The Stealers' War (33 page)

EIGHT

CASSANDRA’S GIFT

The first inkling Cassandra had that something of import would happen this morning was when Nonna started sniffing the chill air inside the tent as though noxious vapours had invaded their home.

‘You have already emptied the chamber pot from last night,’ said Cassandra. They were both sitting around a circular folding wooden table inside the tent. ‘I saw you do it.’

‘Am I so old that I forget to buckle my dagger around my waist, girl?’ said Nonna.

‘Of course not.’

‘One day I shall reach an age when Kalu the Apportioner reminds me it’s time for me to join my ancestors. Should I fight him, he will send his servants to steal my memories one by one until I’m left a husk.’ Nonna picked up the hare she was skinning. ‘But that unhappy day has not yet arrived.’

‘May it be many years hence,’ said Cassandra. ‘So, what is it that you scent?’

‘Nothing under canvas,’ said the old nomad. ‘There is a little witch rider in all of the clan’s women . . . I smell news carried on the morning wind.’

Cassandra did not know what to say to that. ‘Something is always happening somewhere.’

‘I do not mean which warrior has stolen another’s goat or which wife has been creeping into a tent not her husband’s. It is not mere tittle-tattle that I smell.’

‘Wars ending and starting? Thrones being filled and thrones being lost?’

‘I said news, not the inevitable ambitions of the high-born,’ said Nonna, banging the separated hare meat against a stone to tenderize it. She tossed its fur to Cassandra to add to the other two taken. ‘We shall see if I am right.’

Cassandra was glad of the near endless stream of daily tasks Nonna could conjure. It gave Cassandra a distraction from the memory of her mother stalking away, never looking back once as her rescuers lifted off, abandoning Cassandra. When she wasn’t brooding on an exile’s lot, she fretted over Alexamir’s fate. Begging every ancestor and god she had heard of for intervention in the nomad’s mission.

When someone did come calling on their tent, Cassandra was surprised to see it wasn’t the trickster Temmell or one of his lackeys. It was Kani Yargul. The war leader of the horde ducked under the tent’s opening, pushing back the flaps as though this was his home.

‘And what brings the illustrious Krul of Kruls to my abode?’ asked Nonna, hardly looking at the grass king. ‘If you have any complaints about my sister’s humours then you need not carry them here.’

Yargul grunted. ‘My tent is tranquil. As, I hope, is your younger sister.’ He glanced over at Cassandra, his eyes narrowing. ‘I wish to ensure our clan guest is well; Alexamir’s strange little Golden Fox.’

‘And why would she not be?’

‘To be cast off by your own people is no easy thing to bear.’

Cassandra picked up a skinning blade from the table. She had a feeling that the clan’s leader had arrived out of curiosity, to see what sort of strange foreigner Alexamir had chosen to risk his life for. If Yargul was angry over the scornful manner in which the Vandians had arrived here while he was out hunting, he concealed it well. ‘You are worried that I will take my life to end my exile?’

‘You are a woman and a foreigner. Is this your fate?’

‘And you are a fool,’ growled Nonna. ‘This girl is young and loves life. It is for Kalu the Apportioner to judge her time, to drag her spirit away spitting and fighting every step of the way.’

Yargul noted Cassandra flinching at the aunt’s words. He tapped the sword dangling from his belt. ‘Perhaps you believe I should have this old woman’s head for her insolence?’

I would rather you didn’t.
Despite her acerbic nature, Nonna was the closest thing she had to a friend here without Alexamir. Cassandra chose her words carefully. ‘In Vandia the emperor ordered an entire embassy’s staff handed to his torturers for the offence of a single ambassador releasing wind in his presence.’

Yargul roared with laughter. ‘We are Nijumeti, girl. We speak plainly and fart even louder. A good release of arse-breeze only means you have been well-dined. If your emperor kills people for farting, he might as well kill them for breathing in his presence.’

‘It was meant to instil respect,’ said Cassandra.

‘No, it was meant to instil
fear
. Respect is earned by rising from your throne and beating the ears of your real opponents until they bleed, not jumping at shadows. A Krul is followed because his riders know the direction he takes the clan is true.’

‘And a Krul of Kruls?’

‘Riders will follow as long as the direction he leads the clans makes them wealthy, well fed and victorious.’

‘That seems a precariously strapped saddle,’ said Cassandra.

‘I have been given many strong children,’ said Yargul. ‘Yet none of them will become Krul on the day I fall. They have enjoyed the curse of an easy life.’

Cassandra took a needle to the fur in front of her. ‘The same could be said for me.’

‘Temmell tells me Vandian nobles train their young hard and long in combat so that your empire will prevail. We do the same with our heirs. But to be born to a great family is not the same as to be born with greatness. That is a hunger you must find inside your own gut. The sharpest steel is always beaten the hardest and longest.’

‘This is true of you?’ asked Cassandra.

‘As I stand here it is. Have you never heard my nickname among the riders?’

Cassandra shook her head.

‘It is the
Anvil
,’ interjected Nonna. ‘But I have another name for you, Kani Yargul. One you would be less pleased with.
Little Tongs
.’

The nomad king slapped his massive muscled thighs and laughed. ‘Pah! Woman, you are still sour milk that I claimed your sister over you for the Krul of Krul’s tent. I shall tell you where my name comes from, Golden Fox. Only days after my birth the plague we call Red Grass Fever burnt me and left my frame feeble and sickly. Failing to master a wild horse on both my sixth and seventh birthdays, my clan cast me out, leaving me to my end in the hills. Clan Stanim’s blacksmith, Makar, discovered me while he was out hunting, a walking skeleton sucking on roots and close to death. Old Makar’s two apprentices had recently died from the fever and so he said that as the fever had deprived him of his helpers, the cursed sickness now owed him at least one replacement.

‘He claimed me for his new apprentice. Every day he made me strike iron. My arms began as reeds, so puny they could barely lift a set of tongs. But Makar hammered me with a smith’s labours, as I learnt to hammer and fold metal into sabres. “The sharpest steel is always beaten the hardest and longest,” he would tell me. “What the fever has started, I will finish.” And so I hammered until I could lift the largest of his tools. Then I hammered until I could drive an anvil punch through plate armour. My arms slowly grew from reeds to oak. When this was done he made me pick up his anvil and carry it after the forge’s fire had dwindled. First for minutes, then for hours, finally for days. I sweated and cursed him, but he just laughed at me. Then the breath in my chest swelled from a thin breeze into a storm. My legs turned from twigs into trunks.’

Cassandra stared at the Krul. She could see none of the boy in the man, now. Not as described. He was perhaps only a decade younger than her grandfather, Emperor Jaelis. But while Cassandra’s grandfather held to the throne like a half-eaten spectre, imagining conspiracies and plots all around him, this leader joyfully rode at the front of a stampeding horde, swinging a sword and casting spears through his enemies’ hearts. ‘Is Makar still inside the camp?’

‘Makar is with the clan’s fallen,’ said Yargul. ‘The dagger of too many years sliced away his thread upon this world. On the night he left with Kalu the Apportioner, I told him I intended to honour his trade. Makar reached out to me from his deathbed and said, “You were never born to be a smith. You were born to be an anvil.” And in this prophecy, he was correct.’

‘So it seems.’

‘You are a costly guest,’ said the Great Krul. ‘Your people come for you and think to give orders to mine as though Nijumeti are their thralls. Then they abandon you here and fly away in their mighty metal warship.’

‘So they did,’ said Cassandra, trying to hide the hurt in her voice.

‘I understand what it is to be exiled from your own blood and saddle,’ said Yargul not unkindly. He picked up the skinning knife and drove it into the table’s wood. ‘Never forget that the sharpest steel is always beaten the hardest and longest.’

‘Makar’s two dead apprentices were his sons,’ said Nonna after the nomad ruler departed the tent, his blade still quivering in the wood. ‘If the sickness had been a warrior, Makar would have tracked it across the world and strangled it in its sleep. He made Kani Yargul his son to defy the fates and spit upon their rule.’

‘And in the same way, Alexamir is the Great Krul’s son?’

‘A widow-son,’ said Nonna. ‘If my nephew proves worthy of the title.’

He is
, thought Cassandra. She had no doubts on that matter.

‘Makar made many deadly swords for the clan before his end,’ said Nonna. ‘I sometimes wonder if Kani Yargul isn’t the sharpest of them all.’

‘You do not sound entirely happy about it.’

‘I once chased glory as hard and long as any man,’ said Nonna. ‘Victories I found. But little contentment. We ride to live. We ride to die. Alexamir is all I have to show for my life.’

And I
, thought Cassandra.
And I
. She groaned and there was an audible click from her spine as Temmell’s spell worked its daily miracle upon her.

‘Go then,’ scowled Nonna. ‘Enjoy your brief healing, before your legs wither to twigs as thin as our Krul of Krul’s once tottered with. If you find one of the smiths, borrow his anvil and stagger about the grass with it like a fool. Perhaps your legs will grow as strong and fast as the fleetest of stallions.’

‘I will be back soon.’

‘Yes, soon enough,’ warned Nonna. ‘I don’t wish to scour the camp to find you collapsed on the soil like a bag of grain for my old bones to lug back to the tent.’

Beula Fetterman’s rifle exploded and Carter staggered back with shock, but it wasn’t the jolt of being shot.
No pain. She’s missed me
. Carter realized that he had closed his eyes. He blinked them open to discover the aviator rearing forward. She screamed like a banshee, the cry strangled to a halt in her throat when she tumbled down into the freshly dug grave. As she fell, Carter noticed the dagger buried in her spine, her own blade, then his eyes fixed on Sariel swaying behind the grave, as pale as a ghost, but still, incredibly, alive. Fetterman twitched in the dirt before falling still. Fetterman had traded places with Carter.
The grave wasn’t for me after all
.

‘She cut your throat?’ Carter stuttered. ‘I heard it. The knife was stuck through your damn heart!’

Sariel rubbed his back, where the stubs of his wings were, before his wings had been dismembered by the stealers’ torture. ‘And how many hearts do you think a creature that soars through the vaults of heaven needs beating inside his miraculous chest to lift their weight off the ground?’

Carter remembered one of his father’s more unlikely stories, a story Carter had dismissed as a tall tale. About how Sariel’s arm had been ripped off during Jacob Carnehan’s journey across Pellas and how the old trickster had joined the limb back to his body. Healed himself with much the same ease as a child moulding a clay figure in the mud.

‘Sweet saints! Just how hard to kill are you?’

‘All things must die in time. So let us agree like fine gentlemen of the road that it is easier for knaves outside my race to reduce my body, deprive me of my memory and purpose, than to seek a more permanent solution to my existence.’

Yes, exactly how you were when you came calling on the library hold.
Carter felt a shiver of fear rise inside him. A supernatural dread about just who –
what
– he was really travelling with here. Willow’s apocryphal words echoed in his mind.
We’re the ants in his story; you know that, don’t you?
‘You’re here because I healed you.’

‘And now I must return the favour and save us all,’ said Sariel. He gazed down sadly on the aviator’s corpse. ‘But not this one, not this well-gorged gudgeon.’

A suspicion nagged at Carter. ‘You knew she wasn’t what she seemed.’

‘She was far too careful and skilled a pilot to allow her plane to run out of fuel. She wanted to accompany us, just as she wished the three of us far from Rodal. I could not believe her motive for joining our band was a worthy one. She had a sour soul. Did you not smell it? Like rancid milk.’

‘You might have said something to me . . . a warning at least.’

‘A good spy is trained to notice changes of behaviour. Heavens forbid that you might have started being polite to her, attempting to mask your true feelings.’

‘You goaded Fetterman into acting.’

‘It was natural for the marrowless malcontent to decide to murder us when she realized she would only be discovering the nature of our mission upon reaching our destination.’

‘And what if she had started by slitting
my
throat?’

‘I am a light sleeper, Lord Carnehan. Have no concern; I am certain I could have stopped her before she murdered you.’ Sariel clutched his chest where the dagger had been driven into his body. His shirt soaked wet with what passed for the sorcerer’s blood. ‘I, however, am wounded.’

You should be dead.
Carter ran to his pack to search for the roll of bandages and a copper flask of pure medical grade alcohol he had brought with him. ‘How deep is it?’

‘Leave your baggage be. I do not need Weylander potions and salves to heal,’ said Sariel. He reached down to the ground and drew Carter’s sabre out of its scabbard, taking the blade and resting it in the coals of the fire pit until the steel glowed white hot. ‘Seal my wound with fire and trust my body to heal the internal defilement of my person.’ Sariel removed his long leather coat, covered with the artwork of hundreds of stories and tales, before unbuttoning a green silk shirt. Both had been expensively ornate at one point in their existence; but, much like the bard himself, they had grown worn and weathered by an age on the road. The old man knelt in front of Carter as though his young travelling companion was an axe man and Sariel the victim preparing for an execution. Carter gazed down at the wound on Sariel’s chest. It was like nothing he had seen before. Sariel’s wound bubbled with blood, but not red blood . . . yellow and as thick as cream, as though a milk pail had been pierced with a chisel.