Fall of Light

by Steven Erikson

  The tavern door was shoved open and three more soldiers rushed in. Serap faced them.

  ‘Stand down!’ She pointed to the foremost soldier, a woman she thought she recognized, although the name escaped her. ‘Collect up your squad-mates, corporal. Drawing a sword on an officer of the Legion is a capital offence – disarm this one here and place him under arrest. I am off to have a word with your captain, as it seems he is losing control of his Silvers.’

  The corporal’s eyes were wide, and then she said, ‘Yes, sir. Our apologies, sir. There was word of insurgents in this tavern—’

  ‘A reason to pick a fight with the locals, you mean. I have not yet decided how many of you will end up charged. I suppose it depends on what you do next, corporal, doesn’t it?’

  The three newcomers were quick in carrying off their fallen comrades.

  When they were gone, Serap selected a coin from her purse and set it on the bartop. ‘For their ales,’ she said, before striding over to where stood the four young brothers. ‘Listen to me, you fools. When two soldiers come in wearing swords, you leave them be. Understand? First off, they’re not on their own. Second, they’re thirsty for blood. Am I making myself clear?’

  Nods answered her.

  ‘Good, now sit down and order a round – the tab is mine.’ She then returned to her table.

  Settled into the shadows once more, Serap waited for her bloodlust to pass. The silence had things to say about that, but she was in no mood to pay attention to it, right now. Alas, it was persistent. It is afflicting us all, this growing anger, and how it so easily answers all that ails us, all that haunts us, and all that frightens us.

  I wanted a fight as much as they did.

  Oh, banner of white, you came in with such a swagger, I wanted to see it stained red. If only to make a point.

  Now, if only I could work out what that point was, we could close out the night and be done with it.

  * * *

  ‘It was awful,’ the man said. ‘I – I can’t get it out of my skull, that’s all.’ And he leaned forward where he sat on her cot, hiding his face in his hands.

  Renarr studied him for a moment, and then moved to her trunk. ‘I have some wine here,’ she said, flipping back the lid and reaching inside.

  ‘Gives me a headache,’ the man said behind his hands.

  ‘Then remove your clothing, and we can forget this world for a time.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Soldier, what do you want from me?’

  His hands dropped away from his face, but he refused to meet her eyes. ‘Around the campfire, with people you fight beside – people you fight for, in fact – well, you’d think we could talk about anything. But it’s not so.’

  Renarr poured herself a goblet of wine, settled the trunk’s lid back down and sat upon it. ‘Even words aren’t free,’ she said.

  ‘I know. I’ll pay you … for your time. If that’s acceptable.’

  She considered his offer. ‘I’m not your mother,’ she said. ‘Nor your wife. When I spoke of escaping this world for a time, I meant it as much for me as for you. But I suppose my side of the bargain rarely occurs to any of you, does it? After all, you pay to answer your needs, not the whore’s.’ She waved a hand as he made to rise from the cot. ‘You need not go. What your coin buys from me is mostly up to you. That is the point I was trying to make. But I was also warning you – I have no special wisdom, no worthy advice. I cannot light your path, soldier.’

  ‘Then what can you do?’

  ‘I can listen. For the coin. As I said, you are paying for what you need.’

  He shot her a look, and she could not but see his youth, his child’s eyes so terribly trapped in a man’s body and a soldier’s armour. ‘You’re a cold one, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied. ‘I suppose I am.’

  ‘It may be what I need,’ he said, looking upon the floor of the tent, his hands now clasped together but restless. ‘Hard judgement. Righteous condemnation.’

  She sipped the wine. It was on the turn. ‘High words,’ she said, ‘for a soldier.’

  ‘There were three boys in the forest camp. Young, not one taller than my hip. We were three squads. Fourth, Seventh, Second. Well, when we were done with the mother, some of the men – they went for the boys, too. Those boys … it wasn’t me who cut their throats, when it was done, but I wish it had been. I wish the mercy had been mine to offer them.’ He was trembling now, his entire body, making the cot creak. The words had rushed out, and she could see in his eyes that there was no going back. ‘I didn’t touch them, those boys. I could never have done anything like that. But now, all the time, they’re with me. The looks on their faces when we … when we did what we did to the mother. And then, the shock when we turned on them, too. Blank faces, like dolls …’

  He wept.

  Renarr remained sitting on the trunk, confused. Did this soldier want comfort? Or did he indeed seek condemnation? It was clear that crimes had been committed. Urusander would see those men hanged. In fact, it was possible that all three squads would dance on the rope. Her adoptive father was famous for his righteous outrage. ‘Have you reported this to your captain?’ she asked.

  The blunt, toneless question met the man’s grief and swept it aside. She might as well have struck him across the face. Wiping at his eyes, straightening where he sat, he glared across at her. ‘Is that a joke? The bitch sent us into that camp! She could hear that mother’s screams from where she lounged in the next glade! Oh, and what was she doing while we murdered that family?’

  ‘Never mind,’ Renarr cut in, before the soldier could tell her what his captain had been up to. Renarr already knew enough to guess who the woman was. ‘And,’ she added, ‘obviously, Hunn Raal is not, strictly speaking, next on the chain of command. Is he? No, it’s the captains made equal, with only Urusander above them.’

  The man abruptly stood, began pacing. ‘You can’t know,’ he said. ‘Hiding out here. Can you?’

  She felt herself grow cold, and struggled to still her shaking hand as she drank again from the goblet. ‘You know who I am,’ she said. ‘You sought me out, thinking … what? That I would take this to Urusander? It was in your head – why, I have no idea – that my father and I still acknowledge each other. How did you work this out? Oh, he sends her down to the whore camps because she’s bored, the dear lass. Is it not what a father would do?’

  He stopped pacing, and sat again, looking away. ‘Then deliver his justice yourself, Renarr. With your own hand! This heart wants to still its infernal beat! My bones close around it – I can barely breathe. I swear, those raped children – they’ve found me. Haunting me day and night now. It’s not what I signed up for, don’t you see? Not in my vow of service to the realm!’

  ‘It would seem that by far the most righteous punishment for you, soldier, is to leave you alive. Haunted by guilt for the rest of your years. You flee the ghosts of three raped boys, do you? Even when you did not take part? Well, how sad for you.’

  He glared at her now, visage darkening. ‘I’m not paying for contempt.’

  ‘Oh, I am sorry. I was trying to make a point. It was clearly fine, then, that you raped the mother. Her ghost wanders elsewhere, one presumes. But those poor boys, with you watching on! Like botflies they’re now under your skin, gnawing their way into your heart. Of course, they were the ones watching you, at least at first, while you fucked their screaming mother.’

  He stood, reaching for his weapon-belt. ‘For this, I’ll pay you nothing.’

  ‘For this,’ she retorted, ‘I will not be a coward’s path. You know the way to the keep, soldier. I am sure Urusander is there even now. And yes, he will accept an audience with a soldier of his legion.’

  ‘My squad-mates—’

  ‘Oh yes, them. Why, they’ll know, of course, once the charges are brought down. I see now why you thought it best to go through me. In that instance, you all stand accused, and all face the same punishment. You stand with your
brothers and sisters, and not once do they question you or your loyalty.’ Renarr finished her wine.

  ‘It’s not cowardice,’ the young soldier said.

  ‘Isn’t it? Your entire tale is one of cowardly acts, from the moment you rode into the forest, hunting Deniers. Slaughtering women and children? Setting their homes ablaze? Entire companies, so brave in how you outnumbered your every opponent, and set swords to their flimsy spears and whatnot. Your armour against their thin hides. Your iron helms and their oh-so-fragile skulls.’

  He drew his gutting knife.

  She met his gaze, unafraid, understanding what this night had brought to her. ‘So be it,’ she said quietly. ‘Give me, then, your one moment of courage.’

  With a savage slash – beneath eyes suddenly triumphant – the soldier cut his own throat. Blood poured out, rushing from the severed jugular.

  He toppled and she stepped back.

  He made of this whore’s tent a temple, and me his priestess. Or, at least, someone to stand in for his god – as priestesses are purported to do. He uttered his crimes … But the body lying on the floor beside her cot, so motionless now when an instant earlier it had been bursting with life – she could not tear her gaze from it.

  There are ways of leaving. The worst of these is also the most final. You see, the bastard left, yet left his body behind. Why does the thought make me want to laugh? Guests will leave a mess, won’t they just? It falls to the host to see it cleaned up.

  I am no priestess. This is no temple. But the confessions spill out night after night – none as bleak as this one, to be sure. But it was coming. I should have seen that. The fools have blood on their hands, guilt in their souls. The High Priestess of High House Light isn’t much interested in all that, alas. And their mothers are far away.

  It is, I see now, an issue of faith. Faith and faiths, the natural ones and the other kinds, the imposed kinds.

  She recalled the aftermath of the battle against the Wardens, and all the cries from the soldiers left dying on the field, while the whores and looters walked among them. So many had called out, like children, for their mothers. Their god, or goddess, was too remote for them, in that drawn-out journey into death. It was a faith they’d dropped away from, abandoned. What was left, if not the purest, the sweetest of all faiths? ‘Mother! Please! Help me! Hold me!’

  Renarr had been witness to all that, there amidst the heaped bodies and the stench. But her memories of her own mother offered nothing. Too vague, too formless, making that ethereal, half-imagined figure almost godlike.

  Wrong faith, then. Not one for me to call upon, not now, not later. Not even at the very end, I should think.

  But these soldiers, they were far from their mothers, and few were able to reach their wives or husbands, assuming they had any. Failed by the High Priestess and that remote and strangely sinister temple they were even now building, and its god so bright as to blind all who might gaze upon it. Failed, too, that faith in the mother always close, always a short tear-filled run away, her arms opening wide to collect up the wayward child. Faiths, then, failed and failed again. What was left?

  The whore, of course. Confused and confusing idol. Priestess and mother, lover and goddess, and all faith reduced to the basest of needs, one simple game to play out all the infernal wars of power. Astonishing, isn’t it, what a few coins can purchase?

  Renarr collected up her heaviest cloak, and strode out from her tent. She set out from the whores’ camp where it clung to one side of the Legion’s outermost earthworks, and made her way along the embankment. Ahead, the dull, muted lights of Neret Sorr, and beyond that, the high hill of Urusander’s fortress.

  Men had a way of filling her up, it seemed. He had sought her out, to make her his hand of justice. She had refused him to his face, and in answer to that he had taken his own life. She recalled the triumph in his eyes at that final moment, at the gift his own knife gave to him. There was something in those young eyes that fascinated her.

  What did he see, I wonder? What avenue opened before him? A sudden way through, an escape from all the torment? Or was it just the venal act of a selfish child, wanting to somehow punish the woman standing before him … just passing the guilt along, as cowards will do.

  Well, in that he failed. The poor, misguided fool.

  But there was some irony, she decided, in that she now found herself walking into Neret Sorr, and that fell keep looming above it.

  Dear Father. I bring word of hidden temples where your soldiers confess their crimes. I stand before you, a much-used priestess, carrying in me a soldier’s plaintive cry for absolution … well, a few hundred soldiers and a few thousand plaintive cries. They have lost their faiths, you see. All of them, barring the renting of my flesh, thus relieving us all with assurance that, in coin, at least, one kind of faith remains secure.

  This is how the power of the bargain wins out against all other powers. Tell the High Priestess to pay heed. Invite confessions amidst handfuls of coin, to ensure that the believers understand how this deal gets made. They’ll grasp the notion quickly enough, until every temple is sheathed in gold.

  But tell her, also, to do nothing with such confessions. Mouth the proper words of absolution, if she must, but set out no course of hard justice, or proper retribution. Dead sinners are no longer generous, after all, and no longer impelled to rent for a time the easement of their guilt. Take it from a whore, dear Syntara, it’s about renting, not purchasing.

  She walked through the town. Frost limned the muddy ground, the walls of buildings. Overhead, the stars ever in their place, forever silent, eternally witnessing. She had grown to appreciate their remoteness. Whore as goddess and goddess as whore. Oh, how confused your worship, yes? Never mind. It all works out in the end – I saw as much in that soldier’s eyes.

  * * *

  There had been a smithy below the keep’s hill, but its owner had died. The house, sheds and outbuildings had been torn down, along with flanking houses, to make room for the new Temple of Light. Hunn Raal was amused when he thought of the scorched earth awaiting the foundation stones, the heaps of ash, clinkers and cinders; the ragged tailings and sand-studded droplets now hard and brittle as glass.

  Few understood the manifold expressions of the sacred that so cluttered the world on all sides. Few had the wits to see them. Kurald Galain, after all, was born of fires, of forges and vast forests of fuel awaiting the heat and smoke of industry. Pits in the ground, veins of ore, streams of sweat and dripping blood, the straining struggles of so many men and women to make of life something better, if not for themselves, then for their children.

  Fitting, then, to raise a temple upon such holy ground. Not that Syntara would ever comprehend that. She was intent, he now understood, upon a narrowing of the sacred, threateningly surrounded by a wild, chaotic proliferation of the profane. Once all such potential threats were eliminated – indeed, desecrated – then, why, she would hold within her embrace all that was sacred.

  Religion, Hunn Raal decided, was the marriage of holiness with base acquisitiveness, self-defined and purposefully delineated to eliminate natural worship – worship lying beyond the temple walls, beyond the rules, the prohibitions. Lying beyond – more to the point – the self-pronounced authority of whatever priesthood arose to manage, with grubby hands, the sacredness of things. And, incidentally, getting rich on the proceeds.

  Well, he understood High Priestess Syntara. It wasn’t difficult. He even understood the Deniers, and the threat they posed, with their open faith – with the way they made all things in their lives holy, from whittling down a tent stake to singing and dancing under the light of full moons. Even the Shake temples saw those forest-dwelling savages as a threat to whatever privileges the monks and nuns claimed as their own. Which was, if one considered it, ridiculous, since those savages of the wood were, in fact, the Shake’s congregation, their blessed children.

  Oh, that’s right. Their blessed children. Real children, that is, the ones
they could steal, I mean. Never mind the mothers and fathers. Just the children, please, for our blessed ranks.

  He took another mouthful of wine, swirled it through the gaps in his teeth, then pulling it back to flow over his tongue one more time, before swallowing. Thus. He understood Syntara and her pious High House of Light. He understood the Deniers, too, and the Shake.

  But not Mother Dark. Not this empty darkness and its unlit temple, its unseen altar and invisible throne. Not this worship of absence. Dear Emral Lanear, I do sympathize. Really. Your task is nigh impossible, isn’t it, whilst your goddess says nothing. In that despairing silence, why, I too might decide to take to my bed as many lovers as I could. To fill up all those empty spaces, the ones inside and out.

  Well, Urusander old friend, you can have her. If you can find her, that is.

  Rest assured, Syntara will bring light to the scene. Enough to expose the conjugal bed, at least. She’ll wave a hand and deem it a blessing. As if you two were children who would only fumble helplessly in the dark.

  Wed the two, then. Urusander’s fiery bright cock. Into her unlit cunt. Maybe that union was always holy, now that I think on it. A man’s raging light, a woman’s purest dark. We men, we do have a thing for caves, and other comforting places. Our womb, from which we were so ignominiously thrown out. To then spend a lifetime trying to crawl back – but what is it that we truly seek? Sanctuary, or oblivion?

  Glancing down, he pushed the maid’s head away from his crotch. ‘Oh, give it up, will you? I’ve drunk too much tonight.’

  She glanced up at him, just a flicker’s worth of eye contact, and then she rolled on to her side.

  ‘Amuse yourself,’ Hunn Raal said.

  Now, dear Syntara, let’s discuss the notion of murder, shall we? Shall we paint your temple blood red? Or should we wait a few generations first? At the very least, set the engineers to fashion ingenious gutters to channel a flow you would wish endless.