At Faith's End

by Chris Galford

  Chapter 2

  He would forever after remember the smell of cinnamon and clove for the day they put his father to the flame. Cinnamon and clove. The perfumed court-stink of the dead and the dying and the weeping.

  He stood in the grey-cast gloom, caressed by the warmth of the pyres, ringed by the wrinkled faces of the court’s functionaries, courtiers, and sons. Mired in mud. He followed the procession with the son’s dutiful eye, for all to see, but even then he knew the mud would stain his sandals. It would stain his sandals and the southron sway of his robes, and he would not look the emperor his colors deserved. Yet he would seem the bereaved, and the people would love him for it. So sayeth his wife. So mote it be.

  All pomp for a people he knew nothing of. It seemed he was eight years old all over again, but Zelnig, his tutor, was no longer around to take him by the hand and whisper that his father would not do him harm. They were both dead now. The master and the servant.

  Thirty years. Has it been so long?

  He looked at his wife, bundled in the mourning layers, and still somehow resplendent for it. A tiny sable column, dark and fair and utterly possessed of the moment. His sacrilegious heart. No eyes turned back to him. Her voice, needling through his head, ordered him away, and he did, knowing she knew best. She wrapped herself a little tighter about his arm and leaned her head against his shoulder, like a widow might weep for her husband.

  Everywhere, they always made the pair. The white prelate’s robe hung loose about his thick form, weighted by the heaviness to the air. He wore no crown, save the pointed tower of a holy man’s hat. Only the felt cloak, laced in eagles’ splendor, burdened him as anything more than a man of the Patriarch’s court. That and the eyes. The fawning, uncertain glimpses men always quailed before a god.

  Thirty years they had kept him beyond the Empire. It was a second son’s duty.

  The first, they had the blood. They would bear the crown and the weight of nations on their shoulders.

  The second took Assal into his heart and traded steel and gold for shields of psalms and jewels of the divine’s own word. The second son always went into the south, where Assal spread his hands and kissed four corners of the ragged earth to make Ravonno—the princely states, his pact with man.

  Then, his boy’s eyes had looked at his new home with terror. Now, he looked on his old home with wonder.

  But they didn’t come here for him.

  Every turn of the streets revealed still more people, spreading out in congregation. From rich to poor, the mob knew no boundaries, massing in the shadows of the buildings, hanging heads from windows and roofs, clambering over one another for a glimpse. Just a glimpse. Their eyes were bleary with wonder, and they crowded one another with abandon, but the true power of it, the unsettling horror of it, was how the man’s body made them share the silence of the grave. The whole city seemed soundless, vacant, drained.

  He could but wonder if it had been the same for his brothers. Shrouded in silk and pressed through the haunting eyes of the crowd. Yet somehow, he doubted it.

  Gerome and Molin might have had their mourners. Joseph would have been given the solemn march of soldiers. Neither could have stolen them both, as their father had.

  The procession stretched for hours. A stone-faced column of palace guardsmen formed its bulwark, dour and brooding in their black armor and dull, gold-trimmed capes. At the sides of the white-draped wagon that bore the Emperor came the pair that had seen his body safely home, Sers Viltenz and Seppelt, members of the distinguished Imperial Guard, scarcely distinguishable save for the white capes that marked their station. A third lay draped across the coffin. It was a monument to their place beside their lord, even in death. A monument to the one that had fallen beside him in battle—Ser Ettore.

  When he thought hard enough, he could almost picture the man, white-haired long before age truly struck. A memento of his mother’s time. Her brother, her guardian, her friend. A solid, dependable Ravonnen. Dead—ascended for it.

  He glanced down the line of faces atop the high steps—the Hinnlisch Stairs—of the Imperial palace. Portly Portir, his father’s youngest brother and regent for the crown, stood sweating beneath the sun. Beside him stood the general, Mauritz, wild-eyed and bearded in the way of the eastern provinces, the eldest of their trio, and the most dangerous. His eyes were spear points, ticking out over the ocean of souls.

  Beyond and behind them were his own legion—brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, all watching, all waiting. Had she been alive, their mother would have been among them, stout as any castle wall.

  One child stood apart from the rest, “protected” by another pair of palace guardsmen. A veil of brown curls hung about her soft face. She had what the others assured him were her mother’s eyes, tear-struck and amber and utterly uncomprehending.

  Her mother could not be burdened to attend.

  Her mother still hid after the death of his brothers.

  The heathen empress.

  Still, he did not let it consume him. As the holy Vorges intoned, all things with time would come.

  Noon held the sun high in the clouds by the time the body reached the foot of the stairs. At the urging of Mauritz, he joined his family in the great descent, until the casket loomed before him, and the guardsmen spread away from them, to stand at rapt attention. Normally, a priest would say the holy words, the heads would bow, and the deed would be done. Now, Ingricus, his father’s consul-priest, watched him with a mix of awe and indecision. His wife squeezed his hand. Mauritz turned to him, beckoning, as Portir started to move forward, only to catch himself, squinting, as though suddenly aware of a great wrong.

  And then the eyes were watching him, truly watching him. Standing alone above the blackness, he took the torch from Ser Viltenz’s outstretched hand. None of the Marindi nations bade their men be wasted in the earth.

  “With dust,” he cried to the crowd, surprised at the fervor of his own voice, “we are all! Of dust, we breathe! In dust, we may return!”

  The cycle. Unbidden. Unbroken. It killed and it raised anew. It cast sons out and drew them back. One did not understand the Circle. They merely walked it.

  He never even knew his father as he committed his body to the torch.

  But when Leopold looked out on his people, he knew. Then the wailing began.

  Chapter 3

  The first days were the hardest. Essa woke in a cold sweat almost every night, though her body felt aflame. She curled in her covers and tried to hide from the night, but everything prickled and chided her, and no matter how she turned everything bubbled down to the simple, insatiable sense of need.

  It was the most vicious part of arasyl. It worked its way into the bowels and made the body clamor for more. The higher the dose, the worse the craving.

  There were hands in her dreams. Touching. Probing. She bade them to stop, but they did not listen to her. They touched her until her blood flowed, and it wouldn’t stop. She did not want it, but she could feel the wetness, the incendiary itch of the drug bubbling up against her veins, and the voice in her ear would whisper: “Flesh doesn’t lie.”

  She could see her body arch, but she could not look away. It wasn’t her. The hands were on her and she didn’t know who she was.

  The clergy called it the Great Beast. Doctors sufficed to call it addiction. All Essa knew was that it made her very bones shudder. She ground her teeth even as she slept—when she was able to sleep—and woke with a mouth that felt like distant desert sands.

  But Essa weathered it, as she weathered everything else. She huddled in her cousin’s arms in the long winter nights, buried her head in his chest, and tried not to think. It was all she could do. She was not her father’s child. It was not in her to simply lie down and die when the world reared its ugly head at her.

  That did not mean she had the strength to look it in the eye.

  Nor Rurik.

  Months came and went, trickling into the holes of her being like so much rain. She might
have hid beneath the clouds, had the others not forced her back into the light of life. They understood, as only family of the heart could, but they also knew what no victim could remember: the world kept moving.

  Their camp grew to include another woman—a novelty not lost on her. Roswitte, the woman named herself, and she moved with an animal ease Essa found at first compelling. Like an uncertain puppy, however, she had lurked at the edge of her space, observing, waiting.

  Roswitte—the Little Bear, as she heard the soldiers call her—was the first to break the silence. “Eyes like them are like enough to bleed a girl, she’s not so careful,” she quipped over the crackle of a dinner fire. “Go back to hiding, or say what you’ve a mind to say. No right soul can manage both.”

  After that, it was Roswitte that continued to push, prodding for time with her where the others offered only space. Any words they shared were forced, though, for Essa saw in her too much of the wild. She was a brute walked out of the gloom, thrust forcibly on society. She reminded Essa of home. Her true home. Yet she was Ivon’s pet. That alone made her circumspect.

  Regrettably, the bear came not alone. Falcons circled its trail, and it was not long before their lord Ivon extended a hand of friendship to them and bid them land. From the ranks of the Bloody Gorjes—sellswords that encircled the Company’s camp—emerged three souls with which Ivon bade them make friendship and partnership. All served the same banner, he said. It was time they acted it.

  She tried to avoid them as one might the plague, but one was persistent. Viveld, his name was. Where the others danced about with their questions and jibes, he established himself early, walking straight through the bad blood and the interrogations between the groups to offer his hand to her, and introduce himself.

  “Killers need little introduction,” she said, eyeing the hand waggling in her face.

  It pulled the corners of his mouth higher. “Killer? Not yet, if’n it please. These here hands are set for horse flesh, starlight, and when you get caught riding some other fellow’s horses, you don’t have many options.”

  It was more candid than she was used to. She was taken aback by the honesty, as well, and struggled to maintain the mask of indifference too many tavern nights had taught her.

  The man was young, with a beard yet shaping under the lengthening days, and a demeanor that oozed determination. She suspected it was not merely quick hands that had made his trade, while he had it.

  “So what gave you wings?” she countered, sneering at the badge of a bloody falcon pinned to his breast.

  “Alas,” he said, in the same breath he dropped to the earth beside her. She scooted back, but he simply rolled onto his side to watch her. “There comes a time a man with an axe shouts: will it be the hand or will it be the time? I chose time and these fine sorts bought me up right quick.”

  She rolled her eyes. “For your hands?”

  “My hands can do many things, but it’s my head they wanted. Takes a special sort to work with animals. You have to be observant.” With a knowing pride, he emphasized this with a prod of her knee. It was horribly forward. “Much like you, I should suspect.”

  The man proved an enigma. But a good one. His humor was easy, his demeanor unoffensive; where his friends needled and pried, he straddled the line, doing his best to play middle man and defuse any arguments between camps. What’s more: he obviously sensed the hurt within her and greeted it with a childishness that disarmed her.

  Only Voren did not take to him, and there were moments she caught the two in awkward silence, not so much weighing the measure of one another, but as if deciphering how best to be rid of a troublesome rat. Viveld laughed it off. Voren warned her off.

  Essa huddled away from the lights of the camp, swaying to the gentle motions of the night. When the watery remnants of the night’s soup had left her, she staggered back for the maze, reminding herself all the while to breathe.

  She hated it. There was not a moment spent within those shadows she felt safe, or welcome. It felt better in the daylight—the whole camp did. When one could make out faces, one could bring humanity to them. Without, they were nothing but a churning nest of angry hornets, stinging eachother in addled disarray, for lack of anyone else to rage against.

  It was nothing more than a feeling that gave her followers away. The undeniable, preternatural sense of being watched.

  With forced ease, she slowed her steps and shrank against a canvas wall, concealing herself in the snores of the men therein. No one else was around. Yet she knew how to train her ears and to pick out the sounds that preceded men. Most would not have heard them. Their foot falls were like bare feet on cotton threads. Yet the thrum of them beat through her, accompanied by the whispering sashay of leather rubbing against leather. Between the baying of the crickets and the gawking chimes of men at play, such deliberate softness tweaked at the hairs of her neck.

  She tensed, drawing into herself with the knives she kept close. She would have preferred to shoot from afar—with a bow, in a place more rooted in her element—but one could not pick all their battles. She drew down as deep into the shadows as she could, waiting until a figure shimmied down her trail and into view.

  It was Viveld. He cast about for a moment and then, his eyes catching the barest glimpse of her silhouette, lit with such a fire as to be unmistakable as anything but pleasure. “Starlight!” he cried, and stepped toward her.

  Essa eased the daggers back and stood upright. She craned her head, listening for more of the sounds, but as he neared, she could not be certain. He smothered all beneath his boisterousness.

  “Why are you—”

  Even as she stepped toward him, she saw the error of her trust. His fist snapped out and hooked her down. On instinct, an arm swung up to shield her from the worst of the blow, and she bent back, hoping for distance, but it was not alcohol on the man’s breath, and he was quick. He snared her wrist and yanked her forward as she staggered, then flung her forward into the mud.

  Essa kicked out at Viveld’s shin, and screamed as loud as she could—the more bodies, she dared to hope, the more witnesses to deny him. Viveld grabbed at her leg with each successive kick, and lunged over the last, falling on top of her and wrestling her down.

  It was in that same moment the others appeared, intent on taking their petty toll. A pair of Gorjes—in the flash of faces and fists and boots, she could make out shapes, register that she had seen them before, but nothing more. They beat her. She struggled and bit and screamed at them as they beat her, but they were relentless.

  “Easy, girl. You already gave it away. What’s another go of it, yeah?”

  They had her hands down, over her head. Viveld craned over her like a ghoul, his boyish teeth gleaming even in the dark. “Some mares just have to be saddled before they calm the hell down, you know?” Then he started to work his pants down over milky legs.

  There was rage—but the fear didn’t truly hit until they covered her mouth. Because she realized in that moment that all her screams had been for nothing. Not ten feet away, a whole group of men had surely woken with the fury of that wail, and not one stirred.

  This—this is the conviction of men among men.

  The bodies bowed over her like trees bent to the rain. They closed her in, and there was nothing beyond them. The rattle of a belt buckle struck her as sharp as a logger’s axe. Her senses wrapped around the sound, blind to all beyond, sectioning her off from the pain. There was only the fight. No matter how hard they struck her, she kicked and she writhed, determined not to submit.

  For there were two deaths to die. There was a death of the body and a death of the self. They could take the one but she would not let them have the other.

  Thunder pounded the air. Hot ash showered her as sparks of daylight scattered like coals among across the bowed men. In that instant, the pressure increased on her left arm. She started to scream again, but as abruptly it, and the pressure on her mouth, vanished. A dark shape whipped over her head. She hear
d its curses as it crashed.

  As Viveld looked up in horror, the pressure on her legs let up as well. She curled in like a snake and kicked out, taking him square in the chest with both booted feet, satisfaction thrusting wind against her soles as she heaved him into the dust. The last man had risen. Essa rolled away and staggered to her feet. The bruises pulsed, but something deeper carried her.

  Matted braids glanced between the turning of a broad hunter’s knife. The third Gorjes man struggled with something on his belt as Roswitte swung in on him. When he backpedalled she snapped her foot into the crook of his knee. He lost his grip, swung instead. She drove the blade in and carved down. A spatter of blood struck Essa’s cheek. The man howled, but his other arm snapped against the woman’s gut. It drew back to swing again, but in the space a normal person should have stumbled, Roswitte only grunted, tore her blade free and swung it around into the tendons of the man’s other arm.

  It sawed through the flesh as a tanner to his trade. Yet it was the look that cooled the blood against Essa’s skin. As Roswitte kicked the man down, she all but snarled as she leapt after him. The eyes were hot as the campfire ash still flickering in the dirt, but ringed by ghosts as grim as any starving man. Rage danced there. Raw, unfiltered hate. The blade rose and fell. Rose and fell.

  By then there were shouts rising all around them. Death broke what little covenant this place held and sent even cowards scurrying to do what was right.

  The blond mountain that had sloughed off the other man traded blows with him still. They struggled, the Gorjes now a withered branch of the great mountain, and Alviss breaking it more with every rumbling gesture. Alviss caught him and twisted a limb down sharp. She heard the snap. Heard the man cry out.

  She moved of her body’s own accord, for Viveld, her hands shaking with the promise of what was to come. He had moved, though. Her mind, as though asleep, could not register the shift. Dazed, she twisted and saw him running as best as his drooping pants allowed. Running for Alviss.