A Fire in the North

by David Bilsborough

  But in the end all he could manage by way of reply was: ‘Yes, I’m sure . . . you could be right. But, as I said before, I’m a Peladane, and the Quest – well, that’s just what we do.’

  Appa paused in his rage. Then the fire blew out in him and, cold and grey once more, he slumped back into his seat.

  ‘I’m too sick to carry on,’ he announced to any who had the energy to care. ‘Too sick, too weary, too old, too . . . everything. Just drop me at the next stop. I’ll get off there.’

  ‘The next stop is Wrythe,’ Nibulus informed him with sympathy in his voice. ‘Can’t stop there, old chap.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ Appa replied, almost sobbing. ‘I’m serious, Nibulus. I’m staying there. That journey damn near killed me. I only just managed it, and then only because the mission drove me. And now that’s gone – in fact, never even was – what’ll drive me this time? I tell you, I’d never make it back. Not now, not after . . . everything that’s happened.’

  ‘Appa,’ Gapp said quietly, ‘there’s nothing there but sickness and death.’

  ‘Perfect then! Sounds like just the place for me.’

  ‘Well, let’s see how you feel after we get there tomorrow,’ Nibulus said. ‘We’re only stopping to rest and get some supplies before moving on. You’ll feel better after a couple of days.’

  Gapp looked pained and shivered to his very core. ‘I doubt we’ll find much succour in Wrythe,’ he whispered, ‘even with Yggr and his devils gone. You lot don’t know that place like I do.’

  ‘We do,’ Kuthy pointed out reassuringly. ‘And they’re not so bad really, those others, once you let them know who’s boss. Once the Maj left, they just seemed to drift.’

  ‘And the bathhouse there is the finest anywhere in these parts,’ Elfswith joined in.

  ‘I’m warning you . . .’ Gapp muttered.

  But Appa was not listening. His mind was made up. ‘I’m not going on any further,’ he repeated tiredly, ‘no matter what you say. I’m stopping at Wrythe.’

  ‘Are you serious?’ Nibulus asked. ‘You really aren’t coming home? Not even to see old Marla?’

  ‘I’m staying,’ replied the old man, clearly in pain. ‘And I doubt I’ll be the only one stopping there too.’

  ‘What, you mean Bolldhe?’

  ‘Dead right. I can’t see him getting any further than Wrythe.’

  W-wait . . . What? Bolldhe struggled to move, but it was still impossible.

  ‘How is he now, anyway?’ Nibulus asked. ‘He could hardly say a word earlier.’

  ‘No,’ Appa replied, even quieter than before. ‘He can’t at all now, not anymore.’

  I can’t?

  ‘And he’ll never walk again.’

  I won’t?

  Then the last rim of the sun finally disappeared below the waves. A growing spume of redness infused the clouds above its resting place, and against it all Bolldhe could see in his fading sight was the silhouette of a little old man – the one who had brought him to this place – rapping his ring against the tombstone-shaped amulet that hung from its thong round his neck.

  Strange northern skies, thought Bolldhe. No stars – no moon. And this night! Surely the blackest and stillest he had ever known.

  Bolldhe’s eyes were as wide as his sockets, and he stared about himself in silent wonder at this place they had drifted into. He had gone to sleep sometime during the night, he remembered. Just slipped away. When he had awoken, he had found he was still aboard the ship, still lying where he had lain all along, but it was now all so empty, so hollow. Not a sound came to his ears, not even the slightest whisper of wind nor purl of water. It was as if they were sailing along the Trough of the Dead.

  Almost in panic, he looked about for his companions. They were still there, he noted with relief, but for some reason that he found disturbing none seemed particularly inclined to speak to him or even look at him. It was as if they were avoiding him, somehow embarrassed. Then he noticed that one was indeed looking at him, and he strained to make him out. He realized it was Wodeman: the shaman was staring back at him, studying him long and deep . . .

  And then suddenly saw him, saw Bolldhe as he really was.

  After a moment of frozen immobility Wodeman said, You still here?

  Still? Where am I supposed to be? Bolldhe replied, slightly nettled by this tactless and meaningless question.

  Then he realized that the shaman had not moved his lips. In fact, neither had Bolldhe himself.

  Panic rose afresh. He did not want to be here.

  You have a long journey ahead of you, Bolldhe, the sorcerer declared. His voice, if that was what it was, sounded so thin, so insubstantial. Only Wodeman appeared animate now. The rest of the voyagers were quite still, frozen in time, ice glinting in ragged hair, crystalline moisture glistening upon petrified skin, hoar frost-stiffened beards and eyes glazed as if in death.

  Others were there too, Bolldhe now saw, sitting among them on the gunwales. But these newcomers were not frozen; they dripped freely with dark moisture that spread in pools about their feet. Some were human, others Vetter or Cervulus, but all were glaring at Bolldhe with gleaming black eyes.

  Bolldhe’s mind floated now on unstill waters. He could not remember who had survived the battle and who had not, yet he was sure he recognized some of the dead here. He looked along the line of staring faces until he came to . . .

  Paulus?

  Odf Uglekort it was indeed. His body was the most torn up of all, drenched with blood that stained the planking at his feet.

  Even Finwald had joined this nocturnal visitation, though he was now little more than a shadow that flitted aimlessly about the darkened ship, jabbering and sobbing to himself without any idea of where he was.

  Bolldhe found his own body was no longer broken, no longer shackled by crippling injury. Free now from his immobility, he shrank back into the stern, pressing himself into a corner. There he remained and could do nothing but stare back.

  The living, those he was sure had survived, were now fading, thinning, vanishing. Then they were just spaces, gaps in the firmament, windows to the beyond. Around them all was blackness, utterly black and solid, but through them he could see stars, mocking stars that winked at him coldly.

  He began to shudder, his mind to fragment. That subsonic bestial breathing he had heard in the Moghol came back to haunt him, shivering through his frame. This time it was behind him, right behind him, breathing an icy fog with the smell of marsh mist upon his shoulder. There it settled like a wet glove and began to spread.

  He did not want to turn, and could not. He knew it was Zhang, nuzzling him as he had always done, but nuzzling him with a head of stretched dead skin, lifeless eyes and gaping throat.

  I’m . . . so sorry, Bolldhe, Wodeman breathed, barely audible now.

  Then he too was gone.

  Bolldhe was alone on the ship. The others had all left him. With a howl, he lurched up, staggered about upon the slick bottom boards, then fled screaming down the length of the ship. Along sparkling frosted planking he pounded, his footfall thudding dully. He was adrift. He was totally adrift, perhaps floating in this vessel upon a sea of clouds, moon-silvered and ghostly as they undulated about him. Or sailing off into the black spaces between the stars, the countless stars that now glinted in the sky like the shards of Flametongue.

  Bolldhe had reached the prow, but he did not stop running. The horror of that which had breathed behind him propelled him on, and without hesitation he leapt straight off the ship.

  Then, screaming, he was floating, spiralling away through the coldness of space, drifting off amid the stars themselves, or else sinking into the sea, into that black realm of Jagt that somebody had once described to him, its tiny points of phosphorescent light winking like the galaxies above.

  Up, down, water, air, space, time; it all meant so little now. All there was left to him was the din of his own wailing. Like a tiny creature of the woodland that screams at the world in impotent fur
y ere death, so Bolldhe departed, and the world did not care or even hear.

  Along the star-beams Bolldhe found himself travelling now, through blackness, through the All-Void. It was cold here beyond anything he had experienced upon the ice field of Melhus, cold beyond comprehension, and it was utterly, utterly silent. Glints of silver sparkled ahead, points of light against the black, and as he drew nearer he saw them begin to take on shapes, though they did not move in any way. Shapes, symbols . . . constellations.

  Constellations all around him: the Torch, the Sword, the Angel, the Rawgr, Despair, Good Eye, the Death’s Head . . . He knew them all, of course; in his job he had needed to, though he had never believed they really meant anything in truth. But the one he was hurtling towards he could recognize now – the Dolmen.

  The constellation of the doorway, or meeting place.

  Closer, closer he sped, the Dolmen growing larger all the while, until it was a vast shape that stretched across the entire universe ahead, from end to end. But those points of light, the stars, were not stars at all, he realized now. For, as he came yet closer, he could see that they were menhirs, great standing stones hanging in space.

  Nearer still, and the menhirs came together, drawing closer to each other in a rapidly tightening circle. He sensed a lessening in the intensity of the cold and familiar sensations began to nudge at the periphery of his awareness: smells of childhood, the sound of a lonely chattering wind, a wintry tang in the air.

  Then the briefest of flashes, so brief he wondered if it had really happened, in which he witnessed a vision. There was Light, a galaxy-sized god of white robes and flying black hair, with eyes like red exploding suns, and around this god were ranged the Skela, like black sunspots hovering in the corona of his celestial magnificence.

  Then he was back in Moel-Bryn.

  There was no doubt about it: Bolldhe was standing atop the high rocky hill that looked down upon the town of his childhood. He looked about. There was that same old sky, a firmament of lead, a mass of greyness with perhaps the palest blush of scarlet already draining away into the grey. Between this and the horizon was a thin band of silvery light, diminishing as the lead curtain gradually lowered. And, stretching out towards this horizon, a bleak frozen landscape that held the promise of nothing. There were the hills and heathlands of his youth, those grey remembered hills whose bases were mired in icy mist, those heathlands that were punctuated only by the occasional pinprick of light, the minuscule glinting of halls and homes.

  It was late evening. About him were trees, leafless and black, broken and stunted, thorn bushes web-hung and drear. In the last light he could also make out piles of copper leaves like mounds of discarded rusty armour. The ground beneath was a frozen mossy turf that appeared as dead as a lichen-grown tombstone. There were no beasts here, just maggots that poked through the rimed crust of earth to regard him hungrily, and no birds, just midges that cavorted in a danse macabre.

  No people either. Just the menhirs. Surrounding him. Looking at him.

  Time, Fate, Chance, Law, Chaos and the rest, they were all here, the Skela staring down at him as impassively as the stone they were made of.

  And him. He was also here, as he had to be. The broad-backed stranger in the yak-hide kirtle, he with the lamp-staff hung with glistening orbs, the satchel with its wet lumpy contents and the shimmering white coif. There he stood among his menhirs, regarding Bolldhe with those hot, red, knowing eyes.

  ‘Who . . .’ Bolldhe whispered, choosing his words with care ‘. . . the shite are you?’

  Cuna smiled. He was all smiles these days.

  ‘I am Cuna,’ he announced. ‘Aren’t you lucky?’

  Bolldhe regarded the god thoughtfully. ‘Oh, so you do exist, then,’ he said, unimpressed.

  ‘I may not have ever been your god, Bolldhe,’ Cuna rumbled, ‘but aren’t you pleased to find that it is I who am the answer?’

  ‘Answer?’

  ‘To that question which all peoples of the world ask themselves: What is on the other side?’

  Bolldhe looked about himself doubtfully, at the frozen land, the drear hills and the standing stones that hemmed him in with this beggarly old crook. ‘I’d sort of hoped there’d be nothing at all,’ he replied. ‘None of that bedtime-story stuff, anyway, which—’

  At this, Cuna burst out into an uproarious fit of laughter. It rolled out of his mouth like thunder, echoed around the valleys like cannonfire, and sent a reverberation through the earth that caused the ground to tremble. It was laughter that could shake the very mountains to their roots. And even the Skela joined in this time.

  ‘How ridiculous!’ he guffawed, once he had regained control of himself. Then he pointed vaguely over to a space between two of the Skela. ‘Look over there, my boy.’ His voice was as patient as the shifting of continents. Bolldhe looked and saw a black shape hanging there. Just that: an oblong of black, about man-height, suspended in mid-air between two of the menhirs. Bolldhe realized he had seen this somewhere before: a small doorway, its barred gate open wide, and within it a darkness as black as the anti-light Bolldhe had witnessed in the Moghol.

  ‘Know it?’ Cuna enquired.

  Bolldhe did. It was the final cell, the very last door in the dungeon passageway of his soul-house. Inside, the blackness of nothing, of death without hope.

  Oblivion.

  The voice of the knowing god came as a swirl of breath-vapour through the frigid air: ‘It’s there if you want it, Bolldhe. If that is what you truly desire.’

  Bolldhe turned his face away and gazed back down the star-beam that had brought him here. There he saw, now only the tiniest atom of light, the ship carrying his companions away, itself like a star fading slowly from sight, winking out forever.

  What would become of them? he wondered with an ache in his heart. How he would love to have been able to continue looking down upon them, to see how their journeys went, where they ended up, what the rest of their lives would be. Perhaps even sit by their bedsides now and then and whisper strange thoughts into their dreams. Would Nibulus remain a Peladane, to take up the role of his father or die in some useless conflict under foreign skies, or would he have learnt from his ordeal? Would Appa find some measure of peace during his last years, some reward for the torment he had put himself through? And Radnar, with all his life ahead of him, how would the boy use the experience he had gained upon this odyssey? What would he become: a soldier of fortune, a traveller, a writer . . .?

  Wodeman he absolutely did not care about, but what of the Tivor and Elfswith? Would they ever find what it was they constantly sought? And as for the Tregvans? The thieves? Even Yen – could anything of her sanity, her life, be recovered at all?

  The voice of Cuna sounded again: ‘Forget about them, Bolldhe. They don’t concern you anymore.’

  Bolldhe turned back to the god before him. Though still on the far side of despair, he could not help feeling riled. ‘Don’t concern me?’ he exclaimed, marvelling once again at the stupidity of gods.

  But Cuna simply nodded. ‘They’re still alive,’ he explained.

  ‘What could you possibly know about it?’ Bolldhe snarled. Then, without really knowing why he should even bother to explain, he added, ‘We went through so much together . . .’

  Cuna snorted. ‘What’s that, Bolldhe? Surely not love? Don’t you think you’ve left that a bit late?’

  Bolldhe had no answer. The emptiness in him was all the reply Cuna needed.

  ‘Don’t feel bad,’ he went on. ‘You did so well.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Only you could have done it. You are unique, truly. Of all the people on Lindormyn, it was you I chose. I could easily have chosen one of my own followers. Bolldhe, you see this bag I carry?’ Here he undid the clasp of his sodden knapsack, reached inside and drew forth several of the round pulpy objects that leaked their juices perpetually through the canvas. He extended them towards Bolldhe. They were heads. ‘One head for each race of people that worships
me.’

  If he had expected Bolldhe to be impressed, he was to be disappointed. Bolldhe stared back impassively and said not a word.

  ‘I see far, Bolldhe,’ Cuna went on, pointing to the chaplet on his brow and then to the orb-strung lantern-staff in his hand. ‘Not for nothing do I wear the Eyes of Urgnidh the Vulture upon my brow, nor the Eyes of the Great Cat upon my staff. With far-sight and night-sight there is nothing I cannot see in this world, no one I do not know, if I choose to look. I could have chosen a great champion, a wise mystic, a worker of miracles. But, no, I chose you, Bolldhe the Great, for only Bolldhe could have done it.’

  If he had expected Bolldhe to be flattered, again he was to be disappointed. Bolldhe was struck more by the fact that one of the world’s major deities was apparently in need of optical aids in order to see.

  ‘Only me?’ Bolddhe asked with a sneer. ‘You mean only me, or anyone else strong enough to smash a bloody sword. Anyone could have done that just as well.’

  ‘You sell yourself short, Bolddhe. Only your granite was hard enough. Only your loathing of manipulation strong enough. Since you were eight years old you have resisted the schemes and machinations of those who would bend you to their will, and have resisted it still, right to the end, even when you were burning amid the fires of hell.’

  It was then, only then, that the full Truth of Cuna struck Bolldhe. It roared over him like a harbour wave, saturated every particle of his soul, carried him far away with its unstoppable power. Hardly able to speak through the ruination of his being, he wailed, ‘So you used it! My . . . You used it! You were manipulating me all along!’

  The blackest despair. The end of all things. The final awful truth. The destruction of Bolldhe. For the one thing he had left to him, the only thing that had ever really mattered to him during his entire rotten life, he now saw had been ripped from him as brutally as a heart is torn from a shattered ribcage.