by William King
Try as he might, despite all his efforts, he wondered where Rena was, and whether he had done the right thing. The crisis of their relationship had come on so fast, a whirlwind of words that had uprooted something that had seemed so certain for so long. He had become used to having her around, and he felt her absence the way he sometimes felt the ghost of his missing hand. It was an amputation just as much as the one that had given him his hook. A part of his life was missing, and he wanted desperately to get it back.
It was ludicrous. They were marching to war and death, and he had other things to dwell on than the absence of one human. That thought was as ineffective as a prayer spoken in a nightmare to keep the dream-monsters at bay. He could only keep riding and increase the distance between himself and his woman even as he felt her tug at the direction of his thoughts like the pole star on the needle of a compass.
“I tell you they were cheating,” said Weasel. “That’s why they drew knives and accused me.”
“I see,” said the Barbarian, not seeing, which was quite normal when it came to understanding Weasel’s explanations of why things always went wrong when he was around. His feet were as heavy as lead and his heart was not in marching this morning at all. His back felt as if something might have given way last night during his final session with Shera and Annette. He wished those damned drummers would keep quiet. His head was splitting, and his stomach was as rebellious as a province full of the Clockmaker’s dupes. “Could you go and tell Sardec to get the drummers to keep the noise down? My head is splitting.”
“Certainly,” said Weasel, “And after that I will go and ask Azaar if he can give you leave to take a nap for a few hours so you can sleep off the worst of the beer.”
“It wasn’t the beer,” said the Barbarian. “It was the roasted rat. I knew I should never have touched that bloody stew. Pigeon the innkeeper called it. Since when did pigeons have four legs?”
“It’s never the beer with you, is it? It’s always the stew.” The Barbarian glared at Weasel. As always his eyes were clear and he showed not the slightest ill-effect from the previous evening’s debauchery and brawling. How could he do that? They were the same age.
“Everybody knows that Southern cooking is unhealthy. Not like herring porridge and boiled beets. Why does the army always choose to march when I have a bloody hangover- that’s what I want to know? There’s never a time when it doesn’t. Regular as clockwork. I have a hangover. The army marches.”
“Maybe if you did not drink so much to celebrate our impending departure, you would not have one.”
“How come you don’t? Watering your wine again, sticking to small beer? That’s unhealthy, not to mention unmanly.”
“A man needs a clear head when he’s playing hookjack. Otherwise he’ll never spot cheats.”
“Whatever you say. I think it’s because you can’t take your drink anymore.”
Weasel grinned. “Not like you, eh?”
“I can drink any man half my age under the table.”
“Particularly when you pick the table up and smack it down on their heads.”
The Barbarian grinned, remembering. “I did, didn’t I? Teach the bastard to spill my beer.”
“That it did.”
“When do you think we’ll be stopping?”
“The usual time, an hour or two before sunset so we can make camp.”
“Bloody hell, another six hours of bloody fife music and bloody drums. I hope we meet some Easterners later in the day. I’ll be in the mood for killing then.”
“Best hope you are. There’s going to be a lot of it about before we’re done.”
The Barbarian cast a glance at the crowds on the walls. As always, he suspected they were happy to see the soldiers go, the ungrateful civilian bastards. Still, they’d some good times back there. “We had some good times back there,” he said.
“You mean killing deaders and fighting sorcerers?”
“No, I mean in the taverns, with the girls and the beer.”
“You always say that. Every time we leave a place, you say that. I wish I had a copper coin for every time I have heard you say that.”
“It’s because it’s usually true.”
“You’re not often right, but this time you are.”
“Think they have decent brothels in Sardea?”
“Let’s hope we’re alive to find out.”
He did not sound too hopeful which worried the Barbarian. Weasel was smarter than he was and knew about such things.
The village was quiet as a grave, possibly because all of the people were dead. Their corpses lay in the street, bloated and sick-smelling. A few had been gnawed by feral dogs and hungry rats which had died in turn. Tamara could tell because their corpses lay nearby.
Her steed was frightened, and only the spell of calmness she had laid on its mind kept it from bolting. She could see now where all the tales about the end of the world had come from, and why they were spreading so quickly.
These people had not died easily. Their faces, such as were left, were twisted in ghastly rictuses, their eyes were wide and their limbs contorted as if by terrible muscular spasms. She covered her mouth with a perfumed handkerchief and looked at the nearest corpse.
Its skin was pale and bruised in places. A bird had plucked out an eye. She wondered if there was anyone alive in the village. They might be able to tell her something, or she might find out for herself what the disease was if she could see some symptoms. So far all the dead had been human. Few of their diseases affected Terrarchs, and she was protected by medicinal spells so she was not particularly worried about falling ill herself.
Still, there was something about this place that set her trained senses on edge. Her fingers danced through the patterns of an augury as she muttered an invocation. At first, she noticed nothing, but then she found something just on the edge of her perception, so faint that if she had not been so keyed up she would probably have missed it. There was a very, very faint trace of magic in the air.
She shook her head, puzzled, wondering what it could be. Perhaps this village had been home to a sorcerer, or perhaps some wandering mage had passed through. Maybe someone owned a basic charm, or perhaps someone had purchased a ward against the plague. Finding the source of the magic was her best chance of finding someone alive in this Light-forsaken place.
She drew her blade, unsure as to why, but trusting her instincts. She wanted to get back on the steed and leave. Something made her uneasy and she doubted it was the sight of all the dead bodies. The old weapon felt reassuringly heavy in her grasp. She extended her senses as she had been taught, looking for signs of life, of ambush, of danger.
The breeze whispered through the streets. Somewhere a shutter banged, and an unlatched door creaked in the wind. She caught the sound of movement, faint and furtive. Perhaps it was rats but it never paid to make assumptions in a situation like this.
She concentrated again on her divination and sensed the faint magic once more. She moved around an old stone building and saw a doorway before her. A crudely painted sign depicting a rampant bull hung over the door. The picture was old and flaking away from exposure to the elements. The doorway beneath it yawned like an open mouth. From it came a smell of corruption and decay. From within she sensed movement. A man moved behind the bar, perhaps seeking liquor on the shelves. Under the circumstances she could hardly blame him.
She entered the building and saw a group of men slumped over a table. A huge bald-pated bruiser was behind the bar. He moved slowly as if his limbs were twisted or broken and she wondered if he were just beginning to come down with the plague.
Even as that thought occurred to her, she realised that something was wrong, that he was the source of the magic she had detected. He turned to face her, his eyes flaring greenly, the skin peeling from his face to reveal yellowing teeth. His skin was blotched with mould and something else, and he looked as if he had been dead for quite some time.
“Hungry,” he said. Her
sword swept out and took his head off. She turned to leave. This was not a place for the living.
Chapter Nine
The great wyrm waddled along the Eastern road, a huge reptilian ship carried along by the current of troops. Halim was a week’s march behind them, lost behind ranges of hills. In the howdah, Asea sat under a parasol reading. Rik envied her the ability to do that. His mind raced even as he tried to keep still. He was reminded of their barge trip to Harven. That had not ended well either.
Without looking up Asea said: “You are restless.”
“I am.”
“You could try reviewing the meditation exercises I taught you.”
“I have. This bloody potion makes it difficult to concentrate.”
“All the more reason to practise. It is not always possible to work sorcery under ideal circumstances.”
“I take your point.” He said the words slowly and with emphasis. She sighed and closed the book.
“But you are not willing to act upon it.”
“There are times when it’s difficult to concentrate and this is one of them.”
“You are normally a very focussed young man, Rik. It’s what makes you such an apt pupil. Tell me, what is disturbing you?”
“Everything. Nothing. Nothing I can put my finger on anyway. It’s just that my life — all our lives — seem to be spinning out of control. We are marching to war in the East just as if I were still in the army.”
“You still are, Rik. We are both part of it. There is no escape from duty. Not in times like these. Not ever, really.”
“Look at all these men marching. In a few weeks they may all be dead. In a few weeks they may be walking corpses.”
“That’s the risk a soldier takes, Rik. If war does not get them, plague might. If plague does not get them, hunger might. If hunger does not get them, accident might. If accident does not, old age most certainly will. Everything dies, Rik.”
“Terrarchs don’t.”
“Terrarchs do. We simply live longer than humans, Rik.” He looked at her long and hard, trying to measure her youthful beauty against what he knew of her age.
“Are you really two thousand years old?”
“I am two thousand, one hundred and fifty nine years old, give or take a few years.”
“Why do that?”
“The lengths of months and years on Al’Terra were somewhat different from those of Gaeia. I am converting my age into your years for the purposes of satisfying your somewhat impertinent curiosity.”
He considered this. She had told him that the climate was different on the Terrarch homeworld. He had not imagined such basic things as the length of a year might be different. It opened up whole new vistas of strangeness.
“I talked to a sorcerer in Harven who claimed he would give up years of his life for the opportunity to talk to you.”
“You are doing so. I hope it’s worth it.”
“What is it like?”
“What?”
“Being so old?”
Asea laughed. She seemed genuinely amused but there was a hint of anger in her voice. “You have a lot to learn about tact, Rik.”
“This I know. Are you annoyed?”
“Never apologise for being curious, Rik. At least not to me. The only way to get answers is to ask questions.”
“Are you going to answer mine?”
“Let me think about it. I am not sure there is any easy answer I can give you.”
“Any answer will do. It does not have to be easy.”
“Why this sudden interest in matters of life and death?”
“Kathea is dead. I killed Malkior. There are times, looking at the things in my mind when I know what it’s like to die. The Quan killed many people.”
Asea flashed him warning look. Karim was the wyrm’s mahout. He was her servant, and loyal, but there were some things better not discussed in the presence of anyone save themselves. She raised her hand, and he felt the flow of power as she invoked a ward. He could almost picture the lines of energy weaving around them. His sensitivity to such things had increased recently. External sounds vanished, as the bubble of privacy swirled into being around them.
“This is probably not the best place to discuss this, Rik,” she said. He knew this but the words had forced themselves out anyway. Some compulsion lay on him, some force within his mind.
“I have killed a lot of people,” he said. “I have a lot of strange dreams.”
She cocked her head to one side, concerned. “Go on.”
He tried to approach what was troubling him obliquely, like a hunter moving downwind of a deer. He was not really sure what it was, but he felt its presence as he could sense the presence of an animal in a bush, by the rustling of that which it displaced.
“When I was a soldier it was either me or them. The people I killed I mean. Most of the fights since then have been the same way. I thought about these things, but I never really thought about them, if you know what I mean?”
“No,” she said. He sighed and looked for another approach.
“When I was a kid, the Temple priests told me about heaven and hell. I sort of believed them. As I got older I stopped believing. One priest tells you that you go to hell if you murder someone, but another says it’s all right if you do it in the service of Queen and country. Some men can hold both those thoughts in their mind and believe both. I couldn’t — so one of them had to go.”
“I think I follow you now.”
“In the past few months, it all has become much more complicated. You don’t seem to take the Faith very seriously.”
“It’s hard to do so when you’ve watched it being constructed with your own eyes, Rik.”
“See, you say things like that. If I said them, I could be put to death for it. You say it like it’s just the simple truth.”
“The truth is rarely simple.”
“And then you say things like that. And you have talked to Angels.”
“And your point is?”
“My point is that I don’t know what’s happening anymore, either inside my head or outside it. I still hear voices sometimes, telling me to feed. I can remember what it was like to have the power in me, to be able to work magic so easily that it was like breathing. God help me, there are times when I want that again, more than anything in the world. And there are times I think I will be damned for it. That I am already damned for it.”
“I understand what you mean about wanting to work magic, Rik. I really do. On Al’Terra, it was like that for me, always, even from my earliest youth. I was the most gifted sorcerer at the Mazarian Academy. In my time I created things- towers, airships, spells- that are unthinkable in this world. I was constantly surrounded by magical energy that I could draw on in thousands of different ways. Being here is like being a fish on dry land. I can remember what it was like to have power, Rik, the power to destroy armies, to shatter kingdoms, to quiet earthquakes with words, to build cities by force of will.”
As she spoke her face was transformed, as if the clouds had parted and a ray of sunlight focused on her face. She raised a hand to her cheek and brushed away a strand of her long hair. “I can’t do that anymore, and I never will be able to, and it is like the loss of a limb. Worse, it is like the loss of all my limbs and going blind and deaf at the same time and remembering what it was like to be otherwise.”
“Would you go back? To Al’Terra. If you could?”
“There are times when I think that I would, Rik, even though it would mean my death or worse at the hands of the Princes of Shadow.”
“You knew them, didn’t you? You met them.”
“You are in a morbid mood today.”
“Apparently.”
“And you think this is an appropriate conversation to be having with an Inquisitor within hailing distance?” She sounded more amused than concerned, but there was something shifty and a little trapped about her eyes that worried him.
“Appropriate or not, it’s the one we are
having.”
“Yes, I knew them. I went to school with some of them, studied sorcery alongside them.”
He felt like he was standing on the edge of some vast abyss. He had to restrain the urge to reach out and touch her, to satisfy himself that she was real. Today, for the first time in a long time, he saw her as someone who had stepped out of a legend. She had known saints and angels and devils. She had talked to them. And they were just like her. He had never been more aware of the distance that separated them, in time and space and understanding. He was sorry that he had started this conversation, and repelled and fascinated all at once.
“What were they like?”
“They were like you or me, at least to begin with.” He considered that. Scripture said they were incarnate devils, the very personification of evil. Asea’s manner said something quite different.
“What changed them?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did. We walked along the same road for a very long way, and then they chose a different fork in the path.”
“Did they really make a pact with the Shadow, and sell their souls to it for power?”
“There are times when I am not even sure there is a Shadow, Rik. Not in the sense that you have been taught.”
“The priests always used to tell us that was one of the snares the Shadow used to trap our souls.”
“And maybe they are right. Who can tell? I am not one of the Prophets. God does not talk to me. She never did.” He could see that her gaze was turning inward, as it often did, as she retreated from the prospect of answering his questions. He wanted answers desperately, and he pushed on.
“So you don’t think they made a pact with the Shadow?”
“Al’Terra was not the way the priests taught you it was, Rik. This I know. I was there. For reasons of politics, the Temple tells humans things that make them easier to control. But whatever else they were, the Princes of Shadow were real, and they were wicked, and I do not think it really matters whether they made a pact with the Shadow of God or not. The end result was the same.”