“I . . .” I really didn’t want to think about it. I certainly didn’t want to put it into words. Somehow saying it out loud would stop it being a nightmare, something unreal and belonging wholly to that other place. Speaking of it in the light of day would bring it firmly into the realm of experience, a real and concrete thing that had to be dealt with. I might have to start thinking about what it all meant: the idea that after a short span on Earth an eternity in such a place might be waiting for us was a deeply depressing one. It’s all very well when death is a mystery that churchmen fritter away the best part of Sunday droning on about. Seeing it for yourself at first hand is a profound horror and not something I wished to inflict on a child, or myself. “It’s too nice a day, Hennan. Ask a different question.”
Try as I might to bury the memories of Vermillion my old talent proved unequal to the task and they kept pace with me on the road, haunting each hedgerow, ready to spring into any quiet moment, or paint themselves across any blank canvas, be it sky or shadow.
My mind kept returning to Darin’s death, to the lichkin in Milano House, to my last glimpse of Martus. Each of those a stepping stone to the cold and ugly fact that my sister had at last emerged into the world so long denied to her. My sister, unborn, ridden by a lichkin, and still hungry for my death to further anchor her against the relentless pull of Hell.
I sought Kara’s wisdom on the subject, hoping the v?lva might have made some study of our enemy in the time we’d been parted.
“A man in Hell told me it took some holy thing to break an unborn,” I said, nudging Murder up close to Kara’s mare.
She shrugged. “It’s possible. It would have to be something very special. Some relic maybe. Perhaps in the hands of a priest. Sometimes faith moves more of the mountain than magic.”
“Wouldn’t Loki’s key be the best thing to unlock one thing from another? My sister from the beast that wears her? It’s holy—a god made it!”
Kara gave me a bleak grin. “Loki is a god, but who has faith in him?”
“But the key works! It could unlock—”
“The lichkin are monsters of many parts. Not born, not made, but accumulations of the worst parts of men, the filth that falls from souls purged in Hel.” Though the day was bright around us it seemed colder and more brittle as Kara spoke of such things. “When old hatreds sink to the deepest rifts of the underworld sometimes they fit together and interweave, perversions of the most twisted kind, detached from their owners, drift until they become entangled, and slowly over generations, something awful is built. But what is tangled together can be unravelled. Use the key and the lichkin will be undone, but your sister will be torn apart, shredded, still bound to the pieces of its crimes. You need something less destructive— something that will persuade the lichkin to release its hold and let her go.”
I remembered how the lichkin I had inadvertently stabbed with the key in Hell had fallen apart. Kara had it right. Besides, the chances of me driving the key into an unborn on purpose were too remote to bother considering. I needed something sacred and I had nothing. Father’s seal had been reclaimed by Rome and his holy stone had consumed itself in the violence that destroyed Double and his necromancies.
Kara proved no help and my fears continued to stalk me toward the border.
On the fifth day we crossed into Slov. No battles had been fought here, though the passage of so many men of the March had left scars of a different sort. The arrival of Grandmother’s ten thousand must have taken the little fort of Ecan by surprise—certainly the place bore no signs of conflict and the small garrison of Red March soldiers left to hold it looked bored rather than worried.
King Lujan probably heard of the incursion a day or two later. I would not have liked to have been in the same room when he did. I’d never met the man but the stories painted him as possessing the disposition of a wolverine with belly-ache, and a tendency when angered to lash out at those within reach using whatever happened to be handy, be it his dinner plate or a flanged mace.
The Slovs’ unpreparedness could be forgiven to a degree. Invasion is usually preceded by months of bad blood and the progressively loud rattling of sabres. Armies first gather along borders, defences are reinforced against counterattack. Sometimes a battleground is even agreed upon to stop two large armies missing each other and marching in circles for days or months.
Grandmother’s strike, aimed as it was at one target—the fortified town of Blujen—and more specifically at the tower housing the Lady Blue in the city’s eastern quarter, followed none of the rules of war. There had been no threats, no discontent, no border incidents. Her army had been gathered in the midst of Red March, drawing on forces from the western regions, and had then headed east without delay. A sudden and direct blow from deep cover, unexpected and deadly. Perhaps if she had struck at Julana City the Red Queen might have taken Slov’s capital and already have the king’s head on a spike—but what value is there in shading another kingdom red on the war-room chart if the whole map is about to burn?
Any army will make a ruin of the land as they pass through. Grandmother’s army had left its marks on the borderlands of Slov, not through malice or conflict but through sheer numbers. In places where the road could not contain them the troops had marched through fields, though luckily for the farmers the harvest no longer stood there to be trampled. Less luckily however any travelling force of thousands picks the countryside clean as it goes and a newly gathered-in harvest simply makes it more convenient to pick up and take.
“The people will starve come winter. Even in these green lands.” Kara seemed disgusted with me, waving her arm at the hollow-eyed peasants who watched us pass.
“They’re lucky to have homes still standing,” I said. “Hell, they’re lucky to be alive.” Snorri and I had passed through the border region where Rhone and Scorron meet Gelleth—towns there had been reduced to fields of hot embers, others had been left to ghosts and rats, the people long fled. But Kara didn’t seem placated, instead eyeing me as if I’d personally led the invasion.
“Starvation has a crueller edge than any sword, Jal.” Snorri watched the road with a grim set to his mouth.
“I think we’re missing the big picture here.” Ragged children watching us from a roadside tree didn’t help put me in a sympathetic light. “If the Blue Lady isn’t stopped, and if we don’t succeed in Osheim nobody is going to have time to starve: there won’t be a winter, and being hungry will cease to be an option.”
None of them had a reply to that and we rode on in silence, with me still feeling guilty despite my flawless logic. It struck me belatedly that I should have added the way the pair of them made me feel guilty for all sorts of things I normally wouldn’t give a damn about to the case for not taking Kara and Hennan with us.
The next dawn came with a bite, crisp, leaving the hedgerows heavy with dew and us in no doubt that winter was sharpening its teeth.
We rode more cautiously now, scanning the woods and hedgerows for signs of ambush. An invading army leaves dangerous ground in its wake. Add to the desperation of the surviving populace the removal of their ruler’s yoke and you get the perfect mix for armed bands of looters and raiders.
Fortunately Grandmother’s plan called for a quick exit once her goal was accomplished and this required that she keep the roads back to Red March clear. We passed half a dozen checkpoints before the sun set on our first day in Slov, and at each of them I had to argue my case, the volume and confidence of my delivery seeming to be more of a factor in getting us through than Garyus’s ornately worked scroll of authorization.