Yulan went out on the balcony, quite calm now. Quite controlled. Empty, in truth, of anything save the ambition to kill Sullen. Later, he knew, he would be prey to misery and guilt such as he had seldom known. He chose not to feel them now. Not yet.
The Fleet roared beneath the swaying bridge. It bounded and sprayed, and the mists it cast off wetted Yulan’s face as he stood at the bridge’s end. Sullen was almost halfway across. The short sword in his hand was shedding drops of blood that were snatched away by the white torrent beneath.
“Guard on the bridge!’ Yulan shouted, as loud as he could, but they were already coming. Two spearmen showing themselves at the clifftop to which the bridge led.
Sullen glanced at them, turned back to face Yulan, and smiled. He beckoned him.
Yulan laid his sword carefully down. He needed a free hand to steady himself on that inconstant bridge, and in his mind’s eye he could already see the shape of the fight. It would be fast, and intimate, constrained by the lack of space and sure footing. More suited to knifework.
He advanced slowly, deliberately, giving himself time to envisage what might happen. Sullen was, if anything, better with a blade than he was. But Yulan gave himself the edge in balance, speed of movement. An even contest, then. He imagined the next few moments, and took from that imagining the message he wanted: he was going to win. Sullen was a dead man.
When he was within a couple of sword lengths, Yulan pumped his legs to put a spasm into the bridge’s wooden planks and rope skeleton. Used it to throw himself forward, even as Sullen was momentarily unbalanced and reaching for a surer hold on the bridge.
Yulan cut at Sullen’s swinging sword arm and nicked it, but not badly. They slashed and parried, neither landing a telling blow. All the time the river deafened them, flung up its spray as if reaching for them.
But Sullen was indeed the better man with a blade. He wielded that short sword as deftly, as fast, as if it were but a knife like Yulan’s. He flicked aside a darting attack, blade grating across blade, and rolled his wrist to flatten the sword, punch it down and in towards Yulan’s stomach.
It was instinct, not thought, that told Yulan what to do; showed him a pattern he might make of the next instant. He took the thrust into his side, welcomed it. It would not kill him, he knew, and it gave him something worth all the pain. It gave him Sullen’s sword and his neck. He hooked his free hand around Sullen’s sword arm and locked it in there, jabbing the embedded blade deeper still as he jerked the traitor close. He stabbed straight in at Sullen’s neck, aiming for the soft point just above his breastbone.
Sullen’s other hand flashed up and the knife’s blade impaled it. Sullen wrenched it sideways. Yulan used the spreading wide of his arm to lunge his head forward, butted Sullen hard across the bridge of his nose.
Sullen staggered backwards, barely finding a grip on the rough ropes with the hand he tore free from Yulan’s knife. The sword pulled out from Yulan’s flank, and his strength went flooding out with it for a moment, so that his knees shook. Sullen surged back in to renew their embrace, blood pouring from a split above his nose. It might blind him soon, Yulan thought, knowing he might not stay alive long enough to use that.
But Sullen was hurt too. Angry. The smallest of mistakes, to come at Yulan just slightly too high, with a straight thrust. Yulan dropped back and down, twisted to bring one leg flicking round and take Sullen at the ankle of his leading foot just as he put his weight on it.
Sullen’s leg swept out from under him and he went down sideways. His hand lashed against the ropes and the sword was wrenched away, spinning into the river. Yulan rose, one hand clamped across his wound to stem the strong-flowing blood. Sullen, sitting there, looked at him, looked at the spearmen now coming towards him from the other end of the bridge, then silently folded himself, hunched himself, and slipped backwards through a gap in the bridge’s ropes to go tumbling heels over head into the river.
The white water snapped him away like a falling twig. Just once Yulan, leaning heavily to keep himself from dropping to his knees, saw a dark leg rolling in the rapids. Then nothing. Sullen was gone. They searched for him downriver, but never found him.
The next day, Yulan was acclaimed the new Captain of the Free, just as Merkent had wished. Never had a prize been more bitterly won.
There was a dense, sprawling mass of trees down in the hollow beneath Drann, clustered around the stream that fell from the spring up here on the higher ground. Beyond that, plains rolled away for perhaps a mile or two. Then the beginnings of a scrubby, scrappy forest. A few trees here and there, growing in number and size. Thickening slowly.
He stood there, staring out, as he had been for much of the time since the Free came to this lonely place. Since they had fled here, truth be told. It had been a measured, careful flight – in part because they were short of horses now – but flight nonetheless. Yulan had gathered them all together, guided them an hour from the Old Threetower Road, and set camp here on a hillock. Beside a huge tumbledown cairn that must mark an ancient grave, or memorialise some great victory or defeat. Yulan probably knew its origins. Drann did not.
Far out, on the edge of the day’s last light, he could see shapes moving amongst those scattered trees. Like pale shadows sprung free from their sources, drifting through the fringes of the woodland. Wolves. A big pack, each animal loping along its own trail. Ghostly kings, crossing their domain.
Drann had not seen so many in a long time. Perhaps never. There had been a pack, when he was very young, that grew too large and too brave for the liking of the villagers. Every night brought fresh and rising fear, carried on the howls drifting from the high slopes around the village. So they hunted that pack into nothingness. It took them more than a year to do it. Day after day they went out into the mountains, those mere farm folk with their crude spears and rude bows and thin cloaks, and hunt by hunt, death by death, they slowly killed the whole pack.
He remembered them coming back with bloody wolf skins, severed wolf tails. He remembered their fierce joy and pride, as if they, humble as they were, had slain monsters. Which in their way they had.
“War’s always good to them.”
Drann looked round, to find Yulan standing at his side. Staring out at those same distant shapes. One by one they were disappearing from sight, fading into the loose forest. Until there was but a single wolf, running on and on alone. Then it too was gone.
“They’re the only ones who could say there’s no such thing as a bad war,” Yulan said. “The wolves. Once they’re done with killing each other, the people’ll come back, though. Turn to killing wolves.”
“What are we going to do?” Drann asked.
“We?”
Because it sounded as if Drann was counting himself one of the Free, he assumed. That had not been what he meant; but then, it had been what he said.
“We’re going to give Wren and the wounded one more day to strengthen, and then we’re going to kill Callotec and take the Bereaved away from him.”
“Without Kerig?”
“Without Kerig. Once Wren’s got some of her strength back, she can work wonders for us. And we’ve still got the Clamour.”
There was a terrible hollowness to Yulan’s voice, unlike anything Drann had heard there before. And when he looked at the man’s face, he saw only sorrow.
“Is all hope spent, then?” he asked.
Yulan glanced at him, the premonition of a frown on his face. He did not quite understand, evidently.
“Not yet,” the Captain of the Free murmured. “You should leave now.”
That took Drann unawares. It was not a thought that had entered his mind, these last few hours. Perhaps it should have. He had been distracted by memories. Sullen coming towards him through falling leaves. Kerig being dragged away, bleeding. The tree, some little time later, after Drann and Lebid had almost forgotten it, suddenly breaking. Coming down with a terrible mournful cracking, in a cloud of leaves and twigs and branches. Destroyed. Fresh
memories, so vivid he doubted he would ever be rid of them.
So it was not a thought that had entered his mind, but he knew his answer to it at once.
“No.”
Yulan gave a curt shake of his head.
“We’re not fighting for that contract now. What we have to do, we would do whether or not Creel had hired us. It will be brutal. It might become a matter of Free against School. Not a thing to take part in when you don’t have to.”
“The Bereaved can’t cross the border. That hasn’t changed, has it?”
“No,” Yulan conceded.
“That’s what I’d fight for,” Drann said. “Not for the Free, or for money. It’s my land, my village, my family’ll be ruined if the Bereaved’s not here to protect them. You can’t tell me I’m not allowed to fight for that if I want to.”
“No,” Yulan said wearily after a time. “I can’t. You do as you will.”
A sharp clattering sound behind them made them both look round. It was only a few of the flat stones that made up the cairn, come loose and sliding down its flank.
The wagon, the bull, the horses were close to the cairn. The Free – those of them not keeping watch – were scattered about like wind-tossed debris. Some asleep, some sitting staring into air. Mourning their dead and their lost, Drann supposed, though hardly anyone had spoken of that. Perhaps such folk as these did not.
He was surprised to see that Wren had got to her feet. She looked unsteady, with her blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Like someone old. Her voice had not aged, though.
“You’d leave him there,” she was shouting at Akrana.
Everyone looked. Not just Drann and Yulan, but Rudran, his lancers. Even Hestin, curled up on the seat of the wagon, shivered.
“I would,” Akrana snapped back. “It’s what we have to do.”
“It’s not.”
“We can’t turn back, set the whole Free to the recovery of one man. Not when he brought it…”
She faltered. Even cold Akrana was not quite a match for the words Drann knew had been coming to her lips. But he was not the only one who knew them.
“Brought it on himself?” cried Wren. “That’s it? You don’t think we fight for each other, even when we’ve made mistakes? You don’t think Kerig would fight for you, whether he thought your trouble of your own making or not?”
Rudran was starting to get heavily to his feet, but Yulan stalked quickly towards Wren, waving the lancer back down. It was a bad day to be Captain of the Free, Drann thought.
23
A Killer In The Heart
Kerig was too close to death to spare much attention for the living, waking world. His body was battered and bloodied, his mind dulled and disoriented. Because of this, he experienced only fragments of his journey into captivity. Towards his death, he recognised in those brief passages of lucidity he was allowed, but he was entirely too angry, too damaged, too lost to worry overmuch about that sort of thing.
He knew that death lay ahead, because in those first terrible moments when his connection to the tree, and to the entelech, and to the Free was abruptly broken, he heard, distantly, as if it came to him through a howling storm, a voice he recognised. Sullen. He heard it, and then was swept away from it as the agonies in his body overwhelmed him. The wrenching plunge as he lost his grip upon the entelech that had been flowing through him was akin to being disembowelled. That pure and potent stuff of which the world was made, which he had been attempting to give a shape in that world, slumped into raw chaos and poured out of him. Taking with it melting fragments of his strength, his time, his soul. Sucking them out and carrying them away to merge them with the endless, formless entelech.
Nothing more came clear to him until some time later. He was slung over the back of a horse, tied there. Thumping up and down as the animal cantered along. It was dark, but not quite night. The sun was gone, the echo of its light still on the shaking, rocking horizon.
There were others riding all around. He knew that from the hammering of hoofs, not by his eyes, for his sight started to fail almost as soon as it returned.
The next thing he was aware of was being ungently tumbled down from that horse. Falling badly and gashing his head on some stone or perhaps one of those hoofs. Blinking in the pitch dark, dust stinging his eyes. Coming into possession of his awareness just enough to recognise how much his experience at the tree had diminished him. What he had done there would in any case have exacted quite a cost; that cost was higher, since he had been interrupted. Disturbed. Run through for a time by an entelech over which he had lost control. He did not yet have the clarity of thought to measure precisely what had been taken from him. For now, he only knew there was absence. That he was less than he had been before in some small way. Many small ways, most likely.
Someone kicked him as he lay there.
“Fresh horses! We’re not tarrying for food. There’ll be no halts till we reach the Tower.”
Sullen. Hatred bloomed in Kerig then; the only thing potent enough to stir him with any vigour. He understood vaguely that they were at a wayhouse. One of the many far-flung places the School kept for the reprovisioning and rehorsing of message riders. It was inevitable, of course, that the whole land might be convulsed and ravaged by war yet the cursed School still found a way to keep its wayhouses working.
Soon enough he was rehorsed himself. Thrown atop a fresh and rested mount. No more comfortable a perch than the first one had offered. He lapsed into unconsciousness once more.
Later, he was lying on the ground. He could not even open his eyes. They were dry and crusted shut. He felt warmth upon his face, though. It was day. Something was touching his also dry, split lips. Something trying, quite gently, to part them. Then it was snatched away.
“No food, no water for him.” Sullen again. Not angry, just stern.
“He’s not looking like he’s got much life left in him.”
“Good. Idiot. That’s how you get to stay alive around a Clever like him. You keep him close to death. Too weak to call up vines to throttle us all, or fill your lungs with water, or put you on your knees, weeping at some unrequited love that never even entered your thick head before.”
Then, muttering into his ear: “You won’t die, will you, Kerig? You’re tough, you bastard’s bastard.”
Kerig would have given much, everything he had left, to rise then. Even to roll his head and bite Sullen’s nose from his face. But everything he had left was not enough even for that.
In time – how much of it, Kerig could not begin to guess – the sound of the horses’ hoofs changed. They were on stone, not dirt now. He managed a few painful blinks. He glimpsed high walls. A gate. Turrets up above him, against a blue sky. Sullen had said something about the Tower, what felt like half a lifetime ago. Haut Terpen, then. That was bad.
They stripped him naked. His body quaked at that, for it felt like having his skin peeled away, so much did it make his flesh and bones protest. Then they hung him up, in some small and dark chamber. They tied his hands behind his back. They looped and tied cords around and under his shoulders. They hauled him up, with much grunting and puffing, until his feet left the ground. He swayed gently, all his weight upon the narrow bonds under his armpits. It was painful at once. It would be agony soon.
More gaps. More darkness and unthinking emptiness. After what he thought might be many hours, perhaps days, water thrown in his face.
He coughed, then groaned as he rediscovered his pains. It felt as though he had bands of red-hot iron strung beneath his arms. As if spikes of that same iron had been driven through his shoulder joints. The groan lifted into a cry, then dwindled.
“Can you open your eyes?” Sullen asked him.
He tried, but it hurt.
“Try harder,” the man of the Clade said.
Kerig felt a searing heat wash over one side of his face. Sullen was brandishing a torch at him, he guessed. He could not help but try to twist his head out of the way, and that made him cry ou
t again.
“Open your eyes.”
He did. He had to narrow them against the hot glare of that torch. They were in some tiny, stinking room with damp walls and a low ceiling. Sullen stood before him, with a pair of Clade warriors. And another man Kerig recognised. The Weaponsmith.
“You remember my companion, I see,” Sullen said. “He’s painted you a killer, Kerig. Whether you are or not, there’s no doubting it’s not for want of effort on your part, so we can call a killer in the heart as good as a killer in deed, I think.”
I’ll be a killer in deed yet, Kerig wanted to say. Longed to say. But his throat would not allow it. He croaked, like a sickly raven. Let his eyes close once more.
“Kill him and be done with it,” he heard the Weaponsmith rasp. “You saw his guilt with your own eyes, back at Creel’s camp.”
The one man for whom his hatred could find new heights, beyond those which Sullen elicited. For the Weaponsmith, though, his hatred was a cold thing, not like the hot anger he felt towards Sullen. It was cold and deep, as much a part of him as bone.
“Be quiet,” Sullen said in that dead voice of his.
“Why —’ the Weaponsmith began, but got no further.
“He thinks I should kill you, Kerig. He doesn’t understand the game he’s joined. You do, perhaps.”
Again that surging, biting heat from the torch. Again Kerig flinched, and wished he had not as the cords bit.
“It’s not you I want, of course. Or not you alone. I want all of them; Yulan especially. Perhaps fortune will smile on me, and they’ll venture your rescue by force. Somehow I doubt Yulan’s that foolish, or that fond of you since your indiscretions the last time you got within reach of our Weaponsmith here. Still, I can hope.
The Free Page 23