The Path of Sorrow

by David Pilling

  He waited for Sorrow’s reaction, an outburst of rage or tears, but there was none. The boy just went back to studying the void, his eyes bright as a bird’s in the dim light shed by the moon.

  “Good,” he said approvingly, “you accept your fate. It need not be so bad. I’ll try and make sure that your owner is a decent sort, one who doesn’t whip or abuse his slaves too much. Keep your head down, work hard, and wait for an opportunity to cut his throat. If and when you manage to slip your chains, don’t come after me. Don’t ever think of coming after me.”

  Satisfied, Bail stretched his rangy length on the hard ground, wrapped up in his cloak, and closed his eyes.

  After a moment he got up and tied Sorrow’s wrists and ankles together with a couple of lengths of cord. The boy didn’t resist or make a sound as he was trussed up and laid carefully on his side.

  “That’s just in case you’re tempted to put a knife in me while I sleep,” said Bail, loping back to his rough bed. “Again, it’s only business, and you should not harbour any resentment.”

  He rolled himself up in his cloak again and drifted into a light sleep.

  * * * *

  They spent the following day skulking in ravines and ditches, creeping from one patch of cover to the next, wary of the predators that might at any moment descend upon them. They were deep in High Blood territory, and the mountain clans were notorious for robbing and killing any strangers they encountered passing through their land.

  Bail was supremely cautious, and forbade any talk during daylight hours. He moved on soft feet like the practised thief he was, while Sorrow seemed to lose all substance and drift like a shadow. All around them the bluffs and spires of the High Places loomed, like the fingers of some mighty deity reaching up to the heavens. The gaunt landscape was smothered in a deep, weighty silence, broken only by the distant cry of an occasional snow-breasted eagle circling the highest peaks.

  No javelin or dart was hurled from the rocks at the two fugitives, nor did any slender, grey-robed figures appear to challenge them. At last, when knots of dark cloud began to appear in the east and a slight chill crept into the air, Bail began to look for a safe place to rest for the night. He found it in a narrow cave, or fissure. A few old, chewed bones scattered outside and the musty smell within suggested it had once been home to one of the rangy lynxes that prowled the High Places.

  “That,” said Bail, as he sat just inside the cave with his legs crossed in front of him, “was some achievement. To get us through these mountains without being spotted, well, it’s quite a feat. We have good reason to be proud.”

  “And we must do it again tomorrow, if we survive the night,” said Sorrow, huddled up miserably inside his cloak. They still could not risk a fire, and the cold was beginning to tighten its grip. Food and water were also running low, with no more than a few mouthfuls of water, bread, and biscuit between them. Bail seemed to think they could live off mountain springs and the flesh of wild goats, but so far Sorrow had seen little sign of either. Just rocks and cliffs and the bare blue sky above. The landscape was enlivened with just a few beetles and the occasional thorn bush.

  Bail seemed lost in thought, brooding in the lengthening shadows of the cave with his unlit pipe hanging from his mouth. Meanwhile Sorrow sat and shivered, sleep being impossible thanks to the creeping cold and his own great anxiety of mind.

  Young as he was, Sorrow was the last of a race that had never given in to fear. While one part of his mind worried and fretted, another part calculated. “We should not have left the old man,” the boy piped up, his thin, childish voice knifing through the gloom, “he knew things, things that could be of great benefit to you.”

  “Such as?” Bail replied out of the corner of his mouth.

  “He was a learned man, from one of the universities, and he told me many things in the days we were caged together. He knew all kinds of stories and histories.”

  “Very useful in a fight with mountain savages, I’m sure. Try waving a scroll at a High Blood clansman screaming for your liver and see where it gets you.”

  “You’re not listening, Bail. You never listen. He didn’t come to this part of the world out of mere curiosity, but to find something. Something very old, very ancient, and very powerful.”

  Tap, tap, went Bail’s fingers on his pipe. “Bloody academics are always digging up things best left alone. What is this ‘something’ he was after?”

  “He called it the Heartstones. An ancient stone tablet, many thousands of years old, inscribed with runes and a script written in a tongue few can now understand. The Heartstones is called that, so he told me, because it lies at the heart of many of the legends and folk tales of the High Places.”

  “Folklore doesn’t interest me. Where’s the money?”

  “If Denez was here, he could tell you more,” Sorrow answered with as much accusation as he dared. “The tablet is, of course, valuable, but it is worth more than gold. The person who found it would wield great power.”

  Tap, tap. “Still not good enough. By power I assume you mean sorcery. I’m not keen on sorcery. Money is more reliable.”

  “You would have all the riches you could desire. The Heartstones is inscribed with the One Hundred Decrees, the commandments that the ancestors of the mountain tribes were supposed to live by. It was buried in a secret place by one of their old prophets as a punishment, because the tribes kept breaking the decrees and wallowing in sin. They have been looking for the tablet ever since.”

  Bail uttered his dry creaking laugh. “I’ve got a long nose, boy, and I smell bullshit better than anyone. You’re trying to distract me from taking you south. A decent effort, but I can’t be fooled.”

  “Very well, then. Take me south and sell me to some slave-dealer. You won’t get much for me, enough to live on for a few weeks, perhaps. And then what will you do? You told me you are a murderer. That means there will be soldiers looking for you in the heartlands. I wonder how long even the Crooked Man can stay out of their clutches.”

  “Damn you, I’ve told you too much.” Bail ripped the pipe out of his mouth and stabbed the stem in Sorrow’s direction, like the point of a knife. Stupid, stupid. The strange little man-child was getting to him, and the last thing he needed to reveal was his hasty temper.

  “I suppose this Denez knew where the Heartstones was buried, did he?” he asked in softer tones.

  “He had a notebook full of drawings and signs he had pieced together from many years of study.”

  “Did you see it?”

  “Just once, but he wouldn’t open it. Said it was too precious.”

  “Ha! Well, it’s too late to go back and look for the old fool and his drawings now. Some High Blood will have cut his throat by now.”

  “No need to find him. I asked you to save Denez out of compassion, not for the sake of his notebook. I have that already.”

  Before Bail’s astonished gaze, Sorrow produced a small black volume bound in decaying red leather.

  “Yes, I stole it,” said Sorrow, “being in the company of the Crooked Man has made me a little crooked, it seems. Now the poor old man has nothing. I hope, for his sake, that he is dead.”

  Bail leaned forward and stretched out his hand. “Give me the book,” he whispered. His voice had an edge to it that Sorrow had come to recognise, a slight tremble of excitement.

  It was the sound of pure greed.

  * * * *

  There were soldiers everywhere, scouring the land for miles around, and troops of light cavalry were even venturing into the marshes. They came in units of ten or more, grim-faced lancers with forked beards, round iron helmets, and the sign of the leaping lion on their surcoats.

  Nassur was a happily ignorant peasant and made his living by spearing pike from his skiff in the deep pools and lakes of the marshes. He hardly ever ventured into the world beyond and resented the presence of soldiers. They stank of politics and horse sweat and blood, and had undoubtedly come to kill things. That was what soldiers
were for.

  There had already been killing aplenty, Nassur knew, for he had witnessed much from his hiding places in the long reeds. First there was the fight on the hill just beyond the southern extremity of his marsh. He had watched as hundreds, thousands, of men fought and died—for what reasons the Gods above presumably knew. Nassur’s own Gods were the gentle spirits of earth and water, concerned with the cycle of life, not the bringing of death to others.

  The fisherman had watched, his heart bleeding with pity as the butchery went on, until one army gave up and ran away. Many men fled down the north face of the hill and attempted to swim the Nephrates to take shelter in the marsh, and Nassur didn’t begrudge them that.

  Until, that is, the soldiers from the other army came after them. General Anma, flushed with her victory, was determined to exterminate as many of her enemy’s soldiers as possible. She unleashed her lancers on the fugitives with orders to kill until their white uniforms were soaked in blood, and so they did. Years of civil war had bred deep and abiding hatreds, as civil wars always do, and Anma’s troops had needed little encouragement to indulge in slaughter.

  Nassur had quickly become sick of watching men die. He started sadly back towards his hut, manoeuvring his skiff through the dank waters with the aid of a long pole. The cries and screams slowly receded behind him and were but a distant murmur by the time he reached his home.

  His hut stood on stilts in the water and was a simple one-room affair of reeds and mud, with a peaked roof of thatch. It was crude, perhaps, but enough for a man on his own. His late wife had occasionally complained that the hut was too cramped for two and would be much too small for three when the baby came. But she had died of a fever with the baby still inside her. Now their shades haunted the little hut, and their friendly, warm presence helped to ease his loneliness.

  Nassur was gutting a fish for his supper and wondering whether he dared light a fire with so many bloodthirsty strangers in the marsh, when he felt sharp steel prickle his forehead.

  He risked a glance up and saw a tall, filthy soldier with pale skin and a curly black beard standing over him. The man was rank with blood, sweat, and the filth of the marsh, and Nassur couldn’t understand how his normally sensitive nose had failed to smell the man a mile off. Perhaps he had smelled too much blood that day.

  The soldier was breathing hard. He croaked something in a language Nassur did not understand, and the harsh contours of the soldier’s face twisted in annoyance.

  “Food, shelter,” the soldier tried again. The fisherman gazed dumbly at him with his large watery eyes, and then down at the bowl. His lined, lugubrious face cracking into an idiot grin. Long, grasping fingers picked up a hunk of dark bread, twisted off a piece, and offered it up.

  * * * *

  Felipe stayed with Nassur for three days. At first the Templar ate his simple meal of bread and fish and lay on a rough blanket inside Nassur’s hut. He didn’t sleep, fearful of the peasant cutting his throat during the night, the soldiers still searching the fens outside, and irritated by the fleas that infested the blanket.

  He was conscious of Nassur staring at him. The fisherman seemed as gentle as he was simple, though Felipe had known any number of vicious killers with kind faces. With that in mind, he kept his eyes open and his hand closed about the gripe of his sword.

  Morning came, and with it a sense of exhaustion that Felipe had rarely known in his life. Every muscle creaked and every bone seemed to crackle in protest at being moved.

  “I am past fifty,” he said to Nassur, smiling at his dumb, uncomprehending features. “An age that most men in my homeland don’t expect to reach. I am, I think, the oldest person I know. And here I am, wifeless, childless, on some fruitless quest in a foreign land. And yet the Gods won’t kill me. They kill my friends, they rip me away from the places I love and cast me hither like chaff on the wind, but they won’t let me die. For what purpose, I wonder. Do you know?”

  Nassur scratched his hollow grimy cheek with a long finger and shrugged bony shoulders.

  For the rest of that day Felipe laid low in the hut, almost paralysed by his numberless aches and pains. If the soldiers discovered the hut, he knew they would take him easily enough. He was in no condition to put up much of a fight and lacked the will. The previous day’s battle had broken something inside him, some core part of his being. Perhaps it was his long-buried sense of guilt, or the slivers of a conscience, but he hoped it would mend. He felt sure the Gods weren’t done with him yet, and it wouldn’t do to die here, in some squalid hovel in the middle of a stinking swamp.

  The soldiers didn’t come, though he could occasionally hear men’s voices or the jingle of a harness carried on the wind. Nassur left the hut early, unwilling to let his decades-old fishing routine be disturbed by a few interlopers, and Felipe was left alone to brood. At last, despite his fears and his pains, he sank into a fitful sleep.

  Felipe seldom dreamed, but he dreamed now. He was standing on a vast, sandy plateau under purple skies, bare except for a lithe black serpent wriggling towards him. He flinched in fear, but then a lion came and smote the serpent with his paw. The serpent was sliced in two, and the bleeding end of the severed piece grew a head. Hissing and spitting, the two heads crumbled into dust.

  Felipe was left confronted by the lion. The great beast leaped at him, seemed to pass through him, and enveloped him in a gust of its hot breath. Crying out in pain, he shielded his face. The heat dissipated, and he opened his eyes to see a great city.

  The city was a fair place, with gleaming white walls and many-storied towers with peaked roofs painted in bright shades of red, blue, and gold. Inside the walls Felipe saw temples, palaces, fine, strong houses made of the same spotless white stone, clean peaceful cobbled streets, and everywhere the warm glow of the sun bathing the city in golden light.

  “I want to go there,” he said, and his words seemed to hang in the air, forming into tiny sand devils that rolled and sped away across the sand.

  “The City of Eagles is not for you,” said a familiar voice. Felipe turned and was confronted by the Grand Master of the Temple, Fulk the No Man’s Son.

  Fulk was recognisable but very different, taller somehow, dressed in a long robe of plain white, belted at the waist. He carried no weapons but a long staff taller than him, slender as a lance, carved of some sinister dark wood and lapped with bands of silver.

  His face was cold, all harsh planes and angles, the youth and humanity sapped out of it, and he wore no bandage to hide his empty eye sockets. Drawn by the fascinating horror of mutilation, Felipe gazed into those dark holes and thought he saw stars and planets swirling in their depths.

  “I go where I will, degenerate,” Felipe spat, reaching for his sword. The brand flamed into being and he took up a fighting stance, but the Grand Master ignored his challenge.

  “The Lion has killed the Snake, and your course is set,” he said, shaking his blind head sadly. “See, the sun sets and darkness falls.”

  Felipe risked a glance over his shoulder and saw the sun cooling to ashes that fell from the sky. The ashes turned to blood, and the people of the city screamed as they were spattered in gore. There was blood, oceans of it, and the city drowned, all its fine buildings tumbling and swept away by the red torrent.

  “I have you in my head often enough,” Felipe snarled at Fulk, “I’ll not have you haunting my dreams.”

  He cut savagely at his hated master, who deflected the blow with his staff. “This is where I dwell now,” answered Fulk, retreating gracefully as Felipe pressed his attack, “in the world of dreams. My living body sleeps in the Temple, drained by the effort of rescuing you. Consider that. I have almost killed myself to keep you alive.”

  “Do you expect gratitude?” Felipe almost screamed, drawing on every ounce of skill and strength to slay his enemy, to cleave him from skull to groin. It was no use. He was wasting his strength, and Fulk was a phantom, flickering in and out of sight and impossible to touch.

  �
�You reckon you have lost the will to live, but you must live a while longer,” said Fulk, lowering his staff. “The boy. You have yet to find the boy.”

  “Always,” panted Felipe, “when I stumble in the traces, there is someone to prick me up. Back to the plough, Felipe, your service is not done yet! There is no boy. That was a clumsy lie, an excuse to send us away.”

  “No lie, but salvation. Look at the sky.”

  Felipe did as he was told. He saw a million stars blinking in the purple sky, forming shapes and constellations he knew well from gazing at the universe as a boy. The familiar shapes were ragged and losing their definition, as if being slowly picked apart.

  “The stars are realigning,” said Fulk, and the dark holes of his eyes were full of lights, reflecting the movement in the heavens above. “They are preparing for Sorrow. The whole world, above and below, is preparing for him. You must find him, Felipe, before others do.”

  Felipe didn’t understand. He looked at Fulk with hopeless bafflement mixed with hate. How could the stars be realigning? Why would the world be in thrall to a child?

  There had been few problems in Felipe’s life that could not be solved with the swing of a sword. His hand tightened on the gripe. Fulk shook his head.

  “You put your faith in steel, but steel will fail you in the end,” he said. “I pray, for the sake of the Temple, that you find new answers.”

  “The strength of the Temple has always lain in steel!” Felipe cried indignantly, “Steel, and the strength of those that wield it.”

  He raised his arm to strike, and all the remaining strength fell away from him. His eyes darkened until he could see nothing but the slender silhouette of Fulk, black against the purple sky, and then he was cast into the whirlpool.

  Felipe’s eyes snapped open. It was early evening, fingers of crimson light stealing into the hut, and there was a smell of cooking in the room. His empty stomach grumbled in response.

  He rose on one elbow and looked across at Nassur, who had returned some time ago. The fisherman was dragging a freshly gutted fish through the still-warm ashes of a small fire inside a ring of pebbles, and he grinned at Felipe, displaying strong brown teeth.