A Fire in the North Read online

  A

  Fire in the North

  Also by David Bilsborough

  The Wanderer’s Tale

  DAVID BILSBOROUGH

  A

  Fire in the

  North

  ANNALS OF LINDORMYN

  VOLUME II

  TOR

  First published 2008 by Tor

  This electronic edition published 2008 by Tor

  an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd

  Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Rd, London N1 9RR

  Basingstoke and Oxford

  Associated companies throughout the world

  www.panmacmillan.com

  ISBN 978-0-230-71379-6 in Adobe Reader format

  ISBN 978-0-230-71378-9 in Adobe Digital Editions format

  ISBN 978-0-230-71381-9 in Microsoft Reader format

  ISBN 978-0-230-71380-2 in Mobipocket format

  Copyright © David Bilsborough 2008

  The right of David Bilsborough to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Visit www.panmacmillan.com to read more about all our books and to buy them. You will also find features, author interviews and news of any author events, and you can sign up for e-newsletters so that you’re always first to hear about our new releases.

  To the memory of over a hundred thousand citizens of Indonesia who were killed by the British, Dutch and Japanese “Fasces’ of 1945–46

  Also, to Wangari Maathai, and others like her

  And lastly, to A. J. (and why not?)

  Acknowledgements

  All those people at Pan Macmillan who have worked so hard on my book, especially as I wasn’t even around at the time to thank them personally. Especially: Peter Lavery, Liz Cowen and Rebecca Saunders, for the gargantuan editing task; Liz Johnson, Chantal Noel and Jon Mitchell, for the foreign deals; Emma Giacon and Vivienne Nelson, for the publicity; Neil Lang, Rafaela Romaya and Clare Sivell, for the design; Amelia Douglas, for the production; and Sarah Castleton, for the freelance typing. Special thanks again to Peter, who made it all possible in the first place, and in such a way changed my life.

  Thanks also to Robert Hale of the malvern gazette, to sFX magazine, and to the sundry internet sites (especially Damon’s) who publicized the first volume so enormously. I owe you all.

  Thanks also to everyone at E.L.T.I, Yogyakarta, for their help, support, and just for being so unfailingly NICE.

  Quiravian runes

  A

  Fire in the

  North

  That Hidden Threshold

  WHO AM I?

  It’s silent here, and it’s dark – totally, transcendently dark. In this silence, this darkness, I could be anyone – anything – I have no story, no memory of a life, no thoughts nor impressions. Nothing.

  What am I?

  I am freezing, that’s what I am – numbed almost senseless. This, at least, I realize now. And there’s an enormous weight of pressure upon me, all about me, wrapped around and crushing the very soul from me. It presses hard and brittle fragments into my face – shards of stone, splinters of bone. Am I buried alive? Yes, I can smell it: ancient granite, grimy earth all around me – part of me. My hair is woven with tendrils and shoots, my face mingled with the cold clay. I am buried, yes, but am I dead or alive?

  I am alive. Yes, I must be alive to have awareness of such things. Yes, of course, I am alive. I am a man. And with a man comes a name, but . . .

  Bolldhe, that’s who I was – am. Bolldhe from Moel-Bryn. Yes. The dreadful crush of earth’s cold grasp seems to lessen somehow, not so oppressive now that I have a name. I embrace that appellation and sink away from this world, this dream, this nightmare, whatever it is, and my soul flies back to the warm days of youth, and those familiar scents of upland turf, walnut coppice and clovered lea. Moel-Bryn – a land mantled with woodlands of rustling, fallow gold, and braided with rillets of sparkling effulgence; yet tough-boned, a place of granite hills, stockaded walls and robust soldiery. Who am I? I’m Bolldhe, the son of a Peladane, of a holy crusader.

  But not a Peladane, myself – rather a traveller. For I left that land of the war-cult, abandoned them all to their ridiculous displays of metal pomposity, their stiff necks and their strutting. Roamed the world, far and wide. But no explorer, soldier, nor merchant was I, for mine was the way of the wanderer, a free spirit, a bird of passage.

  . . . A runaway, an itinerant. Eighteen years of aimless drifting, like an insect blown far from its colony, and every bit as useless. I was by trade an augur, a fortune-teller, and a fake one at that, scratching a mean living by selling lies to any idiot who would pay for reassurance. I touched nobody’s life and nobody touched mine, and the strange thing is, I seemed to believe that made me better than anyone. Oh yes, I was a real Jack the Lad . . . one of life’s meanest failures.

  Then along comes Appa, the mage-priest, and from then on nothing would ever be the same again.

  I found myself by then in Nordwas, a town of many cults – even my old childhood faith – and all of them in stormy debate about the rumoured “Second Coming of Drauglir’, all of them “quest-hungry’. My first day in town, a total stranger there, and this holy man simply comes up to me and tells me I’m the chosen one – the Rawgr-Slayer – the world’s only hope against the wolf-demon from the north. That was Appa, the mad old priest of Cuna, the god of Truth and Light (ha!), hounding me like a fierce little terrier that would as soon bite your hand as wag its tail and probably not know the difference. Nobody else believes a word he says about me, not the Peladanes, nor his fellow priests, not even his brother-in-faith Finwald (that sibylline charlatan whose prophecy initiated this quest in the first place). Certainly not I myself. But it’s money, I suppose – Peladanes’ money. And, for no reason other than that I’ve got nothing better to do, I go along with it. Never been to the Far North, anyway. Might even be fun.

  So began the quest to destroy Drauglir, a rawgr already slain five hundred years ago which few men, other than various cultists, actually believe will rise again. And my life hasn’t been my own since. Together with the two mage-priests, the Warlord’s son and his esquire, and three others, we journeyed north, far beyond the lands of men, upon a mad hooley of adventure, bloodshed and fear. Two of the company it has claimed already: Methuselech Xilvafloese the desert mercenary, fallen to his death in the Valley of Sluagh, and the Peladane’s esquire, poor young Gapp Radnar, hurled down into the dark by the monstrous Afanc . . .

  The Afanc – that obscene miscreation of darkness, waxing in size and foulness with each hurt we dealt it. The mere thought of that warped nightmare incarnate sickens me. Would that I had never stirred it from its pit in the first place! Did it really hound us all those miles, all those days, just to retrieve the sword we stole from it? My soul shudders at the memory.

  But there’s more to it than that. I wasn’t running just from the Afanc – not even from those terrible giants that finally crushed it underfoot. I was running from myself – from the crime I’d just committed, from what I’d now become. For, only moments before we fled from the giants, I did a terrible thing – a deed which has changed me forever. Something happened to me when I was a child, something w
hich has haunted me ever since, like a scream that echoes down the years, its horror reverberating down the arterial, stony tunnel again and again – that sick, demented laughter as great crimson holes blossomed in human flesh . . . I’d kept my ears stopped to that memory, but now I’ve crossed over a threshold, a hidden threshold, and there’ll be no going back now . . .

  What am I?

  And then the word came to him, and he knew what he was.

  ‘Murderer!’

  ONE

  Elfswith and Ceawlin

  ‘THEY LOOK LIKE BOLLDHE’S BOOTS.’

  (Pounding; dull, but mighty enough to shake the world to its foundations; unrelenting, constant; rhythmic as a heartbeat; all around him. Bombardment.)

  ‘No, his are always covered in kack. Leave them – it’s probably just another bloody thief.’

  (Pressure; painless, but immense enough to squeeze him out of this world; enveloping; uterine; crushing as a landslide; all around him. Entombment.)

  ‘No, seriously, I’m sure they’re his. I think I recognize the heels.’

  (Words from outside, words of mirth, words before birth – smell of earth – Mother Earth – mother tongue – no, another tongue; words familiar to him, but in this state, under all this weight, too wearisome for him to translate.)

  ‘Well, pull him out anyway. If it is a thief, we can always break his neck and claim he was dead when we found him.’

  The words meant little to Bolldhe, and came to him muffled, as if his head were wrapped in a heavy blanket. His concern right now was with only the immense pressure all around him . . . And then the feel of hands tugging at his feet. Tugging hard.

  ‘. . . probably not such a good idea at this moment. Come what may, it looks like we’ll have to put aside our differences with these thieves for now. We’re not even out of Eotunlandt yet.’

  Bolldhe could finally feel himself being pulled out from the suffocating mass. Like an earthworm plucked from the soil.

  ‘Come on, now,’ another voice was saying through the din, a shaky voice, but which carried within it the hint of a smile. ‘You can do it – just one more push.’

  Then, from crushing darkness Bolldhe emerged suddenly, into the glare of orange torchlight, and all about him there were smiling faces.

  ‘It’s a boy!’ came a voice in delight. ‘What shall we call him?’

  Bolldhe sucked cold air deep into his tormented lungs, then continued with huge, bovine gasps. That hefty pounding noise still continued from outside, shaking clumps of earth and fragments of stone onto him from the tunnel roof and filling the close air with a choking dust.

  Moments later, the terrible bombardment from without began to fade away. Within minutes, it had ceased altogether and, as its last echoes rolled on up the tunnel, so too died the rumour of the storm behind it.

  Into the silence that followed, there rose a collective sigh of relief.

  Deliverance.

  Retching violently, Bolldhe opened his eyes blinking furiously. Above, regarding him closely, were three creatures apparently made of stone, like rocks that had come to life and assumed human form. Judging from their faces, though, they had not done a very good job of it; the features were distorted, the skin no more than crude masks of clay.

  But their eyes, at least, looked human, and through them the humanity of souls deep within could be detected clearly through the stoniness of those visages. Already the freshets of sweat and tears streaking their dust-plastered faces were expanding and converging to wash away the clay that would claim them, until they had made a muddy delta of each face.

  Nibulus, Finwald and Kuthy: these three, at least, had made it through. They looked weary, and several years older than Bolldhe recalled, but they were clearly alive.

  ‘All right, Bolldhe?’ Nibulus grunted. ‘You really do leave things to the last second, don’t you?’

  Nibulus. Of course. If there was but one member of their company who could be counted on to survive any catastrophe, weather any storm or come through any battle, it was that solid, dependable bastion of strength and pugnacity, Nibulus Wintus. Son of the Warlord Artibulus, Wintus Hall’s finest Peladane, he would still be around, Bolldhe suspected, long after he himself had been snuffed out. Besides, since it was the Warlord’s money that had funded this entire expedition, Nibulus was not the type to let a mere herd of two-hundred-foot giants come between him and his father’s investment. What would the bards have to say about that?

  Still half-buried, Bolldhe spluttered and spat out gobbets of spittle-soaked soil. He then convulsed in a fit of coughing that further tortured his frame. But, in the midst of this convulsion, it occurred to him that at least no bones were broken.

  Then he felt something warm nudge him gently, and immediately recognized the familiar musky odour of his horse.

  ‘Zhang!’ he croaked, and reached out to clasp the Adt-T’man’s muzzle closer to him. ‘Zhang,’ he continued in a half-whisper. ‘Friend-horse. My only friend, you came back to save me.’ He held the animal’s head close, stroking it fondly with a shaking hand, and within moments his face was streaked with a muddy delta all of its own.

  Eventually, he let go and wiped the grime from his eyes, focusing his gaze beyond his immediate rescuers. Through the dim, dust-infused light of a few torches, he recognized that they were confined somewhere inside a long tunnel. Its rough-cut walls were only about four feet apart, but the roof was higher. With his companions’ help he gingerly pulled himself out from the mound of debris and got to his feet. He looked behind him, and saw how the cave mouth they had entered was now in ruin, totally blocked off by rock and soil. Not even the thinnest sliver of daylight penetrated from the other side.

  Entombment.

  One arm draped for support over Zhang’s shaggy neck, Bolldhe peered around to see who else had survived. Over there, slumped against the wall, was the aged mage-priest Appa, hand folded limply around his precious amulet. But for once not rapping his ring against it, an irritating habit whenever he felt stressed. Was he even alive . . . ? Yes, bless him, there was a bare first hint of movement beneath that grubby biscuit-crumb-stained woollen mantle cloaking the scrawny collection of brittle bones he called a body. Bolldhe managed a smile. So the old bugger had survived Eotunlandt after all, frayed, but unbroken, like a thin piece of hairy string that refuses to snap.

  There, too, was the dark mercenary Odf ‘Paulus’ Uglekort, standing with his back to them, but easy to recognize from his crows’-feather cowl. Now there was another nut not to be easily cracked. Maybe one day Paulus would succumb to the fits that occasionally racked his body, or to the creeping necrosis that already disfigured his face and made him a pariah even among his own comrades, but it was doubtful he would ever fall to an enemy’s sword. Paulus, the mercurial, murderous but elite mercenary from Vregh-Nahov, had his blade drawn even now, as he stood between their company and a separate group of shadowy figures huddled miserably just beyond the halo of torchlight. How many of those bandits had managed to reach the tunnel in time, Bolldhe as yet did not bother to guess. All he knew for sure was that, of his own companions – counting them off in his dizzy head – six had made it safely through. Out of how many? He could not think straight, but he was sure there was someone missing . . .

  He glanced back at the three men who had pulled him out of the rubble. Nibulus was already unstrapping the various pieces of his elaborate armour from the solitary horse and was trying to put them on before the thieves got a chance to recover their nerve and maybe launch an attack. Ever the soldier, ever the professional, but not so professional that Nibulus could control the trembling in his fingers. If those thieves were going to attack, Bolldhe reckoned, they would be well advised to do it now, while the Peladane was so cumbrously distracted.

  Finwald, the younger mage-priest, sat silently upon a large boulder all by himself. He cradled something long and metallic in his arms and Bolldhe peered at it, then almost cried out in disbelief as he recognized the serpentine blade that s
naked out from the hilt. Flametongue! That bloody sword again! After all they’d just come through, after escaping being giant-crushed into oblivion by the narrowest hair’s-breadth imaginable, was that antique weapon all the priest could concern himself with?

  Bolldhe just could not fathom it, how a Lightbearer, of all people, should care so much about a weapon of war. And one which was not even his own possession either. Finwald already owned a sword, that little silver one he’d had forged especially for this quest. ‘The only way to destroy Drauglir,’ he had proclaimed to the council Moot before they set out, ‘is to pierce its heart and brain with a magical blade. Failing that, silver-plated iron will do . . .’ So when Bolldhe had discovered this strange, spell-woven ‘flamberge’ sword down the mines, somehow in the possession of the gruesome Afanc, it had seemed like a particular stroke of fortune.

  Bolldhe grimaced. Having rejected the ways of the Peladane in his youth, he loathed swords beyond all loathing, and everything they stood for. He wished now, more than ever, to have his plain old axe back. Had it not been stolen from him earlier by a sneak thief, he never would have picked up yon cursed flamberge in the first place. But now that that enchanted sword had fallen into their hands, Finwald seemed to think their quest was as good as won. He seemed to even think the weapon was more important than the lives of his companions. Bolldhe still could not believe how, in their moment of danger, the priest had just snatched up the flamberge and run off with it to the safety of the tunnel, abandoning his companions to the giants without so much as a backward glance. Finwald was a good man at heart, Bolldhe knew, and much liked by everyone, but clearly nothing – not even his friends – came before his precious quest.

  Unlike Kuthy Tivor, over there. That one had no friends, and the only quest precious to him was looking after himself. The ageing soldier of fortune had started tagging along with them only a couple of weeks ago, but had proved nothing more than a pain in the backside ever since. At the moment he was busy brushing the dust out of the writhing liripipes adorning the hat that still miraculously clung to his head. They now stood out from the cap itself like the hairs on a frightened cat, and were trembling at the tips. Kuthy was murmuring to them soothingly as he stroked them in turn, but it looked as though it would be a long while before his hat settled down to normal.