by Nathan Hawke
And so Gallow had turned his back on fate, and fate had punished him ever since, for every single day, and now a rage broke inside him, for he could see that there would be no escape; and he screamed at these men in front of him, a cry of rage and anguish enough to make even two Lhosir warriors falter before him; and as they fell back, his axe kissed the face of one and cut the thread of his life; and the other, seeing a thing too terrible to defy, turned and ran; and Gallow stood there alone, quivering, murderous, eyes searching for any who dared stand in his path; and when no one did, he fell to his knees beside the man he’d killed and wept. He tore away the dead Lhosir’s furs to be his own and put them on and walked through the bloody mayhem of Marroc falling on forkbeards and forkbeards slaying Marroc. Turned his back on them all and left.
The Marroc gathered slowly in the open space between the barns where Gallow had stood. It was done. The forkbeards were dead and none of the victors could quite believe it. Oribas darted around until he saw that Achista was still alive and her brother Addic too. He stared open-mouthed at the dead. Not that he hadn’t seen dead men before – he’d seen far too many – but he’d never been death’s architect. Not until today.
‘How did you do it?’ Addic fell in beside him. ‘Because you did. It was you.’ And it was.
‘You always run. That’s what Gallow said.’ He saw Addic wince, though he hadn’t meant it as anything more than a simple statement of the way things were. ‘But I spent a year with him and what I learned was that your Marroc women can be every bit as fierce and terrible as a Lhosir. So I went to them and told them that their men would run, even though they could win this day if they wanted it, and I told them to make their own stand. These are their homes, their lives, their sons and daughters. Why shouldn’t they fight? With ropes to trip, and sticks and yes, pots of scalding water, but most of all they shouldn’t run and they shouldn’t cower, and when their men saw this then they’d turn and stand and fight too. The Lhosir win because they aren’t afraid to die, but there aren’t so very many of them, and men are men wherever they are born, and all can be brave if they have the will put inside them. So that is what I did.’
‘Truly, you’re a wizard.’ Addic shook his head, full of disbelief, and Oribas understood his wonder because he hadn’t really thought it would work either. But the truth was all around them. The Lhosir were dead, and yes, a good few Marroc too, but far fewer than would have died if they’d simply run.
He wondered then whether he might have made a beginning of sorts, whether he might one day look at what he’d done here and know that he’d had a hand in making some consequence he’d never foreseen, and whether it would be for good or for ill. But he didn’t have very much time to do anything with that thought before Achista threw her arms around him and hugged him and then hugged Addic too. ‘Look,’ she said. ‘Look what we did! We won!’
Oribas was already looking. ‘Yes,’ he said, and felt a touch of dread at the joy in her voice.
She looked him in the eye and kissed him. ‘Addic is right. You are a wizard, Aulian. A magician.’
‘No. I . . .’ He shook himself. A dozen Lhosir, that was all. They’d have killed the Marroc too and so he’d saved more lives than had been taken, hadn’t he? He gently let Achista go, still uneasy. Gallow. Gallow would know. He’d never met a man with such a sure sense of what was right. But when he looked, Gallow had gone.
21
THE EYES OF TIME
Under the snow Beyard stared at the past. The Screambreaker was across the sea, basking in his shattering of the Marroc King Tane outside Sithhun. The Crimson Shield of Modris the Protector had been carried to the Temple of Fates in Nardjas and three boys had slipped inside in the dark to steal a glimpse of it before it vanished far into the icy north. But the stealing had not gone well. He remembered the room where the Fateguard had cornered them, the air ripe with fear, shaking at the sharp crack of metal slammed into wood and a door pushed half open. And he was the one who’d turned to the others to ask if they’d stand and take their punishment like men.
Medrin was gone so quickly that Beyard had to blink to remember he’d even been there. Out through a narrow window covered in moon-shadows as sharp as a blade, friends betrayed to a fear that would one day cost him dear. Medrin Twelvefingers, defying his father in those years when that’s what all boys did.
Which had left the two of them. Him and Gallow, parading their courage, shouting their defiance, holding their fear deep inside. Metal groaning, wood cracking, splinters flying. The iron-skinned men of the Fateguard were coming and they’d spat in fate’s eye. ‘My dead grandmother could push harder than that.’ ‘They’ll never catch me!’ ‘You go!’ ‘No, you!’ ‘I’m too fast for them.’ They were both wrong. He knew that now, now that his own skin was sheathed in iron too.
He’d been the oldest and so he’d stood his ground the hardest. He remembered Gallow’s hesitation. The fear in his moon-caught face. They’d both known they’d never see each other again. Both been so sure of it.
How wrong.
‘I will not forget.’ They weren’t Gallow’s words in the end but his own after Gallow was gone. For the brief moment he stood, before the ironskins smashed through the door and he tried to run and they caught him with ease and took him off to the frost winds of the north, winds birthed by ice wraiths, and abandoned him there. He remembered the wind most of all, a cruel gale that flayed any thought of kindness, that moaned and screamed like the ghosts of the ever-hungry dead and wailed like the widows they left behind as it tore at cliffs that were hard as iron and bitter as juniper.
‘I will not forget.’ He clung to it. In a wagon of old weathered wood and fat sausage-fingers of rust, pulled by unicorns born burned and blackened and twisted, he held it in his heart and spoke it out, over and over. ‘I will not forget.’ They weren’t alive, those nightmare horses, and when at last they stopped and stamped their feet, no steamy breath came with their snorts and even the snow and the stone shivered at their cold.
The Eyes of Time had been waiting. And then, for a long time, nothing.
In the ravine littered with fallen snow and broken Lhosir, Beyard understood that fate was not done with him yet. His life belonged to it and always had. Inside his case of battered iron something stirred. The Eyes of Time had made him what he was. He’d sworn vows that couldn’t be broken, even by death. The Fateguard were cursed men and he knew it, and fate didn’t choose to let him go. Metal grated as he moved, the fingers of his sword hand opening and closing, reaching for a blade he no longer held. His eyes opened and saw nothing but darkness, buried in snow. His lungs, which had been still, took a new lurching breath. His muscles creaked and strained, his bones groaned and shifted and the snow heaved and crumbled as he rose. He stood unsteadily amid the wreckage and looked about him. Up and down the ravine at the dead men who had served him. To the bridge that had almost saved him, the tangle of ropes to which he’d clung as others fell around him. Pieces of it lay about him now, broken where they’d snapped under their unwonted burden and pitched him down to the snow and stones below. He stumbled and staggered among them, lost and wondering who he was and where and how he he’d been the lucky one and clung to the severed ropes of the bridge and hadn’t been smashed like all his kin. The Eyes of Time would know the answer, and perhaps the Aulian who did this, and even, deep down, a part of him knew it too. Knew it and feared it enough to know he never wished to hear it.
He shied away from the thought. The snow fell past him as he clung to the severed bridge and so was there to break his fall. Snow and his iron had saved him. Let it be so.
He began to dig, looking for the sword he’d held as he fell, the red sword of the Weeping God which must one day face the Crimson Shield again and repeat the old story of the Marroc, of Modris the Protector and Diaran the Lifegiver and the Weeping God who must bear so much pain. He pulled it from the snow and stared at its blade and then he sheathed it and stared at the thing held tight in his other iron h
and, still safe. An amulet on a chain. A locket. He took off his iron gauntlets and held it in his cold white fingers, opened it and sniffed and then put it away and donned his crown once more and began to walk up the ravine, patiently looking for a way out.
‘I will not forget.’ His words were soft as the broken snow. They’d sealed their destiny by what they’d done, all of them. The others simply didn’t yet know it.
ORIBAS
22
WITCHES’ REACH
The tower of Witches’ Reach was a crumbling old thing of stone built two hundred years before when the Holy Aulian Empire had been at the height of its power. Traders had found the way across the mountains. A legion of soldiers had crossed in their wake and for a time the Varyxhun valley had been a part of that empire, the furthest the Aulians had ever reached to the north. They brought engineers and architects and felled the mighty pines and built their bridge across the Isset, perhaps planning a great conquest of the plains to the north, but the invasion had never happened and fifty years later the last of them had withdrawn back across the Aulian Way to warmer climes. As well as their great bridge and the impregnable Varyxhun castle, they’d left behind them two watchtowers that looked down on the entrance to the valley from the heights over the bridge: Dragons’ Reach on the far side of the river and Witches’ Reach on the near. Dragons’ Reach was a tumble of broken stone after the mountain beneath it had crumbled in the great Ice Winter sixty years later, but Witches’ Reach remained, commanding the road to Varyxhun. The Aulians hadn’t known the paths and trails of the high valleys and thought nothing could come into the valley without being seen by the garrison there. The forkbeards apparently thought the same. Cithjan had put a hundred men into the tower at the start of the winter, charged with keeping the Varyxhun Road and the bridge clear of Marroc outlaws, and so far the fifty of them that hadn’t ridden off to Boyrhun to kill Marroc over on the other side of the valley instead were doing a fine job of it.
Which was why Oribas was crouched beside Addic halfway up a mountain, squinting at the fortress.
‘I want to show you something.’ Achista squatted next to him holding what looked like a scrunched-up bedsheet. She flapped it open to reveal a crude picture of a battle hammer daubed from corner to corner. ‘The banner of King Tane. When this flies from the top of Witches’ Reach, every Marroc crossing the Isset will see it! Varyxhun will rise and turn on the forkbeards!’
Oribas had no idea whether or not she might be right. He’d certainly met a lot of angry Marroc after Jodderslet. He’d also seen the insides of Varyxhun castle and knew that anger wasn’t much substitute for mail and steel. ‘If you took the tower, it would take two days for word to reach Varyxhun. Another two or three for the Lhosir to come. They’ll surround you. I don’t see how you can escape once they arrive. Your flag will not fly for long.’
Addic stood behind them. ‘While it does, every Marroc and forkbeard leaving the valley will see it. Sixfingers himself will hear of it. We’ll make Cithjan look a fool.’
‘Men made to look fools can become mightily fierce.’
Achista rolled the flag into a bundle again. ‘We can’t run away when the forkbeards come! That’s the point! We’ll hold the tower as long as we can. Up and down the valley Marroc will rise to our standard and tear them down!’
‘And if they don’t?’ Oribas raised an eyebrow.
‘They will.’ Addic put a hand on his shoulder. ‘But if they don’t then the forkbeards will kill us. You don’t have to come with us when we seize it, Aulian. You’d be most welcome, but this isn’t your war.’
Oribas looked to Achista. ‘I will come.’ He took her hand.
They walked down the mountainside into the saddle below the tower and then away from the gorge of the Isset and into a thick wood of Varyxhun pine. Deep among the colossal trees Addic led the way to a clearing carpeted with dark blue autumn flowers where a camp of some fifty Marroc men waited for them. The Marroc here were grim-faced. Some had mail and helms and shields stolen from the Lhosir. A few had swords. Most had axes and nearly all of them had bows.
‘Here’s my Marroc army, Aulian.’ Addic smiled. ‘The first part of it.’
‘How will you convince the Lhosir to open their gates?’
‘Don’t I have a wizard, Aulian?’
‘Most of what tricks I had fell into the ravine on the day we first met.’
Addic vanished later that day and he didn’t return for several more, but the first part of his plan was soon clear enough. The Marroc in the forest made no effort to hide their presence. They lit fires to keep warm and the smoke climbed up above the trees for the Lhosir in the tower to see. With each day that passed more Marroc arrived. Perhaps only a few, and mostly farmers with nothing but axes or a spear or a fork, but they all had bows and Achista drilled them for hours every day, making them whittle their own arrows and fletch them and shoot them into bales of straw, and for every arrow that missed its target, each archer was forced to make another. It taught them to shoot with care and thought over haste, though Oribas wondered how well that teaching would survive when their targets changed from bales of straw to screaming Lhosir. An armoured man with a shield wasn’t as easy to kill with arrows as many archers liked to think.
He’d been in the camp for less than a week when the Lhosir made a sortie out of the tower to see what was happening in the woods. He was on the edge of the treeline when the Marroc lookouts came scurrying down from where they kept their watch. A score of Lhosir soldiers were coming on foot. The Marroc spoke with fearful glee and then raced back to the camp deep inside the trees. Oribas stayed where he was, hunkered down among the shadows and the snow. A man who chose to hide in a place like this and kept still and quiet would never be found unless those searching for him almost trod on him. More Marroc came running by. Oribas watched them rushing back and forth, leaving a confusion of tracks and trails. A few ran back the way they’d come, leaving fresh furrows in the snow. But not all: others picked their way back through their own tracks and crouched down to hide with their bows and their arrows. As long as the Lhosir didn’t look too hard, it would seem as though a dozen or so men had fled into the deeper woods.
As the Lhosir came into view, one last Marroc burst from cover, full of shouted warnings and movement as he fled. Oribas watched the Lhosir break into a run. They were like hunting dogs. They had the scent of a fight and could hardly hold themselves back. They ran in among the trees and Oribas tensed, for the greatest danger was now, and it only took one of the hidden Marroc to lose his nerve and bolt and the trap would fail. None of them did. Oribas waited until the Lhosir were gone, lost to sight but not to sound, then rose and hurried after them. He was the signal. The rest of the Marroc emerged from where they’d lain hidden.
The other part of the ambush belonged to Achista – Oribas wasn’t there to see it happen but he knew how it would go: the Lhosir would follow the trail until it stopped at a huge fallen tree that barred their path. Then Marroc would rise from the shadows beyond and throw their spears. Archers on either side would pepper the Lhosir with arrows, and after that it would fall to a confusion of fighting. In the thick forest the Lhosir wouldn’t be able to make a shield wall and muster a charge. There would be three or four Marroc for every Lhosir. Achista would repeat the victory of Jodderslet.
That was how it would be, and so when he heard the first shouts go up, the Lhosir roars and battle cries and the Marroc screams, Oribas dropped out of sight into the snow beside the trail. The sounds of the fighting rose to a peak and then petered away into the shouts of wounded Marroc calling for aid and a few furious roars of the last battle-mad Lhosir as they scythed down as many Marroc as they could before they fell. And then finally what he was waiting for: the sound of men running, the last Lhosir following their own trail back, racing out of the trees. Legs. Shoot them in the legs. That’s what he’d told the bowmen. They’d be soldiers in mail coats, with helms, carrying shields, armour too thick for an arrow to puncture
, but they had nothing to protect them below the knees.
They came, two of them, running fast, still with their axes and their shields even in their rout. Oribas willed the Marroc arrows to fly true but the Lhosir were moving fast and were hard to hit. A flurry of shafts zipped across the trail. One of the Lhosir staggered but kept his feet as an arrow hit him in the side and stuck out of his furs. Oribas gripped a rope lying beside him in the snow. He watched the fleeing Lhosir and then jumped up and pulled with all his might and snapped it taut across the trail. It took the legs of the first Lhosir and he sprawled in a flurry of snow. The rope jerked out of Oribas’s hands. He staggered forward. The second Lhosir lurched sideways, half tripped over the first and stumbled on. Without thinking Oribas hurled himself, crashing into the last Lhosir’s side and knocking him down. They flailed at each other in the snow for a few seconds but the Lhosir had twice the strength and twice the weight of Oribas and threw him off with ease. For a moment Oribas lay floundering on his back like an upturned beetle. The Lhosir pulled himself up. His face was a rictus of fury. He lifted his sword and there was simply nothing Oribas could do about it, no words or clever plans that would make the slightest difference; but before the Lhosir could strike a Marroc arrow hit him in the back, knocking him off balance, and then another Marroc flew out of the trees and bore the Lhosir down, hacking at his face with a knife, and then another and another, and by the time Oribas found his feet, the Lhosir was dead, a crimson pond of blood dripping out of his savaged throat. Oribas stared. Most of the dead he’d seen before had been half ripped to pieces, stinking and rotting and savaged by vultures under the desert sun, so it wasn’t the torn flesh and the blood that held him. It was that he’d never seen a man dead at his feet who’d been trying to kill him only a moment ago.
