by David Keck
“Conran!” Durand tried to wrench free. Beyond the sanctuary, the crowd had ceased their singing. Creation was still under the spinning vault of Heaven.
“Oh! Oh, Heaven help us!” And Abravanal was careering through the sanctuary, the Sword of Judgment clutched to his bony chest, as huge in his arms as a grown man’s weapon in the hands of a child. Coensar trailed the man, not sure whether to leave Deorwen and the child. “They rebel!” Abravanal shouted. “Our fallen sons! First Twilight is upon us . . .” He cast his searching gaze over the praying figures all around him. “It is the traitors! The traitors live!” he cried, now pelting down the nave, weaving closer. “They will not suffer it! It is a clear sign.”
Now, the old man caught Durand’s sleeve, and, for a moment, Durand was torn between madmen. “Your Grace, no!”
“The dawn is theirs and they will not suffer these devils to share it!” said Abravanal. He shouted, eyes starting from his skull, “Bring the butchers out! Bring—”
—But the duke and his son had already stepped from the crowd. “Duke Abravanal, we are here.” Severin’s face was still, though his skeletal frame trembled in its rags despite the support of his heir.
“Good. Good!” The old man clutched at Durand’s tunic, and he seemed to recognize him. Tears shone on his face. “You were at his side. You must do this.” He pushed the great blade upon Durand. “My boy would not take my father’s Sword of Judgment. You must take it now.”
“Your Grace—” Durand had the huge sword in his fists.
“No.” The old man shook his head. “It is justice. It is their debt and freely they pay it.” Durand saw two fools too mad to flee even with an army at their backs. And the old man hauled on Durand’s sleeve, tugging him to the scaffold and up with the men of Mornaway. Abravanal jerked the scabbard from the ancient blade and flung the thing aside. This would be no hanging.
And there Durand stood, with the twilit Heavens spinning like a platter, five thousand shocked faces staring with the Banished beyond. Gunderic’s old blade took both hands to wield; even to lift it was a struggle. He saw the dead mouthing words: mouthing some sort of prayer.
And he saw Almora staring up from the midst of the madness, clutched in Deorwen’s arms. She was a brave thing, but now she was screaming so that she hardly breathed. And Deorwen—she was caught between the little girl and her brother on the scaffold, and her lover with the blade that would kill him.
In the Atthias, there is no block for the highborn: not when a sword is used, for a fine blade was no woodcutter’s axe to risk in a knotted stump. “I will be first,” said Severin. “It must be me.”
“It is not just,” said Abravanal. “I am living.” And his son was dead: the unassailable reason of madness. And an anonymous soldier pulled the old man aside, leaving Moryn of Mornaway to step out on the fresh planks. The man scanned the crowd for an instant, taking in the Heavens and the ruins and the multitudes. He must have seen men among the crowd, hands on their blades.
Moryn’s dark eyes flashed and he thrust his chin high. “I do this by my will! Let no man of mine seek to thwart my purpose. Let none seek to avenge me.”
Durand saw Deorwen looking up as he heaved the enormous blade back. And when he turned back to his work, he saw Moryn staring into his eyes. Finally, the Lord of Mornaway gave the smallest fraction of a nod, taking his death from mad Abravanal. Consenting.
And there was Durand with the killing blade poised over his shoulder, the only sound Almora’s screaming.
“No!” said a voice into Durand’s daft silence. “It is too much!”
And it was not one of the men upon the platform.
Durand shared a tight-jawed look with Moryn before Coensar took the stairs. “Do not stop,” Abravanal was saying. But Durand would not move now for worlds.
The captain limped the last step. “Your Grace, it mustn’t be this way. What will be left if every traitor dies? The kingdom is falling.” He stepped across the platform with his hands open.
“It is justice,” the duke said.
“Have you seen Almora?”
The duke blinked across the sanctuary. Almora’s dark eyes stared from streams of tears, clutching Deorwen.
“Who’s held her with her sister gone?” said Coensar. “Who does she cling to now? And you would slay the woman’s brother, Your Grace? Her father? When her husband’s yet unburied? Could you trust her with your daughter after? You will not do this, because you are a better man than Radomor. He would sneer at us all if he saw this.”
As Coensar spoke, a sound pricked at Durand’s ears, a whisper rising like the rustle of leaves before a storm. All around the sanctuary, the dead were still praying, faster and faster, the tongues clicking and popping in their mouths like locusts in a field. Marshal Conran reeled among the rows of dead men. “His Highness comes up on a clearing!” shouted Conran and fell to the ground below the scaffold.
Durand leapt down, letting Gunderic’s sword clatter.
Conran shook his head. “The branches give way and he stumbles out into a place thick with rank grasses. He’s calling out to the shadows: ‘Do what you have come to do! Work your master’s will upon me.’ And they come.”
Durand looked into the dizzy eye. He could smell the forest in the midst of that burned city, and the sticky whispers of the dead became the rush of leaves in the high branches of Windhover as the giant twisted against the tiles. “They come . . . there are so many.” And in Conran’s eye, Durand could see the twilit sky full of branches, the shadows of armed men, and the gleam of naked blades. The king had fallen, crawling.
And the dead of Gireth stood, tipping their faces Heavenward. And Durand saw the forest explode with horses.
“Lancers!” gasped Conran. “A conroi or more.”
Durand saw men torn from their feet. He could hear crash and scream. Knights thundered down upon the assassins, blades bare. And a gale of small birds stormed around them.
“He . . . he is free!” Conran breathed.
Durand saw the trees wheeling once more. Irridescent birds. Was Ragnal saved or fleeing once more? Then a figure—a long streak of shadow—and a gauntlet reaching. And there was a smiling face. A thin and dog-tired smile.
“It is the prince. Prince Biedin has brought his brother from the edge of death!”
The scent of those distant trees flooded the city by the mere. A feverish ocean of leaves and growing things under the Sowing Moon broke over the ruins. Conran spread his hands upon the sanctuary steps, rising as, all around the sanctuary, the fallen sank to the tiles, and the looming of glaciers and mists churning overhead withdrew, stilled once more.
WITH ONE BELEAGUERED twist of his head, Durand saw Deorwen, Almora, Coensar, Abravanal, mourners in their thousands, and he could not catch hold of it all—it was like catching an ocean in his hands. And so he stumbled away, pitching through the awestruck crowd and out into the twilight and the ruins. He wove between broke-toothed facades beyond which he glimpsed tangles of charred timber like a thousand-acre puzzle box; a touch might bring the black city down in a cloud.
A wet voice chuckled, huge and warm at his neck. “You are welcome now,” it spluttered. The rotten breath boiled around him, and he spun, reaching for a blade that he did not carry. But the monstrous ancient of the mere was not in the street with Durand. The voice addered between the broken walls. “You have left old Gunderic’s blade, Bull of their festival.” It chuckled as Durand stumbled faster.
“Nearly, our kingdoms are returned to us. We have heard the marching step. Temple after temple, falling. Moon after moon. Nearer and tramping nearer. But now, that sandal hangs. It hangs over us, but not falling. Not falling—and that island temple stands by the house of eagles, the vilest brightest temple. That ring by which all chains are gathered, it binds us still!”
No matter what the thing said about its bonds, Durand heard it free in the streets with him. Its sigh shuddered and it dragged its monstrous hooves or feet or talons through the rubb
le not far away. And so Durand scrambled away, hoping that some sanctuary or shrine stood intact in all the broken lanes and he could shut its door on the monster.
“But you, Blood of Bruna,” the brute said. “Bruna betrayed. Bruna betrayer. Dupe and deceiver who crawls my stolen kingdom. Was I prophet enough for thee?”
Durand plunged into an ally. They read his fortune, every mad thing in Creation, and they saw that betrayal there. And Coensar. Some small part of his mind wondered at the darkness of the old story of Bruna, a lover among the Firstborn of Creation’s Dawning. A friend had betrayed him—or he’d betrayed that friend. And he’d taken his people to war. The first of men, maybe. Was this his doom?
But he heard the brute, scraping the high walls on his heels. And its footfalls shaking soot from the sky.
Ahead, Durand heard something knock. He pictured a great door swinging, and a chain across it. “Wait!” he called.
“Long was I king over the men of these shores! The firstborn of man and beast they slid down to me. Cool bodies to comfort me in the dark. ‘Bull’ you Sons of Atthi called me, and bull you sent me full of iron darts. But you, at least, will mock no longer. Bull of their battles! You who have borne the pains I promised!”
With the thing’s breath in his nostrils, Durand burst into the open street once more—there was no swinging door. He saw only the ruined Gates of Sunset and the scorched idol of the Silent King of Heaven, lying like a charred invalid among the empty tents of refugees. How they had fought there! Durand remembered the glorious route, the flight for Gunderic’s Tower, the moment at the castle gates.
He turned and saw the monster stepping from the alley like a man crawling from a barrel—its lamp eyes wide, its great bull’s skull streaming putrefaction. Its hog-rib teeth caught the twilight.
But, as Durand gave ground, he heard the chain still swinging: tock . . . tock. And his mind followed the sound, wondering with a dying man’s dispassion just what he was hearing. The monster stood, the rotten king of this shore. And Durand blundered against the stone King in Silence—just a brush of fingertips.
HE WAS ELSEWHERE.
Tock.
He knew the sound now as a staff’s clear rap on stone. But he was no longer where he had been. The touch of his fingertips upon that idol had taken him away from the city and the streets and now he stood in a forest track under a towering elm. And the Traveler loomed above him, its limbs hung with the rags of the roadside, its frame the bones of the dead in ditches. This was the giant he had seen beyond the sanctuary, looking on. The brim of the giant’s pilgrim hat cut a swelling circle from the Heavens as the Power creaked low, the knotted cords of its beard swinging below its jaw.
“Once more, you’ve come to crossroads.”
Durand shook his head, scrabbling once at his stubbled scalp. It had been a long time since the well at Col where he’d met this thing before. He had been a child, it seemed to him now. But he remembered the questions he had asked down by the water—and the Power’s promises. “There were many promises,” he rasped. And, nearly, a frayed laugh escaped him.
The Traveler rumbled: “So it has ever been.”
Durand struggled to remember their last conversation; it seemed so long ago—though a man could scarcely forget his chats with gods. “A place, I wanted, when mine was gone. And, I think, success. That seemed far from me then.” Though how much farther now? “And, though I asked about ‘family’ I wondered what woman would ever want a pauper-thug on the road.” He stood with his hitched shoulder and the marks of Coensar’s ambition plain on his face. There was more pain than he liked to admit. “What became of all that, then?”
Solemnly, the Power straightened against the sky. “It has come to pass.”
Durand looked high into the Traveler’s distant eyes—one penny bright, the other black. And he clenched his tiny fists. “This is no light matter to me.”
“Did you not triumph at Red Winding and Tern Gyre? Were you not Bull of Acconel’s festival? Did you not bring victory at Acconel and Ferangore and twice swim a mere to save a city?”
“You cannot mean what you say.”
“You craved a place. A share of glory.” The Power’s string-knotted palms brushed dry whispers from his forked staff. “And a beauty . . .”
“Power, your promises weigh less than your brother’s silence.”
There was a dry rushing sound as the Traveler drew breath. “I am not perverse in this. The balance is ancient and we are, all of us, bound by it. Hosts Above; Hosts Below. A push above allows a pull below. Though I might set you upon the throne of dukedoms, the Powers of darkness would throw you down. The straight word is twisted.”
“And so I have groveled for crooked whispers. I ask you, what have your whispers gained me? If I have had my share of fortune, thorned and meager though they have been, what is left to me? What would you have me do now?”
“I stand at the crossroads,” said the Power. “Most hear but the tap of my stick. But much has turned about you.”
Durand groped at his eyes, despairing. “I . . . I cannot fathom what you say. You have come to gloat and torment—”
Like all the seas together, the giant roared. With his staff, he struck the vault of Heaven a blow that flashed from horizon to horizon. And Durand knew that he had dared much in the face of such power.
“The Host may do as it might, but I will answer this. What will become of me? What must I do? The questions, the answers, they echo from heart to heart through the ages. Forever unchanging.”
In mountains leagues away, the ice gave way and plunged headlong down high vales. The Power shook the earth with his staff’s heel, and Durand crushed his face against the mud. “How can a man live and not wonder?”
Durand heard the ship’s-rigging creak of the great frame bending once more. “The answers do not change, O child of my brother’s dreaming. Glory, love. All of these.” The smell of roots and stones and cold-water ditches brimmed the horizons as Durand sprawled on the earth. “Each and all shall be your own!”
And, with a rush of a forest’s weight of leaves, every sound of the titan vanished from that place. “And will I find only the same fruitless harvest?” was Durand’s whisper. But there was no sign of the Traveler when Durand found the courage to raise his eyes.
DEORWEN’S VOICE SUMMONED him once more into Creation. A familiar note reached the forest track: her call, it seemed to him, carried the echoes of stone walls where the breeze was full of tentcloth and guylines. There was even the trill of morning robins.
“Durand?” she whispered.
And he smiled up into a human face in a human place, hard by a capsized idol.
“Where have you been?” she asked.
He blinked up at her. And, finally, saw the marks of exhaustion and fear upon her face. Her doe brown eyes glinted.
“Your father,” Durand managed, “does he live?” And Deorwen blinked back tears, knuckling them from her cheeks.
“He does. Abravanal is like his people. Swords and stone walls did not keep sorrow from his door. There is nothing to do with such anguish. Nothing but rail or collapse and he has relented now. My father has made promises: his host, should there be war. And the free use of his roads and rivers, if there’s peace and trade. All till the death of Moryn’s heir. It is what he meant to offer from the beginning.”
Almost, Durand reached for her—laughed for relief with her. But the black she wore was widow’s black. And a wife’s headcloth covering her hair. On that stone floor, Lamoric would still be waiting. Durand pried himself from the street, and when Deorwen touched his battered jaw, he stepped back. “Almora will be missing you,” he said.
DURAND MET A procession already gathering at the sanctuary ruin. Again, the crowd had found its voice, and it was a singing multitude that lifted each dead man to its shoulders and began the solemn march for the fields beyond the Gates of Sunset.
And so Durand simply fell in line, taking his place under the bier of one dead man. S
oot-blackened plowmen bawled hymns all around him while their pale burdens rode like idols above the throng. Somewhere, Badan rode strangers’ shoulders. Men Durand had known since childhood or marched with down the Valley of the Rushes rocked over their heads, and he fought to keep his eyes closed, breathing the oiled air and hearing the cry of the waking gulls from the harbor.
Shadows led them from the sanctuary ruin past the Gates of Sunset to the rutted fields where dark holes had been opened in the earth. The fallen would lie between their city and the Duchy of Yrlac, standing watch as they had in life.
Through it all, Abravanal marched at the head of his people. In one night, he must have been broken and mended a dozen times. But his duty thrust him before the masses, and he walked now with Almora at his side and the great Sword of Judgment on Coen’s shoulder as they came to the gravesides.
Conran and his brother prayed. The Patriarch sung to the Eye. And though the Sowing Moon hung huge and ghostly over the mere, the Eye of Heaven split the horizon as they laid the dead into the bosom of the earth. Five thousand heads turned and five thousand voices together sang the Dawn Thanksgiving to the clear Heavens and its Silent King. They had seen the storm part. Somewhere in the forest of Windhover, the crown was safe for a time. They had heard Conran’s vision. And though they could not know why the last sanctuary still stood, they knew peace when it came to them.
Durand stayed as serving men and lords filled the graves. He watched faces disappear and long shapes vanish in the rising earth. And he stayed after the last word was sung and the chill had sent all but a few to their beds.
Heremund tapped him gamely on the arm. “I tried to give you some warning. I could see it coming in Coen’s eyes, but you couldn’t hear. Maybe there wasn’t anything you could have done. And then we thought it might hurt you—hearing what he’d done—and you needed to heal. Maybe you were off to the Gates. And after, well, Coensar has been a good man. The lads couldn’t turn on a friend.”