'Kell will kill him,' said Nienna, hope bright in her eyes.
'Maybe,' said Myriam, gathering her bow. 'Maybe.'
They rode through a winter landscape, down narrow unmarked tracks and threading between wooded hills. Myriam knew the trails and paths like the back of her hand; never once did she falter when they reached a fork or series of scattered trails. Nienna, riding on Styx's horse, contemplated making a break for it often, but the Widowmaker hanging close by Myriam's right hand, and indeed her skill with her yew longbow, made her think twice. Myriam told Nienna the short clockworkpowered crossbow could kill at a hundred paces; Nienna didn't want to find out the hard way. As night approached, so did the Black Pike Mountains. They were huge, rearing from beyond the summit of a hill as they breached the rise on steaming mounts. Nienna coughed a gasp. She had seen the Black Pikes, but never this close; and when she saw the reality of their massive, stunning, brooding mass, the sheer weight of their squat and terrifying majesty, all thoughts of exploring them with student classmates went the way of campfire smoke.
'They are truly… stunning,' said Nienna, almost lost for words.
'They are deadly,' said Myriam, drawing rein. Her mount snorted, stamping cold, and she calmed the beast with soothing words in his ear. She gestured, with a broad sweep of her arm. 'The Black Pike Mountains, thousands of leagues of impassable treachery. There is no forgiveness there, Nienna. Only hardness, and a willingness to see you die.'
'One day, my friend and I were going to explore the passes. We were going to climb to Hawk's Peak. It is said to be beautiful beyond belief. We were going to camp, and paint the beauty of the scene in oils to show our friends back at university.'
Myriam snorted a laugh. 'Paint? Girl, Hawk's Peak is a place of wolves and bears, of bandits and blood-oil smugglers. There is beauty, I'll grant you, but there is only one guarantee; death for the unwary.'
'You have been there?'
'I have travelled much in the Black Pikes.'
'So has my grandfather.'
'This, I know,' said Myriam, eyes glittering. 'It is why I need him so. Come on. We need to make camp. I can feel more snow in the air, and if it rolls down from the Pikes we'll wish we had a roof over our heads.'
They made camp that night by a tumble of boulders, and Myriam cooked venison over the fire on a spit. Fat sizzled, dripping into the flames, and Nienna watched, entranced.
'Never seen meat cook before?' asked Myriam, sitting with her legs spread wide, her quiver of arrows before her, checking the length and integrity of each shaft, the quality of each tip, the helical fletching of each arrow so they would rotate in flight.
'When I lived with my mother, we never ate meat.'
'Why not?'
Nienna shrugged. 'She thought it was inhumane.'
'How odd,' said Myriam, frowning. 'Animals are there to be eaten. They have no other use. What the hell did you eat, then, child?'
'Can you stop calling me child? I have seen seventeen winters pass.'
Myriam grinned, and her gaunt face looked almost friendly. Almost. 'Habit. And compared to me, or rather, compared to the horrors I have witnessed for the past decade, you are indeed a child; shall we say, a child of innocence? However. What did you eat?'
'Bread. Vegetables. Roots. Mushrooms.'
'What a veritable platter of delights you must have enjoyed. What about succulent meat compressing between your teeth, juices running down your throat and chin, what about the perfect flavour of roasted venison?' She pulled out her knife, and cut a slice from the roasting spit. She held out the knife to Nienna. 'Go on. Enjoy.'
Nienna ate the venison, and it was indeed a dream. She had eaten meat, of course; sometimes with Katrina, or occasionally at Kell's when the grizzled old warrior had enough coin. But it was usually dried beef, softened in soup. Nothing as fresh and mouth-watering as this.
'It's good, yes?' grinned Myriam.
'Very good.'
'See! You are my prisoner, and yet you have never feasted so well.'
Nienna looked down, then up, into Myriam's eyes. 'Why did you poison me?' she said, slowly, after a long connection. 'Why did you poison my grandfather? I never did get a straight answer. You were too busy tying me to a tree.'
The humour left Myriam's face. She cut herself a strip of venison, and chewed the tip as she stared into the flames. 'You have heard of the vachine,' she said. It was not a question.
'A tale to frighten children,' said Nienna, carefully. Once, in Jalder, only a few weeks previous but feeling like a thousand years, she and her friends had laughed about the Old Tales, the Days of Blood, and the Legend of Three – the Vampire Warlords! And, of course, the vachine. Ghosts from the mountains. But that had been before the invasion of the Army of Iron; that had been before the albino warriors, and Nienna witnessing the cankers. She shivered, even as she thought of the huge, terrifying beasts. Surely, in a world that contained cankers, an ancient race that drank the blood of humans was not so hard to believe?
'They exist. In a place called Silva Valley. I believe they can make me well again, I believe their vachine clockwork technology can cure the cancers inside me.'
'Clockwork technology? So that is how the vachine work?'
'They drink blood-oil. Refined blood. It is blessed with a dark magick. It is what makes the clockwork work. Without blood-oil, the vachine break down; they perish.'
'And you would become one of these creatures? Just to stay alive?'
'Would you rather die?' hissed Myriam, suddenly. 'Would you rather crawl under the earth, have the worms eat your eyes? You watched Styx die earlier today. Was there joy in that? Pleasure? Or are the wolves and maggots even now feasting on his corpse?'
'But surely we go somewhere… better, after we die.'
Myriam gave a savage laugh. 'You want to live with the gods? You want to travel the Elysium Halls? It is a dark comedy, Nienna, told to soldiers to make them fight in battle. There are no Halls for the Heroes. There are no rivers of nectar, no fountains of wine, no Eternal Feasts of the Martyrs. It's all a dark, savage sham.'
Nienna remained silent. She did not agree with Myriam. Because, if there was nothing after life, then what reason was there for life? There had to be something better. Something more noble. Or it would mean people… like her father, and her best friend Katrina… it meant their deaths had been a bitter, final end.
'Why poison us, then?' persisted Nienna, eventually, after she had watched the passion slowly ebb from Myriam's cheek.
Myriam cut another slice of venison, and ate it thoughtfully. 'Kell has travelled to Silva Valley. He knows the vachine.'
'What? My grandfather?'
'Aye. Your grandfather.'
'He would have told me,' said Nienna, after a thoughtful pause.
Myriam grinned. 'Told you everything, has he?'
'I know he was in the army. And I know he went through the Black Pike Mountains. But – knows the vachine? I don't understand?'
'He knows them, because he worked for the king; an elite group, under King Searlan, the mighty Battle King. They hunted down and destroyed vachine. They were assassins, Nienna.' Her voice was soft. Her eyes glowed like jewels by the light of the fire, fuelled by passion, and a need to save her own life. 'Kell knows the vachine better than any man alive; for to kill something as deadly as vachine, you have to understand it. And Kell understood them all right.'
'My grandfather was no assassin,' said Nienna, voice firm.
'Well, you can ask him when he arrives. For he has only days. The poison will be biting him now; he will be suffering, a great pain in his veins, in his muscles, in his bones. The worse the pain gets, the more he will strive to save himself.'
'Then, why do I feel no such pain?' said Nienna, suddenly, sharply.
