Students of the Order

by Edward W. Robertson

  The ground was rocky and he didn't know it well, there being no grass in it, but the trail brought him to a cave in the base of the cliffs. It was short enough that he had to duck to get through. Inside, the stench of blood clogged his nostrils. He froze in place. It was worse than blood, dung and something else that smelled like guts. Had a bear gotten to her? Dragged her back to its den? But then what about her tracks?

  He hissed angry words to himself under his breath, cursing himself for being so afraid, then jerked forward. Almost at once, he tripped over something springy and damp. Isabelle mewled in complaint.

  He laughed and thrust his fingers into her shaggy coat. Her front left leg glistened—it had been chewed up, was still bleeding. She would never have had the strength to make it home. Snow was blowing through the shallow cave's entrance, beginning to accrete against the floor. She wouldn't have lasted the night.

  He bent to try to scoop her up, but something wriggled beside her. He stumbled back, then leaned forward. Two newborn lambs lay tucked against their mother's side. One of them lifted its little head and bawled at him in challenge.

  He would have to go all the way back through the snowy night to get his dad, who might strike him before he had the chance to explain, but he wasn't afraid anymore. Because he understood, at last, how fragile everything was—and how you had to protect it from the cold and the wolves.

  Just for a moment, Joti was back in himself, free from the shepherd's memory, which the man still thought of as the defining moment of his youth. He still recalled it whenever he was afraid. And the dying man was remembering it right now, for the last time.

  Joti swung forward again, into a new memory or something like it. It was dark again. He was in a forest again. He was running again. This time, though, he could feel that he was older. Equipped with the full strength of adulthood. He carried his crook in one hand, and a dagger in the other, and he was so afraid that it felt like his heart would jar itself apart.

  He stopped, staring toward the point in the distant trees. A part of him wanted to pretend he hadn't seen the wink of fire there. Instead, he ran on.

  He found them asleep next to the almost-dead embers of the fire. Two of them had swords laid beside them. The third was much smaller. A rope led from under his blankets to the trunk of a thin tree. He thought about grabbing the boy and running, but there was little chance they wouldn't wake up. And if they did, with him carrying the boy, they'd be on him in moments.

  Fear drove through his stomach like the coldest steel. One of the men stirred, and for a woozy moment, he thought they'd leap to their feet and cut him down while he stood paralyzed with terror. He closed his eyes and remembered the cave of the newborn lambs.

  He lowered his crook to the ground and crept toward the closer of the two men. The bandit was breathing evenly and his breath smelled like beer. The shepherd crouched beside him and hovered the dagger above the man's throat. He'd never stabbed anyone and it took all of his will to bring the blade down.

  A couple of inches into the man's neck, the dagger caught on something and slid to the side. The man screamed and jerked awake, flailing at the shepherd, who toppled backward. The bandit reeled to his feet, clutching his throat as it spewed blood. Across the camp, the other man rolled to his knees and crawled for his sword.

  The shepherd threw himself at the first man, slashing at his arms. The bandit staggered backwards and fell in a bloody heap. The shepherd stabbed at him in a flurry. Feet pounded toward him. The second bandit cocked back his sword and swung hard toward the shepherd's midsection. He threw himself at the attacker's knees.

  They hit the rock-hard ground, grabbing and pawing at each other, the shepherd stabbing wherever he could, but they were too close for him to find much leverage, and the other man was stronger, forcing him to his side, then his back, a knee moving to pin the hand holding his dagger. The bandit reached for the blade, meaning to gut him with his own weapon.

  As he stretched forward, he exposed his gut, where the shepherd had stuck him once. The shepherd scrabbled with his free hand, shoving a finger inside the wound. He ripped downward as hard as he could. The man roared, rocking back. The shepherd grabbed up his dagger. He didn't stop stabbing until long after the bandit was utterly still.

  He sat there a minute, breathing. Across the fire, the boy sobbed. The shepherd found his feet, his whole body aching, and pulled the blankets from over the boy's head. The face he revealed looked so much like the shepherd Joti had shot in the back that for a moment Joti was jarred loose from the vision—but the nose was too straight, the eyes too light.

  The boy said, "Dad?"

  He—the shepherd—embraced the boy as hard as he could. He cut the boy's bonds and picked him up and carried him into the woods. After a short while, Joti seemed to come untethered from his head, drifting to a stop in the middle of the forest as the man trudged onward. The man swung around as if spooked, giving Joti a clear look at his face. It was the same human he'd just shot—but older, by at least ten years.

  The shepherd shivered and walked on, carrying the boy away from the fire and the blood. Both began to fade, growing more insubstantial with each step.

  Until they were nothing but a memory in Joti's head.

  He was kneeling on the rocks. Shain was inspecting the shepherd's body. Fibrous tendrils stretched between Joti and the corpse, and then beyond into nothing, disappearing as though there were a hole in the fabric of being. Joti blinked. When he opened his eyes, the tendrils were gone, but he still retained the memory of the vision.

  Numbly, he got to his feet and moved to join Shain. "Why did we have to shoot him?"

  "He would have alerted someone that there were orcs in the woods. Bad enough to be caught beyond the border when we aren't on the verge of a war that both sides seem to want more than anything." She turned out the man's pockets, but didn't seem interested in taking his things. "Look, history isn't about individual lives. We're all grist crushed in the mill of time. Much better to lose this one life here than to spare him at the cost of thousands." She glared at the body, tugging his cloak straight. "Anyway, I told him not to run." She stood, glancing at Joti and doing a double-take. "What's wrong?"

  "It's nothing."

  "Is that why you look like you've just watched your own guts tumble from your asshole? You are much less fragile than this, Joti. So I repeat: what is it that is wrong?"

  He avoided her eyes, struck with the bone-deep instinct that he shouldn't tell her that he thought he'd just fallen into the Warp—that she or someone else would accuse him of being corrupted by the wizard.

  "It's my dad," he said. "The shepherd reminded me of the last time I saw him. The way he was…"

  Shain gazed at the dead human. "Shot down? You said your father escaped. Along with your family."

  "The others did. But when the raiders were closing in, my father turned and ran away from us. Took an arrow in the back for it."

  "Turning coward just as you needed him most. That is most difficult to live with."

  A hot blush stole over Joti's face. The lies he was telling about his father were utterly shameful, but he'd never understood how manipulatively powerful a person's story could be on those around them. With that realization, he had another: he would not be the only one lying about where he'd come from.

  "His ending wasn't good," Joti said. "When I tell his story, I give him a better one."

  Shain nodded thoughtfully, then returned to the body and pushed the arrow out through the shepherd's chest. This done, she dragged the corpse to the cliff and flung it over the side so that even if it was found, it would look like he'd fallen to his death. The impact sounded duller than Joti had expected.

  Shain made a circuit of the grassy field and the forest beyond. They found a herd of sheep plucking at grass poking from the snow, but no sign of any other humans. With the area cleared, she headed back toward the trail down from the heights.

  "My mother was Artusker," she said without warning. "Her fa
mily traded her to a Tusker tribe in exchange for several prisoners. I was never quite sure if my dear mum had any say in this idea—when there's something they want, Artuskers aren't known for their sentimentality—but when I was a child, she seemed happy enough. Stoic enough, at least, and isn't that better than happiness? Happiness can be taken away from you at any moment. But stoicism depends on nothing but itself.

  "Regardless, I was happy enough. I had the usual assortment of brothers and sisters, and for those of us who showed the interest and facility, our mother taught us traditional Artusker pursuits such as writing and arithmetic. Needless to say our father did not approve, and tried to dissuade us from these arts with a steady diet of Tusker skills such as wrestling, trapping and hunting, and learning how to hit things.

  "Over time, my siblings turned more and more to the Tusker ways, but I always enjoyed the things my mother taught me. They felt like very sharp tools. Perhaps that was in part because she was an excellent teacher. The kind who could lead you to answers without you knowing you were being pushed at all. Like a weightless hand."

  Shain smiled in a way that wasn't very happy, glancing at a grouse as it burst from the brush ahead. "My father vacillated between ignoring me and pushing me twice as hard toward more practical matters. One day, while my mom was out gathering leaves and resin to make her ink, he took me on a hunt for small game. We'd just snagged our second rabbit when we heard her start to scream.

  "Artusker raid. Different tribe. We caught up to find her being beaten by three of their warriors. My father watched from behind a tree as they dragged her off. I almost ran after her. But when I looked at him, I could read the guilt on his face like my mother's calligraphy: he would have let me go, and he would not have followed.

  "We returned to our village. The raiders were already gone. My father told the others that my mother had been taken by a dozen warriors. That he'd killed two of them before he'd been driven back, afraid that they'd hurt me. They believed him. Praised him. If I'd said something then, they might have sent warriors after her. But I was very young, and I was very afraid, and said nothing.

  "In the weeks that followed, I tried to practice what my mom had shown me, her letters and numbers, but whenever my father saw me, he took away my materials and beat me until I promised to stop. After the fourth such time, I did. He tried to erase every other remnant of her as well, tossing out her clothes and tools, but he couldn't erase her memory. Or his failure. He began to drink more than ever. Eventually, he started eating livers. That's what he sold me for: a quarter barrel of human guts. I was a slave for three years before I could escape."

  They had reached the rocky field where Joti had shot down the shepherd. The wind was blowing in confused circles. Gobs of snow veered from the sky like white bees struck dead in midair.

  "Know the funny part?" Shain rested her hand on the pommel of her sword. "I still miss him. Not just the concept of him, or of fathers, but him. They tell us to give up our families. Tribes. Clans. I suppose we do our best. But we still carry our past inside us, tucked away in the places where no one else can see it."

  "Sometimes," Joti said, "I wish we could give them all up."

  Shain nodded vaguely, staring out across the emptiness of the valley beneath them. "Hold the trail. I need to get our people through here before the snow gets other ideas."

  Joti moved to the vantage point he'd picked out earlier, kneeling there with an arrow nocked to his string. Shain seemed to flow down the steep path, vanishing into the trees beyond. He was still searching for the strings of the Warp when she returned with the rest of their people.

  Shain added him to the scouting rotation, sending him roving ahead through the woods. Three inches of snow muffled the ground, making it a simple thing to tell if anyone else had been traveling through the forest.

  It was far more difficult to tell where he stood with the Warp. On the one hand, not only had he seen a memory from the shepherd's past, but he was convinced that he'd also seen a vision from his future—or rather, the future that might or would have happened if the young man hadn't died that day. Either that was the Warp, or Joti was going completely insane.

  With no idea how to get closer to it—without shooting more shepherds, anyway—he tried the test given him by the old man in the tree, and relived the fight at the ford in his mind, feeling the relentless tug of the surging waters, seeing the gleeful wrath on the raiders' faces. It seemed to stir something in him, but no matter how hard he focused on his will to change it, he never saw more than flashes of the strings that bound the world together. These were as insubstantial as rainbows, fading to nothing as soon as he or the sunlight shifted position.

  Two days out from Youngkent, as he scouted the way forward, he crested a short incline and found himself at the edge of a narrow ravine, the bottom lying in shadows some two hundred feet below. The crack stretched out of sight in both directions, blocking their way forward. Deep as it was, there were parts where it was no wider than ten feet across, as if Uggot himself had driven a spike into the flat of the land and then struck it with a galloping great big hammer, rifting the mountain in two.

  Hunting for an end to it, or a bridge across it, he followed the crack south. More than once, the two edges swung close enough together that he thought he'd be able to jump across, but the thought of falling made him woozy. He continued on through the snow. Climbing over a sprawl of roots, he came face to face with a lone sheep. He startled backward, reaching for his sword, but tripped and landed on his ass.

  Joti's heart was thumping as hard as it had when he'd faced down the wozzit cavalry. The sheep stared in puzzlement. It was alone, and too bedraggled to be part of a flock. Was it an omen? Pulse still racing, he laughed. It was a sheep. Why was he so shocked by it? Why was—

  A skein of deep blue lines curled away from the sheep, wrapping behind a thick-boled tree. The sheep tossed its head and trotted around the tree, following the exact course of the lines.

  Joti followed after it as it meandered through the woods, but the lines refused to reappear. His heart had calmed. Things felt perfectly normal. Watching the dull, everyday animal, he knew it wasn't the sheep itself that had troubled him. It was the memory it jogged in him. One with as much power as anything he'd ever felt.

  He kneeled in the dirt, closed his eyes, and remembered the night the young boy had searched through the snows for the missing lambs. When he finished, he remembered again, and this time it felt less like a memory and more like a dream. The third time, he would have sworn that he was actually there: the snow squeaking beneath his shoes, the burn of his ears in the cold, the warm, musty smell of the animals in the cave.

  He opened his eyes. The lines had returned to the sheep. He stood, reaching out for a tree to brace himself, and saw a loom of threads curving from his arm toward his chest. In surprise, he drew back his arm—and followed the exact course of the threads, sweeping them away.

  Another sense seemed to be awakening to him. One that made him understand just how much space separated the Marshals from everyone else. He drew an arrow, fit it to his bow, and pulled it back. A glittering arc traced itself across the air, coming to an end in the middle of a sapling fifty yards across the forest floor. Joti loosed the arrow. It followed the course of the arc exactly, clapping into the trunk of the small tree.

  Heart racing as fast as when he'd stumbled into the sheep, he picked up a rock and threw it as high and far as he could. Transparent strands marked the course it would take. Hurriedly, he nocked an arrow. The missile's path drew itself across the air, intercepting with the rock. Letting the arrow go felt moot, but he did so anyway. It took the rock in mid-flight. He tried again with a second rock, hitting it as well. The third rock he threw was no bigger than an eyeball. His arrow struck it with a crisp ping.

  Emboldened, he nocked another arrow, aiming it straight up. The line that marked its course stretched high into the air, terminating in the ground ahead and to his left. He adjusted his aim, the line fa
ding out and reappearing ten feet in front of him. He released the string. The arrow sizzled into the overcast sky. He watched as it traced the arc inscribed into nothing, erasing it as it went, then peaked, tumbled about, and started back down. It thunked into the frozen ground a long hop in front of him.

  The thought made him blink. He gathered up the arrow, then made his way to the ravine. Most spots were too wide to even think about, but he backtracked to a narrow spot he'd earmarked earlier. He stared at the other side. An arc of threads materialized to span the chasm.

  Joti made a sound that could have been a grunt or a laugh. He backed away from the edge, took three long breaths, and dashed forward. There was some snow on the ground but his footing held. As he neared the rift, he launched himself forward. The chasm gaped beneath him, too deep and dark to see its bottom. He grinned to himself and swung his head forward.

  The threads were nowhere to be seen.

  He hit the opposite side at chest level. As he bounced back, he scrabbled for a hold, his fingers slipping on the snow. He fell away into nothing. He probably screamed. Then he landed, and was silent.

  ~

  He was on a thing. Some light above, weird ribbon of it. Dark around him. Closed his eyes. But that was bad. He needed to be up. Awake. To not die.

  He opened his eyes. He lay next to a wall of rock. Another wall faced him from ten feet away. He was on a snowy shelf thirty feet down from the top of the ravine. The overcast sky was still bright enough that he didn't think he could have been out for more than a couple hours, but that would have been more than enough time for the others to pass him by and leave him behind.

  He got to his knees. That seemed okay, so he got to his feet. Black and white spots crowded over his eyes. He pressed himself to the wall until they went away. The shelf he stood on was about twelve feet long and two to four feet wide. The cliff above him was utterly vertical. He tried climbing at three different spots and each time he nearly lost his hold altogether.