Exile (Bloodforge Book 1) (27 page)

Blades
can be cruel,
he thought,
but they
are quick and a skilled killer can strike so fast that a man will be dead before
his nerves fire and the pain flares.

“Is that why you use a
hammer?” said a strained voice and Beccorban’s eyes snapped into focus.

He was half-walking,
half being carried down a greasy slope of unkempt grass. It was dark but he was
sure he could hear running water. The voice gasped in effort and Beccorban
looked down and smacked his head into something hard.

“Ow! You great ox! Wake
up for gods’ sake,” said Riella.

“Is that you, girl?” he
said dumbly. It felt as though his tongue were a leaden slug and it was as
difficult to lift as his feet.

“No, it’s the Imprissa
Lelon, come from Temple to drag your sorry fat arse to safety. Of course it’s
me! Now are you going to try and walk properly or will I have to drop you?” Her
clothes were cold and damp, and they burned his bare skin.

Beccorban breathed in
deeply and lifted himself off of Riella’s supporting shoulder. He felt like he
was the giant, Melkin, lifting the Widowpeak to find the lost button he used
for an eye. “I was talking out loud wasn’t I?”

Riella rubbed her
shoulder and worked her arm back and forth to get the blood flowing. He was
glad to see she wasn’t wearing the scarf. Even in darkness, sweaty and
distressed, she was a great beauty. At least he thought she was. He hadn’t
spent much time around women of late. “You collapsed and I came to get you.”

“Where is the boy?”

An expulsion of breath.
“On the other side of the water. Now, we need to get you in the boat and over
to them. We’re losing time. You’ve been rambling for the last ten minutes. I
gave up trying to keep you quiet a long time ago.”

“No sign?” he asked,
trying to sound confident.

She shook her head and
dropped her voice to a whisper. “No sign.” She paused so that the only sound
was the sighing water behind them and the warring noise of their breath, hers
shallow and fast with the terror she held in check, his deep and slow as he
fought to calm himself.

“Come and give me a
hand,” snapped Riella, and Beccorban bent to the task of freeing the boat from
the tangle of reeds that had caught it. He grimaced and swallowed hard as
something sour tried to crawl up the back of his throat.

Beccorban was healing
but he had not yet shaken off all of the effects of the poison. His stomach
cramped whenever he tried to eat — not that there was much to eat —
and, for the first two days, anything he took down was almost instantly forced
back up in a hot rush of bitter brown bile. Now, as they sat in the small boat
that they had found in the forest, Riella noted that his colour was returning
to something approaching its usual healthy ruddiness. They had travelled far
and fast upstream, Riella and Loster taking turns in rowing. Initially,
Beccorban had tried to join in. Riella had protested but the big man insisted,
heaving and sawing on the oars with a furious energy until he had turned grey
and salt sweat poured from him in sheets to stain his tunic in dark patches.
She had asked him to stop, then teased him, then begged him and pulled at his
sleeve, but he had raged at her, and his face, often so pale of late, had gone
a dark grey-red, like an after-image of the man he was before the poisoning,
burnt into her retina. And then he had passed out. Riella had decided to let
him rest. The boy was little use. His arms were weak and he could only pull the
boat along at a lethargic pace for a short while before he huffed and puffed
and had to stop.

They passed out of the
forest and through the mountains and into the flat lands north of Kressel. The
smoke from the city was still a smudge at their backs but Riella fuelled
herself with the knowledge that every stroke took her a small distance farther
away from the tall grey men. The land to either side grew boggy and dank and
soon became the fens that guarded the thin neck of land between the last few
hills of the Dantus Range and the cold Scoldsee. After a day of tedious labour,
Riella pulled them into a shallow bay to spend the night.

When she woke it was
morning and she had the feeling that they were moving. She sat up. Beccorban
was there at the oars, pulling steadily. He had his back to her and she wanted
to protest, but then the morning sun emerged from behind a cloud and lit his
dark hair on fire, painting his skin with a healthy glow. The big warrior built
up a distance-eating rhythm while the two younger ones slept and Riella
marvelled at this man who was chasing the corruption from his body by some
savage sense of will. He sweated heavily, as he had before, but this time there
was no laboured breathing, no palsy of weakness. With every stroke he seemed to
grow in strength rather than shrivelling and succumbing to the sickness as
other men would.

“You’ll need to stitch
that wound,” she said quietly, wondering if he’d noticed her.

Beccorban turned without
speaking and lifted up his jerkin to show his crude threadwork. The wound had
not gone deep, though it would leave an ugly scar. One more to add to his
collection. “It was foolish of me to let my guard down like that,” he said
sheepishly. “It won’t happen again.”

She frowned. “How could
you have known that the bitch wanted to kill you?”

“There was a time when I
would have seen it in her eyes. The Sons and Daughters of Iss are still abroad
in Veria. It’s a pity she didn’t live to spread the word that she’d killed me.”

Riella dipped a hand
into the cool water that sparkled in the morning light. “Will they try again?”

“They might,” he said.
“They will. If one knows I’m alive then they all do.”

“What did you do?” she
asked, wondering if he would tell her this time, but when she looked up he was
elsewhere, his eyes lost in the far-away, and she decided that the answer did
not matter anymore. Nor did anything from his past. He was a rock.
Old-fashioned, maybe, unforgiving, callous, brutal, and if the stories were
true, a man with a great capacity for cruelty, yet he was a constant and he was
with her. She felt a warm feeling in the pit of her belly and wriggled around
until it stopped.

“Can you smell that?” he
said suddenly, and she jumped with shock, waking the others.

“No,” she said, sitting
up. “Smell what?”

“Smoke,” he said grimly
and looked behind him at where they were heading. Before them the river grew
narrower until it was little more than a stream. It disappeared as it bent to
the east, away from a low rise in the ground that was topped with gorse. In the
middle distance was a larger, raised plateau crowned with what could have been
an orchard. Riella suddenly felt very hungry. She pulled the scarf from her
face but she saw the smoke before she smelt it: a wispy grey thread, curling
into the air just above the bank.

Loster, rubbing the
sleep from his eyes, gasped suddenly and stood, rocking the small boat and
prompting a squeal from Mirril. “Beccorban, look!” He pointed to a spot no more
than a few paces from the bank where a lone horse with a deep brown coat stood
cropping a tuft of grass.

Beccorban cursed. “Get
down, lad.”

Loster did as he was
told but his movement meant that the horse noticed him this time and raised its
head to stare. Its expression was oddly human, as though it had been caught
doing something it shouldn’t have been. After a moment, it wandered out of
sight behind a stand of bushes.

“It’s military,” said
Beccorban in a tone that suggested he wasn’t talking to any of them. “Its tail
has been docked and tied.”

“Does that mean there
are soldiers nearby?” asked Loster.

“Hmmm. We’re not far
from Blackwatch. It could be someone from the garrison.”

“So?” Riella did not
like being left out of this conversation.

“So, I am no friend to
the Greatseat. The Imbros’ are very loyal to Illis — always have been.”

“But they won’t know who
you are. We need to go ashore and meet them.” The old warrior did not reply so
she shouted, “Beccorban!”

“Keep your voice down!”
he hissed. “We haven’t had luck with strangers so far.”

“Come on! We could tell
them anything. You could be a fisherman, or, or a merchant fleeing north, and I
could be your daughter.”

“What about us?” asked
Mirril.

“We can all be family,”
Riella said.

Beccorban raised an
eyebrow. “Do I look like a fisherman to you?”

“A merchant then.” He
sighed and she scowled. “Look, we need to get to Temple and we need to tell
someone what’s happening to Kressel and I’m pretty sure this,” she kicked the
side of the boat, “won’t get us all the way.”

Beccorban breathed out
slowly then looked over his shoulder at where the horse had been. “Let’s get
out of this damned boat, at least. I feel like a fucking duck.”

The big one came first,
then three smaller ones followed behind, up the slope from the little wooden
boat, wary and watchful and never too far from the comforting bulk of their
large companion.
They can be as careful
as they like
, thought Callistan,
I
won’t be fooled again.

They had reached the
ruin of the house now. It wasn’t a house any longer, just a pile of blackened
stone and charred wood that jutted up into the sky like an open ribcage. One of
the smaller ones pulled off its hood and Callistan blinked in surprise as the
weak morning sunlight glinted off of a mass of dark golden hair that fluttered
as the breeze teased stray strands into motion. The slipskin was masquerading
as a girl. Why would they send a girl to catch him? Did they think he could be
tricked so easily? Once maybe, but no longer.

He swept a lock of his
own hair from his forehead. It too was dark gold but singed in places where the
fire had made it curl and so matted with filth and sweat that it would be hard
to tell its true colour. He suddenly had the disturbing image of a wigmaker
with long, spidery fingers stitching tufts of hair into a skin-coloured
headpiece. It made his scalp crawl with imaginary ants.
Don’t be a fool,
said an inner voice.
If they stole their victims’ hair, how then would you still have
yours?
He reached up and pressed down on the crown of his head, as though
holding a hat down in a high wind. His flesh was still his own, though another
many miles away wore it just as well.

The distant figures made
their way around the ashes of the house and it was clear from the language of
their borrowed bodies that they were talking to each other. About what? Why had
they stopped here?

He would not have
noticed them at all were it not for the horse. Crucio had snorted and
whickered, and though he was some distance away up in the overgrown orchard,
Callistan had seen just enough movement at the fringes of his vision to react
quickly, throwing himself to the ground near the flimsy wooden fence that
protected the fallen fruit from cloven-hoofed pests. Now he waited in the long
grass, peering between the pale stems at the intruders on his land. The land
where his family had died.

The air in the orchard
hung with the sickly, cloying stench of rotten fruit and it was attracting all
manner of insects. One such buzzed by his face and he waved it away irritably.
Summer was over and winter came fast in this part of the world — anything
with wings should have fled south by now. Farilion’s face floated before his
eyes and he tried to swat it away like another insect but it would not clear.

“
Dont do it! I’ll be good! I don’t want to be like Mela, I don’t want to
go to the orchard.
”
He felt tears
threaten and brushed at them angrily.

He started with shock as
he realised that the slipskins had disappeared from sight. He pushed himself up
into a crouch and crawled slightly to one side so that he could get a better
view. Where were they? He cursed softly. Maybe they weren’t slipskins at all
but something worse. His false double had said there was something worse
coming.
Something infinitely more
terrible.

A distant whinny of fear
flew to him on the breeze and Crucio came out from behind the ruin of the house
at a canter. The slipskins followed and Callistan blew his breath out between
pursed lips. He felt in the grass for his falcata and hefted the reassuring
weight. The horse was trotting towards the orchard, looking over his shoulder
every now and again to make sure that the creatures in his wake were just far
enough away.

Callistan grinned,
ignoring the pain as the blisters on his face split.
Good horse. Bring them to me, bring them here so I can split them open
and see what they wear under their cloaks of flesh.

Then
I will burn them
.

“What do you think
happened here?” Loster asked. “Do you think they’ve reached this far north?”

Beccorban grunted. “Hard
to say. We didn’t see any in the Fens, but they could have landed further
downriver.” He looked over his shoulder at him. “Doesn’t explain the horse
though.”

The horse was leading
them on a merry chase up to a bare orchard on a raised platform of land. There
was no sign of the rider anywhere but Beccorban was wary and walked with one
hand under his cloak, wrapped firmly around his famous hammer. For the moment,
they were in the open. Anybody who got too close would have to expose
themselves long before they could pose a threat. Soon, however, if the horse
was to continue where it was headed, they would have to climb the slope and
enter the clutching shade of the orchard. The orchard seemed to swell before
Loster’s eyes, the thin trees bereft of their fruit looming towards him and
promising dark secrets hiding in the blue-green gloom between them.

“Must we go up there?
Into the trees?” he asked. Beccorban turned to look at him, and Loster hugged
himself against a sudden blast of too-cool air. “I have a bad feeling.”

Beccorban looked after
the retreating rump of the mahogany-coloured horse. “What about the horse?”

“We’ve done okay without
it so far,” said Loster. “We can make it to Temple on foot.”

“No,” Riella cut past
him, making sure to brush his shoulder. “Mirril can’t walk for much longer. We
need it.”

“I know, but—”

“But nothing. We’ve
taken the risk of landing here and I’ll be damned if we leave without getting
something for it.”

Loster looked at
Beccorban for help but the big man shrugged and carried on.

They marched on at a
determined pace and seemed to close on the beast.
Damn it, where was it going?
Loster chewed on his lower lip and
looked around, ready to see the rider running pell-mell at them, sword drawn.
They crossed a small wooden bridge that would have forced them from the boat
had they not already disembarked. Twice Beccorban broke into a run and twice
the horse galloped away, only to reduce its pace again once it had opened the
distance, turning its head to glare at them and flicking its cropped tail in
irritation at the big man’s audacity. It felt all too much like they were being
led and Loster wanted to shout out, to tug at Beccorban’s sleeve, but Riella
strode alongside, watching with unfriendly eyes, and he knew well enough by now
that she would not turn from this. Not for him.

The orchard was close
now and Loster could not see where the horse would go. The hill came to meet
them in a line parallel to the stream so that it formed a grassy bay. Unless
the horse broke left soon, it would be trapped in between the hill and the
stream which, though narrower than it had been in the south, was still too wide
to cross easily. However, just when it looked like they had cornered the
animal, it bunched its great muscles beneath it and bounded up the slope,
pausing at the top to look down at them with equine disdain and then trotting
off around the landward perimeter of the fence.

Beccorban sighed and
began to work his way up the greasy incline. Riella followed on her hands and
knees, helping Mirril scrabble up in front. Loster started to climb with them
but faltered near the top and began to slide back down. He tried to ignore
Riella’s mocking laughter as he brushed the mud from his knees and started
again, slower this time.

“Come,” called Beccorban
down the slope. “We might be able to trap the damned thing. I doubt he will be
so sure of his way down from here.”

Loster nodded though he
wasn’t sure Beccorban was speaking to him. As he reached the top of the hill,
he took a moment to catch his breath. Between the rickety wooden fence that
penned in the chaos of the orchard and the edge of the hill, there was a thin
strip of flat ground. It was covered in springy, knee-high grass that had grown
unchecked into thick, flat-bladed wands of faded green. Inside the fence, trees
of several different kinds competed for the most space and sunlight. None held
any fruit but the grass was littered with the dark husks and empty shells of
apples and pears and plums. Most were rotten and fly-blown, covered in strange
orange speckles. A few times Riella knelt to gather the more promising
candidates but they were always soft inside or bored through with maggot-holes.
At one point she found what appeared to be a healthy-looking apple but a
tentative bite into the flesh left her with nothing more than a mealy mouthful
of stale core. She spat it out and glared at Loster as though it was his fault
then took Mirril’s hand and stalked after Beccorban.

It was quiet up here.
Loster was left alone at the back of the group and soon his mind began to
wander. He peered into the gloom of the orchard, wondering what foul things they
had awoken deep in the green folds between trees atop the hill. The wind had
dropped completely, as had had their pace, and after a while the horse came to
a stop. Beccorban was walking very slowly, weighing out each step as if it were
of the utmost importance, taking care to bend his knees slightly so that he
might spring forward should he need to. Loster stopped alongside the others,
watching him. Riella pulled her arms in against herself and fought a shiver,
though there was no breeze.

Loster looked to his
right and something entirely unnatural caught his eye. It was a pile of stones,
arranged neatly on the ground and topped by a beam of wood that had been driven
into the ground and scrawled upon in a crude hand. Yet that was not all. A
child’s doll sat propped up against the beam where it met the earth but it did
not look like it had endured last night’s weather. Somebody had put it there
recently.

“Beccorban!” He hissed
at the warrior’s broad back and Beccorban waved a hand angrily without turning
to face them. “No, now! You need to see this!”

“Quiet, you fool!”
Riella spat in a sibilant breath. “Are you mad?”

Loster ignored her.
“Look! Look there. The horse can wait.”

Beccorban stared
despairingly at the rump of the horse that seemed to wag invitingly and then
marched quickly to Loster’s side. “What? If I lose the horse…” he fell silent
as his eyes tracked the direction of Loster’s outstretched arm and landed upon
the grave and its macabre decoration. Beccorban grabbed him roughly by the
shoulder and pushed him to his knees. “Down!”

Riella dragged Mirril
down to a crouch, her eyes wide. The girl gasped in shock but did not cry out
and Beccorban nodded in appreciation. “Stay here,” he mouthed and rose to peer
through the slats of the fence.

A terrible sense of
foreboding gripped Loster around the chest and after every outwards breath he
imagined he would not have the strength to fill his lungs again. It was that
childlike feeling of stumbling out of your depth into a danger too great for
you to escape from; a double dream where the only thing to greet your waking
eyes was more horror. What if there was another one of those demonic knights in
there? What if this had all been a trap to lure them to the orchard? It was all
his fault: he had seen the horse, he had given them a reason to risk dry land
again.

“
Foolish child,
”
said
Barde. “
You’ve gotten them all killed.
”

He calmed his breathing
and watched as Beccorban lifted and then lowered himself over the fence. For a
large man the old warrior moved through the tangled shrubbery and entwining
weeds with nothing more than a whisper of sound.
As quiet as Death,
Loster thought and immediately scolded himself
for his dark thoughts.

Beccorban moved closer
towards the grave, stopping every now and again to scan the thick wall of trees
around him. As he knelt by the grave and picked up the child’s doll, Loster
wondered if it was a grave at all. Could it be a shrine to some childish god?

Beccorban was kneeling
with his back to them, studying the doll in detail, so he did not see the tall
man step from the trees.

Riella wanted to scream
but her voice caught in her throat, dry with fear, and she bent forward in a
hacking cough. Beccorban turned to scold her just as the tall man leapt into
action, swinging a wickedly long sword in an overhead arc intended to cleave
its target in two. But Beccorban was already moving and he used the momentum to
fling himself away so that the blade bit into his trailing bearskin cloak and
caught in its furry folds. Beccorban’s weight yanked the weapon from the tall
man’s hand and yet he came on regardless, leaping on to Beccorban’s sprawling
frame with a reckless abandon. The two struggled and rolled into a patch of
coarse, thorny scrub bushes. Riella snapped at Loster to guard Mirril and clambered
over the fence. She ran to help but then stopped herself. Beccorban was a
warrior born and he did not need her help. She looked down at the two men as
they fought, and tried to still the stirring of excitement that sent tendrils
of warmth down her legs.

Beccorban was the
stronger man and the larger, but the newcomer had a ranginess to him and he was
using all of the leverage his height gave him to full effect. He was filthy and
his clothes were a mess. His hair stuck up in a chaotic muddle of dirty blonde
locks and his face was grim and scarred but his eyes were a piercing green,
fixed on Beccorban. Now he sat astride Beccorban’s back with his heels dug into
the ground for support. Both of his hands were interlocked underneath the older
man’s chin and he was leaning back, putting his whole weight into an attempt to
break Beccorban’s back. Briefly Riella felt fear settle alongside her
excitement but it was soon washed away into nothing more than a nagging doubt
at the back of her mind. She knew Beccorban and knew that he would not be so
easily beaten.