Any army will make a ruin of the land as they pass through. Grandmother’s army had left its marks on the borderlands of Slov, not through malice or conflict but through sheer numbers. In places where the road could not contain them the troops had marched through fields, though luckily for the farmers the harvest no longer stood there to be trampled. Less luckily however any travelling force of thousands picks the countryside clean as it goes and a newly gathered-in harvest simply makes it more convenient to pick up and take.
‘The people will starve come winter. Even in these green lands.’ Kara seemed disgusted with me, waving her arm at the hollow-eyed peasants who watched us pass.
‘They’re lucky to have homes still standing,’ I said. ‘Hell, they’re lucky to be alive.’ Snorri and I had passed through the border region where Rhone and Scorron meet Gelleth – towns there had been reduced to fields of hot embers, others had been left to ghosts and rats, the people long fled. But Kara didn’t seem placated, instead eyeing me as if I’d personally led the invasion.
‘Starvation has a crueller edge than any sword, Jal.’ Snorri watched the road with a grim set to his mouth.
‘I think we’re missing the big picture here.’ Ragged children watching us from a roadside tree didn’t help put me in a sympathetic light. ‘If the Blue Lady isn’t stopped, and if we don’t succeed in Osheim nobody is going to have time to starve: there won’t be a winter, and being hungry will cease to be an option.’
None of them had a reply to that and we rode on in silence, with me still feeling guilty despite my flawless logic. It struck me belatedly that I should have added the way the pair of them made me feel guilty for all sorts of things I normally wouldn’t give a damn about to the case for not taking Kara and Hennan with us.
The next dawn came with a bite, crisp, leaving the hedgerows heavy with dew and us in no doubt that winter was sharpening its teeth.
We rode more cautiously now, scanning the woods and hedgerows for signs of ambush. An invading army leaves dangerous ground in its wake. Add to the desperation of the surviving populace the removal of their ruler’s yoke and you get the perfect mix for armed bands of looters and raiders.
Fortunately Grandmother’s plan called for a quick exit once her goal was accomplished and this required that she keep the roads back to Red March clear. We passed half a dozen checkpoints before the sun set on our first day in Slov, and at each of them I had to argue my case, the volume and confidence of my delivery seeming to be more of a factor in getting us through than Garyus’s ornately worked scroll of authorization.
At Trevi we saw our first true signs of battle. I smelled it first, the bitterness of smoke lacing an evening mist as we rode along the Julana Way, weary and feeling the miles where we sat. The scent of Vermillion’s burning still haunted my nostrils but that had been an inferno billowing out hot clouds that quenched the stars. This was the stink of old fires hiding among ruins, smouldering, chewing slowly through the very last of their fuel beneath thick blankets of ash.
The sun descended toward the western hills, throwing our shadows before us and tingeing the mists with crimson before we saw the ruined fort. The mound it stood upon was too small and isolated to make it a convincing foothill, too large for me to easily believe that men had heaped up so much earth. A small town had grown at the foot of the mound to service the fort’s needs. Little of those homes remained: most lay in ashes; here and there a standing spar. The fort itself had lost a large part of its gatehouse in some devastating explosion, masonry scattered the slope, reaching down to the blackened ribs of the closest buildings. What magics or alchemy the Red Queen had employed I couldn’t guess but she had obviously not been minded to mount a long siege or to leave the garrison secure to threaten her supply line.
‘Impressive.’ Snorri sat tall in his saddle, eyes on the scene ahead of us.
‘Hmmm.’ I’d be glad when it was all behind us. The road led on into a tangle of forest a quarter of a mile or so past the fort. It looked like the sort of place survivors might gather and plot revenge. ‘We’ll steer well clear of it. Stay alert. I don’t like this place.’
The words were scarcely off my lips before Squire started beeping. It wasn’t something she’d done before. The noise was like no sound any horse could make, or any human or instrument for that matter. It held an unnatural quality, too precise, too clean. Hennan looked around in surprise, trying to locate the source. As far as I could tell what he was sitting on was making the sound.
‘It’s coming from the saddlebags,’ Kara said, nudging her mount closer to the boy’s.
‘Ah.’ I guessed then what was making the beeps and all at once the day seemed colder than it had a moment before. ‘Hell.’
Snorri gave me that two-part look of his, the first part being: tell me what you know, and the second part being: or I’ll break your arms. I dismounted and started to undo the straps on Squire’s left saddlebag. It took a bit of digging to get the package out, and then some wrestling with twine and rags to unwrap it. The beeps came every four seconds or so, the gap long enough so you might imagine the last one was the end of it. A few moments later I pulled away the last of the wrapping and held Luntar’s box of ghosts in my hands. In the light of day it looked every bit as unnatural as it had back in the throne room. It seemed as if it were a piece of winter viewed through a box-shaped hole, and it weighed far too little for what I knew it to contain. It beeped again and I nearly dropped it.
‘What is it?’ Kara and Hennan almost in unison, the boy a fraction ahead.
‘A funeral urn,’ I said. ‘Containing the ashes of ten million dead Builders. I opened the lid. A fan of light spread out above the open mouth and coalesced into a pale human figure. A gaunt man. I realized two things simultaneously. Firstly, that I recognized the man. Secondly, that the shock of the first realization had made me drop the box.
Hennan moved as fast as I’ve ever seen another human react. He’d been fleet-footed when I’d tried to catch him the first time we met in Osheim, but half a year had quickened him. He dived forward and, at full stretch, caught the box an inch above the ground. The air left his lungs in a sharp ‘oooof’.
‘Thank you.’ I scooped the box from his outstretched hands and set it on a marker stone beside the road. Snorri leant down to help the boy up. I crouched to stare at the ten-inch ghost standing in the air above the box. The phantom wore a long white tunic, buttoned at the front and coming down past his knees, a lean, one might say scrawny man of about my age, a narrow, owlish face beneath an unruly mop of light-coloured hair, a frame hooking over his ears and holding two glass lenses, one immediately before each eye. He looked far too young but I knew him.
‘Taproot?’
‘Elias Taproot, PhD, at your service.’ The figure executed a bow.
‘Do you know me, Taproot?’
‘Local data suggests you are Prince Jalan Kendeth.’
‘And him?’ I held the box so he would get a good view of Snorri, now standing in the road, hands resting on Hennan’s shoulders just before him, both of them staring our way.
‘Big fellow. Name unknown.’ Dr Taproot frowned, one hand coming up to stroke his chin, fingers sliding toward an absent goatee.
‘You don’t remember, Snorri?’ I asked.
‘I am simply a library record, dear boy. This unit has not been connected to the deepnet for … oh my, nearly a thousand years.’
‘Why do you look like Dr Taproot?’
‘Who else would I look like? I am Elias Taproot’s data-echo.’
I frowned and considered shaking the box to see if it held more intelligible answers.
‘Why have you popped up out of all the ghosts in this box? And—’ *beep* ‘And why is it beeping?’
Taproot frowned for a moment, flexing his hands rapidly in the space between us as if trying to wring out a reply. ‘A narrow bandwidth emergency signal, broadcast using residual satellite power, has activated all devices in this immediate area.’
‘Say that again in words that have meaning or I’m closing this box, digging a hole, and leaving it here under five foot of soil.’ I meant it too, except for the digging part.
Taproot’s eyes widened at that. ‘This is a level 5 sanctioned emergency broadcast. You can’t just walk away from that – it contravenes any number of regulations. You wouldn’t dare!’
‘Watch me!’ I turned away.
‘Wait!’ The thing had Taproot’s voice down pat, I had to give it that. He’d had the same mix of outrage and nervousness when dressing me down for bringing an unborn into his circus. ‘Wait! You wanted to know why I was projected rather than any other record?’
I glanced back. ‘Well?’
‘It’s me that’s in trouble. My flesh. Somewhere close by. The location system is corrupt, orbits have decayed—’ He caught my deepening frown and amended his language. ‘The box will beep more rapidly as you get closer, but it’s only a rough guide.’
I reached over and snapped the box shut. I don’t like ghosts. ‘So, let’s go.’ I picked it up, straightened and turned toward Murder. ‘While we still have the light.’
‘He said Dr Taproot is in danger.’ I could tell without looking that Snorri wasn’t moving.
‘The circus man?’ Hennan piped up. I must have told him stories at some point.
‘There might be more wonders with him…’ Kara sounded like a starving woman describing a hot roast with gravy. I glanced her way but the box in my hands held her gaze. It beeped again. ‘That was truly his likeness?’
I shrugged. ‘Like him, but thirty years younger.’ In Grandmother’s childhood memories Taproot had been there at the palace, a man in his forties, head of Gholloth the First’s security. What in hell’s name he was, or what gets a man like that in trouble, I had no interest in discovering.
‘Which direction shall we try?’ Snorri asked.
I sighed and pointed up the hill without looking at it. ‘It’s pretty obvious. Where else would it be? A fortress full of corpses, laced with the remnants of some horrendous magic or Builder weapon … it’s got to be there, doesn’t it?’
None of them bothered to deny it.
24
The sun set, leaving us to climb up to the fort in the day’s afterglow. We beat the rising mists up the slopes, and glancing back I could see nothing of the burned village, just a white sea, all a-swirl, flowing into the woods, coiling around each trunk before reaching up to drown the trees.
In the west the sky glowed red; in the east darkness threatened, and somewhere a screech-owl lifted its voice to greet the night. Just great.
*beep* ‘We could wait until morning, you know.’ *beep* I wrapped the box in my cloak, trying to muffle it. The thing had been annoying from the start, and the irritation increased with the increasing tempo of the beeps. ‘Or I could stay here with the box – we don’t want it to give us away.’
‘We need the box to find Taproot,’ Snorri said. ‘And I never saw your Red Queen as the sort to leave survivors. Certainly not armed and dangerous ones.’
Large chunks of masonry littered the upper slope, some pieces so big we had to track around them. Hennan leapt from one to another, clearly oblivious to the growing sense of dread that any reasonable person should feel in such circumstances. Just above us the breach in the walls yawned wide, still jagged with the violence of the event that had obliterated the gatehouse.
‘Is that … smoke?’ I pointed to a white cloud hanging across the breach.
‘The memory of smoke.’ Kara reached up to snatch something from the air. Opening her palm she revealed a small seed hanging below a scrap of downy fluff. ‘Fireweed. Always the first green among the black.’
And as we gained more height I could see she was right. Among the tumbled and blackened walls the stuff grew knee-high, the seeds floating away in white profusion. Even so, something seemed wrong.
‘Doesn’t it look odd to you?’ I asked.
Ahead of me Snorri stopped and looked back. ‘What?’
‘It’s too still,’ Hennan said, coming up behind me.
That hadn’t been what I was thinking, but he was right. The seeds had been drifting around us lower down the slope, but above the fireweed they hung in a great motionless cloud as if the air were wholly without motion.
‘Grandmother came through here … what, two weeks ago at the very most?’
Snorri shrugged. ‘You tell me. You saw her leave – I was in … another place.’
Kara frowned. ‘Two weeks isn’t long enough for fireweed to grow and go to seed. Not even if it sprang up the moment the fire went out.’ She kept her gaze on the false and unmoving smoke. ‘Perhaps your grandmother didn’t do this.’
‘It was her.’ I walked past them, angling toward the far side of the breach where the only weed that grew still lay close to the ground without sign of flower or seed. At the back of my mind another of the Red Queen’s blood-dreams replayed itself, not of Taproot in the palace forty years before I was born, but of Ameroth keep … another fortress that had exploded and where time had run in strange patterns.
Many people must have been killed but we saw no bodies as we crossed the courtyard, clambering over rubble. One could read that as good news – Grandmother having ordered their cremation, meaning that the Dead King would have no handy corpses to set chasing me for the key, or as very bad news, taking it to say that the Dead King had already gathered them into a single force, perhaps hidden amid the shattered walls of the stables, just waiting to pour forth…
‘Jal!’ Snorri’s voice startled me from my imaginings. I jumped away, spinning, sword half-drawn.
‘What?’ Anger and fear mixed in my voice. Shadows filled the interior of the fort wall to wall. I could make out the northerners but the rest lay in a jumble of soft grey shapes.
‘The beeping. It’s slowing down. Was faster back there.’ He jabbed a blunt finger toward a group of outbuildings.
I nodded and started back. In truth I’d already tuned out the box’s noise, too focused on my fears to hear it, only noticing it now that Snorri drew my attention to it. There are probably half a dozen lessons in that for a wise man.
As I approached the nearest of the outbuildings the box’s beeps grew so rapid as to join together into a single tone which then, thankfully, ended. ‘Perhaps he died,’ I said. ‘We should go back to the horses now.’
‘We don’t need a lantern, Jal.’
I hadn’t been planning to go back for a lantern – I wasn’t planning on returning. But we did need light if we were intending to venture into the structure in front of us, and Snorri was right, we didn’t need a lantern for that. ‘Fine.’ I pulled the orichalcum cone from my pocket and tipped it from its leather bag into Snorri’s outstretched hand. The cold light that sprang forth as orichalcum touched skin revealed that the mist had caught us up again, faint tendrils of it curling about our ankles. What I’d taken for gravel underfoot turned out to be grain, the building before us a granary. Snorri stepped up to the shattered doorway and raised his hand. The light also showed a profusion of sacks, wreckage, and that whoever had gathered up the corpses – Grandmother’s troops or the Dead King – hadn’t been particularly thorough. The body of a stout, middle-aged woman lay trapped under one of the fallen roof beams. The sickly-sweet stink reaching out of the room suggested she had been lying there long enough to give birth to several generations of flies. I tried not to look too closely where her flesh lay exposed, not wanting to see it crawling.
‘So, we’re going in, then?’ I asked as Snorri stepped through, Hennan and Kara crowding behind him.
‘This floor is Builder stone.’ Kara knelt to set her hand to it, brushing away grain from split sacks.
‘It will be below us,’ Snorri said. ‘The things that time wants to keep, it buries.’
‘Time might be playing different games around here,’ I said. The fireweed had shown a month’s growth in less than two weeks, then become frozen in a single moment. Whatever had happened
here broke something important and time itself that invisible fire in which we burn, had become fractured.
‘I think there’s a trapdoor over here.’ Kara called us from beside a pile of debris and fallen beams. ‘Bring the light.’
‘How on earth can you say there’s a trapdoor?’ I squinted through a gap in the crossed roof beams. Even with Snorri holding the light up I could see nothing but dust, wheat grain, and broken roof tiles. ‘I can barely even see the floor.’
Kara looked around to meet my question, her eyes with that unfocused, ‘witchy’ look to them.
‘Oh,’ I said.
Hennan took hold of a beam and started to heave. An ant would have more luck trying to drag a tree. Snorri bent to help him.
‘Is this a good idea?’ By which I meant of course that it was a terrible idea. ‘Apart from whatever bad thing might be lurking down there, this place looks ready to finish falling down any moment.’ From what I could see several dozen sacks of grain formed the main structural support in lieu of the stone and timber now piled on the floor. Apparently Grandmother’s men had agreed with me and decided to leave the sacks in place. ‘I said,’ I repeated myself more loudly. ‘The whole place could collapse any moment.’
‘All the more reason to work quickly and keep our voices down then.’ Snorri flashed me a look. He bent and, gritting his teeth, wrapped his enormous arms around a fallen roof beam, straining to move it. For a moment the thing held as Snorri passed from red through several shades of scarlet. Veins pulsed along the bulging muscles of his arms – I later described it to a young woman who seemed overly interested in the Northman as being like ugly worms mating – his legs trembled and straightened, and in a cloud of dust the beam gave up the fight.