Darksoul

by Anna Stephens

  Durdil’s step was heavy as he descended the stairs, leaving the man open-mouthed behind him.

  GALTAS

  Fourth moon, afternoon, day twenty-two of the siege

  Second Last, western wall, Rilporin, Wheat Lands

  Galtas would never presume that he had the favour of the gods, as that was a sure way to have it removed, but the fact remained that he was at the base of the wall, alive and unhurt, while dozens of highly trained soldiers were screeching their way to becoming food for the crows.

  He’d let the first three assaults proceed without him, and he’d watched them fail, the men annihilated for no gain, but there was only so long he could delay the inevitable and the fourth wave carried him along, helpless but for the paltry protection of his shield.

  Skerris had given him the quick version of scaling a wall – be quick. Galtas needed to be up the ladder as fast as the man in front of him, or he’d not only hold up those below, but he’d create a gap in the line of shields hanging from each man’s back and expose himself. As long as he stayed close, the shield of the man ahead of him would offer some protection from the arrows being loosed down the ladders.

  If they stick with arrows. What if they use pitch and fire? Or boiling oil? Or fucking great rocks? What if they turn the stingers on us? Galtas wiped sweat from his eyebrows and sucked in a lungful of air, trying not to think about the portable catapults that shot arrows the size of horses. One of those down a ladder would skewer half a dozen men like a rabbit on a spit.

  ‘The Lady’s will,’ he said, loud and firm. It steadied him as he crouched beneath his shield among the rubble, waiting his turn to sling it on his back and begin the climb. A few others echoed his words, but Galtas recognised them as true believers. None of the forced converts uttered a word – the Dancer wasn’t listening any more and they refused to ask the Red Gods for aid. Bereft in the midst of a fucking battlefield while death rained from the sky. Galtas shivered, glad that his faith was strong.

  Behind him on the sward, East Rank archers crouched and loosed from the paltry protection of moveable wicker barricades, aiming at the men at the top of the wall. Galtas didn’t look up, not wanting to see how many arrows were low, bouncing off the wall around the ladders, as much a danger to their comrades as the enemy was.

  The line was moving fast. Galtas glanced behind him and by the time he looked back, a dozen men were on the ladder and there was a gap opening in front of him.

  ‘Shit,’ he grunted, stood and slung his shield on to his back, leapt forward and on to the first rung of the ladder. He climbed fast, hands slipping on rungs muddy from the boots of those who’d already ascended. A man fell screaming past him and Galtas fought the urge to freeze and cling to the ladder, forced his hands and legs to keep moving, keep climbing, the man in front of him getting further away with every second.

  Galtas’s boot skidded on the rung and he stumbled, his foot flailing and catching the shoulder of the man below. The soldier grunted and swore at him, told him to hurry the fuck up or they were all dead, and an arrow whined past Galtas’s nose to emphasise his point. Galtas yelped and started climbing again, as fast as he could, breath whistling in his lungs and thighs burning. The noise of fighting and shouting got louder the higher he climbed, and then the ladder shuddered and slipped sideways, halted, and then slipped again. He chanced a look up – there was no one on the ladder above him, and there was no one defending its head. Four men in Palace Rank uniforms strained to push it away from the wall.

  The men below him were still climbing, pushing at him, threatening to tip him off if he didn’t move. Everyone who went up here before me is dead. They’re just waiting for my head to rise over the parapet and they’ll cut it off. This is stupid.

  Galtas looked down. ‘Stop,’ he yelled, ‘stop climbing. Retreat.’

  ‘Climb, you fucking coward,’ the soldier below him yelled. The man shoved at his leg, punched his calf. ‘Move or die, cunt.’ Galtas moved, starting the climb again. There was nothing else he could do, and the gods would protect him or call him to Their side if it was his time to die.

  Please don’t let it be my time to die.

  The ladder lurched again and Galtas saw himself falling, screaming, to the base of the wall, already littered with corpses and rocks and spent arrows. And then he was at the top of the ladder and he dropped his left shoulder fast so the shield swung from his back on to his arm. Galtas’s fingers fumbled the straps and he nearly lost it, caught the rim and jabbed it in the face of the nearest soldier, poked him back spitting teeth and leapt through a crenel on to the allure, dragging at his sword. Less than a second later another soldier joined him, then another and another as the East Rank poured on to the wallwalk and fanned out into a bridgehead.

  ‘Still alive,’ he breathed as a knot of soldiers charged him. Galtas laughed and waded into the fight, sword silver on the down swing and red on the way back up. ‘Still alive!’ he screamed.

  The ladder to his right was less successful; Palace Rankers shoved it away with long hooked poles. Men clung yelling to it as it swung in a slow, elegant arc away from the wall and past the vertical. A man at the top of the ladder flung himself desperately at the wall; he missed the top by a stride’s length, slammed into the stone and slid all the way down.

  The ladder picked up speed as it began its inevitable descent to the earth, and the screams of the soldiers faded with distance and were cut off on impact. But more men were climbing Galtas’s ladder, flooding into the space behind him and pushing the front rank further in both directions along the wall. They were spreading, taking more wall, killing the defenders. They were fucking winning.

  Galtas fought alongside the Rankers, no time to look up and out and across to see how the Mireces fared, no breath in him to care one way or the other. It’d be the Rank that won this; everyone knew it. The Mireces were little more than bodies to throw on to metal, the sheer weight of numbers rather than skill securing any victory they might win.

  He was closer to Second Tower than he was to the gatehouse, which suited him well. Without seeming to, he allowed small gaps to form that the Easterners hurried into, no doubt thinking him some untrained idiot for threatening their tenuous hold on the wall. Slowly they drove for the tower and Galtas fell back into their midst. He’d need to be well protected in the seconds it’d take him to effect his disguise. Though of course, once he had, he was at as much risk of being killed by his own side as he was by the defenders.

  The Lady’s will, he told himself again. A defender over-reached himself, bursting through the East Rank’s front line into the space behind where Galtas loitered. Galtas grinned at the flailing defender, punched him in the teeth, swept his arm low and under the man’s knee, and hoisted. He went over the wall with a whooping shriek more of shock than fear, and then he was gone.

  An arrow buzzed past Galtas on his blind side; it looked to have come from further down the allure. It reminded him to take off his eye patch; the first part of his disguise lay in removing the thing he was most well known for. He ripped it off his head and dropped it over the wall, ducked a slash and let the man next to him riposte, skipped behind a third’s shield and stabbed over his comrade’s head into their attacker’s neck where it met the collarbone, sword angled down so half its length vanished into the man’s body, cleaving lung and liver, maybe stomach. The man puked blood and Galtas ripped his sword free, scooped up a fallen shield and inched and killed his way towards the tower.

  Still alive.

  GILDA

  Fourth moon, afternoon, day twenty-five of the siege

  East Rank encampment, outside Rilporin, Wheat Lands

  She was under guard, of course, and had been for what felt like months. That’s because it has been months. There’s a comforting thought. But despite her gaoler Scell’s omnipresence at the other end of the chain and collar she’d worn all that time, the East Rank healers were too busy making her work to care that she was a slave.

  I’m no
t a slave, she corrected herself. I’m a prisoner. There’s a difference.

  And there was. Today was the first time they’d put her to work, whereas their slaves worked from the day they were captured until the day they died. More of a guest, really, she told herself. They like me so much they can’t bear for me to leave. She clanked the chain against her collar and snorted faint amusement.

  Today though, the healers had finally admitted that the number of casualties from both armies had become too great for them to cope on their own. Decades as high priestess of the Dancer and the Fox God had given Gilda ample opportunity to hone her skills in healing, birthing, and easing men into the Light. She didn’t expect to have much cause to employ the middle skill, but healing and the grace were in high demand.

  Scell’s curiosity had faded hours before and now he was the one trailing after her at the end of the chain as she strode between the rows of men lying in the hospital tents, lending what aid she could. The low roar of battle still drifted across the grass between the city and the East Rank’s precise, square, tidy encampment, so unlike the ragged, broken-down, stinking mess of a camp the Mireces inhabited. There, the latrine pits had begun to overflow, and Gilda knew disease would rip through the men like wildfire if they weren’t careful. She didn’t bother worrying she might contract something; death by fever was likely the easiest end she was going to suffer.

  All her amulets had been taken from her, but as she knelt next to a man missing his left leg above the knee, she found the words coming anyway, so low Scell couldn’t hear. ‘Dancer’s grace be with you, lad, and the Fox God grant you His favour.’

  The man’s eyes were wide with pain but they widened even further, so much that Gilda could see the red-starred whites all around. ‘You mustn’t,’ he breathed. ‘It’s forbidden.’ There wasn’t much fire in his voice, though. He groaned against a stab of pain, clutching at his foreshortened leg, cords standing out in his neck. ‘It hurts,’ he gasped. ‘Help me, it hurts so much.’

  Both of them looked at Scell, but the Mireces was too busy poking at a fresh corpse, disgusted fascination lining his face, to pay much attention.

  ‘I will do what I can, soldier, however little that may be. I can pray with you and for you.’

  ‘It’s forbidden,’ he repeated, but there was no defiance in his tone now, just a desperate hope. The bandages around the stump were soaked and leaking blood on to the cot and through the thin straw mattress. Gilda could hear it pattering on the mud below.

  You poor bastard. She tapped a fingernail against her collar and tipped him a wink. ‘Not much more they can do to me, soldier. Burnt my home to the ground and slaughtered everyone I’ve ever known and loved. Kill me too, soon enough.’ She leant very close, so the man went cross-eyed trying to focus on her. ‘Doesn’t mean I should give up my faith, does it? Doesn’t mean I shouldn’t help where I can, offer comfort. Offer … absolution.’

  His mouth twisted with shame and tears spilt from the corners of his eyes. ‘I gave up my faith,’ he muttered, ‘for something as pointless as gold. Gave it up without a thought.’

  ‘Turning to the Red Gods and being tricked into doing so are two different things. Repent, do you?’ Gilda whispered, her hand on his chest, glancing again in Scell’s direction. ‘Embrace the Light, yes?’

  ‘I can’t,’ the man sobbed. ‘They said I couldn’t, said once I’d sworn that I was bound. Bound to Her, the Dark Lady.’

  ‘Horseshit,’ Gilda snorted, wondering if it was. ‘Your soul belongs to no one but you. If you want to give it to the Red Gods, be my guest. If you want to give it to the Dancer, then all you need to do is pray. Here, now, with me.’

  Hope and shame and fear warred across his pasty features. ‘Who are you?’ he hissed.

  She tucked her hair back behind one ear. ‘Gilda, high priestess of Watchtown and member of the council of priests – if such a thing still exists. Now, lad, would you pray? Would you reclaim your soul from Blood and consecrate it again in the Light?’ The soldier nodded feverishly. ‘I cannot offer you a cleansing – there’s no godpool here – so we’ll do the best we can. The Great Trickster is always pleased to see our inventiveness, is He not?’

  ‘Will … will the Dancer want me back?’ the man whispered, his hope breaking.

  Gilda took the soldier’s waterskin and shook it, smiling at the sloshing from within. She unstoppered it and bent her head. ‘Of course. Of that I have no doubt. Now hush a moment.’ She closed her eyes and expanded her soul to encompass the man, draw him close and still within her embrace. She could feel the Dancer; despite everything, beneath the hate and fear and blood and shit, She was watching. Waiting, Her arms open.

  ‘Holy Dancer, Lady clothed in sunlight, I ask that you hear me now and bless this water with all the holiness of your sacred pools. Fox God, lord of cunning and resourcefulness, bless these our efforts to bring this man—’

  ‘Nils.’

  ‘This man Nils out of the darkness and into your sacred Light.’ Another swift glance about, and Gilda dribbled water over Nils’s face and neck, into his mouth. ‘Bathe in this water and be cleansed, from the outside in. Drink of this water and be cleansed, from the inside out. Reject the darkness, reject hate and pain and shame and fear. Embrace Light and love and comradeship. Open your heart and your soul to the Light, my friend. Let it in. Let it heal your soul and cleanse your mind, to bear you up against the waters of evil, to hold you close in love.’

  Nils’s face was ecstatic as he closed his eyes and stretched his head back into his pillow. ‘I feel Her,’ he whispered. ‘I think She’s coming. The Dancer’s coming.’

  ‘I know.’ Gilda said, wanting to hush him, knowing she couldn’t. There was a feather-light brush across her mind, a warm breeze of laughter and overwhelming love. Peace came into Nils’s eyes even as it flooded Gilda’s heart. ‘Child of Light, let go. Of pain and fear and shame. Let it all go.’

  ‘Thank you, priestess,’ he murmured, breath thready, shallowing. ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘Thank you, Nils, for your faith and strength,’ Gilda replied. She bent down and kissed him softly on the forehead. ‘Go in grace, go in peace, and rest now in the Light,’ she added, and Nils turned his face away from her so she had the right angle to punch her slender-bladed knife through his temple into his brain. He died without a twitch and with a smile.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  Gilda jumped and looked up into the face of Brevis, the East Rank’s chief physician. The man’s red-blotched face spoke of too much wine and too little sleep, but his hands were steady and Gilda had seen him wield the bone saw with skill.

  She stood. ‘Nils was bleeding to death and in agony. There was no saving him. He begged the grace; I gave it to him.’ She sheathed the knife she’d stolen from his operating tent earlier.

  Brevis scowled. ‘You have no right to make those decisions. The man might still have been of use.’

  Gilda pointed to the stump, to the pool of blood still accreting beneath the cot. Scell wandered over, curiosity piqued by the raising voices and, no doubt, the sight of another new corpse. The man was a maggot, with a maggot’s lust for dead flesh.

  ‘Would you have me leave him alive in agony to do nothing but beg you for opium and curse you when you refused?’ Gilda asked.

  Brevis looked at Scell, at the knife and sword he wore. ‘The grace is,’ he began. ‘The grace is …’ He trailed off, unable to repeat the dogma that had been forced upon him.

  ‘The grace is a heathen practice outlawed in the East Rank as it is among the Mireces,’ a new voice said.

  Gilda looked past Brevis and bobbed a curtsey. ‘General Skerris,’ she acknowledged, ‘I find it odd you would outlaw such a thing. The grace is, after all, one of the only things your soldiers can be sure of – that if they are mortally wounded they will be ended quickly, with as little pain as possible. Surely you risk rebellion if you take it from them?’

  ‘They fight for a higher purpose now,’ Skerris
rumbled. ‘Their pain glorifies the gods and brings Them closer, therefore we should not see it ended prematurely.’

  Gilda glanced at the beds closest to her; wounded soldiers stared at them in disbelief, or hunched on their sides as far from Skerris as they could get, shoulders shaking as they wept. No swift end if infection takes them, no painless drifting away from a world filled with agony. No blink from life to death as a blade enters your brain. Instead, a protracted, lingering, pointless death that will fill them with despair and their fellows with horror.

  ‘Idiots,’ she snapped, careless of to whom she spoke. ‘You are making a grave mistake. These men are professional soldiers. They have pledged to fight for you, to obey your commands, and have given their souls to your filthy gods. You have already taken everything they have to give. They should at least be allowed to die in dignity, if death be their fate. You cannot take that from them. You must not.’

  ‘Mind your tongue,’ Scell snapped, jerking the chain as though Gilda was a snarling dog. She staggered, grunting as the collar reopened the scabs where the metal had chafed her neck raw.

  ‘You have no idea what the men in this hospital do and do not deserve or how they should spend their last hours,’ Skerris said calmly, as if lecturing a new recruit. ‘They are no longer mired in the delusions of your faith. They belong to Blood now, and if they must die steeped in it, they will do so to further the aims of our gods, the true gods. Treat them and do all you can to save them, but if they are dying, you will leave them to do so in their own time and not go near them again. It will purify their souls ready for the Afterworld. Do you understand?’

  Gilda clicked her tongue against her teeth and scanned the closest beds; everyone was listening and she knew without doubt the news would spread to every soldier in the hospital and then to the entire Rank before dusk tinged the sky. Whether it would be enough to begin a rebellion, she’d no idea.

  I hope so. Those who rise up against tyranny and the gods they’ve been forced to pledge themselves to will be welcome back in the Light when their time comes. If they’ve the strength to deny the pull of Blood with their final breaths, as Nils did.