by Kirby Crow
Ulan was eerily still. “The wolf pack is not very different from what you describe. It is primal necessity, what they have become. They live according to the dictates of their environment.”
“Even wolves don’t cannibalize their own. I’m done trying to harry them back into the wastes, or trying to reason with you.” Liall took a deep breath. “I won’t wait until these animals are howling at our door before I act. I’m taking the army north to wipe them out.”
Ulan made a burbling sound. It took Liall several seconds to recognize it as laughter.
“You do not make this war only to protect your people, scion of the Camira-Druz. Your crown needs a war.”
“Fair enough,” Liall grated out. “But it changes nothing. All I have said of them is true, and they are no less a threat for the happy convenience of timing. Warn them or not as you will, but we are coming, and Ged Fanorl will be cleansed.”
He looked at Ulan, trying to gauge his reaction. It was difficult to measure even the strongest emotions when dealing with an Ancient. Their dark, broad faces at times seemed to be carved from solid wood. Scarlet, being a Hilurin with an open nature that concealed almost nothing, complained that Liall was secretive. If only Scarlet knew. Liall feared that Ulan could read him as easily as he read Scarlet’s moods.
Ulan appeared to be looking through him. Liall wanted to shiver. He had the same feeling as when Scarlet used his magic; a sense of unreality jarring his perception of the world. Did Ulan have a similar magic that allowed him to read minds?
Ulan put one flat foot forward and advanced a step. “There is much you must see, much for you to learn before you reach Ged Fanorl, and there is little time. The channel must have a doorway, the link must be completed.”
“I don’t understand what that means.” Riddles, always riddles!
“You will.”
“And I don’t appreciate your gods-cursed inscrutability!”
Ulan’s wide mouth stretched further in a rare smile. “Even gentle creatures turn predator when they hunger, and into scavengers when starving. You call it abomination, but you have never starved as the Ava Thule have starved. Your fingers and toes have not turned black. The cold has not frozen your mate as she slept, or your babes in their cradles. In the elder times, when the long cold came and night lay on the land like a sickness, I saw worse than the deeds of the Ava Thule, King Nazheradei.”
“You shall not see it again,” Liall vowed.
“And what if I said that the thing you desire above all else will be given to you freely by your enemies, the Ava Thule, from what they have discovered inside Ged Fanorl?” Ulan paused and looked down on him. “Your t’aishka is fragile.”
Liall stiffened. “If you dare threaten him...”
“I would not waste breath threatening you.” Ulan loomed and his voice seemed to shudder the walls. “What need have I to threaten? If I meant the Anlyribeth harm I could root him from the stone of this castle and crush him with my own hands, and neither you nor all your spears could prevent me. This you know.”
Liall held his tongue, though his vision had begun to narrow in a long tunnel focusing on Ulan. Berserker rage, he thought, and willed it back so hard that spots swam before his eyes. He forced himself to wait before speaking, to breathe, to grip the edge of a chair to steady himself. “You will not do that.”
“Not I, no. Death will take a different form for your t’aishka. Forty summers, is it? Less, if their lives are hard. Even if you coddled him in a golden cage until he sickened of it, you will still live centuries beyond his span.”
Liall felt like the floor was sinking beneath him. It was true. Surely I’ve not lived all my adult life without love, only to find it and lose it in a handful of years? I cannot have come this far only to watch my love die before his time and leave me with only old age to endure alone. Fate is not that cruel.
Ulan waited like a statue: unknowable, unreadable.
Liall swallowed hard. “I will not speak of this,” he said hoarsely.
Ulan advanced toward him again. “He will not remain as he is for long. You will bury an old man in less than two decades,” he said pitilessly. “And before that time, his love for you will turn bitter and rancid when he continues to age and you do not, when the fire of his life burns down and yours remains vital and strong. He will never see you in your age, but you will see him wither day by day, year by swift year, until you cannot bear to look at him.”
Liall could hear Ulan’s breath, heavy and slow. “Stop.”
“As he knows you will. Scarlet is wiser than you in this. That is why your lover flees from you already, why his temper grows short and his eyes grow desperate. He will die, and you will live on.”
“Enough!”
“He will do worse than die, Nazheradei. He will try to leave you. And when you do not permit that, when you keep him captive against his will, he will hate you for it. Scarlet will grow to hate you.”
Liall’s arm swept out and he drew his knife. “Stop!” He held the blade in a trembling fist. “I will cut your heart out if you do not stop.”
Ulan reached for him.
It was like the touch of something natural, but not living, the limb of a tree or a wall of rock. Ulan’s hand came down on Liall’s shoulder and the world wavered and undulated like a frond of seaweed beneath the water. Then it was gone.
Ulan’s mind was cold, filled with ice and hoarfrost in every breath. Liall’s body grew cold with it and seemed to freeze and blow away like snow. He was bodiless, a thought on the wind, a skirl of mist, then the world coalesced. Before him was an expanse of ice as far as he could see. The very air seemed to glow like a milky diamond. Clouds floated above the land, blanketing it. In the distance was a tower shaped like a monstrous wheel made of stone and iron. The ground hummed beneath his feet in a rhythmic thumping.
The Blackmoat. How can I be here?
The tower of the Setna loomed above them, casting no shadow. Thousands of years old, it was a monument to the genius and power of the Ancients. Their earliest makers had crafted the wheel, and crafted, too, its purpose. Liall could hear the slow, muffled boom of each impact deep into the earth, and as he watched the wheel turned and one grinding, metallic clack echoed over the glacier like an explosion. The entire immense structure rotated a fraction of a turn.
The Setna were the inheritors of the Ancient’s knowledge. Only they could operate the wheel designed by the Red King. Only they knew how to refine the black sludge that came from deep beneath the ice, so that the fuel could be burned in their lamps and homes and heat the greenhouses that fed them through the lean months. The fuel was trade with foreign lands, food, gold, and all manner of goods in abundance. The Blackmoat was the grand wealth of Rshan na Ostre, its value almost immeasurable.
Liall seemed to float toward the tower, his body no more than a snowflake pushed by the wind, then he was inside it, in a room painted with bright colors on the walls and vivid woven rugs on the floor. Painted birds flitted over the walls, and patterns of vines and leaves framed the window. It was a Hilurin room.
A padded chair faced the window, and hanging on the wall above the flickering hearth was the likeness of Scarlet that Tesk had painted. Liall stared at it. Scarlet had borrowed Liall’s necklace of copper coins for the sitting, the necklace that otherwise never left his possession. Scarlet’s pedlar’s coat was deep red. Light glinted off his black hair and his flawless skin glowed.
So beautiful, Liall thought tenderly, his heart rising. So rare and fine, and so unaware of what a treasure he is.
“Who’s there?”
The voice was cracked and quavering. Liall realized a small man was seated in the chair. A blanket covered his legs, and wispy white hair haloed his skull.
Liall swallowed. “I’m... Nazheradei.” He had forgotten his wolf name. It was lost somewhere, along with the friends he had known then, so long ago. Peysho, Kio, old Dira. Lost. Far away. Probably dead.
“Liall?”
He
knew that voice. “No,” he whispered. The voice was wrong. It was old and feeble, dry as a weathered bone. It can’t be.
Liall knelt by the chair and made himself look. “Scarlet?” Why is Scarlet at the Blackmoat? This room looks like his father’s home, but no... Lysia was burned.
The shrunken old man turned his face away. “I told you to stop coming.”
Liall felt like he was two people: one standing and watching the terrible scene playing out in front of him, the other acting it out, his lips moving with the words, his strong hands reaching to tuck the blanket more warmly around the wasted, frail body.
“I know you did,” he answered gently. “I can’t help myself.”
“Go away,” the elderly Scarlet demanded. He jerked the blanket from Liall’s hands with spotted, claw-like fingers. “I don’t want to see you.”
“But, love...”
“I’m not your love. I’m an old man who’s no fit lover for anyone, nor any use either. Go away, Liall. Go back to your wife and children.”
Liall’s throat ached. “It’s you I love. I’ve always loved you. No one else.” He reached for Scarlet.
“Damn you!” the blasted body in the chair shrieked. Scarlet’s voice broke and he coughed pitifully, his voice a strangled whine. “Leave! I hate you! For Deva’s sake, forget me and let me die in peace. Leave... never come back... never, ever come back...”
The wind howled in Liall’s ears and clouds raced in front of his vision, whiting out everything. It took him long moments to realize the howling was his own. He was keening for what he’d done, for how he’d begged the curaes to treat Scarlet with every known remedy, with how he’d allowed them to extend Scarlet’s life far past his natural time. But there was only so much the curaes could do.
Was this how it would end? Would he be a king still young compared to Scarlet, still virile and strong with many decades ahead of him, while Scarlet faded to a ruined, bitter frame of flesh that hated him, hated him...
“Please,” Liall begged. “No.” He covered his face and sank to his knees in the swirling void, bereft and alone.
Ulan took his arm.
“Returnnnn,” the Ancient breathed like a long moan.
The Hilurin room vanished. Liall took his hands from his face. The dagger was on the floor where he had dropped it. His eyes ached as if he had been weeping, and his nails had cut bloody half-moons into the palms of his hands, but he was not at the Blackmoat.
He was on his knees, looking up at Ulan. A king kneels to no one. He rubbed his hands on his breeches and felt like screaming. “What did I see?” He could hear the pleading in his voice. “Was that the future?”
“One future. Not the only one.” Ulan bent his stiff body and knelt until his eyes were level with Liall’s. “Ressanda has secretly departed his barony. He sends his minion Hallin to distract you, to enrage you and keep you blind to his true purpose. Ressanda underestimates you. And me, for that matter.” A tock-tock sound came from Ulan’s chest; what might have been laughter. His eyes sparkled with lights deep within. “But a king has more eyes than his own, does he not? Even now, Ressanda journeys to Sul to play a game of soldiers and pawns with you, with his fair daughter as the queen.”
Liall could not answer. Baron Ressanda. The army. The throne. What did anything matter if Scarlet died?
“I offer King Nazheradei a solution,” Ulan said. “Scarlet does not have to die. He can have a life as long as any Rshani. Longer, if the legends prove true.”
Liall shook his head, heartsick and afraid to believe. “That’s impossible. You lie.”
“Why should I lie? To lure you to Ged Fanorl? You are coming anyway. To bring Scarlet of Lysia there and capture him? There are much easier methods of taking one man, as Melev well knew. Even Melev did not lie to you. He chose a path and did not inform you. No Ancient has ever lied. Your t’aishka does not have to perish so quickly, so long before his time. The Shining Ones knew the path.” Ulan stood up. “The answer waits in Ged Fanorl, in the hands of the King of Forever.”
Later, Liall would realize that he caught at those words like a drowning man to a plank of wood. Time was his enemy now, so much so that he had begun to dislike waking and sleeping and every moment in between, except those hours when he could forget the future and lose himself in the scent of Scarlet’s hair, in the feel of his skin pressed close. The tragedy he had just witnessed tore at him.
That must never happen, he swore silently. It will never happen.
Ulan offered him a lifeline and he clung to it with every fragment of his strength. He took the Ancient’s hand and rose.
“Tell me,” he commanded.
"You must travel the Temple Road to the Ironspell. Bring no Setna with you past the Blackmoat. Bring no weapons of iron past the Kingsdal."
The Temple Road. Cestimir had died on it, in the depths of a nameless ruin. "The Temple Road is hazardous,” Liall said. “Between the Ironspell and the Kingsdal, the cold is a danger even to us. To Scarlet, it would be deadly. He won’t make it."
“All shall be provided, in time,” Ulan promised. He nodded slowly. “Nazheradei King must trust in me.”
Oh, must I? Liall thought bitterly. “You mean for me to take a man of Hilurin blood into Ged Fanorl, under the mountain,” he guessed. “At best, my people would see that as heresy. At worst, it would be treason. Every loyal subject of Rshan, even the ones who know Scarlet and love him, would turn on me. I would lose my crown, and then I’d lose my head.”
“No.”
“No, you say. Just no and I’m supposed to believe you.”
“An Ancient does not lie.”
The ache in his chest would not leave him. “What’s in the mountain? Who is the King of Forever? Is it what Scarlet saw, the Creatrix?”
Ulan gave a hiss like steam. “So... Melev thought he could claim it. But did he desire it for Rshan, or for himself?”
Liall feared he had said too much. “It doesn’t matter. Scarlet doesn’t know where it is.”
“The king lies.”
He sighed, knowing it was hopeless. Ulan could tell truth from lies the way another man could tell black from white.
“You fear for nothing, Nazheradei. I do not desire the power of the Creatrix, and it rests in a place where none of my kindred can go: a mountain with an iron core.”
“That much is true,” Liall admitted. The Nerit. He had met Scarlet on Whetstone Pass, at the very top of Nerit Mountain. Was that an accident, like everything else? He was beginning to doubt that accidents existed. “But that doesn’t stop you from sending others to claim it for you.”
Ulan’s mouth shriveled like a wizened apple into an expression of disgust. “The Norl Ūhn is deep and cold. Kalaslyn is brown and dry. At the end of that road is only death. We shall send no one to retake the Instrument of Making. No creature that thinks should ever have the knowledge of it. Let it be hidden in the dark until the mountains fall to dust.”
There was such loathing in his voice that Liall dropped the subject. Ulan wasn’t the least bit curious about the Creatrix. There were men in Rshan who would eviscerate Scarlet for the knowledge, if they had the slightest inkling he possessed it.
“As you wish,” Liall said. “Scarlet will say nothing of it. He has given his oath.”
“The vows of Anlyribeth can be broken,” Ulan said cryptically. The lines of his face relaxed. “But not, I think, the word of Scarlet of Lysia.” He swept his hand toward Liall’s desk. “Bring to me your maps. I will show you the path.”
Liall swallowed. “And what lies at the end of that road?”
“Life.” Ulan bent until his eyes were on a level with Liall’s. Opal sparks floated in the depths of his moonlike eyes, a sea of darting stars. “Life.”
Bread and Roses
Scarlet hurried from the bedroom, half his virca unlaced, cursing a button that had decided to pop off as he was struggling to close the door. And the door was too gods-be-damned big, of course. It was like trying to close th
e gate to a stable.
He had grown so accustomed to boredom and dawdling in the mornings that when Liall sent a message to join him for breakfast, Scarlet went into a rush and promptly forgot where the servants kept everything. He could have called for Nenos to help him dress—Liall would certainly have approved of that—but the day he couldn’t dress himself would be the day he’d hang up his pedlar’s coat for good.
Like it isn’t already hung, he thought with a sigh. He was no more a pedlar now than a rabbit was an antelope.
Liall was usually gone before he woke, and they had not had a morning meal together in weeks. Scarlet arrived with his virca still unlaced up the side. The dining room was warm and smelled wonderfully of bacon and apples, and he rushed in with an apology on his lips, only to find Liall was not there.
Tesk stood by the table, his hands folded behind his back. He smiled happily and bowed. “Ser,” he greeted.
Scarlet glanced around, but other than the servants, they were alone. “Oh! Hello,” he said, holding the laces of his virca together awkwardly.
Tesk came forward, his hands outstretched. “If you’ll allow me?”
“I suppose...”
Tesk began to lace the side of the virca with quick, practiced hands. “Do you not have your own manservant, ser Keriss?”
Scarlet shook his head. “I don’t want one.”
“May I ask why?”
“Because I learned to dress myself when I was three.” Tesk’s cologne smelled of jasmine and spice. When he bent to tighten the lower laces, Scarlet was very aware of Tesk’s long, scented hair brushing his cheek. He wondered if Tesk was flirting with him. Surely not.