The Free

by Brian Ruckley

  Yulan and Hamdan searched across the frozen landscape. It broke and cracked under their feet. Faces stared out at them from beneath sheens of frost and ice. Dead faces. Scores of bodies, twisted and contorted and broken. Impaled upon icy shafts. Heaps of rubble where walls and keep had been, thrown down by pillars of ice thrust up from out of the ground.

  The flanks of the hill were white and blue. Nothing remained of grass or soil. The winter that had come had sunk deep into the ground. Made that hill and all who stood upon it entirely its own. Yulan hobbled, holding his injured arm close in at his side. He fell, and groaned, and rose. Fell again. He kept on, shivering.

  He found Sullen just outside what had been the gate into the Kingshouse. His skin was white, and ruptured. The ice had come from within him, lancing out through mouth and eyes and chest. He stared down at that corpse for a little while, and thought distantly, without great feeling, that he would not be unpleased to find one more body yet amidst this chaos: Callotec.

  A drop fell from the tip of an icicle that had thrust out from Sullen’s neck. A single drop. It was melting. Hope surged in Yulan, and all thought of the Dog-Lord fled from his mind. This was not a Permanence.

  “She’s still here somewhere,” he shouted. “Akrana’s still alive.”

  It was him who found her too, lying on her own at the very edge of the wintry havoc she had wrought, down at the foot of the slope. Her hair was purest white. Her cheeks, her fingers were black and frostbitten. Whatever stern beauty she had possessed had been taken, replaced by a deathly, gaunt visage. Her limbs had lost their strength. But she breathed. Tiny, faint flutters of air.

  She was light in his arms as Yulan cradled her, pressed her head gently against his chest. He held her like that for a long time.

  “Well done,” he whispered.

  He stayed there with her until he heard Hamdan shouting from atop the hill.

  “I can’t find Kasuman, or the Bereaved.”

  40

  In Embrace

  Drann stood amidst the great frozen mound of rubble that had been the Kingshouse. There was no way to search beneath it, or to move any of the huge stones. All were locked in ice.

  He still shook, just to be amongst this desolation. It breathed its cold over him, even though the sun now shone clearly above. Some sensation was coming back to his fingers, slowly. That was no boon, for he had torn and bruised them, clawing futilely with Hamdan at the rubble.

  He had seen it, from the edge of Towers’ Shadow. He should have retreated further, perhaps, but the horror of the Kingshouse held him in its grip and he could not turn away, could not back away. He watched the waves of Clade warriors overwhelm it, so quickly he thought all of the Free must be dead in that one engulfing surge.

  Then the Clamour had come, and he had fallen to his knees and covered his ears. Seen its destruction only through narrowed, wincing eyes. And seen the Kingshouse overrun again.

  Last had come the winter, and it had swept down the slopes of the hill and shrouded it all in seething, spitting white storm. Even from where he stood by the village, he had felt its crushing cold on his face. He had watched it, dumbstruck, and known it must be the Hibernal. Akrana. She must have been passing as Wren had done, he thought. Vanishing into the other place from which all these powers came, leaving behind her a tempest of ice that would never cease.

  But it did cease, and a silence more deep than any he had known fell across the place. The mists and frost clouds cleared and the Kingshouse was gone. The hill was turned to winter.

  He climbed up there, and found Hestin and Kerig, both feeble, both curled in upon themselves. He half carried, half dragged them one after another as far as he could from the frozen wreckage of the Kingshouse, then went back there, to the heart of it all, and found Hamdan scrabbling amidst the immovable rubble.

  Drann wanted to embrace the archer, so astonishing did it seem that he should still be alive, but Hamdan was obsessively searching. He seemed almost desperate, so Drann joined him and helped him. Still they found nothing.

  “I can’t find Kasuman, or the Bereaved,” Hamdan shouted down to Yulan.

  The Captain of the Free was lower down the slope, holding Akrana in his arms. Alive, which amazed Drann. What she had done here, the Clever, seemed a match for Wren’s workings, yet she had survived.

  “I care only for the Bereaved,” Yulan called up from far below. “We need it, if it’s here to be found.”

  Drann worked his way around the edge of the ruin. Again and again he almost slipped and fell on the treacherous ground. Bit by bit a melt was setting in, but that only made the footing more dangerous, as it laid a thin skin of water over the ice.

  He came to the eastern flank of the hill, where he could look towards the Old Threetower Road, running away into the valley that would lead it, eventually, to Curmen and beyond. He narrowed his eyes. Down there, at the edge of the river that flowed near the road, he thought he could see something out of place. He stared, and squinted.

  Someone kneeling, or sitting, at the riverside. It came to him whole and clear, like the simple opening of a door upon memory. A story he had been told by Old Emmin, all the stories he had heard of the Bereaved. Its tears.

  “They’re there, by the river!’ he cried, and went skidding and flailing down the hillside.

  His feet went from under him. He threw himself down over the ice and snow. He did not know if anyone else had even heard him.

  “They’re there, by the river!’ Drann cried out.

  Yulan looked. He saw, out beyond the iced fringes of the hill, on the grass beside the river, Kasuman kneeling at the side of the Bereaved.

  Drann was coming wildly, recklessly down the ice slopes. Too far to go and not enough time, Yulan thought. He laid Akrana down and rose unsteadily to his feet. His injured calf was cramping from the cold and his immobility. The arrow-brought wound in his shoulder throbbed and burned like a hot coal buried in his flesh. He limped heavily towards Kasuman.

  The Bereaved had its hands stretched down into the gurgling river. The Clever was speaking to it, his lips at its very ear. He was pressing his hand to the pale, inhuman creature’s shoulder. The Permanence was a frail, hunched white shape. Kasuman was white too. Frosted with Akrana’s magics. Working some terrible magic of his own.

  “Let my man be.”

  The cracking, crumbling voice brought Yulan to a halt. He turned.

  Callotec was shambling towards him. Not the Callotec who had been, though; the Callotec Akrana and the Hibernal had made. Half his face was a black and red welt of dead flesh, killed by winter. One eye was ruined; the other gleamed with madness. His left hand was gone, broken off at the frozen wrist. His clothes hung ragged about him, studded with crystals of ice. In his remaining hand he bore a short sword, blued by the cold.

  Yulan blinked. He was terribly weakened. Terribly tired. Above all, he was tired.

  “No more, Callotec,” he murmured, even as he bent stiffly to free his knife from its sheath at his boot.

  “No more?” the monstrous figure rasped. “Not your choice to make, Massatan. The Bereaved is set loose, and that means a great deal more. I’ll dance on a thousand, thousand graves yet.”

  “You know,” said Yulan as he shuffled clumsily sideways, “you took away my right, or my desire, to call myself a Massatan a long time ago. After that, I was only of the Free.”

  Callotec came on, half-dead mouth twisted in mad glee.

  “Now the Free are no more,” Yulan continued, “so perhaps I can choose differently this time. Perhaps I can be just Yulan the Massatan again. And he thinks it was a mistake not to kill you when he had the chance.”

  The Dog-Lord lunged, cold air hissing out between his teeth. Yulan was so slow and hampered by pain that the sword cut across his forearm even as he tried to spring from its path. He had nothing left. His body remembered all of its martial and murderous gifts, but lacked the strength and nimbleness to use them. He slashed wildly at Callotec’s head as he
struggled to regain his balance, and opened a gash in the Dog-Lord’s scalp.

  Callotec was no less damaged, no less diminished than was Yulan, but he had some deranged fury driving him and came flailing and stabbing on like a tree thrashing in the wind. Yulan backed up, barely keeping his footing. He could all but feel his injured leg shedding the last of its strength. Beyond Callotec, he glimpsed the paired forms of Kasuman and the Bereaved, still there at the waterside.

  “Enough,” he said quietly.

  He stepped in to meet Callotec. There was no artifice, no intent to it. They blundered together. Yulan felt his body gathering another wound to itself, as the sword nicked his flank, but it was a small thing compared to the burdens he already carried. He wrapped his arms about Callotec’s midriff and twisted with the last dregs of his vigour. They fell to the ground together.

  Yulan lay atop the Dog-Lord. That sword was beating at his back. Cutting him perhaps; he could not be sure. Not killing him though, not yet. That was all that mattered. He forced his own knife upward and set its point beneath Callotec’s chin.

  “There’s a village over there called Towers’ Shadow,” he whispered. “That’s why. Remember that.”

  And he drove the knife upward as hard as he could.

  The Dog-Lord spat blood over Yulan’s breast as he died, but Yulan paid that no heed. Shaking his head to try and recover some clarity, some balance, he lurched to his feet.

  Drann was running down, stumbling and tumbling as he slithered from ice on to slick, cold grass. Neither of them was going to reach Kasuman in time to make much difference, Yulan thought dully. He staggered that way in any case, for there was nothing else to do.

  Then, through the haze of weakness and weariness, he realised that one of the corpses close by was a Clade archer. Both of the man’s legs were ice from the knees down. His mouth and eyes were open and crusted with frost. His bow lay just beyond one outstretched hand. Yulan bent, groaning at the pain that awoke, and picked it up. He took an arrow from the quiver on the corpse’s back.

  It was difficult to balance on only one good foot. The arrowhead nested in his own shoulder carved away at him from within as he drew the bowstring back. It was a big bow. Powerful. His arm trembled as hammer blows of pain beat in his shoulder.

  “Wait!’ he heard Hamdan shouting from somewhere behind him. “I’m almost there.”

  “Did you ever meet a Massatan who couldn’t use a bow?” Yulan muttered under his breath in irritation.

  Then he pressed his lips together, breathed out and let the arrow fly. He staggered sideways and fell as soon as it was gone, but watched it all the way. Saw it skim flat and fast in front of Drann, hiss to the river and smack into the side of Kasuman’s head.

  The Clever straightened and reached up, brushing the shaft of the arrow with his fingers. Then he sank slowly down and fell beside the Bereaved.

  Yulan gave a slightly surprised grunt and let the bow fall from his hand. Hamdan came and stood over him. Kerig was leaning on the archer’s shoulder. The Clever was more intent and more clear-eyed than Yulan had seen him since he came back to them from Sullen’s cell.

  “Let me see it,” Kerig croaked. “The Bereaved.”

  Hamdan extended a hand and Yulan clasped it. He gasped as he came to his feet.

  “Were you aiming for his head?” Hamdan asked quietly as the three of them struggled along.

  “What do you think?” Yulan said.

  “I think nobody ever aims for the head.”

  Drann had reached the Permanence before them. They saw him cautiously approach, and lean to look at the Bereaved. He edged around it and stared into its face.

  “It’s too late!’ he shouted. “The black tears.”

  “What?” Hamdan murmured.

  “Too late,” Kerig whispered.

  Black tears were indeed spilling from those unearthly eyes. Trailing slowly down its face, over its shoulders. Kerig pushed away from Hamdan as they drew near, and went unsteadily to kneel beside the Permanence, much as Kasuman had done. He looked into its eyes.

  “Get away,” he said faintly.

  He reached down and carefully lifted the Bereaved’s hands from the river. He rested them in its lap, and took hold of its shoulders.

  “What’s happening?” asked Yulan.

  Kerig gently turned the Bereaved to face him. Still it wept.

  “Get away,” he hissed. “I can’t stop this. But I might shape it, drain it. It’ll kill you if you stay.”

  Drann took a few hesitant steps away. Kerig embraced the Bereaved. He took it in his arms. He pressed his cheek to its cheek.

  “What about you?” Yulan asked.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  As Kerig spoke the words, his skin began to split and rupture. Strands of his hair slipped from his scalp, fell like spider’s web to the grass. He shook.

  “Please go,” he murmured thickly.

  He was weeping, water tears to match those black ones of the Bereaved. His fingers thickened and bled pus. His frame began to shrink in on itself.

  The sight of Kerig dying with the Bereaved by the river struck Yulan dumb. It felt like it was breaking his heart, something that his frame no longer had the strength to withstand. Hamdan pulled him backwards. From the place where Kerig and the Permanence knelt, a sickly black stain was spreading through the earth. The grass curled and died. The soil darkened. It flowed not into the river, but through Kerig, from him into the ground and away up the long slope towards the hills to the north.

  Kerig’s flesh was melting away from him, taking his clothes with it. His face loosened, sagged about his skull.

  Drann turned away. He went quickly, and Hamdan pulled Yulan after him. Of them all, only Yulan watched it to its end. As the three of them retreated, towards the ice and snow fields that Akrana had made, he looked back and he watched.

  And only when he at last said, “It’s over,” did Drann and Hamdan turn to look.

  They too saw the great scar of deepest black etched into the hillside. And at the point from which it flowed, kneeling by the bubbling, pure river, the two skeletons, one tiny, one larger, locked in embrace. Holding one another. The bones were blackened as if they had been burned, pitted and eroded, but they supported one another.

  41

  Free

  They parted in Towers’ Shadow.

  Yulan’s leg and shoulder were salved and bound. The villagers were glad to do it, but there was no hiding the way they looked at him and the others who had come alive out of such havoc. Who had left so many bodies in their wake that the pyres were taller than a man. Who had destroyed a Kingshouse, and laid a great black stain into the hillside just a little way down the valley.

  “No one can touch it, or go near it,” Yulan said earnestly to Metta. “Never.”

  She nodded sagely at that.

  “And if anyone asks you how it came to be,” he went on, “tell them that some men came through this way with a small child, pale as bone, and it was the child that made that mark. And when it was done, they carried it off again, eastward. Towards Armadell. Can you tell people that?”

  Again she nodded patiently.

  “Who are you?” she asked him.

  “Just Yulan,” he told her.

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all.”

  Akrana was awake, yet not entirely so. Her eyes were glazed, her breath shallow. She was coming back to herself slowly, Yulan thought, but coming back to a damaged, brittled body. She had lost fingers. She had lost years, and the vigour that went with them. She had been terribly reduced. But she lived, and for that Yulan was profoundly grateful. It felt like finding one small pearl amongst the wreckage of a venture. One pearl that he could hold on to, and hold up to the light, and know that not everything went to ruin. Not entirely.

  If Hestin was coming back to herself at all, it was a painful, hurtful process. She wept, sometimes. She sat on a chair, like a wizened old lady, while Yulan was having his should
er bandaged, and her frail shoulders shook, her tears fell.

  And through withered lips, she whispered again and again one word: “Free?”

  Yulan did not know how to answer that. “Yes, you are,” he could have said, but he did not know whether that was the answer she wanted. He could not tell from her intonation what she meant. So all he ever said to her, whispering it as he had so often whispered over the years, was: “It’s over, Hestin. I’ll take you home. I’ll take you home soon.”

  “You saw the last day of the Free, as I said you would.”

  “I did,” Drann said.

  He stood with Yulan and Hamdan on the road, by the tree where Lebid had gulled Callotec’s lancers, where the Clamour had done great slaughter.

  “I don’t know what I should think of it, or what story I should tell,” the youth who had been Creel’s contract-holder said.

  “Tell them that the Free died, but they did it well, and bravely,” Yulan told him. “Tell them that they won and lost. Tell them that there was no glory to it, except for when there was. Whatever you like. It’s only a story.”

  “But what did happen?”

  “The Free ended,” Yulan said. “That’s all. Not as it should have done, or as it deserved to, perhaps. But it ended. That’s all that matters.”

  “Where will you go?” asked Drann.

  “Away,” Yulan said. “To find other endings. They’re all the same, at the last. Give him the head, Hamdan.”

  Drann made a vaguely disgusted face as Hamdan pressed a heavy, twice-wrapped sack into his hands.

  “Creel will want to see it,” Hamdan said. Not as much mirth in his voice as there had once been. Yulan was not surprised at that. Perhaps it would return, but not soon, he thought. It would have a long way to travel to outdistance what they had seen and done here.

  “Do I have to carry this thing?” Drann asked.