A Fire in the North

by David Bilsborough

“So, during the great Vaagenfjord war, Daddy, what did you do?’

  “Oh, I was busy cacking myself, hiding up the flue.’

  Grini too went off on his own. Needing no torch, the Boggart used his nose to sniff out those who had been closest to him. It did not therefore take him long to locate the still and leaking form of Khurghan, face down in a pool of his own vomit, his back ripped open like a slashed bolster. The Boggart regarded his former leash-holder oddly, sniffed around him a little and pawed at his broken form. After a while he stopped whimpering: he had found the Polg’s double-dagger, the Haladie of Returning. Casually he slipped it into his hemp belt, cocked a hind leg over Khurghan’s corpse, relieved himself then hopped away to inspect his new treasure.

  Of the remaining Tyvenborgers, Hlessi and Raedgifu would never be found, but there remained one thief that Bolldhe still desired to track down. So he trudged through the dead, the living and those in between, searching and sifting. For the moment there was nothing better to do.

  Two Vetters limped towards him, propping each other up. One, stockier than the norm, was gasping rather oddly, and the other – Radkin? – was dead silent. They passed Bolldhe as if he were invisible and went on their way, wherever that led.

  So few. So very few! Surely more than this survived?

  But they had not. Only five Vetters still lived. Five! Out of the forty-six that had entered the chamber! And of the Cervulice there remained but seven. Eventually the surviving twelve came together and gathered round the remains of their fallen leader. In a circle, they closed ranks and were silent.

  There was not enough of Engliarelle to bear back to the high green karst towers of their beloved Cyne-Tregva, but they would take at least his helm, his gyag-axe and his war-bola. Of the twelve, however, it appeared likely that three at least would not survive their injuries long enough leave the Maw, never mind survive the harsh journey home.

  Everywhere he looked he saw death. Bolldhe was in a land of ghosts. Staring into the eyes of the lifeless husks whose eyes had not yet been closed, did he expect to learn something, feel a sameness perhaps? See the shards of his broken soul reflected in their despair?

  A voice intruded upon his wretched ruminations. Bolldhe looked up to see the silhouette of a man sitting atop a promontory of carcasses . . . and eating?

  ‘You found him then,’ the figure commented between mouthfuls.

  ‘Just over there,’ Elfswith replied to his partner and grinned up at Bolldhe.

  Kuthy, at his repose, was watching Ceawlin down at the base of the ziggurat. The Wyvern was limping around, covered in a lattice of gashes and dragging her tail with its empty poison sac behind her, but she was persistent in her deadly hunt. Like a gigantic red-beaked stork she waded through the morass of corpses, her head turning this way and that upon that serpentine neck as she sought to finish the task she had started on the Oghain.

  Kuthy seemed happy to leave her to it. He did not look particularly interested in joining the search, apparently preferring instead to rest and break open his rations. His terrible secret – had anyone even noticed it earlier? – was well covered up again, for he had succeeded in finding his hat. It had lain quivering on the floor amid a pile of the dead, its appendages wrapped over its crown like a frightened kitten covering its head against a storm.

  Bolldhe glanced at Elfswith and saw he was regarding Kuthy in a way that Bolldhe had not seen before. There was a light in the little man’s yellow eyes that could almost have been affection.

  ‘Normally he’s such a shit,’ he said suddenly.

  Bolldhe stopped. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Callous, scornful, childish – the meanest, least praiseworthy of men. But sometimes, just sometimes, when you least expect it, he ups and does something so extraordinary, so dazzling, that you’re once again reminded of who the Tivor is and why he actually is so praiseworthy.’

  Cupping his hand over the cavity where his arm used to be, the bard, without a further word, strode away from Bolldhe and climbed up towards his partner.

  Not at all sharing the half-huldre’s admiration, Bolldhe continued on his way. That man could trample over the battlefield like a god of death, breaking the heads of enemies and brothers alike, ears stone deaf to their bleating, his veins flowing with limestone, his eyes like flint – the sharpest eyes, the dullest soul – and still, at the end of it all, blithely chew skewered meat, sitting atop piles of men who were likewise skewered. Perhaps, like Bolldhe, so much blood had tattooed his eyes, it meant little anymore. Indeed, Bolldhe wondered whether he should pity him or envy him.

  Other sights he saw made him turn away, and sounds he heard he would rather not have: Hwald, stricken mortally, lying in spasming dementia in the cradling arms of Finan, who could not hold back the tears, his low quivering moan reverberating around the chamber like the sirens of war’s ending; by the Parandus’s side, Shlepp panting heavily and heaving on the foulness he had swallowed but his forepaw laid comfortingly across Hwald’s neck.

  And there too, beyond all probability still among the living, was Gapp Radnar. One arm was around the shoulders of Finan, while his other hand gripped the forest hound’s mane, as if the young fellow were holding onto life itself. At the approach of Bolldhe, he turned and looked up and, to Bolldhe’s amazement, smiled. His mask of dried blood cracked as he did so, and beauty of a kind flowered in his eyes.

  Gapp opened his mouth to speak and, though the words were slurred and difficult to make out, Bolldhe’s heart lurched to hear the humanity still in that voice, though sounding so ragged and coarse: ‘Heard me, den? Heard wa’ I zedd? Mm?’ Gapp broke into a fit of coughing, then continued. ‘Thort yu cou’nnt eer me, but yu god’m messidge, uh?’

  Bolldhe did not have a clue what he was going on about, but for once, for the first occasion in all the time he had known this boy, he felt a touch of curiosity in what he was talking about. Something in the back of his mind warned him that the lad was about to divulge something of import. But, just as Bolldhe was about to ask, something flickered in the corner of his eye and distracted him.

  It was a dull gleam, a meagre reflection of the flames from a passing thief’s torch, coming from somewhere out there in the dark morass of bodies beyond the ziggurat. It could have glinted from any piece of metal – a weapon, armour, even one of the discarded thuribles – but what tapped softly upon the shoulder of Bolldhe’s inner awareness was the fact that this gleam held within it the faintest shade of blue . . .

  Oh no . . . please no . . .

  Bolldhe did not think it possible for him to feel any more grief, but as he picked his way over the groaning mass to where that small piece of metal lay, a new sorrow opened in him. It was the sorrow of loneliness and, with it, a sharp pang of loss.

  He carefully removed the gobbets of flesh from around the protruding Tengriite vambrace that had caught his eye. He could see that these were not the Peladane’s own flesh but rather pieces of foe that Wintus had scattered about in his scything charge. And though he worked with the dispassionate deliberation of an abattoir hand, the curtain walls of his soul had been demolished and, for the first time since he could remember, Bolldhe openly cried for that rarest of things in the world – a friend.

  Gapp was by his side now as together they hauled out the body of the fallen warrior. To their great astonishment, Nibulus, though slack and stinking, still lived. He was barely conscious and covered in blood, either coughed up from his insides or from the wounds on his outside, or from the countless others he had fought. But he was alive.

  So their salvaging finished, and now there was nothing more to be done, no reason to tarry any longer, and they would be gone as swiftly as they might. For though the perpetual winter of Melhus awaited them outside, in here there was a far greater chill, one that could not be thawed by any fire. All now yearned for the golden light of the early autumn that was unfolding without them in distant homelands, longed for the warmth of ember-glow in hearths that as yet lay cold, hearths where mic
e now played.

  All those who had been pulled from the mound alive, they took with them. All those who lay dead, they simply left there. Of wounded wire-faces, there were but a few, for even after grossest injury those subhuman fanatics had fought on and had had to be dispatched. The only ones the company ignored were either already dead or almost so. Though noticing here and there a fluttering of eyelids, a twitch, a sigh, these they left, reluctant to deny them their last chance to savour the full knowledge of their defeat and extinction. Only one Ogha had strength enough to move. Bolldhe felt his cloak suddenly gripped by broken and trembling fingers, and looked down into the pleading face that stared up at him. Its face-wires had been severed, and the spellbinding wrought by the rawgr captain appeared to be diminishing in its eyes. But Bolldhe merely shook his head, stood upon its throat, and then, after all trace of life had vanished, walked away.

  There would be no mourning for the wire-faces.

  As the company made their slow and painful way over the field of fallen, only one voice was raised. ‘ “We brought hell to hell!” ’ Wintus ranted, still battle-mazed and Gwyllch-glamered as he quoted from the book he clasped in his bloodied hands, ‘ “We bedevilled the devils, struck them down before they could wonder, and we print now our signatures in boot-tread into their red, waxen foulness . . .” ’

  Gapp gently led him out by the arm and shook his head as the man continued his oration to heedless ears. Just words, quotations from a dead idiot, they meant nothing, did not apply. Only Bolldhe – though he himself still had little understanding of the how and the why – only he had destroyed Drauglir. Only to him did the words apply. Just as when he was eight years old, he alone of them understood that humans are the only ones who can teach rawgrs what it is to be evil.

  Appa and Wodeman finally tore off the makeshift masks they had wrapped about their mouths and noses because they had at last caught sight of Bolldhe. But they did not approach him yet, because they could sense even from a distance just how loath he was to encounter them at that moment.

  In any case, thought Wodeman, it would not do for me to be seen like this.

  He had masked his face not only because of the stench of the dead but also to hide a most bizarre blemish that afflicted him. He could not fathom it no matter how hard he tried. For not once during all the battle could he remember getting kicked in the face. There had, however, been that soul-shaking blow to his head that had seemingly come from out of absolutely nowhere, just seconds before Bolldhe had re-emerged from the vault and brought down the flamberge. But, whatever had caused it, the shaman now sported a huge smarting blister that covered the entire right side of his face. A footprint, it appeared like, in the shape of a cloven hoof.

  The mark of Drauglir. He laughed nervously to himself but held his stony silence.

  Wordlessly they departed the Chamber of Drauglir, and none would look upon his fellows as they went. They did not know why, but perhaps it was because, blood-masked, stained and ashamed, they all now secretly bore the mark of Drauglir upon their faces.

  As for the slayer of Drauglir, he bore the most livid mark of all. His, however, was not caused by Drauglir alone, but also by the last of the Tyvenborgers he had been trying so hard to find back there. For, moments before leaving, Bolldhe had finally come upon her body where she had fallen – where he had killed her.

  In the eyes of Dolen Catscaul all he could see as he stared into their cold pools was the blackness of reproach, red-rimmed with her heart’s deluge. A new, bright red mouth had he opened in her head, but her original, greyer lips kissed the stiff cold hand of the dead man who had fallen across her. The six fingers of one hand stretched out before her as if reaching for a lover, though they intertwined with empty air only.

  Then Bolldhe had wept. In a torrent of tears he had broken down, fallen to his knees and sobbed so hard that he truly believed he would never stop. Long moments passed before he was able to stand again. But even now, as he wandered after the others from the chamber, his chest felt wounded from the ugly, empty heaving that had continued long after his tears had run dry.

  They trudged down the long lofty passageway of tusk-buttressed ironrock and left behind them forever the undercroft and its awful contents. The last susurrations of the dying reached out after them, still hoping in vain for some pity, some deliverance, but soon even these ghost-whisperings faded, and the only utterances to be heard were their own: laboured breathing, whimpers of pain, the odd furtive disgorgement of vomit. These mean sounds were the only music to accompany the march of the triumphant from the Chamber of Drauglir.

  Wordlessly the company continued down the passage and stairwells of Ymla-Myrrdhain, which echoed faintly still with the vestigial wailing of the fleeing wire-faces. Eventually they came out into the wider spaces preceding the tunnel of Lubang-Nagar, and here were dismayed to see six shapes rear out of the shadows and move towards them. Too weary even to feel fear any more, the survivors could only grip their weapons in readiness and continue towards the newcomers.

  But the bearing of these six betrayed them for who they were even before lamplight could reach them. It was the four Vetters and two Cervulice that had stayed behind after being wounded in the earlier skirmish with the Tyvenborgers.

  Weapons were instantly lowered, heartbeats were stilled and kin embraced. But it was not the sort of reunion any had expected, and they embraced oddly, stiffly, with a confusion of emotions in their eyes. Chief among these was the fear crouching darkly behind the brittle residue of their splintered courage. The six had waited for what had seemed like a purgatorial stretch of time in a limbo of darkness, crouched in terror as the army of hell had – mere yards from their hiding place – surged past them on its way to battle. Now came disbelief that so few had returned, dismay at their horrendous wounds and a numbing disorientation when it sank in that Englarielle would not be coming with them.

  Bolldhe longed to hold them to him, to apologize for what had been done to them, to say something that might assuage the misery in their souls. But all that came to mind was: Thanks for the help, lads, but we won’t be needing you anymore.

  They had come to the end of Lubang-Nagar and the start of that long and infernal trek through the Hall of Fire.

  ‘Elfswith,’ Appa enquired with a hint of pleading in his voice, ‘how many can that bird of yours carry at one time?’

  The bard’s yellow eyes flicked over the sorry group of survivors as they huddled in the moving shadows of the tunnel. ‘None of those deer-beast-types, that’s for sure,’ he replied. ‘And those two,’ he added, indicating with his eyes the Vetters who had been severely wounded in the chamber, ‘might as well give up here and now. They’ll never leave this island, even if they do get out of the Maw.’

  The seethe of gases and the flow of magma could be heard as a louring rumour from outside. Inside, the words of the bard fell flat as molten lead.

  ‘We can take four Vetters as well as ourselves,’ Elfswith conceded finally. ‘All right, Ceawlin?’

  The Wyvern’s head drooped almost to the ground but she nodded wearily.

  ‘Only up to the end of this fire-cavern,’ Elfswith added firmly. ‘After that, they can walk. Ceawlin’s hurt badly, and I’m not having her ferry the lot of you out of here.’

  ‘Better make it just two Vetters, in that case,’ Kuthy suggested. ‘That way Nibulus can hop on too and guide them out from there on. He knows the way . . . if he can keep his head together that long.’

  They appraised the silent Peladane. Like with a berserker after the battle frenzy has ebbed, Nibulus’s wounds were finally sobering him up. Without a word, he nodded dully.

  ‘You’re not coming back then?’ Gapp gaped. ‘You’re just going to bugger off and leave us to walk through this fire?’

  Elfswith and Kuthy looked at each other enquiringly, then at Ceawlin. A moment later Elfswith turned back to the company. ‘The Cervulice and Parandus will have to walk, but Ceawlin’ll come back for one more load – possibl
y two, if she feels up to it. But not those lot.’ He nodded towards the thieves. ‘They can walk the whole way.’

  No one was in the mood to argue. A minute later, Ceawlin spread her wings and lifted off, bearing with difficulty her two friends, Nibulus and a pair of clumsily splayed Vetters. Awkwardly she flew out of the shade of Lubang-Nagar and disappeared into the white glow of Smaulka-Degernerth.

  The remaining fugitives stared after her but said nothing.

  After a short while, Gapp and some of the Tregvans stirred. ‘We’re off,’ the boy informed Bolldhe and the others of his party. He indicated Shlepp, Finan, Ted and Radkin. Though Finan was sorely hurt, he reckoned he had strength enough in him to bear the two Vetters. The two Cervulice who had been shot in the pillar hall and the seven that had survived the battle would plod after them. Even the Cervulus who was mortally wounded had decided to try to follow them; it would not save him, he knew, but he was determined to breathe free air once more before he died rather than rot down here all alone. None of them, however, was in a fit state to bear riders; the Vetters would therefore remain here with the humans until such time as the Wyvern might return.

  Bolldhe gazed down at Gapp. The boy seemed just a mass of pain held together by cuts and bruises, even smaller than usual. Nevertheless, he was bearing up and clearly he and the rag-tag remainder of the Cynen’s army were sticking together. Bolldhe could tell by the look on his face that Gapp wanted to say something, something pertinent, something properly adult. Instead, he clung on to his Parandus with one hand, his dog with the other, and his control with great difficulty, and all he could manage was: ‘I’d just like to go home now, please.’

  Bolldhe shrugged. ‘Just follow the ledge. There’s only one way. We can meet up at the end, where it’s cooler, and guide you out.’

  So they left. Gapp on Shlepp, the Vetters upon Finan, all trying to get through the ordeal as quickly as possible. Without further delay, the Cervulice followed them out, though at a slower pace.