The Right Hand of God (10 page)

Not magic, came a thought. Enhancement. Speeding up the natural healing of the wound.

Many wounds heal without ointment.

He placed the Jugom Ark on the dying man's chest, and the Arrow flamed in response. When he lifted it away, the wound had closed, leaving nothing but a fresh scar.

Exultation flooded through Leith, along with a strange bitterness: again he had been used, a conduit for the power of another. But he could not afford to let his pride cause the deaths of others, so he turned from the open-mouthed Child of the Mist and went in search of other injured people.

The Company surrounded Leith as he went about his task, swords outward in case the Guard returned; but the streets remained eerily quiet, the shadows empty of foes. The only sound was that of sobbing and crying as the newly-healed wept over their dead.

Maendraga supported the strange young man from the north, the chosen vessel of the Most High. Though many were healed of their wounds, Ecclesia and guardsmen alike - some argued against the restoration of the guardsmen, but Hal would have insisted on it, and Leith agreed with him -the Jugom Ark could do nothing for the dead.

'I raised them up as an illusion,' Maendraga said sadly. 'If only they could be raised up in truth.'

Finally the last child was healed. The Company looked at each other, at the sweat and grime that covered them, then turned as one and left that terrible place.

* * *

'I've gathered you here this morning to discuss the events of yesterday,' Deorc said to his fellow Council members, his voice deep and resonant in the inner chamber behind the Iron Door. I'm here to placate your fears, to reassure you that everything proceeds as planned. But a stray thought leaked into his Wordweave. Is everything really under control? Am I safe even here!

'We've had a minor disturbance down by the Granaries, an accident and subsequent fire that unfortunately saw a number of workers killed. Our friends from Escaigne, miscreants and rascals all, decided to take advantage of what was for a while a confused situation. My captains faced a difficult choice. They knew whether they chose to fight the Escaignians, thus following our Council decree of two months past, or helped the worthy residents and businessmen fight the fires that threatened the buildings of Old Struere and the Docks, they would be criticised for having chosen wrong. So, alas, they decided to divide their forces, which left them prey to the Escaignians, and a number of our brave guardsmen met their deaths yesterday. I propose that we do not leave their deaths unavenged; and to remind us of their bravery, we will all stand for a moment's silence.'

The rising Councillors scraped their chairs back and stood silently while Deorc took their measure. The Arkhos of Nemohaim deserved credit, he acknowledged. He had wooed the most intelligent and gifted men of the Council to the Bhrudwan cause. Some of them still did not appreciate what that meant, how completely they had been bought, and the price they would pay when their master came calling. Nevertheless, there were two or three here who, if circumstances had been different, might have served Bhnidwo long and loyally. Firanes, there, proved himself an expert with

figures, having bled the City's reserves dry without anyone realising it, including the powerful House of Commerce. Favony, who stood beside him, spent money as fast as his colleague saved it; but as a consequence of his gambling developed an extensive and useful network of informants throughout the City. It turned out one or two from Escaigne liked to gamble and had amassed large debts, which provided Deorc, through the Arkhos of Favony, a way to whisper his plots to the inner council of Escaigne.

The Council was not yet restored to completeness after the purging of the loyalist group.

Replacements for Sna Vaztha and Redana'a were yet to arrive, having the furthest to travel.

The rest were firmly in his pocket, including the new Arkhos of Deruys, which had been a surprise: all the information he had suggested the Raving King would not send anyone corruptible. Yet this man suggested new strategies to the traitorous Council's advantage.

Deorc had taken him to the cells below The Pinion, seeking to test him, but the fellow had not been squeamish. Another one in the eye for the supposed purity of Faltha!

Talented or not, useful or not, this Council would be swept aside when the Master of All took Instruere for his own, as he would before the year was out. They would surrender the City to him, then find themselves bearing the punishment on behalf of the people for being Falthan.

Deorc already had the perfect place picked out, and would ensure the executions were public and prolonged.

They had barely resumed their seats when the first question came, from the mouth of Haurn the Craven. This was odd: he seldom spoke in front of his betters. He was barely tolerated here and he knew it. 'Forgive me,' he said quietly, 'but why did we not send the main force of the Guard against

Escaigne? We have guards enough to put down Escaigne and to put out the fires. Why did we miss the chance to destroy them while they were out of their holes?'

The question gave Deorc pause. The identity of the one asking it, the content of the question, and that anyone would question him after the Wordweave he'd applied, all these things worried him. He was still weak, he realised. The magic he'd been forced to use last night, including the forbidding spell, had depleted his abilities more than he guessed. In his weakness he had broken one of his master's commands, though not badly. He'd found the wretch Stella with a smile on her face when he'd gone to retrieve her, and so nearly lost control. His level of attachment to the girl frightened him. Despite having ordered her taken down to The Pinion, her face still haunted him.

He dragged himself back to the moment. Damn his wandering thoughts! His powers were low, as evidenced by how easily the councillors shrugged off the Wordweave and asked their foolish questions. He could not afford to lose concentration.

'If we had committed our whole force to the extermination of the rats from Escaigne,' he replied stiffly, 'we would have been severely exposed here in the centre of the City. What would you have done, O master strategist, if they had sent a force here to deal with the Council? No, you didn't think of that. We needed to keep guards in reserve. The attacks by Escaigne may have been a feint designed to draw us out - as, in fact, was proven by the shameful assault on the Hall of Lore last evening, which I dealt with. That's why I sit here and you are fortunate to sit there.'

As the Keeper of Andratan leaned back, satisfied with his answer, the door to the Council chamber opened and

Furoman, his personal secretary, stepped through. Deorc's annoyance flared. 'You are forbidden to enter the chamber while the Council is in session. What emergency do you announce?'

The man's face paled, but he continued into the chamber. 'My lord, the Arkhos of Sna Vaztha has arrived to take up his place at the Council. He has presented his credentials to the protocol officers, and the papers are in order. He awaits your pleasure.'

'Could you not have put him off until this session was at an end?' Deorc asked, again caught off guard. Sna Vaztha? How could the man have arrived so speedily? He should have been a month or more yet on his journey. The report on the queen's nominee had not yet arrived, even though his Sna Vazthan spies had been admonished to hurry. Was the man a loyalist?

Could he be bought?

'Is that the usual procedure for the Council?' asked a deep voice. A tall man in a white robe had padded silently into the room, unnoticed by Deorc in his preoccupation. 'No matter.

Please show me to my seat, and acquaint me with the business of the day.'

He waited, arms folded, until Furoman found a chair and seated him between Deruys and Haurn. Good, thought Deorc, recovering. Where I can keep an eye on him. Let's see what the Wordweave will reveal.

The Arkhos of Tabul, today's designated recorder, spoke quickly, reading through his notes.

When he finished Deorc stood, giving the newcomer a brief welcome, who responded by nodding respectfully to the rest of the Council. A man of few words, Deorc decided. Perfect.

But this illusion lasted only as long as it took the thought to form. The Arkhos of Sna Vaztha leaned forward, fixed

them with his deep-set eyes, and began asking questions. 'What of the attack last night? I have walked the streets this morning, and heard it said that it was not an attack at all, but merely a gathering of religious fanatics called the Ecclesia. Why were they put down so severely?'

Deorc scowled. He'd tried to keep that information quiet, but it was bound to have spread sooner or later. 'It was indeed the Ecclesia, but they were dupes of Escaigne, nothing more.

Do you know of Escaigne?' Acknowledging the man's nod, he continued. 'Somehow they were persuaded it was in their interests to rid the City of the Council of Faltha. They were armed with a variety of weapons, and inflicted heavy casualties on the guardsmen I sent in to disperse them.'

'I took a walk on this battlefield this morning,' the infuriating old man continued, running a hand through his grizzled white hair. 'There were over seven hundred corpses there, the guards outnumbering the Ecclesia by more than two to one. How is it this group of untrained, poorly armed citizens were able to inflict such losses on your well-trained Guard? I assume they are well trained, for you receive a large sum annually from my kingdom to support them.'

His lined face showed nothing but steel.

'Really, Sna Vaztha, don't you think you might wait until you learn how this Council works before you have your say? the Arkhos of Straux said plaintively. Always a bit of a dandy, Straux was the person Deorc would least have liked to try putting the newcomer in his place.

'The Arkhos deserves a reply to his sensible question,' the leader of the Council bit off. 'I have not yet spoken to the captain in charge last night.' Nor would he, for the incompetent fool lay near the bottom of a large mound of dead, precisely where he belonged. 'But it is my reasonable guess

the Guard operated under restraint, trying not to inflict fatalities among what are, after all, our own citizens, however misguided.'

'I visited the local apothecaries,' the hatchet-faced man said in his gravelly voice. 'There was not one single wounded person in their care, either of the Guard or of the Ecclesia. If the guardsmen tried not to kill, why are there no wounded/'

Deorc fashioned a strong Wordweave. 'Perhaps, my friend, the unfortunate Ecclesians took their wounded with them.' The time for questions is over. You will be satisfied with what you have learned. 'Now, we have many other matters—'

Astonishingly, the old man waved a hand in front of his face as though dismissing a persistent insect, then spoke again, interrupting Deorc. 'There are no matters more important than the welfare of our people. What is happening here in Instruere is symptomatic of what we hear throughout Faltha. My queen has sent me here to get to the heart of what ails us all, and I will do so. I respect no authority, no individual placing himself in my way, whatever his title, wherever the land of his birth. I have my orders, and as a representative of Sna Vaztha, I will follow them without compromise.'

Deorc was shaken to the core. The man was unaffected by his Wordweave. Even in his weakened state, there was not a man here, none in all of Faltha, who could resist him. Or was there? He remembered the magic he'd encountered the previous evening. Was this man the magician, sent here to undermine his position? Did the Undying Man have an undeclared enemy, one who might be a rival for Deorc, an inheritor of Andratan's power?

The handsome Bhrudwan cast off all civility, his face distorted into a frightening grimace as though something fought to explode from his skin. 'Tell me, old man, who are you?'

The man from Sna Vaztha raised his eyebrows, then told the Council of Faltha his name. The name meant nothing to Deorc, but cries of anguish came from around the table, faces turned red and his normally restrained Councillors, who had remained calm even in the face of the northerners' accusations a few months earlier, began shouting at the Sna Vazthan and each other. In the midst of the uproar, the white-robed man with the frightening name stood, bade them a solemn if unheard farewell, and left the chamber before a hand could be laid on him.

His feet took him south, away from the corrupt heart of Faltha, back to the devastated Granaries. How could men in leadership ignore the needs of those they purported to serve?

None of them had troubled to investigate the damage for themselves. All they had done was to send soldiers to fight with their own people.

Here, in the old city of Struere, a smoky haze still covered the sky, making it difficult to breathe. He recalled the last occasion he spent time in this district, over four decades earlier.

He remembered the tall tenements, built close together here, some well over a thousand years old, having been occupied continuously since well before the Bhrudwan invasion. He had stayed in a five-floored tenement on this street, if he remembered rightly - yes, there it was -

or, at least, there was a pile of smoking timber where it had once stood. It, and the buildings to either side, had fallen victim to the fires that still burned in places throughout the old city. A line of people ferried buckets from the river, perhaps half a mile away, trying to damp down the smouldering ruin. He watched them for a moment, people who knew little more than the fact that their homes and possessions had

been destroyed; then he walked quietly over to them and joined the line.

The choking smoke made talking difficult, but after a while the scope of the devastation became clear to him. It was not quite of the scale of the burning of Inverlaw Eich - he'd been through the ruins of that city less than a month after the fire razed it to the ground - but it seemed to have struck hardest at the most vulnerable citizens, people with menial jobs and nowhere else to live. Apparently a group of outsiders was coordinating a resettlement effort through the local markets. The old man smiled. Leadership would always arise in the absence of good government. He worked for a while longer, then moved on.