Rythe Falls Page 2

  ''Bout now'd be good, Green,' said the talker, who didn't seem quite so confident now Perr's longsword was in hand.

  There was a sing-song twang of a taut string let free, a sharp ding of an arrow hitting steel and nothing else. Sudden thumping, then, Perr high in his stirrups, one hand on the reins, raised his sword to the sky. The talkative man brought his great, unwieldy axe to bear a little too late, then dropped it. A big, two-hander like that was only of use to a man with two hands.

  The talking man would soon realise he wasn't that man any longer. He stared, dumb, uncomprehending, as his left arm and his great axe fell to the floor.

  Perr ignored the speaker. He wasn't talking anymore. The man was done, or close enough.

  By the time the one-armed man managed to hurl out a scream, the man with the heavy old shield was in the dirt, unhorsed. The shield was sheared through. The man wasn't trying to get up. Instead of trying to live, he lay down and watched his own blood being sucked into the dry dirt.

  Perr could easily have let the bowman flee, but he didn't.

  Because mercy today would mean a traveller's death in a week or two, or a month, but the bowman wasn't a thinker or a worker. He was a thief, a killer, and Perr knew it.

  So did the bowman. His name was Green Othraine, and he was a good man with a bow. Could take down a rabbit or even a mir on the wing with a single shot. Didn't matter a damn, now. For a single moment, Green wished he had a sword.

  He tried to heel his horse into a run, but Perr's sword and arm were more than long enough to swing over the top of the talker's horse and slice a neat little chunk from the bowman's neck.

  As the bowman slid from his horse to the dirt, he wished, instead, that he'd stayed home, minded his sister. Wished he'd never seen bow or sword. But not for long.

  *

  Later that day, Perr and his lady Reih rode on, two good horses underneath them, three poor horses tied in a line behind to trade at Fort Iron Hill.

  Iron Hill.

  A small settlement, a village, perhaps. The last place of people before the swamplands began.

  And in the swamps?

  The mystical home that had once housed the Order of the Sard.

  Sybremreyen, the temple was called. Sister-home to Reih's own Kuh'taenium. A place of power and mystery. And the last bastion, perhaps, in the war for Rythe itself.

  A war, Reih knew, that had already begun.

  *

  Chapter Two

  Perr would not hide who or what he was, even if he could. A big man covered in steel is a difficult man to hide. Reih had to, though. She'd learned that well enough, since leaving her role as Imperator behind her in the dust. The best disguise, she'd found, wasn't in wearing different clothes, or changing her hair. After all, she no longer dressed like a Lady, or a Councillor. Nor, she thought, did she even look as though she had particularly good breeding.

  The best disguise wasn't to look like a different person, but to be a different person. To live it. The way a woman acts, holds herself, the words she speaks.

  Now, after months on the road, they looked more like mercenaries, or a hunter and a man for hire, perhaps adventurers. Not soft, but hard. Not bred, with learning and money, but like they'd been hatched from some dangerous beast's brood. Reih knew she looked rough enough to pass muster as a fighting woman herself.

  I've killed men, too, haven't I?

  She took a light cloak from her pack before she hit the settlement. Too hot for much else, but the cloak had a hood. She'd look a fool to put it up in this heat, but it was dirty and bright and distracting.

  Besides, people won't be looking at my face much, will they?

  Perr didn't talk often anyway, and Reih was almost born to talk, so she did the selling. Iron Hill was mostly a trading settlement with little of interest. Just, really, a collection of rough houses in differing styles. Wood, mud and sticks, little stone to be had. Plenty of iron, in the mines that ate into the hills thereabouts, but not much good stone at all.

  Roofing was thatch, by and large. Reeds, from the waterways and swamplands further south. No roads but dirt tracks. People, too, mixed like the buildings. Southlanders, their hair dark and their skin tanned year round, but a fair few easterners, some in from nearer the coast. Miners with dirt ground into their skin. Trappers and skinners that smelled a little like animals, now, they'd been at their trade so long.

  People look different, different places, but to Reih their eyes weren't that strange. Hungry men and women, tired, wary.

  It wasn't a rowdy place. Too hot for rowdy, too poor for ale and wine.

  Just...bored. Like the whole settlement did their work, ate their food, got into their beds and dreamed about doing the whole thing all over again.

  Reih took three silver coins for the horses. She might have sold short, but blustering for more would've stood out - as would rolling over and taking less. So she haggled a little, but only to show willing. She was happy enough with three silver.

  Maybe Iron Hill had soldiers, once. But like so many other places they'd passed along the road, the fort atop the hill looking down on the settlement was bereft of soldiers. Once, she knew, the Protectorate's armsmen would have patrolled these dirt streets. Maybe taken people in the night, maybe a killing here or there...to keep people in line.

  But no more.

  The Protectorate were busy. An idiot could see it. They'd gone...gone from the land. Tidy, clean, leaving little but lingering nightmares in the night.

  Like their fort, empty, presiding over Iron Hill. Occasionally, Reih would see a settler glance up at the wooden palisade, at the tower. Wondering, perhaps, if it was some cruel joke. If the Protectorate would just come back on some moonless night and wipe them out on a whim.

  Fear lives on, even when the evil has passed. It echoes.

  Reih understood those looked. She had her own fears. Her own echoes.

  But the looks the settlers gave that dark fort were mirrored across the land. All the way from the capital she'd fled, right down to here, in the southern reaches of her land...the Protectorate were gone.

  Utterly gone.

  Arram must be busting at the seams by now, thought Reih.

  Reih nodded to Perr, and the travellers ducked into a wide, low, wooden store. Once again, Reih doing the talking, they bought fresh supplies for the journey. Reih had never travelled a swamp, didn't know what they'd need. A guide, most likely, but they couldn't risk interaction. People talk. They were prone to it. They couldn't help it.

  Like the storekeeper. A garrulous man who she could have asked for help, for a guide, had she wanted the entire town, and the next few down the road, to know her business.

  Fewer the better, though. Just the two of them, they couldn't be betrayed, could they?

  All through the dirt streets, in each store they tried, there was little in the way of supplies. There was a small market, barely three travelling merchants and a couple of farmers selling from the backs of carts. Ready to head off, back to farms, neighbouring villages and hamlets, homesteads.

  Everyone was hot and dusted and tired and miserable and thirsty and poor.

  It's as though...the place is winding down.

  No, she thought, a moment later. Not that. Like the whole country was winding down. Had the feel of the woods outside her capital before a heavy rain. Things fell still. The wind, the birds and the beasts and the insects, too.

  Felt like that to her. Not just Iron Hill...but everywhere.

  *

  Chapter Three

  Reih didn't look back. They left Iron Hill, dead fort and dying town both, in the dust at their back. The suns were still high when they rode on south.

  When they rode, it was with plenty of food, water, weapons, and more coin probably, than the entire village.

  No one remarked on Perr's armour. He would have said nothing, Reih imagined, just glowered them down through his slit-visor. A few people looked at Reih's face, thought they sharply looked away. They didn't remark
on her countenance, either, she noted.

  Didn't matter to her. She'd been fine enough to look at, once, she imagined.

  Did it matter anymore? Did it ever?

  First month out she'd lost her right eye. The wound was still angry.

  In a way, even though the pain and the memory of it still woke her most nights, it was the best disguise she could have hoped for.

  *

  That first month out of the capital, Reih had been proud and held her head high, like a woman born to the heights. And she was, after all, wasn't she? Clinging to her fine dresses, her gold. The lady, looking down on the little folk, splashing her money around like a fool. Being, in fact, a fool.

  Right up until the night she'd told Perr she didn't need him and it had turned out she had.

  *

  They'd rode pretty easily away from their old life, just the Imperator roughing it with a chest full of gold and her sworn man to protect her. Rode straight as they could to a town just north of Beheth, a good way south of Lianthre and the things she'd known. The only life, it turned out, that she'd known.

  Thought she was wise.

  Funny how you can be wise and stupid all at once, she remembered.

  She took a room in the finest inn in the town. The Wayfarer's Star. She remembered that, if not the name of the town itself. Good cotton, soft bed, fine wine, hot food. A gold coin for the night, and she'd put another with the Innkeeper for the rest. Perr, dismissed for the night, went to scout ahead and Reih rested up. He'd protested, but he was her bodyguard and he followed her wishes, always had. He hadn't liked it. Of course he hadn't. But he didn't shout, or argue, he just turned and left the Inn, and left her feeling like a spoiled child, so she ate alone, thinking, and drank angrily, not thinking quite as much and not minding that at all. A lifetime of tiptoeing through the halls of power, where every glance and thought and word could mean someone's death.

  And then, a night alone in a good inn, drinking a thick, sweet wine. The night had been warm and she'd been flushed with a good solid drunk like she'd never in her life known, her mind almost entirely numb, but it had been bliss. Angry, yes, angry with Perr and the Protectorate and the fools, blind, who thought they served the people of Lianthre while they only served themselves.

  Angry, becoming maudlin as the evening wore along and she moved to a second bottle of wine, alone in a fine inn in a town south of Lianthre where no one knew her, nor wanted anything of her.

  A man slid onto the bench beside her. A fine-looking man, and two bottles of heavy wine into the evening, the clientele gradually drifted to their homes or their rented rooms. Reih couldn't remember the last time she'd had a fine man in her bed or anywhere else for that matter.

  Three bottles in, sharing, and gold passing to the innkeeper and the serving girls grinning at the loud, drunk rich woman taking a strange man to her bed...but it weren't none of their business, was it?

  *

  The two rode south of Iron Hill, for the remainder of the day. As Carious' last light faded from the purpling sky they set their camp. Night fell swiftly in the south. For some reason, Dow seemed to chase Carious more quickly as they neared the swamp. These things were not written in the maps Reih had known.

  Reih knew her country well enough...on a map. On the road? Everything was different. Roads that looked short on a map took forever on horse, while winding roads turned out to be straight. Hills were mountains, valleys were rivers. Seemed map-makers only cared a damn about the roads and towns and cities of the north, near the capital. Elsewhere, it was slapdash - more guesswork. The further from the capital, the more the maps seemed a fancy guide than the honest truth. The plains south of Arram were a splodge on a map. It had taken them nearly a month to traverse, Reih's missing eye packed with weeds and mud and weeping the whole time. The tincture she drank all day, all night, made that month seem longer. The pain made it seem endless.

  Perhaps it was, she thought, as they lay down to take their rest. It was still missing, wasn't it?

  Reih and Perr laid in their separate bedrolls under the spinning stars. Perr stripped his armour to sleep. The only time he ever did.

  'Sleep well,' she said. He grunted, rolled in his blankets, his sword near to hand as always.

  Reih kept her long knife close, too. She had since she'd woken in The Wayfarer's Star.

  *

  She woke with her head pounding. Drunk as any man had ever been. She looked around and found the room dim, the candle burned low. Her thighs were wet, and she smelled of...man.

  Had she...had she really?

  Doubt flew away as she heard a sound in the darkness. The chest beneath her bed, dragging across the sanded floorboards of her fine room.

  She turned her head. The room swam, or she did, or the walls...

  Drunk enough to take a man...and not remember a thing.

  She didn't feel ashamed, but stupid. She felt rather like an idiot.

  A roll in the bed with no memory of it, thudding head and vomit waiting somewhere in her future, possibly before Carious' first light...and the bastard was after taking her travelling gold?

  'Stop,' she croaked. Even the effort taken to speak made her head pound and her guts roll. But even so, she managed to push herself to sitting.

  The room swayed, she swayed, and before she could rise properly the man hit her with the flat of his hand. She was so stunned for a moment the room ceased to lurch and everything boiled down to a bright hand-shaped swathe of pain across her cheek and temple.

  Reih had never in her life fought for anything. Truth be told, even the gold in the chest was given to her. All her life, anything she wanted could have been hers. She was fortunate. Coddled, even. Was standing in council with aching hips hard work? Maybe...

  Not soldiering hard, though, or tilling a field hard. Not hard like giving birth or being broken-boned under a falling horse.

  The slap shocked her, and she didn't think she'd ever been as shocked in her life.

  The man turned from her like she was nothing to him but an obstacle. Without even thinking, more with a kind of indignation, she kicked the man before her in the crack of his arse and sent him tumbling across the room. His head bashed into a low cabinet and when he turned she saw a line of blood across his forehead.

  Not even that handsome, she thought. But he was angry. He was pulling a knife from his belt and she didn't know how to fight, wasn't armed, and she'd sent Perr away.

  I need you, Perr, she thought, stupidly.

  'Remember you being a sight more friendly earlier,' said the man. Angry, but grinning.

  'You're not taking that,' said Reih.

  'Well, I figure I'll take it, and we'll call it services rendered, right?'

  'For what? A drunken roll in a bed I can't even remember? Couple of coppers worth? Get out, before I call...'

  But Reih wasn't a fighter and the man was. As she spoke, he figured she'd make a fuss, maybe make some noise, maybe quite a lot. He'd seen the colour of her gold in the bar, thought about it, made the most of the night and planned on climbing out the window, him the richer for it and her still alive.

  He was a fighter, but mostly he was a thief, and the first thing a person needs to know about thieving is the cardinal rule: Don't get caught.

  A thief's not much good dead and hanged.

  'Get out, before I call...' she said, but that was as far as she got, because she was already starting to make a noise and the man wouldn't be caught.

  She spoke, he stabbed her in the face.

  The man would've kept on stabbing, too, maybe lived to be a better thief, if not for Perr smashing through the door and putting his good long steel into the man's head.

  Reih was on the bed, half-blind, in shock, her eye already ruined. Perr picked her off the bed and slung her one-armed over his back. Crouched, took the chest and left everything else.

  Reih remembered little after that. Jouncing on Perr's rock-hard, steel-encased shoulder. Her blood and the remains of her dead eye
pouring down his back. They fled, no time to heal or pack her wound, no time for explanations or the guard or even a moment's respite.

  They fled because murder and death preceded questions. Questions from the Protectorate.

  Back then there would have been questions. The Wayfarer's Star, a month out of Lianthre, when those things still mattered? The Protectorate hadn't been called back to Arram back then. They would have been arrested, questioned. Then, tortured before ultimately, Reih Refren A'e Eril and her bodyguard Perr would have simply...disappeared.

  Now? The Protectorate were gone. The law was dead, the land was abandoned and murder was less than nothing.

  *

  Chapter Four

  Creation, life...it is not little thing. A creature like Caeus understood this. Living is a trick, but not the sole province of those with consciousness, nor the soul, but a happenstance repeated throughout the universe. Elethyn and Dragon, Hath'ku'atch and Jemandril, human and Rahken...worlds upon worlds spreading across the black tide of space, further than even the boundaries of imagination. Yet, once again, Caeus found himself drawn to Rythe. His attention, his focus, always turning toward that fair world.

  Renir and Caeus above, and below? His mutt-children, the Protectorate, swarming across the dirt and the plains, across deserts and seas and snow, all drawn back to their hive, this Arram, the place where they swarmed from once, so many years ago, and now they headed back.

  At the borders of the swamps in the south of Lianthre, the wetlands that had long hid Sybremreyen, two travellers lay down for the night. Caeus could see their future, a short, inconsequential thing to him, but he understood that such things were of great consequence to them. Soon, they will be alone no longer, he thought. In the parched void above Rythe Caeus shrugged.

  Giant or flea, all the creatures have a part to play in something greater.