Riding north now brought those memories back in a rush of desperate longing that nearly overwhelmed me. It wasn’t simply nostalgia: I needed that sense of rightness again. I didn’t care if a mission was hard and dangerous; I just needed it to be right. Instead, here I was travelling to Orison, a Duchy without a Duke, now that Perault was dead (and thank the Gods dead and living for that small mercy), to persuade some unruly villagers that they did not, in fact, have the right to secede from Tristia. It was a pretty safe bet no one would be cheering our arrival there.
And afterwards? Afterwards I’d be sneaking into Avares, a country with which we could not risk war, so that I could capture and not kill the woman who had decided it was her Gods-given destiny to destroy everything King Paelis had built.
‘You look twitchy,’ Morn said, bringing his horse alongside mine.
Arsehole reacted with unexpected glee to this new companion and proceeded to bop the muzzle of Morn’s horse, confusing that poor beast no end.
‘I was just thinking,’ I said.
Morn smiled as if I’d actually said something meaningful. ‘You’re thinking about the circuits, aren’t you?’
‘How the hells did you know that—?’
He chuckled. ‘It’s what we all think about whenever we set out on a journey, Falcio: how much has changed, how much we wish it were more like the old days . . . the anticipation of adventure, the sense of . . .’
‘Rightness?’ I suggested.
‘Rightness. Damn me, you always know just the perfect word.’
‘We’ll have that again,’ I said. ‘Things won’t all go back to being the way they were, but once we have a Queen on the throne, we can get back to the work of making Tristia a just society again. Aline is—’
Morn held up a hand. ‘Please, Falcio, don’t start singing this girl’s praises to me. I’ve heard the stories already. “Aline who defied a God to reconsecrate the laws in Tristia; Aline who commanded her people to rise and never kneel again; Aline who sprouted wings and flew up to the heavens to push away the clouds and let through golden sunlight”—’
‘You know what, Morn?’ Brasti asked, riding up behind us. ‘I forgot what a jackass you are.’
Morn chuckled. ‘Well, the rest of us never forgot what utter zealots the three of you were, that’s for sure.’
‘You’ve seen the others?’ I asked. ‘Quillata? Old Tobb? Senneth?’
His expression darkened a little. ‘Some. I saw Bellow a couple of years ago, in a village in Domaris – he’d lost both his legs. You probably know Cunien started his own little band of vaguely noble brigands a few years back and set about redistributing the contents of caravans run by particularly venal nobles amongst the poorest. He’s something of a legend along the northern trade routes.’
‘Damn it, Falcio,’ Brasti said crossly, ‘I told you we needed to get a move on with this piracy plan of ours.’
‘What about the other Greatcoats?’ Kest asked. ‘Falcio sent Bardatti out months ago with the call to reassemble at Aramor, but few have come. Where are the rest?’
Morn shrugged. ‘How should I know? I’ve been living like a half-wild animal, sleeping in caves and walking hundreds of miles through mountains and forest ever since the King died, which hasn’t exactly made for easy socialising with my fellow magistrates.’
A moment later he reached over from his horse and clapped a hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t look like that, First Cantor. The rest of the Greatcoats will turn up eventually.’
‘Sure,’ I said, forcing a smile I didn’t feel. ‘In the meantime all we have to do is invade a foreign country, sneak into the camp of some devastatingly brilliant new Warlord and kidnap the world’s most dangerous woman – oh, and bring her safely back to stand trial.’
‘You’re forgetting that first we have to go negotiate with a bunch of petulant citizens of Orison and get them to stop threatening to break up the country,’ Brasti added.
Secession wasn’t actually an uncommon problem in Tristia; far too often people got the idea into their heads that separating from their home country would make them rich – or at least, less poor. I knew how to deal with people like that; it always involved a lot of listening, a lot of negotiating and the occasional threat.
It wasn’t until we arrived at the gates of Den Chapier that I discovered a slight setback to my tried and trusted method for securing a deal: there was no one left to negotiate with.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Seditious Village
Like many towns and villages in the northern Duchies, twin -statues of the God of Making guard the entrance to Den Chapier. In much of the south he’s known as Mestiri, which means ‘one who masters’, whereas in my home Duchy of Pertine, Craft has always been depicted as a young woman named Feturia. No wonder the people of Tristia have never been able to get along: we can’t even agree on what any particular God looks like. Of course, no one will ever know who was right in Craft’s case, because by the time I met the God, there was nothing left of him (or her) but a skeletal wreck hanging from the Blacksmith’s gibbet.
‘They call him Duestre in these parts,’ Morn said, standing between the two statues. The one on the left depicted the God as a muscular young man drawing iron from a vein of ore inside the stone on which he stood. That rock had probably come from the hundred-mile-long mountain range that divided the Duchy of Orison from Avares. On the right, Craft appeared as a stoop-backed elder, hammering the iron into a sword.
‘Falcio?’ Morn asked. ‘Why are you just standing there?’
‘I . . . nothing. I just—’
‘Give him a moment,’ Kest said. He and Brasti walked over and stood next to me at the entrance to the village. We were all a little hesitant about taking that next step. Brasti held an arrow and his longest bow, Intemperance, but he hadn’t drawn it yet, perhaps because his hands were shaking almost as much as mine. Memories of Carefal – the charred corpses, the stench – played out in my mind. They had worshipped Craft too, but he hadn’t cared; his only concern was the making of things. The unmaking he left to humans.
‘Come,’ said Kest gently, ‘we need to see what’s happened.’
I forced myself to take a breath, to dispel the stench of burning flesh from my memory, and arranged us in a diamond formation with each man facing a different direction. We moved at a snail’s pace through the narrow, unpaved streets, but the emptiness was absolute: no people, no livestock, no sounds, no smells . . . nothing. We walked like ghosts haunting a place that no longer existed.
‘Saint Shiulla-who-bathes-with-beasts,’ Brasti muttered, ‘how many people lived in this town?’
‘Three hundred and twenty, last time I was here,’ Morn replied. ‘Miners and their families, mostly.’
‘Three hundred,’ Brasti repeated. The muscles in his jaw worked awkwardly, as if he were trying to speak but something was lodged in his mouth.
‘Split up,’ I said, once I was confident no ambush was awaiting us. ‘Check the cottages.’
I headed for the town square: there were no signs of violence, no bodies or blood, no broken weapons, nor even signs of scuffles preserved in the cold, hard dirt.
‘No corpses so far,’ Kest said, coming out of a cottage. ‘There’s nothing in the streets on the other side, nor in any of the homes. Might they have been captured?’