Fall of Light (50 page)

‘And will she make note of your gesture, First Son?’

‘When the notion of interest finds her,’ Anomander said in a growl, ‘she might blink to the meaning. It is said,’ he added in a bitter tone, ‘that the darkness does not blind, yet she has made me as blind as Kadaspala.’

‘She speaks the truth,’ said Caladan. ‘The darkness does not blind. And Kadaspala, I fear, is a poor comparison, since he is made blind by his own hands. In the name of grief, he sacrificed beauty. And here you walk, Anomander, in the name of vengeance. If not beauty your sacrifice, then some other thing. In each instance, the wound is self-inflicted.’

‘As you said,’ Anomander snapped, ‘Kadaspala was a poor comparison.’

‘What would you have of Mother Dark?’

‘If she is to be our goddess. If, indeed, she is to be my mother, inasmuch as the station is well-nigh vacant. Must I list the expectations? Set aside worship – I know her too well. I fear even the role of the mother struggles in me – she is not too many years older, after all. Thus, what is left to me to consider?’

‘The throne.’

‘Yes. The throne. The mundane perch upon which we paint prestige and authority like gilt. And from that vantage all faith in order must descend like gentle rain. Knock it askew and the realm totters. Bathe it in blood, and the lands burn. Should one take that seat, the hands must grip tight the arms.’

They were among the hills now, with the raw stone on either side silvered in frost. Wreneck walked in their wake, listening, understanding little. The sky overhead was the hue of sword blades.

‘Assemble for me, then,’ said Caladan Brood, ‘the necessities of proper rule.’

‘You invite this game?’

‘Indulge me.’

Lord Anomander sighed. ‘Virtues cannot be plucked from position, Azathanai. Nor worn like gem-studded robes. Justice does not live in the length of a sceptre, and the mere wood, nails and cloth of a throne invests nothing but the illusion of comfort. Pomp and ritual belabour the argument, and far from stirring a soul can more easily be scorned and given the drip of irony.’

‘You speak, thus far, as preamble. I will hear your list, First Son.’

‘I but voice my dislike of the very notion of rule, Caladan. She has made it too easy to confuse the worship that comes with a god or goddess with that of the honourable choice to serve one who rules, if that rule is worthy of respect.’ Anomander shook his head. ‘Very well. Live as if you believe in the virtues of your people, but rule without delusions, neither of them nor of yourself. Where stands the throne? In a field of poppies, with the boldest and brightest flowers crowding close, eager to numb your every sense. Their whispers will weave about you a poisonous cloud, through which you must strain to pierce the haze, if you can. Ambition has its own nature, and in every measure it proves simple enough to discern. The ruler’s goal is wisdom, but wisdom is as fodder for the ambitious, and given the chance they will pick its bones clean long ere the serving reaches the throne. By such scraps one must raise up a righteous rule. Is it any wonder so many fail?’

Caladan was silent for a moment, and then he grunted and said, ‘You set an impossible table, upon which no mortal can hope to attend.’

‘You think I do not know it?’

‘Describe for me, if you can, the nature of this wisdom.’

Anomander snorted impatiently. ‘Wisdom is surrender.’

‘To what?’

‘Complexity.’

‘To what end?’

‘Swallow it down, spit it out in small measures, to make palatable what many may not otherwise comprehend.’

‘An arrogant pose, First Son.’

‘I do not claim it, Azathanai, just as I refuse for myself the notion of rule. And, in the name of worship, I am lost in doubt, if not outright disbelief.’

‘And why is that?’

‘Power does not confer wisdom, nor rightful authority, nor faith in either of the two. If it offers a caress, so too can it by force make one kneel. The former is by nature suspect, while the latter – well, it can at least be said that it does not disguise its truth.’

‘You yearn for liberty.’

‘If I do, then I am the greater fool, because liberty is not in itself a virtue. It wins nothing but the false belief in one’s own utterly unassailable independence. Even the beasts will not plunge to that depth. No, if I yearn for anything, it is for responsibility. An end to the evasions, the lies spoken in the mind and the lies spoken to others, the endless game of deeds without blame, and all the causes of seeming justice behind which hide venal desires. I yearn for the coward’s confession, and understand me well here, Caladan: we are all cowards.’

For reasons Wreneck could not grasp, Lord Anomander’s reply silenced Caladan Brood. They trudged on, and no further words came from any of them. With the sun a pale white orb high to the southwest and the afternoon on the turn towards dusk, they came within sight of Dracons Keep.

Wreneck studied the high wall and the gate, and then the freshly mounded earth rising here and there in the land surrounding the fortress. Here there were ravens aplenty. With the day’s end, they would rise from those strange hills and make for the forest branches.

Caladan Brood spoke then. ‘Lord Anomander, what will you do if one day you find yourself in the role of a king, or, indeed, a god?’

‘Should such a day ever arrive,’ the First Son replied, ‘I will weep for the world.’

The gates opened upon their approach. One man emerged, old and worn but wearing the garb of a soldier, and Wreneck saw his pleasure and surprise when Anomander embraced him.

As they moved beneath the gate, Wreneck also saw how Caladan Brood hesitated, his eyes raised and fixed upon the unknown words carved into the lintel stone.

Then, a moment later, they were in the courtyard, and he saw Sandalath, who came to him with a cry, as would a mother for her son.

From a slit in the tower, in the room their brother Arathan had once claimed as his own, Envy and Spite stared down on the newcomers in the courtyard.

‘That’s Lord Anomander,’ said Spite.

Envy nodded. ‘I do not know the other. He has the manner of a beast.’

‘The First Son’s found a pet.’

‘One day,’ said Envy, ‘I will marry Lord Anomander. And I will make him kneel before me.’

Spite snorted. ‘If you make him kneel, you will have broken him.’

‘Yes,’ Envy replied. ‘I will.’

‘That’s an ugly boy,’ Spite observed, through her now endless shivering.

Envy studied the scene below. ‘He will be staying here. With Sandalath – he must be from Abara Delack.’

‘I don’t like him. He makes my eyes sting.’

Yes. He shines bright, does that one.
After a moment, Envy gasped, even as Spite flinched back from the window.

For an instant, both girls had seen, in the sudden brightening of the aura surrounding Wreneck, a multitude of figures, ghostly, all blending and flowing through one another, and they had then stilled, suddenly, to lift their gazes to the tower.

Gods! He’s brought gods with him! That boy! A thousand gods!

They see us! They know us!

Unwelcome guests had come to House Dracons. The two girls fled for the cracks.

TEN

T
HE COURT POET OF KHARKANAS DEPARTED THE CHAMBER, AND
in the silence that followed, it seemed to Rise Herat that Gallan had taken with him every possible word, every conceivable thought. Sorcery still roiled about in the room, heavy and sinuous as smoke from a brazier. Cedorpul, seated on a bench that lined one wall, had leaned his back against the worn tapestry behind him, closing his eyes. Endest Silann, sallow despite the ebon hue of his skin, sat on the edge of the old dais, his hands cupped in his lap and his eyes fixed upon them with peculiar expectancy.

Standing opposite the doorway through which Gallan had departed, Lord Silchas studied the swirls of magic that still drifted above the tiled floor. His arms were crossed, his features fixed and without expression.

‘The Court of Mages,’ said Cedorpul, his eyes still closed. ‘Well, it was a bold ambition.’

Rise Herat rubbed at his face, but everything seemed strangely numb to his touch, as if he was no more than an actor upon some stage, truths hidden behind thick makeup, while he stumbled through a play constructed of lies and penned by a fool.

‘Why does it still linger?’ Silchas asked.

‘Slipped the tether,’ Endest Silann replied after a moment, squinting down at his hands. ‘He left it to wander like a lost child.’

Silchas turned to the young priest. ‘His reason?’

‘To prove the conceit,’ Cedorpul answered when it became obvious that Endest would not. ‘That we can control this power. That we can shape it to our will. It is as elusive as darkness itself, a thing that cannot be grasped. The Terondai bleeds this … stuff. It fills every room in the Citadel. It commands the courtyard and stalks the streets beyond.’ He finally opened his eyes, revealing their red-shot exhaustion, and met Silchas’s stare. ‘Have you seen where it gathers, milord? About statuary, the monuments of the city’s squares, the caryatids shouldering the lintel stones of our proud public edifices. Around tapestries. In the taverns where bards sing and pluck their instruments.’ He waved a plump hand. ‘As if it possessed eyes and ears, and the ability to touch, or, perhaps, taste.’

‘The one you would make seneschal to this Court of Mages,’ said Silchas, baring his teeth, ‘simply flings it all back into your face, Cedorpul.’

‘It is his manner to mock our aspirations. A poet who ran out of words. An awakener of sorcery with nothing to say.’

‘How did he come by this power? To awaken the darkness?’

Endest snorted, and then said, ‘Forgive me, milord. He found the power in his words. In the rhythms, the cadences. Unmindful, he discovered that he was capable of uttering … holiness. Needless to say,’ Endest added, attention returning once more to his cupped hands, ‘the discovery offended him.’

‘Offended?’ Silchas prepared to say more, but then, with a helpless gesture, he swung round and walked to a sideboard where stood a large clay jar of wine. He poured full a goblet, and, without turning to face the others, he said, ‘And you, Cedorpul? How did you come by it?’

‘Could I answer you thus, I would be a relieved man.’

‘Thus?’

‘By prayer, milord, as befits a priest serving a goddess.’

Silchas drank down a mouthful, and then said, ‘If not born of the sacred, Cedorpul, then describe to me what mundane gesture enlivened the magic?’

‘Curiosity, milord, but not mine. The sorcery itself.’

Silchas spun round. ‘Then it lives? It possesses a will of its own? Darkness as sorcery, now manifest in our realm. What does it want of us?’

‘Milord,’ said Cedorpul, ‘none can say. There is no precedent.’

Silchas faced Rise Herat. ‘Historian? Have you perused the most ancient tomes, the mouldy scrolls and clay tablets and whatnot? Is there or is there not, here in the Citadel, the gathered literature of our people? Are we indeed in a time without precedent?’

A time without precedent? Oh, surely we are in such a time.
‘Milord, there are many myths recorded in our library, mostly musing on origins of various things. They seek to map an unknown realm, and where memory does not survive, then imagination serves.’ He shook his head. ‘I would not put much trust in the veracity of such efforts.’

‘Use what you will of them nonetheless,’ Silchas commanded, ‘and speculate.’

Rise Herat hesitated. ‘Imagine a world without sorcery—’

‘Historian, we are in the midst of its burgeoning, not its extinction.’

‘Then, in principle, magic is not in question. It exists. It has, perhaps, always existed. What, then, has changed? A burgeoning, you say. But consider our own creation myths, our tales of the Eleint, the dragons born of sorcery, and indeed the guardians of the same. In the distant past, if we give such tales any credence at all, there was magic in the world, beyond even what we see now. As a force of creation, perhaps, an ordering of chaotic powers and, possibly, emerging with the necessity of a
will
behind that ordering. Shall we call this a faceless god?’

‘And there,’ interjected Cedorpul in a weary tone, ‘is where you stumble, historian. Who created the creator? Whence the divine will that engendered divine will? The argument devours its own tail.’

‘And in that myth,’ Rise Herat said, ignoring Cedorpul, ‘many are made as one, and one as many. Tiamatha, the dragon of a thousand eyes, a thousand fanged jaws. Tiamatha, who makes from her subjects her own flesh.’ He paused, and then shrugged. ‘Too many of these oldest of stories invoke the same notions. The Dog-Runners will sing of the Witch of Fires, from whose womb every child is delivered, even as she dwells in each flicker of flame. Again, one who is many.’

Cedorpul made a disgusted sound. ‘Dog-Runners. Abyss take us, historian. They also tell of a sleeping world, earth as flesh, water as blood, and every creature but a conjuration of the sleeper’s dreaming.’

‘Troubled dreaming,’ Endest muttered.

‘What remains without precedent,’ Cedorpul insisted, ‘and what must therefore be examined as the source of this newfound sorcery in our realm, is the Terondai carved upon the floor of the Citadel. The gift given by Lord Draconus to Mother Dark.’