by Kaleb Schad
“That doesn’t help.”
“The sun rising is the hsing-li. As is your child’s beating heart. Your love for your wife. The way a bird floats in the air. The hsing-li is there, in all of that. It is every thing.”
“You sound like a mector talking about Airim.”
“Sometimes I wonder if the hsing-li and Airim are different names for the same thing.”
“Except, as far as I can tell, Airim doesn’t provide shit for anyone.”
Anaz grinned. He paused scraping the blade and caught his breath. This was a young man’s work, that’s for sure. And when did I stop falling in that category?
“I’ve found, what we think we need and what the hsing-li decides we need are often very different things and that the more I try to control it, the less happy I am with what I get. Though, if you still yourself, and ask kindly, the hsing-li can shape things for you.”
Daveon seemed to think about that for a while before asking, “You’re all alone out there?”
“The silence…helps.”
“Are you lonely?”
He thought about the fox he’d seen three nights ago, its orange tail muddy in the evening light. He thought about the massive cedars and the silence under their canopy and the gurgle of the stream behind his cabin and about the monarch butterflies and about the huckleberries and the bears and the falling pinecones and he said, “It is enough.”
But his mouth tasted like dust after saying it.
“I didn’t think there was a nation in all of Fallow that didn’t know about the bone wall invading Humay.”
“My home was…how do I say in your tongue…isolated?”
“Isolated?”
“Yes, isolated.”
Daveon clearly wanted to ask where that was, but held his question. Anaz was grateful. He hadn’t yet decided if he would lie if asked. Being from Anathest, a brutal nation-state that started as a desert prison colony, might cause grief for people. And for him.
“I guess it was something like three hundred summers ago, the bone wall rolled out of the far east. Nobody knows why or how it started. The eastern border of Humay had always been a fuzzy space, blending into the wilds like it did. Out there, well, it’s where the old things lived with their old magic and their old laws. Some say it’s Airim’s half-brother, Kalkaras, that raised the Wretched. I guess it doesn’t matter. It’s not the wall that’s dangerous, but the Wretched in front of it. Fletchers, Wallwraiths, Red Tails. These things that just…How such things can exist, I’ll never understand.”
If the wall was coming from the south of Fisher Pass, that meant it would come to his cabin first. And if everyone fled Fisher Pass before Market Days or didn’t trade because they were getting ready to leave, Anaz wouldn’t be able to buy what he needed. He knew he couldn’t survive another winter without those supplies. Certainly couldn’t survive a winter on the run from undead.
“Why do they come?” he asked.
Daveon shook his head. “Nobody knows. Food, I guess?”
“They eat people?”
“Our souls, I guess. I don’t know. The mectors have tried to understand it, prayed for help from Airim. When they can, they take any girls and women who are of or near child-bearing age. People say there are breeding halls behind the wall, that they treat us like animals to be raised and harvested. That they eat the children.”
He didn’t look at Daveon, didn’t want him to see his horror. What kind of terror had he fled into? All these years living here and he’d never known…
“The Wretched, they are soulless?” he asked.
He moved to the other hind leg and began tracing the knife just above the hock, slicing the thin skin. Moonlit muscle peeked through the blue-grey hide. Daveon took a second knife and continued to work the loose skin up the powerful thigh muscles.
“Yeah, they are.” He stared past his house for a long moment. “Anyway, I guess the bone wall was smaller when it started, but it’s had two-hundred-plus summers of new bones to pile onto it. It doesn’t move fast…until it does. But for the most part it’s been sitting still for over a hundred years. We have soldiers all along the front and occasionally we get into skirmishes, but it mostly just sits there.”
“And it circles a village? Lindisfarne?”
“What? No, no.” Daveon chuckled and shook his head. “No. I can’t expl—you’ve never seen it? Anaz, this wall spans the entire nation. Leagues and leagues of dried bones and bits of dead things and some dead things that are back alive. It’s…”
Daveon again tumbled into his memories, hidden pain pursing the corners of his mouth, the skin of his eyes.
Stop looking. His hurt isn’t yours. Don’t make it yours.
“It just sounded like Lindisfarne had been an important place,” Anaz said. Stop it!
“Yeah,” Daveon whispered. “It was.”
“You…” Anaz let the words trail off. You can’t fix this. Stop asking.
The hind quarters exposed, he moved to the forelegs. You can’t fix this.
“Can I tell you something?” Daveon stopped working, He let go of the horse’s leg and looked at his blood-smeared hand.
No. Please don’t. “If you’d like.”
“I’ve never told…Alysha doesn’t know this. Nobody does…” He worked a sticky white chunk of fat between his fingers. “The stories. About Lindisfarne. They’re all lies.” When he looked at Anaz his eyes glistened in the moonlight and Anaz watched his chin quiver and he had to clench his own jaw to keep from feeling Daveon’s grief as the man said, “I ran.”
He gasped a sudden sob, clasped his bloody hand to his mouth. “Oh, great Airim, I ran, Anaz. Rayen was there and I had just come up with the caravan when the gap opened and the wall surged and nobody was ready, thousands of Wretched pouring out of the opening, but Rayen and I were right there, right at the mouth of it and we saw the Tellich that was magicking the gap and Rayen looked at me and I knew what he was going to do, that if we hurried we could kill the Tellich and close the gap before more got out and buy time for the rest of the seventh division to come up. And I nodded. I told him I’d follow him and when he charged…I couldn’t.” The man’s grief overtook his words.
Anaz looked down at the stranded leg muscles in his hand, the rolled back hide and speckled hair and he tried to imagine a stone wall around his heart, desperate to keep the man’s hurt from reaching him. Let things be as they are. Let the hsing-li work as it wills.
“I hid in a cellar,” Daveon said when he could continue. “There was a father with his two girls and I hid down there with them, but a Wallwraith found us. I was so scared. The father charged the wraith but it was like watching a toddler attack a twenty-stone man. My whole life I’d been fighting with my brothers. I was good with a blade, I knew it, and still I wanted to run. Unfortunately, or, I don’t know, maybe fortunately, I couldn’t. There was nowhere to go and I saw these two girls and I knew they had just watched their father die and seeing them there like that, their fear, it…I don’t know…I guess it stirred something because somehow I was able to kill that Wallwraith.”
He sighed and closed his eyes. Anaz watched as Daveon breathed, slow, healing breaths that seemed to push out all the sin and guilt this man had carried for years and he felt a bite of jealousy. How long had he carried his own failure? If only it were that easy…
“The girls,” Anaz said. “Did they make it?”
Daveon shook his head. “I don’t know. I got them out of the cellar and we ran. We found their mother several houses down and she took them and said her sister had horses they could ride out on, but the Wretched were everywhere and we got separated. I don’t know what ever happened to them.”
Anaz looked towards the south. The Weeping Maiden constellation had just crested the mountains, the third star of her tears touching the peaks. This wall was out there. Coming for him whether he liked it or not. It was coming towards his home and towards these people. Why had the hsing-li brought him here? What was it trying t
o tell him?
“I’m sorry,” Daveon said after a moment. “I shouldn’t have burdened you like that. You just…the way you talked to Malic tonight…and us skinning Tilly like this—the Rot killing so many people in town, then jumping to my livestock—all the horses I’ve skinned and burned these last months…I guess it’s all just piling up and I could tell you have your own stories. That maybe you wouldn’t judge. I’m sorry.”
“If there is one thing that unites us all, it is hurt,” Anaz said. “Your secret is safe with me. Besides…”
He bent and lifted the horse’s leg straight and resumed skinning it.
“…I don’t have anybody I could tell.”
Somewhere below Anaz a horse snorted, a deep flapping sound. Laying there, a fresh-washed blanket pulled to his chin, the smell of pine lumber and dry hay and, yes, even the horse manure below cozied up next to him. Anaz realized this was the first time he’d slept in the same space as another living creature in years. Certainly since coming to Humay and even that last year of fighting his way out of Anathest. Probably since traveling with Orithen’s doomed caravan.
He found himself thinking about Daveon and his family. A kind man to allow a stranger into his house—a kindness unheard of in Anathest. He could hear again the sleeping children and his wife and saw how her knees had bounced as she sat at the table, looking at her hands, her hair dropping beside her face. He remembered the touch Daveon offered her, the comfort within it. The comfort of having someone to lift your fears and take them as their own, of lifting someone else’s fears for them.
This wall, these Wretched, they were going to destroy all of this. And he’d be caught up in it if he wasn’t careful.
Tomorrow he’d wake and he’d get to Market early and maybe, if the hsing-li was generous, he could sell enough skins to get his supplies and be on the road again before the day’s middle hour. Out of Fisher Pass. Away from these people and their fears and their confessions.
Alone.
And then he was on a bridge, walking to the khatras district. The smell of sand and rot. Reyn carrying his bags.
No, he wasn’t lonely. He didn’t think he had lied.
But he was alone.
That was best. If he’d learned anything, it was that you can only be hurt through the things you cling to. As the hsing-li willed it, so shall it be.
Daveon dropped his tunic into a pile on the floor and eased himself under the blankets next to Alysha. He could still smell the fire’s burned horse flesh and greasy smoke in his hair. A smell too common lately.
On the other side of the curtain, Nikolai called out in his sleep, something about giving it back and that it was red.
His sons. How fast would the wall get here? What would happen to his children tomorrow? The next day? Malic was a fool to order everyone to stay. He knew Alysha was probably right. They should’ve left tonight, in the morning at the latest. Nobody could know for sure how fast the wall would move. Malic was putting everyone at risk.
Yet, leaving would mean running away. Again. It would mean ignoring his king’s orders. Again. Abandoning his countrymen. Again.
It would mean lying.
Again.
They’d never be free. If the king didn’t order him arrested and hung for ignoring his orders, Malic would hunt him down for running from his debt.
It would mean he’d failed.
Again.
He could tell Alysha was awake even before she said, “I started packing what I could.”
“Okay,” Daveon whispered.
But it wasn’t okay. As if unloading his guilt to Anaz had dislodged something, he felt a new determination settle into the opening. Alysha was wrong. They couldn’t run. She didn’t understand what it meant. What it would do to him.
He owed the king twenty horses. As long as he could convince the stable master to take Fennel’s foal—that is, as long as Fennel survived the Rot—and he got the two back from the Skets, he would meet that contract. And if he was heading south to the Skets, he would warn the Evensons and Monsole. Somebody should. After all, if it was reversed and he was out there, he’d hope somebody would warn him.
Malic would be angry he was leaving, but he could go piss up a rope for all Daveon cared.
A couple days. That’s all he needed. The messenger said the wall was two weeks out. That gave him more than enough time to get the horses and save his family all in one fell swoop. She’d understand once she saw him coming back with the horses.
Once she’d seen him as a hero saving his family.
In truth this time.
He’d tell Alysha in the morning.
She’d be angry.
Or maybe in the afternoon. After Market Days.
Maybe.
10
“Moving where?” Baron Marcen Blackhand said.
“Here, my lord,” the messenger said. He was a young elf, Marcen noticed, his face poxed with pimples, but he held himself straight and looked the baron in the eye. It annoyed him.
They stood in his study, a mahogany desk between them, so large it had taken six half-orcs to carry it up here, a scarlet circular rug from Cormyr centered the room. He’d been writing a letter accepting Earl Olisal’s official offer of matrimony to Isabell. For the last two hours he’d been writing draft after draft of his acceptance letter. How to say yes without betraying his eagerness? Not too giddy, but not too dour. How long had he worked to insinuate himself into Olisal’s household? It helped that the earl was old and horny and that his first wife had been beastly and recently dead. Isabell’s face certainly had something to do with it. He knew that. He wasn’t above admiring his daughter’s shape, certain of the tingling crotches she left behind wherever she went. But still, marrying an Olisal was something no Blackhand before him had ever accomplished.
And now this. This fucking rat-faced kid messenger from the rat-faced kid king.
“Now. After all these years,” Marcen said.
“The king has engaged the wall to the east where a Tellich has risen and leads the Wretched. He has dispatched a team of his Airim’s Lances to come and secure the port at Nove, but he cannot spare men for Fisher Pass and Knowles.”
“Cannot,” Marcen said.
“He asks that you not take this as an insult to your family’s name. He recognizes the sacrifice he asks you to make, but begs that the sacrifice be buildings and land and not men and women.”
“He would have us run?”
“A strategic regrouping, my lord.” The baron hated how he said “my lord,” a long dragged out vowel, making it sound like “my laaaaord.” As if this little shit had any loyalty to him. His loyalty is to a king who demands loyalty, but refuses to return it.
“Rally your banner at Earl Ventner’s southern keep,” the messenger said. “He will muster what armies he has not dedicated to the eastern front and will hold the wall there. Airim willing, we will be able to push it back and reclaim the Blackhand Barony.”
Reclaim. It was all Marcen could do to not scream. Reclaim what was only now becoming something worthy of the Blackhand name. It was no accident King Felnis couldn’t muster soldiers to defend Fisher Pass and Knowles. He must know, Marcen thought. Or suspect, at the least, of Marcen’s maneuvering with Olisal and his league. He was letting the Wretched do his dirty work for him. His complete and utter incompetence at waging the war wasn’t winning any folks to his side, that’s for sure. How many villages had been lost to the wall in the last ten years since he’d ascended the throne? Lindisfarne, Grimm’s Hollow, Cornwillow, Remblin’s Reach and now Fisher’s Pass and Knowles? Marcen could think of nobody less suited to be king in the history of their great nation. It was said the prime god Airim chose who should be king at any given time, but if Felnis was the best Airim could do, somebody would have to step in and save Airim from Himself.
Less than half the peerage were pleased with his sudden ascendancy after his father died from the Rot. He had to know that, too. So, the child wanted to play politics?
Welcome to the tourney, kid. Hope you brought your helmet.
“And if I stay? I’ve a mind to die fighting for what is mine than let some undead beasts seize it.”
“My lord,” the messenger drawled and Marcen wanted to pop his head just like one of his piss-ant pimples. “This is not a request. The king says he expects abject obedience in this issue.”
“Abject obedience.”
“Abject.”
In the silence that fell between them, their eyes locked, Marcen felt the rapid click of ideas falling into place, all of the hard decisions becoming easy. He’d swore he would never follow this king, not after what his father had been put through. With Olisal’s offer of marriage…and a king losing another village to the wall…
“This’ll be, what, the fifth and sixth village King Felnis has lost to the Wretched?”
“Truly, these are tough times.”
“But maybe he thinks it won’t be so bad as long as nobody dies in the villages, eh? Maybe he thinks if we all run and live, the rest of the kingdom won’t be as distraught at his leadership—”
“He understands—” the messenger tried to speak over Marcen.
“—as distraught at his abdication to these undead.”
“My lord!” Steel in his voice. “Your concern, your—” The messenger looked at the stag emblem carved into the surface of the desk, the same emblem Marcen carved into everything he rightfully owned. “—careful marking of your property. Giving it up is a great sacrifice, but he asks that you think of all of Humay.”
Understands exactly what the Blackhands losing everything again will mean for us. Understands and isn’t exactly saddened by it, I’d wager.
The rapid click of his ideas slowed as the path forward showed itself to him. It would require blood. First tonight, then for his people, but it might end up being the first blood worth spilling in this war.
The baron nodded.
“I think of nothing else,” he said.
He stood from his side of the desk and began walking towards the messenger. The kid glanced at the dagger strapped to Marcen’s belt. His father had told him a man must never be without a weapon. Every summer older Marcen reached the wiser the words seemed.