~25~
Thirty-six days before the sack of Death's Head
It took Leramis the rest of the day to reach the Atar. For hours, the blue-tinged hills that hid the honeycomb of caves hung tantalizingly close, but the going was slow. His legs were rubbery. His arms numbed. Every time he strained, his heart raced and he had to stop and catch his breath. The morning's misting rain intensified into a howling storm that soaked him so thoroughly his robe doubled in weight. His head grew hot and his vision blurry. His knees picked up new scrapes. Climbing into and out of the gullies left his hands raw and a muscle in his right leg seizing at uneven intervals.
He heard no sounds of pursuit.
In the hour just before dark, Leramis eased his exhausted body into a bracken-filled gully and found what he was looking for-a small cleft between two slabs of black rock, overgrown by long brown brambles and thick blue-green bushes with spiked leaves. He pushed through the vegetation, squeezed through the cleft, and stepped into the stillness of the Atar.
The rain ceased to touch him. The air on his face grew still. He couldn't see in the darkness, but he didn't care. The quiet, the calm, and the peace were all that mattered.
Leramis stepped forward, leaned against the wet rock of the cave, and coughed. The sound echoed sharply over the hollow howls of the wind in the hills. He rubbed his chest. His eyes drifted shut. He slid down the rock wall until he was seated.
Get up, he told himself. Get up and go deeper. You're not safe here.
It was no use. His body wouldn't listen.
Get up, he tried again. Get-
He woke hours later to the feeling of his head being jerked back and the touch of something sharp to his throat.
"You weave, you die," someone growled. "You move, you die. You do anything other than exactly what I tell you, you die. Do you understand?"
Leramis's arms felt limp. His legs as well. The cool, calm air of the Atar surrounded him, but he could see nothing other than harsh white light through a dark cloth across his eyes.
Blindfolded, he realized. A cloth was stuffed in his mouth too. And gagged. He tried to mumble an affirmative. A female voice spoke.
"He's no threat. I have him well wrapped."
She's irritated, he thought. His mind felt slow. And I'm not bound in rope.
He was bound in souls instead. Strands of them had been wrapped around him, biting into the muscles of his arms and legs to sap his strength. The souls formed stronger bindings than the stiffest chains. As he woke, he felt more of them, as well as the flow of the River around him. There were two soulweavers close by, plus a third person whom the River didn't bend around. The latter held the blade to his throat.
"I don't care," said the man with the knife. "You keep him wrapped, I'll keep a knife to his throat, and we'll take him to Lord Steelhill."
A few cords of souls were removed from Leramis's body. Feeling and coordination returned to his legs in a rush, as if the limbs had fallen asleep and their circulation had just been reestablished. The blade pressed against his throat.
"Stand and walk," said the man.
Leramis did-right back into the rain and the cold and the death and the misery from which he'd fled.
The camp his captors took him to was less than an hour away from the Atar, past three gullies and sited on the ridge road itself. Getting there was still difficult. In the end, the feeling was returned to Leramis's arms, then his hands as well, and the man with the blade was forced to remove it from his throat while they climbed.
The blindfold was never taken from Leramis's eyes, but he heard other people once they reached the flatter ground of the Spine. There must have been hundreds of them, milling about and murmuring and catcalling and shouting. He caught horse sounds too, and hammering. He smelled meat and vegetables cooking on fires of wet wood and peat.
If anyone was surprised to see a captive being brought in, they didn't make much noise about it.
The blade was returned to Leramis's throat and his arms were rewrapped. His third escort still hadn't spoken, but the River bent around him or her like water circling a drain. It was the third who was the most powerful and the one worth fearing, not the woman controlling his wraps or the man with the knife or even the hundred people around him.
It was the third who was his better.
The storm let up as Leramis passed through the camp. The rain disappeared, and the wind died and left behind a cold, quiet breeze. Gray light built by the minute beyond the blindfold.
I slept longer than I realized.
The man with the knife stopped walking, and Leramis halted. His arms hung uselessly at his sides. His heart raced. Whispers drifted toward him from the gray nothing.
Voices rose and fell, and then his third escort spoke.
"I will vouch for his harmlessness. Announce us."
The voice was male, bold and deep. It hummed with strength.
A Twelfthman, Leramis guessed.
He heard canvas flapping, footsteps, more murmuring. The rough hands of the man with the knife pressed him forward. He stepped into a slug of warm, pine-scented air.
And then Leramis heard a voice he hadn't expected to hear ever again.
"Half-mad? Half-mad Hentworth?"
He stiffened at the name.
The blindfold was removed from his eyes. Leramis found himself in a wide tent of forest-green cloth. Tall steel braziers hissed and popped in its corners and center. There was a bed at one end, and chests and clothing were scattered between.
In the center of it all stood a gaping young man with barrel arms, wine-cask legs, and blond hair that curled to his shoulders. A gray tabard sat over a green shirt on his chest. He had blue eyes, strong cheekbones-and a round, purple scar where once there'd been a fat wart on his cheek.
Leramis had known him, long ago.
Half-mad, the man had called him. As if that was Leramis's only name.
"We had a name for you too, you know," he growled.
The man's lips thinned. His face turned red. The veins on his arms stood out. He walked forward and leaned in close enough that Leramis could smell the sweetmint on his breath.
"Call me 'Toad' and it's your life, Half-mad," he whispered.
Leramis didn't doubt that he meant it.
He had met Charles "Toad" Steelhill at twelve years old, when he'd been enrolled at the Lars Dors School for Boys in Eldan City. Even mocked as he was by the other boys for his wart, Charles had spat at Leramis's feet when he walked past, turned his back on him at the table, and wreaked a hundred other childhood cruelnesses on the poorest, loneliest, least-important noble at the school.
By the time Leramis had reached Lars Dors, he'd already been Lord Hentworth by title.
The other boys had only laughed at that.
Steelhill straightened and crossed his arms, and Leramis watched him breathe the hatred out of his eyes. Leramis could guess what he was remembering; Lars Dors hadn't been an easy place to be different-not even for a Steelhill. The wart on his cheek had made Charles an easy target, and all his father's money and prestige had counted for nothing against it. Even his cousins in House Taeryn had mocked him.
But Charles Steelhill had clearly grown past that. In a moment, the anger had gone from his face and he'd taken a seat before a map-covered table in the center of the tent. A sheaf of papers lay scattered across the maps. A gold wedding ring flashed on his finger as he shuffled through them.
"You know, Hentworth, this is what you could have had," he said. His eyes remained on the papers before him. Dispatches, Leramis supposed, though he couldn't be sure. "I command a dozen households now-and as many soulweavers, for this campaign. Temper aside, you were smart. I remember that much. Probably smarter than me. You would have done well."
Leramis frowned. He could have done very well, but with no land, no money, no connections, he would've been lucky to command five men, and after the scandal of his father's last days he never would've found a marriage. Charles's eyes came up. A wispy blond beard clung to his face like dandelion fuzz.
"The Temple is claiming all captives in this campaign, Half-mad." The papers shuffled in his hands again. "There's nothing I can do for you. Or that House Serethon can, not that they're likely to try."
Leramis's throat tightened. His cousins in House Serethon had been even crueler to him than the other boys at Lars Dors. His family had been a blight on their name, and their nastiness had been their way of distancing themselves from it.
"How's your father?" Leramis asked quietly. He had the pleasure of watching a muscle in Charles's jaw twitch in response. Alphonse Lord Steelhill had been old and falling apart when Leramis had left Lars Dors. He was almost certainly dead.
The man with the knife struck him on the back of the head hard enough to blur his vision.
"The necromancer killed one man this morning, m'lud," the man mumbled. His voice was thick and choked. "Maimed two others."
Charles's eyebrows rose. "Who?"
"Killed Fishbridge, crushed Bymarsh's legs beneath his horse and burned Lackley's face." The knife twitched against his throat. "They say Lackley'll go blind."
Steelhill's mouth slid into a deep, tight frown, and Leramis was suddenly sorry for the man behind him. Sorry for Fishbridge and Bymarsh and Lackley and the others whom he'd killed or tried to kill. Sorry for the others who'd died and would die before it was over, who served a nobility that, for the most part, didn't care about them.
Steelhill shook his head.
Fire and steel, Leramis saw in his eyes. Hot coals and ice water. It was a look that had made people leave Charles Steelhill alone, once he'd grown big enough to back it up during wrestling lessons.
"There's blood on your hands, Half-mad," he said. "My men's blood, and the blood of the nobles they were fighting alongside. And that makes it my blood." His hand stroked the blond wisps on his chin. He looked briefly at the soulweavers behind Leramis. His chin wagged down and up.
The wrap around Leramis tightened. His legs wobbled and dumped him to the ground. His eyes lost their ability to focus. His chest felt like a heavy weight had been set upon it.
Steelhill's questions came fast and merciless.
"How many more in the caves?"
"I don't know."
"How many left in your unit?"
"I don't know."
"How many man the walls of Death's Head?"
"I don't know."
"You're ripping out your own entrails, Half-mad," Steelhill said.
The rain picked up against the tent. Someone behind Leramis moved. A poker sizzled its way into coals.
Please, Yenor, he prayed, let me die quickly.
If Steelhill was asking about the walls, it meant they hadn't been stormed yet. The city hadn't fallen, but neither had the Eldanians marched into the Order's trap.
Someone talked, he realized. That explained how he'd been found, how Eldan's army had known about the caves. Why it had avoided the trap.
Steelhill's voice was cold.
"I'll ask you again. How many?"
The truth was that Leramis didn't know. But if someone had told the Eldanians about the caves, they'd likely told them about the walls, and in that case misinformation was the best he could offer his comrades. He lowered his eyes.
"Two thousand."
"You're lying." The response came immediately from behind him, out of the mouth of the maybe-Twelfthman. "There aren't that many in the entire Order."
The Twelfthman was wrong. There were about twenty-four hundred in the Order, but many of them had postings on the mainland, and many more had been sent away before the assault, so that the Order would survive even if Death's Head fell. Others had been outside the walls as skirmishers, like Leramis. In truth, he estimated there were about twelve hundred left to defend Death's Head.
Leramis forced himself to smile. His tongue felt dry and thick, but his eyes started to focus more clearly again. "If you're so sure, Twelfthman," he said, "storm the walls and find out."
Steelhill made a note on one of the parchments in front of him. His manner changed. Less cold, more resigned, more vulnerable.
"How many undead can a force like that wield, Leramis?"
Leramis blinked. He hadn't thought Charles Steelhill had ever learned his real name, let alone that he might remember it so many years after Lars Dors.
The coals in the braziers hissed and crackled.
Leramis licked his lips and offered the truth.
"Anywhere from twenty thousand to six hundred thousand, depending on the strength of the individual necromancers involved." Steelhill narrowed his eyes. Leramis tried to shake his head but was stopped by the knife at his throat. "I have no idea how strong those two thousand are, Charles."
Another mark.
"How many corpses buried underneath Death's Head?"
Leramis swallowed, and the knife scraped over the bulge in his throat. He didn't think anyone truly knew the answer to that question. "A few hundred thousand, I expect. The city's as old as we are, and we've been keeping bones since its foundation."
Steelhill's quill fell to the table. He stared blankly at his maps. His right eye twitched.
And Leramis saw that Eldan hadn't properly prepared for besieging Death's Head.
It would be difficult to starve the Order out. There were months of provisions laid in, gardens kept within the city walls, boats for fishing in the harbor and the rocky reaches beyond where Eldan's warships couldn't patrol. Eldan's army would perish for want of food long before Death's Head would.
Steelhill's arm trembled, then stilled. He placed his hands on his maps and stood, looked around uneasily, ran a hand through his hair.
He's showing me his nerves on purpose, Leramis realized. Why?
"Think," Steelhill finally said. "Think about whose side you want to be on in this, Leramis. I don't know how to take Death's Head except by brute force. Neither does anyone else." When his eyes came up, there was real sadness in them. "The Twelve and the Seven won't accept defeat. They've staked too much on this. How many of your countrymen will you send to their deaths? How many of your classmates and cousins?"
Leramis's stomach squirmed.
"We used to laugh at you because you wanted to do something great for the realm, Leramis. Because you wanted to redeem your father's worthless name. But I'll tell you a secret." Steelhill leaned forward. "We respected you for it. You cared more than any of us."
Steelhill drew back and nodded to the man with the knife. The cloth was wrapped over Leramis's eyes again.
"Think about who you want to be remembered as, Leramis," Steelhill said. "Whether you want the entry below your name in the Book at Lars Dors to read: 'Died an unrepentant traitor,' or 'Saved the lives of thousands during the siege of Death's Head before perishing for his sins.'"
The world had slipped back into darkness once again, but it wasn't a darkness that Leramis could mine for strength or peace. He smelled the cloying smoke of the braziers. He saw a few hazy pinpricks of light through his blindfold.
"And think about how you want your last days to feel," Steelhill finished.
The coals clattered as the poker was withdrawn from them.
"Charles, wait."
A source of heat drew near Leramis's ear. His legs began to tremble and his armpits to sweat. The heat moved down, toward the meat of his neck. The soulwoven bonds around his limbs grew tighter, and the man with the knife pressed it against his throat.
"Let me think, Charles. Give me a day to think."
Something hard and biting touched Leramis's neck.
He screamed loud and high before he realized the sensation was one of icy cold. The hot poker receded. His heart hammered against his chest. His throat swam with bile. His stomach twisted over itself like a coiled snake.
They taught you that, he told himself. Remember? Get the man to expect heat and he'll feel it when given cold instead.
He heard the rustle of the poker being inserted into the coals once more.
"That was a warning, Leramis," Steelhill said. "One day. Think hard."