by Tom Barczak
“Don’t pity me,” he choked. “I did what I had to in order to save you. I would do so again.”
“So that the breath of the prophecy could be uttered?” Chaelus asked, pleading for an answer.
Al-Aaron turned away. “Perhaps that is something only you would understand now.”
“There are many things the colors of which I wouldn’t, and should not see. Yet I do. I see their shadow and their light. But they’re strangers to me. Just as you are, their purpose is veiled from me.”
“I can’t help you.”
“Then at least let me, let whatever possesses me, help you.”
Al-Aaron flinched away from him. “No!”
Chaelus withdrew. His own fear flooded through him. It was bleak with ire and like the Dragon’s spirit growing in Al-Aaron, it was absolute.
“I need you,” Chaelus whispered. “I need you in this, now more than ever. I need your guidance. I don’t know how to face this. I don’t think I can face both the Giver and the Dragon alone.”
Al-Aaron withdrew into a deeper silence.
“Don’t abandon me,” Chaelus pleaded.
Al-Aaron crumpled over, stumbling. He clutched himself as a spasm seized him. The glow that Chaelus had once glimpsed within him, the same glow that had once led Chaelus from the dark maw of his own death, dimmed to almost nothing beneath the dark spirit of the Dragon that consumed him.
Al-Aaron waved him away.
The notes of Al-Hoanar’s voice drifted somber behind them. He sang in his own Goarnni tongue, the sound of its muted words rich in flavor and sadness. Soon Al-Mariam’s voice lilted softly with him, the breath and breadth of her own shadow and sadness woven beneath it.
“You must find a way,” Al-Aaron said. He passed his forearm across his sweated brow. “You’re the Giver now. You’re our only hope.”
Chaelus slowed, falling to the words of the song lamented by those behind him as he watched Al-Aaron draw ahead.
A hundred years have passed
since they were awoken.
A hundred years have passed
since the Wyrm was driven away.
A hundred years have passed
since they remembered why they were saved.
So close your eyes behind the Veil
It is a truth you cannot tell
Go to sleep, go to sleep
In the warmth of Dragon’s fire.
Al-Thinneas came beside him, his cowl drawn over his head. His eyes showed bright as steel beneath. The strike of his staff upon the rocks broke in steady measure with his stride. “And what path will you choose to take, Chaelus, Roan Lord of the House of Malius?”
Chaelus chastened himself. Irritation and impatience flooded through him. If there were no answers for himself, he could have no answers for them. “I will be whatever I must.”
“You of all must know its a rare thing for a Khaalish archer to miss his mark,” Al-Thinneas said.
Chaelus recalled the dying breath and scent of his mother; the depth of Al-Hoanar’s and Al-Mariam’s lament drawing heavy upon him. His frustration deepened. “Don’t pretend to know me.”
“Your Story’s no secret. Not to us. Not to those who knew your father well.”
“I’m not him.”
“No,” Al-Thinneas said. “But neither can you escape him.”
Al-Aaron had stopped ahead of them, a dim shadow wavering upon the horizon.
“Al-Aaron won’t speak of what he suffers,” Chaelus said.
“That is because he can’t. Not yet. For now at least, his suffering must remain his own.” Al-Thinneas withdrew his cowl. His brow furrowed with care. “Just know that in your love of him, you’re not alone.”
Ahead of them, Al-Aaron stood where cliff and wash descended to tall grass plain. Familiar white stones traced circles across the landscape, and three men with spears walked towards them across the open plain.
“Al-Aaron!” Chaelus said.
He and Al-Thinneas ran to the boy, pulling him down beneath the crest of the ridge. Al-Aaron struggled against them. Then he stopped. A wary look held his face, his eyes clenched shut as he listened.
Al-Hoanar’s face contorted as he dropped beside them.
“Hunters,” he growled.
Chaelus watched the shadow gather within Al-Hoanar, strange as its tentacles laced through him, strange that it even was, strange that he could see it. Stranger still that against it, the blue aura of Al-Hoanar’s spirit remained steady and unyielding.
In the valley below, Chaelus could see through the Giver’s sense that the men carried more than just spears. Armored in steel-studded leather jerkins beneath their furs, each of them bristled with sword, throwing ax and bow. Hanging beneath the prostrate cross suspended from their necks was a tin stamp bearing the seal of Tulon, an image of three ships with unfurled sails.
Though the Dragon’s shadow threatened to devour the men, they had not been completely consumed. They were not like the Remnants he and Al-Aaron had faced before. They were just men, not demons. Their shadows were the sort of most men. They were no different to Chaelus or the Servian Knights who accompanied him, living as each of them did in their own embrace of prophecy.
“They’re only mercenaries,” Chaelus said. “They carry with them the writ of Tulon. They’re scouts, and your Garden is no secret from them. Only their fear keeps them away from you now.”
“Little do they know that the three of them alone could claim it, as long as our vows stay unbroken,” Al-Hoanar bristled.
“If Tulon has fallen, then the shadow of the Dragon has already passed beyond us,” Al-Thinneas said.
Chaelus watched while quickened fingers of shadow reached down the length Al-Hoanar’s arm as he reached for the hilt of his sword. The Goarnni loosened the strands of its tether. “It will matter little if they come up the rise towards us.”
A grief as quick as shadow colored Al-Thinneas’ face. He looked down to Al-Aaron and back. “Have you learned nothing?”
Al-Mariam, cloaked in hesitation and fear, nestled into the ground behind them.
Al-Hoanar looked to Al-Aaron. His brow furrowed. “I have learned enough to know that a prophecy unfulfilled will never save us, and that the oaths of dead men mean nothing. I do not desire this, but neither will I deny what warnings truth may bring.”
The three mercenaries stopped, a stone’s throw from the base of the rise, beside a small cairn of stones standing out amidst the grasses. The men circled it. One crouched before it. Crimson motes danced in the wind upon it.
“Wait,” Chaelus whispered.
The crouching man shouted something to the others, and then stood, backing away. In his head, Chaelus listened to both their spoken and unspoken voices. The man’s name was Fallon, he was their leader. Beneath the veil of his flesh, his shadow grew deeper. Without further words the other two, Oleth and Shammus, desperately searched the heights around them.
Chaelus lowered his head before the mercenaries’ sight passed over him. What they had seen had scared them, and it was greater even than the fear which led them.
Beside Chaelus, Al-Hoanar stared back at him, the fear in his eyes as dark now as the shadow which filled him. Like the men below, it would be fear that would be their greatest loss.
Chaelus looked to Al-Mariam, who returned his stare, but only for a moment.
“They’ve passed,” Al-Thinneas said, staring into the valley below.
“Something’s scared them away,” Al-Mariam uttered.
Al-Thinneas led them with caution down the loosened slope of the wash, where the happas had long since collapsed.
In the valley below, the stones of the happas resumed, but it was bones and not stones that traced their patterns on either side. Bones and rusted steel, their trappings long since taken by rot, waited within the shallow grave of time which slowly claimed them. They bore testament to the battle that had once been fought here, a battle where thousands had fallen. Their spectral voices sounded out upon the gale.
; “Who lies here?” Al-Mariam asked.
“Those who forgot, and those we’ve forgotten.” Al-Aaron’s voice was a grim whisper against the wind, its normal music shaded by the torture he shared with the souls who lay dead beneath him.
Al-Hoanar cleared the grasses away from a cairn of stones where the hunters had lingered. “And so others now keep it.”
Al-Thinneas stared at Chaelus, his wonder left unspoken in his eyes. “It’s the Khaalish.”
The cairn stood a shoulder in height. There were others, numbered by the score, scattered across the plain. Bundles of grasses adorned with crimson feathers ordained their summits. The voices upon the wind swirled through and amongst them.
Chaelus closed his eyes as he passed the cairn. He listened to the voices of the dead as they whispered to him, telling him their names, showing him their faces, and all they had taken and all they had lost. Each one of them had been a Servian Knight, until by their own hands their own oath had they broken, ignorant of the buried bones of their ancestors beneath them that had suffered for the same, and so the same before them. And so they remained with them and cursed themselves. Their only solace now came from their keepers, those who tended the cairns and who watched over them.
Al-Aaron gave a sharp gasp. The stones of the cairn before him fell and scattered. He had heard them too. The ghosts had spoken to him. He knew them because he shared in their sin.
Al-Mariam reached out to him but Al-Aaron pulled away.
The opening drops of rain blew across them. Chaelus drew his cowl over his head. “Here is where your Order fell.”
“How can…” Al-Mariam began.
“He’s right,” Al-Aaron said. A tremor held his voice. “It’s here where the Servian Lords and their army first drew blood against the Khaalish hordes. It’s here where our vow, their vow, was first broken. Their whispers on the wind, I can hear them. I can hear them because I’ve done what they did.”
Trumpets carried above the wind, above the rain and the voices of the dead. They were Khaalish horns.
“And now they gather to us,” Al-Hoanar whispered.
“No,” Al-Thinneas countered. “It’s something worse.”
“It is the horns of those who keep this place,” Chaelus said. The call of the Khaalish, at once both the heralds of his past, and the harbingers of his future.
Obidae and his raiding party would be with them by now. Already Chaelus knew that the spirit of the Giver he had passed to Obidae by his touch was already spreading to the other warriors around the Khaalish leader.
Then, several bowshots away, Chaelus saw it, where he had not seen it before, not even from the rise where they had hidden. The ground rose to meet a thin crest of white stone. A solemn tower broke up its length against the stygian shadow of the Karagas Mun. A soft glow illuminated its stones. “It’s beyond the Line that they wait for us.”
Chaelus had never seen the wall before. But he knew its mark on parchment well. A weight fell upon his chest at the sight of it. He pressed away the teeming voices of the dead, but they would not have it. They knew well that they had been heard, and they had waited long enough for it.
The Servian Knights slowed in wonder at the sight of the Line. Despite the nearness of the Garden it was clear that they too, excepting only Al-Thinneas, had never laid their eyes upon it.
Yet they had waited to. And Chaelus, or at least the spirit inside him, knew their need well, as much as he knew the desperate need of the dead to be heard, and to be forgiven.
It was a need that he, or at least the spirit of the Giver was somehow supposed to fill, even if they didn’t know it yet, and he didn’t know yet how. How would he? Why should he? The answer was simple, and it waited for him like the voices of the ghosts around him. He would, because the one who dwelt inside him would. He would, because he had no choice.
Two walls comprised the Line. The first and southern most of them was nothing more than rubble. Made of broken stone and loss, it was all that remained of the wall that the Servian Lords had built as protection from their own.
The happas met a narrow causeway that bridged the wide ditch running before it. The dull glint of bone and war filled the space beneath.
“Shoa Tu Mattea,” Al-Hoanar whispered in his own tongue as he placed his fist to his brow, his lips and his heart.
The sight of the small round tower returned again beyond the ruined gateway. A smaller tower still rose from its center. The wall they protected stood more or less intact with only a part of its battlement lost. Stairs reached down like arms along either side of the lower tower.
Dense scrubs of tangled growth, made of pine and coarser things still, gathered beneath the shelter of the wall.
The solemn stones of the wall bore neither flute nor mark, save for a single repeating band running beneath the crenellation of the battlements. The flowing line of script was unbroken. It was taken from the pages of prophecy and spelled out in the lost language of the Evarun; and, it seemed, of his fate as well.
Mourn the ones who will forget
The Dragon waits within.
Al-Aaron already waited for them at the top of the wall. The shattered merlons framed the weight and despair of the Karagas Mun before them. Beneath them, the twisted body of the river Shinnaras still held the amber light of the setting sun like glass.
To the east, a great cloud of dust plumed against the sky. Beneath it, beyond the river’s opposite shore, were the dark shapes of a hundred score riders, the light glinting red upon their rings of mail, upon the tips of their spears and upon the Circle Imperious that they held high above their heads on standards.
Like the hunters before, the singular malice of the Dragon did not fully possess them. “These aren’t Remnants,” Chaelus said.
“No,” Al-Aaron said. “They’re men.”
“It’s the Khaalish,” Al-Hoanar said. “And they march as a legion, just as the Gorondian legions of old. It is to the Theocracy that they rally their allegiance; to the Theocracy, and to the Dragon as well.”
“Then it seems we’ve found our keepers,” Al-Thinneas said.
Al-Mariam and Al-Hoanar slowed as they reached the top of the stairs, their unease clear.
Al-Mariam watched the seemingly endless ranks of the Khaalish as they passed. She sagged against the battlement’s rise.
“The Khaalish would have taken the path of the Shinnaras at its headwater,” Al-Thinneas said. “Long have they marched deep within the Dragon’s hold.”
Al-Aaron pointed down along the western length of the wall, to where the Karagas Mun crept southward and across the gaping mouth of the Shinnaras. The sun lowered itself behind, painting the sky red as the discourse of the Western Sea rumbled beyond. At the jagged mountains’ ending, on the river’s southern bank, a single white spire rose silhouetted against the setting sun. The lights of hundreds of campfires burned in the darkness of its shadow.
“They go to meet the Dragon,” Al-Aaron said. “Beneath the gates of Magedos.”
“Then it’s an army we will find there,” Al-Hoanar said.
“No,” Chaelus said. The anguish of the dead rippled through him. It mingled with the fear of those around him. “It’s just the beginning of one.”
Chapter Sixteen
Memory and Loss
The campfires stared back at Michalas in the waning twilight. They looked like the eyes of monsters. The trembling chill of the stones where he hid vanished beneath their heated glare.
Hundreds of fires already blazed along the river’s edge. The men who kept them had only just arrived and still more of them came, an unending line of torches leading off to the horizon.
They looked like the fires from the day Ras Dumas had come. Drums and horns had heralded his arrival too, just as it did this army now.
Michalas clenched his eyes. They burned, and they were wet. He wiped at them, surprised. He slumped against the ruins. From somewhere inside him something else seemed strange - a dull and hollow sound echoed like a
trap door closing, or a string that had once bound something very tight breaking free.
From nowhere, he remembered his sister’s screams, coming from beyond the soldiers’ backs.
Michalas felt again the rugged soldier’s grip which dragged him away and held him up before the fearsome leer of Ras Dumas. He felt again the roughness of Ras Dumas’ armored fist tugging his hair back away from his brow. He felt the grip soften as Ras Dumas’ eyes widened.