Ibryen

Chapter 9-1

Chapter 9Jeyan woke as she normally did — as soon as light began to appear. As usual, Assh and Frey were already awake. It had been a bad night, punctuated by periods of half-sleep, with her mind full of heart-wrenching memories of childhood and her parents. Fully awake, she would have fended off such visions as though they had been Citadel Guards, but caught thus, she was defenceless and was sorely hurt when morning came.

Throat tight, she lay for a while staring upwards, waiting for the pain to pass. In the low, early morning light, it was possible to make out marks on the ceiling that might be the remains of a painting — probably a cloudscape of some kind, she had decided once, though at times she thought she could also make out the lines of buildings and streets. In her sourer moments, she took them for stains caused by rainwater blown into the floors above through shattered windows.

Now, however, she saw nothing, for she was lingering still in her night thoughts, at once reluctant and desperate to leave, to close and bar again the door that separated her from her past.

As was often the case, the dogs determined the matter for her, Frey walking over and putting her muzzle wetly in her face. Jeyan swore at her and scrambled out of the disordered blankets. With a sudden rush, Frey pushed past her, plunging in search of a spider that had inadvertently scuttled out into the open during the disturbance. The impact tumbled Jeyan over on to her back and she swore again. Before she could sit up. Assh bounded over, tail wagging low along the floor. He stood looking down at her intently until she was obliged to wriggle out from under him. She had no sooner stood up however, than she flopped down on to a chair, her face wearily in her hands. She felt awful. A whirl of black humour came to her aid. Probably caught something off Hagen’s last breath, she thought. Someone as foul as him must surely be diseased through to his very heart. No normal person could do what he did without becoming so.

She looked down at her hands, half-expecting them to be stained where she had seized Hagen’s hair to yank his head back, or where his blood had splashed on her. There was nothing to be seen however, and such blood as had struck her had either washed off in the rain, or merged into the dirt-mottled background of her clothes.

Yet she was still uneasy. Everything after the killing should have been a song of triumph, but there was a strained quality to her. There was no true sense of release, of freedom. It worried her that the trembling that had suffused her yesterday still lingered, fluttering deep within her — it wasn’t as if it was the first time she had killed someone. And from time to time her hand still twitched as she recalled the impact of the blows she had struck.

She took out her knife and looked at it. As she held it, she began to feel quieter. Hagen was dead. Dead! And she had done it! The world could not be other than better for such a deed. True, others would probably follow in his steps — her lip curled as she recalled the names of her father’s erstwhile friends who had bowed before the Gevethen, pleading to serve — but none would ever again pass through the streets of the city with the aura of invulnerability that Hagen had exuded.

She pressed the knife into the table slowly. ‘Invulnerable,’ she said, laughing viciously. ‘Not while you’re flesh and blood. Not while there’s a joint in your armour. Not while someone can get within arm’s length of you.’

The last remains of her uneasiness disappeared under the clarion cry that now filled her. She was herself again. Her momentary weakness had been caused by those treacherous wakings in the night that had tried to take her back to a world long gone, and beyond any recalling. She twisted the knife, gouging a piece from the table as she dashed aside even the recollection. She must not allow herself to be so undermined. She had faced real dangers in her time and doubtless would again, especially after what she had done — it was ludicrous that she should risk being felled by a mere memory. She needed all her wits to be firmly secured in the present. Perhaps one day, when the Gevethen were destroyed, gentler times would come again, but she dismissed these thoughts as she had dismissed the others. Times past and times to come were of no value to her if they impaired what was here and now.

She sheathed the knife and stood up. The dogs came across to her.

‘Better see what we’ve started,’ she said to them, snapping her fingers and indicating the door. The dogs ran off. From the first she had taught them to leave the building as she did, never by the same way on two consecutive occasions. Now they had ways in and out of the building that even she did not know about.

Outside all was still, save for a slight breeze. She looked up. Clouds littered the blue sky and the sun was warm on her grimy face. Perhaps once, celebration might have rung out within her at this but now, sight and sensation were of tactical value only. They gave her a measure of what places in the Ennerhald would be light, what places dark, where she might safely go without being seen, where she might not, what traders, what beggars, would be about and where.

In the distance, beyond the forest, the mountains gleamed, many peaks still snow-capped. For a moment she was drawn to the idea of setting off towards them with a view to joining Ibryen and his followers. It was not the first time such thoughts had occurred to her and, as on all other occasions, she quickly rejected them. Amongst other reasons, it would not be the easy journey it appeared to be. The mountains were further away than the sunshine painted them, and there was the river to cross, with the Gevethen’s army guarding the obvious crossing points and constantly patrolling the rolling land on the far side. And other, more subtle, ties restrained her. She looked around at her immediate surroundings. This was her world. She understood it, she could use it. Here, she, and she alone, determined the time and order of combat. She found little to be relished in the prospect of skulking far away in the mountains, ambushing the Gevethen’s men, when the heart of the problem lay here in the Citadel and nothing would truly be achieved until it had been cut out.

But despite this judgement, there still lingered the faint hope that one day she would look towards the mountains and the Count and his army would slowly emerge from the forest. She laid the notion aside more gently than she had most of her other reflections that morning.

As she moved through the Ennerhald, it seemed to her that it was quieter than usual. Fewer of its denizens were abroad and even the birds were less boisterous than they should have been on such a day. Her senses, already heightened by the previous day’s work and the knowledge that some form of retribution would probably already be afoot, became even sharper. She moved slowly and cautiously from shadow to shadow, each footstep as silent as she could make it, ears and eyes fully alert. The dogs too, tails and heads low, moved stealthily, refraining from many of the bouts of urgent curiosity that usually marked their journeying. The pack was hunting.

Steadily they moved closer to the area where Ennerhald and city merged uncertainly, until she came at last to a building with five towers that stood high above its neighbours. Two of the towers had partly crumbled and stood jagged against the sky. The remainder were intact. All were covered in ever thickening ivy as Nature quietly strove to regain her own. Noiselessly Jeyan slipped inside, then, pausing briefly for her eyes to adjust to the comparative darkness, she made her way towards a long winding flight of stone steps. As she started up them, Frey ran ahead of her and Assh lingered behind, vanguard and rearguard. At intervals, the stairs opened out into landings with doorways leading to the various floors, but she continued past them. Some of the doorways led only to vertiginous drops, the floors that they once served having long since collapsed, while others led to floors that were treacherously rotten. She had learned from terrifying experience in her early days in the Ennerhald to be very circumspect before venturing out on to untested timber.

Eventually she reached the highest landing. A circle of arched openings led out on to a parapet. Frey was waiting for her dutifully, standing at the top of the stairs. Jeyan patted her then dropped down on all fours and crawled out on to the parapet. This was not for fear of tumbling off, as the parapet wall was whole and solid, but the towers were visible from many parts of the city, not least the Citadel, and any movement above the wall was at risk of being seen. Further, this was a part of the Ennerhald into which the Citadel Guards would venture if the mood so took them. It was not a place to which she normally came, for this reason, together with the fact that there was only one way in and out, though she had determined to use the dense ivy, now draping the parapet wall, as an escape route if need arose. Today however, she needed to peer into the city before she ventured into it, and this was by far the best vantage point. It had come to her as she made her way through the Ennerhald that the silence was so unusual because the steady murmur of the busy city which normally pervaded everything was absent.

She came to a jagged hole in the wall. Once, rainwater had run through it, washing along a carved stone channel to discharge through the mouth of a leering head, but some chance had long since carried the channel away and taken part of the wall with it. Carefully she lowered herself on to her stomach and positioned herself so that by reaching out and parting the ivy she could peer through the opening. From here she could see part of the city, including a view directly along one of the long, straight avenues that led to the Citadel.

What she saw confirmed her suspicions. The city streets, which should have been busy with people going about their business, were deserted. As she watched, a group of horsemen appeared and trotted along the avenue in the direction of the Citadel.

She retreated and moved further round the parapet to another, similar opening. Everywhere that she could see was deserted save for groups of Citadel Guards and, on foot, columns of marching men; the army, she presumed. It was an ominous sight, but she registered it coldly. The Gevethen must have ordered a full curfew as a precursor to a purging — probably a bad one, with house-by-house searching. Anyone foolish enough to be found on the streets was likely to be killed on the spot or, worse, taken away for ‘questioning’ first. Excuses would be futile. Once, an entire household had been massacred as they fled their burning house during a curfew.

For a moment a spasm of guilt threatened to shake her as she thought about what her deed had released on the city, but it passed. The city had not helped her when she needed it; now it must take the consequences of so readily accepting the Gevethen’s rule. Even before she had been driven into the Ennerhald she had seen clearly that no civilized proceeding would bring the loathsome pair down, so the people would have to tolerate ever increasing brutality until they too chose to awaken to this realization.

The only question that formed in her mind was, why was the army there? Ostensibly, the army and the Citadel Guards worked together and held one another in mutual regard as the two pillars that supported the Gevethen. In reality there was little love lost between them. The army thought of the Guards as privileged milksops who, despite the occasional foray, avoided the real business of dealing with the Count in the mountains, and who did little or nothing to ensure the safety of Nesdiryn’s boundaries, now under some threat from nervous neighbours since the Count’s overthrow. The Guards in their turn viewed the army as an adjunct to their own power, a body of fairly worthless expendables necessary to prevent the Count from escaping the mountains and for keeping the population beyond Dirynhald under control until such time as the Guards were sufficient in number to handle the matters properly themselves. The Gevethen, creators of both, played their own game.