by Martin Davey
Laughter. Cold and distant and loud and quiet. “The Keepers’ want their prisoners to be docile and quiet. They want the Kneelers to crawl and scrape and beg at their feet. They chose you, Landros. Chose you to be the Captain of the Watch because they saw something in you. If they make you Captain then you don’t have to think, to question.” The hand rose and pointed out to the tower and the city frozen in time, or out of time, before them. Something small and white crawled in and out of a black hole in the white flesh. A skeletal finger pointed. “See the wonder. See the glory of the world that once was. The wonder of the world that we created for ourselves. This is what we are, Landros. This is the garden of man. Think what this would be now if the Keepers hadn’t torn our world from us in their greed.”
Landros did look. And it was glorious. Beautiful. It made his heart ache that he couldn’t leave the hill and spend his life exploring this world. But the castle and its curtain walls and its moat; the giant winged creatures circling the pyramids to the south, the roads and the walls hinted at something darker, something he had been taught from childhood. “This is the world before the Keepers came?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “A world where man murdered man. Where greed and cruelty reigned. Where Kings were murdered by brothers and children were slaughtered because their fathers chose the wrong cause in the wars of men.”
The skeletal hand fell back to the arm of the throne and the hooded blackness turned a fraction as though the creature within regarded Landros from the corner of a hidden eye. “What price freedom, Landros? You Kneelers are like birds in cages praising their captors for depriving them of the fearful vastness of the blue sky, like fish stuck in bowls worshipping those that free them the tyranny of the ocean. Some of those birds would be killed by predators, some of those fish would be devoured by sharks or seamarls, but the rest of them, Landros, the rest of them will live lives of freedom.”
“Freedom.” Landros said. The word almost came out as a snarl. “It is difficult to listen to the word when spoken by one who hides in shadows and covers his self with the bodies of those I once loved.” Landros, not for the first time, wished he had a sword with him.
Now the creature did lift its head and now Landros did see what was hidden behind that robe that might be dark brown or dark green. A form as shifting and changeable as its own voice, the face a nightmarish blur of images that changed so fast, Landros felt nauseous just looking at it. It was as though the creature had stolen a thousand souls and wore them all one instant after another. “We are weak yet, Landros,” the creature said, its words shifting and changing and blurring with the faces. It looked shrivelled and old and shrunken slumped on its ancient throne. “But we grow stronger while the Keepers weaken as they wither in the city they stole from your kind. But the time will come when we will make ourselves known to the world of man. Stand at our side when that time comes and share our glory.”
Stand by the side of an agent of death while it fought the gods? The creature was insane, its mind wrecked by lurking in the world of the dead. The Clerk had smashed its head to a bloody mess and still it had survived. There must be a way to kill the thing. “Who are you? What are you?” Landros breathed.
The creature lowered its head once more, hiding its flickering, blurring face. The hood seemed to ripple and move with the shifting faces beneath it. “I am nothing but a man, Landros. A man like you. A man who remembers what once was. See the world and remember what was taken, ripped from our hands by monsters that hide behind masks and lie and steal.” The hood which might have been brown or green turned once more to the city below them. So still, so quiet, so dead. “They thought they could fight them, the Kings on their white horses, wearing their crowns to battle. Disdaining each other and marching out one at a time to face the armies of the Keepers...” a rattling breath and Landros blanched at the smell of death and decay. “Brother fought brother and father fought son and mothers wept tears enough to make the rivers flood. And still Kings and Princes marched to face the masked monsters, crowns and jewelled swords falling in the mud and blood.”
Landros took a step backwards. He knew the creature now. The monster. The thing whose name was never to be known, the nebulous shape of blackness on paintings and murals and mosaics. “No,” he whispered.
The Nameless One didn’t seem to hear him, its skeletal hand gripping the arm of its stone throne, lost in its memories as the thousand voices hummed and droned on, “They came to me, the sons of dead Kings and dead Princes.” That rasping laugh once more, cold and empty as a broken promise. “Came to me! Me. The one they had shunned, refusing to bow to that which they knew could challenge the Keepers.” The hood moved slowly side to side. “But came they did and kneel as they would never kneel to the monsters from the skies.”
“You’re him,” Landros said. “The liar, the deceiver. The betrayer of men.” If he could have run, he would. But where would he run to? If he left Staxton Hill would he remain in this netherworld, lost forever in the strands of time?
“Am I?” The hood tilted toward Landros, blackness within it. “Have I lied to you? Deceived you? I bring you here to show you what once was, I try to save your mother, to show you the path to discover where you and your kind come from. The past, Landros, is where we discover who we are, and it has been torn to shreds by those you call your gods.”
He came upon them with silent smiles,
Held out his arms to that beyond the Sea,
Raised his armies from those who had chosen to flee,
Forged his weapons with his vicious lies
The words of Solphin, granted visions of the history of men by the Keepers themselves. Everybody knew the stories of the Nameless One. The king of lies. A shadowy figure who had hidden in the shadows throughout the first war but then, with his lies and his deceptions, soon had Kings prostrating themselves at his feet. The liar who killed four of the gods, torturing Keeper Shenofah to death before his own people. A death mourned every year in every city, town and village throughout the world.
“You must think me very stupid to believe your lies.” Landros said, the anger within him cold and hard. “Choose another man anywhere in the world and his answer will be the same. You have no power in this world anymore. You may have power over the dead but they rot and decay and collapse as easily as your lies. If I had a sword, I’d run you through and find nothing there but air and ashes. Is that your domain now when you thought once to rule over all mankind?” Landros did his best to sneer, but found it difficult when he knew the cowled figure before him could probably kill him with one touch of a bone white finger.
“Fools. You think you are men because your Masters let you play with swords.” The anger in the multitude of voices was a terrible thing to hear. Landros fought against the urge to take another step backwards. “You are nothing but children desecrating the graves of men beneath your feet. I have no time to waste on those who choose servitude over freedom. It sickens us all what has become of mankind. You have made your choice, Landros. You may regret it sooner than you think.” The Nameless One rose to its feet. Not a large creature, a finger shorter than Landros himself, and thin. Skeletally thin. Its head was bowed, but now it raised its head and the smiling face was no longer flickering or shifting. Only now did Landros realize that the humming and the droning had ended. “Pray to your gods that we never meet again, Captain.” Blood leaked out of dark eyes and blue veins rippled and writhed in flesh of white.
“Landros! Landros!” Something gripped his arm hard and tight and Landros kicked out and screamed against the touch. “Landros!”
His eyes snapped open, squinting against the rising sunlight. Elian, her large brown eyes wide, looked at him as she knelt in the grass. Beautiful even with her hair awry and the paint faded on her lips. Landros swallowed and blinked, trying to wish away the terror still gripping his throat.
“You were screaming,” Elian said. And then nodded down the hill, the rippling grass bowing the same way in seeming agreement. “They’re
here.” Elian looked back to Landros, the affection of the night before seemingly forgotten, her face closed to him once more. Maybe to her, he was already a dead man. “Blue coats.”
Landros nodded and rose to his feet, trying not to stagger before Elian. Five riders, their uniforms immaculate as always, their horses’ manes brushed to shine. And Landros strode forward to meet them.
There were worse things in the world that could be hunting him.
CHAPTER 21
Marin rolled onto his back and scratched at the thread in his neck. The road was dusty and the sun looked giant in the sky. He shuffled back to rest his head against the boulder they were using for cover, his feet kicking up clouds of dust from the road. “There’s too many,” he said, pulling the stopper out of his waterskin with his teeth. “Three hundred. Maybe more.” There had been seven Canaristi riding out of the darkness to capture him in the garden of the temple so many years ago. Water spilled down his cheeks as he drank. He poured the last dregs of it onto the white cloth wrapped around his throat, the coolness felt good against the stitched wound.
Retaj peered around the boulder, both hands pressed against it, his thick red hair spotted with white dust. “You sure it’s them? It could be somebody else, you know. And I counted nearer four hundred.”
“The Canaristi are the only soldiers I know who will nail women and children to trees in the name of the Keepers.” He rammed the stopper back into the waterskin and rolled around to look down at the camp below. The tents were glaring bright under the sun, reds and whites and greens. More than one with a flag flapping above them, halved black and white, not a flag Marin recognized. They had chosen a good place to camp, sheltered from the glare of the sun, and protected on three sides by the sheer wall of the cliff about them. Shaved heads and muscled shoulders moved around between the tents. Each head with its black tattoo whorls reminding Marin of the terror of being captured by the knights of the Canaristi. Was it too much of a coincidence that mere days after having his throat slashed, he should find a camp of Canaristi when nobody had seen or heard of them for four years?
Marin wasn’t a man who trusted in coincidences. He shielded his eyes from the sun. More than a few women and children moving between the tents too. Since when did the Canaristi take wives? He leaned back against the boulder and pulled the cloth away from his throat, scratching at the thread with his nails.
“Do you realize how disgusting it is when you do that?” Retaj said.
Marin pulled the cloth back up to cover the wound. “I still can’t understand why you never got your throat cut. I’ll talk them round in the end.” He looked back down the road, spotted with dust and loose white rocks, he could still see the last of the bodies nailed to a gnarly, twisted tree scattered with coarse green leaves. It had been a Marshman, stripped of his bright clothes and his head bent at an awkward angle because of the low-hanging branches. More than a hundred Seekers had been found nailed to trees so far. The worst had been the women and children. A warning to others seeking out the source of those godly drums that shook the very mountains with their constant beatings. Marin scratched his throat and coughed. Strange that, after all the blood that had been gushing out of it, the agony now was when his throat was dry. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the packet of ferris root, a shrivelled dry reddish thing that the Mahrata had told him to chew to moisten his mouth. Marin chewed. It tasted of earth and damp leaves.
He coughed and spat into the dust. Tried not to think of a woman with short dark hair on a green riverbank. “No, Marin is a murderer,” she had said. “Come on, let’s get back to camp.”
Retaj didn’t move from where he was, both hands pressed against the warm stone of the boulder, looking down at the camp. “You know, this is our chance. We could run for it, get away from the Mahrata and the others. We could be up and into the mountains before they even know we’re gone.”
Marin grabbed the hilt of his sword to stop himself scratching at his neck. “You can if you like; I’ll take my chances with the Mahrata for now. You run,” he nodded back to the Marshman nailed to the tree, to the scores of others lining the road out of the mountains. “If you want to end up like that.” And there was the other problem. He wasn’t willing to tell Retaj for some reason; but since he had his throat cut, something had changed. The blood oath, she had called it, something that could never be undone. And something had changed, he no longer dreamed of Keeper Martuk, no longer was he tortured in his dreams night after night. Now his dreams were of empty black spaces and cold winds. The woman had rid him of his nightly tortures and he would follow her to the end of the world for that.
“Be nailed to a tree by religious fanatics or go back to a witch who slices our throats and drinks our blood to stay young and gorgeous.” Retaj had made no move away from the boulder. His hair was mussed and his clothes covered in dust. “I must admit, Marin, I thought we’d hit bottom when I found that whore in Gadeni, the one who ended up having a cock. Remember that? What a place that was, but I think we’ve got it beat this time.”
Retaj wasn’t being as quiet as he could be. Maybe Marin hadn’t told him enough of the horrors of being a prisoner of the Canaristi. He grabbed the younger man by the sleeve, his booted feet skidding in the dusty road. “Come on, we’ve found what the Mahrata wanted, let’s go.”
Retaj allowed himself to be pulled to his feet and brushed his clothes down with both hands.
“She doesn’t drink blood.” Marin said, setting off back down the road, shrivelled trees with small leaves lining the way. How long before these trees had Seekers nailed to them?
“Why else would a woman want blood? How else are you still alive if not by black magic?”
Retaj almost seemed to enjoy talking about his throat. Marin chewed on the ferris root. It did ease the pain in his throat, his mouth wet and full of the flavour of a damp morning in a wood. He scratched at the thread hanging from his throat. “I’m not saying I know what she wants it for, I’m just saying she doesn’t drink it. Anyway forget her, it’s the Canaristi we...” A large, round-shouldered shadow on the ground before him, Marin shifted his weight on his feet and dropped a shoulder, turned his head. The blow was a glancing one on his temple, enough to make his ears roar and jagged white light to skitter across his vision. His sword was in his hand in a moment.
Two steps backward, his feet kicking up clouds of dirt as he turned to face his attacker. Attackers. Three of them. All with black whorls decorating their shaved heads. The marks of the Canaristi. Only soldiers, reshan at most, less than half their heads were covered in the black ink. Retaj stood by Marin’s side, his own sword in his hand. He looked more assured now than he had when they first met, but the younger man would never make a fighter.
Two of the Canaristi were topless, their muscles shining in the sun, the other wore a collarless shirt that strained about his shoulders. Two of them had swords, the other an axe with a wickedly curved blade.
Strike first and strike hard. It wasn’t much of a philosophy, but it was the only one Marin had, and it had carried him through more fights than he cared to remember. He struck at the big-eared man with the axe as he was the closest and looked the most assured with the weapon. A low feint to make it look as though he wanted to hamstring the soldier before he spun and aimed a slash at the neck. The axe came up to easily deflect the blow, sending a shiver of pain thrumming through Marin’s arm to the shoulder.
Slow. He was getting old and slow. He backed away again, rolling his shoulders and trying to ignore the slither of fear stirring in his stomach. The topless Canaristi was walking slowly to his left, the shadows of the trees striping his face in darkness and light, his sword low. The other man with the sword was circling Retaj. Cornered dogs. What a way to die, caught on a dusty mountainside by Canaristi soldiers and nailed to a tree.
He charged at the soldier to his left, swung a boot at his groin, dust flying into the Canaristi’s face even as Marin swung a two-handed blow aimed at his bicep.
Where had Retaj learned to fight like that? His sword was a blur of light, defending the strokes of the Canaristi: high and low, low and high, Retaj’s sword flicked and blocked the strokes of the bigger man. Retaj made no attacks of his own, concentrating only on defence, every blow forcing him another step backward, his feet scraping in the loose rocks and dirt.
Which left Marin with the axeman. He hated fighting men with axes, they were heavy and sharp and he wasn’t as strong as he used to be. The Canaristi rolled his shoulders and strode to Marin with the speed of a man who had other places to be. Three strikes of the axe, all aimed at his head and shoulders, sweat flying from the Canaristi’s arms with each blow. Marin parried them all and the pain in his arms, elbows and shoulders was shocking. Had he really grown so weak? He was a beaten man; like a stag who locks horns with a bigger, stronger male, he knew he was lost. But while the stag could bow its head and be allowed to live on, if Marin surrendered to this man he would find himself being nailed to the nearest tree. He raised his sword in both hands, trying to control the shaking.
