‘Can’t you at least change the plans?’ demanded Alya, chill and bloodless.
‘No! It’s too late!’ snarled Chuen. ‘It’s all going – all moving. Something’d come unstuck! Thousands of us, whole lifetimes lost that somebody could try this one day, try to live free! And you go and—’
Alya felt a strange stillness descend. ‘Maybe. Not yet. I’m going to get it back.’
Vansha choked. ‘From there? Man, don’t be mad! Strength or no strength, they’ll slaughter you like a steer!’
Alya wondered if his grin looked as painful as it felt. ‘Then they’ll learn nothing from me, will they? Succeed or fail! They’ll have to slay me to stop me, I’ll make sure of that!’
Rysha was gnawing her knuckles, but she sounded earnest enough. ‘If I can help – get you anywhere unseen, like—’
‘No. Thanks, Rysha, but one’s enough; they might get their claws on you too. Stay and help Vansha and Chuen! And you, Vansha, brother – if you see me no more, go on and rescue Savi!’
‘I will! As I always meant to – brother.’
Alya drew his sword from the cart, strapped it on beneath his cloak. ‘Where can I find you all? In an hour? Two, maybe?’
Chuen was trying to take all this in. ‘Find you? Hah! In Hella’s hands, most like! But … well, where I meant to take you, I guess. On the steep rock slope above the citadel. There’s caves and crevices enough there that my kind use. You won’t see us, but we’ll see—’ He stopped, glaring up and down the caravan as if to seek the support of his men. ‘And they’ll bloody well find that out too, won’t they?’
Vansha caught his dagger hand. ‘D’you want to risk an affray here, like this? Get us all caught? They’ll know then, all right!’
The big man looked sick. ‘Would to the skies I’d let ’em murder the bastard pack o’ you! That I’d turned you in, and gone free of this whole bloody foolery!’
Alya shook his head. ‘It’ll go ahead, your plan. Don’t tell me when, but it will! And well! Look after my friends! Vansha – greet her for me!’
Swiftly, even as he spoke, he ducked out from behind the carts, and drawing his tattered cloak about him, he set off after the torches, back down the slope. He did not look back, something an Ekwesh warrior would hardly do; but his heart was cold and sick within him. It was all too easy to keep his head bowed in the right manner. He was alone, now, dreadfully so; and he had no plan at all, no idea of what he might do – only what he must.
In some old ballad he might have killed a torchbearer quietly, taken his place, felled the big chieftain, snatched the mask, run …
With every man jack there baying for his blood. Assuming, that is, they somehow didn’t notice him killing the torchbearer. They were almost at the corner, anyhow, so there was no time for that. He must look enough like any other common warrior in his armour, though taller and slimmer than most, and that was all he could rely on.
The procession had arrived at the gate of the Mouth. The followers had sprung up and moved well back, while their chieftains were gathering around and bowing obsequiously. It was no effort at all, none, to blend with the milling, nervous warriors; their eyes fixed on the chieftains, they barged and elbowed him like one of their own. Greatly emboldened, he let the jostling slide him easily towards the shadow at one side of the gate.
Men were bustling in and out, treading the earth solid, fetching firewood, setting up tall wide-necked drums of taut hide, hauling open the ancient doors of the hut. These were evidently heavy and stiff, and when he strode over to help, his strength was acknowledged with a harsh chuckle and a word of thanks he understood quite well. He grunted as intimidatingly as possible, and stood imposingly by the doors as if that was his post; and the others, daunted by his strength and size, stood back.
Barely in time, for all eyes turned to the big chieftain, sweeping free of the lesser men, striding towards the hut, carrying his own torch, and into the shadow of the doors. He snarled an order, snapped his fingers, and men leaped to close them; but Alya was already behind one, half drawing it in, and they did not see him as it ground slowly shut.
He stood there in the sudden darkness, shaking violently; but even as he did so, the fire in his limbs, so long dimmed in this place, seemed to awaken for a moment. It was a cold fire now, a frightening tingle. As if some icy breeze fanned it, he thought; as if it came close, here, to some other and chillier power.
The sudden flicker of light at the far end of the chamber seemed almost to answer his thought, and he pressed himself flat against the wall, deep into the shadows as he dared. Lamps had been lit, on some long low stone platform, crude things of some fat or oil, sickly and stinking. By their light he saw a rough pattern painted on the end wall above, glistening with sooty grease. It made little sense to him, but the tall chieftain fell to his knees and grovelled. Then from within his robe he fetched a bundle of cloth, and humming and muttering to himself, he placed it reverently on the platform and poured oil over it. His torch waved in the air, while he sang and swayed on his knees; then he touched the flame to what was there. Fire flared, lurid and smoky, with an awful sizzle. The tall chieftain stood, bowed over it a moment, still singing and humming in the one voice, like some sleepy hive of bees. Then he shrugged off his heavy robe and tossed it carelessly aside. Beneath it he wore a well-worked mailshirt over loose black shirt and breeches and heavy boots, and those also he removed, laying them to one side, with his heavy sword on top. Wearing only a breechclout, he stooped to take the mask in his hands.
He held it high, as if showing it to the fire; and his voice rose for a moment to a chanting scream. Then it cut off; and in the sudden silence he must have heard or felt Alya’s swift step on the soft floor. He whirled, and dropped the mask as he reached for his sword, opening his mouth to shout; but Alya’s hands were already about his throat. The chieftain was massively built, his scarred hands as solid as Alya’s; and their knobbed knuckles stood out white as he tore at the grip that choked him. The fires in Alya’s blood burned lower still, and for a long moment they swayed together. But he forced the grizzled giant slowly back over the low altar, and as he did so, saw the offering that burned there.
His gorge rose, at the sight and stink of the smoke. Shock and revulsion clamped his grip still tighter, and anger flared across the embers of his unnatural strength. All in an instant he felt like a roaring blaze, as if he himself were some flaming sacrifice to uncaring forces. Searing pain flamed in his wounded back, and with barely an effort he heaved the other man bodily off the ground and shook him furiously as a wolf might worry a rat. He felt the bones snap under his fingers, and snarled with malign satisfaction. He opened his grip, and the body fell in a heap at his feet, like old rags.
Alya hardly noticed it. He was scooping up the mask in caressing hands, feeling the familiar weight, the texture of the scarred wood. It was little harmed, indeed. Here and there the bright paint had chipped away, but only to reveal older paint beneath, more than one layer of it, ingrained into the very wood. His father had called it old; but this spoke of greater spans than one lifetime, or even two. Here and there it looked blackened, almost burned, as if the mask had survived some ancient holocaust. But could it survive this one?
It would make sense to burn it at once, here. Help reduce those hapless little limbs on the altar to undefiled ash, if nothing more. But that would still be defeat; and now, with the fire still thrilling along every vein, he did not feel like accepting that just yet. He looked around frantically for some other way out of the stone hut, but there was none. Cold air breathed through many gaps under the roof, but none remotely large enough. And it would not be so easy to slip out as a sentry, not now they were expecting …
He chuckled to himself suddenly. They were expecting a mask.
The doors ground back, and he stepped into what was now a circle of light. The sky was dark, and the torches sent shadows dancing across the ring, and the circle of faces that awaited him – a nightmarish circle, for none o
f them were even remotely human. A ring of men stood there, the tall chieftains, some stripped to their shirts, others naked save for stained breechclouts, but all of them masked, in a style too like his own for comfort. Lowering, stylised shapes of beasts and beings less recognisable surrounded him, wide-eyed carvings heavily lined in black and red, embodying a central clan totem or other votive spirit they hoped to call on.
For the first time ever he entered a gathering of his own kind, of Seers. And every one of them was his deadly foe.
The chieftain’s clothes and mail fitted him well enough, and were better and cleaner than his warrior’s guise, even if, as he found reason to suspect, their former wearer had not bathed in recent memory. It was easy enough to assume the man’s round-shouldered stance, hands on hips, and glare intimidatingly around the circle. He waved a contemptuous hand at the hangers-on now clustered around the entrance, and with the mask to muffle his voice to imitate the chieftain’s bark in a curt word or two – ‘Out! Away!’ The warriors scattered into the darkness, and many of the masks nodded in evident approval.
For all that, the shirt already stuck to his back with sweat. There was little enough chance he could escape, but he had to make sure they could not overwhelm him with numbers. He had to make sure they killed him.
But Alya’s spirit of defiance was still strong, and seeing the men at the drums sneaking out after the rest, he snarled alarmingly. They shrank back, and when he snapped his fingers, they seized great sticks of bone and struck a rolling note on the hides. The masks half looked at one another, but he strode into the midst of them, and clapped his hands angrily, and the chieftains hastily leaped back into their ring. And, wonder of wonders, they began to tread around, to circle to the drums’ dull beat, lifting their feet higher and higher, the jaws of their masks flapping and clapping with musical notes. They began to dance. And, after a moment, so did he.
The drummers had clearly done this often enough. They started with a dull, thudding rhythm, so slow that each foot had to hang hesitant in the air before it fell, a jolting, syncopated rhythm that was already entrancing. Their sandals scuffed and stamped the earth with leaden deliberation, and he felt each vibration in the mask’s leather cheekpads. The others grunted fiercely at each footfall, and so did he, joining himself to them in the stamping rhythm. The wind shifted, and the fires and the torches blew little ghosts of acrid smoke about them. The drums were thumping faster now, and he felt his body catch them up, his heart hasten. Sweat stung his eyes and he closed them, breathing harder; around him the grunts were becoming soft gasps of effort. Was it the ground shivering beneath him again? He seemed to lose all sense of his limbs, save the punishing thumping of his feet. It was as if he floated in the blackness, borne up by a great soundless updraught, propelled by his feet against an unseen ground that grew harder and hotter every instant. Then there was a glimmer in the twilight, and another, like a dark lake over which the moon was slowly coming out.
It felt now as if he had no boots on, that he danced barefoot on the blackness; and it was smooth and hard, its glassy edges stinging even his hardened soles. In the darkness around him, rising and falling, faint gleams circled; and the black mirror underfoot reflected them redly, like rising fires. They moved slower than he, more clumsily, as if still held down by weight. Thin streaks of phosphorescence, tracing patterns he knew well, images of the Trail; some strong and swift, others slow and wavering, yet none as clear or as direct as the shape that whirled into his mind like a spitting track of molten metal.
He laughed harshly and stamped harder yet to the thundering in his ears, drowning out all other rhythms, until those weaker lights were shaking and quivering to its pulse alone, reflecting it back at him. He knew what he was doing now, what he was hoping to do. Minds that encircled his like worlds floating in the void; minds that sought to join with his, to lend him their power.
And let them!
He laughed again and drew upon their strength, let the sound of drum and chant bear him up and lift him higher, so high the lights struggled and faltered to keep up. Small wonder; they were the stair upon which he climbed, leaping now from step to step with effortless floating energy. This was the way his father had told him of. This was the other way he might ascend! This was the other path to power!
And suddenly it was as if he threw back his head and saw white clouds above the blackness, and an airy blue sky. And, rising above its dark glassy horizon, the first red disc of the sun. He reached out to it, and felt the fire in his mind blossom to its warmth, his pulse quicken and with it all the others that laboured to its tune, and whose increasingly frantic efforts only served to raise him higher. He was borne upwards, soaring, leaving the wavering ring of lights struggling below; and it was no surprise to him when the rising rays struck scarlet flame, as fresh as new blood, from the summit of the Wall. Over its margin he soared, on borrowed wings no longer, and stared into the full majesty of the sun.
In that moment he saw too much for any human eyes, too many things laid out beneath him for any human mind to take in, whole. He said, in later time, only that it was as if he did indeed look down from some immense summit, as a predator bird might, striving among a fantastically patterned landscape for the slight stirrings of its prey. Through the raven eyes of the mask, he saw minds open before him, minds known and unknown, familiar and strange; and he launched himself and swooped down upon them – upon every mind in which he saw a strange wild figure, leaping, howling, to the frenetic pace of drums, and around him, jerking like puppets, a ring of others, their gestures increasingly desperate.
Two lay sprawled and silent already. Another, on his knees, vomited helplessly. The rest snatched and tore at their masks, yet still they stamped and capered. One of the drummers lay sprawled and gaping at the sky, with blood trickling from his ears and nostrils; but the others still bent over the yammering hides, helpless prisoners of their own pulse, imprisoning the masked men in their turn.
The masks fought him. Their animal features grinned and snarled, heavy jaws twisting and snapping at the threads of pulsing fire that bound them to one another, and to him. Their own animal fear resisted him, a shapeless, savage, clawing mass that lashed out at his thoughts, seeking to slash them asunder and tear out their substance. But all that hissed away from him without contact, like spit from hot metal, and screamed into nothingness. And Alya rode down its path like a sudden blinding sunshaft with thoughts of his own, of the battle in the mists and the grim faces of the living dead. Out of his own fears they sprang, turned back by him now against their source; and terror boiled up around them, far greater than he had expected.
More than anyone else the Ekwesh feared the Dead, he saw; those they had slain, those slain beside them, as much as any who would slay them. For all their fearful savagery, for all their rapacity and relentless bravery, this warrior race was a seething mass of terrors, instilled since childhood by atrocious means, that they might be ruled only by the greater terror of their inhuman lords. Memories caught fire in their own minds, memories of fearful cruelties inflicted, of dreadful pitiless killings in the name of their masters; and all those mangled dead awakening even in the instant of their death, and reaching furiously out with limbs still mangled and spurting to embrace their slayers.
The maimed child-corpse on the altar sprang up in the oil-flame and screamed in their ears.
The skeletons in the woods raked their withered fingerbones across their eyes.
The slain of the Citadel came swarming up the slopes to drag them down with bleeding fingers.
And the shadowy boats of the Dead bore down on them, as they struggled and screamed in the river’s numbing embrace.
In that moment, as their terror-driven wills beat against his and fell helplessly back as waves from a towering cliff, he reached up. But before he even touched it, the mask of the Raven dropped open, to reveal the human face of shining metal within; and in the light of that unearthly sun it blazed untarnished, with the blinding fire that Rave
n had stolen, for the succour of humanity.
For that instant that mask was all masks, all wills, and he that wore it commanded their minds and hearts as his own. He turned his thoughts away; and theirs turned with him, like so many sunflowers, to the face that took shape in the radiance.
They lay open before him, and he reached out a godlike hand to seize what he willed. In many the image awoke nothing save faint traces of lust and cruelty, or contempt; but in one, two, it found a mirror image, faint and distant, but clearly there. He bore down on those images, sent them seeking through others to the place where they had been seen, and with the flame within him, fed by the radiance above, he sent a thought questing ahead of him, a call, a name—
Savi!
An answer.
Eyes opened, a voice gasped. A confusion, then a realisation of place, a racing rush of images, corridors, rooms, galleries, stairs, columns of swirling ice-blue. A silhouette sat up, slender in the half-light. The glint of glossy black hair falling across a bare brown shoulder and breast, the shining of wide eyes, astonished, full of sudden feeling that flared in his vision like a corona, yet would own no name – pain or hope, fear or expectation, perhaps because it did not own itself wholly one thing or another.
A thought came to him then, a memory awoken by the awareness of the power on which he balanced, the mingled force of wills in thrall. He yearned to be there with her. He could be, now. Closer than even wings could bear him. It had been done, and therefore he could do it. He had only to reach out, but with his whole being, into the presence of the vision before him, fixing two realities in his mind, two ends of a journey in one—
He stumbled. In its outreach his mind touched, not Savi, but some other unexpected shape. Like tripping over a savage dog in the dark, perhaps. Awareness awoke and stirred, as immediate and as menacing as a low growl.
But the shape that stirred and sat up could not have been more different. Shining covers slid away from a shoulder of ivory, swept about with gold, fine features slack and half awakened, large blue eyes sleep-misted, anxious, uncertain – and as they lit upon him, abruptly flaring with fearful alarm.
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