A Time of Dread Read online

  Shadows flitted across the ground and the sound of wings filled Bleda’s ears as the Ben-Elim swooped low. One flew lower than the rest, great wings beating as he hovered above Erdene and Bleda a long moment, grass and dust swirling, then he alighted gently upon the ground. He was tall, taller than any man Bleda had seen, his hair raven-black, wearing a coat of bright mail and gripping a spear in his fist. Blood crusted the spear’s blade.

  ‘Is this him?’ the Ben-Elim asked, eyes lingering on Bleda a moment, then rising to Erdene.

  Erdene was silent for so long that Bleda thought she would not answer.

  ‘You must be strong,’ Erdene said to Bleda.

  Fear trickled through Bleda, then, at something in his mother’s voice, and in the way the winged warrior had looked at him.

  He tried to master his fear, to control the prickling in his eyes that threatened tears.

  No. I am Sirak. I am son to Erdene, Lord-of-all-she-sees.

  ‘Good.’ The Ben-Elim stooped down and grabbed Bleda by the collar of his tunic, hoisting him into the air. Bleda instinctively snatched for an arrow from his quiver, nocking it to his bow, but with a flick of his wrist the Ben-Elim slapped it from Bleda’s grip, sending his bow falling to the ground. Bleda glared at the Ben-Elim, expecting his mother to intervene, to protect him, as she always had done, but she just sat upon her horse, looking at him with her grey eyes.

  ‘I am Israfil, Lord Protector of the Land of the Faithful, and you are coming with me,’ the Ben-Elim said. ‘A surety that your mother will keep the peace once we are gone.’

  ‘What? Where?’ Bleda said, the Ben-Elim’s words seeping through to him slowly, as if through water.

  ‘You are my ward, Bleda, and Drassil will be your new home,’ the Ben-Elim said.

  Ward. Drassil.

  The words set Bleda reeling as if they were blows. Drassil was the Ben-Elim’s fortress, far to the west.

  I am to be their ward. A prisoner, he means.

  ‘No,’ Bleda whispered. ‘Mother?’

  A long silence, a look between Erdene and Israfil that spoke of pride and shame, of the victor and the defeated. The fear returned then, a chill in Bleda’s heart, seeping into his veins, carrying a tremor to his lips.

  The cold-face. Do not shame Mother. Do not shame my people.

  ‘It is agreed,’ Erdene said, her face a mask, only her eyes speaking her message.

  You must be strong.

  ‘It is the price that must be paid,’ the Ben-Elim intoned. ‘There will be peace in the Land of the Faithful. There is only one enemy, only one foe who shall be fought: the Kadoshim and their followers.’

  ‘No,’ Bleda said, both denial and refusal. He felt hot tears bloom in his eyes, snatched at them, knowing the shame they brought.

  ‘Altan and Hexa will not allow you to do this,’ Bleda said, anger and fear twisting his voice, then there was a rushing of air and a beating of wings as more Ben-Elim sped from the sky, alighting around Israfil. The first was fair-haired, a long scar running from forehead to chin. He threw something at Israfil’s feet. They dropped with a thud, rolled in the grass and fell still.

  Two heads, eyes bulging, blood still dripping.

  Altan and Hexa.

  The world went silent. Bleda’s vision was reduced to the severed heads of his brother and sister. He heard something, distantly, realized that it was him, that he was screaming, twisting and bucking in Israfil’s grip, hands reaching to gouge the Ben-Elim’s eyes, but Israfil held him at arm’s length until slowly Bleda’s strength drained away, like wine from a pierced skin. Israfil regarded Bleda with dark, emotionless eyes, then finally shifted his gaze to the fair-haired Ben-Elim who had cast the heads at Israfil’s feet. Although Israfil asked no questions, did not even utter a word, the blond Ben-Elim spoke as if answering a reprimand, his eyes dropping.

  ‘They would not surrender,’ he said, his feet shuffling in the dirt. ‘They slew Remiel.’ His eyes came up, fierce and defiant, and met Israfil’s. ‘They slew a Ben-Elim, gave me no choice.’ Israfil held his gaze a long moment, then gave a curt nod. With a flick of his wrist he threw Bleda into the air, a giant catching him and placing him on the saddle in front of him. Bleda found new strength, fighting and squirming, tears blurring his vision, but the giant held him tight.

  Israfil waved his hand and then the giant was tugging on his reins shouting a command, and the huge mountain of fur and muscle beneath Bleda was turning, lumbering away from the Ben-Elim and Bleda’s mother, from his kin and people, away from everything he knew, away from Bleda’s whole world.

  Towards his new home.

  Towards Drassil.

  CHAPTER TWO

  DREM

  The Year 137 of the Age of Lore, Hunter’s Moon

  Drem grunted as he lifted another shovelful of earth and hurled it out of the pit he was digging. He rested a moment, drank from a water skin, looked up and saw a cold blue sky through dappled branches that were swaying in a breeze. Birdsong drifted down to him; the angle of the sun told him it was close to sunset. The pit was deep, now level with his head, but he kept digging, swapping his water skin for a pickaxe that he swung with practised rhythm. Ten swings with the pickaxe, loosen the ground, fill his shovel and throw it out of the pit. Back to the pickaxe. His shoulders and back ached, sweat stinging his eyes, but he ignored the discomfort, blinked the sweat away and continued to hack remorselessly at the iron-hard ground.

  A sound seeped through the rhythm of his labour and the noise of the river beyond the pit. Footsteps. He dropped his pickaxe, grabbing his spear and pointing it upwards.

  A shadow fell across him.

  ‘That’ll do,’ Olin, his da, said, looking down to him through a mess of iron-grey hair.

  ‘Not deep enough,’ Drem grunted, putting his spear down and picking up the axe again.

  ‘It’s deep enough to hold any elk I’ve ever seen,’ Olin said.

  Drem had been digging pits since he was ten summers old. How deep? he’d asked his da all those years ago. Twice your height, his da had said to him. Back then his da had been digging the pit with him, breaking up the soil and Drem doing the shovelling. Now, though, eleven years later and Drem did most of the digging himself, his da setting other traps along their hunting runs with noose and rope. He had to remind himself that he didn’t need to dig hunting pits twice his height any more, not now he’d grown into a man, and a tall one at that. It still made him uncomfortable to stop, though. He liked to do things the way he was told the first time, didn’t like change. With an act of will, he slammed the pickaxe into the ground one last time, felt it connect with something solid that sent a shiver up his arm.

  ‘Sounds like you’ve found the mountain’s root,’ Olin said. ‘Come on, let’s eat.’

  Drem yanked the pickaxe free, threw it up to his da, then his shovel; last of all held his spear shaft out. Olin grabbed it and held tight as Drem pulled himself out of the pit. His da grunted with the strain, even though he seemed to be made of muscle lean and knotted as old roots.

  Drem turned and looked at his handiwork.

  ‘You chose a good spot,’ Olin said, looking at a well-worn path that the pit cut across. It led down out of the foothills they were standing in towards a fertile plain, the ground around the river there soft and marshy.

  Drem smiled at his father’s praise.

  Together they cast a lattice of willow rods over the pit, then a thin covering of branches and leaves, finally some bark and lilies.

  ‘To an elk that tastes nicer than hot porridge and honey on a winter’s day,’ they said together, the end of their ritual, and then they turned and made their way up a steep slope towards their camp, the river foaming white alongside them.

  The sun was a line of fire on the edge of the world by the time Drem was turning a spit over a small fire-pit, fat from a quartered hare spitting and sizzling as it dripped into the flames.

  ‘Smells good,’ Olin grunted as he finished tending to their packhorses an
d furs, then came and sat down, wrapping a deerskin about Drem’s shoulders and pulling one tight about his own. Drem felt cold now that he had stopped digging, the night’s chill seeping into his bones. Rolls of skins surrounded them, tied and piled high. It had been a bountiful hunting season, and now they were almost home.

  Drem carved the meat with his favourite knife, the wide blade was wicked-sharp and longer than was usual for a hunting knife.

  They call a blade like that a seax in this part of the Banished Lands, his da had told him when they’d forged it together.

  Drem didn’t care what it was called; he just knew that he loved it, that it felt a part of him, his permanent companion. The bone-antler hilt was worn to a perfect fit for Drem’s fist. He shared the meal between them and they sat eating in companionable silence. They were partway into foothills that led up to a range of snow-capped mountains at their back, but Drem was staring in the opposite direction, out over the landscape that unrolled below them. A great lake dominated the view, its waters dark and shimmering in the setting sun, about it a patchwork of tree and meadow that was tinged with red and gold as autumn slipped into winter. Between Drem and the lake the lights of a large town flickered into life, tiny as fireflies from this distance. A sturdy stockade wall ringed the town, dotted with torchlight. It was Kergard, the most northerly town of the Desolation, built by hard people to survive in a hard environment. Drem liked the look of it all, the colours merging, lights glowing soft and warm like candles. Other lights sputtered into existence beyond the stockade walls, homesteads scattered across the land. Drem’s eyes searched out their own home, a little to the north and nestled amongst the fringes of woodland, though he knew there would be no fires lit, no torches or candles burning at a window.

  Home, if I can call anywhere that, when I’ve spent most of my life travelling from one place to the next. This will be our fifth winter in the same place, though, and that’s the longest I can remember staying anywhere since Mam . . .

  He was looking forward to returning home after half a year of hunting and trapping in the Bonefells. He liked his life in the Wild with his da – loved it even – but his da was right: winter was almost upon them, and that was not the time to be sleeping on root and rock.

  As he stared at the speckled landscape he saw a new cluster of lights appear, further north and east from his home, close to the northern bank of the lake.

  ‘That wasn’t there when we left,’ he said to his da, pointing.

  ‘No.’ Olin frowned. ‘Looks like Kergard’s grown. Hope they know what a winter this far north is like. The land won’t be green like this for much longer.’ His da looked from the panorama before them and then up and over his shoulder at the snow-capped mountains and darkening sky, watching his breath mist before him. ‘Winter’s following close behind us.’

  ‘Aye,’ Drem grunted, pulling his deer-skin tighter. ‘Strange that this land is called the Desolation,’ he murmured, struggling with imagining the landscape before him as an uninhabited wasteland of rock and ash.

  His da grunted, licking fat from his fingers.

  ‘And that lake was once a crater?’

  ‘Aye, it was,’ Olin said. ‘The Starstone Crater, where a rock fell from the sky. Started a lot of trouble, did that rock.’

  Drem knew all about that, had listened to the tale-tellers speak of how the Starstone had crashed to earth, though he struggled to imagine such a thing happening. The tales told of Seven Treasures that had been forged from the Starstone, and that the first war had been fought over those Treasures, men and giants shedding a river of blood. It had taken a god to stop it; Elyon the Maker had unleashed his legions of Ben-Elim, raining a judgement of death and destruction upon the world and its inhabitants. Elyon had only stopped when he realized that he had been tricked, lured into the plan of his great enemy, Asroth, Demon-Lord of the Fallen. Elyon had walked away then, abandoning the world of flesh and banishing both his own Ben-Elim as well as Asroth and his Kadoshim hordes to the world of spirit, the Otherworld, where they remained trapped for two thousand years as men and giants slowly rebuilt their shattered world.

  Until just over a hundred years ago, when the Kadoshim found a sorcerous way to break their bonds in the Otherworld. They returned to the Banished Lands in an explosion of hatred and slaughter, but the Ben-Elim followed them, their eternal war spilling into the world of flesh.

  ‘Much has changed since the coming of the Ben-Elim,’ Drem said.

  ‘Aye,’ Olin grunted. ‘And not much of it good.’

  Drem’s da was not a supporter of the Ben-Elim. It was rare that he would even mention them, despite Drem’s attempts to lure him into that conversation.

  ‘Turning the Desolation into this is good, though,’ Drem said, waving a hand at the vista before them.

  ‘This is good,’ his da agreed, ‘but the Ben-Elim didn’t do this. They’ve done it,’ he said, pointing to the settlement beside the lake, ‘and others like them. People like us.’

  ‘We’re trappers, hunters.’

  ‘Aye, well, I mean people that have travelled north and settled here, irrigating, farming, planting, growing. The Desolation has become this because generations of people like us made it a better place. Though I suppose the Ben-Elim are the reason behind that as well, their protection in the south was what drove many here.’

  Drem thought about that a while. Stars prickled into life in the crow-black of night as darkness seeped into the world around them.

  ‘They’ll come here, too, though, won’t they?’ Drem said into the night. ‘The Ben-Elim. Sooner or later, as they have elsewhere, to hunt the Kadoshim.’

  He’d said that last word quickly, knowing his da did not like to hear it uttered.

  Kadoshim. Dread demons of Asroth who had escaped their bonds in the Otherworld and entered Drem’s world to become creatures of flesh and blood, monsters come to destroy all that lived in these Banished Lands. His da hated them, hated the very sound of their name.

  Because they killed my mam.

  He didn’t like to upset his da, could hear his breathing was sharper, his frame tense, just from those few words, but if he could get him to talk of the Kadoshim, maybe he would then be able to talk of Drem’s mam, too . . .

  ‘Aye,’ Olin growled, spitting on the floor beside him. ‘The Ben-Elim will be here one day. But later rather than sooner, I hope. May they linger in Drassil another hundred years. And every day until then shall be better for their absence. I’ve searched many a year for a place where we can live free.’ He drew in a breath, seemed about to say something more, but only silence followed.

  Drem breathed deep, the scent of pine trees and winter heavy in the air.

  ‘Have you seen Drassil?’ he asked, a new tactic.

  Olin gave him a sidelong look.

  ‘I have, as you well know.’

  Drem opened his mouth to ask another question.

  ‘Enough,’ his da snapped as he stood quickly. ‘A long day on the morrow, I’m for my bed.’ He stamped his feet, stood there hesitantly for a moment, looking down at Drem. Then he walked away and lay close to the fire. Drem heard the rustle of furs and popping of a cork as a skin of mead was unstoppered.

  Drem sat and stared into the darkness, listening to the sounds of the night.

  Drem woke to a great crashing. Staggering to his feet, furs falling away, wet with dawn’s dew, he looked to his da, who was on his feet, a short-handled axe in one hand, knife in the other. The stillness of dawn was shattered by a roaring that echoed through the foothills, startling birds from branches.

  ‘The pit,’ Olin said, and then he was off and running. Drem stooped and swept up his spear, his long legs carrying him after his da, who was already disappearing amongst the pine trees that cloaked the hillslope.

  The path curved close to the river, which frothed and foamed with icy water fresh from the mountains. Drem closed in on his da as the ground began to level, and then saw him skid to a halt, twenty paces ahead.
r />   Drem caught up, breathing heavily, staring in disbelief at the sight that had caused Olin to stop.

  The elk pit was a mass of limbs and fur, a great-antlered bull-elk with head and shoulders scrabbling on the ground as it tried to heave itself out. It was lowing frantically, clouds of cold breath misting and billowing, a terror and agony in its cries.

  Because something else was in the pit with it. Or part of it was, its bulk too great for the pit to contain.

  Behind the thrashing elk Drem caught a glimpse of white fur, of long claws and a wide, gaping maw full of teeth as they clamped down upon the bull-elk’s muscled neck.

  A bear. A giant bear. What’s it doing here, so far south of the Bonefells?

  Scythe-like claws opened up bloody tracks across the elk’s chest, the bear gave a vicious shake of its head and Drem heard the crack of bones breaking, the elk slumping, slipping slowly back into the pit.

  Even through the fog of shock, Drem realized he’d never seen a white bear before. Beside him his father stood as frozen as he was, awestruck by the savage power before them.

  ‘What do we do?’ Drem whispered.

  The bear’s head reared up from the pit, jaws red with gore, white fur stained pink, and it looked straight at them.

  ‘Run like hell,’ his da said, pushing Drem back up the path. In a handful of heartbeats they were both sprinting, legs pumping, behind them the sound of the bear extricating itself from the elk and pit, the thunder of its gait as it lumbered after them, Drem feeling the ground shaking beneath his feet.

  They ran amongst pine trees, where the ground was spongy with forest litter and pine needles. Drem’s heart felt it was bursting though his chest, a great crashing behind them as the bear barrelled into a tree, the sound of wood splintering. Then sudden pain, Drem’s foot plunging into a hole, his body flying through the air, crunching to the ground. He tried to rise, but a sharp pain shot up his ankle into his leg and he dropped to the ground.