Cold Redemption

by Nathan Hawke

  ‘Achista!’ screamed the Marroc in front. He was a good way ahead of her now, racing for the tower of Witches’ Reach. She remembered seeing that tower for the first time, looking over the Varyxhun Road not far past the heights of the Aulian Bridge over the Isset. Fenaric the carter had brought her here. She tried not to think about that too much. Maybe she’d never know whether what she’d done had been stupid or right, taking the blame for Nadric’s moment of madness. It had probably saved Nadric’s life and maybe Fenaric’s too, but it had driven Gallow away and in time she’d regretted that more than anything. ‘Achista! Marroc! Lower the ladders!’ Last she’d heard, Witches’ Reach had been full of forkbeards.

  Torches appeared on the walls. She was tiring. The Lhosir behind her were getting closer despite Gallow and Tolvis. She heard their shouts, both of them. They felt sharp inside her.

  The gates to the Reach didn’t open but a ladder came over the wall. The Marroc in front of her reached it and started to climb. Arda couldn’t help herself: she let out a low wail. A ladder! Someone would have to stand at the bottom and hold the forkbeards off while the others climbed. Whoever did that would have no chance to climb it themselves. No. No no. Not Gallow, not after he’d come back after so many years, yet she couldn’t bring herself to want it to be Tolvis either. Do I have to choose? But no, she didn’t. She didn’t ever get to choose. The men would do the choosing. And most likely, since they were cut from the same idiot cloth, they’d choose to stand together and she’d lose them both.

  She reached the ladder and started up. The Marroc was standing at the top. As he reached to haul her up, he stared at her in horror. ‘Who are you? You’re not Oribas!’ He looked aghast.

  Arda grabbed his shirt and pointed at Tolvis and Gallow running towards the wall with a dozen Lhosir behind them. ‘Help them!’

  Another Marroc woman pushed along the wall. ‘Addic! Where’s Oribas?’ A look went between the two. The woman’s face turned ashen and then a tight mask of fury settled on it. ‘Archers! Kill the forkbeards.’

  A rain of arrows flew from the wall at the Lhosir, at Gallow and Tolvis and the forkbeards chasing them alike. Arda screamed at the archers, ‘Not the two at the front! Not the two at the front!’ The forkbeards kept on coming though, all of them, right up to the walls. Gallow was first. He dropped his broken shield and threw himself at the ladder, pulling with his arms. The Marroc on the walls kept loosing arrows, mostly at the chasing forkbeards but not all. One arrow hit Gallow on the head, bouncing off his helm and almost knocking him off the ladder. Two or three flashed past Tolvis.

  Gallow screamed up at them, ‘Friend! Friend!’ and the Marroc who’d led them here roared at the archers to let him climb. More arrows flew into the onrushing forkbeards below. One fell and then another and the rest slowed, crouching behind their shields. Gallow reached the top. Arda wanted to rush to him but Tolvis was at the ladder now and Gallow was leaning over, urging him on.

  Another forkbeard fell. The edge of panic had gone from the Marroc on the wall and now they took their time, picking their targets carefully. As the first forkbeards ran at Tolvis to haul him off the ladder, a dozen shafts hit them, cutting down two and staggering the rest, making them cower behind their shields again; and then Tolvis was out of their reach and Gallow was pulling him over the wall and they were grinning at each other and grinning at Arda and she wanted to run over to embrace them both and bash their stupid heads together but she just couldn’t.

  Instead she walked up to Gallow and brought her fist like a hammer down on his chest. ‘Where were you?’ There was a catch in her voice. She hit him again. ‘Where were you? Where? What were you thinking! That you could leave us for year after year and then just come back again?’ She had tears in her eyes and there was nothing she wanted more than to hold him and cry and laugh and perhaps hit him a few more times, but there was a wall inside her that wouldn’t let her, a wall that had never let her show him how she really felt. She stepped away and looked at Tolvis instead. Did what she always did when she was angry, turned away to someone else.

  Tolvis had an arrow sticking out of his side. A Marroc arrow. His face was pale and gleamed with sweat in the starlight. Arda jumped. ‘Modris and Diaran!’

  Loudmouth grimaced. ‘It’s going to hurt,’ he said, ‘but it’s not going to kill me.’ He turned her around and pushed her at Gallow. He took her hands and put them on Gallow’s shoulders. Panic started to burn inside her and she didn’t know what to do. Then Tolvis cracked his hand sharply across her buttocks and walked away, laughing. The shock paralysed her and for a moment the wall had a crack in it. Gallow wrapped his arms around her and she reached for him and they held each other close for a very long time, not saying a word.

  ‘Where’s Oribas?’ he asked as they finally pulled apart.

  41

  AN AULIAN INTERROGATION

  For most of the first hour after Gallow fled, Beyard stayed where he was, crouched beside the Lhosir campfire. He had no idea what it was that had burned him, nor who had thrown it in his face, but he wasn’t surprised when three Lhosir showed up dragging the Aulian between them. He had Cithjan’s men tie Oribas up and put him in a tent and watch him, constantly. He also had them empty his pockets and take away anything they didn’t understand and lock it up in Cithjan’s strongbox. For most of the morning that followed he contented himself dealing with Cithjan’s murder.

  A message would go to King Medrin Sixfingers to say Cithjan had been killed while putting down a Marroc insurrection and that he, Beyard, had assumed command. He thought long and hard about what to say about how it had happened and what had led up to it but there was no pretending now. He’d been protecting Gallow ever since his old friend had returned. Not in any useful, meaningful way, but little things. Not telling Cithjan about Gallow when he’d taken Solace. Not calling him by his name outside the Devil’s Caves. Going alone to Middislet. Most of all, letting him go. A life for a life had seemed fair and due and fated to be, but Sixfingers would never see it that way and nor would Cithjan if he’d lived to hear of it. Even in Hrodicslet, not giving chase: time after time he’d held his hand but last night he’d meant it. A good fight, a fair fight, a fight to be remembered. A better end than Sixfingers would have given him. Last night he would have killed Gallow, and Gallow had understood and so he’d named himself in front of a thousand Lhosir.

  And despite the pain that still burned his face, he was smiling because Truesword had escaped anyway and there was a part of him that was glad. Truesword. Now there was a thing. In Beyard’s thoughts Gallow had changed from being Gallow the Foxbeard to being Gallow Truesword again. He tried to remember where and how it had happened. In the bottom of the ravine. I will not forget . . .

  He looked at the messenger he meant to send to Sixfingers. ‘Ask him on my behalf for a new governor. Tell him . . .’ Even now he hesitated. ‘Tell him that Gallow Truesword has returned with the red sword the Aulians call the Edge of Sorrows and the Marroc call Solace and the Comforter. I will send both to him together.’ Not that Gallow would be taken alive. He’d see to that.

  After the messenger there was the matter of command. Beyard dealt with that by telling the Lhosir that he would be in charge until the Marroc of Witches’ Reach were crushed and responding to all objections with a malevolent silence. Cithjan had already sent half his force down to the Aulian Bridge to guard it against the outlaws and rebels in the Crackmarsh. He’d hoped the pleas from Witches’ Reach might lure them out to where he could slaughter them. Beyard supposed it was a good enough plan to follow, and it left him with five or six hundred Lhosir against a few score Marroc. Good enough. He told everyone to go and make ladders and a ram and whatever else they usually made when they were attacking a walled fortress, and then at last he went back to the Aulian. He’d put it off because it was the part of the day he was most looking forward to and also the part that made him afraid. He couldn’t remember being afraid since the Eyes of Time had given him his iron ski
n.

  The Aulian was awake. Droopy-eyed and with a great lump on his temple, bruised and bloodied but awake.

  ‘Again, Aulian.’ Beyard sent the other Lhosir away, and when he and the Aulian were alone he took off his mask and his crown. He saw the Aulian’s eyes widen for a moment. ‘You were never meant to be sent to the Devil’s Caves.’ His voice was as dry as desert sand. ‘Cithjan should have let you go. Or kept you in the castle as his guest until the pass opened in the spring. I dare say there’s a great deal we could have learned from a man like you. How many Marroc are there in Witches’ Reach, Aulian?’

  ‘Sixty. Seventy. I didn’t count them exactly.’ The Aulian was terrified and was right to be. A Fateguard stood before him, an iron-made man, and the Lhosir were not known for kindness to their prisoners.

  ‘Food? Water?’

  ‘Whatever you Lhosir once stored there. I saw enough to know they have food for two or three months. Water? They have the snow. You won’t starve them out in a hurry.’

  ‘I never thought I would, Aulian. But I have to ask. What have they done to the gates?’

  ‘Piled up snow behind them and packed it tight. It is as good as placing a block of stone behind the doors.’

  Beyard nodded. He tried to smile, a thing he was never very good at since the Eyes of Time had made him into what he was. ‘I would have let you go still, even after the Devil’s Caves. I suppose it was your doing to bring an avalanche down on us.’ The Aulian lowered his head, which was enough of an answer. ‘Cithjan underestimated how many Marroc were in the Reach. He sent a smaller force first. Not all of them died but I would like you to tell me, in your own words, how most of them did. I know you were there.’

  The Aulian bowed his head. ‘You must give me a day, shadewalker. That is the Aulian way of these things. One day, and then we will imagine that your torturers have plied their trade and done terrible things and that I screamed and bled and begged for it all to end, and at the end of that one day I was broken. We shall both imagine this thing and then I shall tell you without the pain, and you will hear it without the unpleasantness and the expense. That is the Aulian way.’

  Oribas was quaking where he sat but his voice was strong and resolved. Beyard lifted his mask back over his head. ‘But we are not in Aulia and that is not the Lhosir way, and there is no expense, nor is there unpleasantness.’ He sighed. ‘I would like to send you back to Varyxhun to hang. But I can hand you over to the Lhosir here to take their time over you if you like. You’re a foreigner, as good as a nioingr, so there’s nothing they won’t do if it amuses them. We are not a civilised people. Not in your way. So tell me about the other way into Witches’ Reach you claim to know, or all those things you wish only to imagine will be visited upon you, one after the other. Or . . .’ he paused and leaned in closer ‘. . . worse.’

  ‘Bird, fish, bear, dragon,’ said the Aulian. ‘There. I’ve told you the piece that matters. The thing you want to know. But they will be watching. The shaft is death to you now.’

  Beyard lifted the red sword and grated the edge of it against his iron-gloved hand. The Aulian whimpered. His words tripped over one another in their eagerness. The cave in the mountainside, the passageway, the shaft and the old Aulian tomb. The sealed door – bird, fish, bear, dragon – and how it led into the cellars of Witches’ Reach. How Oribas had opened it for the Marroc and how he’d lured fifty or more Lhosir into that same shaft and then burned them alive. The Aulian almost wept when he spoke of it, and there was more to his tears than fear: he was ashamed. Beyard understood. He almost reached out a hand, but they were cased in iron and were hardly things of comfort. So he let the Aulian speak on until he was done, and when at last Oribas fell to silence, Beyard let it hang between them for a long time.

  ‘I know what it is to have shamed yourself,’ he said at last. When the Aulian didn’t reply he got up and looked outside the tent. The day was fading, the sun already low over the mountains.

  ‘I was taught to battle monsters,’ whispered Oribas. ‘Not men.’

  Beyard kept staring out at the orange sun hanging in a deep blue sky. The mountains before it were in shadow, a deep purple, almost black. He felt a terrible truth coalescing inside him, as yet unheard but demanding at last to be told. ‘Why did you call me shadewalker.’

  The Aulian didn’t answer.

  ‘What did you throw in my face, Oribas of Aulia?’

  ‘Salt.’ The word was a whisper, so quiet that Beyard barely heard.

  ‘Salt. Again?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Just salt?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Beyard let that linger a while. ‘Why, Aulian? Why would you throw salt in a man’s face? Why did your salt burn so?’

  The Aulian didn’t answer but by then he didn’t need to. The iron skin, the ever-present sense of cold, the ambivalence to food and even water, the sleepless nights and salt that burned. He’d been what he was for seventeen years and had never understood, and yet this Aulian had seen through it in days. If he’d still been able to cry, Beyard might have shed a tear for himself.

  ‘No need, Aulian. No need.’ His voice was like the grinding of stones. ‘I am like them, am I?’

  Yes.’

  ‘I am no longer alive.’

  ‘No.’

  The Eyes of Time had done this to him. He’d stolen into the Temple of Fates, for which the price was always death, and thought he’d escaped his punishment, but he hadn’t escaped at all.

  He slipped the crown and mask over his face once more. ‘They will hang you in Varyxhun. It will be clean.’ He strode out into the sunset, leaving the Aulian behind.

  42

  A SPEAKING OUT

  The Lhosir took their time. They stayed in their camp on the first day of the siege and Achista stood on the walls watching, wondering whether Oribas was a prisoner among them or whether he’d found his own path to slip away. She couldn’t bring herself to think of him held by the forkbeards, but nor could she bring herself to think of him simply walking away.

  ‘We have to suppose the forkbeards have him,’ whispered Addic. He stood beside her, looking down the slope of the mountain saddle to the Lhosir camp. ‘We have to suppose they know about the tomb.’

  ‘He wouldn’t tell them!’

  ‘But perhaps they knew already. Is it sealed?’

  ‘If you sealed it when you left.’ Achista couldn’t remember what they’d agreed. Whether they’d even spoken of it. ‘How many forkbeards this time?’

  ‘More than enough.’ Addic put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed.

  ‘The Wolf will come out of the Crackmarsh.’ She tried to sound as though she believed it. Not a word had come back, not one of the messengers they’d sent. She didn’t know if any of them had even reached Valaric. The Crackmarsh was a hostile place, filled with monsters that only he and his men had learned to master.

  Her brother stroked her hair. ‘Cithjan sent as many men again to the bridge to guard against that. If Valaric comes, he’ll have a hard fight to even get here.’

  ‘Then there’s no rescue and no escape.’

  ‘Win or lose this day, sister, we’ve already won this war before a sword was drawn. I’ve ridden across the valley, back and forth. Men will see what we’ve done. They’ll rise as we did, not a few score as we are but in their hundreds and their thousands, from here to Andhun, in Sithhun itself. I’ve seen it with my own eyes and heard it with my own ears. The Marroc of Varyxhun are ready for you, Achista.’

  ‘If they’re ready then let them come.’ She turned away.

  Gallow and Arda spent the rest of that night together. Neither said much. ‘I don’t want to hear,’ Arda told him when he started to speak. ‘I don’t want a word. You can tell me why it took three years to walk from Andhun to home when there’s no forkbeards out there and I can get properly angry with you again. I don’t want to be angry with you now.’ And there were tears in her eyes, and Gallow didn’t understand but he held her in silence
as she’d asked, and it was beautiful because it was a closeness that had always been unacknowledged. Eventually they fell asleep holding one another, and in the morning light the Marroc looked at him askance, trying to work him out, this man who looked like a forkbeard but wasn’t.

  Some time later Gallow sat with Tolvis. Loudmouth’s pain ran deeper than the Marroc arrow in his side and for once there was nothing Gallow could do. Late in the afternoon as he crossed the yard with a bucket of water, he found Addic coming the other way. They glanced uncertainly at each other. Each had been in the Lhosir camp that night for something different. Both had got what they went for and both now had a hole in them where Oribas used to be.

  ‘I thought you were him,’ said Gallow. All the way from the Lhosir camp to the walls of Witches’ Reach he’d thought they were following Oribas. He’d never seen the skinny little Aulian run so fast, but then he’d never had a dozen Lhosir chasing him. In the dark he simply hadn’t noticed. And Addic had thought that the Aulian was Arda.

  Addic looked at his feet, at the ground, all around, anywhere but at Gallow’s face. ‘Oribas married my sister.’

  ‘Oribas?’ Gallow struggled to imagine Oribas even interested in a woman. Before they’d crossed the mountains every drop of his life and passion had gone on hunting the Rakshasa. After they’d defeated it he’d just seemed empty. Then Gallow started to laugh. Oribas, looking for something to fill the place where the Rakshasa had been, had found a fiery Marroc woman had he? Achista. The Marroc called her Huntress now. She was their voice and their fire, and who was he, Gallow, to say anything to that but Well done?

  ‘Why are you laughing?’ Addic looked stricken. ‘I thought he was your friend.’

  ‘The only one I had for a long time.’