The Right Hand of God (20 page)

Another party would leave Instruere by the ruined Struere Gate, thence to the Docks and the canoe of the Aslamen. Wiusago and Te Tuahangata, the latter having overcome his initial reluctance to the Mist's involvement, would be set ashore at Brunhaven, and Geinor and his son, who perhaps had the most difficult task of all, were to continue on to Bewray. The Aslamen would then return to their islands. Various others, mostly of the losian, were also to leave from the Struere Gate. They would make their way to their southern and eastern homes, and see what assistance they could raise in support of events far away.

For three glorious days the number of the Company had been full, Kurr realised; always excepting Stella. Now they were being sent all over Faltha, and would be together again - if at all - only when they came face to face with their enemy.

Deorc strode impatiently down the noisy corridor leading to the Iron Door. The hands of a dozen or more supplicants reached out towards him as he passed; angrily, he slapped them away with a fraction of the power still burning redly within him. The great door was slowly raised in anticipation

of his return, too slowly for his mood. With an imperious gesture he sent the Iron Door crashing up into its housing. He stormed into the Outer Chamber amidst falling gears and broken machinery, the ruined craftsmanship of an earlier, greater age.

There the Council of Faltha waited for him, the Arkhoi of Haurn and Deruys at their head, themselves newly returned from the site of his failure, ready to question him on the day's disaster. Deorc would have none of it. With a snarl he spread his arms wide, and the Councillors were struck dumb. It took only a crook of his finger to drag a gurgling Furoman into the Chamber, the secretary struggling as though he had a rope around his neck.

'Set the blue fire,' he commanded his servant. Furoman tried to obey, even though his face was turning blue, invisible fingers at his throat. He managed to lay the bowl on a table, but collapsed halfway through pouring the oil.

'You,' Deorc hissed, pointing at the Arkhos of Favony. 'Set the fire.'

Favony had never done it before, though he had watched with some distaste as the new Head of the Council had in his view behaved like a common conjuror, summoning a voice from the flames in an unnecessary display of intimidation. Setting the fire was servants' work, but he knew better than to argue with the man. The Arkhos of Favony was about to learn that the conjuror wielded real power.

With shaking hands he picked up the oil pitcher, which now lay on its side on the floor, slowly leaking sticky fluid on to the marble. As soon as he began to pour, a strange, terrible power sucked at him. To the frantic man it felt as though his strength, his soul, was being poured into the bowl along with the oil. He could not scream, he could not move, he could not halt the dreadful pouring. He could do nothing but die.

To the others it seemed as though the Arkhos of Favony slowly dissolved in front of their eyes, first his flesh, then his bones. The Council cried out as one man, protesting to Deorc:

'What are you doing?'

'I need blood for the fire,' the Bhrudwan replied acidly. 'Would anyone else like to volunteer?'

'But we are your allies!' shrieked Vertensia. 'We're on your side!'

'You are of no account,' Deorc responded. 'You are straw, and I come to set fire among you.

Now be silent, or you will burn before your time.' He turned towards the fire, set his face to it, and put the foolish conspirators to the back of his mind as the eager blue flame leaned towards him.

The Destroyer stood tall, looming like an avalanche over the girl who only now began to stir.

He had wrung her out, drained her of all she knew, which was not much - on the surface. A simple northern peasant girl, nothing more, not worthy of his attention. Dungeon fodder. But he had dug down deeper, remembering the time he first sensed her through the blue fire, remembering the touch of the Most High on her. No one could resist him when he dealt with them in person. And there, like a light hidden inside a shuttered room, he found it; a so-small kernel, an opening to the Realm of Fire, a jewel in a setting of dross. A life so ordinary, filled with petty fears; a small, mean spirit, with no capacity for greatness. A slave, not a master.

What had attracted Deorc to her?

The Undying Man could answer his own question with little difficulty. Somehow - she attributed it to a dream - she

had been given the Fire of Life. This hint of power, wrapped up in an attractive, vulnerable package, would have drawn a man like Deorc. She did not know what she had, knew nothing of the power she could draw on, and was no threat to his plans, though he would keep her alive until he solved her mystery. But for what purpose had she been given the Fire?

This girl had to be a decoy, he concluded. The Most High had obviously not entrusted his defence of Faltha to such as her. Though she saw herself at the centre of the Most High's plans, this was'" plain self-deception. She must have received the Fire incidentally, as part of a larger group. If the rest of them were like her, he had nothing to be concerned about. He knew how unlikely that was. Others of her party must be more powerful than she, for with his own eyes he had seen the Jugom Ark, had felt the power of the Arrow wielded expertly by a shining youth, such as he himself had once been, two thousand years ago in the Vale. A shining youth who was undoubtedly the Right Hand.

And now, thanks to the knowledge embedded in the mind of the girl grovelling before him, the mystery began to unfold. Less than two years ago he had interrogated a man in Andratan, a Falthan spy from far Firanes sent to uncover Bhrudwan secrets. He squeezed that one dry, he remembered; but like all the Falthans he put to the question, this man knew nothing of the Right Hand. According to Deorc, who was Keeper at the time, he was put to death some time later. Only it transpired he had not been put to death at all. This Falthan spy had somehow returned to Firanes pursued by four Maghdi Dasht, sent, the Destroyer presumed, by Deorc in an attempt to put right his blunder. The Maghdi Dasht finally caught up with the spy, and that should have

been the end of it - but, staggeringly, they had not killed him and whoever else might have learned of the plan to invade Faltha. Instead they made him captive and dragged him back towards Bhrudwo. Blunderers! Or was there something more sinister behind this? A subordinate positioning himself to take Deorc's place by winning the Undying Man's favour?

Or - it hardly seemed possible, he knew the mind of Deorc inside and out - was his most faithful servant finally aiming higher?

Surely it could not be. And yet... he cast his mind back to his arrival at Malayu several months ago. He spoke through the blue flame with Deorc that night, and his lieutenant denied sending the four warriors westwards. People had been sent to find out what became of them, Deorc told him. He remembered sensing a resonance through the flame . . .

Now, thanks to the memories of this girl still twitching on the floor, he knew what had happened to the four Maghdi Dasht, if not who sent them west. They had been defeated and slain, save one. Their captives rescued, not by great warriors, but by peasants from their home village. This northern girl was one of them! The one Maghdi Dasht remaining alive was taken into the service of the northern peasants. Tamed and set to work. Moreover - and this troubled him most of all - this spy named Mahnum, the man he had interrogated, had held in his own fortress, turned out to be the father of the Right Hand. Of this the girl's memories were unequivocal: she had seen the youth with the Arrow for only a moment, but recognised him beyond any doubt. The Undying Man sifted her mind to find out more about this Arrow-wielder, and uncovered her affection for him, hidden in a secret place, as though she herself turned from

it. The youth had a name, and it echoed through her deepest thoughts. Leith Mahnumsen.

This information raised many questions, the most immediate of which was the role of Deorc.

The Keeper had either been deceived as to the supposed death of this Firanese Trader in his own dungeons, or had lied to his master. Certainly he was evasive about the activities and the fate of four Maghdi Dasht. He must have lied. Certainly there was now enough evidence to destroy the man. And, disturbingly, he found something else in the girl's mind, a package of fresh memories from two days ago when Deorc held her prisoner in a high tower. Her memories clearly indicated he had done things to her, touched her, tortured her, in violation of the express command of his master. The images were there, half-formed, as though seared into her mind against her will. Worse, according to her memory, he boasted to her that the Undying Man would never find out what he, Deorc, had done.

At that moment, as he considered the unthinkable treachery of his servant, the Destroyer was startled to see the remaining oil in the Bowl of Fire begin to smoke. Deorc was trying to contact him. In an instant his anger burst all restraint, and the bowl roared into flame. Barely conscious, Stella was thrown across the room, ending in a crumpled heap against the far wall; and as she came to herself, her mind aching with the agony the black-robed man had inflicted on her, she was able to watch what happened.

In the Outer Chamber of the Hall of Meeting, the blue fire erupted into a howling inferno. The Arkhoi of Vertensia and Firanes disappeared screaming into the flames, as did the table. The remaining Council members scattered, some running, others thrown by the force of the blast. Deorc alone withstood the furnace that began to eat into the marble floor, holding his ground, awaiting his master's response to his failure.

What emerged from the conflagration was not a voice. Instead, the red mouth spewed blue flame like a vast rotten hand. It reached out and took him around the throat, then jerked him forward into the heart of the fire. Before he had time to protest, Deorc found himself ripped away from Instruere, transported through a tunnel of shrieking agony and deposited at the feet of the Undying Man.

'I command your soul,' said the voice, with a sharpness that cut at him like the daggers in the hands of the torturers of Andratan. He could not breathe, let alone reply. He could not take in what had just happened to him. 'You kept secrets from me. You schemed against me. You disobeyed my word by taking the girl for your own.' The evidence was laid out in front of Deorc, who scrabbled and retched on the cold concrete floor.

'I entrusted my power to you, power enough to deal with the opposition in Instruere, but you wasted it. Now learn how I deal with those who are untrue!'

Stella hauled herself to her knees, unable to believe she was watching the one thing she had wished for so fervently. She remembered hanging from chains in the tower of the House of Worship, going over and over an imaginary story in her mind, one in which the hated Deorc abused her and boasted of it. She remembered trying desperately to force the story deep into her memory, so that when the Destroyer questioned her, as she knew he eventually would, he might come across the memory and believe his lieutenant false.

And so, beyond every hope, it had proved. The day of her revenge had come.

Farr Storrsen walked with an angry stiffness, a rage that drove him forward. Had anyone asked him in those first furious days where he was going, he would not have been able to supply them with an answer, even if he had been inclined to speak.

He felt he had a right to his rage. He had been involved in a quest the like of which he had never heard, had for the first time in his life been right at the heart of things, had witnessed the finding and the raising of the Jugom Ark. Right there, at the Bearer's side! And suddenly, so suddenly, everything went wrong. His counsel had not been listened to, and the Company elected to make allies of the losian. When he walked out, no one had come running after him, begging him to return. Well, then. He would return home, would stop only to gather the ashes of his dead brother, and scatter them on the grassy tops of the Vinkullen Hills. Wild, open and free, where no one told you what to do and no one forced you to befriend half-men. Where the cold winds would shrivel your soul.

Day and night he walked, powered by his anger and deep bitterness. With the long strides of a mountain man he covered many miles between sunrise and sunset, and as many again at night.

He had food in his pack, so did not need to forage or purchase meals from the inns he passed.

Water was plentiful on the northern roads of Deuverre; shallow, swift rivers crossed the road regularly on their journey down from the Remparer Mountains over the horizon to the northwest. He stopped for nothing but brief snatches of sleep, spoke to no one, and did not turn aside from his road. Within a week

he was high up on the Rhinns of Torridon, near the borders of Treika, having left Deuverre, civilisation and the Jugom. Ark far behind him.

The moon, almost full, hung low over the Westway in a cool night sky clear of cloud. Farr crested a grass-clothed saddle, and glanced up at the shadowy ruins of castles on the brows of high hills to the right and to the left. Quite possibly the builders of these ancient holds had been enemies, ranged against each other, separated only by this valley he now walked through, a no-man's land of hatred that prevented people working and playing together. As he drew level with the broken walls, he imagined children's laughter coming from within in times of peace, then the screams and cries as siege was laid and walls torn down. He wondered how Instruere might look in a few years' time, whether people would wander past the ruins of the great City and wonder who used to live there. It would serve them right. How could friendship with the losian please the Most High? He shrugged his shoulders and carried on, but could not get the ominous image of the ruined walls out of his mind, the sound of laughter suddenly silenced. The brown armies will not reach Vinkullen, he told himself, but his mood did not improve.

The moon rose into the silver sky like the eye of an accuser, and he lowered his head to be rid of it. Thus it was he did not see the hundreds of lights spread out ahead of him, coming up the slope towards him, bobbing slowly as though on the back of ponderous beasts. The sound of singing finally jerked his head up, and in a moment he would never forget, Farr Storrsen beheld the Army of the North marching to Instruere, moon-washed and night-cloaked, arrayed for battle.