Fall of Light (139 page)

‘Will you cast the bones, milord?’

‘What? No. No need. Cowards and heroes, the wise and the fools, the red mud takes them all. No matter. I once came upon a hare caught in a snare. It fought that trap. It sought to leap away, again and again – and when I knelt there beside it, I saw how its efforts had stripped the skin from its ankle, down to the very bone. And looking into its eyes, I saw something. A truth. Anguish, my friend, is not exclusive to people. Anguish is a language known to, and shared by, all things that live. Battle strips away everything until only anguish remains – even the triumphant cry betrays the echo of what is lost. Relief comes in tears to match any sorrow. The living bemoan their luck, the dying curse theirs. To survive is to stagger away in disbelief, and see before you a life spent in flight from this moment, the memory of this day and others like it. You run, my friend. Every veteran runs, on and on, to their dying day.’ He flattened both hands over his eyes, clawing at his brow. ‘Oh my, who dares face the tragedy of this? The survivors who must live with this … this
loss.’

Wreneck watched as the lord, pulling his hands away from his face, began toppling his soldiers, slowly, one by one. Without the cast of the die, without a single triumphant cry. And now Wreneck too was weeping, though he was not sure why.

‘Build your estates,’ the lord mumbled. ‘Clear the land. Plant your crops. Let loose your herds. Into your cherished rooms bring the finest furniture, the most beautiful tapestries. Thick rugs upon the floor, wood for the hearth, the squeal of playing children and mouths to the tit. Poets and minstrels to visit, feasts to invite, wealth to display. While in the dead of night, before ebbing flames, you sit alone, fleeing behind your eyes. Fleeing, and fleeing, for ever and for ever more.’ He sent another soldier falling into the mud. ‘Pity the victors, Wreneck. In winning, they lost everything. In killing, they surrendered their own lives. In all that they won, they murdered love, the only thing worth fighting for.’

‘I fight for love,’ Wreneck whispered. ‘I mean to, for Jinia, who they hurt.’

The lord blinked at him, his face grave. ‘Leave your spear,’ he said. ‘Run to her. Give back to her whatever she lost.’

‘But – how?’

‘Vengeance shrinks the heart, Wreneck. It is not a worthy path.’

Wreneck wiped away his tears, studied the toppled soldiers in the ditch.

‘It’s done,’ the lord whispered. ‘Strike the flag. Draconus has fled, his Houseblades cut down to the last. He weeps in rage, and darkness devours him. The Hust – my beloved Hust – almost half gone. A coward came to the fore, seeing the exposed flank and imminent slaughter. He rallied his fellow convicts and, with extraordinary fortitude, he led them into a withdrawal. Many who would have died now live thanks to him. Toras Redone – ah, my sweet Toras – I cannot say her fate. I dare not. The poet soldiers live still – the First Son will be pleased to discover that, I’m sure. They fought well, as expected, and now, unhorsed by battle, they walk with their fellow Hust. Weapons sheathed, the iron silent, they lick their wounds and look upon one another – it was the ritual, you see. That terrible ritual. It took away the virtues – every one of them. Honour, integrity, loyalty, duty – flung them away! Not one soldier among them can find comfort in the lies they would tell themselves. Those so very necessary lies, the ones that keep a man or a woman sane. My poor Hust!’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Wreneck.

‘Each soldier now faces the truth, inside and out …’

‘Milord? What truth?’

‘Only this: for all that they have done, there is no excuse. None. Justification sloughs off each and every deed. Nothing holds, nothing hides. Deceit is impossible. They have taken lives! Not just in this battle, but in all the battles they ever fought – the ones that sent them to the mines, the ones that wounded so many, the ones that made so many people – loved ones – suffer for what they’d done! This is why the iron mourned, you see. It knew what was coming.’ He leaned forward once more, his eyes wide. ‘Take a man or a woman, strip away all the lies they tell themselves, until they stand naked unto themselves, their souls utterly exposed. Then, make them
soldiers.
Tell them to kill. Do you see? No armour can defend them. No sword can be other than what it is – a length of sharpened iron that steals lives. Now,’ he added in a hoarse whisper, ‘see them walk from the field of battle. See their faces, there beneath the helms. See their eyes. I tell you, Wreneck, you cannot imagine the anguish writ there. You cannot. Nor can I. And yet, and yet
I see it. I see it!
’

They sat in silence for a time, unmoving, although it seemed that waves of pain struck the old man, making his face twist. Wreneck looked away from the distress. He scanned the lead soldiers lying in the ditch. In his mind he heard the wails of the wounded and the dying. He saw soldiers reel from the field, and just as the lord had described, there was something shattered in their eyes. While elsewhere others shouted in brittle triumph, as if each was somehow trapped into doing something they thought they were supposed to do. That pleasure. The satisfaction.

But the old man had spoken of relief. The wonder of it, and the quivering disbelief, to have survived by luck what took down so many. He remembered his own failure, yet again, lying on the ground outside the estate, curling up round the wounds in his body.

The sad thing was, he now knew, the dying still had things to do, things to say. The dying still had faces they wanted to look upon one more time. Pleasures they wanted to reach for, holding tight. The dying longed for all the embraces that would never find them, and theirs was a world of sorrow.

He thought he could hear the grieving swords of the Hust, the moaning helms and keening hauberks. They crowded each and every soldier of the Hust as they filed from the valley, in lines ragged and broken, with many helping their injured comrades. The iron gave voice to exhaustion, and all the things lost on this day.

For a moment, his will to go on faltered. When adults stumbled this badly, what was the point in looking up to them?

‘Wreneck.’

He looked over at the old lord, and saw how one side of the man’s face sagged, as if being pulled down by unseen hands. Even the utterance of his name had come out muddy, muffled. ‘Milord? What’s wrong with your face?’

‘Mask. Broken. Listen.’

‘Milord?’

The old man was slipping to one side, his right arm limp. ‘Go then. If you must. Go. To your battle. Tell them.’

‘Tell who? What?’

‘My Hust. Tell them. I’m sorry.’

‘Tell them you’re sorry? Sorry about what?’ Wreneck moved over to collect the spear. The shaft and its crusted sheath of ice bit into his palm, but as he tightened his grip, the ice melted.

The lord lurched to one side, closer to his line of lead soldiers. He struggled, face straining, to drag his left arm – the one that still worked – closer to the toys. And then, with one careless sweep of his forearm, he knocked the rest of them down. He settled on to his side then, head on his arm as if ready to sleep. When he opened his eyes, the left one was red, leaking. ‘Sorry,’ he said in a whisper. ‘All done. All done.’

He fell asleep.

Wreneck hesitated, and then set down the spear once more. He crossed the ditch, pulling off his own waxed cloak – the one given to him by Lord Anomander himself – and settling it over the lord.

The wind clawed through the weave of his tunic. Shivering, he retrieved the spear and then stiffly regained the side of the road, joining the mass of ghosts still marching along it.

By keeping to the road’s verge, he was able to avoid passing through too many of them, and once he quickened his pace, the cold went away.

TWENTY-SIX

A
S THE FIRST FLASHES OF SORCERY LIT THE EASTERN SKY, THE
historian Rise Herat fled the tower’s roof. Boots on the spiralling steps downward, taken at speed, a dizzying descent. Once upon the main level of the Citadel he traversed little-used passages and corridors, encountering no one, and then resumed his descent, until he found himself in the cavernous hall crowded with the failed sculptures of the past, the heaps of rolled-up, rotting tapestries, the forgotten portraits. Ignoring the bronze monstrosity of the snarling hounds – that had so haunted him the last time he had been here – he made his way to the stacked tapestries.

Some mindful cleric had tagged each roll, and in faded script had written the title and what was known of each piece, along with an index number of some sort. If the Citadel’s archives held any master list, Herat knew nothing of it. Kneeling, he worked his way through the leather tags dangling from the ends of the rolls, squinting at the embossed script where the ink had faded to almost nothing. At last he found the one he sought.

It was a struggle pulling the tapestry from the stack, and his efforts sent many rolls sliding and spilling out to unravel upon the floor. The dust stung his eyes, made his nose run. He felt more than saw moths fluttering about, brushing his skin when he dragged the tapestry clear. Finding a stretch of unobstructed floor, Herat unrolled his prize.

Lanterns were no longer necessary. Darkness failed in hiding a thing.
More’s the pity.
He stood and stared down at the vast scene stitched into the fabric.
‘The Battle of The Storm in the Founding Age’, artist unknown.
He had last seen it more than thirty years ago, though he could barely recall the context. Perhaps it had been found in a storage cupboard, during one of the many refurbishings of rooms that had occurred as the Citadel’s population burgeoned with acolytes, priests and priestesses. Or upon a wall in some long-sealed chamber that had been reopened. The details hardly mattered, the title even less.

What battle? What storm? What Age of Founding?

He studied the swarm of figures upon the blasted landscape, the scores of flying dragons shredding the dark clouds hanging low over the battlefield. His eyes narrowed on the flanking hilltops, where stood the rival commanders of the two armies locked together between them. From one such figure, tall and martial, something like a stain, or scorching, marred the weave, blackening the air surrounding the man.

He’d thought it nothing more than damage, the bloom of rotting mould, perhaps, or where a torch had been held too close to the hanging. But now he saw, as he looked more closely, that the very threads were black.

It’s him. Draconus. The helm hides his face, but the manner of his stance betrays him. That, and the darkness, like smoke. I saw it today, as he strode across the Terondai.

Abyss below, what have we done?

A voice spoke behind him. ‘I sought you upon the tower.’

Herat closed his eyes, not yet turning to face her. ‘Yet you tracked me here.’

‘Your journey was reported,’ Emral Lanear replied. ‘This is my temple, after all.’

‘Yes,’ the historian replied, eyes opening again, gaze returning once more to the tapestry laid out on the floor before him. ‘There is honour,’ he said, ‘and then there is stupidity.’

‘What do you mean?’

Still he would not turn to face her. ‘If in the course of our lives, we find ourselves in the same place, again and again … what lesson is not being heeded? What wilful idiocy obtains, proof against any self-examination, any reflection or contemplation? How is it, High Priestess, that a single man or woman’s life can so bitterly match the history of an entire people?’

After a long moment, she moved up to stand beside him. Her attention fixed upon the tapestry.

‘Draconus,’ said Herat, ‘has done this before. See him? That wreath of darkness he wears like a cloak – or wings. See the woman at his side? Who was she, I wonder? What forgotten ancestor embraced his gifts, only to vanish from all memory?’

‘That is no more than a stain,’ she said. ‘Your imagination—’

‘Is beggared by truth,’ he said sharply. ‘Blind yourself if you must. At last, I begin to understand.’

‘What? What is there to understand, historian? We have done what was needed.’

‘No, I think we have failed.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘We saw Draconus, Kellaras on his heels. They were setting out for the Valley of Tarns.’

‘Yes, so that Draconus can retrieve his Houseblades.’

‘But he won’t,’ Herat said. ‘He can’t. Don’t you see? This is
his
battle. It’s been
his
war, from the very start. We just didn’t realize it.’

‘You are speaking nonsense,’ Lanear snapped. ‘Liosan is to blame. And Urusander’s Legion. Hunn Raal—’

‘Failure finds myriad details, High Priestess, each one like a trap. Each one can snare you into believing the moment was unique. And so you are deceived into focusing on the details instead of the failure itself. In this manner,’ he added, ‘failures breed unchecked, unchallenged, and more often than not, unrecognized in what they all share.’

‘Which is?’

He shrugged. ‘The face in the mirror.’ He heard her breath catch, but continued remorselessly. ‘This is a squalid revelation, High Priestess. Nor are we alone in our … errors in judgement. Draconus and the ways of love … it is my thought that, time and again, his ways of love become ways of war. Call him a fool – it’s easily enough done. But even then, Emral, spare the man a moment of pity.’