Torrent scratched at his sparse beard. He’d used up the last of the oils young Awl warriors applied to burn off the bristle until such time that a true beard was possible—he must look a fool, but nothing could be done for it. Not that anyone cared anyway. There were no giggling maidens with veiled eyes, no coy dances from his path as he strutted the length of the village. All those old ways were gone now. So were the futures they had promised him.
He pictured a Letherii soldier standing atop a heap of bones—a mountain of white that was all that remained of Torrent’s people. Beneath the rim of his helm, the soldier’s face was nothing but bone, leaving a smile that never wavered.
Torrent realized that he had found a lover, and her name was hate. The Letherii details were almost irrelevant—it could be any soldier, any stranger. Any symbol of greed and oppression. The grasping hand, the gleam of avid hunger in the eyes, the spirit that took all it could by virtue of the strength and might it possessed.
Torrent dreamed of destruction. Vast, sweeping, leaving behind nothing but bones.
He glanced again at Olar Ethil. Why do you want me, witch? What will you give me? This is an age of promises, isn’t it? It must be, else I exist without reason.
‘When you find your voice,’ she said without turning, ‘speak to me, warrior.’
‘Why? What will you answer?’
Her laugh was a hollowed-out cackle. ‘When I do, mountains shall crumble. The seas shall boil. The air shall thicken with poison. My answer, warrior, shall deafen the heavens.’ She spun amidst flapping rags. ‘Do you feel it? The gate—it cracks open and the road will welcome what comes through. And such a road!’ She laughed again.
‘My hate is silent,’ Torrent said. ‘It has nothing to say.’
‘But I have been feeding it nonetheless.’
His eyes widened. ‘This fever comes from you, witch?’
‘No, it ever lurked in your soul, like a viper in the night. I but awakened it to righteousness.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it amuses me. Saddle your horse, warrior. We ride to the spires of your legends.’
‘Legends that have outlived the people telling them.’
She cocked her head in his direction. ‘Not yet. Not yet.’ And she laughed again.
‘Where is he?’ Stavi screamed, her small fists lifted, as if moments from striking her.
Setoc held her ground. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied levelly. ‘He always returned before.’
‘But it’s been days and days! Where is he? Where is Toc?’
‘He serves more than one master, Stavi. It was a miracle he was able to stay with us as long as he did.’
Stavi’s sister looked close to tears, but she’d yet to speak. The boy sat with his back against the lifeless flank of Baaljagg where the huge beast lay as if asleep, nose down between its front paws. Playing with a handful of stones, the boy seemed oblivious to his sisters’ distress. She wondered if perhaps he was simple in the head. Sighing, Setoc said, ‘He turned us into the east—and so that is the direction we shall take—’
‘But there’s nothing out there!’
‘I know, Stavi. I don’t know why he wants us to go there. He wouldn’t explain. But, would you go against his wishes?’ It was an unfair tactic, she knew, the kind meant to extort compliance from children.
It worked, but as every adult knew, not for long.
Setoc gestured. The ay lifted to its feet and trotted ahead, while Setoc picked up the boy and cajoled the twins into her wake. They set out, leaving behind their measly camp.
She wondered if Toc would ever return. She wondered if he’d any purpose behind his taking care of them, or had it been some residue of guilt or sense of responsibility for the children of his friend? He had left life behind and could not be held to its ways, or the demands it made upon a mortal soul—no, there could be no human motivation to what such a creature did.
And the eye he’d fixed upon her had belonged to a wolf. But even among such beasts, the closeness of the pack was a tense game of submission and dominance. The bliss of brother-and sisterhood hid political machinations and ruthless judgements. Cruelty needed only opportunity. So, he had led this paltry pack of theirs, and his lordship had been uncontested—after all, he could hardly be threatened with death, could he?
She understood, finally, that she could not trust him. And that her relief at his taking command had been the response of a child, a creature eager to cower in the shadow of an adult, praying for protection, willing itself blind to the possibility that the true threat was found in the man—or woman—standing over it. Of course, the twins had lost everything. Their desperate loyalty to a dead man, who had once been their father’s friend, was reasonable under the circumstances. Stavi and Storii wanted him back. Of course they did, and they had begun to look upon Setoc with something like resentment, as if she was to blame for his absence.
Nonsense, but the twins saw no salvation in Setoc. They saw no protector in her. They’d rather she had been the one to vanish.
The boy had his giant wolf. Would it protect them as well? Not a notion to rely upon.
And I have power, though I can’t yet make out its shape, or even its purpose. Who in their dreams is not omnipotent? If in sleep I grow wings and fly high above the land, it does not mean I will awaken cloaked in feathers. We are gods in our dreams. Disaster strikes when we come to believe the same is true in our real lives.
I wish Torrent was here. I wish he’d never left me. I see him in my mind even now. I see him standing atop a mountain of bones, his eyes dark beneath the rim of his helm.
Torrent, where are you?
‘They looked near death,’ Yedan Derryg said.
Riding beside her brother, Yan Tovis grimaced. ‘They must have awakened something—I told them to protect themselves, now I’m thinking I may have killed them both.’
‘They may look and act like two giggling girls, Twilight, but they aren’t. You killed no one.’
She twisted in her saddle and looked back down the road. The light of torches and lanterns formed a refulgent island in the midst of buildings at the far end of the city. The light looked like a wound. She faced forward again. Darkness, and yet a darkness through which she could see—every detail precise, every hint of colour and tone looking strangely opaque, solid before her eyes. As if the vision she had possessed all her life—in that now distant, remote world—was in truth a feeble, truncated thing. And yet, this did not feel like a gift—a pressure was building behind her eyes.
‘Besides,’ Yedan added, ‘they’re not yet dead.’
They rode on at a canter as the road climbed out of the valley, leaving behind the weed-snarled fields and brush-crowded farm buildings. Ahead was the wall of trees that marked the beginning of the forest called Ashayn. If the tales were true, Ashayn had fallen—every last tree—to the manic industry of the city, and in the leagues beyond that wasteland great fires had destroyed the rest. But the forest had returned, and the boles of blackwood could not be spanned by a dozen men with hands linked. There was no sign of a road or bridle path, but the floor beneath the high canopy was clear of undergrowth.
The gloom thickened once they rode beneath the towering trees. Among the blackwood she could now see other species, equally as massive, smooth-barked down to the serpentine roots. High above, some kind of parasitic plant created islands of moss, serrated leaves and black blossoms, like huge nests, depending from thick tangles of vines. The air was chill, musty, smelling of wet charcoal and sap.
A third of a league, then half, the horses’ hoofs thumping, hauberks rustling and clasps clicking, but from the forest itself only silence.
The pressure had sharpened to pain, as if a spike had been driven into her forehead. The motion of the horse was making her nauseated. Gasping, leaning forward, she reined in. A hand to her face revealed bright blood from her nostrils. ‘Yedan—’
‘I know,’ he said in a growl. ‘Never mind. Memories return. There’s
something ahead.’
‘I don’t think—’
‘You said you wanted to see the First Shore.’
‘Not if it makes my head explode!’
‘Retreat is not possible,’ he said, spitting to one side. ‘What assails us, Yan, does not come from what awaits us.’
What? She managed to lift her head, looked across at him.
Her brother was weeping blood. He spat again, a bright red gout, and then said, ‘Kharkanas . . . the empty darkness’—he met her eyes—‘is empty no longer.’
She thought back to the two unconscious witches in the city behind them. They will not survive this. They cannot. I brought them all this way, only to kill them. ‘I must go back—’
‘You cannot. Not yet. Ride that way, Twilight, and you will die.’ And he kicked his horse forward.
After a moment she followed.
Goddess of Darkness, have you returned? Are you awakened in rage? Will you slay all you touch?
The black pillars marched past, a cathedral abandoned in some timeless realm, and now they could hear a sound, coming from just beyond the broken black wall ahead. Something like the crashing of waves.
The First Shore.
Where we began—
A glimmer between the boles, flashes of white—
Brother and sister rode clear of the forest. The horses beneath them slowed, halted as the reins grew slack, lifeless.
With red-smeared vision, silence like a wound, they stared, uncomprehending.
The First Shore.
The clouds in the west had blackened and fused into an impenetrable wall. The ground was silver with frost and the grasses crunched and broke underfoot. Hunched beneath furs, Strahl watched the enemy forces forming up on the gentle slope of the valley opposite them. Two hundred paces to his right Maral Eb stood in a vanguard of chosen Barahn warriors, behind him the mixed units of four lesser clans—he had taken command of those warriors who had tasted the humiliation of defeat. A courageous decision, enough to grind away some of the burrs in Strahl’s eyes. Some, but not all.
Breaths plumed in white streams. Warriors stamped to jolt feeling back into their feet. Blew on hands gripping weapons. Across the way, horses bucked and reared amidst the ranks of mounted archers and lancers. Pennons hung grey and dull, standards stiff as planed boards.
The iron taste of panic was in the bitter air, and eyes lifted again and again to stare at the terrifying sky—to the west, the black, seething wall; to the east the cerulean blue sparkling with crystals and the sun burnished white as snow and flanked by baleful sun-dogs. Directly above, a ragged seam bound the two. The blackness was winning the battle, Strahl could see, as tendrils snaked out like roots, bleeding into the morning.
Now on the valley floor phalanxes of kite-shielded Saphii held to the centre, their long spears anchored in the hinged sockets at the hip. D’ras skirmishers spilled out around the bristling squares, among them archers with arrows nocked, edging ever closer. The Akrynnai cavalry held to the wings, struggling to keep formation as they advanced at the walk.
Sceptre Irkullas was wasting no time. No personal challenges on the field, no rousing exhortations before his troops. The Akrynnai wanted this battle joined, the slaughter unleashed, as if the chorus of clashing weapons and the screams of the dying and wounded could wrench the world back to its normal state, could right the sky overhead, could send the cold and darkness reeling away.
Blood to pay, blood to appease. Is that what you believe, Akrynnai?
Strahl stirred into motion, stepping forward until he was five paces in front of the Senan line. He swung round, studied the nearest faces.
Belligerence like bruises beneath the sheen of fear. Hard eyes fixing on his, then shifting away, then back again. White-painted faces cracking in the cold. In turn, his officers stung him with their acuity, as if they sought the first sign of uncertainty, the first waver of doubt in his face. He gave them nothing.
Strange crackling from the silvered sky, as of a frozen lake breaking in the first thaw, and warriors ducked as if fearing the descent of shards of ice. But nothing came of the eerie sounds. The fists of the gods are pounding against the glass of the sky. Cracks craze the scene. It’s all moments from shattering. Well may you duck, my friends. As if that will do any good.
‘Bakal,’ Strahl said, loudly enough to startle the figures he faced, and he saw how the lone word rippled back through the ranks, stirring them to life. ‘And before Bakal, Onos Toolan. Before him, Humbrall Taur. We came in search of an enemy. We came seeking a war.’
He waited, and saw in the nearest faces a host of private wars unleashed. He beheld in those expressions the fiercest battles of will. He saw the spreading stain of shame. And nodded.
‘Here we stand, Senan.’ Behind him he could hear and feel the sudden thunder of soldiers on the advance, of waves of riders sweeping out from the flanks. ‘And I am before you, alone. And I shall speak the words of those before me.’ He held high in his right hand his tulwar, and in his left the weapon’s scabbard.
‘Not this enemy! Not this war!’
Strahl sheathed the sword, slamming the weapon hard to lock it and then holding it high with both hands.
Weapons flashed. Iron vanished. Barked commands from the rear and the Senan forces wheeled round.
And now, we leave.
You wanted this, Maral Eb? Then take it.
Someone was shouting, but Maral Eb’s eyes remained fixed on the enemy as it advanced. The first arrows hissed through the glittering air—almost unseen in the gathering gloom. The phalanxes were readying for a charge, long spears levelled in the first three ranks. On the outer wings horse-archers were fast closing, moments from loosing arrows and then wheeling to rake the front Barghast lines with subsequent salvos.
Bastards fought like babies. Once those Saphii closed, everything would change—
The shouting was suddenly louder and then a hand gripped his shoulder and yanked him round. He glared into the face of one of his bodyguards—but the man was pointing, spittle flying as he shrieked. What was he saying? The damned idiot—what—
Then he saw the growing gap that was his line’s centre.
What? Did they charge—no—I see nothing—but—
‘They’ve withdrawn! Warleader! The Senan!’
‘Don’t be a fool!’ He pushed his way through his milling guards until his view was unobstructed. The Senan were gone. The most powerful of the Barghast White Faces—routed! ‘Get them back!’ he shrieked. ‘Get them back!’
Sceptre Irkullas reined in, a deep frown knitting his features beneath the helm’s flaring rim. What was the centre doing? Do you invite us to march into that maw? Do you really think that will work? Damned barbarians, have you never before faced a phalanx? ‘Rider! Inform the Saphii commander to be certain to hold their squares—if the Barghast want to bite down on that mouthful of spikes, they’re welcome to.’ He twisted round until he spotted a second messenger. ‘Have the lancers draw in closer to our centre and await my orders to charge. Go!’
Another messenger who had been among the skirmishers rode up, saluting. ‘Sceptre! The centre clan is withdrawing from battle!’
‘It’s a feint—’
‘My pardon, Sceptre, but their leader was seen facing his warriors—he sheathed his weapon and held it high, sir. And they did the same back, and then turned round and left the line!’
Errant’s pull! ‘Sound the Saphii advance to close! Before the bastards can plug the hole—ride, soldier! Signallers! To me!’
Sekara the Vile pushed her way through the press for a better look at the treachery. She was in command of the rearguard, the elders, unblooded youths and their mothers, along with eight hundred warriors still recovering from wounds. Their task was to hold the line of wagons should the Akrynnai encircle or pull round to strike for the belly. But with the front centre gone, they would have nothing but enemy at their backs.
She spat out a string of curses at the retreating warrio
rs. ‘Cowards! I will wait for you at the Gate, for every one of you!’ She ran out a half-dozen strides—the last ranks of the Senan were almost within reach. Not of her claws—that would be too risky—but she could spit as well as any Barghast woman, and now—
Someone moved up beside her. She twisted round, teeth bared.
A gauntleted hand hammered her face. Light exploded behind her eyes. Legs giving out, she collapsed in a heap. Her mouth was full of shards of teeth.
Strahl’s voice spoke from directly over her. ‘Sekara, wait at the Gate all you want. But remember, your husband’s already there. Waiting just for you. The dead will say what they dared not say in life. Oh, don’t forget to take your hoard with you.’
She heard his moccasins crunching on the grasses as he set off in the wake of his clan.
My husband? Whenever did he not cower before me? She spat out a mouthful of slimy blood.
We’ll stand side by side, Strahl, to welcome you. To tear you to pieces! A curse upon the Senan! Choose what you will, you shall not see the fangs until it is too late!
The ground shook. A shock wave thundered through the Barghast. Screams battered the frozen air. The battle was joined.
Sekara regained her feet, her face already swollen and hot. ‘Other side of the wagons!’ she shouted. ‘Everyone—through! And then form up!’
She saw them lurch into motion.
Yes, hold for a time. Time enough for me to run. Darkness, such a blessing! She staggered towards the wagons.
Another sleet of arrows and Sagal ducked behind his hide shield. Two thuds bit into the thickly matted reeds and he flinched as his forearm was pricked. Warm blood trickled beneath his vambrace. He cursed. His brother had done the best he could in selecting this site, but to deal with these Akrynnai horse-archers most effectively they would have done better to find broken ground. A proper range of hills, plenty of rock, gullies and draws.
Instead, the bastards didn’t even have to close—at least for as long as they had arrows—and Barghast were dying without even the honour of clashing blades with the enemy. The rattling pass of the horses continued its deadly sweep.
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