by Tom Stacey
Callistan did not know how long he lay there but when he sat up he was alone and it was dark. He frowned. He hadn’t heard them leave. Why had Raiya not told him about this?
Rage struck flint to steel and his cheeks burned hot with anger, but he fought it down and did what he knew he must. He followed the sound of water and found a narrow river nearby. He gathered stones from the banks and carried them back to lay them on the grave, pressing down on the wet soil with sodden boots and then arranging the stones neatly on top. He thought that Mela should have a headstone and knew that he could not make one now, so he resolved to do it first thing in the morning. All thought of flight was put on hold as he stumbled back to the house and away from the labyrinth that the orchard had become. His anger had abated some but it still squatted dark and ugly in the pit of his stomach.
He marched inside and made straight for their shared bedroom, and there his resolve crumpled and his throat grew thick, for Raiya lay curled on the bed like a wounded animal, crying and holding on to Farilion’s tiny frame. She turned when he entered and her face was a picture of wretched misery. Silently Raiya ushered her son from the room and then, after she had asked Callistan to close the door, it all came out in a rush.
Mela had caught the lung-fever, Raiya said. She had been down to the coast to stay with a friend, and when she returned she had been pale and shivering. Raiya admitted that she had panicked at first, but she had thought it best to isolate the girl, keeping her in her room and banning the others from going near her, lest they catch the deadly fever too.
“She was so weak,” said Raiya. “She fought hard, as only your daughter would, but in the end it was too much for her.” Raiya leaned in to Callistan as he held her and he breathed in the too-strong scent of cloves. It reminded him of death, though he knew not why. Mela had died two days ago, at the age of twelve, and Raiya had buried her in the orchard, carrying the small body out herself, without the aid of the servants. Mela had loved the orchard. “I’m so sorry, my love. I should have told you sooner, but you had such strange news and I did not know what to do.”
Callistan stroked her hair and shushed her and suddenly felt very empty and tired. He only wanted to sleep. Raiya looked up at him and kissed him. The force of it shocked him, but it was welcome and it helped him forget his grief as he had forgotten so many other things. Suddenly she bit his lip and Callistan gasped, tasting salty blood in his mouth. Raiya’s tongue was a slippery, searching eel and Callistan’s mind was a whirl of confusion. He pulled away from her and he saw the hurt in her eyes, shot through with a hunger that scared and excited him in equal measure.
She stood smoothly and reached behind herself to untie her skirt. It fell to the floor and she was left only in a long cotton shift that glowed yellow-white in the candlelight, the hem reaching down to her creamy thighs. She reached up and loosened her copper-coloured hair and then shrugged the shift off of her shoulders so that it dropped down to join the skirt. Callistan ran his eyes up her body, past the smooth shapely legs and the fiery mound of hair where her thighs met, over the flat, milky skin of her stomach and up to her small but perfectly formed breasts, as pert as a kitten’s nose.
He felt lust stir in his loins and reached up to grab her, but she batted his hands away lightly and brushed past him. He propped himself up on one arm and watched the sway of her buttocks, marvelling as the shadows played across the dimples at the small of her back. She disappeared into the hallway. Callistan was shocked at her brazenness, but then the house was dark and largely empty and she would return soon. Wouldn’t she?
He sighed and lay back on the bed. The pain was there, lurking behind his eyes, but he didn’t want to think about it now. It would come back with a vengeance soon enough and he did not want to speed its return. He hadn’t had a woman in — well, he didn’t know how long — but now he was with his woman and he could delay the grief for a little longer before it swamped him.
He dangled his arm over the side and swung it back and forth, aware that he was shutting out something important. It was as if he could hear it banging at the door to come in. He swung his arm quicker, as if he could waft the guilt away, and it brushed against something sharp that bit into him. Callistan swore and drew his hand away, sucking at the scratch and rolling off the mattress. There lay a long handled knife that he did not recognise. It was tucked just under the bed and did not have a sheath, and suddenly, like the sun shining through morning mist, Callistan’s eyes were opened.
For all was not as it seemed.
He stood and ran into the hallway. It was dark and as empty as it had been before, but now the shadows held a menace that made his skin crawl. He ran to his left, through the archway and into the dining room with the large wooden table and out into the cool night air.
Crucio was gone.
He swore and his mind raced. When he had found Raiya earlier, after she had run from him, it had been in the bedroom. She had been crouched by the bed and now he knew that she had been going for the knife. Does a wife reach for a weapon on the return of her husband?
Callistan ran around the side of the house that struck out into the darkness like a jetty. This was the servants’ quarters and in daylight you could make out the difference between the new pale stone of the main house and the annex where the servants lived and worked. Now they were one great mass, turned grey by the night. He wanted to call out but some instinct urged caution, and instinct had kept him alive so far.
He rounded the corner and crashed into something hard, falling with a curse. He turned to see what had tripped him. It was a wooden wheelbarrow, plugged full with shiny mud, the surface of which had been flattened into clay by the rain so that it was smooth and unlined. Callistan stood and stuck his finger into the cool mud, leaving a small depression. The sight of Mela’s resting place came to him: churned mud and lumpy soil without any stones to cover it. Raiya had said that Mela had been buried two days ago, but it had rained since then. His heartbeat was suddenly very loud in his ears.
She had been lying. It was a fresh grave. And Farilion… the mud on his clothes.
Callistan searched frantically for a door to the servants’ quarters that he knew should have been somewhere nearby. He scratched at the stone with his hands, unable to see anything in the darkness except flashes of creamy skin and hair the colour of fire. Finally his fingers found the wooden door and it was unlocked. Callistan crept inside. “Cyna,” he hissed and then stopped as his boot slid in something liquid. He closed his eyes and crouched to see what it was, but he knew what he would find. It was a body, large and wet with blood and still warm to the touch. Cyna’s body. Callistan struggled to draw breath and had a sudden urge to be outside. He stood and ran back to the door, stumbling over the threshold and staggering out into the night.
There was the jingle of a chain and a large shape loomed at him from the shadows. Callistan instinctively reached for his weapon but it was not there. He cursed and raised his hands defensively, until the shape in the darkness lumbered close enough to reveal itself. It was Crucio, eyes wide and white and ears flat with fear. The poor beast was still tied by his muzzle to the hitching rail, but something had scared him enough for him to rip it from the ground and flee, dragging it along behind him. Callistan caught the horse by the traces and soothed him. Crucio grunted softly and calmed visibly, so Callistan moved down his body, feeling for the falcata he had placed there. He was desperate to have the comforting weight of wood and steel in his hands.
It was gone. He swore. Perhaps the horse had shaken it loose in its panic. Callistan turned and looked at the pale house behind him. He would have to go back inside and find a weapon.
Raiya had seemed so real just moments before, but now it was clear that she was something else. He did not want to say it, didn’t even want to think it, yet the thought was there and the horror was lapping at the shores of his sanity. He swallowed and ruthlessly suppressed thoughts of anything other than the task at hand — the benefit of a soldier’s iron
discipline.
Crucio snorted and then reared with an all too human scream, knocking Callistan on to his back as something sharp whistled through the air where his head had been. Callistan grunted, the wind blown out of him as he impacted on the hard earth, but he recovered quickly, rolling to his feet and spinning away from his attacker. She came at him again, falcata held high and that beautiful face of hers twisted and distorted with an inhuman fury. She swung the blade downwards, aiming to cut him in half, but it was a wild blow and he skipped back easily, careful not to slip in the mud.
She attacked once more, naked and spattered with filth, and he sidestepped her clumsy slash. Callistan backed away quickly and let her approach him. He knew now for certain that his wife, his beautiful Raiya, was dead, and that this thing before him was simply another cruel parody.
The slipskin strode towards him, both hands firmly wrapped around the falcata’s hilt. But this creature was not trained in combat. It was lashing out, putting all of its fears and frustrations behind its swings, and therein lay his advantage. Callistan abruptly stopped his retreat and the slipskin began to run, loping forward on those long legs to bury the blade in his body. Callistan took a step to the side and slipped in the mud, and the slipskin screeched in horrid triumph. But the slipskin had been fooled and Callistan had not slipped at all. Rather he had found a firm footing, and as the stolen falcata came whipping towards him to cut him in half, he threw himself forward so that he went under the blade and his shoulder crunched into the slipskin’s midriff. He felt her ribs break, and not knowing if that would do anything other than superficial damage, he threw himself on top of her writhing form and began to beat at her face, Raiya’s face, with his bare hands. He closed his eyes so that he did not have to watch, but every blow felt as if he was tearing something inside. Eventually the struggling beneath him stopped and he knew he had to look, if only to see if he had won.
He had crushed the skull, and those beautiful features were gone, mauled by his bleeding knuckles. Shards of white bone jutted from the jellied mess and blood had matted in that coppery hair and spattered downwards to stain Raiya’s borrowed breasts with blood, dark against flesh. However, tellingly, a strange blubbery plate of translucent cartilage had been exposed beneath the hairline and a single orb of cat-eye yellow stared glassily at him from behind its dislodged human mask.
Callistan sat back in the mud and tried not to look at the ruin of the slipskin. Water fell on his cheek and he thought he was crying, but the water was cool and he held out his hand as the heavens opened. The gods were trying to wash away the horror.
Crucio snuffled loudly, and Callistan turned to look on him. As he did, he noticed a tiny figure pop its head around the side of the house and then disappear again.
Callistan leapt to his feet and snatched up the fallen falcata, swinging himself on to Crucio’s bare back and kicking the horse into motion. Crucio answered without resistance, as if sensing his new master’s mood, and they quickly reached the corner of the house.
On the dark grass by the stream, a small, child-like figure ran helter-skelter, not even pausing to look over its shoulder. Wordlessly, Callistan dug his heels into Crucio’s flanks and they sprang forward, eating up the distance in no time. The rain muffled most sounds but a warhorse is not built for stealth and the thunder of Crucio’s hooves was enough to make the creature he had called Farilion turn and look up in terror. Callistan leant out from the saddle and slapped the small slipskin with the flat of his blade, knocking it into the mud. He hauled Crucio to a stop and dismounted smoothly, stalking over to the slipskin, that was scrabbling backwards, one hand held up to cover its face.
“No, Papa! Don’t, please!”
The sameness of that voice nearly defeated Callistan but he felt ice forming around his heart so he set his jaw and crouched to grab the small boy by the jerkin.
“Please, Papa! Let me go,” it sobbed.
Callistan felt raw emotion clawing at his throat, but he swallowed and it stilled, caught in the iron bonds of his resolve. He placed the tip of the falcata on the slipskin’s chest, his arm bent awkwardly to admit the length of the blade.
“Don’t do it! Don’t do it! I’ll be good! I don’t want to be like Mela, I don’t want to go to the orchard.”
Callistan closed his eyes and suddenly a flash of memory swirled before him: Mela screaming and running in panic from a hive of bees she had found whilst playing. He remembered the fat worker bee near her grave amongst the trees and opened his eyes to stare at this mockery of his son.
“Mela hated the orchard,” he said softly and the slipskin looked at him as if he was insane and then gave a piercing scream. He thrust the blade forward and it was over. The small body hung limp in his arms.
The body was not heavy, but he would not carry it. Instead he tethered it to his saddle and dragged it back through the mud, then laid it beside Raiya’s double on the huge wooden dining table and piled wooden furniture from the house all around. There was a barrel of lantern oil in the servants’ quarters that he splashed on everything, and then he struck a fire in the stone hearth, and once it had caught, touched it to the slick wood.
The flames rose hungrily, and before long the thick black smoke drove him from the house and into the rain, where he could hear the roar of the fire and the hiss as errant drops from above fell into the heat.
Callistan sat and watched the fiery dancers devour the house and did not flinch as the great beams of the roof gave way in an explosion of sparks. Crucio kept his distance.
The rain ebbed and flowed and smoke mingled with steam. Tears not of his making formed on Callistan’s cheeks, scouring paths of clean flesh through the filth. He was grateful for them because, try as he might, he had not the strength to weep.
XVII
It was madness, sheer bloody madness, and he was leading from the front as he had so often before. The Land Walls of Kressel’s Outer Fortress towered above him and he had to make a conscious effort not to slow down and stare in awe. Despite the flames, the outer walls glowed like a bleached skull in the moonlight. That was fitting: the city reeked of death. Ahead lay the Wandering Gate, even bigger than it had seemed from a distance. Something had torn it from its hinges, and as Beccorban looked at the twisted and tortured metal, he shuddered to think what he would find in the city beyond.
He motioned for Riella to catch up. She was young and fit but this kind of pace was relentless and Beccorban had opted for speed over caution. He could feel a thousand phantom eyes burning into the back of his head, though fortunately there had been no more columns of long-limbed soldiers, nor any sign of the strange birdlike creature and its rider with the antlered helm. The light from the city made them both cast long shadows on the sandy turf as they scuttled across the open ground.
They came to the broken gate and Riella waited while Beccorban checked it was clear. Behind the gate was a long, high-arched tunnel. It was black inside the tunnel and the stone walls were curiously damp. Every now and again a fat droplet of icy water found the gap between clothing and flesh and sent shivers down his spine in stripes. Each step squelched and each squelch echoed off the walls so that it was all the old warrior could do not to double his pace. You’ve used your speed, Beccorban, now use your caution. A strange ghostlight bounced off of the high curved ceiling and Beccorban could make out the murder holes: thin slits placed at regular intervals so that defenders could pour suffering down upon any foe that made it past the gate. Usually it was oil but once in his youth he had seen the outnumbered occupants of a small fortress in the Heatlands use heated sand, each grain a white hot speck of agony that stuck to skin and burrowed down into the flesh. Sand was so much worse than oil. Instinctively he hugged the lefthand wall, avoiding the evil gaze of the murder holes and whatever watched from behind them.
Finally they came out of the tunnel into the main courtyard of the outer fortress. Beccorban had last been here decades before. Kressel was a busy city, and though most of its business came
from the sea, there was always activity on the landward side, even in the relatively small Outer Fortress which had been designed to keep people out rather than as a waystation. The walls here were high enough to block out the brightness from the main city but the moon was high and, though it was little more than a sliver in the sky, it bathed the open area in a dim bluish light.
He felt Riella’s hand on his arm. “Where is everyone?” she whispered.
Beccorban looked around. There were a few broken wagons and barrels lying around as well as several scattered and shattered weapons, and there in the middle of the open space was a large piece of dark cloth. An eddy of wind from the sea washed over the walls and caught an edge of the fabric, teasing and lifting it so that Beccorban could make out the sigil. It was a flag, with a crowned man resting on a sword — the emblem of imperial Veria. The wind gusted stronger and lifted the soiled flag from the mud, turning it over and making it fold in on itself so that the crowned man appeared incredibly thin.
Riella stepped out of the deep shadows of the tunnel and into the courtyard. Beccorban did not stop her but watched instead, ignoring the voice in his head that told him he was using her as bait.
“Where have they all gone?” she asked, louder this time. Her question echoed off the walls all around and she cowered at the loudness of her own voice.
He raised a finger to his lips and gestured for her to join him at the mouth of the tunnel. She scampered over to him. “Beccorban, what do we do?” She looked up at him and her eyes were big and wet.
He reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder. “I think we should go, lass.” He spoke softly but she recoiled from him as though he had shouted.
“We can’t. We have to help those people. You can’t just let them die.”
“They’re already dead. Listen.” He pointed at the dark gatehouse, past the Long Bridge into the city proper. There was a distant howling sound that had been with them since they had approached Kressel. Until now, Beccorban had thought it was a sea-wind, the same one that tore the tops from the waves of the Scoldsee. However now that he truly listened, he could tell it was a human sound, the sound of agony, thousands of voices screaming in terror. Heard all together, it was no surprise that he had mistaken it for something elemental. “We can’t save them, Riella.”
