You are willing to risk it?’

She nodded.

‘Why?’

‘Because I want you too much not to.’

She kissed him as he opened his mouth to reply. He hesitated an instant, then responded, his mouth equally hungry for hers. Long minutes vanished as they clung to each other, tasting each other, nipping at lips, flicking with tongues, then his lips slipped to her neck and his hands slid inside her shift and up the silken skin of her back.

She murmured encouragement, all the while kneading his shoulders, feeling the strength in his solid muscles. Then it was too much and she raised her arms over her head and whispered in his ear, ‘Pull it off.’

He pulled her shift over her head, then put his mouth to her left nipple and began to suckle it, hard, drawing a moan from her lips as she held him there, arching against him.

Only once did the ugliness of Gatoz and his threats intrude, a brief flash that she pushed aside. Done was done, and there was no point in dwelling on it. If there was one thing her career in the shadows had taught her, it was how to forget. Life was always renewing itself: that was its lesson. She let the pure physical pleasure of his touch lick her soul clean, then murmured, ‘Let’s try out that cot anyway, shall we?’

*

Kazim undressed, and then she let him pull her leggings off. The afternoon sun was brilliant outside, but inside the tiny shepherd’s rick, there was shade enough to make it a haven. All he could see was Elena as she lowered herself onto her back and pulled him down onto her. Her hair shone palely as he stopped, poised above her, then he had to catch his breath as she grasped his shaft and pulled him towards her. She lifted her face to meet his and his mouth locked on hers. She tasted salty, as if she’d been drinking tears, and her lips moved as she sighed. His hand found her breast and he cupped it, his fingers stroking the nipple into a hard little nub while he pushed into her wetness, into her warmth. Memories of Ramita flashed momentarily before him, then they were swept away by the here and now as Elena gasped and made a sobbing sound as he thrust into her. Her hands gripped his buttocks as he found his rhythm,
in-in-in
, and the heat inside him rushed to his loins and suddenly all control was gone, borne away on the tumult that flooded through his lingam and into her yoni. A moan burst from his throat and he found himself sobbing tearlessly into the soft triangle of her neck.