by Martin Davey
Tiege leaned back in his chair, looking at Ysora. “Your mother died in the doorway of her own home with an arrow in her neck. I stayed in the tree for two days before I dared come down after the men had ridden away. And when I came to the village, the roads were as red as the bitterbloom fields. Your mother was lucky, she would have died quickly. I hope you never see what a sword can do to a body, Ysora. And most of the village had been put to the sword.” Another shrug, “But if you think I’m lying, think of plagues and how they spread and where they come from. You think the plague just arrived here from nowhere, killed everybody in the village and then vanished without a trace? That is the work of men, not diseases. Diseases don’t chop the arms from children, don’t rape and torture.”
“But why would anybody do such a thing? To kill an entire village?”
“They were looking for something.” Two men shuffled into the pub, one old, the other younger with brittle grey hair falling to his shoulders. Tiege waited until they’d passed before continuing. “Or someone.” His dark eyes were bright in the shadows.
“The Clerk wants the woman!”
Ysora swallowed. She could almost wish she were still at the farm on the cliffs at the edge of the world. At least life there was constant. Predictable. Rhodry would rise before the sun, sail out to sea on the first tide. Come home stinking of fish and beer, his eyes blazing with lust and fury.
Predictable.
Now it seemed men smiled at her from the shadows, filling her head with lies and half-truths and deceptions.
There had been a boy in the village called Redmond. Chunky and shy and awkward, the boy had watched them from trees and haylofts, from behind fences and walls. Nothing like this dark, lithe figure sitting before her and watching her from hooded eyes. She could only remember speaking to the boy once in all her time in the village. He had told her about a tree he liked to climb, so high he could almost see the spires of Jerusin in the distance.
“This tree,” her eyes felt wet when she spoke, her throat thick. “This tree you were sitting in when you saw the men approaching. What did you call it?”
Tiege looked up at the question, surprised. And then he seemed to remember and he looked back down to the table. “My faraway tree,” he said. “I called it my faraway tree.”
Ysora took a shuddering breath, tried to stop the tears from falling. “What do you want from me?”
And when Tiege leaned forward on the table and told her what he and his Master needed of her, then the tears did begin to fall.
CHAPTER 17
Eyes cracked open, thick with gunge and yet feeling dry and scratchy. Mouth raw and dry, tongue swollen and sore, feeling like some giant slug squirming in his mouth. Limbs heavy enough that Marin couldn’t begin to imagine trying to lift one of them. And then his throat...he had seen fish slapping on the ground, eyes wide and gills opening and closing; that’s how he thought his neck would look, he could feel it sighing as he breathed, the white cloth sticking to the raw wound. The thought made him want to vomit but he swallowed it instead. The last time he had been sick, it had leaked out of the hole in his neck and seeped down his shoulders and chest and into the cot he was laying on. He could still smell it now.
Being dead wasn’t all he had heard it was supposed to be.
All he could see was a smeared greyness through eyes almost stuck together by the thick crust. A darker shadow appeared in the greyness.
“You’re awake,” it said. It had a southern accent. Areen or Darl, Marin guessed. Lucky he couldn’t move or he would have cringed from the man, the memory of the blade slicing through his throat still stark in his mind every time he breathed and felt the flaps of his skin rippling like a banner in a cool breeze. Instead he let his eyes fall shut, thought of the woman with the short brown hair on the sunlit river bank. If only he could will himself there, away from this cot stinking of vomit and away from southerners who cut throats and collected blood in beakers.
Marin licked his lips with a dry tongue and tried to nod. Could the southerner even see it? He didn’t care. He was on a river bank, the sun warm in his face and when he told the woman he loved her, she told him she loved him too.
“Good.” The southerner’s voice shattered the dream, it seemed like an age since he’d spoken, but it could only have been moments. He tried to open his pus-filled eyes again. Two of them. Two shadows moving towards him, one of them holding something long and thin in his hand.
“You’re a lucky man, Marin.” Areen, Marin remembered now. The man whose nose he had broken. The man who had cut his throat. Marin felt his throat flaps quicken. “The Mahrata has chosen you to lead her fight. The Paramin only knows why, but you will be the one who brings the Blood Lord home.” A low chuckle with no humour in it.
Marin’s throat flared in agony as the skin moved on the bare wound. In and out. In and out.
“Even your Keepers will tremble when you bring the Paramin to their gates.”
Marin said nothing, not daring to speak with the hole in his neck, not wanting to feel what it would be like to even try.
“You’re a lucky man, Marin,” Areen said again. “You’ll know when you wake up.”
When he wakes up? So he wasn’t awake? Marin felt hope rise within him. Was this yet another tortuous dream? Would he waken to the sun warm on his face and no gaping wound in his throat? He felt his throat pulsing quicker at the thought.
“But first we have a job to do.” A shadow leaned over him, it smelled of oils and spices and cold leather which creaked when it moved. Darl, Marin guessed, even now willing himself to waken.
“I don’t know why I have to do this,” Darl said. “It’s woman’s work.”
“Then you should have had a lot of practice at it,” Areen’s voice sounded faint, as though he was standing miles away. “It stinks in here, just get it done.”
Darl’s breath was warm on Marin’s face as he leaned closer. “Yeah, I think he’s shit himself,” the southerner said. His breath smelled as foul as the cot. Horse meat and beer and rotten teeth.
And then pain.
Pain like he had only ever known at the hands of Keeper Martuk.
Darl reached into Marin’s throat, pulled at a flap of skin. Pulled it tight and skewered it with a needle, blunt enough that he had to force it through the skin, the thread rasping horribly as it followed the needle through the hole.
And now Marin did scream, scream soundlessly, his throat pulsing and cold air blowing out of it as Darl pulled the thread tight and reached for the other fold of skin.
CHAPTER 18
The solar was darker than any night Landros had ever known. He stood, his hands out by his sides, focussing on a single point before him, waiting and willing for his eyes to adjust to the unnatural blackness. All he could smell was the fetid, sour smell of death blooming about him, all he could hear was his mother whispering in a distant corner of the room.
“Rasher mairiun jesivur...losir mara viru...hasba nirun serlossi...” A calm, quiet whisper that she had never used in life. If only she had appeared ranting and raving and shouting and threatening, then Landros might have believed the creature hiding in the corner was his mother. This being using his mother’s voice, and for all he knew, even using her body, could never be the woman who had raised him.
Landros turned, sight slowly returning to him. Black objects gathering shape and form in the blackness, a crouching table here, a hunched chair there. He breathed through his nose, the smell of death stronger now he faced the corner where his mother stood. Her hair was long and loose. She never let her hair loose in life. She still wore the white nightdress she was killed in, a hazy grey in the black. Her face was hidden in shadow and still she whispered, but now Landros could make out words he recognized amid the alien language. It whispered his name more than once, as though Landros was some anchor or some prayer the creature was using to pull itself into the solar of the Clerk.
Then silence. The words, the chanting ceased and the creature, Landr
os’s mother, stood in the corner, her hair long and dark and loose, her arms limp by her side.
Landros’s fingers itched for his sword. But even if he had it, would he be able to use it on the body of his mother, even if she was possessed by some strange creature? Even if she was already dead?
The creature raised its head, Landros couldn’t see its face, only a black emptiness framed by dark hair. The stench of death was even stronger now.
“You followed me here,” Landros said. “What is it you want from me?” He stayed where he was, well away from the creature.
More speaking in tongues, a whisper of wind through a valley of bones. “...shinoh vesti varul...lison...marat kepul...carasin...”
Landros could almost long for the sound of his mother chewing on her own tongue, blood spattering the walls as she shouted and cursed.
“You think I want something from you, Landros Endrassi?” The words sounded forced and cold, as though spoken on a single exhalation of breath. “Death is here...varon seiati ciirsti...death has come to the world of the Keepers...farasi mandu salak...here in this place, the boy will see the wonder of death...” A sound like a cold wind rattling against a dark window, and the smell of death grew stronger, strong enough to make Landros gag. The smell of his mother rotting before his very eyes. The creature took a step towards him, the nightdress moving like a cobwebbed curtain in an empty house.
“The boy?” Despite himself, Landros backed away from the creature, his heels knocking against a low table and almost sending him sprawling. The thought of being splayed on the floor before his possessed mother filling him with terror. “The boy who saw my mother?” He regained his balance, still backing away.
“...maratin vesrtu kaita...immin...death is with him even now, showing him the glory of the new night...lissun orivi mesun...” Hard to understand the words now, the old language mixing with the tongues, softer and louder and louder and softer until it hurt Landros’s ears to listen to it. He knew what the creature wanted. The boy was even now being visited by death. “Don’t betray your mother,” the creature had said at his mother’s house. And Landros was betraying her by letting the Clerk steal the memories of the only one to witness her murder.
His mother moved closer as she spoke, something black and wet-looking staining her hip, the grey-white nightdress sticking to it, creasing as she moved. She looked like some dread bride from nightmare. Any closer and, despite the blackness, Landros would be able to see her face.
He ran.
His breath tore at his throat and he ran, ignoring the flaring pain as he jarred his hip on a chair, sending it scraping and rocking across the floor to land quietly on the thick rug. He pulled the door open, nearly hitting himself in the face with it in his rush to be away.
Downstairs. The Clerk had said the boy had been taken downstairs.
Landros staggered to a halt in the great hall, lifting a hand to block the light of the torches and the giant chandelier. It seemed incredible that so much light and so many people could be so close to the walking corpse of his mother. He glanced back to the solar, wishing he had closed the door behind him. No sign of the creature, though, only a dark and silent solar which he doubted he could have entered if his very life depended on it.
He grabbed a passing serving girl by the wrist, her make-up stark and white and her lips painted red. She tsked in annoyance, but seeing Landros’s uniform, soon cast her eyes down, ignoring the ale sloshed over her hand. She would have to refill the tankard before she served it.
“The stairs,” Landros said. “Where are the stairs to below the kitchens?”
The girl pointed to the western corner, past a row of tables laden with sweet meats and smoky candles. An archway, dark as the doorway to the solar and promising only more death.
He ran to the stairs, rushes thick and awkward beneath his feet, scratching at his ankles as he ran. Serving girls and kitchen staff and others in finer, richer dress stopped to watch him pass. Landros ignored them all.
The stairs were cool, narrow and winding and steep. Fluttering torches hung from the wall, crackling and smoking. Landros’s steps sounded loud and echoing and he held his hand to the chill stone wall to keep his balance as he hurried down the stairs.
He stopped as he reached the bottom. Three doors, one on either side of the corridor, one facing him. Shelves were lined along the damp walls, dim in the shadows cast by a solitary torch.
Boxes piled one on top of the other leaned against the walls and a patter of tiny feet in a corner sent the hairs on the back of his neck to standing on end.
He turned around, gasping aloud as the torch fluttered in some unfelt breeze, almost extinguishing and then setting to burning again. The creature was trying to follow him here? The thought sent a shiver rippling down his spine. There in the far corner where greenish water seeped down the wall and a ceiling beam had rotted away and fallen to the floor, something glittered dully in the light of the trembling torch. Landros stumbled toward it, leaning on boxes and broken bits of wood to keep his balance. Something crunched beneath his boot, he didn’t stop to see what it was.
A rusted poker, comfortingly heavy in his hand. It was spotted with rust, the shaft bitten and chipped. It looked crueller and meaner than a bright sharp blade. He turned to face the corridor. Shadows everywhere. It seemed as though since Feren had died, the world had turned into a warren of shadowy corners and dark nights and flickering torches.
A whimpering. A sound of crying, sobbing, muffled and muted coming from the door at the end of the corridor. Then quiet, the only sound the quiet drip of water. Landros gripped the poker tighter, chill fingers dancing up and down his spine.
The sound of crying again, louder now. Someone said something, sounding like a woman or a child. More sobbing. The door facing him wasn’t totally closed, open the width of a finger and shadows danced in the room beyond. Landros hefted the poker, swallowed and stepped over the boxes and rubbish as quietly as he could, all his haste washed away by the sound of the weeping.
He pushed the door, gritting his teeth against any sound it might make. The wood was warm to the touch. The door whispered against the stone floor, a smell of cold moss, the air dry and ancient. His heart high in his chest, his hand white about the poker as he pushed the door open.
Only one torch was lit, burning and crackling and smoking, the cloth about it yellow and filthy, blackening as it burned. Bare brick walls, eaten and broken away by whatever it is that makes bricks flake and crumble with age. Chains, black and bright as the hide of an eel hung from the wall at irregular intervals, some high, some low and all with locks at the end of them. And in the middle of the room was one chair, the boy sitting in it with his hands tied at his back and the Clerk standing behind him, his dark eyes closed and one fist on the back of the boy’s neck, one hand on his forehead, as though Ricon Lovelin was trying to break the child’s neck.
And there was Feren.
Standing in a corner far enough away from the shivering torch to be a still, dark shadow in a room of lighter, flickering, shadows. His hair looked thin and brittle in the gloom, as patchy and sparse as a burnt field, his red coat little more than loose rags clinging to the wet things that oozed about his body. His face, hidden in the shadows, looked lumpen and uneven, as though bits of skin and muscle had fallen away even as he stood watching the Clerk torment the boy. How the Clerk couldn’t smell the Watchman, Landros didn’t know.
The boy’s face was twitching, his face grey as Landros’s mother’s nightdress, twitching and writhing and rippling as though a family of spiders skittered beneath the skin. The skittering stopped, and the Clerk’s eyes snapped open, black and bright as they focussed on Landros. A moment of pure rage, pure hatred in that white, white face before the Clerk seemed to recognize him. One breath of relief from Landros; he hadn’t realized he had been holding it.
And then the world erupted about him.
When Feren had died, he hadn’t had a sword. Now the creature had found on
e as sharp and bright as Landros’s poker was chipped and battered. In the moment that the Clerk recognized Landros, Feren stepped across the room and, rags flying and skin flaking and stinking, slashed the boy’s neck with one smooth blow. Blood gushed and spurted before Landros had even moved.
The boy slid down the chair, long legs folding beneath him, blood streaming down his chest. Feren and the Clerk ignored him, turning to face one another. Now the torchlight shone on his face, Landros saw that the creature barely resembled his dead friend at all, only the Watchman’s uniform that clung to the gore and blood about his body told him who it was. The hair had fallen out in dry clumps and his face had sloughed away, skin peeling like a rotten tomato, streaked with red and brown and white. The Clerk backed away, no fear on his pale face, only a watchfulness, his hands out by his side as he took slow steps backwards.
“Landros, now is the time to do your duty.” The Clerk never took his eyes away from the creature. Two swipes at Clerk Lovelin’s face, the sword a blur in the shifting gloom, the torch sputtering and struggling as the creature seemed to suck the very heat from it. The Clerk ducked and leaned from both strikes, movements which made the sword seem slow and sluggish.
Duty? Hadn’t the creature said something about duty? Or betrayal. ”Do not betray your mother...do not betray Feren,” it had said. And now the creature still moved forward, its back to Landros, strips of faded red cloth a mockery of Feren’s memory. A mockery of the Watch. Another strike at the Clerk, strips of cloth falling to the ground, muscles and flesh rippling wetly. The stink of death billowed about the room.
Was it trust that had the creature with his back to Landros? Did it think Landros would do nothing? Landros looked at the boy, his blood pooling black in the gathering shadows. His hand tightened about the grip of his poker.
“...varum jerusa arahm...dersi lera piero...” And now the attack started in earnest, two forehand strikes, a backhand slash, the sound of struggle echoing about the room, the torchlight dimming even more. And all the while, the creature speaking, “...uurih lesta varus...pemali sahri seroh...”