by Greg James
Milanda’s eyes asked the question she did not dare to speak.
“What would you rather have others think of you, girl? That you defeated one of Man’s deepest fears in mortal combat and were given immortality as a reward for your prowess? Or, that you were cursed for taking someone who was not yours to take? For being the Father-Creator of such an act? No, you’re safe from me, girl. Never fear me in that regard. But beware the men of this world above all things. They have a darkness born to them that not even the Gods can fathom. I know this because I am its root and seed.
“I have lived, and I have seen the giants of humanity brought to their knees. I was there the day they nailed the wrong man to the cross, and I saw how he wept at his fate. How forsaken was he. Yes, they conquered much, they achieved so much, but always it was born from death, darkness, and pain. The one thing they could not master was themselves. They spent centuries in fear of creation, only for themselves to be the ones who laid waste to the world. Humanity undone by humanity; ever has it been so, girl, ever shall it be. And it all began with me. Would you like to hear more?”
Milanda quietly said, “No ...”
Chapter Seventeen
Leste’s horse spent the morning tramping over the land and there was barely a sign of life around them. How many days travel now, was it? Six? Seven? Eight?
Had she missed Subote?
Are the Gods angry with me, she wondered in black humour, is that why things have gone so ill?
She was losing count of the days and growing sick of subsisting on roots and bitter berries plucked from thornbushes. Pale tufts of brittle grass thrust through the cracked ground at irregular intervals, and when her footsteps disturbed them, they collapsed into dust. She was coming close to the mountains. They were no longer a roughness on the horizon, they towered over it, though she was not yet in their shadows. Clouds continued to creep across the sky, creating an unbroken monotony that mirrored her journey thus far. Leste was glad of the robe she had packed, as it fended off the worst of the elements, but she would have killed for a moment of shelter and sanctuary by the time noon came around, when the wind began to pick up, driving blinding sand and stinging grit into her face.
As the day wore on, the wind eased, and she stopped to let her horse rest. She was chewing on a mouthful of bland, dried meat when she saw a small black form moving towards her across the horizon. It was coming over the hillocks at speed, bobbing, ducking, and weaving.
A man—a young man in rags. It looked like he was running for his life. Leste took a step forward, her fingers stroking the hilt at her waist when she saw his pursuers appear. A group of men, no better dressed than the one being pursued, but mounted and armed. Leste recognised scythes, short swords, and clubs swinging from their hands.
Then, there were the cries coming from their victim, mingling with their own bloodthirsty shouts. Leste shivered at the harsh sounds and gripped the hilt of her sword more tightly.
She rocked back and forth in her saddle, wondering what to do. It did not take her long to decide. She would help him. Whatever he had done, she could not imagine it being so vile as to deserve being ridden down in this manner.
She came to the man just as he collapsed, exhausted, before her horse. Leste dismounted and laid a hand upon his shoulder. “I’m here to help.”
“You can’t. Run,” he gasped. “You can’t help me. Flee. Those men want me. I ran from them. Days and days they’ve hounded me. I don’t know how much longer I can go now they’ve found me. They’re here to kill me.”
Leste got to her feet and faced the approaching hunters. She stepped over the fallen man, making a shield of herself between them and him. The hunters stopped short. Their eyes regarded the traveller who intervened between them and their quarry. Leste could see the men were poor, and yet they were hunting this man: for what reason?
“Give him up, traveller. Our quarrel is not with you.”
“Why should I?” Leste asked.
One of the hunters dismounted and stepped forward. “It is not your concern. This is our matter, and we mean to see it through to the end. Now, get out of our way, so that we do not put your head in a bag along with his and take it back to our ’steads.”
Leste said nothing. Blood was thundering in her ears. Her heart ached from a tightness closing around it. “I will not stand aside and let you kill him.”
“Then we will ride you down also. You know not what you are protecting here, woman.” The hunter lifted a barbed whip in his right hand. “Now, move, before I take your skin from your back.”
Leste did move. She drew her sword, stepped quickly, and drove it through the man’s chest. It grated against bone, and she had to pull hard to draw it back out before he took it with him as he fell.
The other hunters shouted their horror and made to dismount. Leste dashed in and, with swift slashes, hamstrung two of them, sending them squealing to the ground to twist and writhe, bleeding into the dust. She moved away as their horses whickered, rearing and bringing their hooves down hard on the skulls and chests of their masters.
The two hunters left dismounted before she could get to them. One circled out to the left, and the other to the right. They meant to play a game with her, but they were ill-armed for it. One hefted a cumbersome scythe and the other wrestled with a sword that was old, rusted, and notched. There was no skill in how they stepped towards her.
Leste went for the one with the sword. He fought without craft. He swung it as a child swings a sword while Leste parried and slashed until he left himself wide open and she pierced his stomach with a brutal counter-riposte.
The hunter with the scythe tried to take her head off, but he overstepped his mark, stumbling over his own feet. The curve of the blade whistled and then stopped silent as it slit him open, spilling the pale ropes of his insides onto the dry earth. Leste cut his throat to put him out of his misery.
She looked down at the dead and felt no victory or good in what she’d done.
A voice came from nearby—the young man approaching her. “Thank you, Mistress. You saved my skin.”
“Who are you?” she asked, not feeling the tightness around her heart lessen any.
“I was a prisoner of those men.”
“How did you escape?” Leste asked. “And why were you being held by them?”
“Food becomes scarce in these parts,” he said. “Outside of Colm and the like, we needs must fend for ourselves, and when the livestock are gone, people turn on each other. First, babes, women and children, then old folk, and then the unwary.”
Leste eyed him. Now that the other men were dead and he was this close to her, she saw there was something in his manner that she did not care for.
“Can you lead me to the mountain-pass?” she asked.
“Why in the world would you want to go there?”
“I am on a journey to rescue someone much like yourself. She was taken against her will.”
“Then I will certainly help you.”
“How long will it take to find the way?”
“A day, or so.”
“What’s your name?”
“Kereth.”
“Then lead on, Kereth,” she said, not offering him a place on her horse or giving her name.
*
Leste followed Kereth until it was time to stop and rest.
After a frugal meal of jerky, berries, and water, they sat together and talked.
“You know, when it’s quiet like this, it’s beautiful in its own way. This wilderness,” Leste said. “There’s something about the emptiness, the soundlessness of it.”
Kereth nodded, making no reply.
They sat on in silence for a time, each chewing at their jerky. Leste watched him out of the corner of her eye, until her eyes became heavy.
Leste dozed fitfully.
She was awoken by a sharp, ragged pain. When she opened her eyes, she saw that he was suckling on her finger. Then, she looked again and saw the flesh was bleeding and that
he was biting down, trying to reach the bone.
He caught her watching him and smiled widely. “Do you not like what you see, Leste Alen?”
Her eyes widened. She had not told him her name. “Let me go, or I swear I will cut you open.”
He opened his mouth slow, and let her withdraw the mauled finger.
“Those men ... they had good cause to hunt you, after all.”
“Of course they did,” he said. “What I told you was true. Meat is rare enough to come by out here, so we must feed on what we have.”
“And you fed on some loved one of those men?”
“Oh, don’t think them to be so pure as to be mere victims. The old bastard was the father, and the rest were his sons. The one I ate was the youngest, and they all loved him if you take my meaning. I just loved him in a different way. You could say I put the poor child out of his misery.”
“Bastard creature.”
“One among many out here,” he said.
Leste suddenly felt very cold.
“Are things not as they seem, Leste Alen? Do you know not what is and what seems to be?” He was chuckling in his throat.
As she got to her feet, he looked at her. His eyes danced with a pale light not cast by the fire.
“What are you?” she asked in a low tone.
“A child of the wilderness.” He grinned, showing his filed teeth.
“How did you come to know my name?”
“Because the world is rotting, Leste, and things are no longer as well hidden as they once were, and those of us once bound are being set free.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Is it? Look at this wounded land, and then look at the wounds upon yourself. The mark on your hand that the Brother made. Where do you think this sickness comes from, if not from humanity, and from those like you?”
“Be silent.”
Leste kicked a spitting faggot at him. It spun through the air and landed in the dirt, where it went out.
There was nothing, and no-one, there. He was gone, like a lost thought.
Leste was alone.
She warily watched the shadows and shapes that danced around the fire until the dawn came up. He did not come back for her.
It was as if he had never existed.
This was not how it was meant to be, she thought. For a moment, she wondered whether she should turn about and return to Colm, to Murtagh, to Yrena and Osta. But she couldn’t do it. She had made her decision, and she had decided to ride after Khale, to bring him down and to rescue Milanda so she might sit on the throne of Colm and rule, as her father had done before. But she had slain Hethe and defied Murtagh. She would not be able to return to Colm and rejoin the Watch, even if she had Milanda with her.
I have forsaken myself, she thought, and for what? A dream, a romance that is already fast becoming a nightmare.
“What am I doing?” Leste cried to the empty land. “What have I done?”
It gave her no answer.
*
The next day, Leste came to an ancient henge, its stones leaning into the wind. She fed her horse its evening rations and then nibbled at her own, not feeling so hungry. The ground felt strangely cold under her. The small fire she was able to strike into life with a few stones and handfuls of parched grass did nothing to alleviate the chill in the soil. The archaic markings on the faces of the standing stones appeared to her as angry ghosts and frowning hollows in the low light, blustered by the wind.
She cooked, ate and shivered among them.
When exhaustion caught up on her, she dreamed of a shore beneath a scintillating aurorae, a shimmering ribbon, pulsing with numerous rhythms of colour. It split the sky as far as she could see, forming a second, false horizon. As Leste watched its hues and shades, she felt a drumming and saw figures moving down by the shoreline. She kept to the darkness cast by the towering cliffs and slowly approached the rear of the crowd. As she came closer, the rhythm of drums increased in tempo. Looking up, she saw that the pulsations emanating from the ribbon were becoming increasingly violent. The crowd was calm; waiting, watching. This is a ritual, taught and practised many times over, she thought. Whatever is happening here has happened before, and they know what comes next.
As she watched, she saw the ribbon’s rhythm slowing once more, almost to a stop, but she knew this was not the beginning of its fading away. There was a tension in the way it rippled and shone, something was either being held back or was forcing its way through from the other side.
The drumming stopped. The crowd was hushed. And she was sure that the motion of the ocean’s waves had stilled too, impossible as that seemed. The silence and the stillness went on for what felt like forever but could have been no longer than the space of time between one heartbeat and the next.
Then, the ribbon opened.
It yawned wide, peeling back the sky as careful fingers peel the skin from a fruit, revealing … what?
Where the sky had been, she saw there was naught but a great roaring, and it was lacking all colours, all shape, and all form.
And then, it was gone.
The ribbon was closing, but, before it closed completely, a small host of fragile forms came fluttering through. She saw them in silhouette against the reappearing sky. Along with the rest of the crowd, she watched them descend, drawn down to earth by a gravity and a reality that was steadily reasserting itself.
They were birds and they came to rest on the shoreline, where the waters that should have lapped over their taloned feet instead parted and flowed around them. These bedraggled crows from the other side stood shuffling in the wet sand. Their eyes, intelligent, went from person to person in the crowd until they alighted upon her. And Leste realised, through some strange forward motion she could not recall, that she had moved to the very front of the crowd. They were as tightly packed behind her now as they had been when they obscured her from view. She looked to the people and saw they were shorn of hair, frail and dressed in the vestments of the Church. Their eyes were dead, their skin was mottled, and she knew these were Fathers, Sisters and Brothers who no longer served the Four on the earthly plane.
She turned to the crows waiting by the water. They were black and stained, as if doused in a crude oil, showing patches of skin that were livid and scaled like a reptile’s back. Their blinking eyes were yellow pearls. Dangling from the hooks of their beaks were limp, tattered morsels of enseamed matter.
One of the birds stepped fluidly towards her, its movements recalling the behaviour of liquid rather than of natural muscles. It reached forward its beak, making an offering of whatever the hook held. She stepped forward, still shaking a little, and knelt before the bird, holding out her hand. The matter slopped into her palm, cold and slippery as old tripe.
Tentatively, Leste raised it to her lips. She could already smell it. It was overripe and bad. She should fling it away into the sea now, right now. But then she was eating the stuff, swallowing it. Her stomach clenched hard and tight. She threw her hands out as she fell forward onto the sand, feeling pain as a hard burning, sinking into the base of her gut. And then, she heard a voice.
It was the voice of Voyane.
And Leste realised, with horror, that she was eating of the Blood-Creator’s flesh.
Chapter Eighteen
Khale watched Milanda sleep and wished she were no longer with him. Her questions and closeness to him had roused memories he would sooner have left forgotten, like so many others.
He remembered fighting back-to-back as dark hordes crowded in on himself and a companion, a long time ago.
Swords screamed and sang as they cut through tortured flesh and shattered tempered iron. Inhuman shrieks and very human shouts competed with the relentless clash and clatter of steel on steel. Bodies fell. Shields were sundered. Mouths champed with grinding teeth, seeming to laugh joylessly as the slaughter went on. Blood rained heavily upon the ground, soaking the earth until it turned into a sucking mire. Overhead, darkening clouds raced and chased one
another in surging patterns, echoing with thunder and words of power that smote lightning upon the armies below. Some, as they lay dying, saw hideous faces congeal out of the storm’s billowing tumult; twisted, hateful visages that trailed pale grave-worms from between their jagged teeth.
Those dying soldiers looked upon the darkness wherein the Gods and their Black Madness writhed, and then they were overtaken by it and knew nothing more of the world. They felt themselves rising, leaving their bodies below, coming closer to those black faces in the sky. They saw that there were no worms writhing despairingly between those teeth, only the pale souls of the fallen, of men and women from the battlefield below.
Khale saw it all, felt it all, and still he fought on.
Death, when it came, was never like those fates of legend after all.
A wicked blade slithering in through the space between one plate of armour and the next. A moment when they did not touch and hold was all that it took. He heard her cry out. It was no demon who drove the sword home. It was a man, desperate and hungry, fearing for his life and his family. When Khale turned, the man’s fingers sprang away from the sword as if it burned him.
And, eyes wide, mouth streaming blood, she turned, took a step and fell dead into the mud; the one whom he had been fighting back-to-back with. Her eyes stared off into nothingness. The man stumbled away from her, away from Khale. He was shaking, sick, guilty and white-faced over what he had done.
“I’m not supposed to be here,” he said. “I’m supposed to be at home. Not here. Not doing this.”