by J. V. Jones
With his fire-darkened tweezers, Iss picked at the bladderskin cap. The Bound One’s skin was yellow and loose, attached to his body in very few places, and Iss had to be careful not to tear it as he worked.
When the cap was off and the glue scraped away, Iss pressed his thumb and forefinger into the flesh to either side of the boil. As he felt the hard scaly form of the caul fly rise against his fingertips, a small thrill heated his face. This one was fully formed. It had pupated in the flesh; another few days and it would have eaten its way out. It was heavy, too, gorged on blood. A perfect parasite, every organ, cilia, and membrane created by the host.
And that was the real reason why one had to withdraw it whole. Nothing, not one drop of digestive fluid, one double-jointed leg, or one hollow and serrated tooth, could be lost during the extraction. Blood sorcery could be drawn using an incomplete specimen, but it was never as potent as when the parasite was whole. It was the Bound One’s creature in every way, his sorcerous child. During an eight-week incubation the caul fly had fed upon the Bound One’s flesh, concentrating his power and distilling his blood. Iss had read that some men who bound sorcerers to them gained access to the sorcerer’s power by using other parasites such as leeches, lice, or loa worms, but Iss found the caul flies much to his liking. They stayed close to the skin and could be easily tracked and extracted, and they lived two of their three life cycles within the host.
The caul fly was now in view, pushed to the surface by the action of Iss’ fingers, its dark, segmented eye staring at Iss through the airhole. Good. It was close to death, but the tiny cilia on its body moved against the current of clear fluid that leaked from the boil. Iss flexed the tweezers, testing their bend. As he reached through the airhole, probing for the thorax, a soft gasp parted the Bound One’s lips.
Iss was not disturbed. The Bound One made noises sometimes. He had no words. All speech, memories, and learning had been taken from him sixteen years earlier, during the thirty-one days of his breaking. At the end of the thirty-one days he was left with nothing but an animal’s needs, and like an animal he grunted when he was afraid or in pain. A word softly spoken was all it took to calm him.
The caul fly came free with a wet pop. Already it had begun to darken and enlarge in preparation for attracting a mate. The carapace covering its wings was a thing of beauty: red toned, transparent, divided into angular shapes by a network of crossing sutures. Iss held it to the light.
This one is for you, almost-daughter. That I might see how far you reached yesterday at dawn.
The Bound One groaned as Iss withdrew his touch. Again the arm moved, and for an instant Iss thought he saw a flicker of pure hatred darken the Bound One’s eye. Iss was not a man given to shivering, yet he felt his chest muscles contract all the same. Surely he was mistaken? The Bound One saw but did not perceive, existed but did not feel.
It was the way it had to be for a bound sorcerer. They had to be broken completely, both their body and their mind at the exact same instant. Iss had learned the danger of breaking the body first. Thigh bones wrenched from the pelvis, spines forced backward around a wheel, and needles inserted into the inner ear to misalign the tiny hammer-and-tong bones there were not enough to destroy a mind. Iss knew that. He had lost two men learning that lesson, had the enamel burned from his teeth as a drawing leaving his mouth was forced back.
Iss snapped his head, sending the memory away. His pale hare’s eyes focused upon the Bound One’s face, searching for signs of sentience. The Bound One’s good pupil was dull and unfocused, a black hole with nothing spilling out.
“Do you know who I am, Bound One?” Iss asked. “Do you know all that I have done?”
The Bound One’s hand moved again, this time toward the package of beans sealed in waxed linen that hung from Iss’ belt. Feeling a strange mixture of affection and relief, Iss nodded his head. “Hungry, eh? Of course, of course. That’s the beast I’ve come to know.”
Turning his back on the Bound One and his iron pen, Iss took a moment to still himself before he began the drawing. The close, curving walls of the iron chamber reminded him of a dry well. Even this deep the stone cutters had worked to maintain the gradual tapering of the spire’s walls. Iss only had to close his eyes to imagine the spire’s form: a stake into the heart of the mountain. A perfectly rounded stake.
Robb Claw, Lord of the Fourth Spire, builder of Mask Fortress, and great-grandson to Glamis Claw, was rumored to have begun excavation on the Inverted Spire five years after the Splinter was built. The city of Spire Vanis was new then, one-tenth the size it came to be. The four Bastard Lords had crossed the Ranges a hundred years earlier and wrested Mount Slain from the Sull. Robb Claw had taken the timber-and-stone stronghold the Quarterlords had erected and built a city around it. Spire Vanis was Claw’s creation. The plans were his, the vision was his, and it was rumored that the curtain wall that contained the city would have been raised to twice its height if Robb Claw had lived to see an end to his work.
Iss let out a long breath. Robb Claw feared something. A man does not spend thirty-five years of a fifty-year life building a fortress unlike anything the world has ever seen if he does not believe he is in danger. Theron and Rangor Pengaron, Torny Fyfe, and Glamis Claw had no such fears. They had simply ridden north and conquered. And despite the glorious tales of impaled beasts, fields steaming with blood, and battles that lasted ninety days and ninety nights, Iss suspected they had taken Mount Slain and the Vale of Spires with ease. The Quarterlords erected their first strongwall a mere seventy days after they crossed the mountains with their warhost. Seventy days.
It was a tantalizing fact. The Sull, who were known throughout the settled world for yielding land to no one and defending their borders with cold fury, had barely wetted their blades in defense of Mount Slain. Oh, the historians would tell you otherwise, and Iss could name a dozen terrible and bloody battles that had supposedly taken place during the Founding Wars: battles where the sky turned as dark as night with the weight of Sull arrows, where the moon disappeared from the midnight sky, snuffed by foul Sull magic, and where dread halfbeasts walked the battlefield, their exhaled breath cold as death, their touch enough to burn the light of sanity from a fighting man’s eyes. Iss had read the tales along with the rest . . . yet he wasn’t sure he believed them.
Two thousand years ago the Sull had yielded Mount Slain to the Quarterlords. And a thousand years before that they had yielded the land that became known as the clanholds to the fierce, animal-skinned clansmen who were driven out of the Soft Lands by Irgar the Unchained. Historians claimed that the Sull had sanctioned the Great Settling of the clanholds because the clans were not a threat; they kept themselves to themselves, had no interest in converting or persecuting the Sull, and they took the hard, inhospitable land in the center of the continent that the Sull had no love or use for.
The reasons blew like false notes through Iss’ ears. He had been reared in Trance Vor. He knew all about the Sull. He had stood by and watched as Sull warriors shot his father a dozen times in the back. Four warriors. Three arrows apiece. It was over in less than an instant.
Breath shot from Iss’ throat like a pellet of white ice. His father had been a fool! Slowly encroaching on borders, stealing hair-thin slices of farmland each season, was no way to take land from the Sull. They had a sixth sense about these things, always knew the exact moment foreigners crossed into the Racklands. And they possessed deep ancestral memories of each stream, glade, heath, and wooded grove that formed their sacred borders.
Ediah Iss had acted in the same way a thousand Trance Vor farmers had before him: He saw his own marshy, ill-drained soil, then he looked in the distance and saw the soft, fertile loam of territory belonging to the Sull. “They don’t work it,” he had complained, using words well worn before him. “Good land laying fallow like that, while I’m out in these shit fields breaking my balls each day.”
They had warned him, of course. The Sull always warned. The same four wa
rriors who had eventually slain him rode to the Iss farm one morning at the break of dawn. Iss remembered being wakened by the sound of a metal arrowhead smashing against the claystone grate. He was eight at the time, sleeping at the foot of his parents’ pallet on a dog mattress stuffed with straw. The arrow had come through a slit in the shutters no bigger than a child’s mouth. Ediah Iss had been meaning to fix it since spring.
Iss stood at his mother’s side as his father opened the door. Four mounted warriors dressed in lynx furs, wolverine pelts, and midnight blue suede formed an arc around the farmhouse. Seeing their black lacquered bows stamped with quarter-moons and ravens, their silver letting knives that hung on silver chains from their saddle pommels and tinkled in the wind like bells, and their arrows fletched with the snow white feathers of winter osprey, Iss learned what it was to be afraid as a man. He had known only child’s fear till then.
The Sull did not speak—it was not their way—simply stood in warning for a period of time and then turned east and rode away. Iss’ mother was the first to move and speak. Iss remembered her pushing her husband so hard, his forehead hit the door frame.
“You fool!” she cried. “You late-weaned fool! I told you they would know about the onion field the minute you tilled it. Run over there before they top the ridge and pull the new bulbs out.”
She hadn’t told him, Iss knew that. She had been the one who encouraged him to plant the onions in Sull soil ten days earlier, then stood over him as he spent four days turning a weed-choked meadow into a lot.
Perhaps it was anger toward his wife that made Ediah Iss leave two rows of onions undisturbed, or perhaps he believed that those two particular rows, being nearest to his own border and hidden from the casual eye by the deep shade thrown from a hundred-year-old milkwood, might go unnoticed by the Sull. Either way he left forty-eight onion bulbs in the ground. Iss knew the exact amount, as he had pulled each one from the grainy black soil an hour after his father’s death.
It had taken the Sull less than two days to return. Iss could still remember his mother screaming as the four warriors cut the used strings from their bows, discarded them as if they were soiled rags. He only had to close his eyes to see his father lying belly down on the path, a full quiver of arrows, bristling and golden like ears of wheat, growing from his back.
Iss sucked his lips against his cracked and discolored teeth. It was a fool’s death, foolishly invited, yet it was not without its compensations. Iss had gained two things of value from it. First, his mother’s family had moved quickly to be rid of him, and he was sent for fosterage to a distant uncle in Spire Vanis who held a grangedom there; and second, he had learned a lesson about the Sull that would stay with him for life.
“Poor Father,” Iss said, turning the caul fly in the light. “One does not take land from the Sull in small slices. One waits until the time is right and then moves to take it all.”
With a quick snap of his wrist, he drew air over the caul fly’s abdomen, shaking the creature awake. The creature’s rear legs stiffened, and deep within the red-toned carapace four fully formed wings twitched to life. The caul fly knew it was no longer in its host and now sought to unfold its wings and fly in search of a mate. Iss was not displeased. The presence of such a strong and universal instinct could only add potency to the drawing.
Iss sat in the sorcerer’s seat that had been cut two thousand years earlier by masons who were later blinded and untongued before they were killed so even their ghosts could tell no secrets. The seat was little more than a hip-size depression in the chamber wall, backed with the same pressure-formed granite that lined the entire structure of the Inverted Spire and then plated with a sheath of dull iron. Nothing of meaning had been stamped into the metal, no runes or symbols or legends. The mere presence of the seat in the apex chamber was legend enough. Iss liked to imagine that it was the final refinement Robb Claw had commanded his masons to make. “Cut me a sorcerer’s seat that I might sit as I do the work of gods.”
Jabbing his tongue against the roof of his mouth, Iss prepared himself for the drawing. Even after all this time he was nervous. He trusted the Inverted Spire and knew the power of the Bound One as well as he knew his own, but always before taking the caul fly in his mouth, his stomach clenched as tight as a trap.
True, there was no danger from backlash. The Inverted Spire had been constructed as an insulator. The mountain’s worth of rock that lagged it, the facing tiles mined from the destroyed sorcerers’ tower at Linn, and the spiking iron-tipped structure itself combined to make the Inverted Spire a haven from the outside world. No outside sorcery could penetrate it. No backlash could break it. No sorcery unleashed within it could be traced to its source. Any man who drew forth power here was free to act like a god.
Iss brought the caul fly to his lips. Even as his mouth opened to accept the bloodmeal, his stomach and lungs contracted, ready to push the power out. Relaxing his grip on the tweezers, he laid the creature upon his tongue. It twitched there for just a moment until Iss bit it in two.
The Bound One screamed and screamed, his high wavering cry bashing against the walls of the chamber like a bird trapped in a well. Bitter fluids filled Iss’ mouth. Stick legs scraped his teeth.
Wings cracked with the soft snap of broken wafers, and then all the power of the caul fly, stolen over eight weeks of living, feeding, and shedding within its host, filled Iss’ being like floodwater, pushing his insubstance out. Iss felt a moment of pure divinity as he parted from his flesh and bones. This was what it felt like to run with the gods.
Penthero Iss, Surlord of Spire Vanis, Lord Commander of the Rive Watch, Keeper of Mask Fortress, and Master of the Four Gates, ascended to a place where he could no longer hear the Bound One scream. Power pumped from the caul fly’s body like blood from a cut vein. Iss looked down and saw his hair and robes blowing wildly below him. He took a breath with a body he no longer inhabited and tasted his own remains in the air.
Higher and higher he rose, the roar of the drawing filling his abandoned ears. The midnight blue arc of the firmament dipped to meet him, curving with the slow guile of infinity, inviting him to come and play in the cold land beyond death. Iss shrank from its gleaming edge. Follow that road and there was no going back.
As he turned inward toward himself, seeking the dark path that would lead him to the borderlands, the color of the firmament stayed within his mind. He’d seen that particular shade of blue once before . . . stretched across the bellies of the Sull the day they’d sent twelve arrows into Ediah Iss’ spine.
A world and a half below him, Iss’ body shivered upon its seat of iron and stone. Pushing his insubstance forward to meet the swirling gray shadows of the borderlands, Iss paid his own flesh and blood no heed.
The borderlands had many names. The Phage called it the Gray Marches, the priests in the Bone Temple called it No Man’s Crossing, and the Sull had a name for it that was better left unsaid. The Listener of the Ice Trapper tribe called it nothing at all and said only that it was a place where a man could steal dreams. That was what Iss felt like as he approached its pale borders: a thief.
A line of light, pink as newborn flesh, marked the threshold to the borderlands like a false dawn. Smoke fingered its edges, curling and uncurling, reaching and drawing back. There was no sound or smell, yet the silence was the kind that brought no peace. Without noise or odor to divert his senses, Iss found himself looking with the same single-mindedness of heretics in the Far South, who were pegged out on the desert floor and left for dead. For the sin of disbelief, the dark-skinned priests sewed the eyes of heretics open, pinning back their eyelids against their brow bones with cross-stitches of black silk, so that the heretics might see the face of God as they died. Iss felt as if his own eyelids were sewn open. Blinking or averting his gaze was impossible. He had no choice but to see.
The borderlands stretched ahead of him, a landscape of gray mists, iceberg peaks, and shadow-filled troughs stretching into distant darkness. Iss kn
ew many things about the borderlands, knew that its outskirts could be visited by a handful of people in every generation, that different people came for different reasons, and that some, like the Listener of the Ice Trappers, could see the future written here. Even with the Bound One’s power fueling his journey, Iss’ abilities were limited. He was a trespasser, a thief. He had no place here, not even on the threshold. If the future hung like ripe fruit around him, he could not pluck it. If he glimpsed a pathway leading inward, he had no choice but to turn away.
Asarhia March, Foundling, mountain born, spire bred, was the one person alive who could enter the borderlands without fear. It was her element. Her body was shaped for it. Her mind could perceive paths through it. Her hands could touch the Blindwall and come away unburned.
It was out there, the Blindwall, far on the other side where grayness gave way to darkness and where even the most powerful sorcerer and Listener could not tread. All worlds bordered here, all dying souls passed through on their way to final resting or ruin. Iss had once heard that people sometimes dreamed their way here in the dead of the night. Unlike the Listener, who made dreams his business, these people had no knowledge or ability to help them find their way. Their sleeping selves drifted here like mist, pushed by dreams filled with longing for a loved one now gone. The newly bereaved did not hold power here, only Asarhia March and the gods held that, but their loss brought them kissing close to death.
Iss floated above the threshold, held in place by power stolen from another man, and cast his gaze over all that lay below him. He did not know the borderlands well, yet he had been here a half dozen times before, and his cool Surlord’s eyes saw straightaway that something had changed.
Asarhia had been here.
Leads had opened up in the smoke. Cold currents blew with the same intensity as before, but crosscurrents cut through them, creating a rippling mesh of flaws. The gray mass of the borderlands swelled and shifted, sending great lobes of matter rising above the surface and dragging other things under so quickly that they left comet tails of smoke. Beneath the surface, pockets of quiet existed as dark smudges in the grayness. And beneath them, writhing like the hide of a vast and muscular serpent, ran a river so dark that it swallowed light.