Knife Sworn

by Mazarkis Williams

  “…was born of Yi-ith, and she begat Jedah. And Jedah brought the word of Mogyrk to the people of Mythyck in the time of Ansos…”

  Grada risked a look around at her fellow faithful. Five women, two men, one of those fat with flour on his apron. She wondered how he had made it between the buildings. Perhaps he was greased specially for the occasion? Her lips twitched at the thought. Once she would have shared it with Sarmin. He would have laughed. The other wore the head cloth of a dock-counter, up from the river quays with his abacus under his tunic no doubt. She wondered if it were a good sign that he had to travel so far to find a church, or a bad sign that his need was so strong he would brave the Maze to worship.

  “…into the desert that we might follow. Praise be his name.”

  “Praise to Mogyrk.” Grada muttered it with the others.

  She knelt in the heat, her knees starting to ache, listening to the droning priest and wondering what hold such a dull faith had on her fellow citizens. The basement held no statues, no fearsome warrior god to inspire, no toothed horror to breed a righteous fear. Just words and more words. And after a while one realised that the stink of the alley over mastered the incense to reach in even here.

  “Praise to Mogyrk,” she repeated with the others into the pause.

  “For Mogyrk went before us, brothers, sisters, to prepare a house of many rooms. And in this house there is a place for all men, for each of us and everything, for each blade of grass and grain of sand. So it is written, and so shall we be unwritten. Death waits for every man, life is but a heartbeat, death eternal, and into this eternity Mogyrk threw himself, for me, for you, his love for the world boundless. In this house we shall be many, no one of us alone, held within the love Mogyrk died for.

  “Praise to Mogyrk.” The words came unsought. The Many. That’s what Mogyrk offered. Faith in togetherness. Grada felt it, the promise, the temptation. The priest walked among them now, between the kneeling faithful, a clay cup in his hand, letting each person drink.

  “The dead god’s promise.” And he tipped the cup to Grada’s lips. She drank deep. The promise tasted only of water, giving no hint as to whether it were poison or cure.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  SARMIN

  Sarmin sat once more on the carpet, gritty with the debris of ruined walls, and lay back to watch the gods. In the shadow and soft flicker of his lantern they returned his inspection, Herzu hooded, with just the gleam of his eyes on show, Mirra full of grace, her compassion wrought in five lines by the skill of an artist long gone to dust. Meksha with fire in her eyes, Ghesh wrapped in midnight, Torlos of war, battle dressed, many others. Beyond the door sword-sons stood guard. The Fryth waited on his presence while viziers, generals and priests waited on his word; provincial lords travelled up and down the Blessing; babies sucked their mother’s milk and knew nothing of the emptiness growing in the heart of the empire. But in here, in this high tower, this small room, nothing had changed.

  Sarmin returned to the undamaged wall below the window, to the place where the design had spoken and lit visions within him. Twice the pattern had spoken to him. Not in the old way, through some devil or demon concealed in plain sight within the intricate sprawling scroll of the ancient decoration, but in a new voice, a raw and powerful voice that rang him like a bell and woke echoes among the Many that remained trapped within him.

  Sarmin’s fingers had learned to fear the tight-woven lines of the design but he over-wrote their reluctance with his will and set them trembling against the patterning. The voice had warned of a woman who approached, and he’d seen her through the eyes of a mountain boy. Seen an ancient woman who spoke of the Pattern Master as an old friend, a mentor, a lover maybe. “Show her to me,” he said. “Why is she coming here?”

  “She comes!” The voice pulsed through him once again and the boy’s life swept over him.

  Gallar stands alone, uneasy in the woods - burdened by the exhaustion of his escape through the high passes, the ache of his long descent into Fryth running in each muscle from heel to hip. The mountain-born are used to seeing mile upon empty mile, used to the wind and silence, the surety of rock—in this forest every direction ends in tree, soon or sooner still, everything is malleable, even the trees have give, and each part of it whispers or creaks or rustles.

  The outpost announces itself first with the smell of wood smoke, then with the smoke itself seen rising into an evening sky through breaks in the canopy. Mule dung on the trail, the buzzing of flies, the stink of men lingering among the trunks, and the path breaks without preamble into a wide clearing.

  The trading post stands three stories high, a log-built hall with stone foundations, turf roofed, surrounded by a score of buildings that are no more than shacks, stables to the rear, trade goods beneath awnings to the fore. Gallar stops in the tree-line. Nothing moves in the lengthening shadows, save a scrawny yellow dog sniffing between the lean-tos. A mule brays from the stables. Silence.

  Far back, past the shack, among the trees on the far side of the clearing, something catches his eye. In the gloom beneath the foliage… something moving, things moving, not men though, or if they were, not moving like men. He frowns, takes a step back.

  “Hold.” The sharp point of a blade pricks him between his shoulders. Yrkmen! They beat me here! Gallar raises his hands. “I’m just a traveller.” “Hold.” Noises from the bushes, rustling. He has walked right past them and

  now they’ll kill him. He had wanted to be brave but fear unmans him, trembling in his raised hands, the tingling of pins and needles across his cheekbones, making him want to piss himself like a child.

  Two men walk around him, knives in hand, both hung about with cut vines. Each of them wears an iron helm of strange design, white enamelled, also wreathed in vines. It seems impossible that he had missed them. The elder of them, tall with a grey speckled moustache, watches him a moment through narrowed eyes, cocking his head to the side. Gallar tries to return the look but his gaze keeps slipping to the dagger point held between them.

  “Yrkman?” The soldier makes it sound wrong.

  “I’m a traveller. From the mountains.” Gallar realises the hands holding the knives are too dark for any Yrkman or Fryth. Even in high summer the men of Fryth never scorched to such an olive tone.

  Behind the boy’s eyes Sarmin recognizes the men as soldiers of his army of the White Hat, men from Nooria or the cities strung south along the Blessing. Far from home.

  “Come.” And the tall soldier leads off, one of his companions moving back up the trail.

  A prod from the sword or spear at his back gets Gallar’s feet moving. In the stories Voice Zanar told this would be where the hero made his escape. A lunge, a twist, and he’d be off with a stolen weapon and men bleeding in his wake. But Gallar finds himself nailed to reality by certain knowledge that a spear thrust would outpace any move he might make and that his shaking hands have no chance of stealing a blade.

  They cross the clearing, following the gradient in a series of rough steps, aimed for the far side. Soon enough Gallar understands what had first caught his eye. Men swinging from the boughs of a mountain oak, ropes about their necks. Ten or more, swaying gently, toes pointed to the ground, hands bound behind backs. Closer still and even the twilight can’t hide their faces, dark with blood, eyes bulging in unreal almost comic exaggeration of what should be possible. Their heads, cocked to the side at broken angles, recall how the soldier had first looked at him. Is this his fate then, to cross the high pass just to die choking on a rope?

  It starts to rain. At first Sarmin only hears it, pattering on the leaves above. He wonders what it is. The first droplets find Gallar, spilling from leaf and twig, cold and shocking. The tempo builds until it’s a downpour beating at the canopy. Sarmin has never seen such rain, a season’s water will fall in an hour.

  The soldiers here are not so well hidden, and more plentiful. Dozens of them emerge, their armour foreign to Gallar’s eye, overlapping scales of iron on
linen. Most hold long spears with narrow steel heads, weapons unsuited to the forest. One approaches, this man with bronze chasing on each scale of his armour, his white helm without camouflage, its back extending into lobstered iron plates to guard his neck and running with water. Sarmin knows him for a first-spear captain.

  “Yrkmen?” He speaks the word better than his men.

  “I’m from the mountain tribes.” Gallar can’t keep the terror from quivering in his voice. “I’m not from Yrkmir or Fryth. From the mountains.” He tries to point towards the peaks but the man behind him slaps his arm down.

  The officer shakes his head. “You are from Yrkmir I think. A spy. There is room for you on the tree.”

  Sarmin tries to order the captain to stop. He knows this is memory. It has to be memory. But even so he tries, and fails.

  “No, don’t!” Gallar falls to his knees in the soft dirt, as if that might stop them. “I’m from Hollow!” He screams as two men drag him to his feet. “I hate the Yrkmen.” Someone loops a rope about his neck, a coarse thick rope that makes him retch even before they tighten it. “No! They killed my mother! All my people! With magic!”

  “Hthna.” The officer holds up a hand. Hearing Cerantic through Gallar’s ears is strange and for the first time Sarmin realizes Gallar is thinking and speaking a language he doesn’t understand. The captain steps closer. “Hanging is easy, boy.” A pause here and there to select his words, his lips struggling with their shapes. “You die hard if you lie to me.”

  “I’m not lying, I’m not, I never lie.” Gallar rushes his words, speaking too fast for the man but unable to stop. “I saw it. I saw them die. They put a pattern on us. Everyone died—”

  The man’s hand closes around Gallar’s throat, intense dark eyes on his, face close enough to smell the spices on his breath. “A pattern?”

  “I swear it. A pattern. I swear it by the highest rock. By my home-stone.” He remembers the lines curling over everything, everyone, his mother becoming dust even as he told her to run. None of them would listen. He remembers the pain as the pattern lines wrapped him too, the agony as the scars of the old pattern, the illness that had made him Many, had flared into angry echoes of their old form and burned the new marks from him.

  Even in the midst of this remembered suffering Sarmin can wonder—how can this be memory? This boy was cured of the Pattern Master’s curse. I saved him.

  The soldier barks a command and steps back. He waves to the left and with a tug of the rope Gallar is led deeper into the woods. They pull him choking through a wall of thorny bushes into the beaten-down circle at their midst. Two white helmed soldiers stand guard over a hunched figure crouching at their knees, a stick figure in wet rags, hands bound at the wrists to a heavy wooden yoke across its shoulders. The prisoner looks up as Gallar stumbles in, bright eyes staring at him through a dirty straggle of hair.

  “Megra!” he gasps.

  “I know my name, boy.” And her gaze returns to the leaf mould and broken thorns.

  “You ran and left us!” Gallar spits the words at old Megra, crouched in the tatters of the woolen shift she had always worn so proudly.

  “Stayin” wouldn’t have helped,” she mutters, eyes bright behind grey straggles. A dark gap stands where one of her teeth should be, old blood at the corner of her mouth. “A hundred winters and I still got my teeth,” the Megra had been wont to boast. His Ma used to whisper the Megra was a lot more than a hundred winters and that she stole her teeth from corpses. Whatever the truth, she has one fewer now.

  The soldiers thrust Gallar to the ground, broken thorns jabbing through his leggings as he falls. He gathers himself up and crouches opposite the old woman, pausing to pull prickles from his hands then wipe the rain from his face. He tries to take the noose from about his neck but one of the men barks at him, lowering his spear.

  “You could have told Hound Marka…” Until this moment, until he actually sees her Gallar has accepted the Megra’s treachery, but now she lies within arms’ reach he can no longer credit it. The woman had watched Hollow grow, known its children from birth to death, and their children after them.

  “Hound Marka paid more attention to bird song than to me. Woken in the night he would have thrown me from his hall.”

  “You could have tried! Someone would have listened.”

  “Did they listen to you?” The Megra shakes her head. “Hollow would have argued until dawn and died all the same. The rock clans won’t leave their home-stones on the say so of an old woman.”

  He wants to shake her, to hit her, the need for it itches across his knuckles, he wants to see her spit the rest of her teeth into the gloom. “They’d listen to you before a boy like me. You could have done something.”

  She shakes her head. “The austeres were already writing their trap around Hollow when you came to my hut.” Overhead the rain beats at the leaves, loud and furious, running down to pour on all below in spurts and dribbles. The Megra hunches, old and frail, a knot of misery in human form. The rope itches at Gallar’s neck and the memory of the sensation as it had tightened below the bulge of his throat makes him retch again.

  Gallar wipes sourness from his mouth and says nothing. The Megra is right and it angers him. Her fear angers him, a worse betrayal than any other—that the Megra, so old, and tough, has surrendered to her fear. And now she hunches in the rain, utterly defeated, the pivot of old tales, a threat to scare children, just an ancient woman, soaked and waiting to die.

  The people of Hollow would not have left. But even so, she should have stayed to try. The Rock Hounds would have waited on their enemy, stood their ground, the common people too. The Hollow had been watered with their blood for too many years to just leave it. None of them had any give in them. The sharp-angled language of the soldiers returns him to the moment as they exchange an observation.

  “Who are these people?” Gallar asks, leaning in towards the Megra.

  “Cerani.” Her hair hangs before her face, water drops forming and falling from the ragged curtain of it, forming and falling.

  Gallar can make no sense of that. Desert men from the ends of the world, here where the mountains keep Mythyk from Fryth? He wants to ask more but sounds of shouting, louder than the rain, turn his head towards the clearing. He stands, cold water running into the few dry places remaining to him. The Megra stays huddled as if she knows nothing good is coming. Be brave. He remembers the words from the Megra’s ring and wonders why they come to him now, demanding to be spoken. “Be brave,” he says. “We’re none of us just one thing.” It seems important to say those words, to remind her. Perhaps he forgives her too, but those words won’t come.

  The shouts grow closer, several men, then a sudden silence filled by the drone of rain on leaves.

  “What did the ring say for you?” he asks, wondering if the soldiers have taken if from her or is it hidden, or lost.

  “Helmar gave me that ring,” she says, spitting rain. “Long ago, before time corrupted us both. It said: You are my salvation. It still says it. A lie.” She spat bitterness with the rain this time. “He’s dead. He lived too long and now he’s dead. Past any salvation. As if a twisted thing like me could have saved him even when there was a chance.”

  And Gallar knows they are lost, him and the Megra both. She wouldn’t be spilling secrets with the rain if they weren’t about to die. He puts his hand on her shoulder. Rags and bone, soaked through, but there’s something in that moment. Be brave.

  A few seconds pass, then more rustling and two more dripping soldiers break into the circle of thorns. One points at Gallar, the other man takes hold of the dangling end of the noose and pulls him behind them as they leave again.

  They return to the hanging tree, to the swaying corpses, running with water now. There are men beneath the tree, close to the trunk, faces obscured by the legs of the hanged. A score or more soldiers come pressing in from deeper in the forest, a nervous air about them, as if the rain doesn’t agree with these men from the
dry lands. Lanterns hang on lower branches at wide intervals, the rainclouds having ended the day prematurely. Several of the lights dangle from the hanging tree, one close to the face of a victim, black-faced, eyes bulging, the blood on his chin running again in the rain.

  Still more soldiers arrive, these ones hurrying, barking orders or questions to the others. The men by the base of the tree turn and between them Gallar sees a clansman, on his knees, blood covering half his face from a cut high on his forehead. They jerk the man to his feet by the rope about his neck. A man of Rella by the look of him, only ten miles from Hollow if a crow flew above the Ridge of Tears. The officer that had spoken to Gallar stands beside the clansman and now leads the other soldiers as they bring him out from under the tree, knocking aside the feet of the dead men swaying above them. They have bound his hands tight behind his back and already they’re purple with trapped blood. The officer says something and one of his men slings the spare loop of rope from the noose over a tree branch.

  “No!” Gallar starts forward, only to find his own noose tightening as his guard holds fast. “No!” He chokes it out. The Rella man can see what’s happening to him—why isn’t he fighting, trying to run?

  The soldier reaches high, wraps the rope about both hands and leans back, letting it take his whole weight. A single short cry escapes the clansman, he staggers across the forest floor, drawn onto his toes beneath the branch. A second soldier joins the first and the man’s feet leave the ground, his legs scissoring wildly, kicking up fallen leaves and wet rot as he loses contact.

  Gallar vomits acid and falls to his knees unable to look.

  “Get up.” The officer’s boots, gleam beside the watery yellow splatters of Gallar’s vomit. “Up,” he says again in his broken accent.

  Gallar struggles to his feet, his legs almost too weak to stand. “I didn’t do anything.” His father would not be proud. His father would tell him to stand like a man and not beg.