by Martin Davey
Landros finally turned from the body and nodded to the lines drawn on the wall, to the golden circle in its white box. “Maybe that’s why these are here? To guard against the Sight of the Keepers?” He was thinking aloud now, but Torra nodded, looking more closely at one of the drawings, the blood trailing down the wall almost black in the fluttering torch. The drawings were barely seen in the darkness now, the torch having flickered away to barely an ember, before firing into life once more as though a great wind blew through the room. It flickered again, the flame dying once more. Landros watched it, his eyes widening and his breath catching in his throat. He looked to the Guardian, still slumped on the floor, hands still shackled to the wall. “We have to go,” he said, his words sounding strange to his own ears.
The torch grew, flames licking the walls, smoke filling the room and then it died again as though some unseen force was fighting the flames. “We have to go,” Landros said again, almost shoving Torra to the door.
A sound like a chill wind rolling down a barren hillside, and Landros didn’t dare look back to see if it was coming from the Guardian. He slammed the door shut behind them and told himself the sound of his whispered name coming from the other side of the door was only his imagination.
Only his imagination.
CHAPTER 29
They had ridden hard all day. Hard enough to make her legs and back ache like nothing she had ever known. Ysora hated riding at the best of times, but racing like the minions of the Nameless One were after them for mile after mile so soon after the terrors of the dream was enough to make her think she was about to faint right out of the saddle. Her eyes constantly drawn to Tiege clinging to Phailin’s back, his own back striped with blood and cuts which only seemed to open more with every stride of the horse.
When they finally did stop, she had no idea where she was. She hadn’t even known which direction they were fleeing in. Phailin had been patient before their flight, his eyes creasing at the corners as he smiled and let her carve and model from strips of grass and twigs and mud a little figure hanging from a tree. It had scared Ysora how lifelike the figure looked, scared her how true the branches of her veirwood were. She had shown Phailin the image and he had caressed it with his hands, the nails neat and the grey hair poking out from his sleeves looking fine and soft. He had looked at the figure, asked Ysora who the girl was, when she had lived, the people the girl had known and the god she had been sacrificed to. He had been patient as he squatted before her on his haunches, smiling at her as he waited for the shivers to subside, even when she had screamed at him and seen a tongue of black rope snaking out of his mouth, he had waited, never coming too close, but never leaving her either.
And then she had seen them bring Tiege from the house, swaddled in a blanket like an infant, walking with back bent like an aged man. As soon as Ysora had been ready, and Tiege had been lifted onto Phailin’s horse, the ride had begun. Racing away from Yerotan until the horses gasped and sweated beneath them, and then they had raced some more. Ysora trusting them, urging her horse to keep up with Phailin and his men. And they had trusted her, trusted her to ride with them and not to try and escape. Would it truly be an escape if she wasn’t a prisoner?
The day had been grey and dreary and the night was dark and dreary, not a star in the sky and not a breath of a wind to ease the heaviness in the air. The grass was dry and soft as she stretched her legs out before her, leaning back on her elbows. Trees with branches like grasping fingers were scattered about the land around them. A narrow stream wound through the hills, and hedges and stone walls seemed to mark where fields had once been; farmland perhaps. She looked around; saw piles of stone in the distance, black in the darkness. An idle part of her wondered what had happened to these farmers, how this land had come to be abandoned so long ago. She was so tired, every fibre of her being ached with weariness.
“You alright, Ysora?” Wynne stood over her, his face dark in the night, but Ysora could still see the two fine cuts she had scratched into his cheek. She winced at the sight of them.
She nodded up at the man, wanting to rise to her feet and not have him towering over her like that, but she couldn’t find the energy. “How is Tiege?” She hadn’t found the courage to go over and see him yet, guilt that her own carelessness had caused those cuts in his flesh, caused him to be tortured by Mashin and Geyan.
Wynne looked over to the dark shape still and silent on the hill, looking out to the dark trees and the dark clouds across the fields. “Why don’t you go and ask him yourself?”
She looked back to the silent shape on the hillside, then back to Wynne. “Where’s Phailin?” she asked. She hadn’t been able to talk to the leader of the group since their ride from Yerotan.
Wynne shrugged his big shoulders, “Not here.”
Ysora nodded and struggled to her feet, her calves and thighs groaning in protest. Wynne rested a hand on her shoulder as she got to her feet. “You did well. You were brave.” And he wiped the back of his hand across his nose and walked away back to where Ket and Shen stood talking quietly.
Walking felt strange, her legs stiff and awkward, not quite her own. The shape on the hillside didn’t look her way as she approached, didn’t look her way as she sat down next to it. He had a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and sat with a straight back, as though slouching would hurt the cuts even more. She followed his gaze out across the fields, watching the trees reach for the sky, watching the black silhouettes flutter silently about the branches. They reminded Ysora of the stormweavers and other birds in her dream. She blinked and looked down at her feet, hugging her knees to her chest. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Tiege still didn’t look her way. “What for?” he asked the fields, the trees, the silent stones.
Ysora looked at his profile. He looked the same, but he looked different. Older. She hadn’t expected the question, and now he asked it, she didn’t know what to say. “I was careless,” she finally said.
Now Tiege did look at her, and his eyes were bright in the darkness. “You’ve nothing to be sorry for.” His eye was black and puffy, she noticed now, half closed, and it made her stomach churn to look at it. “We are the ones who should be sorry. For choosing you, for putting you in that position. “ He looked away now, seeming to remember that he didn’t want her seeing his face. “The Master should have known better. They could have had you killed. Or worse. You know they were sending the Town Watch to take you back to the Clerk?”
Ysora nodded, remembered he couldn’t see her. “Yes,” she said, following his gaze out to the black-branched trees.
“They would have come for you eventually, but still we shouldn’t have put you in that position.”
“Why would they come for me? What would the Clerk want with someone like me?” Even as she asked the question, she already knew the answer.
“The dreams,” Tiege said. He sounded younger, smaller than the tall man who had walked around Yerotan, Addison’s admiring gaze following his every step. “The dreams of the gods.” Tiege shrugged and winced against the pain in his back, shifted his position. He looked pale, his eye swollen and black in the darkness. “The Master knows, Ysora, just be careful how much you tell him. He is a cold man, dead inside. And he would sacrifice us all if it suited his ends.”
Ysora felt her breath catch in her throat. The smiling, mocking Tiege seemed a thing of the past. “The Master? He’ll be coming to us soon? Is this where we’re going to meet him?”
Tiege’s smile was twisted and painful to look at. “You’ve met him, the man you told about your dream? The one who helped you make the girl?”
“Phailin?” Ysora said, not able to keep the disbelief from her voice. The man with the watchful smile and the silver hair so neatly brushed to the side. The man with the soft voice and the cautious eyes. She could almost imagine him being a Guardian like Cioran. At the thought, she felt an empty ache in her stomach. The thought she might never see Cioran again, that he might spend the rest of his d
ays thinking she had betrayed him. Knowing she had betrayed him. Mashin and Geyan had said Cioran loved her. She remembered the way he had looked at her with his sandy hair and his formal, kindly smile and only now did she know it to be true. She wanted to weep at the thought.
“Phailin.” Tiege nodded. “Master Phailin. Be careful with him, Ysora. Do as he says, tell him what he needs to know and he will be your friend.”
“He said I could leave,” Ysora said, a vague fantasy forming in her mind of returning to Cioran, his forgiving smile forming on his face, his arms spread wide for her. “He said I could go back home whenever I wished.”
“Home?” Tiege laughed. It sounded more like a cough. “You don’t have a home anymore once they find Mashin and Geyan or Cioran.”
Ysora felt cold, her shoulders tightened. “Cioran?” she almost whispered the name.
Tiege glanced at her once more. “This is a war we fight. People die in war.”
“But Cioran...” Ysora stifled a sob. “Cioran wasn’t fighting a war, he was teaching about the love of Keeper Liotuk, the love of the Keepers.”
There was no sympathy in Tiege’s beaten face. “Then he was fighting a war more surely than either of us. And if he hadn’t fallen then it would have been the two of us. I would already be dead and you would be wishing you were.”
“But Cioran...” Ysora still couldn’t believe the Guardian was dead. Killed at the hands of the man with the watchful eyes.
“You mean your step father?” Tiege’s smile looked cruel in the darkness.
“”He wasn’t married to my mother,” she said.
“He wanted to get close to you, to get you to trust him quickly so he could keep you in Yerotan while he got news to the Clerk of your arrival.”
Ysora sucked on her lip and winced against the pain of the cut there. Farmer Mashin had had bony knuckles for a fat man. She could see Ket, Shen and Wynne standing about, all of them lost in their own thoughts in the darkness, but no sign of Phailin. “Where is he? Master Phailin?” She would have thought he’d have been with her, smiling and talking and understanding her dreams. He had told her they weren’t dreams, but memories. Memories of people long forgotten and long dead. This had somehow made them harder to bear. Harder to dismiss the death and the suffering she had seen in them.
Tiege shivered under his blanket. “His army comes.” He nodded to the north, to the darkness and the black hills. “You hear it marching? This is where the Master has arranged to meet his army. Now he will be praying for victory.” He wrapped the blanket tighter about himself, tucking it under his chin. “Can’t you feel it, feel the cold?”
What did the weather have to do with an army coming, with Phailin praying? But now that Tiege mentioned it, the air did have more of a chill in it, preferable to the stultifying stillness of the day, but definitely colder. A coldness that had nothing to do with the air ran through her veins. “Who is it Phailin is praying to?” she said.
An appraising look from Tiege. She had always thought he had somehow been above her, wiser and more knowledgeable even though they were of the same age. Now he looked at her as an equal. “That is something we all had to find out in the end, somehow.” He looked over to the three big men. Ket and Shen were talking quietly to one another, Wynne was standing alone watching the black birds swoop about the black trees in the distance. “He says we all know the answer to that question in our hearts, we just need our eyes opening to the truth. And I think he is right, when he found me after I ran from the men who killed your mother and the rest of Yerotan,” Tiege shrugged again, sighed against the pain in his back. “I always knew what he was.”
It was definitely colder now, Ysora could even see her breath misting before her. She hugged her knees tighter to her chest. “What he was? What is he then?”
Tiege smiled at her and she saw something of the old Tiege in it. “That isn’t something I can tell you, that’s something you have to find for yourself with Phailin’s guidance.”
Ysora nodded, sucked on her lip and wished she hadn’t. Somehow she knew what was expected of her; they wanted her to go and find Phailin, but she wasn’t quite ready yet. She didn’t want to be ready. She thought of all the gods she had dreamed of, dark gods with sennablossoms for eyes walking through forests, black and wet gods that swam in rivers and oceans, gods with no eyes that sat and brooded in the deepest caves. All of them long forgotten and long dead outside of her dreams. But who was it that Phailin would pray to? Phailin who was so like Cioran with his calm smile and his intelligent eyes. “What about you, Tiege? How did you find out?” Her breath fogged and misted before her.
“Everyone who is a follower will tell you a different tale, Ysora.” Tiege sighed, shifted his long legs beneath him. “He says there are more of us than you could ever imagine, that the war is being won, but all I ever see are people hiding in the hills, people who fight with us who daren’t even tell us their true names.” He frowned, turned to Ysora, no longer trying to hide the awful wound to his eye. “But I listened to what he had to say, I saw the truth in his words and, even if there were only the six of us fighting the war and we were all to die tonight, it would still be a fight worth fighting. Think of your mother, think of Russell and Sora and Vicki. Think of them all being killed by the men hunting you and you might think the same.”
Ysora nodded and watched Shen and Ket talking , watched Wynne looking out across the fields, thought of Phailin and his smile and his understanding of her dreams. No judgement there because she dreamed of false gods, only understanding in his ice blue eyes. Even without her mother and her childhood friends, she knew she could side with Phailin against anybody. He was the first man she’d ever met she didn’t have to hide her true self from; even with Tiege she’d been breathless and overawed by his appearance. Phailin she felt she could tell anything to. Even her dreams. She swallowed and nodded again.
Even without looking at her, Tiege seemed to understand a decision had been made. He’d been changed since Farmer Mashin’s. She could have asked him what they had done to him, but she knew he wouldn’t tell her and she wasn’t sure she’d want to know either. He grabbed her hand with a speed that shocked her as she turned away. She met his gaze and tried not to flinch at the sight of his eye. “Things will seem different once you have seen, Ysora. Try not to be afraid. Breathe and think and keep your mind free of doubt and you will see the truth.” Not Tiege’s words, she knew. Perhaps they were the same words that somebody had once said to him when he went to see the Master on a cold dark night. She shivered against the chill, nodded once to him and, wrapping her shawl tighter about herself, turned away to the blackness of the night.
The grass was long and it wisped against her skirts as she walked. How to know which way to go? Follow the cold, she thought, and there was no doubt where the cold was coming from, out there in the darkness beyond a hill scattered with stones black in the night. A few scraggly trees and bushes clung to the side of the hill. She skirted them all, almost slipping once and catching herself against the thin trunk of an atlas tree. It was colder here, cold enough to make her cheeks and nose feel raw, cold enough to make her clench her hands into fists and hold them close to her body as she walked up the hill. She wondered if the others were watching her; Tiege, Ket, Shen and Wynne, but didn’t turn around to look. She doubted she would have been able to continue on if she did.
The hill wasn’t a large one, no higher than a two storey house and she was reaching the summit before she was altogether ready. What to expect on the other side? Phailin and his god? A god who dared challenge the world of the Keepers? She had dreamed of gods since the death of Rhodry, gods long dead and long forgotten, and there wasn’t one of them she would want to meet on a dark hillside in the middle of the countryside. They were all alien things, with little understanding of the needs and wants of man. Isn’t that why the Keepers had come to the world, to save man from himself and the tyrannies of the Kings and cold, cruel gods?
A curious sense o
f disappointment and relief as she reached the crest of the hill and saw nobody there. She did glance over her shoulder now, an excuse to go away and turn back, but she remembered Phailin, how he had understood her dreams, the questions he asked and the lack of judgement in his eyes. She dreamed of gods other than the Keepers and yet to him she wasn’t tainted with evil, she was a woman to be helped, a woman to be trusted.
She walked down the other side of the hill, her steps careful, the grass cold enough to crunch beneath her feet.
More piles of stone around this side of the hill, grass and weeds growing about them. Ysora ran a hand along the taller pillars. She moved on. Trees and more stones and bushes. Cold breath, cold grass and cold stone.
And then she heard the voices. Phailin’s, unmistakably. Cool and intelligent. Like Cioran. Ysora followed the sound of the voice, running a hand along a low brick wall with thick grass snaking up the sides of it. There, where two black trees grew either side of a crumbling stone wall, that was where Phailin’s voice was coming from. Another voice, lower and harder to hear, not the voice of a god, she thought, more the sound of a man like any other. Still her steps were more tentative as she approached, her breath thick about her face.
The muffled voice sounded again and Ysora couldn’t help wishing the moon was in the sky to shed some light on the scene. All was darkness; walls and trees and grass and bushes nothing but darker shades of black in the darkness. Again the muffled voice spoke and Phailin answered with a single word, then the sound of movement, clothes rustling, the chink of metal.
Ysora had to force herself to walk on, every instinct in her being telling her to turn back, to flee as fast as she could. She swallowed away the instinct and walked around the tree, her fingers brushing its stone cold trunk, she walked around the wall where the bricks and stones crumbled and flaked.