by Nathan Hawke
There was only so far they could answer with their faces. He walked to the fire and pulled out a burning branch. The flames licked over his iron gauntlet as he reached into the blaze but he never felt the heat, only ever cold. Between them the Marroc told him everything with an honesty born of fear. The bandit Addic had come with a half-dead Aulian he’d found on the road and, yes, the red sword too. They’d stayed a few days and then gone with another to hunt a shadewalker. Beyard took a while to believe that, but in the end he did. As for the sword, none of them knew. The men had taken it with them when they’d gone, or else they’d hidden it in the barns perhaps. The burning branch never left Beyard’s hands. It never once touched their skin.
Fear gives birth to truth. He rose when he was done, oblivious until then to the other Lhosir moving around him, tearing the house apart, helping themselves to food and mead or else simply standing, watching.
‘The men we’re looking for will return,’ Beyard told them. ‘We wait for them. These ones are not to be touched.’ The Lhosir didn’t like that but they could live with it. The Fateguard were joyless souls. He looked about, missing something. ‘Where’s Gallow? Where’s the other woman? Where’s Niflas?’
But it was a while longer before Niflas came back and when he did he held up a handful of tangled rope and dropped it at Beyard’s feet. ‘Bordas and Torjik are still looking, Fateguard, but they’re gone. Both of them. Gone and taken our horses too.’
10
ACHISTA
In the failing light Gallow struggled with the ropes around him. He tried to bunch his legs to pull his hands in front of him, to bring the bonds to where his teeth could work on them, but Beyard had tied them too tight, and so he lay in the snow, rolling helplessly back and forth. Shouts and screams echoed from the farmhouse and then one of the shutters slammed open with a crack of wood and firelight spilled out into the night. A figure struggled from the snowdrift beneath the window.
‘Marroc!’ he cried. ‘Marroc, here!’
The figure glanced his way, turned a moment, hesitated and then turned back. ‘Who’s there?’
A woman’s voice. Gallow answered, ‘I can lead you to the forkbeard horses.’
The figure ran towards him, arms and legs flailing through the deep snow. Yes, a woman. She stopped when she saw him though. ‘You’re one of them!’ She turned away and started to run.
‘Have you seen an Aulian? His name is Oribas!’
He couldn’t think of anything else to say but that was enough. She stopped again. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Gallow.’
The woman came back. She had a knife in her hand. She looked him over, face filled with indecision while the rest of her twitched with the desire to run far and fast before the Lhosir came after her.
‘I can take you to their horses!’
‘You’re the one who saved Addic?’
The Marroc on the road? Gallow shook his head. ‘I never knew his name.’ He rolled and turned his ropes towards her. ‘Quickly!’
‘Addic brought your Aulian friend here. He spoke of you. Fine words.’ The woman knelt beside him and took her knife to the ropes that hobbled him. She’d seen Oribas! Somehow he’d been thrown off a cliff and lived!
‘We crossed the mountains together. Is he hurt?’
The rope snapped free. The Marroc woman shook her head. She kept glancing back at the farmhouse. The crashes and cries from inside had been muffled by the snow but now they’d fallen quiet. The Lhosir hadn’t yet come out to chase her down but maybe that was because they didn’t think she’d get far in the dark. The need to run filled her eyes as she sawed at the rope around his wrists. ‘Gallow. I’ve heard of you. Everyone has. Gallow the Foxbeard, who turned on the forkbeard prince and cut off his hand and stole away with the Sword of the Weeping God. No wonder they have you all trussed up.’ She gave him a hard look. ‘How do I know you won’t cut off mine?’
‘You don’t. But I won’t.’
‘Forkbeards were everywhere looking for you a few years back. Murderous mad they were about what you did. Still are, I expect.’ The rope split and Gallow’s hands flew apart.
‘I had my reasons.’
She looked him up and down, the knife held between them, the point at his belly. ‘You can keep them. Forkbeards murdering forkbeards is good enough for me.’ She took a wary step away. ‘Lead then, Gallow Foxbeard, and move fast. Don’t you worry about me following. I’ll be there, just not so close in case you lead me false.’
‘Why would I do that?’ Gallow picked himself out of the snow and set off at a run, following the Lhosir tracks back the way they’d come. The moon gave enough light; the woman would have seen them easily enough without him.
‘Forkbeards are forkbeards, that’s why.’
The horses were exactly where the Lhosir had left them, stamping their feet and snorting at the deepening cold. Gallow let them all loose and mounted one. He watched the Marroc woman throw herself at the back of another and scrabble and pull herself up until she was sitting upright. She didn’t look like she’d ever been on a horse before. ‘If you can’t ride then you should come up with me.’
A derisive snort answered him. ‘We go our separate ways now, forkbeard.’
Gallow shrugged. With a kick he urged his horse into the others, chasing them away and scattering them. Anything to make it harder for Beyard to follow. The Fateguard would, though. That was what they did. When he looked around, the Marroc woman was lying in the snow.
‘Nioingr!’ A shout from the farm pierced the night. ‘Now we’re going to kill you, Foxbeard.’ The Lhosir had discovered his escape. They were coming. The woman looked at him, brushing the snow off her. Gallow reached out a hand.
‘Get up behind me!’ She was shivering already. The shouts from the farmhouse were getting closer and quickly. They weren’t stupid. The horses were the first place to look.
The woman hissed at him. ‘Go your own way, forkbeard!’
‘Then I thank you for setting me free. Go back to your house, woman.’ He turned his horse away from her. ‘You won’t escape these Lhosir on foot.’
‘So sure?’
‘They have a Fateguard with them. He’ll find you.’
She ignored him, tried to mount her horse a second time and ended up flat on her back in the snow again. Gallow unwrapped his fur cloak and threw it at her. ‘Take this at least! You’ll not last the night out here without it.’ And without it he’d likely freeze too. He’d have to kill the horse. Find a deep drift and dig in until the morning. Kill the horse and climb inside its carcass like Hostjir had done in the old sagas. Was that even possible?
The woman looked at the furs and then looked at him. ‘Damn you, forkbeard.’ She picked them up and threw them back at him and then stood beside his horse and held up her hand expectantly. ‘Well, help me up then.’
As soon as she was pressed up behind him and Gallow had wrapped the furs around them both, he felt a jab in his ribs through his mail. ‘I still have a knife, forkbeard. You might have saved my brother Addic and you might have helped me out but that doesn’t make us friends. I’ll fillet your liver if you even blink wrong.’
Gallow almost smiled but then a bitterness welled up inside him. Arda might have said the same, the wife he’d left behind. She’d come from the mountains too. Did they make all Marroc women like that up here? He missed her. Three years spending every day trying to find a way back to her, and now he’d come so far and was so close to what had once been home, and . . .
But now wasn’t the time. He pushed the horse on and drove it as hard as he dared through the night, following the trail the Lhosir had made back to the ridge and winding down the other side, back to the Aulian Way, the Varyxhun Road as the Marroc called it. The snow here was only a few inches thick. Older falls had been piled into embankments on either side and had half melted in the afternoons and then frozen like granite each night, over and over until there were ice walls on either side of the road half as tall a
s a man. He pushed on and on down the gorge of the Isset towards Varyxhun while the night grew ever colder. The woman stayed slumped against his back. He thought she was asleep until she suddenly shifted and poked him. ‘Here! Stop! Go up that trail there.’ In the dark he could hardly see it, but when she pointed, there it was, a break in the ice wall beside the road and a narrow path up through the trees. The horse was close to the end of its legs, breathing hard, fighting against the cold. His own hands and face were numb too.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Never you mind. It’s not far and that’s all you need to know.’
The last ten minutes were slow. The black branches of the trees blotted out the sky and the stars and the moon flickered between them. The track wound back and forth, climbing up the slope. It was hardly a track at all in places and Gallow had to stop more than once to see which way it led, but it ended at a tiny log hut, empty and with no door. The Marroc woman slipped out from under their furs and went inside. Gallow blew on his hands and rubbed them together, trying to find some feeling in them again. The horse snickered and butted him as he got off. He patted its neck. ‘Sorry. No blankets.’ Likely as not the cold would kill it before the morning and then they’d be on foot and Beyard wouldn’t be far behind.
The Marroc woman was building a fire. ‘Woodsman hut,’ she said as he came in. ‘No one comes here this time of year.’
‘Except Marroc hiding from forkbeards?’
She gave him a sharp look. ‘I still have my knife. Don’t you try anything.’
Gallow looked at the door, at the roof. Too small to coax their horse inside. He went back out and tied it as close to the door as he could, then stripped the saddle off its back and tied his fur cloak around it instead.
‘What are you doing?’ The Marroc woman looked at him as though he was mad. ‘We’ll need that!’
‘How far is it to Varyxhun on foot?’
She shrugged, striking sparks now at a little nest of tinder. ‘Three days, give or take. Depends how fast you walk.’
‘Beyard will catch us before then.’
‘Never heard of him,’ She cupped her hands over the first tiny flame and blew softly, fanning it.
‘The Fateguard.’ Which didn’t mean anything to her, so he added, ‘The one in the iron mask.’ That did. She looked up sharply and made the sign of Modris the Protector. ‘So we need the horse.’
She snorted. ‘People see you riding a forkbeard horse in Varyxhun, they’ll have you off the back of it and hanging from a gibbet before you can blink.’
‘And why shouldn’t I ride a forkbeard horse? I’m a forkbeard.’
She straightened and looked at him long and hard. ‘Yes.’ Her fingers tightened on the knife. ‘Yes, you are.’
He helped her to build up the fire, careful to stay away from her as best he could in the cramped space of the hut. When it was done he curled up as close as he dared and let its warmth seep into him. The Marroc woman sat on the other side, watching. Her eyes drooped but never quite closed; and why would they, when all the Lhosir had done among the Marroc was a litany of rape and slaughter and carnage? No, he understood her wariness. In her place he’d feel the same.
He closed his own eyes and rubbed the feeling back into his face and fingers and listened to the silence of the woods, and then suddenly light was streaming in through the door and it was morning. He blinked and sat up. The Marroc woman was fast asleep, snoring gently. He stoked the embers and then went outside and there was their horse, still on its feet, pressed against the wall of the hut with his furs wrapped around it. It gave him a baleful look and nudged him as he searched the Lhosir saddlebags for anything to eat. Back inside he shook the Marroc woman; as soon as he touched her she jumped and scrambled away, one hand going into the fire in her haste, the other grabbing for her knife. Gallow backed off as far as the walls would let him. He sat down and tore bread from the Lhosir saddles in two and threw her half of it. She snatched it out of the air, then looked at her hand and winced. ‘Forkbeards are full of lies!’
‘Oribas would have something for that.’
‘The Aulian.’ The anger fell out of her face. ‘What do you forkbeards want with him? What’s he done?’
Gallow shrugged. ‘It’s not Oribas they’re looking for, it’s the sword I was carrying.’
She stared at him, and for a moment the mistrust vanished into wonder. ‘Gallow Foxbeard and the Sword of the Weeping God. So it’s all true, is it?’
‘Was Oribas there? And the sword? Has Beyard got them both now?’
The old look of suspicion settled back over her face. ‘There was a shadewalker. Your Aulian claimed he could put an end to it. Addic went off with him to see if he could.’
‘Where did they go? How do I find him?’
The woman took a deep breath and then seemed to come to some decision. ‘Horkaslet. They went across the ridge to Horkaslet.’ Then her hand flew to her mouth. ‘We have to stop them from going back to the farm! The forkbeards will be waiting for them!’ She still held the knife and now she waved it in Gallow’s face. ‘You! You have to take us there. Quick! Before it’s too late!’
11
A WARM WELCOME
The Marroc were cheerful as they rode the last miles towards home. Oribas tried to let the mood take him with it, but there were too many glooms weighing on his mind. Gallow, his strange and unexpected friend for the last year. Whatever he’d told the Marroc, whether or not the gods had sent Gallow as an answer to his prayers, he was still just a man returning to his family. Harsh of fate to let him come so close to what he so wanted and then take him. And then there was his own fate too, hanging loose in the great weave now the Rakshasa was gone, flapping in the wind. The monster had given him a purpose and a direction and now that was over.
He stopped and got off his horse while the Marroc wandered on. They were riding beside a stream, rustling its way down from the mountains, swathed in ice but not so frozen that the water didn’t break through here and there. He cleared a patch of snow, plucked a blade of grass and tied a knot in it and set in the water. ‘If you’ve killed him then you’ve done wrong. You should have let him have his last years among those he loved. If not, if you truly sent him to me to kill my monster, leave him be. Give him his peace.’ They were words spoken to gods, though the only gods Oribas knew were the old gods of Aulia and they were far away. As an afterthought he set another knotted blade adrift. ‘If you’ve killed him then I would like to go home now.’
Jonnic waited up the path. Addic walked slowly back. ‘Have you found something, Aulian?’
Oribas shook his head. ‘A little prayer, that’s all. To wish us all to our homes in warmth and safety.’ He pushed past Addic and mounted again. The desert where he’d been born was littered with temples to the Aulian gods, all empty and desolate now, abandoned just as the gods themselves had been after the empire fell. To the desert child in Oribas, water was the sacred goddess and always had been. Quiet and unassuming, asking little save that she be nurtured with love and care, fickle though, and deadly when she withdrew her blessings.
‘Amen to that.’ Addic followed him and together the three rode in silence over the rise to Brawlic’s farm. Smoke rose from the chimney. There was no one about. Maybe that was to be expected late on a winter afternoon. Oribas’s world had little to say about farms, nor about mountains or winter or all this cold and snow and how men set about living in the middle of it.
The Marroc left their horses in the barn and called out, and suddenly there were armed men everywhere, soldiers like the men in the road that Gallow had fought, big and tall, cloaked in thick heavy furs with mail underneath, with axes and shields and swords at their sides and helms that hid half their face but not the braids of their forked beards.
‘Forkbeards!’ Addic had his iron sword in his hand as the Lhosir reached him but they didn’t stop to trade blows. The first charged into him, taking Addic’s sword on his shield, and battered him back, and before he c
ould find his balance, the next one crashed in and knocked him to the ground. Jonnic was already running with three more Lhosir chasing after. Oribas simply stood where he was, helpless and with no idea what to do.
‘Alive!’ A monster came out of the farm behind the soldiers, a terrible golem made of black iron, or so it seemed at first until Oribas understood that this was simply a man, huge and fierce perhaps, but a man clad in metal. He wore a crown on his head and a mask over his face. ‘Alive, you dogs!’ he cried again, and then he saw Oribas and came straight towards him. There were more Lhosir behind him, swords drawn, watching. Addic cried out, a scream of fury and fear, as the forkbeards pinned him to the ground. The metal man strode closer.
Oribas turned to flee but barely managed a handful of strides before an arm with fearsome strength caught his shoulder and spun him round and a palm smashed into his face and knocked him flat. He blinked, bewildered by the brightness of the sky, and then darkness fell as the shadow of the iron man loomed over him. The mask was a twisted visage, as though of a demonic man burned deep by fire. Between vertical slits in the metal, deathly pale skin hid among the shadows. Oribas squealed, ‘Shadewalker!’ It was the first thought that came into his head. His hand was at his side, resting on the shoulder bag where he kept his salt – he scrabbled back in terror and scraped out as much as his fingers could claw together and threw it at the iron mask. A moment later a boot stamped on his arm, hard enough to bruise bone, and pinned him there. A spear point came to rest against his throat. The Lhosir soldiers around him laughed.