The slam of the cosh made the soldier’s eyes roll back and his knees fold.
For a moment, the doorman flickered a grim smile.
The other three had turned and come for the Bard, spreading into a loose line.
Sera took two running steps and launched his spear, javelinlike, at the sky.
It arced, spiralling lazily, terhnwood shaft glittering, then began to fall, gathering speed. It hit one of them clean in the back of the neck and flopped him forwards like a child’s doll. The other two glanced, hesitated.
Sera reached for another spear.
But the poignard was metal in Roderick’s hand and there was still blood at its hilt.
He’d killed one person already. He was stinking and tired and filthy and he itched.
He’d had about enough.
“What the rhez do you think you’re doing?”
His voice was a challenge in the still evening air. Birds lifted, cawing alarm. Barefoot and uncaring, he strode across the broken roadways to where the two members of the tan now looked at each other and backed up, wary. Behind them, Sera had picked up a second spear but he was waiting, watching.
With the sunlit might of the Lord city rising behind him, and The Wanderer’s lure in front, the Bard had a tangible authority – and he was at the outermost limits of his tolerance.
His voice resounded. “The man behind you can rip you into little pieces in less time than I can tell it. So I suggest that you pick up your weapons, and your comrades, and you get your backsides the rhez back into the city. And when you go, you tell the Merchant Master that Rhan may have fallen, but that I am still here. You tell Phylos that I know who he is, and I know what he’s done, and I know exactly what he’s sold his soul for.
“And you tell him there will be a reckoning!”
The two soldiers were retreating as the Bard strode forwards.
Behind them, there was a sudden scuffle in the tavern doorway and Karine rounded on something that the Bard couldn’t see. She had fury and courage, was swearing with vicious, high-pitched anger. As Sera turned for the tavern door, she sprang at something and was gone from sight.
The Bard raised his voice. “Go! Or help me Gods I’ll send that promise back with your heads!”
For a moment, he thought they’d say something, defy him, but they were backing away so fast they were almost stumbling and, when he twitched his hand and let the poignard catch the sunlight, they gathered their legs and their spears and they fled.
Roderick reached the doorway to see a body slumped across a broken table and Sera, with a doorman’s long practice, closing his fist in the collar of another and spanging his lolling head repeatedly off the wall.
Karine was stood with her hands on her hips, indignant and uninjured, chastising him about the mess. Silfe’s brown eyes peered wide from behind the bar.
Roderick the Bard was home.
* * *
“They will come for us,” Sera said. “We do not have long.”
There had been hugs and tears and questions and explanations – and there had been a cold and glorious moment with his head under the water pump in the back yard. Eight days had passed since the ill-fated Council meeting, eight days since Phylos had taken the Council.
Now, standing at the window with his hair still wet, looking at the sunset as it lit the plains to a huge, burning light, Roderick’s righteous fury was evaporating into a more rational fear.
They were outcasts, criminals.
Murderers.
Behind him, Sera was turfing their unwelcome guests out of the doorway and Karine was picking up a scatter of plates and leather mugs from the long tables. Silfe sat quiet, an odd, avian creature perched on her arm. It was a lean thing, hook beaked and featherless, its wingspan massive. Around one dew-clawed ankle, it had a terhnwood band that marked it as the property of the Lord Nivrotar.
Silfe stroked the bretir’s ugly head and it burbled at her. They were smart things and affectionate, like both nartuk and chearl, alchemically bred by long ago Tusienic scholars.
Alchemy. Old skills, like old lore, like old might and Elementalism – all of it, now awakening.
He understood now. In the rousing of the sleeping Monument, so the Powerflux itself stirred to life – and so other things stirred with it.
But the nartuk, the half-man, half-horse monsters, these had come before the Monument had risen. Somehow, somewhere, there was an alchemical scholar that was using ancient skills...
...was that scholar Vahl Zaxaar himself? Or was it something else?
The floor juddered again, sending prickles of unease down Roderick’s spine.
Sera said, “There are lights moving towards us. Their formation suggests the Council has called a considerable force. I suspect they will not be lenient.”
“You should leave,” Roderick said, turning from the window. “This is on my head alone –”
“Oi.” Karine’s reprimand was stern. “This is my home and I’m not calling last orders ’til they drag me out of here by my hair –”
This time, the floor shook harder, rattling the pottery in the wine racks. The rumble was longer, they felt it through their boots and in their hearts.
There was no mistaking what it meant.
The Bard lifted his head, the faintest whisper of humour flickered through his blood, chasing the darkness of his mood out into the last of the sun. “Silfe,” he said softly. “Send the bretir back to Amos with a message for Nivrotar. Tell her to keep Ress of the Banned safe and as well as she is able – I must see him.”
The floor was shivering now, the movement making the weapons on the walls rattle against beams and brickwork.
Roderick said, “Where’s Kale?”
Karine shrugged, almost apologetically. “We locked him in the privy. We sort of had to. I guess I’d better see if he’s calmed down yet.”
“I suspect,” the Bard said, “that he’s going to thank us. In the long run.” Both his grin and his agitation were growing now. He was on his feet, his fingertips on the warm wood of the table, his faith and hope rising and his breathing tight. “Do we not trust in the wisdom of The Wanderer to defend itself? It seems Phylos cannot have us – not yet.”
As if in agreement, the building shook harder, the floor lurching and making them grab for upright beams and table edges.
Silfe stumbled, but she reached the doorway and loosed the huge wings of the bretir past Sera and out into the last of the light. For a moment, it was a shadow, rising into the air, and then it turned south and faded from sight.
Bretir were enormously swift. For a long moment, Roderick watched where it had gone.
The world’s fear comes!
Sera said, “The force will not reach us in time. We are free. But we should not return here without an army.”
The Bard chuckled. “I’m not sure I can muster such a thing – but think of this. If Ecko was right, and all of this is just a pattern, endlessly repeating itself, then this building is what changes that pattern, what adds the thrill of the random to an otherwise predictable future. If there is a pattern, then we live on its outside. We are The Wanderer, and Rhan was right – they cannot touch us.”
Karine said, “What in the world are you talking about? You damned crazed prophet.”
“They are coming to try.” Sera’s hands were clenched in anticipation of a second fight. “If we are going to move –”
The tavern twisted, spun, and winked out of existence.
30: MEGALOMANIAC
FHAVEON, THE MONUMENT
Somehow, the location of The Wanderer wasn’t even a surprise.