This Forsaken Earth

by Paul Kearney

  “But first, Governor Moerus, let me introduce to you the Queen’s brother, Rol Cortishane.” There were audible gasps, widened eyes. Standing there with the blood still seeping from his hastily stitched wounds, Rol shot the Thief-King an irritated glare, but said nothing. It was all he could do to keep his feet.

  Moerus bowed. “We had heard rumors, of course, but it seemed too much to hope that it should be true. You are very welcome, my lord.”

  He was a spare, well-knit man of medium height in a wine-colored coat. A narrow face, and an eagle nose that lent it both ugliness and distinction. His eyes were brown as the neck of a thrush. They took in Rol, Gallico, Creed, and Giffon in one swift sweep, giving away nothing except concern and dutiful interest, but one of his hands was working as though it played an invisible pipe.

  A period of talk and bustle, and then stairs that seemed to go on forever. A winsome young housemaid propped up Rol’s elbow. She smelled so clean and felt so good that he leaned more weight on her than he had need to, and hazily wondered how long it had been since he had dirtied up a sweet-smelling young woman.

  Clean sheets, a wide bed like an expanse of pale desert. The maid stripped him naked and he was too tired to care. He lay back in the bed and stared at a fire burning in the brick and marble hearth close by, and staring into the heart of those flames, he drifted down deep, deep into darkness.

  In the dream, or what passed for a dream, his wounds were healed but their scars remained. He stood as he had before, and stared out across a moonlit expanse of silver-gray hills to the savage heights of the Myconian Mountains in the distance. They seemed to ring every horizon, and nowhere could he find any glimpse of the sea, or any smell of salt. He was lost, buried in a ring of snow-girt stone.

  Fleam stood beside him again, but something about her had changed. She was still a statuesque beauty, white-skinned and black-haired, but now she wore the loose ocher robes of a desert traveler, the keffiyeh thrown back on her shoulders. She looked older; there were lines at the corners of her eyes and a hint of dark hollows under them. Her resemblance to Rowen was startling. She did not turn when Rol spoke her name, but studied the mountains in the distance as though some secret was hidden in the shape of the peaks.

  “Cross these eastward, and in time you will come to the edge of the Inner Reach,” Fleam said. “On the shores of that ancient sea is a ruined city whose true name has been forgotten. It was a place of refuge once. It is where I was made, forged in blood and iron and rage by one whom I had betrayed.” She smiled, and there was a humanity in her eyes that Rol had not seen before. She seemed to realize this; the smile curdled.

  “In the beginning, I had no name. I was a shape, a snarling shadow of the Old World that slipped into this existence. An old man who was not a man, not anything like a man, gave me this form, and in it I walked the earth. I became a woman who loved, and lost, who betrayed and was betrayed in her turn. Little of that woman remains; the shadow swamps what soul he gave me. What is left is a mere ghost in the blade, and the other thing feeds upon the blood the metal spills.”

  Now Fleam turned her head and looked Rol in the face. Her eyes were the color of burnished steel. “The woman died, murdered. The sword is all that remains—and the ghost within the blade. I am but an echo of who she once was.” A change came over Fleam’s face. The lines smoothed out.

  “My name was Amerie.”

  Ten

  GHOSTS OF MEMORY

  ROL WOKE THIRSTY. THERE WAS A PITCHER BY THE BED, and he pulled it to his mouth, gulping back cold water until it spilled down his neck and chest and soaked the bedclothes. He swung his legs onto the floor and stood up. The fire was dead, and there was a gray light in the room; it was still some time before dawn, but dawn came late these days. The air in the place was chill enough to beget a white cloud out of his breath, raise goose pimples on his skin. He scratched at the wound on his shoulder; it itched damnably. Then it struck him. He peeled off Giffon’s neatly bound dressings and as he did they came away crusted with dried blood, and stuck in it a tangle of short black threads. His stitches, he realized; they had all come out.

  His wounds were closed, pink with new flesh. He was as hale and healed as if he had slept a month away in the night.

  He stretched and flexed his limbs experimentally, fear fighting wonder in his mind. A round roseate dimple was all that remained of the bullet-wound in his thigh. The more minor wounds had entirely disappeared, as if they had been inflicted in a dream.

  Is this it now? he wondered. Is this how it will be from now on?

  The sight of his new scars frightened him. He realized that there was some process at work within him that he had no control over, no inkling of rhyme or reason.

  “I am not human,” he said aloud to the empty room. He had known that; what he had not suspected was that he would grow even less human as he grew older. When would it stop, and what would he become?

  There was another stone in his mind’s shoe: a memory of visions in the night. If they were dreams, he had not remembered them, but retained the aftertaste. He began to shiver, the stone floor numbing the soles of his feet. Human enough for that, at any rate. Looking about him, he saw that fresh clothes had been laid out for him on a chair. A linen shirt, leather jerkin and bronze-buckled belt, woolen breeches and hose, and well-made half boots. On top of them lay Fleam in her scabbard. He picked up the scimitar; the leather of her sheath had been sliced open halfway down its length so that the pale shine of the blade peeped through. He drew it forth and studied the edge closely. Not a nick or scratch to be seen. Fleam never needed sharpening, never tarnished, and the gore that had clotted her had disappeared, though her scabbard was still stained with it. Rol kissed the blade, and it was warm under his lips. He had the strangest urge to run the edge of the scimitar across his face, and imagined that marvelous steel sinking into his own flesh with an inexplicable thrill of pleasure.

  He set the sword down again, and had to stand still a moment to clear his mind. He dressed himself—everything fitted perfectly—and strode to a curtained alcove. When he drew back the drapes he found that they concealed a pair of windowed doors, which in turn led out onto a balcony—the tiny draft had beckoned him. He opened the doors and stood looking out on a sea of snow-covered roofs that was the city of Gallitras. He was high up here; not only several stories off the ground, but on a low hill that nonetheless afforded a fine view of the vast river-valley beyond the city walls. Always, the nobility built their homes on the higher ground—it was a basic of human nature that the rulers must look down on those they rule.

  He was looking west, toward the still-smoking ruins of Ruthe and its bridges. The Embrun River itself was a dark ribbon across the land, cutting through the matt paleness of the snow-plain; beyond it, the fires of the loyalist encampment were beginning to light in their hundreds in a drear country that the slow-rising winter sun had not yet touched. On the Inner Reach that sun would already be kindling to jewels the broken facets of the waves, but the tall bulk of the Myconians still hedged the kingdom of Bionar in shadow.

  “Winter lies long here, and the sun begrudges the journey over the mountains.”

  Rol spun on his heel, his hand automatically slapping the hip where Fleam should have been, but she was still on the chair by the bed. The speaker was an old, withered man in a shapeless robe that must once have been fine, judging by the heavy embroidery, but which was now grimy and faded. The man had an inquisitive, triangular visage with prominent front teeth and bright black eyes. He looked like Canker’s grandfather. He leaned on a knobbed blackthorn stick, and age had brought the joints of his fingers out in bony lumps. “So you are Rowen’s long-lost brother, eh?”

  “You’re quiet on your feet,” Rol said. He went back to the side of the bed and buckled Fleam’s scabbard to his belt.

  By way of reply the old man lifted his stick and pulled back another set of drapes behind him. A black archway loomed beyond, and dank air eddied out of it. “Set there so that
the household slaves would not wake up the occupant in their nightly comings and goings. You slept like one of the dead, my friend.”

  “Who are you?”

  “A friend of Canker’s. A scholar. My name is Phrynius. I see you have no more need of your dressings.”

  “It would seem so.”

  “Fascinating. Come with me, my young friend. My rooms are not far from here, and I have warmed wine and fresh bread for to break your fast.” The old man’s face was bright and friendly. He stooped over his stick, but had he straightened he would have been as tall as Rol.

  “I’d sooner look in on my friends first.”

  “They’re mere yards away, and all sleeping like babes, despite the halftroll’s snores. Come, now. The house is still abed; we’re the only folk awake. The best time to talk with discretion.”

  “What’s to talk about, old man?”

  “Michal Psellos, for one thing.”

  There was a fire burning, which was something. Rol stood before it warming himself, wondering if his time in the south had rendered him more susceptible to northern winters. The backs of his hands were faintly blue, as if his blood were cramped out at the wrists. Phrynius had a little spirit-stove on which he heated a copper pan of wine and added cloves, cinnamon, and other spices Rol did not recognize. The heady scent of them filled the cramped room, along with that of newly baked bread.

  “There is a bakery in the basement,” Phrynius explained. “There’s not much in the way of flour to be had these days, though; we eke it out with ground chickpeas, and it answers well enough, if you have a pat of butter to melt on it.” He stirred the wine.

  “You like books,” Rol said, scanning the room. Every wall was lined with them. They were piled up in pillars on the floor and lay perilously close to the hearth. There were two tables, but one was hidden in papers. The other supported the little brass stove and a slatternly collection of unwashed clay plates and bowls, one of which housed a sleeping dormouse.

  “They are my life,” Phrynius said equably. “And my friends. One is never alone if one possesses a book.”

  Rol selected one at random, a slim, leather-bound affair. The Roots of Cantrimy. He flicked through it, but it seemed gibberish.

  …and when one is assured that the hagrolithic interstices in the blood are in fact closely bound enough to occlude the introduced substances, then it can be said with some certainty that upon the death of the subject a hagrolithic transformation is possible. How much this transformation is a result of the subject’s conscious volition, and how much it is an irrefragable physical process has yet to be fully determined. With the paucity of research, and the inevitable dearth of subjects willing to—

  “Here we are,” Phrynius said. “Warm wine on a winter morning—just the thing.” He poured the steaming, fragrant liquid into two clay mugs and set down the pan with a clang, his knob-knuckled old hands trembling with the effort. There were two badly stuffed armchairs before the fire, and he and Rol sat in these sipping their wine and staring into the flames. From a small window above them a gray gleam of light seeped into the room as the sun began to top the mountains in the world outside.

  Phrynius raised his pointed nose and sniffed the air. “It’ll snow again today. Bah! I can smell it, and I feel it in my poor swollen bones. Let us hope those fools will leave their guns alone for a day and let us breakfast in peace. I prefer the night hours—less coming and going, and servants snooping with laundry and chamber-pots—and meals, the gods preserve us. Ah, this wine is rubbish, of course, as is all Bionese that is bottled east of the Embrun, but what is the matter when one adds all manner of stuff to it and boils it over a stove, eh?”

  “You spoke of Michal Psellos,” Rol said patiently. He was half convinced the little man was not quite right in the head, but that name held him fixed here, drinking the hot, execrable wine and half listening for the sounds of renewed battle from the river.

  “An unpleasant man, though an apt pupil. Old Ardisan trusted him too much, but then he was his father, and oftentimes fathers are blind to the faults of their sons.”

  Rol leaned forward. “You knew my grandfather?”

  “We were, you might say, contemporaries, fellow scholars and wanderers—until Bar Asfal’s usurpation, of course. He dropped out of sight after that, buried himself in bucolic bliss, no doubt.” The old man’s eyes sharpened. “And you are the grandson. Well, the world is small, after all.”

  Rol studied the purple, trembling face of his wine. He did not know where to begin; he did not know what to ask first. He was almost afraid to open his mouth.

  Phrynius’s little rodent eyes were fixed on him like two beads of jet; like Canker’s eyes, they gave away nothing more than they could afford. And yet the old man seemed inoffensive enough, and frail as a wind-borne leaf.

  “It seems I have now met the entire family,” Phrynius went on. His satisfaction was somehow unsettling, like that of a wine-drinker who rounds out his cellar with a final crowning vintage.

  “Tell me of them,” Rol said quietly. “Tell me everything you know—about Psellos, about Amerie and Bar Hethrun, about Ardisan and Emilia. I have lived my life being fed drips and riddles, and now I am here in Bionar because of a woman some say is my sister, walking into a war I do not understand and have no stake in.” He raised his head, and out of his eyes there came a light colder than the glint of the winter dawn. “Tell me everything you know. And make it the truth, for if I hear one word of a lie, I swear that I will kill you.”

  Phrynius’s old parchment face went gray. He spilled his wine, and winced as the hot liquid scalded his fingers, but kept his gaze fixed, fascinated, on Rol’s livid face.

  “There is no need to get testy,” he said. His voice quavered. “Some of what I know is conjecture at best.” But he did not seem entirely afraid; in fact, there was eagerness burning across his face, that of a man desperate to make a confession.

  “I don’t care. Everything you know.”

  “I was told as a boy,” Phrynius said, having emptied his wine-cup in a rattling gurgle, “that I had some of the Blood in me. My people were from Perilar, near Geberran in the foothills of the Western Myconians. There were many in the towns and villages, and among the goat-herding peoples in that part of the world, who claimed the same. Your friend the halftroll; I grew up seeing things like him now and again. They were kept away from the settlements for the most part, hidden in remote crofts and bothies by their families—that is, if they were not strangled at birth, as many were. But the Mountain Folk were simple people, and they cherished their children in the main, no matter how grotesque they were when they issued screaming from the womb.

  “My father’s name was Pherion. He was a healer, of sorts, a wise man in a world where few could read and fewer still knew anything of their land’s history beyond the lives of their grandparents. If he bequeathed any of the Blood to me, then it was very little; I am eighty-two years old, and I feel every single one of those years.

  “But I digress. The Bionese invaded Perilar, seventy years ago now. They came by sea and took our great harbor at Onastir, then raided inland. Our town fell to a band of their marauding cavalry. They killed my father and many others, and took me as a slave. At night they used me like a girl, and in the day I gathered firewood and fodder and groomed their horses for them. I was taken back to Bionar in chains and sold there on the auction block at Palestrinon. A slave’s lot in Bionar is not a happy one. My first master treated me as the soldiers had. I ran away, was caught and flogged, ran away again. I was sold inland, and in time my voice broke, I grew a little, and I was no longer abused in—in that particular way. In time, when I was almost out of my teens, I found myself sold to a good master, a man of learning who lived in Myconn itself. I could read and write, thanks to my father, and he loved books, this man, and delighted in sharing his knowledge of them, even with a household slave. His name was Magre Psellos.”

  Phrynius paused, his eyes far away. “He was a good man, a ki
nd man. He became like a second father to me. When his death drew near he set me free, and bequeathed me a small sum of gold, and the beginnings of a library.” Phrynius smiled, remembering. “That was more than sixty years ago, but to this day, every time I open a new book, I think of him.

  “Magre was a supporter of Bar Hethrun, rightful heir to the throne of Bionar. He would host dinners at which Bar Hethrun—a young man then—and his friends would sit and discuss the great matters of the kingdom, and I as house steward would see to it that all the usual things were taken care of, and would stand in the shadow beyond the lamplight, and listen as these great men talked over their wine. It was at one of these occasions I first saw Amerie Bar Hethrun, the nomad witch out of the Goliad that Bar Hethrun had married, to the scandal of Bionese society and to his own eventual ruin.” Phrynius stared at Rol, nodded. “There is something of her in you, as there is in Rowen. She was a remarkable beauty, and there was a sense of peril about her that both frightened and attracted every man who met her. Bar Hethrun was a strong man, but she held him enthralled. I confess that I did not like her—there was something raw about her eyes.” Phrynius gulped. “Not that—I mean—”

  “Go on,” Rol said.

  “There was something bad.”

  “For a scholar, you speak in simplistic terms.”

  “Sometimes language is at its best when it is simple. Amerie’s parents were different from her. Different, you understand. Well, to me, at least. After Magre’s death I set myself up as a pedagogue, teaching the young, tutoring the nobility’s sons in history and languages. Ardisan and Emilia visited me often, while they were still tolerated in Myconn. Ardisan and I shared many interests, and Emilia, she was simply a joy to be around. She warmed every room she was in.” Phrynius shook his head. Looking at him, Rol had an instant’s picture of a gangling young man, all long nose and legs. Good eyes and a deep-burning fire of ambition.