by Micah Yongo
“Come on. She went this way.”
He led Caleb into the next tunnel, leaning as he went, letting his shoulder slide and scrape along the wall to steady himself. They passed several empty rooms; living quarters, one that looked like a kitchen, another with nothing in it save more scribbled markings, each one doorless and lit by small oil wells whose quiet lights leaked out into the slim corridor to illuminate their way.
They continued further in and slowed as they began to hear the sound of voices up ahead, low and rhythmic. Neythan couldn’t make out the words. Too dizzy. He readied his blade as they crept on along the tunnel to the lit doorway. They leaned around the jamb’s corner. Two figures in white linen. They were kneeling with their backs to the door, facing a large altar on the far side. Neythan could see Arianna lying on a stone gurney against the wall. She was tied down at the wrists and ankles. Her eyes were closed. The chamber was filled by the ashy sweet scent of incense, silver-blue wreaths of smoke hanging in languid curls, clogging the air and making shapes like… Neythan blinked. The smog seemed to suddenly shift, coalesce, shaping into a face, a skull, looking at him. Then it was gone again. He glanced at Caleb to see if he’d seen it too but he was just looking at the men. Neythan looked back to the room. Nothing. He shook his head.
Caleb was looking up at him now, beginning to motion instructions. He pointed at his bow and then the elder on the left, and then at Neythan’s sword and the elder on the right.
Neythan nodded agreement. He crept slowly into the chamber, blinking through the smoke. Still woozy. The chants grew louder, the elders’ stooped hooded heads bowed and nodded. Their hushed words seemed to be echoing around the room, stirring the air, a thousand mad whispers tugging Neythan’s attention this way and that like a band of invisible bats. He stumbled, distracted, dizzy, knocking over a pot and toppling against the wall.
The hooded men flinched and turned. They were rising to their feet quicker than Neythan could steady himself. The one furthest away slumped almost as soon as he stood as Caleb’s arrow plunged through him, puncturing his chest with a thud. He slid down to the floor, blood blossoming around the wound.
The other came up snarling. Reached for Neythan, teeth bared, hands clawed. Neythan stumbled back. He let himself fall as the man came on, then shoved his blade into the oncomer’s groin as they went down. The man grunted and hissed through his teeth. He grabbed at Neythan’s throat, bony calloused hands squeezing around his neck and trembling with fury.
“You are cursed,” the old man wheezed, his wide bloodshot eyes staring into Neythan’s. “There is a shadow on your soul.”
The man’s head jolted as another arrow burst through his face, locking his jaw open and jutting out on the other side near his eye. His hands loosened from around Neythan’s throat as he slowly sank to the floor.
Neythan climbed to his feet. He stood with hands on knees, breathing hard, then rubbed his neck. He turned at the choked spit sound of Arianna coughing. She lay half-conscious on the bed covered in sweat.
Neythan let Caleb take his sword and cut her loose, then helped pull her up from the stone gurney and walk her out of the room and back through the tunnel as she murmured and babbled and limped.
When they eventually made their way out it was still night but lighter. The dim sky was visible through the giant tree’s canopy. Dawn on the way. They followed the path to a shrouded opening out and then lumbered back down the hill and through the Forest of Silences, stopping frequently to rest. Although the air seemed to do them good, Arianna and Neythan were growing increasingly weak. The sun was rising by the time they eventually passed on through the village and came to the trench they’d hidden in to spy on the settlement.
“You’re shivering,” Caleb said. “Both of you.”
Neythan looked down at his hands, and then across to Arianna. He felt hot. He was sweating. So was Arianna. She lay on her side with her knees curled to her chest, her whole body trembling.
“What did they do to you?”
“I don’t know… We cannot stay here.”
“No. We cannot. Come.”
It took them until the following day to make their way down the mountain. Neythan, weak as he was, walked with Arianna’s arm slung across his neck as he dragged her down the craggy slopes to the mount’s foot. When they finally reached the bottom and Caleb saw the mule and cart still there where they’d tied them, he laughed with relief. They loosed the animal and climbed into the cartbed. Caleb snapped on the reins and let the mule walk them into the plain. Neythan and Arianna drank water and then slept, covered in blankets and still shivering as Caleb drove them forward.
Neythan’s sleep was fitful and bitty, filled with whispers and a dark falling space and a vague recurring notion of oncoming grief. Someone dying that he didn’t want to die. It was a familiar dream. He awoke thinking of Master Johann’s dead gaze but when he opened his eyes he was lying face up in a large tabernacle with the sun pressing through the goat hair of the tent sheets. The tabernacle was high and open on one side. An empty sunbaked plain sat beyond his blanketed and outstretched feet.
“Awake at last.”
A woman’s voice. Deep, slow, vaguely familiar. Neythan rolled his head toward the sound and found the old Súnamite woman, Filani, sitting on the ground beside him in a black baggy smock with a shawl over her head.
“I was beginning to think you’d never wake,” she said. She lifted a cup of water and put it to his lips. Neythan sipped.
“Filani…”
The old woman smiled.
“Where am I?”
“We are halfway across the Salt Plains. A few days from the Gihon. We will continue south through the Havilah to Súnam. I know a way through the sands, and this way no one will follow.”
Neythan just looked at her, confused. His throat felt parched and salty. His whole body ached, his head worst of all. He could feel the thud of his own heartbeat pulsing through his skull. And fatigue, extreme fatigue, trying to pull him back to sleep. He resisted.
“We found you,” she explained. “We’d been looking for you a long time.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“My niece and I… the one I entered the village to find the day I left you and Caleb by the well to wait. You remember?”
“Yes. I remember. We did wait… We were chased.”
“Yes. We saw. It was then I was sure of who you are.” Her eyes narrowed against the light breeze skipping in from the plain as she looked out to the dry dusty horizon. “I must ask you to forgive me, Neythan,” she said. “There were things… things I could not tell you before, not until I was certain. It’s why I sought to bring you to my niece. She is good at seeing these things.”
“What things?”
“She’d be able to tell if you were what I thought you were, and who I think you are.”
Neythan didn’t understand. The effort of making sense of the words and everything else seemed to press in on his fatigue like added weight. He closed his eyes and let sleep roll in like a wave.
This time he dreamt of motion, the slow, buoyant yaw of an ocean over and around him, dark and hefty and vast. Dim aqueous gleams glinted about the gloom like luminous ghosts and whispered to him, just as the temple’s air had seemed to, quick sibilant murmurs, words just beyond hearing. And then it came to him. He was drowning. The glints were not lights at all but eyes, staring and winking and watching him die.
He awoke with a start to find Caleb dabbing his forehead with a damp kerchief.
“Ah, welcome back to the land of the living.”
Neythan felt hot but he was shivering.
Caleb swiped again at his brow with the kerchief. “You have some kind of fever,” he said. “From the elder somehow, I think. It is getting better, though…” He gathered a steaming pot from behind Neythan’s head. “Here.”
Neythan sniffed the pot doubtfully. He felt sickly and dazed.
“You must eat,” Caleb said. “You’ve been asleep four days.”<
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“What?”
Caleb nodded, setting the pot down and dipping a spoon into it, stirring.
“Four days?”
“Yes. I thought you were going to die. We all did.”
“What happened?”
“I rode us about a day’s worth from the mount, just to put distance between us and it. I rode until I could no longer stay awake, but when I tried to wake you to take over, you wouldn’t, and neither would Arianna. We were in the middle of nowhere without food and little water and neither of you would wake to take us on to shelter. I knew something was wrong but I could not stay awake. I was exhausted. So, well, I slept. If Filani hadn’t found us when she did… Here, eat.” He lifted the spoon to Neythan’s lips. Neythan nibbled and sipped. Hot. Brothy. “She came with her niece. Nyomi, she is called. Though I had to learn that from Filani’s lips. The woman herself will hardly speak. A lesser soul would count it rude, Neythan… here, good… Anyway, they’d been seeking us for weeks, hunting us, ever since we parted from her at that village. Though she will not say why. Says she’ll tell you only, and only when you are strong enough to hear it. But, well, when she saw that scroll of yours… no, it’s fine, it’s safe. The scroll is safe. Just eat. Here, eat… But listen, when she saw it… you should’ve seen her, Neythan. Any would think she’d happened upon a tomb of gold. And then the niece, Nyomi, she smiles for what must be her first time since the womb, bows to it even, the scroll I mean, and even smiles at me, all friendly all of a sudden… That’s when she insisted we go to Súnam. That’s where we’re going, by the way, where we’re on our way to.”
“Why?”
“She says the scroll can be read. That there are those who know how to read it.”
“Who?”
“How would I know? Mystics, probably. Like her. You’ve heard the way she speaks. Could be there’s a whole clan just like her.”
Neythan pushed the spoon away and tried to lift himself, pushing himself up. He flinched when he pressed his hand to the ground.
“You’ll have to be careful with that. Nyomi redressed it only an hour ago.”
Neythan held his bandaged palm to himself. The wrappings were thick and dry. The wound had forgotten to ache when he woke but was now remembering. He turned and saw Arianna lying on another bedmat beside him.
“She is fine,” Caleb said. “She’s recovering more quickly than you, actually.”
“She has woken?”
“Yes. A few times. She is fine.”
“Good… that is good.”
“There’s something I wanted to ask you,” Caleb said. He waited for Neythan to turn back to face him. “About when we were back in the temple… when I came in… do you… remember any of it?”
“Any of what?”
“What the elder… Do you know what she was… doing, to you? What she was trying to do?”
Neythan just looked at him. His head still ached. His pulse seemed to be tapping a rhythm through his eyes.
“It was like you were… floating, you see… when I came in, I mean… above the ground.”
“Floating.”
“Yes.” Caleb was watching him closely. “And you were speaking. You were saying whatever she said. You were each speaking the same thing at the same time. Strange words.”
“What words?”
“I don’t know. I’ve not heard words like them.”
“I don’t remember any of it,” Neythan said.
“Did she tell you anything? Did you learn anything?”
“I learned she was the one who killed the other Brothers.”
“I see… and did you learn why?”
Neythan thought about it. “She said she was Magi. Said she’d always known what I would do, and that Arianna and I were just a distraction. She told me the scroll I took from the tomb was written by gods.”
“Then it is true,” Filani said as she entered the tent. She hobbled in slowly, stooping a little under the awning as she passed beneath the shade and lowered onto a mat.
“What is?”
“I told you once that the world is a veil, Neythan, with secrets, things hidden, as is the sun or moon on a cloudy day. Do you remember?”
“Yes. I remember.”
“My people, for centuries, have known of your kind as one does a rumour. Many in the Summerlands do. In Súnam we say rumours are as the vultures that circle a carcass – they are there for a reason… I suspected you to be what I now know you are the first hour I saw you, Neythan. I suspected other things of you too. Do you remember what I asked you then, after we first met?”
“You said I was troubled. You asked me why.”
Filani smiled. “And do you know why I asked?”
“No.”
“I think you do, Neythan. I think you knew even then… No man abides by fire without carrying the odour with him. So it is with unseen things, each leave an aroma, a mark that lingers. I could smell it on you, Neythan. You know of what I speak.”
“The Watcher.”
“Yes. Such a one did visit you… tell me: what did the Watcher say?”
Neythan hesitated.
“I am not your enemy, Neythan. If I was, I’d have left you to die where I found you, out on the plains baking in the sun. But instead you are here. Our paths did not cross without reason. Not then. Not now. You know this within yourself. I am here to help you.”
“Why?”
“Because you are here to help us all. But only if you tell what was said.”
“I cannot remember the whole of what was said. In truth, I remember little of it.”
“Tell me what you do remember?”
“I remember… she spoke of darkness… coming darkness.”
Filani’s face changed. She nodded slowly. “Then its coming is sure,” she said, almost to herself. She locked eyes with Neythan. “It has begun by destroying those things that would withstand it. Like your Brotherhood. And the Fellowship.”
“Fellowship?”
“The Fellowship of Truths. They are an order of men and women committed to the overturning of the Sovereignty.”
“You are part of this Fellowship?”
“No…” Filani, for the first time since Neythan had met her, became genuinely melancholy then. The lines on her face seemed to deepen, become drawn. “I was, many years ago,” she said. “But the Fellowship is made up of many, some of them even officials on the Sovereign council, like Zaqeem son of Tishbi, the governor of Qadesh. Or Tobiath son of Abner, the chief scribe of Dumea.”
Neythan took that in slowly. The names were like weights thudding on a floor. “I watched Zaqeem die by sovereign decree, and Tobiath is husband to the decree I received when I took my covenant and became a Brother.”
Filani gave a single slow nod. “Then it is as I thought. They sought to use the Brotherhood to destroy both itself and the Fellowship.”
“Then you know of what is coming?”
“No, Neythan. It is you who knows. I have seen only the shadows, you, the things that cast them. It is with you the Watcher visited. It is you who carry one of their books.” She pointed at the scroll in the corner. “There are others like it, but what is written in them cannot be read by anyone.”
“Then how are they read?”
“In Súnam, the priests and elders will explain everything. They will answer your questions.”
“But you won’t?”
“It is forbidden for me to speak to you of these things without their consent. It is the vow I took, the law that was given me. In Súnam, you will understand.”
“In Súnam…”
“That is where we must go. And will do so once Nyomi has prepared the wagon.”
It was then the niece, a Súnamite, middle-aged, stepped in from around the side of the tent where she’d been working. She was much lighter than Filani, bronzed, as though of mixed blood like Neythan. She stood by the door of the tabernacle and glanced at them all before turning to address her aunt. “It is ready now,” was all she sai
d.
And with that Filani rose. “Good. Let us tarry no longer.” She looked at Caleb and Neythan. “In a few weeks we will be in the Summerlands. It is there you will find your answers.”
Outside, Nyomi had fixed a canopy over Caleb’s cart using staffs tied with scrim, just high enough to lie beneath, a shelter for the feverish Neythan and Arianna. They climbed into the cartbed and covered themselves in the blankets beneath its shade as the others packed up the tabernacle.
An hour later they were journeying on toward the south. Nyomi and Filani resumed on camelback whilst Caleb held the reins of the cart, driving the mule as the wheels slid and sifted over the grit of the sloping plain as it stretched out beneath the hot white meridian.
Epilogue
D A R K N E S S
Curious thing, the night. Especially how people respond to it. The simple absence of light, and yet see how it turns the bold hesitant, the strong weak. He’d seen it a thousand times, was fascinated by it. How it would change people. For what, when all’s said, is darkness? Not seeing, not knowing what’s there. No more than mere uncertainty, a kind of void. Strange, amusing even, to see the way men’s imaginations were prone to fill it, making every stray sound an enemy, the slightest noise some malevolent foe. Such a funny thing, the mind; never so lively as when separated from what it knows.
He’d not known the habit in himself until now, until this very night in fact, hanging, bowed over, on the neck of his horse. He could feel her fear too, warm against his cheek, surging through her rapid pulse, heaving through her haggard snorts as she plodded on through the rain. How he hated the rain. Every drop stung; drumming against the wound on his head where lobes of flimsy flesh flapped in the wind like a tossed sail. He could feel the cold knifing into him through the gash there, down his neck and chest like the blood he’d bled. The blood he’d seen. All that blood. More than he’d ever forget, there when he closed his eyes, there when he opened them too, stained to his thoughts.
He fumbled by the throatlash for his skin of water. Remembered he’d dropped it hours before. His fingers weak and clumsy now. Hard to stay awake. He tried to lift his head to see which way his mare was carrying him. Too dark to tell. Nothing but blue fog lifting against the night as the moors steamed in the downpour. He willed her to keep going. Could feel she wanted to stop, the sag and halt of her steps, the way her hooves scraped with each pace as though too heavy for her to lift.
