Winter Be My Shield (34 page)

Oh, they're probably looking for Vasant's books
, he said.

Vasant's … but they were all destroyed!

Little Crow, do you believe everything the ruling clans tell you? Vasant hid his treasures well and they weren't all found, not by a long shot. The Ricalani mages have always known things the Akharian school didn't. Back before Leandra led her people in the Great Purge, the Akharians would sometimes raid our coast for slaves and our mages had weapons to use against them. Now, it's the Akharian coast being raided by Mesentreian ships, and they could use those weapons themselves. They're probably hoping Vasant left some records that will let them re-create them.

The news left her speechless. Vasant's books  … It could mean an unimaginable wealth of knowledge just waiting to be found. Or it could be just so much rotting paper, as much use as the decaying mulch revealed by melting snow. Not that it mattered either way — if the Akharians found the books they would be taken out of Ricalan before Sierra even heard of it. She had her doubts, too, regarding just how much one could glean from books alone. She'd been studying Kell's book daily but had not yet learned anything of use.
Will they find them, do you think?

Who knows? People have been searching for Vasant's treasure for nearly a hundred years without finding a thing. I think he hid it too well. But maybe the Akharian mages know something we don't. Sirri, there's something else we need to talk about. I know you're hunting me.

Sierra made no reply.

If you try to corner me I promise you won't like the results. It was unwise of you to leave Balorica behind. He would at least have given you a source of power. What have you got now to feed you?

He wouldn't have survived the ride.

How well do you think he'll survive as a slave? If you insist on following this path, you'd better start thinking about which one of your companions you intend to sacrifice to raise the power to face me.

Delphine wrapped her arms around herself and bounced on her heels, hoping the movement would warm her a little. She had hand-warmer enchantments tucked into her sash, but she didn't want to use them just yet. She knew from experience she would need them later on. ‘How much longer are they going to keep us waiting?' she muttered to Harwin, who stood beside her, hunched and miserable in his barbarian fur.

‘Oh, we've hardly been here any time at all,' he drawled. ‘If they want to break their previous record we'll have to be standing around for at least another hour.'

She sighed and the steam in her breath condensed into frost on her hair, where it glittered like diamonds in the light of her lamp.

The academics were only allowed into the village once all resistance had been quashed, but Delphine had seen no one move except soldiers in the entire time she and her colleagues had been kept waiting here. Early on in this campaign she had come to the conclusion that the soldiers liked to keep them waiting. Back in Akhara these soft civilian academics were their social superiors — this was one of the few occasions when the mages had to wait upon the pleasure of the rank and file, instead of the other way around.

Delphine's feet were numb inside her monstrous barbarian boots by the time a soldier wandered over to lead the Collegium mages up to the temple. They tramped through the village, weaving around the bodies that still lay where they had fallen during the fighting. Delphine carefully averted her gaze from the staring, sightless eyes and the brilliant stains of frozen blood. The soldiers were more interested in the business of taking slaves than in wholesale slaughter, but any who refused to drop arms and surrender when surrounded were simply cut down where they stood. The sight of the men didn't trouble her so much. They were tall, these
barbarians, taller than most Akharian men, heavily built, and decidedly strange with the alien features of their race. The women disturbed her more but the ones who wrung her heart were the children — beardless boys and young girls who had snatched up weapons they didn't know how to use. If Delphine had borne a child when she was first married, the babe would be of an age with them now …

And then there was the blood. Instead of seeping to a brownish stain on the soil it froze bright and vivid on the surface of the snow where neither time nor sun would fade it. She hated to think of the trail of blood her people had left across this land.
Good Goddess forgive me. I never imagined just what this would be like …

The new captives had been driven back into the houses where they were being divided up by age and sex. Other slaves, ones who had already learned their place, would be brought here to ransack the houses for gear and supplies. Slave-keeping was a more complicated business here in the north than it was back in the empire. There, slaves could be made to sleep on the ground with the privilege of a blanket for warmth if they were lucky, but here the new slaves couldn't be marched to the slave camp until tents and stoves had been found for them. In the meantime they would be kept in the houses that had until recently been their homes.

The temple lay at the far end of the village at the top of a small rise, surrounded by a stout stone wall. Once inside the temple grounds Delphine and her colleagues had to wait again while a soldier went to find Mage-Commander Presarius, the leader of the Battle-Mages and nominal commander of the Collegium contingent. In the meantime Delphine turned her attention to the wall. Though covered with a rime of ice it was so sheer and smooth it would have been near-impossible to climb. ‘Those walls,' she said, catching Harwin's eye and nodding to them. ‘What do you think? Mage-built?'

‘Could be,' Harwin said. ‘If they are, I'd like to know why they don't crumble under ice like sea walls do under salt spray. I wonder if the general will give us a chance to examine them before we move on?'

Presarius emerged from the great hall with her cousin Torren at his side, and Delphine nudged Harwin into silence as they stalked across the snow towards the dozen or so Collegium mages. ‘Ah, so our flock of lost sheep has turned up at last,' Presarius said. ‘The hall and the shrine are both secure, professor. You can take your people through, but first
I'll need some volunteers to look over the slaves.' Presarius's gaze swept over the academics before settling on Delphine. ‘Madame Delphine, I understand you've served as a talent scout for the Collegium before. You should be well suited to the task.'

Delphine's stomach lurched and she gritted her teeth to keep from spitting out a refusal.

Every mage was trained at the empire's expense and had to serve the empire's needs for a certain length of time each year to repay the debt. For a time Delphine had served by searching for fledgling mages among the empire's children, both free-born and slaves, but that was a very different thing from what Presarius was asking now. A slave-child with the gift was granted his freedom, placed with a foster-family and destined for a life of honour and prestige. A fully grown slave with talent, however, whether enslaved as an adult or missed by the screening process, was a different thing entirely. Anything more than the weakest of mage-talents simply could not be tolerated in an adult slave. Any person she identified here with a spark of talent powerful enough to become dangerous would have his or her throat cut and be left for the crows.

By all the demons in hell, she didn't want to be responsible for any more deaths. But she'd fought tooth and nail for the right to be included in this expedition, while Presarius was one of those who expected her to wait at home and get on with her spinning. He expected her to protest and beg that this task be given to someone else — well, she wouldn't give him the satisfaction. ‘Very well, commander,' she said.

‘Now wait a moment, commander,' Torren said, glaring at her. ‘I don't want my cousin traipsing around alone with a mob of soldiers and slaves. What would people say?'

Delphine rolled her eyes. Torren could always be relied upon to take any bait that happened to be waved in his direction.

‘You are quite right, Mage-Captain Castalior,' Harwin said, stepping forward. ‘I'll go with her.'

‘Capital!' Presarius said. ‘Are you satisfied, Castalior? Surely no one would imagine the Matron Castalior getting up to anything untoward with Master Harwin for a chaperon? Well, until it's time to look over the slave-boys, anyway, and then she'll have to chaperone him!' Presarius laughed and slapped his thigh at his own joke while Delphine tried to hide her disgust for Torren's sake. How a man like Dassenar Presarius
had risen to the rank of mage-commander was beyond her. ‘Well,' Presarius said, still chortling, ‘the rest of you no doubt have your own tasks awaiting — get on with it, then, off you go.' He shoved his hands into his pockets and strolled away, whistling.

‘Matron, my arse,' Delphine growled at his back. Then she saw the red flush creeping over Harwin's face. ‘Oh Harwin, don't let him get to you.' It was the hypocrisy of it all that angered her the most. No one cared what a man did at home with his slave-boys, but because Harwin chose free men for his partners, rather than slaves, he was the one they called a pervert.

Harwin kicked at a clump of snow and shook his head with a chuckle. ‘Never mind, Delphi. But by all the Gods — your language!'

‘Oh, screw him —'

‘Him? Not with a ten-foot pole. I do have standards, you know.'

Delphine laughed and linked her arm through his. ‘By the hells, what a miserable job. Come on, then, best get it out of the way.'

Since Presarius had returned to the Priests' Hall followed by the other academics, the pair of them began with the shrine, a low, heavy-beamed building with a steep, shingled roof. The doorway was filled with rubble and splintered wood from where the battle-mages had blasted it down and one of the junior mages had hung lanterns inside so the soldiers could find their way around without tripping. The light was weak and Delphine was glad she had brought her own lamp.

The captives in the shrine were divided into two groups — women and children on one side, men on the other. The women, considered less of a threat, had been allowed to huddle against the wall, clutching their children close. A few of them were wounded, but other than being allowed to tear strips from their clothes for bandages, had been permitted no other means to tend their injuries.

‘Let's start with the men,' Delphine said. That would be easier. The men were dangerous — even with the despair of defeat settling over them they would still be hoping for an opportunity to begin the fight again. They would kill her in a moment if they could and she could convince herself to feel less guilt if she had to single any of them out.

The men had been made to kneel in ranks on the far side of the hall. They were bent double with faces to the floor, hands bound behind their backs and their feet tethered.

It was easier if she couldn't see their faces. Delphine dropped her gaze to the floor and let herself slip into a partial trance. This was one talent she had inherited from her famous father, the skill that made her valuable as a talent scout and let her spend her months in service on a veritable jaunt, travelling the empire in comfort to reach out like some messenger from the Gods, lifting a select few from a life of poverty and servitude and giving them the gift of a future.

Of course, what she was doing now was exactly the opposite.

When a person had mage-talent, energy radiated from them like heat from a flame. Part of a mage's training involved suppressing this wanton seepage of energy but even the best of them could never contain it entirely and the untrained couldn't contain it at all.

She wasn't expecting to find much here. Without use and training a mage-talent would atrophy just like an unused limb and the enchantments these barbarians made their talented children wear would only make that happen faster. It was rare that she found anyone powerful enough to be considered dangerous, but it did happen. Delphine let down her own containing shields — because the same mechanism that held her energy in prevented her from sensing energy from outside — and opened her senses to the men lined up in front of her.

A flash of light blazed across her field of view. One of the men was glowing like a blacksmith's forge, radiating such a fierce and jagged aura of power it startled her out of her trance like a novice.

Beside her, Harwin swore. ‘By all the boils on the arse of the king of Hell. Can you feel that?'

‘I certainly can.' Suddenly Delphine's heart was beating hard. She wasn't feeling pity for these folk any more — that surge of power had snapped her out of it like the sight of a dog frothing at the mouth. She waved one of the guards over and pointed at the source of it. ‘That one,' she said.

One of the soldiers strode towards the prisoner, drawing his knife from his belt.

‘Not yet!' Delphine called after him. ‘I want a look at him first. Bring him over here.'

Harwin's face had turned faintly green. ‘Delphi, must you?'

‘Bear with me, Harwin. There's something odd about that power. I've seen something like it before …'

‘You have? Dear Gods, where?'

‘Do you remember, oh, about fifteen years ago, one of the students at the Collegium stumbled onto the Blood Path?'

Harwin blanched and reeled back. ‘Heavens preserve us, he's a Blood-Mage?'

‘No, I don't think so. After the student was killed, the Watch thought he had another victim hidden somewhere in the city, but they didn't know where. My father spent the whole day riding around in a sedan chair, trying to find him.' It was the bravest thing he'd ever done. Delphine had gone with him, to hold his hand. Her father had been a Sympath, one of that rare breed of mages who could harvest power from others instead of merely generating it within their own flesh.

Sympaths were incredibly powerful, so long as they were treated with the delicacy their condition required. There were rarely more than half a dozen of them alive in the empire at any one time, although how many more were born only to have their powers snuffed out by the suffering of people around them no one could say. Most of their lives were spent living a pampered existence in the residence known as The Palace, where they were sheltered from the hardships of the common folk out in the city. The thought of some poor soul tortured and dying alone and by inches had driven Delphine's father, Ballenar, to use his remarkable senses to try and track him down.

‘We did find him, though the poor lad died a few days later. I was there when they carried him out on a litter … the energy radiating off him was something extraordinary. He must have had a little power to start with and what that wretch did to him blasted all his channels wide open …'

While she spoke, a pair of soldiers had grabbed the prisoner by the shoulders, dragged him free of the others and dumped him sprawling on the flagstones at Delphine's feet.

The moment they dropped him on the ground, a wave of energy washed through her, tingling unpleasantly right at the edge of her range. Delphine shuddered profoundly and silently thanked the Gods she hadn't inherited all of Ballenar's powers. She could feel the energy but she couldn't touch it directly — and that was a welcome thing. If she were a Sympath, the sympathetic echo of that wave of pain would have brought her sobbing to her knees.

The prisoner moaned and opened his eyes with a brief flicker of awareness. There was a lump on his forehead and another on the back of his head where the skin had been split open. Drying blood was matting into his hair.

‘Take off his jacket and his shirt,' she told the guards. They didn't bother to free his arms — they just yanked the garments open and pulled them down from his shoulders to bare the skin of his back.

Harwin gasped and covered his mouth with his hand. Delphine just bit her lip as her stomach lurched. The prisoner's back was a mass of burn scars, still tender and fresh, marching from his shoulders all the way down to disappear past his bound hands.