The Stealers' War (17 page)

He hiked for two days through the lower slopes of the Mask Heights, sweating inside an itchy Rodalian shirt and dark bear-furlined coat. He kept his hood down, even during the drizzling rain. Temmell’s glamour over Alexamir was superficial. It had altered his face but not changed his nomad blood, able to sleep naked in a winter meadow and never once freeze. Swaddled in these heavy clothes he felt like a corpse ready for burial, wrapped in leather armour and a funeral shroud made of his tent.
But then, the enchantment has also left me my strength. How much worse if I had been turned into a weakling rice-eater, tired after an hour’s sprint, barely able to lift a boulder without cracking my spine. No, better that this sorcery lies skin deep
. The clothes were old but well repaired. Cleaned of the blood from whatever unlucky Rodalian had once worn them. He had an air-mask hanging on the back of his neck as part of his disguise, but at this altitude it was thankfully unnecessary. Alexamir followed the directions Temmell had made him memorize, avoiding the sparse settlements in this part of the country. Navigating south-east by the cold clear waters until he reached the Yarl River itself. There he marched with the current until he reached a small river port where merchants arrived from the east on billowing sails, carrying goods to be portered down ramps and slung over the side of mules and mountain ponies. The settlement itself was no more than thirty buildings, surrounded by a wooden palisade that had seen better days. Strange-looking holes had been cut into the fortification. Not arrow-loops, but to channel the wind without collapsing. A barrier good for keeping out wolves and bears, but not human attackers. This far inside the centre of the country, there would be few nomads raiding in search of saddle wives. Too far a journey back to the steppes with an ungrateful struggling peasant girl in tow. A sentry on a watch tower waved at Alexamir as he passed through the village’s open gates and he returned the greeting.
If you could see me in my true skin, you would scream until your lungs burst.
Every house in the village was a low, thick-stoned affair, all windows hidden out of sight from outside and opening on to a central courtyard. Not out of fear of men, but protection from the fierce storms.
Dreary grey stone. Nothing like the brightly coloured warm tents of the Nijumeti.
The beasts in the merchant caravans stared lazily at Alexamir as he passed them, the air-masks they needed at higher altitudes swinging lazily under their necks.
I wonder if I look like a rider or a rice-eater to them – if the glamour tricks animals as well as Rodalians
? He glanced about the docks, looking for the giant hunting hounds that often followed after Rodalian patrols. A canine encounter was the last thing he needed right now. Their large dogs were as canny as people, and he didn’t need his disguise questioned by any madly barking hound. But no hounds were in sight along the wooden piers. Just trading boats, piers and a few river fishing coracles.

Alexamir found a flat-bottomed river cog as empty of passengers as could be hoped for and booked passage to Hadra-Hareer. The boat bore a name, as proudly as any horse or a flying wing: the
Arrow Jang
. Merely the act of passing over his copper coins to its master, a man called Shan, felt alien to Alexamir. How much more honourable would it have been to creep in at night and cut the boat’s anchor lines, stealing the craft and taking her downstream? Sadly for the nomad’s honour, blending in was what was required. Stepping on to the soil of the rice-eater’s capital as just one more visitor. And to be fair, the boat currently appeared to need a crew of twenty to work it and keep the unruly wooden contraption on course and well-mastered. Glorious to steal but hard for a single man to sail, even one as supremely talented as Alexamir.
But I could have done it. Temmell’s chosen men taught me to fly their wooden pigeons. How much harder can pointing an over-sized raft down a river be?
Let the foreigners handle the boat then, this was not fit work for such a magnificent hero as Alexamir. It felt strange as he sat on the planking of the cog’s deck, watching the crew work the single square-rigged sail. They were sailing with the thrust of the river. In truth, there wasn’t much for its crew to do on the downriver portion of the voyage apart from teasing him. Alexamir tried not to flinch each time the boat rolled and yawed in the rapids, but the crew sensed this experience was new to him and laughed at the traveller.
But these fools are themselves fooled, for they tease Norbu the goat herder — who does not even exist — not the greatest among the Nijumeti.

‘This would be your first time down from the heights, lad?’ grinned the skipper. Captain Shan was a snub-nosed riverman with a grey beard that made Alexamir itch just to look at it.

‘It is,’ said Alexamir. His cover story as well as the truth of the matter. When he spoke, his voice sounded as sing-song and as clipped as any rice-eater. The foreign accent still a surprise every time he opened his mouth to spill a cunning lie. ‘My brother’s lived in HadraHareer for a year and he sent word that he has arranged a good apprenticeship for me.’

‘You won’t like the city, Norbu,’ said Shan, confidently. ‘Too many people, too little space. No clean gusts like those of the High Mask. Lad like you should sign up on one of the boats. Get trained in rivercraft. With your muscles, you’d porter cargo and trim sails with ease.’

‘Family is family,’ said Alexamir.

‘True enough,’ said Shan. ‘You can’t pick them. But you need to be careful where you’re heading. The spirits may well be blowing bad fortune over the capital’s walls soon enough.’

Alexamir flinched.
Does he suspect why I am here?
‘Bad fortune?’

‘The war, lad. The civil war in Weyland. Have you not heard of the war to the south up in the cloud scrapers?’

‘Oh, that. I have heard of fighting in Weyland. Two men who want to be king and only one throne to be shared between them.’

‘You’re not a complete bumpkin, then. As good a summary of our neighbour’s sad affairs as ever I’ve heard.’

‘But their land is far from here.’

‘Aye, but not quite far-called enough,’ said the riverboat skipper, lighting a thin pipe. ‘For centuries our nations stood together. Yet as soon as those ungrateful Weyland devils found the means to scrape together their own skyguard, our kites were banished from their air, as unwelcome as plague in a child’s cot. And now the new Speaker of the Winds is making common cause with one of the factions in the Weylanders’ blood feud. What good will come of that?’

‘I’ll tell you what good,’ called one the sailors. ‘The chance to avenge Palden Tash’s death.’

‘A disgrace, I’ll grant you,’ said the skipper. ‘And a dark dishonour, to trade the protection of salt and roof for foul murder instead. But when you step between the duelling daggers of another family’s blood feud and shout for peace, you shouldn’t be surprised if one of the blades slips and accidentally ends up decorating your own gut.’

‘Blood follows blood,’ said Alexamir.

‘May it never be yours,’ said the skipper, ‘or mine. You mark my words, lad, you may yet be grateful for the chance to sail back to the Mask’s foothills, trade warm chambers inside Hadra-Hareer for a mat in a high village house on the cloud scrapers.’

‘You find trouble swirling in every current,’ complained the sailor.

‘And is that not a captain’s job? May our new Speaker of the Winds yet find the wisdom to understand the same in time.’

‘If I was the Speaker,’ said the sailor, ‘I would send our skyguard down to the King of Weyland’s palace and burn it to ashes for murdering Palden Tash. Let a fire-pot or two fall on this Bad Marcus’ fat head to remind him of the cost of treachery.’

‘Then let us say a prayer of thanks to the kind winds of Langaltso that you are my foolish nephew and not from any family grand enough to be put before the council and voted in as speaker. I want my skyguard in the clear air above Rodal. Protecting us, as is their sworn duty.’

The
Arrow Jang
followed the Yarl’s fast swirling waters for days, little for Alexamir to do but listen to the quarrelsome crew arguing good-naturedly between themselves while he tried to avoid new passengers taken on at each river port they docked at. There were trapped furs to be traded and fresh vegetables to be bought. At least the vegetables made a change. The staple diet on board was a white fish caught in the river by the crew, which Alexamir had to pretend to enjoy, even when it was served in a spicy sauce of minced fish mixed with red peppers and onions. Fish-heads would grin mockingly at Alexamir from the corner of his wooden bowl, sharp-toothed and crafty, nothing like good wholesome lamb or solid oxen meat. Ready to catch in his throat with small bones too numerous to be removed. It was well known that the only people who happily ate fish were the coastal clans west of the steppes. Beach-clingers and dirty trident wielders. Sneaky cowards who would flee out to sea on their tiny vessels sooner than face a man on horseback. That was what regularly eating fish did to you. Still, Alexamir did his best. Or at least, his alter-ego Norbu did his best.
We should call the Rodalians fish-eaters rather than rice-eaters. This is only for you, Golden Fox. The gods will protect me from fish-eaters’ cowardice, surely, while I am honouring my people during the raid.

As the
Arrow Jang
sailed east, Alexamir began to notice the regions they went through growing more populated. They passed high towns clinging to mountains, the choice of river ports to halt at growing more frequent. At one of the river towns a wandering penitent priest joined the vessel, causing Captain Shan to complain about how he was expected to give free passage to every shave-headed monk who took it in his heart to stroll down from a temple. The scrawny orange-robed priest gave no name apart from describing himself as an acolyte of Dro’alung. Alexamir was secretly glad the monk had joined their voyage. Now he did the praying for the crew and passengers, rather than voyagers conducting their own. He’d kneel at the front of the vessel, his hand thumping his traveller’s stave into the decking. It had a little metal wind-vane on top, four spinning silver blades – beaten into the shape of the heads of a monkey, dragon, yak and goat. Professional praying on Alexamir’s behalf was superior to his amateur efforts and the rest of the crew obviously felt the same way. Temmell possessed a book naming over six hundred Rodalian spirits of the wind, and if there was any one thing that was going to give Alexamir away as a proud horseman rather than a mealymouthed rice-eater, it was misremembering some air-blown god of these mad people. Luckily, every region’s mountain tribes held their own pantheon, calling common spirits by local names largely alien to their neighbours. Alexamir spent as much time as possible on deck. He and his fellow passengers such as the priest shared an open chamber below that ran squeezed next to the cargo chamber. It was windowless and dank, any light coming from small wooden grilles in the deck – old bug-infested sacking for beds on the hard wood. The sailors’ accommodation wasn’t any better; just on the other side of the
Arrow
with a few hammocks for sleeping quarters. Only the captain had a cabin worthy of the name at the vessel’s stern.
It does not matter. I do not need comfort. I can ride ten thousand miles sleeping on horseback and only dismounting to water the grass.

‘You’re an unusual fellow, Norbu,’ said the skipper, one afternoon.

Alexamir’s hand touched the back of his coat where his dagger rested.
Still there
. ‘I am?’

‘Many a man in the High Mask dies on the same mountain they were born on without even leaving it. You’ve travelled through the Low Mask already, and now down the bubbling length of half the Yarl River. You must have been far-called in a previous life.’

‘It’s a good trade that calls me.’

‘And what trade would that be?’

‘A vent-man,’ said Alexamir, recalling the careful lies that the old sorcerer had made him memorize.

Captain Shan shivered. ‘A big fellow like you, crawling up an air shaft with a hammer and chisel? I know it pays well and is in the gift of the little guilds, but that’s nothing but a fool’s trade. Can’t spend your coin if you’re lying broken under a rock slide.’

‘Man can fall off a mountain any day of the week.’

‘But if you tumble off a trading cog, chances are you’ll reach the shore. Every man and woman on the Arrow knows how to swim. Easier to teach a fellow that, than how to pull their bones back after a fall down an air shaft.’

‘Perhaps I shall bounce.’ Alexamir had been warned against boasting, but this was just a little one, unlikely to give him away.

‘You’re not a careful man, Norbu. Brave but not careful. You sure there’s not a village girl up in the scrapers crafting a little leather breathing mask for what’s warming her belly?’

‘Do I look like such a man, Captain?’

‘Hard to tell,’ said Shan, winking. ‘But there’s many a maid happy to see the
Arrow
come into port . . . and not just for the goods in our cargo hold. A Yarl trader can have only one wife, yet keep many comforts.’

One wife?
Alexamir tried to keep a look of pity off his face for the old trader. Why, a hero like Alexamir would be embarrassed by anything less than three true wives and twelve saddle wives. More than that would be greedy. And expensive to feed. But heroes did not trouble themselves with petty ledger-keeping when it came to their households or their appetites. That was for thralls to worry about. ‘There is a woman. I plan to return to her.’

‘Yes, but will you return to your love carrying a fat purse of coins, or hobbling on two walking sticks and bearing a shattered spine?’

‘Hopefully I will take the path that returns a man bearing treasure.’

‘I shall pray you are not disappointed,’ said Shan.

If you could see through this enchantment, Captain you’d be praying for your crew to put a harbour hook through my skull
. The river skipper walked off, realizing that this was yet another afternoon where Norbu wasn’t going to be convinced to sign up as crew.

It was a day colder than those that had preceded it when the
Arrow
came sailing towards a dam-like structure built across the canyon, a vast dark wooden structure rather than stone, reaching as high as the mesa top. A wide opening in the structure arched over the Yarl River, enough space for seventy cogs to sail abreast below the dam.
A wind temple
. Alexamir had heard of these giant oddities, but his raiding along the Rodalian borders had never carried him deep enough into the country to witness one before. It was no solid mass of timber such as a dam beavers might build across a river, but a wall rising high above them riddled with thousands of hatches and ports, a complex mess of pulley systems linked to the temple squatting atop the wall.
So, this is how the rice-eaters call their spirits?
It seemed a tame breed of demon who would answer a priest signalling by fluttering heavy wooden shutters. At least the witch riders of his people chewed herbs which set the mind spinning wild and the soul soaring free. What were these monks doing . . . merely banging doors and making a clatter? Alexamir grunted to himself in amusement.
Perhaps that is how they tame the storms of the mountains? They make so much racket that their spirits cannot sleep, and then the demons descend upon Rodal in angry fury to shut the stupid monks up
.