Stranger of Tempest: Book One of The God Fragments (13 page)

As the camp took shape around them, Sitain realised she wouldn’t have long to fetch her belongings and find Kas’s tent. She scampered over to the caravan she’d passed the day in, found the one small canvas sack containing the sum total of her possessions – a blanket, two changes of clothes and a carved wooden flute given to her by her grandfather. She had been unable to grab anything more and suddenly she found herself squatting on the floor of the large caravan, eyes screwed up against the tide of despair rolling over her.

Memories of her family filled her mind; her mother’s wary face, which always seemed surprised at every kind word or gesture that came from Sitain’s father. Her father himself – a slight man and shorter than his tall Hanese wife, but able to labour every hour of daylight and return home to his family’s enthusiastic chatter with strength remaining. Felit, her brother, larger than his father by the time he was fourteen and with more than a little of Lynx about him. As quick to anger as any young man, Felit was always quiet and careful around their mother, while little Sutai with her round, guileless face and boundless joy made noise enough for all three of them.

Sitain knew then that she would never see them again – or at least not for a long time – and she would never be able to return properly. Her happy little family, shattered by some grasping informer and the unmatched power of the Knights-Charnel. She knew night mages were rare. Just how rare was anyone’s guess, and no one back home had known anything more than rumour about magic. Rare enough that the Charnelers wouldn’t let her go easily, though, she guessed that much. Her family would be watched or at least informed on, so there was no return there – no life of farming and family ahead of her, just danger for them all if she so much as visited.

How long she stayed in the gloom of the caravan Sitain couldn’t tell, but in a mercenary company there was little time for sentiment. Soon she found herself jostled by the men and women fetching their own belongings, barely noticing the young woman curled at their feet. At last she sensed someone watching her and looked up to discover a slight, middle-aged man with blue eyes and a stern expression staring at her.

‘Hop it,’ he said once he had her attention. Not unkindly, but Sitain sensed unkindness could be forthcoming. ‘You’re the mage girl, right?’

Sitain stood up and nodded, wiping the last traces of dampness from her cheeks. ‘That’s right, Sitain.’

‘Foren,’ he said with a formal little nod. ‘Company steward, of sorts anyway. Little advice for you, girly. This caravan’s Anatin’s bedroom and office come evening. Anything you want out of it, you move quickly ’cos once I turn it down it’s off limits.’

‘Turn it down?’

He pointed towards the rear of the caravan and edged past her. With shelves and cupboards lining the wooden walls for most of the length, there wasn’t much room to pass towards the back, where a high bed-sized shelf went across the rear. With practised movements, Foren jerked the shelf towards him. He slid it off its runners and manoeuvred it around so he could stand it on end and drag it out of the caravan.

At the door two mercenaries were waiting to take it and Sitain guessed it would double as a table to eat at. As though to confirm the idea, Foren retrieved a folded leg frame from the roof of the caravan and passed that out next. In the space underneath was bedding all ready for use, while beside it a cupboard opened out to reveal a desk with a bank of drawers behind. Opposite that Sitain noticed a tiny iron stove was built into an alcove of glazed tiles, red, yellow and blue.

‘Out now,’ Foren urged, giving her a prod in the shoulder, ‘You keep clear of Anatin’s stuff or you’ll not make it to the next town, understand?’

His tone of voice had hardened and Sitain realised the steward took his duties very seriously. She gathered up her bag and backed down the steps, quickly searching out Kas. The woman was in the process of erecting her tent and Sitain lingered for a few minutes, following instructions until it was done and she could abandon her bag there to find Lynx again.

She found him hovering at the side of one fire, a white-haired woman in a blue shawl warming a pan of fried leeks and potatoes over it. The tantalising aroma of fat was rising up in the air as dusk began to descend, and soon Sitain and Lynx had a stick of bread filled with the mixture to carry to their assigned flank of the camp.

Guarding the opposite side she saw the officer called Teshen along with a young recruit. Clearly Teshen’s status wasn’t enough to keep him off their commander’s shit-list. Sitain ate her half of the bread as fast as she could, watching Anatin stamp up the steps of his caravan until Lynx gave her a nudge and pointed out to the darkening landscape beyond.

My commander now?
she wondered as she finished up and handed the other half of the makeshift meal to Lynx.
If only for a few weeks? Do mercenaries let you leave when you want? Or am I just some camp follower and it’s only the soldiers they care about? Gods, they don’t expect me to fight, do they? Kill people?

Her thoughts were broken by Kas sauntering over, jacket unbuttoned to a scandalous level. As both Sitain and Lynx blinked at her, Kas grinned and offered a sheathed dagger the length of her forearm to Sitain.

‘For you, courtesy of your friends the Charnelers.’

‘Why?’

‘You’re on guard duty, girl. Best you have some sort of a weapon and we’re not giving you a loaded bloody mage-gun to wave around while we sleep!’

Sitain blushed, feeling stupid for even having asked, and buckled the knife-belt around her waist. Lynx finished his food and pulled his mage-gun out of the long leather sheath across his back. He thumbed the breech open, slipped a bolt inside and closed it up again, settling himself into some sort of long-practised pose, his arms almost folded and the gun resting on top.

‘Thanks,’ said Sitain as Kas made to return.

Kas waved it off. ‘If I were you, I’d ask for some of the plunder too. Bastards stole you, after all, least you can do is steal something back.’

An image of demanding money from the dead-eyed Teshen appeared in her mind and her guts went cold. ‘No, it’s fine,’ Sitain muttered.

‘As you like.’ Kas laughed. ‘Enjoy guard duty, you two. I’m for a sleep.’

Still chuckling, she headed back into the camp and was soon swallowed by the hubbub of the mercenaries as they finished eating and some sort of card game was announced. Lynx and Sitain kept outside the perimeter of tents, not straying far into the gloom but staying well clear of the fire lights and lanterns which had been hung from brackets on the wagons.

Sitain couldn’t help but look at the gun in Lynx’s hands as the man gazed off into the dark. It was an unassuming shape, without decoration, and the barrel was almost as thick as her little sister’s wrist. The wood of its stock was stained and scratched, the grey metal scored in several places. She tried to imagine the battles it had seen until he caught her looking and shifted the gun’s position.

‘So tell me about the magic, then,’ Lynx said abruptly.

She blinked at him. ‘Why?’

‘’Cos I’m curious. Don’t know anything about your lot. Night mages, I mean. Certainly never met one.’

She scowled. ‘It’s not like anyone’s taught me about it, I’ve only barely worked out what I’m doing at all.’

‘Okay, let’s try an easy one,’ he said, unconcerned by her snappishness. ‘What can you do? Put folk to sleep, like Himbel said?’

‘Pretty much. Mebbe calm thoughts to help you sleep, or put you down if I’ve got the burst ready to hit you.’

‘Burst?’

She shifted uncomfortably. ‘That’s what I call it, anyway. The magic comes from somewhere inside me, I need to drag it all together to use it in a burst like that. Like, ah, it’s like drawing a deep breath, sort of – your body just knows how to do it because it was made that way. But here I’m drawing from every part of my body. I get a tingle under the skin and in the bones that I never noticed before I started to draw on it.’

‘Sleep, eh?’ Lynx mused. ‘Calming thoughts. That could be useful to Himbel in more ways than he realises.’

‘Why?’

‘Company surgeon. If you can calm a man’s thoughts to the point of him blacking out, that’d be useful to a doctor trying to treat the wounded. Pain’ll kill some before you can do anything for ’em.’

Sitain shook her head. ‘I don’t have that much control over it. I wouldn’t dare.’

‘Maybe you need more practice first,’ he said with a shrug. ‘Though for some, anything’d be a mercy once they’re wounded. You practising ain’t going to cause any more pain. Always takes me a while to go to sleep if I’ve taken the first watch. Someone who could put me straight out and get me a half-hour more sleep might be a useful friend.’

She gaped at him. ‘Are you mad? You’d happily let me practise something like that on you?’

He paused. ‘Good point. We’ll try it on Deern first, just in case something goes wrong. What about cartridges?’

‘What about them?’ The lurch in subject matter threw her completely and Sitain had to remind herself not to snap at him. She knew this stranger was the best friend she had now, her patron inside the mercenary company and her best chance to remain free from the Charnelers, so she had to put up with him.

‘Can you make ’em? Night-bolts – bullets that mebbe put a man out rather than kill him? A gunsmith told me once that it was the magic that killed; they use porcelain balls ’cos they shatter into dust straight away and help carry the magic at speed. That means a night-bolt might knock ’em down without killing.’

‘Well, perhaps,’ she hazarded, ‘so long as you have someone to teach me and the materials to manufacture the cartridges. Oh, and of course a fragment of some god’s shattered mortal form to focus my magic and store it in the charge-glass!’

He nodded. ‘Good point, I forgot about the god-fragments part. Ah well, it was a nice idea, I guess.’

Lynx nodded with his head towards the tall silver birch that marked the southern tip of their small camp. In the dull glow of the Skyriver the tree’s bark shone like a ghost, where it wasn’t shaded. Following his lead Sitain walked with him in that direction, the slow amble of people with no real destination. The moon had not yet risen so the Skyriver was still the brightest thing in the sky. Graduating strata of silvery-grey cut across the southern half of the sky, gauzy and insubstantial for the main but studded with small discs that made it easy to follow the slow spin of the Skyriver around the world.

‘Which is yours?’ Lynx asked, pointing up. ‘Don’t they say that’s where the magic comes from? Mother Skyriver’s blessing?’

‘So they say,’ Sitain said, squinting. ‘But if that’s true, there’s more types of magic out there than anyone knows about.’

Currently visible on the Skyriver were about a dozen small discs, each much smaller than the nail on Sitain’s little finger when her arm was outstretched. Drifting like flotsam, the shade and course of each was unique and students of the heavens could easily identify them all. Sitain only knew the five largest, which were named after the shattered gods, and the relatively small one that trailed the path of Insar the Cold. Insar’s priests named it as their god’s consort, or child of Ulfer, rather than its true name of Atul, for the magic of night balanced both cold and calm order.

‘It’s not risen yet,’ she said after searching the sky. She pointed at a yellow-tinted dot halfway to the Skyriver’s zenith. ‘Look, there’s the Fire Lord. Mine follows Insar on the Skyriver, so she’ll never share the sky with Veraimin.’

‘I see it.’ He cocked his head at her. ‘You believe it?’

‘That magic comes from rocks in the sky?’ She laughed. ‘As good an answer as any, I guess. Magic’s got to come from somewhere, right? I’ve seen how the Militant Orders treat mages. Guess it wouldn’t surprise me if there’s more forms than the world’s heard of, hidden away in some secret prison.’

She saw Lynx scowl and nod as he turned away, but before the man could say anything more he tensed and brought his gun up ready.

‘What is it?’

He didn’t answer so Sitain tried to follow the direction in which he was staring. The dark had stolen in quickly while they’d been talking and now they were surrounded by the tangled shadows of undergrowth, a spiderweb of contrast that seemed to pulse as her mind formed shapes around it. There was no movement that she could detect, nor sound, but something had prickled the instincts of the bulky mercenary and she had no intention of breaking the silence again. One gift her magic did bestow was night vision beyond excellent, but still she could see nothing. The only sound she could make out was the distant cough of an elk.

They stood still a long while, ignoring the dull chatter from the campfires behind, and Sitain felt her fingers begin to tingle. As she flexed her fingers the sensation only grew. A faint itch of warmth began to pervade them, something familiar, but it took a while to remember what it was. When she did, Sitain gave a tiny gasp that made Lynx tighten his grip on his mage-gun.

‘Where?’ he breathed.

‘No,’ she replied, ‘it’s not a danger.’

He didn’t lower the weapon, but did turn to squint at her. ‘No?’

Sitain shook her head. ‘I’ve felt this before.’

‘Felt what?’

‘This, ah …’ For a moment she was at a loss for how to describe it and just gestured for him to lower his gun. Once Lynx complied she beckoned him forward.

Ignoring his look of annoyance, Sitain picked her way forward over the clear ground beyond their camp. When the bushes started to thicken she paused and motioned for Lynx to crouch down beside her.

‘What is it?’ He glanced back, adding, ‘We’re too far from the camp.’

‘Don’t worry, there’s no danger out here.’

‘Sure? What
is
out here?’ Lynx hissed.

‘Something that would vanish if any Charnelers were sneaking up on us.’ She gave him a smile, for the first time in a while feeling a burst of genuine happiness inside her. ‘An elemental.’

Lynx swore and brought his gun up again, but she held her ground and put her hand on the top of the barrel. While Lynx was far stronger than she was, the act itself was enough to check him.