Read The Seventh Friend (Book 1) Online
Authors: Tim Stead
“And now the Benetheon is torn apart,” she said. “I wanted to prove myself, to gain skill, to be certain, and now there is nothing to come back to.” There was no bitterness in her voice, just resignation. Narak wanted to reach out his hand and touch her, but he did not dare. He did not wish to fright the sparrow that had suddenly perched so close to him after so many years.
“There is always something to come back to, Pascha,” he said. “Even if it is only yourself, or Wolfguard, or your true calling.” Or me. He dared not say it. He was ambushed by feelings he had thought long dead. Did he really want her back at his side? Like that? Perhaps he did. Perhaps he always had.
“There is yet one more thing I have to say,” she said. “Your problem, the strategy that you do not have – I have an answer for you, or at least a path to follow.”
“You do?” He was surprised and could not hide it.
“You have avoided men too much, Narak, or you would have seen it yourself. You must ask the cleverest man that you know.”
He stared at her. Ask a man? Well, it was possible, but not something that he had really considered. He had been alive for over fifteen hundred years, and experience counted for a lot.
“Who should I ask? Raffin? Havil? Quinnial?”
She shook her head, impatient. “These are your shadows, men who are like you but in a lesser fashion. It would be the Wolf asking the dog how to hunt. You must ask someone who is different, someone who thinks in different ways.”
It was Narak’s turn to show impatience. “I will not play games with you, Pascha. Who do you mean?”
“Arbak.”
“
Arbak
? Cain Arbak? The Innkeeper?”
“You prove my point. You think just as they do. You do not see the thing that you have created. Arbak is more than an innkeeper. I would wager Wolfguard that he has not taken a florin of your money from the day his inn opened, and yet look what he has done since that day. He is a city councillor, a respected general, lord of Waterhill, and a wealthy man. There are two thousand soldiers in Bas Erinor who would draw a blade at the least insult to his name. If he carries on like this he will be King of Avilian within a year, by popular acclamation.”
“Are you serious?”
“About the king? No. But you see my point. None of your shadows could have held the Green Road, but he did. When he is losing he changes the rules; he does something different.”
“I thought you did not like him?”
She looked away for a moment. “I have not forgotten Perlaine,” she said her voice softer. There was real grief there, he thought, though she had not seen Perlaine for centuries before her death. Such was the memory of the Benetheon. Yet when she raised her eyes and met his again there was great conviction there. “You would not fell a tree with a sword, Narak. Arbak is the tool for this work. He will solve your problem.”
“You really think so?”
“I do.”
“Then I shall think on it.”
For a moment she did not move, and he thought that she was going to say something else. He hoped she was. It was like the past, sitting here with Pascha, talking about things that mattered. There was a melancholy taste to it, the memory of Remard and Beloff haunted them, but it was still good. Then she rose from the chair and went to the door.
“Think on it well, Wolf Narak,” she said, and then was gone, the door closed behind her.
She was right. Of course she was right. When Pelion had made them, or changed them from men and women into what they now were he had not changed their minds. He was still Narak Brash, son of the hunter, and she was still Pascha Lammeling, the shop keeper’s daughter. None of them were stupid, but they were not far beyond the realms of the ordinary.
But Cain Arbak? Sergeant, if that, Arbak?
He had attributed much of the innkeeper’s rise to luck – to being in the right place at the right time. But Pascha had been there at the Green Road. She had seen more than Narak. Well, it could not do any harm to try, as long as he phrased it the right way.
Within the walls of the lair, deep in the belly of Wolfguard, the Bren Ashet dreamed. Caught in the stone like a fly in amber it did not breath, it did not see, and it did not think, but the Bren Ashet are one. In distant places other eyes saw, other ears heard, and all of it passed through the creature’s head, rushing past; a waterfall of noise and light.
In distant caverns there worked the diggers, great and powerful Bren with tree-trunk arms and massive hands that plucked the rock from its bed and shovelled it aside for the others to carry away. It smelt the smell of their kind, tasted the dust on its mouth, gritty and bitter. It saw the new tunnels, driving forwards miles beneath the ground to places where the Bren had never walked. It saw the caverns of the Bren Morain, ranks upon ranks of dark, chitin shelled warriors, stood still as stones in the dim light. The Bren Morain did not chatter and fret as men did. They stood silent until there was something that must be done. When it was time to eat, they ate. When it was time to fight, they fought. All their skills were bred, not learned, so they did not train or practice. Their obedience was perfect. Their fitness for combat did not need to be honed. They simply waited for the time, for the order to march, and their numbers grew every day.
Elsewhere the Bren Ashet stood by the Bren Morain of the seventh rank, and that creature, too was still. Yet this one housed the brain that hatched the plan, and the Bren Ashet did not understand, for the Bren Morain of exalted rank were like men. They thought and schemed in the solitude of their own heads. They had secrets.
Elsewhere again the Bren Ashet stood in the silence of a great chamber, a cave the size of a city where ice sparkled on the walls in the dimmest of lights and the high roof was lost even to its dark adapted eye. And here, and only here was a voice that spoke; a voice like silk and thunder, like the threatening surf at night on a sandy beach warning of a storm to come.
“It is wrong,” the voice said. “What you are doing is wrong.”
The voice was echoed, stripped of its essential qualities, in the chamber of the Bren Morain of the seventh rank.
“So you say,” it replied. The warrior scarcely moved as it spoke, an obsidian statue.
“You have twisted Pelion’s law so far that it turns back upon itself. You strike for the wrong reason. You are doing the wrong thing.”
“And yet you cannot prevent it.” There was a trace of malicious certainty in the Bren Morain’s voice, and the messenger caught it perfectly, rendering the emotion in its piping imitation. For a while there was no comment from the other, but when it spoke again there was no trace of emotion in its measured voice.
“Not I,” it said.
“But there is another? You dream, Bren Alar. It was Pelion’s curse on you, to let you dream.”
“It is a blessing. When I dream I see a million things that you cannot imagine.”
“You are bound to your fate, Bren Alar. How many have come that might have freed you? A hundred? More? All dead by your own hand…”
“A hundred and seventeen.”
“And you think another will come? You dream of the wolf man? If he comes you will kill him, and even if you do not kill him he will not do what you wish because it would end him, and you will tell him that. You are cursed indeed.”
“The will of Pelion will find a way, Bren Morain.”
“Indeed it will. The army will be ready soon. The tunnels will be complete.”
“Yet you know that it is wrong.”
“So you believe, but you are mistaken. We are Pelion’s true children, not you, not the half men. You were created broken. We will rise and clean the land of lesser things.”
“Pelion was a man.”
“So he was, Bren Alar, but tell me in all honesty, do you believe that men are your equal? Even the ones that he raised up and named gods?”
There was no reply, and after a few minutes the Bren Morain switched its attention back to the problems at hand and became completely still again.
In the huge, distant, frozen chamber the Bren Alar did not speak, but the Bren Ashet could hear it shift as it moved around in the dark. Frustration, anger, impatience.
“Something must be done,” it muttered. “Something must be done.”
And something would be done, the Ashet knew, for the Bren Alar was the first of the first, the bound one, the bearer of the light, the immortal spark of Pelion’s will. Something would be done, but what that might be was beyond its comprehension, and it knew that it would wait for whatever wonders were intended, wait with the detached awe of the truly uninvolved for miracles to unfold.