Fall of Light (112 page)

He knew Rance had been the killer in the camp. He had awaited her knife, and would have welcomed it. Instead, she had danced around him, until the anticipation left holes burning in his gut. And then he had been sent away, out into the wild plains of the south, as if there’d been no thought of his fleeing, running away from all that he was.

The women were now coupling, in the way that women did when together, each with her face in the other’s crotch. At least, he assumed that was a typical position, although he could not be certain. A few other times, fingers had been involved.

They would be at this for some time. Sighing, he looked away, drew off his satchel and crouched down, unclasping the flap.
Hands upon horseflesh. A judgement of meat. No wonder they run with dogs, not horses.
He drew out the makings of a meal and set to preparing it. ‘We are not far from the camp,’ he said.

As he expected, neither woman replied.

‘We’re not eating the horses. You two were supposed to ride with me, to deliver us quickly to the Hust camp. We are short of time.’

Hataras lifted her head, licked her lips and then said, ‘A ritual of cleansing, yes. Stains taken away. You ride, we run.’

Vastala rolled over and sat up. ‘The Ay now hunt. Mother will provide.’

Studying the two of them as they recovered, their flushed faces and glowing cheeks, the wetness of sex on their sloping, almost non-existent chins, he said, ‘This Mother you speak of, the one you cry out to when … when doing what you just did. She is your goddess?’

Both women laughed. Hataras climbed to her feet. ‘Womb of fire, the promise that devours.’

‘Child Spitter. Swollen Spring.’

‘Guardian of the Dreamer. False Mother.’

‘Deadly when spurned,’ Vastala said. ‘We appease to keep her claws sheathed. She is masked, is Mother, but the face of blood-kin is a lie. Azathanai.’

‘Azathanai,’ echoed Hataras, nodding. ‘She keeps the Dreamer asleep. The longer the sleep, the weaker we become. Soon, Dog-Runners will be no more. One dream ends. Another begins.’

‘Mother whispers of immortality,’ said Vastala, making a face. ‘A path out from the dream. Let her sleep, she says.’

‘We do not fear Mother,’ added Hataras, walking over to run a hand along a horse’s flank. ‘We fear only the Jaghut.’

Listar frowned. ‘The Jaghut? Why?’

‘They play with us. Like Azathanai, only more clumsy. They think us innocent—’

‘Children,’ Vastala cut in.

‘But look into our eyes, Punished Man. See our knowing.’

‘The Dreamer birthed us and we are content. Our lives are short.’

‘But fullest.’

‘We struggle to eat and stay warm.’

‘But love is never a stranger.’ Hataras stepped away from the horse and approached Listar. ‘Punished Man, will you wait with others? Or we give you ritual now? We end torment in soul.’

‘How, Bonecaster? How will you do such a thing, to any of us?’

Vastala settled down beside him. ‘Many dreams are forgotten upon awakening, yes?’

He glanced away from her appallingly open expression. ‘But not memories,’ he said. ‘They just rise up, like the sun. Each morning, after a moment’s bliss, they return. Like ghosts. Demons. They return, Vastala, with all the fangs and claws of the truth. We awaken to what’s real, what was and can’t be taken back.’

She reached out with a tanned, blunted hand and touched his cheek. ‘There is no real, Punished Man. Only dreams.’

‘It feels otherwise.’

‘There is fear in awakening,’ she replied, ‘even when the dream displeases. In the voice in your head, even as it cries out, begs to wake up, another voice warns you. You awaken to a world unknown. This is cause for fear.’

‘We need our guilt, Vastala Trembler. Without it, all conscience dies. Is that what you would do to me? To us? Take away our conscience? Our guilt?’

‘No,’ answered Hataras, who now crouched opposite him, her eyes bright and wet. ‘There is another path.’

‘What is it?’

‘Only what must be felt, in the heart of the ritual. Shall we ease you now?’

He shook his head and swiftly began packing up the leavings of his meal. ‘No. I am a Hust soldier now. I will stand with my comrades.’

‘Your fear speaks.’

He paused. ‘Fear? More like terror.’

‘If you are made to surrender the lie of your crime of murder,’ said Vastala, ‘you will face the crime of your innocence.’

‘For which,’ Hataras said, ‘you feel greater guilt than could any bloodied blade in your hand.’

‘She killed herself,’ Listar whispered, ‘out of spite. She arranged it to make it seem her death was by my hand.’ Shivers rippled through him, and he sank back down, bringing his hands to his face. ‘I don’t know what I did to earn that … but it must have been something. Something.’
Abyss below, something …

Their hands were upon him now, surprisingly soft and warm. They left heat wherever they touched.

‘Punished Man,’ said Hataras, ‘there was nothing.’

‘You can’t know that!’

‘Her ghost is chained. You drag it behind you. You have always done.’

‘This was what she wanted,’ said Vastala. ‘At first.’

‘It was madness, Punished Man. Her madness. A spirit broken, a dream lost in the mists.’

‘We will wait,’ said Vastala. ‘But for her, we cannot.’

‘Her dream is a nightmare, Punished Man. She begs like a child. She wants to go home.’

‘But no home waits for her. The hut where you lived – with all its rooms – still screams with her crime. To send her there is to send her to a prison, a pit, the very fate of your punishment – but an eternal one.’

‘No,’ he begged. ‘Don’t do that to her. I tell you – she had a reason! There must have been – something I did, or didn’t do!’

‘Be at ease, Punished Man,’ said Hataras. ‘We will make her a new home. A place of rest. Peace.’

‘And love.’

‘You will feel her from there. Feel her anew. Her ghost will touch you again, but with tender hands. As the dead owe to the living, no matter their state. The dead owe it, Punished Man, to salve your grief, and to take from you the grief you feel for yourself.’

He wept, while their hands slipped from him, and their voices fell into a cadence, making sounds that seemed less than words, yet truer somehow, as if they spoke the language of the souls.

After a time he thought he heard her then. His wife. The sounds of weeping to answer his own. He felt their shared grief washing back and forth, cool and impossibly bittersweet. The madness of long ago, the endless torment of uncertainty each time he stepped into a room where she waited, the dread of what might come the instant he looked into her wild, panicked eyes.

If there was magic in the world worthy of its power, this was surely it.

I must tell everyone. There is another kind of sorcery. Awake in the world, awake in our souls.

And her words on that last day, before he set out to place an order with Galast the cooper, for the casks they would need at the estate.
‘I have a surprise for you, beloved husband, for your return. Proof of my feelings for you. You will taste my love, Listar, when you come home. You will taste it, in ways unimagined. See how my love blesses you.’

And so he had, returning home filled with a new hope, and yet something trembled beneath the surface of his thoughts, a visceral fear. Hope, he now knew, was a vicious beast. Every thought a delusion, every imagined scene perfect in its resolution and yet utterly false; and when he found her, with the braided cord about her neck that she must have slipped over the bedroom door’s latch – in a house emptied of servants, who each later swore that they had been sent away by Listar’s express command – and when he comprehended the power of the will that kept tightening the cord while she sat against the door, only then did he understand the blessing of her love for him.

Illness, a mind bent, a soul broken, wherein every cruel impulse had slipped its leash. He knew now the horror behind her eyes, the fleeing child within who had nowhere to run.

He lowered his hands, wiped at his eyes, and looked to the two Bonecasters kneeling opposite him. So many undeserved gifts.

But the Dream will fade. The Dog-Runners will die out.

Abyss take us, that loss is beyond all recompense.

Something left him then. He did not know what it was, could not know, but its departure was like a sob, a relinquishing of unbearable pain. And in its absence, there was … nothing.

Faintly, as he sank to the ground, he heard one of the Bonecasters speak. ‘She makes the home ready. For her husband, for the day he joins her.’

‘It is well,’ the other replied. ‘But still, they make ugly huts.’

‘Let him sleep now – no, stop that, Vastala, leave his lovely black cock alone.’

‘This is my payment. I will have his seed.’

‘He does not give it freely.’

‘No, but I take it freely.’

‘You are such a slut, Vastala.’

‘We can keep him asleep. You can have him after me, when this cock recovers.’

‘He may be asleep, but it surely is awake. Don’t empty him, Vastala. I want my share. Don’t be greedy.’

‘I’m always greedy.’

‘Too greedy, then.’

He heard his wife laughing as a heavy, brawny pair of legs straddled him, as he was pushed inside, and a body began moving rhythmically against him.

‘It is dark enough,’ said someone, ‘when you keep your eyes closed.’

This was, Listar decided, the strangest dream, but one for which he had no complaint.

  *   *   *

Commander Toras Redone had been riding beside him in silence since they’d broken camp that morning. By the day’s end they would reach the Hust encampment. Galar Baras studied the track ahead as it slipped between denuded, pockmarked hills, bending round slopes of tailings, the scoured flats where furnaces had once stood, along with sheds and ditches, all lining the old road to either side.

The day was cool, but he could feel the weather turning, as if a new season was rushing upon them. Word had come on the day they had left Henarald’s estate: Urusander’s Legion had departed Neret Sorr. They had begun their march on Kharkanas.

He listened to the horses’ hoofs strike the frozen ground, at times sharp as the strike of a ballpeen against raw rock. The sword at his hip murmured incessantly.

‘If you think I hate them, you would be wrong.’

Startled, he glanced across at her. She wore a heavy cloak of sable, the hood drawn up to hide her profile, and sat slumped heavily in the saddle. ‘Sir?’

She smiled. ‘Ah, back to the honorifics, then? No more thought of the sweat between us, as we grapple every night beneath the furs? Our breaths shared, out from me and into you, out from you and into me, our taste as one – could two people hold each other tighter? Oh, for a sorcery to merge our flesh. If I could, I would swallow you, Galar Baras, my body a mouth, my arms a forked tongue to wrap about you, to pull you in.’

‘I beg you, sir, no more of that.’
Your words torment me.

‘This day too bright? All things in stark detail, a focus so sharp as to cut the mind? No matter, come the night I will fold you in, yet again, like a lost child. I was speaking of Urusander’s Legion. And Hunn Raal, whom I should despise, but do not.’

He thought about that, and then shrugged. ‘He is truly of the Issgin line, sir, a betrayer, a poisoner – if not hate, then what?’

‘Yes, the Issgin line. Possessing a well-matched claim to the throne, only to lose the bloody struggle. By virtue of failure, they are now condemned, tarred, vilified as the quintessential villains. Do not let our perpetual reinvention of the past deceive you, captain.’

He shrugged. ‘Then is this pity that you feel?’

‘Consider well my warning. We can make no claim to righteous vengeance. These prisoners now wearing the Hust, they have no anger to mine, no ruinous rubble to crush down with fury. You may well seek to bleed down upon them all, and so stain them alike, but such a desire will fail, captain.’

He said nothing to that, as she had touched upon his own fear. There was no cause for this new Hust Legion.
In manner, they are mercenaries who have already been paid, with all the suspect loyalty such an error in judgement entails.

‘Hunn Raal and his ilk seek stature and wealth,’ said Toras Redone. ‘A redistribution of power. The highborn of the Greater and Lesser Houses deem the table crowded enough. So, we now have a war.’

‘There is also the matter of Urusander, and the High Priestess Syntara—’

‘Temple squabbles, and worse yet, captain, some hoary remnant of misplaced notions on monarchy, when our queen has long since left us to become a goddess, making the whole debate a charade. But let them elevate Urusander into godhood, a Father Light for Mother Dark. Do you see the assumption yet?’

‘I’m afraid I do not, sir.’

‘It is this atavistic absurdity, this clinging to kings and queens who must be bound in matrimony, as the putative parents of Kurald Galain. Captain, listen to this drunken whore here, when she tells you that there can be a Father Light and a Mother Dark without the former having to jam his cock into the latter’s cunt. More to the point, a god and a goddess
need not be married
to rule us. Let her keep her lover. Let him fuck his scrolls. What of it?’

He stared at her, speechless.

She tilted her hood back, showed him her sallow, puffy face. The ebon hue was fading, like a failing of convictions. Her smile was broken. ‘But they’ll not listen to me, captain. It’s gone too far. The highborn will see Draconus taken down. The priestesses will see their victims wed. Hunn Raal will see the power of the nobles broken, and his own lackeys in their place.’

‘Sir, Lord Anomander—’

‘Is a man. Of honour and integrity. Mother Dark commands him to keep sheathed his sword. He thinks this a denial. A refusal of all that he is. He sees no other path, comprehends nothing of her meaning.’

‘Then, by the Abyss, Toras, someone should tell him! No! She should! Mother Dark!’

‘She has, from the arms of her lover.’

‘Too subtle!’