by Jude Fisher
Urse’s was not the only corpse they found that day; but the next one was odder by far.
This time, Mam would not go near it. Despite all her apparent pragmatism, she was still superstitious at heart, and one gift of luck – which she counted as her reprieve that the first man had not been Persoa – must surely be paid for.
And Katla could not help but dread that where Urse had been there might next be her father or Fent.
So it was left to Saro to approach the hunched figure. He did so cautiously, for it was sitting in a slump, head lowered to its chest, looking as if it was taking a rest from a long and weary walk. Whatever it was, it was not Persoa; not unless the desert had a very strange way with the dead. The man – for such Saro judged it to be, though merely as a result of the remnants of its breeches – had expired long before Urse One-Ear, for the ivory of bone shone through tatters of skin gone black with rot and weathering. It had no eyes left to it, and no nose or lips either, and its hands were skeletal, clasped in its threadbare lap. The boots it wore had been of fine quality once and were still in good condition, but of a fashion so long out of date that Saro had seen a pair only in the library where his father had kept his curios. That pair had belonged to a distant ancestor. They were almost three hundred years old. He frowned and sat back on his haunches.
As he did so, the thing moved, though it might just have been the breeze, or its old bones shifting.
Unnerved, Saro scrabbled backwards as fast as he possibly could, never taking his eyes off the corpse.
‘What?’ demanded Katla. ‘What is it?’
‘Who is it?’ cried Mam. There was an uncharacteristic quaver in her voice.
‘I don’t know –’ Saro hauled himself upright – ‘except that it’s no man who has lived these past three hundred years.’ Pale skin showed around his eyes where it had been a dark golden tan before.
Katla made a face.‘That’s just fanciful,’ she declared grimly. She trudged over to the figure and stared down at it. But Saro was right: it looked ancient, maybe even one of the lost army of which he had spoken; except that it carried no weapon. She hunkered down beside it, relieved that it could not possibly be anyone she knew. Its wind-dried, eyeless face gazed back at her, grinning. She noticed that there was a patch of skin in the centre of its forehead which was a different colour to the rest – a wan pink, where all around was blackish grey, as if that had been the last part of it to die. Most strange.
Curiosity satisfied, she levered herself to her feet and turned to walk back to her companions. Something snagged at her. She reached around behind and her questing fingers met something hard and cool and jointed. Turning in slow horror, she found the thing had hold of her tunic.
‘Aargh!’ She dragged herself free and stared at the corpse.
It stared back. Though it had no extant features she could have sworn it looked disappointed. Then it raised the withered forearm which had grabbed at her and pointed out into the desert, south, towards the Red Peak. It tried to get up, the bones in its legs and hips grinding against one another as it struggled for purchase, then gave up, exhausted.
‘No.’ Katla shook her head. ‘No, that can’t be.’ She backed away, making the sign of Sur’s anchor. ‘Did you see that? Did you?’ she demanded of Mam and Saro.
Saro nodded mutely; Mam just stared, mouth open.
‘I saw it,’ Saro confided, still white around the gills. ‘Katla, I think I know what it is.’
She glared at him. ‘It’s obvious what it is. A dead man, an afterwalker.’
‘Reanimated,’ he said softly. ‘It’s a dead man which has been brought back to some semblance of life. By the death-stone. By Alisha.’
Katla shuddered, remembering Erno Hamson’s words to the Lord of Cantara about a stone which could heal the sick and raise the dead. There was no reason for her to be here, she thought suddenly; she could take one of the horses and return to the north, row back to Rockfall if she had to, away from all this. But that would leave Mam and Saro in this gods-forsaken place, with only a single mount. She knew she could not do it.
As for Saro, he felt his doom approaching.
He braced his shoulders and tried very hard not to think about the vision which had plagued him since the Lord of Cantara had embraced him in Jetra’s Star Chamber.
Then he approached the dead man. ‘Were you raised by the Wanderer, Alisha Skylark?’ he asked it solemnly and waited for a response, although to do so felt absurd – surreal. ‘With the eldistan – the deathstone?’
The thing shifted slightly, cocking its head as if to listen with non-existent ears. Saro repeated his question in the tongue of the hillfolk. Now the dead man moved its bony fingers to the pink spot on its head and touched it thoughtfully. Then it nodded once, almost imperceptibly, then with greater emphasis, its jaws clacking, confirming Saro’s worst fears. Again, it tried to rise, as if the very mention of the eldistan had galvanised it.
Saro stepped quickly away. The company in which he travelled was already peculiar enough, without adding this bizarre newcomer to the band.
They made a broad circle around the straggler from Alisha Skylark’s dead army, and continued south.
Thirty-nine
The Red Peak
It took another day to reach the foothills of the Dragon’s Backbone; but still there was no sign of Persoa or his mount. They did, however, pass three more revived corpses in various states of decomposition and animation, and each time they gave them a very wide berth.
At a small, almost-dried oasis, they tethered the horses to a pair of palm trees within reach of the muddy pool, stashed the packs and carried on afoot, for ahead the ground rose steeply into ashy screes and rocky channels which promised to be both unstable and inhumane: it hardly seemed fair to expect the animals to climb the side of a volcano which they would themselves have problems ascending.
The going was hard even from the start. The air was thick with sulphur, so that the lungs burned with every breath, and although the altitude and the mountains afforded more shade, still it was every bit as hot as the desert, for the volcano was alive with fumes. Sweating out moisture she couldn’t afford to lose, Mam scrambled up the choked defile as if every second lost would result in tragedy.
Katla glanced at Saro and grimaced. The Istrian looked as exhausted as she felt, his eyes red-rimmed through lack of sleep and the constant grit which showered from the sky here. A shadow fell across her and she looked up. Above them, high up, black birds hovered warily, wings outstretched, primary feathers spread like fingers.
‘Lammergeyers,’ Saro said, following her gaze. ‘Carrion birds.’
Katla knew what that meant. She bit her lip. Eschewing the rubble-filled path the mercenary leader was battling up, she opted instead for a slab of smoother rock, sole and palms flat against its surface for the best possible friction. At once, a great jolt of energy flowed through her, inflaming her muscles, filling her head with pounding blood. Voices boomed and jostled for attention, echoing around her skull like bats in a dark cave. She moved up the rock, trying to ignore these sensations, but the voices got louder and more insistent. One of them broke through her concentration altogether.
‘Katla!’
Saro’s warning cry dragged her back to herself, though she could not make out what he was saying.
Disorientated, Katla pushed down on the lip of rock on which she had set her left foot and levered herself into a standing position. She rubbed her hands across her sticky face, breaking the contact with the rock and at once the voices fled away. It was hot, so hot. She was burning up. I must have become remarkably unfit, she thought.
‘The sword!’ Saro cried again.
Too late, she understood. By then it was afire. She felt her hair catch in its flame, felt the blade ignite down its length so that her shoulders, her back, her buttocks and thighs felt its dangerous heat. Turning, she wrestled it off with swift instinct and cast it aside.
‘The flaming sword!’
Above her, Mam h
ad stopped in mid-stride and was gazing down at her in awe. ‘It’s the tattoo Persoa has on his back.’
Katla stared at the blade. It was aflame from hilt to point, shooting out its fire in a great swirl of colour. She could feel the heat it gave off from where she stood, a killing heat, like a bone-fire. She reached around and gingerly explored her hair and shoulders, those parts she could reach, fully expecting to find skin and hair and clothing sloughing away beneath her fingers. But she could find no damage. None at all.
She presented her back to Saro. ‘Am I all right?’ she asked nervously. ‘Has it burned me?’
Saro shook his head mutely.
Frowning, Katla approached the sword. The flames guttered as she neared it, clearing from the hilt as if in invitation. The fox in the pommel seemed to grin at her. Her hand wanted to take up the weapon: her right palm itched for it, as if part of itself was missing. She gritted her teeth and darted a finger to the hilt. It was warm, but not hot; it welcomed her touch. She curled her grasp around it, hefted it suddenly. Virid flames gouted amongst the red and orange. Then a great force drew her arm out in front of her and drew her body after it, as if she were a lodestone and the mouth of the Red Peak was the Navigator’s Star.
Mam stood aside to let her pass and for the first time, Katla saw fear on the mercenary’s face.
‘The sword knows,’ Katla said. ‘It heeds the call of its maker.’
How she knew this, she had no idea, but it came to her with all the clarity and compulsion of a fact.
Mam and Saro exchanged harrowed glances, then followed after the flame-haired girl with the flaming sword.
Some hundreds of feet above the desert plateau there came a commotion from above, then a rain of debris. Rocks skittered past the climbers, narrowly missing them. Mam flattened herself against the side of the defile, panting, and scanned above for what had dislodged the detritus. Above, the shape of Katla was suddenly eclipsed by a larger shape entirely, and out of nowhere a huge black horse came plummeting towards them.
Saro stared.
It was Night’s Harbinger.
He called the stallion’s name, watched its ears flick – once, twice, as if in recognition of his voice; then it was past him in a thunder of hooves, its fiery eyes rolling. He watched it disappear into the gloom below, puzzling over the glimpse of red muscle and white bone exposed in haunches which bunched and flowed with a power and grace he remembered well.
A few minutes later, they came upon its erstwhile rider, seated below the mouth of a cave, the roof of which appeared to glow with a fierce red light.
With a start, the figure looked up.
Bony hands cradled a bony chin; but this was no afterwalker, no reanimated corpse.
‘Alisha!’
Saro remembered the nomad woman on the journey he had taken with her caravan, south from Jetra. Then, he had thought her wonderfully attractive, with her springy masses of auburn curls, her warm olive skin, unusual pale eyes and luscious body. Now, only the striking pallor of those eyes remained, points of light in a stripped and sun-blackened face which had sunken in on itself, adding decades to her thirty-odd years. The simple human consequences of grief and starvation had taken their toll; but how much of this ravened, feral appearance had been caused by her use of the deathstone?
Beside her, a small figure lay curled in on itself, as if asleep. Saro felt his heart thud disturbingly against his ribs, an instinctive reflex, as if his body was preparing to run even before his mind had reached such a decision.
‘Falo?’ He could not keep the quiver out of his voice.
As if stirred by the sound of its name, the thing shifted its position, coming up on one elbow to look at him. Saro wished it had not. Falo it undoubtedly was – or whatever was left of him, once the carrion creatures, natural entropy and the privations of the desert had taken their toll. Apart from the arm the boy had lost to the militiamen, the reanimated child had also lost its eyes, and misshapen lumps and cavities now covered by some sort of grey skin suggested that wild dogs had worried and feasted on its corpse.
Alisha Skylark put an arm around the boy and drew him close.
‘He’s not well,’ she rasped, her voice hoarse from the heat and lack of water. ‘He must rest. The others are inside the mountain, helping the Man. But he and I can do no more.’ She looked mournful. ‘And even our horse has deserted us.’
‘Night’s Harbinger?’
Alisha cocked her head. ‘The same. He fell when they ambushed us, but the stone brought him back to me.’ Her hand went instinctively to her breastbone, patted and rubbed: a strange, placatory gesture.
‘And Falo?’ Saro could not take his eyes from the macabre sight of the boy, lolling his skull against his mother’s arm.
Alisha blinked. ‘The stone won’t work on Falo any more. But he looks much better than he was,’ she added brightly and smiled at Saro, her teeth a startling flash of white. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘Give me the stone, Alisha,’ Saro said sternly, coming up the slops to stand over the pair.
She looked mulish. ‘It might work again, away from here.’
‘It might. But you must give it to me. You know it is my burden to bear, not yours.’
She stared at him and he thought for a terrible moment that he would have to overpower her and her dead boy and forcibly take the stone from her; then she reached inside her robes and held out her hand to him. On the flat of her outstretched palm lay the eldistan which Hiron the mood-stone-seller had given him at the Allfair, the stone which might be the most dangerous object in all the world, pale and innocuous now, a cloudy yellow in colour, as if it, like the woman, lacked focus and energy.
As simply as that, it was done, and Saro had what he had come here to fetch. Even so, it was with considerable reluctance that he closed his hand around the deathstone. As he did so, it glowed briefly with a bright white light as if recognising its true owner, then subsided abruptly.
His heart raced.
‘Ah,’ Alisha sighed morosely. ‘That was the end of it. One little spark of life, and now it’s gone again. You wasted it,’ she accused.
Grimly, Saro turned to his companions. Mam’s face was twisted into a grimace of disgust; but Katla remained impassive, her face lit by the unearthly fires of the sword. Then, without a word, she walked past him, drawn by the flaming blade, scrambled over a boulder in the path and disappeared into the mouth of the cave, the sword illuminating it with weird new light.
Saro watched her go, watched till the illumination flickered and vanished with her. He stood there irresolute. With the stone restored to him, his task here was accomplished. He could turn and leave, make his way back across the desert and go north to find the Goddess. His companions were on their own quests now. If Persoa was still alive, he felt sure he and Mam would find one another. And Katla, too, was powerful, self-sufficient, even when not possessed by the sword. She didn’t need him; didn’t love him, barely seemed even to like him. There was nothing keeping him here.
But all the logic in the world had no bearing on his heart.
Tucking the stone into the empty pouch he wore around his neck, he strode after the Eyran girl, quickening his stride till he was almost at a run, scrambling over rocks and scree with the reckless determination of a man about to lose the one thing in his life that truly mattered.
Mam watched Saro run after Katla Aransen with an unreadable expression which fell somewhere between admiration and sorrow, had there been anyone there to interpret it. But there was no one left in this grim place but a mad woman and a dead boy. Even so, she could not pass them without asking the question that burned inside her.
‘Have you seen a man come this way,’ she asked Alisha Skylark, ‘a hillman, from Farem?’
The nomad looked blank.
‘A handsome man, with the tattoos of his tribe on his face?’
A twitch – of recognition, or irritation?
‘An eldianna,’ she persisted.
At this
, Alisha looked up. ‘Eldianna,’ she repeated softly. ‘Eldianna ferinni monta fuegi.’
‘What?’ Mam took a hasty step forward, lowering her face to the woman’s.
Alisha cringed away, a protective arm shielding Falo from this terrifying looking creature with the wild white-blonde braids and glinting saw-tooth maw.
Mam straightened up, hands spread. ‘Persoa,’ she said. ‘His name is Persoa. Please tell me if you’ve seen him. I must find him. I must—’
Tears sprang to her eyes. No one on Elda had ever seen Finna the Teeth weep before, and if anything it was even more alarming than her habitual grimace. But the nomad woman reached out and caught Mam by the hand. ‘You love him, yes? The eldianna?’
Now the tears fell. Mam wiped them away with her free hand, snorted horribly and hawked over her shoulder. ‘I do,’ she mumbled. ‘Yes, I do.’ She fixed the nomad woman with a fierce stare. ‘If you have seen him you must tell me, please.’
‘Yesterday, I think it was. He came yesterday. He tried to take the stone from me, but I wouldn’t let him have it. He was angry, he shouted at me. Then he saw Falo here, and he cried and went away.’
‘Where, where did he go?’
Alisha gestured vaguely behind her. ‘Into the mountain,’ she said. ‘He went into the mountain of fire. To help.’
‘Help who?’
The nomad woman turned a smile of utmost gentleness upon the mercenary, transforming her ravaged features to a sudden beauty.
‘Sirio,’ she said simply. ‘They are freeing Sirio. The Three will be One again, and then we shall all be released from this wheel of fire and torment.’ She cradled her son tight, rocking him to and fro. ‘We shall all be free, Falo, I promise.’
Mam left the mad woman crooning to her long-dead son, and took the path into the volcano with her jaw thrust out like the prow of a warship breasting a stormwave.
‘Katla! Katla, stop! Wait!’
Brought up short by the sound of her name, she turned and stared back over her shoulder. Fiery lights shone in her eyes: she looked like the spirit of the volcano, Saro thought with a shiver; an avenging spirit with an avenging sword. He remembered now how frightened he had been by her when he had taken up the blade in the corridors of Jetra’s castle and he had thought she might strike him down for his temerity. He had seen her wield it with such determined violence he had thought her possessed by it; he remembered how alien she had seemed to him then, how remote and inaccessible. But through it all, he loved her still, for all his denials and evasions. Guaya’s touch had released him not only from the gift of empathy, it seemed: it had also confirmed the depths of his passion, and released him from his fear.