by Martin Davey
“Looking for pretty blonde women sounds like more fun,” Torra said.
“Temple? What temple?” Dorian looked at Landros sharply, his grey eyes accusing.
Landros nodded to where the temple could be seen, towering over a row of thatch-roofed cottages at the far side of the village. The temple was white stone with a single spire reaching up to the skies. In Katrinamal, the gods had a temple each for their worship. In a village this size, it looked like there was only one temple for the worship of the gods. “That one,” he said. “He held up the book. Maybe the Guardians know where she got this book and who gave it to her.”
Dorian fell silent a moment, deep in thought, looking as though he was searching for an argument. Finding none, he could only nod in agreement. “Get the horses?” he said.
“We’ll walk. Keep an eye out for her on the way.” The more he made the decisions, the more Landros found himself liking it; a fact he wasn’t altogether sure he liked. “If we don’t find Pascal and Wes, we’ll have to come back here anyway.”
“So when you say we have to keep an eye out for her, this is the woman you said is medium height and medium build with long brown hair?”
“Yes,” said Landros, and set off walking.
The road to the temple took them past another inn, this one with open white-framed windows and a red roof. The whore’s place that caused Len so much ire, Landros guessed. The houses in the village were small, some of them only two rooms, others bigger, and most of them looked tidy. The village green was neat, only marred by a patch of muddied grass in the middle as though games of shineball were a regular occurrence here. Carts trundled past, horses trotted past and dogs and chickens and even the occasional cat watched the three of them. It was a nice place, Landros could imagine living here. He could imagine a world where all he had to do was go out to the fields every day and return home to a cooked meal with Elian smiling at the door. To go to bed in their own house, hold each other close and then wake in the morning and do it all again. He blinked as a hand landed on his arm.
“That book,” Dorian said.
Landros looked at the book in his hand, looked back up the road where Torra was talking to a blonde woman under a riyas tree. The woman had a little girl pulling at her skirts. “This book? What about it?”
“What makes you think it’s so special?” Dorian fell into step with him, looking ahead, avoiding Landros’s eyes. A scream from a house they passed with flowers in the window, then the sound of a woman laughing.
“Special? Well, the Clerk, Clerk Lovelin had books about the histories of the wars, about the wars of the gods and he told me how rare they were.” Landros swallowed as he remembered Feren, remembered the Nameless One sitting in the Clerk’s solar, fingers scrabbling like blind slugs as they sought out the ancient book on the table. Ysora’s book felt warm in his hands.
They were nearing the temple now, more of it visible over thatched roofs, red-tiled roofs, all towered over by the temple of the Keepers. As they should be. None could challenge the Keepers. None could be closer to the home of the gods as the Keepers themselves in their mighty towers.
“And so why would a Guardian give such a book to her?”
“That’s what we’re going to find out, isn’t it?” Landros smiled.
Dorian didn’t return the smile. He looked tired, his bristles hard and sharp, his eyes rimmed with purple rings. “Something doesn’t feel right here, Landros. The Clerk sending us after this woman twice. Why? Why is the Clerk so desperate to have her? What can the woman have done to upset the Keepers? Why hasn’t the Clerk told us her crimes?”
“He questions the why,” Clerk Lovelin had said a lifetime ago. “It’s not really our place to question the Keepers, Dorian.” Landros kept his voice low, watching people walking away from the temple, hurrying past, lazily sitting at the roadside. A strangely tranquil scene.
“I wish you’d have come over to see me last night,” Dorian said, his eyes fixed straight ahead. “Laraine wanted to speak to you. I hope the Captaincy hasn’t gone to your head, Landros. You were rude to her. I always thought you a polite young man if nothing else.”
“Laraine?” Landros looked at Dorian, and then remembered. “The woman you were with at the Fiddler’s Tree? The one who wanted to speak to me?” It seemed a very long time ago and it annoyed him that Dorian would bother him with this now. “I’ve had other things on my mind lately, you know.”
“And that means we have to forget manners and common courtesy, does it?”
Landros sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “You don’t know what it’s like, what’s happened.” Elian, alone in the house at the mercy of Clerk Killian. He didn’t even know where she was being held. The thought of her chained to the chair in the dungeon, the blood and the gore still lining the walls...he coughed and tried to swallow away the taste of the thought.
“Of course I don’t. How could I know what it is like being the Captain of the Watch? You’ve been Captain a week now. How long was I Captain? More than twenty years? I could never understand.” Dorian did look at him now, and he looked like a stranger.
Landros sighed. “Who was she then? Why did she want to speak to me?” He remembered grey hair and black eyeliner.
“I think Laraine would prefer to tell you that herself. Some of what she has to say you might not like, but you need to hear it, Landros. For yourself and your mother.”
Landros stopped in the road. A cart rocked past, carrots rumbling in the back and a young boy stopped to gawk at the men in the fine red coats. “My mother? What does Laraine have to do with my mother?”
Dorian stopped next to him, and the way his eyes fixed on him sent a chill running down Landros’s spine. He’d never seen his old friend look so intent. “You, me, your mother, Feren,” he nodded up the road to where Torra was walking, “Torra; all of us Landros. Everybody needs to hear what Laraine has to say.”
Landros didn’t like this new Dorian. What had happened to him since he lost the Captaincy? The Dorian of old had been stern and quiet, a man’s man who only believed what he saw before his eyes. Landros didn’t like the way those eyes brightened when he spoke of Laraine. “I’ll speak to her when we get back,” he said. “Where is she staying?”
Dorian started walking again, looking at the temple before them. “You don’t find Laraine, Landros. She finds you.”
Landros followed him. One final corner and they were before the temple of Yerotan. Even in small villages such as this, the temples of the gods were spectacular, built of the finest stone available to the forgotten builders all those years ago after the final defeat of the Kings and Queens in the first war of the gods. This one was built in a deep white stone that seemed to glow even in the greyness of the day. The spire towered far, far above them. Carved into the stonework was the crest of the Keepers, and images in the windows showed some of the greatest deeds of the first war of the gods. The temple looked cool and dark within, the door half as tall again as Landros and made of thick oak. Torra stood before it, waiting for them to catch up. “It looks empty,” he said. “What if there isn’t a Guardian here?”
“Let’s go in and find out, shall we?” Landros walked straight past him and through the door. The temple looked deserted; something that seemed strange after Katrinamal where all the temples were constantly occupied by people seeking the favour of the gods. The entrance hall was cool and dark; images lined the walls, paintings of the first war of the gods, paintings of the second war. Landros averted his eyes from the nebulous blackness that represented the Nameless One and moved on through another oaken door leading into the praising room. This had row upon row of benches, enough to seat the entire village, it seemed. Before this was a stage high above the benches, behind which hung a massive silken banner bearing the crest of the Keepers. Two flights of stairs flanked the stage. Landros’s steps sounded loud on the cold stone floor. It looked like Torra was right, the temple was empty.
He stopped before the stage and look
ed around; the rows of benches made him feel watched, he could imagine Feren sitting in one of them watching him with black gunge leaking out of the hole in his head. He shook his head and turned away from the benches, squinting against the parched light spearing through the stained glass windows. One of the windows must have been replaced at some point, as it showed a scene from the second war of the gods. It depicted one of the most famous scenes of them all: the culmination of the battle of the Red Dawn, seven gods standing tall and proud before a castle bearing a black flag, the Nameless One and his foul followers fleeing in the distance under a sky of blood red. Everybody was familiar with that story, the turning point of the second war after the Nameless One had been winning battle after battle with his evil trickeries and deceptions.
“We should go,” Dorian said. “Wes and Pascal will probably be at the inn by now. We could tell the Clerk she wasn’t here.”
Elian. Clerk Lovelin. So many things Dorian didn’t know. And Landros couldn’t imagine going back to Clerk Killian empty handed. He couldn’t imagine handing an innocent woman over to the Clerk, either. If she was innocent. He sighed and climbed the stairs leading onto the stage, his steps loud in the cavernous hall. He turned and looked over the rows of benches, over Torra and Dorian looking up at him, imagined standing there before the entire village and speaking the words of the gods.
There was a stand on the stage, elaborately carved and with a book resting open on it. Landros walked across the stage and flicked through the book, the pages thick and stiff and the writing yellowed with age. The illustrations were elaborate, showing the Keepers dressed in fine robes with intricate masks the like of which he had never seen before. In his Dream, Keeper Jerohim had worn only the most simple of masks, red and oval with two eyeslits. In these illustrations the masks were of every colour, and long, reaching to below the breastbone with curls and whorls, with streamers of every colour hanging from them.
“Landros?” Torra said from somewhere far below him.
And then Landros heard it. A sigh like an infinitely cold wind drifting through a dark alley. It sighed again, coming from behind him, and Landros tried not to shiver against the sound.
He turned and saw the open door at the back of the stage. The whisper again, sending the skin on the back of his neck to crawling. How easy to turn away from the door, jump down from the stage and leave with Torra and Dorian, forgetting he had ever heard anything? Landros closed the book and walked slowly to the door, each step a death knell in the quiet of the praise room.
The door creaked softly, swinging towards him as he reached it. Landros reached out a hand and stopped it. The banner of the Keepers above him billowed in some unseen breeze. He stepped through the door.
The smell was like a solid thing, thick and pungent and enough to make him stop. How could he have not smelled it on the stage? The Nameless One, it had to be. The only thing he had smelled like it was the corpses the Nameless One possessed.
The breeze again, cold and dead and lifeless. No, not a breeze, a sigh, a moan of pain and suffering that made Landros want to close his ears. The room beyond the door was dark and cold, cold enough for Landros to see his breath. Something stirred before him, another moan of pain and Landros’s eyes adjusted to the darkness. He wanted to turn and leave, back out into the light and to Torra and Dorian, back to the inn and Len and his foul ale.
“Please...” something at the far side of the room whispered. Dark shapes all about him now, furniture, a short table, chairs, things hanging on the walls, paintings, it looked like. And a torch in the near corner behind the door. Landros reached for it and the tinderbox on the shelf below it. His hip jarred against another table, this one scattered with books by the look of it. Landros swore and the thing at the far side of the room whimpered at the sound. Landros wanted to whimper himself. The Nameless One had returned to him, he knew it. “Pray to your gods that we never meet again,” the foul creature had said to him on a dark hillside.
His hands shook as he scrabbled for the tinderbox, his fingers awkward and clumsy. He didn’t want to see, but he had to see. Save the Keepers, the smell! Landros gagged and fumbled with the tinderbox. Something black and wet had been drawn onto the wall near the torch. Landros did his best not to touch it with his hand.
The torch warmed his face as it flared to life and now the sigh became a scream, and then another scream, loud enough to make Landros flinch. Feet kicked and scrabbled on the floor, And Landros saw, and he wanted to scream himself.
A Guardian, judging by the shreds of a green smock still sticking to the black blood covering his chest. Spikes had been hammered into the wall above the Guardian’s head, his hands shackled to them as he slumped on the floor. There was a bald patch on the side of his head as though his hair had been pulled away and the skin with it. His lips were split, and as the poor man screamed, Landros could see his teeth were broken and splintered. All around him, on the wall and on the floor and all around the small room, were drawings painted in blood, diagrams looking like nothing but random lines connecting to one another at strange angles; and on each wall, painted in white, were simple squares with nothing in them but a single circle of gold.
The door burst open. Landros hadn’t even realized it had closed behind him. “Shit,” Torra came to a halt, lifting a hand to his mouth. The Guardian had stopped screaming, now a quiet whimpering. He might have cried if the skin below his eyes hadn’t been cut away. Some of the blood of the diagrams dripped onto the floor.
“Save the Keepers,” whispered Torra, making the sign of Keeper Jerohim on his breast. “What have they done to him?”
Landros kicked a chair out of the way, it looked like whoever had done this had found the Guardian at his desk writing. An open book lay on the table, a quill next to it. Perhaps he had risen to answer a knock at his door. Landros knelt next to the Guardian, he wanted to touch the man, comfort him somehow, but with the cuts and the welts covering his body, he didn’t want to hurt him anymore than he already was. “Guardian,” he spoke softly, quietly to the man. Trying not to scare him any further. “Who did this?”
“Please...” the Guardian whispered, “Please.”
A shuffle at the back of the room and Dorian moved closer, his face dark and with more fury in it than Landros had ever seen as he looked at the Guardian.
Now Landros did touch the man’s arm, softly and somehow managing to find a place where there was no blood. “Guardian, who did this to you?” And who would dare do such a thing in a temple of the Keepers? He looked at the walls, smeared blood patterning the intersecting lines, the circle in the white square on each of the walls. He was sure he didn’t want to meet these people who would dare defy the Keepers in such a way.
The Guardian groaned again, rolled his head to look at Landros, his eyes bright in the blood marring his face. He looked younger than Landros had first thought. He met Landros’s eyes. “Please,” he said again, running a tongue along his broken teeth and split lips.
“What?” Landros leaned closer, the foul smell now only making him pity the man all the more, making him hate the people who could do this in a house of the Keepers.
“They,” the Guardian licked his lips again, blood smearing on his tongue. “They were looking for her. The Clerk told me to keep her safe for the Watch.” The effort of talking had made blood seep from his mouth and Landros looked to Torra and Dorian.
“You mean Ysora?” He said to the Guardian, leaning close despite the foul stink. “They were looking for Ysora? Where is she? Why did they want her?”
Too many questions. The Guardian coughed, bubbles of blood in the corners of his mouth. “I tried, but they were too strong. They stole the name from my mind. I never told them where, but they knew anyway.” As though remembering, he opened his eyes wider, the cuts beneath them seeping more blood. A wracked sob escaped him, “How could they do this? The drawings, the things they said...” Tears of blood spilled from his eyes and Landros drew the knife from his boot.
&
nbsp; “Where is she, Guardian? Where is Ysora?” His hand tightened on the hilt of the knife.
The Guardian rested his head back on the wall, arms still shackled above his head. They had cut off two of his fingers, the blood leaking down his arm and onto his shoulders. “That’s what they wanted to know. I tried, I tried...” He closed his eyes against the memory.
“But they knew, what did they take from you?” Torra spoke now, his arms folded across his chest.
“Farmer Mashin. She was at Farmer Mashin’s. They’ll be there by now.” Bloodied tears of shame trailed down the cuts in the Guardian’s cheeks.
Landros looked up at the two men of the Watch. Dorian and Torra both looked down at him and nodded once. Landros nodded back before resting his free hand on the Guardian’s arm. “Hush, friend, you did well. You were brave.” He felt tears sting his own eyes and remembered a horse on a hillside not so long ago. He wouldn’t make the same mess of the poor Guardian. He crouched before the man, hating the people who had done this to him, hating them for making him have to do this. “You did well,” he said again and then cut the Guardian’s throat as quickly as he could, slowly and gently releasing his head so it rested forward against his chest.
“Poor bastard,” Torra said after a long silence.
Landros rose to his feet, his eyes still on the tortured Guardian. At least he wasn’t in pain anymore. He wanted to untie him, lay him to rest, but he needed to be away, find the woman. Was this why the Clerks wanted her found? To save her from the creatures who could do such a thing in a temple of the Keepers? He wiped his knife on the cloth on the table.
“We should go, find this woman.” Dorian was already at the door, his face grim and dark in the flickering light of the torch.
Landros took one last look at the Guardian, nodding. “Who could do this?”
“You’d think the Keepers would have Seen it, saved him.” Torra seemed more shaken by the scene than any of them. A fact Landros found vaguely surprising.