Dark Forge

by Miles Cameron

  “Tonight the Great Moon, which we call the Hippo, will cross the Dark Forge,” Qna Liras said. “At least, I pray the Hippo will survive the crossing.”

  “Eagle!” Aranthur swore, and made the sign with his hands. “What do you mean?”

  “I watch the heavens,” the Masran Magos said. “I know the tracks that the stars and planets must follow. Tonight, the Hippo must cross the abyss of the rift.”

  Aranthur had never given it a moment’s thought, and he shuddered.

  The smaller moon was red-brown like old blood, and it crossed the sky rapidly, low on the horizon. The larger moon, which Easterners called the Hippo, and which the Byzas sometimes called “the Lady” and sometimes “the Huntress,” moved with deliberation.

  After midnight, it became obvious that the Huntress would either enter or cross the abyss. The Nomadi, especially, became very quiet.

  They were on the sands of the desert by then. It was cold, and a bitter wind blew from the north, picking up sand.

  The Nomadi began to ride with their heads down, and Jalu’d rode in among them.

  “Brothers and sisters!” he said. “What is written is written! And what the hand of man has marred, the hand of man can remake.”

  “This is not a matter for people, but gods,” Omga growled.

  “There is no difference between people and gods,” Jalu’d said.

  Qna Liras looked up at the stars.

  “A very strange doctrine, brother.”

  Jalu’d’s teeth flashed in the starlight. He rode up and down the column, and suddenly he was the clown, making Chimeg laugh, making Haran hold his stomach.

  Aranthur was on the same mission—trying not to watch the track of the great moon, trying not to let his mind go.

  “Change the outriders,” he said to Vilna, who was staring at the moon.

  “I am sorry, Bahadur,” he said. “I am trying to hold her in my mind, in case she dies, so that I will not forget her.”

  Aranthur looked back along the column, and then glanced up at the heavens.

  “I do not think she will be disturbed in her track, Vilna. And I am still worried about the ones hunting us.”

  The man nodded. “I will change the outriders,” he said, and cantered off across the sand and gravel.

  Aranthur wasn’t sure he believed what he’d just said, but he knew that it was his role to be confident, and he played it. He rode along, reminded Chimeg to take a mouthful of water, mocked Jalu’d to Sasan, mimed his own inept salutes to the rearguard, and exchanged a wary smile with Dahlia. She was at the very back of the column with Ansu, who was asleep in his saddle. Aranthur envied him.

  He turned Ariadne and cantered all the way to the front of the column. As he reached Vilna, he saw the man’s hand shoot up into the air, heard the cries from all the Nomadi, and then the shouts.

  High above them in the cold night air, the Huntress entered the black maw of the Dark Forge. Her light dimmed…

  And dimmed…

  Aranthur winced.

  Behind him, Qna Liras raised his hands.

  “Pray!” he called.

  He began a hymn—a hymn that any worshipper of the Twelve would know, to the beauty of the silver moon. Jalu’d joined him with a clear, beautiful voice, and Aranthur sang too.

  The Safians were off their horses, raising their hands in prayer, and then the Nomadi.

  The Huntress grew so pale that she appeared to be made of translucent marble, but she continued across the rift. Her light withered but did not go out.

  Aranthur thought of his Natural Philosophy Master, who had insisted that all gods were human fabrications and the planets were all natural phenomena.

  I wonder what he would think now, he wondered.

  He was kneeling in the cold sand; he had no memory of dismounting.

  The Great Moon reached the middle of the dark rift.

  Its light was very pale, like that of a new moon on snow, and then it seemed to stop in the sky.

  The hymn rose from them. Aranthur tried to imagine in his prayer that he sang with tens of thousands of other believers—with every free man and woman. He imagined the dance of the spheres, which his people danced at Darknight and the Eagle’s Triumph.

  The Huntress moved. She sailed like a queen through the rift, and as she crossed the centre and made her way to the broad end of the Dark Forge her light began to increase. The hymn faltered as the Nomadi fell on their faces in the sand and roared their approval.

  And then she completed her journey across the abyss of utter darkness and her light shone, pure and white.

  Aranthur got to his feet. Vilna was stuffing a talisman back inside his khaftan. ’Asid was still prostrate on the cold sand.

  Aranthur drew his sword. He felt as if he was in the grip of another’s will—or rather, he felt as if he’d been told what to say. But he agreed. He raised the old sword, and the blade glowed blue-white against the darkness.

  “The Light can cross the Darkness!” he roared. “Darkness cannot quench the Light!”

  They all turned, and then Chimeg gave a yip, and there was a scream like a battle cry from the whole company.

  Then he sheathed his sword, feeling sheepish. But his people were smiling.

  Later, as they rode across a plain of gravel, Jalu’d rode up beside him.

  “That was a Yezziri prayer,” he said. “And well chosen, Bahadur.”

  And later still, as the Tail of the Wolf brushed across the eastern sky, Qna Liras joined him.

  “What happened?” Aranthur asked. “To the Huntress?”

  “You think I know?” Qna Liras asked. “Let me see your sword.”

  Aranthur unsheathed it carefully and handed her over, hilt first.

  The Masran Magos cradled it like a child in his arms as they rode. In the early light, it appeared black and grey, the old stains of use mottling the surface of the blade.

  They rode side by side, and Aranthur felt… odd… at having the sword so far away.

  “I have just learnt…” Qna Liras began. Then he sighed. “I cannot believe, as a mature Magos, that I have had three things like this happen in one day. The Well. The Moon.” He looked at Aranthur. “And your sword.”

  He handed it back. “Tell me again where you received this sword? An ancient heirloom of your house?”

  “No, syr. I found it on a table of scrap and kitchen implements in the Covered Market in Megara. I paid…” He remembered. “Thirty silver soldi for it. Couldn’t pay my rent. Had to take in extra leather work. I almost failed Arithmetika.”

  Qna Liras shook his head, and then he laughed, and it was a long laugh, an unexpected sound in the desert dawn. Above them, the Huntress, or the Hippo, beamed.

  “Thirty silvers.” He shook his head. “You bought your fate for thirty soldi. Perhaps my fate as well.”

  Aranthur couldn’t read the priest’s face in the dawn.

  “Now you are mocking me,” he said.

  Qna Liras shook his head. “Do you know of the Seven?”

  Aranthur shook his head. And then, when Qna Liras opened his mouth, he raised a hand.

  “Kurvenos mentioned them once,” he said suddenly. “Seven swords. Artifacts—”

  “Seven paladins of the First Empire. Emperor Tulwar, the second emperor, ordered them killed, and their souls condemned to ride in swords.”

  Aranthur shuddered.

  “Six of them… were very dark, and how could they not be, forged in murder and betrayal?”

  Aranthur tried to imagine what it would be like to have his intellect shut up in the prison of a sword blade.

  “Eagle,” he muttered.

  “One of them was a woman. She… chose a different path.” Qna Liras said. “Or so the myths say.”

  “When was this? Two thousand years ago?”

  “It is a Byzas myth and not a Masran myth. Your Byzas empires do not keep records in stone like Masr. It was sometime in the late First Empire, before the wheels fell off.” He glanced a
t Aranthur. “There is a tale among the Lightbringers that she protected Tirase. The sword. She… rode an outlaw. He became a great general.”

  “Aploun! And this is that sword?” Aranthur asked.

  Yes.

  Aranthur touched the warm hilt. He flinched at her word.

  “Does she speak to you?” Qna Liras asked.

  Aranthur glanced at Vilna. “I need to get a camp spot and get us bedded down.”

  “You said that she spoke during the battle,” Qna Liras said.

  “Yes.”

  Aranthur didn’t really want to talk about the sword, and he waved to Vilna, who trotted over.

  “We need a camp,” he said.

  “If the lee of a dune can be called a camp,” Vilna said. “Does the One Who Seeks still know the way?”

  “To Masr?” the Jalu’d asked. “Of course I know the way. And the Sickle in the Sky is above Masr, so of course that’s where the hero is going, and all the rest of us.”

  Vilna tapped his mount’s sides with his heels and he was racing along the track south. Except that south was now a direction almost identical to every direction; the dunes ran roughly north-east to south-west, but there were enough exceptions to make dead reckoning almost impossible.

  Qna Liras raised his head.

  “Someone is searching,” he said.

  “And in the Aulos,” Dahlia said, and suddenly she put her hands to her ears.

  Aranthur could feel it, but not as sound. For him, it was more like a coherent beam of colour.

  “Shit,” muttered Qna Liras in Byzas.

  Aranthur watched the mottled patterns move along the desert floor. They swept over the column and went past.

  “Damn, damn,” Qna Liras said. “I didn’t think they could do that.” He shook his head.

  “An ancient Dhadhian artifact that still works, an incredible lesson in cosmology, a magik sword.” The Magos closed his eyes. “And now a search beam of coherent sihr.”

  “It’s coming back,” Dahlia called.

  “Everyone freeze!” Ansu shouted. “Do not move.”

  He reached inside his khaftan and produced a jade perfume bottle, which he opened.

  Instantly a breeze of fine scent seemed to caress them, and then to fly away. Ansu pointed west and north, and the breeze moved with a flutter of uncountable tiny iridescent wings.

  The mottled colour swept past the caravan and pounced on the fluttering, but the wings seemed unaffected. They moved very fast, and the mottled colours tried to move with them and vanished.

  “What was that?” Dahlia asked. “Ansu, you are an endless surprise.”

  The prince bowed in the saddle.

  “I endeavour only to please you, fair lady.”

  They slept, or at least rested, through the blazing heat of the day. Aranthur found it impossible to settle to sleep with the brilliant light of the day just beyond his eyelids. Every time he began to nod off, he thought of the sword which he had clutched to his side.

  But when he assumed he would never sleep, he rose, drank some water, and looked at the horses, stumbled around to his three outposts and checked his guards, and then went almost instantly to sleep under an awning of his military cloak. He awoke to the smell of salt fish in water.

  “Surprising news,” Qna Liras said, when he was awake and had a cup of hot quaveh in his hand. “Kilij’s hip and pelvis have knitted.” He rubbed his jaw. “In one day.”

  Vilna was roasting a tiny piece of meat on a skewer.

  “And all the horses…” he said. “The lame are healed. The old look younger.”

  “The Well,” Qna Liras said.

  “The other glyph I could read was Youth,” Dahlia said.

  “Are we younger?”

  Aranthur wasn’t awake enough to be having this conversation. But his wrist told him that the story was a true one.

  “How old does that make our guide?” Ansu glanced at Jalu’d, who was standing atop the dune, facing the setting sun. “He said he’s been drinking the water for years.”

  Aranthur shook his head. “I feel as if I’m going mad, or perhaps living in a myth brought to life, or maybe just an opera.”

  Dahlia nodded. “I knew your sword was an artifact, for what it’s worth. I thought you knew it too.”

  “Two thousand years old? With a woman’s soul in the blade?” He shook his head again. “But she has spoken to me.”

  And then, fascinating as the sword might be, or the speculation between Ansu and Qna Liras about what the passage of the Huntress meant, he had to see to his pickets, look at the horse herd, and round up all his people.

  “Rations for two more days,” Vilna reported.

  “So half rations from tonight,” Aranthur said.

  “At least the water’s good,” the old nomad said with a quarter of a smile.

  The night was uneventful. As the Red Moon rose, they entered a vast salt flat. Everyone tied scarves and turbans across their mouths, drank a mouthful of water, and settled in for a long ride. When the breeze picked salt up, it burned their eyes and nostrils, and the horses fidgeted. Twice, Aranthur ordered the column halted so that the riders could wipe their mounts’ eyes.

  And again, after the Great Moon rose, it had to cross the abyss, but the column kept riding. All of them felt fear, but it was not the gripping beast of the night before, and they rode on until the Huntress burst out of the far side of the Dark Forge, and again they cheered.

  Early in the new morning they climbed out of the salt flats and came to an outcropping of rock.

  “The Island!” called Qna Liras. “Jalu’d, you are the very prince of navigators.” He turned to Aranthur. “It is the only outcropping on the whole floor of the desert—it has water…”

  Vilna was beckoning to him. Aranthur walked over to find a desiccated corpse, headless, and the head a few paces away on the ground.

  “How long ago?” he asked.

  Chimeg moved one of the dead arms and then picked up the head. She shrugged.

  “Hard to know. Very dry here. A week? A month?” She looked at Aranthur. “Look at the cut.”

  The neck was cleanly severed, and there was black, scorched skin at the edges of the cut.

  “Malas,” she said.

  Aranthur couldn’t be sure in the moonlight, but it didn’t look like magik to him.

  “More like the swords of one of the Exalted,” he said.

  They refilled their water skins, ate half a meal, and went to sleep.

  And in the evening, they did it again. They rose and stretched, cooked a little food, and drank deep of the water before settling into another night of riding.

  The line of hills, or mountainous dunes, was growing closer.

  “How far to Masr?” Aranthur asked Jalu’d.

  Jalu’d smiled. “As far as it must be, of course.”

  Aranthur smiled in amusement. “So, how many days must it be?”

  “Ah, now you want prophecy. I will prophesy, then. Two days to the area we call ‘The Belt.’ Then two days to Al-Khaire.”

  “Four days?” Aranthur thought of the sand, the gravel, and the lack of fodder.

  “You worry too much. We are in the hands of the gods. And you especially, Bahadur.” Jalu’d nodded. “All the gods watch you.”

  “And yet you say the gods are but men and women.”

  “We are all kin, we and the gods. Who knows? Perhaps you will become a god, or I will, or Dahlia. In fact, I could easily worship your Dahlia. She is… perfect.” He laughed.

  “I do not know if you are the holiest man I have met, or the greatest blasphemer,” Aranthur said.

  “Good. I make you think, and that is good. And the only blasphemy is not to seek knowledge.”

  Jalu’d saluted with his riding whip and rode away, his axe glinting in the moonlight.

  Aranthur roved his column for a while, and eventually fetched up by the Lightbringer. He generally rode alone.

  “Tell me more of being a Lightbringer,” Aranthur
said.

  Qna Liras glanced at him. “I am a terrible Lightbringer.”

  Aranthur smiled at the other man’s humility. “Really?”

  “I have no idea. There are no meetings, or awards. I don’t even know who else is a Lightbringer, except Kurvenos and a handful of other men and women.” He shrugged.

  “Is it all about choices?” Aranthur asked.

  Qna Liras turned and looked at him. “Choices about power.”

  Aranthur nodded. “You kill.”

  “Too often,” the Lightbringer said.

  “Kurvenos does not kill.”

  “He doesn’t kill with a sword. But he leaves a fair number of corpses.”

  Aranthur had heard the man say as much with his own lips. He rode along for a while.

  “My powers are… greatly increased. Since the rift opened.”

  “I’m not surprised,” the Magos said. “Mine as well.”

  “I have a theory about the superiority of the Pure’s magik to ours. In the battle.”

  He glanced at the Lightbringer, but the man was muffled against the wind and his veiled face gave nothing away. Aranthur found that he craved the man’s good opinion so much that he was hesitant to voice his wild guess.

  But Qna Liras turned and pulled his face veil aside.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  “What if the Pure have recovered the use of glyphs? A whole lexicon of sigils and glyphs. They’d cast faster, and their castings would be more certain. And more… massive. The red fire. They cast it again and again.”

  Qna Liras toyed with the end of his turban.

  “Ahhh,” he said. “I believe you may be on to something. Speed, but not subtlety. The glyphs cannot be altered to circumstance, you understand. Indeed, I suspect that’s why the Dhadhi stopped using them.”

  Aranthur shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

  Qna Liras nodded. “Imagine water. Now, when you write the glyph for water, what you get is water in a single, ideal state. But what if you want muddy water? Or some other kind of water?”

  Aranthur wasn’t sure he understood, but he let it go.

  “You get water—but faster,” he said.

  “Very fast. When we faced the Disciple, he was incredibly fast, and yet not very good at dealing with rapid change.” Qna Liras nodded. “Glyphs. Varestan glyphs. I believe you are correct.”