As Feathers Fall

by Chris Galford

  She closed her eyes, tried to dream a little dream, but her nap in the spa had apparently sapped her mind’s ability to do so. It ran, and ran, a thousand leagues ahead of the rest of her, though she was the most relaxed she had ever been, in recent memory. She tossed, trying to imagine how places such as these could fall to men like Cullick, or the Bastard, how they let themselves be led by creatures that cared nothing for the peace, the tranquility, saw it only as a means to the end of more, more, and why the good always seemed to bow to the bad.

  Maker’s balls, she thought after a while, is this where I’m at?

  A drink might have solved that, but if Rurik could resist that scourge—as he had most admirably during their stay—then so could she. Which in turn, turned her mind to Voren, to another night at another tavern, so far away now, and cold, the memory as much as the place, bitter with what had come to pass.

  Bitterness, too, had a way of growing upon itself. Boy turned to man, and she found herself plodding after her father, down all the little lanes that alcohol had apparently ruined in her life. She could still picture him, if she tried hard enough. A little potbellied, but still strong, still barrel-chested—a bit of the north in him. He never talked much, when he was sober. He hunted instead, or worked—a different sort of vice. Gone. All gone.

  There were families one made and families one was born into.

  She was still toying with that thought when the tavern erupted with the ferocity of new arrivals. She could hear them through the door, shouting, stomping around—the others had not stirred. She rolled from bed, shook Rowan awake. A finger to her lips set him still, very still. Chigenda remained by the door, head lowered, spear taut against his shoulder. The head rose as she stepped toward him, though.

  “Get your things,” she said, hearing the rattle of armor in the hall. Close enough, now, that anyone could hear it.

  Would that their rooms were not in a basement.

  They were still gathering them when someone heaved into the flimsy door, as others repeated the gesture down the hall. Chigenda’s spear was at one’s throat before he had even stepped inside, but there were four more behind him. Essa shook her head, and the man, red-faced, bulbous, cried out, the others forcing their way quickly inside as the spear lowered.

  “You will assemble in the hall!” one of them shouted, all of them moving with purpose.

  Few of them were soldiers, of that much she was certain. All wore chain beneath their robes, but that was as far as it went. Circlets of office rested upon some of their necks—Visaj, then, which meant the rest was obvious. No good would come from fighting them. There was always more where they came from.

  Chigenda looked at her pointedly as the men shoved him out the door, but she shook her head again, in warning. Not the time, not the place—too close quarters and they hadn’t anywhere to go. “This is outrageous,” Rowan cried above them all, like a paid wailer at a funeral, “outrageous! You can’t just barge into private rooms. The guest right, what about…” And he was still wailing it as they shoved the guests into the inn’s main room, a cluster of sleepy and terrified men, merchants mostly, no longer secure in a place that was supposed to be sleepy.

  The Inquisition cared little for privacy. So far as they were concerned, there was but one power on Lecura or above it to which they answered, and He did not wear human flesh.

  Bloody Friars. They earned that name. Essa had, until this moment, been fortunate enough never to have made their acquaintance. But you heard things. You always heard things.

  She tried to remain calm. It was not easy, when men shouted orders at you and beat those who did not comply fast enough. Even the innkeeper and his wife had been dragged into the assembly—good, honest folk they, though she had lamentably at first assumed they had sold the rest of them out. She was only human, and the mind—it jumped to its own conclusions. The fear on that pair’s faces more than settled the matter of truth.

  There was a scuffle in the backrooms. She heard it, felt Rowan tense beside her as he realized who it must have been. She clasped a hand on his wrist. He was not an impulsive man, but even careful men had limits. Not long after, one of their new compatriots jerked into the room, his nose a bloodied mess, half-naked. He scrabbled at the boards, started to come around despite the beating he had already received. A gauntleted fist put him right back down.

  How quickly things could change. Fury bridled the man. Tears, be they from pain, or something deeper than flesh—her grip on Rowan tightened, as one of the men bound Ross’s hands behind his back.

  “Where’s Jarvis?” she heard Rurik say. Would that she could tell him to shut his mouth, but she could tell it was a question borne more of dread realization than actual wonder.

  Behind the others, where Jarvis should have been, a thickly robed man came instead, mostly bald. A little robust, but not fat at all—and with a face as smoothly forgettable as a doe in the woods. It was the eyes that anchored him to this world, and she did not like what she saw in them.

  He took up a place by the counter, saying softly, “August goodmen and women, this place, so lately under the jurisdiction of derelicts in their Visaji duty, is now remanded into the custody of His Reverend Lordship, under the stewardship of Duke Burkhard Rusthöffen of Sorbia—“she saw Rurik “of Sorbia” flinch visibly at that, “—for the judgment of its character. You have my apologies for our rude awakenings here, but we have found, through time, that one must move swiftly, and at times harshly, to establish good feeling, or things…” And this he directed pointedly at Ross’s curled form, “slip through the cracks.”

  His speech was crisp. It had that humming tongue against the roof of the mouth quality most Ravonnens seemed to spout, but it was subtle, less pronounced. She could picture the man reclining in a bathtub as he ordered another man strangled.

  “We have to…” Rowan murmured.

  She stared at him. Fierce. Absolute. Which was when the soldiers came to them.

  “Name, position, purpose,” they ordered again and again, going down the line. None of them seemed to mind the shallowly breathing Ross huddled into the floorboards.

  Rowan stepped forward to answer for them, all four of them, before even Rurik had a chance to voice. “Messar Rowan von Sorbia, gentleman magistrate of Sommersell, good messars. You will forgive us our earlier intransigence…” He was, she realized, the only one that actually looked the part of a gentleman anymore. Rowan, in the last of his damnably peacock-colored attires. All the rest were gone, abandoned to camp and to winter, to roads long forgone.

  Other men were deferential, submissive. The tone caught them, the place unsettled them. It connected him to them; the Inquisition did not particularly like that.

  “What is a magistrate from Sorbia doing this far north?” one of the men asked.

  Rowan bowed, the curls of his red hair falling free. “He is—and his servants, mind—was pursuing justice of deserters north, and has most recently, regrettably, found himself trapped.” The other man opened his lips to speak again, but Rowan rushed words into the opening. “The deserters, regrettably, gone to banditry, and my own well-meaning fools a bit too overwhelmed to engage it.” He brushed a hand across Rurik. Any fool could see how beaten he was.

  The inquisitors’ eyes were relentless. “Little young for guards, no?”

  “Clearly, you have not yet seen my village,” Rowan clucked.

  “And that heathen?” the lead inquisitor called with a lazy gesture to Chigenda.

  But Rowan didn’t so much as bat an eyelash toward the man. “The most arrogant Zuti on the roads of the provinces. I may be an idiot for putting up with him, but he knows these roads, and he pays his fees for his trade and his tithes to the Church. A man that knows his place.”

  It was the last that sealed it. However much the inquisitors would have hesitated, there was much that could be disarmed by language. By confidence. Gazes still swarmed over the Zuti, standing proudly among them, defiant eyes meeting each and every one. He m
eans to kill us, she thought. She thought of another tavern, leagues and moons away, under a canopy of trees, when all of them were younger.

  “They all are. Arrogant, this is,” one of the inquisitors said. He moved on.

  Only later, as all the good people of the town were being pulled out into the square for a hanging, did she dare ask Rowan: “How…?” She could vaguely remember Sommersell from their journey south at Rurik’s youthful exile, but it had been far, far in the south of Sorbia, a border place of plums and little else, as far into Sorbia as Rurik, having still hated the duke for his part in his prosecution, would go. At least, that seemed to be the place she remembered. There had been so many little places—but the name held. A gambol, he had taken.

  “Would you forgive me if I had leaped at those men?” he countered.

  She hesitated, watched where the men looped ropes around an oak beside the springs. “I would respect you,” she said.

  “Hard to respect the dead, especially when you’re among them.”

  No mirth. There was something gone from him, then, where his eyes met the bound man being led to his undoing.

  “Did they find the armor?” Rurik whispered. Ignorant. She gave him a pointed look, disgust intermingled. Wilfull blindness she could not abide.

  Rowan put a hand on his shoulder, a gesture of deprecation. It would not seem out of place, though his soft words did not match the gesture.

  “What am I, Rurik?” Silence. “What am I?” A shaking hand laid upon the boy’s head, and Rowan turned away again, forcing his lips into a smile. “Pretty little lord, we are all of us such desperate fools. Ask yourself what I love, and you’ll know. You’ll know.”

  She learned that evening what it was to hate without sense to ground it. On the orders of the lead inquisitor, a soldier was dragged to the base of the town’s oldest tree, still bruised, yellowed beyond any defiance. A rope was placed around his neck as the man proclaimed him a nonentity—a soldier of Cullick’s, hiding out like a wolf in a sheep’s pen, and a degenerate, an affront to Holy Scripture (though nowhere in Holy Scripture did they make such claims). Then that same soldier was strangled on the Inquisition’s order, for the soul of their latest acquisition.

  No one else was taken that night. They were simple folk here, and none wealthy enough to sport whatever idols might have marked them. This, and the Inquisition’s hatred had already found an outlet. They might have hung another soldier, but he had, it seemed, resisted and been killed. A regrettable error. There would be words, for it. The Inquisition liked their public displays. Fear, after all, was every bit as powerful as love. Maybe more.

  The Inquisition took rooms that night, free of charge. They also billeted themselves in other homes, and put men out on the streets—godly souls, they seemed to say, had themselves a curfew. It was not easy to sleep then, though there were no sounds to hear of. She lay beside Rowan as he closed his eyes—his breathing was not shallow enough to be sleep—and she wrapped him in her arms and tried to hold the pain at bay, as she had when they were children, and sometimes he would heave, or shake, but he never made a sound. Not a sound.

  They were all actors here, every single one. Some were better than others, beneath the necessities of this human skin.

  Much later that night she slipped from their rooms. On the morrow, they had been invited to dine with the head inquisitor, to act, no doubt, as spies for this ranging operation. She intended them to be gone by then. The Inquisition were terrible, and they were mighty, but they went nowhere without the confidence to do so. It meant the army of Sorbia should not be far behind.

  There was a guard in the hall, but he had gotten into the inn’s wine. Sanctified it with his lips, no doubt. He was asleep when she crossed into the deserters’ room, where their things had been ransacked and scattered, but largely remained. Tomorrow, they would be burned.

  A waste, a terrible waste. She took the armor, piece by piece, with the colors of the lion, and she slipped out the window with them, sticking to the shadows and burying them in a pen for pigs not far from there. It was on re-entering the inn, however, that she caught the flute out of the corner of her eye, the snapped string still dangling like a noose about the base.

  No more music in the night. Had that been what brought them together? There were so many subtle things that captivated, which made people more than merely human. It certainly wasn’t a love of country.

  Their story would never be told. She knew this, lamented it. But some piece of them would live on, at least. She took the flute last of all and went back into her own room.

  It was a long night, even with it tucked between her fingers. Sleep never did come.

  * *

  They were soldiers once. Deserters. Not so different in the end. They came to a crossroads of morals and duty, and they ended up choosing what they knew to be right. For them. Admirable. Strong. There was nothing cowardly in what they had done.

  Men made what monuments they could of such things. For his ignorance, in not knowing sooner, Rurik had nothing but a monument of rope and wood beams, of the steady, cloying creak of a weightless song. Another trickle of sand in an hourglass, building like the trailing thump of Chigenda’s sandals. It had been, he decided, too long since he had slept well.

  Midday was still a few hours away, and he felt his tiredness. He had studied those bodies by the light of the moon, studied them until the Zuti sidled up in the night and put a hand upon his shoulder. He had gone then, without question. The signature of these men’s deaths had been all around him. Death awaited them in the lands of the lion and the lands of the gryphon equally. For some things, civilized men made no distinction.

  The inquisitors had left without waiting for the populace to question their decision. They had holed up in the tavern and in people’s homes, these zealot-priests, talking as though they had some part in this war other than their own grim credo.

  Justice, men said, was blind. Rurik suspected it was more oft men blinded themselves to it. Himself included.

  “Death answer death,” the Zuti intoned.

  Should I waken the others? He wondered. This irrationality—it has never moved us anywhere but ill.

  He brushed a lock of hair from his forehead, looked back at Chigenda. That one did not care. Slowly, languorously the Zuti blinked, the spear that was his answer to all things trundling behind him. Rurik considered asking him what he thought of those men, if he saw and knew what it was they were. Most likely, this was one battle whereby Chigenda’s silence was his only action. This simply was not his battle to fight.

  It should not have been his, than. He paused, considered this.

  In that pause, he heard Rowan’s voice echoing across time, “At a time, we prostrated before sun and moon. Then we kneeled to the faceless idols of a thousand nameless thoughts. Now we stand before the saving light of the one true god—and verily, say I, there is not one difference between the lot.”

  As it was, he tried to picture some diabolical, practiced mayhem in this. He could not find the calculation. There was a time he thought maybe, just maybe it was because his father had so ignored the God that the God had ignored him, but He should not have punished his mother for that. She had been, had always been, a godly woman. She believed.

  The Maker. The gods. Whatever one would, they explained the world, gave it purpose. Sometimes it took devastation to realize, however, that all had ignored in equal measure.

  Malevolence was the wrong word. Their own religion had some grasp of it—Assal, they said, had made the world and stepped away, leaving it to its own devices. It was not His burden, they said. Shifting of responsibilities, Rurik saw. He did not care, was the truth of it.

  Funny, how men could turn idleness into something, diverting simple matters into the grandiose and mysterious.

  His thoughts were trailing. He caught himself, just outside the hovel the priests’ leader had taken for his own. Another cleric was on duty there, humming tunes to himself, normal in every way but for
the ease with which he killed. Conviction could do that. Rurik stared at him, rubbing his woes together until he could practically see a devil in that man. It did him no good.

  “Wait here. If you hear something…” He hesitated. Merely by speaking, he thought he might lure the uncertain into the open.

  The Zuti said, “Know I. Done.”

  The cleric’s head lolled forward and he jolted to his feet as Rurik approached. He spoke accusingly: “What say you, man? You aren’t one of them farm folk.”

  The man’s round, dark face was drawn into a displeased, but not fearful, expression. Behind him, the square bit of thatch and wood seemed an odd place for a priest to take for his abode, particularly when others of his breed were lounging in the relative luxury of a spa-laden inn. He probably thought he was being modest.

  “Servant o’ that Magistrate Rowan,” Rurik said, with a quick salutation. “Come to make peace with your father, have myself a confession. Your men at the inn, they said…” He flinched, let his eyes fall, as if in sudden realization. “They said he’s the one.”

  The guard’s eyebrow lifted, a wiry rush of disbelief. “Aye? Look half-dead as is.”

  Rurik met him with a grim smile. “What do you think spurred need of confession?”

  With little more goading, the guard knocked, announced him, and escorted him inside. A few words exchanged between the inquisitors, then the guardsman headed back outside. The somewhat slanted door clacked shut, Rurik’s eyes drifting over the rusted iron latch at its side. Inside, he found a home lit against the early dark with candlelight, just a single window flap open to the light—and heat—of skylit salvation. Beneath these talismans, in a single room, sparsely furnished, sat a robe-wrapped man, feminine but unremarkable, save for the eyes.

  A man could tell a lot by another’s eyes, his father had said. Watch, Alviss had told him, as much as listen. Odd how one consumes the notes of dead men. He would like to have thought those words were as powerful to him in life. A falsehood. He thought of Usuri’s eyes, somewhere out there, searching for him. Unintentionally, he shuddered.