“Master, your family is my own – you know that.”
“I do. Berimus, we will come out of this thing. When I bring Karnos what I seek we will be citizens again, of the greatest city in our world. I will see you right, I swear.”
Berimus bowed his head.
“You remember when we were boys together, and we came up here hunting with my father?”
“The day the boar felled him – I remember.”
“We stood over him that day, shoulder to shoulder like brothers. That is what you have always been to me. I am entrusting my family to you now – stand over them as you stood over my father.”
“I will, master.”
“I am called Phaestus, my friend.”
Berimus looked solemn as an owl. “Phaestus. I will deliver your family to Machran, or I will die trying. You have my word on it.”
They clasped forearms as free men do.
“Philemos and I will join you before midwinter. Karnos will look after you until then. Give this to him.” Another scroll, another waxed seal.
“Be careful, Phaestus,” Berimus said. “These hills are a strange and dangerous place.”
“Dangerous?” Phaestus smiled. “Don’t worry, Berimus. I only go to call on the home of a friend.”
TWO separate lines of people, one family. They moved apart from one another, mere dots on the white spine of the world. Phaestus was throwing his life into the hollow of a knucklebone, and with it, those of all he loved.
Let me show you how it feels, Rictus, he thought.
He had hunted in these hills for decades; he knew them as well as any city-dweller could. In the winter he had tracked wolf, in the summer deer. North of the Gostheres, in the deep Harukush, there were mountain leopards with blue eyes, and enormous white cave bears. So it was rumoured, though Phaestus had never seen one, or met anyone who had.
It was an ancient place, the Deep Mountains. The legends said that the Macht themselves had originated there, migrating south and east out of the snows and the savage peaks, leaving behind them a lost city – the first city – whose walls had been made of iron.
The first Macht had all been Cursebearers, according to the myth, and had known Antimone herself. She had descended to the surface of the world to dress them in her Gift, and then had left for her endless vigil among the stars with only her two sons for company.
And God had turned His face from them all, from the goddess of pity and the race on whose behalf she had intervened upon the face of the earth.
So said the legends. Phaestus was nothing if not a rational man, but he was astute enough to know the value of myth. The black armours which dotted the Macht world were an undeniable reality, and had not been made by any craft that now existed. So there was that seed of truth at the root of the legends. If there was one, there might be others.
He had talked to Rictus of it, back in the days when he had been an honoured guest at Andunnon and the two had sat by the fire after a few days’ hunting in the hills. Together, they had speculated idly that they might one day make an expedition into the lost interior of the Deep Mountains, to look for that lost city with walls of iron. Something to occupy their retirement.
Antimone, Lady of Night, Phaestus thought, how did it come to this?
They kept to the high ridges to steer clear of the drifts, and found, themselves in a blue and white world, where the wind took their breath away and set the snow clouding in a blizzard off the rocks and stones at their feet. The sky was empty except for the pale red disc that was Haukos, always reluctant to quit the sky in winter, but to the north the great peaks of the Harukush – legendary even among the Kufr – barred the horizon like a white wall. Down from them the wind swooped, and the bite of it was as bitter as a plunge into a midwinter sea.
There were six of them: Phaestus, Philemos, and four others who had come out of Hal Goshen with them. One of these, Sertorius, had been at various times in his life a mercenary, a hunter, a slave-dealer, and a pimp. It was in this latter guise that he had come to the attention of Phaestus, in his duties as chief magistrate of the city.
The two had known each other for many years, and from their confrontations there had arisen a grudging mutual respect. In his own way, Sertorius was as proud and stiff-necked as Phaestus, and as disgusted by the tame surrender of his city. It was he, and his silent little band of henchmen, who had smuggled the Speaker of Hal Goshen, his family and some of his household out of the city – and with a surprising degree of discretion.
Ostrakr, the sentence had been, but Phaestus had no doubt that he was not intended to survive. His rival, Sarmenian, had ached for the chief magistracy for too long to be magnanimous in victory.
Sertorius had been well paid for his troubles, but this current exploit he was doing for free. Like Phaestus, he was a man without a city now, and were he to walk through the gates of Machran, he wanted to do so with something to show for his trouble, something which would ease the transition.
He was a lowlander, a black-haired, brown-skinned man with eyes the colour of a thrush’s back and a convict’s gall-marks on his wrists. His face was seamed and scarred with knife-fights and wickedness and he had a wide gap between his front teeth. He was not the company Phaestus would have chosen for a trip into the highlands in winter -still less the three hulking street-thugs that were his companions – but the choice had not been wide, and Sertorius had at least a brassy, hail-fellow-well-met way of getting along with others which had come in useful with the goatherder folk the night before.
What Sertorius and his men lacked, however, was a knowledge of the mountains, and they stumbled in the wake of Phaestus and his son, holding onto the tails of the mules and complaining endlessly about the cold.
“Two good day’s travel,” Phaestus told them, reining in his contempt with the practice of a politician. “That’s all. Two days, and then we shall have a roof over our heads, for a day or two at least.”
“If the weather holds,” Sertorius said, the words hissing through his gapped teeth. “I hope the prize we seek is worth it, Phaestus.”
“Believe me, my friend, it will be well worth the trip. But we must make it to Machran as quickly as we can. The last I heard, Corvus was banking on a swift winter campaign. The fighting is going on even as we speak.”
“Then we’re well out of it,” Adurnos, one of Sertorius’s henchmen muttered.
“If it hurts the little fucker who took our city, then I’m all for it,” Sertorius said. “But remember, Phaestus, I was paid only to get you out of Hal Goshen. This here trip is my own charity.”
“And your own self-interest,” Phaestus told him. “This way you turn up at Machran with something that Karnos wants. You arrive there empty-handed, and you’ll be starting at the bottom again.”
“The bottom’s where I feel comfortable,” Sertorius said with a laugh.
Struggling along the knife-ridge later in the day, with the sun setting at their left shoulders and the wind masking all conversation, Philemos drew his father close.
“I don’t trust them.”
“Nor do I. But so long as their interests and ours coincide, they will serve us faithfully. Sertorius is a rogue, but he has a keen sense of what’s good for him.”
“They’re animals, father; scum from the sewers. What’s to stop them turning on us?”
“Philemos,” Phaestus said, smiling, “I am their introduction to Karnos, to the fleshpots of Machran. And more than that, look at them. They’re lowland city criminals – if you and I walked away from them now they would perish up here. They need us as we need them. They are outside their own world.”
“So are we,” his son said. “Father, I would sooner we had gone to Machran and joined the League army – to fight in open battle. What we’re doing here -”
“What we do here is worth a thousand men on the battlefield,” Phaestus snapped. “Not everything comes down to standing in a spearline, boy. And you’ll get your chance at that before we’re done.” His face softened at the look on his son’s.