“If I may make a suggestion, Great Prince. Your little rat of a page seems to be cultivating friendships in the kitchen, and indeed all through the servant’s quarters. Perhaps you should instruct him to question his friends about the disease.”
Cuillioc turned the idea over in his mind, trying to uncover the hidden snare. Never had Iobhar made a suggestion that was not part of some scheme. Yet after a long period of examination Cuillioc could only conclude that this time his own advantage and Iobhar’s marched hand in hand.
Accordingly, he did as the priest advised, sent for his page, and gave him his instructions.
11
The sun dipped behind the mountains, but King Ristil would brook no delay. Dusk lasted long at this time of year, and he was determined to keep his riders moving.
So great was his desire for speed that they rode for a time under the stars. More than once, those who rode to the fore nearly came to grief riding too close to the edge of a sheer drop, or barely missed tumbling into some deep chasm when the road turned and the land fell away. They were saved each time by Prince Ruan’s keen night vision. At last the King said they might stop a while and rest the horses.
Everyone dismounted and sat on the ground; they lit hundreds of little fires, but no one slept.
At the first tint of purple dawn above the peaks, they were up and riding again. The weather remained clear and bright; melting snow formed thousands of tiny rills and rivulets running along beside the road.
They travelled all through that day with the fewest possible stops to breathe the horses, and took their meals in the saddle, when they even thought to eat. So swift was their progress that those who rode in the vanguard reached the valley under the pinewood shortly before nightfall and saw the Old Fortress rising up ahead of them in the fading light.
It took Sindérian’s breath away: her first glimpse of the ancient fortified city, piled stone upon stone, level upon level, to such incredible heights. Every stone shone with a pearly luster; every roof tile was afire in the sunset. Yet something that might be a memory, or a warning, or an omen, hovered at the edge of her thought.
As they approached the walls, a deadly silence hung over the entire valley. Even the birds had fled—even the carrion eaters, and that was strangest of all. Sindérian had seen battlefields before, but never anything like this. Wherever she looked there was desolation: hundreds of bodies left to rot; immense wooden siege engines, broken and abandoned, looking like nothing so much as gibbets waiting for someone to come and be hanged.
All the horses began to jibe and balk. From his perch on her saddlebow Faolein bated and screamed like a wild hawk, protesting something large, dead, and covered in dirty white fur lying directly in their path.
Steering the black mare in a wide circle, Sindérian glanced over her shoulder to get a better look. It lay stretched out on one side, with an arrow piercing a bizarrely elongated throat.
“Skinchanger,” she said under her breath.
“Varjolükka,” answered one of the King’s men. “Our horses can never abide them, alive or dead, but the barbarians teach their own beasts to endure them.”
She saw just ahead a gaping hole in the fortifications, and all around where the wall had been there was great debris of shattered stone and pulverized rock. When they reached the outskirts of the wreckage, horses shied again, this time from a gigantic, sprawling man-shaped figure pinned in place by a pile of stone blocks and the splintered remains of a ladder.
Worst of all was a pervasive smell, a taint, infinitely worse than anything rising from the decomposing bodies, with a stomach-churning familiarity about it that Sindérian could not immediately place. Then she did remember; the muscles in her abdomen clenched, and sweat broke out on the palms of her hands. It was the stench of blackest magic, and the last time she had encountered it in such strength was on the road from Gilaefri after the fall of Cuirarthéros.
So it was true, just as she had feared even before the thunderstorm: Ouriána’s priests had arrived here first.
Weaving a path through the rubble, Sindérian and those who rode with her came at length into the outer bailey. White marble walls rose sheer on either side; buildings stared blindly into the yard with dark, shuttered eyes. And everywhere was the drip, drip, drip of melting ice falling on marble pavements.
Here, someone had at least made an effort to pile up hundreds of the bodies as if for burning, until the work of gathering so many must have proved overwhelming. Following after the King, the first riders passed under the arch of a broken gate and into a second yard, then into a third, and each was the same: silent buildings and piled corpses. Meanwhile, shadows were steadily lengthening and it grew darker and darker between the walls.
Circling the third enclosure looking for a way into the next, Sindérian heard a faint rattle of chains, followed by the sound of timbers scraping over gravel. An inner gate began to open slowly, a foot at a time. Lantern light flashed from within as someone peered out, and a moment later the gate swung wide.
A crowd of gaunt-faced men, followed by women and children like pale ghosts of famine erupted into the yard. Most came silently, but no few wept unashamedly as they fell to their knees before the King.
Visibly moved, Ristil swung down from the saddle and walked among them, dropping a comforting hand on a man’s shoulder, a light caress on a child’s hair. Their hands reached out eagerly to touch his cloak as he passed; men and women cried out his name, followed his every movement with hungry eyes.
Sindérian felt her throat close up and her eyes sting—how could he bear this tide of suffering, sorrow, and loss?
“Haestan,” said the King, stopping before a man with grizzled hair and a scarred face. “It is Haestan?
You are one of Prince Kivik’s captains.” The old warrior nodded. “Then you will tell me what has happened here, and if my son is alive.”
With his grey head sinking under the King’s regard, the old man answered in a voice roughened by grief.
“Highness, our losses have been heavy. Most of the men who came with the Prince from Lückenbörg are dead. Your son is alive and so is Lord Skerry, though both suffered many wounds. But—” He choked on the words, shuddered, and went on with an effort. “But our Lady Winloki is gone.”
“Gone?” Ristil seemed to sway, then quickly regained command of himself. “Where has she gone?”
“No one knows where. The Princess was stolen away from us. But perhaps—it may be—Prince Kivik would wish to tell you more of this himself.”
“Yes,” said the King. “Yes. I am eager to speak to my son. Take me to him at once.”
Prince Kivik’s tale—after an emotional reunion with his father—was so convoluted and full of strange twists, he was more than halfway through before Sindérian and the rest began to make sense of it.
They were seated with the Prince and his cousin by one of the cavernous fireplaces in the keep, sipping a thin broth of uncertain origins out of cracked wooden bowls. After many digressions, he finally came to the point in his story where the wall near the gatehouse shattered in a burst of light and sound. “And then I saw them picking their way through the rubble. They weren’t Eisenlonders, nor dead witch-lords as I first thought, but creatures I had never seen before, all in red robes, like to men in form—but not like them either.”
“In truth, they were Furiádhin,” said Sindérian, putting her bowl aside. With the first pangs of hunger dulled, she had no desire for more of the bitter broth. “Accompanied, no doubt, by their acolytes and temple guards.”
Kivik frowned and shook his head. “I never imagined that Ouriána’s priests might look like that.” Then he shrugged, a movement that brought on a little grunt of pain. She suspected cracked ribs or a broken collarbone.