Chaz Brenchley - Outremer 01 - The Devil in the Dust

"The intensity verges on horror at times...compelling reading."

--Locus

"All the adventures a discerning fantasy reader could wish for."

--SFX Magazine

From award-winning author Chaz Brenchley comes the first book in the powerful new series

about Outremer--a harsh and barren kingdom born of blood and at war with the world around.

For forty years, the Order of the Knights Ransomer has been the sword-arm and conscience of the

kingdom. Their stronghold is Roq de Rancon, an ancient and mysterious fortress that is the key to

Outremer's defense. But nomadic tribes on the kingdom's borders threaten to reclaim this land that was

once theirs. And a heretic state within Outremer has magically closed itself off-and been marked for

destruction by the Order.

Marron, a young knight training to be a Ransomer, and Julianne, daughter of the King's Shadow and

betrothed to a man she's never met, are journeying to Roq de Rancon. There each of them will be put to

the test, as they become inextricably bound up in the coming upheaval that will decide the fate of

Outremer.

"Drama and spectacle to spare. Brenchley's prose is clear and vivid...the kind of dark,

painful power rarely seen in the literature of heroic fantasy."

--Cemetery Dance

Also by Chaz Brenchley

The Books of Outremer

THE DEVIL IN THE DUST

TOWER OF THE KING'S DAUGHTER

A DARK WAY TO GLORY

FEAST OF THE KING'S SHADOW

HAND OF THE KING'S EVIL

THE END OF ALL ROADS

Visit the series' website at www.outremer.co.uk

THE DEVIL IN THE DUST

The First Book of Outremer

CHAZ BRENCHLEY

ACE BOOKS, NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the

author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead,

business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

THE DEVIL IN THE DUST

An Ace Book / published by arrangement with the author

PRINTING HISTORY

Orbit first edition / 1998

Orbit reprint edition / 2000

Ace mass-market edition / June 2003

Cover art by John Howe.

Cover design by Rita Frangie.

Text design by Julie Rogers.

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Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic

piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

For information address: Orbit, a division of Little, Brown and Company (UK),

Brettenham House, Lancaster Place, London WC2E 7EN.

ISBN: 0-441-01071-7

ACE®

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ACE and the "A" design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

10 987654321

Best things come in big packages.

The start of something this big,

it has to be for Ian.

DESPITE WHAT THE church claimed and the people believed, this was still a Kingdom born of

younger sons, the land-hungry and the dispossessed.

And those sons were fathers now, they had sons of their own; and their landless younger sons were

looking north and east and south themselves, finding this realm of Outremer too tight a glove, seeing no

border—internal or outward-facing—invulnerable to change.

The Kingdom of the Hammer they called it, drinking late and talking, always talking in the halls of

their fathers: from its shape and from their own aggressive yearnings to see that hammer fall and crush,

beat out new territories for the needy.

But the church preached contentment, as ever, we have what we came for; and their fathers

preached security and caution, we have all that we can hold.

And the wisest among them, churchman or father or younger son—or daughter—looked at the land

unblinkered, and saw that in truth this was not even one Kingdom, for all that it had one King and many

public oaths. Too quarrelsome, these exiles, these families far from kin; they were four states—four and

one, but that one closed, that one Folded and never now to be named, torn from maps and memory

both—and always in contention, always wrangling each with the others. And of course always, always at

war with the world around.

No, the wisest said, this cannot last. It cannot live. A hundred years, perhaps, they gave Outremer; no

more than that. Certainly, no more ...

ONE

The Bright Dead of the Day

NOT THE FIRST, Marron knelt in the Chamber of the King's Eye and thought, What need

Ascariel? Why had his father, had so many fathers fought and died to win possession of that golden city,

that dream of priests and kings, when it seemed that they had it all already? When the dream and the

deaths and the very Mount itself could be contained within a bare room rock-hewn and chilly, where die

walls sweated sour-tasting water and it needed only a single plaited candle and the words of a fat and

sour-sweating brother to bring forth miracles?

The thought, of course, was heresy. It should be confessed, and due reparation made. But Marron

was fresh come from far away, gentler country where he'd seen no more true magic than the seasons'

changes, the hand of blessing laid upon the land; his mind was dizzy with wonder, and it was from that

unaccustomed whirling strangeness in his head that the words and the idea had been flung up, all

unintended. He thought both souls of the God would understand him.

Besides, his troop had burned a village for heresy only the day before, and he was afraid of his

confessor.

IT HAD SEEMED like a celebration, he remembered thinking even at the time, in the heat and the

hard light and the hurry, hurry urgency of it all. Not the human arm of the God's justice wielded, but only

something done in madness to mark the end of a long march and their new home almost in sight now,

very much on their minds. They'd been too many days in the saddle, a storm had forced them ashore too

soon; days and days of eating tack and sleeping on dusty earth and riding, riding: the sun savage above

the alien hills, their bodies baked as dry as the road they followed, vows resurgent in their minds and

untried steel impatient at their backs, seeming as hot and as thirsty as they were themselves.

And Fra' Piet had led them away from the road one morning, promising them the castle by tomorrow

sunset and the God's work now; and they had followed a track high into the hills till they came at the

bright dead of the day to close-shuttered huts with domed roofs and ragged mud-mortared walls, two

dozen such and a well, and a temple of dressed stone at the heart of the village. And the heresy was

there, clear to be seen on a weathered board above the temple's door: the Blinded Eyes, the double loop

that was the sign of the God Divided but with the hollow spaces filled as though to say His unremittingly

watchful eyes were closed, now and always. Fra' Piet had warned them of worse in these hills, of the sign

painted with a fringe of lashes below, to say that the God slept; but that was deliberate defiance, a sign of

Catari revolt. This, these blank circles were something entirely other.

The Heresy of Korash: that the God moved indeed on His doubled path but that He gave no heed to

mortal men, that He cared not a whit for their deeds on the earth. Though Korash had been redeemed by

fire and his bones crushed to powder two hundred years ago, he still had his adherents, here particularly,

in these hills long lost to the voice of the true church. So they had been told, Marron and his new-sworn

brothers, and so it had proved.

They had ridden into that hilltop village, three dozen men with the ache of their weary road still on

them, hungry for more than food. Fra' Piet's disfigured hands had swung the axe that smashed that

sacrilegious sign, it had been his hoarse voice that called down fire and steel and his own weapon again

that hacked the black-robed priest on the temple steps. After that, though, he had only sat his horse and

watched. It had been a test, Marron thought later, or a challenge; perhaps a baptism.

ONE HALF OF a baptism, he thought now, the opening rite. This was the completion, here under

the castle, a gift of marvel from the King's Eye.

They had been mad that day, young men crazed by the sun, drawn and deadly. They had screamed,

he remembered, louder than the women and the children both; now they were mute, transfixed. In

themselves emblems of the God, turning and turning, each one a traveller on two paths: to the savage, to

the serene. Looping always to the centre, to the Godhead, and always passing through ...

Not an hour had passed since their arrival. They'd ridden up the precipitous hill and through the gate

of the awesome castle, up the broad shallow steps and the long covered ramp that followed, as weary as

their horses and stained with more than travel now. In the courtyard by the inner moat their packs and

mounts had been taken from them by thin black-haired boys, Sharai slaves, someone had said; and

without even the chance to change their habits or rinse the caked dust from their skins they had been

ordered to silence although they were silent already, and led up another ramp too narrow for horses and

so into the castle proper. Then down: down and down they had come, soon confused by the winding

stairs and the ill-lit passages, shivering in the sudden chill and the uncertainty.

At last a door, cedarwood bound with iron; and beyond that, this. Nothing like the great halls and

pillared spaces they'd heard of and not yet seen, caught like bubbles of akin the mass of rock and stone

above their heads; a troop of men made this chamber crowded. Where they knelt in a rough circle, each

brother's legs and shoulders brushed his neighbours' on either side, but the touch of another human was

nothing but relief here. Even the smell of his brothers' bodies and his own too long unwashed, the rank

heavy odour of woollen habits damp with sweat, gave Marron something to cling to, something to root

him to the known world in a place of wonder and terror strangely mixed.

What is this? was the question they must all have been asking silently as they had filed in behind the

brother with the torch. None had spoken it aloud, but Marron had seen it in their eyes as they'd glanced

at each other and at the crudely rounded walls and the uneven floor, as some few of them had reached to

touch damp rock and carry the wetness on their fingers to dusty lips. He had done that himself, and then

had wanted to spit, had swallowed instead though his mouth had twisted at the rancid taste of it.

The brother with the torch, Fra' Tumis had gestured them into a circle and then onto their knees, his

heavy-jowled face frowning with suspicion as his narrow eyes had flickered around watching for

disobedience, for someone to speak against his order. Denied that, he had at last spoken himself, though

only to say, "This is the Chamber of the King's Eye," which had told them nothing. Then he had gone to

the only furniture in the chamber, an iron tripod holding a four-wicked candle, two white and two black

tapers plaited and twisted into a single column.

He had lit the wicks from his torch before handing that across the kneeling circle to Fra' Piet, who had

carried it outside and closed the door behind him.

Somehow the click of the latch had set a shiver to run down Marron's spine, nothing to do with cold

or rank wet air. Fra' Piet scared him, to be sure; but it was a fear born of knowledge and witness, many

weeks in the man's company and one frantic hour caught in his madness, or else brought by him into the

pitiless possession of the God.

That fear Marron could understand and deal with; it was good sense, to be afraid of Fra' Piet.

This was different. Here he was ignorant and bewildered and his brothers the same, strangers both to

the land and to the life. Only a few short months since, they had been yeomen or artisans or peasants in

another world. Fra' Piet was their bridge from that to this; he was their mentor, albeit harsh in his

demands and obsessive in his duties; he was a rock in an ocean, craggy and dangerous and dependable.

And he had left them suddenly in the hands of an unknown, in this bare hand-hewn cave of a chamber,

and Fra' Tumis had seemed bored or contemptuous or both but not at all fearful and yet Marron was

fearful of him, or of what he meant to do.

What Fra' Tumis meant was a mystery; what he did had been hard enough to see, in the moving

shadows of the candle's light. Harder still after he had glared around the circle and then stabbed one hand

sharply downward, redirecting their nervous, curious stares to laps or folded hands or the dark damp

stone they knelt on.

Marron had lowered his head obediently, but no will of his or any other's could have stopped his eyes

from spying, as best they could. It had seemed to him, in what bare glimpses he dared risk, that Fra'

Tumis held his hands above the bending flames of the candle, to cup the light within his fingers; it had

seemed as if that pudgy flesh went too close, there should have been a smell of singeing and a yelp of

pain.

But Tumis had chanted softly, and his voice at least was sweet. The words, the language Marron

didn't know. Nor did he know how there could have been more light suddenly in the chamber and not

less, when Tumis' hands guarded the candle so nearly. Light there was, though, fierce white light that had

made him squint, that had drawn hisses of breath from all around the circle, that had made his

neighbour—Aldo, for the love of your skin, be still!— grunt and draw his hood up over his head, to

shade dazzled eyes within it.

* * *

LIGHT, THEY HAD been taught, is the chief token of the God's even-handedness, that we walk

half our time in the sun and half in darkness. It is His gift to us, that we may see our way to

virtue; it is also an instrument of His justice, that others may see our sin.

This was light as Matron had never known it, though, light they had made no space for in his theology.

This light drew lines of gold and fire in the air, and not only Aldo was moving now. Men were making the

sign of the God against their brows, more in superstition than in prayer, Marron thought; but he gave

them only a glance, only a moment before his eyes and his mind were gripped again.

This hard light came, it seemed, from the candle: flames rose above it like glass, like white-hot rods of

glass, so rigid and so still. The walls of the chamber were in shadow, though Tumis had snatched his

hands away now; Tumis also stood in shadow, though he stood only a pace back from the candle.

Fragile and strong as skeins of silk drawn taut, all the light there was struck down to the heart of the

brothers' circle, and there it showed them wonders.

You will see miracles, they had been told before ever they set out for the Sanctuary Land, you will

see miracles and monsters; be prepared.

But how could they ever have prepared their minds for this?

"This is the King's Eye," Fra' Tumis intoned, against their staring, straining silence. "It is the God's

benediction upon the King, that he may watch over all this land in the God's name, to guard the borders

from the God's enemies and the heartlands from heresy. It is the King's kindness to his subjects, that he

gives this blessing also to the Church Militant, that we may serve the better."

Was this kindness? Marron was unsure. He sweated cold in that cold place, his fingers trembled with

the beat of his blood; this was the second time in two days that he had been stricken to the core of him

and the blade in his heart was not more than half of wonder. The rest was sheer terror.

The Light drew lines like golden wires, and planes like sheets of gold; it drew walls and domes and

minarets; it built a palace or a temple in miniature, like a princess's golden toy only that this toy burned

their eyes, its making burned their minds like a brand, and it lay still in the air a hand's span above the

floor.

"This is the Dir'al Shahan in Ascariel," said Tumis, "that was their greatest temple when the Ekhed

governed the city. It would have been destroyed," it should have been destroyed, his voice seemed to

say, "when the God gave us victory there; but the King decreed otherwise, and took it for his own. Now

it is his palace, and the seat of his power."

And it turned in the air and seemed to move further off, from all sides at once; and as it moved so

other buildings flowed into the light, and streets, and vast gardens on steep slopes and a river below, and

...

"This is Ascariel," said Tumis, when all the city on its high hill was before them, gleaming golden in that

foetid air; and Marron thought, What need the real world, then, what needed all those deaths?

MARRON HAD SEEN maps, in the library of the great abbey where he had made his profession.

He had even seen a map of these lands, though that had been Sharai work looted at the fall of Ascariel

and sent back as a gift to the abbot, and he could not read it. He had been shown the holy city by an

elder brother there, who understood the strange writing; only a mark of coloured ink on parchment, but

still he had felt a thrill to lay his finger on it and murmur the name, Ascariel!

This, though—this was more than a map, more even than a map of light and magic. This was the

blessed land itself, brought forth in glory. It seemed to him that he had seen guards around the King's

palace, figures in the streets, horses and wagons and a busy marketplace. Even now there was a shimmer

of gold, like a string of beads being drawn slowly through a tiny gate in the outer wall, and he thought that

was a merchant's caravan come to trade in the city.

Fra' Tumis brought his hands close to those glassy pillars of light rising from the candle, and chanted

words that Marron could distinguish but not comprehend. White faded to yellow, pillars shrank to normal

flame and As-cariel was gone.

Like men waking from a dream, Marron and his brothers stirred and shifted, worked their shoulders

against a dying tension, gazed at each other's awestruck faces and knew they saw there reflections of

their own.

Looking at Tumis, Marron saw him pale and sweating, trembling, rubbing wet hands on his habit. No

shell of supercilious boredom on him now, and no contempt.

"Go," he said, his voice also drained of its strength and self-content. "Go out, Fra' Piet will show you

where ..."

THEY FILED OUT as they had filed in, in silence. Fra' Piet was waiting in the corridor, thin-lipped,

grim-lipped as ever, but nodding in satisfaction as he read their faces. There was a man, Marron thought,

who would never need to see the miracle twice. A vision once witnessed would live in his sight forever, a

burning testament to faith and a private covenant between himself and the God. This might have been

how it began for him, Marron thought: that he had come to Outremer like Marron himself, a young man

no more than ordinarily devout, impelled as much by family history as by religion; that he like Marron had

been shown Ascariel in that dank dungeon, like a sending; and that for Fra' Piet at least the fire had never

dimmed since, that he had discovered a true vocation then and had sought only the direct path since, the

glory of a golden city blinding him to pleasures of the body or the mind, or any earthly glint of light.

Numbed and dazzled, Marron could see that path threatening for himself also, could feel it almost

opening like a pit beneath his feet, waiting only for his mind to lose its hold on anything but wonder ...

But Fra' Piet brought them no sermons, nor—thank the God!—another miracle; he only led them

back the way they'd come, up to the moat and the courtyard and the dry hot dusty wind. There were the

stables, where their horses dozed now in wooden stalls in cool stone shadow, groomed and watered and

revived; but here blessedly was the bath-house, and here were boys in white tunics fetching water in

leather buckets from the moat. Here at last was the time to jerk and wriggle free of the heavy habit, to

kick off stiff riding-boots, to leave all in a heap in a corner and fight to be first to a bucket; and then to

shudder under the sluice of chill water down his back and through his matted hair, to chase the shudder

with a laugh and earn Fra' Piet's scowl for laughing. To turn away, rubbing at wet skin, catch Aldo's eye

and share a private grin; and in that moment to feel the spell fade, not leave him but recede into the secret

spaces of his mind, where it could be kept safe and treasured but not allowed to rule his thinking beyond

reason.

Pushing his fingers through his hair and looking around, impatient for another bucket, Marron saw a

boy carrying a wooden box. He took it first to Fra' Piet, who grunted and dipped his twisted fingers in,

scooping out a handful of something soft and greyish. Marron watched him massage the paste across his

lean, scarred body, raising a froth which he rinsed away with fresh water; then the boy caught Marron's

gaze, took it for a summons and came across.

Marron peered uncertainly into the box, and asked, "What is this?"

"Soap," the boy said in a light singsong. "For washing."

The word meant nothing. The paste felt greasy between Marron's cautious finger and thumb, but Fra'

Piet had shown him its use; he took a dollop on his fingers and stroked it onto his arm, rubbing at it till he

raised a thin grey lather, as on a horse after hard running. When he wiped it away, a swathe of skin

showed startlingly pink, in a place he thought he'd washed already. He gave the boy a grin, received a

shy smile in return and took more of the soap, working that across his shoulders and neck and into his

hair, feeling it foam more stiffly there.

"Not for the eyes!" the boy said urgently, too late. Marron had already rubbed his face with frothy

fingers.

His eyes burned suddenly; he gasped, pressing the heels of his hands against them, barely hearing the

boy call out in a liquid, foreign tongue.

Searing pain, and then the cool flow of water over his head again. He reached to cup it in his hands

and rinsed his eyes as best he could, blinking hard. Two boys there were now, one with a bucket;

Marron scooped out handfuls of water and splashed his face until the burning eased.

"Not for the eyes," the first boy said again, trying another smile.

"No," Marron agreed wholeheartedly. And not for the mouth either; he'd had a taste of that lather,

and his tongue and lips were burning. He rinsed his mouth and spat; but still took more of the paste—

soap, remember the name of it—before the boy was called away to another curious brother. It hadn't

burned his skin, at least, though it made his fingertips pucker; and he felt scoured clean where he'd used

it, cleaner than he could remember.

DISCIPLINE SEEMED TEMPORARILY in abeyance, even here, within the Order's walls;

unaccustomed time they were given, to wash themselves. Marron soaped Aldo's back for him and Aldo

his, and they fetched more water from the moat to rinse each other, as other brothers were doing all

around them. They drank also, surreptitiously at first—obedience is the prime commandment,

children: to do what you have not been ordered to do is disobedience— and then openly, after

they'd seen Fra' Piet do the same.

At last the boys brought linen towels and clean fresh habits; and when Marron and all his troop were

dry and dressed and once more under the bleak gaze of their confessor, they were taken barefoot back

into the castle and up to a chapel for prayers.

* * *

THIS AT LEAST was familiar and undisturbing, old words in an old tongue, rhythms and responses

ingrained into Mar-ron's mind since he was an infant.

Familiar also was the way his mind wandered from the words, even here in the God's own land,

where he had thought he might have been different, more devout. Not even the blinding revelation of a

miracle could work magic on his digressing soul, it seemed. He knelt on the bare stone floor of the chapel

with Aldo on his left side and another brother, Jubal, on his right; and his voice murmured steadily with

theirs, with everyone's; and his thoughts slipped free, slipped back to a day, an hour not far in time or

distance but far indeed, very far in strangeness.

Aldo, friend of his childhood and friend of his youth, in many ways a brother long before they were

brothers in religion:

Aldo with his long-known, long-loved face twisted beyond knowing as he leaned sideways in

his saddle to throw a flaming torch through an open doorway; Aldo with his laugh tuned harsh

and knowing at the scream that came back, at the sight of a woman running out with her robe

and hair afire; Aldo who must have seen the woman in there before he threw, who already had his

sword in his hand and used it not to kill quickly but to drive her back, back and burning into the

burning hut...

Jubal, an older man and a stranger before this voyage but all his life a monk, sent to Outremer by his

abbot as penance for an offence not to be talked of:

Jubal wide-eyed and screaming, no longer containing heavy thoughts behind his heavy brows;

Jubal a better soldier maybe than he ever was a monk, swinging a mace with joy, his bare arm

blood-spattered as he hacked, as he kicked his horse on and hacked again, as he screamed; and

there were words within his screaming, that was the Credo that ran mixed with spittle from his

mouth as he declared his belief in the one true God, twin-souled and all-pervading...

And between Aldo and Jubal there was Marron, there was himself; and he had a new image of

himself also to wonder at, to shudder at, to come between him and his prayers, him and the God's due

worship:

himself on his feet now, slid down from his bucking, frantic horse; himself with a child in his

hands, a heretic, a babe snatched from its father's arms and too young yet to be clearly boy or

girl; himself gripping its ankles and spinning with the frenzy like a mad priest on the temple steps,

stumbling over the body of the priest but catching his balance with a hoarse cry, crazed even to

his own ears as he dashed the babe against the stones of the wall there, as he saw its skull split

and heard its sudden silence even in all that noise, as he tossed it through the open doorway into

the fire within and turned away from the stain, so small a stain it had left on the wall there, a thin

smear of red that the first rains would wash away if ever it did rain in this barren, sun-bright

land...

TWO

The Devil in the Dust

A BARBARIC HABIT, her father called it, veiling women as the Sharai did; no practice for a

civilised land, he called it, but that had of course not stopped him sending Julianne into the hands of men

whose practice it was.

It was the same with the litter she travelled in. She'd fought against that—why be carried at a slow

walk, she'd demanded, when she could perfectly well ride her own palfrey, they could mount the whole

party and be half the time on the road?—but her future husband had sent a palanquin and the men to

bear it, and her father had insisted. Perhaps he'd even been thinking a little of her comfort, she granted

grudgingly, though mostly of course it was politics, not to offend either custom or a powerful man.

At any rate, this easy swaying ride on soft cushions was in honesty no burden to her, nor seemingly to

the eight black giants whose shoulders took the weight of it. They talked between themselves in soft

voices as they went, though she couldn't understand their speech; they laughed often, with a bubbling and

mysterious humour. The men-at-arms who walked beside—also sent by her intended husband—found

the journey more testing, though they were soldiers and all they had to carry was their own packs. She

watched them sweat in the hard sun, heard them curse in hoarse whispers and saw how their shoulders

drooped in the late of the day, how their feet dragged in the dust.

That dust was the devil, throat-choking and harsh; even the men veiled themselves against it when the

wind lashed it eye-high and stinging. No, she hated to admit it but she was better here in the palanquin

than on horseback in such heat, in such a land. Better to conceal her face behind soft silken curtains than

behind a veil that would be soon damp and sticking to her face, soon clogged and filthy and stifling with

the dust. Better to be shaded, cool and comfortable, though she had stamped and shouted, stamped and

wept for one last freedom, not to be confined until she must.

Oddly, she had neither shouted nor wept against the journey itself. It seemed odd to her, at least. She

had thought herself shamed by the palanquin, until she'd seen the truths of sun and dust; but being first

taken and now sent to marry a man she'd never met, for reasons of politics and power—surely there

should be greater shame in that, for her and for her father? And yet she didn't feel shame, only a cold

dread and a great weariness that she thought would never lift hereafter.

She was sixteen, and the weight of her life to come exhausted her. When she thought about it, when

her clouded vision turned that way. Not yet, she reminded herself once more; there was another reason

to be glad of this slow procession.

THERE WERE PANELS of gauze let into the curtains, allowing her to see out quite easily, though

they were small and cleverly offset so that the men would see nothing clearly within.

There was little enough to be seen outside, though she watched for hours, her mind dulled by the

swaying of the litter and the slow drift of the endless hills, yellow and grey with dust, studded with dark

thorns and what other bushes were tough enough to grow in this hard hot land. Hateful land, she thought

it: and wondered what Elessi would be like. So much nearer to the desert, so much worse than this, she

thought, she feared. No land to ride in, even were she allowed to ride. A land without shade, without

compromise; and its people much the same; and her father the diplomatist, the smooth and subtle

compromiser, sending her alone into such a country and for all the rest of her life ...

And no, she was not, was not going to allow her anxieties and resentments to blight these last few

days of travelling. Deal with what comes, when it comes; you leave the future be. That had been her

milk-mother's advice when she was a child, and it had always seemed nothing more than good sense to

Julianne. Why be miserable, when cheerful was always a choice?

Now she felt that choice had gone, or was going. But she determined to keep despair out of her soul,

where it had never had a place before and would not be granted one so long as she could fight it.

She turned her gaze forward, only looking for something to distract her suddenly rebellious mind,

teetering on the verge of falling into the pit wherein it was forbidden to fall; and blessed be the God and

all His saints and angels, there actually was something for once that she could look at.

Not that it seemed so very much at first, just barely enough to pique her interest. Not of course what

her soul yearned for, a city the like of Marasson to bring colour and life to parched eyes; neither what her

father dreaded more than she did, a horde of bandits sweeping down to overmaster this small troop of

men and carry her off into slavery or worse. It was only someone else on the road, a local boy to judge

by his size and dress. The sergeant of her guard was speaking to him, though, and not simply to order

him out of the way; that was sufficiently unusual to make her curious.

When her litter drew alongside the sergeant's horse, she reached to strike the chime that would call

her bearers to a halt, but then didn't need to do so because he gestured them himself to stop. Even

through the blurring gauze, she could read consternation and uncertainty on his face.

"What is it, sergeant?" His name was Blaise, but he preferred her to use his rank, for the sake of

Chaz Brenchley - Outremer 01 - The Devil in the Dust

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