Lyrna turned back to Mastek. “I am not in his debt.”
◆ ◆ ◆
He sang his death song as they looped a rope about his already bound hands and lashed it to the saddle of Mastek’s pony. Turning to face the rising sun, Alturk’s doomed son sang a dirge in lilting Lonak, most of the words archaic and unknown to Lyrna but she noted the phrase “vengeance of the gods” repeated several times. He was jerked from his feet in mid-song as Mastek spurred his mount into motion, dragging him away at the gallop, the rest of the band closing in around as they rode hard for the south. Davoka commented she had once seen a man last a whole day being dragged behind a pony. Alturk watched his former clansmen disappear from view and said nothing.
Lyrna felt Sollis’s eyes on her as she went to her pony, checking his hooves for signs of injury and working the worst of the knots from his mane. “Do you have something to say, brother?” she asked.
Sollis’s expression was as unreadable as ever but there was a new tone in his voice, the suppressed anger she usually detected replaced by what might have been respect. “I was just thinking, Highness, that the Lonak may have it right,” he said. “We are riding with a queen after all.” He gave a small bow before going to see to his own mount.
The mountains closed in again as they journeyed north, the peaks broader and higher even than those found around the Skellan Pass, the summits shrouded in perpetual cloud. The tracks they followed became ever more narrow, winding around hill-side and mountain in increasingly treacherous spirals. The first night out from the scene of the Sentar’s defeat they camped on a precipice above a drop Ivern judged at near five hundred feet, a damp blanket of mist descending as night came.
Alturk sat apart from them, still and silent at the edge of the precipice, not troubling to eat or make a fire. Lyrna had begun to approach him but stopped at an emphatic shake of the head from Davoka. Instead she went to sit opposite Kiral. Davoka had positioned the girl beside a smaller fire, as far from their own as was practicable, both legs bound together since there was no soft ground to stake her to. She regarded Lyrna with an incurious glance, reclining against a rock, every inch a bored adolescent.
“Does it hurt?” Lyrna asked her, gesturing at her scar.
Kiral frowned. “I don’t speak your dog tongue, Merim Her bitch.”
Not all gambits work, Lyrna thought with a rueful grimace. “The scar I left you with,” she said. “Does it pain you?”
The girl shrugged. “Pain is a warrior’s lot.”
Lyrna glanced at Davoka, seeing the wariness in her eyes as she watched their conversation. “My friend thinks you are no longer her sister,” she said. “She thinks her sister has been claimed by you, that what lives behind your eyes is no longer the girl she cared for.”
“My sister is blind in her devotion to the false Mahlessa. She sees lies where she should see truth.” Lyrna could see no particular emotion in the girl’s face, finding her tone flat, like a child reciting one of the catechisms of the Faith.
“And what is this truth?” she asked.
“The false Mahlessa seeks to slay the spirit of the Lonakhim, to turn the sight of the gods from us, to leave us with no stories for our fires or our death songs. Peace with you, then peace even with the Seordah. What will that make us? Will we grub in the earth as you do? Make slaves of our women as you do? Labour in service to the dead, as you do?” Again the same flat tone, fanatical invective delivered without a hint of passion.
Lyrna nodded at the hulking form of Alturk, dim and forlorn in the mist. “Do you know why I saved him?”
“Merim Her are weak. Your heart is soft, you imagine a debt where there is none. He followed the false Mahlessa’s word, you owe him nothing.”
Lyrna shook her head, eyes searching the girl’s face. “No, I saved him because I saw that you wanted him dead. Why is that?”
Nothing, not even a flicker of concern or a sign of deceit when she replied, “He has ever been the Sentar’s persecutor. Why would I not wish him dead?”
There’s no evidence here, Lyrna decided. The girl was strange indeed, quite possibly insane, but that was hardly proof of Davoka’s conviction. She got up to return to her place by the main fire.
“I heard a strange thing about Merim Her women,” Kiral said as she rose.
“And what is that?”
For the first time there was some animation in the girl’s face, a malicious curl to her lips. “Custom forbids them a man until they are joined. And after that they are only allowed their one husband. Is that true?”
Lyrna gave a small nod.
“But you, Queen, are not joined.” Her gaze ranged over Lyrna, it was not the gaze of any adolescent girl, Lonak or no. “You’ve never known a man.”
Lyrna said nothing, watching the girl’s features as she laughed, soft mocking rasps. “I’ll make you a bargain, Queen,” she said. “I’ll answer any question you have with an honest tongue, and all I ask is a taste of that unsullied peach between your legs.”
Is this it? Lyrna wondered. Is this finally my evidence? “What are you?” she asked.
The girl’s laughter subsided after a moment and she lay back against the rock with the same bored expression as before. “I am Kiral of the Black River Clan and true Mahlessa to the Lonakhim.” She looked away, staring into the fire, still and indifferent, her face blank of all expression.
Lyrna returned to the larger fire, sitting down at Davoka’s side. The Lonak woman seemed reluctant to meet her gaze. “I can’t kill her, Lerhnah,” she said after a moment, a note of apology in her tone.
Lyrna patted her hand and settled down to sleep. “I know.”
◆ ◆ ◆
Two more days brought them within sight of the Mountain, the home of the Mahlessa. It rose from the floor of a small valley nestling between two of the tallest mountains, a circular spike of stone, curving up from a wide base to a needle-sharp point at least three hundred feet in the air. It seemed to shimmer in the sunlight, but as they drew nearer Lyrna saw it was honeycombed from base to top with balconies and windows, all hewn out of the rock. From the weathering of the surface she judged this a truly ancient structure, the architecture so unfamiliar as to appear alien, like something from a distant land never visited by modern eyes.
“The Lonakhim built this?” she asked Davoka.
She shook her head. “It was waiting for us at the end of the great travail. Proof that the gods had not turned their sight from the Lonakhim. For who else could craft such a gift?”
They entered via a tunnel, the walls ascending to meet overhead in an elegant arch of stone. There were no guards at the mouth of the tunnel and they proceeded unchallenged into the Mountain’s interior. After a hundred paces the tunnel opened out into a broad courtyard, ringed by balconied walkways bathed in sunlight shafting through the many circular windows. A number of women were waiting there, some armed and wearing similar garb to Davoka, others dressed more simply in robes of black or grey. Their age ranged from young to old and none seemed perturbed by their appearance, although the sight of Kiral provoked some hard stares from the women bearing arms.
“I see you had an interesting journey,” a short, blunt-faced warrior said, coming forward to take the reins of Davoka’s pony. “I trust you have a story for the fire.”
“More than one.” Davoka dismounted, favouring the blunt-faced woman with a warm grin. “We need rooms, Nestal.”
“Ready and waiting.” Nestal’s gaze roamed their company, settling on Lyrna. “Queen,” she said, with an incline of her head. “The Mahlessa asked that you be brought to her as soon as you arrived.” She turned to Kiral, her expression hardening. “Together with this one.”
Lyrna had expected the Mahlessa to make her home on one of the Mountain’s upper floors but Davoka led her to a stairwell in the centre of the chamber, the spiral course descending into shadow.
“No!” she barked when Smolen and the two brothers attempted to follow. “Stay here. Men do not look upon her.”
Smolen seemed about to protest but Lyrna held up a hand. “I doubt your sword would aid me here, Lord Marshal. Wait for me.”
He bowed and stepped back, standing stiffly at attention, every inch the loyal guards officer, albeit one without armour or any vestige of his former finery save his sword and the boots he had contrived to retain, and even they had lost their previous mirrorlike sheen. For the first time in days it occurred to her that her own appearance was hardly more edifying. No more ermine robes or finely tailored riding gowns, just sturdy leather garb and hardy boots, scuffed and dusted from the trail. But for her hair she might well have been taken for Lonak.
“Please, sister!”
She looked round to see Kiral resisting Davoka’s tug on her leash. Her once-passive features now so riven with fear it almost seemed she wore a mask. “Please,” she begged in a terrorised rasp. “Please if you ever thought me your sister, kill me! Do not take me to her!”
She continued to beg and struggle as Davoka took hold of her and forced her to walk down the stairwell, her pleas becoming plaintive shrieks as they descended into the shadows. No fear of death, Lyrna thought. What awaits her below is worse.