Ghosts of Mehan'Gir, page 14
part #3 of The Four Trophies Series
‘Stop where you are,’ Garran warned. ‘We don’t want to harm you.’
They continued their advance, and he warned them a second time: ‘Stop where you are!’
He swung his blade towards the pale figure in front of him, just a warning stroke: without breaking stride, it raised one arm and pushed the flat of the blade away.
Ubrik had stepped forwards as well, attempting to block their advance with his sword. His move was also parried away, but he reached up and caught the creature’s arm as it blocked his blade: it twisted free of his grip, at the same time striking Ubrik’s chest – pushing him away. Faster than Lanvik had seen him move before, Ubrik turned his sword and nicked the outside of the creature’s arm: it didn’t react, but continued moving forward.
There was no blood at the cut, no welling trace of red or orange.
Ubrik took another few steps backwards, and Thawn and Garran moved back in formation with him. He transferred his weight to his back foot, and swung his sword again, much harder than before: trying to inflict a real injury. This time his blade sliced deep into the pale figure’s arm.
There was still no blood, and still the creature walked on.
Aiming for the torso of the pale thing, Ubrik swung his sword a third time, but this time there was suddenly a blade in the warrior’s hand and his attack was parried, metal on metal. And his next, and his next: a series of fast moves and counter-moves, like a training session. With Ubrik’s attack, the tempo of the fight had stepped up. All three of the warriors had blades and, although they still pressed towards Lanvik, they were now paying attention to the three Light Elves in front of them: facing them, blocking their blows, pushing back. So they were moving slower.
Ethryk, who had been standing with his sword ready, chose that moment to join the fight from one side. He approached with his sword raised, and sliced aggressively at the warrior in front of Ubrik. Although he was much slower than the others, his hacking briefly diverted his target’s attention and Ubrik took advantage of that moment to step inside its guard. In one strong chopping motion, he was able to separate its left arm from its body, above the elbow. He shouted in triumph.
The creature pushed Ethryk away with a fist and then with a kick, and retrieved its own arm from the ground where it lay twitching. It stepped backwards, wrong-footing Ubrik for a moment, and pressed the severed limb back in place. The arm stayed connected, and seemed unimpaired.
The other, bloodless wounds that they had inflicted had been similarly temporary and ineffective. Where there had been cuts or gashes, they not only failed to slow the creatures at all but quickly closed without leaving any mark.
‘We can’t stop them,’ Karuin shouted. ‘We need another strategy.’
Lanvik was slowly reversing away with his staff. He wished there was some way he could use it: something he could do that would help the others. Or at least that he could stop it from howling so fiercely.
Their three attackers continued their advance, still trying to reach him despite the efforts of Garran, Ubrik and Thawn. If he moved to the left or to the right or changed speed, then they adjusted to match him.
Karuin shouted to him: ‘Throw me your staff!’ She started running towards him.
‘What?’
He knew that Karuin hated the staff: perhaps was even afraid of it. Why would she want him to throw it to her? But she was already running and, as she passed at an angle, she snatched it out of his hand.
At once, the three white figures switched their attention and their direction towards her: they also adjusted their speed to match her run, catching Ubrik and Garran by surprise. Thawn somehow dodged to one side, and continued to block the path of the third warrior.
‘It’s the staff,’ Karuin called back. ‘It’s the staff they want, not Lanvik.’ As she shouted, it was suddenly obvious that the two pale warriors were closer to her than the others were.
At a full run, Ubrik caught one of them, swinging his blade in a full sweep towards its back – the sword bit deep, creating a broad cut and embedding itself. As Ubrik pulled his weapon free, the pale, lifeless warrior stopped completely for the first time and turned. The blade in its handed flashed once, twice, three times and Ubrik fell to one knee. He staggered half to his feet but then keeled sideways to the ground, dropping his sword. His white assailant didn’t wait, didn’t stop to finish him, but turned and resumed its jog towards Karuin.
Lanvik had meanwhile collided with its companion, trying to shoulder it aside from its path just as it was at the point of reaching Karuin. It was solid, muscular and hard and Lanvik simply bounced off to one side, trying to roll as he hit the ground. He hadn’t inflicted any visible wound or damage, but he had distracted it from Karuin and the staff for a moment. It paused, turned and slashed towards him with its blade: he was falling away when it struck him, but still felt a sudden stinging pain from where he had been cut. Now he was on the ground, ineffective; Ubrik was lying nearby, out of action; and two of their attackers reached Karuin.
She turned, holding the staff at one end and swinging it in a wide arc towards them like a weapon. They leaned back, out of its way, and then stepped quickly forwards: each sliced at her, silently and efficiently, each of them cutting her mostly in two. Either blow would have been fatal.
Her short cry sounded more like surprise than pain.
The staff flew to one side, landed on the ground and rolled. The two white warriors turned towards it just as Ethryk shouldered into the nearest: he grabbed it around its upper legs, perhaps trying to topple it, but it continued walking, punching his head and face. As he slid down towards the ground, it kicked him away. That brief delay was enough to buy Magda enough time to reach the staff first: she had been closest to it, and was still on her feet.
‘Slow them down a bit,’ she shouted.
‘Don’t!’ Lanvik yelled. But Magda had no intention of keeping the staff or of challenging their murderous opponents with it. Instead, she kicked it forwards from where it lay, as the three warriors altered their direction towards her. Despite its cloth wrapping, the staff bounced: she caught it in one hand and flung it forwards as far as she could, towards the river. It splashed into the shallows near the bank and froze there, unmoving for a moment, before the current caught it and it began to drift downstream.
The third of the white figures had finally dodged around Thawn and Garran in a blur of speed: it followed its two companions into the water.
‘Let them go!’ Magda shouted.
Thawn lowered her sword but Garran couldn’t resist following the white figure into the water, still trying to inflict some kind of more serious injury. He let out one more shout, completed one more ineffective chop, and missed the creature completely. Then he glanced down at his wounded arm, where blood was flowing from the deepest cut, and staggered back to the bank.
The three pale warriors splashed awkwardly down the river, ungainly in the water, while the staff spun and swivelled and flowed erratically downstream, slightly ahead of them and gradually sinking below the water, wrapped in heavy fabric as it was.
‘We need to get away from here,’ Magda urged – the others were still staring at the river: ‘They might come back for us.’
‘They wanted me. They came for me,’ Lanvik agreed.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No they didn’t. You saw Karuin: you saw what happened. They came for the staff. But that doesn’t mean they won’t come back for us later.’
‘Karuin,’ Lanvik repeated: remembered. He turned and took two steps towards where her body lay.
‘Leave her!’ Magda said. ‘Don’t stop; don’t think about it: there will be time later. The rest of us have to get away from here now. We have to find somewhere safer and tend to the wounded. They’ve beaten us here and they’ve moved on, but now we’re weaker than we were before. There’s nothing we can do for Karuin, but you and Ubrik and Garran are hurt.’
‘We need to stop the bleeding,’ Thawn said. She was already kneeling beside Ubrik, wrapping a wide gauze bandage around his chest, while Ethryk helped Garran bind his own injury.
Lanvik looked down at his own arm, which was bleeding from a long cut: deep red, instead of the pale rusty orange of Elven blood.
Bleeding?
‘What?’ he stared at it.
He tried to remember when he had been injured, but could only think that it didn’t hurt as badly as he thought it looked. As he stared at it, Magda was suddenly beside him, pulling back his top and covering the wound with material. She tied something tightly around his upper arm and told him: ‘That’ll have to do for now.’
As she had worked, Ethryk and Thawn were trying to tend to Ubrik’s injuries as well as they could. Garran joined them there.
‘It’s bad,’ Ethyrk said. ‘We can stop the bleeding, but he needs proper attention. We have to get him away from here.’
Ubrik was in no state to walk: when Ethryk and Garran had tried to move with him, his feet simply dragged on the ground, so the others improvised a stretcher. They cut some canvas from one of the tents and hacked two uneven branches from a tree to make supports. Once they’d lifted him onto it, three of them were able to carry him.
Whoever wasn’t helping kept their weapons drawn, and all of them glanced up at the sky as often as they could without stumbling in the dark. After a few minutes, they saw the three deathly figures pass silently above them, heading back north, and they relaxed a little. From the ground it had been difficult to tell, but it looked as if any wounds they had inflicted had healed.
They’ve left, Lanvik thought. Does that mean they’ve destroyed the staff, or did the current take it south of the Boundary Stones? Maybe they don’t go past that line.
He glanced towards the wide river, wondering if there was any chance of finding the staff again. And what about the things they had left at the camp … and Karuin’s body?
‘Do we go back?’ he asked. ‘For Karuin. And everything else.’
‘She’s dead,’ Magda shook her head. ‘There’s nothing there worth risking our lives for.’
‘We need to get away from here,’ Thawn agreed. ‘And we need to get Ubrik somewhere he can be looked after as quickly as we can.’
‘Hopefully a boat will pass soon,’ Magda said. But it was late and there was almost no traffic on the river.
2
From Port Evendar, Atterlie had taken a ferry to Eastholm. Although there were roads that ran north from there through the foothills of the White Mountains, there were not many scheduled coach services and the quality of the roads meant that they were slow. Instead, she chose to buy a horse and ride steadily north herself for six days before eventually transferring to ferry and riverboat services. She left the river again in Belsace, in order to travel overland towards Helvengar.
As she rode through Belsace, it was obvious that much of what she had heard about the situation there was well out of date. Not only were the refugee camps largely empty, but many of the towns and villages were deserted as well. There were heavily guarded Imperial checkpoints every few miles, and the soldiers there were touchingly concerned for her safety, travelling on her own as a young woman. She fancied that she might have been more of a target if she had accepted their offers of an Imperial escort, though she supposed that it was possible that someone might try to take her hostage for their particular cause.
When she crossed the border into Rossony, she found a complete wasteland.
There was less evidence of recent fighting, but there were hardly any signs that the little kingdom was even inhabited. The towns had become a new kind of landscape – a landscape of broken rubble and burned wooden buildings, where the streets and the houses merged into each other in a jumble of debris. Temples, often the only stone buildings, sat broken and gaping and empty, the icons removed and the colourful murals staring out at the open sky.
She saw no-one who looked as if they might live there: the inhabitants had been completely replaced by foreign soldiers.
She knew where the camps had been that housed the initial flood of refugees, but the war had come to Rossony after them and they had moved on. A few had stayed, she discovered: those who had decided to stop running or who had someone in their party that couldn’t travel – a young child, an ageing relative, someone badly injured or ill. When she came upon these remnants, she asked them about the situation here and in Ruthin, and where everyone had gone afterwards – where she could find the people that had fled. She gave them coins, and hoped that there was something to spend them on that would help.
After Rossony, she rode north into Flax. That border was tightly policed but her papers told them that she was an Imperial citizen, so they barely paid her any attention at all. There were refugees in Flax as well, in shambolic slums on the outskirts of towns or in small groups of tents, but not as many as she had expected. They all seemed nervous and guarded, as if they expected to be moved on again at any moment.
Finally, she reached Falkenvey.
The little kingdom was mostly mountainous, but the town of Helvengar sat on a small river – a tributary of one of the branches of the Great River that flowed south to Corvak. From here, barges laden with processed and raw ores were steered gradually downriver. There was something grubby about the place: at some level below the surface, decades of dirt had been ground in and were now impossible to remove, no matter how much they cleaned and decorated and painted.
Although it was further from Ruthin, she saw refugees here as well. These were people who had a little more money or were strong enough to make the longer journey, and they had come looking to work: labour in the mines, mostly – jobs that were unreliable and hard and low-paid, but at least gave them money. Worse than the tired and worn-out adults were the gangs of barefoot children from Ruthin that begged in the streets with outstretched hands or bowls – Light Elves and Dark Elves and Humans.
She found a room in a little guesthouse beside the river: there was white lace on most of the surfaces and at the window, and the room smelled of perfume. It wasn’t to her taste, but it was inexpensive, conveniently central and had a space to stable the horse.
‘What’s his name?’ the old Terevarna woman had asked, bringing hay for the stall.
‘He doesn’t have a name.’
After unpacking, she set out to find the address she had been given.
It was a large house, in an area of large houses, and the grounds backed onto the river. From the sounds and smells, there was a celebration taking place around the back. Unable to find any obvious vantage point, she crossed the river by a small bridge upstream and found a spot among the trees on the opposite bank. She could watch through a spyglass.
There were around thirty people in the garden, with tables and chairs laid out: food was being prepared and cooked, small children were running about and laughing, and a small band stood in the shadow of the house playing traditional dance tunes.
She scanned the faces, and recognised her target from the description and sketches she’d seen. He seemed pleasant enough: jovial and popular with the people who were there – perhaps a mix of his family, friends and clients.
He was a merchant: that was all she really knew. It was impossible to tell why someone had taken out a contract on his life in the Guildhouse in Arafel: there were a thousand possible reasons. Perhaps he had bills unpaid to suppliers in the south, or orders undelivered; perhaps he was having an illicit affair; or this might be revenge for some ancient personal or family slight.
Perhaps his death was not even because of anything that he had done, but was intended to send a message to some third party. In contracts of that type, there was often a clause specifying that the death should be public or else take place at a particular time or place, or should be carried out in a particular way, or that some item or message was required to be left with the body. There was nothing like that in the paperwork that she had been given.
It would have been easy to kill him today – now, from the opposite bank, with her bow – while he was surrounded by friends and family. But she decided to go back later: there would be a time when he was either alone in the house, or went out.
Her job was killing people, but she preferred to avoid unnecessary suffering.
If the opportunity presented itself, she might even make it look like an accident.
She spent that evening out, talking to the children in the streets and learning about them. Mostly they were aged between eight and twelve years old, though there were some who seemed as young as three or four. They lived in groups, staying close through the day and sleeping together at night, hoping for some kind of security in numbers. They were most vulnerable to the elements and to other people, alone or in gangs, so they tried to sleep in hidden places – places that no-one else would go, like the sewers.
The luckier ones spent the nights in the relative protection of mixed family groups, among the other refugees: under bridges, in the unswept and overgrown corners of public parks, in abandoned or partly finished buildings, in empty sheds and industrial sites that they had broken into. Atterlie walked among them, trying to discover where refugees might have gone after Belsace and Rossony, and asking about Ruthin.
‘I have family there,’ she explained. ‘And I haven’t back in a long, long time. I hear things have got worse.’
‘It’s bad,’ they agreed, ‘and it’s been bad for a long time. The rebels strike the roads and the checkpoints; the soldiers burn the towns and the farms; bandits and robbers take advantage of the chaos and lawlessness to steal anything that hasn’t been destroyed. Nowhere is safe, and there’s nothing to eat.’ No-one seemed optimistic that things would get any better, and no-one could see any way that the war would end soon. There was too much anger and bitterness on both sides now.
She asked about the names on her list, but everyone shook their heads and told her that she’d be lucky to find them now that the larger camps had closed down. As the years passed, people who had fled Ruthin became more and more scattered, and many of them tried to integrate and disappear into local populations, apparently abandoning any hope of ever returning home.
