Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1

Book 1: The Empty Throne

by Daniel Polansky

Genres: Fantasy; Epic Fantasy

Synopsis

They enslaved humanity three thousand years ago. Tall, strong, perfect, superhuman and near immortal they rule from their glittering palaces in the eternal city in the centre of the world. They are called Those Above by their subjects. They enforce their will with fire and sword.

Twenty five years ago mankind mustered an army and rose up against them, only to be slaughtered in a terrible battle. Hope died that day, but hatred survived. Whispers of another revolt are beginning to stir in the hearts of the oppressed: a woman, widowed in the war, who has dedicated her life to revenge; the general, the only man to ever defeat one of Those Above in single combat, summoned forth to raise a new legion; and a boy killer who rises from the gutter to lead an uprising in the capital.

Those Above is the first of an extraordinary new fantasy epic by the author of the acclaimed Low Town series that will sweep the reader into a wholly alien, wholly recognizable world of rebellion and revenge, of love and of death, of intrigue and pitiless war.

Release date: February 26, 2015

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 400

Sample

Bas could not remember a time when it didn’t hurt to wake.

Age alone would have been enough to make it an exercise in misery, but well before sprouting its first grey hairs his body had been a catalogue of injury. Those halcyon days before pain had ended after he had taken an arrow in the knee during a skirmish in Dycia, and that was closer to twenty years past than fifteen. Bas had preferred a possible future on two legs over a certain existence on one, and though he’d had to threaten the sawbones with his boot knife, and to refuse water for fear it had been drugged, Bas had had his way. Bas was a man who often had his way. The knee still pained him when it rained, and when he stood, and when it was dry, and when he sat, but he got around on it well enough.

That had been the first serious injury, but far from the last. A Marcher had crushed two fingers of his left hand some years back, and this time after a look at the ruptured flesh Bas had allowed the doctor to go ahead with his hacksaw. Sometimes they ached, the ghosts of these digits, though Bas did not understand why their absence would be a source of pain. There were others, many others: a scar on his chest from where a hand axe had cut through his armour, another just below his hip where a disgruntled subordinate had tried to make good on some real or perceived slight, an array of nicks and gouges and half-healed contusions the source, even the existence, of which Bas had all but forgotten. Bas was not one to waste time on rumination.

Nor did his injuries noticeably affect his comportment. From the first words of his attendant – from before really, from when he had heard the folds of his tent being opened – the Legatus had been fully cognisant, or close to it. A short moment and he rolled up from his mat, prepared to face another day.

He had slept in a long shirt and thick wool trousers. Winter came early here on the plains, and summer was no great joy either. The rain had died off before dawn but left behind a thick patina of mist that carried the cold inside the tent and inside Bas’s bones. He turned to the corner and took a long, slow piss into a tin bedpan, taking his time with it, the only luxury he’d be allowed that day. Then he washed his face in the basin of fresh rainwater, paying no more mind to the cold than he had to the ache in his knee. ‘Any movement?’

‘A few more may have trickled in. Nothing that will affect the balance.’

‘And our emissary?’ Bas had told Isaac to send out a rider to the Marchers’ camp at first light. It was a mark of respect for his subordinate that he hadn’t bothered to enquire whether it had been done, simply assumed it and moved on to the resolution.

‘Still out.’

Bas pulled on his armour, supple leather overlaid with strong chain links – good against a blade or arrow, all but useless for the chill. Over the top he belted a long dirk and a short war hammer. Leaning against the wall, covered with a scarred leather scabbard and a thick layer of cloth, was a long blade. He swung the baldric over his shoulder, an awkward motion accomplished without thought or strain. ‘Best have a look,’ he said.

Issac had worked as Bas’s number two for near on fifteen years. Whether his character had fitted itself to the position from the start or whether he had moulded himself to it Bas couldn’t quite remember. He was short and dark and hard as the knob of an oak tree. His eyes were flat and brown and roamed about like a stray dog, searching for a loose strap or a broken catch or a man out of position. Looking at him straight on it took a few seconds to realise that his head was off-kilter, his features strangely unbalanced, though you’d have needed to have viewed him in profile to see the raw red mess of his cropped ears. What exactly Isaac had done to mandate not only his mutilation but also a lifetime of service in the outermost hellhole of the Aelerian Commonwealth Bas had never asked, and Isaac never volunteered. ‘At your command,’ he said now, holding open the folds of his tent.

Bas nodded, then dipped out of what passed for his home and into the structured chaos of camp.

The bivouac of the Western Army, consisting of the Eleventh and Thirteenth Themas, was a city on the move, a whirling, clanging, all-consuming metropolis of flesh and steel that had crossed half a continent to take up residence in the very heart of enemy territory. They came from the Aelerian heartland, a month’s hard ride east; from the coast and the border cities, whose independence had only been finally eclipsed in the years just after Bas’s birth; and from more recently subjugated territories as well, slingers from the Baleferic Isles, archers from Old Dycia. Twenty thousand men and two thousand horses, three hundred wagons, a dozen mobile foundries and a herd of cattle large enough to keep everyone fed. These were only the official numbers, didn’t take into account the perhaps only slightly smaller mob of merchants, con-artists, camp-followers and beggars who had decided the financial benefits of attaching themselves to Bas’s wandering nation outweighed whatever risks the Marchers posed.

Bas stood in the centre of it. Was the centre of it, the camp radiating out around him like the spokes of a wheel. The ranking officers down to the chiliarchs had pitched their tents nearest to Bas. The remainder, with the hoplitai themselves, were packed closer to the walls. The scavengers took up position wherever they could, brightly painted wagons advertising drink and flesh and food. It was Aeleria made manifest. Tomorrow it might well be ashes. Today it was the largest city that the March had ever seen.

There was a fire in front of Bas’s tent, and a cauldron of coffee boiling over it. Bas poured himself a cup, drank it and pretended not to see the boy staring. When that didn’t work he turned his dark brown eyes over to him, only for a moment, but long enough.

‘Legatus,’ Theophilus said, belatedly realising his attentions had been noticed, and snapped a quick salute.

Bas would have found it difficult to hate Theophilus even if Theophilus hadn’t been so obviously infatuated with him. In fact, this last was the only thing Bas really disliked about the youth, though he had been well prepared to find more when the boy had shown up six months earlier, escorted by a troop of cavalrymen. He was the son of a senator and looked it: dark hair cropped short, piercing blue eyes, sallow skin over loose muscles. Of course a half-year on the plains had done its work, levelled out some of his boyishness. It had been a surprise, the speed with which he had taken to the tasks required of every soldier who served on the frontier, for out here there were no servants, and the chores of all but the highest-ranking officers included the menial. Many of the senators Bas had met were courageous, in their way – could wield a blade and didn’t shirk from doing so. Far fewer would have put up their tent without complaint, or chiselled a stone from the shoe of a horse, as Theophilus had been doing until he noticed Bas approaching.

‘It will be today, then?’ he asked.

‘Sharpen your sword,’ Bas said.

Theophilus swallowed his smile, but not before it lit up his face. Though he had taken part in any number of skirmishes since his arrival on the plains, chasing rogue bands of barbarians further into the endless waste, this would be his first real engagement. Bas tried to remember if he had been the same way at the boy’s age. He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t even quite recall the circumstances of his first real battle. It would have been in Salucia, during the long series of conflicts that had anticipated the war against the Others, but that was as far as Bas could say. It had become part of his legend long since – born on the battlefield, bastard son of a camp-follower and an anonymous ranker, nursed by the themas, his first toy a dagger, the beloved son of Terjunta, god of war.

That he hadn’t been born on a battlefield, but in a yurt like countless other of the Commonwealth’s by-blows, was a moot point to the minstrels who had made his name common wherever Aelerian was spoken. Bas had the impression that, as a group, minstrels did not consider truthfulness so great a virtue.

The coffee had grown cool, and Bas tossed what was left of his cup in the fire. ‘I’m going to take a walk,’ he said, turning his back and starting off before Theophilus could answer.

The Western Army was not a popular posting. Far from the capital, half forgotten by the Senate, so far from civilisation it was all but impossible to find a competent whore or a decent flask of wine. And though the Marchers were brutal and cruel, deadly as the passing of time, their cities were mobile camps and their temples wooden, so a soldier couldn’t even expect much in the way of plunder. You’d get something out of the slaves, but not much, as the Marcher men were rough and wild and the women considered uncomely. Bas’s hoplitai were a cross section of the Commonwealth’s poorest and least influential citizens – the third sons of tenant farmers, minor criminals offered the choice of a stint in the themas or the loss of a hand. Man for man they were dirty, cruel and infrequently sober. As a group they were the finest corps of fighting men the nation had to offer, at least as far as Bas was concerned, and there was no one more qualified to offer an opinion.

They had spent the previous afternoon and much of the evening putting up the camp, a task that the barbarians across from them wouldn’t have been capable of completing to any degree of competence in a fortnight. Wood and water had been gathered, a long ditch had been dug at the perimeters, a set of sharpened stakes erected in front of them. Watchtowers had been built at regular intervals along the line – only forty or so links tall, three times the height of a man, but here on the plains you could see halfway to the capital from forty links up. Behind the palisades the rest of the camp had been cut out along classic lines, surveyors ensuring that each avenue was straight as any thoroughfare in the capital, hoplitai setting up their mass tents, quartermasters passing out provisions. The labour had continued until well after nightfall, and for many had been followed by long hours on watch, staring out into the endless night of the plains, piteously far from the bonfires around which their comrades hunkered.

Just the same, Bas’s arrival in the south-east section of camp brought the men to their feet, and a cheer to their lips. The men of the Western Army, and particularly of the Thirteenth Thema, loved Bas, loved him with the curious and unselfconscious passion of children, loved him though he gave no speeches and never offered more than a curt nod. His presence was enough, brooding and unapproachable as it was. They preferred it that way, even – a god does not lower himself to speak with men, to laugh and curse and scratch himself, to feel fear or joy or despair. Let the Commonwealth’s other soldiers, the men of the Fourth or the hated Seventh, enjoy a joke with their superiors, the good humour easy and inauthentic – the Western Army fought beneath the auspice of Death himself.

Bas passed among them, keen-eyed for any show of weakness or lack of discipline. He found little of either. The plains discouraged incompetence. A man who couldn’t handle himself wouldn’t last long enough to be chewed out by his pentarche, would be cut away by one of the roving bands of Marchers looking for stragglers, or lose his toes to frostbite, or find a reed-snake in his boots one morning. Though this would be the first major engagement they’d fought in nearly a year, even in peacetime skirmishes were the rule rather than the exception.

Satisfied, Bas returned to his fire, drank a second cup of coffee and ate three pieces of salted jerky with the methodical rhythm of a man attending to a task. He didn’t say anything to anyone, and his officers made a point of not interrupting the silence. The commander was a man of ritual, of rote even. His daily routine had brought them success in the past – there was no point in disrupting it.

When Bas finished he unslung his weapon and checked the edge. It was threefold the size of the short swords common to the rest of the thema, though it weighed the same or less. The lack of heft had been one of the things Bas had taught himself to compensate for over long years of practice. The guard, in the fashion of the Others who loved all thing avian, was a hawk with wings extended. Or perhaps it was an eagle – falconry was one of the many arts of which Bas remained ignorant. Indeed, the hilt was not of any great interest to him, though it was beautifully rendered and the eyes sapphire. It was the blade that rendered the weapon priceless, sharper and stronger than even the finest human smith could craft. A few of the other hoplitai, veterans of the war against the Others, carried with them smaller blades of similar make, daggers and hand axes, but none could claim a treasure equal to his. Bas spent a few minutes sharpening the foreign metal, glimmering folds and vermillion hue, ever so slightly darker than that of human blood. In the twenty years since he had taken it off its last owner, it had rarely been out of his sight. It rested next to him when he slept, hung on the wall when he shat, lay beside the bed on those infrequent occasions when he felt the need for a fuck. In the strands of doggerel that grew around Bas like ivy, it was called Soulflame, or Endbringer, or Salvation, though if Bas had given it a name he had never yet let it passed his lips.

Bas knew the emissary had arrived before he could see him from the buzz coming off the south road. Not long after a man on horseback could be seen trotting towards the centre of camp, very conscious of his moment of glory.

‘Legatus,’ the emissary said, ‘I return.’

Bas sheathed his sword, stood and approached the man. ‘What news?’

‘Hetman Mykhailo agrees to a meeting. Midway between the camps, in thirty minutes’ time.’

Bas nodded, dismissed him and returned to the fire. The area had grown crowded with officers waiting to hear the news or just to bask in the glory of their leader.

‘What’s the word then, Legatus?’ Hamilcar asked. The Dycian sat cross-legged on the ground, stringing his long, horn-sheathed bow. Hamilcar was tall and dark, dark even by the standards of his nation, with lively eyes that seemed to smile even when his mouth was a grim line. And indeed, his tone suggested that he found the threat of imminent violence a source of amusement. Everything seemed to be a source of amusement to Hamilcar, and though levity was a quality for which Bas had little regard, he found the Dycian’s skill and cleverness nearly made up for it. ‘Are we finally to finish chasing these mule-fuckers?’ Hamilcar said.

‘Make sure your people are ready,’ Bas replied.

Hamilcar lifted one arse-cheek off the ground and let loose a wet fart. The expulsion failed to interrupt the work of his hands. ‘My people are always ready.’

It had taken three themas five years to subdue the Dycians, a contest that had only ended with the capture and virtual destruction of their capital. Bas himself had been part of the force that had stormed the ramparts, could remember the mad rush as his soldiers had swarmed past the remaining defenders and into the great city itself. In part as a guarantee of their continued loyalty, in part because the Commonwealth always needed more killers, a force of three thousand were pressed into service as auxiliaries. The greater part of these had found themselves fighting on the Marches these last ten years, firing their arrows from beneath Aeleria’s banner. Had Bas been a poet, this reversal of fortune might have offered him some fodder.

Bas was very much not a poet, though Hamilcar had some pretensions in that regard. He liked to say that his tongue was sharper than his eye, before demonstrating the excellence of the latter with some extraordinary act of marksmanship, bringing down a bird on the wing or piercing a coin at a hundred paces. Hamilcar’s men were less impressive manifestations of the ideal set by their leader, rough-bodied and cruel, good with a long knife and better with a bow; reckless in victory, brave in defeat. Loud, arrogant, dishonest, clever verging on untrustworthy. In short, excellent allies, so long as you kept a boot on their neck.

Hamilcar finished with his bow, slipped it gently back in the case at his side and took to stuffing his long clay pipe full of tobacco. ‘When you die today, boy,’ he asked Theophilus suddenly, ‘will the Marchers be impressed enough with your bravery to give you a spot on their pyres? Or will they leave your corpse to be picked apart by the winter wolves?’

‘I will labour not to dishonour my fathers,’ Theophilus said, young enough for such seriousness to be forgiven.

‘Then you think to see battle?’

‘The Legatus said to keep my sword sharp.’

Hamilcar held a small branch in the fire till the tip turned red, then brought it to his pipe. ‘The Legatus can only speak in orders. “Sharpen your sword.” “Ready your people.” When he lies with a woman, his first words are,“Moisten your cunt.”’

Theophilus turned redder than the kindling. Isaac turned a chuckle into a cough. No one else in the camp, perhaps no one else in the Commonwealth, would have dared to make a joke at Bas’s expense.

Bas pretended he hadn’t heard the remark. In truth, his temper was not so fierce as was generally believed. He didn’t find Hamilcar amusing, particularly – there was very little indeed that Bas found amusing – but neither was he so consumed by self-importance as to resent the occasional joke.

‘If you talked as well as you fought,’ Isaac said, ‘I wouldn’t have had the pleasure of raping your mother in front of your palace.’

‘Wasn’t my mother,’ Hamilcar answered, taking a draw from his pipe. ‘Was my grandmother. She hadn’t had a good roll for years, and you Aelerians are energetic, if fundamentally untalented.’

‘Remember me to her in your letters,’ Isaac said, taking his leather cap off and holding it to his chest for a moment. ‘She was very tender.’

Hamilcar laughed, went to continue in that line, but Bas cut him off. ‘Enough,’ he said, standing. ‘Hamilcar, you’re with me. Isaac, the camp is yours.’

Hamilcar feigned a scowl, tapped out his half-smoked pipe and stood. It was a source of pride that Bas kept him in his counsels despite his foreign birth and former allegiance, that his intellect and ability was respected by the Legatus. In fact, Bas would have preferred to take Isaac, who was more reliable if less brilliant than the Dycian. But in the unlikely event that the Marchers decided to violate the flag of truce, Isaac would be required to lead the hoplitai in revenge of their fallen commander. Or, failing that, maintain a capable fighting retreat.

Bas grabbed a pair of bodyguards and his personal standard-bearer, and they walked quickly towards the stables. Bas did not count himself much of a horseman, and his opinion contained no weight of false modesty. To be a truly skilled rider requires empathy, the capacity to interpret and alter the moods and feelings of a dumb animal, and this was not a quality that Bas could justly claim. He worked best on two feet, or in the thick of battle where manoeuvre counted for little. Oat was the name of the horse he chose – a silly name, but Oat had been given it long before Bas had owned him and Bas had never cared enough to change it. Oat was a stallion, strong and mean. He obeyed Bas for the simple reason that Bas was stronger and meaner.

Though his people were little-regarded as riders, Hamilcar was a masterful horseman. It was what he did best, he claimed, after bending a bow and pleasuring a woman, and though Bas couldn’t speak to the last, he had seen the Dycian feather enough men to recognise at least that much of the boast as truth. ‘Shall we die today, then, Legatus?’ Hamilcar asked, boosting himself into the saddle. ‘Will Mykhailo do the wise thing, as my people should have done, and kill you as soon as he sees you?’

‘If they kill me they’ll kill you the same.’

‘I’d die happy, knowing that Aeleria has lost the tip of her spear.’ Hamilcar had been a servant of the Commonwealth for ten years, had signed up for a second term after his first had expired. In all that time he had never returned to Dycia, though he claimed three wives and a passel of lovers still wept his name into the night. Hamilcar would die in a foreign land, the victim of some quarrel in which he had no particular interest. He was as much a soldier now as Isaac; the talk was just posturing, and posturing was how he handled his nerves.

Everyone had a way, and Bas had seen most of them. Some yelled, some boasted, some prayed. Isaac was steady as a stone in the thick of things, but as soon as it was over he’d find the nearest flask and drink himself into oblivion. Jon the Sanguine, who had taught Bas everything he knew of war, used to piss himself before a hard scrap, a bloom of yellow spreading out through the crotch of his trousers – but despite the odour his orders were unfailingly correct, and in those few instances when his own life had been in danger he had fought like a man possessed, laughing and cutting flesh like spring flowers.

Bas put spurs to his beast by way of answer, and Hamilcar and the bodyguards followed after him. Down the south road leading out of camp, through the open gate and into the plains beyond. It was late summer and the March was striking if not quite beautiful, the grass high enough to hide a troop of soldiers, the land so flat that it extended out into the horizon, a sea of blue meeting with a sea of green.

Bas of course thought little of it, his attention taken up with the horde of men occupying the field some few cables distant. They seemed very large, as hordes of men tend to. The Marchers’ camp looked haphazard by the elaborate standards of the Aelerians, but Bas knew that impression to be a false one. This was not a mass of raiders and bandits, brought together by the promise of booty. The confederation that lay across from him represented an extraordinary accomplishment of diplomacy, hundreds of man-hours spent by the counsel fires trying to convince a warlike people to put aside centuries of enmity, to forget their traditional freedoms and swear obedience to a single leader. That it existed at all was testament to the degree to which the Commonwealth was hated.

It was twenty minutes before Hamilcar made out the Hetman and his lifeguard riding out from the vast horde, and another five before Bas could do the same. Mykhailo had been a leader of the Marchers for thirty years, and a year to the plainsfolk meant six months shivering in their tents and six months making war on their neighbours. They had no notion of power as a hereditary gift, nor as an obligation. Success was what they honoured, the only acceptable currency – success in raids against the Aelerians and against their fellow barbarians, success that could only be achieved with a strong arm and a sharp eye. Mykhailo possessed all of these qualities in abundance, had demonstrated them for decades in an arena as brutal as could be found.

He was smaller than his reputation might have suggested, and age hung over him like a mantle. His face was strained as old leather, his eyes grey and small, his hair bone-white, hip-long and pulled back in a gaudy silver clasp. But his body was perfectly erect in the saddle, and his war lance equally steady, and he greeted his enemy without a tremor. ‘Hail Bas, Killer of Gods. May death pass over you another day.’

It was what the Marchers called him. Even two thousand cables distant, among a people who had never seen an Other, Bas’s great act of murder had elevated him above the common rung of men. ‘Hail Mykhailo, son of Bohdan, who rode between the raindrops. May fate view your enemies with displeasure.’

Mykhailo had brought with him a half-dozen of his riders, young men, tall and fierce-looking, each mounted on a shaggy pony and carrying a steel weapon. ‘Are you so sure you wish that, God-Killer? For my enemies to meet with misfortune?’ He spoke Aelerian confidently, though with a harsh accent.

‘We aren’t yet enemies, Hetman. There’s still time to avoid bloodshed.’ But Bas knew better even as he said it. If Mykhailo had wanted peace, if this had been a show of force to sell a few more years of tranquillity for golden trinkets and Commonwealth-forged steel, he would have brought with him a yurt, one of the small horsehide tents that could be set up and taken down within the span of a few minutes. And they would have sat beneath it and drank the fermented mare’s milk that the barbarians loved more than wine, and paid each other elaborate compliments, and the Legatus would promise the Hetman trade goods and coin, and the Hetman would promise not to kill anyone for a while, or at least not to kill any Aelerians.

Bas knew when Mykhailo didn’t get off his horse that there was no chance of averting the coming battle. He had known before that, really, but he was sure then.

‘Why do I find the son of Bohdan here, on territory the people long ago granted to the children of Aeleria?’ Bas asked.

Mykhailo turned his head to one side and coughed over his shoulder. ‘Who made you this grant? Mykhailo, who comes with the setting sun?’

‘With the great Chief Longinus, whose banner you rode beneath.’

‘Rode beneath for one summer, five years ago. I swore no oath to that flea-ridden cripple. He is no kin of mine, not by birth, nor suckling. If he is happy eating Aelerian bread, that is his burden to take to the ancestors. I am not content, and I have made no such promises. Better to ask the God-Killer what it is that brings him so far from his home, and his hearth?’

‘Aeleria is wherever its people are. And wherever its people were. We’ve come east from Eilweid. The Commonwealth has seen the bodies of her citizens in half a dozen freeholds all the way up from the mouth of the Pau. The bodies and what were done to them.’

‘The bodies of invaders, of trespassers well-warned.’

‘Do invading armies bring with them their women and children?’

‘Your kind do. They bring their families and they fence in the grass, and they build their foolish wooden houses that freeze in the winter and burn as soon as a torch is put to them. And then they come screaming to the God-Killer to save them from their own foolishness. Does it ever bother you, being the running dog of halfwits too weak to protect their own seed?’

Mykhailo was a fine speaker, even in his second tongue. Most of the plainsfolk were – the leaders anyway, skills honed over long winter fires in the communal yurts, telling jokes and false stories of their accomplishments. Bas wasn’t a good speaker, had never wanted or tried to be so. ‘I won’t argue the rights and wrongs of it with you, Hetman. This is not the first time we’ve stood across from each other. I need not boast of the strength of my themas – you’ve watched your riders break against them more than once.’

Mykhailo smiled, brown-toothed but honest. ‘Do I look so young as to bend knee for a few more years beneath the sky?’

‘And your men? Are there none among them who would prefer life to death?’ Bas pointed almost unconsciously to one of Mykhailo’s bodyguards, a hulking brute who became furious at being singled out. He shook his lance and said something unfriendly to the Hetman. Mykhailo responded in his native tongue, too swiftly for Bas to make out, though he recognised the tone, each word like a lash. And indeed the bodyguard fell silent and turned his eyes away to hide his shame.

The conflict averted, or more accurately postponed, Mykhailo took a long time before answering. ‘Better an honest death in battle than a dotage as protectorates of Aeleria. When first you came here, God-Killer, we rode free from the Salt Flats to the Pau River, and never saw a yurt or a cow that was not ours. Now the dark-skinned children of Aeleria plant wheat on the graves of my fathers, tell me where to ride and whom to kill. Your hunger is never-ending. You speak of peace, but what peace can be made with fire?’ Mykhailo fell into a long coughing jag, spat a hunk of yellow into the wind. ‘Enough, God-Killer – between us there is nothing but war. I will die this morning, or you will.’

Mykhailo had intended this to be the last word, was turning his pony back the way he had come when Bas reached out and grabbed his forearm. ‘Think hard before refusing. If you find victory today you will not have long to enjoy it – by spring Aeleria will have sent another army to avenge me, and a third if that proves insufficient. And on the day that fortune turns against you, they will plant stakes from here to the wastes, and spike your men atop them, and sell your womenfolk into bondage. And there will be no one to remember your glory beside the fires, or carry your name onward. We do not make war for glory, or for captives.’ Bas spread his free hand out over the empty plains around them. ‘Aeleria will till these fields. If not this year, then the next.’

‘I know how your kind make war,’ Mykhailo said, tearing his arm away from Bas. A spark of fury uncoiled itself from the Hetman’s soul and spread up into his eyes. Hamilcar shifted his hand to the hilt of the sabre that hung down his saddle, and a second later Bas’s s