The Second Empire

PART ONE
RETURN OF THE MARINER
ONE

They had stumbled a mile, perhaps two, from the ashladen air on the slopes of Undabane. Then they collapsed in on each other like a child’s house of playing cards, what remained of their spirit spent. Their chests seemed somehow too narrow to take in the thick humidity of the air around them. They lay sprawled in the twilit ooze of the jungle floor while half-glimpsed animals and birds hooted and shrieked in the trees above, the very land itself mocking their failure. Heaving for a breath, the sweat running down their faces and the insects a cloud before their eyes.

It was Hawkwood who recovered first. He was not injured, unlike Murad, and his wits had not been addled, unlike Bardolin’s. He sat himself up in the stinking humus and the creeping parasitic life which infested it, and hid his face in his hands. For a moment he wished only to be dead and have done with it. Seventeen of them had left Fort Abeleius some twenty-four days before. Now he and his two companions were all that remained. This green world was too much for mortal men to bear, unless they were also some form of murderous travesty such as those which resided in the mountain. He shook his head at the memory of the slaughter there. Men skinned like rabbits, torn asunder, eviscerated, their innards churned through with the gold they had stolen. Masudi’s head lying dark and glistening in the roadway, the moonlight shining in his dead eyes.

Hawkwood hauled himself to his feet. Bardolin had his head sunk between his knees and Murad lay on his back as still as a corpse, his awful wound laying bare the very bone of his skull.

“Come. We have to get farther away. They’ll catch us else.”

“They don’t want to catch us. Murad was right.” It was Bardolin. He did not raise his head, but his voice was clear, though thick with grief.

“We don’t know that,” Hawkwood snapped.

“I know that.”

Murad opened his eyes. “What did I tell you, Captain? Birds of like feather.” He chuckled hideously. “What dupes we poor soldiers and mariners have been, ferrying a crowd of witches and warlocks to their masters. Precious Bardolin will not be touched-not him. They’re sending him back to his brethren with you as the ferryman. If anyone escaped, it was I. But then, to where have I escaped?”

He sat up, the movement starting a dark ooze of blood along his wound. The flies were already black about it. “Ah yes, deliverance. The blest jungle. And we are only a few score leagues from the coast. Give it up, Hawkwood.” He sank back with a groan and closed his eyes.

Hawkwood remained standing. “Maybe you’re right. Me, I have a ship still-or had-and I’m going to get off this God-cursed country and out to sea again. New Hebrion no less! If you’ve any shred of duty left under that mire of self-pity you’re wallowing in, Murad, then you’ll realise we have to get back home, if only to warn them. You’re a soldier and a nobleman. You still understand the concept of duty, do you not?”

The bloodshot eyes snapped open again. “Don’t presume to lecture me, Captain. What are you but the sweeping of some Gabrionese gutter?”

Hawkwood smiled. “I’m a lord of the gutter now, Murad, or had you forgotten? You ennobled me yourself, the same time you made yourself governor of all this-” He swept out his arms to take in the ancient trees, the raucous jungle about them. Bitter laughter curdled in his throat. “Now get off your noble arse. We have to find some water. Bardolin, help me, and stop mooning around like the sky has just fallen in.”

Amazingly enough, they obeyed him.

They camped that night some five miles from the mountain, by the banks of a stream. After Hawkwood had browbeaten Bardolin into gathering firewood and bedding, he sat by Murad and examined the nobleman’s wounds. They were all gashed and scratched to some degree, but Murad’s spectacular head injury was one of the ugliest Hawkwood had ever seen. The scalp had been ripped free of the skull and hung flapping by his left ear.

“I’ve a good sailmaker’s needle in my pouch, and some thread,” he told Murad. “It may not turn out too pretty, but I reckon I can get you battened down again. It’ll smart some, of course.”

“No doubt,” the nobleman drawled in something approaching his old manner. “Get on with it while there’s still light.”

“There are maggots in the flesh. I’ll clear them out first.”

“No! Let them be. I’ve seen men worse cut up than this whose flesh went rotten for the lack of a few good maggots. Sew them in there, Hawkwood. They’ll eat the dead meat.”

“God almighty, Murad!”

“Do it. Since you are determined that we are to survive, we may as well go through the motions. Where is that cursed wizard? Maybe he could make himself useful and magick up a bandage.”

Bardolin appeared out of the gloom, a bundle of firewood in his arms. “He killed my familiar,” he said. “The Dweomer in me is crippled. He killed my familiar, Hawkwood.”

“Who did?”

“Aruan. Their leader.” He dropped his burden as though it burnt. His eyes were as dead as dry slate. “I will have a look, though, if you like. I may be able to do something.”

“Stay away from me!” Murad shouted, shrinking from the mage. “You murderous dastard. If I were fit for it I’d break your skull. You were in league with them from the first.”

“Just see if you can get a fire going, Bardolin,” Hawkwood said wearily. “I’ll patch him up myself. Later, we must talk.”

The pop of the needle going through Murad’s skin and cartilage was loud enough to make Hawkwood wince, but the nobleman never uttered a sound under the brutal surgery, only quivered sometimes like a horse trying to rid itself of a bothersome fly. By the time the mariner was done the daylight was about to disappear, and Bardolin’s fire was a mote of yellow brightness on the black jungle floor. Hawkwood surveyed his handiwork critically.

“You’re no prettier than you were, that’s certain,” he said at last.

Murad flashed his death’s-head grin. The thread crawled along his temple like a line of marching ants, and under the skin the maggots could be seen squirming.

They drank water from the stream and lay on the brush that Bardolin had gathered to serve as beds while around them the darkness became absolute. The insects fed off them without respite, but they were too weary to care and their stomachs were closed. It was Hawkwood who pinched himself awake.

“Did they really let us go, you think? Or are they waiting for nightfall to spring on us?”

“They could have sprung on us fifty times before now,” Murad said quietly. “We have not exactly been swift, or careful in our flight. No, for what it’s worth, we’re away. Maybe they’re going to let the jungle finish the job. Maybe they could not bring themselves to kill a fellow sorcerer. Or there may be another reason we’re alive. Ask the wizard! He’s the one has been closeted with their leader.”

They both looked at Bardolin. “Well?” Hawkwood said at last. “We’ve a right to know, I think. Tell us, Bardolin. Tell us exactly what happened to you.”

The mage kept his eyes fixed on the fire. There was a long silence while his two companions stared steadily at him.

“I am not entirely sure myself,” he said at last. “The imp was brought to the top of the pyramid in the middle of the city by Gosa. He was a shape-shifter-”

“You surprise me,” Murad snorted.

“I met their leader, a man named Aruan. He said he had been high in the Thaumaturgists’ Guild of Garmidalan in Astarac a long time ago. In the time of the Pontiff Willardius.”

Murad frowned. “Willardius? Why, he’s been dead these four hundred years and more.”

“I know. This Aruan claims to be virtually immortal. It is something to do with the Dweomer of this land. There was a great and sophisticated civilisation here in the west at one time, but it was destroyed in a huge natural cataclysm. The mages here had powers hardly dreamt of back on the Old World. But there was another difference…”

“Well?” Murad demanded.

“I believe they were all shifters as well as mages. An entire society of them.”

“God’s blood,” Hawkwood breathed. “I thought that was not possible.”

“So did I. It is unheard of, and yet we have seen it ourselves.”

Murad was thoughtful. “You are quite sure, Bardolin?”

“I wish I were not, believe me. But there is another thing. According to this Aruan, there are hundreds of his agents already in Normannia, doing his bidding.”

“The gold,” Hawkwood rasped. “Normannic crowns. There was enough of it back there to bribe a king, to hire an army.”

“So he has ambitions, this shifter-wizard of yours,” Murad sneered. “And how exactly do you fit into them, Bardolin?”

“I don’t know, Murad. The Blest Saint help me, I don’t know.”

We will meet again, you and I, and when we do you will know me as your lord, and as your friend. The parting words of Aruan burnt themselves across Bardolin’s brain. He would never reveal them to anyone. He was his own man, and always would be despite the foulness he now felt at work within him.

“One thing I do know,” he went on. “They are not content to remain here, these shifter-mages. They are going to return to Normannia. Everything I was told confirms it. I believe Aruan intends to make himself a power in the world. In fact he has already begun.”

“If he can make a werewolf of an Inceptine then his words are not idle,” Hawkwood muttered, remembering their outwards voyage and Ortelius, who had spread such terror throughout the ship.

“A race of were-mages,” Murad said. “A man who claims to be centuries old. A network of shifters spread across Normannia spending his gold, running his errands. I would say you were crazed, had I not seen the things I have on this continent. The place is a veritable hell on earth. Hawkwood is right. We must get back to the ship, return to Hebrion, and inform the King. The Old World must be warned. We will root out these monsters from our midst, and then return here with a fleet and an army and wipe them from the face of the earth. They are not so formidable-a taste of iron and they fall dead. We will see what five thousand Hebrian arquebusiers can do here, by God.”

For once, Hawkwood found himself wholly in agreement with the gaunt nobleman. Bardolin seemed troubled, however.

“What’s wrong now?” he asked the wizard. “You don’t approve of this Aruan’s ambitions, do you?”

“Of course not. But it was a purge of the Dweomer-folk which drove him and his kind here in the first place. I know what Murad’s proposal will lead to, Hawkwood. A vast, continent-wide purge of my people such as has never been seen before. They will be slaughtered in their thousands, the innocent along with the guilty. We will drive all of Normannia’s mages into Aruan’s arms. That is exactly what he wants. And his agents will not be so easy to uncover at any rate. They could be anyone-even the nobility. We will persecute the innocent while the guilty bide their time.”

“The plain soldiers of the world will take their chances,” Murad retorted. “There is no place on this earth for your kind any more, Bardolin. They are an abomination. Their end has been coming for a long time. This is only hastening the inevitable.”

“You are right there at least,” the wizard murmured.

“Whose side are you on?” Hawkwood asked the mage. Bardolin looked angry.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean that Murad is right. There is a time coming, Bardolin, when it will be your Dweomer-folk ranged against the ordinary people of the world, and you will have to either abet their destruction or stand with them against us. That is what I mean.”

“It will not-it must not-come to that!” the mage protested.

Hawkwood was about to go on when Murad halted him with a curt gesture.

“Enough. Look around you. The odds are that we will never have to worry about such things, and we’ll leave our bones to fester here in the jungle. Wizard, I’ll offer you a truce. We three must help each other if any of us is ever to get back to the coast. The debates of high policy can wait until we are aboard ship. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” Bardolin said, his mouth a bitter line in his face.

“Excellent.” The irony in Murad’s voice was palpable. “Now, Captain, you are our resident navigator. Can you point us in the right direction tomorrow?”

“Perhaps. If I can get a look at the sun before the clouds start building up. There is a better way, though. We must make an inventory. Empty your pouches. I must see what we have to work with.”

They tore a broad leaf from a nearby bush and upon it they placed the contents of their pockets and pouches, squinting in the firelight. Bardolin and Hawkwood both had waterproofed tinderboxes with flint and steel and little coils of dry wool inside. The wizard also had a bronze pocketknife and a pewter spoon. Murad had a broken iron knife blade some five inches long, a tiny collapsible tin cup and a cork water-bottle still hanging from his belt by its straps. Hawkwood had his needle, a ball of tough yarn, a lead arquebus bullet and a fishhook of carved bone. All of them had broken pieces of ship’s biscuit lining their pockets and Murad a small lump of dried pork which was hard as wood and inedible.

“A meagre enough store, by God,” the nobleman said. “Well, Hawkwood, what wonders can you work with it?”

“I can make a compass, I think, and we can do some fishing and hunting if we have to also. I was shipwrecked when I was a boy in the Malacars, and we had little more than this upon us when we were washed up. We can use the yarn as fishing line, weight it with the bullet and bait it with the pork. The blade we can tie to a stave for a spear. There’s fruit all around us too. We won’t starve, but it’s a time-consuming business forageing for food, even in the jungle. We’d best be prepared to tighten our belts if we’re to get back to the coast before the spring.”

“The spring!” Murad exclaimed. “Great God, we may have to eat our boots, but we’ll be back at the fort before that!”

“We were almost a month coming here, Murad, and we travelled along a road for much of the way. The journey back will be harder. Maybe they did allow us to escape, but I still don’t want to frequent their highways.” He remembered the heat and stink of the great werewolf lying beside him in the brush, back inside the mountain-

Would I harm you, Captain, the navigator, the steerer of ships? I think not. I think not.

– And shuddered at the memory.

They stood watches that first night, taking it in turns to feed the fire and stare out at the black wall of the rainforest. When they were not on guard they slept fitfully. Bardolin lay awake most of the night, exhausted but afraid to sleep, afraid to find out what might be lurking in his dreams.

Aruan had made a lycanthrope of him.

So the arch-mage had said. Bardolin had had sexual relations with Kersik, the girl who had guided them to Undabane. And then she had fed him a portion of her kill-that was the process. That was the rite which engendered the disease.

He almost thought he could feel the black disease working in him, a physical process changing body and soul with every heartbeat. Should he tell the others? They distrusted him already. What was going to happen to him? What manner of thing was he to become?

He considered just walking off and becoming lost to the jungle, or even returning to Undi like some prodigal son. But he had always been stubborn, proud and stiff-necked. He would resist this thing, battle it for as long as there was any remnant of Bardolin son of Carnolan left in him. He had been a soldier once: he would fight to the very end.

Thus he thought as he sat his watch, and fed the fire while the other two slept. Hawkwood had given him a task: he was to rub the iron needle with wool from one of the tinderboxes. It made little sense to Bardolin, but at least it was something to help keep sleep at bay.

To one side, Murad moaned in his slumber, and once to his shock Bardolin thought he heard the nobleman gasp out Griella’s name-the base-born lover Murad had taken aboard ship who had turned out to be a shifter herself. What unholy manner of union had those two shared? Not rape, not love freely given either. A kind of mutual degradation which wrought violence upon their sensibilities and yet somehow left them wanting more.

And Bardolin, the old man, he had been envious of them.

He sat and excoriated himself for a thousand failings, the regrets of an ageing man without home or family. In the black night the darkness of his mood deepened. Why had Aruan let him go? What was his fate to be? Ah, to hell with the endless questions.

He spun himself a little cantrip, a glede of werelight which flickered and spluttered weakly. In sudden fear he sent it bobbing around the limits of the firelight, banishing shadows for a few fleeting seconds. It wheeled like an ecstatic firefly and then went out. Too soon. Too weak. He felt like a man who has lost a limb and yet feels pain in phantom fingers. He drank some water from Murad’s bottle, eyes smarting with grief and tyredness. He was too old for this. He should have an apprentice, someone to help bear the load of a greybeard’s worries. Like young Orquil perhaps, whom they had sent to the fire back in Abrusio.

What about me, Bardolin? Will I do?

He started. Sleep had almost taken him. For a moment he had half seen another person sitting on the other side of the fire. A young girl with heavy bronze-coloured hair. The night air had invaded his head. He brutally knuckled his aching eye-sockets and resumed his solitary vigil, impatiently awaiting the dawn.

They were on their feet with the first faint light of the sun through the canopy. Water from the stream and a few broken crumbs of biscuit constituted breakfast, and then they looked over Hawkwood’s shoulder as he set the needle floating on a leaf in Murad’s tin cup. It twisted strangely on the water therein, and then steadied. The mariner nodded with grim satisfaction.

“That’s your compass?” Murad asked incredulously. “A common needle?”

“Any iron can be given the ability to turn to the north,” he was told. “I don’t know why or how, but it works. We march south-east today. Murad, I want you to look out for a likely spear shaft. Myself, I reckon I might have a go at making a bow. Give me your knife, Bardolin. We’ll have to blaze trees to keep our bearing. All right? Then let’s go.”

Rather nonplussed, Hawkwood’s two companions fell into step behind him, and the trio was on its way.

They tramped steadily until noon, when it began to cloud over in preparation for the almost daily downpour. By that time Murad had his iron knife blade tied on to a stout shaft some six feet long, and Hawkwood was laden with a selection of slender sticks and one stave as thick as three fingers. They were famished, pocked with countless bites, scored and gashed and dripping with leeches. And Murad was finding it difficult to keep the pace Hawkwood set. The mariner and the mage would often have to pause in their tracks and wait for him to catch up. But when Hawkwood suggested a break, the nobleman only snarled at him.

In the shelter of an enormous dead tree they waited out the bruising rain as it began thundering in torrents down from the canopy overhead. The ground they sat on quickly became a sucking mire, and the force of the downpour made it difficult to breathe. Hawkwood bent his chin into his breast to create a space, a pocket of air, and in that second it filled with mosquitoes which he drew in helplessly as he breathed, and spat and coughed out again.

The deluge finally ended as abruptly as it had begun, and for a few minutes afterwards they sat in the mud and gurgling water which the forest floor had become, sodden, weary, frail with hunger. Murad was barely conscious, and Hawkwood could feel the burning heat of his body as the nobleman leaned against him.

They laboured to their feet without speaking, staggering like ancients. A coral-bright snake whipped through the puddles at their feet, and with a cry Murad seemed to come alive. He stabbed his new spear at the ground and transfixed the thrashing reptile just behind the head. It twined itself about the spear in its last agony, and Murad smiled.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “dinner is served.”