Trinity Rising: Book Two of the Wild Hunt (Wild Hunt Trilogy 2) (22 page)

Nothing at all.

Not a word, not the smallest crumb of knowledge of the starseed. Impossible.

Swearing foully, Savin swam back up through the foggy layers of childhood, into the crystalline sharpness of the present.

Where is the key? You cannot hide it from me, boy!

He clawed the living mind pinned under his will, left bright welts of agony across its surface.

Where is it?

Another swipe of his claws, and another. Colours flared and dimmed. The boy knew something; he had to. The Church, his gift, there was a connection – there had to be! All that careful planning . . .

You must know! Tell me! TELL ME!
he roared in frustration.
TELL ME!

Again no answer. Only soft, helpless sobbing. Pathetic. This was Alderan’s great hope for the Order of the Veil?

This puling excuse for an apprentice is what you choose, old man?

Rage flared, white-hot behind Savin’s eyes, sour in his gut. By all the Seven Kingdoms, he would not be made a fool of in this way. He reached into his power, the dark and twisted undercroft of the Song that the Hidden Kingdom had shown him how to unlock, and wove its leathery strands together.

If Alderan thought this clod-footed northman’s brat was the future of his withered rump of an Order, he would be deeply disappointed.

The daemon seed took shape under his will. The instructions for its making crackled through his mind like hoar frost over dead leaves, all spiky eldritch syllables in voices colder than a winter’s night. Good, good. Almost done.

Around him the leopard-shape convulsed. He was losing his hold on it, but he didn’t care. It had served its purpose for now, so he let its Song go and felt the uneasy sliding of muscle and sinew and bone back into a human configuration.

The seed was sown. Even dormant it exuded a malign self-awareness, as if that dull-as-pitch carapace would at any moment crack and its two halves lever apart like the lids of an eye. Which, in a way, they would. Once the daemon was fully grown, Savin would be able to observe everything its host observed.

As lightly as if tossing a flower into a grave, he dropped the daemon into the boy’s ravaged mind.

And when your precious Order collapses in flames, Alderan, I will watch it happen and laugh
.

The Cold Stars Gaze
was hove-to in the deeper waters off the northernmost of the Five Sisters, with her head turned into the wind. Canvas flapped and banged sullenly, and her dragon-carved prow tossed up and down on the swell as if in frustration. Plaid-and-fur-wrapped warriors stood about on her afterdeck, half of them watching the sailors at their make-work and errands, whilst the other half stared south across the leaden rollers towards the inhabited islands and fidgeted with their axes.

Eager for the raid, no doubt – but then Nordmen were always eager for a raid. In fact, fighting, fornicating and feasting was about all they were fit for. No cultured pursuits to speak of: their music consisted of drinking songs, their poetry of turgid, leaden-footed sagas about hacking and hewing. As for their theatre, they had none worthy of the name, unless you counted feast-day mummery to entertain their litters of brats.

As he flew, Savin’s mind wandered somewhat wistfully back to the sun-baked garden city of Aqqad with its courtyard fountains, the urbane discourses on philosophy and civics – not forgetting the kohl-lined athleticism of the
najjir
, who made northern women look as pale and lumpen as tallow. He tried not to shudder. No point dwelling on it. Once he found the starseed and united the Kingdoms, he could retire to Aqqad and spend the rest of his days in a cloud of
mezzin
smoke, but until then he had to remain here, where the Veil was so permeable, and cultivate the primitives who controlled this region – however distasteful a task that might be.

Flying a tight circle around the masthead, he shrieked until someone on the afterdeck looked up, pointed. Other faces turned skywards, including the brooding cliff in human clothing that was Jaldur, who commanded the war party. The hulking Nordman barked a few guttural words and waved the rest of his men back to make room. Savin folded the peregrine’s wings and dropped like a stone, flaring them out at the very last second to arrest the dive. Then he let the Song go and stepped out of the blurring air onto the scrubbed planking as casually as if he’d just returned from a stroll.

Jaldur inclined the ruddy thicket of braids and tangles that passed for his head. ‘My lord.’

His pale-blue eyes were carefully impassive, but behind him a couple of the more superstitious sworn men made signs of protection. Savin gave them a flat-eyed glance, just long enough to let them know he’d seen them. It didn’t hurt to keep them fearful.

‘You need to leave these waters,’ he said, in common. ‘Have the captain set a course to rendezvous with the others.’

‘We go?’ Jaldur’s expression clouded. ‘But we raid, yes?’

Savin nodded. ‘Soon.’

‘Hah!’ Jaldur beamed and threw some words at his men in his own tongue. A forest of weapons was thrust aloft on a raucous cheer. The shaggy thane grinned, shaking his fists in the air. Then he frowned and waved a hairy paw at Savin’s arm.

‘You bleed.’

Savin looked down. His golden shirt was salt-spotted and splashed with blood across the sleeves. It was ruined.

‘Your hands, see?’ Jaldur rumbled on, but Savin barely heard him, paid even less attention to the deep scratches that laced his hands and wrists, black with congealed blood. One of his favourite shirts was
ruined
.

He walked away from the Nordman’s clumsy concern, heading for the ladder to the lower deck. Stalked aft to the stern cabin that only Nordships of
The Cold Stars Gaze
’s size and prestige possessed. Slammed the storm door behind him, flicked fire at the lamps swinging from the overhead beams.

Intolerable.

Savin ground his teeth. Finest Sardauki mugatine, which cost more gold to the bale than that useless Leahn guttersnipe could even
imagine
, and it was utterly spoiled. Gah.

Quite, quite intolerable. He wrenched the shirt off over his head, unable to bear it against his skin any longer.

‘By the Seven Kingdoms, I should have made a new shirt out of his hide,’ he snarled, balling up the silk in his hands. He hurled it across the cabin, but instead of smacking into the ship’s side it ballooned open in flight and fluttered down to the deck as lightly as a bird.

From where he stood the marks were invisible, but he knew they were there. Even if there’d been a way to clean the fabric and restore its lustre, in his mind the shirt would forever be stained. Soiled, imperfect. He levelled his finger at it and called fire. The silk burned with a quick, almost smokeless flame, and in less than a minute had been reduced to a handful of blackened buttons in a smear of soot on the planking. Another thought crushed the ivory to powder, then scattered it with a breath of wind.

The scratches on his hands and wrists began to itch and he held them up to the light. None of them was deep enough to scar: the boy had been panicked, more intent on escape than making a fight of it. Tsking, he fetched a damp washcloth from the basin mounted on gimbals on the bulkhead and began to dab away the drying blood.

And on top of it all, he’d learned nothing. Oh, there had been a few amusing titbits, like the crippled woman, but no useful information about Corlainn’s treasure or where it might be hidden. Either Alderan had indeed told the boy nothing at all, or . . .

Abruptly Savin stopped sponging his cuts. He frowned, water dripping unheeded from his hands.

. . . or the whelp had known something and kept it hidden.

For a second he considered it, then dismissed the idea with a quick shake of his head. It was impossible. The discipline required simply to withstand a reiving would take years of study to perfect, and this Leahn boy was a barely trained brute: all muscle and no control. Impressively strong, to be sure, but still with less skill than Savin had possessed at the age of five. No real challenge, and certainly not a threat.

He thought of the broken, bloody shape he’d left mewling in the snow on the island and finished cleaning his hands, lips curved into a smile.
Not any more, anyway
.

No, Chapterhouse was where the answers lay. He dropped the red-streaked cloth back into the basin, then hauled his clothes chest out from underneath the bunk to find a fresh shirt. In all his searching, the length and breadth of the Empire and beyond, he had found no clues that led him anywhere else.

Well. That wasn’t
entirely
true, but the remaining trail was faint and less likely to reap him a reward than Chapterhouse, so that was where he needed to direct his efforts. Pluck the lowest-hanging fruit first, as it were.

As he buttoned his shirt, he eyed the rail-edged table bolted to the deck on the opposite side of the cabin. In the centre stood the velvet-shrouded oval of the sight-glass. Silent, since he had set sail. Just as well. It irked him to have to carry the wretched thing wherever he went, but not as much as being dressed down like an errant schoolboy afterwards if he was not there to answer when
they
stirred.

The Hiddens’ aid had been useful thus far, but they needed him much more than he needed them, and their meddling, the constant questions and petulant admonitions were . . . wearing. Still, he’d not have to tolerate them much longer. Come the trinity moon he’d have their fealty, and then no one would dare tell him what to do ever again.

Duncan leaned back in the chair and tried not to let the fire’s warmth lull him to sleep. After so many weeks in the saddle the simple hide chair felt as comfortable as a feather bed, but he had to stay awake to deliver his message. He could only hope the chieftain’s steward hadn’t decided to go back to bed and leave him sitting there. He’d tried to impress urgency on the man, but still. It was well into the small hours of a bitter winter’s night and no one would be keen to rouse their chief after feasting unless the whole longhouse was afire.

He yawned. Slaine’s stones, it felt good to be warm again. Riding the plains in winter was part of a captain’s lot so he shouldn’t complain, but there was a lot to be said for a cosy fireside at the end of a long journey, for heat that wrapped itself around him like the thickest, softest blanket. He yawned again, shook his head to clear it. Tried to sit up straight, because it wouldn’t do for his chief to find him dozing by the hearth like an old man. Yawned again, even longer than the last one, and blinked eyelids that felt as heavy as tent curtains. Ended up leaning his elbow on the table when his weary back just didn’t want to hold him upright any more.

His eyes drifted closed and his drooping chin fell off his hand, jerking him awake again. Footsteps sounded outside and the double doors at the end of the hall swung open. Between them strode a tall figure wearing what looked like yesterday’s shirt, hanging loose over buckskin trews and bare feet. Sleep-tousled brown hair gave the chief of the Durannadh and Lord of the Plains the appearance of a hastily roused lion. ‘Duncan,’ he said by way of greeting.

Duncan pushed himself to his feet. ‘Forgive me for disturbing you like this, my lord.’

‘If it’s as important as my steward implied I won’t hold it against you, Firstmoon or no.’ Aradhrim came into the light from the fire-pit. ‘Slaine’s stones, man! Sit down. When did you last sleep?’

He rooted through the feast’s debris on the long tables until he found a
uisca
flask still with something in it and two cups, and pushed a generous measure into Duncan’s hand. The spirit scorched down his throat and set his stomach aglow.

‘Better?’ Aradhrim asked. Duncan nodded. The chieftain threw more fuel onto the dying fire and dropped into another chair opposite. ‘Your face says this is bad news. Spill it out.’

‘It’s bad, my lord. I think the Nimrothi mean to come down through the passes again. In force.’

Aradhrim’s cup stopped halfway to his mouth. ‘You wouldn’t say something like that lightly.’

‘No, my lord. Sor and I were scouting near the border forts and surprised some Nimrothi warriors at Saardost Keep, watching the pass. One of them was persuaded to talk and confirmed the rumours we heard after the Gathering last year. The Crainnh’s new chief is to be made Chief of Chiefs, and he means to bring a combined war band south to retake the lands lost in the Founding.’