Riding the Serpent's Back (71 page)

“But what about you?” said Leeth.

Herold smiled again. “I’m different,” he said. “I am the one on your side.”

When Chi turned to face him, Leeth was surprised by the look on his face. “Will you do it, Leeth?” Chi asked. “Will you go and find out what Donn’s involvement is in all this? Persuade him to either aid us or at least stop interfering.”

“But...” Leeth didn’t know what to say. He was the only one in a position to negotiate with Donn, the only one who could guarantee finding the old mage’s volcano-home again. But Donn had turned him away and forbidden his return until he was worthy of him, whatever that might mean.

“Donn is a trickster,” said Herold. “He will complicate things for his own amusement: he loves nothing more than to subject his loved ones to the most gruelling tests and trials. If he is taking an active interest in what is happening, then he must be stopped, by whatever means are necessary.”

Herold hesitated, then added, “I am near to the completion of my investigations in the Heartlands. Nearly ready to start work. But I will do nothing if you do not go back to your father and find out what, if anything, he has been doing.”

Leeth looked around the gathering. Everyone was watching him. He nodded. “I’ll go in the morning,” he said.

~

Red was waiting for him at first light. Initially, Leeth thought his gloomy expression was merely one of farewell, then he saw there was more to it than that.

“It’s Joel,” said Red. “Marsalo found him this morning. He killed himself in the night.”

Leeth swallowed. Death was so familiar to him now, but still it hurt. He embraced Red. “I’ll see you again, soon,” he said. “I promise.”

It was not a promise he believed.

Monahl was not sorry to see Leeth go.

Ever since her return to Chi’s camp she had been distrustful of anyone who was close to the boy-leader. Joel’s betrayal disturbed her greatly – of all the siblings it was Joel she had regarded most fondly. She remembered his kindness towards her when he had accompanied her on the first part of her trip to Divine, his deep sadness at the condition Oriole had inflicted upon him. Yet it had been Joel who had turned against Chi, and Joel who was now dead.

Leeth was different. She didn’t know what it was, he was just
different
. When she first met him she had detected something vaguely disturbing about his presence, some half-obscured ambiguity that reinforced her distrust.

Even when Chi had survived the two betrayals – Red’s inadvertent one and Joel’s deliberate one – Monahl’s suspicion of Leeth had lingered.

In his favour, he had made an immediate impact on Chi. Even though their paths rarely crossed in those busy times, the simple fact of Leeth’s presence seemed to bring about a change in Chi’s character: more stability, a blunting of his sharper edges.

It was how she had been with Chi all those years ago, out on the Serpent’s Back. They had been so close, before...

Almost as soon as it entered her mind Monahl dismissed the thought that her animosity towards Leeth might simply be jealousy. She didn’t resent the closeness of their bond, or their natural communication. She didn’t see in their relationship something that for her had been snatched away, destroyed.

She wasn’t the jealous kind. Not at all.

~

Herold returned from another trip three days after Leeth had departed.

Monahl watched him walk his horse down the hill and she knew immediately that something had happened. He had an energy about him, an intensity she remembered from years ago, back in Zigané.

She hurried to meet him and he jumped down from the horse and hugged her hard. “Oh Monahl,” he said. “Child. I’ve found it. At last I have found it!”

He wouldn’t say any more until they found Chi, a few leaps out along Two Rivers Road in the village of Shiels. He was in the old meeting hall, with Red, Marsalo and some of the others amongst his inner circle of military advisers. Monahl hadn’t understood why Red had been adopted by this group, at first – he was not exactly the army type – but then she had worked out that it must be for his inside knowledge of the enemy positions and thinking. She didn’t begrudge him his influence: she was sure he must have some merit hidden under his brash exterior. Somewhere.

“I’ve found it,” said Herold as he marched into the room.

Chi turned and forced a smile. “Good,” he said. “I hope we still have time.”

“Time is exactly what I require,” said Herold. “I will expect your forces to hold off the Tullans while I do my work, otherwise my efforts are for nothing.”

Chi narrowed his eyes. “We’ll do it, Herold. We came here prepared to fight.”

Herold nodded. “I’ve been travelling among what remains of the nomadic peoples of the Heartlands,” he said. “Winning their confidence. It has been a delicate process after all Lachlan Pas has subjected them to. Everyone I encountered had lost members of their families to the labour gangs. Their settlements have been looted and destroyed, their men, women and children have been beaten and raped in punishment. From what I learnt, I would estimate that greater than three-quarters of the indigenous population have been killed or removed.”

Chi interrupted. “The time for reparations and bleeding hearts is later, mage. What did you find?”

“Eventually, I was introduced to a nomadic priest – in our own terms she would certainly be regarded as a mage. She told me a story, passed down through her mother’s line, about the time just after the dawning of our Era. The time when the first of our True Families built the city that would channel the energies of the earth for their own use.

“The cyclical texts refer to this as a golden period, but Ahjab’s version is a useful counterpoint: to her people, the First Families were just the first in a succession of abusive oppressors. I digress. The priest, Ahjab, referred to a place a short distance from Samhab, a site lost to our knowledge for even longer than Samhab itself. It is the site where the Charmed Pact which stabilised the Heartlands was created and sealed.”

Herold looked around at the attentive faces, revelling in his audience. “Friends,” he said. “By combining my own specific knowledge of the Charming arts with the historical information Ahjab provided, I have located that place.

“I must return there immediately in order to begin my work to unravel the pact which protects the First City.”

He looked around the room again, his eyes resting briefly on each face.

“I require help,” he continued. “An assistant. An individual with an intuitive grasp of what must be done. Someone who can feel the beat of the earth in their bones. Someone who has heard the earth-tune of Samhab.”

Monahl swallowed, suddenly fearful of the prospect of what was ahead, the challenge. As a votary-priest of Zigané she was attuned to the earth’s energies. She remembered the time she had ridden out with Herold and he had made her stop and listen to what he had called Samhab’s earth-tune.

She looked at him, waiting for him to say the words.

But he was looking past her.

At Red Simeni.

“You’ve been there, Red,” the mage said. “You’ve felt it in your bones.”

Red nodded, his eyes fixed on Herold’s.

“You will come and assist me, then.”

Slowly, Red nodded again.

~

Monahl was not the jealous type.

What did it matter if she was a trained earth-tuner, if she had been out in the Heartlands and felt the energies of Samhab humming through her bones?

Herold had made his choice and she must accept it.

She tried to take Red’s place in Chi’s inner circle, determined to do what she could to help the cause. She was saddened by how low Chi’s spirits had become. His thoughts turned more and more towards merely coping with the situation they were in, so that it appeared he had completely forgotten why they were there: to attack Samhab.

One day, he took her aside. He was so transparently in need of someone to confide in.

“How much longer will we be able to hold out like this?” he asked her.

She resisted the impulse to smooth things over, to try to reassure him that it was all going to work out. “What does Marsalo say?” she asked. The man who had been Joel’s favourite had become one of Chi’s main advisers, in the void left by Sawnie.

“He thinks we should counter-attack immediately. While we still have the strength.” Chi shrugged. “I seem to have lost all my judgement, now. Kester is the only person I can think of who could fill Sawnie’s boots, but she is so far away.”

“She’s doing a good job,” Monahl reminded him. With the guerrilla raids she was coordinating throughout the north-east, Kester had tied up a large proportion of Lachlan’s forces. “She’s more effective where she is.”

“But what am I supposed to do?” cried Chi. “Sawnie masterminded so much of our strategy. The raids on the railways and the river supply routes were all at her instigation – at one point we almost had Samhab under siege with a roving force of no more than two hundred men! Yet now we are pinned back in our camps. It’s not just random raids now: the Tullan army have moved south in places and the fighting is almost constant at Northway and Charde. Before we know it we’ll be cut off.”

“You think Sawnie would have had the answer to an army that uses plague as a weapon?”

“She didn’t, did she?” said Chi sadly. “But I don’t know what to do. Should we do as Marsalo says and attack? Should we bide our time and pin every hope on your fool-mage? Do we flee, while we still can?” Then a dark look clouded his features. “Or must we try to negotiate a peace with Lachlan, if he’ll allow it?”

Monahl had not realised his thinking had gone so far. He couldn’t possibly be considering reconciliation! He must know that could only be a trap. “What are you asking?” she said. “Do you want yet more advice?”

Chi shook his head. “No,” he said. “I want more than that. I want your sight.”

“I...”

He was staring at her intently. He couldn’t know what he was asking.

“I want you to induce a vision. I want you to find out what course I must choose.”

“But I’ve never done that before,” said Monahl. “Not deliberately. It’s always been something that has simply
happened
.”

“You could do it though, Monahl, couldn’t you?”

She knew the state of mind she would have to seek, she knew how to open herself up to the possibility. “You know what it does to me, Chi. The sight isn’t a Talent, it’s a curse. Every time it happens I think this will be the time I tip over and lose my sanity again. And you ask me to deliberately do that to myself. You don’t know what it’s like, Chi.”

“No,” said Chi. “I don’t know what it’s like, but I do know what I’m asking of you. You’ve said before that you are prepared to pay for victory with your life, if necessary. Are you prepared to pay with your
mind?
”

~

She pulled on her votary-priest’s smock, and fixed her hair up in a twist at the back of her head. She clipped the necklet of Charmed discs around her neck.

Would she still be sane this time tomorrow? Would she have found the answer Chi so desperately sought?

She left her tent and climbed the hill alone.

At the top, she found the upthrust crag where Herold had perched so long ago. She dipped her head and pulled the smock clear. Naked apart from the necklet, Monahl climbed up the rough side of the crag.

She sat cross-legged at the top, looking northward into the Heartlands. The stony ripples and folds of the land were lit a deep red by the sinking sun in the west.

She stared out at the dry landscape for a long time, wondering where Herold and Red were and how they were progressing. She swallowed, scared of what was to come.

She closed her eyes and for an instant she might have been back at Zigané, perched on one of the jutting spurs to Charm the floating city on its never-ending voyage across the lava sea. She could feel the energy of the earth humming deep inside her body, resonating.

She sank into the tuning trance with little effort. It was so long since she had sat like this, but the response was still automatic.

She thought of the state she must achieve, the openness, the precarious balance between the solidity of the earth and the instability of her mind.

So easy to tip over.

She didn’t know if she could do it. She had certainly been more attuned with her own irregular nature since she had been in this encampment. She had put that down to Chi’s influence, but perhaps it was more: perhaps she had been subconsciously latching on to the energies being disturbed to the north, feeding on them.

She reached out, trying to find her way through the mental fog.

She had to, she realised. She had to find her way. For the sake of Chi.

For the sake of them all.

~

Chi was waiting by her tent. He must have been there all night, waiting for her to finish.

“Well?” he asked, rushing up and taking her hands. “Did it work? Did you find guidance?”

She stared at him, and he saw the defeat in her expression. His face fell, as he was unable to hide the great depth of his disappointment.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I wish I could help you more.”

He shrugged, but the gesture was betrayed by the general slump of his posture. “You tried,” he said. “Was there nothing?”

“Nothing to hang onto,” she said. “All I know is that you should hold on, not give up. It was vague, but it was there. And you don’t need to defend against attacks from the south: Lachlan’s army fears the jungle.”

“So you
did
see something,” said Chi, managing to smile.

Just as she had known he would.

“So you didn’t fail, after all.”

She shook her head.

~

Two days later, she boarded a train at the river-port of Khalaham. There were soldiers in the carriage, but they paid little attention to her: she was not the only person in the uniform of an Embodied Church votary on this train. She had noted at least six other pilgrims waiting for the train that would take them to the fabled city to pay homage to the glories the future held for their kind.

A woman came along to swing the carriage door shut, and then one of the soldiers glanced across at Monahl. He pushed a clay bottle towards her and said, “Drink, darling?”