The Mark of Ran

by Paul Kearney

  “Someone somewhere will understand, and if we found even ten lines of original Waric, it would be priceless. I doubt there’s enough of it left in the world to make a shopping list.”

  Piles of books fell over as they moved through them. A few were in Gascarese: A Gramarye of Ancient Symbols, The Alchemy of Blood, and even Sailing Directions for the North Wrywind Sea. But most were in languages Rol did not know. He wearied of the task long before Rowen and began hoking through cupboards, sniffing the contents of jars. He tapped the side of one and the sudden flicker of movement within made him cry out.

  “Rowen!”

  Set on a lamplit table, the liquid within was a bright carmine, like arterial blood. But it was not opaque, and something swirled within, occasionally tapping on the glass. Rowen lifted the lid gingerly, and, too quick even for her superb reflexes, the glistening thing inside leaped out and landed with a wet splat on the tabletop. Rol drew Fleam and tried to stab at it, but the bright point buried itself in wood as the creature twisted aside.

  “No, let it be,” Rowen said. She set a hand on Rol’s sword arm.

  “So you have killed me, then,” the thing said, and its voice was recognizable: that of Michal Psellos.

  They backed a pace, openmouthed.

  “Ah, my brave assassins, my lovely pair of killers. What a picture you make.”

  It was a foot high at least, a bulging bag of glistening muscle and corded sinew that wheezed and twitched with life. There was a steady rhythm to its contractions, and in the echoing dark they heard the pulse of the liquid that was coursing under the flayed meat of its skin.

  “Psellos?” Rol rasped.

  “Part of him.” The thing sprayed globules of blood from tiny gaping orifices, and with the blood the breathy, bronchitic voice issued, like that of a man with water on his lungs.

  “I am his heart, the thing that beat his blood for him once upon a time, until he found a way to put me here. For safekeeping, you might say. So long as I exist, Michal Psellos survives, in some form.” Quaking tendrils issued from the flesh like chopped ends of offal, and tapped the tabletop in delicate motions.

  Rol fought his rising gorge, the urge to stamp this monstrosity out of existence.

  “You found the key, and passed the guardians. For that I congratulate you. Perhaps you are ready for the world.” A pause. “And now you stand in a veritable midden of wisdom. Are you impressed? Did you think that Psellos had untold sheaves of secrets neatly cataloged down here? You have such tidy minds.”

  “I think he wanted us here,” Rowen said.

  The thing bubbled and contracted to itself, an unnatural horror surrounded by an accumulated chaos of junk and learning, the magpie hoarding of decades. Somehow it seemed to sense their disgust and disappointment.

  “There are men in the world who would pay a king’s ransom to pick over the bones of this room, and to you it is nothing, a mound of rubbish. It is to be expected—neither of you completed your training, and it is in neither of you to attempt its completion. A waste, after all. You will come to realize this yourselves, in time.”

  “Why would he want us here?” Rol asked.

  “To hear the truth about yourselves. A parting gift. It is the least he—I—can do.”

  Rol knew suddenly that he did not want to hear the thing speak further. “Let me kill it, Rowen,” he said.

  “No, let it speak.”

  “Ah, Rowen, you have a fatal flaw,” the thing gurgled. “Deep within you there is a great compassion, well concealed. A need to love. Whereas, in this boy there is a hardness you will never match. Ultimately, he will give nothing of himself that he cannot afford.”

  “You ugly little lying bastard,” Rol said hotly.

  “And yet you are both so similar in many ways, which is hardly unexpected. You are, after all, brother and sister.”

  Rol and Rowen froze as though the thing’s words had turned their blood to ice. It gurgled with laughter again.

  “Amerie was mother to you both. She gave Rowen to Psellos—to me—to look after, and Rol to her father, Ardisan, hoping that in separating you she was increasing your chances of survival. You must forgive me, Rowen; guardian or no, you were too beautiful to resist, even as a child. But know this also—in you the blood of Bion flows true. You are rightful heir to the throne of Bionar, daughter of Bar Hethrun himself. May you have joy of the knowledge—I know you have been seeking it a long time.

  “Rol, your father was someone or something else, unknown to me. I was close to finding out, but my untimely death has put paid to that. May you live in ignorance always, you murderous little ingrate.”

  The thing’s soft flesh crumpled slightly, as though weary. But there was a malign triumph in the awful voice. “Now you may kill me.”

  Rowen drew forth her poniard as though in a trance, but this time it was Rol who restrained her. “No. He’s lying. He has been false in everything, and so in this too.”

  “She knows the truth when she hears it, Rol Cortishane. I do not lie, not at the door of death itself. In Waric, the word rowren signifies queen. She was named deliberately.”

  “What does his name mean?” Rowen asked, and her voice was cold and lifeless as glass.

  There was a hesitation. “It means king.”

  Rol picked the creature up. His fingers sank into the clammy flesh and his lips stretched back from his teeth in disgust.

  “Kill it,” Rowen said.

  “No. There is a better way.”

  As it realized what he intended the thing began to squirm and wail in his hand. He stuffed it back into its jar, slopping the evil-smelling liquid all over the tabletop. Then he found the lid and screwed it closed again. The thing that had called itself Psellos’s heart writhed and flattened itself uselessly against the glass, the black mouths in its flesh opening and closing.

  “Let him rot there for all eternity,” Rol said.

  They sat a long time in silence, knowing that they had fallen for the last of Psellos’s many ruses. There was no longer any wish in them to go ferreting through the piles of books and manuscripts and scrolls for lost knowledge. They knew too much already. When Rol went to take Rowen’s hand she moved away from him, shaking her head.

  “Leave me be.”

  At last the candles burned low, and the last of the oil began to gutter in the lamps. Rol had the sudden fear that if the darkness returned they would sit here like this until the flesh withered on their bones, but he could not think how they were to get past the waiting haunhim. He stood up. The thing was still struggling in the jar. He set it inside a cupboard and closed the door.

  “We must go now.”

  Rowen did not reply. Leaving her, Rol began to explore again listlessly. The heavy silence of the gutrock seemed loud as a dog’s whine in his ears. But there was a different sound also.

  He left Psellos’s room and wandered down the cavern again, his eyes attuning to the dark as soon as the lamplight was left behind. The noise grew stronger; it was the distant churn of running water. He followed it like a hound on the scent and tracked it down to a hole in the cavern wall. Within the hole was a brightness, a skein of movement. He entered and found himself enveloped in a fine spray of moisture, impossibly refreshing after the dryness of the cavern. There was a river running through the rock, an underground stream tipped with fast-moving flashes of foam. Bobbing against the stone jetty he stood upon was a boat, a flat-bottomed punt with a wooden pole rolling in the bottom. It was made fast to a stone bollard with a length of rope. Rol laughed aloud, and the sound was ugly in his ears. Psellos always left himself another way out, it seemed.

  The last of the candles had died and Rowen was sitting in darkness, turning her knife over and over in her hands. When Rol set a hand on her shoulder, she sprang up under it and the knife kissed his throat. He pushed it away gently.

  “There’s another way out, a river with a boat on it. I think it’ll take us to the surface. At any rate, I’d rather chance it than go back out
the way we came.”

  “You go. I’m staying here with the rest of the trophies and specimens.”

  “Rowen—”

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “He was lying.”

  “No. It fits. A thousand small things have suddenly made sense to me. He enjoyed watching us draw close, knowing he held the breaking of us in the palm of his hand.”

  “I love you, Rowen.”

  “There is not one thing I have that is not sullied and besmirched and debased. I thought he would allow me to have you, but I should have known better.”

  “Rowen, listen to me—”

  “Do not touch me, or I think that I shall kill you.”

  They left the cavern with nothing more than they brought, save a battered lantern and the burden of their heritage. Rol untied the mooring rope and the punt was seized at once by the current and began coursing downstream. They had to crouch close to the thwarts to avoid hitting their heads on the stone overhead, and now and again their craft would crack off the rocky wall of the river-course with the crunch of wood, until Rol learned to fend off the walls with the pole. They spoke no more word to each other in all of that long, subterranean voyage, until at last they came out from under a screen of hanging willow and found themselves floating on a broad river toward the sea, with an autumn sky bright and blinding blue above them.

  There was smoke rising over Ascari. They beached the punt and climbed a small hill in the yellow morning light and all about them the Ellidon Hills were loud with birdsong and the trees were flame-bright with the turning year.

  Rowen peered northwest to the smoke which sullied the sky. “I hope it burns to the ground, every stick and stone of it.”

  Reluctant to speak, Rol said at last: “We have to go back. We need money, gear. It’s all in the Tower.”

  “You go back. I’d rather beg by the roadside than enter that place again.”

  There was a rising panic in him, a sense that he had stepped over the edge of a cliff and had no way to halt his fall; he must merely await the moment of impact.

  “I’ll go back on my own, then, and you wait for me here.”

  “No. I’m done with waiting too. It’s time to be gone.”

  “Then where shall we go?”

  She looked at him, and he felt his hopes hit the ground within him.

  “I go alone.” This was the girl who had booted him off the steps of Psellos’s Tower all those months ago, as cold and unknowable as a statue.

  “Rowen, whatever that thing says we are, I do not care.”

  “I do, Fisheye. I care very much. I can’t love you, for what we feel is as flawed and perverse as all the rest of my life has been. I’ve had enough of all that shit. I want to be clean. It ends here.”

  “You can’t mean that.”

  She looked away from his incredulous boy’s eyes. “We were brought together for his entertainment, no more. You were lucky, you had only a year of it. He took my life and shaped it like clay and set it up on a little pedestal and mocked it and charged entrance fees for others to do the same. I have had men piss on me for their entertainment. I have been passed from beast to rutting beast and had them violate me three at a time and then I have dressed like a lady and sat opposite them at dinner. There is nothing left inside me now that has not been covered in filth. Well, so be it. I shall take my chances elsewhere. Alone.”

  She began walking away, downhill toward the fishing villages on the coast. Rol watched her go in disbelief. He ran after her, grabbed her by the arm. She spun round instantly, her knife naked in one white fist.

  They looked at one another, and he knew that she would kill him if he spoke one more word. He released her arm. The knife came up and stroked the side of his face in a caress. Then she turned and resumed her way downhill. She grew smaller in his sight, and finally disappeared into the tawny patchwork of the trees. He never saw the tears streaming down her set face, nor the bloody stripes she was cutting mechanically into her forearm with the keen edge of the knife.

  After a while, an age it seemed to be, Rol forced himself to take a step, and then another, and then he stumbled into a walk, a march, and finally he was running through the woods, northwest toward the smoking horizon. Finally he was sprinting, one hand on Fleam in her bouncing scabbard, the other punching the air before him as though its momentum could increase his speed. He ran like one pursued, like a felon fleeing the scene of a crime, and he did not stop until he was hoarse and panting and had to bend over and swallow his gorge and wipe the sweat and tears from his face. Then he ran some more, until he was passing through the shapeless outskirts of Ascari, and the dirt roads turned to cobbles, and the sky above became a narrow slot between houses, and the stink of ordure and smoke was all about him.

  He drew his sword, for there were gangs roaming the alleyways breaking down doors and carrying off valuables and women. He saw street urchins running wrapped in tapestries, footpads holding a man’s hands in the red hiss of a brazier while he screamed and told them the shop was empty. A woman bent half-naked over a barrel by a group of slavering beggars whilst her husband was beaten to a crimson pulp beside her.

  Rol shut his ears to the shrieks and laughter and picked his way through the riotous chaos of the streets, climbing always uphill toward the Tower. A pair of men made the mistake of shouting at him to stand fast and give over his purse. They were drunk, and slow, but he took fierce pleasure in lopping off their hands one after the other and leaving them to squirm and bleed behind him. He began to run again, assailed by some sense of urgency he did not understand. Here and there a knot of militia stood guard over a rich man’s house, but otherwise the streets had become a murderous free-for-all.

  There was a mob in front of the Tower. They had forced the postern and were already inside. On the ground in their midst lay the bodies of two Feathermen, their blood trodden into a mire. Canker had at least tried to keep his word.

  Lying beside them and beaten into raw meat was the body of Gibble, a kitchen knife still clutched in one bloody fist.

  The last rags of Rol’s restraint blew away. He let the training take him over completely, and a white-hot sun of grief and rage within him fueled it to the brink of madness. Fleam was a thing of pure, bestial joy in his fist, and as he fell upon the rear of the mob like some berserk angel, he heard the sword singing.

  Those who were intent on forcing their way within the fabled Tower saw a bright light behind them, and then a storm of steel broke upon their ranks, and it smashed bodies to right and left, cutting men in two, amputating limbs, decapitating, disemboweling, blinding. They streamed away from the Tower in panic and the thing came after them, cutting them down, making a charnel house of the street, splashing blood as high as the eaves on nearby houses. Bodies and limbs and the ropes of entrails were strewn in scarlet ruin for a hundred yards and the survivors fled down the hill in abject terror, climbing over one another to get away from the light, the singing blade, the terrible eyes.

  The light faded as quickly as it had come. A boy was left leaning on a bloody scimitar in the street, his face a wilderness of pain streaked with other men’s blood, his clothing soaked scarlet. He dropped the sword, fell to his knees in the puddled gore, and began to weep.

  There were crowds of townsfolk on the wharves mobbing the gangplanks. Every ship’s master docked in Ascari had jettisoned his cargo onto the quays and was taking on passengers instead, charging a fortune for every square foot of his hold. Enterprising longshoremen were taking others out in cutters and longboats, sculling them down the coast to quiet backwater Gascar.

  Rol had entered the Tower and chased out the looters within. It had not been necessary to shed more blood; they had taken one look at his eyes and had made off, dropping their plunder. He had walked the gutted corridors, treading on priceless manuscripts and the tattered remains of ancient paintings and hangings, kicking aside empty bottles, crunching over broken glass. There was little left of the gear he and Rowen had gathered togethe
r to aid them in their proposed journey; the bag of money was long gone.

  He gathered up what he could, nonetheless. An oilskin cloak, a tinderbox, a change of clothing, a loaf of bread, a wooden flask which he filled with Cavaillis and drank a swallow of in memory of Gibble. Then he went to the uppermost levels—the looters had not ascended this far—and managed to scrape together a purseful of copper minims, and a few silver, from Psellos’s apartments.

  He entered Rowen’s room, a place whose threshold he had never crossed before. It was bare as a hermit’s cell. A narrow bed, a table, a chair, a rack for her swords. A wardrobe which he opened. Hanging within were all the fine gowns Psellos had insisted on buying her. Rol buried his face in them, smelling her, unwilling to leave off the pain, like a dog that will lick a wound into fresh rawness. His heart was a burnt-out cinder. There was no one left even to hate.

  Rol secured a berth on the Seahorse, a leaky, overcrowded caravel that was bound for Borhol to the southwest. The only reason he was allowed aboard was because they were shorthanded, and he was able to convince the captain that he knew his way about a ship. As they cast off, a collective wail went up from the crowds on the quays. He belayed a loose point and staggered slightly as the wind took the caravel and nudged her from the dock. A southerly, it was blowing fresh and true and had been all day. Just as well, for all the harbor cutters were ferrying passengers and were too busy to tow anything beyond the mole.

  “Why are they so desperate to take ship?” Rol asked the captain, a lanky, gray-haired Vryhedi named Kyle Gavriol. “They could just walk out into the countryside. The rest of Gascar is peaceable enough, isn’t it?”

  Gavriol spat over the ship’s side. “Peaceable for some, not for all. There’s an army has arrived in the west, mercenaries from Andelys hired by the council. Rumor has it they’re to purge Ascari of everyone the council dislikes or is afeard of, and that’s a long list of people. Running to the hills won’t help—once your name is on the list they’ll hunt down the whole island for you. So half the miscreants in town are running mad and the other half are trying to get to sea in anything bigger than a rowboat. It’s a sorry state of affairs. Where have you been not to know this, my lad, under a stone?”