A Fire in the North

by David Bilsborough

  In the glow of the exquisitely swaying flame, Cuna’s eyes were now the calm red of a westering sun. Pale now, their fire was diluted by the cool tide of approaching darkness, and within them the early stars sparkled clearly. He drew in a long, long drag of smoke, held it for a moment, then let it drift out of nose, mouth and ears in the most protracted and blissful exhalation of equanimity and contentment he had ever experienced.

  ‘Oh . . . man, I needed that . . .’ Cuna rasped in repletion and, handing the roll-up languidly to the Syr at his side, flicked the forgotten match with its tiny flame down into the abyss of darkness below.

  They were reclining at their ease on the smooth curve of cool marble that formed the snout of a giant idol of Drauglir, idly regarding the little humans scurrying about upon the cold mounds of putrefying battle detritus below.

  ‘Not many left, are there?’ Time noted as he handed the roll-up back.

  Cuna nodded, took another puff, and mouthed ‘No’ while blowing a smoke ring. ‘Indeed, it’s a terrible thing, war,’ he concurred.

  ‘But you won’t be losing too much sleep tonight, I’d guess.’

  Cuna put his hands behind his head and stretched out upon their marble perch. His smile was broad and carefree. ‘I have won the game, yes. I have triumphed over Olchor. But still I will not gloat. There will, after all, be other times, other battles, in which I may not be as . . . staggeringly successful as I am today.’ He chuckled nevertheless and tapped ash onto the idol’s nose.

  Time nodded acknowledgement in what was almost a bow. ‘Enjoy your moment, Lord Cuna,’ the Skela replied without rancour. ‘You have earned it. I must admit that none of us believed your plan had any hope of success. Bolldhe is, after all, nothing more than an ordinary man.’

  ‘Don’t be so quick to judge ordinary men. After all, some of the greatest deeds are achieved by their like. Just because a thing is cheap, coarse and plentiful doesn’t mean it’s of essentially low value. Bolldhe has qualities many men possess—’

  ‘He’s psychotic.’

  ‘ – but never so much and in such a unique combination. Only one such as he could have resisted the temptation to stab out those taunting eyes . . . He was in hell, yet still he refused to be manipulated. He remained Bolldhe right to the end.’

  ‘He is uniquely psychotic, then?’

  Cuna hesitated. ‘Well, maybe. But it is still fortunate for me that he is the way he is. For without Bolldhe we would all be in a very bad place right now.’

  ‘And you foresaw all this in him right back then, before he had even reached Nordwas?’

  ‘I cannot foresee all. Let’s just say that I saw his potential. Don’t forget, there was always the matter of his unreliability, yet that was one of the things that made him Bolldhe. This whole business could have swayed either way at any time. But especially at the end.’

  ‘And that was your best plan?’

  ‘That was my only plan.’

  ‘But you are a god?’

  ‘Yes, but only an ordinary god.’

  ‘An ordinary god,’ Time echoed. ‘And how does this ordinary god estimate his servants on this day? Did they perform to his satisfaction?’

  ‘Appa couldn’t have done better,’ Cuna pronounced, ‘for one of his age. He wavered not once, and he has been true to me all along. I look forward to meeting that one in person.’

  ‘I doubt you’ll have long to wait. Anyway, he did nothing. He was clueless right to the end.’

  ‘Yet still he endeavoured to direct Bolldhe right to the end, and we all know how much Bolldhe resists being directed. And as for the renegade priest, well, I believe he got what he deserved.’

  ‘Yet he lives.’

  ‘If you can call that living . . .’

  Cuna grasped the string of eyeballs that hung from his staff, and the lantern atop it shone forth a beam of light from a different spectrum. Thus equipped, he projected his vision through the darkness and the great thicknesses of stone that lay between him and the tattered, ruined figure that ran on and on and on through the endless labyrinth of Smaulka-Degernerth, wailing in damnation.

  ‘I would rather be dead,’ Cuna shuddered. ‘And so would he. He knows he’ll no more ever be able to leave this place than the ones who died here. But, unlike them, Finwald is aware of his ruin.’

  ‘Yet others in the past guilty of a lesser apostasy than his you have treated somewhat more harshly,’ Time pointed out.

  Cuna shook his head. ‘Finwald was no apostate for he never turned against me. Not really. He just lost the way, became a little deluded. He was never – still is not – evil.’

  ‘He essayed to revive the hell hound.’

  Cuna shrugged. ‘He had his reasons. But, like I say, he was not evil. No, the only apostate here was that one down there.’ He waved a hand towards the lower-half remnant of Brother Number One, which had finally stopped kicking – if not twitching.

  ‘Oswiu?’

  ‘No, not Oswiu, damned blasphemer though he was. I’m sure he is now someplace where he should be.’

  ‘You mean Mauglad, then. Your Plan B?’

  Cuna’s red eyes half-lidded themselves, his mood all of a sudden not quite so comfortable. ‘Only a poor general goes into battle with no backup plan, and some words I may have used back there were said purely in the heat of the moment.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, and they do not in any way reflect my satisfaction regarding the final outcome.’

  ‘Words like, “Kill Bolldhe”, for example?’

  But Cuna would not be drawn. He had won, and that was all that mattered.

  ‘A neuropath, a non-communicant, a necromancer and a necrophile,’ Time reflected. ‘You really do pick them, don’t you?’

  Cuna laughed before drawing the last smoke from his aromatic roll-up.

  The Syr rose and made as if to depart. But, just before he did so, he turned back to the still-reclining figure below him. ‘And Odf?’ he asked. ‘What of him? Was he not proved the greatest of them all? The noblest of the noble? The only true hero of the quest?’

  Cuna looked up blankly.

  ‘Odf?’ Time reminded him. ‘Uglekort?’

  Still blank.

  ‘Paulus!’

  ‘Oh, him! Yes, I suppose you’re right. Yes. Yes, indeed, he was. Absolutely. In fact, he proved to be so much more than the others, in the end. And, now I come to think about it, probably more than any who have ever done battle against Drauglir, even those champions of old.’

  Time cocked his head enquiringly.

  ‘For they got what they wanted, those lionhearts. They knew their actions would buy them immortality, and among their own people their praises would be sung forever more. Ha! They were doing no more than was expected of them – toeing the military line. But Odf Ugle-thing, he knew he’d get no such reward. Yet still he did it, even knowing it meant him being misunderstood by all and dying alone, forever reviled . . .’

  As Cuna trailed off, Time wondered if he could not perceive a rare gleam of pensiveness in his eyes.

  ‘So, you’ll embrace his soul, then?’

  Cuna regarded the Syr curiously. ‘Not likely.’ He laughed. ‘He was never one of mine. Sod him.’

  And with that he stubbed out the butt of his roll-up in Drauglir’s marble eye and, together with the Syr, began to fade.

  Just before they disappeared entirely, Fate grudgingly slapped a small pouch of coins into the outstretched palm of Chance – who said naught, merely gloated, and vanished from sight.

  ‘It was eerie, I can tell you . . . First . . . you started chopping that stone . . . just exploded into a thousand shards . . . then that complete silence . . .’

  A stabbing, throbbing pain occupying every square inch of his back. On his front a sensation of sand-blasted rawness, almost as though from prolonged exposure to the sun or wind. Down his right arm a numbness that had grown into pain also. Coating his chin the cold slime of his spittle.

  And that smell, so
potent that it had a presence almost physical, a weight of its own. It was like being smothered beneath the damp embalming shrouds of the pestilential dead.

  He felt he would never be able to wake, to open his eyes or even breathe properly, ever again. Too much pain, too much suffering to recover from this time.

  I’m dead, aren’t I? I must be.

  Somebody was pulling at him. Then trying to pull a weight off him. Trying to revive him. He attempted to find sleep again or oblivion or, better still, death.

  The voice went on, as familiar as it was irritating: ‘You’d have expected something . . . well, I don’t know . . . something a little more dramatic . . . But, no, he was just destroyed. You destroyed him . . . And then just that silence, that eerie silence . . . I say, are you listening to a word I’m saying?’

  He managed to stir. He managed to prise open an eye. But the red glow, though dim, reminded him of blood, and he felt he would be violently sick.

  ‘Oy, Bolldhe, d’you think you could shift yourself sometime? It’s not that easy hauling your arse about, me having only one arm, you know!’

  Bolldhe finally awoke. The light was poor, tenebrous, almost non-existent. It seemed to come from more than one source, and it shifted about slowly. Above him swam the indistinct face of . . . Elfswith? . . . peering at him with a puzzled expression. There was indeed silence, a hushed stillness that rang hollowly in his ears after the insane clamour of the battle, yet was underlain by muted and disembodied moans from the darkness.

  His head lolled to one side and something hard jabbed into his eye. He flinched back with a grunt, then peered at it, trying to identify it through the gloom.

  It was a foot protruding from the pile of dead, a bare foot with the texture of withered leather, hardened by death and time into something resembling a petrified tree branch. The nail of the big toe, long and twisted and cracked, had nearly punctured Bolldhe’s eyeball.

  He swung his head to the other side in disgust, only to find Englarielle staring back at him.

  Bolldhe did not flinch this time, but his eyes narrowed in curiosity. Though one of the Vetter’s ears was plastered flat over much of his face like an oil-drenched rag, even covering one eye, the other eye was wide open and held Bolldhe in its fixed and strangely unfathomable gaze. Englarielle appeared like a child that sleeps open-eyed, with a trace of confusion in its regard. But even in this light Bolldhe could discern how that same eye was clouded, opaque and would never move again. And it was upside down. The head was upside down. And it finished at the neck.

  Bolldhe remembered. At last he remembered. Remembered it all, every little bit: the killing, the horror, his engram, his vision . . . And his body, with mind and soul, convulsed, contracted in upon itself like a salted slug, in an agony of emptiness and despair that he knew could never end.

  The pivot of the scales needs oiling if they are to move, and blood is such a plentiful lubricant. Bolldhe finally raised his eyes, looked past Elfswith, and beheld Gehenna – hell itself. The ziggurat now was a terraced hill trickling with crimson that from multitudinous sources did spill, oozing down the marble steps in slow cascade. Over this grisly sacrifice small flames hovered, not the gas-fed candles of dead men’s souls nor the lure of hungry will-o’-the-wisps, but the dull spitting flames of torches held high by the few who still breathed. Their smoke sputtered in oily reminiscence of the thuribles, their light casting a blood corona over the black shades that bore them: corpse-mongers that drifted like salvage hunters over worm-ridden refuse tips.

  Salvage hunters – Bolldhe recalled the memory of them vividly. A city in the far east, a sprawling cesspit of a place with outskirts that reeked of destitution and disease; young mothers, tiny children, age-twisted crones roaming over the mounds of decay, searching for any mean thing that might prove of some value, however wretched; bent almost double, coughing and retching in the greasy smog that held back dawn’s pale gleam.

  Here now too the salvage hunters wandered. Cold. Limp. Drenched. Numbed by so much death. Boots dragging through sucking mire. About the smoking hills of the slain they went, scanning the corpses for movement, for old friends. The grinding of teeth, the occasional pop of escaping gas, the hushed voices of the soul-robbed, reluctant to be heard.

  ‘Come on, Bolldhe, get up if you can. We’re going soon . . .’

  The words of the half-huldre sounded muffled, as if he was hearing them from beneath a turf-piled coffin lid. Far off and irrelevant. They might take him with them, he knew, but what would be the point? Even if he could drag his old bones out into the open air, would that pallid excuse for a sun warm even the meagrest flicker of life back into his soulless flesh?

  ‘. . . once we’ve found everybody.’

  Every. Body. Had he been able, Bolldhe would have laughed. They may have found his body, but his soul was dead and would remain in this pit forever.

  ‘Come on, Bolldhe!’ Elfswith was losing patience, ‘We’re leav ing! You’ve won already. What are you waiting for?’

  Won? What triumph was this? He was in hell! Broken flesh and crucified soul languishing still in the darkest bowels of this cursed earth. Sinking into the mounds of the slaughtered, embalmed in shrouds of dead skin and sarcophagus oil, the flesh-eating acids of corrosion that from this hill of sacrifice did pour . . .

  ‘This what that from the what did what?’ Elfswith piped. ‘You useless twat! Get up now or I’ll stick you myself!’

  Bolldhe’s attention swung back to the little man above him. Elfswith’s manner was fragile but light, and his coat the bleached-out white of a snow hare.

  ‘Your arm . . .’ Bolldhe managed, as a scrap of memory penetrated a small way through his insensibility.

  Elfswith did not follow Bolldhe’s stare down to the new hem that Scathur had so impolitely tailored onto his coat.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said dismissively. ‘It’ll grow back eventually. I’m just annoyed about losing the sleeve – there were some good little pockets on that one.’

  Bolldhe forced himself to sit up in a more or less vertical position. Parts of him still refused the order to stand, or move at all, as if they preferred the rigor of death to the vigour of breath. But eventually he coaxed himself upright and, both supporting and supported by the half-huldre, started to cross the dead-mounds.

  Bolldhe spotted the first survivors almost immediately. Elfswith tapped him on the arm and pointed out the two bent and cloaked figures scouring the wreckage near the ruins of the blasted crypt. ‘Your religious friends,’ he murmured. ‘Shall I call them?’

  As Appa and Wodeman combed through the layers of dead, torches in hand and their faces masked against the foulness, they appeared to Bolldhe like pall-bearers or grave robbers, he was not sure which. They had not noticed him, and, drawing Elfswith aside, Bolldhe headed off in the opposite direction. He had nothing at all to say to those two and absolutely did not want them saying anything to him.

  The next one he came upon was Eorcenwold. The thief-sergeant was still standing, but Bolldhe perceived in his mien a measure of the despair he himself was suffering, and as he drew closer saw that those big eyes were coffin-lidded and turned away from him and Elfswith as they approached.

  Though Chance had collected the coins of his wager with Fate, some of them had fallen through his fingers – not into the wish fountain but rather carelessly upon the eyelids of those who would never leave here. Eorcenwold had lost over half his company including all three of his siblings. He had found only scattered lumps of Cuthwulf so far and, though he could scarcely believe it, he definitely remembered seeing Klijjver kill Oswiu. Amid the clenching and shaking that manifested his bewildered shock he cast the odd murderous glance towards the herd giant he had once called friend. Even with the insanity prevailing back then he could not fathom it: the Tusse had picked out his brother, lumbered over to him and deliberately and repeatedly sledgehammered his head into nonexistence.

  But what was hardest for Eorcenwold to understand was wh
y he himself had taken off the back of his dear sister Aelldryc’s head with his morningstar. Sightlessly her sunken eyes gazed up from where she lay, staring right through him, forever through him, and his mouth mumbled words too clotted for any to hear.

  Eventually he would move. Eventually the black fog of his mind would thin just enough for him to depart this place and leave behind not only those dearest to him, but his dream of riches too. And when eventually he felt the fresh tang of salt air upon his face once more, he would think to honour those of his band who had emerged into daylight with him. Especially Flekki, Grini and Cerddu-Sungnir, for they, together with their leader, had succeeded in dispatching the D’Archangel Scathur. They were the Scathur-Slayer-Brotherhood, Rawgr-slayers! That, at least, had to count for something.

  For the moment, however, those heroic three were still too preoccupied with picking through the fallen to feel much pride. For Cerddu-Sungnir this was a half-hearted task; the Half-Grell had sustained deep gashes to his torso and was coughing blood. He could not manage to stand for long, and when he did, he almost doubled over with pain. At length he gave up and just stayed close to his leader, muttering.

  Flekki was in a lighter mood. The River Hauger had managed to stay out of the thick of the fighting, preferring instead to send her baneful little chakrams out into the enemy from a distance. More sprightly than most, she had returned to the fireplace and had succeeded in dragging out the gibbering and spluttering wreck of Brecca. Staring gleefully into the wide and rheumy eyes of the Stone Hauger (who still could not believe it was all over and even less that he had survived) she sang,