by C F Welburn
“Your vote of confidence is endearing,” Balagir muttered. “Besides,” he continued when it was clear no inkling of apology was forthcoming, “all of this will be redundant if the askaba succeed. We’ve thwarted them, inconvenienced them, perhaps even unsettled them. But we haven’t stopped them. If anything, we’ve given them more cause to destroy us. If these children are their doing, then they have no qualms in attacking us at our one place of refuge. There is no longer any sanctuary.”
With these words, an unspoken sense of urgency took hold, and for a time they marched on in silence, with only the wind for company.
The fire was lost from sight and they had descended some distance before the winds made themselves more prominent. At first it was a standard howling, with a whip and whistle when it licked the lips of the furrow with its flail tongue. It made conversation more taxing, but not overly so, and Balagir was generally content, as long as it did not exacerbate. And it didn’t. Not obviously, that is. Not suddenly. This wind worked subtly, weaving itself into thoughts, creating the soundtrack of this desolate place.
The first time he heard his name, he stopped and turned. Fry looked at him nervously, but they continued without pause. It took several more incidents to realise that this was no coincidence; somewhere in this wind were voices, and one of them knew his name.
He shivered as it brushed his neck, cool breath—a wraith’s respiration—ruffling his beard, buffering his cape. The others walked in equally isolated worlds. He knew not whether they heard their own names, or if the bleakness and haunting howls had subdued them. Either way, he decided not to mention it. Poor Fry looked ready to bolt, and any fanning of the flames could tip him over the edge. That would bring the company back to its fabled number, though he would much prefer it were the black-eyed ashen in front of him who fled.
He began thinking of Finster then, and because of the voices which disturbed him, because of the wind that would hide his words from all but the nearest, he stepped into line.
“I’ll not apologise for what I did,” he stated candidly. Finster seemed not to hear him at first, or perhaps thought it just another voice on the wind. At last he turned.
“Nor will I.”
“If she was dear to you, you have only yourself to blame for putting her in danger. You expect me to die for your cursed love? Solve your own problems.” Finster grinned, a cold, humourless slit.
“Ha. I’m glad you’ve carried that guilt. I hope it gave you some unease.” He paused then, as if deciding whether or not to disclose something. In the end, he did. “She was never my love, you should know. Just a good deal we had going.”
“The ring?”
“I thought you’d have figured it out by now,” he said, shaking his head almost disappointedly. “She needed food—by food I don’t think I need to elaborate—I needed smoke. If her cottage had not been so far off the beaten track, she would not have needed me. As it was, I was pleased to help.”
“So, you sent ashen there to be killed.”
“They had a chance to defend themselves. Any oath carries such risks. Also, as you will know, it was not such an unpleasant end. How many nights did you share her bed? How many evenings did you drink wine and taste flesh?”
“She was a corpse, Finster. A succubus. I do not look back on it with fond memories.”
“Either way, she ate, lascivious ashen sated themselves, and I got smoke. You know how much that ring made me? Now it’s gone and I’m out here, as industrious as all you other drudges.”
“Forget Mailen, this isn’t just about her. You deceived me from the start.”
“You’ve worked that out, have you?”
“The amulet you put in my pouch? How much time I wasted until I found out its worthlessness.”
“I needed something to get you moving. Why else would you have accepted my oath?”
“You’re a vulture, Finster. Preying on the lost. I had hoped you weren’t wholly bad, that it was my deed that had pushed you too far, had broken your heart. For that I could forgive you. But this ruse against your own, and the deaths of those in Wormford—actions that scream of a true black-eye.”
“The men who wanted you dead? If anything, it leaves you in my debt.”
“Consider it repaid. We are saving the ashen, not reaping them.”
“You call me a black-eye, but I’m nothing compared to you. Tell me, just how many have you killed? Is that what it takes to be a hero?”
“I have done no more than was necessary.”
“I see. So, you’d turn it down, would you? If an opportunity arose?”
“It would depend on the circumstances.”
“Bah. You keep telling yourself that. I may have done some despicable things, but at least I’m honest with myself. The sickness upon you makes me look positively benevolent.”
Sickness. Where had he heard that? The sickness of Botswa and his banishment from the dwellings of men. “You don’t know what you are saying,” Balagir defied. “Leave the north and see the world for what it is.”
“Oh, but I have, and found it not to my taste. Unlike some, I still have enough control over my actions to determine my fate.”
Their pointless debate was interrupted by a piercing shriek from behind. They wheeled to see Fry on his knees, clutching his head.
“They’re inside me!” he wailed. “They know my name.”
“Calm yourself!” Igmar barked. “It’s a trick. Keep moving. We all hear it.”
“It wants me to do things. Terrible things.”
“Get a hold of yourself, Fry!” Igmar roared over the wind once more. “Focus on some other thought.”
“I can’t,” he moaned. “It wants me to kill you. All of you.” Freya put her hand on her dagger, but Igmar signalled her to stop.
“Come on, boy. We’re the Good Company, remember? We don’t kill—” He never finished, for just then Fry leapt, all cowardice gone from his eyes, replaced by a lopsided sneer. Igmar fell back beneath the force, Fry’s clammy white hands clasping his throat, thumbs jabbing down on his larynx. His flailing arms sought a stone.
He didn’t need it. Fry’s hands went slack, and he slumped, gurgling to the side. His killer stood behind, a long thin shape to Igmar’s blurred vision. Finster threw his head back and sucked in the smoke. Then he looked very slowly at Balagir.
“Tell me you don’t wish you’d done that,” he said gloriously. “Tell me you can’t taste it.” Balagir looked away as Freya helped Igmar up, for he did not wish Finster to see the hunger that dwelt within him. He was furious, but because Finster had killed needlessly? Or because he had beaten him to it? He grimaced at such uncertainty.
Igmar rose, shaken, dusting dead ash from his cloak. This was not a place for discussion, and wordlessly he turned and pushed on.
The bodiless tirade did not stop there and bombarded them all the while. Balagir fixed his eyes on Finster’s billowing cape, then on his own boots. He could do no more than trudge step after step. Letting himself think would open his mind to the voices. If he just walked, one foot, then the next, mechanically, rhythmically, it could not touch him. He did not know how long they walked—each battling some internal force, raising walls, resisting ghosts—but it was dark when Freya stopped, clutching her head.
“What is it?” Balagir asked, alarmed.
“It’s in me,” she said, her face pale. “It got in.” He did not need to ask what. He had been succumbing himself, its prying fingers forcing the chinks. He had seen what it had done to the weak-willed Fry, and now he saw something similar in Freya’s eyes. All her walls broken down, all her bombast and sharp retorts revealed as nothing but a shield. Here she was, and she was terrified.
From beside him, he saw Finster reaching for his blade. Balagir spun to face him.
“You’d die before you touch her,” he growled.
But Finster just laughed bleakly.
“And who said ashen could not love? I have to see this. Who will kill whom, I wonder. My kepla
s are on the wind witch.” He lowered his sword and stood back to watch. Balagir snarled and turned his attention back to Freya, who clawed at her own head to keep the voices away.
“Freya!” he snapped. Then he slapped her so hard she sat on her haunches, bewildered as a child shaken from a nightmare.
“What…”
“We’re all right. Just keep walking. Talk with me.” Shakily she got to her feet, clutching his arm. All the while Balagir muttered things, senseless things, an inane stream of consciousness to flow through the winds. She nodded and mumbled, never answering, but distracted. Finster and Igmar stumbled on ahead and behind, each too engaged in their own struggle to hark his rambling soliloquy.
How long had they walked? How long had he talked? His throat was dry, he knew that much. The voices had almost claimed him despite his banter, and at one dark moment when he felt his will waver, he had to think back over his travels, all the names of the characters come and gone, alive and dead, friend and foe, simply to create a barrier, a mental shield of concentration through which the wind could not break. It was a sad list, he realised, but it had saved him.
And then, finally as dawn was undeniably upon them, the winds dropped. The voices faded from blood-curdling screeches to antagonised moans to petering, sad whispers. They had escaped. If ashen had ghosts—another curious question—maybe Fry would add his voice to the choir, singing forever on swirling torrents of air.
When only enough breeze remained to jostle his tangled hair, Balagir stopped, his throat parched as old bone. Freya still rested on his arm, her face pale. She seemed herself, though things laid bare could only be partially re-concealed. He had seen her vulnerability, the nakedness she hid from the world, perhaps even from herself. Knowing this, she would not meet his eye, not even in gratitude. She shrugged him off, and he let her go, realising what it had cost her, how it felt to lose control. The others staggered to a stop, and for the first time since they entered the chasm, they leant wearily against the cold, grey walls.
Igmar was furious.
“Why did you do that?” he accosted Finster.
“The last I saw, your face was turning purple. I thought you’d be a bit more appreciative.”
“You could have slapped him, punched him. Nothing so definite!”
“Maybe because I wasn’t infatuated with him, I couldn’t take such a risk,” he said. Balagir kept his eyes away from where Freya stood alone.
“He was a good man.”
“He was a coward. And besides, aren’t we meant to be four? Isn’t that what you’ve always said?”
“That’s not the point.”
“No. The point is, had I not acted, we might have been three, or two, or, judging on how sentimental everyone has become, just myself.”
“It’s done. We’re through.” It was Freya who spoke, having composed herself. “Let’s keep moving, lest the wind gets up again.”
Nobody could argue with that, and wordlessly they continued, Igmar angered and regretful, Finster cold and sated, Freya brooding and irritable, and Balagir sullen and irked. Irked because Finster was right. His feelings had jeopardised the group. There was no place for sentiment amongst ashen, less so when the stakes were so high. But his ill humour did not stop there. Sure, it was humiliating, and a clearing of the air was now unavoidable. But something else weighed on his mind. Envy. An unashamed covetousness that Finster, and not he, had taken Fry’s smoke.
And so passed the morning in an almost painful silence, devoid of both the voices of the living and the dead.
The piper’s tune, when they heard it, was a relief, principally because—funds permitting—they would not be forced to pass back through that haunted chasm on foot. It also allowed them an opportunity to trance. Though it was not easy to resist, he held his smoke in reserve for healing or fast travel when it was needed. The situation was not improved when Finster emerged with a satisfied grin, a man licking gravy from his fingers to make a hungry man’s stomach groan. Perhaps, Balagir mused bitterly, when the time came to travel, Finster would be forced to remain for not having rationed. The truth was though, that however much they disliked each other, the ashen needed solidarity. Events were larger than their petty disputes and internal rifts. When the time came, their disagreements would have to be put aside.
Still, the man’s twisted grin, his flaunting of pleasure, set Balagir’s nerves on edge, and he had to pace the peripheries so as not to act in a way he would regret.
The hub, having no name, was swiftly dubbed Chasm’s End. The grey rocks of Bluster Chasm sloped away until the land became flat once more, and what had begun as a twisting of tenacious trees in nooks and on ledges became predominate until they found themselves in a forest.
Unlike Bone Forest in the south, or the neighbouring Golden Wood, or even the murky, swampy places around Warinkel, this place exuded an air of isolation. A sense that no foot had trodden beneath these eaves for time beyond reckoning. An ancientness that made even the huge oaks in the west seem like mere saplings. The trees here were not slim and straight like youths, but gnarled and crooked with beards of ivy. Tangles of roots pushed the earth aside like thick, writhing snakes. The trail passed through the hollow of a tree so immense it was akin to passing through the doors of a temple, its looming arch making their footfalls echo hollowly. Yellow eyes in the darkness blinked but seemed otherwise uninterested.
The trees here recalled the tree of ages, where he had removed Ginike’s curse as well as his memory of the event. Except here there was a forest of such beings. The sky suddenly seemed a long way off, and he could imagine for a time how insects must feel, moving through long grass. Indeed, it became difficult to judge direction, but fortunately there were few forks to choose from, hemmed in by nature as they were.
Finally, after the better part of the morning, they entered what was by any woodman’s reckoning a clearing, save that the trees on all sides stood so tall and dense that it gave the impression of being at the bottom of a deep, trunk-lined pit. The small circle of blue sky above was cloudless, and the sunlight would have been quite pleasant had any of it been capable of spilling down to those dark depths.
It was there they felt it. A cracking beneath their feet, a powdery crunch. Balagir looked at the mossy, uneven ground shifting beneath their weight. He kicked aside a chunk of moss to reveal a set of mouldering ribs.
“What are they?” Igmar asked, wrinkling his nose in distaste. “Hiilg?”
“They appear man sized,” Balagir said, peeling away another section of moss with his toe. “And quite old at that.”
“I hope whatever did this has not a lifespan so long,” Igmar said, warily regarding the trees.
“Look, there,” Freya said, indicating a dull gleam. Balagir pulled back the moss to reveal a skeletal hand brandishing a metal disc.
He uncurled the fingers and retrieved the object. In its centre was a perfectly round hole, and around its edges, several indecipherable symbols engraved with excruciating delicacy.
“Those look familiar,” Freya said, sharing a glance with Balagir.
“What is it?” Finster asked impatiently.
“We’ve just found the resting place of Hersten and his ill-fated expedition,” Balagir said, straightening. “It seems he never made it to the temple after all.”
Igmar shuddered. “Maybe we should go back to the hub. Dwell on this in safety.”
“The hubs are no longer safe. Besides, we can’t turn back now,” Balagir said, peering through the disc. “Not when we are so close. Not now we have the key.”
For a key it was, and yet much more than that. His eye through the small hole saw the world differently, and he squeezed the other shut, so he could better understand what he beheld.
His companions remained, regarding him quizzically, but the trees behind them were different; younger, sparser. So sparse in fact that the grey stone of a temple could be seen not far off, poking through the low canopy. He lowered the disc, and the trees shot up and d
arkened the sky once more.
“This way,” he announced, turning from the path. They grudgingly followed as he walked in one world and looked in on one long forgotten.
XXVI.i
TOMB RAIDING
The hiilg he could see moving through the trees were taller than those he had seen in the wilderness. It wasn’t that they were bigger, but their backs were unbent, their heads held high with an air of dignity. It was a nature so far removed from the scampering wretches of the wilds that it would be easy to mistake them for another race. But he recognised them, transformed as they were in both posture and manner. For they still had the green-scaled skin, the same narrow faces, the same locks of black hair. Except these locks were braided and shining, not matted and tangled, and their faces were those of both sexes, elegant and chiselled, contemplative and serene. The face he had beheld had been savage and afraid.
How could so proud a race have fallen so utterly? He knew not how far back he saw, but the trees that had since choked the land suggested millennia.
The hiilg were clad in brown robes and moved with a purpose unapparent to Balagir.
“What is it? What do you see?” a taut voice came from his side.
“I see the lost age of the hiilg,” he answered, lowering the disc and refocusing on Igmar. “And just beyond these trees, the temple.”
“How can you know?” Freya asked, and briefly Balagir lent her the eyepiece. She gasped and let Igmar take it from her limp fingers. He too stepped back, but Balagir retrieved it before Finster could think to try. The trees were now dense on all sides, and to be stranded here without the artefact could leave one eternally adrift in the labyrinth. He may be part of the Good Company, and for the nonce striving towards the same goal, but faith could not be placed blindly. Memories of the decaying face Balagir had entertained for a week made sure of that.
They stuck to him now, as reluctant of being left behind as they were anxious to reach that alluring place. Walking through two times at once, however, was not without its challenges. It was only illusion that summoned that place, and the trees themselves were very much still rooted in the present. He learned that painfully when a low branch, absent in the past, jabbed him ruthlessly in the neck.