Fifty thousand able-bodied men, fifty thousand dead or injured: in the end not as important as one Company, a handful of friends, one family. One brother. Go and make your peace with him, Leith, and everything else will fall into place.'

'Hal sent you, didn't he,' said Leith flatly.

Kurr looked at the boy, his eyes narrowed. It was as well to remember that he was clever, much cleverer than he appeared. Truly the son of his father. 'Yes, the cripple sent me. He warned you about this. You need to keep the love of your family close to your heart and always in your thoughts at times like this. Come and visit your friends, son, come and call on your family. There'll be no recriminations.'

'You can tell Hal you delivered his message like a good delivery boy,' Leith said, intending the insult, and was savagely glad - and bitterly hurt - to see the old man's face harden. 'Leave me to think on what you have said. Go out the door, go past the guards. I am not ashamed of you.'

'But I am ashamed of you,' the old man growled. 'A boy called to be a man, but who insists on acting like a boy. Well, boy, I am leaving. But remember that a boy needs his friends and family if he doesn't want to grow up into a lonely and bitter old man.' The old eyes fixed on the young man's pale face, holding his gaze. After a few moments, Leith dropped his head.

Without another word Kurr turned on his heel and left the tent, occasioning grunts of surprise from the guards outside. For a long time after the flap had closed Leith lay unmoving in his pallet, staring at the play of light on the ceiling. Finally he rubbed his eyes and turned away from the light, seeking the questionable solace of sleep.

The Lord of Bhrudwo understood his enemies and knew what motivated them. Constantly they underestimated him, thinking him mortal like them, limited as they were limited. How could they know that at various times in the last hundred years he had travelled to Faltha, had lived and walked in their towns and cities? How could they even suspect his planning would be so meticulous? He learned so much and forgot nothing, his disciplined mind a repository of transcendent wisdom. As a consequence he knew that uppermost in their minds would be concern over the numbers of dead and wounded - in particular of those whose misfortune it was to live in the path of the conflict. Bizarrely shortsighted or simply sentimental, they would protect these people even at the risk of losing the war. He challenged them at every opportunity by sending men to destroy the villages the Falthans tried to save, on occasion having some of the inhabitants publicly tortured, so as to unsettle them.

Moreover, he knew the lie of the land far better than any of them. Did they think they had deceived him with this clumsy attempt to lure him towards Vulture's Craw? It was the only defensible place west of the Gap, and would suit his purposes admirably. Indeed, the Undying Man had once spent a year living in Aleinus Gates, acting as a river guide, studying the Gates and the country behind them. It had then been his thought to engineer this as the place of the final battle. His decision had been confirmed by what he had learned in the two following years, which he spent in the far west shadowing an elusive prophecy he'd heard from a Dhaurian's dying lips. The blind Falthans believed they could spy out his land with impunity, and never for a moment thought that he might come to Faltha to learn what he needed to know. And since that time everything that happened was according to his plan.

Looking through the eyes of the eunuch, he smiled down at the face of the girl sleeping uneasily in her litter, and was content.

Once things were organised, the right people paid and other people intimidated or eliminated, it took a surprisingly short time for the City to fall into his hands. Yes, his hands, even though his would not be the hands everyone saw. The citizenry still thought the City governed by the collective of business leaders and worthies appointed by the northerners; but unknown to all but a few, the Guard and the warehouse owners took their orders from him. Soon two of the appointed leaders would suffer tragic accidents, allowing the Escaignian and the Mystic to step in. They, too, would follow his orders, though they did not know it yet, and thus he would control their followers.

The Arkhos of Nemohaim stretched languidly, eyeing the shivering figure in the corner of the well-furnished room. His old room, in fact; the symmetry pleased him. He pursed his lips.

Pleasure could wait. Clasping the vial in his left hand, still unable to use his right - curse the northerners! -he motioned his servants to prepare the blue fire. His old master would be surprised.

The snow lay heavy on Vulture's Craw, deep but frozen, and the Army of Faltha forced themselves a path, after a fashion.

There was no helping the fact this would make it easier for the following Bhrudwans. It had been nearly two months since the loss of the Nagorj. Their strength and conditioning had recovered somewhat, so now was the time to test themselves by an all-out sprint to the narrowest part of the steep-sided valley. They had no time to lay obstacles in the path of their pursuers. The weather offered them no assistance, for it was as settled now as it had been wild when last they had come this way.

Gradually the hills became familiar to Leith. Here is how far east we came on the southern path. The snow here was at its thickest, and occasionally the marchers came across sad reminders of the disaster a season ago: a discarded shield, the carcass of a horse, an abandoned wagon. Leith did not look too hard, so as not to see any frozen bodies, although he heard the talk. His men were unsettled, but he had no choice. This was where he had to be.

They pressed on, perhaps a day's march ahead of the Bhrudwan outriders.

There came a morning when the forward riders, including Leith and Sir Amasian, his ever-present shadow, passed under a high bluff, and the Loulean youth realised that under this cliff Sjenda and the wagoneers had perished. And around the corner the valley opened up a little, revealing the place where the Falthan army had recovered from the untimely snowstorm.

'We have one day,' he said to his generals. 'One day to prepare a defence. We will keep the Bhrudwans from passing this bluff. They must not enter the valley downriver.'

His mother Indrett stared at him. Of late she had been doing a great deal of that. The chief strategist she might be, but he was the Bearer of the Arrow. There could be no argument on this point, for Amasian had been quite specific.

This was the place he had seen. Leith glanced across the river, and noted the presence of a bluff that might have been the twin of that which they stood under. Yes, he thought, the image on the ceiling shining brightly in his mind. This is the place.

CHAPTER 15.

RAINBOW FALLING.

THE HUGE GORGE OF the Aleinus River narrowed until the winter sun could not penetrate, not unless it was directly overhead. And cloud-free, of course, the tall, grey-robed man thought as he stood at the head of his army. This place is never cloud'free. He remembered his days as a guide on this river, Faltha's artery of trade and commerce. Boats going east and west, traders making profit from Favony and Redana'a, bringing fish downriver from Turtu Donija and even further north, and sometimes illegal goods traded from the Wodrani: exotic powders or liquor. The shouting of boatsmen echoing from the cliff walls, all quiet now in winter. There were always clouds above the narrow-throated gorge, whipped up by the relentless winds or driven south from the Wodranian Mountains. The river sometimes seemed to breathe the clinging valley mist into existence, he recalled. There was a bluff some distance ahead which used to have every kind of moss growing on its sheer'sided walls.

It would be the place chosen by the Falthans to mount their final defence. The valley widened out downriver, and perhaps a day's ride west of the bluff a bridge crossed the Aleinus. They will not want us to get near the bridge. The valley is perhaps two hundred yards wide by Moss Bluff, and they will wall it off. Perhaps we should approach more slowly, to give them time to complete their construction. Or would that be too obvious? No: the Lord of Bhrudwo knew nothing could be too obvious for those who had charge of the Falthan army.

Not like Conal. That one was clever, cunning and patient. He laughed quietly. But over nine hundred and fifty years dead. Safe in the arms of oblivion...

. . . the huge figure shadowed against the sun. . . the indrawn gasp of the crowd in the Square of Rainbows .. . the swish of the arrow as it flew towards him .. . the thunk as it sliced through his wrist and lodged in the Rock of the Fountain. But above all the burning of the Water as it travelled down his throat! Aaah! The burning! The agony as it touched the place where the embers of the Gift of Fire still lodged, the agony that spread through every joint in his body...

. . . these had been his dreams for two thousand years. Two thousand years and never a moment of oblivion! Always the same dream! But the last two months had been different. He would have brought down the Citadel of the Most High himself, were it accessible to one who was not dead, for one dreamless night's sleep. But for two months! No price would have been too high to pay.

He glanced at the litter beside him and at the four plump figures that bore it. The person in the litter had been responsible. Just seeing the litter reminded him of the nightmares that had finally passed. It was difficult not to feel gratitude.

She had spat in his face, and he struck her an instinctive blow with all of his pent-up power and rage behind it, knocking her some way down the slope. It had been the blow, not the fall, that had almost killed her, but the fall had done further damage, if it was possible to further damage someone who was so close to death. In his fury he had taken her up to his own tent, intent on breathing some life back into her, if only to crush it out of her again, slowly.

But she had been a challenge he could not resist. Her life ' had been all but extinguished, the merest spark remaining to taunt him, as a challenge to his limitless power. Could he draw her back from the arms of oblivion? Could he let her escape so easily?

He tried everything he knew, reaching for vials and ointments he seldom used outside of Andratan's cruel confines, but the best of them merely kept death waiting at the door. Finally he had resorted to the most extreme measure of all. To his surprise, it had worked. The cost to her, however, would be enormous.

He had been there when she awakened; not through the eyes and ears of his foolish servant, but in the flesh. He sat there in the shadows of his own tent as she babbled and groaned, as she finally found the strength to run her hands over her numerous wounds, as she rose from the bed and saw herself in the mirror, as she saw what she had become.

Aaah, the screams had been worthy of Andratan. A soul that knew it was truly lost, that it was worse than dead, bound forever to one who would not die. The eunuch had warned her, for which he'd had his tongue cut from his pleading mouth, so she knew what had happened. She knew what he could now do to her.

But she suffered a greater agony still, about which none of his other unwilling servants knew.

Unlike them, she had already acquired the Gift of Fire. And now, because of what he had done, she would know unremitting pain for the rest of her life.

The rest of? How could the unrelenting span of eternity be called 'the rest'? Soon she would know the truth of the Most High's curse of Life, just as he knew it.

Inside the litter Stella tensed. She could sense the Destroyer close by. Part of what he had done to her had tied them together, as though they were attached by some sort of cord. For the thousandth time she railed at her fate. Why didn't he let me die! How could anything I have done, including running from the Company, merit this punishment?

She had awoken from a sleeping nightmare to a waking horror. Skin broken, body twisted near to ruin all down her right side, it had been all she could do to walk the few steps from the bed to the mirror on the wall, where she beheld what had been done to her, the remaking of Stella in her new master's own dark image. The waxen face staring back at her drooped on one side, lips slack, grey skin hanging loose on her thin neck. Her right hand was a claw, fingers twisted in on themselves, unresponsive to her efforts at straightening them. Her insides seemed to boil as though they had been set afire. Several times since waking she had checked herself, fully expecting to see gouts of flame emerge from her arms and legs.

Over the weeks that followed, she pieced together what had been done to her. Some of the pieces were given to her by the Destroyer himself, who spoke of the lengths he had gone to in order to keep her alive. She had new gifts, he told her, as if he thought she would be grateful for the constant torture her life had become. 'You and I, we are the only ones in the world with both Gifts, Fire and Water,' he said to her. 'You know what that means, don't you?'

He had infused her with the water of the Fountain, for the drinking of which he was cursed by the Most High, driven out of Dona Mihst and rejected by the First Men. There was only one source for such an infusion.

His desperate remedy for her injuries had been to give her some of his own blood.

She felt him draw nearer, then the white curtain opened and the Undying Man entered the litter. She turned her hideous face on him and he laughed. 'Now, now, you have all the time in the world to become used to your new looks. Surely you cannot be vain, not after all that has happened to you? All I saved you from?'

No, not vain. 1 don't care how I look. I'm sick of being saved. Just let me go. Let me crawl off somewhere to die.

'Come with me, Jewel of the North, and watch the destruction of the Falthan army,' he said gaily, as though inviting her to an afternoon's picnicking.

'An invitation you issued months ago, but have not been able to deliver on yet. Can your powers be so limited?'

His eyes flashed momentarily, then a broad smile spread over his false features. She knew what was hidden beneath; she had seen it the day she was taken by the blue flame. The ancient features of a two-thousand-year-old man. She fixed those features in her mind, the better to take the sting from his jibes.

'Still putting up token resistance? You are just like your foolish Falthan friends. They resist long past the time they should sue for peace. What of you, Stella? When will you surrender?'

'Surrender?' She spat the word back in his face. 'Why must you have me surrender?'

The Lord of the Brownlands chose not to answer her, instead extending his hand and his coercion at the same time. She took his arm - not by choice, oh not by choice -and he guided her out into the daylight, where the Falthan sun broke through for a moment, sending a few weak rays of light to illuminate Falthan rocks and scraggly Falthan soil. Stella's heart nearly burst at the purity, the beauty of it. The world outside her litter was so glorious in comparison to the world within.

'Here is why,' he said to her, and extended his handless arm westward. From the slightly elevated vantage point the valley spread in front of them, framed by tall mountains. The River Aleinus ran past them to their left, hugging the southern cliffs: above it a narrow path had been cut into the rock. On it, Stella noted with a frisson of fear, marched company after company of Bhrudwan warriors.

'Bhrudwans are not clever enough to capture boats as they march, according to Falthan wisdom. They would not think of dividing their force and trapping their enemy in the very place he thinks he is strong. They think Bhrudwans are brutes, and so assume we will use brute force.' The Destroyer slammed a boot down on the stony ground. 'They will learn!'

In the distance lay the Falthan encampment. Activity raged all around the tents, Stella noted.

Small figures carried things here and there, while others dug trenches and still others built walls out of whatever they could find.

'I do not want to destroy them, not utterly,' the voice at her side continued. 'I do not wish to rule over a land empty of subjects. I have set myself the much more difficult task of convincing them to surrender.'

'Never!' the girl snarled through her ever-present pain. 'They will never surrender to you!'

'They will be just like you, is that it? They will hold out even though every breath is torture?'

He gazed on her, and for the first time allowed the full force of his power to pour through his eyes, binding her utterly, wiping the slate of her will clean of resistance. 'You surrendered to me a long time ago! You were mine the moment you saw me. It was confirmed when I tricked you into thinking you had escaped me. The only reason you continue to defy me with your lips is as a sop to your own pride. You are mine more completely than anyone else who has ever lived!

'Yet there is room at my right hand for another. I will have the chosen weapon of the Most High as my own talisman, and it will be brought to me by the boy from your own village. Ah, how this simple plot you are all part of reeks of the Most High! How foolish he is to entrust his will to such as you! The boy is the Right Hand of the Most High, as evidenced by his possession of the Jugom Ark. Soon the circle will be complete; soon he will be mine.'

'How?' Stella whispered as soon as his enormous, irresistible will withdrew. 'How will you do this?'

The Destroyer smiled. Surrender, whether she recognised it or not. 'Come with me: we have a hill to climb. Then you will watch, and you will see.'

The Bhrudwans were perhaps two hours' march from the Falthan walls and trenches. By rights Leith should have been riding among his soldiers, reminding them of the promise of the Most High by lifting high the Jugom Ark, granting them a little courage in the face of what was to come. But his thoughts had turned to his family, and he found himself powerless to prevent his feet taking him to where they were gathered. It was past time, he'd held out too long, hurt and misunderstood, but no time remained.

They were all there, his family and the others of the original Company, taking their midday meal in a green-sided tent capped with the standard of the Jugom Ark fluttering in a rising breeze. Voices were quiet and people moved slowly, as though savouring the food and the company. Instructing his guards to remain outside, Leith stepped into the tent, and silence fell.

Kurr nodded to him, then took the Haufuth's arm and motioned him to follow. For a moment the big man looked longingly at the food spread on the board. Not a snack for the man we knew as our village headman, Leith reflected as he followed the Haufuth's eyes to such poor fare. How has it come to this? But he could not ask the question, so admissive of their perilous state would it have been; and the two men left the tent, leaving Leith alone with his family.

Three figures waited patiently for him to approach the table. 'What will you have, son?'

Mahnum asked him, indicating the food.

'I will have peace between us,' said Leith formally, trying to hold in a whole world of hurts. 'I will have understanding and respect, even if we can never have what we once had.'

'You might be surprised what can be reclaimed from the ashes of misunderstanding,' Modahl said quietly, his arm resting lightly on Mahnum's shoulder. Modahl1. Leith had been sure up until the moment the man spoke that it had been Hal standing there, not his grandfather.

'What do you want, son?' his mother asked him, and at the sound of her voice he could no longer keep the tears inside.

'I want you to be my mother and not the commander of the Falthan army,' he sobbed as she held him tight. 'I want Mahnum to be my father and not the Trader of Firanes, always ready to leave his family in the service of his king. I want Modahl to be my grandfather and not the famous Arkhos of Sna Vaztha.' He took a deep breath and wiped his nose on his sleeve. 'I want Hal to be my brother and not some wild magician with terrible powers who might betray us at any moment. And I want to be Leith, and not the Bearer of the Jugom Ark! I wish I was home in Loulea, not here awaiting the slaughter that will come today, whether or not we win the battle. Isn't that what you wish too?'

His family were all around him, saying things he could not hear through the pounding of his heart in his ears, hugging him tight, reassuring him.

'Go and find Hal,' his mother whispered to him. 'Speak these words to your brother.'

'Where is he?' Leith asked them. They did not know: his brother had left some time earlier.

'He spends a lot of time on his own, since ...' His father did not finish, but Leith knew what he referred to.

'I will find him,' Leith said, and left the tent less burdened than when he had entered it.

Somehow he knew where Hal would be. The Falthan army had camped in much the same place they had used when recovering from the snowstorm nearly four months earlier, and the dell in the centre of the camp was as unoccupied now as it had been then. His crippled brother was there, sitting as still as a statue at the bottom of the depression, and did not move when Leith cried his name. Finally his brother raised his head and looked at Leith with red-rimmed eyes.

'Hal, I. . .' Leith began, his mouth dry and his heart on fire. He had seen much during their journey. He'd witnessed his brother become a stinging insect, inflicting illness on an innocent man; he had heard Hal's voice offering him counsel - not only since they had left Loulea, but all through his life.

'Hal, why is it always me that has to say sorry?' It was not the question he had intended to ask, and he saw his brother's face close up as soon as the words left his lips. He wished he could call them back, but they sped towards their target like arrows from a bow, and with as devastating an effect.

It used to be that 1 couldn't hurt him, no matter what 1 said.

Hal took a deep, settling breath. 'I have cried with you many times, Leith. I nursed you when you were sick, I defended you when others tried to hurt you, I offered you words of comfort and support whenever I could, and received little in return. What have I done to apologise for?'

His brother's voice was thinner somehow, his cheeks hollower than Leith remembered. He drank in the sight of him nevertheless, the one person who had remained steadfast and true when his father was gone and his mother didn't understand. How could 1 have done anything other than love him?

And yet...

'You should apologise for all those things you did!' Leith cried, his shameful, secret self finally exposed. 'For always being right! For always being the voice of reason! For the guilt I cannot shake off! The Most High curse you, Hal! The number of people I have lost since all this began burns in my head, and the very first number is YOU!'

Hal held out his crippled hand. Leith could see what an effort it was. Had his brother been eating? Had he wounded him so deeply that he refused food?

In an agony of indecision, his own need for release finely balanced against the needs of his brother, he reached out his own hand. Their fingers came close together, touched.

Forgiveness, understanding, love; all in that touch.

A hundred horns rang out, swamping the valley in noise. Both Leith and Hal clapped their hands to their ears as the echoes beset them. Again the horns blew, and Leith knew, without being told, the assault had begun. Later: we can finish talking later. He turned and ran up the sides of the dell, emerging into the central scene from the ceiling of Greatheart's hall.

The Falthans knew the horns would blow to signal a Bhrudwan attack, but the horns had blown far earlier than they expected. Though there was a rearguard, no one seriously thought the Bhrudwans would attack them from behind - but somehow they had appeared in great numbers on the downvalley side. All over the valley companies fought with each other, engaged past extrication. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that the final battle had come, and victory would go to the army that avoided total destruction.

An arrow hissed past Leith and struck a soldier just to his left. The man went down with the shaft lodged in his throat, his hands scrabbling at the thing killing him. Leith poured himself into the Jugom Ark, but even as the Arrow flared into life he knew that it was too late for the man lying dead on the muddy ground. The field of battle rapidly became a confusion of grunts, shouts and cries; and Leith seemed to be cursed, arriving just too late time after time.

There came a tug on the sleeve of his cloak, and he shook it off in his frustration and anger. The tug came again, and with it a voice: 'My lord? My lord!

It is time! The prophecy, my lord!'

The man with his hand on his sleeve was Sir Amasian. Leith shook his head, but did not succeed in clearing it. All around him the screams of the dying continued to steal whatever clarity he strove for.

'The knights will help us,' the old seer continued, as though Leith had understood him. 'The Knights of Fealty will cut a path to where you must stand. They are ready for this task; it is what they have prepared for ever since the vision came.'

Numbers. The numbers rustled in his head like sheaves of paper falling one on top of the other. Every dead warrior was another number. Where better to count from than one of the hills? In a kind of madness, overwhelmed by events, he pulled away from the knight, but apparently had struck out in the direction they wanted him to go. They rode ahead of him without a backward glance. His guards followed the mounted troop, unsure of their role. Left and right the armoured figures swung their heavy blades, driving the enemy before them, parting the massed Bhrudwan ranks, clearing a path for the Arrow-bearer to meet his appointed destiny.

Soon they came to a narrow path, and here the Knights of Fealty formed a line, parting momentarily for Leith and the seer to pass through. 'Up the path,' Sir Amasian said, wheezing slightly.

Are you sure you can make it?' Leith asked. The bluff towered above them, its crown perhaps a thousand feet above the valley floor.

'I see myself standing beside you. I behold your victory. I will survive the climb.'