Fall of Light (45 page)

We both saw the forests emptied, made shallow with our knowing. And yet, for all that, the slaughter could not defeat our abiding fear.

Fighting the chill, he strode into the forest, boots silent upon the thick, wet leaves.

Another battlefield, this one, with the scars of slaughter upon all sides.

He yearned for the return of Lord Draconus. Or even a simple word – a missive sent from the Citadel. He had fashioned a report of the battle with the Borderswords, dispatching it to Kharkanas. It had elicited no response. He had reported in detail the murders within the house. Even this was met with silence.

Milord, what would you have me do? Two daughters are left to you, their hands red. We found the charred remains of the third – Malice, we think – in an oven. Envy and Spite, milord, hide in the bones of the house. But it’s a flimsy refuge. With a word the walls can be breached. With a word, Lord Draconus, I can have the horrid creatures in chains.

But this led Ivis into a realm in which he did not belong, and responsibilities he would rather do without. Was this cowardice? Was there not the necessity of justice in the matter of slain men and women?
But milord, they are your daughters. Your charge. For you to deal with, not me, not a master-at-arms, who by every law imaginable would see the two of them skinned alive.

Return to us, I beg you, and make right this crime. Their blood protects them from me. But not from you.

More to the point, milord, what if they seek to strike again? We have our hostage to think of, the sanctity of her life – Abyss take me, the sanctity of what remains of her innocence!

I will defend her, milord, even against your daughters.

He was among black spruce now, passing between boles that had bled sap now frozen into obsidian-hued beads, as if the trees were bleeding black glass. It was said that in the far north, such trees could explode in the depth of winter. When the air grew cold enough to pain the lungs with each breath drawn. It would not surprise him: this wood made for a foul fire, and its habit of growing up from sunken and rotted ground gave the trees a deathly feel.

At least they reared straight, and seemed to know a youthful span before their sudden death, when all life fled them in a seeming instant. Then, straight or not, they would become skeletal, home to spiders and not much else.

He paused at a faint smell upon the cold wind. Woodsmoke.
Shallow, and shallow again. Even you, smoke, now taint my memory. It is fire’s light that is brittle, not its heat. Quench one and still flinch from the other. I’ll take the glow as a promise and leave it be. Deniers, if indeed you have returned to this forest, play out your rituals in private, and know well my aversion. The stench suffices.

He swung about, set off back to the keep. It seemed that no matter which direction he chose, it was not a day for wandering.

Winter had cooled Kurald Galain’s rage, surely. The civil war slept restless as a hungry bear in its cave, but he would with relief call it sleep nonetheless. Swords sipped the oil in their scabbards, whilst other weapons were plied, to keep banked what the season’s turn promised.

He would lead the Houseblades out then, Ivis believed. Into the new warmth and lengthening days. Even in the absence of his lord, he would fight on behalf of the Great Houses. As the beast shook itself awake, lumbering into the bright spring air, he would wield Draconus’s soldiers like a sharp talon in the First Son’s reach.
We’ll take to the blood as well as any other, and make of Urusander’s Legion a field of meat. Lord Anomander, do set us where you will, but pray it is in the heart of the fight. I have deceits to answer, in the name of the Borderswords.

The stolid, grey walls of the keep stretched out before him, beyond the track’s single ditch. He carried with him that tendril of woodsmoke.
No, Ivis, say it plain. Stay where you are, Draconus. Leave it to me to fold us into Anomander’s army. By this single act, your enemies are plucked. If instead you take the vanguard … ah, forgive me, I see us standing alone on that fell day. At our backs, not the host of noble allies, but bared teeth and rank indignation.

Stay, milord, and make your Houseblades a gift to the Son of Darkness. In the name of the woman you love, make us a gift.

A few paces clear of the trees, as he crossed the wagon trail, a sound behind him made him turn, to see three figures at the edge of the treeline. They wore skins, two of them wearing the ragged heads of ektral. For an instant, riding a thrill of fear, Ivis had thought them demonic – some blend of Tiste and beast – but of course, he then realized, the antlered ektral were but headdresses.

Deniers. Torturers of goddesses. The night before the summoning, you sat together, sharpening stakes at the edge of the glade. You invented a ritual, and filled it with power, and then you did something terrible.

Teeth bared, Ivis drew out his sword.

The three drew back, beneath the shadows.

Ivis saw that they were unarmed. Even so, the gloom of the forest behind them could be hiding any number of warriors.
I’ll not take a step. If you would speak to me, come forward.
But such boldness belonged to his mind, the words left unspoken. The truth was, fear gripped his throat. The thought of sorcery had unmanned him.

After a moment, one of the shamans stepped forward. As the figure drew closer, he saw that it was a woman, her face ritually scarred to make ragged streaks running down her cheeks. Unlike the two who wore ektral headdresses, the hood covering her head was furred, the fur black but silver-tipped. It hung down to cover her shoulders and was drawn together at the front by a single toggle. Her pale eyes were bleak as they fixed upon his face, and then the sword he held in his hand.

Ivis hesitated, and after a moment he slowly returned the weapon to its scabbard.

She drew nearer.

At last he found his voice. ‘What do you want? I saw her. The goddess in the glade. Nothing you can say will wash the blood from your hands.’

She received his harsh words without expression, and when she spoke her tone was flat. ‘We have come to tell you, Keep-Soldier, what has birthed this war.’

Ivis scowled. ‘You would not bow before Mother Dark—’

‘She never asked us to.’

‘And if she had?’

After a moment, the woman shrugged. ‘When the animals are gone. When hunting ends, and the ways of living change. When one must look to tamed animals, and the planting of crops. When all the old ways of bravery and prowess are done away with, the hunters will turn upon one another. Honour becomes a weapon, but it pursues no wild beast. Instead, it pursues your neighbour.’ She pointed to the keep behind him. ‘The birth of walls.’

Ivis shook his head. ‘There was war, with the Forulkan. We were forced to create an army. When the war was done, witch, only then did that army turn upon us. Honour was well served in the instant, but its flavour quickly fades, and now the taste is bitter.’

‘What drove the Forulkan into our lands? For them, too, the old ways were dead.’

‘Is this all you wanted to say? Why bother? We could argue causes until the last sunset; it avails us nothing.’

‘The Shake will leave their fortresses,’ the woman said. ‘They will come to us, in the forests. You will try to find us, but we will not be found. Not by you, not by Father Light. We are no longer in your war.’

Ivis snorted. ‘You think to usurp Higher Grace Skelenal?’

The witch was silent for a long moment, and then she said, ‘The goddess you saw chose the manner in which she manifested. When we found her … we fled. If others set upon her, they belonged to the forest. Spirits of wood. Spirits of old bones and blood-hungry earth and roots. For us, there was no need to hear her words. We well knew what she would say to us.’ The witch raised both hands, out from under the skins she was wearing, and Ivis recoiled upon seeing the stakes driven through both. ‘It is our fate to slay the old ways of living. We take too much joy in the slaughter, in the proof of our skills with spear and arrow. Longing gave power to our summoning. We must now suffer the proof of our regret.’

‘Then … send her back.’

‘Seen or unseen, flesh or ghost, she suffers still. You and I, we have murdered the old ways, and all that we will come to, it is of our own making.’ She hesitated, and then cocked her head. ‘You can always blame your neighbour.’

She bowed before him, and turned away.

Ivis watched her re-join the others, and the three shamans slipped back into the forest. In moments they vanished from sight.

Blame the neighbours. Yes, we’ll do that. When we can, if only to make living easier.

He resumed walking, his scowl deepening as he looked upon the wall before him. The Deniers would do as they must. If indeed they chose to disappear, rejecting the vengeance they had every right to seek, well, regrets had a way of breeding, and the swarming spawn could drown a soul in an instant.

Passing through the gate, his steps slowed as he studied the keep before him.
Ah, milord. Your daughters? Well now, there was a fire in the house … we saw naught the telltale flickers of light, and all too late felt its murderous heat.

Come the spring, milord, I see a sky made grey with smoke.

  *   *   *

Sandalath Drukorlat sat near the fire in the common room, away from the others. The new surgeon, Prok, was singing a ballad, words slurring and the brightness of his gaze an alcoholic sheen through which he blinked regretfully at the world. Whatever sorrow existed in the song lost its truths in the maudlin self-pity of the man’s voice.

Seated near the surgeon, in poses of faint attention or outright uninterest, were arranged the other newcomers to the household, as well as Armourer Setyl and Horse Master Venth Direll. The new keeper of records, a woman named Sorca, hid her face behind the bowl of a pipe. Her complexion, oddly smooth and unlined, was the same hue as the smoke she sent out in long, tumbling streams from her somewhat overly generous mouth. Her hair was cut short as if to undermine her femininity, but her broad features were soft and peculiarly welcoming. For all that, the woman rarely spoke, and when she did, it was in a low mutter, as if all conversation was in truth a private one, she with herself. Sandalath had yet to see her smile.

Sitting close to the new keeper was the woman who had replaced Hilith as head of the house-servants. Bidishan was wiry, nervous, carrying herself with an air of impatience, as if some vital task yet awaited her for which she needed all her energy, but, Sandalath had come to realize, there was no such task, and each day and evening was consumed by the same headlong rush. Perhaps it was sleep that Bidishan hurried towards, as if oblivion was the only island to take her exhausted self, flung insensate upon the strand at day’s end, and in the realm of dreams the woman unleashed all that was in her soul.

Musing on the notion, Sandalath felt a pang of sympathy for Bidishan. Within the mind, after all, was a world of unchecked dramas, where loves were unveiled and made so bright, so fierce, as to sting the eyes, and every gesture could make the earth groan, and every glance could awaken unfettered flames of passion.

In that world, Bidishan was beautiful, young, filled with vivacity. And others who came upon her, why, they saw her truly, and in the face of such encounters they avowed their hearts, and made every labour bent to her service an act of worship.

Sandalath knew her own such world, also clothed in sleep. And often, she found herself longing for its embrace, for in this cold, wintry place, with its stone walls hiding secret passageways, her waking moments were filled with anxiety, fear and longing. In her thoughts and in her body, she lived with nervous fires flickering without end. When she could, she fled them all, huddling beneath furs in her bed, and, as sleep took her, slipping back to the life that existed before House Dracons, before the murderous spawn of Draconus and the blood splashing floor and walls, before the bodies carried out into the bleak light of the courtyard and the small white bones in the bread oven. Before the terrible battle that had been fought outside the keep’s walls.

A secret lover, the pleasure of his touch, his weight upon her in the high grasses far beyond the sight of her mother. A son, free to play out his games of war amidst the scorched embers of the old stables. Children were visible shouts of life, a crowing delight in possibility and promise.

He was taken from me, taken from my sight. Where he once lived, in my life, there is nothing. An emptiness, empty of life and love. Empty, I fear, of hope.

Was that child not the mother’s gift? Children were where things could start over, be made different, where wounds could be avoided, evaded. Where dreams could live again, passed on in the clasp of her hand to his. Youth sent echoes into the world, echoes that could rush over a mother and sweep her back into her own past, and the swirling sorrow of such moments, so bittersweet, could become a kind of strength, a protectiveness both savage and undying. As if, in protecting the child, the mother was also protecting what remained of the child she had once been.

Bridges such as these should never be dismantled.

And yet, when Sandalath thought of her own mother, she felt nothing.
No bridge there. She sold off the stones, one by one, until she had us all perched upon a single block, a tottering foundation stone, the height of which she held to be more vital than anything else, even love.

Nerys Drukorlat, was it Father who stole everything from you? His war? His wounding? His death? But Orfantal wasn’t your child with which to begin again, to make right.

He was mine.

Prok’s song stuttered and then fell away as the surgeon lost his memory of the words. From near the kitchen door, Yalad – now the gate sergeant – rose to collect wood for the fire. She watched him approach and answered his weary smile with one of her own.