As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  He spread his hands against his thighs and spat into the dust.

  We all fear abandonment. What does it take to turn fear into certainty?

  A drink. A knife. A cold winter’s night.

  Back on the plains, they moved even when normal men slept. The Zuti did not rest. He scarcely ate. Something drove him that Voren could not see—did not, in truth, desire to see. Maybe it was Alviss’s death, but the quietude he cultivated seemed to deepen the longer they walked, and there seemed little human in his stride.

  He was away. Far away. Voren was just something tethering him to the present.

  Complacency was one thing. Acceptance was another. Voren accepted his present lot in life; it did not mean he enjoyed it. Given that they could have overtaken the lordling a half a dozen times by now, he could not see the point of their walk. They were not hunting, so much as taking in a leisurely stroll of the boggy stench of stilled water and the tumultuous crash of men and animals arguing in the distance.

  “Why follow him if we never mean to join him?” Voren asked at last. The trees were scarcely visible by then. Weeds clung to them and tore at his rags—rags that were stained and stank of blood. The wind rolled through them and iced his bones, for all the warmth of a single star above. “Don’t you mean to return to him?”

  Chigenda seemed amused by that. “Go,” he said, and all the while his pace dwindled into nonexistence. It took Voren a moment to notice. He stopped, turned, licked his chapped lips. The Zuti crossed his arms and smiled. “All need done was asking.”

  A nervous glance carried him across the plains, to the half-dead boy and the half-dead plans he had worked upon him. Not like this. His palms were sweaty. He hated sweaty palms.

  “Go,” the Zuti repeated more forcefully.

  Try as he might, the words of objection rose in Voren’s throat and died there. He should have reveled at the chance to kill the boy, to right the mistakes he had made in that thrice-cursed forest, just days before. Yet no matter how deep he looked, he found no mirth. Though he tried to tell himself it was because of the rather glaring fact that the Zuti, following at his back, would kill him for even trying, he could not find the killer within him.

  So much had been spent on that pursuit, and what had it gained?

  Still, the Zuti waited. When Voren moved back toward him, the Zuti slapped him full in the face. “Go,” he repeated, and so Voren went. A few steps into indecision, no more, and the voice—its words indistinct—twisted him back. A wooden shape crossed the distance between them. Startled, he jumped as it struck the ground between where his hands should have been. When he replaced his courage, he found a shining lump of splinters and metal, a hunk of ash and brimstone wrapped in mortal package.

  At his feet lay a pistol.

  There was an unspoken challenge that came with it. Voren’s mouth pursed and he cast helplessly between the object and the man. The Zuti’s eyes uttered the message words would have only made vulgar: “Pick it up.” He fell to his knees, trembling like a leaf in a summer storm, but he took up the pistol all the same. For a half-moment, he considered the impossible—shooting the Zuti in cold blood.

  He would cross the barriers of death to wrap his hands about your throat.

  Voren’s legs began to shake in spite of his efforts to steady them. He rose and took a few hesitant steps back—the Zuti’s eyes never left him. The why of it incited and dismayed him. He did not know what to do. Yet he turned all the same and started walking. The boy was not so far; as he rose onto the proper level of the plains, he needed but cast back once and he would see.

  The wind is wet in my hair, I see a shadow in the distance, but the earth is acid beneath my feet and I am alive.

  For how much longer, he could not say. Death quaked in his fingertips. Again and again he turned the pistol, remembering the countless moments the boy before him had done the same. Had it been easy for him to kill? Given the way that Rurik had drank in the camps, he suspected not. It had almost been easy for Voren to kill, though—to carve out life, not swift or certain, but with the slow imprecision of pleasure.

  What did that make him? Tears, he realized, had begun streaming down his cheeks. Don’t make me do this. That voice had come unbidden. Why it should come at all, he did not know. What he did know was that he hated it. Hated himself. Hated all the madness that had led to this moment, but still he walked, and he raised the pistol high, and though he was still far enough from the boy, he drew back the hammer and he disgorged fire into the empty sky.

  The sky burns auburn where the earth ends in fire. I choke on desolation, and I am alive.

  He kept the pistol held high as fright twisted the lordling.

  Rurik. His name is Rurik.

  Void swam blue across the flat plains dividing them. Where saltpeter caught, Voren’s lungs rasped and burned, but he did not look aside. He stood his ground and Rurik stood his. Both were wrinkled men, boys no longer. The one had lost a finger and his mind; the other was black with soot, face burned by embers, and though he limped and shambled around the wounds Voren had inflicted, there was no mistaking the humanity in him. Voren lowered his pistol, let it hang loose above the earth, dangling as if by a string.

  “I am alive,” he whispered, and though no man alive should have the ears to hear it, he had no doubt that Rurik knew. Let him know as well, then, what remained: And so are you.

  Rurik was starting toward him, the devil eyes bright on his dark face. Wrath. Madness. Sadness. Something. So many things warped him, propelled him forward. Yet Voren had said his piece, and words would grant it nothing more.

  Though he could not move fast, he moved faster still than youth half-blown and half-carved to Hell. He turned his back on a piece of his life and returned to the shadow in the rushes. It waited for him in the silence of thought, and where the earth dipped, gated limbs parted and beckoned him back onto the road.

  After that, it was not so simple a thing to hide. Rurik watched for them. For him. Voren wondered what was racing through his head, if the lordling thought to kill him if ever he laid hands on him again, but Chigenda advised him otherwise.

  “Other look,” the Zuti said. At first, he did not know quite what the Zuti meant. Time bore this out as well. When they slowed up long enough, he spied the color on the horizon, the unmistakable blotch of gaudy self-assuredness, and he knew the rest of the Company of the Eagles stalked the same trail as they.

  “So it’s to be a reunion,” Voren said bitterly. He was not prepared for the hand that clapped him on the back.

  “Not you,” the Zuti said, and that was all they shared on the matter.

  For what should have been dread, Voren felt for some reason a lightness of being. A weight had left him, and for reasons beyond his knowing it was as simple as a crack of thunder, as simple as two men looking upon one another and recognizing shared existence.

  Here was a baker, a man that in the entirety of his life never thought he should ever leave the town in which he had been born. The scope of his ambition was to press hands to powder and craft what purity of taste he might, and all the while accumulate enough coin to buy another shop, another apprentice—maybe set a little something aside. He filled a niche, and for the longest time, that was good enough for him.

  It had never been enough. He saw that clearly now. He convinced himself that it had been enough. Yet he had never been happy there—which was not to say he had spent many days abroad happy either. War. Frostbite. Starvation. Heartbreak. More had crossed him in a year than ever might have come to Verdan in a lifetime.

  He was less for it. He was more for it. Which outpaced the other he could not say, but he knew one thing: he wanted to see more. For all the impossibility of it, he wanted to be free, to have more than this taste dangled before his eyes, for though he had suffered agony, it was the only time in his life he had scratched at the possibility of bliss—and he had done wrong, such terrible wrong, but it was all in the pursuit of that bliss, because he, as he was, had bee
n unable to recognize and reconcile that bliss with circumstance.

  In short: he wanted to live.

  The traffic on the road was thicker where they watched Rurik descend. The Zuti looked bemused by the effort, but Rurik had been slowing for a long time. Every hour, his pace shortened and the sun seemed to take its toll. It was too much, too soon. Whether he knew Essa pursued him, or simply stood determined to flee from all he’d left behind—the reasons were many, the actions few. He struggled, into the thick of the crowds, and made to disappear.

  Chigenda dragged Voren up by the arm, cursing softly in his foreign tongue. Went he did, however, until the crowds swelled about him and crossed aside, giving the black-skinned man a wide berth. These were simple folk, not lords or soldiers, and for them, there would be nothing natural in the Zuti’s approach.

  Voren had no idea where they were. West, was all he knew, and this was far too west for experience to have ever taught him. His sister had gone further still, but Voren’s trade had never taken him beyond the forests of Ulneberg. They were in Usteroy now, land of the lions, and there was nothing here familiar to him. People were everywhere, numerous as roaches it seemed.

  The paving stones were a relief to his dry and aching feet as they climbed onto the road. Unlike the Ulneberg, even this outskirt corner of the province had the look of civilization—solid stone roads, to aid the march of Imperial men. These roads were wide, cobbled straight, and in places lined with weathered standing stones—reddish upthrusts that bespoke more ancient tales.

  They never did find the boy. The frustration of that seemed to build in his warden’s eyes. He became increasingly restless, and the berth around them grew accordingly; there was blood in his eyes, and every man afield could see it. They could not ask questions. One look at the company he kept, and even Voren—as plain as he looked—would be denied.

  “Listen, if no speak,” the Zuti said to him. “Listen.”

  Listen he did. It was not easy, though. Half his life had been spent teaching himself to tune people out—his mother mostly—and his ears did not take well to the change of pace. Too few spoke, beaten down as they were, and those that did chattered endlessly of the inane. They made nothing but noise.

  Tears swept the road. When he was younger, Voren had dreamed of making such simple voyages as these were making now. War was the cause, it seemed the case, and he should have felt sorry for all these lot, but instead all he knew was agitation. Give me something! He wished to scream. There were all the wonders of the world beyond and he was here, among the dirt and the muck and people of little thought and less mind.

  The wind gusted. A phrase caught his ear. It had grown cooler, oddly, the higher the sun went, but it must have shone on his pleas. For all this, the place was a warm bath, of light and word, and in basking in it, he heard some fool’s dismissive rants of a colorful fool with a plume in his cap and too staunch a line of questioning. Inquisition, the man cried, inquisition garbed in what they thought normal people wore—idiocy.

  It could be only one person, insofar as Voren was concerned. Follow the one, find the other. Voren found Chigenda, and led him back along the road. Once he told him who and what they were looking for, the Zuti was back on the hunt, and their roles reversed. The Zuti did not thank him. There was a small piece in him at which that fact still ate.

  Follow the one, find the other. They found both for their troubles; Essa and Rowan had sniffed something up, and when they spied them out, the pair was trudging behind a farmer’s cart as it trundled off the main road. On a hill a short ways away, the round, slight frame of a church stood like a redoubt against the world. Beyond it, there would be a village, a hamlet, some small farmers’ collective where people could stop and rest along the long road. They had emerged from the acidic earth; the grass here was strong, with old roots, and beyond he could imagine flocks of animals roaming the fields. This was good country, with what he hoped were good folk.

  It was not hard to imagine what had happened. Someone had taken the boy in. Perhaps he thought it would keep him safe.

  Not from our huntress, Voren thought.

  Nerves heated him the closer they moved to the wayward pair. Essa. He had not seen her since the attack. He could only imagine the things—truthful, all the worse—that Rowan and Rurik alike had whispered in her ear. My love. It was a ball of lead settled in his gut. Truth: she had as much right as Rurik to kill him, if ever she laid eyes on him again. Grace could not command me let you go. Yet he had to. Belatedly, ineffectually, he realized this. He had to let her go, for what was desired and what was dreamed would never be.

  As she swept back on the crowd, he found himself slinking behind the Zuti, blushing as a thieving child. Desire demanded too dark a price. Pity was: he had already paid it.

  The Zuti grabbed his arm and thrust him back to the fore. “Hided. Hided. It always hide. What dis be?” When he tried to speak, the Zuti shoved him. “Moment. Moment of passion. Moment of strong. Fleet. You man who ride? Or man who hide?”

  Chigenda’s eyes were a hot spring of derision, burbling to the surface. Truth be told, he wanted to hide from them, to shut them out as he always had and wrap himself in some other’s guiding arms. There was nothing and no one left to oblige him. He was alone.

  And though he quailed, under the pale light with all the whispering, judging eyes upon him, he found it left him numb—not hurt. There was, he slowly came to see, no more pain that could be wrought. He was alone—the thing he had feared for the entirety of his young life. He was alone, and there was nothing more to be done.

  Freedom had strange ways about it.

  The Zuti pushed past him, all but ignoring him again, but they did not leave the road. For a time, they sat at the roadside and watched the church the couple entered, watched for that uncertain moment where one or all might emerge, and something lost might be regained. The question for him was whether he would go to them, fall on his knees and beg, or simply fade away. Whether, for that matter, the Zuti would let him. The Zuti—aloof, distancing eyes upon the wandering refugees—gave no hint of his intent, no consistent pattern to it.

  So he did something his mother had long ago beaten out of him. Instead of waiting for that uncertainty to rear, he decided to play the fool, and put it to the question.

  “Zuti,” asked Voren, “have you always known what I did?”

  Some ruckus in the distance caught the Zuti’s eye. It made him hesitate. Darkness turned back on him, sat nestled in the scars time had bored into the Zuti’s form. There was nothing young about him, Voren saw then. Impulsive as the creature could be, there was no childishness left. This was an old soul, weathered—and perhaps, colored—by time.

  The Zuti’s head bobbed with his denunciation. It roiled Voren’s stomach. So why did you never tell? He fidgeted, felt the heat rise inside. People were shouting in the distance. Quiet, he wanted to tell them. Couldn’t they see the torment already upon him?

  “Death is…not’ing. Suffer is…is…” The Zuti’s browless face furrowed. The word was there, lurking, but he could not seem to find it. “Grow? Wrong is grow. Self grow, in suffer.”

  For the first time, he looked on the Zuti with clarity. He understood from whence he had come—it was not so different a place from his own, in truth. Both accepted suffering in the world. Yet where Voren spent his life dreading that suffering, lending it power through fear, Chigenda embraced the suffering as unavoidable, certain—a power in and of itself. His argument: without pain there could be no growth, no joy. Without pain, one would simply continue to make the same mistakes over and over—or die, and never learn.

  Sanctification was tears. He felt them hot on his cheeks. Why he cried, he could not truly say. They did not fit a man. Straighten up. What are you? But he was no longer on the road. He was alone and far from a man, for he could not take the Zuti’s words with grace. The Zuti’s lip wrinkled and he wanted to hate him for it, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t. So much of his life had been spent on his im
agination, not to the future, but to recalling the memory of past sorrow. He did not bear his lot. He did not grow. He wallowed in it. He died in it, piece by piece.

  Perhaps the Zuti was right, but how could he be? Reading one book did not make another book poorer for it. They were two separate things. So was pain, and knowledge, and joy.

  Time worked slowly between them.

  Not so, for the rest of the world. There was a horde of them suddenly, spilling out along the road, herding more than killing, but flashing steel and guns wherever men did not move quite fast enough. Bandits, he thought at first, but it was worse, so much worse. He froze, as if waiting, but the other had not quite given up on him yet, and the Zuti reached out, snatching him up by the collar, and drove them both off the roadside amidst a stampede of other hopeless fools.

  There were at least a couple dozen riders—brazen, patchwork fools astride slobbering gryphons—and they came with banners. Bloody falcons. He might have known. The Zuti forced them down into the long grass, lying still until the Gorjes had ridden past, but Voren supposed he need not have worried—their eyes were for the church, and no doubt, what lay within.

  Oh, Essa. Why? Why do you always run headlong into such madness?

  “Quiet,” the Zuti said. It was the only thing he said, as he crept forward on his belly.

  By then, the clearly armored and agitated sellswords had spread out around the church. Most remained cloistered around their ugly dandy of a leader, but a handful circled around back, and from the creak and scrape of wood and metal, he assumed they were beating the thing down. In fleeting gestures, he popped his head above the grass, just long enough to catch glimpses of the scene. To his dismay, it would not take long with the door. The church was not so large a thing—a chapel, really—and wood-carved, for all the rocks about.