The Path of Sorrow

by David Pilling

  “He’s waiting for your permission,” gasped Bail, bent almost double as he fought for air. “It seems you are…the leader. Almost choking Amkur to death…must have…impressed them.”

  “I had nothing to do with that,” snapped Sorrow, too quickly. Despite the fire in his lungs, Bail smiled wryly.

  The warriors were watching them in expectant silence. “We must not let them think there is tension between us,” said Sorrow, nodding gravely at Sadaf. The clansman nodded in return and motioned his men to follow him onto the path. Sorrow trotted in their wake. Bail limped painfully in the rear and wondered what fresh hell he was being led into.

  The path was long and winding, far too long for Bail’s liking, and led between high, narrow walls of rock, taking them ever upwards until it opened onto a mercifully flat plateau.

  Having reached the first flat piece of ground he had set foot on for three days, Bail fell to his hands and knees, certain he was about to suffer a heart attack. When his heart had stopped beating like a drum sounding the retreat, he had leisure to look up and take in his surroundings.

  They had wandered into the inner compound of a fortress, or such was his first impression. All around them were low stone walls, such as might surround a keep back in the Winter Realm, but these lacked battlements and had clearly been abandoned some time ago. They were in a poor state of repair, the mortar cracked and crumbling. A number of flat-roofed stone huts were arranged in neat lines around the compound. These were also in a poor state, the roofs fallen in and open to the elements, window frames and doors all rotted away.

  Sadaf and his warriors had looks of awe on their villainous bearded faces, like a gang of brigands who intended to plunder a church but instead had been overwhelmed by the holy atmosphere. Rising carefully and taking quick deep breaths, Bail looked around for Sorrow and spotted him examining a strange T-shaped structure in the centre of the compound, a square pillar or trunk of rough undressed stone with an altar balanced on the top. There were figures carved into the sides of the pillar, but these had been obliterated by the passage of time and were almost impossible to make out.

  Sorrow dug out his well-thumbed notebook and rifled through the decaying pages. “This is the remains of a temple,” he announced, not looking around as Bail limped towards him.

  “So much I had worked out for myself,” answered Bail, his voice still hoarse and gasping. “No doubt built by the ancestors of the filthy savages we have for companions. Does that tome you’re carrying tell you what they used the altar for? Human sacrifice, I’ll be bound.”

  Sorrow browsed a few more pages, furrowing his brows in concentration. “It contains some diagrams of similar-looking things,” he said, “drawn in charcoal and other substances. The notes underneath say that when an important monk died, his body would be laid on the altar for the snow eagles to feed on. The High Blood clans used to believe the eagles were servants of the gods of air and sky, and so offered up the flesh of their dead.”

  Bail grimaced and looked up at the endless blue expanse of the sky. He could see an eagle high, high above, a mere black dot gently wheeling through the air. “So they ennobled carrion-eaters and shite hawks,” he said. “What a civilisation.”

  He watched Sorrow carefully as the boy ran his hands over the faded carvings and continued to consult his notes. “There are several of these temples scattered across the mountains,” said Sorrow, “and the monks who kept these places also kept the tablets of the Heartstones. It was they who hid them. Their old language is full of puns and abstract metaphors, difficult to decipher, which is why the tablets have been lost for so long.”

  Bail said nothing. His breath was still coming in short gasps, and he had no wish to waste it on someone he did not trust.

  “I’ve been watching you these past few nights,” he said quietly, even though the High Bloods would not understand even if they heard him, “you say little, you eat little, and you spend hours by yourself, staring at the stars. What do you see?”

  Sorrow ignored him, and continued to divide his attention between the altar and the notebook.

  “Don’t try to be subtle,” Bail warned, moving closer, “you have not the skill or the experience for it, despite all your premature poise. Why do you watch the stars, Sorrow?”

  Sorrow turned quickly and looked directly at him. Having expected the boy to shy away, Bail stopped, revising his plan to snatch the notebook.

  “You are the Crooked Man,” said Sorrow, “and you would not understand. Your task is to follow your course, as I must follow mine.”

  Bail was entirely out of patience. “I will read you the near future, Sorrow,” he said in an angry whisper. “The savages seem willing to follow you, and they may do so until world’s end for all I care. For my part, I will follow you for three more days, and no more. After that time, if we have not recovered the Heartstones, I will shift for myself. I do not intend to grow old chasing after mythical relics in the wilderness. Do you understand?”

  Sorrow looked frightened and glanced sideways at Sadaf, who was wandering nearby, poking and peering at the ruins. “Don’t think of calling for him,” warned Bail, “remember, they must not think there is tension between us. You said so yourself.”

  “Do not dare to threaten me,” Sorrow said defensively. He held the book against his chest, clasped in his arms as if it was some kind of protective amulet.

  “Do I not?” rasped Bail, shuffling even closer. “Why, what would you do about it? Come, place invisible claws about my throat, pour magical fire into my veins…show me what you can do, boy!”

  A band of iron tightened around Bail’s chest, and he stumbled, coughing and gasping for air. Sorrow moved away, keeping his back against the altar and watching indifferently as the Crooked Man fought to draw air into his lungs.

  Bail wondered, was this merely the effects of altitude, or Sorrow’s doing? Would Sorrow kill him now, using whatever godless powers he possessed to crush the remaining air from Bail’s lungs? He had no way of knowing, and then the pressure started to ease.

  “Three days,” Bail managed to croak, hauling himself upright. “Three days. That is all I give you.”

  * * * *

  When the High Bloods had satisfied their curiosity regarding the temple of their ancestors the party moved on, climbing ever higher. Sorrow was their unofficial leader now, and Sadaf deferred to him in all things. The clansman was a creature of superstition and clearly thought the boy was a kind of magician or inhuman sprite to be obeyed and treated with utmost respect.

  Sadaf’s warriors shared this attitude, and no-one paid much attention at all to Bail. This suited him. He sat apart from the others at the evening meal, his eyes fixed on Sorrow, breathing deeply as his body slowly adjusted to the pressure of the altitude and his mind calculated.

  At last they were beyond the snow line and toiling up an endless expanse of bare rock. The going was steep, but not precipitous, and they made slow but steady progress. At times they were obliged to scramble on hands and knees, or resorted to the picks and grapnels the High Bloods had brought. Below them, the mountain plunged down into the mists and forests, a dizzying sight that made Bail’s head spin and his suffering body throb with vertigo.

  They encountered no rival clans on their trek. The three days Bail had promised came and went with no sign of discovering the Heartstones. At the break of dawn on the fourth day, as the sun slowly winched into the sky and fresh golden light spilled over the mountains, he decided it was time to cut and run.

  While the High Bloods still slumbered he was up, fingering the blade of his favourite knife and debating whether to kill them all. He couldn’t hope to dispatch eight strapping barbarians in a straight fight, even if he had been in peak condition, so the sensible course was to slay them while they slept.

  Sorrow had risen even earlier and vanished, and Bail was more relieved than worried by this. That he was a blackguard, capable and guilty of many dark deeds, he knew. However, killing a child in cold
blood, even one as freakish as Sorrow, was something else. There were crimes of all sorts, and some crimes did not wash. Bail wondered if the fragile threads of his conscience would snap under the weight.

  He tested the edge of the blade against his thumb. It was sharp as any razor. The nearest High Blood was just a couple of feet away, rolled up in his cloak, chest gently rising and falling as he slept. He had studied the clansmen carefully in the past few days. They were frighteningly quick and alert, capable of snapping awake in an instant and rolling to their feet, long hooked knives in hand. But he was faster. He would have to be.

  Bail crouched to spring, eyes fixed on the sleeping man’s jugular, and a hand fell on his shoulder.

  Pure instinct took over. He spun around, knife drawn back to stab, and froze. Sorrow stood before him, his little monkish face solemn and unruffled as ever. He raised a finger to his lips as Bail choked back a curse and motioned him silently to follow. Then he turned and padded away, drifting like a tiny wraith up the side of the mountain, bathed in the dark blue-grey light of early morning. Once again, Bail, without really knowing why, found himself trailing in the child’s wake.

  The going was steep, and got steeper until Bail was clambering up an almost vertical slope, sweating despite the morning chill. He was forced to stretch for purchase on the rock face and more than once he slipped, scraping patches of skin from his ankles and wrists.

  There was a shelf of rock jutting out from the slope, wide enough for a man to stretch out on. Sorrow climbed onto the shelf and stopped, turning and reaching down to give Bail a hand up. Despite the shrieking protests in his joints and the needles in his chest, Bail refused aid. He clambered up and over and knelt panting and dripping with sweat.

  “What…is this place?” he hissed, wiping the streaming perspiration from his brow. Sorrow pointed at a narrow fissure scored into the side of the mountain, little more than a shallow dent in the surface.

  “Here,” he said. “The Heartstones are here.”

  Bail remembered the knife in his belt and wondered if his conscience was so fragile after all. To slit the little bastard’s gizzard and hurl him down the side of the mountain…it was a tempting thought. The tiny body would bounce like a rag doll down the slope, scattering loose rocks and shale and scaring the life out of the High Bloods. Even while they rubbed the sleep from their eyes and stared in amazement at the dead child, Bail would dive from the shelf and fall on them like an avenging angel, stabbing to right and left.

  All these appealing images flashed through Bail’s mind, while he rose painfully to a sitting position and waited for an explanation.

  The sun was now a flaming half-circle silhouetted against the jagged peaks and troughs of the horizon. Fingers of light groped across the rocky landscape, expelling the sullen and resentful shadows of night. The light suddenly broke like a wave over the flank of the mountain, forcing Bail to avert his eyes.

  “See, Bail,” said Sorrow in a hushed voice, “the finger that cracks the mountain!”

  When he thought his retinas might cope with the glare, Bail turned his head and saw the child bathed in light, his hands held aloft. He gazed at the fissure with an expression of rapture.

  “What? What is it?” Bail demanded, rising painfully to his feet. “There is nothing! Have you never witnessed the sunrise before? Speak!”

  He was behaving like a fool and knew it. Before him, one of the questing fingers of light was stealing into the shallow cavern of the fissure. And there, midway along the inner wall, the light revealed a narrow fracture running from the ceiling to the floor, no wider than a hair’s breadth.

  “Put your boot to it,” Sorrow snapped. Without thinking Bail stepped inside and slammed his boot against the fracture. There was a hollow booming sound, an echo gradually dying away deep inside the subterranean depths of the mountain, and the rock shifted slightly under his heel. Encouraged, he kicked again and again, drawing on his last reserve of strength. The wall shuddered and heaved and cracked, and then collapsed inward with a crash and a shower of dust, folding into two neatly divided halves.

  The dust cleared to reveal a small cavern, barely wide enough or high enough for a man to enter. When Bail’s eyes had adjusted to the gloom, he made out a huddled shape on the floor. Cautiously, he shuffled into the cavern, stooping to avoid cracking his head against the ceiling, and nudged the shape with his boot. Something yielded under his heel, and there was a crunching noise.

  “What is it?” Sorrow’s voice cut through the musty atmosphere of the cave. By way of reply Bail leaned down, grasped the object with both hands and heaved it in Sorrow’s direction.

  A bundle of human bones wrapped in a rotted shroud landed at the boy’s feet. Sorrow gasped and took a step back, allowing the creeping light of morning to fall upon a tiny, pathetic figure, not much bigger than him. The skeleton’s whitening fingers were wrapped about the ancient gripe of a bronze sword with a leaf-shaped blade. Its hollow eye-sockets gazed sightlessly into the beyond, splintered teeth clenched in a vacant grin.

  “They left a child to die in here,” Sorrow whispered. “Why? Was he supposed to be the guardian of this place?”

  “I doubt he was a child,” said Bail, squatting to examine the bits of debris and rubbish scattered about the floor, “men were probably smaller then. Now then…”

  His voice died away as he grubbed around in the dark. There was the scrape of stone, and he slowly stood up.

  “I have it,” he said in a quiet voice. He slowly turned to face the light, clasping six square stone tablets to his chest. Bits of ancient rotted leather and twine fell away from the tablets as he rose.

  Sorrow’s eyes narrowed. He stepped carefully over the remains of the long-dead guardian and reached out to touch the collection of tablets known as the Heartstones. They were covered in dense lines of ancient runic script, badly decayed in places. His fingertips brushed over the carved lines and indentations, lips moving silently as if he was touch-reading and repeating the words.

  Men’s voices could be heard from outside, their echoes drifting into the cave. Sadaf and his men must have woken, found Bail and Sorrow missing, and immediately started a search.

  “You can read the script, can’t you?” said Bail accusingly, staring fiercely at Sorrow. “Even though it must be thousands of years old, written in some ancient tongue no-one has used for centuries. But you can read it. I suppose that old notebook taught you, did it?”

  Sorrow shook his head, unwilling to explain. “Our friends are waiting for us,” he answered. “We should go to them. Remember, in the days of glory to come, the part I played in making you.”

  Bail remained suspicious. “Making me what, a king? You really think the clans would bow down to me just because I’ve found their bits of old rock?”

  “I know it. Don’t ask me how. Time enough for explanations later. Come, Bail. The people of the High Places are waiting for you. They have been waiting for you for centuries.”

  Still Bail hesitated. “Oh, very well,” he said at last, “but you go first. If the High Bloods turn nasty I’ll use their precious bloody Heartstones to brain them.”

  Smiling at his relentless cynicism, Sorrow turned and walked back to the light.

  * * * *

  Colken and his canine travelling companion headed north for five days. The name, Blue, had stuck, and he grew to trust the dog. He slept easier knowing he could rely on the beast's keen senses. He needed the protection, for his nights were still plagued by baffling and often exhausting dreams.

  Perhaps Blue had learned to trust Colken too, as the dog no longer disappeared at sunset to sleep alone and hidden from sight, but instead slept by his side as though guarding him. The strange-looking animal’s large ears permanently stood up, twitching and twisting back and forth, as though scanning the surrounding area for any sign of a threat.

  Blue dreamed too, whimpering and yipping, his huge paws jerking and jumping in his sleep. Colken wondered if the dog was experiencing the
same disturbances in the night as him, but unless Blue sat up and spoke, he would never know.

  As they travelled north, the altitude increased and the atmosphere gradually cooled. On the fifth day they found themselves skirting sheer cliffs and picking their way through narrow ravines. Colken felt uneasy in this new landscape. In the desert the terrain was open and he could see anyone coming from a long way off, but here there were too many places for an enemy to hide. He counted himself lucky he had Blue with him to scout ahead as they travelled in the day and listen out for anyone approaching at night.

  Late one afternoon, Blue returned from his restless scouting and whined at Colken, pacing back and forth agitatedly.

  Colken crouched and patted the dog on the head. They were in a narrow ravine, sheer on either side, with no choice but to push on or return the way they had come. He was leading his stolen stallion by its reins, cursing the huge beast’s inability to move in silence as its plate-sized hooves clattered and scraped against the ground.

  “What is it, Blue?” he whispered. “What lies ahead?”

  Colken looped the horse's reins over a rock and spoke soothingly in the beast's ear before he and Blue moved forward silently, padding slowly and carefully over the crunchy gravel beneath their feet. It was almost dusk and the ravine they moved through became shallower, the ground beneath their feet sloping gradually upwards.

  As they came up onto a rocky plateau, the last few rays of sunlight stretching their shadows away to the east, he felt exposed and vulnerable. It didn't help Colken’s trepidation that Blue's hackles were raised and the dog crept low on his belly, a slavering snarl on his lips, displaying his long canines and blood-red gums. Colken wondered what could possibly have frightened an animal that, until now, had shown no such fear of people.

  The plateau sloped gently upwards to a ridge, preventing Colken from seeing any further. Blue slunk up to the ridge, a low, rumbling growl emanating from his throat, and peered over the top. Colken followed, slowly inching forward on his elbows, until he could look down over the edge.