Mordraud, Book One (66 page)

An alliance between
Flux and harmony that could leave anybody speechless.

I
mpossible for him not to see it. He’d find it even with his eyes shut.

It was a pity to break it off, he mused.
But he was ready to do anything to have the chance to carry on investigating that astounding mystery shaped by those two brothers. Even to put an end to as remarkable a demonstration of power as the Long Winter was.

“
I’d like to know how you can be so sure of yourself,” Mordraud burst out. Saiden smiled. “Maybe you should just have a little more trust.”

***

A bureaucrat. Nothing more than a mere bureaucrat. Dunwich couldn’t believe he’d fallen so low. The lounge was choked with pipe smoke and dripping onto the white marble floor were the dregs of wine from the bottle he’d just drained. It wasn’t the first. Dunwich was paralytic, and had been since the afternoon, since he’d finished marching with the other Lances stationed in Cambria for the usual commemorative parade. Such a shallow and hateful event as to always make him want to down copious amounts. His poor luck was that the Empire staged dozens of them.

Since
being sent home after the assault he’d declared on the Rampart of his own accord, his duties were restricted to tending to his wounds and to pushing paper upon paper. Requests from the front for food, requests for horses, requests for troops, requests for anything at all. The usual answer he was supposed to send, after validating the Imperial sealing wax with the stamp was:
We’ll do our best
. Triumphant methodical disorganisation. Viewing the bureaucracy monster from close up was devastating for his frame of mind. Then the parades suitably rounded off the picture.

“
Why does nobody ever listen to me?!” he grumbled, swigging a large gulp of wine directly from the bottleneck. It tasted of dirty acidic water, yet he, in that precise moment, couldn’t care less. “They packed me off because I know what I have to do! If they were to let me lead the army... Instead, they waste time and do nothing...”

He didn
’t know if it was down to drunkenness or his gloom, but that evening Dunwich felt right in the mood to believe in a phantom Imperial conspiracy. Someone wanted to waste time, was endeavouring to protect the rebels – or who knew what. Cambria’s army could count scores of captains capable of manoeuvring very sensitive plots. Even among the Lances. Asaeld found himself always having to train new lads, while the veterans were sent to all four corners of the Empire to sort out every kind of trouble. Or they were left to organise parades. It was easy to point a finger at the guilty party in that fiasco.

Loralon.

From incompetent ruler to sordid instigator. An evolution that wasn’t even very unlikely. Dunwich had heard a few Lances discussing in hushed voices outside the council chambers. Rumours went that it was the Emperor himself who’d summoned him back to the city – a request Asaeld had tried to oppose, until he was forced into the inevitable surrender. Asaeld had reprimanded him severely, but what more could he do? He was following his superior’s orders, and besides, he’d been frightened out of his skin when he saw Dunwich head off on his wild charge. He only had murky recollections of what had happened after the raid. But the facts were more than clear. He’d carried through a superb attack, with staggering results, and had then been moved away. The blueprint was complete. Loralon had a greater plan, besides the war. A malignant scheme of domination, which included wiping out the Lances.

Or was the
wine perhaps talking in his place?

Dunwich
tapped his pipe on the small table to free it of ash, but he did so with such little art that the briar stem snapped in his fingers. He really had drunk too much. He couldn’t even stand up.

A hand appeared in front of him, to assist him.

“You need to be more careful, my boy. Just as I came in here, others could do the same. And you’d already be dead.”

“
Asaeld?!” Dunwich asked, squinting. The world was spinning about him far too fast.

“
Of course. Who else if not?! I dropped in to see how you’re feeling. Does your shoulder still hurt?”

Dunwich
pulled back his shirt and looked at the scar with dumb eyes, as if checking it was still there. His shoulder was in meagre shape but was improving. The other injury, the one on his side, was progressing more slowly. A weird wound, that one. It didn’t look like a sword cut – rather a deep clawing. The healer told him it was made by the links in his armour breaking and biting into his flesh. Even if there was no trace of infection.

“
It doesn’t hurt any more. I’m ready to return to the front with you!”

“
I’m sorry, but I spoke with Loralon just today. He wants you to stay here... He’s adamant about it.”

“
I don’t give a damn about what
he
wants!” Dunwich blurted out. He’d got to his feet, but the world was swirling even faster. He had to hold on to Asaeld to avoid slumping to the floor like a helpless drunk.

“
He’s still our Emperor, my boy...”

“
Well, he can go bugger himself! I’m not staying here in the city while a war is fought so pathetically at the front! For love of the Gods, Asaeld...” Dunwich shook his head in despair. “Why did you let him do it?”

“
What? Force you to stay here? I told you... it’s an order...”

“
No, no! I meant the Long Winter! That putrid chanting will be the death of all of us!”

Asaeld
let out a deep sigh and took Dunwich by the shoulders to look him right in the eye. “Don’t talk rubbish. The targets are Eldain and his supporters. You’ll see they’ll give in, sooner or later. In fact, it might not be very long now.”

“
You think so?! Do you really believe that pack will give up because of this?” Dunwich chuckled coarsely, but had to interrupt it at once. He was on the brink of being sick.

“
The rebels aren’t immortal,” Asaeld retorted succinctly.

“
In any case, there’s a
conspiracy
– someone’s helping them!”

Asaeld s
tiffened, but Dunwich failed to notice. “There’s no conspiracy, my lad.”

“
Instead there is! Trust me! There’s someone...” Dunwich brought a hand to his mouth and spoke in a whisper. “There’s someone preventing us from winning through his choices. Somebody powerful.”

“
And who would that be?” Asaeld inquired, also whispering nervously.

Dunwich
nodded in conviction.

“
Loralon.”

“
The Emperor?!”

“
Exactly... And we should do something... to stop this conspiracy...”

“
And you mean? What should we do?”

“
Well... you’d be perfect... on that wretched... throne...”

Dunwich
didn’t even finish his sentence. He’d really gone overboard on the wine. Without a drop of strength left in him, he collapsed into the armchair again, passing out. Asaeld picked the bottles up off the floor, placed the young man’s arms and legs in a more comfortable position and, after ruffling his hair with a hand, left with a light step.

***

“We’ll stay here.”

Mordraud
indicated to Gwern and Saiden the ghost of a hut half-buried by the snow. Evening was approaching and a storm was about to break. The wind whipped their legs and bent the trees that gradually faded along the valley. They were a few days’ away from the Empire’s borders, in a combat zone. The Rampart’s southern front.

“
Let’s go in. At least we’ll be sheltered from the wind...” suggested Saiden. Mordraud dug around the shack’s door, and forced it open with his shoulder.

Inside
, a family had perished from cold in a corner, on a bundle of brushwood. The rest of the furnishings had been burnt in the fireplace, which had then filled up with snow. The floor was scattered here and there with excrement, but the smell was unnoticeable. The air was rarefied, unbreathable.

Gwern
turned to stone in the doorway, with Mordraud in front of him, who was already busy making a bit of space to sit down.

“
Let’s go somewhere else...” he muttered in a faint voice. Mordraud gazed at him in puzzlement. That hut could protect them from the storm, it was a good place. He didn’t immediately realise that Gwern was entirely unfamiliar with the Long Winter. The corpses in a corner, the misery of that home. It had become a sad habit for Mordraud. At the front, he had already come up against scenes like that. Whole villages annihilated by a blizzard, the dead heaped in hay barns, and ditches strewn with frozen bodies. Many a time he and the lads had had to dig holes in the marble-like earth and fill them with the dead, to clear the battlefield. He paid very little notice now to the horror of it. It had become a form of hardship, like all the others.

Saiden
pushed Gwern from behind, but entered alone. The boy couldn’t cross the threshold. He kept staring at the corpses, the shit on the ground, the rotting in the corners. He was shivering inside his fur cloak but pulled his neck backwards, as if not wanting to even share the air with that hovel.

Mordraud
finished sweeping the floor with his boots, approached his brother and took his hand. Slowly, he coaxed him inside. Then shut the door straight away and led him to a vaguely clean part, among moth-eaten clothing and the remains of wood chopped with a rusty axe, left in the sawdust.

“
When we comb the area around the Rampart, we often find places like this,” he commented, going back to his tidying. “The winter’s merciless.”

“
It’s all because of the war – the winter’s just a consequence,” replied a shaken Gwern, unable to avert his eyes from the grey mouths of those frozen bodies. The chill was deathly in there, maybe more so than outside, even if they’d shut out the wind. It was worse than a glacier. It seeped into bones and infected thoughts.

“
Eldain should stop resisting against Cambria. These people would have preferred to change lord, rather than die.”

“
It’s not a matter of lord, Gwern,” Mordraud exclaimed, sitting down heavily on the floor, using an old shirt as a mat. “Cambria wants to invade lands that have always belonged to others. It can’t have its way so easily.”

Saiden,
who had said nothing so far, now bore a faint smile. He let Mordraud go on, without taking his eyes off Gwern’s invisible reactions to his brother’s words.

“
Doesn’t seem to me like a great reason for having to put up with such suffering,” insisted Gwern, pointing at the three frozen beggars. A man, a young woman and an elderly mother. The girl’s stomach was a strange shape. She might have been pregnant, when she’d died. Gwern shuddered and moved a hand to his mouth, as if he’d felt the sudden need to vomit.

“
Eldain sees it differently. And so do his allies.”

“
But the ones who pay the price are all the others,” Gwern answered. Mordraud was about to give a curt reply, but the boy beat him to it. “We both know why you wanted to join the war, my brother. Not to fight for the cause. But because of Dunwich.”

Saiden,
who was sitting in a distant corner, nibbling on some cheese rind, squinted. The light of that meagre day was at its last drabs and the sole window was crusted up with ice. The two brothers were talking alone, in the dark.

“
I’m also fighting for other reasons now. I have friends at the Rampart. There’s Adraman.”

An embarrassing silence descended. As if both had more to add, but did
n’t wish to. Deanna. Gwern wasn’t aware of all the facts, but he could figure them out. Mordraud didn’t want to admit aloud what he was really doing to his friend. The betrayal that went on each time he returned home, to his wife.

Saiden
could observe it all, even if the light had faded. He discerned the Flux of the shack’s wooden form, and the rubbish littering the floor. And he could make out Mordraud’s vacant body, like a human-shaped black mass printed on a background of woven Flux. He could also perfectly see the bubble of light in Gwern’s chest. The Flux movements between the pair were constant, now. Saiden shifted seating position, too excited to sit still. What was relentlessly taking place between the two had no precedent. It could not be explained through any knowledge he’d delved into, neither Aelian nor Khartian, in all the centuries he’d wandered the world far and wide. Gwern’s light, in the form of Flux strands, was constantly striving to come into contact with Mordraud. Sometimes it succeeded, others it had to withdraw, recomposing itself inside the boy. Saiden was attempting to work out whether what they were saying had any effect. And he also wondered, smiling from the agitation of having no answer, how it was possible that the brothers were so anomalous, residing totally outside the rules making up the Flux framework to reality.

“
We’re here now. We need to put a stop to this winter. There’s no point brooding on these things.”