The Pariah

by Anthony Ryan

  I took a moment to blink the hateful moisture from my eyes and cough away the dryness in my throat. When I turned to meet her gaze once more it was with a steady eye and voice. “I can tell you that I’ll follow as long as you command it, for there’s too great a debt between us to ever settle. But the moment your mission ends, for whatever reason, I’ll begin my own.”

  She regarded me with a thoughtful but otherwise blank expression and, though I searched for some sign of disappointment or reproach, I couldn’t find either. “Then it seems,” she said, “you have struck a fair bargain of your own.”

  She gave a brisk sniff and got to her feet. “Be so good as to gather the others in the shrine,” she told me. “We have an escape to plan after all.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “Of course, it had to be raining.” Toria grimaced, blinking the spatter of moisture from her eyes as she stared up into the blackness of the shaft. I assumed she shared my growing concern that the thing was about to collapse at any moment. We couldn’t see the opening Carver had created that morning, but the constant rain and occasional cascade of mud was both reassuring and frightening. At Sihlda’s insistence the moment of our escape had been set at a good stretch past sunset when the guards would be tired and darkness would provide cover for so many fleeing souls.

  Each of us carried a full skin of water and a small sack of food, enough for two days. The burdens were deliberately light to allow for a speedy dash to the promised sanctuary of Callintor. In addition to the sacks, many of us had chosen to arm ourselves. Besides our knives, Toria and I carried cudgels fashioned from shortened pickaxe handles. Brewer had contrived to build a crossbow, a task requiring many months, skilled attention that he had somehow managed to keep hidden. It was an enviably well-made thing with a thick stave and cleverly crafted lock, indicating that Brewer was a more accomplished fellow than I previously realised. Besides the crossbow, he also had a modified pickaxe strapped to his back, the blade hammered into a broad, wickedly sharp crescent. From the way he hovered close to Sihlda as we crouched in the tunnel, I knew these weapons were not for his benefit and felt a small spasm of pity for any pursuers who came close to laying a hand on the Ascendant this night.

  The preceding day had passed in an agony of anticipation as we readied our supplies and girded ourselves for what lay ahead. Sihlda spent longer than usual in communion with Lord Eldurm, apparently keen to complete his unburdening before we departed the Pit. I found it curious that so uncomplicated a fellow as our lordly gaoler could possess a soul in need of so much cleansing, but ascribed it to a well-hidden empathy for the plight of his toiling captives. As the day wore on, I grew increasingly worried about the reaction of our fellow inmates. The congregants made some effort to adhere to the expected routine, but with the need to complete the shaft and prepare supplies, far fewer of us had made the journey to the top of the slope than was typical. It was bound to be noticed, surely by the other prisoners and possibly a sharp-eyed guard or two.

  Then, with the sky darkened and rain beginning to fall, Sihlda finally appeared in the shrine, a tired but satisfied smile on her face as she scanned the array of tense, expectant faces. “It is good to bid farewell to an unburdened soul,” she said.

  “Let’s hope it cools his rage when he discovers our absence,” I said.

  To my surprise, Sihlda laughed, a distinctly odd sound in an atmosphere so thickened by fearful suspense. “Some things are beyond even the Martyrs’ example.” She took a breath and started towards the tunnel. “Shall we?”

  “Don’t you want to rest for a while?” I asked. “The flight to Callintor will be hard—”

  “Not with the Seraphile’s grace to sustain me,” she said with an airy wave of her hand. “And I feel they are surely with us this night.”

  Sihlda had been wise in choosing the four most dangerous congregants to be first up the ladder. Toria would take the lead, being the swiftest among us while also possessing the keenest eyes at night. Brewer would follow with his crossbow ready to dispatch any unfortunate glimpsed by her eyes. Hedgeman would be next with his slingshot. Having lived most of his life in the wilds, he was skilled with the weapon and, like Hostler, his devotional zeal didn’t prevent him from being a dab hand when the need for violence arose. I would go next and assist Sihlda as she crawled free of the shaft. With the exit secured, the other congregants would follow, forming into ten small groups and following different courses to Callintor. Moving in one great mass might have provided an illusion of protection but was surely an invitation to discovery and subsequent slaughter. Whatever makeshift weapons we had fashioned, this group would be no match for armoured men on horseback, no matter how favourably the Seraphile might view this enterprise.

  Carver advised the ladder could tolerate only five bodies at once. As I climbed in Hedgeman’s wake, I felt even that was too much, suppressing a flinch at the squeal of the brackets and the groans and creaks of the timbers. The climb seemed to take far longer than necessary, time stretching as it often does in the interval before momentous and irreversible events. I found myself battling a perverse reluctance with each passing rung of the ladder. Tonight would see me either dead or free. Once I climbed out of this shaft there could be no backward step. The last four years had been a miserable trial in many ways but also had been a far safer and more enlightening refuge than any I had known as an outlaw. My mind and skills had expanded greatly under Sihlda’s guidance and the congregants, while a dull lot for the most part, were far less fractious and prone to arousing my vindictive streak than the members of Deckin’s doomed band. I had also found in Toria the only soul I could truly call a friend. Tonight it could all end, along with everything else.

  A chilly and painful slap of mud falling onto my forehead was enough to banish my introspection, along with any reluctant impulse. This course had been set years ago and couldn’t just be abandoned on a cowardly whim. Besides, what manner of man would ever think of the Pit as home? Sihlda had her mission and I had mine. Neither would be fulfilled by wasting away digging ore to fatten the purses of nobles.

  The rain grew heavier as we neared the top of the shaft, the protests of the ladder drowned by a loud rumble of thunder. Looking up, I saw the opening revealed in full by a flash of lightning, Toria’s slight silhouette resembling a scurrying spider as she crawled through, lost to darkness as the lightning flickered and died. I felt the ladder shift and sway to an alarming degree as Brewer heaved his considerable bulk into the open. I swallowed a curse as Hedgeman’s shoe made brief but painful contact with my scalp then another burst of lightning revealed he had also clambered out.

  I paused to let the lingering smear of colour fade from my eyes then climbed the last few rungs to the surface. I waited at the lip of the hole, feeling the caress of damp, wind-tossed grass on my face as I glanced down, expecting Sihlda to follow. Instead the shaft remained dark and empty.

  “Ascendant!” I hissed in impatience, lowering myself to peer into the gloom. As I did so I heard something new, a fresh concordance of sound that had been swallowed by the tumult of the storm above. Shouting. Screams. Some angry. Some pained. Also, dim but detectable to my practised ear, the clash and clatter of metal on metal.

  “Sihlda!” I called out, descending several rungs as panic seized me, then stopped when a flicker of lightning revealed the small pale oval of her face. It was gone in an instant, but in that brief glimpse I had seen more emotion in her features than ever before. She was weeping but also smiling, the same serene smile I knew so well, the smile that told all who saw it that she knew everything worth knowing. But there was sadness too, a great deal of it shining in the wet orbs of her eyes. In later years, I would sometimes try to convince myself that guilt had also been present in that stricken yet content face and know it to be just a comforting lie. A soul possessed of so much certainty is incapable of guilt.

  “We all deserve to be here, Alwyn,” she told me, voice rendered faint by the storm and the din of combat below. “B
ut a few deserve another chance, one I do not require for this is my parish where I am content to remain.”

  “Don’t be fucking stupid!” I said, panic stripping away all formality as I descended further, reaching down to clutch at where I imagined her hand to be. “We’re nearly there. Your mission! Remember your mission!”

  “You are my mission, Alwyn. The testament I gave you. Martyr Callin’s scroll. They and you are my gifts to a world I failed. I know you do not yet know the truth of the Covenant in your heart, but you will, in time. Of that, I am certain.”

  “Come with me and see for yourself!” I flailed about, grasping for the slightest touch of her but all I felt was the faint heat of a breath on my fingers as she spoke the last ever words I would hear from her.

  “I left a note for Lord Eldurm, with instructions he not read it until midnight. I told him it contained the final step in his unburdening. For a soul to be free of sin, it must know itself, know its true nature. He is a gaoler of souls deserving of punishment. You are a man in search of a reckoning that will lead to far better things.” A brief pause as her lips kissed my hand before her fingers pressed something into my grasp. “Goodbye, Alwyn.”

  A short pause, then from far below a thud sounded amid the chaotic chorus of voices. It heralded a brief interruption in the cacophony followed by a sudden and savage resurgence. Sihlda’s name was screamed out from desperate throats, the thud and clatter of weapons echoing loud for a few frenzied moments, then slowly diminishing. Defiant cries choked into gurgling death rattles interspersed with hard, wet thwacks familiar to any butcher’s shop.

  I hung there, staring into the blackness as rain pelted from above, then the ladder began to shake more violently than before, juddering and squealing as a dozen or more bodies began to climb.

  “Alwyn!” Toria’s shout filled the shaft, shrill and desperate. “Where the fuck are you?!”

  A familiar sense of purpose gripped me then, outlaw’s instinct reasserting itself with a cold implacability. She’s dead. Save yourself.

  I scrambled the remaining distance to the opening in a few frenzied seconds, emerging into a rain-lashed meadow of tall grass whipped into chaos by the storm. “The Ascendant!” Brewer demanded, gripping my arm hard. I tore myself free, staring at the coin resting in my palm: Martyr Callin’s only relic, the Ascendant’s final gift. Consigning it to my pocket I rushed to crouch at the opening, fixing my hands on the ladder’s topmost bracket and hauling hard.

  “Where is she?” Brewer shouted, large hands clamping onto my shoulder. I glanced up to regard a man beset by forlorn desperation rather than rage. I could tell the next words I spoke held no surprise, but still they wounded him worse than any blade.

  “Dead!” I yelled into his face, his hands falling limp at his side. “The guards found the tunnel! She gave her life to stall them! If you don’t want to join her,” I grunted, as I continued to try to work the bracket loose from the shaft wall, “then help me!”

  He continued to stare in slack-mouthed shock, barely shifting as Toria pushed past him. Crouching, she jabbed her knife at the bracket in an effort to work it loose, the ladder flexing with greater animation as the guards climbing it drew closer to the top. Its stubborn resistance to destruction caused me to reflect that Carver should have had more faith in his own craftsmanship.

  “Won’t… fucking… budge!” Toria cursed, words part swallowed by another crash of thunder as she continued to worry at the bracket. I looked around to see Hedgeman standing in slumped, blank-eyed indifference, barely stirring at my profane command to help.

  “Forget it!” I told Toria, pulling her back from the hole and getting to my feet. “We need to run. Now, or we’ve got no chance—”

  I flinched as something fast and heavy cut the air an inch from my nose. Brewer’s roar as he brought the modified pickaxe down on the ladder was loud enough to contend with the thunder, also painful to hear in its sheer animalistic pain and fury. Lightning flashed as he raised the pickaxe, revealing a murderous visage before he brought it down again. The upper rungs of the ladder disappeared into splinters then the stone surrounding the bracket turned to powder under the force of a half-dozen blows. Dust rose briefly from the hole, accompanied by a chorus of short, quickly smothered screams. I felt the ground tremble beneath my feet as the shaft collapsed, several tons of rock colliding and subsiding to crush the unfortunate guards to pulp.

  As the tremble faded from the earth, Brewer continued to stand over the rubble-filled hole, I assumed in the manic hope that he might get to smash the skull of any guard who had miraculously survived to poke his head out. I knew there was every chance Brewer and the still silent and unmoving Hedgeman would continue to stand vigil over the site of Sihlda’s death until pursuers arrived from the Pit, probably in just a few short hours if not sooner. However, I felt I owed both her and them some last show of comradeship. We had been congregants of the same shrine after all.

  “She wanted us to live,” I told Brewer, moving closer but not near enough to place me within reach of his pickaxe. The storm had lessened somewhat so I didn’t have to shout, but the rain continued to fall in thick, chilling sheets. “If you die tonight you betray her.”

  His one eye flicked up at me, glimmering now with suspicion rather than rage. “How did they know?” he said, his voice possessed of a worryingly calm note. Looking into that narrow orb I had little doubt speaking the truth at this juncture would invite a dire and possibly fatal response. I might be closer to his height these days but had no hope of matching him in brute strength, especially when he was filled with a maddened rage.

  “We aroused suspicion somehow,” I replied with a helpless shrug. “The Shunned. One of the guards. Who can say?”

  “No.” Hedgeman’s voice was thin and grating, the words choked out as he stumbled towards us. I was sorely tempted to punch some reason back into him but his next words tumbled forth before I could raise a fist. “No. It was treachery. No one outside the congregation knew.” He sank to his knees with a piteous sob, hands clutching at the rocks sealing the shaft. “Martyr Sihlda has fallen to a traitor’s hand!”

  “Something to reckon out at another time,” I said, turning away and gathering up my sack of food and sundry valuables. The folded writing desk was by far the heaviest item but I felt no temptation to abandon it, not then and not at any point since. “We’re going to Callintor,” I added, jerking my head at Toria and striding off towards the dark irregular wall of woodland to the east. “Come or don’t. Just remember, you let yourselves die here you’ll be dishonouring the Ascendant’s memory.”

  “It was you!” Hedgeman’s words were barely coherent, gabbled out in a rapid, spittle-flecked torrent. He rushed to bar my path, a brief flash of lightning revealing the knife in his hand. “You were never her true disciple. I saw it. I saw how you remained deaf to her truths. You sold her to the lord!”

  “You’re off your fucking head,” I said, trying to go around him but coming to a halt as he lurched to my front once more. His eyes were wide and lacking all reason, but he held the knife with a practised hand. I would realise later that this man had surrendered himself entirely to Sihlda’s teachings, gifted to her every ounce of faith that remained him. With her divine mission ended before it had even begun he had nothing, a soul emptied of purpose and desperate to fill the void with what he saw as holy retribution.

  “She is a Martyr now!” Hedgeman gabbled, crouching in readiness. “And you her slayer. Those who spill Martyr’s blood can know but one end. Every scroll that forms the Covenant speaks thus.”

  I let my sack fall from my shoulder and mirrored his pose, knife in one hand and cudgel in the other. Toria moved to my right, doing the same. This, I knew, would be quick and ugly. We had no time for any more talk, and, disordered of mind or not, Hedgeman was a lethal fighter. If I escaped this with only a cut or two, I would count myself lucky.

  A dull snap sounded to my rear, accompanied by the thrum of a vibrating cord. Hedgem
an jerked upright, standing in rigid immobility before embarking upon a chaotic dance through the swaying grass, stumbling about on stiff, spasming legs while strange, guttural grunts gibbered from his lips. The cause of his distress was concealed by the gloom until a distant shimmer of lightning outlined the fletching of a crossbow bolt jutting from his forehead. His shadowed form slumped abruptly to the ground, coughed and farted out a truly noxious odour which was to stand as Hedgeman’s last testament to a world that wouldn’t miss him.

  I turned to watch Brewer cast his crossbow away and shoulder his own sack. “Too heavy to carry,” he said, striding past us towards the distant woods. “You coming?” he added, spurring to a run as Toria and I continued to stare at his fast-receding form.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  For a big man, Brewer proved capable of maintaining a fast pace through the meadow and the woods, so much so that Toria and I found ourselves straining to keep up. We had all memorised the route to Callintor before climbing the shaft, repeating it word for word at Sihlda’s instruction. It had been formulated by a select few congregants with knowledge of the local country, a winding, at times aggravatingly wayward course that avoided the principal roads.

  Through the woods east of the river, I recounted inwardly as I ran, checking constantly to ensure Toria was still close by. Keep going until you reach the stream. Follow it north to the old ruined mill. From there it was a supposedly straight run north over open country to Callintor, a prospect I viewed with a distinct lack of anticipation. The woods felt like home, my outlaw’s eye for hiding places and ambush sites returning as the storm abated and the burgeoning sun revealed our surroundings. It birthed a temptation to abandon this increasingly taxing flight and seek out a refuge among the trees, an impulse I crushed with ruthless insistence. I had not escaped the worst prison in all of Albermaine to return to a life of skulking in the woods.