The High King's Vengeance Read online

  Malessar’s Curse:

  The High King’s Vengeance

  Steven Poore

  www.kristell-ink.com

  Copyright © 2016 Steven Poore

  Steven Poore asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this book.

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Paperback ISBN 978-1-911497-04-2

  Hardback ISBN 978-1-911497-12-7

  EPUB ISBN 978-1-911497-06-6

  Cover art by Jorge Luis Torres

  Cover design by Ken Dawson

  Typesetting by Book Polishers

  Kristell Ink

  An Imprint of Grimbold Books

  4 Woodhall Drive

  Banbury

  Oxon

  OX16 9TY

  United Kingdom

  www.kristell-ink.com

  Contents

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  A Selection of Other Titles from Kristell Ink

  For Ralph Brett Poore

  My evening-rest and sleep to meet.

  Prologue

  Storm clouds flattened the sky to the north and the west. The mountains looked bruised, the snow-capped peaks mottled like the skin of a sickly old man. Hetch shivered inside his thick woollen coat and kicked his heels against the steps, frustrated by the delay.

  This was an important deal, for his family and – more importantly – for himself. It was the deal that would prove to Rann Almoul that his youngest son was ready, mature enough to take his place alongside Tarves in the business. Hetch had plans and ambitions: he had seen how Tarves had invested in the towns south of Keskor, and he intended to do the same in the north. The same, but better. Tarves is slow, not competitive enough. He doesn’t take risks. But Hetch had been thinking ahead, and he knew there was a good profit to be made out along the northern coast, if he took the right goods into the markets there.

  No sense in taking anything Hellean. The Factor already had that sewn up tighter than a child’s purse. But the lands along that north coast were a gateway into the Berdallan grasslands, and there was a taste for good Berdellan leather that Hetch believed he could foster into a demand. All he needed was a good contact.

  And that was why he had come to Escalia, three days ago, to find the men he needed to talk to. A clan of grass-munching herders, vagrants and trouble-makers, but they were rumoured to have the ear of some of the more important Berdellan families. Hetch needed to find out if that was true. Unfortunately the men were not in town, and Hetch had no intention of following them around the countryside. They would come back to Escalia eventually.

  Hopefully before I die of boredom, he thought sourly. Escalia was a fair place to visit for one day, perhaps two at the most, but it was dull. There was nothing to hold his attention.

  Like Keskor, these days.

  He kicked the steps again and stone flaked from the corner. He’d had plenty of time over the last three days to reflect on his boredom and his new passion for the northern coasts. Tarves had been on the mark with his barbed jests – as his older brother so often was, much to his chagrin.

  You’re still mooning over that bloody girl! Sweet gods, did she have a grip on your balls, boy? She was just skin and bone! Go and find one a bit more appealing!

  It’s not like I wanted to bloody marry her, Hetch thought. I wouldn’t have gone that far. Cassia had a pleasant smile, and they’d certainly been friends for as long as he could remember, but she was Norrow’s daughter. A girl with no worth, no property, no family or influence. Nothing but what she had between her legs. She could have been some use as one of Da’s servants. Indentured and confined, of course, to stop her running away. At least until one of my marriage contracts got signed. And maybe after that too, if the girl at the end of the contract was as unattractive as he suspected she might be.

  He had tried to put Cassia from his mind and concentrate on his own concerns, but it was not as easy as all that. His thoughts kept returning to her – especially when Rann Almoul described the virtues and qualities of yet another potential bride to him. And the comparisons were never as unfavourable as he thought they should be.

  Anyone would think she was bloody Queen of the North.

  The thought of the North altered the direction of his thoughts.

  Baum said that the North will rise again. My father didn’t believe him, or he didn’t want to believe him.

  But Rann Almoul had to believe the old man could achieve something, or else why would he have stretched his own influence out beyond Keskor’s walls, making subtle plays for the authority that belonged to the Emperor and his Factor? Rann was skilled at playing both sides of an argument, but never usually on such a dangerous scale. If the North does rise up, he intends to be there at the top. That was easy enough to recognise, and Hetch had no problem in playing that game along with his father. Reaching out to the Berdellans seemed a logical step forward. Hetch thought he might even outstrip Tarves’s successes.

  If the idiots ever turn up.

  The wind, which had risen steadily over the course of the day, whipped around again, bringing cold air and the taste of rain from the mountains. Hetch flattened his hair back with one hand. He’d deliberately grown it longer to make himself appear less youthful, knowing the Berdellans equated maturity with prosperity, but his light, wispy hair only tangled itself across his scalp when the wind caught it, making him look as though he had fallen through last year’s harvest. The gingery stubble on his chin was just as aggravating.

  If they’re not here before this storm breaks, I’ll have to call the whole damned venture off. Da won’t let me spend any more time chasing these fools down.

  Escalia’s main square was already quieter than it should have been. It was plain that the townsfolk, aware of the weather bearing down upon them, were hurrying through their business and returning to their homes. The stallholders in the market were closing up, and the town’s resident storyteller had not even bothered to put in an appearance. He’d be in one of the nearby taverns, Hetch had no doubt.

  Just where I should be now.

  On the far side of the square a lone herdsman dragged a recalcitrant ewe up the steps of the compact temple to Olthea, goddess of the Eastern Winds. One of the new Hellean gods, one that had always received short shrift here in the mountains, especially since the temple was built upon the shattered foundations of the old shrine to Pyraete. An old god, a forbidden god. The god that Baum and that swordsman of his both worshipped. Relics – all of them. Perhaps the supplicant thought to pray for Olthea to raise her winds and blow the storm off-course. There was little chance of that. The storm was too close for any amount of blood to make a difference.

  There was a low rumble of thunder in the distance, as though agreeing with Hetch’s silent assessment. The sound echoed through the square and sent a chill up the back of h
is neck. It was time to retreat indoors. The Berdellans would not arrive today.

  Even the tavern’s business was muted. Hetch used his purse to secure a table to himself, close to the fireplace, heedless of the sour looks the room’s other occupants cast at him. The tavern owner ducked his head obsequiously and brought him a small cask of ale that Hetch recognised, with no small humour, as a brew that his father had traded in the previous year. At least it has some degree of provenance, he thought.

  This tavern’s rooms were supposedly the best Escalia had to offer, though to Hetch that was not saying much for the town’s wealth. Still, they were private enough to suit his business, especially since the traders’ hall on the other side of the square would not take kindly to the presence of armed, stinking Berdellans amidst their refined, Imperial airs. Too much a reminder of how closely related they still were, Hetch guessed. We were squabbling barbarians as well, once, and the joke of it is that we ruled so much of the world.

  Perhaps Baum wasn’t quite so mad after all. The North could rise again. The soft flatlanders to the south would not know what had hit them, and the balance would be restored, just as it should have been hundreds of years ago. All they needed was a leader. A figurehead to inspire them. Was that what Baum proposed for himself?

  No, Hetch decided. Not Baum. The man had seemed too . . . too sly to allow himself to be set up in such fakery. And, besides, Vescar had called him a sorcerer. Vescar was mad, of course – disgraced and deemed unfit for command by the Factor, he skulked about Keskor like an infection – but something had happened to the company he had taken to retrieve Norrow and his daughter, and that something was still unexplained.

  Baum’s companion, the swordsman, on the other hand . . . yes, he had been the very image of a Northern prince. He was a man armies would rally behind. He was skilled and dangerous in combat – Vescar had been clear on that point, and Hetch himself had witnessed the man’s considered and deliberate movements. He was someone that any opponent would fear: a Northern warrior with the power of the mountains behind him.

  And if Baum sets him up as the Heir to the North, then Cassia and her father will be spreading rumours in the wind for him. Well, the plan’s doomed to fail then, with that addled old fool aboard it.

  Nevertheless, it left a bitter taste in his mouth and he reached for the cask to wash it away. His thoughts had lingered on Norrow’s girl too long, he realised: now he needed some form of distraction. It was just as well there was plenty of that to hand as well – one of the servants here in the tavern was quite in awe of his fine thick coat and his status as a scion of one of Keskor’s leading mercantile houses, and he’d caught her blushing and fiddling with the hems of her skirts when she thought he wasn’t looking. She would fall with a quip and a smile.

  His thoughts were jarred away from the girl’s skirts by the sudden arrival of another man at his table. The newcomer threw himself onto the bench opposite and dragged the cask across the table, spilling an over-generous amount into his own flagon. Ale splashed over the brim onto Hetch’s sleeves.

  His first impression – that this was one of the overdue Berdellans – was dashed swiftly. The man was wild-eyed, his hair and beard uneven and matted, as though he had hacked at the tangles with a blunt knife. His face was mottled like the mountains outside, his cheeks aflame with some kind of fever. He appeared to be clothed in little more than sacking and the tattered remnants of a cloak. And he stank to the heavens above. Hetch raised one arm to cover his nose – even ale-soaked wool was better than such ordure.

  “You intrude—” he began, in a higher pitch than he would have preferred, but the man stopped him with a stare that burned his words to cinders in his mouth.

  “You hear it too, don’t you? You feel it in your bones. In your sleep. Your dreams.”

  Hetch felt intimidated. And ashamed for feeling that way. That shame fuelled his rising anger. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said coldly.

  The man paused long enough to empty a good half the contents of his flagon. More ale trickled down the sides of his face than entered his mouth. “You do,” he said, his lips foam-flecked and bubbling. “Everybody does. You all feel it. Don’t you?” he shouted into the room at large.

  Hetch looked around for support, but the tavern’s other customers had turned their backs on his table. They knew who this man was, he thought. Knew him, and feared him. Because he’s insane, that’s why. He needs to be thrown out and put down like a rabid dog. Get the owner of this bloody dive – it’s his job. But even the landlord had ducked his head to avoid Hetch’s gaze.

  “You’re raving,” he said, rallying a small portion of his confidence. His father would have had the man whipped out of Keskor’s gates by now, the Factor’s justice be damned. What would Rann Almoul say now? “You shame your sons.”

  The man spat ale through his laughter. “Sons? What do you know of sons, boy? Look at you quivering there – you could hardly fill a woman, let alone seed her!” He reached for the cask again, but Hetch was faster and pulled it beyond his reach. His ears burned from embarrassment and his free hand dipped to the slender knife buckled at his belt.

  “I have no sons!” the man continued. His voice sounded hollow, as though he spoke from a distance. Hetch recoiled – the man’s eyes glowed with an unnatural light. “For they all were murdered by fell and grim sorceries!”

  Hetch rolled back off the bench with a cry, no longer concerned with the pitch of his voice. Some of the tavern’s other drinkers had looked around now, warding themselves with old signs. The first waves of rain slapped against the closed shutters.

  The man slumped on his seat and shook his head. “Now it comes when I’m awake. Gods above, I need a bloody drink.”

  And abruptly Hetch recognised him, despite his tattered, shrunken appearance. A few patches – discoloured, torn and stained by travel and weeks of disrepair – still survived on the shoulders of the man’s cloak. “Norrow?”

  The man stared up at him suspiciously. “Aye. The young Almoul, is it? I’m in Keskor, then?” He staggered onto his feet. “Curse it, no, I must go south. South.”

  “You’re in no state to go anywhere, old man,” Hetch said. He rounded the table and pushed Norrow back onto the bench, meeting no resistance. “How are you this far North? Did you get left behind? And you’ve been here all these weeks?”

  He looked back at the other drinkers. “Well? What of it?” They turned away, glad to leave him to deal with the madman alone. “Another cask for the storyteller!”

  The tavern owner brought a flagon instead; Hetch could tell just by looking that this was his cheapest brew. “Sir, the man’s badly touched.”

  “I can see that,” Hetch said.

  “He was left outside the gates last night. They say it’s the mountain curse.”

  “Chicken balls,” Hetch replied acidly. “Old tales for credulous fools.”

  He took the flagon and pushed the tavern owner back out of the way. Norrow gulped the piss-weak ale as though it was nectar, and Hetch concentrated on wringing the worst from his sleeve. If he was lucky the coat would not suffer too much.

  The shutters rattled again, whipped by wind and rain alike. Another low rumble of thunder cut beneath the muted conversations, the sound persisting long after it should have died away.

  “They may be old tales, but that doesn’t mean they’re not true,” Norrow muttered.

  Hetch frowned. “You’re not making sense. Why are you in Escalia? What happened to you?”

  “Ran away. Bloody sorcerer would’ve burned me to ashes. Better her than me. Went back to Fodrakh. He let me stay a while. Quiet and out of sight.”

  Fodrakh . . . Hetch couldn’t place the name. He was sure Tarves knew the man though. More alarming was the implication that Cassia was dead. That Baum was indeed a sorcerer and that Norrow had abandoned his daughter to death at his hands. “Norrow, what happened there? Did you see what happened to Vescar’s men? Was Cassia still alive then?”
/>   “Cassia . . .” Norrow’s eyes were unfocused again. He flinched at the sound of another thunderous rumble. “Damn everything, this is Escalia, isn’t it? Oh sweet gods protect me – Movalli, save me!”

  Hetch grabbed at his hand. “Listen, old man! What happened?”

  “I came north. I didn’t want to, but I came. Every morning I walked south until I collapsed from exhaustion. And every morning I would awake further north once more, and my feet would be raw and bleeding. Once I tied myself to a tree. That didn’t work.” Norrow’s gaze slid away from Hetch again. The man walked a narrow strip of sanity, Hetch realised; the chasms on either side of that ledge might be too deep to allow any return.

  “And I awoke in Gethista,” Norrow continued. “An unholy land.”

  One of the tavern’s other patrons had been listening. “Gethista’s just a legend to scare small boys with.”

  Norrow shook his head. “No legend. I’ve been there. Twice.”

  Hetch barely understood any of this rambling, but for one thing. “Baum – the sorcerer. Is he here? Did he come with you?”

  More thunder. This time Hetch felt it through his bones, just as old men like Attis said they did. But I’m not that old.

  “Yes. You can hear it, can’t you?” Norrow asked. “All of you – you can hear it. Feel it, too.”

  All hells, we’re back to this, are we? I’m not going to get anywhere with him until he sobers up.

  “It’s in my dreams, dragging me north again. And in my head, too, all through the day! It whispers of power and glory and riches and battle – and it rages of anger and vengeance and fear and death! Just as it does to you – I can see it in your face! In your eyes! It’s already here, dreaming of me!” He was shouting again, his ragged fingernails scoring deep lines into the table. The landlord was ushering his wenches out through a curtain into one of the back rooms. More than one of Hetch’s fellow drinkers had decided to leave, preferring to face the fury of the storm instead.

  His eyes – there is some godless magic here! Norrow’s eyes glowed again, appearing to leech colour from the air around him. Hetch drew his knife, though he knew somehow that Norrow would not heed the threat.