The Last Bastion

by Nathan Hawke

  His salt lay scattered across the floor of the tomb, each grain glowing white like a tiny star.

  The abomination lifted the crown and mask off its head and the ice-blue light of its eyes burned brighter. ‘An Aulian.’ Its words were in the old tongue, the perfect high speech of the priests and the magi of the empire at its height a hundred years ago. ‘Come, Aulian!’

  Not a Fateguard. Worse. Far worse. Oribas took two quick steps toward the monster and threw his other handful of salt in its face, then turned and screwed up his eyes. The blast of light came again. He saw it red through his eyelids and then another shock of air caught him and threw him back. He stumbled, almost scuffed the line of salt he’d laid across the passage and landed heavily on the other side. The creature opened its arms wide and strode towards him and Oribas couldn’t stop himself from stepping back until he was on the brink of the shaft. It reached the line of salt and stopped and hissed. Oribas had to pinch himself. It worked! Mere salt was actually holding it. He made himself look at it now. Take it in, good and long though his eyes squealed and squirmed to look away. The armour of a Fateguard, without question, but the face behind the mask was of a man much longer dead. A shadewalker, perhaps.

  A wisp of wind started around the creature’s feet. A crumb of salt flew up into the air and swirled around it, touched its metal leg and flared into light. The creature looked at Oribas and smiled.

  18

  GHOSTS

  There was a part of him that wanted to turn and leap into the darkness to get away. There was water at the bottom of the shaft, it wheedled, and it would break his fall, wouldn’t it? And it didn’t matter that he hadn’t the first idea how to swim, because if he took a deep breath he’d float once he threw off the furs, and then surely he could haul himself out into the tunnel, even if he’d once seen a Marroc man almost drown trying the same with three men to help him. He thought these things as he swung over the edge of the shaft and started climbing down the rungs as fast as he dared. But no, the water wouldn’t cushion his fall, not from this height, and chances were good he’d hit the wall on the way down and maybe the walkway at the bottom, and even if he didn’t, he’d break his bones and his clothes would drag him down, and he’d drown before he could shed them. If he was even still conscious.

  Up above, the dim light of the thing – he had no idea what it was, some creature half dead and half like the Fateguard and the shadewalkers – lit up the shaft enough for him to see how far the water was below, black and glistening like a hungry mouth. He saw the air swirl around the entrance to the tomb. It, whatever it was, was making a wind to blow away his salt, and he could be thankful now that he hadn’t done such a good job of keeping it dry out with the Marroc in all that snow – it was sticky and crumbly and not the nice fine powder he might have wanted it to be. He tried not to look up, only down, one foot after the next, hand over hand as fast as he could, and when he slipped on a loose rung, he simply let himself fall to the next and clung to it for dear life.

  A whistling began. It filled the shaft and a low moan rose behind it. And then it stopped and everything was silent, and Oribas did look up now because he still wasn’t quite at the bottom of the shaft and the silence meant the wind had stopped and that meant . . .

  It was looking down at him. Its pale blue eyes gleamed and there was a white wind swirling around it. It seemed to smile. ‘Aulian . . .’ whispered the white wind, and it whirled into the shaft overhead and dived towards him. Now he forgot about how hard the water might be. He threw off his cloak and let go of the rungs, all other thoughts and fears wiped away by the ghost-thing hurtling towards him. He fell straight as an arrow, arms stretched up, cringing inside. He didn’t even know how deep the water was, and then it hit him like a mountain, shaking his bones. It tore at his arms, almost pulling them from his shoulders, and snapped at his neck like a hangman’s noose. It gouged the air out of him.

  The cold might have been what saved him, a deep killing ice-cold that forced itself into his nose and his mouth and the back of his throat and stabbed him awake as he felt the impact suck him away. It crushed into his ears, a deep hard pain, and all he could hear was a terrible roaring. The light was gone. He kicked, half expecting to find the bones in his knees and hips and spine shattered into fragments but to his amazement they seemed whole, and whatever pain they had waiting for him, the shock of the cold and the fear had killed it for now. He burst to the surface, floundered, grabbed at something that turned out to be his fur cloak floating beside him and began to sink again. He clawed at it, pulling himself some way or other. Caught a glimpse of the passage out of the mountain’s heart as he looked wildly around, and of the walkway, and then of the ghost-thing above still arrowing down at him. Instinct made him duck under the surface, but as he began to sink again he knew his instinct was wrong. He needed salt for a ghost, not ice-water. That was for other things. Desert things.

  The ghost plunged in beside him and for a moment they were face to face under the water, the empty sockets of its eyes boring into him. It seemed to speak, though it had no mouth. I’ve never had an Aulian. Your skin is already on its way. Oribas kicked away, frantic to escape. He surfaced again and the ghost floated beside him, mocking him, but he reached out of the water and clawed at the stone floor of the passage and hauled himself up into the tunnel, inch by freezing inch, dripping, already shivering, driven by terror. The ghost opened its mouth impossibly wide and swallowed him. He felt it run through him, a bone-shiver deeper than the shakes born of cold, a weight on his soul and on his consciousness, dragging him into a place far deeper and darker than the water of the shaft. His eyes began to close, so heavy that nothing would keep them open.

  His bag! Right there beside him! His fingers reached it. Touched it as his eyes closed. Fumbled at the buckle as his mind began to drift. Reached inside and found what they were looking for. Salt. And then the weight was suddenly gone and he opened his eyes and the ghost was hovering above him, swirling and spitting. His fingers clenched tight, Oribas drew out another handful of salt and threw it and the ghost dissolved in a shower of light and sparks and was gone. From high up the shaft came a cry of fury. Oribas didn’t wait to see what followed. He stuffed his feet into his boots and snatched up his bag and another fistful of salt in case he needed it and stumbled away, forgetting in his fear how icy cold he was, how bitter the night air would be outside the cave to a man already soaked in freezing water. Forgot until he felt the first gasps of wind like knives into his skin.

  In sight of the cave mouth he stopped. A monster was behind him, a cold seeping death ahead. Despair almost took him then but that wasn’t who he was, not who he’d been taught to be. He opened his bag and let his numb fingers feel at the pots and the parcels and the waxed paper wrappings and the glass vials, questing for something that would turn back the cold.

  Saltpetre. He could set fire to himself. That would keep the cold back. He snorted bitterly and closed the bag and sat there for a moment in the dark, lost. Then uttered a tirade of Marroc curses that he’d been learning in the company of so many soldiers.

  A spark of light flashed by the mouth of the cave. The spark of a man striking a flint. He started to laugh. That would do nicely, wouldn’t it? If there had been a Lhosir guarding the cave mouth after all and somehow they’d missed each other, and now maybe he wouldn’t die of the cold after all but something even worse. They’d wanted to hang him for what he’d done in this very tower, and sometimes in the dark at night, as he saw the flames again, he thought that a mere hanging would be a kindness. Then again he’d seen a Marroc made into a blood raven and that had been far less kind. On the whole, hanging sounded better then freezing, but freezing sounded better than having his ribs snapped off his spine and two metal spikes driven through his chest.

  The spark flashed again. He could always go back and drown himself in the water. Not that drowning sounded all that pleasant either.

  ‘Oribas?’

  He froze. ‘Achista?’ />
  ‘Oribas! What in the name of Modris are you doing?’

  ‘Shivering.’ He picked up his bag and ran. In the starlight he could see her standing inside the entrance. He threw himself at her, burrowing under her furs for her warmth.

  ‘Modris and Diaran! You’re freezing! And sodden! What were you doing here? What were you thinking?’

  ‘I was thinking that something hasn’t been right here for quite some time, even before the Lhosir king came. And now I know I was right.’

  ‘How?’

  He shivered, squirming closer. ‘Ah, you’re so warm!’

  ‘And you’re freezing. What do you mean something not right?’

  ‘There’s a monster here.’

  He felt the growl in Achista before he heard it. ‘I know. And we’ll find a way to cut off his head as well as his hand!’

  ‘No, not the Lhosir king. Something worse. The creature my ancestors imprisoned here has returned. And I know why, and the iron-skinned men are its children.’

  She stepped away, or would have if he hadn’t been clinging to her like a leech. ‘Tell me later. You’re freezing. We need to get you shelter.’

  ‘We need to get back to the camp.’ To a fire, except the Marroc hiding up the mountain didn’t ever dare to light one.

  ‘No.’ Achista started to drag him down the mountain. ‘It’s too far. You’ll freeze.’

  He ran after her, tumbling and slipping through the snow back to the trees. He was shaking uncontrollably, steadily freezing to death, but at the edge of the wood Achista stopped. Something was ahead of them, ploughing through the snow, and Oribas would have said it was a man from the steady sounds of its shuffling except what was any man doing out in the forest at the dead of night?

  Achista reached for her bow. She pointed. In the starlight he saw something move. A shape shambling through the trees. They stood there, both of them frozen to the spot as the shadow moved through the wood and passed them by, and when it was gone Achista stared after it and Oribas had no idea what it was that they’d seen. Tall enough to be a man. A bear, perhaps? ‘I can’t feel my face,’ he whispered. At least his boots were dry and warm. Otherwise he’d probably have lost his feet by now. Good chance he’d lose a finger or two.

  Achista shook herself free of her wonder. She pulled him into the trees until she found a deep drift and made him dig a hole for them both. She took his wet furs off him and laid them out and then took off her own and squirmed into the burrow, and Oribas squirmed in after, pulling her furs too. They huddled there together, as close as could be, the two of them wrapped in a cocoon for the night, shivering.

  And in the morning they rose, stiff and half frozen but alive, and saw three sets of footsteps ploughing through the trees towards Witches’ Reach. When they got back to the rest of Achista’s Marroc, the watchmen in the night said they’d seen shadewalkers and the iron devils of the Lhosir Fateguard too; and over the days that followed more of them came, and forkbeards crossed the Aulian Bridge until the Reach was full and their camp sprawled around it, and it was barely another week before Oribas wrote his last message from Achista the Huntress to Valaric the Wolf in Varyxhun: The forkbeards are coming.

  19

  THE DEVIL’S CAVES

  The paths through the Crackmarsh were slow and winding. A month or two earlier and they might have simply walked straight over the frozen boggy ground. Another month, when the waters were at their highest, they might have poled their way on a flat-bottomed raft. But in these months of early spring while the waters were rising but still far from their peak, there were only so many ways to go. Reddic led the mules and the children took it in turns to ride them. Arda followed, then Jelira and Nadric. They stayed in the hideaways that riddled the water meadows and the swamps and Reddic took them to what was left of Hrodicslet; and when they were through it Arda led him along a trail that ran south and east into the hills among tiny clusters of farms tucked away in the valleys. The Vathen had never come this far, nor any forkbeards, but it was a path Reddic knew well. They all did, all the Crackmarsh men who’d marched with Valaric to Witches’ Reach.

  They crossed the ravine where Valaric’s men had built a new bridge of ropes. On the other side lay the Devil’s Caves which ran right through the mountain to the Varyxhun valley. Marroc soldiers waited inside, Crackmarsh men, and when they saw Reddic and Arda their faces broke into smiles of welcome, though the smiles faded quickly when Reddic told them of the shadewalkers he’d seen. In the warmth of the caves, in the cathedral-like chamber of spires and columns near the passage out to the valley, Valaric’s soldiers of the Crackmarsh told him in return of everything that had passed, of Sixfingers himself at Witches’ Reach only a half-day’s hard march away, of the forkbeard army that was massing, bigger and bigger, and more iron devils too.

  ‘You staying here?’ Arda asked him that night as they settled down around stones warmed beside the fires lit outside the caves.

  Reddic shrugged. It would be nice to be among friends and to stay in one place for a while. To have other men around him so that he wasn’t the one to whom everything fell when difficult things needed to be done.

  Arda cocked her head. ‘Well, you can do as it pleases you. No need for you to follow if you don’t want to. First thing in the morning we’re off to Varyxhun.’ In the dim flickering light of the few torches kept going under the ground Reddic saw a pair of eyes watching them from where Nadric and the children had lain down to sleep. Jelira. Arda saw them too. ‘We all are,’ she added sharply.

  ‘You should go back to your forge. To your home. You’d be safer. There’s a war coming here and people run away from wars.’

  Arda stared as though she hadn’t heard.

  ‘He’s not here, you know.’

  She looked at him hard now, as if she was waiting for more, but Reddic had nothing left to say. They both knew who he meant. ‘I know.’ She looked away at last. ‘I asked too.’

  ‘He killed a Marroc.’ Jelira was still watching them.

  ‘I heard. We didn’t come here for Gallow anyway. Middislet isn’t safe any more.’

  Reddic had to laugh. Did she really believe her own words? ‘And Varyxhun is? Sixfingers is going to march an army on it any day now. He’ll sweep every Marroc in the valley out of his path. They’ll all go running to the castle and he’ll sit outside and wait until we all starve, because after Varyxhun there’s nowhere left to run.’

  ‘Still, it’s where I’m going. So you staying here, are you?’ She looked him over, and now he was the one who had to look away, though he stole a glance at Jelira as he did.

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Arda smiled. ‘You should. You’ve done good for us. If you were my son, I’d be proud. At least here you’ve got a way out when the forkbeards come. Might not be much back the way we came but you’ll have a chance.’ She reached out a hand and touched his cheek, stroked his face. ‘You’re young, boy, and you have a good heart. Live.’ She touched his sword arm, still in its sling. The pain wasn’t quite as bad now, but only as long as he didn’t move it.

  He put his other hand over hers but Arda pulled away and shook her head. ‘Live,’ she said again, and rose and backed away and lay down with her family, with her children and the old man Nadric, and Reddic watched as they huddled together and slowly fell asleep, one by one. He felt a great longing wash through him. He’d had a family of his own once, not all that long ago, and he’d thought of the Crackmarsh men as his new one; and they were too, but it only went so far.

  He turned away. Forced himself to look somewhere else. Despite everything they’d been through he didn’t feel tired, not tonight. Stay or go? Varyxhun was a dead end. Sixfingers would have the Isset running red with Marroc blood. He wouldn’t leave anyone alive, not a man, woman or child. He’d wipe the valley clean and behind him there’d be nothing but a legion of blood ravens to be picked to bones by the crows. There weren’t many here who’d stay to fight that future, not those men who still had a way
out through the caves.

  Live?

  He looked at Arda and her sleeping children. They’d need someone to look after them. Ought to go with them then. Except the more he thought of Arda, the more he thought that maybe they didn’t need anyone at all, thanks very much. And besides, with his arm as it was, a fat lot of use he’d be when an army of forkbeards came sweeping up the valley.

  Another hand touched his shoulder. ‘Hey.’ He turned quickly, thinking it was Arda again, but in the flickering light of the candles the face was much younger. Jelira. ‘So you’re not coming with us?’

  Reddic tried to smile. ‘I don’t know. I sort of think I should actually, but what use am I?’ He shrugged. ‘And I don’t know the way.’

  ‘We stayed there for a while when I was younger. After . . . Gallow went away to fight and didn’t come back.’ A smile spread across her face. ‘It was so big! So many houses and so many people.’

  ‘He’s not there, you know.’

  Her face hardened. ‘That’s what ma says but he’ll come. He will. He came back before.’

  And left again. That’s what Arda had said and her face had said a whole lot more – anger and despair and wanting and resentment, and even Reddic had thought better than to pry.

  Jelira bit her lip and touched his injured arm, her fingers light as a falling feather. ‘You fought off those ghuldogs. That’s what use you are.’ Reddic lifted a hand and then didn’t know what to do with it. Before he dropped it again, Jelira took it and pressed his palm to her heart. He could feel it beating under her shift. ‘I want you to stay. But not like the other forkbeard did.’ Her eyes were huge in the candlelight. She put her other hand to Reddic’s chest.