Already uninterested in this conversation, Narad turned away. ‘Glyph,’ he said wearily, ‘consider your habits when you gathered to hunt the herds. Tell me, did each leader battle the next for command?’
‘No, Yedan. One was chosen.’
‘Upon what basis?’
‘Guile, and prowess.’
‘Take this to your people, then. The Legion is but a herd. Dangerous, yes, but even wild beasts can prove dangerous, so that detail should not alarm you. The enemy will behave just as a herd would, but instead of fleeing the sight of you, they will rush towards you. This is the only difference. Have your chosen leaders apply their guile to that.’
‘Narad Yedan, I will do as you say. Thank you.’
‘You considered that good advice?’ Lahanis demanded.
‘It speaks to our habits, Bordersword. We were not told we must be remade. The Watch gifts us his wisdom. We understand the way of hunting the great herds.’
‘But you will be fighting here, in this forest, not upon a plain!’
‘Bordersword, often a herd will break apart, with smaller groups fleeing into woodland. We know to anticipate such a thing. The forest poses no obstacle to our understanding the words of the Watch.’
With a frustrated snarl, Lahanis marched away.
Still behind Narad, Glyph sighed, and then moved to stand alongside him. ‘She bears too many wounds upon her soul.’
Narad grunted, and said, ‘And you do not?’
‘She is young.’
‘The wounds you speak of are indifferent to that.’
‘Our own children were slain. She reminds us of this—’
‘More than you realize, Glyph. Had your children lived, they would be just like Lahanis. Think on that.’
The Denier was silent for a time, and then he sighed again. ‘Yes. You remind me that there is a difference between the wound survived, and the wound that slays. Only in the first is a new hunger born. We speak of vengeance, but even the loss within us is borrowed. So it is and so it shall remain, for as long as we live.’
‘Indulge Lahanis,’ Narad said, closing his eyes upon his own pain, his own borrowed wounds. ‘Her fire will be needed.’
‘I feared as much.’ Glyph paused, and then said, ‘The Legion soldiers in the forest are thinly scattered. Our hunting bands will know how to deal with them.’
‘The habits of the arrow.’
‘Just so. Yedan Narad, do you fear the night to come?’
Narad snorted. ‘Why should this night be any different?’
‘In your dreams, you walk the Shore.’
‘I have told you this, yes.’
‘Will glory be found there, Yedan?’
Narad knew he should open his eyes, shift his gaze to Glyph, and reveal to the man the raw brutality of an honest reply. Instead, he did not move, barring the sudden trembling of his soul, which he was sure none other could see. ‘Glory. Well, if it needs a name … we can call it such.’
‘What other would you choose?’
The death of innocence? The loss of hope? Betrayal? ‘As I said, it will suffice.’
‘Yedan Narad, upon the day of the war’s end, you must lead us. None other will serve. But this day, as we begin the war, you have already served well enough. We see at last the path we must take, to become slayers of men and women.’
‘The same habit of hunting, Glyph. Only the prey has changed. I said little of worth.’
After a time, the Denier slipped away. Eyes still closed, Narad stared out upon a raging shoreline, argent with furious fire. He felt the weight of his sword in his hand, hearing but otherwise ignoring its muted peals of glee, while beside him a woman spoke.
‘My prince, our spine is bent unto breaking. Will you not return to us? We need your strength.’
Narad grimaced. ‘How is it that you make a virtue of my refusal of your lives, my refusing your right to them? For that is what you now ask of me. Stand fast, I will shout. Bend we shall, but break they will.’
‘Sire, you never shout.’
He waved a hand. ‘You know me as a humourless man, and yet you persist. Why dog a beast that never lived?’
The woman – a soldier, not a queen – was silent for a time, and then she said, ‘I took upon myself a family I never had. A daughter. A son, or was it two? I gave them the delusion they desired. They called me Mother. Until their moments of death, I held to the lie. What compelled me to do such a thing? Even now, while my corpse lies rotting beneath the stones the Andii raised about us, the question haunts me like my own ghost. ‘What compels us, Yedan, to so plunder the truth?’
He shook his head. ‘Nothing less or more than love, I think. Not for the ones you know and have always held close, but for the ones you may never meet. Or for those who, bearing the face of a stranger, stumble into your arms. In that instant, friend, you draw upon the deepest taproot within you. It has no name. It needs no name.’
‘Then, what do you call it?’
He pondered the question for a moment, wondering at her insistence that some things need be named. Then he said, ‘Why, call it glory.’
He opened his eyes and the scene vanished. Once again, before him was the stark contrast of snow and trees, white and black, raised up in front of a fissured sky.
The man he was, in his dreams – the man who was a lover of men – was far wiser than Narad. He spoke with knowledge and forbearance. He spoke like a man at peace with who he was, with who he would ever be. He spoke, too, like a man about to die.
Oh, my queen, see how I will fail you? He and I, we are brothers in failure, bound as lovers to a singular flaw. And when your day comes, Glyph, your final day of the war, he will lead you, not I. Or so I will pray. Better him than Narad, who will, I fear, take the coward’s path.
In this winter, all thoughts of redemption seemed as frozen and hidden as the ground beneath its mantle of snow.
* * *
Glyph watched the other packs slipping away from the camp, and then turned to the four hunters gathered behind him. ‘We must clear the forest of these invaders. Iron not flint for your arrows. Today, I am not interested in seeing them suffer. Quickly done, a return to winter’s silence.’
Lahanis stood among the small group. She alone carried no bow, no quiver of arrows. He would rather she stayed behind, as he had little faith in her woodlore. Borderswords were not trained in forests. Their world had been open land and denuded hills, the tundra of the north. They had often fought from horseback.
But now the Borderswords were no more. Slaughtered in a battle with Houseblades. Lahanis was the only survivor to have joined his people. He would rather she hadn’t. The smooth, round face before him was too young for the ferocity in her eyes. Her weapons invited the kind of death that was delivered with an embrace. Not for her the distance of an arrow or a lance. She would fight and don the blood of those she killed, and this red dress was one she yearned to wear.
She frightened him.
But then, so too did Narad, his first brother since his rebirth. The visions plaguing the Watch, as much as Narad had told him, seemed to promise conflagration and endless slaughter. It was as if Glyph had somehow stumbled into an unexpected destiny, making for his people a role none sought, and it was the Watch who would guide them into it.
But I cannot know. Does he share my love for my people? He would see us used by the First Son. But we owe nothing to the black-skinned Andii, and less to the Liosan, who now wear the guise of bloodless corpses.
A hunter spoke, ‘We are ready, lord.’
And this! Lord! They had given him a title, Lord of the False Dawn. Glyph did not understand it. He saw no significance in any dawn, false or otherwise. Nor could he determine who had first fashioned for him that honorific. It seemed to have sprung up from the frozen ground, or perhaps drifted down with the flakes of snow. He did not like it, but as with Narad, the Watch, there was no fighting this tide. Something now grasped them both, and its hands were cold and unyielding. ‘Very we
ll. Lahanis, we must travel in silence, with not a single misstep. These Legion soldiers are their scouts, their trackers.’
‘I know,’ she replied. ‘We must be as shadows.’
‘You have stained your skin. That is good.’
She frowned. ‘I have done nothing.’ She raised a hand, squinting at it. Her skin was the hue of ash. Blinking, she looked across to Glyph. ‘You are the same. But I saw you smearing ash upon your faces when first I came among you. I considered doing the same, but then forgot. We are stained, but not by our doing.’
Shaken, Glyph glanced over to where Narad stood, still facing out into the forest. ‘I thought him made ill by his visions.’
‘We are Deniers.’ Lahanis claimed the title as if she had been born to it.
The other hunters were muttering, their expressions troubled.
It was startling that no one else had even taken notice. Glyph could think of nothing to say, no answer to give them, or Lahanis.
‘It was on this day,’ said Neerak, the first hunter to have spoken to him. His eyes were wide. ‘By the spring, lord, yesterday, I saw my own reflection, where we keep the ice clear. Pale, but not as pale as the Liosan. Pale, in the way that I have always been. But see my hands now, my forearms – has a plague come among us?’
A plague.
‘We chose neither,’ Lahanis said. ‘We defy the Andii. We defy the Liosan. We have made ourselves apart.’
‘But on this day?’ Neerak demanded, spinning to face her. ‘Why? What has changed?’
Glyph answered. ‘I spoke with the Watch. I asked him, do we begin our war today?’
‘He told us to kill the scouts,’ Lahanis said. ‘The war indeed begins. Glyph, he is a priest. I care not what title you give him, but he walks more than one world. Today, by his blessing, we become an army.’
He stared into her eyes, and saw in their eager light the promise of fire and destruction.
The Last Fish, who now walks, seeking an old enemy. The lake lies almost forgotten, the leagues uncountable between it and where he now stands. The water, he recalls now, was clear. Nothing in it to blind him to his future, a future awash in tears. From water he left, to water he must go. I end where I began. ‘The war claims us now,’ he said. He collected up his bow. ‘By the blessing of the Watch, we are made into slayers of men and women. Come, then. This forest is our home. Time to defend it.’
Pulling up the cloth that masked his face beneath his eyes, he set out, his pack close behind him.
They moved quickly, upon old trails, hunched down beneath tangles of overgrowth canopying the animal tracks. Theirs was a run that devoured leagues. It flowed swiftly but made little sound, the snow taking their footfalls, the shadows of branches and boles scattering their own shadows as they raced onward. The secret of subterfuge was to move as if one belonged, to fight against nothing, bending and dipping, shifting where needed.
It was near dusk when Glyph, still in the lead, caught sight ahead of figures, three in all, drawn together as if in consultation. Their bulks betrayed their presence, along with the glint of iron buckles, an inverted strip of hide, and plumes of breath from unguarded mouths as they spoke in whispers. When one caught the fluid approach of Glyph and his hunters, he cried out and drew out his sword.
Glyph’s arrow sank into his right eye, dropping him instantly.
Two more arrows followed, hissing past Glyph.
Both surviving scouts went down.
The hunters reached the bodies, flowed over them like water, pausing only to cut free arrows. Lahanis pushed close to make certain the scouts no longer lived, but Glyph knew that was unnecessary. All three were dead before they struck the snowy ground. He continued on, shaking the gore from his arrow. The shaft was splintered, the iron point bent where it had struck the inside of the man’s skull. Still padding through the forest, Glyph worked loose the point and slipped it into a pouch at his belt, to be hammered straight later. He then snapped the shaft just below the fletching, and pocketed the end as well, before flinging away what remained.
They rushed on, as the dusk slowly closed around them.
It was as before. My first time, when they sat about a fire and laughed and flirted with the woman in their company. Nothing of them reached the place inside me. Nothing to invite sympathy, nothing to blunt my cold, sharp need for their deaths.
Slayers of children. If the blood not upon their own hands, then upon the uniform. They claimed the standard and wore upon their shoulders the banner that belonged to butchers. I felt nothing killing them. I felt nothing sending a flint arrow into the gut of the last one. I felt nothing chasing him down.
This must be how soldiers think. It could not be otherwise, for what kind of person murders a child? Defenceless elders? Hearth-wives and hearth-husbands?
What kind of person?
Why, the one I am become.
Do I mock myself now, if I say that I will hunt the uniform, slay the uniform? That the uniform is my enemy, mere cuts and hues of cloth and leather, a lifeless thing of belts, buckles and wool? Or is this my only path, my only hope to remain sane?
This, then, must be war. And what begins without must also begin within.
It was well, he reflected as he rushed on into the night, that he was reborn, for surely his old self must be dead by now, fatally wounded by grief and horror.
The lake water was once clear, but now, oh now, now it runs red.
Yedan Narad, I see what haunts you. For you, and all that you see of what awaits us, my chest now aches.
Behind him, close, Lahanis said in a hiss, ‘Wound the next one, lord. My knives thirst.’
And he nodded. For it was best if they all drank.
Like stained water, they flowed dark through the forest, while above them the sky groped towards night. They travelled a shadow world.
It was a night for killing, and kill they did.
* * *
Higher Grace Sheccanto was propped up in her bed, like a corpse bound to the headrest. Pillows were stuffed against her sides to keep her upright, and her head had a habit of dipping, even when she was speaking, until such time as her chin reached her breastbone and her words became incomprehensible. A young acolyte sat upon the bed, close by, ready to help the old woman lift her head once more. Despite this diligence, the words Sheccanto said made little sense.
Warlock Resh sat leaning forward, forearms upon his thighs, in an effort to hear – and understand – the Higher Grace. Finarra Stone stood a few paces back, having already surrendered the task. This, she well understood, would be her last audience with Sheccanto. The Shake might well remain hale in body, but the crown upon the head was broken, if not entirely lost.
None knew what afflicted the old woman. By years alone, she should still be stalwart and sharp of mind, with sufficient power to temper her husband and his increasingly bizarre pronouncements. Have they both spent years hunched over a forge? This is the iron curse, the stealer of memory, sower of confusion. Something has poisoned them both. Am I witness to the cruellest of assassinations?
From the terrible, wretched news that had finally penetrated the monastery, her suspicions needed to shake off few chains in pursuit of imagined conspiracies, ones where civility was the first victim. This could well be Hunn Raal’s work, aspired to genius. Far better than simply murdering Sheccanto and Skelenal, if one could paralyse the Shake with months, if not years, of ineffective rule.
No far reach for the poisoner of an entire legion, the murderer of Lord Ilgast Rend and the slayer of the Wardens of Glimmer Fate. He had been an unprepossessing man, she recalled, arrogant to be sure, but in the way of many soldiers, for whom that arrogance was a brittle façade hiding a wounded soul. She could forgive that bravado. He had also been a drunkard, the kind for whom the pretence of sobriety was a game, eliciting a smile upon his fleshy features – as if the man believed he was fooling everyone around him, when in truth he himself was the only fool, though even then, a knowing fool. Drunkards such as Hunn R
aal had a way of eating themselves from the inside out, and alcohol simply served to dull the pain of his endless chewing. She had expected from him a simple continuation of his degradation, his body hollowed out, his skull filled with terrors, a trembling, stumbling descent into death.
Instead, it seemed that evil itself had manifested in the man, lending him preternatural energy even as it scoured him clean of compassion. He was, she now believed, capable of anything.
Did he poison them? Has he agents here among the Shake? Spies? Assassins? Would not their loyalty bleach their skin? Look around – we here are unchanged, although, now that I consider it, the amber hue of our skin seems to have lost its gleam, as if dust now settles upon us all.
Are we transformed here, or simply revealing our sense of loss? What else is surrendered, when faith dies?
‘The sands will burn,’ said Sheccanto, her eyes fixed and staring at a vista none other could see. Those eyes were sunk deep in shadowed sockets, surrounded by withered skin the colour of the winter sky. ‘Someone drags me by an ankle, but my flesh is cold. Lifeless. The pain – the pain comes to those who must witness. Ignominy. The fires of outrage. I wonder … I wonder. Only the dead see the clarity of war. They chose to dishonour me, but my body cares not. Only the Watch understands. But he can do nothing. Nothing.’
Finarra shifted weight. The old woman wandered unknown landscapes in her mind. Every word she uttered took her farther away. By an ankle? You will not live that long, Higher Grace. Already they prepare your crypt, beneath this very floor. None shall drag you from it.
‘By royal blood we were born,’ Sheccanto said. ‘It is well to take the title of queen or king. But the day holds meaning, for what plays across its passage? I will tell you. I will tell you …’ Her head dipped again, and this time her eyes closed, and she began drawing the rattling breaths of sleep.
Slowly, Warlock Resh leaned back in his chair. He raised his scarred hands to his face.
Finarra cleared her throat. ‘I believe Caplo Dreem still awaits us in the compound, warlock. If we are to do this today, it must be soon.’
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