Ghaal nodded his head towards the rising fires and the burgeoning heat closing in on the city. ‘Garonin. They take too much mana from the air. Ix is weak today and our mages can find no consistency.’
The elves without had paused to see the effect of their work.
‘End this futility,’ shouted Auum into the moment’s relative calm. ‘Please. It cannot end well for any of us.’
‘Not bad for you, TaiGethen!’ came a shout. ‘You get to live. We get to burn.’
‘I know you, Halis. At the Caeyin you chose to stay, did you not? Despite my warnings. You had your chance. Another more worthy elf will travel in your place.’
Quiet had fallen and was spreading out across the harbour. Eyes and ears turned, sensing something.
‘You have to offer us a way out.’
Auum straightened. ‘All I can offer you are my prayers.’
Halis laughed. It was a short, bitter sound. ‘And our souls will be trapped without rest much as our bodies are now. We will take ship and you will not stop us.’
Auum stared into the eyes of those in the front rank of the crowd.
‘Yes, I will.’
‘He cannot stop us all,’ urged Halis.
Auum let his finger trail along the line of ten or so frightened, desperate elves.
‘Who of you does not believe me? I have no desire to prove myself upon you. All the ships are full. You are putting your lives above those of your fellows. Do you really believe yourselves more worthy than those with papers whom you hold back? Yniss turns his head in shame from such conceit. It is you who should turn. Pray while you still have the time. Invest your energy in the survival of our race. Prepare your souls because we will free you to travel.
‘Do not test me, for I will not fail.’
‘Filthy Ynissul lies,’ spat Halis. ‘He claims more life yet how long has he already lived? We only have one chance to live. This is it. Push.’
The barrier shimmered for a moment and Auum heard Miirt curse under her breath. Seeing the spell weaken energised the crowd and Halis felt it, beginning his rhythmic clapping again.
‘Tai, be ready,’ said Auum. He pushed the regrets and the guilt from his mind.
‘We need to get those with papers through these crowds,’ said Ghaal.
‘I know,’ said Auum. ‘We need the TaiGethen in the crowd, not fighting them. Damn these fools. I am ashamed to be an elf when I look upon them.’
Those near the front of the crowd could hear him. One or two had the decency to look guilty but none turned away. Like a spring tide, the crowd surged against the barrier once more. It guttered, wavering on the verge of settling for a moment, and then collapsed.
Ten wide, the crowd stumbled forward, some tripping, others leaping across the fallen. Death was behind them and it reduced their compassion to ashes. Auum’s Tai stood before them, unflinching. The advance lost momentum. Auum could read the indecision in their faces. None would have faced TaiGethen before. Few, if any, would have seen them in action. Reputation stole the will from them, just for now.
Auum stared at the central figures in the front row, urged on by those standing safely behind. The truth was that a surge would roll over TaiGethen and Al-Arynaar warrior alike.
‘Stand fast,’ said Auum, pointing at one scared elf. ‘Remember your words on crossing to adulthood.’
His Tai intoned: ‘ “Unto my race, I pledge my life. That my death should serve my people, such shall be my fate. Gladly accepted. Proudly travelled.” ’
‘Then swap places, TaiGethen,’ called a voice. ‘Serve your people.’
‘Gladly,’ said Auum. ‘And can I count on you to fight the Garonin street by street to allow the last ships to sail? Will you speak with the Lord of the Mount in Xetesk and describe our slim chance of survival? Will you finally lead the rest of our people to the west to talk with Tessaya, Lord of the Wesmen?
‘Which of you will do this in the service of your race and hope to succeed?’
A momentary pause was followed by a ripple in the crowd. There was forward movement.
‘Not another pace,’ warned Auum.
He kept his arms by his sides; the jaqrui pouch on his belt was closed and his twin swords remained sheathed.
‘We are many,’ shouted a voice. ‘And the ships won’t wait. See the sails flying. To remain is to die.’
People burst forward. Fists were bunched. Crazed expressions replaced fear. Auum swayed inside a flailing blow and thumped the heel of his palm into an elven chest. The elf was propelled back into the crowd.
‘Yniss forgive me,’ he whispered.
Miirt dropped and swept the legs from another. She bounced back up to catch a punch in one hand and slam a fist into the chin of the same elf, knocking him senseless. Ghaal blocked a blow aside, paced forward and kicked out straight into the midriff of his opponent. The elf staggered back. Ghaal stepped in, both fists hammering out, taking down two more. Auum, next to him, and Miirt on Auum’s right, moved up as one.
‘We need that casting back,’ called Auum. ‘Tai, let us take the head from this beast. Arrowhead formation. Mind your flanks.’
Halis, his face contorted and reddened with his rage, was standing and shouting not more than ten yards away. Auum moved onto the offensive. He set himself a pace in front of his Tai, freeing his legs. One pace and he spun a kick into the temple of the elf in front of him. He twisted on his standing leg, reversed another kick into the chest of a second. He landed to face the next three. Auum punched the first square on the nose, splitting skin, The next he flattened with a reverse punch to the side of the head and the third pressed himself back into the crowd.
‘Get out of my way,’ hissed Auum.
All the impetus had gone from the surge. Twenty had been downed before the ordinary elf had time to draw breath. Some were unconscious. Any who moved were dragged aside by Al-Arynaar. The weight of the mass pressed against those at its head but none wanted to be next to face the TaiGethen, on whom not a blow had been landed.
A movement right and there was a scream. Auum glanced to see Miirt clutching the wrist of an elf. In his hand a blade dangled. Miirt continued to press. The wrist and two fingers broke. The blade fell.
‘Next elf who shows a weapon dies here and now,’ said Auum. ‘I want Halis. Give him to me or I will come and get him.’
There was a gap of about two paces now between the Tai cell and the crowd. Halis was still calling for attack but the heart had left those of his foot soldiers who stood in the immediate path of his intended targets.
‘I am not in the habit of repeating myself.’
A single arrow hissed from the crowd. Auum jerked his head to the side. The shaft whispered past his ear.
‘The taipan is not quick enough to strike me from cover,’ he said, his blades in his hands, his voice cold. ‘For I do the work of Yniss and my time is not yet come to die. What makes you think you are faster than the deadliest of Tual’s denizens?
‘Bring Halis. Bring him now.’
‘Spell ready. Casting on one.’
The words changed everything.
‘Down,’ said Auum.
The Tai dropped prone. Auum felt the spell come past him. It thudded into the crowd, flashed yellow and steadied. Auum rose to his feet and turned his back on the crowd, whose shouting had begun again in earnest.
‘I want Tai cells to bring in those who are granted passage. I want archers here to fire on anyone who brings down the barrier. Leave Halis. His time is done.’
He turned back to the crowd and walked all the way to the barrier.
‘And now I take my Tai and we will face the Garonin once more. That is how I serve my race, giving you more time to face your fate like elves, not frightened humans.
‘I am prepared still to lay down my life for you. And that is far more than you will ever deserve in this life or in the next. Tai, we move.’
Chapter 9
While much of Xetesk still struggled to recover ten years on f
rom the wars that had all but seen the end of life on Balaia, the college itself had been restored to its opulent original state. The very centre of the college, the Circle Seven, six towers set around that of the Lord of the Mount, had escaped largely undamaged. But buildings of great age and importance had been severely battered or, in the case of the library, destroyed altogether.
‘The shell is complete but inside the hollowness echoes for all we have lost,’ said Denser.
‘Very poetic.’
Ilkar did not turn from the balcony. They were stood at the tower’s highest point. It was the morning after their abortive first meeting and some tempers had cooled considerably. Beyond the grand marble courtyard, on whose borders the other six mage towers stood, he could see library, Mana Bowl, long rooms, refectory, lecture theatres and the massed buildings of the college administration. All wrapped up in the college walls and all shining with recent paint and polished roof tiles.
Outside the college walls, repairs were still not complete on the city’s own defences. Many buildings would never be rebuilt, their stone stripped for use elsewhere. There was poverty in parts of the city. Resentment too but no power with which to act. Smoke from open fires rose into the still sky. To the east, the horizon was obscured by mist.
Rich drapes hung in Denser’s meeting room. Fine-spun rugs lay on the stone floor. Paintings and tapestries hung around the circular walls. Cut glass and gold-inlaid jugs sat on trays on the carved wooden table in the centre of the room around which The Raven sat. A bizarre gathering. The bodies of strangers with the shadows of lovers and friends.
‘I wonder what the criteria are for making it back here,’ said Ilkar ‘We rather hoped you might be able to tell us that,’ said Sol. He was sitting in between Hirad in his merchant’s body and Erienne in her five-year old girl’s.
‘I’m working on it. The trouble is, this whole thing is so essentially wrong I can barely bring myself to believe what I am seeing and feeling. Indeed that I have the capacity to see and feel at all.’
Ilkar gazed down briefly at the body he inhabited. Its previous soul would never have seen the sort of finery on display in Denser’s tower. Ilkar’s soul, bursting into the air over Xetesk, drawn there by the presence and strength of Sol and Denser, had sensed the body immediately and he had reached it before others could take it for their own.
It had been lying sprawled in a narrow alley between the walls of two warehouses. From the attitude of the body, Ilkar had assumed the unfortunate youth had fallen while trying to jump between them. It had been an assumption confirmed by the broken neck, arms and ribs.
He had managed to heal the worst wounds but the pain of the fall was everywhere in the body. Still, it was young and strong, not yet twenty by his reckoning. Human though, and that was fundamentally unpleasant. Like putting on a suit of crawling insects.
‘I have to say that I don’t really understand that,’ said Sol. ‘I realise you are in strange bodies and that there is pain and confusion. But this is a second chance at life. Why is it so bad? Why does Hirad keep on saying he doesn’t want to be here?”
All around the table Ilkar saw the reactions of the dead. And he saw their inability to put their thoughts into words. Hirad looked up at him.
‘Go on, Ilks,’ he said.
‘All right. You see, the trouble is you are using assumptions based on the fact that you are still living. You assume that because of the manner of our deaths we must feel robbed of the life we expected and so would desire a return to finish what we started. Am I right?’
‘Something like that,’ said Sol.
‘Well we don’t. I haven’t spent a moment regretting being dead. And that isn’t a conscious choice; the thought just never occurs.’
‘So what is it like being dead, then?’ asked Denser. ‘It seems you all find it hard to put into words.’
‘Well that’s because death doesn’t conform to anything anyone living thinks it might be,’ said Darrick, his new voice rich and full toned.
‘Exactly,’ said Ilkar. ‘There is nothing to see, there is nothing to do in the way you would understand it. But the souls of those you love are always close and there is no risk that you will ever be separated from them. At least, there wasn’t. Can you imagine the comfort that brings? We have memories; we communicate but not through speech. We drift, I suppose. Time does not exist. Every moment is both a lifetime and the tiniest spark.
‘I know what you’re thinking, Denser. It sounds terribly boring. Interminably so. And standing in this skin and breathing the air of Balaia, I can see why you’d think that. But it isn’t. It’s, well, bliss, I suppose you’d call it. Endless bliss.’
‘Good job, Ilks,’ said Hirad, and he was not alone in having a mist of tears in his eyes.
Denser was frowning. ‘But you cannot see, hear, feel, taste or smell. There is no colour. There is no music. How can it be bliss?’
‘That’s exactly what Darrick was saying,’ said Ren, her young voice chirpy and bright. ‘You cannot apply the joys you experience as a living person to your existence after death. There is no comparison, barring the deepest feelings of love, friendship and intimacy. ’
‘You’ll have to take our word for it,’ said Hirad. ‘It’s not just enough, it’s everything.’
‘Coming from you, that is some statement,’ said Sol. ‘So how do we get you home? Presumably ridding ourselves of our latest enemy would be a good start.’
Silence inside the meeting room. The Raven dead could not look at him.
‘Did Hirad not tell you?’ said Ilkar, his voice quiet, the pain in his body intensifying. Heat was flooding him and the gale of the void threatened suddenly to sweep him away, such was the despair that surged over him. ‘You cannot beat them.’
‘He did say that but we are not bound to believe him,’ said Denser.
‘And even if you could, the land of the dead lies ruined. There is no going back.’
The words, like ice on Ilkar’s tongue, rolled over the room.
‘You’re stuck here?’ said Sol.
‘Oh great,’ muttered Diera. ‘Mouldering Raven has-beens cluttering up my inn.’
‘That would be the least of our concerns,’ said Sol sharply.
Ilkar winced at the expression on Diera’s face.
‘He’s right, Lady Unknown,’ said Hirad. ‘Our souls no longer have a place to rest.’
‘So what?’
‘So where do you think yours will go if you die?’
Diera put her head in her hands. ‘You know, I’ve seen and heard a lot in my time. Being married to The Unknown Warrior and the first, albeit reluctant, king of Balaia means I can’t get away from it. But this is too much. And I’m worried that I’m starting to believe you, like my daft husband and the Lord of the Mount do. So I’m going. Home. To open up.’ She shot a glance at Sol. ‘Let me know what hare-brained scheme you end up with. Meanwhile I’m going to spend some time with our boys.’
Diera got up to leave, ignoring the hand that Sol put out towards her. Hirad pushed himself from his chair and opened the door for her.
‘It is us,’ he said. ‘Just look at our shadows and say you don’t recognise them.’
Diera gazed at him. ‘This is Xetesk, city of magic, home of the Dark College as was. You think this couldn’t be some spell? Give me some credit, won’t you?’
‘Keep your boys close, Diera,’ said Hirad. ‘Be ready.’
‘You know we named the youngest after the real Hirad Coldheart. There was a man we could all love. You? I don’t know what you think you are.’
Hirad’s face cracked into a huge grin when the door had closed.
‘You’ve got a boy called Hirad, Unknown?’
Sol nodded, the beginnings of a smile on his careworn face. ‘We have.’
‘Hirad.’ The barbarian’s eyes sparkled. ‘Not Ilkar, then. Or Sirendor, or Darrick. Hirad.’
‘All right, Coldheart, we get it.’ Ilkar felt his mood lift despite himself.
> ‘Never mind, Ilks. Perhaps if they have a few more and are really scraping about for a name, yours might surface like a bloated corpse in Korina Bay.’
‘Can we concentrate on what we are here to discuss?’ said Ilkar. ‘I don’t know about you but every breath I take is shot full of needles, or so it feels. What happened to Hirad and me last night should also be concentrating our minds, don’t you think?’
‘It’s the knowledge that my name will live on in a younger generation that I find so gratifying.’
‘If we are to believe you, Hirad, there is to be no living on,’ growled Sol.
Hirad sobered. ‘We cannot let any of our names go to dust.’
‘That is what I invited you all up here to avoid,’ said Denser. ‘And we have got nowhere fast. So why don’t you, any of you, tell me what you know about whoever it is that is coming here to do whatever it is they’re planning to do. Because I, for one, do not wish my soul to be casting around for a resting place when I die.’
‘It’s worse than that, my love,’ said Erienne, the little girl’s voice dripping with weary experience. ‘We think that any souls unable to reach their birthplace are already lost in the void between dimensions, and that is an eternal screaming purgatory no one should have to suffer.’
‘So talk to us,’ said Sol.
‘We can’t tell you about their strengths, weaknesses, modes of attack and goals,’ said Darrick. ‘It doesn’t work like that. Where we’ve come from there is nothing but certain knowledge and intense feeling. So all we know is, they have destroyed the dead dimension and they are here now and will do the same to Balaia. So everyone who wants to live and everyone who wants to die in peace has to leave because there is no point in trying to fight. This much we know.’
Denser kneaded the bridge of his nose, feeling a weight of frustration beginning to build.
‘At the risk of repeating myself, go where?’
‘I think that should be self-evident,’ said Ilkar. ‘Out of this dimension. Out of every known dimension, come to that.’
Denser threw up his hands. Sol held up a hand to still his protest.
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