Unholy War (52 page)

Malevorn glared up at Wornu, seeking some pride to cling to. ‘Do your worst, scum.’

The butt of Wornu’s spear hammered into his belly and left him gasping and retching, almost blacking out from the pain. It was a while before he could even think again.

‘Pretty thing,’ Hessaz remarked coldly. ‘Like a girl.’

‘How white his skin is!’ Huriya commented. ‘Pale as a nightworm.’

‘Slugskin,’ Wornu sniffed. ‘Look, you can see his blue veins. Revolting.’

‘Better a slugskin than a shitskin,’ Malevorn retorted defiantly.

Wornu raised his spear-butt over his face. ‘Better whole than a cripple,’ he growled. He spun the spear until its wide leaf-head was poised over Malevorn’s genitals. ‘Or a eunuch.’

‘Peace, Wornu,’ Huriya said quickly. ‘First, we talk with him and give him the chance to save his pallid skin. If he refuses, then you may do as you will.’

Wornu scowled but subsided as Huriya stepped into the middle of the clearing, subtly taking control. Malevorn stared up at her, feeling his fears rise again. She might be tiny, but he found he feared her far more than the bullish, brutal Wornu.

Holy Kore, please make this swift …

‘So, here we are all seeking the same thing,’ Huriya mused in a sing-song voice. ‘The Scytale of Corineus, holiest of holies. Are you going to talk to us, Malevorn?’ When he didn’t react she didn’t look surprised. ‘You know, it seems to me that he needs a change of motivation. Something we should have done to that damned gypsy …’

‘No,’ Hessaz protested. ‘No, Seeress, you can’t! He’s a damned Inquisitor!’

‘He doesn’t deserve it,’ Wornu spat. ‘The pack will not accept him.’

What are they babbling about? I’d never
join
them …

Huriya stepped closer. ‘I do not ask you to accept him. He will be my responsibility. But we need his loyalty if we are to unlock his mind.’ She nudged him casually with her foot, as if he were a dog. ‘He’s an ideal case. His loyalties are broken, and—’

‘My loyalties are not—’ He collapsed, choking, his lips sealed shut by a peremptory gesture from the tiny Keshi girl.

‘Don’t interrupt me,’ she snapped, her face momentarily vicious. ‘As I was saying, his loyalties are broken. I have seen a little of what’s inside his head. He’s a vain, bigoted bully with a streak of moral cowardice he’s entirely blind to. He would justify any crime in the name of self-advancement and think it noble. His only loyalties are to himself and any soul as twisted as his own.’

Malevorn was still gasping for air; her slander barely registered – and anyway, it was easily ignored.
Her opinions are beneath me
.

Wornu frowned and looked at Hessaz, who stared at Malevorn with a highly displeased expression on her severe face. ‘He would be strong if unrestrained.’

‘I don’t intend to set him free, not until the artefact is in our hands and he has demonstrated his utter loyalty.’ She looked down at him. ‘At any rate, we can’t trust a word he says until after we’ve changed him.’ She gestured to Wornu. ‘If you hold him down I’ll do the rest.’

The massive Sydian frowned. ‘I’m still against this, Seeress, but so long as his powers remain Chained, let it be so.’ He gestured, and a kinesis-blow threw Malevorn once again onto his back in the dust and grit.

‘Piss off, big man. You’re not my type,’ Malevorn snapped dazedly, with a bravado he didn’t feel.

What are they going to do to me?

He tried to struggle, but Wornu pinned him like a child. Huriya knelt beside his head and stroked his cheek. ‘Play nicely,’ she said brightly, waggling a finger. ‘Now, do you know the tale of Nasette?’

*

He woke again. At least he wasn’t attached to the arse-end of a stinking donkey this time. He still felt battered and raw; he’d struggled against Wornu until Hessaz had produced a cold blade and held it against his jugular vein, then cut his throat. After that it all got blurry, though he could recall the feel of Huriya’s lips against the cut, and her mouth brimming with blood. She’d swallowed it, infused it with her gnosis as he lay dying, then at the last second vomited the glowing scarlet fluid into his mouth. A convulsive gulp had sealed his fate: a simple, disgusting process, so basic he wondered more people didn’t know of it. Here was Nasette’s secret laid bare: not pregnancy, nor being wounded, nor fucking … she’d ingested gnostically-infused blood.

After that, he didn’t want to die. He wanted to live.

I’m
not
a coward. Cowards are like Seth Korion, who blubs in the face of hostility and aggression. I’m just rational: what would be the sense of dying? It’s just what Kore-bedamned Adamus Crozier or Fronck Quintius would want. I can still restore my family. I can still stand before Emperor Constant, Scytale in hand, purified anew and Saviour of the Empire …

After he’d thought that through, it wasn’t so hard to swear loyalty to the little mudskin harlot and her devil brood. It was the practical choice. Death achieved nothing. Survivors won. Winners survived. And he didn’t doubt that it had worked – he could feel it to the depths of his bones.
I’m a Souldrinker now …

‘How do you feel?’ Huriya purred from beside his ear. He opened his eyes and looked about him. He was in a tiny little hut, a mud hovel with a straw roof and a single cot laid against one wall. The stink of a slop bucket assaulted his nostrils, and the spice-laden smell of something glooping towards the boil on the tiny fire.

He was lying on his back, naked, but wrapped in a blanket. He felt …
well enough
, he decided tentatively. Alive. Functional, though his gnosis was still chained up. No, more than that, it was also empty, like a stomach awaiting a meal. He craved … not food, but
something
. The Chain-rune dulled that hunger, though.

He faced the little Keshi witch. ‘It worked?’

Huriya’s face was full of self-satisfied cleverness. ‘Yes. You are now one of us. “God’s Rejects” is the term you use, I believe. You have no gnosis unless you kill and drain another’s soul … but you’re Chained anyway. Your former brethren would kill you on sight – if you were lucky. If they take you alive, I understand the “correct” punishment is to be hanged, drawn, quartered, and then roasted over a slow fire to expunge your body of evil. Your living kin will then be put to death and your possessions will revert to the Church. Am I correct?’

He nodded mutely.

‘Excellent. There is no way to cure this affliction, except with the Scytale of Corineus: an artefact thought to be beyond hope of extraction in a vault somewhere in Pallas. Except that now it turns up in the hands of a Rondian mage and a Lakh market-girl. Incredible, yes?’

‘You’d never let me use it, even if I placed it in your hands.’

‘Why should I not? Once we are all equal in the eyes of the Kore, what reason remains for persecution? We would bring all our brethren into the light, and believe me, there are a lot of us – not as many as the magi, but with the Scytale, we would not be short of new friends. A new Ritual of Ascension, to found a new empire.’

‘That’s a fantasy.’ But as he considered, the more he thought,
Why not?

‘See,’ Huriya said warmly. ‘You’re coming around.’

‘I’ve sworn vows—’

‘To faithless men who threw your life away. And the life of your lover, too, yes?’

He blinked.
Raine
… It had been weeks since he’d thought of her. A vision of his last sight of her face as the Dokken buried her and began to rip her apart swam across his eyes. ‘I love you’, she said, who’d sworn she was incapable of ‘that emotion’.
Did I love her too? How does one even tell? And what does it matter anyway?

Love doesn’t exist. Just lust and hunger.

‘You don’t owe your former masters anything, Malevorn Andevarion. But you owe me your life.’

He closed his eyes and churned through various scenarios of escape, of somehow gaining the Scytale on his own and restoring it, despite being a stranger lost in a hostile land without access to the gnosis. Then he abandoned such notions for the foolishness they were.

The bitch is right. I have no choice.

He exhaled heavily and met her gaze. He gave her his most meaningful melt-your-heart look and said, ‘You are right, my Queen. I do reject them. I pledge my true loyalty to you alone.’

Was there a flash of girlish coyness in the satisfied look on her face?

*

They travelled on, riding captured wild horses, bareback and primitive, fringing the coastal ranges as they left Dhassa and entered southern Kesh. A few towns were set about a giant bay Huriya called the Rakasarphal. There was some story about it that the Dokken told each other, something about a Creator-God and a serpent. Malevorn was amused to hear these primitives and their ignorance, but he was careful to hide it now. The Rakasarphal was a spectacular place, regardless, the delta a maelstrom of constricted seas, the cliffs dwarfing even those on the Dhassan and Pontic coastlines. The damp air kept this land relatively green, though the salt had seeped deep into the soil, which prevented extensive agriculture. It was, however, mercifully cool.

They still hated him, of course: they still kicked him and slyly raked him with claws and teeth. But they found him clothing and they fed him and gave him water, and they let him ride alone – unarmed, but controlling his own steed.

To put them off guard, he devoted himself to his new queen, tended her horse at day’s end, gathered wood for her fire and learned how to boil and spice the vegetables and grains they bartered for in the villages. His skin turned pink and peeled, his wounds scabbed over and turned to a morass of scars, then darkened as if he were turning Noorie. But he was alive. He began to lay plans again.

Where are you, Alaron Mercer? And how will it feel to drink your soul?

Cym perched on a wide rock at the lip of a narrow gully, a dead hare lying beside her, its fur charred by her mage-bolt. The rock warmed her pleasantly after another day spent in the close and foetid darkness below. She went naked, to preserve the useful life of her tattered tunic and boots. Her feet were now hard as leather anyway, and her skin browner than the sand.

Luna rose, and sent the usual shiver through her: she’d always found the moon’s vast weight in the skies above unnerving. Hungry now, she slid across the rock and down into the cavern below.

A rumbling sound rose from beside the cavern’s small pool: the loud snoring of a lion. She barely noticed it as she walked to the smoothest rock wall and gouged another mark in the surface. There were fifty-seven strokes carved there, one for every night she’d spent here with her patient. Two months that felt like an eternity. She lit the fire she’d prepared earlier then skinned and gutted the hare, skewering chunks of flesh on green twigs to roast.

The lion woke and rumbled, a plea for water. There wasn’t a noise or movement of his that she didn’t understand. She’d washed his wounds and sealed them with the gnosis, and spent weeks cleaning away his shit and piss. She’d fed him and watered him, kept him warm through the cold nights; devoted her days to him.

She still wasn’t sure why. It was too complicated.

When she’d bent over him that day, with freedom beckoning and time precious, it would have been so easy. She tried to walk away – but she couldn’t. Instead she’d beaten off the vultures and used the gnosis to lift him and take him north out of the Noose, questing ahead with her Water-gnosis until she found the hidden cavern and its treasure: the promise of life in this arid land. A pair of foxes were using it as a den, but she’d killed them and fed him the meat. She’d worked the arrow out of his body with excruciating slowness, using the gnosis, where she could. There were always broken bones to set and wounds and illnesses to treat in her father’s caravan, so she’d been healing ever since she gained the gnosis. She had a talent for it – though she was almost entirely self-taught as neither Alaron nor Ramon had ever paid much attention in those classes – but Zaqri’s wound was the deadliest she’d ever worked on, and it had taken all her patience and concentration. When she’d finally eased the shaft from his flank, she’d never felt such pride.

After that, letting him die would have been a waste.

Since then it had been long, slow days of close care, interspersed with hunting, something she still struggled with. But being a mage had its advantages, and she persevered. Sometimes she sensed scrying, which sent her scuttling for the cave, but there hadn’t been many attempts, and the last one was weeks ago.

After three weeks, she worked up the courage to return to the Dokken camp. She found nothing but three lances topped with eyeless, desiccated skulls. There was nothing left to identify them but a few clumps of hair clinging to the scalp. The nearby ground had been dug up, hinting at mass graves beneath. There was nothing to scavenge: the camp itself was nothing but churned sand and ash, her flying carpet was charred beyond repair and the gem was gone.

At night she lay against the lion to share warmth. He slumbered uneasily, moaning softly, but his wound remained uninfected and gradually his breathing became easier. She didn’t think too closely about what she was doing, or why. It just felt right: payment for his protection, perhaps, when she’d been his prisoner.

It means I can kill him in good conscience
, she told herself.

She was aware that he was unconsciously drawing on the gnosis to survive, and that his reservoir of magical strength was running low. For two months he had been little more than a beast, but thirst for the gnosis was drawing him back to awareness. She could see his eyes clearing and tonight, for the first time since this ordeal began, she could feel the presence of the man within the beast.

‘Buonasera,’ she said. ‘Water?’

A throaty growl.
Yes
. She scooped a handful and fed it to him gently, feeling a jitteriness in her stomach. He was returning to himself and she was going to have to deal with that. Now the danger was over the urge for flight returned; the need to move on and leave him. Alaron was on the run from the Dokken and the Inquisition and doubtless in trouble. And he had the Scytale, the prize of nations.