The Seventh Friend (Book 1) (51 page)

Narak now looked fully recovered, but yet again Quinnial found that he was on a trail where the young lord could not follow. He found it frustrating.

“What are you thinking, Deus?” he asked.

Narak smiled and shook his head.
Not now
. He turned back to Keb. “And can you ask them for me, Keb, how many priests were in the group so instructed by the god?”

Keb hesitated, but he turned and spoke to the men.

“There were several cleansers,” Keb replied when he had his answer. “None of exalted rank.”

Keb and the other prisoners were dismissed, but Keb did not move.

“What will happen to them?” he asked. Guards closed in to seize him, but Narak waved them away.

”Should a man be blamed for following the orders of his god?” the Wolf mused. “Perhaps not, but a man who worships a god who gives such orders may be held accountable for that worship, don’t you think?”

“You would condemn us all?”

“Would you?”

Keb hesitated only for a moment. “Yes,” he said.

“Then I am more merciful than you, and kinder than your god.” Narak smiled. “None of you will suffer punishment until the war is over and heads are clearer, and if your god wins, well, you may be heroes.”

When Keb had departed Quinnial could contain himself no longer. “You would let them live? After what they have done?”

“I have my reasons, Lord Quinnial. Remember that once you have played a card you cannot play it again. These men may be valuable to me at some future time, and I will not spend their lives rashly. The spy knows a great deal, he trained as a priest, a master of the rule, and I hope that I can turn him, but if I execute these others I will fail to do so.”

“What use is such knowledge, Deus?”

“I do not know. But I would give ten thousand gold guineas for a copy of their damned book. These men play by rules, and we have only fragments.”

“But if his god exists, as those men testified, then you will never turn him. Fear alone will keep him true.”

Narak said nothing. Again Quinnial had the feeling that he was being shut out. There was something more to be said, and Narak was not saying it. “Deus, I wish that you would trust me,” he said.

The words caught Narak unawares, and he gave Quinnial a sharp, surprised look.

“You are still young, Lord Quinnial. There are things that it is better you do not know, words that you should not hear.” It was not a dismissal. Narak spoke kindly.

“I am old enough, Deus. I have seen my share of misfortune.” He saw Narak’s eyes flick down to his crippled arm. Yes, that and Maryal, but both those things put behind me now.

“Old enough? You have eighteen summers, Lord Quinnial, and I have seen one thousand, five hundred and twenty-six, and yet sometimes I doubt that
I
am old enough to know what I know.”

“Then when shall I be old enough, Deus? When I am thirty? When I am fifty? Or are these dark secret things shared only among the gods?”

Narak barked a laugh, suddenly amused by what Quinnial said, it seemed. He smiled. “There is no such age, and yet all ages deserve the knowledge. Come and walk with me in the air, Lord Quinnial, and we shall see.”

He stepped out of the room, and Quinnial motioned the guards to leave them be. Narak led down a long stone corridor that tunnelled away from the warm inner chambers, passing statues of kings and lords who had served the kingdom, their sigils and badges still brightly painted, though some of the faces were worn away to unrecognisable approximations of men, faded by time and the touch of ten thousand hands. As a child Quinnial had played here in the summer when it was a cool, hard place where children could run unhindered by breakables and fussing adults. His hand had touched the faces, the swords, the sword encumbered arms, and taken their toll of dust, worn them a little more.

Narak went on, out of the garden gate and onto the lawns to the south of the castle. Here the land was terraced, stepping down towards the cliff edge of the butte on which the city of gods nested. He went to the very edge, to the last wall beyond which the world fell away two hundred feet to the low city, and there he stopped.

It was cold. Winter was in charge of the weather now, and many of the trees were naked, shivering in a thin, bitter wind that curled itself around the castle. Quinnial wrapped his cloak more firmly about himself, and waited for Narak to speak.

The wolf seemed entranced by the view. It was a good view, but one that Quinnial enjoyed mostly in the summer. They looked out over the low city, the smoke and smell of it dulling the clear winter air before them so that the sea beyond seemed an indistinct greyness, flecked with white, reaching away to the point where it merged with the lighter grey of the sky. At least it was not raining.

“Do you know my name?” Narak asked.

A trick question, he was sure, but Quinnial answered as though it were not.

“Wolf Narak,” he said.

“I am Narak Brash, a hunter out of Cashdiel in the eastern part of Berash. My father was Heral Brash, also a hunter. He was a big man, bigger than me; stronger than me. He loved his work, and he did it well. He taught me how to hunt, and he taught me respect for the wild things. Don’t kill what you won’t eat. Walk away from wolves and bears. That sort of thing. I loved my father.”

“You were a man,” Quinnial offered.

“I am a man. What Pelion gave me didn’t change that. My mind is still the same. He gave me strength, speed, long life, some other abilities, but he left my mind much as it was. He also gave me a duty, and that was to protect the forest, to be a father to the wolves. They are simple words, but they do not describe simple things.”

“I understand duty.”

Narak glanced at him before looking back at the low city. “Perhaps you do,” he conceded. “But duty is all that I have left to me. I had a brother and a sister, cousins, aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces. All of them are dust a thousand years and more. The friends I have among the Benetheon are dying, too. Remard is gone, Beloff is gone. Others will die in this war. There is too much blood silver out there for things to be otherwise. I, too, may die.”

“I do not understand what you are telling me, Deus.”

“There are no gods, Quinnial. There is only me, and Jiddian, and Passerina and the rest; men and women plucked from the ordinary, we are exalted by time, by belief, and we use that to deceive.”

“That is blasphemy,” Quinnial said.

“Against myself? An original accusation. I tell you this so that you know that there is no higher justice, no appeal. If we fail, we fail.”

“And what of Pelion? Ashmaren? Maritan?”

“Pelion, at least, was real. He was a man, though. He had great power. If Pelion had stood before Afael he would not have taken it with a sword, he would have reached out with his hand and crushed his enemy with a gesture.”

“And yet you say he was not a god.”

“I do. He was tired, Quinnial. I do not know how old he was, but he had a beginning, and he had an end. Pelion no longer wished to live. The Benetheon was his way of discharging his duty before he left.”

“Pelion is dead, then?”

“No. Not dead, but he is no longer alive. It is difficult to describe. I feel him still, but it is like feeling the north wind and knowing that somewhere there is snow. He is just not here any more. As for Ashmaren and the rest, do they answer prayers? I think not. There are tales, of course. Belief will always engender tales because coincidence is food enough for the hungry, but their miracles are no more than chance glorified.”

“I do not believe it,” Quinnial said. All his life he had prayed, and for much of it to the one that now stood before him denying his godhood. Narak Brash the hunter. Wolf Narak, the victor of Afael.

“Perhaps, then, you were indeed too young to hear these words.”

“You tell me these things, but I do not see the point.”

“The point is Seth Yarra,” Narak said. “There was no Seth Yarra four hundred years ago. I would have known. I would have felt the mind behind the army. They fought like oxen driven before the whip. Their strategy was to move forwards. Then I could believe that they fought according to a book, but this time it is different. There is a cunning mind controlling their moves. It weaves patterns around the book, but it is not
of
the book.”

“But not Seth Yarra himself?”

“No,” Narak laughed. “It is a point of faith with me,” he said. “There is some man who has stepped into the position, a man who has taken the trouble to learn their ways, their language, to study their legends; a deceiver”

“A man such as yourself?”

“Or less, or more. If it is a man like Pelion, then we are quite without hope, but I doubt that it is. Pelion would have simply stepped into the court at Golt and told the king what to do. Indeed he did exactly that more than once. The fact that this one skulks suggests that he can be beaten.”

Quinnial was unsure if Narak had deliberately missed his point, and he decided to press it. “You, too, are a deceiver, Wolf Narak. You claim to be a god, and yet now you say that you know you are no such thing.”

Narak raised an eyebrow, perhaps surprised at Quinnial’s boldness. But Quin himself was shocked by two revelations; firstly that Narak denied that he was a god, but even more so that he was low born. He was the son of a peasant with not a drop of high blood in his veins, and yet Narak was Narak. He was the victor of Afael. He was the general of all their armies and there was no denying his ability.

“I have never lied, Lord Quinnial. If men want to believe me a god, then that is their own affair, and frankly it’s useful. I deceive by omission, because I do not think denial would help.”

“And yet…”

“We are at war. Remember that, Lord Quinnial. This killing in the south, the villages, it is a message, and it tells us that we are all to die. There will be no mercy from Seth Yarra, no conversion, no prisoners. The land will be swept clean and peopled with the faithful.”

“That is monstrous. It’s not possible,” Quinnial objected. Narak’s words conjured up terrible images, and he thought of Maryal, and Maryal dead. In his mind he saw her dead on a Seth Yarra blade. It filled him with despair, and anger.

“It is quite possible,” Narak said. His voice carried little emotion. He was speaking as though describing a fencing bout. “The plan is a simple one. If they get through the green road they will meet our army and lose. I think they will lose one more time, but the battle will cost us more men than we can afford. After that they will attack again, and this time they will face a fresh army of levy soldiers, and their numbers will tell. If they fail to take the wall they will consolidate in Telas and attack through the white road come spring.”

“But to kill every man, woman and child…”

“You have seen that whoever directs the armies of Seth Yarra will not baulk at this, and why would he show his hand so early? He is confident. So far the game is his. His pieces have moved on the board and we have moved in response, just as he anticipated, but I like to think that we have done better than he expected.”

“Then what are we to do, Deus?”

“What we can. There are battles to win, cities to run, and each of us has our own duties. If we hold the green road we will have the winter to prepare, and then we may have a chance. To that end I must go.”

“I will prepare to raise the levy. We will train more men, but there must be something else I can do.” He would not let it happen. Images of the city burning filled his inner eye. His friends dead, the city gone, the end of Avilian – he would not permit it. Just an hour ago he had been standing in a city that was eternal, enduring beyond his imagination, and now it was a ghost, teetering on the rim of the abyss.