Published at 29th of December 2023 10:39 am

Chapter 4

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Five years earlier

I took the Haunt and the Highland’s crown in my fourteenth year and bore its weight three months before I went once more to the road. I ranged north to the Heimrift and south to the Horse Coast, and approached fifteen in the Castle Morrow under the protection of Earl Hansa, my grandfather. And though it was his heavy horse that had drawn me there, and the promise of a strong ally in the Southlands, it was the secrets which lay beneath the castle that kept me. In a forgotten cellar one small corner of a lost world broke through into ours.

‘Come out come out wherever you are.’ I knocked the hilt of my dagger against the machine. In the cramped cellar it rang loud enough to hurt my ears.

Still nothing. Just the flicker and buzz of the three still-working glow-bulbs overhead.

‘Come on, Grouch. You pop out to badger every visitor. You’re famed for it. And yet you hide from me?’

I tapped metal to metal. A thoughtful tempo. Why would Fexler Brews hide from me?

‘I thought I was your favourite?’ I turned the Builders’ view-ring over in my hand. He hadn’t made me work very hard for it and I counted it a gift above any my father had ever given me.

‘It’s some kind of test?’ I asked. ‘You want something from me?’

What would a Builder ghost want from me? What couldn’t he take, or make? Or ask for? If he wanted something, wouldn’t he ask?

‘You want something.’

One of the glow-bulbs flickered, flared, and died.

He needs something from me but can’t ask.

I held the view-ring to my eye, and once again I saw the world – the whole world as viewed from outside, a jewel of blue and white hung in the blackness that holds the stars.

He wanted me to see something.

‘Where are you, Fexler? Where are you hiding?’

I moved to pull the view-ring away in disgust when a tiny point of light caught my eye. A single red dot in all that swirling blue. I pushed the ring tight against the bones of brow and cheek. ‘Where are you?’ And dialled the side of the ring so the world grew beneath me as though I fell into it. I steered and dialled, homing in on my prey, a constant red dot, drawing me to it now, faster and faster until the ring could show no more and the dot held steady above a barren hill in a range that stretched across badlands to the west of the Horse Coast.

‘You want me to go here?’ I asked.

Silence. Another glow-bulb flared and died.

I stood a moment in the trembling light of the last glow-bulb, shrugged and made my way up the narrow spiral of stairs toward the castle above.

My grandfather’s map room is in a tall tower that overlooks the sea. The map scrolls are held in oiled leather tubes, a wax seal on each set with his sigil. Seven narrow windows admit the light, at least in the months when the storm shutters are not closed against the elements. A scribe is employed to tend the place, and spends his days there from dawn to dusk, ready to open the tubes for anyone authorized to view the contents, and to seal them away again when the work is done.

‘You’ve never thought to suggest a different room?’ I asked the scribe as the wind tried to steal the map for the twentieth time. I had been there an hour, chasing documents across the chamber, and was ready to commit murder. How Redmon hadn’t taken a crossbow and opened up on the folk below through his seven windows I didn’t know. I caught the map before it left the table and replaced the four paperweights it had shrugged off.

‘Good ventilation is essential for preserving the vellum,’ Redmon said. He kept his gaze on his feet, his quill turning over and over in his hand. I think he worried I might damage his charges in my temper. Had he known me he would have worried about his own health. He looked narrow enough to fit through one of the windows.

I located the hills I had seen through the view-ring, and found the general area of the particular hill where the red dot had sat so patiently. I had wondered if there might truly be a red light blazing on that hillside, so bright it could be seen from the dark vaults of heaven, but I reasoned that it had grown no brighter as my view closed in upon it and so it must have been some clever artifice, like a wax mark on a looking glass that seems to override your reflection.

‘And what does this signify?’ I asked, my finger on a symbol that covered the region. I felt pretty sure I knew. There were three similar symbols marked on the maps of Ancrath in my father’s library, covering the regions of Ill Shadow, Eastern Dark, and Kane’s Scar. But perhaps they served a different purpose in the southlands.

Redmon stepped to the desk and leaned in. ‘Promised regions.’

‘Promised?’ I asked.

‘The half-life lands. Not a place to travel.’

The symbols served the same purpose as they did in Ancrath. They warned of taints lingering from the Builders’ war, stains from their poisons, or shadows from the day of a thousand suns.

‘And the promise?’ I asked.

‘Noble Chen’s promise, of course.’ He looked surprised. ‘That when the half-life has spent itself these lands will be returned to man, to till and plough.’ Redmon pushed the wire-framed reading lenses further up his nose and returned to his ledgers at the big desk before the towering shelves of pigeonholes, each crammed with documents.

I rolled the scroll up and took it in my hand like a baton. ‘I’m taking this to show Lord Robert.’

Redmon watched with anguish as I left, as if I’d stolen his only son to use as target practice. ‘I’ll look after it,’ I said.

I found my uncle in the stables. He spent more time there than anywhere else, and since I’d met his shrew of a wife I had come to understand. Horses made her sneeze I heard it told, worse and worse minute by minute, until it seemed she would sneeze the eyes from her head. Robert found his peace amongst the stalls, talking bloodlines with his stable-master and looking over his stock. He had thirty horses in the castle stables, all prime examples of their lines, and his best knights to ride them, cavalrymen billeted away from the house guard and wall guard in far more luxury, as befits men of title.

‘What do you know of the Iberico?’ I called out as I walked toward him between the stalls.

‘And good afternoon to you, young Jorg.’ He shook his head and patted the neck of the black stallion leaning out at him.

‘I need to go there,’ I said.

He shook his head with emphasis this time. ‘The Iberico are dead land. Promised but not given. You don’t want to go there.’

‘That’s true. I don’t want to. But I need to go there. So what can you tell me?’ I asked.

The stallion snorted and rolled an eye as if venting Robert’s frustration for him.

‘I can tell you that men who spend time in such places sicken and die. Some take years before the poison eats them from within, others last weeks or days, losing their hair and teeth, vomiting blood.’

‘I will be quick then.’ Behind the set of my jaw second thoughts tried to wrest control of my tongue.

‘There are places in the Iberico Hills, unmarked save for the barren look of them, where a man’s skin will fall from him as he walks.’ My uncle pushed the horse away and stepped closer to me. ‘What grows in those hills is twisted, what lives there unnatural. I doubt your need exceeds the risks.’

‘You’re right,’ I said. And he was. But when was the world ever so simple as right and wrong? I blinked twice and the red dot watched me from the darkness behind my eyelids. ‘I know you’re right, but often it’s not in me to take the sensible path, Uncle. I’m an explorer. Maybe that itch is in you too?’

He rubbed his beard, a quick grin showing through the worry. ‘Explore somewhere else?’

‘I should take my foolish risks while I’m young, no? Better now than when that little girl you’ve found for me is grown and looking to me to keep her in silks and splendour. If my mistakes prove fatal, find her another husband.’

‘This is nothing to do with Miana. You just shouldn’t do this, Jorg. If I thought it would stop you I would tell you “no” and set a guard to watch you.’

I bowed, turned, and walked away. ‘I’ll take a mule. No sense risking good horseflesh.’

‘On that we’re agreed,’ he called after me. ‘Don’t let it drink from any standing water there.’

I stepped back into the brightness of the day. The wind still raked across the courtyard, cold from the sea, but the sun would burn you even so.

‘Visit Carrod Springs first!’ Robert’s shout reached me as I started for my quarters.

‘Qalasadi and Ibn Fayed.’ The names tasted exotic.

‘A man of power and a powerful man.’ My grandfather rested in the chair where the Earls of Morrow had sat for generations, facing the sea.

A circle of Builder glass, stronger than the walls around it and a full three yards in diameter, showed us the Middle Sea, the curvature of the Earth making it an azure infinity, white-flecked with waves. Out beyond sight across those depths, across the Corsair Isle, no further from us than Crath City, lay Roma and all her dominions.

Caliph Ibn Fayed might keep his court in the heart of a desert but his ships reached out across that sea, Moorish hands seeking to reclaim these lands that had been passed back and forth between Christendom and the Moslems since forever. Ibn Fayed’s mathmagician, Qalasadi, had likely returned to the shadow of the caliph’s throne to calculate the optimal timing for the next strike, and the odds of its success.

Far below us a wave slapped the cliffs, no tremor of it reaching the room but a high spray beading the glass. Twice a day they lowered a stable-boy with bucket and cloth to ensure that nothing but age dimmed Grandfather’s view.

‘Four sails,’ he said.

I had only seen three. The merchant cog, red-hulled, hauling cargo along the coast, and two fishing boats, bobbing further out.

Grandfather saw my frown. ‘Out there, on the horizon.’ A soft-voiced man despite the creaks of age.

A white flash. The sails of some wide-ranging vessel. A warship? A pirate cutter from the Isle? Or some flat-bellied scow out of Ægypt, treasure-laden?

I went closer to the glass, pressed a hand to its coldness. How many centuries ago had it been looted and from what ruin? Redmon surely had a scroll in his windy tower that held the secret.

‘I can’t allow them to live,’ I said. The caliph was just a name to me, Qalasadi filled my thoughts. The numbered man.

Grandfather laughed in his chair, the whale-ivory back of it spreading above him like the spray of a breaking wave. ‘Would you hunt down every man who wronged you, Jorg? However far-flung? However long they run? Seems to me a man like that is a slave to chance, always hunting, no time for living.’

‘They would have seen you die screaming while the poison ate you,’ I said. ‘Your wife too. Your son.’

‘And would have had you take the blame.’ He yawned wide enough to crack his jaw and ran the heels of both palms across the grey stubble of his beard.

‘Poison is a dirty weapon,’ I said. Not that I had been above its use in Gelleth. I maintain a balanced view of the world, but that balance is always in my favour.

‘We play a dirty game.’ Grandfather nodded and watched me from his wrinkles with those dark eyes so like Mother’s.

Perhaps it wasn’t the poison that irked me. Or setting me up for the fall – a chance inspiration surely and none of Ibn Fayed’s doing. I recalled Qalasadi in that courtyard the only time we met, his assessment, his calculation as he considered the probabilities. Maybe that lack of malice had made it so personal; he reduced me to numbers and played the odds. Fexler’s ghost had been constructed by reducing the true man to numbers. I found I didn’t like the process.

‘They struck at my family,’ I said, and shrugged. ‘I’ve built a kingdom on not allowing such acts to go unpunished.’

He watched me then, with the sunlight streaming around me from the sea window, making me a shadow cut from light. What went on beneath that thin circlet of gold, I wondered, what calculations? We all make them. Not so cold-blooded as Qalasadi’s but an arithmetic of sorts nonetheless. What did he make of me, this watering-down of his seed, beloved daughter mixed with detestable Ancrath? Nothing but a name to him a month ago. No child to remember, no soft toddling innocence from years past to blunt the sharp angles of the young killer before him – blood of his blood.

‘How would you do it? The Caliph of Liba lives in lands that are not like ours. You would be a white man where almost no white men are. A stranger in a strange land. Marked at every turn. Reported from the moment you set foot on the Afrique shores. You’ll find no friends there, only sand, disease, and death. I would gladly have Ibn Fayed and Qalasadi die. Fayed for striking at me in my halls, the mathmagician for his treachery. But if a lone assassin, especially a lone white assassin, could have accomplished it I would have dispatched one. Not in answer to Fayed’s raids – as a man of honour I meet war with war – but in response to his assassin.’

All men of ambition must pray to be pitted against men of honour. Although I pitied my grandfather at that moment, also it made me happy to know that at least somewhere in the mix from which I sprung there lurked a dash of such a man.

‘You’re right to say it would not be easy, Earl Hansa.’ I bowed. ‘Maybe I’ll wait until it becomes easy … certainly I need to learn more, consider more.’

Grandfather came to a decision. I saw the change as his face hardened into it. He would make a terrible player of poker.

‘Leave Ibn Fayed and his creatures to me, Jorg. They struck at Morrow, at me and mine in the Castle Morrow. The vengeance is mine to take and I will take it.’

The old man had weighed his odds. In one hand the life of an unknown relative, tainted by bad blood, in the other the chance of destroying an enemy. Whether ‘unknown relative’ had grown into ‘Rowan’s son, my daughter’s child’ and outweighed the gain, or whether he judged my chances of success so feather-light as to be outweighed by any claim on kinship, I didn’t know.

‘I will leave them, then.’ I bowed again. The lie came easily. I chose to believe he saw me as his daughter’s son.

I provisioned well, loading my mule with water-skins and dried meat. I would find fruit on the way: on the Horse Coast in high summer you had only to stretch out an arm to find an apple, apricot, plum, peach, pear, or even an orange. I packed a tent, for shade is a rarity in the dry hills behind the coastlands, and without the sea breezes the land bakes. I’m told the Moors have held the southern kingdoms time and again, Kadiz, Kordoba, Morrow, Wennith, Andaluth, even Aramis. They find it not so different from the dusts of Afrique.

‘So the Iberico, is it?’

I finished cinching the load-strap beneath my mule and looked up.

‘Sunny!’ I grinned at his scowl. Months back I chose the name for the guardsman after he did his best to keep me out of the castle that first day when I arrived incognito.

‘Minding my own business I was and up comes Earl Hansa. “Greyson,” he says. He likes to know all the men’s names. “Greyson,” he says, and puts his hand on my shoulder. “Young King Jorg is making a trip and I’d like you to go along with him.” “Volunteering”, he called it.’

‘Sunny, I can’t think of a man I’d rather have with me.’ I stood and patted the mule’s haunches. It seemed a sturdy beast, shabby but strong. The ostler said he was forty years and more, and wise with it. I thought it good to have at least one greybeard in the party.

‘This is revenge for making you drink from the horse trough, ain’t it?’ Sunny said. He had a sour look to him that made me think of Brother Row.

I waggled my hand. ‘Little bit.’ In truth I hadn’t known I was getting an escort, let alone picked the man. ‘In any case, you’ll enjoy getting out and about,’ I said. ‘Surely even the Iberico Hills beat a day standing guard at the Lowery Gate?’

He spat at that, strengthening his resemblance to Row still further. ‘I’m a wall guard, not a house flower.’ A stretch of his arm showed off the sun’s nut-brown stain. House guards are never so tanned.

With the mule’s tether in hand I set off for the gate. Sunny followed. His packhorse stood outside the castle wall in the shade of an olive tree, high laden as if we were bound for a crossing of the Aups.

However reluctant the show Sunny put on, my mule had him beaten. I had to haul the beast past the horse trough. I named him Balky and encouraged him with a stick. In the end I had my way, but the fact that Balky did not want to go where I led was never in doubt. I guess he really was the wise one after all.

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