Forge of Darkness (Kharkanas Trilogy 1)

by Steven Erikson

  Every artist was haunted by lies. Every artist fought to find truths. Every artist failed. Some turned back, embracing those comforting lies. Others took their own lives in despair. Still others drank themselves into the barrow, or poisoned everyone who drew near enough to touch, to wound. Some simply gave up, and wasted away in obscurity. A few discovered their own mediocrity, and this was the cruellest discovery of all. None found their way to the truths.

  If he lived a handful of breaths from this moment, or if he lived a hundred thousand years, he would fight – for something, a truth, that he could not even name. It was, perhaps, the god behind the gods of colour. The god that offered both creation and recognition, that set forth the laws of substance and comprehension, of outside and inside and the difference between the two.

  He wanted to meet that god. He wanted a word or two with that god. He wanted, above all, to look into its eyes, and see in them the truth of madness.

  With brush and desire, I will make a god.

  Watch me.

  But in this moment, as he rode through swords of light and shrouds of shadow, upon the trail of blind savagery, Kadaspala was himself like a man without eyes. The painted face was everywhere. His fingers could not stop painting it, in the air, like mystical conjurations, like evocations of unseen powers, like a warlock’s curse and a witch’s warding against evil. Fingers that could close wounds at a stroke, that could unravel the bound knots of time and make anew a world still thriving with possibilities – that could do all these things, yet tracked on in their small scribings, trapped by a face of death.

  Because the god behind the gods was mad.

  I shall paint the face of darkness. I shall ride the dead down the throat of that damned god. I, Kadaspala, now avow this: world, I am at war with you. Outside – you, outside, hear me! The inside shall be unleashed. Unleashed.

  I shall paint the face of darkness. And give it a dead child’s eyes.

  Because in darkness, we see nothing.

  In darkness, behold, there is peace.

  * * *

  Narad’s fingers brushed the unfamiliar lines of his own face, the places that had twisted or sagged. Haral’s fists had done more than bruise and cut. They had broken nerves. He had looked upon his face reflected in a forest pool, and barely recognized it. The swelling was gone, bones mending as best they could, and most of the vision had returned to his left eye, but now he bore another man’s visage, thickened and pulled down, stretched and dented.

  He had known Haral’s history. He had known that the bastard had lost his family in the wars, and that there was a cauldron of rage bubbling and popping somewhere inside the man. But for all that, Narad had been unable to stop himself, and finally – the day with that highborn runt – all of his verbal jabs and prods had pushed the caravan captain too far. It wasn’t hard to remember the look in Haral’s face, in the instant before he struck, the raw pleasure in the man’s eyes – as though a door had been thrown open and all the fists of his anger could now come flying out.

  There was plenty of anger among the Tiste, swirling and on occasion rising up to drown sorrow, to overwhelm what was needed to just get along. Or maybe it was a force that existed in everyone, like a treasure hoard of every humiliation suffered in a lifetime of broken dreams and disappointments, a treasure hoard, a chest, with a flimsy lock.

  Narad was an ugly man now, and he would think like an ugly man, but one still strong enough to keep sorrow’s head down, beneath the surface, and find satisfaction each and every time he drowned it. He wasn’t interested in a soft world any more, a world where tenderness and warmth were possible, rising like bright flowers from beds of skeletal lichen and sun-burnt moss. He needed to keep reminding himself of all of that.

  He sat listening to the conversations in the camp around him, the words coming from those gathered round the fire, or outside the tents. Jests and complaints about the damp ground, the fire’s wayward but vengeful smoke. And he could hear, in rasping susurration, iron blades sliding on whetstones, as nicks were worked out and blunt edges honed sharp once again. Narad was among soldiers, true soldiers, and their work was hard and unpleasant, and he now counted himself one of them.

  The troop awaited the return of their captain, Scara Bandaris, who along with a half-dozen soldiers had gone on to Kharkanas, to deliver the Jheleck hostages. Left behind by the caravan, still rib-cracked, still face-swollen, still half-blind, Narad had stumbled upon this troop and they had taken him in, cared for him, given him weapons and a horse, and now he rode with them.

  The war against the Deniers had begun, here in this ancient forest. Narad had not known such a war was even threatening; he had never been impressed by the forest people. They were ignorant, most likely inbred, and meek as lambs. They weren’t much of an enemy, and it didn’t seem to be much of a war. The few huts they had come upon yesterday had been what Narad would have expected. One middle-aged man with a bad knee, a woman who called him husband, and the children they’d begotten. The girl who’d been hiding in the hut might have been pretty before the fire, but she was barely human after it, crawling out like she did. The killing had been straightforward. It had been professional. There had been no rapes, no torture. Every death delivered had been delivered quickly. Narad told himself that even necessity could be balanced with mercy.

  The problem was: he was having trouble finding the necessity.

  Corporal Bursa told him that he and his troop had cleaned out most of the Deniers in this section of forest – a day’s walk in any direction. He said it had been easy as there didn’t seem to be too many warriors among them, just the old and mothers and the young. Bursa reminded Narad of Haral, and already he had felt his instinctive response to a man bad at hiding hurts, but this time he kept quiet. He had learned his lesson and he wanted to stay with these men and women, these soldiers of the Legion. He wanted to be one of them.

  He had drawn his sword in the Deniers’ camp, but none of the enemy had come within reach, and almost before he knew it the whole thing was over, and the others were firing the huts.

  Where the girl had hidden was something of a mystery, but the smoke and flames had driven her out, eventually. Narad had been close by – well, the closest of any of them – and when she’d crawled out Bursa had ordered him to put the creature out of its misery.

  He still remembered edging closer, fighting the gusts of heat. She was making no sound. Not once had she even screamed, although her agony must have been terrible. It was right to kill her, to end her torment. He told himself that again and again, as he worked ever closer – until he hunched over her, staring down at her scorched back. Pushing the sword into it had not been as hard as he thought it would be. The thing below him could as easily have been a sow’s carcass, roasted on a spit. Except for all the black hair.

  There was no reason, then, that his killing her should be haunting him. But he was having trouble laughing and joking with the others. He was, in fact, having trouble meeting their eyes. Bursa had tried telling him that these forest folk weren’t even Tiste, but that was untrue. They were – the lame man they’d cut down could have been from Narad’s own family, or a cousin in a nearby village. He felt confused and the confusion wouldn’t go away. If he could get drunk it’d go away, for a time, but that wasn’t allowed in this troop. They drank beer because it was safer than the local water, but it was weak and there wasn’t that much of it and besides, these soldiers weren’t like that. Captain Scara Bandaris wouldn’t allow it; by all accounts, he was hard and ferociously disciplined, and he expected the same of his soldiers.

  Yet these men and women worshipped the captain.

  Narad was jealous of them all. He’d not even met the captain yet, and he wondered what he would see in this Scara Bandaris to make sense of this killing of Deniers, and this whole damned war. Narad had grown up on a farm lying just outside a small hamlet. He knew the reasons everyone gave when hunting vermin – the rats brought disease, the hares ate the crops and riddled the
ground, and so all that slaughter was necessary. He knew that he should think of these Deniers in the same way, as an infestation and a threat to their way of life. Even rats minded their own business, but that didn’t save them; that didn’t stop them from being a problem; that didn’t keep the beaters and their dogs away.

  He sat on a log outside the tent he had been given. Every now and then he would look down at his hands, and then quickly away again.

  It wasn’t murder. It was mercy.

  But he was an ugly man now and the world was just as ugly, and this face wasn’t his and if this face wasn’t his then neither were these hands, and yesterday was someone else’s crime. He wondered if that girl had been beautiful. He believed that she had. But beauty had no place in this new world. This world that Haral had delivered him into. This was Haral’s fault and one day he would kill that bastard.

  He looked up, his eyes catching movement from the trail. A man had appeared, astride a mule.

  Others took note, and Narad saw Bursa approach. The corporal caught Narad’s eye and a hand waved him an invitation. Narad straightened, feeling the weight of his sword at his hip, a weight he had always liked but never quite felt comfortable with, but it was there now and it wasn’t going away. He made his way over to Bursa’s side.

  The stranger had not even paused upon finding the camp, and by his dress Narad could see that he was highborn, although his mount and the stained boxes strapped to it suggested otherwise.

  Bursa, with Narad now on his left, positioned himself directly in the stranger’s path, forcing him to rein in.

  It came to Narad suddenly that the trail this man had come from led straight back to the Deniers’ camp. His eyes narrowed on the stranger’s bland, utterly fearless expression.

  ‘You wander obscure paths, sir,’ said Bursa, hands on his hips.

  ‘You have no idea,’ the stranger replied. ‘Cleaned your blades yet? I see that you have and so must acknowledge your discipline. You wear the livery of Urusander’s Legion, but I suspect he knows not what you do in his name.’

  The challenge of this left Bursa momentarily speechless, and then he laughed. ‘Sir, you are mistaken—’

  ‘Corporal, I have just ridden from Vatha Keep. I have been Lord Urusander’s guest for much of this past month. The only “mistake” here is your assumption of my ignorance. So I ask you, since when does Urusander’s Legion make war upon innocent men, women and children?’

  ‘You have, I fear, been somewhat out of touch,’ Bursa growled in reply, and Narad could see the anger bubbling up, a fizzling froth that this stranger seemed blind to, or indifferent.

  Narad put his hand on the grip of his sword.

  The stranger’s eyes flicked to him then away again, back to Bursa. ‘Out of touch? What you are touching I want nothing to do with, corporal. I am returning to my father’s estate. It is regrettable that you are in my way, but as I have no wish to share your company I will continue on.’

  ‘In a moment,’ Bursa said. ‘I am under orders to make note of travellers in this area—’

  ‘Whose orders? Not Lord Urusander’s. So I ask again, who gives orders to Urusander’s Legion in his name?’

  Bursa’s face was reddening. In a tight voice he said, ‘My orders came by messenger from Captain Hunn Raal not three days past.’

  ‘Hunn Raal? You’re not of his company.’

  ‘No, we are soldiers under the command of Captain Scara Bandaris.’

  ‘And where is he?’

  ‘In Kharkanas. Sir, you ride in ignorance. An uprising is under way.’

  ‘I see that,’ the stranger replied.

  Bursa’s lips thinned into a straight, bloodless line. Then he said, ‘Your name, please, if you wish to pass.’

  ‘I am Kadaspala, son of Lord Jaen of House Enes. I have been painting your commander’s portrait. Shall I tell you how much I see in a man’s face when studying it day after day after day? I see everything. No dissembling evades my eye. No malice, no matter how well hidden, can hide from me. I don’t doubt you are following Hunn Raal’s orders. The next time you see that smirking drunk, give him this message from me. It will not do to imagine that Lord Urusander is now little more than a mere figurehead, to be pushed this way and that. Manipulate Vatha Urusander and he will make you regret it. Now, we have the measure of each other. Let me pass. It’s getting late, and I ride in the company of ghosts. You’ll not wish us to linger.’

  After a long moment, Bursa stepped to one side. Narad did the same, feeling his heart pounding in his chest.

  As the artist edged past them, he turned to Narad and said, ‘I can see the man you once were.’

  Narad stiffened, biting back his shame.

  Kadaspala continued, ‘But all I can see is this. What was inside is now outside. I feel sorry for you, soldier. No one deserves to be that vulnerable.’

  He then rode on, through the camp and the crowd of other soldiers – all of them silent and hooded, as if cowed by this unarmed boy of an artist. A few moments later, he disappeared into the far end of the clearing, where the trail picked up once more.

  ‘Shit,’ Bursa said.

  Narad wanted to ask a question, but seeing the expression on Bursa’s face silenced him. The corporal had paled, looking to where the artist had gone, and in his eyes there was confusion and something like sick dread. ‘Captain told us to sit tight,’ he muttered. ‘But Hunn Raal’s whore said—’ He stopped then and glared across at Narad. ‘That’ll do, soldier. Back to your tent.’

  ‘Yes sir,’ Narad replied.

  Moving quickly, eyes on the log lying in front of his tent, Narad reached up to brush the lines of his broken face, and for the first time, he felt fear at what his fingers found.

  * * *

  Drought had dried the field and the hoofs of horses had driven like mattocks into the soil, tearing up the grasses until nothing was left alive. Master-at-arms Ivis walked from it covered in gritty dust. His leathers were stained, his jerkin sodden under his arms and against his back. Behind him the brown clouds of dust were slow to settle over the clearing and the troop he’d been training had all retired to the trees, desperate for shade and a rest. There wasn’t much talk left in them: Ivis had driven that out. Some were crouched down, heads hanging. Others were sprawled on the grassy verge, forearms covering their eyes. Armour and half-emptied waterskins were scattered about like the aftermath of a battle, or a drunken night of revelry.

  ‘Take what’s left of that water and cool down your horses. Those animals need it more than any of you.’

  At his words, the men and women stirred into motion. Ivis studied them a moment longer and then turned to where the warhorses stood beneath the trees. The only movement that came from them was the swishing of their tails against the swarming flies, and the occasional ripple of their sleek hides. The beasts looked strong, stripped down of all fat. As the Houseblades moved in among them, Ivis felt a spasm of sadness and looked away.

  He didn’t know if animals dreamed. He didn’t know if they knew hope in their hearts, if they longed for things – like freedom. He didn’t know what looked out through their large, soft eyes. Most of all, he didn’t know what teaching them to kill did to them, to their spirits. Habits and deeds could stain a soul – he’d seen enough of that among his own kind. He’d seen broken children become broken men and broken women.

  No doubt scholars and philosophers, puttering in their cosy rooms in Kharkanas, had devised elaborate definitions of all those intangible things that hovered like clouds of stirred-up dust above hard and battered ground – things nobody could really grasp or hold on to. Ideas about the soul, the hidden essence that knew itself, but knew itself incompletely, and so was doomed to ever question, to ever yearn. No doubt they had arguments and defences, built up into impressive structures that were more monuments to their own brilliance than stolid fortifications.

  He remembered something his grandfather used to say. ‘The man patrolling his prejudices never sleeps.’ As
a boy, Ivis had not quite understood what Ivelis had meant by that. But he thought he understood now. No matter. The philosophers dug deep moats around their definitions of things like the soul; moats that no animal could breach, since animals spoke the wrong language and so could never argue their way across. Still, when Ivis looked into a horse’s eyes, or a dog’s, or a felled deer’s in the last moments when the beast shudders and blinks with eyes filled with pain and terror, he saw the refutation of every philosopher’s argument.

  Life did more than flicker. It burned with fire. He knew it to be a fire for the simple reason that eventually it burned itself out. It ate up all the fuel it possessed, and dimmed and waned, and then was gone.

  But were life and soul one and the same? Why the division at all?

  Anyone could draw circles in the dust, but in the greater scheme of things, it made for a pathetic moat.

  His Houseblades had pushed away their weariness and were attending to their mounts. Saddles were pulled off, brushes drawn. Hands stroked down the length of muscles, felt along tendons and brushed bones under stretched hide. The animals stood motionless: Ivis never knew if they but tolerated the attention, or were comforted by it. He’d seen mischief in animals, but none of them could smile. And always, their eyes were but wells of mystery.

  Corporal Yalad moved up alongside him. ‘Sir, they wheeled with precision, didn’t they? Never seen anything so perfect.’

  Ivis grunted. ‘You want compliments, corporal? Maybe even a kiss? Go find that maid you keep rocking up the wall back of the stables. I’m the wrong man to make you feel good, and if I wanted a conversation I’d find someone with more than half a brain.’

  Yalad backed a step. ‘Apologies, sir.’

  The captain knew that his foul mood was the subject of plenty of barracks talk. If no one knew the cause of it, all the better as far as Ivis was concerned. It just made them work harder trying to please him, or at least avoid a dressing down. If they knew, they’d think him mad.