At Faith's End

by Chris Galford

  He struck something. Rolled. Rock seared the already beaten skin. Something rattled—him, or his chains. There were no bodies. No people. Only silhouettes. Bones felt nothing more than clay, and every bump struck like a coiled fist. When everything stopped spinning, though the ground beneath him thrummed, he tried to lift his head. He felt the slickness—something licked the hair damp to his head.

  Then.

  The darkness.

  He was not in a war. There was a girl—pale-eyed. Her tears filled an ocean, and the world was at peace because no one could hear any other scream. No fire. No emptiness. Because the entire world was shifting all around him. Her hands reached out to him, and he saw only then that she wore two faces.

  Waking was not painful, nor wearying. The only word he could find for it was: heavy. He tried to move. Again the slickness, the pain. A face loomed over him. It burned into his eyes. They too were heavy. With ash, he supposed.

  I’m dying. He tried to voice that, but his words were smoke. Something brushed him, and the words found a scream.

  A caress on his throat. “Let it go. Let it go.” Storms capsized the whole of him. In the waves, there was no forgiveness.

  When he entered into Rurik again, the world was moving. He could feel it under him, and see it shift through half-lidded eyes. But slowly. As though it all bore a great weight. Bodies all around—so many, many weights. His head lifted from them and, strained against light, looked to salvation. He expected his mother’s eyes. Or father.

  Instead, he found a wisp of a baker. “Thank you…” He did not hear it, so much as his lips formed around it. The muddy eyes flickered down, abruptly uncertain.

  It was then he began to wonder at the fire in his side. It seemed to burn the world away by inches. His head lolled. It was Usuri’s hand, and her scream. In the coin? He longed to reach for it, but the fire burned hotter and the smoke choked it all away.

  The darkness.

  Just a girl by the sea.

  Sweat drowned him. It lapped at the flesh and submerged the mind, drawing back only piecemeal the man, drenched in the agony. Crusted and heavy, the world revealed itself. Focusing hurt. It was all a blur and his eyes strained to take it in. Wavy. That was the world. Something burned in him to such an extent it drew the rest of him cold. He shivered despite himself, reliving the depths of winter tight against the length of him, without fire for reprieve.

  “You’re awake? I didn’t think—no matter. It is what it is. Does it hurt?”

  He narrowed the scope of things, to the point dangling before his eyes. A human point. Is this it? The girl was gone, and the waves by the sea. Instead, Voren rippled over him, above him, fingers roaming over themselves like nervous spiders arrayed against a backdrop of wood and peeping rays of sunlight.

  They were in a cabin. Dust filtered through the air. An old cabin. He tried to move and felt through the needles of pain a solid weight beneath his back. The world did not swim around him, but he was not level. A table. He blinked, remembering the battlefield and the swirling hell it brought. The heat. The smoke. There was none of that here. Only an old home and a splint-ridden table on which he lay. It seemed to wobble with his motions.

  A flush of air galloped across bare skin and he gasped for it. Ash still touched it, dirtying his lungs to the point of a rasping cough. As he heaved, and invisible nails drove deeper into his spirit, his jerking motion brought the whole into view, and made the point of flame burn all the hotter for it.

  His tunic had been cut away, his armor discarded. Sweat beaded and descended into pools, burdening his mere humanity and staining the wood beneath. Most vividly, though, stood a blight against the flesh—a deep, jagged slash bit into his side, pulsing with every subtle shifting of muscle and oozing the colored flash of life out and away. Something was jammed in it. Wood, he thought at first—a part of the table. Yet it shone in the ragged light and some distant part of him named it metal, while his soldier, by widened eyes, named it for what it was: shrapnel.

  Bile surged in him and the wound pulsed, sending another wave of fire running ragged through him. He fell back howling, and only as the numbness carried him back to the low, murmuring moan did he beg. “Water. I-I need water…” It felt as though the cool drink were all that might draw out the flames.

  The mind receded, to deal with the pain. It too narrowed, heavy and blind to the roar beyond. It narrowed to a baker and to the nature of reality. Is this real, or do I dream? It felt real. Dream pain—it was an abstract thing. But this…The baker was the crux of it. Would that he could cry out! The baker—the baker was supposed to be gone. Voren was an enigma. He existed only in the land of Essa, and she, in the sanctuary he had carved of his mind, where his was a noble sacrifice and they, at last free of his imbecility, and free of all that man might use to do them wrong. They had fled.

  If Voren were real, then so was Essa. Her face cycled through the flames and the smoke and rasped as if for air, but it was own throat that choked. Be free. Assal above, please be free.

  Then the water struck his face and removed any doubt. Wretchedly, he wrenched back to the land of sight, and to the baker clutching a canteen above his now sopping head. Therein, he saw the first true glimpse of the boy, and it made him shudder worse than any piece of metal.

  “I need you awake, Rurik. Focus. Can you hear me?” He nodded only vacantly, reaching for the canteen. Only lately did he realize it already hovered upside down, the contents lost. “I had thought you dead,” and Voren receded on that note, pulling the canteen with him. “It would have been easier if you had died.”

  What would have been easier? It seemed Voren meant to stitch him up. The hands returned—the smooth, yet heavy hands. They wrapped about his throat and he wretched as they pulled him back to tie something taut. His own hands jerked up to take hold of it, but the baker forced them down, hard, and snapped the fight from him. Rope, he now saw. It chafed the bare skin, but it held him fast. Voren was no doctor. Is he with Witold?

  “Voren…” He could not think of what else to say. The baker, though, drew back on the word and stared at him through eyes lidded by grief.

  “Rurik. Do you…” Voren’s eyes darted down almost fearfully to the wound in Rurik’s side, before they settled somewhere below his own gaze. They would not meet him. “Am I a bad person?”

  Only a mad one. “No, Voren. I don’t think—”

  “Well that much is true,” and the voice turned venomous. “You never think. No, you never do that. Fly, fly, little ones, you say, and play the noble fool. And what does it do? It engrains you more. Endears you more. Raises you above the filth you play at every other moment of the thing.” He stepped forward, so that above Rurik there was nothing but his leering, soot-stained face and those beady, hate-filled eyes.

  “Why? Why can’t you just forget? You have had everything, don’t you see? Moan, whine, complain, oh—how the world is so cruel! It takes and takes, but you—you don’t know a damned thing about the reaping! And you sure as Hell can’t let it go.” His hand on Rurik’s collar shook. “The pain you bring to others. To her…”

  Essa? He tried to lean up, even if only an inch, but the ropes held fast and the wound sapped the rest. He moaned, fearing for what had happened in the dawning.

  All men marched toward death as soon as they were born. Yet at the thought of Essa’s demise, Rurik saw the other half of that truth: that for those who outlived those closest to them, death was something that settled over them and blotted out the light. One still lived, but they might not see it.

  “Is she…?”

  The baker blanched. “How could you even…? No! She comes for you, you twit. There was the forest all before her, and life, and light, and what does she do? She comes back for you. After your assassins came for her. After the dark.”

  This, however briefly, focused him. It pushed the pain back. “My…?” The Gorjes. He knew it without even asking. But how…?

  “You don’t think, Rurik. None of you nobles
do. You give orders, sure. You act, but you surely don’t think. No-no, don’t try to talk. You’re too weak, too weak.” The baker’s hand pressed him flat as he squirmed, and the eyes softened of their fury. “That’s for us, isn’t it? Do, do, do. Listen. Obey. And you reap all the rewards. Do you even realize how lucky you have stood? Oh, poor lonely boy. Misunderstood. What do you know about it?

  “You’re an idiot, Rurik. An idiot, and all you do is hurt the ones that try to help you for it. I tried. Oh, I tried to understand, to let you go, saying, she’ll see in time, she’ll learn, and him, he’s not so bad, not so bad, if you just take that one single point away, well, it will all work out. And they can drift, side-by-side down the riverbank, and there, we can be content. And then…

  “Alcohol is a dirty drink, Rurik.” Something squealed, sharp and hollow. It took Rurik a moment to realize it was Voren, biting back a sob as he twisted away, trembling. “It wasn’t for you. Not a drop. Yet there again—what can a man do to turn a woman’s eyes away from the flame that will consume her?” This last he said into the floor, shaking his head slowly from side to side. Rurik stilled, the words revolving around him like a flight of pecking crows.

  The alcohol. A certain night. Suspicions, long pushed to the edge. His lips shaped around words, and lost them. There was something terrifying in honest evil.

  So many times he had wished to give it voice, only to hold it in check saying no, no, it couldn’t be, but now it overwhelmed him. “You drugged her? How could you—”

  The wrong thing, apparently. Something squeezed his side and the world dissolved into a shimmer of screams. He had never known sound could take so vivid, and bloody, a picture. He panted in its wake, a caged dog thirsting for relief against a summer heat.

  “Even this…you found a way. And you hurt for it. Always. Hurt them all. They’ll all be better off without. And I, surely, I.” The baker turned back, cheeks wet with his own decision. He saw it then—Voren was not lecturing him, not truly, but debating with himself. There was a dark decision in that malevolent gaze and he was working to it in leagues. The pit of Rurik’s stomach churned at the sight. “If you live, Rurik…”

  This was all a dream. A terrible dream. “Voren. Please.”

  Yet Voren simply talked over him, as though he heard not a word. “I tried to be like you. To talk like you. But the lines—they just can’t be erased, can they? A peasant is a peasant. A noble is a noble. How could I ever compare myself to you? I come with obligations and you with freedom. You offer adventure, and I? I offer a bitter mother, unable to leave her husband’s deathbed.”

  “Let me go, Voren.” Like me? Assal avail me of madmen.

  The books Voren had learned from Essa as a child. His letters. The hound he made, always following at their backs. Unable to let go. The pieces went round about in Rurik’s head, forming a gradual chain down to this extreme moment. The realization: was this simple jealousy?

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh I don’t? I don’t?” The baker’s voice snapped like a whip and for a moment Rurik feared he would strike him again. “You’re blind as a bat. I love her. As a man should love. Not like you, with your bitterness, your shortsighted—no. I’m not like you. Not like that. All I ever wanted was to give her the world, but it was never mine to give. It was yours. And theirs. Men like the Bastard. Like your cold-hearted corpse of a father. You don’t deserve her. But then…”

  Love. He felt as empty as a flake caught on a winter’s breeze. The boy could stand there, talking about drugs. About pain and death and all the rest, and lecture him of love? Voren wasn’t just a fool. He was insane. But inside was still that scared child. He knew he had to reach it. Cow it.

  He let pain settle in his lungs on a deep breath. It was necessary fuel, to sober him for the assault. Without it, the boy might yet come out the other end a man.

  “Is that it?” The words seemed to startle the baker. Rouse him. “You drag me from the field, just to tell me your heart? That you love Essa? How? How can you love her? And how do you think she can love you? If this is what you are, I tell you this, she surely never could. You dwell. You whine.” Why do you think she could not love me? “You’re pathetic. You drug her and you call it love? What kind of a sick love is that? No one that loves a person could do that.

  “You know nothing!” The boy screamed, and he kicked the table, jerking the wound in Rurik’s side and leaving him rasping. “You don’t know what the emptiness will do—what it can drive a person to. You’ve never had to go without.”

  “Coward,” Rurik sputtered through gritted teeth. Again the table shuddered.

  “Monster. You’re no friend to anyone but yourself. You don’t know love. But you masquerade, to get what you will.” The baker leaned forward and spat on him, square on the chest. “You deserve to die. Let the worms have you.”

  Perhaps a different tack. Rurik’s tone softened around the agony that split him. “Listen to me. I never meant to hurt you. I—certainly not Essa.” He had to try to reason. “But I’m—I’m dying, don’t you see? I’m already dying! If you—I just need water. Please. That’s all I need. Just give me water. Do you think Essa would want to know you for a killer? I’m a killer, and look where it has gotten me. Please. You’re better than this. The pain, if you just…”

  “Shut up!” A hand flashed across his vision and snapped his head sideways. The baker shrieked and drew back like a startled child. Then, in the silence that followed, he crept back by inches, peering over the edge, into the abyss that waited. Something changed. “I’m not like this, Rurik. I’m not. But you—if you just die, you won’t be able to hurt them anymore. And they won’t kill themselves for you.”

  The sting in Rurik’s cheek stole away the rest of the pain, but only for a moment. It took his breath, and when it returned, so too did all the rest. “Voren,” he said again, more softly, trying to fix his pleading gaze on the boy, to speak to whatever human thing remained with him. “Voren, look at me. This isn’t you. I never meant…”

  The boy grew still indeed. “No. You didn’t.”

  When Voren had acquired the dagger, he could not say. It took him a moment to realize the blade now brandished in the baker’s hand was his own, no doubt pilfered from his belt when the tunic was cut away. It dangled between those pale fingers, uncertain, but its threat was palpable. Bright eyes glinted in it, watched it as if captivated. It hung in them and danced in them, and only slowly descended. Where it touched his chest, there was only chill.

  He pleaded. He pleaded until his hoarse voice cracked. Even though Voren looked as pained as he, as pale and as broken, the blade pressed in, and he howled as a line curled its way across him in little beads of scarlet. The knife retracted as quickly as it went in, and the baker hovered over it, transfixed by the blood. He dabbed it with the end of the knife and flicked it away. He would not touch it himself.

  “I’m not sure how this…”

  The blade bit again, this time at the arm, where the muscle was most tender. Tears took Rurik as this second flesh wound was dealt.

  “Is this what war is like?”

  Lower, this time. As the blood scrabbled against the air, Voren’s hand grew steadier in its butchery, and uncertainty’s dark lines withered from his face. Horror refined into a horrific expression of curiosity.

  It was in that instant Rurik remembered a lesson his brother had taught him many years before: Man was not born to kill. He learned it, and inch by inch it possessed him.

  The blade arced in and slit a long, deeper line down the length of his arm. Rurik’s shouts wavered, for they struck at the dryness of his throat and burned him all the more for it. He could breathe, and yet, he was being cut to pieces. Voren’s blade flicked again and again, sometimes lighter, sometimes deeper, without pattern, but growing bolder and more quickly wielded with every triumphant carve.

  “Is this what you do to people? How you soldiers get your kicks? Mother, she always said I’d
be too weak for a war…” The blade tapped against the first wound again, already crusting over. “Just a baker, you know. Nothing so like a man. Can’t even get the other boys to play with him—they’ll break him, they say.” The blade danced in and laid it open anew.

  By then, Rurik had run out of pleas. He felt only the sharp pain, only the dulling sparks of the fire. Thought of dying and killing in the same breath. Killing Voren. What is this monster doing? He drugged Essa and now, what, because he couldn’t have her, he…but the thought broke on the memories of a boy far beneath his notice. The little baker boy, but a shadow of the girl from the trees. What had he done? What had he said? Always nothing. Like everything else.

  Yes, somehow, somewhere in all the pain, he found the strength to turn to pity. Poor boy. Poor little boy. Doesn’t he see? But the anger remained, even then. So much anger.

  The blade hovered over Rurik’s throat when the rage snapped forth again. “Do you expect me to feel sorry for you? You stand here, carving up a bound man, and you moan? Poor boy, indeed. Just a boy. A stupid, jealous boy that will never have what he wants.” He winced, but knew he had to force himself on. The blade held, and he felt a bit of the killer recede at the sudden outburst. If he didn’t have out with it now, he probably never would. Life ran with the blood, out onto the floor. “How many children like you? How many let it eat them up and grind them down to this? You’re just a scared, miserable little shit. Maybe I don’t always think. But if you don’t act, if all you do is think—all you get is what you are, Voren.”

  He punctuated the last by hocking a glob of phlegm on the baker’s hand. Never had he seen a thing recoil so fast. Bäcker screamed and struck the affronted hand across Rurik’s leg. Then he turned the blade to his own affronted flesh, and as Rurik looked on in dread, sliced across the skin. Blood oozed and the baker’s eyes teared anew, his blubbering reaching a new peak.