Godless World 3 - Fall of Thanes

by Brian Ruckley

  The first of the stone houses loomed out of the mist. Orisian went, as soft-footed as he could, to crouch in the lee of its irregular wall. The moisture-laden air rolled thickly over his face. Up ahead, the mist took Ess'yr as he watched, fading her into its concealing mystery. Varryn went with her, and first one then two of Taim's men.

  Orisian could hear nothing. He could see little more. Just the intricate patina of lichens and mosses that had colonised the rough stone blocks of the wall. Just the narrowing, undulating trail, now gathering water, harvested from the sinking cloud, into its crevices. He could feel tiny beads of water forming all across his skin, merging with one another into a cold sheen. He licked his upper lip, drinking the stuff of the sky.

  Taim Narran eased past him, moving without haste in a low crouch. The warrior rounded the corner of the house. He went almost soundlessly, leaving no trace but the gentle turning of a pebble under his heel. Orisian edged forward. He had his shield on his arm. It was cumbersome, but its weight and breadth were comforting. This place, and these moments, felt unsafe, as if the skin of things was wearing thin. There were whispers of trepidation in his head, and he had the distracting sense that they came not from within but from out there, just beyond the fog-defined limit of his vision. As if there was something waiting for him. Beckoning him.

  He looked around the corner. Taim Narran was there, hunched down with his back against a strange, conical structure of rocks--a storage chamber of some kind. He pointed silently to the opposite wall of the narrow alley. Orisian looked, and at first could not understand what his eyes told him. There were bulbous shapes hanging from the wall: bloated waterskins or rocks some river had smoothed into unnatural spheres. Orisian frowned. The mist thinned briefly, showed them to him more clearly, and then drew a dank veil once more. Skulls. Human, as far he could tell. Adorning the back wall of a house like mad decoration.

  He stared at Taim. The warrior raised his eyebrows and shuffled back to join Orisian on the main track.

  "Stay close," Taim whispered.

  He led the way forward, still cautious but moving more quickly now. Orisian followed. Those distant murmurs inside his mind came now from skulls, which he imagined to festoon every invisible building out beyond the wall of mist. Two more warriors were close behind him, and beyond them somewhere the rest were waiting with Yvane and K'rina and the horses. The animals had their hoofs muffled, in the hope that they might pass unnoticed once the way had been cleared or secured, but Orisian felt an inexplicable certainty that whatever was here in Hent had already noticed them all, had already begun to gather itself all around them, unseen.

  A sound from up ahead, vanishingly faint: indecipherable but swiftly followed by a sibilant whimper. Then scraping, uneven footsteps and a shape was coalescing out of the grey nothingness. A man stumbled into sight down the centre of the track. He staggered against the bulging wall of a house, then came on. He wore an ill-fitting chain jerkin over a ragged hide jacket. One foot was booted, the other bare. There was an open wound in his throat, robbing him of the power of breath and speech even as it spilled his blood down onto his chest. As Orisian watched, the man's eyes rolled up into his head and he pitched forward. Taim darted up and caught him as he fell, then lowered him gently to the ground, one precautionary hand clamped over his mouth and nose. The man died without any further sound.

  Orisian and Taim knelt by the corpse, both of them gazing ahead. There was no more movement in the shifting, rolling bank of mist. A sickly scent rose from the dead man: an alloy of ale and vomit.

  "Is he Black Road?" Orisian whispered.

  Taim put a finger to his lips.

  They went on, deeper into the town's heart. A face startled Orisian, looking up at him from a shallow gutter cut along the side of the track. It was a girl's face, tiny and delicate, softened and blotched and a little deformed by incipient decay. She had been dead for some time. Orisian could not help but look into those smeared eyes. As he did so, he found himself looking not at this nameless girl but at the face of mute Bair, the stable hand who had died in Castle Kolglas; and the darkness of night rather than the gloom of fogs enveloped him, and he could smell smoke and straw and horses. The vision was more acute, more merciless, than memory. It mastered him and held him there, on the night of Winterbirth. He heard the clamour of battle, the crackle of flames, and experienced once again the dizzying mix of fear and anger that had been in him then. And he was turning, knowing already what he would see; knowing that his father was about to die, a knife in his chest. He did not want to witness that again, but still he turned towards it, caught by its irresistible pull.

  There was a hand on his arm, and instead of his father, he saw Taim Narran, leaning close in, staring worriedly into his eyes. Orisian sucked in wet air and nodded. Taim looked unconvinced, but released his grip and moved on.

  The track twisted and plunged down between two houses that angled out of the mountainside like flat ledges. Varryn was crouching on one of the slate roofs, at Orisian's eye level. The Kyrinin was holding out a hand in warning. Taim shrank back, extending his own arm to nudge Orisian half a pace back up the track.

  Even as they retreated, a figure appeared in the doorway of the hut, directly beneath Varryn. A frowning, gaunt-faced man peering about him like someone roused from sleep by a puzzling but unthreatening sound in the night. He rubbed at his stubbled chin as he looked down the track and then up. His eyes met Orisian's and widened. His hand frozen in mid-movement, he said something: still puzzled, but with the first foretaste of alarm in his northern-accented voice.

  Varryn flicked himself flat onto the roof and his two long arms darted down, one hand spreading across the man's mouth, the other clasping his throat in a cage of rigid fingers that dug into the skin, crushing. The man gave out a muffled, groaning yelp, only half-stifled. He twisted against Varryn's grip, and it seemed he might be free in a moment. Taim Narran rushed forward, heedless now of the noise his boots made on the rocky path. He punched the man once in the centre of the chest, with all his strength and with all the weight of his sword, its hilt firmly clenched in his fist. The man flew back into the dark interior, his breath gusting out from him, and Taim followed him without breaking stride.

  Varryn gathered up his spear and bow and vaulted lightly down from the roof. He glanced once in through the doorway and then, evidently satisfied by whatever he saw there, looked up at Orisian.

  "There are few," he said quietly. "They die easily."

  "Are any of the townsfolk left?" Orisian asked. His own voice sounded distant and hollow to him. "Have you found any of them?"

  Varryn said nothing but dipped the point of his spear down the slope of the path. Orisian's gazed followed, and he saw there lying in the mist another corpse. The hands were tied behind its back. The head was gone, leaving an open, rotting stump of neck. Orisian blinked at it, then looked down at his feet. When he lifted his eyes again, Varryn had disappeared and Taim was emerging from the house. His sword was dark with blood. He held up a short length of cord.

  "Woven from human hair," he muttered. "He was wearing it like a necklace."

  "What happened here?" Orisian wondered.

  "Madness," Taim said. His expression was troubled. For the first time he could remember, Orisian saw a fleeting distress there, an unease that bordered upon fear.

  "Can you feel it?" Orisian asked, not knowing what answer he hoped for. He did not want to be the only one who sensed the sickness boiling in Hent's gut, and congealing out of the air. But then, if he was not the only one, it meant that the sickness was real. It was here, closing on them.

  Taim shook his head, not in disagreement but confusion.

  "Something," he said. "I feel something."

  There was an anguished cry from somewhere ahead. Another death amidst the vapours.

  "Go and bring the others on through, as fast as you safely can," Taim said to one of the warriors coming hesitantly up behind them.

  As the man trotted back the wa
y they had come, Taim grimaced at Orisian.

  "The sooner we're clear of this place the better, I think," he said.

  Orisian opened his mouth to agree but was struck dumb by the insubstantial figure that he suddenly saw a little way up the slope, in the entrance to one of the tight, twisting paths that ran between Hent's high-walled yards and squat houses. The form was at first too faint to be sure whether it was made of flesh or from tendrils of heavy cloud. Its features were obscured or absent. Yet he knew who it was.

  He took a step up the track.

  "Fariel," he murmured.

  And the mist-shape of his dead brother turned its vague head towards him. Had there been eyes there, they would have been upon him. Orisian lost all awareness of where he was, or even when. For the space of three heartbeats--and he felt them, each one, loud and sharp in his breast--there was only him and this memory of Fariel.

  "I'm sorry," Orisian said. "I tried." He did not know what he was saying, or why. It was the need in him, the despair, that spoke.

  "Orisian!"

  The shout snapped him out of his dark reverie. Taim Narran was pushing past him. Just in time to block a spear thrust delivering by a laughing, leering woman. She wore a mail shirt, a dented metal skullcap of a helm, heavy boots that rose to the knees of her thick hide leggings. It was the garb of a warrior, yet she fought without skill, without guile. Spittle flew from her lips; her eyes rolled this way and that in their sockets.

  Orisian fell back onto his heels. Taim flattened his shield, driving the point of the woman's spear into the ground. His sword came down and smashed through the spear's shaft; would have taken the woman's hands too, had she not released it an instant before. She came at Taim again, reaching for him with bare hands, not hesitating. Grinning, muttering. He snapped his sword up, and the backhanded sweep hit her on her cheekbone, gouged its way up into the side of her face. Sent that little helmet soaring away, down the hillside, clattering off a wall before the hungry mists swallowed it. Orisian stared after it. He heard it bouncing once, twice: metal on stone. Ringing like some ailing, cracked bell. And then there was silence.

  "I saw the dead," Orisian said.

  He was sitting on a cloak spread over wet grass. Hent was some way behind them. They had travelled deep into the night, driven on by a common, unspoken desire to put as much ground as possible between them and that awful place.

  There had been not just skulls, but finger bones threaded onto sinews and hung from the eaves of houses. A corpse spreadeagled on a flat roof, hands and feet tied. The tiles beneath it stained by blood, for the woman had been alive when she was stretched out there, and when the carrion birds had come spiralling out of the sky. A tiny compound, the workspace of a stonecarver, now filled with bodies. They lay three deep, with snow draped over them.

  Of the Black Road company that had wrought such havoc upon that remote town, only a handful had remained for Ess'yr and Varryn and Taim and the rest to kill. Some had died of disease, some had apparently been killed by their companions. None of the dead had been interred or burned. They lay amongst the townsfolk, discarded and forgotten. It was as if, once Hent's inhabitants had been slain, the mad rage that fuelled their slaughter had demanded yet more tribute of those it possessed. And they had mindlessly done what it required of them.

  "Not the dead," Yvane said beside Orisian. "Memory. The Shared. The dead--the echo of them--persist in the Shared as long as there are those still living who remember them. Much longer than that, if stories are told of them, if their names are not forgotten."

  She shifted uncomfortably upon the cloak, searching for an accommodating undulation in the hard ground beneath.

  "It is Aeglyss, spreading. The walls between our minds and the Shared are breaking down. For you, today, it came as the dead, as death itself. It will come to each of us as our own minds and inclinations permit it. As they invite it. For those who know only struggle, only anger and killing... well, we saw back there what it does to them."

  "What about you?"

  "I hold it at bay. So far." There was a subtle strain in her voice. "I felt something last night. A... I don't know. Something. He grows stronger, or at least sinks deeper into the Shared."

  Orisian looked into the east. He was not sure whether he imagined it, but there seemed to be a hint of dawn out there. A grainy lightening of the horizon.

  "If the Shared can bring the dead to the surface like that, then is it the Sleeping Dark?" he asked, watching that possible, longed-for, distant daybreak.

  "Oh, if you want answers to questions like that, you need to ask them of a wiser head than mine."

  "There must be those who have thought of such things."

  "There are. At length, and for many years, in Highfast. And elsewhere. Why do you suppose some of the Kyrinin imagine the Anain, the lords of the Shared, to be the shepherds of their unresting dead? Does it matter, though? The answer?"

  "I don't know," Orisian said at length. "Is Inurian there, then? In the Shared?"

  "Not him. The dead are dead. Gone. What remains in the Shared is only the memory of him. The sound of his voice, the sense of who he was. Something like him, but not truly him. He has ended."

  Orisian nodded, sad.

  "It might be best if you tried to shut such things out," Yvane said gently. "It's only something inside you, wounding itself with the Shared."

  "But I remember them so clearly."

  "That's good, I imagine. It would be, anyway, in quieter times. Just don't let the memory of them crowd out the living for you."

  The dawn did come, and blearily illuminated a vast landscape. The ground sank away to the east of them in successive lines of grass-clad hills, interspersed with crags and snowfields and clusters of scrubby trees. Beyond that, sweeping off towards the faint and hesitant sun, lay Anlane. Endless, from this high vantage point. Rolling like a brown and grey sea into the indefinable distance, where it and the huge sky blurred into nothingness. All the world was silent forest, and Orisian feared it. He looked out over Anlane's illimitable wilds and imagined it to be alive, a gigantic sleeping power that waited only for his footsteps to disturb it. A place that, once entered, could not be left.

  Taim Narran was checking over the horses nearby. Yvane was kneeling beside K'rina's prostrate form, changing the bandages on her shoulder wound. The warriors, one by one, were mounting their horses as Taim approved their condition. It was all done with hardly a word.

  Ess'yr came across the grass to Orisian. She was holding something out to him. He looked down at what lay in her palm and at first did not recognise it.

  "Too long since the last we made of these," Ess'yr said.

  Two cords, each of them with a dozen or more small, tight knots spread along their length. A dozen memories, Orisian knew. A dozen thoughts, embodied in those tiny tangles of cord, to go into the wet earth in place of a lost, irrecoverable body.

  "You and Varryn?" he said quietly. He was afraid to reach out and accept these tokens, afraid of their implications and importance. But Ess'yr sank her hand a little closer to his own, tilting it to let the cords edge closer to her fingertips.

  "It is not a good time for the dead to wander, to go unrooted in willow," she said. "When Anain can die, there are none to shepherd the restless dead."

  Orisian willed his hand to rise, and accepted the two cords into his grasp. They were light. Yet he felt every knot in them as a hard point pressing against his skin. He stared down at them: the beaded kernels of two lives.

  "Which is yours?" he asked.

  Ess'yr touched a finger to one of the strands.

  "If you live and we do not, plant them beneath stakes of willow," she said.

  Orisian nodded numbly, for he could never have refused her this. That she should bring such a thing to him, and make him its guardian, filled him with a kind of awe. And a faint, intimate hope, perhaps, glimmering there deep inside him. But he feared it too, this responsibility that he knew with absolute certainty would bring unbearable
pain should he ever be called upon to discharge it.

  "If you are to die, I do not think you will do it alone," he murmured. "I may not be able to do as you ask."

  "Perhaps." She sounded unconcerned. "But the ra'tyn is done now. The promise I made to Inurian. It is spent. Where we go now, where you choose to go, Varryn and I have other battles to fight. We become a spear a'an, entering the lands of the enemy. I have done what I can for Inurian. For you. We will go as far as we can with you, but..."

  The words trailed away. Orisian lifted his head and looked into her eyes. So imperturbably calm and knowing, those flinty windows, yet revealing nothing of what lay beyond them, within.

  "I understand," he said. "I will keep them safe."

  The thought came to him suddenly, woken by the sorrow of potential partings, potential loss.

  "Will you wait for a moment?" he asked her.

  He found a cord of his own, sealing the mouth of a canvas bag that held only a few remnant scraps of food. Long enough, he thought.

  He sat crosslegged on the cold, damp grass and began looping a chain of knots into the cord's length. He was clumsy, but stubbornly persisted. Each knot he moistened with the tip of his tongue, as he had seen Ess'yr and Varryn do, long ago in the vo'an where he had woken from wounded slumber to her face.

  One for the time before the Heart Fever, a bright memory of family. Then one for his mother, one for his brother, one for his father. The memories came clearly, carrying equal parts of comfort and misery. One for Inurian, one for Anyara. That last hurt him more than he expected, for its texture of distance and parting. But he remembered her strength and her unruly vigour, and found a smile. One for Rothe, too raw and recent to linger upon, no matter how much he longed to recall only the man's gruff companionship and loyal affection. And the last of them, tightening into the strand, clenching itself into permanence, for Ess'yr. For what might have been, in a world, or a life, other than this one.

  He wept a little, running his finger over what he had made, but nor for long. He took it to Ess'yr, who had been standing patiently some way down the slope.