the swift, gorge-cutting Searil river and for forty years it was the easternmost outpost of the Fimbrians, until the founding of Aekir on the Ostian river still farther east. The Torunnans themselves were thus direct descendants of the first Fimbrian soldier-settlers, and the great families of the kingdom all traced their origins back to the most senior officers from among those first tercios. The Royal family of Torunn was descended from the house of Kaile Ormann, the builder of Ormann Dyke.
It was one of the ironies of the world that Torunna was the first province to rebel against Fimbria and declare its independence from the Electors. It snatched Aekir for itself and was recognized by the then High Pontiff, Ammianus, as a legitimate state in return for four thousand volunteer troops, who were to become the forerunners of the Knights Militant.
Torunna was thus a cockpit of momentous history in the west, and during the long years of Fimbrian isolation following the empire’s collapse it had become the foremost military power among the new monarchies, the guardian-state both of the Pontiff and the eastern frontier.
A man coming upon Torunn for the first time—especially from the north—might see in it uncanny similarities to the layout and construction of Fimbir. The old city walls had long ago been enlarged and changed so that they bristled with ravelins, bastions, crownworks and hornworks designed for a later age of warfare, when gunpowder counted for more than sword blades; but there was a certain brutal massiveness about the place which was wholly Fimbrian.
It brought back memories for Corfe as his troop of horsemen and their trundling charge came over the final slopes before the city. A tangled riot of later building meant that Torunn was surrounded by unwalled suburbs beyond which the grey stone of the walls could be seen lying like the flanks of a great snake amid the roofs and towers of the Outer City. This was the place where he had joined the tercios, where he had been trained, where his adolescence had been roughly hewn into manhood. He was a native of Staed, one of the southern coastal cities of the kingdom. To him, Torunn had seemed like a miracle when first he had seen it. But he had seen Aekir since, and knew what a truly huge city looked like. Torunn housed some fifth of a million people, and that same number were now on the roads leading towards it, seeking sanctuary. The enormity of the problem defeated his imagination.
In the suburbs the press of people was worse. There were Torunnan cavalry there, struggling to keep order, and open-air kitchens had been set up in all the market places. The noise and the stink were incredible. Torunn had the aspect of one of those apocalyptic religious paintings which depicted the last days of the world. Though Aekir at its fall, Corfe thought bitterly, had been even closer.
Before the new, low-built city gates a tercio of pikemen had been drawn up in ranks and a pair of demiculverins flanked them. Slow-match burned in lazy blue streamers. Corfe was not sure if the show of force was to receive the High Pontiff or to keep the teeming refugees out of the Inner City, but as the carriage was spotted the culverins went off in salute, blank charges roaring out in clouds of smoke and spitting flame. From the towers above, other guns began to fire until the walls seemed to ripple with smoke and the thunderous sound recalled for Corfe the Merduk bombardment at Ormann Dyke.
The Torunnans presented arms, an officer flourished his sabre, and the High Pontiff was welcomed through the gates of Torunn.
K ING Lofantyr heard the salute echoing across the city, and paused in his pacing to look out of the tower windows. He pushed aside the iron grilles and stepped out on to the broad balcony. The city was a serried sea of roofs reaching out to the north, but he could glimpse the puffing smoke clouds from the casemates on the walls.
“Here at last,” he said. The relief in his voice was a palpable thing.
“Perhaps now you will sit a while,” a woman’s voice said.
“Sit! How can I sit? How will I ever take my ease again, mother? I should never have listened to Abeleyn; his tongue is too renowned for its persuasiveness. The kingdom is on the brink of ruin, and I brought it there.”
“Pah! You have your father’s gift for drama, Lofantyr. Was it you who brought the Merduks to the gates of Aekir?” the woman retorted sharply behind him. “The kingdom won a great battle of late and is holding the line of the east. You are Torunnan, and a king. It is not seemly to voice the doubts of your heart so.”
Lofantyr turned with a twisted smile. “If I cannot voice them to you, then where shall I utter them?”
The woman was seated at the far end of the tall tower chamber in a cloud of lace and brocade. An embroidery board was perched on a stand before her, and her nimble hands worked upon it without pause, the needle flashing busily. Her eyes flicked up at her son the King and down to her work, up and down. Her fingers never hesitated.
Her face was surrounded by a deviously worked halo of hair that was stabbed through with pearl-headed pins and hung with jewels. Golden hair, shot through with silver. Earrings of the brightest lapis lazuli. Her face was fine-boned, but somehow drawn; it was possible to see that she had been a beautiful woman in her youth, and even now her charms were not to be lightly dismissed, but there was a fragility to the flesh which clothed those beautiful bones, a system of tiny lines which proclaimed her age despite the stunning green magnificence of her eyes.
“You have won the battle, my lord King—the fight against time. Now you have a Pontiff to parade before the council and quell these murmurings of heresy.” She caught her tongue between her teeth for a second as the needle bored in a particularly fine stitch. “Unlike the other kings, you can show your people that Macrobius truly lives. That, and the storm which approaches from the east, should suffice to unite most of them under you.”
She set aside her needle at last. “Enough for today. I am tired.”
She stared keenly at Lofantyr. “You look tired also, son. The journey from Vol Ephrir was a hard one.”
Lofantyr shrugged. “Snow and bandit tribesmen—the usual irritants. There is more to my tiredness than the aftermath of a journey, mother. Macrobius is here, yes; but beyond the city walls thousands upon thousands of Aekirians and northern Torunnans are screaming for succour, and I cannot give it to them. Martellus wants the city garrisons moved to the dyke, and the Knights Militant promised to me will now never arrive. I need every man I can spare across the country to hold down the nobles. They are straining at the leash despite the fact that I promised them the true Pontiff. Already there are reports of minor rebellions in Rone and Gebrar. I need trusted commanders who do not see opportunity in the monarch’s difficulties.”
“Loyalty and ambition: those two irreconcilable qualities without which a man is nothing. It is a rare individual who can balance both of them in his breast,” the woman said.
“John Mogen could.”
“John Mogen is dead, may God keep him. You need another war leader, Lofantyr, someone who can lead men like Mogen did. Martellus may be a good general, but he does not inspire his men in the right way.”
“And neither do I,” Lofantyr added with bitter humour.
“No, you do not. You will never be a general, my son; but then you do not have to be. Being King is trial enough.”
Lofantyr nodded, still with a sour smile upon his face. He was a young man like his fellow heretics, Abeleyn of Hebrion and Mark of Astarac. His wife, a Perigrainian princess and niece of King Cadamost, had already left for Vol Ephrir, vowing never to lie with a heretic. But then she was only thirteen years old. There were no children, and a severed dynastic tie meant little at the moment with the west struck asunder by religious schism.
His mother, the Queen Dowager Odelia, pushed aside her embroidery board and rose to her feet, ignoring her son’s hurriedly proffered arm.
“The day I cannot rise from a chair unaided you can bury me in it,” she snapped, and then: “Arach!”
Lofantyr flinched as a black spider dropped from the rafters on a shining thread and landed on his mother’s shoulder. It was thickly furred, and bigger than his hand. Its ruby eyes glistened. Odelia petted it for a moment and it uttered a sound like a cat’s purr.
“Be discreet, Arach. We go to meet a Pontiff,” the woman said.
At once, the spider disappeared into the mass of lace that rose up at the back of Odelia’s neck. It could barely be glimpsed there, a dark hump nestled in the fabric which transformed her upright carriage into something of a stoop. The purring settled into a barely audible hum.
“He is getting old,” the Queen Dowager said, smiling. “He likes the warmth.” She took her son’s arm now, and they proceeded to the doors in the rear of the chamber.
“As well I became a heretic,” Lofantyr said.
“Why is that, son?”
