The Avowed stood nearby, his squad mage, Corlo, at his side. They were studying the distant fire and speaking in low tones.
Somewhere south and east of Dresh, half a day from the coast. She could not imagine the Tiste Edur invaders were anywhere near, yet the roads had been full of refugees, all heading east to Letheras. She had seen more than a few deserters among the crowds, and here and there bodies lay in ditches, victims of robbery or murdered after being raped.
Rape, it seemed, had become a favoured pastime among the thugs preying on the fleeing citizens. Seren knew that, had she been travelling alone, she would probably be dead by now. In some ways, that would have been a relief. An end to this sullied misery, this agonizing feeling of being unclean. In her mind, she saw again and again Iron Bars killing those men. His desire to exact appropriate vengeance. And her voice, croaking out, stopping him in the name of mercy.
Errant knew, she regretted that now. Better had she let him work on that bastard. Better still were they still carrying him with them. Eyes gouged out, nose cut off, tongue carved from his mouth. And with this knife in her hand she could slice strips of skin from his flesh. She had heard a story once, of a factor in a small remote hamlet who had made a habit of raping young girls, until the women one night ambushed him. Beaten and trussed, then a loincloth filled with spike-thorns had been tied on like a diaper, tightly, and the man was bound to the back of his horse. The pricking thorns drove the animal into a frenzy. The beast eventually scraped the man loose on a forest path, but he had bled out by then. The story went that the man’s face, in death, had held all the pain a mortal could suffer, and as for what had been found between his legs…
She sawed off the last length of greasy hair and dropped it on the fire. The stench was fierce, but there were bush warlocks and decrepit shamans who, if they happened upon human hair, would make dire use of it. It was a sad truth that, given the chance to bind a soul, few resisted the temptation.
Corlo called to the soldiers and suddenly they were running hard down the hillside towards the farm, leaving behind only Seren and Iron Bars. The Crimson Guardsman strode towards her. ‘You hear it, lass?’
‘What?’
‘Horses. In the stable. The fire’s jumped to its roof. The farmer’s left his horses behind.’
‘He wouldn’t do that.’
He squinted down at her, then crouched until he was at eye level. ‘No, likely the owner’s dead. Strange, how most locals around here don’t know how to ride.’
She looked down at the farm once again. ‘Probably a breeder for the army. The whole notion of cavalry came from Bluerose—as did most of the stock. Horses weren’t part of our culture before then. Have you ever seen Letherii cavalry on parade? Chaos. Even after, what, sixty years? And dozens of Bluerose officers trying to train our soldiers.’
‘You should have imported these Bluerose horse-warriors over as auxiliaries. If it’s their skill, exploit it. You can’t borrow someone else’s way of life.’
‘Maybe not. Presumably, you can ride, then.’
‘Aye. And you?’
She nodded, sheathing the knife and rising. ‘Trained by one of those Bluerose officers I mentioned.’
‘You were in the army before?’
‘No, he was my lover. For a time.’
Iron Bars straightened as well. ‘Look—they’ve reached them in time. Come on.’
She hesitated. ‘I forgot to thank you, Iron Bars.’
‘You wouldn’t have been as pretty drowned.’
‘No. I’m not ready yet to thank you for that. What you did to those men…’
‘I’ve a great-granddaughter back in Gris, D’Avore Valley. She’d be about your age now. Let’s go, lass.’
She walked behind him down the slope. Great-granddaughter. What an absurd notion. He wasn’t that old. These Avowed had strange senses of humour.
Corlo and the squad had pulled a dozen horses from the burning stable, along with tack and bridles. One of the soldiers was cursing as Seren and Iron Bars approached.
‘Look at these stirrups! No wonder the bastards can’t ride the damned things!’
‘You set your foot down in the crotch of the hook,’ Seren explained.
‘And what happens if it slips out?’ the man demanded.
‘You fall off.’
‘Avowed, we need to rework these things—some heavy leather—’
‘Cut up a spare saddle,’ Iron Bars said, ‘and see what you can manage. But I want us to be riding before sunset.’
‘Aye, sir.’
‘A more stable stirrup,’ the Avowed said to Seren, ‘is a kind of half-boot, something you can slide your foot into, with a straight cross-bar to take your weight. I agree with Halfpeck. These Bluerose horse-warriors missed something obvious and essential. They couldn’t have been very good riders…’
Seren frowned. ‘My lover once mentioned how these saddles were made exclusively for Lether. He said they used a slightly different kind back in Bluerose.’
His eyes narrowed on her, and he barked a laugh, but made no further comment.
She sighed. ‘No wonder our cavalry is next to useless. I always found it hard to keep my feet in, and to keep them from turning this way and that.’
‘You mean they swivel?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘I’d like to meet these Bluerose riders some day.’
‘They are a strange people, Iron Bars. They worship someone called the Black-winged Lord.’
‘And they resemble Letherii?’
‘No, they are taller. Very dark skins.’
He regarded her for a moment, then asked, ‘Faces like the Tiste Edur?’
‘No, much finer-boned.’
‘Long-lived?’
‘Not that I’m aware of, but to be honest, I don’t really know. Few Letherii do, nor do they much care. The Blueroses were defeated. Subjugated. There were never very many of them, in any case, and they preferred isolation. Small cities, from what I’ve heard. Gloomy.’
‘What ended your affair?’
‘Just that, I suppose. He rarely saw any good in anything. I wearied of his scepticism, his cynicism, the way he acted—as if he’d seen it all before a thousand times…’
The stable was engulfed in flames by now, and they were all forced away by the fierce heat. In the nearby pasture they retreated to, they found a half-dozen corpses, the breeder and his family. They’d known little mercy in the last few bells of their lives. None of the soldiers who examined them said a word, but their expressions hardened.
Iron Bars made a point of keeping Seren away whilst three men from the squad buried the bodies. ‘We’ve found a trail,’ he said. ‘If you don’t mind, lass, we want to follow it. For a word with the ones who killed that family.’
‘Show me the tracks,’ she said.
He gestured and Corlo led her to the edge of a stand of trees on the southeast end of the clearing. Seren studied the array of footprints entering the woodcutters’ path. ‘There’s twenty or more of them,’ she pronounced after a moment.
The mage nodded. ‘Deserters. In armour.’
‘Yes, or burdened with loot.’
‘Likely both.’
She turned to regard the man. ‘You Crimson Guardsmen—you’re pretty sure of yourselves, aren’t you?’
‘When it comes to fighting, aye, lass, we are.’
‘I watched Iron Bars fight in Trate. He’s an exception, I gather—’
‘Aye, he is, but not among the Avowed. Jup Alat would’ve given him trouble. Or Poll, for that matter. Then there’s those in the other companies. Halfdan, Blues, Black the Elder…’
‘More of these Avowed?’
‘Aye.’
‘And what does it mean? To be an Avowed?’
‘Means they swore to return their prince to his lands. He was driven out, you see, by the cursed Emperor Kellanved. Anyway, it ain’t happened yet. But it will, someday, maybe soon.’
‘And that was the vow? Al
l right. It seems this prince had some able soldiers with him.’
‘Oh indeed, lass, especially when the vow’s kept them alive all this time.’
‘What do you mean?’
The mage looked suddenly nervous. ‘I’m saying too much. Never mind me, lass. Anyway, you’ve seen the trail the bastards left behind. They made no effort to hide, meaning they’re cocksure themselves, aren’t they?’ He smiled, but there was no humour in it. ‘We’ll catch up, and then we’ll show them what real cavalry can do. Riding horses with stirrups, I mean—we don’t often fight from the saddle, but we ain’t new to it either.’
‘Well, I admit, you’ve got me curious.’
‘Just curious, lass? No hunger for vengeance?’
She looked away. ‘I want to look around,’ she said. ‘Alone, if you don’t mind.’
The mage shrugged. ‘Don’t wander too far. The Avowed’s taken to you, I think.’
That’s…unfortunate. ‘I won’t.’
Seren headed into the wood. There had been decades of thinning, leaving plenty of stumps and open spaces between trees. She listened to Corlo walking away, back to the clearing. As soon as silence enveloped her, she suddenly regretted the solitude. Desires surged, none of them healthy, none of them pleasant. She would never again feel clean, and this truth pushed her thoughts in the opposite direction, as if a part of her sought to foul her flesh yet further, as far as it could go. Why not? Lost in the darkness as she was, it was nothing to stain her soul black, through and through.
Alone, now frightened—of herself, of the urges within her—she walked on, unmindful of direction. Deeper into the wood, where the stumps were fewer and soft with rot, the deadfall thicker. The afternoon light barely reached through here.
Hurt was nothing. Was meaningless. But no, there was value in pain, if only to remind oneself that one still lived. When nothing normal could be regained, ever, then other pleasures had to be found. Cultivated, the body and mind taught anew, to delight in a darker strain.
A clearing ahead, in which reared figures.
She halted.
Motionless, half sunk into the ground, tilting this way and that in the high grasses. Statues. This had been Tarthenal land, she recalled. Before the Letherii arrived to crush the tribes. The name ‘Dresh’ was Tarthenal, in fact, as were the nearby village names of Denner, Lan and Brous.
Seren approached, came to the edge of the clearing.
Five statues in all, vaguely man-shaped but so weathered as to be featureless, with but the slightest indentations marking the pits of their eyes carved into the granite. They were all buried to their waists, suggesting that, when entirely above ground, they stood as tall as the Tarthenal themselves. Some kind of pantheon, she supposed, names and faces worn away by the tens of centuries that had passed since this glade had last known worshippers.
The Letherii had nearly wiped the Tarthenal out back then. As close to absolute genocide as they had ever come in their many conquests. She recalled a line from an early history written by a witness of that war. ‘They fought in defence of their holy sites with expressions of terror, as if in failing something vast and terrible would be unleashed…’ Seren looked around. The only thing vast and terrible in this place was the pathos of its abandonment.
Such dark moments in Letherii history were systematically disregarded, she knew, and played virtually no role in their culture’s vision of itself as bringers of progress, deliverers of freedom from the fetters of primitive ways of living, the cruel traditions and vicious rituals. Liberators, then, destined to wrest from savage tyrants their repressed victims, in the name of civilization. That the Letherii then imposed their own rules of oppression was rarely acknowledged. There was, after all, but one road to success and fulfilment, gold-cobbled and maintained by Letherii toll-collectors, and only the free could walk it.
Free to profit from the same game. Free to discover one’s own inherent disadvantages. Free to be abused. Free to be exploited. Free to be owned in lieu of debt. Free to be raped.
And to know misery. It was a natural truth that some walked that road faster than others. There would always be those who could only crawl. Or fell to the wayside. The most basic laws of existence, after all, were always harsh.
The statues before her were indifferent to all of that. Their worshippers had died defending them, and all for nothing. Memory was not loyal to the past, only to the exigencies of the present. She wondered if the Tiste Edur saw the world the same way. How much of their own past had they selectively forgotten, how many unpleasant truths had they twisted into self-appeasing lies? Did they suffer from the same flaw, this need to revise history to answer some deep-seated diffidence, a hollowness at the core that echoed with miserable uncertainty? Was this entire drive for progress nothing more than a hopeless search for some kind of fulfilment, as if on some instinctive level there was a murky understanding, a recognition that the game had no value, and so victory was meaningless?
Such understanding would have to be murky, for clarity was hard, and the Letherii disliked things that were hard, and so rarely chose to think in that direction. Baser emotions were the preferred response, and complex arguments were viewed with anger and suspicion.
She laid a hand upon the shoulder of the nearest statue, and was surprised to discover the stone warm to her touch. Retaining the sun’s heat, perhaps. But no, it was too hot for that. Seren pulled her hand away—any longer and she would have burned her skin.
Unease rose within her. Suddenly chilled, she stepped back. And now saw the dead grass surrounding each statue, desiccated by incessant heat.
It seemed the Tarthenal gods were not dead after all.
Sometimes the past rises once again to reveal the lies. Lies that persisted through nothing more than force of will, and collective opinion. Sometimes that revelation comes drenched in fresh blood. Delusions invited their own shattering. Letherii pre-eminence. Tiste Edur arrogance. The sanctity of my own flesh.
A sound behind her. She turned.
Iron Bars stood at the edge of the clearing. ‘Corlo said there was something…restless…in this wood.’
She sighed. ‘Better were it only me.’
He cocked his head, smiled wryly.
She approached. ‘Tarthenal. I thought I knew this land. Every trail, the old barrow grounds and holy sites. It is a responsibility of an Acquitor, after all.’
‘We hope to make use of that knowledge,’ the Avowed said. ‘I don’t want no fanfare when we enter Letheras.’
‘Agreed. Even among a crowd of refugees, we would stand out. You might consider finding clothing that looks less like a uniform.’
‘I doubt it’d matter, lass. Either way, we’d be seen as deserters and flung into the ranks of defenders. This ain’t our war and we’d rather have nothing to do with it. The question is, can you get us into Letheras unseen?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. The lads are almost ready with the new stirrups.’
She glanced back at the statues.
‘Makes you wonder, don’t it, lass?’
‘About what?’
‘The way old anger never goes away.’
Seren faced him again. ‘Anger. That’s something you’re intimately familiar with, I gather.’
A frown. ‘Corlo talks too much.’
‘If you wanted to get your prince’s land back, what are you doing here? I’ve never heard of this Emperor Kellanved, so his empire must be far away.’
‘Oh, it’s that, all right. Come on, it’s time to go.’
‘Sorry,’ she said as she followed him back into the forest. ‘I was prying.’
‘Aye, you were.’
‘Well. In return, you can ask me what you like.’
‘And you’ll answer?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You don’t seem the type to end up as you did in Trate. So the merchant you were working for killed himself. Was he your lover or something?’
‘No, and you’re tight, I’m not
. It wasn’t just Buruk the Pale, though I should have seen it coming—he as much as told me a dozen times on our way back. I just wasn’t willing to hear, I suppose. The Tiste Edur emperor has a Letherii adviser—’
‘Hull Beddict.’
‘Yes.’
‘You knew him?’
She nodded.
‘And now you’re feeling betrayed? Not only as a Letherii, but personally too. Well, that’s hard, all right—’
‘But there you are wrong, Iron Bars. I don’t feel betrayed, and that’s the problem. I understand him all too well, his decision—I understand it.’
‘Wish you were with him?’
‘No. I saw Rhulad Sengar—the emperor—I saw him come back to life. Had it been Hannan Mosag, the Warlock King…well, I might well have thrown in my lot with them. But not the emperor…’
‘He came back to life? What do you mean by that?’
‘He was dead. Very dead. Killed when collecting a sword for Hannan Mosag—a cursed sword of some kind. They couldn’t get it out of his hands.’
‘Why didn’t they just cut his hands off?’
‘It was coming to that, I suspect, but then he returned.’
‘A nice trick. Wonder if he’ll be as lucky the next time.’
They reached the edge of the wood and saw the others seated on the horses and waiting. At the Avowed’s comment, Seren managed a smile. ‘From the rumours, I’d say yes, he was.’
‘He was killed again?’
‘Yes, Iron Bars. In Trate. Some soldier who wasn’t even from Lether. Just stepped up to him and broke his neck. Didn’t even stay around to carve the gold coins from his body…’
‘Hood’s breath,’ he muttered as they strode towards the others. ‘Don’t tell the others.’
‘Why?’
‘I got a reputation of making bad enemies, that’s why.’
Eleven Tarthenal lived within a day’s walk from the glade and its statues. Old Hunch Arbat had been chosen long ago for the task to which he sullenly attended, each month making the rounds with his two-wheeled cart, from one family to the next. Not one of the farms where the Tarthenal lived in Indebted servitude to a land-owner in Dresh was exclusively of the blood. Mixed-breed children scampered out to greet Old Hunch Arbat, flinging rotten fruit at his back as he made his way to the slop pit with his shovel, laughing and shouting their derision as he flung sodden lumps of faeces into the back of the cart.
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