“And so you lived in the House of the Maker,” murmured Quai. Logen shivered as he hunched down over his own bowl. His one brief visit to the place still gave him nightmares.
“I did,” said Bayaz, “and I learned its ways. My skill in High Art made me useful to my new master. But Kanedias was far more jealous of his secrets than ever Juvens had been, and he worked me as hard as a slave at his forges, and taught me only such scraps as I needed to serve him. I grew bitter, and when the Maker left to seek out materials for his works, my curiosity, and my ambition, and my thirst for knowledge, drove me to stray into parts of his House where he had forbidden me to tread. And there I found his best-guarded secret.” He paused.
“What was it?” prompted Longfoot, spoon frozen halfway to his mouth.
“His daughter.”
“Tolomei,” whispered Quai, in a hiss barely audible.
Bayaz nodded, and one corner of his mouth curled upwards, as though he remembered something good. “She was unlike any other. She had never left the Maker’s House, had never spoken to anyone besides her father. She helped him with certain tasks, I learned. She handled… certain materials… that only the Maker’s own blood could touch. That, I believe, is why he fathered her in the first place. She was beautiful beyond compare.” Bayaz’ face twitched, and he looked down at the ground with a sour smile. “Or so she seems to me, in memory.”
“That was good,” said Luthar, licking his fingers and setting down his empty bowl. He’d become a great deal less picky with his food lately. Logen reckoned a few weeks of not being able to chew was sure to do that to a man. “There any more?” he asked hopefully.
“Take mine,” hissed Quai, thrusting his bowl at Luthar. His face was deathly cold, his eyes two points of light in the shadows as he glared across at his master. “Go on.”
Bayaz looked up. “Tolomei fascinated me, and I her. It seems strange to say, but I was young then, and full of fire, and still had as fine a head of hair as Captain Luthar.” He ran one hissing palm over his bald scalp, then shrugged his shoulders. “We fell in love.” He looked at each of them in turn, as though daring them to laugh, but Logen was too busy sucking salty porridge from his teeth, and no one else so much as smiled.
“She told me of the tasks her father gave her, and I began, dimly, to understand. He had gathered from far and wide some fragments of material from the world below, left over from the time when demons still walked our earth. He was trying to tap the power of these splinters, to incorporate them into his machines. He was tampering with those forces forbidden by the First Law, and had already had some success.” Logen shifted uncomfortably. He remembered the thing he had seen in the Maker’s House, lying in the wet on a block of white stone, strange and fascinating. The Divider, Bayaz had called it. Two edges—one here, one on the Other Side. He had no appetite now, and he shoved his bowl down by the fire, half-finished.
“I was horrified,” continued Bayaz. “I had seen the ruin that Glustrod had brought upon the world, and I resolved to go to Juvens and tell him everything. But I feared to leave Tolomei behind, and she would not leave all she knew. So I delayed, and Kanedias returned unexpected, and found us together. His fury was…” and Bayaz winced as though the memory alone was painful “…impossible to describe. His House shook with it, rang with it, burned with it. I was lucky to escape with my life, and fled to seek sanctuary with my old master.”
Ferro snorted. “He was the forgiving type, then?”
“Fortunately for me. Juvens would not turn me away, despite my betrayal. Especially once I told him of his brother’s attempts to break the First Law. The Maker came in great wrath, demanding justice for the violation of his daughter, the theft of his secrets. Juvens refused. He demanded to know what experiments Kanedias had been undertaking. The brothers fought, and I fled. The sky was lit with the fury of their battle. I returned to find my master dead, his brother gone. I swore vengeance. I gathered the Magi from across the world, and we made war on the Maker. All of us. Except for Khalul.”
“Why not him?” growled Ferro.
“He said that I could not be trusted. That my folly had caused the war.”
“All too true, surely?” muttered Quai.
“Perhaps, in part. But he made far worse accusations also. He and his cursed apprentice, Mamun. Lies,” he hissed at the fire. “All lies, and the rest of the Magi were not deceived. So Khalul left the order, and returned to the South, and sought for power elsewhere. And he found it. By doing as Glustrod had done, and damning himself. By breaking the Second Law, and eating the flesh of men. Only eleven of us went to fight Kanedias, and only nine of us returned.”
Bayaz took a long breath, and gave a long sigh. “So, Master Quai. There is the story of my mistakes, laid bare. You could say they were the cause of my master’s death, of the schism in the order of Magi. You could say that is why we are now heading westwards, into the ruins of the past. You could say that is why Captain Luthar has suffered a broken jaw.”
“The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present,” muttered Logen to himself.
“So they do,” said Bayaz, “so they do. And sour fruit indeed. Will you learn from my mistakes, Master Quai, as I have, and pay some attention to your master?”
“Of course,” said the apprentice, though Logen wondered if there was a hint of irony in his voice. “I will obey in all things.”
“You would be wise to. If I had obeyed Juvens, perhaps I would not have this.” Bayaz undid the top two buttons of his shirt and pulled his collar to one side. The firelight flickered on a faded scar, from the base of the old man’s neck down towards his shoulder. “The Maker himself gave it to me. Another inch and it would have been my death.” He rubbed sourly at it. “All those years ago, and it still aches, from time to time. The pain it has given me over the slow years… so you see, Master Luthar, although you bear a mark, it could be worse.”
Longfoot cleared his throat. “That is quite an injury, of course, but I believe I can do better.” He took hold of his dirty trouser leg and pulled it right up to his groin, turning his sinewy thigh towards the firelight. There was an ugly mass of puckered grey scar flesh almost all the way round his leg. Even Logen had to admit to being impressed.
“What the hell did that?” asked Luthar, looking slightly queasy.
Longfoot smiled. “Many years ago, when I was yet a young man, I was shipwrecked in a storm off the coast of Suljuk. Nine times, in all, God has seen fit to dump me into his cold ocean in bad weather. Luckily, I have always been truly blessed as a swimmer. Unluckily, on this occasion, some manner of great fish took me for its next meal.”
“A fish?” muttered Ferro.
“Indeed. A most huge and aggressive fish, with a jaw wide as a doorway and teeth like knives. Fortunately, a sharp blow on the nose,” and he chopped at the air with his hand, “caused it to release me, and a fortuitous current washed me up on shore. I was doubly blessed to find a sympathetic lady among the natives, who allowed me to recuperate in her abode, for the people of Suljuk are generally most suspicious of outsiders.” He sighed happily. “That is how I came to learn their language. A highly spiritual people. God has favoured me. Truly.” There was a silence.
“I bet you can do better.” Luthar was grinning across at Logen.
“I got bitten by a mean sheep once, but it didn’t leave much of a mark.”
“What about the finger?”
“This?” He stared at the familiar stub, waggling it back and forward. “What about it?”
“How did you lose it?”
Logen frowned. He wasn’t sure he liked the way this conversation was going. Hearing about Bayaz’ mistakes was one thing, but he wasn’t that keen to delve into his own. The dead knew, he’d made some bad ones. Still, they were all looking now. He had to say something. “I lost it in a battle. Outside a place called Carleon. I was young back then, and full of fire myself. It was my stupid fashion to go charging into the thick of the fighting. That time, when I cam
e out, the finger was gone.”
“Heat of the moment, eh?” asked Bayaz.
“Something like that.” He frowned and rubbed gently at the stump. “Strange thing. For a long time after it was gone, I could still feel it, itching, right in the tip. Drove me mad. How can you scratch a finger that’s not there?”
“Did it hurt?” asked Luthar.
“Like a bastard, to begin with, but not half as much as some others I’ve had.”
“Like what?”
That needed some thinking about. Logen scratched at his face and turned over all the hours, and days, and weeks he’d spent injured, and bloody, and screaming. Limping around or trying to cut his meat with his hands all bandaged up. “I got a good sword cut across my face one time,” he said, feeling the notch Tul Duru had made in his ear, “bled like anything. Nearly got my eye poked out with an arrow,” rubbing at the crescent scar under his brow. “Took hours to dig out all the splinters. Then I had a bloody great rock dropped on me at the siege of Uffrith. First day, as well.” He rubbed the back of his head and felt the lumpy ridges, under his hair. “Broke my skull, and my shoulder too.”
“Nasty,” said Bayaz.
“My own fault. That’s what you get when you try and tear a city wall down with your bare hands.” Luthar stared at him, and he shrugged. “Didn’t work. Like I said, I was hot-headed in my youth.”
“I’m only surprised you didn’t try and chew through it.”
“Most likely that would’ve been my next move. Just as well they dropped a rock on me. At least I’ve still got my teeth. Spent two months squealing on my back while they laid siege to the city. I only just healed in time for the fight with Threetrees, when I got the whole lot broken again, and more besides.” Logen winced at the memory, curling up the fingers of his right hand and straightening them out, remembering the pain of it, all smashed up. “Now that really did hurt. Not as much as this, though,” and he dug his hand under his belt and pulled his shirt up. They all peered across the fire to see what he was pointing at. A small scar, really, just under his bottom rib, in the hollow beside his stomach.
“Doesn’t look like much,” said Luthar.
Logen shuffled round to show them his back. “There’s the rest of it,” he said, jerking his thumb at what he knew was a much bigger mark beside his backbone. There was a long silence while they took that in.
“Right through?” murmured Longfoot.
“Right through, with a spear. In a duel, with a man called Harding Grim. Damn lucky to live, and that’s a fact.”
“If it was in a duel,” murmured Bayaz, “how did you come out alive?”
Logen licked his lips. His mouth tasted bitter. “I beat him.”
“With a spear through you?”
“I didn’t know about it until afterwards.”
Longfoot and Luthar frowned at each other. “That would seem a difficult detail to overlook,” said the Navigator.
“You’d think so.” Logen hesitated, trying to think of a good way to put it, but there was no good way. “There are times… well… I don’t really know what I’m doing.”
A long pause. “How do you mean?” asked Bayaz, and Logen winced. All the fragile trust he’d built over the last few weeks was in danger of crumbling round his ears, but he didn’t see any choice. He’d never been much of a liar.
“When I was fourteen, I think, I argued with a friend. Can’t even remember what about. I remember being angry. I remember he hit me. Then I was looking at my hands.” And he looked down at them now, pale in the darkness. “I’d strangled him. Good and dead. I didn’t remember doing it, but there was only me there, and I had his blood under my nails. I dragged him up some rocks, and I threw him off onto his head, and I said he fell out of a tree and died, and everyone believed me. His mother cried, and so on, but what could I do? That was the first time it happened.”
Logen felt the eyes of the group all fixed on him. “Few years later I nearly killed my father. Stabbed him while we were eating. Don’t know why. Don’t know why at all. He healed, luckily.”
He felt Longfoot easing nervously away, and he hardly blamed him. “That was when the Shanka started coming more often. So my father sent me south, over the mountains, to look for help. So I found Bethod, and he offered me help if I’d fight for him. I was happy to do it, fool that I was, but the fighting went on, and on. The things I did in those wars… the things they told me I did.” He took a long breath. “Well. I’d killed friends. You should have seen what I did to enemies. To begin with I enjoyed it. I loved to sit at the top of the fire, to look at men and see their fear, to have no man dare to meet my eye, but it got worse. And worse. There came one winter that I didn’t know who I was, or what I was doing most of the time. Sometimes I’d see it happening, but I couldn’t change it. No one knew who I’d kill next. They were all shitting themselves, even Bethod, and no one more scared of me than I was.”
They all sat for a while in gaping silence. The ruined building had been seeming like some kind of comfort after all that dead and empty space on the plain, but it didn’t any more. The empty windows yawned like wounds. The empty doorways gaped like graves. The silence dragged on, and on, and then Longfoot cleared his throat. “So, for the sake of argument, do you think it’s possible that, perhaps without intending to, you might kill one of us?”
“It’s more likely I’d kill all of you than one.”
Bayaz was frowning. “Forgive me if I feel less than entirely reassured.”
“I wish at least that you had mentioned this earlier!” snapped Longfoot. “It is the type of information a travelling companion should share! I hardly think that—”
“Leave him be,” growled Ferro.
“But we need to know—”
“Shut your mouth, stargazing fool. You’re all a long way from perfect.” She scowled over at Longfoot. “Some of you make a lot of words and are nowhere near when the trouble starts.” She frowned at Luthar. “Some of you are a lot less use than you think you are.” She glared at Bayaz. “And some of you keep a lot of secrets, then fall asleep at bad times and leave the rest of us stranded in the middle of nowhere. So he’s a killer. So fucking what? Suited you well enough when the killing needed doing.”
“I only wanted to—”
“Shut your mouth, I said.” Longfoot blinked for a moment, then did as he was told.
Logen stared across the fire at Ferro. The very last place he’d ever have hoped to get a good word. Out of all of them, only she’d seen it happen. Only she knew what he really meant. And still she’d spoken up for him. She saw him looking, and she scowled and shrank back into her corner, but that didn’t change anything. He felt himself smile.
“What about you, then?” Bayaz was looking at Ferro as well, touching one finger to his lip as though thinking.
“What about me?”
“You say you don’t like secrets. We have all spoken of our scars. I bored the group with my old stories, and the Bloody-Nine thrilled us with his.” The Magus tapped his bony face, full of hard shadows from the fire. “How did you get yours?”
A pause. “I bet you made whoever gave you that suffer, eh?” said Luthar, a trace of laughter in his voice.
Longfoot started to chuckle. “Oh indeed! I daresay he came to a sharp end! I dread to think of the—”
“I did it,” said Ferro.
Such laughter as there was sputtered and died, the smiles faded as they took that in. “Eh?” said Logen.
“What, pink, you fucking deaf? I did it to myself.”
“Why?”
“Hah!” she barked, glaring at him across the fire. “You don’t know what it is, to be owned! When I was twelve years old I was sold to a man called Susman.” And she spat on the ground and snarled something in her own tongue. Logen didn’t reckon it was a compliment. “He owned a place where girls were trained, then sold on at a profit.”
“Trained to do what?” asked Luthar.
“What do you think, fool? To fuc
k.”
“Ah,” he squeaked, swallowing and looking at the ground again.
“Two years I was there. Two years, before I stole a knife. I did not know then, how to kill. So I hurt my owner the best way I could. I cut myself, right to the bone. By the time they got the blade away from me I had cut my price down to a quarter.” She grinned fiercely at the fire as if it had been her proudest day. “You should have heard him squeal, the bastard!”
Logen stared. Longfoot gaped. Even the First of the Magi looked shocked. “You scarred yourself?”
“What of it?” Silence again. The wind blew up and swirled around inside the ruin, hissing in the chinks between the stones and making the flames flicker and dance. No one had much left to say after that.
Furious
The snow drifted down, white specks swirling in the empty air beyond the cliffs edge, turning the green pines, the black rocks, the brown river below into grey ghosts.
West could hardly believe that as a child he had looked forward to the coming of snow every year. That he had been delighted to wake up and see the world coated in white. That it could have held a mystery, and a wonder, and a joy. Now the sight of the flakes settling on Cathil’s hair, on Ladisla’s coat, on West’s own filthy trouser leg, filled him with horror. More gripping cold, more chafing wet, more crushing effort to move. He rubbed his pale hands together, sniffed and frowned up at the sky, willing himself not to slide into misery.
“Have to make the best of things,” he whispered, the words croaking in his raw throat and smoking thick in the cold. “Have to.” He thought of warm summer in the Agriont. Blossom blowing from the trees in the squares. Birds twittering on the shoulders of smiling statues. Sunlight pouring through leafy branches in the park. It did not help. He sniffed back runny snot, tried yet again to worm his hands up into his uniform sleeves, but they were never quite long enough. He gripped the frayed hems with his pale fingers. Would he ever be warm again?
He felt Pike’s hand on his shoulder. “Something’s up,” murmured the convict. He pointed at the Northmen, squatting in a group, muttering urgently to each other.
Before They Are Hanged tfl-2 Page 37
