by Martin Davey
Landros hadn’t thought about where to go, his first and only thought had been that he wanted to spend his last night with Elian, he hadn’t thought where to take her. Somewhere quiet, somewhere that he wouldn’t be found the moment they started hunting him. Somewhere he and Feren had played and dreamed of better lives and hoped to see the towering spires of Jerusin.
“Staxton Hill?” he said.
Elian looked up at him with a raised eyebrow, her pale face covered in dancing shadows of the torch hanging from the wall. “You have your own house now and you want to whisk me away to Staxton Hill?”
“Yes,” Landros said. Now he had Elian alone, he didn’t know what to say, couldn’t force a smile even if he tried.
Elian looked at him a moment longer, her arm still in his, her dark eyes moving over his face. “Alright,” she finally said, her own smile faltering.
They walked on in silence through the dark streets of Katrinamal. Dogs barked and people shouted in the distance. Torches fluttered in the breeze and shadowed corners and alleys loomed at every turn. Landros could only think of the feel of Elian’s arm on his. Even if the creature that had possessed Feren and his mother was watching him from some darkened corner, it wouldn’t matter now. His mother was dead. Feren was dead. Clerk Lovelin was dead.
Only when they were walking past Garstower House did Landros realize how long they had been walking in silence. The old house made of giant grey stones, its windows black and silent in the night.
Elian’s small hand tightened on his arm. “So when are you going to tell me?”
Landros looked down at her, her cheek almost resting on his shoulder as they walked. Her nose and ears slightly too large, things that only made her more beautiful. “Tell you what?” he said, confused. There seemed to be a thousand things he wanted to tell her, but couldn’t. All he wanted was to be with her, spend time with her before the horrors of the world came to engulf him once more.
Elian squeezed his arm again. “Tell me what’s happened tonight. You leave the inn to go and look for your mother and then you come back covered in blood with eyes that wouldn’t look out of place on a mad man, your hair all over the place and your hands filthy.”
Landros looked away. They were walking through Trotters Fall, the buildings here squat black shadows, the fences dark and ragged, the breeze stronger and setting gates to banging against the fences in a rhythmic beat. He and Elian seemed to be all alone, all the animals and all the farmers fast asleep in readiness of an early rise in the morning. Landros envied them the dull surety of their lives, knowing that all they had to look forward to was the same menial jobs, the same rhythm of life that they had every other day.
“Well?” Elian said.
He took a breath, still unsure how much he could tell her. The last thing he’d want was for anybody to begin hunting her; he was taking a big enough risk just by wanting to spend his last hours with her. “My mother was murdered tonight,” he began, his voice faltering. It seemed strange saying it, almost as though his brain hadn’t had time to digest the information.
“Oh, Landros.” Her hand tightened on his arm, but she kept walking by his side. Somewhere in a far distant stable a restless horse brayed. “What...why, who would want to do such a thing, wasn’t she...?”
“She had the ravings, yes.” Still they walked, Staxton Hill looming over them, black-branched trees slanting down the slope, the grass rippling in the breeze.
“So who would want to do such a thing?” The grass whisked against their boots as they strode up the hill, the lights and shouts of Katrinamal behind them. “I suppose you’ll find out in the morning when the Clerk wakes. The Keepers will have your answers for you.” Another squeeze of his arm.
He shouldn’t have brought her here, Landros now realized. She could have been in the inn with the torches around her, enjoying Torra’s jokes and smiles. Instead he had dragged her out here into his dark world where the dead walked the land and Clerks were murdered. “I don’t think so, Elian.”
“Of course you will. Nobody can escape the Keepers. Look at that man the Clerk sent you after the other day.”
“Gerard.” Landros said absently, his legs aching as the hill steepened.
“Yes, the man that killed your mother will be in the River before the day is over.” She paused, chewing on her lip, her strides long and sure through the grass, her hair blowing in the breeze. “Maybe the Clerk will even send you for him. How would you feel about that?” She looked at him, her eyes dark in the night.
Landros felt cold in his stomach. “I shouldn’t have brought you here.”
“I went back to the inn to look for you,” Elian said. “I’d hoped you’d be back there. And then when you did come back and I saw the look on your face when you saw me,” she let go of his arm and walked at his side, withdrawing back into herself with a breath. “I’m glad I was the one you wanted to be with, Landros.”
Something small and dark and furry scurried through the shivering grass before them. Landros pulled a stalk and wrapped it round and round his finger, stopping the blood and sending the tip a bloody red. He could see the throne now, the huge grey stone that Feren had liked to sit in and pretend to be King of a magical kingdom. It was black in the night, the sky above it turning from black to the dark blue of an ageing bruise, the stars more silver than gold.
Night was ending so soon.
“You were the only one I wanted to be with, Elian.” Landros dropped the grass, feeling his blood flow once more. “But I was selfish. The Guard will be coming for me soon. You should go, I wanted to be with you, to see you one last time. But you should go.” Elian’s dark hair blew about her face, about her long neck and pale cheek. It seemed like one final cruelty of the night that he should have her here alone and he had to send her away. “If you see anybody looking for me, tell them where I am. There’s no hiding from them.”
When Elian spoke, it was quiet, hushed in the sound of the breeze rolling in waves down the hill. “What in the name of the Keepers have you done?”
It was as good a place to stop as any. The grass was as high as his knee, and dry; the sky in the distance beginning to be tinged with blue, smudged with orange and red, the clouds wispy and scattered. Here was where you could see the spires of Jerusin, it was said. He and Feren never had, though. He sat in the grass, his knees pulled up to his chest. He saw the blood on his breeches. Probably the boy’s blood, thinking about it. He straightened his legs to keep the blood away. “The Clerk is dead,” he said without looking up at her, his hands behind him in the grass.
Elian sank to her knees next to him. “The Clerk? But I thought your mother...”
“My mother was murdered. The Clerk was murdered.” Landros took a breath. “By some creature that can possess the dead.”
Silence from the woman next to him. The breeze gusted, riffling the grass about them. “The Clerk is dead? Murdered?”
Landros thought of the Clerk, his blonde hair and his black eyes. A curious sense of loss at the thought. The Clerk had only ever been kind to him, been good to the people of Katrinamal, guiding them in their worship of the Keepers. “I think the same creature that killed my mother killed the Clerk. He said it could hide from the gaze of the Keepers.”
“He? The Clerk said that?”
Only now he was in the cool, calming presence of Elian did Landros realize what had happened to him. Why else would the creature have told him where the boy was, tell Landros to go there? But why would an agent of death want him to be blamed for the murder of a Clerk? He nodded. The stars overhead were thick and silver against the dark blue sky, small black birds starting to take wing. Landros envied them their freedom, their distance from the horrors of the world.
“Shit,” Elian breathed. “So when they find the Clerk dead they’ll come looking for you...” She moved behind him, rested her hands on his shoulders. “But the Keepers will see into your heart, see that you had nothing to do with it even if they can’t see the creature that
did.”
Landros rested a hand on hers. The sky was getting lighter with every moment now, the day seeming in a mad rush to begin just to spite him. Far in the distance, beyond a wood and beyond a winding river, beyond a patchwork of green and yellow fields bordered by stone walls, he could see the dark peaked rooftops of a distant cluster of buildings, a village or small town. He and Feren had often wondered who lived there, what the place was called. Now he’d never know. “I am guilty, though. I knew of the creature, it had spoken to me before and I never told anybody about it, never told Clerk Lovelin of it. In their eyes I’ll be as guilty as if I had swung the sword that killed him.”
Elian’s hand was still in his. “You knew of it? What was it? Why didn’t you tell anybody?”
“Death.” Landros said, unsure why he was burdening Elian with this. “It was death, it possessed Feren and my mother and it was cold and rotten.”
“And you didn’t tell anybody about it?”
Landros shook his head, stroked her hand with his thumb. “I thought I was becoming like my mother, that the ravings were beginning to take me. Who’d think such a thing could exist? It could hide from them, even in the Clerk’s own house.”
A heavy sigh behind him. Warm as the breeze rolling down the hill and brushing the grass against them. “So you take me from a nice warm inn and take me to a dark hill and tell me that an agent of death is stalking you and killing Clerks and that you’re about to be arrested by the Town Guard?”
Landros could hear the smile in her voice, hear the warmth there. “I wanted to see you,” he said. “Since we met I’ve wanted to be with you but couldn’t stand the thought of sharing you with your clients or you choosing someone else.”
“You’d always have to share me, Landros. You know that.” Her voice was deep, regretful. “But after our night together, you seemed to break your neck to avoid me, or insult me.” She sighed. “You could run, you know. Run now, get a head start.”
Landros heard the surrender in her voice. Nobody could run from gods who could give judgement in Dreams. He shook his head. “I deserve what I get. I failed Clerk Lovelin at every turn. He sent me for the woman in his vision and I came back with her tormentor, I saw the creature days ago and told him nothing and then when he was struck down I stood and watched and ran.” Landros felt the frustration rising within him even as he said the words. If only he could go back and do things differently. “Ours is to do,” the Clerk had told him once. Perhaps the Clerk had seen the weakness in him; not cowardice, but a watchfulness that paralyzed him with indecision. Landros wouldn’t be that man again, better to strike first and think later than to live with regret like this.
“The Keepers will have their judgement on me,” he said. He turned and stroked her pale cheek with the back of his hand. Another waste. To think of all the times he could have spent with Elian; instead he had hidden away, hiding with bitterness and jealousy and fear roiling within his heart. “Whether I’m running or here, they’ll decide what to do with me. But whatever they do, I’d rather be here with you for my last moments.” He smiled, the expression felt unfamiliar.
The night was warm and the hour was late. Elian looked even paler than normal, her dark eyes rimmed with dark rings. “They will judge you, but I know you, Landros. If the Keepers see the heart and mind of every man, then they will know you did nothing.”
She rested her head in his lap, her hair loose and her face pale. He stroked her hair away from her face, her cheekbones sharp and angular in the parched light. Did nothing. The words were like a rusted sword twisting in his heart. Elian’s breathing became slower, steadier. He watched her breast rising, deep and slow as he stroked her hair. He had wanted her calming influence and now he felt a heavy tiredness settle on his own shoulders, an ache around his eyes. He leaned back on one elbow and squeezed his eyes shut and then open. Stay awake so he could watch Elian sleep. His dreams would only bring nightmares of the dead stalking him, the wrath of the Keepers, the Town Guard hunting him.
It was the golden glow tingeing the velveteen blue of the dawning sky that made Landros move Elian out of his lap, a halo of light like the shimmer around a torch in a smoky room. He rose to his feet, and walked slowly through the long grass brushing and nodding against his legs.
Floating pyramid shapes in the dark sky. Four of them hovering in the distance like beacons of a better place, golden and bright and giant, their peaks tipped in brilliant silver. From this distance they were no larger than Landros’s fist, but who knew how large they truly were? How high they floated? Even from where Landros stood on Staxton Hill, they towered miles above the trees and hills and black rooftops of the towns and villages between Staxton Hill and Jerusin. Black things, larger than any birds Landros had ever known were flying and circling about the pyramids.
And the pyramids were humming. A dull drone like a contented nest of wasps, but the pitch wavered and shimmered, a sound that couldn’t settle and couldn’t be ignored. But it couldn’t be the pyramids, it was coming from behind him. He turned and saw the stone throne. If the golden pyramids were surrounded by a golden light, the throne was surrounded by a nimbus of black light, a blackness which swallowed all other light about it. The humming was coming from the throne.
The grass nodded and pressed against his legs as though trying to push him away from the black light. Landros turned, the humming loud then quiet, loud, then quiet. Far beyond the hill, to the north, was a tower taller than any he had ever seen, taller than even the temples of the Keepers. It glowed silver, with a golden orb at its summit, more towers and spires surrounded it like devouts clambering for words of grace from a prophet. Arched windows of reds and greens and yellows, all with some image of the golden orb, shimmered on every wall. Landros had never even imagined a building so immense. All around it spread a city which had never been there before. A castle surrounded by curtain walls and topped by battlements was dwarfed by the tower and despite the darkness of the dawn, the city seemed to glow in the light of the tower’s majesty.
And still the droning hummed. Loud and quiet. Loud and quiet. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Even when the voice spoke from the throne, thin and quiet, it spoke in the same way as the droning. Loud and quiet, as though it whispered to him from a time and a place unimaginably distant and the gateway between Landros and the speaker was struggling to remain open, sometimes steady, sometimes not. And the voice came from the black light engulfing the throne.
With an effort, Landros turned from the glorious tower and the mighty city. Even now he thought of Feren and the stories he had told, all of them could have taken place in that one city. He looked at the throne, the shape of the stone barely visible in the engulfing blackness. Had something moved in that darkness, or was it merely the grass wisping against its sides? Even with his senses numbed by wonder and fear, Landros didn’t have to guess who spoke to him from the throne. Fear and resignation welled within him, warring in his stomach. It frightened him that meeting the creature was becoming familiar. “Where are we?” he said. The stone throne was still there, the grass still brushed against his legs, but he couldn’t still be on Staxton Hill. Not with the fantastic city to the north and the golden pyramids hovering brighter than any star to the south where Jerusin should be.
Something definitely moved in the darkness on the throne. It looked thin and wasted, like a dark rag hanging limply on a broom handle. “You might ask when are we instead of where.” The voice joined the humming and the droning. Loud and quiet. Quiet and loud.
The sun rose unnaturally quickly, like a soap bubble rising from a sink. Light spread around the land. Villages and towns and cities in patchwork fields of red and yellows and browns bordered by stone walls. Winding roads with swaying carts ribboned the view. Another city in the distance glorious and bright in the sunshine. It was as though every story Feren had ever told had made a new world beneath Staxton Hill.
Landros caught his breath and turned back to the throne. As though to contrast the glory of
the view, the creature sat slumped on his throne, covered in a hooded robe that might have been dark green or brown. One clawed, skeletal hand, the flesh thin and pale rested on the arm of the throne. The hood was bowed low, only darkness visible within, to Landros’s relief; he didn’t think he wanted to see what was hidden there. A quick glance about, no sign of Elian; he could only hope that the creature had brought him to this strange otherworld and left her unharmed to make her way home.
“You can’t win, you know,” Landros said. “Kill me now, or have the Keepers do your work for you.” He shrugged, his stomach feeling empty and light. “But whatever it is you want, the Keepers will find you and make you pay.”
“Kill you?” The voices hummed, droned like a persistent bee at a window. The hooded head moved, as though tilting its head to listen to something in the distance. “Why would we kill you?” The hand moved on the arm of the throne, the sound of bone scraping against stone making Landros feel light-headed. “We’ve done nothing but help you. Nothing but show you the way to enlightenment.” Landros’s head ached from listening to the droning voice. Loud and quiet. “We couldn’t save your mother but we can save you.”`
“Save her?” Landros’s voice was bitter, disbelieving. “You killed her, killed the boy who could tell the Clerk of you.” The golden-orbed tower, the pyramids of Jerusin glowed in the sunlight about them, the sky a parched blue, shimmering on the horizon and yet it seemed more a painting, still and quiet despite the giant-winged creatures circling the pyramids and the rocking carts swaying between towns.
“We killed the boy to save him. We know what it is to have our memories ripped from our minds, to see the terror in the emptiness left behind. The Clerk was stealing the boy’s mind, Landros. Pray to the One that never happens to you.”
Landros was quiet, thinking back to the horror of the cell beneath the Clerk’s house. Thinking of the sounds of sobbing before his shaking hand had pushed the door open, thinking of the look on the Clerk’s pale face as he stood behind the child, his long-fingered hands pressed to either side of his head. “You lie,” he said. “You used me, used Feren and my mother and the boy to get close to the Clerk to murder him. It will do no good, the Keepers will never suffer the death of a Clerk without making you pay. I only hope I can be there when they do.” And Landros vowed to be there that day, with sword in hand to make the vile murderer suffer. In whatever way it could suffer.