‘Paran!’
‘All right – open the damned gate!’ The train of horses reared, then surged forward, slewing the carriage round as they began a wild descent on the slope. Swearing, Paran kicked his horse into motion, risking a final glance back—
—to see a huge, hump-shouldered beast emerge from the clouds of dust, its eyes lambent as they fixed on Paran and the retreating carriage. The Deragoth’s massive, broad head lowered, and it began a savagely fast sprint.
‘Karpolan!’
The portal opened like a popped blister – watery blood or some other fluid spraying from its edges – directly in front of them. A charnel wind battered them. ‘Karpolan? Where—’
The train of horses, screaming one and all, plunged into the gate, and a heartbeat later Paran followed. He heard it sear shut behind him, and then, from all sides – madness.
Rotted faces, gnawed hands reaching up, long-dead eyes imploring as decayed mouths opened – ‘Take us! Take us with you!’
‘Don’t leave!’
‘He’s forgotten us – please, I beg you—’
‘Hood cares nothing—’
Bony fingers closed on Paran, pulled, tugged, then began clawing at him. Others had managed to grab hold of projections on the carriage and were being dragged along.
The pleas shifted into anger – ‘Take us – or we will tear you to pieces!’
‘Cut them – bite them – tear them apart!’
Paran struggled to free his right arm, managed to close his hand on the grip of his sword, then drag it free. He began flailing the blade on each side.
The shrieks from the horses were insanity’s own voice, and now shareholders were screaming as well, as they hacked down at reaching hands and arms.
Twisting about in his saddle as he chopped at the clawing limbs, Paran glimpsed a sweeping vista – a plain of writhing figures, the undead, every face turned now towards them – undead, in their tens of thousands – undead, so crowding the land that they could but stand, out to every horizon, raising now a chorus of despair—
‘Ganath!’ Paran roared. ‘Get us out of here!’
A sharp retort, as of cracking ice. Bitter wind swirled round them, and the ground pitched down on one side.
Snow, ice, the undead gone.
Wheeling blue sky. Mountain crags—
Horses skidding, legs splaying, their screams rising in pitch. A few animated corpses, flailing about. The carriage, looming in front of Paran, its back end sliding round.
They were on a glacier. Skidding, sliding downward at ever increasing speed.
Distinctly, Paran heard one of the Pardu shareholders: ‘Oh, this is much better.’
Then, eyes blurring, horse slewing wildly beneath him, there was only time for the plunging descent – down, it turned out, an entire mountainside.
Ice, then snow, then slush, the latter rising like a bow wave before horses and sideways-descending carriage, rising and building, slowing them down. All at once, the slush gave way to mud, then stone—
Flipping the carriage, the train of horses dragged with it.
Paran’s own mount fared better, managing to angle itself until it faced downhill, forelegs punching snow and slush, seeking purchase. At the point it reached the mud, and having seen what awaited it, the horse simply launched into a charge. A momentary stumble, then, as the ground levelled out, it slowed, flanks heaving – and Paran turned in the saddle, in time to see the huge carriage tumble to a shattered halt. The bodies of shareholders were sprawled about, upslope, in the mud, limp and motionless on the scree of stones, almost indistinguishable from the corpses.
The train of horses had broken loose, yet all but one were down, legs kicking amidst a tangle of traces, straps and buckles.
Heart still hammering the anvil of his chest, Paran eased his horse to a stop, turning it to face upslope, then walking the exhausted, shaky beast back towards the wreckage.
A few shareholders were picking themselves up here and there, looking dazed. One began swearing, sagging back down above a broken leg.
‘Thank you,’ croaked a corpse, flopping about in the mud. ‘How much do I owe you?’
The carriage was on its side. The three wheels that had clipped the mud and stone had shattered, and two opposite had not survived the tumbling. Leaving but a single survivor, spinning like a millstone. Back storage hatches had sprung open, spilling their contents of supplies. On the roof, still strapped in place, was the crushed body of a shareholder, blood running like meltwater down the copper tiles, his arms and legs hanging limp, the exposed flesh pummelled and grey in the bright sunlight.
One of the Pardu women picked herself up from the mud and limped over to come alongside Paran as he reined in near the carriage. ‘Captain,’ she said, ‘I think we should make camp.’ He stared down at her. ‘Are you all right?’ She studied him for a moment, then turned her head and spat out a red stream. Wiped her mouth, then shrugged. ‘Hood knows, we’ve had worse trips…’
The savage wound of the portal, now closed, still marred the dust-laden air. Hedge stepped out from where he’d been hiding near one of the pedestals. The Deragoth were gone – anything but eager to remain overlong in this deathly, unpleasant place.
So he’d stretched things a little. No matter, he’d been convincing enough, yielding the desired result.
Here I am. On my own, in Hood’s own Hood-forsaken pit. You should’ve thought it through, Captain. There was nothing sweet in the deal for us, and only fools agree to that. Well, being fools is what killed us, and we done learned that lesson.
He looked round, trying to get his bearings. In this place, one direction was good as another. Barring the damned sea, of course. So, it’s done. Time to explore…
The ghost left the wreckage of the destroyed statues behind, a lone, mostly insubstantial figure walking the denuded, muddy land. As bowlegged as he had been in life.
Dying left no details behind, after all. And most certainly, nothing like absolution awaited the fallen.
Absolution comes from the living, not the dead, and, as Hedge well knew, it has to be earned.
She was remembering things. Finally, after all this time. Her mother, camp follower, spreading her legs for the Ashok Regiment before it was sent to Genabackis. After it had left, she just went and died, as if without those soldiers she could only breathe out, never again in – and it was what you drew in that gave you life. So, just like that. Dead. Her offspring was left to fare for itself, alone, uncared for, unloved.
Mad priests and sick cults and, for the girl born of the mother, a new camp to follow. Every path of independence was but a dead-end side-track off that more deeply rutted road, the one that ran from parent to child – this much was clear to her now.
Then Heboric, Destriant of Treach, had dragged her away – before she found herself breathing ever out – but no, before him, there had been Bidithal and his numbing gifts, his whispered assurances of mortal suffering being naught more than a layered chrysalis, and upon death the glory would break loose, unfolding its iridescent wings. Paradise.
Oh, that had been a seductive promise, and her drowning soul had clung to the solace of its plunging weight as she sank deathward. She had once dreamed of wounding young, wide-eyed acolytes, of taking the knife in her own hands and cutting away all pleasure. Misery loves – needs – company; there is nothing altruistic in sharing. Self-interest feeds on malice and all else falls to the wayside.
She had seen too much in her short life to believe anyone professing otherwise. Bidithal’s love of pain had fed his need to deliver numbness. The numbness within him made him capable of delivering pain. And the broken god he claimed to worship – well, the Crippled One knew he would never have to account for his lies, his false promises. He sought out lives in abeyance, and with their death he was free to discard those whose lives he had used up. This was, she realized, exquisite enslavement: a faith whose central tenet was unprovable. There would be no killing this faith. The Crippl
ed God would find a multitude of mortal voices to proclaim his empty promises, and within the arbitrary strictures of his cult, evil and desecration could burgeon unchecked.
A faith predicated on pain and guilt could proclaim no moral purity. A faith rooted in blood and suffering—
‘We are the fallen,’ Heboric said suddenly.
Sneering, Scillara pushed more rustleaf into the bowl of her pipe and drew hard. ‘A priest of war would say that, wouldn’t he? But what of the great glory found in brutal slaughter, old man? Or have you no belief in the necessity of balance?’
‘Balance? An illusion. Like trying to focus on a single mote of light and seeing naught of the stream and the world that stream reveals. All is in motion, all is in flux.’
‘Like these damned flies,’ Scillara muttered.
Cutter, riding directly ahead, glanced back at her. ‘I was wondering about that,’ he said. ‘Carrion flies – are we heading towards a site of battle, do you think? Heboric?’
He shook his head, amber eyes seeming to flare in the afternoon light. ‘I sense nothing of that. The land ahead is as you see it.’
They were approaching a broad basin, dotted with a few tufts of dead, yellow reeds. The ground itself was almost white, cracked like a broken mosaic. Some larger mounds were visible here and there, constructed, it seemed, of sticks and reeds. Reaching the edge, they drew to a halt.
Fish bones lay in a heaped carpet along the fringe of the dead marsh’s shoreline, blown there by the winds. On one of the closer mounds they could see bird bones and the remnants of eggshells. These wetlands had died suddenly, in the season of nesting.
Flies swarmed the basin, swirling about in droning clouds.
‘Gods below,’ Felisin said, ‘do we have to cross this?’
‘Shouldn’t be too bad,’ Heboric said. ‘It’s not far across. It’d be dark long before we finish if we try to go round this. Besides,’ he waved at the buzzing flies, ‘we haven’t even started to cross yet they’ve found us, and skirting the basin won’t escape them. At least they’re not the biting kind.’
‘Let’s just get this over with,’ Scillara said.
Greyfrog bounded down into the basin, as if to blaze a trail with his opened mouth and snapping tongue.
Cutter nudged his horse into a trot, then, as flies swarmed him, a canter.
The others followed.
Flies alighting like madness on his skin. Heboric squinted as countless hard, frenzied bodies collided with his face. The very sunlight had dimmed amidst this chaotic cloud. Trapped in his sleeves, inside his threadbare leggings and down the back of his neck – he gritted his teeth, resolving to weather this minor irritation.
Balance. Scillara’s words disturbed him for some reason – no, perhaps not her words, but the sentiment they revealed. Once an acolyte, now rejecting all forms of faith – something he himself had done, and, despite Treach’s intervention, still sought to achieve. After all, the gods of war needed no servants beyond the illimitable legions they always had and always would possess.
Destriant, what lies beneath this name? Harvester of souls, possessing the power – and the right – to slay in a god’s name. To slay, to heal, to deliver justice. But justice in whose eyes? I cannot take a life. Not any more. Never again. You chose wrong, Treach.
All these dead, these ghosts…
The world was harsh enough – it did not need him and his kind. There was no end to the fools eager to lead others into battle, to exult in mayhem and leave behind a turgid, sobbing wake of misery and suffering and grief.
He’d had enough.
Deliverance was all he desired now, his only motive for staying alive, for dragging these innocents with him to a blasted, wasted island that had been scraped clean of all life by warring gods. Oh, they did not need him.
Faith and zeal for retribution lay at the heart of the true armies, the fanatics and their malicious, cruel certainties. Breeding like flyblow in every community. But worthy tears come from courage, not cowardice, and those armies, they are filled with cowards.
Horses carrying them from the basin, the flies spinning and swirling in mindless pursuit.
Onto a track emerging from the old shoreline beside the remnants of a dock and mooring poles. Deep ruts climbing a higher beach ridge, from the age when the swamp had been a lake, the ruts cut ragged by the claws of rainwater that found no refuge in roots – because the verdancy of centuries past was gone, cut away, devoured.
We leave naught but desert in our wake.
Surmounting the crest, where the road levelled out and wound drunkenly across a plain flanked by limestone hills, and in the distance, a third of a league away directly east, a small, decrepit hamlet. Outbuildings with empty corrals and paddocks. To one side of the road, near the hamlet’s edge, a half-hundred or more heaped tree-trunks, the wood grey as stone where fires had not charred it – but it seemed that even in death, this wood defied efforts at its destruction.
Heboric understood that obdurate defiance. Yes, make yourself useless to humankind. Only thus will you survive, even when what survives of you is naught but your bones. Deliver your message, dear wood, to our eternally blind eyes.
Greyfrog had dropped back and now leapt ten paces to Cutter’s right. It seemed even the demon had reached its stomach’s limit of flies, for its broad mouth was shut, the second lids of its eyes, milky white, closed until the barest slits were visible. And the huge creature was very nearly black with those crawling insects.
As was Cutter’s youthful back before him. As was the horse the Daru rode. And, to all sides, the ground seethed, glittering and rabid with motion.
So many flies.
So many…
‘Something to show you, now…’
Like a savage beast suddenly awakened, Heboric straightened in his saddle—
Scillara’s mount cantered a stride behind the Destriant’s, a little to the old man’s left, whilst in her wake rode Felisin. She cursed in growing alarm as the flies gathered round the riders like midnight, devouring all light, the buzzing cadence seeming to whisper words that crawled into her mind on ten thousand legs. She fought back a scream—
As her horse shrieked in mortal pain, dust swirling and spinning beneath it, dust rising and finding shape.
A terrible, wet, grating sound, then something long and sharp punched up between her mount’s shoulder-blades, blood gouting thick and bright from the wound. The horse staggered, forelegs buckling, then collapsed, the motion flinging Scillara from the saddle—
She found herself rolling on a carpet of crushed insects, the hoofs of Heboric’s horse pounding down around her as the creature shrilled in agony, pitching to the left – something snarling, a barbed flash of skin, feline and fluid, leaping from the dying horse’s back—
And figures, emerging as if from nowhere amidst spinning dust, blades of flint flashing – a bestial scream – blood slapping the ground beside her in a thick sheet, instantly blackened by flies – the blades chopping, cutting, slashing into flesh – a piercing shriek, rising in a conflagration of pain and rage – something thudded against her as Scillara sought to rise on her hands and knees, and she looked over. An arm, tattooed in a tiger-stripe pattern, sliced clean midway between elbow and shoulder, the hand, a flash of fitful, dying green beneath swarming flies.
She staggered upright, stabbing pain in her belly, choking as insects crowded into her mouth with her involuntary gasp.
A figure stepped near her, long stone sword dripping, desiccated skull-face swinging in her direction, and that sword casually reached out, slid like fire into Scillara’s chest, ragged edge scoring above her top rib, beneath the clavicle, then punching out her back, just above the scapula.
Scillara sagged, felt herself sliding from that weapon as she fell down onto her back.
The apparition vanished within the cloud of flies once more.
She could hear nothing but buzzing, could see nothing but a chaotic, glittering clump swelling above the
wound in her chest, through which blood leaked – as if the flies had become a fist, squeezing her heart. Squeezing…
Cutter had had no time to react. The bite of sudden sand and dust, then his horse’s head was simply gone, ropes of blood skirling down as if pursuing its flight. Down beneath the front hoofs, that stumbled, then gave way as the decapitated beast collapsed.
Cutter managed to roll free, gaining his feet within a maelstrom of flies.
Someone loomed up beside him and he spun, one knife free and slashing across in an effort to block a broad, hook-bladed scimitar of rippled flint. The weapons collided, and that sword swept through Cutter’s knife, the strength behind the blow unstoppable—
He watched it tear into his belly, watched it rip its way free, and then his bowels tumbled into view.
Reaching down to catch them with both hands, Cutter sank as all life left his legs. He stared down at the flopping mess he held, disbelieving, then landed on one side, curling round the terrible, horrifying damage done to him.
He heard nothing. Nothing but his own breathing, and the cavorting flies, now closing in as if they had known all along that this was going to happen.
The attacker had risen from the very dust, on the right side of Greyfrog. Savage agony as a huge chalcedony longsword cut through the demon’s forelimb, severing it clean in a gush of green blood. A second cut sliced through the back leg on the same side, and the demon struck the ground, kicking helplessly with its remaining limbs.
Grainy with flies and thundering pain – a momentary scene played out before the demon’s eyes. Broad, bestial, clad in furs, a creature of little more than skin and bone, stepping placidly over Greyfrog’s back leg, which was lying five paces distant, kicking all by itself. Stepping into the black cloud.
Dismay. I can hop no more.
Even as he had leapt from the back of his horse, two flint swords had caught him, one slashing through muscle and bone, severing an arm, the other thrusting point first into, then through, his chest. Heboric, throat filled with animal snarls, twisted in mid-air in a desperate effort to pull himself free of the impaling weapon. Yet it followed, tearing downward – snapping ribs, cleaving through lung, then liver – and finally ripping out from his side in an explosion of bone shards, meat and blood.
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