If dawn ever comes.
He had heard about Estaral’s death. He had heard about what she had claimed to have done. None of that made sense. Bakal would not have used Hetan—clearly, Estaral had believed she would be with Bakal, that she would be his wife, and when she saw him with Hetan her insanity had painted the scene with the drenched colours of lust. She had murdered them both in a jealous rage.
Strahl cursed himself. He should have driven the widow away days ago. He should have made it plain that Bakal had no interest in her. Spirits below, if he’d seen even a hint of the mad light in her eyes, he would have killed her outright.
Now command of the Senan in the battle this dawn fell to him. He had been handed his most hidden ambition—when he had in fact already willingly surrendered it to stand in Bakal’s shadow. But desire, once it reached the mouth, never tasted as sweet as it did in anticipation. In fact, he was already choking on it.
Bakal had discussed the engagement with him. Had told him what he intended. Strahl had that much at least. And when the Senan gathered at dawn, he would summon the chiefs of the clan, and he would give him Bakal’s words as if they were his own. Would they listen?
He would know soon enough.
The sun opened its eye in the east and seemed to flinch in the face of the massive wall of dark clouds devouring half the sky. On the vast plain at the very edge of what had once been the lands of the Awl, two armies stirred. Bestial standards of the Barghast clans lifted like uneasy masts above the wind-flattened grasses, as ash from the enormous bonfires spun and swirled in the air thick as snow. Approaching from the southwest was a vast crescent, warriors mounted and on foot. Pennons snapped above legions of Saphii soldiers marching in phalanx, shields tilted to cut the wind, long spears blazing with the dawn’s fires. Companies of D’ras skirmishers and archers filled the gaps and ranged ahead of the main force in loose formations. Mounted archers advanced on the tips of the bhederin’s horns, backed by the heavier lancers. The horses were skittish beneath the Akrynnai warriors, and every now and then one reared or bolted and fellow riders would close to help calm the animal.
Along the summit of the ridge, Warleader Maral Eb had positioned the Senan in the centre, framed by the lesser clans. His own Barahn he had divided between his brothers, anchoring the outer flanks.
As the day awakened, the crescent approached the Barghast position, swinging south as scouts rode back to report on the field of battle.
All at once the wind fell off, and in its place frigid cold gripped the air. It was the heart of summer, yet breaths plumed and steam rose from the backs of thousands of horses. Warriors shivered, half with chill and half with sudden dread.
Was this a battle between gods? Were the Akrynnai spirits about to manifest like fangs in snapping jaws? Were the undead ancestor gods of the White Faces only moments from clambering up from the hard, frozen earth, chanting an ancient dirge of blood? Were mortal men and women destined to cower beneath the terrible clash of ascendants? Above them all, the sky was split in two, the brittle light of morning to the east, the unyielding darkness of night in the west. None—not Barghast, not Akrynnai, not Saphii nor D’ras—had ever before seen such a sky. It filled them with terror.
Frost sheathed the grasses and glistened on iron and bronze as icy cold air flowed out from beneath the storm front. Among the two armies, no fierce songs or chants rang out in challenge. An unnatural silence gripped the forces, even at the moment when the two masses of humanity came within sight of each other.
Not a single bird rode the febrile sky.
Yet the Akrynnai army marched closer to its hated enemy; and the enemy stood motionless awaiting them.
A thousand paces west of the Barghast position lay the body of a woman, curled in the frozen grasses with her back against a lichen-skinned boulder. A place to lie down, the last nest of her last night. Frost glittered like diamond scales upon her pale skin.
She had died alone, forty paces from the corpse of her brother. But this death belonged to the flesh. The woman that had been Hetan, wife to Onos Toolan, mother of Absi, Stavi and Storii, had died some time earlier. The body will totter past the dead husk of its soul, sometimes for days, sometimes for years.
She lay on frozen ground, complete in her scene of solitary surrender. Did the sky above blink in witness? Not even once? When a sky blinks, how long does it take between the sweep of darkness and the rebirth of light?
The ghosts, their wings burnt down to black stumps, waited to tell her the answers to those questions.
Saddic, are you still alive? I have dreamed a thing. This thing was a vision, the death of a lizard-wolf lying curled on its side, the danger of bones beneath the sun. Listen to my dream, Saddic, and remember.
Greed is the knife in the sheath of ambition. You see the wicked gleam when you’ve drawn too close. Too close to get away, and as I told you: greed invites death, and now death takes her twice. This thing was a vision. She died not forty paces from her brother, and above her two armies war in the heavens, and beasts that are brothers are about to lock jaws upon each other’s throat. Strange names, strange faces. Painted white like the Quitters. A man with sad eyes whose name is Sceptre Irkullas.
Such a sky, such a sky!
Greed and ambition, Saddic. Greed and treachery. Greed and justice. These are the reasons of fate, and every reason is a lie.
She was dead before dawn. I held her broken soul in my hands. I hold it still. As Rutt holds Held.
I knew a boy.
Absi, where are you?
Saddic listened, and then he said, ‘Badalle, I am cold. Tell me again about the fires. The wonderful fires.’
But these fires were burned down to cinders and ash. The cold was the cold of another world.
Saddic, listen. I have seen a door. Opening.
Chapter Eighteen
What feeds you is rent
With the claws of your need.
But needs dwell half in light
And half in darkness.
And virtue folds in the seam.
If the demand of need is life
Then suffering and death hold purpose.
But if we speak of want and petty desire
The seam folds into darkness
And no virtue holds the ground.
Needs and wants make for a grey world.
But nature yields no privilege.
And what is righteous will soon
Feed itself with the claws
Of your need, as life demands.
QUALITIES OF LIFE
SAEGEN
W
eak and exhausted, Yan Tovis had followed her brother through the gates and into the dead city of Kharkanas. The secret legends possessed by her bloodline had virtually carved into her soul the details before her. When she’d walked the bridge, the echo of the stones underfoot embraced her, as familiar and steeped in sorrow as a dead grandmother’s cloak. Passing beneath the storeyed arch, she felt as if she had returned home—but this home was a forgotten place, as if she had inherited someone else’s nostalgia. Her discomfort turned to distress as she emerged from the cool darkness and saw before her a silent, lifeless vista of tall, smoke-stained buildings, smeared towers and disfigured statues. Tiered gardens had grown past weeds and were now thick with twisted trees, the roots of which had burst the retaining walls, snaking down walls and buckling pavestones. Birds nested on ledges above walls painted white in guano. Heaps of wind-blown leaves mouldered in corners, and plants had pushed up between flagstones.
She could feel the ancient magic, like something fluttering at the edge of her vision. The city had survived the eons far better than it rightly should have. And the sorcery still resisted the relentless siege of time. She looked upon a scene that might have been abandoned little more than a generation ago, when in truth it was ancient beyond imagining.
Mothers will hold children close
Until the world itself crumbles
So wrote some poet from this very
city, and Yan Tovis understood it well enough. The child and the home shall never change, if that child’s mother has any say over the matter. But explanations make truths mundane. The poet seeks to awaken in the listener all that is known yet unspoken. Words to conjure an absence of words. But children will grow up, and time will drive spears through the thickest walls. And sometimes the walls are breached from within.
It had always been her habit—and she knew it well enough—to sow uncertainty. In her mind, indecision was a way of life. Her brother, of course, was the very opposite. They stood facing one another in extremity, across a gulf that could not be bridged. When Yedan Derryg stepped beyond challenge, his will was a brutal thing, a terrible force that destroyed lives. When she did not have him facing her—his hands dripping blood and his eyes hard as stone—she came to believe that indecisiveness was the natural order of the world, a state of mind that waited until acted upon, doomed to react and never initiate, a mind that simply held itself in place, passive, resigned to whatever the fates delivered.
They were meant to stand together, meant to fix pressure each upon the other like the counterweights at either end of the bridge, and in that tense balance they might find the wisdom to rule, they might make solid and sure the stones beneath the feet of their people.
He had murdered her witches and warlocks, and it had not been a matter of stepping round her to get to them, for she had proved no obstacle to him. No, she had been frozen in place. Awaiting the knife of fate. Yedan’s knife.
I forgot. And so I failed. I need him back. I need my Witchslayer.
Behind her trooped the vanguard of her people. Pully and Skwish, plump and rosy as maidens, their faces growing slack as the residual magic bled through their meagre defences. The two officers commanding the Watch’s company, Brevity and Pithy, had already begun sending squads on to the side streets, to scout out places to accommodate the refugees. Their calm, drawling instructions were like a farrier’s file over the uneven edge of fear and panic.
She could not see Yedan, nor his horse, but ahead, close to the centre of the city, rose a massive edifice, part temple, part palace and keep, from which five towers rose to spear the heavy gloom of the sky. The Citadel. It occupied an island encircled by a gorge that could be crossed by but one bridge, and that bridge was reached by this main avenue.
Yan Tovis glanced back, found Pithy. ‘Settle the people as best you can—but don’t spread them out too much. Oh, and tell the witches they won’t be able to think straight until they’ve worked a protective circle around themselves.’
At the woman’s nod, Yan faced the heart of the city again, and then set out.
He rode to the Citadel. Of course he did. He was Yedan Derryg. And he wants to see for himself where all the blood was spilled.
Some enormous concussion had cracked the marble pillars flanking the Great Hall. Fissures gaped, many of the columns bowed or tilted precariously, and a fine scattering of white dust coated the mosaic floor. In places that dust had congealed into muddy stains.
Indifferent to the rubbish, Yedan crossed the vast chamber. He could feel a warmth coursing through him, as if he was about to wade into a battle. Currents of power still drifted in this place, thick with discordant emotions. Horror, grief, black rage and terrible agony. Madness had descended upon this citadel, and blood had drenched the world.
He found a side corridor just beyond the Great Hall, its entranceway ornate with arcane carvings: women marching in solemn procession. Tall, midnight-skinned women. Once within the passage, the images on the walls to either side transformed into carnal scenes, growing ever more elaborate as he proceeded to the far end. After a series of cloisters, the function of which was in no way ambiguous, Yedan entered a domed chamber. The Terondai—was that the word? Who could say how time had twisted it? The sacred eye in the darkness, the witness to all things.
There was a time, the secret legends told, when light did not visit this world, and the darkness was absolute. But only the true children of the Mother could survive in such a realm, and no blood remains for ever pure. More, there were other beings dwelling in Night. Some saw truly, others did not.
Light was what seeped in with the wounding of the Mother—a wounding she chose to permit, a wounding and then the birthing that came of it. ‘All children,’ she said, ‘must be able to see. We gift the living with light and darkness and shadow. The truth of our natures cannot be found in the absence of that which we are not. Walk from darkness, walk into shadow, walk beyond into light. These are the truths of being. “Without ground, there can be no sky.” So spoke the Azathanai in the dust of their quarries.’
Secret legends, likely little more than nonsense. Words to give meaning to what already existed, to what existed with or without the guiding hand of sentient beings. To this rock, to that river, to the molten fires from below and the frozen rain from above. He wasn’t much impressed with things like that.
The Terondai was smeared in ashes and cluttered with dried leaves. Shapeless ridges of white dust were all that remained of bodies left lying where they fell. There was no sign of weapons or jewellery, leading Yedan to surmise that looters had been through the chamber—and everywhere else in the Citadel, he suspected. Odd that his bloodline’s secret legends made no mention of those flitting thieves. Yet, weren’t we here at the grisly end? Not wielding weapons. Not making heroic stands. Just . . . what? Watching? Prompting the question: who in the name of the Shore were we? Their damned servants? Their slaves?
Secret legends, tell us your secret truths.
And what of this ancient claim to some kind of royal bloodline? Rulers of what? The woodshed? The garden island in the river? Yes, he would trot out the righteous assertions that he and his sister were fit to command, if that was what was needed to bend others to his will. They had titles, didn’t they? Twilight. The Watch. And Yan Tovis had done much the same, taking upon herself the role of Queen of the Shake. The burden of privilege—see how we bow beneath its weight.
Jaws bunched, he scanned the chamber once more, now with greater care.
‘You damned fool.’
He twisted round, eyed his sister.
‘You’re in the temple, idiot—get off the damned horse.’
‘There are raised gardens,’ he said. ‘Find some farmers among your lot and get them to start clearing. I’ll send others down to the river—we’ve got plenty of nets.’
‘You want us to occupy the city?’
‘Why not?’
She seemed at a loss for words.
Yedan drew his horse round until he faced her. ‘Twilight, you took us on to the Road of Gallan. The Blind Man’s Road. Now we are in the Realm of Darkness. But the realm is dead. It is preserved in death by sorcery. If this was once our home, we can make it so again. Was that not our destiny?’
‘Destiny? Errant’s balls, why does speaking that word sound like the unsheathing of a sword? Yedan, perhaps we knew this city once. Perhaps our family line reaches back and every story we learned was true. The glory of Kharkanas. But not one of those stories tells us we ruled here. In this city. We were not this realm’s master.’
He studied her for a time. ‘We move on, then.’
‘Yes.’
‘To where?’
‘The forest beyond the river. Through it and out to the other side. Yedan, we have come this far. Let us make the journey to the place where it started. Our true home. The First Shore.’
‘We don’t even know what that means.’
‘So we find out.’
‘The river is still worth a look,’ he said. ‘We’re short of food.’
‘Of course. Now, in honour of those who fell here, brother, get off that damned horse!’
Moments after the two had left the chamber, the stillness that had existed for millennia was broken. A stirring of dead leaves, spinning as if lifted by small whirlwinds. Dust hazed the air, and the strange muted gloom—where light itself seemed an unwelcome stranger—suddenly wavered.
______
Brevity followed Pithy to the mouth of the alley. They carried lanterns, shadows rocking on walls as they made their way down half the narrow thoroughfare’s length.
She halted beside her friend and together they stared down at the bodies.
‘Dead?’ Brevity asked.
‘No, sweetie. In the realm of dreams, the both of them.’
‘When did this happen?’
‘Couldn’t a been too long ago,’ Pithy replied. ‘I seen the two wander in here to do that ritual or whatever. Little later I chanced to peek in and saw their torches had gone out. So I come for a look.’
Brevity settled into a crouch and set the lantern to one side. She grasped the witch nearest her and pulled the woman over, peering down at the face. ‘Pully, I think. They look like twins as it is.’
‘Gettin’ more so, too,’ Pithy noted, ‘or so I noticed.’
‘Eyelids fluttering like mad.’
‘Realm of dreams, didn’t I say so?’
Brevity pushed back an eyelid. ‘Rolled right up. Maybe the ritual turned on ’em.’
‘Could be. What should we do?’
‘I’m tempted to bury them.’
‘But they ain’t dead.’
‘I know. But opportunities like this don’t come every day.’
‘What’s broken cannot be mended. You broke us, but that is not all—see what you have done.’
Gallan had been horrified. He could not abide this new world. He wanted a return to darkness and, when he’d done gouging out his own eyes, he found it. Sandalath, her son’s tiny hand held tight within her solid grip, stood looking down on the madman, seeing but not registering all the blood on his face and smeared across the floor—the impossibility of it here at the very threshold to the Terondai. He wept, choking on something again and again—yet whatever was in his mouth he would not spit out—and his lips were glistening crimson, his teeth red as cedar chips.
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