The other man threw. Alya saw the heavy spear arch down towards them, and leaping, stretched out his open hand. The ironbound shaft slapped stinging into his gauntlet palm. In the same flowing motion he spun it in his fingers, poised and hurled even as his feet hit the ground. The cast had such force that the shaft flew almost level, and wholly true. It took the thrower in the midriff and struck him off his feet, dead. The other gave back, but hoarse cries were going up on every side. Alya sprinted after the others, catching them up as they staggered into the slime and shadow of the little street.
Rysha was so done that she almost sank down there and then, but running feet were close behind. Alya and Vansha scooped her up. Asquan limped along by himself, wheezing with pain at every step. But suddenly they were around a corner, the fatal firelight was hidden and shadow ruled once more. Another knot of alleys opened up, and they plunged down one at random. Vansha alone waited an instant at the corner. Alya heard the feet catch up, the sudden confusion of steel and shouting, and sprang back to help. But Vansha came bounding up and waved him along with his bloodied sword. ‘The closest; and the two behind unready. That’ll teach ’em! What ails the old fellow?’
Alya had hardly noticed how Asquan faltered, still clutching his side as if with a stitch; but when he tried to help him, he saw the torn gash in the mail beside the lower ribs, and the clotted blood like trailing silk. Not … too painful!’ wheezed Asquan. ‘Stimulating, almost! And Powers, but we’ve a lively chase!’
They reeled and plunged down lane and streetlet, for never was there anything wider or cleaner, rows of windowless huts whose life was all turned inward. Filth spattered about them from undrained ways; and the few they met in their course scattered, appalled. At last, when they had to stop, all doubled over and retching save for Alya, it came to him that he could near no sound of pursuit save distant horn-calls.
‘Beaten the bastards!’ coughed Vansha.
‘For the moment!’ said Asquan, and then folded forward over his side, wincing. His gloved hand came away dark with new blood. ‘Struck deep, for a dead man’s shadow!’ he sighed, but he pushed away Alya’s hand. ‘No, I shall manage.’ And indeed he straightened up once again, tore off his fouled gloves, smoothed back his soaking hair, and looked about.
‘Did anyone note the lie of the town, from up there? I did. We’re well inside now; but hear those horns! The hunt will be upon us soon enough. And you wish to reach the palace? Perhaps if Rysha can oblige us some more?’
‘Must be bloody joking!’ she muttered. ‘I’m wrung out like a tart’s clout!’
‘I perceive the resemblance. Well, I see my own way clear enough. We must keep moving. Up to the left, I think – upslope, though it’s hard to tell in such an antheap.’
‘You can see the sheen of the palace,’ said Alya thinly. ‘Up there, against the snow. It reflects the light like nothing else.’
‘Walk on, then. Nothing else? Have you ever seen pearls? No? I had them once, and loved them. There was, let me see, the clasp of a great cloak-pin, ancient in my line. Huge ocean pearls, lustrous against silk linings. I sold it for two horses and a good meal. I miss the coolness of it, and the touch of the silk it fastened; but this is better.’
Alya looked at him. ‘I wouldn’t have thought so. I never had silks or jewels. Probably never will. I surely wouldn’t trade them for being wounded and in danger!’
‘Then you would never understand what it is to live! Comfort or danger, live either to the limit, to the surfeit. Seek the heights of pleasure, and you will find them merely another face of the peaks of pain! I have scaled both, as near the summit as now. And when you know that, nothing mortal is your master.’ The old lord chuckled. ‘Not all share this enlightenment, true. I have bestowed enough pain in my time to know that. You who care so much for a slip of a girl, you will never wholly understand. But it is also the way to your Wall.’
‘I follow it. I find little pleasure in it.’
‘And that is why you have never quite conquered it.’
‘My father took no joy in pain! He took little enough in anything, I thought!’
‘Nevertheless. Not everyone who delights in pain realises it. I am wiser. So are the shamans of the Ice, with their fearful rites and sacrifices. Through those they wield great powers, they do more than merely See! Their masks, their dances transfigure them, because they first endure so much. Through that, they can control forces of nature, wind, fire, storm even. The greatest of them can kindle men’s hearts to some degree, it is said; or quench them. The legendary masters could travel anywhere in the space of a thought. And all that they win through pain.’
Alya sighed. ‘I doubt that! They wallow in the pain. I have suffered enough to need no more! You are wise indeed, my lord, and I owe you so very much; but don’t seek to shape me in your image. I will live by other means.’
‘A shame!’ said Asquan lightly, and yet there was sadness in his eyes. ‘For I have no son I know of, and no heritage to give him, save the essence of my life, my own self. Yet I suppose it’s best that you are as you are – a good man, better than I, even without the strength of the Powers within you. I would not mind such a son; but I would worry about his survival.’
Against his will, Alya was touched. ‘I guess the Ice has distorted you and your life. As it has all of us, one way or another.’
Asquan laughed softly, and winced at the twinge in his side. ‘That is so; and I should have expected such perception from a Seer. But you little guess how much. Did you know that there are abandoned souls who will go so far as to worship the Ice? Grovel like any Ekwesh, though they are not born to its service?’
‘I’d heard something of the sort,’ said Alya, slowly. ‘I found it hard to imagine it was true.’
‘Oh, it is, I assure you. A cult, a very ancient cult, both here and in other lands, though always secret and small. A more refined worship than the Aikiya’wahsa, of course. Involving … a retreat from the world, in a sense. A denial of life, and all it entails, to exalt the mind. Sounds noble enough, doesn’t it? And after a fashion it is. The Powers of the Ice are pure mind, or so they imagine, greater minds than ours. Finer and higher thinkers, so they believe. So to imitate them, the flesh must be mortified, with privation, with pain, with strange experiences. Morality is a void, feeling an illusion, loyalty and honour mere self-deceptions. Things happen and must be made to happen because they are happening, ask not for cause or reason. All that matters is the triumph of the thought over the shell of filth that contains it. So one wallows in pain, to oneself and others, one espouses treachery in all things great and little, and above all one subjugates oneself to the higher will, believing in nothing else. Remarkable, is it not?’ He looked around at Alya and smiled seraphically, as if inviting some response.
Alya, cold and damp already, felt the awful chill of sweat along his spine, and the flickering fires did nothing to relieve it. ‘My lord, that sounds very familiar, indeed …’ He swallowed. ‘My lord – why have you brought us here, then, at such cost? To what end?’
‘To help you,’ said Asquan mildly. ‘Only that. Yes: in my rage at my loss and exile, my contempt for my fellow-men, pursuing their petty ends in the face of their peril, my fury at being so continually cheated by Volmur – in all that bitterness I bowed my head down to the Ice, once. I did its bidding, and believed in nothing, as it told me; and I did it well. The amount Volmur and his father suffered through me! The blows to their regime, their ambitions – why do you think they never felt able to move against the Forest, the Citadel, the other outlivers? And sold out, in the end, to the Ice?’ Asquan chuckled. ‘And I, their slighted servant, watched them sit and sweat their filthy lard away in fear! Oh yes, I served the Ice well.’
Alya shook his head, dazedly. ‘But then why help us? Only that?’
‘Because even those who bow their heads may sometimes raise them once again. They may, if they can but gain a shred of wisdom, see that the pursuit of pain is merely the pursuit of anoth
er kind of pleasure; that for treachery to have any meaning, so must loyalty; that one kind of tyranny is much like another; and that to believe in nothing, followed to its logical extreme, is to believe, indeed, in nothing. And so, after a time, I ceased to believe in the Ice as well. That opened my eyes to the falsity of the beliefs they imposed upon us; and to my own damnable folly!’
He sighed, and shook his head in wonder. ‘They must despise us as much as their Ekwesh brutes, for all they flatter us! To sell us servitude in the guise of freedom! But at last I was free of that illusion also, free to live on without purpose, looking to little more than death. And then you appeared, a fair and foolish boy on an Ekwesh horse like a hero of old, a demon in your saddlebag, the fire of the Powers in your sinews and a desperate warmth in your heart. And it came to me that there are two ways to capture the essence of existence – to live constantly in mind of death, or in mind of life. For myself, I could manage no better than the first; but in you I saw the second, and better. And that in helping you, I could at least keep life in sight a little longer. Warm my hands at it, you might say!’
Alya, shaky with relief and confusion, smiled and shook his head. ‘Perhaps I understand you, lord; or I will one day. I’m just a foolish boy, still. But I know this, that whether you believe in faith or not, you’ve kept it. For my part, you’ve given me more than many a father, already, and at great cost to yourself. You help me towards my dream, and I honour you for that. If we come through this, and I can make your name live in story, I will.’
The old lord held his head high, obviously pleased. Then, all in one onrush, he whirled on one foot and lunged into the shadows of a side-alley. There was a brief scuffling sound, a strangled gasp. Alya and the others ducked after him, not knowing what to expect – a body, most likely. But Asquan held a man pinned upright against the crumbling wall, his sword to his throat, though the newcomer was far larger than himself.
‘Why were you sneaking after us? Live a little longer! Speak!’
Clearly the man understood. He flapped his brawny arms urgently, and Asquan relaxed his grip and his sword slightly.
‘Why? Why d’you bloody think? Word’s gone out, there’s interlopers! Catch at all costs!’
He was a great swarthy oaf of a man, rawboned, sag-cheeked and stooped. His greasy face was slashed and scarred, eyes dull and heavy as if too little intelligence lurked there; and he stank, with the stink of the place made flesh. Yet there was steel in his voice, sharpened with terror; and something else very different.
‘And you’ve come hotfoot to catch them?’ sneered Vansha.
‘To help them! I’m Chuen, me, one of the headmen here! Our own headmen, not the bastards the Ekwesh set over us! We’re combing the streets, though it’ll go mortal hard if the patrols catch us. We need them, those interlopers. We need ’em more than our lives!’
‘You impetuous old thing, you!’ sneered Asquan. ‘And just what might you need them for, so badly?’
‘Because you’re here!’ snapped Chuen. ‘Because you found a way in! Word is, you passed the Dead and came through the Gate – that true? Anyhow, a way in. And a way in’s a way out!’
Alya sighed, and abandoned all pretence. ‘We lost half our number, man, and our boats in the rapid down there. What use is that to you? What use are we?’
‘What use?’ Chuen giggled. ‘So it’s true? Hah! Nobody, nobody’s ever got through that before, out or in! You … I don’t know why you’re here, you’re bloody mad – but what you could be to us! Hope. Life!’
To Alya’s astonishment he saw that Chuen wept, great fat tears that could barely roll down his seamed cheeks. ‘You’re saying,’ he said softly, ‘that the people here want to do something? To escape?’
Chuen’s teeth grated. ‘The people, yes! Those as are still human. Every poor bugger who’s not lost their soul to the Ice, or their wits. What’d you expect? We like it here?’
‘I thought you’d be cowed. Among all … all this.’
Chuen nodded. ‘We are. Maybe we are. Seems so fixed, so finished. There’s many folk here never known aught else, save in tales. Me, I was snatched as a babe, I can hardly guess what life might be like outside. But we still tell the tales!’ He looked anxiously around. ‘And this is no place for ’em! Heard the horns, and came running. Others did too. Some saw you, put me on your tail. But what I know, the Ice will too, soon enough. There’s a big price on your heads! More food, lighter toil. And for bringing you in, freedom, no less!’
Rysha sniggered. ‘Likely they’d honour that!’
‘Reckon they would,’ said Chuen uncomfortably. ‘What’s one thrall more or less to them? A piddling matter to—’ He gestured at the palace, and the cold slopes behind. ‘That. It’s got bigger plans in play right now. But we’ll see you safe, never fear!’
Asquan sheathed his sword. ‘You’ve order of some sort? Even here? Where you’re prisoners and thralls? I’m astonished.’
‘Here, more’n anywhere! An order of our own, that all the whips and spears can’t touch! What else can we have? Well, will you come, or die gabbing?’
Vansha and Rysha looked suspicious still; but Asquan nodded with grim pleasure. Alya clapped the man’s arm. ‘If you meant us harm, you’d have called down the patrols! Lead on!’
But from behind them came a rattle of iron-shod feet, and a challenge. The dialect was broad, but the words were all too clear.
‘You there! Stand!’
Six lined faces, hard as treetrunks, blank eyes level and suspicious. Spears and shields at their backs, arrows nocked on their short horn bows, drawn and ready in taut arms. The leader had none, but his spear was levelled.
‘Drop us, if we run!’ hissed Vansha.
‘Whoever would be fool enough to run?’ exclaimed Asquan. ‘As I said, Alya, I see my way quite clear.’
He tottered forward, cringed to the warriors, lifting his empty hands as if to seek grace. The leader grunted and struck him over the shoulders with the spear, forcing the old man to his knees. But Asquan’s hands slapped tight about the shaft, behind the head, and the leader jarred as if he had struck stone. His brawny arms bulged, but Asquan’s knobbed knuckles stood out stark white, and with little apparent effort he twisted the shaft suddenly upward into the leader’s astonished face, hurling him back into his followers like ninepins. A bowstring twanged, the leader screamed and went rigid, and as he fell Asquan’s sword swept out from beneath his cloak. Arrows tangled in the cloth, or rattled off his mail. One stuck in his shoulder, to little effect; for he slashed to left and right, cutting bow and hand apart, hurling the remaining warriors back against the wall.
So swift was all this that Alya and the rest had no chance to move; but as Asquan struck again, and two more warriors slid down the wall in bloody smears, he turned to laugh. ‘Go, fools! Don’t spoil my story!’
The wounded leader had spear in hand, stabbing up at him from the earth. Alya and Vansha sprang forward, but Asquan was faster still. His sweeping blow cut the man almost in two. But as his head bowed with the force of it, a spear came crashing down like an axe upon his crown. He jerked upright, blood spurting from a trenched gash among his grey hairs; but he leaned forward, almost casually, and smiled a terrible smile in the face of the man who had struck him. The warrior turned to run; but stopped dead, staring in horror at the blade that pinned him to the wall, and sagged. Cornered by the corpse, the last man cowered in dread, as well he might. Asquan, drenched in blood, slid the body contemptuously off the blade, and brought it up under his chin, so that he must rise on tiptoe or be impaled.
Asquan chuckled. ‘Go, cur, tell your masters the Inheritance of Teoquhan is avenged!’ He made as if to thrust, coughed, staggered and sank down to his knees.
Alya seized the sword as it dropped, and struck. ‘A dog at your feet, my lord!’ he said, as the Ekwesh fell.
Asquan smiled ecstatically, throwing his arms wide as if in greeting. Life—’ he cried.
And slumped sideways. Alya, sto
oping over him, saw the eyes wide and fixed. The wound in his side gaped a handspan deep, already clotted and congealed, the last pulse of blood fading as he watched.
‘He was dying all this time!’ whispered Alya.
‘Since the boat-fight? Think he knew?’
‘Lesser men would have dropped dead on the spot! He said his way was clear!’
‘Come, fools!’ rasped Chuen. ‘Or I wash my hands of you!’
‘Washing anything’s an improvement!’ snapped Vansha; but he tugged at Alya’s arm, and they ran.
‘Brave man!’ wheezed Chuen, herding them around corner after corner. ‘But they’ll rip the town apart to find you now!’
‘Then you needn’t shelter us!’
Chuen flapped his hands. ‘No. We keep you, long enough. Turn here, left! Up here, now! Worth any cost. We light the fire faster, that’s all!’
‘What?’
‘Heard what I said? The spark! Down this way, mind the footing! Kindling’s all stacked. Been ready a long time.’
‘What fire?’
Chuen’s laugh was brutal. ‘Fire that melts the Ice! That’s what bloody fire! Just wants a touch of the tinderbox. That’s you!’
He seized a heavy door and hurled it back. ‘In here! And down to the cellar, there! Fast!’
An imperturbable pair of shovellers, man and woman, scuffed away their tracks on the earth floor even as they passed. Down in the cellar Chuen tumbled old barrels aside to reveal a patch of mud brickwork. He tore at its heart, until a brick toppled outwards, and others beneath it. He bundled Rysha through the gap, then Vansha and Alya, who feared Chuen himself would stick in the gap. But the burly headman simply carried more bricks away, and as he tumbled through they were already being stacked up again. It seemed to take no more than a moment before they were shut in the dark, and could hear mud plastered on the patch, and the barrels rumble back into place. The loudest sound was suddenly Rysha’s agonised breathing.
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