Knife Sworn (20 page)

She shakes her head. “The austeres were already writing their trap around Hollow when you came to my hut.” Overhead the rain beats at the leaves, loud and furious, running down to pour on all below in spurts and dribbles. The Megra hunches, old and frail, a knot of misery in human form. The rope itches at Gallar’s neck and the memory of the sensation as it had tightened below the bulge of his throat makes him retch again.

Gallar wipes sourness from his mouth and says nothing. The Megra is right and it angers him. Her fear angers him, a worse betrayal than any other—that the Megra, so old, and tough, has surrendered to her fear. And now she hunches in the rain, utterly defeated, the pivot of old tales, a threat to scare children, just an ancient woman, soaked and waiting to die.

The people of Hollow would not have left. But even so, she should have stayed to try. The Rock Hounds would have waited on their enemy, stood their ground, the common people too. The Hollow had been watered with their blood for too many years to just leave it. None of them had any give in them. The sharp-angled language of the soldiers returns him to the moment as they exchange an observation.

“Who are these people?” Gallar asks, leaning in towards the Megra.

“Cerani.” Her hair hangs before her face, water drops forming and falling from the ragged curtain of it, forming and falling.

Gallar can make no sense of that. Desert men from the ends of the world, here where the mountains keep Mythyk from Fryth? He wants to ask more but sounds of shouting, louder than the rain, turn his head towards the clearing. He stands, cold water running into the few dry places remaining to him. The Megra stays huddled as if she knows nothing good is coming.
Be brave
. He remembers the words from the Megra’s ring and wonders why they come to him now, demanding to be spoken. “Be brave,” he says. “We’re none of us just one thing.” It seems important to say those words, to remind her. Perhaps he forgives her too, but those words won’t come.

The shouts grow closer, several men, then a sudden silence filled by the drone of rain on leaves.

“What did the ring say for you?” he asks, wondering if the soldiers have taken if from her or is it hidden, or lost.

“Helmar gave me that ring,” she says, spitting rain. “Long ago, before time corrupted us both. It said: You are my salvation. It still says it. A lie.” She spat bitterness with the rain this time. “He’s dead. He lived too long and now he’s dead. Past any salvation. As if a twisted thing like me could have saved him even when there was a chance.”

And Gallar knows they are lost, him and the Megra both. She wouldn’t be spilling secrets with the rain if they weren’t about to die. He puts his hand on her shoulder. Rags and bone, soaked through, but there’s something in that moment.
Be brave
.

A few seconds pass, then more rustling and two more dripping soldiers break into the circle of thorns. One points at Gallar, the other man takes hold of the dangling end of the noose and pulls him behind them as they leave again.

They return to the hanging tree, to the swaying corpses, running with water now. There are men beneath the tree, close to the trunk, faces obscured by the legs of the hanged. A score or more soldiers come pressing in from deeper in the forest, a nervous air about them, as if the rain doesn’t agree with these men from the dry lands. Lanterns hang on lower branches at wide intervals, the rainclouds having ended the day prematurely. Several of the lights dangle from the hanging tree, one close to the face of a victim, black-faced, eyes bulging, the blood on his chin running again in the rain.

Still more soldiers arrive, these ones hurrying, barking orders or questions to the others. The men by the base of the tree turn and between them Gallar sees a clansman, on his knees, blood covering half his face from a cut high on his forehead. They jerk the man to his feet by the rope about his neck. A man of Rella by the look of him, only ten miles from Hollow if a crow flew above the Ridge of Tears. The officer that had spoken to Gallar stands beside the clansman and now leads the other soldiers as they bring him out from under the tree, knocking aside the feet of the dead men swaying above them. They have bound his hands tight behind his back and already they’re purple with trapped blood. The officer says something and one of his men slings the spare loop of rope from the noose over a tree branch.

“No!” Gallar starts forward, only to find his own noose tightening as his guard holds fast. “No!” He chokes it out. The Rella man can see what’s happening to him—why isn’t he fighting, trying to run?

The soldier reaches high, wraps the rope about both hands and leans back, letting it take his whole weight. A single short cry escapes the clansman, he staggers across the forest floor, drawn onto his toes beneath the branch. A second soldier joins the first and the man’s feet leave the ground, his legs scissoring wildly, kicking up fallen leaves and wet rot as he loses contact.

Gallar vomits acid and falls to his knees unable to look.

“Get up.” The officer’s boots, gleam beside the watery yellow splatters of Gallar’s vomit. “Up,” he says again in his broken accent.

Gallar struggles to his feet, his legs almost too weak to stand. “I didn’t do anything.” His father would not be proud. His father would tell him to stand like a man and not beg.

“You knew this Fryth man.”

“No.”

“And now you lie.” The officer slaps him, an almost casual blow with the back of his hand, but enough to stagger Gallar and have him spitting blood into his hands.

“How many other Fryth are hiding in the trees?”

“None.” Gallar looks wildly for help he knows isn’t there. “I don’t know.”

The man sneers at him, a wrinkling of his long nose. Water glistens in his sharp dark beard. “I can’t trust a liar. The old woman knows about the austeres. I don’t need you.”

A quick command to Gallar’s guards and the officer turns on his heel to walk away. Yet more soldiers have arrived, some setting up more lanterns, others tying a wide canvas to make a shelter from the rain, yet more rolling out rugs beneath it.

Someone important is coming!
Sarmin wonders if it is General Arigu. The boy’s fear infects him but an anger builds too. These are Cerani. His army. And Arigu has stolen them. Set them to hanging innocents, to killing men and boys in mountains and forests far from home.

“Wait!” Gallar calls at the officer’s back. “What—”

The sharp tug of the rope cuts him off. One of the soldiers hits him on the back of the neck and shoves him forward. Gallar falls into the mud beneath the tree. A man laughs, just a short bark of laughter, a little way off. And still the rain keeps falling. The echoes of the Many ring in his head. He tries to speak over them, heart pounding, it seems so wrong, so unfair.

“I’m fourteen—I don’t want to—”

Sarmin tries to speak to the boy, tries to offer some comfort, but he has none to give, and Gallar cannot hear him.

The rope jerks him to his feet, then off them, the pain excruciating, worse than he has ever known, stars explode in his vision. The scream that needs to be heard won’t come, can’t come. I’m going to die. Raw terror chases away all thought. Sarmin’s terror, Gallar’s terror. Neither of them can escape the moment—both suffer the agony. The thrashing of his legs seems distant, the useless hands clutching at the rope around his neck, weak and belonging to someone else, only the pain is his, and even that is being taken away, piece by piece. He sees his Ma, at the hut door, younger, back when her hair was still like wheat and she sometimes smiled. He sees that butterfly, the one he dreamed of, failing to take wing. The sharp scent of white-stars fills his mind, a vision of them, a dozen of the flowers glistening in his palm, then only one white-star, just one, bright and fierce, rushing towards him from dark infinity, growing, filling the world, taking him home.

Sarmin found himself on the floor, choking. With effort he relaxed the fingers knotted about his throat, sucked in cool air, choked and retched. He neck hurt. His hands ached. Looking down he saw his palms slashed red, as if marked by the rope that had hanged him. Hanged Gallar—he corrected himself. He sat up, spitting dust, rolling his neck, looking back towards the wall where he had pulled the vision from.

“Arigu.” The name fell like a curse and summoned a cold anger. Sarmin had fought to stop this war, known it to be both foolish and wrong. But now he had seen it and his convictions ran deeper than bones. “Arigu.” And he stood, ready to find Azeem, issue orders, demand action.

—I was a soldier.

“No” Sarmin tried to reject the voice but his strength had gone. The Many would take him as they often did when he slept or lay exhausted.
—I sailed the Blessing ten years and seven.

The Many came whispering from the back of Sarmin’s mind, diminished now by the emptiness of Beyon’s tomb—but still they were the Many, whole lives, hundreds of personalities left stranded by the Unpatterning, lost and lorn, without form or voice, his to hold, his people. They surfaced from the depths of imagination, insinuating themselves into his thoughts as if they were new ideas or sudden memories
.
In the cartodome the walls held a painting, a work of the Yrkmen, made in coloured oils on stretched canvas and executed with such skill that a man might think it a window onto some distant place. Beyond cliff tops the painter showed the vastness of the sea, as wide and unknown as the empty desert. And on that endless expanse of heaving foam-flecked water, a lone ship, its motion captured in the stillness of oils, tossed by waves.

When the Many came at night, when Sarmin’s mind sought sleep, he felt like that ship, alone and without anchor in a place far from any surety of solid ground.

—
I hammered pots of copper and plates of silver in the Street of— I knew a girl from Honna Province with hair like dark water falling—Mine was the truest heart that man had ever known—Four times I bore a child and none drew breath—I ran from—I killed—I loved
—

The tide rose and lifted Sarmin from all thought or care.

Sarmin regained himself in a cold dark place. He found himself hunched, turning some smooth object in his hands.
The Ways
. Only in the Ways could a man be cold in Nooria. One of the Many had brought him here from his room, taking the secret door and the staircase that spiraled down within the thickness of the walls until it reached the tunnels. He shifted and his shadow moved. He shifted again and turned towards the lantern set behind him on the rock.

Sarmin’s hands held a skull, fingers hooked through its dark sockets. He almost dropped it but some instinct made him keep hold. He looked around, trying not to feel the smoothness of the bone between his fingers. The walls stood straight, dressed with blocks of stone.
Not the Ways then, but still some deep place. The dungeons?
Had he come through a hidden door into the oubliettes? He made a slow circle, still crouching. The cell rose high above him but he would not have space enough to stretch his arms wide and still make the turn. The narrow door stood ajar, old wood, inches thick and black with age. Sarmin rotated the skull to face him.
Someone more forgotten than ever I was—with no comfort but cold stone, no bed or books, no window, no freedom but death.
Had one of the Many brought him here to silence his recriminations with shame? To make him face up to his duties? Perhaps one of the sets of memories that seethed within his mind had once been entirely confined behind the dark eye sockets that now regarded him.

Silence wrapped him. No sound from any others unremembered in their tiny cells, nothing of the palace’s clatter and stamp reached down this far, no cry of tower mage or hawks’ keening, just time sliding past unheard, by second, minute, and year. He had ordered the dungeons emptied. If their crimes were as forgotten as the prisoners then they were freed, or executed if their crimes were remembered and not forgiven—but each man saw the sky, and spoke with an acolyte of Herzu on the wall-tower where the wind comes in from the desert. And so he was alone, the cells abandoned.

Sarmin set the skull before him, wincing at the clack of bone on floor slab. The sea of the Many had stranded him on strange shores before but none so lonely as this. He sat still and let his eyes explore the stonework with that same intensity which once found every angel and each devil in the detail of his own prison walls. Time’s river flowed. Twice the lamp guttered but did not die, and at last Sarmin’s gaze settled upon a stone in the wall… in the wall, but not of the wall. It drew him to his feet and he worked it free by fractions of an inch breaking nails and skinning a fingertip. At last he held it, a dark smooth stone, one edge disguised with dirt and dust to better match the wall. It had a weight to it, more than such a stone should, and a warmth…

When the sound came, Sarmin took it for the return of the Many, but they held their peace, perhaps kept back by whichever of them had walked Sarmin to the oubliette in the first place.
Again!
The scrape of shoe on floor slab. Sarmin set the stone dead centre of the cell on the floor beside the skull, slid the hood across his lantern, and sat behind the door with his back to the cold wall. Footsteps approached but the Many came faster, some new person from among the unreturned now overwriting him like sudden inspiration.

“Are you well, Magnificence?”

Sarmin shook his head and found focus. His mind had gone silent and the oubliette, skull, and stone had been replaced by soft silk, feather mattresses, and a harem girl, pale as milk with golden hair, naked and smiling. A pre-dawn light filtered down from tiny windows high above.

Silk covers slid from Sarmin as he sat, pooling around his hips. He too was naked.