18

ANTON

Dead Zealots lay in the passageway, more numerous than the living ones, who stood with haunted expressions, spears raised. There were more in the circular chamber where Anton had been stripped and beaten, and a couple of grievously injured soldiers, crying and spitting blood, with comrades crouched uselessly over them.

Elecy did not head for the high, arched doorway that Anton had come through when he was introduced to this hell, but to a side door. The two priests were joined by a Zealot, also wearing the garb of a scout, covered with outdoor furs.

“Anton, this is Franj,” Elecy said. “She will ride with you. We have only two horses, the stables are bare.”

Franj nodded a greeting. She was almost a child, younger than Anton.

“You’re not coming?” Anton asked Elecy, his heart thrown to the floor.

“I must stay,” Elecy said, avoiding his eye.

“They’ll kill you for this.”

She shook her head. “I was never here. This is a mutiny among the Zealots. No tzans involved. It is safer to stay.”

“How can it be–”

“If I go,” Elecy said, “Ving will suspect a wider plot. He will purge more of the priesthood. The cost will be terrible.”

They had passed from the high circular chamber, through a short connecting atrium, into a long vaulted hall that stretched for further than the meagre light of the oil lamps could reach. With a shock, Anton realised he knew exactly where they were: this arcade ran the length of the Brink, directly beneath the Processional Way, and at its far end connected to the warren of buried rooms used by the blade-priests, where they kept their sacrificial victims and made the arcane preparations for the Giving of the Gift. Disused chambers, thanks be to the Custodians, but ones he knew. He had the sense that Elecy had been here much more recently than he. In any case, they turned the other way, away from the Mountain. Their footsteps echoed in the near-dark. From the distance came more sounds: the clatter of metal, thin screams. As they walked, these sounds receded.

“How many are you?” Anton asked, panting for breath. He felt pitiably weak, and if he could hardly make it across the Brink, he had no idea how he would fare crossing the Hidden Land.

“About twenty,” Elecy said. “A couple more joined when we made our move. Without surprise we could never have done it.”

“Not enough to take the Brink?”

Elecy did not answer, but her grim expression was answer enough. Even in its depleted state, the garrison would be a couple of hundred strong. Twenty was enough to achieve his escape, and no more. At this moment, time was being paid for with death.

“They’ll all die,” Anton said.

“We are ready to die,” Franj said. “There is not a man or woman among us who would not gladly lay down our lives for the Tzanate.”

Even in the wavering light of the oil lamps, Anton could see the ardour in the soldier’s eyes, and he heard it in her voice, and did not doubt it for a moment. But it was the Tzanate they had raised their spears against, and the terrible bloodshed in the dungeons, and the bloodshed that would surely come, was all to serve something far tinier: Anton, his life and liberty. That could not be an equal price to pay. With that thought, Anton realised that in the young Zealot’s eyes, he was the Tzanate. He was, somehow, the living embodiment of what Franj and others had sworn their lives to protect, far more so than the priests gathered above, than the man who bore the title altzan-al and the vast monastery all around them. Anton was the Tzanate.

It was a thought that made him want to stop still, to shake Franj until she saw her error, and then to return to his cell. He felt weaker than ever.

The arcade terminated in a wide spiral staircase that twisted around a stone column thick with carvings. Anton saw raised wings and sickles, flames, talons, robes, the chambers of the heart, the entwined pageantry of death. Was that it, then, the idea that he represented the power of life and death? He hoped not.

A terrified Zealot stood holding a heavy banded door on a lightless landing off the stair. To one side, briefly caught by their passing lamps, was a body, another Zealot, face-down. Not a pleasant duty, to stand in the darkness with a body. Behind the door was a communication tunnel within the Brink’s fortifications, banked with massively buttressed stone. Anton realised that they must be near the immense outer wall of the fortress, having passed under the wide open space filled with barracks, stables and training yards. The warmth had gone from the air, and their breath fogged. Even under his fur, Anton shivered.

At last they reached a rust-stained iron door set within a defensive dogleg of stone – a postern gate, used to launch surprise attacks on besieging armies, but also a discreet way out of the Brink.

“The light, the light,” Franj said, and she and Elecy extinguished their lamps. And suddenly they were outside, in the night-time, on the grey broken dirt of the Hidden Land. The cold hit Anton like an avalanche, and once he had breathed it in, it was as if he had never been warm. The waxing moon lay just above the black line of mountains like an anxious sentry behind battlements, and Anton counted only two of its maids, a bad omen. He wondered about actual sentries on the battlements above. Two horses were tethered by the concealed entrance to the gate, dressed for riding and tended by a groom.

“I must leave you here,” Elecy said. “Goodbye, Anton. The Mountain will see that we will meet again.”

“Elecy, come with me,” Anton said. “It is madness to stay.”

Elecy looked at her feet. “They must not believe that tzans were involved in this enterprise,” she said. “Besides – the Mountain needs me. I hear it whispering. I have business here.” As if jolted by a memory, she started fiddling with her belt, unbuckling and removing it, and with it came the sheathed knife she had put to work in the dungeons. “Take it,” she said. “You will need it.”

In the moonlight he could see the dark streaks on the hilt of the blade, and on the hand that held it.

“No,” he said, his insides twisting. “I cannot.” Feeling he needed to give his refusal some weight or justification, he added: “You may need it yet.”

Elecy hesitated, her expression unclear, and then she embraced him. He felt the weight of the sheathed blade bump against his ribs.

“Be safe, sister,” he said.

“Be quick, brother,” Elecy replied. Then she smiled, a wicked smile, the smile that recalled all the best times of their childhood together. “Altzan-al.”

And she returned to the shadows of the Brink.

They went cross-country, avoiding the main road between the Brink and the Gull Gate. From the Brink, the Hidden Land looked almost flat: a wide stony expanse between mountain ranges, like sand in the bottom of a bucket. This impression changed little when travelling the Mirolinian road that crossed it. But away from the road, the picture was revealed to be a lie. The horses had to climb steep ridges and negotiate loose slopes of scree. Far from taking a straight line, they had to work in careful zigs and zags, taking each furlong as it came.

It made for slow riding, especially where the shadows cast by inclines and the giant shattered rocks that littered the plain turned moonlight into darkness. The horses whinnied and complained, and the only words that passed between their riders were terse instructions given by Franj to Anton, while Anton strained every nerve for the sounds of pursuers.

“This is hard going,” Anton said at last, when the base of a shallow gully gave them a stretch of natural road.

“We need the cover,” Franj said. “There’s a dry lake ahead that we can cross – it’ll be better. But we must be across it by dawn.”

“You know the land well,” Anton said.

“I want to be a scout,” Franj said.

“Want to be,” Anton echoed.

Franj looked away from him. “I am a scout. Trained but not yet assigned. I know the land.”

“I’m thankful you’re here,” Anton said. “I was not doubting you. You will be a fine scout.”

She did not reply. Anton thought back to Ramnie’s conversation with him on the ride back from the lake. How awkward he had felt. Was that the way Franj felt with him?

“Why didn’t you take the knife?” Franj asked.

Anton had not expected her to speak, let alone ask such a direct question, and for a moment he could not think of what to say. “I cannot,” he said, knowing the weakness of his words.

“We may need it,” she said. “We will be pursued. It’s danger-ous.”

“I’ll fight, if I have to,” Anton said. “But I cannot bear a blade.”

Franj frowned at him. “A knife isn’t just good for fighting, it can cut a tangled rein, it can free a stone from a hoof, it can carve your meat…”

“The last time I picked up a bloodied blade, I was accused of murder.”

“We may have to fight,” Franj said, and Anton saw what underlay her words – not a Zealot’s disdain for those unprepared to take up arms, but fear.

“I will do what I can,” Anton said. “I will fight.”

“I’m just surprised,” Franj said. “I knew you were a blade-priest, and I expected…”

Of course he knew exactly what she expected, and a vision of Elecy flashed into his mind, the spray of blood across her neck and cheek, her stained hands. And he felt ashamed. How many lives had his scruples saved so far? The corridors of the Brink were still littered with the dead, and the killing surely went on, others killing and dying in his name. Refusing to kill might oblige Franj to take on more – was that a lesser sin? It might cost her her life.

This is the way it would have been anyway, a voice inside said. As altzan-al, he would have needed to command an army in war. There would have been killing on a scale that made tonight’s deeds in the dungeon look like a children’s game. Whichever way he turned, there was blood.

“I need a little time to think about it,” he said at last.

Franj sniffed. “Fighting might not be necessary,” she said. “Scouts are supposed to avoid and conceal themselves and withdraw alive… It’s only the Gull Gates I’m really worried about. The Hidden Land is large enough. They do not have the men to comb it all. If they know we must pass the Gull Gates, that is where they will wait. But…”

She said no more, but the way that her voice had lifted on that last word had kindled a bright flame of hope in Anton’s chest. “But what?” he asked.

Franj paused before replying, focused on the darkened path ahead. Anton could not make out her expression, only the puffs of steam her breath made in the icy air. “When we heard that the altzan-al was dead, the stablemaster had all available horses made ready for dispatch,” she said. “Messengers would be sent, he said, carrying the news across the Tzanate and to the world. That was what he expected. But no order went out.”

“Ving did not want the news to spread,” Anton said. “It might have been possible to catch Yisho if he had sent out messengers immediately, but he didn’t want that, he let the army and the Conclave priests pass out of the Tzanate without knowing.”

“Well, yes,” Franj said. “That was our assumption – that he did not want word to reach the army. We tried to think of innocent reasons for that, because it did not strike us as the act of an innocent soul. Why would you not want to tell your strategos?”

Anton considered this. Even if she had heard the news, it was unclear what Yisho would, or could, have done. The caravan of priests and their retinues she was escorting was a large, hungry, vulnerable beast. It could not be simply abandoned in the wilderness while she returned in force. The altzans and tzans could conceivably have been left at the lake or at Mal Nulalus, but they could not be fed indefinitely. They were obliged to press on to Cassodar. Nevertheless, Yisho might have been able to divide her force and send a contingent back to the Brink. To do what, though? To shore up Ving? To oppose him? The latter would be nigh-impossible. The Brink was impregnable – it was far too formidable to take quickly, even with only a small garrison within, and a besieging army could not be kept provisioned in the wasteland of Elith-Tenh.

“You’re saying that we might get to the Gull Gates ahead of Ving’s men?” Anton asked. That seemed their best hope. Once there they could invent a story – trying to get a message to the Conclave, for instance – and talk their way through.

“There are very few horses left,” Franj said. “Yisho took near all of them to accompany the Conclave. Today there were fewer than twenty horses in the stables, and half of them were lame, or with foal. There’s a reason we are only two.”

“So it’s possible?” Anton said, hope again rising within him.

“It’s possible,” Franj said. “But the road is direct and easier travelling. Even if they left hours later, they could beat us. We must be quick.”

The land fought them; fortune fought them. The riders kept to the defile far longer than either expected, as their mounts were forced to pick every step in the near dark, and every turn and dip in the terrain had to be watched for treachery. Already light was building behind the black line of mountains around Elith-Tenh when the valley splayed out into a wide, flat expanse, ringed by low hills, a kind of reproduction of the whole plateau in miniature. But they gained no speed. Though it seemed as level and firm as a flagstone court, the lake-bed had the yielding, treacherous qualities of old, frozen snow, and it kicked up thick, choking clouds of clinging dust, which Anton feared made a column of signal-smoke that would be visible from the Brink. He yearned to raise the pace, but they could not. For a couple of hours, Anton had noticed Franj’s peculiar manner around her horse, the way she frowned down at it, and leaned forward to whisper in its ear, and would look around and underneath it as it walked. Once they were out into the flat, he could see why: it was limping.

Before they had gone a half-mile across the lake-bed, she stopped to examine its right foreleg.

“It’s injured?” Anton asked, dismounting to give his own horse a drink from its canteen. The dust had coated them both, itching his eyes and putting a foul taste in the back of his throat.

“An old injury,” Franj said, scowling. “It’s why she was held back. We thought she was recovered.” She clapped her hands together to shake free some of the coating muck.

“Will it get better? Can we go on?”

“Not this one,” Franj said, giving it a look that combined annoyance and sadness. “Bad choice. My fault.”

Days of starvation diet, and a sleepless night in the saddle, caught up with Anton all at once. He felt himself close to collapse, and lowered to a crouch, hoping that he did not appear weak.

“So what do we do? Leave it?”

Franj frowned at the horizon, towards a line of peaks now brilliantly etched in sunlight, even though it had not yet reached down into the lake bed. “Leave her,” she said. “No, we’re not going to leave her, not here, anyway. There’s a settlement not far from here. We’ll leave her there. They’ll take her back to the Brink.”

“And then Ving will know where we are.”

“Not for a couple of days. Maybe longer. I’ll talk to them.”

“Will they listen?” Anton asked. He knew little about the Hidden Land’s natives. Several times a year, small groups of them would come to the Brink in supplication and to participate in timeworn, elliptical rituals of mutual respect. They had little to offer, and once the Tzanate had the wealth of the world flowing through its halls it no longer needed the paltry barley and goatflesh they provided, so their tributes had become symbolic. Naturally, blade-priests were there to be seen and feared, not to make chitchat, but Anton had the impression that they chitchatted little with any tzan. This laconic nature was hard to read – sometimes it appeared cowed and awed, othertimes contemptuous. In an obscure and shameful way, Anton resented them, because they made him feel a visitor in the only place he could reasonably call home. They had no need for the Tzanate to know the Mountain, and who could say what they thought of its vast and gaudy temples and fortresses.

“They’ll listen to me,” Franj said.

“I’ve heard they can be difficult,” Anton said.

Franj shrugged. “They are my people, so…”

Introduced in panic and darkness, Anton had seen his companion as sharing Elecy’s dark hair and tanned skin, and he had assumed that she shared her origin in Miroline or Vell, or the cities of the Estami shore – after all, that was true of two-thirds of the Brink’s “recruits”. The Elithi who came to the Brink were elders, and he had somehow forgotten that some, most, of them must be young – but yes, she was Elithi. She knew the land, she had said. Of course she did. He covered his embarrassment with a cough. “I’m sorry. I assumed you were an orphan. Like me.”

“I am. I was. They have orphans too. Come on.”