Wild Magic (21 page)

The mercenary leader levered herself upright and thrust her face at him. ‘Right? Since when have we been interested in what’s right? We’re sell-swords – and Knobber died because he forgot that small fact. No sword – he dies. Simple as that. You die as a sell-sword, you get left where you fall. We don’t do funerals: we kill people.’ She leaned down and unhooked the pendant from around Knobber’s neck, weighed it in her palm, then pocketed it. ‘Waste not, want not.’

The hillman made a superstitious gesture. ‘Unlucky,’ he said.

Mam eyed him with hostility. ‘I don’t ever remember you having such scruples in your previous life. In fact, I’d go so far as to say you’re the least principled man I ever met. Which is saying something. You and Rui Finco make a good team.’

Persoa grinned. Except for the ritual tattoos of his tribe, which ran in complicated whorls and flourishes from chin to brow, he had the face of a young man – smooth skin stretching over strong cheekbones, a disingenuous expression. Laughter lines ran from his engaging smile to the corners of his wide-set brown eyes. The tattoos tended to frighten people, so he had learned early in life how to make people trust him: as a weapon it was more useful than even the best Forent steel. But his eyes were a hundred years old: those eyes had witnessed and stored away sights that would set weaker souls to gibbering. ‘I never could fool you.’

‘You did pretty well in Jetra.’

‘Who was fooling whom? I was enchanted, enraptured; bewitched.’

Mam coloured.

Dogbreath grimaced at Joz Bearhand, who winked. Doc gawped from the prisoner to the mercenary leader, hardly believing his eyes or his ears. Mam and this . . . southerner? Mam . . . bewitching?

‘So enraptured that you went out one morning to fetch us bread and kaffee and never came back,’ she croaked.

Persoa’s eyes went solemn. ‘I had no choice.’

‘And did you have a choice about taking on this little commission from our Lord of Forent?’

‘Had I known—’

‘Oh, you knew,’ Mam stated grimly. ‘You always know.’ Persoa acknowledged the fact with a tilt of the head and a barely perceptible shrug.

‘I hope Rui paid you damn well,’ Mam snarled.

‘He did.’ Doc held up a heavy belt lined with bags of coin. He hefted it consideringly. ‘I made him take us to this. Haven’t had a chance to count the contents, but I’d say there’s at least four thousand cantari in here.’

The hillman made a face. ‘I would not have accepted less for such a . . . challenge.’

Mam laughed, then winced. ‘Didn’t have the nerve to take me on yourself, then.’

‘Perhaps I did not wish to see you die.’

‘I’m so touched.’

‘Hami never was as accomplished as he liked to think.’

The fallen assassin’s blood had crept across the floor in an ever-expanding puddle. Under the dark tan of his skin, Hami’s face had already begun to take on its death-pallor, the cheeks shrinking in on themselves, the eyes staring hollowly up into the rafters. All five sell-swords regarded the corpse dispassionately.

‘He nearly took me out,’ Mam said softly. ‘I must be getting slow and deaf in my old age.’ She removed the dagger she wore strapped to her left thigh and tested the blade on her thumb. A thin red line appeared in the skin. She sucked the beads of blood away, looking thoughtful.

‘To me, you look as young and as beautiful as you always did,’ Persoa said gallantly.

Dogbreath guffawed, then tried to disguise his lapse in social etiquette as a cough.

‘Well that’s an accurate enough statement, even if it was phrased as slimily as by a southern lord, since I never did look young or beautiful.’

‘To me you did.’

‘Are you really so desperate to save your neck?’ Mam asked curiously, placing the point of the blade under the hillman’s chin and pressing hard enough that he was forced to raise his head to expose the entire length of his throat. The tail end of the left tattoo that marked him as one of the Catro clan from the south-east quarter of the Farem Heights curled lazily past his ear and disappeared from view amid the folds of his cloak. Mam ran the blade lightly down his neck, tracing the line of the pattern. The dagger tickled the skin, then reached the fabric of the cloak and slipped abruptly sideways and down. Sheared from its fastening, the cloak slid to the floor around Persoa’s feet. Little beads of perspiration popped out onto his brow. Mam grinned. The blade wavered, then continued its journey along the inked design where it ran down the throat and came to rest at the collarbone in a curlicue that completed itself with a delicate bifurcation and three elongated dots. ‘I always did like your tattoos,’ she said nostalgically.

‘I remember,’ Persoa said, looking distinctly nervous.

‘Do you still have the others?’

It was a pointless question. Once marked by the tribe leader, nothing less than flaying was going to remove a Farem tattoo. The assassin nodded. Mam raised an eyebrow, then slit his shirt fastenings till the fabric gaped open to the waist. Joz whistled. Where above the markings had appeared abstract and stylised, those covered by the man’s clothing were figurative and extraordinarily detailed. They depicted a scene from mountain legend: the imprisonment of the god Sirio beneath the Red Peak and the flight of his sibling, the goddess Falla. The tail and hindquarters of her magical cat, Bast, could just be seen disappearing into the waistband of Persoa’s leggings. Mam knew the markings well: she had spent many hours tracing them across the hillman’s smooth, dark skin. She knew exactly what lay between the cat’s forepaws. Ah yes, she remembered that all too well . . .

‘Why, Persoa, you remain a work of art,’ she smiled. ‘It would be a shame to lay such craft to waste.’

The assassin breathed a sigh of relief.

‘Though of course I could simply carve the skin from you as a keepsake, to remind me of . . . interesting times.’ She looked away from his alarmed face, took in the curious expressions of her troop. ‘Shall I spare him, lads, now that we’re one down?’

Doc stared hard at the corpse he’d carried back from Tiger Alley. ‘I’d sooner run him through and have done with this sorry place,’ he said shortly.

Dogbreath polished his knife on his leg. ‘I’d be happy to oblige.’

Joz’s face remained stony. ‘Knobber’s dead and there’s nothing that’ll bring him back. But I guess Persoa was doing the job he was paid to do, same as us: we’ve all taken the Lord of Forent’s money and done worse.’

Mam nodded. ‘If we’re to steal a ship and get ourselves out of here by morning, we’ll need all the help we can get.’

‘Steal a ship?’ Doc echoed disbelievingly.

The mercenary leader grinned. ‘Ah yes, hadn’t had time to expound my newly devised plan to you,’ she croaked. ‘We’re going down to the docks with – well, I was going to invest some of our own hard-won earnings in the venture, but since Sur has seen fit to provide us with an alternative source of cantari—’ she indicated the money-belt Doc held ‘—and a remarkably able navigator—’ she indicated the hillman ‘—it would be churlish not to make the most of our good luck.’

‘A navigator?’ Now it was Joz’s turn to be sceptical. ‘The man’s from the mountains: what on Elda does he know about crossing oceans?’

Persoa bowed his head. ‘I have . . .’ He paused. The admission he was about to make would get him stoned or burned in regular company in Istria. But Finna Fallsen’s mercenary troop hardly counted as regular company. He took a deep breath. ‘I have a certain affinity with rock and mineral.’

‘And what’s that when it’s at home? An
affinity
?’ Dogo waved a limp wrist at the hillman.

‘Among the hill-tribes of the Farem Heights there are those who are born with the magical ability to divine the land: folk who can “see” every aspect of it even when it’s hidden from the eye. They call them
eldianni
– “landseers”, and Persoa is one of the best. It means he can sense rock – below the water, across the sea, in the middle of a desert. He can follow a mineral vein a hundred miles with his mind; he can feel islands, continents, reefs,’ Mam declared with a certain proprietorial pride. ‘In Eyra, he’d be prized beyond worth; in Istria, he landed himself in trouble digging crystals and precious stones out of the Golden Mountains as a boy; got most of his tribe murdered or enslaved as a result.’

Doc gave the hillman a fierce look. ‘You stabbed Knobber in the back when he was weaponless. But if you can do what Mam just said and not give us any trouble, I’ll stomach you.’

Dogo grinned at the assassin. ‘Efficient, though, taking him out like that. I’ll be watching you.’

‘Knobber was a friend of mine,’ Joz Bearhand said quietly. ‘And there aren’t many who’ve earned that distinction. A man who kills my friend might by definition be regarded as my enemy: and my enemies rarely live long. You’d better prove yourself to be invaluable to our diminished team, or I shall personally rip your throat out.’

Persoa eyed the big man warily. Then he extended his hand. Joz nodded briefly, then engulfed the hillman’s wiry hand in his own great paw. ‘Welcome to our world.’

The world was red and full of pain, but when she opened her eyes, everything became a desperate, blinding white. She blinked and coughed, blinked again. Red; white; red; white; red. Her chest felt as raw as if it had been laid open to the winds and she was cold to the bone. When she tried to move, she found herself constricted and began to panic. She rolled and wailed and the world rolled with her.

‘Selen! Selen!’

Strong hands gripped her shoulders. A face came into view. It was a good face, strong-boned and healthy-looking: a man, with long hair and wind-darkened skin. His blue-grey eyes were anxious. She tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come out right. When she struggled again, the man bent and eased her bindings, put an arm under her and helped her to sit up. His shadow afforded her eyes respite. She looked around and realised she was in a small boat, which explained the rolling. It seemed very familiar, while at the same time bizarre in the extreme.

‘Thank Sur you’re alive! I thought you’d died for sure. I’ve never prayed for anything and meant it before. Perhaps there is a god, after all.’

She frowned. Sur? Who was Sur? Died? What was he talking about?

‘Who are you?’ The words came out as an indistinguishable croak. She watched his brow furrow as he tried to understand her. With an immense effort, she concentrated on what she could remember and came up only with the image of a dark man with a hooked nose coming at her with a leather strap and malice in his black eyes. He was not the man she saw before her now; but beyond that piece of information, nothing in the world seemed certain. She tried again. ‘Who am I?’ This time the words managed to separate themselves into distinct sounds, though why she had asked this particular question, she had no idea, since it was not the one she had originally framed; was not even sure whether she wished to know the answer.

‘Selen. Selen Issian,’ the man said. ‘Don’t you remember?’

She shook her head, coughed again. Her throat felt like hot ashes.

Almost as if he read her thoughts, the man offered her a skin of liquid. She took a mouthful and found it was fresh water. She had never tasted anything so marvellous in her life, whatever that life might have been. She laughed. The man looked surprised.

‘Selen Issian,’ she repeated. ‘What a ridiculous name!’

It really wasn’t the best day to be trying to make a swift escape from Forent City with a longship stolen from the dangerous lord of that province and a depleted crew of thugs and ne’er-do-wells, though the sun beat down and the sky was a perfect, cloudless blue. But there wasn’t a breath of wind to be had and therefore they had had to row the whole damn way until they were out of sight of any likely pursuers. They had, judging by the height that merciless bright gold disc had now attained, been rowing without pause for over three hours, and still the outline of Forent Castle could be seen in the distance behind them as a vague and geometric extension to the tall black cliffs. Mam’s arms – as brown and gnarled as old oak – burned with the effort. Her back ached. Her palms felt raw. On the back of her neck – above the bandage – she could feel the hot breath of a man whose presence had once made her knees go weak with desire, though she would never, ever admit to it, to him, or to anyone else. A man, moreover, she reminded herself, who had just caused the death of one of her troop and sent one of his own to dispatch her and Joz. ‘Couldn’t do it, myself,’ he’d said to her softly, head slightly cocked in that confiding way of his that she remembered so well. ‘Too many pleasant memories.’

She had nearly killed him on the spot for that insolence alone.

‘Over there! See, over there to steerboard—’

Mam jumped, nearly lost her grip on the oar.

The man who had called out was a swarthy sailor who hailed originally from the foothills of the Golden Mountains and had been pressed into service some twenty years before by a predatory Istrian merchant in need of new crewmembers following a disastrous voyage through the infamous storm zone of the Gilan Sea. He had a sore head from the skinful of wine he had drunk at the mercenaries’ expense in the Skarn Inn the night before; it made his thickly accented Old Tongue even more impenetrable.

‘What?’

The man made an impatient gesture. He was less than pleased to have woken aboard this purloined northern vessel, pressganged onto an oar yet again, but there was coin chinking in his purse and more promised once they reached Eyra and while his new employers were a ramshackle team – a group of Eyran mercenaries and an
eldianna
from the Farem Heights – at least they owned no whip-man like that bastard Oranio. He said something unintelligible in his native language and pointed out across the sparkling water.

Mam shaded her eyes and peered where he pointed. ‘A small boat,’ she said after a while. ‘I think it’s a small boat.’

‘It’s a faering,’ Doc said, from the crossbench to her right. ‘An Eyran faering.’

‘Long way from any shore for a faering,’ Joz noted. ‘Let alone from Eyra.’

‘Take her alongside,’ Mam instructed the rowers. ‘Quickly now.’ Quite what she was expecting to see in the tiny vessel that pitched awkwardly up and down on the gentle swell she did not know; but it certainly was not what they found.