As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  He couldn’t reverse his blade. Instead, he clubbed it into the temple of the charging man. The hunter tripped, veered away, and Aurinth twisted, thrust in. The hunter dipped it, danced close enough to get inside his guard, but he reversed and boxed the hunter solid on his ear. The shadow leapt up in the momentum of the hunter’s recovery and put a boot hard into his chest. The hunter tumbled, and his shadow glided effortlessly into his wake, he and the curve of his blade, which he slid along the hunter’s side, just above the bulge of his hip.

  The shriek was divine.

  A foot nearly caught Aurinth in the side, but he dodged back. Wounded, still, it gave the hunter enough time to produce both his boot blades, and he came up swinging—limping, but swinging. When the hunter pressed, his shadow switched his leading hand, reflexively turning his guard to be opposite his opponent’s—and to utterly belittle his effort. Clean strokes pressed them both. The hunter fought like a drunken man. He tried to get inside the reach of Aurinth’s blade, but nothing quite worked. Another foot presented itself, and the shadow thrust past it, through a hunk of thigh.

  Nothing was clean anymore. Red spots followed, but the blade arced free. As it passed to one hand, a shorter blade dropped from swaddling robes, and as it reversed in Aurinth’s grip, he stabbed it up under the hunter’s chin until it chattered with a concerto of teeth.

  Tragedy, in the wake. Thrill died with the cooling of blood and the knowledge that nothing remained. Silence was simple. Silence was beautiful. But silence was not interesting.

  He wobbled in his safety, breathed deep of the heady nothingness. Alone again. Others—apprentices, hired blades—would fade or die if they crossed his knowing. This was the last of those that knew. The only one to have left the shadows of the capital with his breath. Anscharde would grasp nothing but empty air now, watch the circles move and wonder.

  In every mortar was its share of blood. Crowns needed theirs to bond the gold on which they sat.

  Alone again. He turned south, letting chills settle into the bony tips of his shoulders.

  Before he went, he cleaned his steel limb in the cloth of a corpse and the oil that was its bath. He titled his head, drew one more breath, and moved back upon his road. There was still one smell he could not forget. It called to him, even across the churning miles.

  Wind divided the earth from it seed. In chaos flourished life, before the order resumed—a sun, consumed by the swirl and serenade of thundering clouds; the teasing lathing of the skystruck tears.

  They did not stop, save to sleep. He ate in the saddle. Pissed from the saddle. Marked the days and nights and miles, all, from the saddle, and knew not the pain those long hours should have riddled within too many cringing bodies.

  At times he sang, dark and low as the twilit prey, offering no opposition to the storm. Villages were shunned; let them be swallowed. No campfires beckoned; the soul did not yearn. The way the rain drowned his clothes, those passing might have taken him for a skeleton—a wraith of loose skin and hammered bone—or simply a madman, and they avoided him, and never once did he disavow their judgment.

  Once, he came upon the ends of a skirmish. Another likeness between men and bugs: they were squishy. Pluck their legs and watch them squirm, squishy. Yet they were defiant. Pitchforks and bows rose and fell against swathes of maces and long guns.

  There was a moment when old men spied him, stumbled on toward him begging aid. Instead, he rode on, memorizing the heat of a torch fire. It would flicker in the night. Corpses would burn like fleshy stars, and the world would go on.

  It always did.

  Cullick’s men had a cycle, as most men of a time did. Long had the night waxed into the flickering sparks of distant pyres before the final approach was taken. Barracks. Patrols. Statues. Each folded along the map of his mind, twining into a host of dots that roved and burned to paper ash again as the lines rolled off the page. They would not crisscross his own line.

  It was a slog of a thing. Two miles out of the way, skittering, skittering, while all the world was chittering, but days had been spent at the learning, and it taught him well. Where he walked only bats still flew, and it was here he left his horse, a field of grass at its whim and the northern star to keep it warm. If he did not return, he did not fear—it was a thing of wildness, and it would know the moment when freedom bid it break its bonds.

  Nettles nicked and knotted his cloak. Burrs burrowed anywhere that caught. Yet to pick them out should only have left more of a trail than their plucking forged. Calloused skin scarcely noticed anyway.

  Only one moon remained in the sky by the time he stepped into its violet caress. Like the points of a pentacle, her guardsmen fanned that fallow light, more frightened of the shadows within than the night without. One step. Two step. Into the deep.

  An invisible line passed beneath him as he drew his blades—the long and the short.

  It was an old game, as old or older than men, and aswari, and all the novice beasts that thought they saw the world as it was. She would know he came, as he could smell her stench upon this field. The blades steadied him.

  A shout precipitated action. All it ever took was one man with sight beyond his own fears. Young, as expected. Always, it was the young that rushed to meet death’s maw.

  “Crow for me,” he told the night.

  There came a moment in battle when one truly ceased to feel. Transcendence of the flesh. In the north, a pale man jeered and screamed it out. Became as one with the wrath. Yet others, no less deadly, simply ceased to be themselves. Battle fever. No terror. No rage. No exhaustion. There was nothing to hear, and only this man, and the next, and the next to be seen. It was a winnowing. They fell way. The world thinned still further. And in the end, either the world rushed back into being, more vibrant than ever before—or it was gone. All gone.

  One state of mind slid into the other. Pieces in a puzzle. Crack. As he stepped from the blackness of his focus, he was warmer. Some of the men still cried out. They were few, and foul, and though at another time and place he should have slit a hole in their misery to let them drain out, the scent remained.

  Until it was flushed, there could be no other focus. It was in his blood.

  Over the bodies, he moved to his purpose. Can’t see. Can’t run. Its blindness is the end. It would not be long. Awake! Awake! You fetid muse! Gone, as a mouse in the night, but there in the contours of her dirt-brushed existence burrowed the remnants of her flight. Would that he might sing, for a chase so grand. Yet he bent instead, lower and lower, and took her chains reverently into his hands, letting the weight and substance of their being call to the voices within.

  She would not be far. What remained was still warm, though not by any embrace of flesh. Ceration, it so named, at the tip of his tongue. In ceration was liquid drained and transferred and coalesced into the dry blandness of the metal—a pinch of bodily heat for flavor, and what was solid turned to the constitution of wax. Some gelled within his hands, but most peeled and snapped asunder.

  For all things were born of earth, and whatever fool did claim that iron bound a sorceress was nothing but an earth-bound fool.

  Not far. He rose and pirouetted, taking in the world at a glimpse. A whole world of material, and so little of it of use. Stable ground. He rooted himself, let the salt within his pocket give him bearing. Solidity. Salt was solid. Salt was stable. Sprinkle it by the shoulder and all one got was superstition, but in the pocket, on the fingers, pouring out the pours—it was pure.

  Unlike the dirt that gave their world bearing. The dirt that covered. The dirt that concealed. One step, two step, three step—hidden. He smiled. Not far. Not far at all.

  Façade cracked as the earth moved across the field—mounds of suddenly muddied flesh dribbling off her nudity as dust on the wind. Take the dirt and make it mud. Take the mud and make it skin. Become as one with mud, become as one with earth—a lump, by any other name, by human shape, but in the dark, another lump. She knew that she was had and he knew tha
t he had her and he was off, springing with the wind sucking tiny breaths from his lungs.

  It congealed and contorted and what was mud became yet darker still—matching his skin. A ploy. His blades swept out but she twisted as he neared, pale for all her bearing, and flung dirt into the air.

  Or what looked like dirt. It burst upon the space between them with the ceaseless bearing of black powder, and all became as flame. For her. For the world. But not for him. He was the chink in the chain, the solid bred into the malleable breadth of the world’s womb. And he burst through it, warmed but unharmed.

  “Come oh come, oh bird of old! Where would you go with your story untold?”

  She fled. Words caught and burst in bounds of laughter in the heaviness of his throaty pining, but she fled from it with all the dread of the tern before the eagle. Mushrooms and tall, tall grass—which had the misfortune of her touch, and razored to the point of knives—gave way to the gnarled roots and branches of bastard trees, mingling in a forest of misbegotten menagerie. Poor little roots, pruned and plucked. Sheered like sheep to beautify another bastard’s image. There was nothing to use against him, save the petals and the bark and the dark itself, and though her legs were lithe, her breaths were not, and none of these would carry her far.

  Hide and seek. He dove, she strove, they swooped and preened with bladed claws.

  “You’re not real! You are nothing but a myth-myth-myth!” she screamed.

  And the myth came at her, and the earth rumbled its terror.

  She skidded, faltered, out of breath. Trees and trees, and no way out. Everything was night, and he was of it and within it and he did not slow. That this was a woman meant nothing to him. That she was little more than a girl, unarmed and bare, lips full, arrowhead chest with new breasts—nothing. She was a thing. A torrid swamp of pale flesh and suckling veins, and something less, and more, than what a man should be. She was a thing, and he was a thing, and all were born into the world to die—and this, especially, was the fate of all aberrations.

  She turned, her eyes catching the light and drowning it as all men were wont to do. Grey storms to his silver oceans. Pools in pools that dissipated in the disarray. She was close.

  A bolt slapped against the dirt and broke his charge. He leapt back. No man did he seek, but the angle of the bolt—his eyes roamed, veered, short breaths as acting counsel against the innate uncertainty of the bladder. Angle right, angle low—the crossbow came before the man, and Aurinth had him there among the trees. A warden. Not hers, but a man beyond his duty.

  Aurinth did not like creatures that did not adhere to their routine.

  Course altered. The short drooped low and in the three bounds it took him to reach a proper place, it pitched across the space toward the interloping fool. Ploy. Boots set in motion and the man staggered from his cover. It was not so long a space. The light above was clear and full and suckled like a babe against the warmth of their skin. His blade gave him reach. The crossbow gave more. It fired again, and Aurinth dropped, rolling into the crook of a log.

  Then he sprang. Over the log, onto the dirt that hid, and they danced a little dance as the man’s one good arm swung the crossbow like a club. But in this, it was Aurinth’s sword that was the longer, and its arc cleaved through all that armor did not bind. In so doing did he breathe, and another absence shuddered to the milky earth.

  Even as he turned, he already knew. Gone, gone like the wind and the birds it bore. Lost to the storms that consumed its heart. Alone again. Yet he knew, also, where she went, for though the trees were thick, beyond their base he stalked the cusp of a hill that buried itself into the roots of stone and harvest, to name itself a town.

  Its walls were history. Its secrets many. Its holes, far deeper than any cave.

  History bid him follow. That the horns beckoned in the distance and the sharpened height of his hearing told that all the world did stir against this betrayal, he cared little. Little and less than little. For they were but points on the map. There were always more.

  He would die without a voice and so too would she. It was what his people had been bred for, in the ages beyond remembrance—by men whom still thought aswari might have some use. Perhaps rightly, than, the night enwrapped his skin—that he might be as dark as their souls, as dark as their hearts, as dark or darker than anything his blade might reave. For he was a tool, and it was always the hand that colored it.

  He slid down the hill, trailing her into the streets where wise men huddled in their homes and even watchmen fled before the word. Attack, they cried. For in confusion, and bells, and horns all, they took the madness of the night for a facet of war—their war—and set to all the things that fear and orders bred.

  No one opposed him, though men skittered past. In the trail of her scent did he breathe the remnants of her passing—prints and pads upon a stoop, a stolen dress from a dangling line, and the subtle tartness of the Shift her minor works would leave behind. Shuttered to him, was this world of stone; shuttered since the world had seen fit to hunt the hunters and undue his brethren centuries before. Yet her people’s stink always wove through them, and in the cracks of this old town, he sought her to flames that fanned into a scorched path.

  A distraction. Yet still did it burn, a bonfire that would have the insects skitter, for all places were made of stone and wood, and in the wood did fire grow. Oil had been laid across his path—first one, and then a block of buildings licked and lapped the wealth of the fire.

  It soured his skin and tickled his fragile fabrics, and threatened something worse than absence. Yet where there was a street there were foundations, and he found his path through—in the depths of the sewers, through which he found a ladder to the cobbled demesne of chaos.

  Everything seemed to shriek. People, buildings, and flesh. He could not look at the fire too long. It burned the unsuited character of his eyes, left him night-blind. Someone pointed at him, cursed him and named him Zuti. Named him mudman and shade and demon. Named him for the death and devastation. He ignored them. Tried, rather.

  A carpenter seized at him, and he took the man in the shin, rounded, and put a boot on the back of his head. The shrieking went on. But no one took him, and by the time the clatter of guards and the clamor of horses clip-clopped into the overtures of the flames, he was free.

  Still, cities were a maze, and their roads diverged, and in their alleys he guessed and lied and learned. Only time righted him. All roads led to her. The stink was all about him. Flaws were many. They gave her away. Little mistakes people never thought to correct.

  What trail she left wove into the warehouses that stored the city’s supplies for life and luxury. Neither her veil nor this inconvenient monstrosity was difficult to breach.

  There was no flare in this one’s approach. This time, he stalked. All roads led in, but he waited, and he watched, and as time lengthened and the clamor of the streets hit its fevered pitch, he found his in. Doors were obvious portals. Windows stood out awkwardly whole stories above the earth, and it was to these he lent his bearing.

  One warehouse led to another, and though feet separated them, he leapt the distance between with an alley runner’s poise. From there, it was a simple—relatively speaking—matter of slipping down the cornice and shimmying to one of the window ledges. The windows themselves were sealed. He made entrance with the short blade and plunged within.

  Balance was the key, and he carried it across the beams that formed the ceiling of this cavernous warehouse.

  Chapter 7

  If anyone had asked her in the midst of that squalid, terrible night, Charlotte should not have been able to wrap head nor hide about which tiding struck her worse: that they were under assault by a force of unknown measure, or that in the midst of that assault their jewel had slipped its bonds and fled into the warren of knotted tree lanes and angled streets that were her home.

  As men and beasts clamored through the night with the urgency of the unknown, she scythed through the news even as
she hitched her riding trousers and waded into the yard, a half-dozen orders already on the tip of her tongue.

  Usuri could have run from the day they bound her. That she had chosen now only bespoke the horror of her present situation. This assault—whomever so lay at the intoxicating swell of its murderous intent—was pointed, purposeful, and the witch was at its heart.

  Raiders might have attacked a dozen, a hundred different places just by Charlotte’s reckoning. Assassins should have turned their blades within the castle—not without. Yet these killers had stricken men dead in the middle of a field, half a dozen men of no small training, mind, and had neither used them for a trap, nor faded away into the night. There was no message in them. They hunted the witch, and they did not seem content to let up until she faltered.

  Soldiers had already locked down the castle. Small bands mustered and combed the woods. She doubted they would find anything. Even as others collected the bodies of their fallen comrades for the death vigils, she was turning, calling for a gryphon of her own. Stable boys ran to obey. Knights pounded past on mailed destriers, headed for the city.

  She forced her way against the tumult of the yard. Sweat was everywhere, the only thing to combat the unmistakable scent of burning timber. It spurred more than a little panic, not only in her own heart, but in the cluster around her.

  Even in the dark, the orange-lined clouds screening the final light of the first, pale blue moon were impossible to deny.

  She was almost running, with a terrible pang in the restless pits of her stomach, when her father and his guardsmen took their measure of her yard. Even in the tumult, in the wavering shadows between the towers, they stood out. Her father was still attired for sleep, but had possessed enough sense to smother the fact in fur and leather—a bit warm for the weather, but enough to make him look the popinjay he was. His shieldmen were at least a head taller than most the other men about them, and save for the knights they watched depart, few came better equipped or ready for violence.