The Seventh Friend (Book 1) (12 page)

When he grew cold she arranged his limbs and combed his hair, kissed him one last time on his blue lips and taking up the blade she had used before, descended the stairs to see what shape the world now took.

It was over. The alliance of kingdoms was victorious and the streets were filled with bodies. She made her way down through the town to the docks, passing many fires. Afael was no longer a beautiful city. It was a charnel house, a smashed piece of glass that would never be reassembled. There were soldiers everywhere. She recognised the accents, the languages, and she heard one name repeated again and again. Narak. Wolf Narak, Victor of Afael.

She found him by the sea. He had stripped off his armour and was washing the blood from his body in the water, lit by a dozen burning ships. It was a scene that had burned itself into her memory, the men, thousands of them, pressing around Narak, hushed and reverential. Kings and princes, eyes full of something like love as they gazed on this one slender man.

Narak was moving slowly, as though he was exhausted, but Pascha knew that he was not. Narak did not tire. He could run for days through the forest, go a week without sleep, and he did not tire.

“Is he well?” she had asked one man. Her voice was a whisper, because the dockside had become a temple. The man did not answer her question.

“He could have taken the city on his own,” the man said.

She looked at the man’s eyes, looked at the waiting, reverent army, and it occurred to her that this is what it must be like to be a god of men.

Narak walked up from the water, the firelight showing her his perfect body, unmarked by any blade, glistening with sea water. He saw her, met her eyes, and she saw that he was deeply troubled. He walked towards her, stopped.

“Remard is dead,” he said. But it was not just the death of a friend. What he said was an excuse, a reason for what he had done. He had killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of men. She had seen him training with Caster, seen those blades cutting the air like a summer storm. He had walked through the armies of Seth Yarra like the god of death, dispensing his anger, spending his grief on their lives. Now he was empty, ashamed.

A man stepped forwards. She knew him. He was the duke of Casraes, no friend to Alaran and one of the old Afael nobility who had fled north. The duke knelt before Narak, and she saw that in his hand he held the crown of Afael, Alaran’s crown.

Anger surged in Pascha. Her hand gripped the blade firmly, and it took all her will to stay and not step forwards to part this man’s head from his shoulders.

“Deus,” the man said. He did not even see her, so fixed was he upon Narak. “Take the crown. Rule us. Be our king for ever.”

Had ambition come to this? This had all come about because she had prolonged Alaran’s life, kept him young and beautiful at her side, and now they offered his crown to Narak. Suddenly she hated Narak again, and despised herself for it, because she knew why they did this. Narak was the better man. All art and dancing aside, all manners and swords forgotten, Narak was to Alaran as an eagle is to a chicken. He was true steel.

Narak looked at the man, not seeming to see him, and the army waited, held its collective breath.

Another man came forward and knelt beside the duke of Casraes. This one she also recognised. Duke Paradin of Bas Erinor knelt and offered his sword to Narak. It was no idle gesture. He was offering Avilian, its armies, its lands.

She willed him to accept, because she knew that it would be a mistake. She badly needed him to make a mistake, and Narak stood for a full minute looking at what was offered, his eyes dull, his hands still and his shoulders round. If he took these things she had no doubt that Berash would follow, and probably Telas. He would become the emperor of Terras, and it would be so for ever.

But when Narak moved he took the crown and placed it on the Duke of Casraes head, lifted him to his feet.

“Lead your people kindly, lord King,” he said. He turned to Paradin, smiled. “Old friend, you know better than this. Take your sword back to your king.”

They bowed to him and the army shouted his name, over and over. The town was battered by the sound. On this day he was their god. He could do no wrong.

Pascha turned away and began to walk, unable to bear the noise. She did not know where she walked, but it did not matter, as long as it was not here. She wanted to be in a place where his name was not spoken.

So she had fled from Afael, centuries had passed, and here she was.

Pascha sat in her tower room over the bay of Benafelas and sipped her cool drink, picked at the fruit on the plate.

Narak had asked for her help. After four hundred years he had reached for her through the Sirash and asked, and she had failed him again.

Everything was in the wrong place, and already he had made mistakes. Narak sat alone in the lair and thought by the light of just six candles. Their poor glow made the chamber seem larger and infinitely more sinister. He sat cross legged among the rugs and rested his back against cushions that he had propped against a chair. Sometimes he was more comfortable like this, wedged tightly into a corner, limbs folded, head down.

There was no doubt that the arrow had been Avilian. He had expected the curved head and deep barb of a typical Seth Yarra point. He had dreaded it. Now he was worried again. He did not know enough about Avilian and its politics to even guess at who was behind the attacks. There were a score of wealthy lords who might gain by such a war, and any one of them, or any combination of them was possible.

Perlaine could have guessed. She knew more about Avilian. She had property near Golt, and more than any wolf she was his eyes and ears among the men of the kingdom in much the same way that he would turn to Poor for news of Telas, Caster for Berash, and Narala for knowledge of the Green Isles.

He could go to Perlaine and ask her, but she was travelling, and he needed time to think. If he thought for long enough he would know the right questions to ask. He had already spent an hour in discussions with Caster. The swordmaster had a fine tactical mind, and he often gained insights from their discussions. This time, however, there had been no benefit. To be sure they agreed on the essentials, which reassured Narak, but Caster’s questions were ones that Narak had already tried to answer, and his theories were no better formed.

Could Seth Yarra have made Avilian arrows? Of course it was possible, but these were perfect copies, and he would swear they had been made on an Avilian forge. Could they have stolen them? The disappearance of so many shafts would have been noticed. He guessed that the better part of a thousand arrows had been loosed in the ambush, and probably a fifth of those had been broken. More than that, it had not been the first such incident. And why? Why would they make Avilian arrows only to go to such lengths to hide them?

Yet he should be concerned with none of this if it were simply
power games among the southern lords. It was only the other things that concerned him.

There was another question. He lifted his head and cursed. There was another matter he should have raised with the officer in Tor Silas. Were there any hoof prints in the positions occupied by the attackers? It was important. The Seth Yarra had no cavalry, no horses. Their wagons were pulled by a sort of broad shouldered ox, but they had no riding beasts. It had been a critical weakness in the Great War, one which Remard had exploited to perfection. If the attackers on the Berashi border were infantry it would be one small pointer. If they rode horses it would rule out Seth Yarra altogether.

Narak knew that they would not use horses, even if they had managed to capture them, breed them, train and equip them. Horses were not Seth Yarra, they were, in the language of the black robed priests,
taint
.

He should read the reports again, he realised. After the war he had gathered much information, taken down the first-hand accounts of many people who had spoken with the foreigners and lived to tell of it. There were hundreds of parchments upstairs in his private room that held these words, and while he had a good memory it could certainly stand to be refreshed. He needed the information at his fingertips.

He sat back again, closed his eyes.

Why was he so certain that Seth Yarra was involved? There had been no mention of the name except in his secret thoughts. No evidence, no sighting, nothing at all. He could point to nothing and say
this is proof
. He had the adequately explained dogs in Bas Erinor, and he had some unusual things concerning the border clashes in the Berash Avilian marches, but it was nothing. He had the note, too; the impossible note. Someone had warned him. But they had warned him of something that turned out to be inconsequential. Or was it?

“Poor!”

His steward was there in moments, alert and anxious to please.

“Poor, when were you last in Telas Alt?”

“Many years past, Deus, but my folk are there all the time.”

“I heard a story,” he said. “A story of a disease that troubled the city. It did not kill, but many became ill. It was found that dogs carried the sickness, and so the dogs were killed and the sickness went away.”

Poor frowned. He shook his head. “I have heard no such tale, Deus. Such an event would not have passed unnoticed. I would have been told if it was true, but I will send a messenger to confirm that belief if you wish?”

Narak shook his head. “No need,” he said. “Your judgement has never failed me in the past. Thank you.”

Poor bowed and departed.

So! It was a lie, and now he must find the source of the lie. He checked himself again. Perhaps not a lie. Perhaps the wrong city, perhaps a mishearing of a word, perhaps a mistake on the Duke’s part. Whatever, he must look into the source.

He gasped. There was a sudden sharp shock within him. It was a feeling of pain as though he had been stabbed in the gut, and a sensation that he had been struck at the same time. It was the feeling of disaster, and he recognised it at once. He had not felt it for so many years, but he knew. One of his own was dead.

Poor was suddenly in the doorway again. He had felt it too, and his eyes were wide with shock. “Murder, Deus!” he cried.

Narak stood and crossed to his steward, laid a hand on his arm.

“I need you to be calm, Poor,” he said. “Be calm and the others will be calm. I will deal with this.”

He left the man and ran up to his private room, a knot twisting in his gut. It would be nobody at Wolfguard, he was sure. There had been no alarms. It must be one of those who were about in the world, and he knew that there were only two. Then he remembered the undertaker, the man they called Deadbox who he had gifted with his favour. He had been an old man. He lived in a poor part of the low city. He could not help himself, but he hoped it was the old man who had died, not Narala, not Perlaine.

He sat, tried to sink into the Sirash, but he was too desperate. It would not come to him. He opened his eyes and focussed on the candle he had brought with him from the lair. It had a steady light, a still column of flame, and he strove to make his mind copy the candle, be calm, be still. He slowed his breathing, tensed each muscle in turn, then relaxed it until his whole body was loose. He let the spirit of the great forest fill his mind, and he began to chant.

The trance came quickly now, and once free in the Sirash he moved swiftly. In moments he knew the answer, and he withdrew, sitting disconsolate on the cluttered floor.

It was Perlaine. Perlaine was dead.

Narak put his face in his hands. Perlaine was dead. Dead. Gone. He pushed the thought away, tried to hide her face from his inner eye. He took a deep breath and stood, He pulled on a coat and plucked his swords from the wall, strapped them onto his back and threw a cloak over them. He would deal with this now. He felt calm, almost serene, and he knew the feeling. When Remard had been killed he had felt like this after the grief had ebbed, and he knew it was not a true calm. It was just that he had one task now, a task that overrode everything else, and he would do nothing else, consider no other matter until this was done.

“Poor!”

The steward took the best part of half a minute to appear. He looked drawn and unhappy, his eyes pleading with Narak to deny what he had felt.

“It is Perlaine,” he said. “Look after the wolf.”

A moment later he was in the forest, and he knew that there was a wolf in his private room, looking at Poor. That would be all right. The wolves loved Poor as he did, and would obey his word. In his turn Poor would feed the creature and then release it into the forest around Wolfguard.

He looked around him. He could have been anywhere. Tall trees rose to a dappled canopy. Wind played among the tops. He summoned them, and wolves came to him. It would take a few minutes, and so he reached out and gave them Perlaine’s scent and one command.
Find her
.

They spread out around him. He knew that he was close, and that it would not be long, but he was surprised when one of them gave voice after only a few minutes. He ran. It took another five minutes for him to arrive at the place. There were wolves everywhere now. They seethed in and out of the trees, perhaps fifty of them.

Be calm.

They were. Almost as one creature they sat and watched him, bright eyed, tongues lolling, breath steaming the autumn air.

Perlaine’s body was lying under a bush at the bottom of a short slope. He went down to her and examined the body with tender care. Three arrows had struck her in the back, and would have been enough to kill her, but not at once. A sword blade had been pushed beneath her ribs, and upwards into the heart and lungs, just to make sure. A few feet away lay the body of the wolf that she had been travelling with. Here, too, he saw arrow wounds. All the shafts were gone, taken by whoever had killed them, and that reminded him of the border troubles between Berash and Avilian, but it was a common enough practice.

He lifted her in his arms and carried her to the top of the slope. He removed his cloak and laid her upon it, carefully removing all the twigs and leaves that had stuck to her skin. Her skin itself still retained a ghost of the warmth of life. He fetched water and gently washed away all the blood, all the dirt, leaving her face bright and clean against the dark cloth, and then he wrapped it around her. Next he fetched the body of the wolf and that, too, he cleaned, laying it across Perlaine’s feet.

The grave he dug was deep, and he dug with his hands, strong as any spade. When he had finished he covered the earth floor with leaves and twigs, making a soft bed, then laid Perlaine and the dead wolf within, arranging her fair hair more carefully than she had ever done in life. He crouched in the grave, caressed her pale cheek.

“Six hundred years you were with me,” he said. “Six hundred years and I never regretted a day of it. Sleep well, Perlaine. You will not be forgotten. You shall be avenged.”

He covered the body with the cloak, climbed out of the grave and began to fill it in. He worked quickly, and in a few minutes it was done. He looked at the small mound, and knew that he would come back to place a better marker here, and that a wolf would always stand guard in this spot as long as he lived. Perlaine had been special – a fixture in his life. She had been kind, generous and unafraid. He turned away from her memory again. There would be time for that later.

Now it was time for justice. Several of the wolves had caught other scents in their search; scents like wood smoke, cooking, men. He already had the direction fixed in his mind and he moved that way. The wolves moved with him, a grey carpet flowing across the forest floor.

He did not run. He walked, each footfall soft, and yet the whole effect was a tide of something that could not be prevented. His eyes looked straight ahead, a slight frown on his brow, and his arms swinging comfortably at his sides.

It was not far to the village, and he did not pause when he entered, and nor did the wolves, they flowed about him, a manifestation of unexecuted rage; a threat. People saw, and some cried out, ran to hide in their homes. Other stopped and stared, not quite able to believe what they saw. Still others turned and followed at a respectful distance.

It was a small village. A hundred people, or perhaps half as many again lived here. The houses were simple structures of lath daubed with mud. None was any greater or more finely built than the others, and the place stank of poverty. The huts were gathered around an open space, and on one side of this stood a small barn and a threshing floor. Narak stopped before the barn and waited. He did not have to wait long. They knew who he was, and the head man would come to him.

“Deus.” It was an old man, or at least a man who looked old; too much hard work, not enough food and too many days in the sun. Narak looked at the brown skin and white hair. The old man was afraid. His body crushed by terror, he stood in a sort of half crouch, a standing foetal position, half turned away from the source of expected pain.