Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 Read online

  It would be useful, obviously, to know where she was. She could work that out even in the dark. She knew more than the history of the Sanctuary Land, thanks to her father's training, although she'd barely seen its northern borders. She'd gleaned clues enough, from the glimpses she'd had in the courtyard and her brief exploration of this cell; she thought now that she could touch a finger to a map and say with confidence, 'This is where I am.'

  All that she'd seen - the high walls with their battlements, the blunt square design of the doorway here, the way the door itself was made - all of that was her own people s work, no question. The Catari did not build in such a fashion; the Sharai did not build at all. This was a Patric castle, then; and yet it was in the desert still, by all the blown sand in the court, not in Outremer proper. And it had been deserted, abandoned, some time since. She could think of only one place that answered such description; and that lay west of Rhabat and still east of the border, and perhaps she should have thought of it before.

  "When the Sanctuary Land was won again for the God, the Ekhed who had been rulers there were driven out entirely. The settled Catari by and large accepted their new Patric overlords, finding them little harsher and in some cases kinder than what had gone before, or so Julianne s father had told her; their wild nomadic cousins the Sharai could be held back in the deep desert, on the far side of the mountain ridge that made a natural eastern border for the Kingdom. Raiding-parties were commonplace, from both sides, but a fragile and unofficial truce developed quickly, supported by both trade links and diplomacy.

  Except that there was one ancient settlement only a short distance to the east of the mountains, from where there was swift and easy access to the valley principality of Surayon, and from there to all of Outremer. The lords of the Kingdom were reluctant to leave it in the hands of the Sharai; they sent a force to seize it. The Sharai tribe that claimed that land tried to retake it time and again, was beaten back time and again. The Patrics built a castle; the sheikhs, united at last — the place had religious importance to them, as well as trading wealth — sent an army to lay siege. The Patrics were starved out and surrendered, returning to Outremer under safe conduct; the Sharai occupied the castle until the Duke of Ascariel led his own men back to retake it.

  And so it had gone on, turn and turn about, until Surayon vanished within the mystery of its Folding. Now the castle was more isolated than before and men of the Kingdom more unhappy within its walls, seeing enemies on all sides and malign magic at their backs. Given the rumours of collusion between Surayon and the Sharai, the nobles were doubly reluctant to lose their outpost, but they found it ever harder to garrison. The King would say nothing about it; at length they sent their own emissaries to Rhabat, and made a formal truce with the sheikhs. The settlement should live as it had since time immemorial, a place of prayer and trade; the Sharai would not occupy it, and neither would the Patrics. The castle would stand empty, as a sign of good faith from both parties.

  And so it had, so far as Julianne knew — until now, at least. This must be that castle; there was no other.

  It was called Revanchard, a name that raised doubt and suspicion throughout the Kingdom: who knew, who could say what evil the sorcerers of Surayon might not be working there, or their cohorts the devilish Sharai?

  Julianne knew, Julianne could say. Nothing, and nothing. There was only dust and rubble and emptiness, and now a girl, a fanatic and an 'ifrit.

  It seemed to Imber as though he were losing time, growing younger, falling back through years almost as fast as the weeks passed around him. He felt himself fifteen again, passionate and helpless: mired in humiliation, caught constantly between tears and rage and able to indulge himself in neither.

  Only his physical body had not changed, and even that was faithless. He craved to be sick, to have a killing fever that might legitimately keep him private in his grief and would make his family sorry to have lost him later. Instead he was robust, thriving, pale only in anger or sorrow; which meant that he was pale all the time except when he was blushing, which meant that he alternated all the time between white and scarlet, and even his skin was an accursed traitor.

  His father, his uncle, his cousins: all had shown him a combination of sympathy and fury in their several different manners, and all had brought the blood rushing to his face every time their eyes met his, because he knew what they were thinking, what they were saying between themselves in their several different voices. Imber the love-lorn, marries the girl and can’t keep her, she ran away before the wedding and ran again after, straight after their wedding-night, and he pines over her posy because he cannot find her when he should be raging at the insult to himself, to all his family to us...

  He blushed because it was cruel, and also because it was true. Sometimes he could be angry with Julianne for fleeing him, for making such a public mock of him; and yet he loved her, he wished her nothing but well, he wished that he could find her to offer whatever aid was in his power, to bring her out of what trouble she was in. Then he was angry with his family for their blindness, for their being concerned only with honour when his girl must be in need of help. And yet he had loved them all his life, collectively they were still his wisdom as they always had been, and when he was rational he saw that they were right in this, that it was wilfulness and nothing more that took her from him, and insult that she left behind ...

  He hadn't been so muddled in his thinking since the year of his manhood, the year of first blood on his sword and first girl in his bed; but that wasn't the only reason why he felt so displaced in time suddenly, why he could fling back the flap of his tent in the mornings and almost feel an urge to rub a hand through his beard, to check his height against the pole and be sure of the ring on his smallest finger, to reassure himself that the last four years of growth, maturity, marriage had not been merely a dream.

  He was young yet, but he had been younger; and not since then had he woken to days like this, days of tension and confusion and embarrassment all blended together to keep him in a ferment, when he was glad of simple things to do to keep his mind from chasing phantoms far away.

  Simple things like fetching his own breakfast from the fire, and eating on his feet with his confreres; like harnessing his own horse for the day's ride and grooming it at sunset, even cleaning his own tack under the stars. Troopers saw to the pitching of his tent, but he would gladly have done that too if he hadn't been so aware of his cousin Karel's eye on him in his shame.

  Even the land they rode through was a reminder of his youth. At that age he'd been sent to ride the southern border of Elessi for a year with the regular patrol, wild lands and a rough apprenticeship for the future Count. Now he was back, watchful and anxious as he had been then, feeling the weight of another's critical gaze just as he had before. Then it had been the sergeant's, who commanded that patrol; now it was his cousins, who commanded this.

  Imber had spent days searching uselessly for Julianne, after her flight. Finding no certain sign of her, no trail that he could follow, he had at last returned to his father's house in Elessi to face the court's politeness, his uncle's rudeness, his own desperate puzzlement at how he had made Julianne so unhappy.

  It had been pure relief when rumours reached the city about strange movements among the Sharai, all the sheikhs gathered at Rhabat and their tribesmen following. It must mean war, rumour and logic both agreed; and what more likely than a strike against Elessi, the hammerhead, the most vulnerable of all the states of Outremer? Let the Sharai but win Elessi, and they could ride into Tallis and so down all the length of the Kingdom, killing as they went...

  Ambitious sheikhs had tried the same before, and had been rebuffed with many losses; Elessans were the finest soldiers the King had, everyone knew that. But they'd never had to face all the tribes united. It had been divisions among the Sharai, blood-feuds between tribe and tribe that had kept Outremer secure until now.

  Every man who could be spared from other duty was ordered to the bor
ders, north and east and south, especially south, where the desert rubbed its hot muzzle against unprotected farmland. No mountains here, to make a wall to guard.

  Imber had leaped at the chance to ride with Karel and his troop: to leave squire and servants behind with the gossiping, fractious court, to leave fretful father and sour uncle to their maps and arguments, to spend the days staring into a searing dust-laden wind and half the nights sitting up with his cousin, twitching at every natural sound and trying never, never to think of Julianne. He almost hoped that the Sharai would come and find him; better to lose his life, he thought, than to lose the girl he loved. At least he could understand that, a bitter fight and bitter steel's touch at the end of it and so a sudden peace and no more blushing, if all his blood were let run out...

  And that again was fifteen-year-old thinking, and he knew it; and thought it anyway, thought it deliberately, trapped in some strange mood between misery and defiance.

  This day - riding miserably, defiantly a little distance ahead and to the south of Karel and the troop, courting danger and making a childish point of it, which his cousin was pointedly indulging - he scanned the smudged horizon as he had done times without number and saw nothing of what he hoped for, neither a moving shadow which might be a Sharai outrider nor a moving shadow which might be his Julianne unaccountably returning, as she had unaccountably left.

  Closer to him, though, something was moving, and did snag his eye; anything that moved in this drear, dead landscape was unusual, and potentially a threat.

  This was only a dust-devil, though, a slender twisting pillar; he'd seen a dozen such since he came south. One had struck their campsite in the night, and ripped Karel's tent from its moorings. He watched this one for lack of anything else to fix his eyes on, and registered slowly that it was heading directly towards him. He nudged his mount to the side, out of its path - and saw it veer, and realised that it was moving against the wind, which surely ought not to be possible. Unless it was some trick of the Sharai, some touch of sorcery, a wicked conjuration sent against him ... ?

  He turned his horse with a yell, saw how far he'd wandered from his companions and thought himself lost, even as he dug in his spurs. He had a moment to regret his bravado — this was not what he'd wanted even if he'd truly wanted that, there was neither honour nor satisfaction in being slain by a magical sending, without the chance to face an adversary blade to blade — and then the swirling cloud swept past him, steadied, and spoke.

  It spoke his name, but he had no time yet to wonder at it; he was busy with his horse, which was rearing, screaming, terrified. It was all he could do to stay mounted; the beast backed away, entirely out of his control.

  The dust-devil, apparition, whatever it might be hung motionless, except that its body was constantly in motion, a spiralling rope of dust and air. It stood between him and the troop. His horse was fighting the bit, straining to turn, to flee - but flight would take it and him south, where any evil might be waiting. Imber used spurs, reins, his mailed fist, everything he had to hold it still. When at last it subsided, quiescent and trembling, he lifted his head to face the devil, and heard it say his name again.

  'Imber von und zu Karlheim, your wife has need of you.'

  Imber blinked, stared; its voice was high and carrying, quite inhuman.

  'I -I do not know what you are.' His own voice came out only as a whisper, it could surely not have covered the distance between them, except that the creature replied instantly.

  'I am the djinni Esren Filash Tachur, and this is my message to you, that I am sent to carry: that your wife Julianne, who is daughter to the Kings Shadow, is in need. If you would come to her aid, ride south to Selussin, to the castle called Revanchard. Ride swiftly, her peril is great, I am told to say. It may be true. The future is dark to me, but I at least cannot save her.'

  'Wait. . .!' he cried, too late; there was a sudden soft fall of dust, and he could see nothing before him except Karel thundering forward on his giant destrier.

  Imber pulled off his mailed gauntlet, ran his hand over the prickling cold sweat on his face, and wondered what in the world he should say to his cousin.

  5

  A Heating Possession

  Blaise had thought that nothing could frighten him more than the company he kept these days, until he made his first journey into the Kings Eye. When he was there, he thought that nothing would ever frighten him more than simply being in that place; now he thought that he'd been twice wrong. Soon he would have to go back there, to report his failure to the man who had sent him on this mission. He dreaded facing Magister Fulke, to confess that failure; he thought that the marshal's anger would be a more frightening thing than any that he'd yet seen.

  He had called them a rabble, the people that he followed, but that wasn't strictly true. A rabble is disorganised, and loud. This was neither. The preacher led and his disciples marched behind - like an army, almost, except that it was an army of the poor, dressed in rags and lacking weapons. More like penitents in a procession, then, silent and involved, their thoughts turned to holy matters. Except that the preacher only ever spoke about Surayon, the need to crush heresy, to bring the Gods light to unbelievers. Which made it an army indeed, intent on victory, though Blaise had no idea how that victory could ever be achieved. It was all a mystery to him, as much now as it had been on the first day; and that was his failure, that he was so frightened to admit.

  He walked behind the procession like a camp-follower, he was so far reduced; and he was just one among the many, many who did the same. These really were a rabble. Some were relatives of those the preacher had healed. They had seen their husbands or wives or children called back from certain death, had seen them rise up and abandon family and village and all to follow the preacher, and had felt drawn to follow in their turn. Blaise had spoken to a few of them; he'd seen and heard and to some extent shared their confusion, their distress. Their loved ones shunned their company and would not speak. Those whom the preacher healed might as well have died, he thought, for all the good their resurrection did.

  Others among his companions had heard the preacher speak, and answered more simply to the call. Men and boys largely, they had seized what few weapons they owned or could improvise and set off to do what the long generation of their fathers had failed to do. They would pit knives against nothing, mattocks against magic, and Surayon would open before them like a flower to a probing bee, because the preacher said it would.

  And then there were those who would follow any band of men, for what gain or comfort they could find; and those who would follow any voice that cried to them to follow, wherever it might lead.

  And among them all — the worried and the warriors, the women and the weak - there was Blaise, who was one alone and quite unlike any whom he walked beside. Both worried and a warrior, neither woman nor weak and yet he felt so, he might as well be both for all the good he could accomplish here. Sent for a spy, he had foundered beyond rescue. The preacher spoke to no one when he was not preaching, and his disciples spoke to no one at all. What could a man uncover, in the face of such inhuman silence?

  Nothing, nothing at all. Blaise had known and lived under the strictures of the Ransomers' Rule, with its penalties for idle or inappropriate talking; he knew how young men kept such rules, and how they broke them also. Since he left the Order he had served on the borders of Elessi, he had fought raiders and been a raider himself. He could hear a voices whisper in a wind; as the sergeant of a young troop, he had learned to read the movement of a finger or the twitch of an eye, to know when lads were sending messages under the uttermost silence of his glare.

  There was none of that here, nothing at all. The disciples, the healed ones walked at a steady pace all day, behind the preacher who led them; they spoke not a word, they passed not a sign between them. Nor a mouthful to eat, nor to drink. They would eat at dawn and at days end if they were offered food - and they were, always, by villagers or family — but they showed no hint of
need between. Even the hardest-trained army would sling waterskins along the line when the sun was high, and whatever dried meat or biscuit fell to hand, something to chew against the tedium of the road and the heat and the ache of wounds, perhaps, the bite of blisters. These, not. When they marched, they marched and did nothing other. As when they sat — in the evenings, in the villages, around a fire or a well while the preacher spoke -they sat and did nothing other, until they were fed or sent away to sleep. They did seem to listen to the preacher, but Blaise thought that it was only seeming. He thought that mans words fell as far short of them now as their wives' words did, or their brothers'. It wasn't to them or for their sake that he spoke, in any case; they were his already, as though he claimed their souls in payment for their lives.

  Reluctantly, whipped into something fearful by his greater fear of Magister Fulke, Blaise limped ahead of the murmuring crowd. He'd had to change his good soldier's boots for a poor man's sandals when he put on this guise of a landless labourer; the straps had rubbed his heels raw, the thin rope soles were no protection against the sharp stones of the road and every step was a fresh reminder of futility.

  He walked forward, to join the tail of the disciples' lines. For a while he made his way beside them, as silent as they were themselves; not a head lifted, not an eye turned aside to find him. He might have been invisible, a ghost in a parade of ghosts.

  Eventually, he came up next to a boy whose name he knew, whom he'd had some conversation with just two nights earlier. It happened sometimes that the disease tracking ahead of them would turn suddenly to snap at their heels; that those who followed would wake in the morning to find one of their number weak and lethargic, unable to rise. Then the disciples would come to claim the victim, the preacher would work his abiding miracle in the dawnlight, and there would be one more disciple to trail dumb and obedient in his wake.

  No one ever fell sick in the daytime, on the march. Blaise couldn't decide if that was sinister or meaningless. He'd like it to mean something; he'd like to believe that the preacher gave poison to his victims and then stole their souls while they were weak and failing. That would be a thing to say to Magister Fulke. He couldn't make any sense of it, though, no matter how he strained. If the preacher came slipping through the camp at night, it would be known, however light his tread; if he sent one of his disciples, it would be the talk of all the company. And if he did either one — or if he sent his poison by the birds, if an earthworm carried it, a zephyr — there was still no reason in his choices. Man or woman, young or old: whether in the villages ahead of him or among the followers behind, the sickness struck at random, as a sickness should. Perhaps the man was a monster, perhaps he fed on souls and cared not if they were virgin and innocent or raddled with age and sin; but why drag their emptied bodies behind?