‘It is said,’ Spinnock spoke, straightening and setting an eye down the length of his sword, ‘that some quality of the Vitr infuses the edge, strengthening it against notching and, indeed, shattering.’
She smiled to herself. ‘So it is said, cousin.’
He glanced up at her, and once more a strange kind of envy rushed through her. What woman would not lie prone before Spinnock Durav? Yet she could not, dared not. It was not that he was barely into manhood whilst she had eleven years on him and was betrothed besides. She would have discarded both obstacles in an instant; no, their bloodline was too close. The Hend – her own family – was but once removed from that of House Durav. The prohibitions were strict and immutable: neither the children of brothers nor those of sisters could mate.
Still, out here, so close to the Vitr, so distant from the lands of the Tiste, a voice whispered inside her, rising gleeful and urgent in moments like these: who would know? Finarra Stone had ridden off and would probably not return before dusk. The ground is bare and hard / and will hold all secrets / and the sky cares not / for the games of those beneath it. So many breathtaking truths in Gallan’s poetry, as if he had plied her own mind, and could at will reach into countless others. These were the truths that found their own flavours and made personal the taste, until it seemed that Gallan spoke directly to each and every listener, each and every reader. The sorceries of the delvers into the secrets of Night seemed clumsy compared to the magic of Gallan’s poems.
His words fed her innermost desires, and this made them dangerous. She forced silence upon the whispering in her mind, pushed down delicious but forbidden thoughts.
‘I have heard rumours,’ Spinnock went on, sheathing his sword, ‘that there are Azathanai vessels capable of holding Vitr. Made of strange and rare stone, they must be.’
She had heard the same, and it was details like that which convinced her that the Azathanai understood the nature of this terrible poison. ‘If there are such vessels,’ she now said, ‘one wonders what purpose might be served by collecting Vitr.’
She caught his shrug before he strode back to his horse. ‘Which camp is near, Faror?’
‘The one we call the Cup. You’ve not yet seen it. I will lead.’
His answering smile – so impossibly innocent – brushed her awake between the legs and she looked away, taking up the reins and silently cursing her own weakness. She heard him climb into the saddle of his own mount. Drawing her horse round, she guided the animal forward, back on to the trail leading away from the shoreline.
‘Mother Dark is the answer to this,’ Spinnock said behind her.
So we pray. ‘The poet Gallan has written of that,’ she said.
‘Why is that no surprise?’ Spinnock said, clearly amused. ‘Go on then, oh beautiful cousin, let’s hear it.’
She did not reply at once, struggling to slow the sudden leap of her heart. He had joined the Wardens a year past, yet this was the first time he had included her in his easy flirtations. ‘Very well, since you are so eager. Gallan wrote: In unrelieved darkness waits every answer.’
After a moment, as their horses scrabbled over uneven footing, Spinnock grunted. ‘As I thought.’
‘What thought is that, Spinnock?’
He laughed. ‘Even a bare handful of words from a poet, and I lose all sense of meaning. Such arts are not for me.’
‘One learns subtlety,’ she replied.
‘Indeed?’ She could hear his smile in the word. Then he went on, ‘And now, in your grey-haired wisdom, you will, perchance, pat my hand?’
She glanced back at him. ‘Have I offended you, cousin?’
He gave a careless shake of his head. ‘Never that, Faror Hend. But the years between us are not so vast, are they?’
She searched his eyes for a long moment, and then faced forward once more. ‘It will be dark soon, and Finarra will be most upset if we fail to have a meal awaiting her when she returns. And the tents raised, as well, with all bedding prepared.’
‘Finarra upset? I have yet to see that, cousin.’
‘Nor shall we this night.’
‘Will she find us in the dark?’
‘Of course, by the light of our fire, Spinnock.’
‘In a place called the Cup?’
‘Ah, well, there is that. Still, she well knows the camp, since it was she who first discovered it.’
‘Then she will not wander lost.’
‘No,’ Faror replied.
‘And so,’ Spinnock added, amused once more, ‘this night shall see no revelations. By the fire’s light no answers will be found.’
‘It seems you understood Gallan well enough, Spinnock Durav.’
‘I grow older with every moment.’
She sighed. ‘As do we all.’
* * *
Captain Finarra Stone reined in, her eyes fixed upon the carcass thrown up on to the ragged shoreline of the sea. The bitter air had sweetened with the heavy stench of rotting meat. She had spent years patrolling Glimmer Fate, and the Outer Reach that was the verge of the Vitr Sea. Never before had a creature washed ashore, living or dead.
She had ridden far from her companions and it would be dark well before she managed to return to them. This time, however, she regretted her solitude.
The beast was enormous, yet so much of it had been devoured by the acidic Vitr that it was difficult to determine what manner of creature it might be. Here and there, along the back of the massive torso, ragged sheaths of scaled hide remained, bleached of all colour. Lower down, closer to the ground, the thick slabs of muscled flesh gave way to a curved fence-line of red-stained ribs. The pale sack encased by these ribs had ruptured, spilling rotting organs on to the ground, close to where the Vitr slowly lifted and fell on the quartzite sand.
The nearest hind limb, bent like that of a cat, reached up to a jutting hip bone, level with Finarra’s eyes as she sat astride her horse. There were remnants of a thick, tapering tail. The forelimbs seemed to be reaching for the shore, the hand of one stretched out with thick claws buried deep in the sands, as if the beast had been trying to climb free of the Vitr, but this seemed impossible.
Its head and neck were missing, and the stump between the shoulders looked chewed, torn by fangs.
She could not tell if the creature belonged to land or sea, and as far as she knew the mythical dragons were winged, and there was no evidence of wings behind the humped shoulders. Was this some earthbound kin to the legendary Eleint? She had no way of knowing, and among all the Tiste, only a few had ever claimed to have seen a dragon. Until this moment, Finarra had half believed those tales to be exaggerations – no beast in all the world could be as large as they had made them out to be.
Her horse shifting nervously beneath her, Finarra studied the stump of the neck, trying to imagine the weight of the head that those huge muscles had held aloft. She could see a large blood vessel, possibly the carotid, the severed end forming a mouth big enough to swallow a grown man’s fist.
Some vagary of air current carried the heavy stench towards them and her horse backed a step, hoofs thudding the sand.
At the sound, the stump lifted.
The breath froze in her lungs. She stared, motionless, as the nearest hand dug deeper into the glittering sands. The hind limbs bunched, pushed. The torso rose and then lurched further up the beach, thumping back down heavily enough to make the shoreline shiver. The reverberation awakened in Finarra a sudden sense of danger. She backed her horse away, watching that ghastly torn stump wavering about, blindly groping. The second arm twisted round, coming up beside its companion, to sink talons long as hunting knives into the sand.
‘You are dead,’ she told it. ‘Your head has been torn away. The Vitr dissolves your flesh. It is time to end your struggles.’
A moment of stillness, as if somehow the beast heard and understood her words, and then the creature heaved forward, straight for her, crossing the distance between them impossibly fast, one hand scything through the a
ir.
Her horse reared, screamed. The bludgeoning, raking hand caught its forelimbs, shattering the wooden leaves of armour, twisting the animal round in the air. Finarra felt herself pitched downward to her left, felt the immense weight of her horse suddenly above her. Disbelieving, overwhelmed by the impossibility of her death, she sensed one booted foot slipping free of the stirrup – but it would not be enough; already they were falling together.
The second hand came from the other side. She caught a flash of talons scything close, filling her vision, and then there was an impact and the horse’s scream cut off abruptly, and Finarra was spinning through the air.
She landed hard on her left shoulder, facing back the way she had come, and saw the carcass of her horse, its head and most of its neck torn away. The beast had lunged again, savaging the horse with its hands. Bones splintered to drumming concussions, blood pouring out on to the sand.
Then the demon fell still once more.
Pain was filling Finarra’s shoulder. A bone had broken and fire was lancing down her arm, numbing the hand. She fought to control her breathing, lest the creature hear her – she did not believe it was dead, and indeed wondered if death was even possible for a beast such as this one. Sorcery held its life-force, she suspected, an elemental defiance against all reason, and if the Vitr had worked its absolute dissolution, devouring even its bones, something shapeless yet white-hot would now reside on this shore, washed up from the depths, as virulent as ever.
Teeth clenched against the waves of pain, Finarra began pushing herself away, heels digging into the sand. She froze when she saw the beast flinch, the severed neck trembling. Then a shudder took the entire body, violent enough to tear flesh, and the demon seemed to sag, sinking down until a swath of hide on its flank facing her began to show bulges, and then split, the broken ends of ribs pushing through.
She waited a dozen heartbeats, and then resumed her slow, tortured retreat up the slope of sand. At one point her boot dislodged a fist-sized rock that broke under her heel, but the crunching snap elicited no response from the beast. Emboldened, she drew her legs under her and regained her feet, her left arm hanging useless and swollen at her side. Turning, she mapped out her avenue of retreat between boulders, and then cautiously set out.
Reaching the high ground she turned about and looked down on the now distant creature. She’d lost her saddle and all the gear bound to it. She could make out her lance, a weapon she’d possessed since her Day of Blood, half its length pinned under the carcass of her horse. And her mount had been a loyal companion. Sighing, she faced east and set out.
As the day’s light faded, Finarra was faced with a decision: she had been walking along the boulder-strewn ridgeline above the beach, but her pace was slow, made more difficult by her useless arm. If she set off down to the beach … she had to admit to herself a new fear of that shoreline. There was no telling if the beast that had dragged itself ashore marked a solitary intrusion. There could well be others, and what she might in the gloom imagine to be a boulder could prove to be another such creature, that had crawled up higher on the strand. Her other choice was to cut inland, on to the flatter verge of Glimmer Fate, where the grasses had died, leaving nothing but gravel and dusty earth. The risk in that, with night fast approaching, would come from the high grasses – the naked wolves were not averse to pursuing prey into the lifeless area.
Still, she could pick up her pace on the level ground, and so reach her companions that much sooner. Finarra drew out the long-bladed sword that had once belonged to her father, Hust Henarald. It was a silent weapon, predating the Awakening, water-etched and a known breaker. Serpentine patterns flowed up the length of the blade, coiling at the hilt. Off to her left the Vitr Sea was an ethereal glow and she could see its play on the polished iron of the sword.
Finarra swung inland, threading past the rotted boulders until she reached the verge of the plain. She eyed the wall of black grasses off to her right. There were darker gaps in it, marking some of the hidden paths forged by the beasts dwelling in Glimmer Fate. Many were small, used by deer-like animals the Wardens saw but rarely, and even then as little more than a flash of scaled hide, a blur of a serrated back and a high, slithering tail. Other gaps could easily accommodate a horse, and these belonged to the tusked heghest, a kind of reptilian boar, massive and ill-tempered; but the passage of these beasts through the high grasses eschewed stealth and she would hear any approach from some distance. Nor could a heghest outrun a mounted Warden: the animals were quick to tire, or perhaps lose interest. Their only enemy was the wolves, evinced by the occasional carcass found on the plain, in trampled clearings drenched in blood and torn pieces of hide.
She recalled once hearing such a battle in the distance, the keening, ear-hurting cries of the wolves and the heavy, enraged bellowing of the heghest brought to bay. Such memories were unwelcome and she kept her eyes upon that uneven wall of grasses as she padded along.
Overhead, the swirling pattern of the stars slowly appeared, like a spray of Vitr. Legends spoke of a time before such stars; when the vault of night was absolute and not even the sun dared open its lone eye. Stone and earth were, in that time, nothing more than solid manifestations of Darkness, the elemental force transformed into something that could be grasped, held cupped in the palm, sifting down through the fingers. If earth and stone held life back then, they were little more than promises of potential.
Those promises had but awaited the kiss of Chaos, as a spark of enlivening, and as a force in opposition. Entwined with the imposition of order that was implicit in Darkness, Chaos began the war that was life. The sun opened its eye and so slashed in two all existence, dividing the worldly realm into Light and Dark – and they too warred with one another, reflecting the struggle of life itself.
In such wars was carved the face of time. Birth is born and death ends. So wrote the ancients, in the ashes of the First Days.
She could not comprehend the existence they described. If there was neither a time before nor a time after, then was not the moment of creation eternal and yet for ever instantaneous? Was it not still in its birth and at the same time forever dying?
It was said that in the first darkness there was no light, and in the heart of light there was no darkness. But without one the other could not be known to exist – they needed each other in the very utterance of defining their states, for such states existed only in comparison – no, all of this snarled mortal thoughts, left a mind trapped inside concepts hidden in shadows. Instinctively, she shied from extremes of any sort, in attitude and in nature both. She had tasted the bitter poisons of the Vitr; and she had known the frightening emptiness of unrelieved darkness; she had flinched from the heart of fire and blinding light. For Finarra, it seemed that life could only cling to a place much like this thin verge, between two deadly forces, and so exist in uncertainty – in these cool, indifferent shadows.
Light now warred in the sky’s deepest night – the stars were proof of that.
She remembered kneeling, in the time of her avowal to serve as a Warden, and cringing in that sorcerous absence, the deathly cold of the sphere of power surrounding Mother Dark. And by that chilling touch, there upon her brow, she had been invited into a kind of seductive comfort, a whisper of surrender – the fears had only come later, in that shivering, breathless aftermath. After all, Mother Dark had, before embracing Darkness, been a mortal Tiste woman – little different from Finarra herself.
Yet now they call her goddess. Now, we are to kneel before her, and know her face as Dark’s own, her presence as the elemental force itself. What has become of us that we should so descend into superstition? Treasonous thoughts – she knew that. The philosopher’s game of separating governance from faith was a lie. Beliefs ran the gamut, from worshipping vast spirits in the sky down to professing love for a man. From listening to the voice of a god’s will to accepting an officer’s right to command. The only distinction was one of scale.
In her head s
he had run through her arguments in this assertion countless times. The proof, as far as she was concerned, was found in the currency used, because it was always the same. From the Forulkan commander ordering her soldiers into battle, to the paying of a fine for baring a weapon on the streets of Kharkanas: disobey at peril to your life. If not your life then your freedom, and if not your freedom then your will, and if not your will, then your desire. What are these? They are coins of varying measure, a gradient of worth and value.
Rule my flesh, rule my soul. The currency is the same.
She had no time for scholars and their sophist games. And no time for poets, either, who seemed obsessed with obscuring hard truths inside seductive language. Their collective gifts were ones of distraction, a tripping dance of entertainment along the cliff’s edge.
A sudden blur in the grainy gloom. A high-pitched scream intended to freeze the prey. Iron blade, serpent-twined, rippling out beneath the swirling stars, like a tongue of Vitr. Piercing scream, the thrashing on the ground of a mortally wounded body. A hissing growl, paws scrabbling behind her. Lunging motion—
* * *
Faror Hend straightened, holding up a hand to keep Spinnock silent. Another eerie cry sounded in the night, distant and to the west. She saw Spinnock draw his sword, watched him slowly rise to his feet. Finarra Stone was late – half the night was gone. ‘I hear no other voice,’ Faror said. ‘No heghest or tramil.’
‘Nor that of a horse,’ Spinnock said.
That was true. She hesitated, breath slowly hissing out from her nostrils.
‘Still,’ Spinnock went on, ‘I am made uneasy. Is it common that Finarra remain out so late?’
Faror shook her head, and then reached a decision. ‘Stay here, Spinnock. I will ride out in search of her.’
‘You ride to where those wolves do battle, cousin.’
She would not lie to him. ‘If only to ascertain that their quarry is not our captain.’
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