She turned and looked at him with a neutral expression, though her eyes showed she’d been crying. She was not, it seemed, half as surprised to see him as he was to see her. She walked towards him slowly. ‘You’re back,’ she said. ‘Have a nice adventure?’
‘Hardly. What’s wrong? Is Anfen dead?’
She scoffed. ‘Shall we send you to check if he’s there?’ A hand went to the curved blade on her belt and he saw she was shivering with anger. When he got over his surprise, he said, ‘Wait! Don’t do it. I can explain what happened.’
She inclined her head with a humourless smile as if to say: I very much look forward to it. ‘And where’s the old twit?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe on his way here with the wolf, Far Gaze.’
She looked with a moment’s pause at the war mage’s staff in his hand, which he didn’t even remember picking up. ‘The charm?’ she said.
‘He still has it.’ Eric told his story, the hardest part explaining his motives in following Case, since he’d done it with her own words echoing in his ears. Siel paced back and forth while she listened, tugging on her braids so hard it surely hurt her. The part about Kiown she asked him to repeat word for word, and her eyes shut when she heard it the second time. She said, ‘Are you sure?’
‘It’s all true. Even the part about Nightmare.’
She said nothing, but gestured for him to continue, wiping a fresh tear from her face. When he told her about the war mage, her eyes narrowed and fists clenched. ‘They want you back with Anfen,’ she said, incredulous.
‘So it’d seem. Case thought the war mage was just nuts, acting on its own, not on orders.’
She scoffed again and paced along the ledge, thinking. People still bustled around them, many now watching the northern gate, at which a steady pounding could be heard from the invaders’ battering rams. ‘So much you think you know,’ she said after a while.
‘Of Kiown, you mean?’
Her laugh was bitter. ‘And Anfen, of course.’
‘What do you mean? You don’t think he’s in league with-?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly. ‘I don’t know any more. But I see now why Kiown would fuck anything that moved but not me. I’d learn his secrets.’
They both watched the carnage below for a while without speaking. ‘Why not go riding?’ she said at last. ‘Let’s discover the rest of the surprises. If there are provisions left at our inn, we’ll take what we can, but I doubt the important people will have left much behind. No matter. We’ll be riding through safer country this time, provided no Invia come for you, Marked one.’
‘Where are we headed? Is Anfen even here?’
‘He’s off to destroy the Wall at World’s End,’ she said and laughed. She looked down again at the now eerily quiet streets. ‘Maybe he’s right to try it, whatever the Mayors say. Maybe I shouldn’t have tried to stop him. We may soon know. Let’s get horses.’ She put a hand on his arm. ‘And I hope your friend shows up.’ It was no well-wishing: because I intend to slice him up the middle, her wide dark eyes had said.
61
A human flood poured south: refugees clogged the roads, clutching what possessions they’d been able to carry through the frantic press of escaping bodies through the southern gate. The road was littered here and there with things cast aside as the realities of travel sank in, and a day or two of hauling excess weight proved plenty enough. The inns between Elvury and the closest city, Yinfel, were so stuffed that patrons paid big money to sleep under tables in their pubs, or in their closets. A good number refused to stop moving, certain the Tormentors would pursue them. But no new sightings were heard of.
News of Elvury’s doom travelled along the road much faster than the trudge of its refugees, spreading to the other Free Cities, whose forces frantically checked their underground passages and ramped up defences. Tormentors were now widely known of and rumoured to be attacking at the castle’s behest. There had indeed been sightings of them in remote places, usually from far away, those who saw them not having known what they saw, those who’d got too close not surviving to report it.
Through these nearly impassable crowds, Siel and Eric set out. That first day he slipped from his mount four times, miraculously escaping broken bones. They were fine steeds, tall and muscled as racing horses. Siel and Eric discovered why the ‘important folk’ hadn’t wished to brave travel on ground-level through the deadly stampede for the southern gate. On one nightmarish street half a dozen Tormentors had gathered to stand around motionless in strange poses, victims littered about their feet. The huge ones had slunk back towards the river as though all following the same impulse and, according to talk, stood motionless along the banks watching people flee, bodies impaled all over them, some still slowly writhing and screaming for help. The Tormentors loose in the city were bad enough; looters, invading soldiers, raging fires and occasional riots had not made things any safer.
The only light moment for Eric and Siel was when they found Loup patiently waiting by the roadside for them with a wide toothless smile and his own plundered horse.
Most on the road, Siel and Eric included, tried not to think about what they’d left behind. They tried to shut out the wailing of refugees unused to war so close at hand and no longer a distant abstraction, unused to being caught in the shadows of a man-god’s descending feet. It had all been so quiet for so long, the state of conflict between the Free and Aligned worlds … tense, but out of sight like an earthquake brewing. The shock on the refugees’ sleep-deprived faces said it all, the stagger of their walk as though under new and terrible weight, the disbelief as it sank in: We’re not going home tonight. There is no ‘home’.
Eric felt guilty at his relief on finally passing the grim-faced vanguard and leaving them behind on the road. Siel made no secret of hers. Loup whistled a tune like he hadn’t a care in the world.
Meanwhile the General leading the invasion had a far larger ‘mop-up’ operation on his hands than he had been led to expect. His men slammed open the city gates at last, lulled by the silence on the other side. He’d expected a few score of the creatures, a hundred at most, not several hundreds of them, all difficult to kill, some huge.
They made a dent in the monsters’ numbers before the last of the invading soldiers were killed or fled, enough to make the real mop-up a job at least possible. The General had missed something: that while men could be sacrificed, so too could generals who walked on ice that got thinner the closer they walked to the throne of power they served. The Strategists had long ago marked him as ‘ambitious’, a potential threat, and sought missions suitably deadly to throw him into, so he might have an honourable death for the rank and file’s gossip, and be useful as a martyr. That his ambition in reality had extended no further than his achieved rank was neither here nor there.
62
Pushing the horses to their limits and changing them frequently gave Sharfy a sour taste, for he felt horses were friends of men more than servants. Anfen believed that too, but something had changed in him since they’d set out. There was a light in his eye Sharfy didn’t much care for, nor did he like the grim silence of their journey, which made every second of it pass so heavily. The road went so much easier and faster with jokes, songs and stories.
Yet he understood what Anfen saw, what the invasion really was: the castle’s hand closing its fist around the world at last. If they could take the unconquerable city in one night — years of planning or not, it looked like one night’s work, and what your enemy thought you were capable of mattered as much as what you actually were capable of — then, surely, they could take the rest of the Free Cities at their leisure. And would. And the Mayors would begin to ponder whether they should resist the inevitable, or bargain and speed it up, to maintain their own places of power. That seemed, from Sharfy’s view, to be written in the lines on Anfen’s face.