Rebble glanced at him with his dark, half-mad eyes. ‘That sword?’
‘You have the truth of it.’
‘Yet you never saw me as metal for your confessions.’
‘I would say, perhaps, I learned my lesson.’
Rebble grunted, nodding. ‘I have many friends. Of course I do. Better my friend than my enemy, hey?’
‘The regret of the broken bodies strewn in the wake of your temper, Rebble. But when that rage is chained, you are an honourable man.’
‘You think? I doubt the worth of that honour, Wareth. Maybe this is why we’re friends.’
‘I will take that wound,’ Wareth said after a moment. ‘It was your temper, after all, that warded me when I was bound to the cot.’
‘If you’d been bound face-down, even that would not have sufficed.’
‘Rapists don’t live long in the pit.’
‘Nor do the raped.’
‘So,’ Wareth said, and he ground the word out. ‘We have a code.’
‘Of honour? Maybe so, when you put it that way. Tell me, does it take cleverness to be a coward?’
‘I think so.’
‘I think so, too.’
The sergeant reappeared with Listar. The miner looked confused and would not meet the eyes of his companions, and there was something in the set of his body that whispered defeat.
The sergeant gestured to one of the waiting soldiers and said, ‘Take him to the wagons.’ Then he pointed at Rebble. ‘Now you.’
‘If any of you asks me to cut my hair,’ Rebble said, straightening from the wall against which he had been leaning, ‘I’ll kill you.’
‘Come with me.’
Wareth was left alone. He glanced over to see the last remaining soldier studying him. After a moment the woman turned away. That’s right. You saved my life. How does it feel?
No matter. Merrec got what he deserved. A bully. Full of talk. All the women he had, all the husbands he cuckolded, until the one who got in his face and made trouble. But a knife in the back took care of that one. And you dared to call me a coward, Merrec?
But you would have done for me today, knowing I’d run. He studied the Hust soldier, the slantwise curve of her back as she settled most of her weight on one leg, hip cocked. Her attention was fixed southward, out across the broken landscape pockmarked by pulled tree trunks. Her armour seemed to ripple of its own accord. On occasion, the scabbarded sword at her side jolted as if knocked by her knee – but she had made no move.
The Hust. Few were left. The story had come in hushed tones – even for the savage killers in the pit, there was something foul in the poisoning of almost three thousand men and women. But it seemed that civil war precluded all notions of criminality, and who among the victors – standing beside Hunn Raal – would even contemplate a redressing of justice? Blows were struck, the cause sure and true, a rushing sluice to wash away what lingered on the hands, what stained the boots. The first words of the triumphant were always about looking to the future, restoring whatever nostalgic illusion of order they’d fought for. The future, for such creatures, was a backhanded game of revising the past. It was a place, Wareth well knew, where lies could thrive.
He was chilled now, having left his shirt in the shaft far below the earth’s surface. He used the wall behind him to keep his back straight, although the effort made his spine ache, but the cold of the stone quickly sank into his muscles, offering some relief.
A coward saw regret as if regarding a lost lover, as a thing used hard and fast only to quickly pall, pulling apart in mutual disgust. Those regrets then died of starvation. But their carcasses littered his world, all within easy reach. Occasionally, when driven by need, he would pick one up and seek to force life into it once again. But any carcass could be prodded this way and that, given gestures that resembled those of the living. A child would understand this easily enough, and deem it play. The games adults played, however, existed in a realm of ever-shifting rules. Regrets were the pieces, escape the coward’s prize, and each time, the prize turned out to be failure.
He lived in a world of confusion, and neither the world nor the confusion ever went away. I am slave to living, and nothing is to be done for that. He will see that. The captain is not a fool. Wise enough to survive the Poisoning. One of the very few, if the rumours are true.
Had he stayed, hidden among them, he would now be dead.
But the coward ever finds ways to live. It is our one gift.
The sound of footsteps, and then Rebble reappeared. He looked over at Wareth. ‘Half the game, us,’ he said. ‘I pity the other half.’
‘The women?’
Rebble nodded.
The sergeant detailed the last soldier to escort Rebble to the wagons beyond the camp. Before they drew out of earshot, Rebble turned and shouted, ‘The captain has lost his mind, Wareth! Just so you know!’
Scowling, the sergeant waved Wareth into the corridor.
‘You do not argue his opinion,’ Wareth said as they approached the office.
Saying nothing, the man opened the door and gestured.
‘Alone?’ Wareth asked.
‘The captain elects privacy in this,’ the sergeant said, ‘as is his privilege. Go in now, Wareth.’
But the miner hesitated, eyes narrowing on the man. ‘Did we once know each other?’
‘No, but your name is known to us all. The Hust Legion’s lone blot of shame.’
From within the office, the captain spoke. ‘That’s enough, sergeant. Wait outside.’
‘Sir,’ the man replied.
And if shame was the only blot, we could do away with swords. And war. And punishment, for that matter. We would guard ourselves against the crime of failing oneself, and feel only pity – like Rebble – for those who fell.
Wareth walked into the overseer’s office. Looking round for a moment, he saw a clerk’s abode, which made somewhat pathetic the hatred the prisoners had heaped on the overseer. Then he looked down at the man seated behind the desk. It was a moment before he could pierce the ebon skin and see the features. Galar Baras.
The captain looked distracted, perhaps even irritated. He moved a hand, encompassing the room. ‘Not much different from my own. Well, the one I had in Kharkanas. Needless to say, the similarity has soured my mood.’
Wareth remained silent.
Sighing, Galar Baras went on, ‘Rebble claimed it was his idea. Breaking open the shed. But I saw you speak to him in the moment before. I think it was your idea, Wareth.’
‘And this is an important distinction, sir?’
‘It is. So, tell me the truth of it.’
‘The idea was Rebble’s, sir. As he told you.’
The captain slowly leaned back in the chair. ‘I understand you want to return to the pit. Will you work alone, then?’
‘You cannot take these men and women for the Hust, sir. You cannot.’
‘So everyone keeps telling me.’
‘Is this by Commander Toras Redone’s order, sir? You’ve seen us. Go back and tell her it’s a mistake.’
‘The disposition of the commander is not your concern, Wareth. Right now, I am your only concern.’
‘Do not execute me, sir. It’s been nine years, damn you!’
Galar Baras blinked. ‘That notion had not even occurred to me, Wareth. All right, you turned and fled. You probably had your reasons, but that was long ago.’
‘Nothing has changed, sir.’
‘You stood between the men and the women down there. You were the first to do so. I was looking for leaders. Natural leaders. Ones with honour.’
Wareth laughed. It was a hard, bitter laugh. ‘And I stepped to the fore! Oh, you poor man.’
‘At least we can share the chagrin,’ Galar Baras said, smiling.
‘It’s impossible, sir. And not just with me. Rebble’s temper—’
‘Yes, I know all about that. And Listar strangled his wife.’
‘Even if he didn’t, sir, he is guilty of s
omething, and whatever it is, he would walk into death at the first chance.’
‘Then help me.’
‘Sir?’
Galar Baras leaned forward. ‘We are in a civil war! Mother Dark’s most powerful army lies buried beneath mounds a league south of here! And now we’ve had word of a battle – the shattering of the Wardens. As of this moment, the only forces standing between Kharkanas and Urusander are the Houseblades of the Great Houses.’
‘Then surrender, sir.’
The captain shook his head. ‘Not my call, Wareth. I have been commanded to replenish the Hust. I need bodies.’
‘And you are desperate,’ Wareth said. ‘I see.’
‘I doubt you do.’
‘I see well enough, sir. Go back to the commander—’
‘This order comes from the Lord Silchas Ruin.’
‘Not his to make!’ Wareth snapped. ‘Toras Redone—’
‘Lies disarmed and in a drunken stupor in a locked room.’
After a moment, Wareth said, ‘She was drunk when she spared me.’
‘I know.’
‘You do? How? She was alone in the command tent.’
‘She told me.’
Wareth fell silent.
‘I need officers,’ Galar Baras said.
‘Promote every Hust soldier you have left, sir.’
‘I will, but they’re not enough.’
‘You will forge a nightmare. The Hust swords will twist in the hands of this pit’s murderers.’
Galar Baras’s eyes were level. ‘I would think it the other way round, Wareth.’
‘This is your faith in all of this? Abyss below! Captain, I know the limits of those weapons – perhaps more than any of you, and I tell you, it is not enough.’
‘Your sword failed in making you brave.’
‘It begged in my hand, damn you! And still I ran!’
‘I see only one way through this, Wareth. I am attaching you to my staff.’
‘You are indeed mad. Sir.’
‘Then I well suit the times, lieutenant.’
‘Lieutenant? You would promote a coward? Sir, the sergeants will turn their backs to you. As for my fellow lieutenants, and your fellow captains, they will—’
‘I am the last captain bar one,’ Galar Baras said. ‘And that one is in no condition to assume command. There were two others, after the Poisoning. Both took their own lives.’
‘You’ll need more.’
‘I’ll worry about that time when it comes. As for your fellow lieutenants, they will take their orders from me, as expected. Oh, I am not so foolish as to think you face anything but a lonely future, but, Wareth, you will be my bridge to these prisoners. From you, to Rebble and Listar, and to whatever women I can lift through the ranks – and as to that, can you give me a few names?’
‘Only by reputation,’ Wareth said, and in his mind he could well see the future the captain offered him. In his staff, hovering around the command tent. Away from the battle. The image rose like an island from the seas of his confusion and fear. I can weather the scorn. I’ve lived with my own long enough. ‘We were kept entirely separate, and hardly saw one another. They were the cats, the night-shift in the shafts.’
‘I know, Wareth. This isn’t the first pit I’ve emptied. I’ll take those names, lieutenant.’
‘When I said “reputation”, I did not mean it in a good way.’
‘Right now, that distinction is irrelevant.’
Wareth looked down at the man. ‘I think, sir, that we will lose this civil war.’
‘Keep that opinion to yourself.’
‘As you wish.’
‘Now, the names, lieutenant.’
* * *
The stench of a burned forest slipped in through every pore. Its stink soaked skin and the flesh beneath. It lurked in a man’s hair, his beard, like a promise of fire. It fouled clothes and the taste of food and water. Glyph walked through heaps of ash, around blackened stumps and the bones of tree-falls with their charred roots stark in the still air. His face was covered by a rag, leaving exposed only his red-rimmed eyes. He wore the hide of a deer, turned inside out in a feeble effort at disguise, as the deerskin’s underside was pale grey. He had rubbed handfuls of gritty ash into his black hair.
He could see too far in this forest, now. In past winters, there had been enough evergreen to offer up places to hide, blocking lines of sight, to allow a hunter to move unseen if care was taken.
Among the Deniers, it was the men who hunted. This tradition was older than the forest itself. And the great hunts, in the spring and again at summer’s end, when all the men set out, bearing bows and javelins, making their way through the forest to where the last herds still walked in their seasonal migration, far to the north now – these things too were old beyond memory.
Traditions died. And those who held fast to them, cursing and filled with hate as their precious ways of living were torn from their hands, they dwelt in a world of dreams where nothing changed. A predictable world that knew nothing of the fears that every mortal must face. He recalled the tale of the lake, and the families that lived on its shore. In all of their memories, reaching back to the very beginning, they fished that lake. They used spears in the shallows during the spawning season. They used nets and weirs at the streams that fed the lake. And for the creatures that crawled upon the lake bottom, they built traps. It was their tradition, this way of living, and they were known to all as the people who fished the lake.
There came a spring when no women walked out from that place, seeking husbands among the other peoples. And those women of the other peoples, who thought to travel to the homes of the people who fished the lake, they arrived to find empty camps and cold hearths, with huts fallen in under the weight of the past winter snows. They found nets, rotting on the scaffolds where they’d been hung to dry. They found unused fish spears amidst the high heaps of fishbone and broken mussel shells. They found all this, but nowhere could they find the people who fished the lake.
One young woman looked out to the lake’s lone island, a hump of moss and rock on which the last tree had been cut down long ago. Taking a canoe, she set out for that island.
There, she found the people who fished the lake. Crow-picked and withered by the winter. Their skin was sun-blackened in the manner of fish strips hung over a smoking fire. The children that she found had been eaten, every bone picked clean, and the bones then boiled so they were now light as twigs.
And in the lake, no fish remained. No mussels and no freshwater crabs or lobsters. The waters were clear and empty. When she paddled back across it, she could look down to a lifeless bottom of grey silts.
Tradition was not a thing to be worshipped. Tradition was the last bastion of fools. Did the fisherfolk see their final fate? Did they comprehend their doom? Glyph believed the answer to both questions, among those who still worked the waters, was yes. But the elders on the shore droned on about vast harvests in times past, when the gutted fish hung in their tens of thousands and the smoke of the fires drifted low and thick on the water, hiding the lake’s distant shores. Hiding this island, even. And oh, how they all grew fat and lazy in the weeks that followed, their bellies soft and bulging. There are fish in the lake, the elders said. There have always been fish in the lake. There always will be fish in the lake.
And the witch flung fish spines on to level beds of ash, reading in their patterns the secret hiding places of those fish. But she had done the same the last season, and the one before that, and now no hiding places remained.
The elders stopped telling their stories. They sat silent, their bellies hollowing out, the bones of their wizened faces growing sharp and jutting. They spat out useless teeth. They bled at their fingertips, and made foul stench over the shit-pits. They grew ever weaker, and then slept, rushing into the distant dreams of the old days, from which they never returned.
One cannot eat tradition. One cannot grow fat on it.
The witch was cast out for he
r failure. The nets were all bound together, into one that could sweep through half the lake, from the muddy bottom to the surface. There was talk that some otters might be snared, or fishing birds. But those creatures had long since left. Or died. Every canoe was pushed out into the water, to draw that net through the waters. They circled the island, a slow spin around its treeless mound, and when at last they returned to their camp, everyone joined in the task of drawing in that net.
It was easier than it should have been.
Tradition is the great slayer. It clings to its proof and it drowns in its own net, from which nothing ever escapes.
Glyph and the other men had left their camps when the leaves turned brown. They trekked into the north, out on to the barrenlands, seeking the last, dwindling herds that had summered in the forest. Bearing bows and javelins, they gathered into hunting parties, seeking hoof-sign, and at night they told tales of past hunts, of hundreds of beasts slain where the herds crossed the cold rivers. They spoke of the wolves that joined them, and became comrades in the slaughter. Wolves they all came to know by sight – and surely, it was the same for the wolves – and like old friends they were given names. Odd-eye. Silvermane. Broketooth.
And, as the fires died down and darkness closed in with the moaning wind, the hunters sought to find the names the wolves had for each of them.
Fartwind. Sackscratch. Prickpump. Nubhide.
Laughter bit the cold from the air on those nights.
The layering of memories built tradition’s high walls, until the place made by those walls became a prison.
Glyph now saw how the very last tradition, when all the others had done their grisly work, was just this: a prison. The tales told, the memories gathered up like clay and then made into something hard as stone. It was what the elders of the lake had clung to, with their bleeding fingers. It was what Glyph and his fellow hunters had clung to, on those empty nights so filled with empty words.
He walked through the scorched bones of the forest, and the bitter ash on his tongue had become a kind of mortar, and he felt himself beginning the building of his own wall. A modest two or three stones. A meagre wall. But he would find more to work with, he was certain of that. Constructed from new memories. These memories …
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