The Gauntlet and the Broken Chain, page 14
‘I lit the shrine, and a moment later it cracked. Then the fox found me, and followed me. Half a moon I’ve travelled since, and three shrines I found. All were cracked, all the same – glowing silver seams marring the rock. No tulka to be found, except this one at the first.’
The witch crawled around the candles and sat cross-legged on the carpet in front of Torrenda, slowly looked her over. Soaked, Torrenda thought, she sees a tired soaked woman, panicked and half-mad. She is not wrong.
‘Half a moon you’ve travelled,’ Aida said, and Torrenda nodded and drew the little fox closer.
‘The last three days I’ve had no sleep. I’ve not stopped. The last shrine…’
Aida reached a hand down and tentatively scratched at the top of the fox’s head, and it clicked its jaw appreciatively.
‘What happened at the last shrine?’
‘I was coming here to find Sami anyway, to ask his advice. To tell the caravan leaders, or the witches in Wasserchild. Tell someone who might fix it. But the last shrine… the tulka there is a scorpion. I have never seen it before, but a local told me so. The shrine was as the others are, cracked with silver. The scorpion. When I went close to the shrine with the fox, it attacked. Attacked me, attacked us both.’
Torrenda shut her eye and pictured it, the dragon stone slick black in a field of dusty brown boulders, the shrine on top of it dark and empty of peat or flame. The shrine was a few canyons over from a group of farms that called themselves Onen Marja, lucky berry, after the brambles that wove through their paths and around their rock chimneys. Torrenda had approached the shrine, the air thick with mist around her, the fox at her heels. Then it was chaos. A scorpion the size of her arm racing at them, its pincers and stinger flashing gold, its carapace a dull white limned in a faint blue glow. It ran at them, tail raised high, and Torrenda fell back to the ground and then it was jabbing at her feet with its tail and claws and she was scrabbling and…
In the witch’s room beneath the wayhouse in Laitila, Torrenda told Aida of the attack. She managed to get through it, but her jaw ached and her head pulsed.
‘The fox saved me,’ she said at last, her voice so quiet. ‘It killed the scorpion. It ripped off its tail and tore it to pieces. It killed it.’
They both sat in silence for a long moment, and Torrenda slowly gestured to the fox’s cheek, its back leg, as it lay asleep on her lap. Each was scarred, fresh wounds scabbed and healed. The witch Aida went back to her cushion and rubbed at her hands.
‘A tulka cannot be harmed by any human or beast,’ she said quietly, in the tone of one repeating a phrase from a book or a childhood classroom. ‘And a tulka will never attack any human or beast.’ Even as she said the words she was staring into Torrenda’s eyes, and Torrenda knew what she wanted. She wants me to tell her it will be okay.
Slowly, Torrenda rolled up her sleeves and began unpeeling the thick bandages over her right arm until the jagged wounds were visible, inflamed and wet and only half-healed. The witch lifted her candle and stared at the wounds.
‘Something has happened to the dragon shrines,’ Aida said, and drawing a small chest close to her began to rummage through pouches and boxes of vials. ‘The tulka are fighting, and loose from their places. Attacking humans.’
Torrenda felt her head nodding in agreement, but she was so tired and her arm ached so much, and the burning peat at her stomach was so warm. The little fox lifted its head and began to lick at the wounds on her arm.
‘We must check the shrine in Laitila,’ she said, and felt her head nodding forward. The woman Aida was suddenly at her side, a thick salve in hand she spread across the oozing pincer cuts that screwed their way up Torrenda’s arm. The salve was cool and Torrenda let Aida lower her down to the thick carpet by the candle, let her pull off her boots, let her gently lift her head and push a cushion below it.
‘Sleep, Shrinekeeper,’ she said, ‘you have done all you could have done. In the morning, we will seek answers.’
Torrenda felt sleep take her, her uninjured arm wrapped close around the little fox.
‘Don’t worry, little one,’ she said, and then she slept, and dreamt of the great father dragon dancing through cloud above, fast and frantic.
ACT 2
THE PATTERN BELOW
‘The war of insurrection is fought by few, but supported by many. Each act of solidarity is a blow against the oppressor. Each gifted loaf of bread or pair of boots a blade at their throat as they sleep.’
Four lessons in revolution, Knight-Commander Jozenai
7
FIRE AND SNOW
‘The Stormguard have offered us protection, where it has been asked. Some are grudging, through the fear those orbs have brought or through a hatred born of the memory of the war we fought. War leaves a stain. The Stormguard would not break the armistice – our information and intelligence networks have spread across the northern continent. Our advisers have made themselves ubiquitous amongst those that govern in Undal, in Tessendorm, Isken, Kelamor, Cinnae, and Uradech. They assume we spy, and they assume we serve some greater goal – but what do they care what happens far below the earth? A small cost, when in return they get the ore we mine. What do they care of deep gods and hidden councils? Their deepest mines are scratches. It is for this I write to you. I am a criminal and an exile. I bake my bread in the shadow of their keep, and I save what coin I can to return to my family. I write to you because never have I seen them pressed as this. Not in our war, not by the barons of Tessendorm. Not in their histories of the corvus epidemic or their violent reforms. The Stormguard have no allies. This is the time.’ – Letter to the Hidden Council of the Undal Redoubt, Bellentoe Firstclaw
Floré coughed and then spewed water so cold it made her throat ache. So cold. She rolled onto her knees and her hands were pressed wrist-deep into snow. Judges’ spit. So cold! She spewed another lungful of black water and closed her eyes a long moment, felt the dizziness slowly pass. She tried to blink the water from her eyes as she gulped deep at frozen air. She could hear groaning around her, but before she could open her eyes to check they had all made it she felt a familiar sharp pressure at her throat, right on her jugular vein. A sword point. Floré kept entirely still and opened her eyes. She could see leather boots in snow.
‘They are with me, children,’ Highmother Ash’s voice called, weak and frail. ‘We need fire – and quick about it. The girl is dying.’
The blade left her throat and Floré rolled to her back. They were in a wide meadow coated in snow and surrounded by towering oaks. Above her the branches of the oaks danced in the wind, bare fingers of wood reaching out to one another. Benazir was laid flat on her back next to Floré, staring up at the sky breathing in deep huffs. Next to them in the snow Voltos was curled in a ball and coughing. Tomas was rubbing at his face and wringing his hands. All of them were drenched through in the ice water of Loch Hassel. Cuss was… No.
Cuss was gripping Yselda close, his mouth opening and shutting but no words coming out. Yselda with her eyes wide but unseeing. Yselda not breathing. Cuss was shaking her, his hands gripping at her cloak and tabard, and all around them, wherever they were, a dozen Orubor were staring, save two who had pulled Highmother Ash to her feet.
‘Fire!’ the Highmother called again, and the Orubor at last began to move. Floré rolled to her feet and rushed to Yselda’s side. She pulled her from Cuss. The boy was frantic. Not breathing. Floré grabbed the girl and pushed at her chest. She laid her flat in the snow and tilted back her head, and a slick of water poured from her mouth. Not breathing. Not breathing. She ripped the gauntlet from her right hand and pressed her fingers to Yselda’s neck. No heartbeat.
Floré pushed her other gauntleted fist into Yselda chest over and over. ‘Breathe, damn you, girl.’
Highmother Ash came to her and crouched and held her hand over the girl. The old Orubor was as soaked as the rest of them, the strain clear on her face. Her skin was sallow and there was a thick smear of blood beneath her nose. Closing her eyes she flexed her fingers over Yselda and began to sing, a low throaty rhythm. Floré sat back in the snow and gripped at her knees, and next to her Cuss was weeping. The old Orubor gasped, and with a sudden convulsion Yselda was spewing black water and bile and oats, gasping for air. The Highmother swooned, but with a swish of leather through snow an Orubor was there catching her before her head hit the ground, lifting her frail form up into his arms. Cuss went to Yselda, cradled her head as the girl pulled in weak breaths, eyes fluttering.
‘That was Lothal!’ Tomas said, his teeth chattering. He was gripping something in his hand and pawing at it desperately. Is that Jozenai? Floré felt as if she’d been punched in the head, a thick stabbing skewer of pain in the back of her skull breaking through the numbness and the cold. She reached her hand to her scalp and her fingers came back wet with water tinged pink with blood. The broken ice had battered her as she tried to reach for Cuss, for Yselda, for Benazir, for Voltos… She forced herself to look around at each of them. Alive. She gripped her knees again and stared at Tomas, at Jozenai. The little cat was wet through – after six spans in Riven never leaving Tomas’s side, it had doubled in size from the scrawny lump it had once been, but soaked as it was it looked so small. And cold. Floré watched Tomas holding it in one hand, and with his other he drew the starmetal wand from his sleeve. No flame threw from its tip, but it began to radiate red light and heat, a heat she could feel hints of even half a dozen steps away.
She fell back in the snow and shook, shook down to her core. High above, the skies were clear, nothing but a blue so pale. Hands were pulling at her, Orubor hands thin and slight but strong. Between the dozen Orubor they began to pull Floré and her companions to their feet, and two lifted Yselda. Silently they guided them to the edge of the snow-packed meadow. Set back in the woods a few dozen yards from the meadow’s edge was a hall of some kind, swooping arcs of wood seamed together tight, the architecture an echo of the vaulted eaves of the trees above. The roof was steep, coated with a thick layer of snow. The Orubor led them through and there were pallets, fires being lit. The Orubor carried Highmother Ash through a narrow doorway and out of sight – Highmother Ash seemed unable to stand after whatever aid she had given Yselda.
‘That,’ Benazir said, wiping snow from her face, ‘was Lothal the fucking god-wolf. Lothal – the Lothal. Lothal, march beside me and grow claws and sharp teeth and big muscles Lothal. Berren’s black blood we are utterly, utterly screwed.’
It took them hours to get warm. The Orubor brought blankets and fresh clothing, breeches and shirts of tanned deer hide. Floré realised her pack was gone, everything she’d taken to prepare for a winter campaign. All she had left was one sodden set of clothes, drenched boots, her tabard, her sword, Tyr’s old knife, and her gauntlets. What the hell happened to my cloak? She remembered the churn of black water, a flash of yellow as the old man of Loch Hassel spiralled past, a cold beyond anything she had ever felt – then a flash of silver and a dizziness that still had her blinking, nausea raising hot bile into her frozen mouth.
A younger Orubor brought them tea, cups of carved wood and a pot of cracked clay. It was sweet and pungently floral, but it was hot and that was all that mattered. Before squaring herself away, Floré had stripped Yselda from her sodden clothes and wrapped her in a dozen blankets, and then dragged the girl to the blazing hearth. She was pale, eyelids fluttering, but she was breathing. Tomas made Jozenai the kitten a nest of blankets and set her next to Yselda, and Voltos laughed so hard Floré thought he was breaking into hysterics.
The Antian was swamped in the clothing of the Orubor – his pack was gone too. Nothing they were given would fit him save a huge overshirt, meant to be worn over many smaller layers. His proportions were all different to theirs, short where they were long, broad where they were slight. He fashioned himself a toga from a blanket and pulled on the overshirt, rolling up its sleeves over and over again.
‘Would it attack Hasselberry?’ Cuss asked, when they were all huddled around Yselda and the fire. Of them all, only he had managed to keep his pack on. Glancing back at where he’d laid the contents out to dry, Floré smiled when she saw his axe. Lad didn’t even drop his steel.
‘You can tie a sword-knot to an axe handle,’ Benazir said, working at the leather of her arm-hook with a scrap of dry cloth. ‘I saw a lancer do that. They tie sword-knots to all sorts, lancers.’
In the loose tunics and breeches of the Orubor, Floré could see the scars spiralling up Benazir’s arms and chest and neck, the marks of the wyrm’s teeth. She smiled at the attempted distraction, though Cuss just stared into the fire. Floré knew that if Lothal chose to attack Hasselberry, then the village had no hope. She gazed at the door where the Orubor had taken Highmother Ash. She saved Yselda. She helped us get this far. Floré had been curt with the Orubor. I’ve been curt with everyone.
She looked down at where Yselda slept, and stroked the girl’s hair. I’m sorry, kid. Why do I keep bringing you into hell and trouble? Floré knew the answer to the question, even as she asked it. Yselda was her cadet. Yselda was lost. Yselda was the same that Floré had been, when she was a little girl before she found the Stormguard. Floré only knew one model to shape a life – service and discipline. Yselda stirred, and Floré pressed her hand against her forehead and shushed her, the way she soothed Marta. Her hand faltered for a moment as she thought of Marta. Would I want this for her, this life?
‘How does this change the plan?’ Cuss asked, and Tomas pulled out his pipe and began searching the pockets of his wet clothes for tobacco.
‘It doesn’t,’ Tomas said. ‘Plan is the same. We need to wake up dear mother before that wolf rips the whole protectorate apart. We need to kill that git Tullen. You should start smoking, Cuss.’
‘What?’
Tomas sat back and threw down his pipe, and rubbed his hands over his scalp. He pointed at Cuss’s things spread out and drying.
‘You have an uncanny ability to get through anything, and everything, with what looks like a wheel of cheese wrapped in a handkerchief. If you smoked, I could borrow some dry leaf.’
The morning passed, and the Orubor moved swiftly through the room when they appeared, but offered no conversation or answers. They would not meet Floré’s gaze, and when questioned simply ignored her. The floor was jointed wood covered in thick hide pelts, and there was no furniture save for the low wood pallets. Floré sat with Yselda and rubbed at the joints of her gauntlets with the cloth from Cuss’s weapon kit. She’d dried the cloth by the fire first, laying it next to the dozing kitten.
‘It’s just going to keep happening,’ Yselda said at last. Her eyes were open, staring into the flame. Floré put down her gauntlets. How long has she been awake?
‘What is, Yselda?’
The girl squirmed in her blankets. ‘Wolves on ice. Beasts come to kill everyone we love. As long as the rust-folk are out there, they’ll send orbs, rotsurges, they’ll send mages, they’ll send Lothal. We’ll never be safe.’
Floré itched the scar on her cheek and sighed. ‘The wolves that killed your family were not sent by rust-folk,’ she said. ‘They were sent by their own hunger. Hunger driven by the Claw Winter. Anshuka brought that on us, the same as she brings the rotstorm to the Ferron. The rust-folk are trying to flee hell itself – we would do the same.’
Yselda pulled herself up and Floré saw the anger in her eyes and held up a hand for peace.
‘They sent the wolf. They sent the orbs. They took Marta, Yselda. I’ve no mercy in my heart for what we must do next – but they are not the author of every ill in this world. There will always be someone who wants power, or what little resource we have. We will kill the mage. We will wake Anshuka and let her deal with the wolf. But if I could have a word with her, the madness of the rotstorm and the Claw Winters would be high on my list.’
Yselda settled back and looked again into the fire and Floré reached a hand out to her but drew it back.
‘If you could change the world,’ she said, ‘how would you change it? That is what we must ask ourselves. Not where we’ve been. Where we are going now.’
The girl did not answer, but closed her eyes and clutched at the locket of wood around her neck. An Orubor stepped through the door at the end of the cabin where they had taken Highmother Ash and Floré appraised him carefully. He was clad in the same cured hides as the others, his shining white hair braided tight to his skull. The orbs of his eyes were green, a dazzling green, and the skin of his face and hands were scarred in an intricate web of geometric red, a pattern of triangles and squares and curving lines.
‘Floré Artollen,’ he said, ‘the Highmother is dying. She would speak to you, before the end.’
~
‘You cannot see him,’ the reeve said, and Brude tried to bite down her anger.
‘I am war-leader, Reeve,’ she said, careful to keep her voice low. ‘I command our troops, our goblins, our wyrms. Ceann is the rank you gave me. I listen to Amon as he talks of logistics, I listen to the other crow-men as they talk of hunting more rotbuds deep past Lothal’s bones. I listen to Commandant Jehanne on tactics and I listen to you as you talk of our people. Yet I cannot speak to the One-Eye. Why?’
‘He will speak only to me,’ the reeve said, and he tried to reach out a hand to comfort her.
Brude stalked away to the window. They were in one of the captured houses in Dun Fen, the market town they’d taken as headquarters for their occupation of the Northern Marches. Occupation, Brude thought, and chewed her lip. Residence. Through panes of thick glass rimed in snow, Brude watched as, in the street outside, a troop of goblins tried to haul the carcass of a horse. They’d looped a rope around under its front legs and there were twenty of them, but they made no progress. A rottroll who could have moved the horse in a moment watched lazily from the shadow of a building opposite. No rust-folk or crow-men were on the street – as night began to fall, it was too cold. They huddled together in houses, and by day dismantled their abandoned neighbour’s walls for fuel.
