As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  “They’re killing people. Not asking questions, not giving orders—they’re just riding us down. Why? Why?” the farmer said, some of his composure beginning to leave him. Behind him, the grating of a bench hinted at the departure of some of their seating.

  Essa took his arm and got Rurik moving faster than his aching body otherwise allowed. They made it only as far as the altar, however, before the scattered group of refugees came rushing back the other way, this time with the chapel’s priest and an apprentice beside. These last slammed the back door behind them, and the quick-thinking youth jammed a candelabra through the handles to secure them.

  Which, in turn, left Rurik with a sinking feeling.

  “That won’t stop them,” Essa said, an octave higher than her earlier command.

  Rurik, desperate for an explanation, cast helplessly between the cousins. It was Rowan that mouthed, without speech: “Gorjes.”

  Suddenly, the feeling of claustrophobia turned to one of drowning.

  “There’s always the—”

  Windows, Rurik finished for Rowan, but even as the one said it and the other thought it, men shuffled between them, clapping the wooden blinds shut. It did not matter either way, for another man shouted the arrival of their devils, and like a circling vulture, Rurik saw the shadow of one pass through the slit of one such portal, and he knew that they were trapped.

  A dream—he hoped beyond all else that this stood a dream. Yet the pain was still there, burbling between the contours of his waking body. His hands trembled, but he still shook Essa off as she pulled back, thoughts as much a storm as her voice, and Rurik moved for one of the blinded windows. Inevitability bid him pluck the pistol from the passing farmer’s belt.

  There he waited. Even as Essa fell upon him, a wraith of fire-licked words, he remained, but politely shaking his head at her insistence. “Help them stack the doors,” he said, for that was all that they could do. Her cousin had already gone with the farmer to finish shutting windows.

  Through the slivers of pale light, he watched them come. They were not soldiers in the strictest sense. Order did not guide them. Beyond this church was the road and the gentle rolls of a flat, flat land, and they scattered across it, weapons loose and eyes wandering. At first it was hard to see them all. Some still ravaged the roadside, and whole bands of people ran or rode before them, fleeing the senselessness of their approach.

  Some few tried to make a stand. They were circled and pulled down, as wolves would tear the stray calf down. This was rare, though. Most fled, and by and large, they let them.

  What came amounted to a column, by the end, all mounted on gryphons, and as the crowd stampeded from their path, their path itself shifted toward the church. Out of their center emerged the sickening grey-green of familiarity, and that was the moment Rurik eased his pistol between individual blinds, steadying it for a shot.

  Where the orjuk went, so too did its master, and before long Orif of Kellsly reined up before the slope of the granite outcroppings which formed this church’s base. It had been, as best Rurik could tell, a quarry at one time or another. The Gorjes’ captain, looking vaguely yellow for what patchy skin showed under a plumeless cap, spat at those rocks, as if to curse the whole land on which they quailed.

  “You, in the church! It’s time you opened the doors,” the sickly rider shouted.

  “To what end?” Some fool-man shouted before Rowan struck him upside the head.

  Elsewhere, the more panic-stricken had begun to clutch one another and weep obnoxious tears. Rurik tried to tune them out. To focus. Thankfully, Essa had moved to the window beside him, peering out with arrow-thin eyes at the same thing he was.

  “I don’t much do the warnins’,” Orif shouted again when no one was forthcoming.

  Then came the old priest’s familiar tenor, and Rurik cursed inwardly. He glanced aside just long enough to take in the man squeezing out the door again. Ambassador by virtue of religion. Always efficient.

  A pair of riders broke away to intercept the man. Rowan circled back as well, shoving the old man’s acolyte aside and slamming a pew back against the door. The Gorjes were no longer the only ones with loose steel. Satisfied that threat would seal that door for the moment, Rurik looked back to what he dubbed the falcon and the fool.

  “Hold, ser! You tell it true, this is a church—so by what right come you with swords?”

  The falcon turned his head; his body did not shift away from the church. One had to give the fool something for sheer bravery. Or confidence. Determination, at the least.

  “You named the right, old man. Swords is its own right, yeah? And ours is on a trail countries wide,” the falcon sniggered.

  “Right or wrong, by what possible creed might either name us foes?”

  Essa, unexpectedly touching Rurik’s shoulder, shook her head when he looked to her. “Little more to the right,” she said, nodding toward his pistol. Either his face changed, or she read his thoughts as she added: “I’ve seen its kind enough to know, and I know the nature of that range.” She was, eternally, the huntress. He followed her whim.

  The falcon eased back on his horse and spat something black into the grass. “Father, use whatever words you want. Don’t mean shit to me or mine. I’m hunting cunt, and there’s muck enough on those roads what told me she headed this way. You hear?”

  That was the first moment Rurik caught a whiff of smoke. He leaned as heavily into the frame of the window as he could, trying to see more, but he could not find the source. It was woodsmoke—this much he knew.

  “You stray. You think you walk the final circle, to speak so brazen, but death is an end as often as it is a beginning. Ser, I beg you, away! What you seek is not here,” the fool boomed.

  An irritated smile crossed the falcon’s face. Burns, Rurik saw then. The patchy remnants were burns—probably from the disaster at Verdan.

  “I like your balls, father, so I’ll give you one last getting. Get your scrawny arse up to them doors, tell your sorry flock to pull ‘em open, and I might not even gut you,” Orif said.

  For a long moment Rurik agonized against what he knew would come. The priest, not disappointing, said, “The vengeance of Count Cullick, as that of Assal, shall be swift.”

  Orif raised a hand and a crossbow bolt leapt his shoulder. There was no real room to miss. Though Rurik could not see the priest, he heard the wet thunk as it hit and the rattling wail of a dying man. Beside him, a sharp intake of breath led him into the heart of a girl he thought he might never read again. Wordless rage.

  The source of all life’s problems comes down to one simple fact: wisdom teaches doubt, while the fanatics and the fools just keep on believing.

  In this and only this would the Gorjes and the dead priest find common footing. Cheers rattled armor as loose weapons tittered for a share in the bloodletting. Rurik obliged them. As Orif started to turn, that mote in his eyes took another shape. It danced between notions, of a common murderer and delusional hero—a sellsword and the stout, wrathful guise of a knight in castle forged steel and lies. Two bastards of different birth. It was in that moment, when Rurik’s villains became as one, that his fingers found the nerve to light the match.

  Essa had the right of it. Lead pitched the falcon forward. Visions of a boneless man fallen from his steed gripped Rurik. He opened both eyes, realized belatedly he had squinted one shut.

  Drilled through, the featherless cap tumbled to the earth. With a scream, the featherless falcon reared back even as his gryphon bolted forward. Molted, but alive.

  Essa had been right about the aim. Unfortunately, only so much of a firearm went into its owners’ aim. All the rest was in the hands of luck. For him, that was always the rub.

  “An inch, maybe less,” Essa noted in a disappointed voice.

  A cross between panic and affront scattered the Gorjes for a moment, and some surged forward as others tittered back. Evidently the first to reach a window came from back, though—he screamed as Rowan’s sword
bit into his grasping fingers.

  Yet Orif’s recovery did not immediately herald vengeance. “Back, you idiots,” he called to his men. They obeyed, to a man, though this time they were not fools enough to let him move ahead of the rest.

  “Poor shot, boy-o. By the pistol’s grumble I’da put it to you, though, Rurik. That right?”

  Having no more shot for the pistol, Rurik tossed it back to the pale-faced farmer, and trundled aside of the window. Essa, in his place, had notched an arrow to her bow. It slid more easily between the window’s slots.

  It was, he told himself, probably the wrong move, but he spoke regardless, eager to buy time. “So ugly even bullets won’t touch your face, Orif. Kind of a double-edged thing, isn’t it?”

  From outside, he heard the choking laughter of the man. “Oh, little rat, I thought our chance at you’d slipped back in camp. That cunny in there with you? Be awful fine to spear two wit one thrust, you know? Come on out, now.”

  It was Rurik’s turn to laugh. “Let me guess: if I do, it’s to be forgiveness for the others’ sins?”

  “Not like. All you’ve got to reason is I do it quick or I do it slow. Told you I’d come a-walking for you lot,” Orif called.

  Rurik took in the rest of the room. A scarce six defenders; at least as many locked somewhere between catatonia and mourning, huddled with the church’s acolyte in prayer for the dead priest’s soul. The farmer fingered his scythe with nervous apprehension. It slid round and round, until the whistling got too deeply engrained in Rurik’s head. He caught it in one hand, and shook his head at the farmer. The man blushed, but stilled.

  So many innocents for one man’s sense of self.

  “Don’t even think it,” Rowan called from across the room. He was stalking the walls, like a cat prowling out its next meal.

  “Just as well. Fire it,” Orif said in a bored tone.

  The falcon didn’t even have to raise a hand this time. No one cheered, but the men rattled forward all the same, weapons mingled with curses. Gradually, the smell of smoke took on the shape of flame, and in more than one man’s hands, Rurik beheld a miserable, ungracious end.

  The first arrow took one of those torchbearers just above the collar. The second embedded in the orjuk’s thigh. It roared out a cry that seemed as rolling thunder; it shook for a few moments, but its fury was eternal.

  Rurik scraped the sword from his scabbard and prayed silent thanks that the priest had not, at least, deigned to take this from him. It had to be in his left hand; the right was too freshly scarred to be of any martial use. But the Gorjes that neared did not come to break the windows. They came to seal the outer shutters as well. Rurik stabbed blindly for what hands ventured too close, but few did. It was only Essa that could make them pay for their injustice, and her arrows fell like rain.

  “There is nothing in this,” Rowan shouted. “Nothing. Rise above or die below, and none of us is much for dying.”

  That was the moment a devil of flame first appeared upon the ceiling, the crackle of its laughter blazing into the rafters and streaming over the nails, heat clear down to its tail. It tumbled through the lines of the planks and flew through as much as it licked the air, joining hands with other devils that sprang into the same dance, moment by moment. Too swift for his logic, they spread, and writhed, three then four and five, their howls worse than nightmare, broiling the edges of sanctuary’s foundations.

  People began to scream. Burnt hair became the only real smell, beyond the cloying ache of the smoke itself, and the world began to billow. It was his turn to grab at Essa, to pull her back before she ran out of arrows.

  He hacked against the smoke. Thickly, it bundled in his lungs, but he did not care. Somewhere beyond the veil a noise like a scream, and shouts began to burst upon the devils’ tune, even as the darkness sealed them in. Laughter, he named it, or mockery. There were so many trails lost to them. So many words that, time after time, would never be spoken. Yet she had guided his hand. It was time he guided hers.

  * *

  The air is wet and heavy, shallow pools dot the ground beneath my feet, and I am alive.

  Hope bid Voren breathe, and in that breath, to seek a steadying against the suffering. He was alive. He would stay alive. No one ever said that went hand in hand with freedom.

  There is only one dry road through this earth, and I am on it. I am walking. A dead man cannot walk.

  If he wasn’t careful, he should sink into the deep fen which ran in the low parts of this country, sink into the brownish muck that sucked at his disintegrating boots. Moss would rise up over his head and he would be pulled down into the earth itself, to feed the grass and the muck until roots ran through his bones and green devils made dust of his hair. In the end of life, that was all there was: be one with the muck, or rise above.

  He laid a steady hand against his chest and felt the whistle in his lungs. The pain was not as bad as it had been in the forest. There, he had watched a hound butchered by the woman he loved and a boy and a hunter engulfed in the black smoke of flames. He had outlasted riders come to grind them all to dust, and emerged into this fresh hell.

  Last night’s fog had left dampness to the air. A sane man should have kept more to dry ground, but a sane man would not be in his position. Voren had seen the light, and like so many will-o-wisps of ages past, he had followed it into this bog to parallel what would escape.

  Forgiveness.

  The swampy ground, festooned with slimy remnants of the mist, sickened him deep into his entrails—entrails the man at his back might pluck from his still whimpering gut if he so much as twitched incorrectly.

  He fidgeted a backward glance. Though unheard but for the gnashing of his teeth on rough nuts, the Zuti stuck out plump and dark as a woman’s lips, his eyes as restless as the quivering legs those same lips could bring. He never looked at Voren. He never had to look.

  The powdered flowering of his hair was turning to straw, and there was nothing left to craft. His hands were dry and broken, and he imagined his eyes held much the same. There was little human left to him, and the Zuti saw it and took its prophecies for truth: he would never run. Not again.

  “Stop.”

  And he stopped.

  The Zuti peered across the distance, spat another nut into the long grass, and shifted his bare feet into a boxer’s stance. Only once his back had cracked did he sweep the other way, jabbing across the moor with his spearhead. “There,” he said, though Voren saw nothing. Voren never saw anything. Yet the man pointed more insistently, and Voren obliged, leaning forward until the Zuti took him by the neck and forced his eyes to their proper place.

  What he saw in the distance was a road. A dry, well-kept road where people roamed. Dozens of people, coming to or going from death. Soldiers and widows and children, and no one that might give him aid. Not that he deserved any. I am the powder of life, he whispered in the dead of night, though he did not believe it.

  What the Zuti wanted him to see was a speck of a thing, paralleling the fields from the opposite end.

  “Is that…?”

  The Zuti shoved him forward. “Soon. Soon.”

  What was it the soldiers said at night? He flinched, let it come of its own accord. It had been in the way they looked at one another, in the frowns they left pooling in their cups at night. We are mud on their boots. We are prints upon sand. We fall and we drift and we fade away, and no one will remember because we are the ones that are left behind. There were men and there were faces in the crowd. He knew where he stood.

  Part of him was grateful for a second chance. Most of him read the signs, realized more realistically what the Zuti would do to him.

  He’s known all along. Why has he never said a word?

  In the forest, he had thought himself done for. Steeled men rode down on him, and he knew it was not for him they searched. He was just an addition, an uncharacterized element in their hunt. He was the rat that emerged when men hunted rabbits; just because they killed him and th
ey cooked him did not mean he was what they wanted.

  A hand had taken him by the belt. He might have cried out, had another not snapped about his mouth as quick as any dagger. They pulled him down. Too scared to speak, certain of death but not prepared for it, he had sat shaking in the needles and the rush until the long train of them had ridden past. He laid in the dust until their thunder was past. Still, he lay until the warmth beneath him shifted, and the hand on his mouth became a hand on his throat.

  Dirt was all that he remembered. His face was slammed into it. Flecks caught in his lungs and in his hair, as his lessened hand was dragged behind his back. A foot held it there.

  “Please…” he sputtered, but this was not a man to be implored.

  It was the voice that gave the Zuti away. “What learns, in dark places?”

  He did not understand the question then. He did not understand the question now.

  Yet the Zuti had dragged him up all the same, and suffered his silence through the long nights since, out of the trees where the riders had camped, onto the plains where a boy had run. It had been they, creeping forward inch by inch, that had watched the soldiers rustle through the brush in a hunt for what they could not see. Stable in their lassitude, it had been they—not the camp—which beheld the moment of the young owl’s flight.

  If only! His mind had cried—but this was a different person, a different time. Death had come and death had gone; it ran roughshod over conscience and worked its way around again. Never once did it take to the whims of man. It played its own games and took its own tolls.

  When the Zuti told him they would follow, there was a part of him that resisted. This was the part the Zuti’s eyes begged to take the machete from him, to seize the little blade from the side of his hip and give an excuse for whatever came next. Those amber things seemed almost disappointed when he had turned away without a fight.

  He watched the boy run from them, and he had a grasp of inevitability.

  He had taken so much. So much. Honor. Dignity. Love. But he might have taken so much more—and for what I’ve done, should I not deserve it? The thought of what Rurik would do to him when the Zuti delivered him to the lordling was nothing before what he himself had done.