‘Not just yet, please.’ Anfen gazed around at the bodies, counting them: forty. ‘How long have these ones been here? How soon until they are freed? How long were you held?’
She shifted uncomfortably. ‘I remember little. Only that I was one of those who came from the cities to the castle seeking work, as my parents wished. I was accepted, my aptitude tested. They took those who had magic talent. I had much — I knew it before they tested me. They sent coin and a letter full of lies to my parents, brought me with a few others underground, and that’s where memories fade.’ Her eyes closed. ‘Or, at least, change. Please, let us go.’
‘And these ones, you say, will be of different inclination from you, if they survive to become New Mages? They are certain to be a threat to the Free Cities?’
She frowned, watching him carefully. ‘Yes. When this process is complete, they will be unable to do anything other than serve the Arch Mage.’
‘Even if we free them now?’
‘There is no way we can. Your sword will not break their bonds.’
‘Are you absolutely certain all that is so?’
‘Yes.’
Anfen nodded. He drew his sword.
She looked at him, eyes wide. ‘What are you doing?’
He looked back, surprised at her. ‘You have told me yourself, this is a threat awaiting us.’
‘Please. Some of these were with me at the castle gates. Some were my friends. They were just like me. Their parents think they are spinning wool or learning trades.’
‘I am sorry, Stranger. Such is war. Look away if it distresses you.’
‘Don’t …’
He didn’t look back at her, did not wish this moment or this act to be extended. His arm moved, that was all, and he distanced himself from what it did, made it a mechanical thing, a killing machine. He made himself distant from Stranger’s blazing, hateful eyes, glaring at him with — he imagined — heat as strong as that coming from the claws embedded in the walls. How shocked he’d have been by the change in her just then, had Anfen really been present in the room as his arm lashed out and killed, rather than watching it all from a safer distance, and trying to bury the memory even as it occurred, to make it meaningless sounds and blurs of colour.
The poor souls trapped in the Arch Mage’s embrace did not make a sound. Anfen’s sword thumped against the stone wall behind them with impersonal regularity. Finally the last of them was dead. Sweat poured from him and he felt dizzy, wanting a drink of water more than anything else. He felt Stranger’s rage, felt it seething. She could kill me, we both know it, he thought, as Anfen returned to himself.
‘We may be allies,’ she said, ‘but from this moment, we will never be friends.’
Anfen cleaned his blade as best he could. He looked at her sadly. ‘As It wills.’
47
As they headed back through the tunnels in the ghostly glow of lightstones her mood cooled, and she finally broke her silence. ‘I had hoped to win them over, when they were freed.’
‘Yet you told me that was impossible.’
‘I thought I alone could do it. I, who knew where they had been and what they’d been before. Of course I couldn’t promise you success.’
Anfen would have liked to put that memory in the place he kept all the others, where other blood had been spilled in such fashion. Yet part of him was glad for the chance to explain it this time, to reconcile his arm mechanically slaying with a mind that knew its purpose, and (this time) stood by it afterwards. ‘How well do you know history, Stranger? How well do you really know them? The ones who put those people in that cavern. And put you there.’
She didn’t answer. The caverns echoed with the phantom drip drip of unseen water, though Anfen now imagined it as blood. He spoke quietly. ‘Did my arm seem practised to you, just now? Professional? Do you know that I have had to do that sort of thing before? Only not to people little more than suffering bodies. And not to those who will soon be a powerful weapon in evil hands. I have overseen the slaughter of entire villages of people deemed trouble, or inconvenient, or simply in the way of some construction and refusing to move from their land. Sometimes it seemed they were killed for no reason at all. I executed with my own hands wise people who owned forbidden books, who practised folk magic. Some of whom did do foul things, rituals of sacrifice and perversion. But mostly others, whose crime was to cure their children of fucking colds.’
Easy. Easy. Detach. Breathe.
A swirl of dizzying thoughts spun through him and his knees felt weak. Funny — no, plain incomprehensible — that all the while Anfen and his men had done it all believing, honestly believing, that these pitiful clinging remnants of the old world did present a threat to the castle’s great strength. Small-time folk mages like Loup, farmers, refugees from Aligned cities who’d banded up for one last stand. Their tenacity, their bravery … he’d thought himself charitable, as an opposing commander, to recognise it and grant them mercy where he could, a swift kill, ordering his men against rape and plunder. Drip drip went the phantom echo between their scuffing footsteps.
‘I know the history better than you may think. Keep your voice low,’ Stranger replied.
It was indeed the last thing either of them said for a while, as muttering voices could soon be heard in passages beside theirs. In silence she led him back the way they’d come, illuminating the way with her green light when the dark grey walls were free of lightstones.
The walk it seemed would never end, but Anfen watched that too from a distance, while his tired legs propelled him along, mouth and throat dry as sand, body sick with what he’d done, his consciousness hidden in a small quiet corner of his own mind.
‘Maybe you were right, back there,’ Stranger said as they neared the surface at long last. ‘Maybe it was necessary. I know it was hard for you. I take back what I said.’
He barely heard her. He was exhausted, as though he’d just marched for days straight, not two or three hours. He found his way back through the woods, not even noticing at what point Stranger parted from him, nor caring. It was still night, well past someone else’s turn to take watch. Anfen woke Sharfy and murmured, ‘Another hour, then wake me and we leave.’
‘Where you been?’ said Sharfy, smelling the sweat of Anfen’s exertions and watching the speed with which he emptied a full skin of water. Anfen waved the question away and dropped onto the mat Sharfy had vacated.
48
There was no point chastising Loup for taking another scale vision; they had four days’ march ahead, less if they really laid boot to road, and having the folk mage storm off, disgruntled, was very likely a death sentence. There were elementals between them and their city, perhaps even Lesser Spirits, and Loup would make sure they avoided them.
‘We had a visitor,’ Anfen said to Siel and Sharfy as morning set in and they set out in the woods. He’d debated whether or not to tell them about Stranger, and decided he’d better, lest Siel put an arrow through their new ally, or lest he be killed and news of ‘new mages’ never reach the Mayors. They listened to his account of last night without interruption.
‘So she’s our friend,’ said Sharfy, clearly not convinced.
‘I deem her such. I do make mistakes. But she had ample time to kill me. And she may have wanted to. She did not enjoy my actions in the cavern. Yet she led me through guarded tunnels safely, and back. If she is in league with the enemy, she passed up a chance to deliver them their most hated defector.’
‘You need more sleep than you got,’ said Siel.
‘Welcome to the road,’ he said, a stock reply to complaints among soldiers about rations, foot sores, tiredness. But she was right. This campaign was draining him, this life was draining him, and no pleasant idle retirement waited at its end. Only this war, sure to last more than his lifetime, unless the castle won it sooner. Then oblivion.