As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  “What is it, my son?” the inquisitor asked him. “What troubles?”

  Slowly, speaking in a low voice to contain his anger, Rurik said, “Father, I come to you a man burdened. Doubtful. This land. This place. All of it is just…” He shook his head fiercely.

  The brows of the inquisitor shifted perfectly, face matched to the moment. He leaned forward, put hands to knees and bid for more, bid him sit and be free, free as an owl in the night. Rurik tried to picture this man at Verdan, plying his trade beneath the Duke’s shielding title. Leading his father away. He had the certainty of noble-born men.

  Rurik took a step forward and slumped against a table, wincing quite authentically where his burned hand touched the wood. It was barren, save for a bowl, and the wooden instruments laid beside it.

  “You seem young for guardsman,” the priest said.

  “I’m not a guardsman. I’m a servant,” Rurik said with a forced ounce of dignity. He twisted away from the table with a flourish.

  The father put his hands up just a touch, pursed his lips slightly. “We are all servants, goodman—that is phrase here, yes? Goodman?” Rurik nodded. “Ah, yes…it is…not my first tongue, this. Your master…he is gentleman?”

  “He is.”

  “And you are…”

  “Hunting deserters.” He cast his eyes down, deliberately made himself flush. “Were hunting deserters. They did this, father. Did…this. I’m not sure I can…”

  “And it made you afraid.” Again, Rurik nodded. “It made you doubt path.” Another nod. He looked up, hopefully. “A man in service to lord is man in service to the path,” the priest said, quoting the Vorges. “Vorges say this, but they have never said it easy.”

  “There is more, father,” Rurik said, advancing another step. He shuddered to his knees at the priest’s feet. The man shuffled back an inch or so, clearly unused to such contact. “I doubt. I am shaken. The magistrate says we must kill, and I know these men to be wicked but I…I have never killed before. I don’t know what it is to kill. And killing…is it not wrong to bring another man’s path to its end?”

  The priest grew hesitant here, licked his lips before templing his hands in his lap. “I tell you story, my son. In my country, there are bulls. Great creature. Black, oiled thing. Horns long as my arm. Men seek to prove bravery may fight these creatures. Noble men often do. Beasts and men are put into great pen, and other men, they go there, to this pen, and they watch as man and beast dance around until one or other dead.

  “If man wins, bull is killed. He receives adoration of his people, is reaffirmed of his choice, is given to story. It teach him: do this again. Now, if bull wins, I tell you, it knows none of this. Bull is still killed. People still cheer, but for different reason. There will be no stories, save as warning, as doubt. Know you what I mean to tell with story, child?”

  Eyes wide, soaking in the prideful licks of the man’s words, Rurik shook his head, guarding his silence.

  “We all have role. Not all are lauded, or glorious, but we have them all same. We do our duty, until duty taken from us. Is not always pretty, but is, and we are, and this is all we know.”

  He nodded dutifully. A soldier’s answer. An escape from attachment to his own actions. Rurik smiled hopefully. If I was younger I should eat it up.

  For faith, though, he supposed one had to give themselves to that belief. Duty conquered all. Whether it was pointless duty, or gainful duty, mattered little. The duty itself was what mattered. The end, always the end, never the means.

  He knew another man like that. That man had talked him into his confidence, once.

  Perhaps a sixth sense warned the priest. He had started to rise when Rurik slammed a hand into his throat. The wooden table knife followed, a thrust and puncture—all it was good for. Rurik pulled back from him then, let him fall, let him agonize and slide back into the chair, then to the floor, grasping for something. Anything. It might not have been a painless way to go. All things considered, it was a quick way to go, though.

  When he was done, he looked at his hands, noted how they shook. The blood, the lack of feeling. Slowly, how his burned hand began to throb. Rurik steadied himself on the table, breathed. Duty, the man said. And I had a duty to those two men, Rurik whispered inside, to shore himself up. Injustice could not answer injustice, but one could find the line of justice but faintly drawn within a man. Briefly, he wondered if it was the motivations that set its nature.

  It surprised him to find the guardsman still alive, sitting just outside the door. He did not appear overly perturbed by the Zuti; he scarcely even looked up when Rurik emerged. “Holy Maker grant His blessings upon you,” the man said, and stretched his legs into the sun. Rurik pressed the door shut and hurried away with Chigenda, toward the spot in the woods where the others waited. Men would check that hut eventually. They would find that priest and they would fly into a frenzy.

  Let them blame Cullick. Duke and count, Visaj and Farren, they all deserve one another.

  He should have liked to return to the tavern, to gather what little things he might, but Chigenda was insistent. Away from the rising sun was where they needed to be, away from all the greased shadows of this place that had stolen music by a rope.

  Here, so far removed from the forests, there was nothing truly tall. Flat land, leading into flat land, heat-addled air spreading south and away, to hills and mountains beyond sight, to other lands, other schemes, other fanatics. He closed his eyes. Bitter, he told himself. Well, he had some right to that.

  Essa handed him his sword as he rejoined them. He buckled it onto his belt and tried to stretch the sleep from his muscles. Long nights make for long days, he mused. It was quiet. They were all quiet. He found he enjoyed it, in its way, directionless though that silence seemed.

  Eventually, Chigenda spoke without turning: “Hunt, when find. Not far. Us? Far. Tink de where. Tink de how.” He pointed north, stood square against the light, and it seemed to Rurik he addressed himself to Essa, of all of them. “Lean mind. Or…lose.”

  Across from them, Rowan was trying to see the fields through the Zuti’s eyes. Rurik recognized the look. Not distrust, though the two had no liking of one another, but curiosity—a self-imposed wonder of the unknown. He wondered at how the swordsman could still cling to that, in the face of such darkness. He had grown closer to that pair in their time together than any of the rest of them. To Chigenda, those deaths didn’t even mean anything.

  They headed north, skirting the village and keeping low as they might to what cover they could. Essa led them. She had never been to Fürlangen, to anywhere in Usteroy, but she listened to things that he did not, learned, grew. He listened to the people, to the stories of what might be, while she listened to the earth, to the stories of what was. She was the oak, its questing roots learning the ground that would hold it.

  The priests had not yet noticed anything amiss. Rurik guessed it was their man’s custom to long breakfasts, or long morning moments of reflection. It would not hold forever. He only hoped it would be enough to get them away.

  There were no roads, where they walked. At times they could see the cobbled lanes that marked civilization. Mementos of other people, carts, beasts of labor on the trails of a well-traveled existence. They were not a part of that existence. They did not mean to be. North, Essa said, and east, east toward the distant murder of a home, toward the flames, toward the smoke. Everywhere they went seemed to be heading toward something, he mused, rather than away. All of existence was moving toward; no one ever truly moved away.

  Rowan, one of the deserters’ suit of arms tossed heavily across his back, neared him when the place was gone, and Chigenda and Essa had together gone into the fore, plodding their steps along the earth. There was something in his manner. Rurik watched him for a moment, waiting, but the fencer seemed to be gathering his thoughts before he spoke. It was a trait Rurik sometimes wished he emulated more carefully.

  The man’s voice, when it came, was low. “Did
that make you feel like a man, lordling?”

  Feral, was his first thought. Accusation. It startled him—not a tone he recognized in Rowan’s vast repertoire.

  Rurik stammered, “It wasn’t about manhood. It was about right.”

  “Right is right, regardless of what is wrong. Take a stone: heavy thing. Take the dirt beneath your feet,” and Rowan stamped there, once, drawing an inquisitive look from his cousin, “weighty. Wrath? Makes a man sink faster than both.”

  Then he shoved the deserter’s armor into Rurik’s chest. They had left before the town had gotten bloodier, left with a boon, but they went toward more blood, toward a place where armor might not be enough. Rurik blinked over it, to the swordsman now unburdened.

  “You and I,” the swordsman said, “will need these things where we go. The others will have to cross through other means. Forget not, but don’t be a twat about a gift.”

  Wild color lines spread over the horizon. Night on the plains was not like night among the trees—it was a slow, weighty thing, not the sudden coal collapse which blotted a place already shadowed. There was a feeling of lift toward the stars, and Rurik breathed, watching the rise of the first moon over dreamless flatness. Everything tinted silver, like a lost treasure.

  Somewhere beyond that flatness was a castle, and in it were men and women, and one woman especially, upon which a whole nation tottered. Such a small thing, he realized, smaller even than the motes of silver above their heads. Bobbing in the waves, struggling to stay afloat.

  Chapter 13

  The Emperor Leopold Durvalle looked out on the pooling falls that were the ends of the River Klein and marveled at the way the foam spawned there, glistened in the waxing light, a battering force of infinitum. His father’s chancellor had drowned in those waters. It was tranquil here, but in the dying of the day, he could almost convince himself he saw the flame-lit night of distant ends.

  His nephew was dead. H-something or other. One of Joseph’s louts. He lamented the passing for what it meant to Joseph’s family—not for what it meant to him. This one was a traitor, not so different from Mauritz. Yet the nature of the killing was no cause for celebration either. Cullick had done it, had struck so far south into their heartlands as to be absurd—and scattered a prime fighting force there. The scouts Mauritz supposedly had ringing Cullick’s damnable province had meant nothing, had died or simply been blind to the passing of an army.

  They were supposed to be safe there. It was the decision he had banked on in allowing his children to be sent there. Sweat beaded on his neck, clung to him unwanted.

  Their family was dying. Every inch of their name.

  His brother Matthias had fled north with Rufus, he was told, slipped the noose of patrolling men in Fritensia and lit out by the coast. Not all of his people had been so fortunate. Those closest to that traitor-brother had been put to the sword and his only son had died in flight of an arrow to the back. It seemed appropriate. The mother, he knew, would be crestfallen. Unworkable thereafter. Some satisfaction in that.

  If they were past the Shield Isles, they would cross the sea of Ordun to the isles of Karnush, seek sanctuary there. Nights had been spent thinking of the assassins he could send there. Ersili, however, had cautioned otherwise. She was a more insidious creature.

  “An assassin on foreign soil is a dangerous game. Caught? A symbol of embarrassment at the least, of jeopardizing ostracization to the isles at worst. You might make the army for them there you wish to evade.” Her hand had caressed his wrist, as it had not done in a moon or more. “Take a piece of Portir’s inheritance. Buy Karnush with it; guarantee your brothers’ stay there.”

  She was right, of course. She always was.

  Leopold turned aside from the river, looked back at the assembly of men who concurred with the woman. How he hated to admit how right she was. Had she been born a man, to arms and armor, she should have been unstoppable. Hells, the only thing that stopped her now was that it was him to which she had deigned to marry.

  My thoughts…they scatter like wind. It was not easy, as once it had been, to hold himself together.

  “Ontlaus, I should know the state of things.”

  Chin like a pointed boot, that one. He measured the man, the way time had not dampened his body, merely sufficed to dampen his spirit. This one, at least, lacked the pretentiousness of the other preening fools.

  The Captain of the Imperial Guard bowed his head. “Mauritz’s men are in Usteroy, under Count Hernando and Duke Rusthöffen. Ravonnen levies are still days south of the fighting, but with the tracts of land we have confiscated it stands to reason that Cullick’s army will be cut off from any northern re-ascent. Your Blades”—his word for the Imperial Guardsmen—“Sers Flukanz and Jermaakt have led a second force to the north, of our own men, and put Goslen castle to siege.”

  “If the Ravonnens are trapped in Sorbia, we should have them hunt the traitor’s brother,” Lord Hinslen chimed in.

  “To be fair,” Ontlaus said with caution, “the Ravonnen men are, as I understand it, largely ceremonial. The principalities are formidable, mind you, but they have not fought a real war in decades. From what I know of Count Cullick’s brother, this would be a poor decision.”

  “And Duke Rusthöffen? Would he not take umbrage to their lot being left to rampage through his lands? It might make his men question their oaths,” Leopold said.

  “It is true, the longer he is afield, the more damage will be done to his own lands. If he withdraws, we cannot hold what we have gained,” Ontlaus conceded.

  “Have more faith in the man than all that,” the taciturn minister of foreign affairs added.

  Leopold stared at him with his one good eye until the creature squirmed. He preferred it that way.

  “Men can only be pushed so far,” Hinslen mumbled.

  “Just so,” Ontlaus said.

  “And Duke Urtz? He sent me my brother; why has he not yet sent me men?”

  Ontlaus shook his head, demurred. Hinslen rose into his place, shifting between the guardsmen arrayed upon the rocks. “He holds in Berundy, majesty. Old grudges there, between those two. And Berundy was slow to submit its graces to you.”

  Thrice be damned. Their country tears itself to bits and these fools are still so self-involved as to add to it. Have they lost all sense?

  “Its graces? Its graces? I don’t care about its damnable graces, I care about soldiers!” Leopold yowled. “Maker be damned, what is the point in securing my rear if men are stabbing me in the fore? I want him here. Now.”

  “It will take many days, Your Majesty,” Ontlaus said.

  “And he has wasted many more in Berundy. Making me more enemies. Are all of you Idasians so damnably petty?”

  He raged. The others slid back, giving him space to do so. They knew better by now than to stop him when his headaches coursed, to let them play themselves out lest the throbbing became too much to bear. He was alone, and he knew it, isolated, forgotten. A churning in his gut whispered to him night and day: You are a page in someone else’s history. Had it been his wife’s, he should have been fine with that fact. Or his children’s.

  Air. So much air.

  “And what of my children?”

  It had been a question asked for a week, if not more. Time and again they sidestepped it, put it off, placated and soothed and never answered the damnable thing. Politicians, even among the soldiers—and he thought priests were terrors of that field. He closed his eyes, rubbed a thumb against the throbbing pulse of his mind. The others made noise. Too much.

  They did not know. Whatever else they might say, it was clear they did not know. Which was precisely why he had given them into southern lords’ hands in the first place—so that no one knew, not even he, if the war went to the worst. Certainly not the specter-woman that haunted his dreams with visions of his own end.

  How he hated her! How he feared her! Is this what a god comes to?

  So long as they were moving, they were safe. He had to bel
ieve that. Meanwhile, he stood in one place and let the whole world surge around him. Corvaden alone was nigh double the size of Usteroy. In a just world, he should have been able to simply swallow that wayward province whole—but then, all the other little crows would peck at his sated, bloated figure, spear him until the boar writhed and moaned and died in a puddle of its own saturated blood.

  He missed the palaces of Ravonno, the lazy indenture of physical pleasures to purely mental gains. Religion and culture, he supposed, worked at higher levels of existence. They made for a different life.

  The council, at least, was dismissed with an indolent wave. He hated the sounds of their voices, the distaste he knew they showed him as soon as they turned their backs. When the guards had showed them off, he turned to his guard captain, his Ravonnen captain, a man to be trusted on two vices alone: coin and religion. The man was practically a peacock—bright clothes for feathers, a chain skirt that was the marking of traditional Ravonnen warriors.

  He might have raged at the man, but he feared the only showing in it would be of his own disability. It was with some violence, nonetheless, that he bobbed toward the oblivious man.

  “Makari!” he bellowed.

  There was no mistaking his tone. Makari’s soldiers scattered.

  The captain stood quickly, the stiffness in the gesture enough to betray his fear. The music of the river seemed distant by then.

  “My Majesty,” he said.

  “Your Majesty,” Leopold snapped back. “There is nothing majestic about you.” He scanned their faces, let their fear stir a sort of calm in him. Good. If they are afraid, then I remain something to be feared. In a more diplomatically silken tone, he continued: “Do you know what it was my previous body servant sufficed to do for me?”