by Sean Rodden
The Lady sighed, a long slow susurrus sourced deep within her soul. Paid in pain, our Seer is. Such cold coin. The emolument of her labours. She peered up at the flat stone faces of her heroines. Of her labours, and my own. And six pairs of petrous eyes seemed to look everywhere but back at her. Such very cold coin.
“I assume that you intend to await the Harbinger and his escort here, Shield Maiden?”
But Caelle shook her head.
“I would not be so far removed from you, Lady. I will ride with the rearguard. I am sure our wayward friends will catch up soon enough.”
Cerriste lowered her eyes. “Very well, cousin.” And with no further word the Lady of the Fiannar turned and rode away.
The Shield Maiden watched her go. She did not fail to mark the slight slope to the Lady’s shoulders, the marginal stoop in her posture; even the mist of Cerriste’s breath seemed overly pale and ephemeral.
Caelle glared up at stone indifference of the Grey Ladies.
“Whatever you said to her,” she hissed menacingly, “take it back.”
The Hard Hills were not, in fact, hills at all. They were mountains. Very old mountains. And of a time, long, long ago, when the world was young, they had been the floor of an ocean. The waters had ultimately withdrawn, and an angry volatile earth had thrust its lithosphere upward and outward, forming a range of smaller bone-white mountains at the northern knee of darksome Ora Undar. Then, like a child’s city of mud castles left overlong beneath a burning sun, the pale dolomitic formation had cracked, and then cracked some more, innumerable fractures forming over the eons and spreading in all directions throughout the structure. And then the glaciers had come, filling the fissures, widening them, pressing, pushing, pulling them apart. The entire range became a limestone labyrinth of crevices and crevasses, of clefts and cliffs and narrow canyons, the sheer walls of which could soar half a mile high.
Vallian, Second Lord of the Fiannar, had named the shattered massifs of white rock the Stone Maze. Ardh Yllus, in the Old Tongue. The etymological leap to the Hard Hills was not an exceptionally long one.
The four riders whispered their mounts to a halt before the jagged fissure of the First Cut. Above and to their left, the Grey Ladies peered into the distance, granite gazes straining westward, perhaps into the delusive mists of a generously glorified past, perhaps at a future far too bleak even for eyes of stone. Behind the company, the many cookfires of the Fiannian encampment had all been extinguished, leaving naught but black char and white ash; nary a sinuous wisp of slithering smoke snaked into the morning gloom, and the improvised stone hearths had grown cold.
“They have gone, likely with the dawn,” observed the young Heir to the House of Eccuron. He slid from his saddle, and something snapped underfoot as he alighted. He stooped to retrieve a shiny object from the ground, turned it over upon his palm. A small silver brooch in the shape of a flaming sword. The blade was broken, remaining attached by but the slimmest of silver slivers. “If the Lady heard the cautionary counsel of Galledine,” he muttered beneath a furrowing frown, “she did not heed it.”
“Or she heard and heeded,” offered Zalkan, the Swordlord of the Dragon Emperor, his pale breath sifting through the silk of his scarf like mist through mesh, “and we have yet to comprehend her answer.”
“Possibly,” said Arumarron, pocketing the pin. “Possibly not.”
And away he strode into a tumble of moss-skinned talus.
“Aru!” called Tielle, breaking from the grasp of her brother’s arms about her waist and fairly leaping from her mirarran. “Where are you going? What are you planning? I’m coming with you.”
The Heir did not slow, but glanced back over his shoulder, his tawny mane only partially obscuring a peculiar glint in his eye.
“I go to heed an altogether different call of nature, Heiress,” he drawled, his lips twisting about a flash of white teeth, “but do as you will – come if you must.”
Tielle skittered to a sudden stop.
“Ahhh… no… I’m good.” She raised one hand, waving awkwardly. “Quite… yes… good. I’m good.”
Still aback the tall mirarran, little Chadh lowered his face, shook his head.
“Smooth, Tee-tee. Smooth as glass.” A succinct pause. “Broken, smashed, absolutely shattered glass, but glass nevertheless.”
The Heiress turned and glared. “Careful, brother. It’s a long walk to Allaura.”
“Says the girl who’s not actually on a horse at the moment.” The boy frowned down at his mount. “Though horses do make me uncomfortable.”
Tielle genuinely growled.
“You are quite smitten, no?” Zalkan’s words were low and conspiratorial, slightly muffled by his face-wrapping, but neither discretion nor black silk could quite conceal the smile in his voice. “Ah, to be young and in love again. You gladden me so, young Tielle of the House of Mirmaddon.”
The Heiress folded her arms across her chest.
“I am most certainly not smitten, Master Harbinger,” she protested emphatically. “I’m annoyed.”
Bright eyes glinted in the slitted silk. “The one oft follows the other, Heiress.”
Tielle’s face flushed. Her mouth opened, shut, opened once more. She seemed finally ready to retort when –
You won’t win, Tee, Chadh’s voice intervened in her head. Don’t even try.
The Heiress hesitated, clapped her lips closed, stomped away.
The boy watched her go, waited, then turned to the Harbinger.
“Smitten? Really? You haven’t spent a lot of time with teenaged girls over the last three thousand years, have you?”
“I am not a hoary old hebephile from one of Jorjararem’s sordid stories,” Zalkan replied, mist sifting through his scarf like a snicker. “But admittedly, that did not go well. I only meant to…” His voice drifted into an intense silence, and he sat completely still upon the back of the mor-marran, staring fixedly into the crepuscular crevice of the First Cut. A sense of unease, of agitation, emanated from him; his body was as rigid as a rod of black steel, the soul within atwitch and anxious.
Chadh followed the Swordlord’s gaze, blinked languidly at the moss-skinned stone, then looked upon the man on the mor-marran again.
“You feel drawn, don’t you?” the boy asked. “Compelled, even.”
Zalkan nodded stiffly. “I do.”
“They won’t admit it, but Tee-tee and the big fellow are really tired. We should rest here. But if we do that, you won’t wait for us, will you, Master Harbinger?”
An equally stiff shake of the head. “No.”
“Because you’re compelled to go” – Chadh pointed to the First Cut – “in there.”
“Yes.”
“But you would prefer to remain here, with us.”
A short pause for thought. “Yes, I believe I would. However, I cannot.”
“Do you know what compels you?”
“I have a fairly good idea.”
“As do I. A curse, I gather. An everlasting doom. To forever be drawn to disasters, but to always arrive too late or be able to do too little to prevent them.”
Eyeshine and breathmist. “A fair summation.”
“Well, if you know what you’re doing, and it isn’t working,” said Chadh with the sureness and the black-and-white logic of a child yet in possession of true innocence, “just stop doing it.”
A sad silken smile. “If only it was that simple, tamashi shifuta. Even sane men can be constrained to repeat their mistakes, no?”
The boy blinked; a slow, languorous falling and rising of thin flesh shutters that seemed to tardigrade time and hone the edges of awareness.
“But it is that simple, Master Harbinger.”
Zalkan turned in his saddle, away from the First Cut, his sharp silvery eyes narrowing from slits to slivers. The Swordlord knew that the boy was more than that which was apparent, more than others perceived, more than … just… more. And in that moreness was a wisdom surpassing mortal constrictio
ns, and from that wisdom the boy’s words had come – and in those words was a certainty more assured, more ardent than mere belief, more real than any zealous conviction formed of faith.
More.
“Perhaps I am too complex a man to see the simplicity. You will enlighten me, no?”
Chadh smiled a little boy’s smile, guileless and endearing.
“Ignore the call, Master Harbinger. No fate is inevitable. Even the smallest change can influence an entire chain of events and radically alter its outcome. Don’t follow this compulsion – at least not now, not right away. Wait with us here. Refuse the curse.”
Zalkan lowered his head. “I… cannot.”
“Yes, you can.”
“You do not understand.”
“But I do understand. I understand many things: I understand that you are the last of the ancient saburau; I understand that the word of a sabura is sacrosanct, inviolable, as holy and as binding as any covenant made by Man; I understand an oath made by a sabura cannot be unmade, even by the maker, and that the world contains no power that might compel him to dishonour this oath; and I understand that there is no curse that can break the bond of a Turian Swordlord.”
But the man in black shook his head. “You… misunderstand, shifuta. The saburau swear no oaths, make no promises. When a sabura means yes, he will say yes. When a sabura means no, he will say no. Anything beyond this is invitation to perfidy and failure.”
“Then tell me you will remain here with us, at least until we decide to leave. Tell me you will do that, and this curse will not have its way, not this morning, not this day. And in doing so, whatever tragedy awaits us in there” – he waved one little hand at the crooked fissure in the stone – “might be averted.”
The silk that covered Zalkan’s mouth moved as though something writhed there, strived there, struggling, wanting out, but no words issued forth.
The boy glanced to his left to see Arumarron returning, the huge youth doing his utmost not to appear weary and overworn. Chadh then looked lakeward, saw Tielle also walking back to them, her gait become more of an irritated stamp than an angry stomp. He turned his strange gaze back upon the weapons master.
“Let me put it another way, Master Harbinger,” he said quietly, so very quietly. “I ask you, will you remain here with us? Will you remain and continue on with us, at least until we catch up with the rest of my people?”
Zalkan closed his eyes, heard the thudding of his three-thousand-year-old heart, and deep within his soul he sighed. Hooves clattered against rock as the mor-marran turned away from the First Cut. The man aback the beast bowed low. Mist streamed from his silken scarf like cold white fire.
But it is that simple, Master Harbinger.
“Yes. Yes, I will.”
Mundar led a forecompany of the Green Watch down a deep defile sliced by the ages into the limestone of the Hard Hills. Tumbled talus and shattered scarp littered the declining floor of the crevasse, and the walls were sheer and close upon either side. Hundreds of feet above, barely distinguishable from the rock, a narrow line of gloomy sky signified the upper limit of the fissure. Had he looked upward, Mundar may have seen the grey-white adumbration of an encroaching sun limn the lip of the western wall. But the Darad did not look up. Even that affable Warder of the Wandering Guard preferred ceilings of stone to a remote and empty empyrean.
“What do they call you?” asked the young woman at Mundar’s back.
The Darad grunted, a sound like a laugh.
“You haven’t yet learned my name, Fiann? I am Mun – ”
“I know your name, Stone Lord. I ask what your folk call you. The Lord of Doomfall is the Mighty One. Dulgar is the Wild One. And I have heard the commander of your Fifth Army is called the Golden One. I therefore wonder, what ‘One’ are you?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“Try me.”
Quietly, “I am known as the Friendly One.”
“The Friendly One.” A quick silence. “How terrifying.”
“Careful, Fiann. Don’t test the truth of it. It wouldn’t do to aggravate even the most pleasant of my people unnecessarily.”
A longer silence, made loud with soundless mirth. Then –
“We should find a suitable place to rest soon, Friendly One.”
The Darad made a strangled noise, something between a growl and a chuckle.
“You are bold, Fiann, I will give you that. But boldness doesn’t make one stout and sturdy. Have the long days and longer nights left you winded?”
“Hardly,” sniffed the Watcher. “However, the children will be hungry and the mirarra are not mountain goats – and it would not do to aggravate either unnecessarily.”
Mundar shook his head in rare surrender as he climbed. I think she just called me a child or a horse… or maybe a goat. His back and beard efficaciously concealed a munificent grin.
Behind and below him, the Fiann kept her face to the stone. And if she smiled, there were none there to see it.
The Stone Lord halted atop an enormous boulder that had been wedged firmly between the walls of the crevasse. The curve left his lips. He folded his massive arms across his chest, blond beard abristle, night-black eyes staring out from beneath bunched brows.
“Soon, Fiann, soon,” he muttered. “The White Warren lies directly before us. In fact, I’m looking right at it. We will cross it first, rest after.”
With one, two, three long limber strides, a young red-tressed warrior was atop the moss-crowned boulder, her naked sword in her able hand and glinting in the shadows. Mundar could feel the Fiann’s own frown at his shoulder.
“What – ”
“If you ask ‘What place is this?’, I’ll be forced to spank you, woman,” the Darad deadpanned. “And not in the fun way.”
Before it could fully bloom, Watcher Chelyse plucked the flower of a smile from her lovely face.
“As I was about to inquire, what reason for the name, Stone Lord? No, not the Friendly One – that reason is obvious enough. I refer to the name for this place. For I hear ‘White Warren’, but all I see is solid stone and the sundry shades of grey.”
Before them, the cleft in the rock broadened into a gorge about three hundred yards long and half that across. Here and there little waterfalls slid down the encircling stone cliffs like cold tears upon bloodless cheeks, trickling, trailing into natural troughs worn into the rock at the feet of the walls. A pall was upon the place, a pervasive gloom, like the everdark of a long-forgotten undercroft, or of a tomb never warmed, never touched by torchlight.
Mundar did look up then, saw the marginally wider gash of greyish sky, noted the slight lightening of the shadow upon the rim of the western ridge. And, rather cryptically, he said again –
“Soon, Fiann, soon.”
The Darad leapt from the boulder, dropping a dozen feet to a stone ledge, another six feet left and down upon a jutting spur of rock, before landing in a crouch on the floor of the gorge a further fifteen feet below. A moment later, Chelyse of the Green Watch alighted nimbly at his side, her scarlet locks lashing about her fair oval face like whips of fire. Mundar gave the grave girl-woman a glance and a grin, but expected and received neither in return. And together the two very different warriors walked into the stony void of the White Warren.
After a few strides, the Warder grumbled surlily, released his twin war-axes from their bindings, took the hafts in his huge hands.
“You feel it too, Stone Lord? The air here is stained. It lodges in the lungs like paste. It stinks of nothing and tastes of old death.”
Mundar grunted. “You have the tongue for poetry, Fiann.”
“Nothing grows here, save moss and lichen, and algae where the rock weeps. There is no soil, just stone and dust, and memories of ice.”
The Warder spun the axes in his hands as he walked. “The Daradur don’t have much use for poets,” he grinned, “but you’re pretty enough.”
Chelyse said nothing.
Grin warped int
o grimace. “I meant your words are pretty enough, Fiann.”
“That is how I received it, Stone Lord.”
Mundar quickened his pace, fighting against the improbable redness that warmed the weathered skin above his whiskers. “At least they sound pretty to me – but what does a Darad know about poetry and pretty things?”
“What indeed, Stone Lord,” Chelyse sighed quietly.
The Darad merely grunted once more, left it at that. Safer that way.
As they moved forward, the Fiann detected several shadows on the walls, patches and lines and slices of pastel darkness that may or may not have been actual lacerations in the limestone. The little snakes of a slow shiver slid under her armour and over her skin, and she lowered her left hand, her long slender fingers splaying once, twice, three times.
Behind her, warders of the Green Watch fanned out over the stone floor of the Warren. Women, for the greater part, a few young men just shy of their twenty-first sun. They moved like wraiths, gliding over the stone, alert and furtive, cautiously inspecting every fissure and hollow and deeper shadow wrought low into the cliff walls. Riderless mirarra followed them, ears perked and pivoting back and forth, the quicksilver of their manes struck soft by stone-shade, the shine in their eyes dimmed in the pale gloom of the place. There was a cold silence to the stealthy movements of the Deathward warders and their agile steeds that whispered of apprehension, of taut anxiety, and the troublingly ironic expectation of unexpected things.
Mundar halted at the heart of the White Warren. He turned in a slow circle, his onyx orbs probing, searching the stone on all sides, his axes spinning in his strong hands as though of their own volition. Whisks of stone-snared wind issued from a dozen different crevasses and in as many directions; the close moaning breath of the White Warren, chill and damp at one moment, tepid and dry the next. The Darad felt a gust ruffle his thick hair and beard, tugging his attention toward a specific rip in the rock.
“Yes. There, Stone Lord,” Chelyse agreed quietly. She gestured for a few Fiannar to inspect the opening. “I feel it, too.”