The Mark of Ran

by Paul Kearney

  Rol eyed his companion with some wonder. “You seem tolerably well-informed for a pirate.”

  Gallico grinned. “I like to read.”

  They walked on in silence after that, their pace steady but slow. Gallico told them to breathe with their mouths closed to keep their tongues from drying out and when they drank he made sure it was a few gulps at a time, no more.

  The land fell and then rose again, a long, hard slog in the rippling heat. At the height of the slope Rol looked down on the blinding glare of the Gorthor Flats and thought he saw black figures moving in the heat-shimmer. He pointed them out to Gallico, who nodded.

  “Ur-men. They prowl the Flats in packs.”

  The name brought forth a prickle of memory in Rol’s mind and no more. “What are they?”

  “Creatures of the wastes, manlike in some respects, but not remotely human. Experiments gone awry, some contend. They are dangerous to one alone, or a small party unarmed, but so long as we keep a good watch out we should hold them at bay.”

  The Flats began like a white sea lapping round the shores of the rockier hills. They glittered with salt in wide pans, and reflected the heat and light of the sun with pitiless ferocity.

  “Rub the hollows of your eyes with dirt. It’ll help with the light,” Gallico told them, and they used some of their precious water to create a muddy paste which all save the halftroll smeared over their faces.

  “There are ruins a few leagues out on the Flats,” he went on. “We will march to them and then lie up until dark. Only the Ur-men walk far upon the Flats in daylight; any man who tries will go blind in a few days.”

  “Is there no way to go round them?” Creed asked.

  “We could, but it would take us up into the foothills, fifty or sixty leagues out of our way. I’m hoping we can reach the firth in two marches. The land is kinder after that; we’ll have left the Goliad behind us, and there are woods and rivers; we may even be able to take down some game.”

  The heat slammed into them like a wave as they ventured down onto the Flats. They screwed up their eyes against the harsh light and the mud in their faces cracked and flaked despite the sweat that was soaking into it. When Rol’s palm brushed against the lock of his pistol it burned like the handle of a skillet left over the flame.

  The earth was fractured in a million angular cracks, as if the Flats were a shattered, burnt-out mirror the ages had covered in dust. “This was a lake, once,” Rol said, “or a lake-bed rather.”

  “If it was, it was in a time before men were here to see it,” Gallico said. He was moving somewhat stiffly, and Rol could see the shine of new blood oozing out of his dressings. He wondered at the endurance of the halftroll.

  “Are there many like you walking about in the world?” he asked.

  “Not many. Small communities here and there who share similar deformities. I am not part of a different species—I am a man, but one whose frame has been skewed by the potency of the Blood. My parents were not like me, though they would not have been considered human either.” He glanced at Rol and seeing his eyes said: “I come from a village in the Myconians, on the Perilar side.”

  “Hence your knowledge of the Goliad’s history.”

  “It is said that one day the Goliad will be a garden again, and when that happens the Creator will come back to the forsaken earth and give every man a life beyond death. A pretty story, but stories are cheap. I like to find out the truth of things. I have spent days in the Turmian Library in Myconn itself, back in the days when my kind was welcome there. But they say that all the learning in the world is as nothing compared to the archives of Kull, the isle of the Mage-King.”

  “Who is the Mage-King?”

  “You might as well ask the Name of God, or how He made the world. For myself, I think he is a Were, the last of the Ancients. The last angel on earth, you might say.”

  “Is he evil?”

  “I don’t know, Rol—no one knows what it is he wants from the world. His agents come and go unseen amongst us. He has no armies, he fights no wars, and yet nations tremble at the mention of his name. I have heard an old man in the Myconians insist that he is merely waiting for some change to come upon the world, after which he will leave his island and walk amongst men again, but the old man was half crazed and half drunk. As I said, stories are cheap.”

  “Why did you leave your village in the Myconians?”

  “The Bionari burned it in one of their habitual forays into Perilar, slew everyone in it. They paid a dear price for their temerity, though; we Folk of the Blood know how to go down fighting, if nothing else. I think the Perilari were glad to see the back of us. As our numbers grow fewer, so men grow more afraid of us.” Gallico paused and looked over his shoulder at the remainder of the party. The low hum of aimless talk had ceased, and the Cormorants were eavesdropping without shame.

  “The Bionari take a lot upon themselves,” Rol said darkly, oblivious.

  “They have always been a quarrelsome lot, it’s true. But they’re in a fix of their own making now.”

  “How so?”

  “This civil war they’ve started. Arbion and Phidon have declared for the rebel queen, and huge battles are being waged across the Vale of Myconn itself. Last I heard, Bar Asfal had fled the capital to raise more troops in the north.”

  Rol walked along mutely, his mind jarred into startled silence.

  “She has a chamberlain who is also one of her generals, and he speaks Bionese with the accent of Gascar. He calls himself Canker, and they say he is an assassin. At any rate, several of Bar Asfal’s most talented commanders have been killed in odd circumstances.”

  “What do you know of this rebel queen?”

  “Rowen Bar Hethrun she is called, a great beauty, but cold as frost, and a wicked hand with a blade. She’s won over many of the nobles through a combination of fear and lust—rumor has it half of Bionar’s aristocracy has sampled her charms at one time or another in the past five years. It’s how she built up her support to begin with: in the bedchamber. But the strangest thing is that she has the Blood in her, or so it is rumored. Imagine—Bionar ruled by a monarch with Weren blood. God knows, it might be an improvement.”

  “It might. It might not.” Rol felt sick at heart.

  “There’s something ahead,” Creed said, the dust clicking in his throat. “Something out on the Flats.”

  Gallico shaded his eyes and nodded. “The ruins, and not before time.”

  Rearing up out of the haze were the crumbling remains of a large building. As they drew closer they could see that it had once been a high tower of some sort. Closer still, and Rol realized with a shock that it was familiar—the shape, or what remained of it, was a direct duplicate of Psellos’s Tower in Ascari. Here it had been built upon a plain, not set into the flank of a hill, and he could see the huge unmortared joints of the perfectly sculpted stone at its base. They seemed inviolate, unworn, but as the eye traveled upward their massive courses were disrupted and broken so that the tower looked as if it had been broken off halfway up by the hand of a giant, and all about it the tumbled blocks lay scattered and piled in mounds half buried in blowing dust and sand.

  “This was a Weren place,” he said.

  “Yes,” Gallico agreed. “Turrin Ra, I have heard it named, which is merely an old way of saying the High Tower.”

  They drew closer step by weary step, the men eyeing the ruins with a mixture of curiosity and distrust. The sweat had dried into white salted rings upon their clothing, and the light boots and shoes they wore were already flapping upon their feet; they had been made for the timber of a ship’s deck, not the raw grind of a trek across a desert.

  As they entered the naked gateway of the tower the sun was cut off and they sighed with relief at the blessed shade. The stone of the ruin was cool to the touch despite the heat of the day, and they laid their hands upon it, forgetting their qualms. Gallico led them up a surviving stairway and they found that half of one upper floor had survived more o
r less intact. Here he bade them stretch out and rest. The company collapsed like a puppet show whose strings have been cut, too tired even to bicker amongst themselves. There were five or six hours until dark, and they fell asleep almost at once, sprawled on the stone, but Rol sat looking out of the perfect archway of one huge empty window, his gaze traveling across the sunblasted Flats to the blue heights of the mountains beyond, pale against an empty sky. Gallico sat with him, blotting the fresh blood from his wounds and studying his face.

  “You should sleep. We’ll walk all night.”

  “I’m all right.”

  They shared a few swallows of tepid water from one of the skins and Rol helped the halftroll bind up his dressings again. The scraped skin was already closing beneath them, and the deep gashes made by the coastal rocks had closed like brown-lipped mouths.

  “You heal quickly.”

  “You and I both, and all who partake of the Blood.”

  Irritated without knowing why, Rol slumped back down again. “The Blood. I wish I had never heard of it. I was a fisherman once, living a small life on a small island.”

  “Dennifrey. I hear a touch of it in your voice. But you were never going to be a fisherman, Rol; I sense that in you at least. You are here for a reason. It is why I suggested Ganesh Ka. Do you think I would lead these others to it, were it not for you?”

  “It’s such a special place, then?”

  “It is a haven, one of the last for folk such as you and I. My village was another such place, and they burned it. They will not be happy until we are consigned to legend, and the Lesser Men have the world to themselves. Man has always feared what he cannot understand. You can try to bury yourself among them, but you will never succeed.”

  “I succeeded well enough, these last seven years.”

  “Is it so long since we drank beer together in Ascari?”

  Firelit good fellowship in a smoke-filled tavern. The laughter of men. “Yes. It seems like a whole lifetime.”

  “You have seen something of the world since then.”

  “I am—I was—a mariner, nothing more. That is all I wanted out of life.”

  “But no longer? Well, who knows—you may find something else to occupy you in Ganesh Ka. It, too, is old, and there are folk there who know much of the world past and present.”

  “A city of pirates and scholars, no less.”

  “If you like. Now I’m for sleep if you are not. Wake me if you begin to nod—someone must stay alert.” And with that Gallico’s massive head sank forward on his breast. Within moments he was snoring gently.

  The sound of the sleepers’ breathing was the only thing Rol could hear. The Flats were concave, though over miles it was hard to realize. The wind might be blowing somewhere up in the washed-out sky but here it was dead and still as the air in a cellar.

  Rol wiped sweat from his face, fought the urge to drink more water, and cursed himself for not letting Gallico take the watch. He was exhausted—more than that, he was worn, so that the very workings of his mind seemed dulled and leaden. He occupied himself with cleaning the grit and dust out of Riparian’s pistol. Retrieving a coil of match from his pocket, he found that it was almost dry despite its submersion that morning. He loaded the weapon—he had but four lead rounds to his name—and, finding his tinder wet, spread the filaments of wool and bark out on the stone to dry. Then he drew Fleam and checked the lustrous blade. It was, had he known it, the exact same storm-shade as his eyes, and there was no speck of rust upon it. He ran his finger down the hollow of the blood channel with something like affection, and then leaned forward slightly and kissed the metal. It was refreshingly cold, and he felt that shiver in his loins as it met his lips, the sort a boy might feel upon glimpsing the nakedness of a beautiful woman for the first time.

  “What are you?” he murmured, but the sword was silent, cold. He slid her back in her sheath and felt the hungry disappointment through the hilt.

  Something in his brain left off working, however, and when he opened his eyes again it was fully dark. The air was chill and blue about him but the stone of the tower had retained the warmth it had absorbed during the day and was pleasant to the touch. Everyone else was still asleep. But something else was moving, somewhere.

  Again—a tiny scrape on the stairs, like someone’s foot shifting. Rol rose to his feet with all the stealth he could muster from the rags of Psellos’s training, and padded noiselessly to the top of the stairway. It was pitch-black now, though if he looked out of the tall surviving window of the place he could see the paleness of the earth below and, raising his eyes, the hard glitter of the stars. A lighter patch on the world’s rim spoke of the rise of the moon to come; it would be a mere sliver, a new moon. There was no breath of air to stir the dust in his throat and when he swallowed it felt as though he had sand coating his tongue.

  He looked down the stairway, his night vision soaking up the blackness and making sense of it. There was someone standing at the foot of the stairs. Even his preternatural sight could make out only that it was a man or manlike, short in the legs and long in the arms, the limbs very fine. A shapeless lump of a torso, and a head oddly sunk into the shoulders, almost domelike. No neck to speak of, or any feature where the face should be. But he knew it was watching him. He was not afraid; in fact, he felt the strangest sense of pity.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  The thing disappeared so quickly he almost lost track of it. He drew Fleam, the moment of calm broken, and pelted down the stairs. Out of the ruined gateway he ran until the vast bright arch of the night sky was all above him, the welkin ablaze with more light than he had thought stars could make, mare’s tails and filigrees of diamond in the black. The Gorthor Flats ran out all around him in a featureless blank, and closer to, the broken fragments of the tower lay in skewed lines and mounds. There was no sign of the visitor and the night air was icy and still.

  Gallico appeared at his shoulder, fast and quiet despite his size. “What was it?”

  “I don’t know. An Ur-man perhaps. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  The halftroll sniffed the air and it came out of his gaping nostrils again in two gray spumes. “Yes, they have been here. Time to go. They may be a while gathering yet.”

  “Gallico, it was not threatening. And it ran from me.”

  “To fetch its pack-brothers, you may be sure. They never hunt alone. Come—let’s get the others on their feet. The tower is no longer safe.”

  The party set off across the Flats, cursing the brevity of their interrupted rest and shivering in the cold of the desert night. All but Rol and Gallico found themselves tripping and stubbing toes on the deep cracks of the Flats as they set a fearsome pace northward. It was bitterly cold, and hunger had begun to bite into their strength despite a hurried meal of dried fish, wolfed down on the move. They had a mouthful each of water, gulped down as they half jogged in Gallico’s wake.

  “What’s the rush?” Bartolomew complained. “Is this some kind of race?”

  “Yes,” Gallico said shortly. “Keep your wits awake and your weapons to hand.”

  “Who’s to attack us out here?” Rusaf complained. “Lizards? Beetles?”

  “There,” Rol said, pointing. Gallico followed his arm. The flicker of movement was so brief as to be dismissed as a trick of the eye, but he nodded.

  “They’re coming up to larboard.”

  “I’d rather stand and await them than have a running fight,” Rol said.

  “That’s what they want, with a small group such as this. Stop for only a few minutes, and they’ll use that time to gather in their hundreds. No, they are like wolves. A stalled prey only emboldens them.”

  “What in the world are you two talking about?” Rusaf hissed.

  “The locals,” Rol told him with a thin smile. “They’re about to pay us a visit.”

  Ten yards in front of them the cracked planes of dirt reared up like trapdoors in the ground, and out of them swarmed a mass of shadows, nois
eless, swift as snakes. Rol had a split moment to take in their features before he had drawn Fleam and she was leaping forward in his grasp with the distinctive whistle that sounded like the laugh of a woman.

  They had heads like moles, eyeless, with delicate snouts and snuffling nostrils set at the very tip. Below the heads were wet holes that might have been mouths. Aside from that they were featureless. Their thin arms ended in four digits, all tipped with long claws. Their bodies were gray, lighter on the belly and darker on the back. The backs and shoulders were covered with fine fur, like the stubble of an unshaven man’s chin.

  They came in from all sides, thirty or forty strong. The Cormorants drew their cutlasses, faces white as bone in the darkness.

  “Stand fast,” Gallico said. “Make a ring, and do not let them inside it.”

  The Ur-men circled, uttering a high-pitched ululating warble that hurt the ears. More of their fellows were running and lurching and limping across the Flats now, dozens and scores.

  “Should have stayed in the tower,” Gallico spat. “This is new to me, these numbers. I have never seen—”

  The black ring closed in on them.

  The party fought silently, murderously, beating away questing talons, stabbing out with the bright points of their blades. A nick here, a shallow stab there, the sharp, horrified intake of breath as Rusaf saw his forearm laid open from wrist to elbow. Rol edged his way left to close the circle. It was like fighting a gale-flapped thornbush. The Ur-men would move in, dart back, bob and duck and leap up and chance a swing with their claws, then scurry out of the ring to let another in. Rol stabbed out in growing desperation, to meet nothing but empty air. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gallico’s towering frame, fists barreling through the air. The water cask was sliced from his back and fell to the ground behind him. He turned for one moment and the creatures leaped on his back, howling. Others scampered through his legs and pummeled the cask itself, breaking in the timbers with a splash and a splinter. Creed impaled one on the ground, his cutlass bending in the thing’s spine.