Half a King

“Perhaps they’ve turned back.” Yarvi sent up a prayer to He Who Turns the Dice for a little rare luck. “Perhaps Shadikshirram couldn’t convince the Banyas to follow us.”

Sumael wiped grimy sweat across her face. “Who wouldn’t want to come here?”

“You do not know Shadikshirram,” said Nothing. “She can be most persuasive. A great leader.”

“I saw scant sign of it,” said Rulf.

“You were not at Fulku, when she led the fleet of the empress to victory.”

“But you were, I suppose?”

“I fought on the other side,” said Nothing. “I was champion to the King of the Alyuks.”

Jaud’s forehead wrinkled with disbelief. “You were a king’s champion?” Looking at him it was hard to imagine, but Yarvi had watched great warriors in the training square, and never seen the like of Nothing’s blade-work.

“Our flagship was aflame.” The old man’s knuckles were white about his sword’s grip as he remembered. “Roped by a dozen galleys, slick with the blood of the fallen, crawling with the soldiers of the empress when Shadikshirram and I first fought. I was tired from battle and sore with wounds and unused to the shifting deck. She played the helpless woman, and in my pride I believed her and she made me bleed. So I came to be her slave. The second time we fought I was weak from hunger, and she had steel in her hand and strong men at her back and I stood alone with only an eating knife. She made me bleed a second time, but in her pride she let me live.” His mouth twisted into that mad smile and made flecks of spit as he barked the words. “Now we shall meet a third time, and I have no pride to weigh me down, and the ground shall be of my choosing, and she shall bleed for me. Yes, Shadikshirram!”

He raised his sword high, cracked voice echoing from the bare rocks, bouncing about the valley. “The day is here! The time is now! The reckoning comes!”

“Could it come after I’m safely back in Thorlby?” asked Yarvi.

Sumael grimly tightened her belt a notch. “We have to move.”

“What have we been doing?”

“Dawdling.”

“What’s your plan?” asked Rulf.

“Kill you and leave your corpse as a peace offering?”

“Don’t think she’s come all this way for peace, do you?”

Sumael’s jaw muscles worked. “Sadly, no. My plan is to reach Vansterland ahead of them.” And she started down the slope, gravel trickling from every footstep.

The ordeal by steam was almost worse than the ordeal by ice had been. Though the snow was falling it grew hotter and hotter, and layer by layer they stripped off their jealously-hoarded clothes until they were slogging along half-naked, sweat-soaked, dust-smeared as labourers emerging from a mine. Thirst took the place of hunger, Ankran rationing out the cloudy, foul-tasting water in their two bottles more stingily than ever he had the stores on the South Wind.

There had been fear before. Yarvi could not remember the last time he had been without it. But it had been the slow fear of cold and hunger and exhaustion. Now it was a crueller spur. The fear of sharpened steel, the sharp teeth of the Banyas’ dogs, the even sharper vengeance of their owner.

They struggled on until it was so dark Yarvi could scarcely see his withered hand before his face, Father Moon and all his stars lost in the gloom, and they crawled in silence into a hollow in the rocks. He fell into an ugly mockery of sleep and was shaken awake what felt like moments later, bruised and aching at the first gray glimmer of dawn, to struggle on again with the splinters of his nightmares still niggling at him.

To keep ahead was all they thought of. The world became no bigger than the stretch of bare rock between their heels and their pursuers, a space ever shrinking. For a while Rulf dragged a pair of sheepskins after them on ropes: an old poacher’s trick to put off the dogs. The dogs were not fooled. Soon enough they were all bruised, grazed, bloodied from a hundred slips and falls, but with only one good hand Yarvi did worse than the others. Yet each time he went down Ankran was there with a steadying hand, to help him up, to help him on.

“Thanks,” said Yarvi, once he had lost count of his falls.

“You’ll get your chance to repay me,” said Ankran. “In Thorlby, if not before.”

For a moment they scrambled on in awkward silence, then Yarvi said, “I’m sorry.”

“For falling?”

“For what I did on the South Wind. For telling Shadikshirram …” He winced at the memory of the wine bottle cracking into Ankran’s head. The heel of the captain’s boot crunching into his face.

Ankran grimaced, tongue wedged into the hole in his front teeth. “What I hated most about that ship wasn’t what was done to me, but what I was made to do. No. What I chose to do.” He stopped for a moment, bringing Yarvi to a halt and looking him in the eye. “I used to think I was a good man.”

Yarvi put a hand on his shoulder. “I used to think you were a bastard. Now I’m starting to have some doubts.”