At Faith's End
Page 55
“Alive?” Liesa’s voice was little more than a whisper. “Please, Ivon. Soon there may be none of us left.”
“I will do my best.”
It was all any of them could do, in truth. In the pit of her stomach, however, Roswitte felt a familiar lump. Would that it were enough. She doubted it would be, and Liesa was right. They were running out of Matairs to save.
Chapter 20
Circles moved the world. Mad men told it true. Circular motions, round and round about. Routine, they called it. Predictability.
The shadows breathed it. The air. The sound. Like sweet summer rain. There was nothing but the people. Guards stepped along the parapets, the darkness in the halls. Silhouettes. Routinely shambling to the coin that sang. All men were sellswords at heart. Some merely charged more for the pleasure.
It was just the two of them alone. Moon rose and eyelids fluttered. Mortal coil yawned to the twilight mumblings of the soul. The bedded one thought he was alone. Lonelier than the loneliness of they. Like children, settled down between the sheets, he crooked arms and legs in tight and sought to dream stone walls between the sheets to guard him from the world beyond.
Guards. Walls. Shadows. He knew them. He held them. He thought they would protect him. The Routine bid it so.
The shadow tensed, breathing out life as he slipped from the rafters. Grounded, grounding—the world was real again. Present. Shoeless feet made no sound on the old wood.
Below, three guards waited in a small room. All cards and chatter. Within the hour, one would rise for the privy. Like clockwork. An old board on the second step would give word of approach. Stone stools would grate. So were they set, alarm to the bedded soul; it would serve in turn to the shadow and the cry.
He stretched, savoring the warm trickle through numbed flesh. Tingles lanced the delicate step.
They did not write of shadows, merely the forms they stalked.
Caution there. Five beads to the draw. Bone and string dangling from the very rafters. Chill made the boards’ squeal extra firm. Caution, bred of routine. The slumbering master knew. It would not aid him. Where starlight cracked the window, steel broke its sheath. Come one man or twenty, gold spent was blood earned. Some called that anarchy. They knew little. It was not duty, no, but they could not understand it could be something else entirely.
Nothing drove him but the coin? Endless, aimless collision. Who could say that was the world?
It had not been coin that turned him on the woman’s dutiful hound. The bloody clash! The knowing look! The anxious creak of will! Coin—what madness indeed!
Skin often tensed just before a blow. Even if the mind could not register its passing, the body reacted—to sound, to motion, to the subtle touch of change. So it was with the sleeping man, chest panging with the chill of the blade. Only then, the mind realized. Only then did routine’s veil slip.
He knew. They always knew.
Blood shot the eyes as they fluttered open. Breaths gasped for life, but the shadow clamped a gloved hand tight against the wriggling hollow of his being. The blade worked through flesh as it did through silk, carving a line up the contours of a caving chest. The whole of the man heaved. Hands quaked—too weak to rise. Another sound, pattering past the gulping quivers of his heart’s descending tune.
It did not have to be slow. He considered it a courtesy for one of his own craft. A lesson, that he might learn of his errors for the next incarnation on the circling descent into eternity.
One could hope.
Wrinkled skin quavered. The feral eyes grew grey. Bare skin, paled in the restlessness of a killer’s dreams, slicked the laxing face. Only the mouth—that eternal portal—remained open to the silence. Even in death, the soul sought to scream.
Only then did Aurinth lean back. He made the courtesy of closing the eyes. Another gift for shadows. There was nothing else. No silk. No gems. The room, save for the bed, was all but as barren as a tomb. Even those that killed for duty knew: the pompous earnings only drew you to the light, and the light was far more deadly than the dark. Spymasters and assassins were no different. Only the targets shifted.
This one breathed it in. It was not all he breathed. Another scent, airier, yet heavier, scorched the halls of this place. Hate had burned it deep, and he knew it well, for he had smelled it once before.
There was a woman in a place not so far from here, and the world was wings and chains alike to her. It rippled through the very nature of her. It stained those she touched. No scent quite like it. His mind drifted to a note, one of many. A lion’s scribbled clawing. Oh, Usuri. The Many-starred. The Many-ended. Let this be done. Then it would be for her.
A thought to savor.
Then came the whimper of the dispossessed. He breathed. They had tried it one way—the lions and their spiders. Rattled and roared and rotted for it. When they sent the bird, they had resolved to the final course. It had begun with the great mother. Could not even see him, she couldn’t, not with so many suckling at her breast. Horses could be such skittish beasts.
This one saw, too clearly. She had the mother’s look. She shied away, curling into the shelter of the corner. Too late to know: it offered her nothing. The little girl…
Just a step. A very little step. Whole worlds below.
About the Author
Chris Galford spends his days as a freelance journalist and editor. Writing, in all its forms, has been his passion from a young age, but fantasy and science fiction are the sparks that give his nights purpose. A native of Michigan, in his spare time he can usually be found wandering the lake shore with a camera in one hand and a pen in the other.
"The Hollow March," the predecessor to "At Faith’s End," was his first major work, based on a series of short stories he wrote in the summer of 2008, titled The Company of the Eagles. Another short story set in the same world, The Child's Cry, was published in the Twelfth issue of Mystic Signals magazine.
Visit his website at: http://cianphelan.wordpress.com/
Or contact him directly at: shadowedwolfe@gmail.com
Table of Contents
At Faith’s End
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
About the Author