He blew into his hands, though it was not cold. He rubbed them together, cupped them again. Turned his head to one side and whispered. Turned to the other, did the same again. Then pressed his lips into the cup of his hands and knelt there like that, quite still and silent, for some time.
“You do enjoy your little rituals, you people,” Sullen murmured once to the Weaponsmith, but otherwise the two of them merely waited and watched.
At length, Sestimon began to rock back and forwards gently. He blew into his hands once more. Then spoke, softly but quickly, into them. He snapped his head back and away, pressed his hands more tightly together so that they were sealed.
His arms shook. Then he flung them upwards, threw them out wide, opened his hands. As if to cast his words into the sky. But it was not words that burst forth and flew off eastwards. It was bees. A tiny humming swarm of them.
Sestimon fell back. He set his hands down to hold himself erect.
“How long?” Sullen asked, watching the vanishing insects. They flew far faster than any of their natural kin might.
Sestimon croaked. Shook his head. Sullen glared at him.
“How long?”
“Six… seven hours, perhaps,” the Clever rasped, and now his voice was not thin and reedy, but near ruined. Near gone. As frail as a frayed twig. He touched his throat, brushing the great scar there with a trembling finger.
“That’ll do,” Sullen said, and turned to the Weaponsmith. “I wanted you to see that. So that you’d realise what remarkable times we now live in. You understand now that I will do – I must do – whatever I deem necessary. You do understand that, don’t you?”
“I do,” the Weaponsmith said glumly.
“Good.” Sullen folded his arms across his chest. “There is something I require of you. You’re going to refuse me, because what I ask may well kill you. That won’t do, so to save us all time I’m first going to tell you why you will do as I command. The why is this: I know Kerig didn’t kill anyone in Creel’s camp. I know that you did… hush, hush.”
He held up an admonishing finger as the Weaponsmith stirred to protest.
“I understand your need to deny it, but we both know you did it. I can read the marks on a man’s face, even a burned one. He died not of fire, but from want of air, that man of yours. Long after Kerig was gone, I imagine. Someone knelt by his cot and closed mouth and nose with a strong hand. Something like that. The details don’t matter.
“I don’t know if it was your hand, but I know it was your intent. And I do understand, believe me; I even admire it. Perhaps it was the only chance you’d ever have to set the law and the Clade against a man who was otherwise never going to stop coming after you. I might well have done the same thing in the same circumstance. Indeed, I have done something rather similar in our current circumstance. Something of grander conception, but similar even so.”
Throughout this address, Sullen was entirely unmoving. His face betrayed no emotion. His voice remained steady. The Weaponsmith, the taller of them by a fraction, was by contrast growing restless. Like an animal in a cage that was unexpectedly shrinking about it.
“My sympathy, my appreciation, is not to the point,” Sullen continued. “Despite it, I will put you in that same cell from which Kerig has been removed, and I will extract from you a full confession that you killed your own man. Then I will myself undertake your execution, by whatever means seem most likely to extend your suffering. I confess, I enjoy it. So you can be sure I mean what I say.
“And once you’re dead, I’ll make it my calling to find everyone you’ve ever spent any affection on and render their lives as miserable and cruel and brief as my position and power make possible. Do we understand one another?”
The Weaponsmith said nothing, but stared hatefully at the School’s butcher. His huge hands were at his sides, clenching and unclenching. None of which perturbed Sullen.
“I only need you to do what you’ve always done. You’re going to make me a weapon, more quickly than any you’ve made before. I imagine its making will cost you the greater part, perhaps all, of what life and strength you have left. It’s unfortunate, but there you are.”
“You have no right —’ the Weaponsmith began.
Sullen took a single quick step forward and struck him, hard but open-handed, across the face. Hard enough to draw a spot of blood from the corner of the Weaponsmith’s mouth.
“I have every right. I have the right of judgement, since I command the Clade, and the Clade judges Clevers. I have the right of power, since I have this castle, and warriors below to answer my call, and you… well, you’re just you. Alone. You have your Clever ways, of course, but by the nature of my employment I am required to study you and your kind. I know that you’ve refined your talents a lot more than most. You can do one thing, and do it well, but almost all else is beyond you. You could not, no matter how hard you tried, produce any trickery from out of the entelechs quickly enough, or strongly enough, to stop me from cutting your throat this very moment, should I want to.
“And most of all… most of all I have the right of will. Because yours is weak, Weaponsmith. And mine is not. I can assure you. Mine is not.”
27
Permanence
The sky was stained black, out there near the horizon. A moving stain that spread and flowed. The wind came far before it, stirring the grass and brushing over Yulan’s scalp. It smelled bad to him, of ash and flesh.
He could not look away, as the dark storm cloud of birds rolled ever closer. None of the Free could. They halted in their march, and every head was turned. Every eye watched the coming tempest. No one said anything. The only sound, on that high road, was the rustling of the grass, the gusting wind that buffeted about them.
Yulan and a few others were on foot, walking behind the wagon. The rest stayed on their horses. Stared. The birds came on and on, a sheet of them that stretched itself across the sky and dimmed the light of the sun. The noise mounted as they drew near. Wingbeats, harsh calls, the rumbling wind.
Then, as the leading edge of the immense throng reached the point above where Yulan stood, the birds rushed together. The multitude made itself into a huge rope, or snake. The serpent of birds put a great coil into itself, folding and turning. Then it plunged, punched down at the ground not thirty paces from Yulan. A dizzying fall of birds, like dark water, hammering at the earth. Some died, some veered up and away, scattering. Grass and soil were churned up, sprayed out.
“Oh, Wren,” murmured Yulan, but nobody could hear him.
He stumbled at the shaking of the ground. The horses around him quailed, and nervously backed away. He heard, quite clearly, a groan and a shifting of great mass from the Clamour’s cage.
The turf was stripped away. Rocks were exposed. Still the birds came, the whole immense flock of them plummeting down. Yulan had to narrow his eyes against the veils of dry soil that were being thrown up. Its dusty scent was mixed in with the stink of death and fire and feathers that the flock brought with it.
They began to spin, the rooks and thrushes and hawks and owls, churning around just above the ground. Thickening, so that there was only a dense mass, seething there. Then, just as suddenly, they were done, and the whole flock erupted away. Birds, great and small, sped in every direction, waves of them skimming so low that Yulan felt their wings on him.
He saw a naked man lying on his side in the bare scar the birds had etched into the hillside. Kerig. Pale, thinned, bruised and bloodied, but alive. Heaps of feathered corpses lay about him. Yulan and Hamdan ran forward, side by side. Kerig was already trying to rise when they reached him, but he was too weak. When he set his weight through his legs, they crumpled and he thumped back down.
Yulan was dimly aware that birds still thronged the sky, sweeping back and forth overhead. But he could not look away from Kerig. He was utterly changed from the man who had settled himself beneath that tree so little time ago. He had been made frail, and feeble. Wounded.
“W
here’s Wren?” the Clever rasped, scrabbling blindly about on hands and knees.
Yulan threw a cape over him, held it down over his shoulders and back. Knelt at his side.
“Wren?” Kerig coughed, faltering.
He slumped into Yulan’s arms. His captain cradled him on his knees. There was so little of him left. Yulan was worried that he might harm the man, for he barely knew what his arms were doing. Only that he wanted to hold him, keep him safe.
“Make space for him on the wagon,” he shouted.
Rudran jumped down from his horse and ran to Kerig, reaching down to lift him from Yulan’s grasp. But Kerig cried out at his touch and lashed his arm around, flailing impotently. Yulan saw pain in Rudran’s face as he shrank back. The big, gruff man wanted to help, but did not know how. Much like Yulan himself.
“Let him be,” Yulan said.
And he rose, and carried the weeping Kerig in his arms like a babe, and set him on the wagon. Hamdan brought bandages and water to tend to him, and when other of the archers came to help, he herded them away like so many overcurious children.
“I’m sorry,” Yulan whispered to Kerig.
“Look,” Hamdan said quietly to him.
Yulan looked up. The birds were massing again. The survivors, still in their thousands, were knotting back into a churning, formless flock.
“Is it not over?” he heard Drann murmuring in bewilderment. “Where’s Wren?”
Yulan said nothing. Just watched the sky. Akrana came to stand beside them, gazing up just as they did. A shadow seemed to be there, in the heart of the flock. Not just the darkness of the birds’ bodies, but of the air itself.
“What’s happening?” Drann asked of no one and everyone.
“Wren’s gone,” Akrana said without looking at him.
“What?”
“She overreached,” Yulan told him dully. “She’s gone away, into the entelechs. This is a Permanence.”
Such dreadful loss, to speak just those few words. All he had wanted to do was bring them safely through this. Never had he fallen so far short of any ambition.
“We should go,” he said. “Quickly.”
He walked away, calling out as he went to get everyone moving. Even he could not help glancing upward at the appalling, extraordinary thing taking shape. A multitude of birds, of every kind, writhing in the air. A Permanence.
“It will be a bad one,” Akrana said. “Born from anger, violence. They are always bad ones. Someone will give it a fell name one day, perhaps years from now. Perhaps lifetimes.”
“What do you think it will do?” Yulan wondered.
“Fly, I suppose. Fly, until the world comes to ruin and wreck and all that ever was has gone back whence it came.”
Yulan looked this way and that. For as far as he could see, there was not a house, not a farm. Just the hillsides, the trees, the grass. No one to witness this save the Free. No one to witness the making of this thing that might come to be spoken of in the same hushed tones as the Bereaved, the Unhomed Host, the handful of Permanences that the world held. A great and lasting change.
He wished he had not seen it.
“Yulan’s right,” Akrana was calling out. “We should go. It will not remember that the one who created it was one of us.”
Hamdan rode in the wagon, crouching at Kerig’s side and trying to ease his trembling and his moaning. Yulan walked behind in the wheel tracks. It took an act of will not to look back, and watch the birthing of that monstrosity in the sky.
With each step he took, grief filled him. Tears pressed at his eyes, demanding release. He did weep a little. And as he wept, other feelings slowly came to take the place of the grief. Not extinguishing it, but covering it over; storing it away to be felt and embraced another day.
He could only be what the moment demanded now. He would match Callotec, Sullen, any who yet lived and would oppose him. Set his terrible will against theirs and visit upon them terrors that they could not yet imagine. If he could save anyone, that was how he would save them. Wren had said she believed he could do it. Now he must find out if she was right, and any who stood in his way would learn that the Free were not done yet. Not so long as his heart still beat in his chest.
PART THREE
28
When Drann Was Seventeen
When Drann was seventeen, he went to war. It was not the decision of a moment, taken in haste or high passion. It came slowly, gathering itself over days and weeks and awaiting the circumstance that might call it forth. That circumstance was made of Armsmen, mud and death.
The war began not as war but as rumours, spread over months, of scattered strife and quarrels. A riot, it was said, in such-and-such a city, over bread made from bad grain. Another city, elsewhere, shutting its gates against the royal Armsmen when they came to take the leader of its watch into custody. The Far Men of Haut Werl, bandits who had plagued those parts for years, learning bravery and overrunning a Kingshouse, slaughtering its garrison. A lord, at last, raising the banner of revolt in Mondoon.
Word of each of these things came to Drann’s village, but it came late and faint, like so many fragments of a broader tapestry fluttering on the breeze. There was no one there would speak Crex’s part. He was not a well-beloved monarch. Their lord – no more well-beloved – did nothing. Mustered no levies and proclaimed himself for neither one side nor the other.
Life went on. War happened elsewhere, though part of Drann longed for it to come close, that he might see it. Perhaps taste it. Unseasonal rains came and turned half the fields into quagmires. Killed or battered or bent the crops. That was of more concern to most of the villagers than war.
Then one bright day, a long column of Armsmen passed through.
“Stay behind your doors,” they cried as they rode. “Any man on the path will be cut down. By royal command, none may pass a night anywhere but under their own roof, unless called to bear arms in service of the rightful king. Any in breach of this command shall be guilty of treason, and meet its punishment. Stay behind your doors!”
Drann watched them pass, peeking out through a crack between the planks of the door. Tall men, with pennants and spears and horses clad in royal insignia. Magnificent, had they not been servants of a loathed rule. Had the words they shouted not brought repression and restraint.
After they had gone, disappearing no one knew where, it turned out they had not merely ridden along the village’s one good track. They had crossed the fields behind the cottages. Churned them up and broken down the rough fences and gates that separated one holding from another.
Drann cursed them and their kind, and flung the broken remnants of their own fence around in impotent rage. His father said nothing. Simply stared at the damage for a time, and then set to mending it. They laboured side by side, ankle deep in the sucking mud that rain and the Armsmen had made of the field. Even when the bright day became a cloudy one, and it began to rain again, a misty drizzle, they worked on. Hammering, digging, staggering about in the boggy earth.
When they were almost done, a whole day that was to have been spent weeding the barley field wasted, there was a wailing in the village. Despairing grief given such heartfelt voice that Drann winced to hear it.
Martan was dead, it turned out. He had been Drann’s friend – of sorts – when they were younger, but the two had spent less time together as the years turned. He had disappeared days ago, perhaps weeks. Drann could not be sure. No one had known where he had gone; or no one had told Drann, at least.
Now everyone knew. Martan had gone to the war. Walked away from the village, alone, without even a word to his parents, and found his way to the army of Creel of Mondoon, many miles to the south. And died there, in a battle that was won, but in which he – and those parents he had left behind – lost everything.
And that night, after he had eaten the broth his mother set on the table, and helped his father restore an edge to the digging blades they had blunted, Drann took up his spear and told them he was go
ing to fight.
“Why?” his mother asked, aghast.
“Because nothing’ll ever change if we don’t fight for it,” he told her, feeling both foolish and wise. “We’ll never change if we don’t fight.”
“You’re not going anywhere,” she told him.
“I am.”
His sisters stared at him, both fear and surprise in their regard. Drann looked to his father, not knowing what he might say or do. The man was shaking his head, slowly.
“You’ll not get the change you’re dreaming of that way,” he said.
It was not said angrily. It did not even sound – so Drann chose to believe – quite like refusal or forbiddance. Rather, it sounded… small. Simple.
“You can’t make yourself a warrior or a winner of wars just by wanting,” his father said.
“I know,” Drann replied, not certain he entirely did know, or believe it. He spoke softly and modestly, matching his tone to that of his father. “But I can’t make myself anything but sorry and shamed if I hide away here while there’s others doing what I want to do.”
“You’re not going,” his mother said again.
She was snatching empty bowls away from the table so violently, so hastily, that one spun from her hand and shattered on the hearth. They all stared at the broken bits of pot.
“Take my spear,” his father said into the silence. “It’s better than yours. Be sure to bring it back.”
29
Three Doves
There were three doves in the basket, of the purest white. More simply beautiful than any birds Drann had ever seen. He had not even known they were there, packed away amongst the bedrolls and feed sacks and quivers on the Clamour’s wagon. Packed away beside Kerig, who slept on, swaddled like a suckling child, as Yulan eased it out from behind him.
The Free Page 26
