Better had Glyph sent an arrow into his chest, with point of flint, iron, bone or antler, in spinning flight, the length of shaft perfectly suited, the wood elegant in its supple answer to the bow’s string.
There were thirty or so Deniers in this camp now. If they each had a tale to tell, it was whispered in that voice Narad could not hear, the mouths moving behind masks, and all the while the quiet, maddening preparations continued. Round and round and—
Glyph moved to settle into a crouch beside him. ‘I name you the Watch. In our old language: Yedan.’
Narad grunted. ‘I do little else.’
‘No. For the time of night, when you wake. When you rise and walk the camp. The time of night when your haunts return to you. Your nerves tremble. A restless thing takes you, a thing you cannot name, unless you clothe it in your deepest fears. You wake and stand, when others would fight back into sleep, into losing themselves again. This is a terrible vigil, a solitary vigil. It is the vigil of one who stands alone.’
With the toe of one boot, Narad pushed the end of a branch deeper into the fire. He could think of nothing to say. The other names he had earned had stung. But not this one. He wondered why.
‘My hunters honour you,’ said Glyph.
‘What? No, they ignore me.’
‘Yes, just so.’
‘You call that honouring? You Deniers – I don’t understand you.’
‘The Watch is always alone. Their story makes them so. We see in your eyes, friend, that you have never known love. Perhaps this is necessary, for the task awaiting you.’
Narad thought about Glyph’s words. He had set for himself a task. That much was true. But he had doubt as to the purity of his purpose: after all, that Legion troop was witness to his shame, and the faces he saw, at night – the ones that started him awake with the sky black overhead – were ones he wanted to cut away, cut down, crush under his heel. My shame. Each of them. All of them. He could raise high his vow, voice her name like a prayer, and announce himself the weapon of her vengeance. And even then, he would hear his own whispered hunger, heart-wounded and pathetic, for something like redemption.
There were mines where worked the fallen and the failed, the unforgivable fools who carried with them their unforgivable deeds. They crawled into the earth, burrowed under heavy stone and layers of rock. They dug their way through their unforgiving world, and deemed that a kind of penance. He should have gone to such a place. If only to shatter the bedrock holding that iron stake, shatter it, see me burst free, to run a straight path – straight as an arrow, straight over the nearest cliff.
To Glyph he now said, ‘My task is vengeance. Against my own shame. Others took … bits of it. I need to hunt them down and take it back. If I can do that … if I can reach that, that place …’
‘You will then be redeemed,’ said Glyph, nodding.
‘Which must not be, Glyph. Must never be allowed to happen. For what I did … no redemption is possible. Do you understand?’
‘The Watch, then, must guard a bridge destined to fall. The Watch who stands, and stands fast, is our harbinger of failure.’
‘No. What are you saying? This – this crime of mine – it has nothing to do with you Deniers. Your cause is just. Mine isn’t.’
‘The two must recognize each other, friend, and then together look upon the deed between them. See how it is, in the end, one and the same.’
Narad studied the warrior. ‘It seems you have already invented me, Glyph. Found a way to, well, hammer me into your way of seeing the world. I am an awkward fit, don’t you think? Best find another, someone else, someone with less … less history.’
But Glyph shook his head. ‘We do not fear this … your awkward fit. Why fear such a thing? A world made smooth allows no purchase. Neither a way into it nor a way out from it. It is closed on itself. It makes its own answer, and so lies undisturbed by doubt.’
Narad scowled at the fire. ‘What are we waiting for, Glyph? There are soldiers I need to find and kill.’
Glyph waved a hand, and then straightened. ‘Visitors are coming. They will soon be here.’
‘All right. Coming from where?’
‘From a holy shrine. From an altar black with old blood.’
‘Priests? What need have we for priests?’
‘They walk the forest. For days now. We have been following their progress, and it seems that it will bring them here, to this camp. So we wait, to see what comes of it.’
Narad rubbed at his face. The ways of the Deniers remained a mystery. ‘When do they arrive, then?’
Glyph set a hand on Narad’s shoulder. ‘Tonight, I think. In your time of waking.’
In his dream Narad walked a shoreline of fire. He held a sword in his hand, but trailed its tip through the sand, and the sand was spitting sparks and flaring as embers were pushed to the sides of the wavering furrow left by the weapon’s point. The blood on the blade had burned, curled black. He was exhausted, and he knew that somewhere behind him he had left behind a much larger wake, one made up of corpses piled to either side.
Flames surrounded him, rising high as burning trees. Ash rained down.
There was a woman beside him. Perhaps she had always been there, but he had no sense of time. He felt as if he had been walking this shoreline for ever.
‘You’ll find no love here,’ the woman said.
He did not turn to her. It was not yet time to see her, to meet her eyes. She walked like a sister, not a lover, or perhaps just a companion, but not a friend. When he answered, a tremble of shock followed his own words. ‘Yet here I will stand, my queen.’
‘Why? This is not your war.’
‘I have been thinking on that, highness. On war. I have been thinking that it does not matter where the war is, or who fights it. Or whether we hold blood ties to the slayers, or not. It could well be on the other side of the world, fought by strangers, for reasons we cannot even understand. None of that matters, highness. It is our war nonetheless.’
‘How so, Yedan Narad?’
‘Because, in the end, nothing divides us. Nothing distinguishes us. We commit the same crimes, taking lives, holding ground, yielding ground, crossing blood-drenched borders – lines in the sand no different from this one here. With fires at our backs, and fires ahead – I thought I understood this sea, highness, but now I see that I did not understand it at all.’ He raised his sword and pointed its tip at the shimmering, flame-wrought surface beyond the shore. The weapon bucked and trembled in his hand, as if bound to its very own will. ‘That, my queen, is the realm of peace. We dream of swimming it, but when at last we do, we but drown.’
‘Then, O brother, you give us no hope, if war defines our existence, and peace our death.’
‘We all commit violence on ourselves, highness. It is more than just brother against brother, sister against sister, or any other combination you care to imagine. Our thoughts wage savage mayhem in our skulls, with no respite. We fight desires, wave banners of hope, tear down the standards of every promise we have dared utter. In our heads, my queen, is a world that is without peace, and by that description we define life itself.’
‘You question your purpose, brother,’ she said. ‘After all this. It is no surprise.’
‘I was a lover of men, Twilight—’
‘No. That is not you.’
Confusion took him and he almost stumbled. Drunkenly righting himself, he let the sword drop again, the point sending up a burst of sparks as it struck the sands. They walked on. He shook his head. ‘Forgive me, it nears the time.’
‘Yes. I understand, brother. The night crawls; even should we lie in sleep and so see nothing of it, still, it crawls.’
‘I would have you, my queen, uproot the spike.’
‘I know,’ she replied in a soft voice.
‘Their faces were my shame.’
‘Yes.’
‘So I cut them all down.’
‘White faces,’ she murmured. ‘Not sharing our … inde
cision. We are their only shadow, brother, and in that, we can never lie to them. You did what you had to do. You did what they demanded of you.’
‘I died in my sister’s arms.’
‘Not you.’
‘Are you sure, my queen?’
‘Yes.’
He halted, shoulders hunching, head bowing. ‘Highness, I must ask you – who set this world afire?’
She reached out to him, one soft gore-smeared hand touching the line of his jaw, lifting his gaze to her own. The rapists had done their work. There was no forgetting that. He remembered the feel of her broken body beneath him, and the ragged mess that had been her wedding dress. With dead eyes, she looked upon him, and her dead lips parted, to utter the dead words, ‘You did.’
Narad’s eyes blinked open. It was night. The few fires had burned down, and the scorched stumps of trees stood thin and black on all sides of the camp. The others were asleep. He sat up, tugged aside the ratty furs of his bedding.
He welcomed her haunting, but not the illusions it delivered. He was not her brother. She was not his queen – although perhaps, in some ways, he had made her so – but that honour, as he felt it in that place, on that fiery shoreline, was not his alone. It was an earned thing. She led her people, and her people were an army.
Wars inside make wars outside. It has always been this way. There is nothing left, but everything to fight for. Still, who dares imagine this a virtue?
He lifted hands to his scarred, mangled face. The aches never quite faded away. He could still feel her grimed fingers along the line of his jaw.
Motion caught his eye. He quickly stood and faced it. Two figures were walking into the camp.
The heavier of the two reached out to stay his companion, and then strode towards Narad.
He is not Tiste. He wears the guise of a savage.
But the one who waits behind him, he is Tiste. Andii.
The huge stranger halted before Narad. ‘Forgive me this,’ he said in a low, rumbling voice. ‘There is heat in the earth beneath us. It burns fiercest beneath your feet.’ He paused and tilted his head. ‘If it eases you, consider my friend and me as … moths.’
The others in the camp had awakened, were sitting up, but otherwise not moving. All eyes were fixed upon Glyph, who had risen and was joining Narad.
The stranger bowed to Glyph. ‘Denier, will you welcome us to your camp?’
‘It is not for me,’ Glyph replied. ‘I am the bow bent to the arrow. In this matter, Azathanai, Yedan Narad speaks for us.’
Narad started. ‘I’ve not earned any such privilege, Glyph!’
‘This time of night belongs to you,’ Glyph replied. ‘This is not where you stand, but when.’
Narad returned his attention to the stranger. Azathanai! ‘You are not our enemy,’ he said slowly, flinching at the faint question in his tone. ‘But the one behind you – is he a Legion soldier?’
‘No,’ the Azathanai replied. ‘He is Lord Anomander Rake, First Son of Darkness.’
Oh.
The lord then stepped forward, his attention fixed, not on Narad, but on Glyph. ‘We need not linger, if welcome is not offered. Denier, my brother haunts this forest. I would find him.’
Narad staggered back, his knees suddenly weak. A moment later he sank down on to his knees as the words of the evening just past returned to him.
‘Coming from where?’
‘From a holy shrine. From an altar black with old blood.’
He felt a hand upon his shoulder, a grip both soft and yet solid. With his own hands he had been clawing at his face, but now all strength left him, and they fell away, leaving him nowhere to hide. Shivering, eyes bleakly fixed on the ground before him, he listened to the storm in his skull, but it was a roar without words.
‘We know him,’ Glyph replied. ‘Look north.’
But the Azathanai spoke then. ‘Anomander, we’re not done yet here.’
‘We are,’ the Son of Darkness replied. ‘We walk north, Caladan. Unless this Denier lies.’
‘Oh, I doubt that,’ Caladan replied. ‘Still, we are not done yet. Bent Bow, your Watch suffers some unknown anguish. Does he refuse us welcome? If he does, then we must quit this forest—’
‘No!’ snapped Lord Anomander. ‘That we shall not do, Caladan. Look at this … this Yedan. He is not one of the forest dwellers. He bears a Legion sword, for Abyss’s sake. More likely we have stumbled into one of Urusander’s famous bandits – his very reason for invading the forest. I can now imagine them as godless as Urusander’s own, and a pact forged between the two.’
Narad closed his eyes.
‘A fine theory,’ Caladan said, ‘but, alas, utter nonsense. My lord, understand me – we walk lightly here, or not at all. We will await the word of the Watch, no matter how long it takes.’
‘Your advice confounds,’ Anomander said in a growl. ‘It is of a kind with all that now crowds me.’
‘Not the advice that confounds, lord, but the will that resists it.’
The hand on Narad’s shoulder was not a man’s hand. For this reason alone, he dared not open his eyes. Welcome to these two? How can I, without uttering the confession that now struggles to win free? Brother of the husband to be, I was the last to rape your brother’s would-be wife. I alone saw the light leave her eyes. Will you give me leave, good sir, to seek redress?
When Glyph spoke, his voice came from a few strides away, ‘His torment is not for you, Azathanai. Nor for you, Lord Anomander. Dreams make the path to waking, for the time of the Watch. We know nothing of that world. Only that its shaping is given form by anguished hands. And one of you, Azathanai or lord, now rattles that thing in his soul.’
‘Then name our crimes,’ Anomander said. ‘For myself, I will face them, and deny nothing that I have done.’
Narad lifted his head, but refused to open his eyes. Ah, this. ‘Azathanai,’ he said. ‘You are welcome here.’
Hunters now stirred, rising on all sides, taking hold of weapons.
Anomander said, ‘So I am denied, then.’
Narad shook his head. ‘First Son of Darkness. The time is not yet for … for our welcome. But I will promise this. When we are needed, call upon us.’
At last, Narad heard the voices of his fellow hunters, their murmurs, their curses. Even Glyph seemed to hiss in sudden shock, or frustration.
But Anomander was the first to reply. ‘Yedan Narad, this civil war does not belong to you. Though I can see how your companions might like to witness what vengeance I may deliver, in the name of the slain people of this forest.’
‘No,’ said Narad, and his shuttered eyes offered him nothing but a silvered realm, mercurial and flaring as if with unseen fires. That seemed fitting enough. ‘That is not our battle, you are right. Not … how we will fight our … our enemies. I speak of something else.’
‘You stumble—’
Caladan cut off the Son of Darkness with a harshly rasped, ‘Stifle your mouth, you fool!’
‘When the fires take the sea,’ Narad said, seeing once again that terrible shoreline where he had walked. The hand on his shoulder held him with a savagely tight grip now, sending pain lancing through him. ‘Upon the shoreline,’ he said. ‘There, when you ask it of us, we will stand.’
‘In whose name?’ Caladan asked.
‘Hers,’ Narad replied.
The Deniers shouted, in fury, in outrage.
But Narad opened his eyes and met Lord Anomander’s startled gaze. And said, a second time, ‘Hers.’
He watched as Caladan reached out, grasped hold of Lord Anomander’s left arm, and dragged the Son of Darkness out from the camp. As if a single additional word might shatter everything. In moments both were gone, vanishing among the burned boles.
Glyph stepped in front of Narad, his face contorted. ‘You pledge us to Mother Dark?’
‘No,’ Narad said.
‘But – I heard you! We all heard you! Your words to the First Son of Darkness!’
Na
rad studied Glyph, and something in his expression swept the rage from Glyph’s face. ‘She was not in my dream, Glyph,’ he said, attempting a smile that made the hunter recoil before him.
‘Then—’ Glyph paused and looked away, as if seeking one last sight of the two who had come among them, but they were gone. ‘Then, brother, he misunderstood you.’
‘But the other one did not.’
‘The Azathanai? How can you know?’
Narad smiled again, although it was a hard thing to manage. ‘Because of what he did, Glyph. How fast … how fast he took Anomander away. No explanations, you see? No chance for … for clarification.’
‘The Azathanai chose to deceive the Son of Darkness?’
Yes. But that, well, that is between them. ‘Not our concern,’ he said, turning on his knees to find his bedroll.
‘When Lord Anomander calls, will we answer?’
Narad looked across at Glyph. ‘He won’t have to, Glyph. That place I described? I fear we will already be there.’
Standing fast, upon the shores of peace. In her name.
‘Glyph?’
‘Yedan Narad?’
‘Your old language. Have you a name for a shoreline?’
The hunter nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘What is it, then?’
‘Emurlahn.’
Yes. There.
FIVE
And here the tale’s tone must change.
A war upon death? The wayward adventures of the Azathanai? Foolish youth and bitter ancients – raise a sceptical brow, then, and let us plunge into the absurdity of the unimaginable and the impossible.
I’ll not gainsay the prowess of the Azathanai, nor seek to diminish the significance of their meddling. Draconus was not alone in his headlong careering into disaster. The question, for which there remains no answer, is this: are they gods? If so, then childish ones. Stumbling with their power, careless with their charges. Worthy of worship? You would well guess my answer.
You are curious, I gather, and indeed led into bemusement, by my fashioning this tale. In your mind, I am sure, the place of beginnings lacked the formality of territories, shorelines, the hinting of a discrete and singular world, upon which myths and legendary entities abound. Dare I suggest that what clashes is within you, not me? The deep past is a realm of the imagination, but one made hazy and indistinct with mystery. Yet is it not the mystery that so ignites the fire of wonder? But the unformed realm is a sparse setting, and little of substance can be built upon the unknown.
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