Fall of Light (18 page)

If gods could truly offer up a simple world, would not every mortal soul fall to its knees? As buildings crumbled, as fields fell fallow, as injustices thrived in blessed indifference. She had seen temples and sacred monuments as gestures of diffidence, stone promises to permanence, but even stone cracked. There was nothing simple in the passing of lives, in the passing of entire ages. And yet, for all her convictions – that verged on the worship of complexity – something deep in her heart still cried for a child’s equanimity.

But the Shake places of worship were now lifeless. They had become tombs to their slain god. The faith of these people here was blunted, like fists pounding a sealed door. The simplicity they had found, she realized, was no virtue, and if a child’s face could be conjured from this, it was dark and obstinate.

They would stand to one side, Resh said. But she believed that position was suspect. They would find themselves not to one side at all, but in the middle.

This warlock here, risking his life for his friend, was the last soldier available to Skelenal and Sheccanto, although ‘soldier’ was perhaps the wrong word. These men and women were trained in the ways of battle. But of leaders they had but one, now. A grieving man, a man consumed with doubts.

It was difficult to gauge the passage of time, but she was growing weary of standing, and the strain of staying alert clawed down the length of her nerves. She let the tip of her sword rest against the wooden boards of the floor.

‘Abyss below!’

Resh’s bellow startled her and she staggered back a step. Before her, the warlock had lurched upright, flinging himself on to the body of Caplo Dreem, as if seeking to hold the unconscious man down.

Wondering, frightened, she dropped her sword and lunged forward.

Caplo Dreem was not resisting Resh – he was not struggling at all – and yet she saw his form
blur,
as if it was moments from vanishing. The warlock grasped the assassin’s right arm and leaned down on Caplo’s chest. ‘Take the other arm!’ he shouted. ‘Do not let him leave!’

Leave?
Baffled, she moved round to the left side of the cot and grasped Caplo’s left arm with both hands. The stump, she saw, had bled through the heavy knot of bandages. Horrified, she saw the talons pierce the gauze. ‘Warlock! What is happening?’

‘Admixture of blood,’ Resh said in a rough hiss. ‘The old one within him mocks the child still – he drags it along. No abandonment. No murder. They will dwell together – I hear it laughing.’

‘Warlock, what has your magic unleashed here?’

The talons had sliced through the bandages, fingers splaying as they grew. On Caplo’s sweat-lathered arm, Finarra saw a mottled pattern forming on the skin, darkening to form a map of dun spots that seemed to float on a shimmering surface of gold and yellow. The flesh under her grip felt as if it was melting away.

‘Not my doing,’ Resh said in something like a snarl. ‘I couldn’t get in. Even with the sorcery I awakened, I couldn’t get in!’

A guttural growl emerged from Caplo, and she saw that he had bared his teeth, although his eyes remained shut.

‘He must not veer,’ said Resh.

‘Veer? Then indeed they were Jheck—’

‘No! Jheck are as children in the face of this – this
thing.
It is old, captain – gods, it is
old
! Ah, Ruvera …’

The spots were fading. She saw the talons retracting into fingers. His forearm and hand had grown back, slick with blood and the torn fragments of scorched flesh. The wounds of the thigh were but faint scars now, all signs of infection gone.

‘He retreats,’ Resh said in a frail gasp. He looked across at her, his eyes wide and frightened. ‘Understand me, captain, none of this was my doing. They but wait, now.’

‘They?’

‘I spoke of the revenant awakened by my wife – how one became many.’

‘And this now afflicts Caplo Dreem?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it an illness? A fever?’

‘I think … no. It is—’ He shook his head. ‘I cannot be certain. It is … an escape.’

‘From what?’ She leaned back, released Caplo’s arm, and studied the warlock. ‘From death itself? He was going to die—’

‘No longer. But I can say nothing more, captain.’

‘And when he awakens? Your friend – will he be as he once was?’

‘No.’

The fear in his eyes would not fade. Looking into them, she thought of caged beasts.

‘Remain with me,’ he then said. ‘Until he awakens.’

Straightening, she searched the floor until she spied her abandoned sword. She strode over, crouched and closed her hand about the damp, cold grip.

Someone pounded on the door, startling them both.

‘Go away!’ Resh roared.

  *   *   *

The line of hills ended in a series of ridgebacks, steep-sided and bare of all growth. The soil was stony, the hue of rust, forming fans at the base that spread out over the edge of the plain. Sharp-edged rocks studded these fans, glinting like gems in the pale, wintry light.

Kagamandra Tulas stood facing east, looking out over the flats to the distant line of black grasses. Below him the red fans of silt had the look of draining wounds, bleeding out across the dull grey clays of the plain. He had made his camp just behind this last serrated line of the hills, sheltered against the bitter winds that swept down from the northeast. In the midst of tumbled, fractured boulders, near a massive nest of withered branches and trunks from some seasonal flood, he had built a small wooden shelter, tucked against an overhang. The opening faced on to a small firepit, where he cooked his meals, slowly working through the serendipitous cache of fuel. A dozen paces along the crevasse was a cut to one side that led to a cul-de-sac where he had hobbled his horse.

Somewhere between his departure from Neret Sorr and here, the tide of determination and will had died away. A better man would have pushed on in defiance of his own sordid failings. At the very least, he would have completed his journey to the winter fort of the Wardens, or perhaps onward from there, to the Shake denizens of Yannis Monastery or Yedan. And from such places Kharkanas was not far, not far at all. Each step offered its own momentum, something even a mule understood.

Heroic journeys, as sung by poets, never stumbled against a lack of fortitude in the hero. The inner landscape of such men and women was something strange and foreign to the audience, and so it was ever intended, as a poet’s purpose was neither simple nor innocent.

No mortal could set himself against such a hero. Perhaps that was the secret lesson in such tales. But Kagamandra had long since abandoned the romance of heroism, as if life could be lived only from a distance, with oneself that figure, forever remote on the horizon, crossing an arid landscape with every step a battle won, where every war was a war worth fighting. In this scene, there was no promise to draw closer. Details surrendered to the necessity of purpose.

He had once believed that such tales would be spun of his own life, of his exploits on the field of battle. He had once yearned for the attention of poets – in the days when songs showed no bitter underside, before the world grew jaded with itself.

Sharenas – cousin to Hunn Raal and the woman who had quite possibly stolen his heart – had urged him to ride to his betrothed. Was that not a heroic quest? Did that not invite a song or a poem? Would not such a journey win for him Faror Hend’s undying love? But as he rode out from Neret Sorr, leaving behind that wretched, reborn army, did he truly believe any of that? Should he find her, should he come at last face to face with Faror Hend, what would she see? A desperate, pathetic old man, who would grasp hold of her in the way of all old men: as if she embodied his long-lost youth. How could she not flinch from his approach? How could she not distrust anything he had to say?

Vows of freedom were like a dog clamping jaws on its own tail. With the promise between its teeth, it could run for ever.

The sky to the east was heavy with clouds, polished iron and promising snow. He was running low on food and these hills were mostly barren, barring a few rabbits that still eluded the snares he’d set. The forage he’d brought with him for his horse was almost all gone and the animal was weakening by the day. The exigencies of survival should have already forced him to resume his journey, but even this impetus had yet to drive him from his lair.

His father had known him for a self-indulgent child, and, should the man’s spirit still linger, it would yield no surprise when looking now upon its only surviving son. The privilege of dying while still filled with promise had belonged to Kagamandra’s brothers. Somewhere leagues to the south, three cairns made islands on the plain, and around each of them the grasses grew verdant, and come the spring flowers would blossom in colourful profusion about the stones.

He had spent years telling himself to not begrudge the liberation his brothers had found: that blessed release from expectation and the sordid disappointments that followed.

I do not love her. That much is clear. Nor do I wish her love. I am a ghost. I linger on through lack of will.

In the distance, riders had emerged from the wall of black grasses. Some led horses bearing what looked like bodies. He had been watching the troop for some time as they walked their mounts alongside the sharp edge of Glimmer Fate. They were now directly opposite him and would soon pass as they continued south.

There was an ancient saying his father had been wont to use, wielding the words like weapons to batter down his children.
A hero’s name will live for ever. Die forgotten, and you have not lived at all.
When Kagamandra had returned home from the wars, the lone survivor among his father’s children, he had been a hero of renown, a warrior raised high on the shield of nobility – gifted with title and honour. His father had stared at him with lifeless eyes and said nothing.

In the following year, the old man elected to waste away to nothing, behaving as if all his sons had died. He never again spoke Kagamandra’s name.
You’d forgotten it, perhaps. And so I, who lived, never lived at all. Your favourite saying, Father, proved a lie, when at last it settled at your feet. Or was it you who failed it?

No matter. Not a single reward did not taste bitter once I returned home. I did not return to find my bride awaiting me. I did not return to my father, for the news had preceded my arrival, and when at last I came, he was already standing in the shadow of death.

He did not love Faror Hend. He’d not even wanted her. When he huddled under the furs at night, hearing the distant cries of the lizard wolves of Glimmer Fate, he thought not of that young woman. He thought, instead, of Sharenas.

How many fatal choices could a man make?
Many, because even death need not be sudden. It can be measured out like sips of poison. Each day can be greeted as if it too had died, and but awaited your arrival.
How many deaths could a man endure?
I still walk a field of corpses, and not one of them has anything good to say, but I have learned to look them in the eye and not flinch. I thank my father for that.

He stepped away from the ledge, worked his way down the narrow, crooked path to his camp.

He fed the last of the forage to his horse and then gathered and bound his bed furs, strapped on his sword and checked over the rest of his gear before saddling his scrawny mount.

A short time later, astride his horse, he emerged from the defile, swung the animal over the crest and rode down a red slope of silts to the hard, frozen plain. Snowflakes spun down from the sky. He set out at a slow canter, to work some heat into the beast’s legs.

  *   *   *

Bursa re-joined them. ‘It is Kagamandra Tulas, commander.’

Calat Hustain rode on for a moment longer, and then reined in. The rest of the troop drew up around their leader.

The veteran sergeant settled in the saddle, gloved hands resting on the horn. Since the day on the Vitr shore, Bursa had not slept well. Each night pulled him into a fevered world where dragons wheeled overhead whilst he ran across a vast, featureless plain. His arms were burdened with strange objects: a silver chalice, a crown, a sceptre, a small chest from which gold coins spilled.

In this nightmare, he was the lone protector of these treasures, but the dragons were not hunting him. They but circled overhead like carrion birds. They waited for him to fall, and onward he ran, flinching from their vast shadows that played over the ground ahead. The coins kept falling, bouncing and scattering in his wake – there seemed to be no end to them. And when the sceptre slipped through his grasp and fell, he found another one, identical to the last, still in his arms.

The crown, he saw, was broken. Mangled. The chalice was dented.

The Eleint were patient overhead. He could not run for ever, and there was no place in which to hide. Even the ground under his feet was too hard for him to make a hole, to bury his precious hoard.

Awakening in the dawn, he was red-eyed with exhaustion, and he found himself repeatedly searching the sky during the course of each day’s travel.

They had seen no further sign of the terrible creatures. The Eleint had plunged into this world through a gaping rent in the air above the Vitr, only to then vanish. Somehow, this was worse – and during the day Bursa almost longed to see one, a minute talon-slash of black off in the distance. But this desire never lasted the journey into sleep.

At Calat Hustain’s command he had ridden back to discern the identity of the lone rider following them. It seemed now that they would await the man. Bursa glanced across at Spinnock Durav, and felt a stab of something close to resentment. The young could weather anything, and among them there were those who stood out even among their peers, and Spinnock Durav was such a man. Was it his perfect features that made certain the founding stones of his confidence, or did some residue of untrammelled self-worth seep out to settle into his face, creating the illusion of balance and open equanimity?

Bursa was tasked with protecting the young Warden by none other than Captain Finarra Stone. But it had been Spinnock’s warning cry that had saved everyone, down at the shoreline. Or perhaps Bursa misremembered – it had been a fraught time. But when he revisited that shout in his memory, it came in Spinnock’s voice.