Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 (37 page)

The second time he fell, it was in the deepest dungeon and the deepest dark that he had found thus far. This time he had tripped over a simple bucket; he heard its hollow rolling and sobbed suddenly for more than breath, sobbed for the loss of all that was most precious, light and faith and dreams and Julianne.

He was still lying there, still sobbing when there was a light brought into the darkness by the sound of boots, and then a voice; and that was Karel, of course, come to find him in his torment, and he said, 'Oh, get up. How dirty do you want to be, for the men to see you?'

'She, she isn't here, Karel
...'

'No, she isn't. At least, if she is, we haven't found her yet, though we're more likely to do it than you were, running and screaming like a child playing lost. Torches are good, in dark places; so is the patience to search in corners. So is it good that we haven't found her, Imber. There are no bodies in the
castle
; all the dead are out in the yard.'

'You don't know that. Perhaps those are only the ones that they've found so far, and carried out. The djinni said that she was here
...'

'I think they died out there — but perhaps you're right, or perhaps the djinni was wrong, or deceptive. Let's go and find out, shall we? Those people seem used to men of

Outremer, unless they're just too distressed to be frightened. We'll ask them. You may want to clean yourself up first.'

There was a scullery above, with a well that drew clean water. Imber washed hastily, rubbed a little at the stains on his sur-coat, then shrugged and walked out into the stabbing brightness. No matter what the men saw: they knew already, and he would not, he would
not be
ashamed of his feelings, his lady or himself.

Karel was right about the people outside. Frightened peasants confronted by an unknown soldiery would stop working, gather in knots, flinch even from an undrawn sword; these might have been briefly disorganised but now they were back at their labours, carrying the bodies one by out out of the hot suntrap of the yard and laying them neatly, reverently in the hill's shade.

One man — bearded, middle-aged, lean and sinewy -seemed to have taken charge, if anyone had. Karel approached him, somehow letting authority slip from his own shoulders in favour of a respectful solemnity; he said, 'Who are these dead, fellow, are they yours?'

'Ours, aye, every one. Our mothers, our children, my wife.'

'My friend here, he is looking for his own wife
...'

A swift assessing glance, a shake of the head. 'Not here, not among these. We know all of these, between us.'

Not his face, but something in the man's look was very familiar, if utterly out of place; his accent confirmed it. Imber spoke haltingly, reacting without thinking: 'You're Elessan.'

'I am, and my wife — was. I know you too, my lord

Baron. You came to our village once, we saw you, I lifted my boy up to give him a better view of you
...'

He nearly broke then, as Imber had broken already; he would have done for sure, his mouth was twisting out of his control when Karel interrupted with the questions that Imber couldn't be troubled to ask- The facts were enough for him, but not for his cousin.

'I am sorry for your loss, but tell me, I must know: what is a man from Elessi doing here, in this company? How is it that you left your land, your family, your little boy? And what caused all these deaths?'

'Truly, sir, we don't know. We found them so, after we had followed them for so long. They should have died before, but they were saved, we thought; and there were promises made, to those of us who followed
...'
Promises that were all dust now, that much was clear even to Imber, who had come here in pursuit of a promise also and knew the bitter taste of betrayal too well himself.

'I don't understand,' Karel said.

'No more do I, sir. I will try to try to tell the tale, but it is hard
...
There was a sickness came to the village, a cold kind of death. And then a healer, blessed by the God s favour, he claimed, and with a holy relic of great power. He gave life to the dying, and not only to those who were sick; my wife hurt herself working in the fields and should have died of the bleeding, but he touched her with his saint's hand and she was whole again, except that she would not speak to me or anyone, not even to our child. Those he had healed before had followed him thus far, and so did ours when he moved on; and so did we. I left the boy with my brother and went after my wife, though she was strange to me now. I hoped to bring her back, but the healer preached a great war against the Folded Land, and said that we were the Gods army to strike against heresy. We were no soldiers - there were old men and children he had healed, and we had few weapons between us - but we had seen the power of the God in him, and so we believed. He said we should strike from here; but he led the healed ones on at a great pace, and we fell behind. When we arrived this morning, we found this as you see it, all our kindred dead and the healer too, we found his body outside the
castle
. He had been killed with arrows, but not these. We don't know how they died, except that my wife had bled terribly from her old injury. Perhaps when the healer died, all his healing was undone; but that cannot have been the God's work, sir, he would not treat us so
...'

'No. There is a devil in this, man.'

'Yes, sir. What can we do?' He had been strong too long; now suddenly he was lost, too far from home and from the life he understood, bewildered by finding tragedy where he had looked for ho
pe. Imber understood him perfectl
y.

'Do what you have been doing, it's all there is for now: take out your people and
find a place to bury them decentl
y. My men will help with the digging, once we have thoroughly searched the
castle
. And I can say the funeral service over those you have lost, if you would like it, in the absence of a priest. I have done that before.'

'Yes, sir. Please, if you would
...'

Imber went all through Revanchard again in the hours that followed, this time with a torch and a companion. He found nothing, not even the scant evidence of occupation that others turned up, indications
of a small party staying recentl
y.

The men Karel had sent to Selussin came back with news of more moment. Julianne's father, the King's Shadow had been in the town this last week, along with three companions whose descriptions tallied with the jongleur, the renegade Ransomer boy and the girl Elisande from the Roq, all of whom had accompanied Julianne in her flight.

'That's proof positive,' Imber said, feeling his spirits lift for the first time since they had come to Revanchard. 'The djinni did not lie to me; she was here, and she was taken away before this happened,' with a gesture towards the great burial pit that was being dug close by. 'But taken where, where is she now?'

'Wait, there's more. Yesterday an army came out of the desert, the Sharai on the march behind that war-leader Hasan who attacked the Roq before our arrival. The town is full of rumours, some even claimed that he had married Julianne, which must be nonsense; but what is certain is that they brought siege to the
castle
last night, and went on into Outremer this morning. They sent messengers back, who said that the Folded Land lies open now. I don't know if that's true, Imber, but if it is, I think we must look there for Julianne. In any case, that way lies our duty. The Sharai are in Outremer, and we must follow; every man will be needed. These, too,' with a glance of his own at the people laying their dead in their last home. 'They were promised a holy war, and they shall have one, if they are still willing. We can arm and equip them, from the town and our own supplies; they may not be soldiers trained, but dispersed among our own men, they'll be fit to fight. Half of them are Catari born, but even the Catari fear the Sharai. I'll take any who swear loyal to the King.'

Imber nodded distractedly, impatient only to be mounted and on the move again, in pursuit of Julianne though all the Sharai of the desert, all the wizards of Surayon, all the operations of malign destiny lay between him and her.

11

Th
e
Heal
ing
Heart

One of the hidden, the unexpected things about growing up, Elisande thought, was the way simple words changed their meaning. Concepts that were once fixed and clear and sat easily in the head became murky, slithery, impossible to keep a grip on.

Take her, here, now. She
was home, visibly and incontro
vertibly; and yet she was not, quite, and she thought that perhaps she never would be again, quite. Whether she stayed and waited or went in search, wherever she stood in the world, she thought that home would always hereafter be a step ahead, a glance aside, somewhere just a little elsewhere than where she was.

When she was very small, home had been her mother: more specifically her mothers lap, her mothers hug and the curtain of hair falling all around her.

Her mother had died, and then home had meant her father: a cold place, dark and grim, where she lived in storm and ice and ran away whenever she was able.

When she was older, when she was away she thought that perhaps home was not a house at all. Home was her co
untry, home was Surayon and ever
ything that was contained within those borders: hope and fear, strength and loss, beauty and brutality. Her grandfather, her mother
’
s soul, her father - all were a part of the whole, and she encompassed it all within her head, within her heart, within her home. Substance casts shadow, bitter redeems the sweet; danger gave a spice to life, and death gave it a meaning. She sought out clanger, more than once she challenged death, and all the time held her vision of home like a banner in her thoughts. Her feet marched to the unsung songs of Surayon; her toes all but touched rich Surayonnaise tilth whether they walked on rock or sand or marble. She would work even with her father for her country's survival.

Now she had seen her father die for that same cause, die and so fail; and she had seen him die and so failed herself. She was back to the land that she had held for so long as treasure, a substitute for mother and father both, but she couldn't — quite — say that she was home. Not without qualifications.

She was home, but it was not the home that she had left, that she had always hugged to herself as an immutable talisman, sealed behind its impregnable borders. This Surayon was a shelled nut, and there were scavengers on every side.

She was home, but she was not the girl she used to be: neither the sunshine child nor the adolescent ridden by the dark. She almost couldn't recognise herself in these familiar surroundings; she wasn't sure what she had become, nor where or whether there was any place for her.

She was home, but not to the welcome that she'd looked

for, her grandfather
’
s healing wisdom. She'd brought too much else with her, disaster for all; that had overridden all her private disasters, so that she'd had barely rime enough to tell her tale before he'd left her.

She was home, but her father was dead. That above all, that was a clamour in her head that struck echoes from ten years before, that made her want to rage now as she had raged then, when her mother died; except that this time, there was no one to rage against. Morakh was dead too, she had killed him herself, and she had no other target. Which was what left her feeling so stranded: she was very afraid all the time and if she only thought for a minute she could make herself terrified, but she had no one to hate any more, which to her was no definition of home.

She stood on the terrace of her grandfather's palace, which was absolutely her grandfather's home and had once been hers and was still the one place that she would always come back to, whether she belonged here or not.

She'd been standing there a long time, unless it had been only a single moment indefinitely prolonged: she couldn't say, couldn't begin to guess. It felt like time enough for her bare toes to have dug down through the cracks between the rough-laid stones underfoot, to have taken root
in
the hidden dark of the soil beneath; but two steps on Surayon ground had always been enough to make her feel sunk soul-deep in the land. Two steps, one breath of that air that she'd found nowhere else in the Kingdom or outside it and she'd always felt immediately enfolded, possessed, encompassed. That was not a feeling of unadulterated good - in some senses, in some moods it was like being hugged by her father, he was so associated with this country, dug in deeper even than she was herself — but it was what she had always thought of as coming home.

Today the air had a stranger taste, there was a sourness to the moist earths scent, even the sunlight seemed a little dark; she felt as though she had arrived somewhere that was almost Surayon, but only almost. Not quite home.

She had come and done terrible, lethal damage to what she loved; and her father was dead already as her land was likely going to die, and that also was her own fault, his death lay across her conscience as his blood had stained her clothes.

And more even than that, there was a hollowness at the heart of her, an empty place where something had been ripped from her body. Her bloods beat echoed there, hammer-hard and hurting,
he is dead, he is dead
Never mind blame, never mind consequences: only the fact of it pounded through her brain, burned behind her eyes like thoughts turned to flame,
he is dead...