Where were they? Were they in the Lows or in the real world? What was the real world, anyway? The thoughts left Voran with bile in the back of his throat.
As they approached the last house of the village, a leaning ruin with a young osier bursting from the roof, Tarin stopped and entered.
“Stay here, slave” he said, leaving Voran no time to come up with any suitable answer.
When Tarin came out, he had a pack in each hand. Tarin laid both packs—one of them felt like it was full of rocks—on Voran’s back and took the sword from him.
“You are now my ass,” he said, beaming at him proudly. He slapped him on the back, and Voran fell face-first into the mud. Tarin laughed as he walked out of the village. Curses that he didn’t even know he knew hissed out of Voran’s lips. Tarin seemed not to hear.
It took them most of the day to reach the pass. Beyond, the grayish path switchbacked up into white-capped mountains, taller even than those in Vasyllia.
“We are going there?” Voran pointed at the peaks. “It’s the middle of winter. We’ll freeze to death, if an avalanche doesn’t get us first. And I don’t have any clothes other than these rags.”
Tarin broke into verse:
“Raven Son, hark now to me.
Twixt faith and mind, what shall it be?
A choice I leave to you to make—
To crawl to doom (a fool, a snake),
Or walk with me. Which shall it be?”
Voran sighed and bowed his head. Tarin clapped him on his shoulder again. This time, Voran stayed on his feet. Tarin seemed pleased by that, judging by the way he hopped in place and hiccupped.
They continued to walk, even after the sun set. Voran expected them to camp for the night, but Tarin kept on walking, head erect and back perfectly straight. Heavy flakes soon swirled around them, but Tarin only sang at them. They seemed to dance to his melody. Voran had always prided himself on his strength, but his endurance was nothing compared to the old warrior’s, whose head did not so much as dip during those heavy night hours. Voran soon began to trip over his own feet from fatigue, and once or twice he caught himself falling asleep between steps, only to jerk awake at the pain in his knee as his leg caught the full weight of his body and the two packs.
Just when Voran thought he could go no further, a dark shape loomed directly in front of their path. It was a huge bear, standing on its hind legs. It roared and rushed at them on all fours. Voran cried out in warning, but all that came out was a dry rattle. Tarin didn’t seem to see the bear.
At the last possible moment, the bear pulled up short and stood up, waving its arms like a child learning to walk. Tarin raised his own hands and whooped. He chattered and growled at the bear, gesticulating with his hands. The bear…laughed!
Tarin embraced the beast and slapped him on the side of the head, and the bear continued on his way. Voran’s shuddering limbs refused to listen to him for a time as Tarin—grumbling and whistling all the while—kept walking forward.
This occurred several more times throughout the night, but every time the encounters were never less than horrifying. Finally, the sun inched toward the horizon.
“Well, here we are,” said Tarin, stopping in the middle of the road. They had climbed about half the distance up the switchback path hugging the mountain, and the peak loomed above them, still impossibly far. The sounds of the waking forest bubbled up to Voran’s awareness—snakes rustling through dry brush, rabbits running from the cover of one shrub to another, groundhogs pushing up against the fresh blanket of snow covering their holes.
Then Voran saw it. Just off the road was a hole in the ground, gaping at them uninvitingly.
“In you go, slave,” said Tarin, waving his arm toward the hole.
“Yes, Lord,” said Voran, with a hint of sarcasm that earned him a sound blow across one ear.
“You will learn to keep a civil tongue, my ass.”
Voran jumped in head-first, then the world turned upside down and he found himself sitting on prickly, yellow marsh grass. For a moment, his mind thought that he should be falling still, and it spun uncontrollably, until he felt his feet sink into a pool of icy water. He cursed and pushed himself up, and the world righted itself. But something was still wrong. It was too quiet, so quiet that the silence buzzed in his ears.
Someone was watching him, but every time he turned around he saw nothing, not even Tarin. Yet the feeling remained. It grew, until he was sure that an invisible army was staring at him. Far away, dim across the endless marshland surrounding him, Voran thought he saw something swirling and dark.
“Hurry,” said Tarin, appearing suddenly at his side. “It seems they knew we were coming.”
Now the malice coming from that mass of something dark was palpable, as though Tarin’s appearance had enraged a great beast.
“What is it?” gasped Voran as they ran across the dry grass and through shallow pools, turning this way and that to avoid the deeper tarns.
“Raven’s horde,” Tarin said. “Run!”
Voran’s sides felt as though one hundred knives pierced them. His vision grew foggy. His wounds oozed and throbbed, and his feet squelched in clammy water. He tottered. Tarin grabbed his arm and threw it around his shoulders, holding his side with a grip like iron pincers.
“I can’t…”
“Just a little farther,” Tarin said between heavy breaths.
The long marsh-plain suddenly ended. They stood on the edge of a precipice plunging thousands of feet down, with nowhere else to go. Voran turned around, and now the swirling cloud was much closer. He thought he could glimpse indistinct shapes in the mist.
“Do not stop, Voran. Forward!” said Tarin.
“Forward? Are you mad, Tarin? What should we do? Fly?”
“If that is necessary, yes.”
Voran felt the fear rise like vomit.
No, he said to himself. Enough.
In his mind, a fog seemed to lift. This was another parting of the ways, similar to the waystone. There was no going back, the way forward led to certain death, and yet there was no other way.
I do this for you, Sabíana, he thought with a stab of guilt. Maybe my death will pay my debts.
He stepped forward into the air, expecting the rush of mad pleasure that accompanies a fall and precedes the terror. Tarin followed, laughing, singing.
They walked on air. As they walked, it was not they who descended, but the land underneath them that ascended, almost as if they were climbing. Before Voran’s mind registered it, the thick, wet smell of peat slapped his nostrils. He and Tarin stood in another marshy plain. Mountains sheer as glass rose to their left. Only their extreme tips were white; the rest of the slopes were a lush carpet of green. All around was brown-yellow marshland, veined over with meandering rivers of inky blue. Ahead of them was a sight that made his legs, already throbbing with exhaustion, dance with joy. Twisting hearth-fires. There was a village ahead.
Tarin fell on his knees and raised his arms up to the sky.
“Sing unto him, let your voices exclaim!
Bring unto him all your praises and glory,
Honor his name, by its power exult,
For the voice of the Lord thunders over the waters,
For the voice of the King fills with life all the forests,
For the voice of the Father lifts up the high mountains.
Rejoice in his name, all you fighters of darkness,
For his mercy and glory illumine your passes,
For his love and his power destroy all your weakness
We run with all speed to the Lord of the Realms!”
Voran turned to look back at the cliff from which they had descended, and felt the danger fading away. No swirling darkness followed them. Voran laughed, coming back to life with every twitch of his exhausted legs.
“How did we…?” Voran began.
“Sometimes, the earth itself helps us poor ones,” said Tarin in an awed whisper.
All around them, gr
ey branches and dead stumps reached up from the muddy earth, giving the land an agonized look. In the riverbeds, glacial water trickled, carving through the land like a blade through clay.
“It’s…beautiful.” Voran was surprised to hear himself say.
Before Tarin answered, something struck Voran in the back. Sharp, throbbing pain wove through every inch of his body.
It’s like I’m milk being churned into butter, he thought.
He fell, cramped over on the grass, the pain rising in waves. He breathed in, but his chest didn’t respond. His heart raced. His mind reeled with panic. There had never been anything else but the pain. He had always suffered. He would always suffer. It would never end.
A firm hand took his clenched fingers and forced them open. The hand was warm. Tarin’s face looked like it was in a fog, but he smiled. He whispered, and in spite of the noise in Voran’s mind, he heard his master.
“Raven Son. Focus on what I am telling you.”
The agony twisted Voran as though he were a dishrag.
“Listen! Repeat in your mind, clearly, this one word. Do it, no matter what doubts creep into you head. ‘Saddaí, Saddaí.’”
Voran twisted his lips into the right shape, though even that effort racked him with pain. He repeated the word under his breath, softly. The pain receded and his mind cleared. Into the breach in his mind a thousand thoughts barreled through.
That word! What does it mean? What if it’s an evil summoning, and Tarin is no more than a creature of the Raven? What have I done? Look at him, that foul beast with his smirk and detestable face. I want to claw that face open. What a pathetic creature I am. Why could I not stand the pain on my own? Stop saying that word. Stop! There is awful power in it!
He continued to repeat it stubbornly—Saddaí, Saddaí—until all thoughts ceased. Warmth suffused his body. He stopped twitching. He noticed the sun was shining.
“Raven Son, you did not yield,” said Tarin, tears pouring down his face. “As a reward, look. You are healed.”
All Voran’s wounds had closed, leaving only purple scars.
“Tarin, what in the Heights was that word?”
Tarin lifted Voran by the hand with no apparent effort.
“Perhaps, someday, I will explain it to you. Don’t forget it, Raven Son. It may save you again, and not only once.”
He looked suddenly thoughtful and perturbed by something.
“What is it?” asked Voran.
“They overreach themselves,” he said. “I did not expect such boldness from them yet. Vasyllia must be on the very brink.”
In the year of the covenant 845, Dar Mikahil left no male heirs. His only daughter Albiana and his daughter son’s Barhuk both claimed the right of inheritance. Rather than choose between them, the Dumar decided to summon a Council of the Reaches to choose a new Dar. On the day before the announcement, Albiana commanded the warriors to imprison the entire Dumar as traitors to the Monarchia. Soon afterward, Barhuk chose a life of solitude and contemplation in a monastery, and no one challenged the rise of the first Darina in the history of Vasyllia.
-From “A Child’s History of Vasyllia” (Old Tales, Book I)
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Complications
“Highness,” said Sabíana’s trembling maid—she trembled constantly these days— “the representative of the Dumar has been waiting to be admitted for the last hour.”
“Let him wait,” said Sabíana, not raising her eyes from her scribbling. They all think too much of themselves, these third-reachers, she thought.
There had been nothing but complaints from the rich ever since she mandated that every citizen of Vasyllia donate their food and clothing stores to the refugees now camped in the second reach. She knew what this man would say to her. More complaints, more bitterness. More insinuations that had she been a man, things would not be so dire.
Her nib cracked under her hand. She cursed. She had no more quills. With a reluctant sigh, she looked at her maid.
“Let him in.”
To her surprise, it was not Yadovír, whom she expected. It was Elder Pahomy of the warrior seminary. She stiffened. Battle with the old warrior required tact as well as forcefulness.
Elder Pahomy lumbered in, dressed in the black, flowing robes of a cohort father. The traditional dress did little to diminish his significant belly. He bowed formally. She saw his jawline ripple as he rose.
He is as unsure as I am, she thought.
“I did not expect the Dumar to send you, Elder,” she said, standing up and approaching him. She lightly took his forearms and reached up to kiss him thrice on the cheeks. His jawline relaxed a little, and his eyes changed from stormy to merely threatening.
“I do not relish the role of errand-boy, Highness,” he said, his jowls quivering in irritation.
“I do understand you, Elder.” She kept her left hand light on his arm and continued to look him directly in the eyes. “But I promise not to be cross with you, no matter what their nonsense.”
“Sabíana,” he said, sighing heavily. “May I sit?”
“Of course.” She smiled and led him to a chair, which creaked dangerously when he sat down. She remained standing by him. It gratified her perversely to see how uncomfortable that made him.
“Highness, the third reach is very… unhappy about your arrangements concerning the refugees,” he began.
She sighed very loudly, and he stopped.
“Get to the point, Pahomy.”
He flushed briefly and cleared his throat. “It’s been three weeks since the siege began, and the weather is only getting colder. They fear a long winter. If their stores are used on these refugees, many will starve.”
“And they think I do not know this?”
“Highness, I think it an admirable thing that you do. I do. But necessity sometimes dictates that we become cruel and hard, for the sake of the many. And treachery is a terrible disease to catch during siege-time.”
“I know all this, Elder. But if we cannot extend our compassion to our neighbors in the times when that compassion is most needed, we do not deserve to survive this siege.”
“In that case, you leave me no choice.”
He stood up ponderously and drew himself to his full height. The room seemed to shrink as he stood.
“Highness, the third reach demands, by its ancient right, to convene a Council of the Reaches.”
Sabíana felt the blood drain from her face, and spots began to dance before her eyes. The nobles wanted to elect a new Dar. The nobility of Vasyllia had just committed treason.
“Rogdai!” Sabíana called, and immediately the door flew open and the old swordsman strode in and saluted. He looked slightly perturbed at seeing the elder, but only for a moment.
“Rogdai, Elder Pahomy has just informed me that there are traitors in the third reach. Take a full detachment of the palace guard. The elder will lead you to the houses of the conspirators. You are to arrest all of them. Our dungeons have stood too long unused.”
The elder looked at her for a long time, then his eyes creased and twinkled. He bowed low and offered her a hesitant hand. She extended hers, and he kissed the tip of her right forefinger.
“Come, Vohin Rogdai,” he said and walked out of the room.
Sabíana stood for a long time, smiling. She had taken a tremendous risk, won an important ally, and removed a dangerous infection from the city in one move of the chessboard. It excited her, far more than she expected.
Kalún and Yadovír each held a torch that smelled unpleasantly of burnt lard. The nether regions of the palace, far below even the dungeons, were hardly more than caves. In some of the rooms stalactites dripped water in a maddening, steady rhythm. Every drop made Yadovír want to jump out of his skin. He knew that there was a significant possibility that they were walking into a trap. He was ready to give up and turn back. The darker the caves became, the more the recent stories of the Gumiren’s atrocities bubbled up to his conscious mind.
/> You think you can reason with blood-drinkers? asked his mind. What sort of madness possesses you to think you can reason with savages?
“Not much farther now, Otar,” he said, more to distract himself than anything.
And yet he recognized that a kind of madness had bitten and infected him. Yadovír wanted power, absolute power, and he was even willing to speak with the Ghan, to give up his own city on the enemy’s terms, if only it meant a chance at that power. It was increasingly becoming an irrational urge. The knowledge that he would sell his own family for it no longer bothered him.
“Yadovír.” The priest’s voice was insufferably calm. “Tell me again why you waited so long to meet with them?”
Yadovír wanted to scream. They had spoken of this already at least five times.
“Winter deepens, Otar. They are Steppe-people. They do not know real winters. I waited for them to feel a truly deep Vasylli freeze. It will make them more amenable to our terms.”
“Our terms. Yes. Very good.” His voice was soft and absent.
Yadovír wondered if the priest was going senile.
They turned past the last bend, and before them the passage was blocked by fallen boulders and dirt. Here, as Yadovír had already found, was a small hole, barely visible even with the torches, through which they should be able, with some difficulty, to push to the other side.
“I am afraid we must leave our torches behind, Otar.”
Kalún grumbled under his breath. They left the torches in an old, rusty brazier that clung to the cave wall and plunged into the dark on the other side. The murk was almost substantial, like a hand that groped for their eyes at every step they took.
“Otar,” whispered Yadovír, the echoes running ahead of him. “Follow my voice. I know the way from here well enough.”
The priest didn’t answer, but Yadovír heard his breathing, so he stepped forward into the void. It was far more frightening this time than the last. Every step he took increased the sense that he was approaching something horrid and irrevocable. Maybe it would be best to go back? To just pretend that the way ahead was hopelessly blocked?
The Song of the Sirin (Raven Son Book 1) Page 20