Wolfblade (70 page)

“Back, evil creatures of the night!” the Karien cried, brandishing his staff before him, desperately looking for a place to run to, but with two Harshini in front of him and the demons closing in behind, he had nowhere to go.

“Evil creatures of the
night?”
Brak repeated, with a wounded look. “How can we be evil creatures of the night, for the gods’ sake? It’s the middle of the afternoon!”

“Your sinister charms will not work on me!” The priest was sweating profusely and panting with fear. “I call on Xaphista to vanquish you!”

“Xaphista actually can’t hear you right now, old son,” Brak told the babbling priest with a deliberately evil leer. “Got a few gods on our side, too, you know.”

“There are no other gods!” the priest declared bravely. He lifted his staff even higher. “Wither and die, servants of evil. You cannot harm me!”

“Did Xaphista tell you that?” Brak asked, noticing that Wrayan had come up beside him and was advancing in step with him on the terrified priest. The Halfbreed was as tall as any Harshini. Wrayan was not much shorter. Dressed in their dark leathers, looming over the priest and with Wrayan bathed in blood from Brak’s kill, he supposed they really did look quite terrifying.

“No other gods, eh? Boy, are you in for a shock when you die.”

The priest fell almost as soon as Brak had spoken, Wrayan’s knife protruding from his right eye. The Halfbreed turned and stared at the young man in shock. He hadn’t expected him to learn
that
quickly. Wrayan couldn’t meet his gaze, though. Brak suspected the young human would have quite a bit to deal with later, once his blood cooled down. He stepped forward and kicked the priest’s staff clear, staring down at the dead man unsympathetically.

“How do we get rid of the bodies?” Wrayan asked in a surprisingly calm voice.

“The demons will take care of it.”

“
Those
two?” he asked sceptically, indicating Eyan and Elebran who had run past the fallen priest and were now standing on top of the body Wrayan had brought down earlier, squabbling over a shiny buckle they’d found on his belt.

Brak shook his head, smiling at the very idea. “Gods, no. I’ll get Elarnymire and the older demons to deal with them.”

“What about the staff? Can the demons take care of that, too?”

“No more than we can,” Brak replied, squatting down to examine it more closely. The staff was made of a black metal and, in the fading afternoon light, seemed to suck in all the illumination around it. The head of the staff was made of gold; shaped like a five-pointed star intersected by a lightning bolt crafted of silver. Each point of the star was set with a crystal and in the centre was a larger stone of the same crystal.

Brak studied it for a moment longer then looked up. “Zegarnald!”

The War God appeared almost immediately—noticeably larger than he had been the last time they’d spoken to him. The blood of seven Kariens had given him a much-needed boost after Kalianah’s Feast, which had drained him considerably.

“What can I do for you, evil creatures of the night?” the god asked, sounding rather amused, which Brak thought strange because Zegarnald had no sense of humour at all.

“You thought that was funny, I suppose.”

“As much as I care about anything being funny, I suppose it was.”

Brak stood up and pointed to the staff lying on the forest floor. “Can you get rid of that?”

The War God nodded and the staff vanished—gone to the gods alone knew where . . . quite literally.

“Thank you, Divine One.”

“Thank
you
, Brakandaran,” Zegarnald replied gravely. “As usual, despite how much you profess to dislike it, you are there when the Harshini need you most.”

“Which was more good luck this time than anything else,” Brak warned.

“The Primal Gods need to do something about Xaphista, Divine One. And soon.”

“We are considering it,” Zegarnald conceded.

“Well, consider faster. The Harshini may not survive you lot taking your time on this.”

Zegarnald didn’t answer the warning; he merely vanished, leaving the humans alone in the clearing with the squabbling demons. Brak turned to the young man, who was looking pale and rather ill under all that blood now he’d had a few moments to consider what he’d done.

“You all right?”

Wrayan nodded uncertainly. “I think so.”

Brak looked around the woods at the bodies lying there, dead because he had taken it upon himself to protect his people, no matter what.

Some things never seem to change
, he mused sadly. And then he clapped his hand on Wrayan’s shoulder and smiled wearily.

“Come on, Wrayan,” he said. “Don’t start whipping yourself. You did what you had to and the Harshini are safe.”

“I killed three men, Brak.”

“I know.”

“It was easy.”

“Sometimes it is.”

“Too easy.”

“Well, it seems you are an ‘evil creature of the night’, after all,” Brak reminded him with a faint smile, trying to divert the young man from where he knew he was going with this.

“Come on, there’s a stream up ahead. You can wash the blood off there.”

“Are you sure I was an apprentice magician, Brak? I might have been an assassin. A cold-blooded killer . . . you said yourself I couldn’t have learned to throw a knife like that if—”

“Stop it!” Brak commanded. “There’s no point in this. And if you don’t get it under control, every Harshini in Sanctuary is going to know what we’ve done here today. You need to worry about
that
more than the lives of seven men who were planning to bring about the total destruction of the Harshini.”

Wrayan nodded, accepting the wisdom of Brak’s advice. He kneeled down and pulled the knife from the priest’s eye and wiped it on the grass before handing it back to Brak. “Was it difficult for you? The first time?”

“The first men I ever killed were the bandits who murdered my father, Wrayan,” Brak told him, accepting the knife. “It wasn’t difficult at all.”

I
t was unthinkable that Laran would be laid to rest before Jeryma returned home, so the funeral was delayed long past the normal time for burial. Fortunately, the hot weather hadn’t set in yet, so it wasn’t really a problem, but Marla had ordered the embalmers to do what they could to preserve the body, in the hope that when they finally got around to interring Laran in the family vault the cadaver still bore some resemblance to him.

The delay meant that many people who would not normally have been able to make it this far north for a funeral were able to attend. That included the High Prince, the Warlords of Pentamor and Izcomdar and the Warlord of Dregian, Barnardo Eaglespike, along with his sorcerer wife, Alija. Jeryma arrived last of all, escorted by Chaine Tollin, his wife and his eight-year-old son, Terin. By then Marla’s grief was all but done. Her guilt, however, seemed to have a much longer shelf life. Laran was finally laid in the family vault almost six weeks after he was killed on the border.

Six weeks, Marla had discovered, was a lifetime in politics.

Some of her problems were easily fixed, and the first thing she did after the official mourning period was over—which was almost as soon as Laran was buried, as the customary duration was only a month—was to settle the issue of Sunrise Province, once and for all.

Laran had hung on to Sunrise by a thread, she knew, aided only by Chaine Tollin’s willingness to bide his time and the fact that Laran hadn’t instigated any new taxes or changes radical enough to cause the population to revolt. Elezaar was right. She couldn’t hold the province without a fight. Their province in the hands of a foreign Warlord was hard enough for the people of Sunrise to stomach. Their fate in the hands of a foreign Regent, however, when their true Warlord’s only remaining heir (unacknowledged bastard or not) was relegated to the role of Governor, would be intolerable.

Marla was aware that as Laran’s widow she had little real power, but she wielded considerably more as the mother of Hythria’s future High Prince.

Despite what others thought of Lernen’s lifestyle, he and Marla had always gotten along well. Lernen wanted as little trouble in his life as possible and Marla had been hardly a problem at all. She had grown up quietly at Highcastle, not made too big a fuss over that awkward business with Hablet, married Laran Krakenshield (a deal Lernen had profited from considerably) without complaint and then thoughtfully provided him with the heir he needed and had no inclination to produce himself. She was confident she could extract a few favours from her brother that would allow her to secure Damin’s inheritance as much as was possible in the volatile world of Hythrun politics.

Marla asked Chaine to take a turn around the gardens with her one morning several days after the funeral, deliberately steering him away from Kalianah’s grotto, where the memories of her tryst with Nash were still too raw to deal with. They wandered, instead, along the path near the outer wall, their footfalls silent on the rain-washed gravel. An overnight shower had rinsed from the trees the dust laid down during a long dry winter and the garden sparkled with the onset of summer.

“It was good of you and your family to come all this way for the funeral,” Marla told him as they strolled along.

“Laran was my friend as well as my Warlord, your highness. And I could not, in good conscience, allow Lady Jeryma to return to Krakandar without an escort.”

“Even though she despises you?”

“She despises what I represent, your highness. I think, given enough wine, she finds me tolerable enough personally.”

Marla smiled. She liked the fact that Chaine made no secret of his status as a bastard. And that, as yet, he hadn’t played on it. For his forbearance, Marla intended to see he was rewarded.

“Have you heard that Mahkas is to become Regent of Krakandar until Damin comes of age?”

“It was my understanding that he was to become Regent of Sunrise, too. Or are we soon to be absorbed into your province so comprehensively that we’ll be known as little more than Southern Krakandar?”

“Southern Krakandar,” she repeated thoughtfully. “That has a nice ring to it, Chaine. Now why didn’t I think of that?”

He smiled when he realised she was teasing him. “That’s
not
the fate you have in mind for Sunrise?”

“I
was
going to petition my brother to let you have it,” she told him. “But I really like the sound of
Southern
Krakandar.”

He stopped and stared at her in shock. “You’re going to just
give
me Sunrise Province?”

“Well, I was. But now you’ve given me this wonderful idea about Southern Krakandar . . .” She smiled at the expression on his face. “I think we
need to clear something up at the outset, Chaine Tollin. I don’t intend to
give
you anything. You’ll pay for the privilege, believe me.”

“And the price?”

“Two things. You will swear fealty to my House and promise to fight to the last man standing in Sunrise Province to see that Damin becomes the next High Prince of Hythria.”

“Suppose your son grows up to be an incompetent fool?”

“That will never happen,” she declared flatly. “I won’t allow it.”

Chaine smiled. “I believe you wouldn’t. And the second thing?”

“When Laran spoke to Hablet after Riika died, he negotiated a deal for three million rivets to pave the Widowmaker Pass at Winternest.”

“I know. We’ve had surveyors up in the pass all spring working on it.”

“I want a guarantee that all the building material used in the construction of the pass comes from Krakandar. I want my share of that three million.”

“I can get granite cheaper, and faster, from our local quarries. Even Elasapinc travertine would be less expensive than transporting red granite all the way from here, and arguably a better material for the job. And then there’s the other costs involved. The weight of the wagons alone would mean construction of new roads, new bridges and the gods know what else between here and Sunrise.”

Marla knew that, although it had been Elezaar who pointed it out to her. It was much of the reason she was making this demand. Ensuring Krakandar was a major trading partner in the Widowmaker Pass construction meant a great deal more to Damin’s province than selling a lot of red granite.

“That may be the case, Chaine, but think for a moment of what I’m giving up by surrendering your province and all the wealth that goes with it. Sunrise controls the only two navigable passes from Fardohnya into Hythria. This might cost you, but you certainly won’t starve from it. If you want Sunrise, that’s my price.”

He studied her for a moment, then shook his head in wonder. “If you don’t mind me saying so, your highness, you’ve changed a great deal since that morning we spoke in Highcastle.”

“The day you offered to be my friend?”

“You remember?”

“I never forget a kindness, Chaine. No matter how small.”

“And I appreciate the sentiment, truly I do, but can you deliver, your highness? Do you have the power to grant me this?”

“I believe I do.”