‘It began there, yes, but even then, sir, there was simple necessity. I don’t like the sight of blood. I hate the feel of it even more.’ Straightening in her seat, she set the tankard down. ‘It would be better, sir, if you were the one to arrest me.’
Wareth sighed. ‘You leave me little choice, but what should also be apparent to the captains here is the extent of my incompetence.’
‘I am not alone,’ Rance said. ‘In this body you see, I am not the sole occupant. There is someone else – we’ve never met. She walks when I sleep, and in her freedom she murders … people. Child of my own womb, men who have killed women – these are only lists. Categories. Satisfied with one, she will move to another. A new list. You need to kill me, sir.’
Sick with dread, heavy with something like disappointment – if such a bland word could be used – Wareth shook his head, as if he could deny this entire morning. He faced Prazek. ‘I understand now, sir, why you stepped around me for this.’
Prazek’s brows lifted. ‘Do you?’
‘I – I like Rance.’
‘The woman you know, you mean,’ corrected Dathenar.
‘Well, yes. Of the other, I know only the corpses she leaves in her wake – and even then, the details do not make sense.’
‘The other,’ said Dathenar, ‘is a mage.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘A wielder of sorcery,’ Prazek said. ‘A natural adept. That said, she is somewhat feral. She uses what she needs to clean up her mess. But the knife work, why, that is most mundane, wouldn’t you say?’
‘She exists,’ said Rance, ‘in a world without remorse. That, sirs, should be reason enough to see her executed. But I fear she will defend herself, and if she is as the captain says – a mage – then you must act now, while she sleeps.’
Dathenar grunted. ‘Two within you, sergeant, and between them, the one demanding punishment is the innocent one.’
‘Yet this body is the only one we possess, sir. Kill me, and the other one dies as well.’
‘The death of two for the crimes of one? ’Tis skewed scales no matter how they tilt.’
Rance made a sound of exasperation, but there was something brittle in her eyes now. ‘Then what will you do to me?’
‘The mage,’ said Dathenar, ‘we deem useful.’
‘What?’
‘If awakened to its companion, who, it seems, possesses conscience—’
‘No.’ She sat forward. ‘No. It is bad enough to know what you’ve done, but to remember it as well – no.’
In that instant, Wareth understood her. How sweeter would it be to recall nothing of Ganz’s crumpled skull? The weight of the shovel in his hands, the snap of reverberation along the wooden handle, the sound of the man’s breaking neck? Take up the shovel. Blink. Stand looking down upon his body. As if I but stepped over the moment, blessed to see only the aftermath.
Rance, the woman hiding in you took hold of your baby and drowned it. You remember nothing. The mage is not without conscience, not without mercy, all too desperate to protect her twin. I can almost hear her: ‘Not for you, my love. I will protect you, as only I can. Sleep, dear sister, and dream of nothing.’ ‘Sirs,’ said Wareth. ‘She is right. If you have some plan of somehow merging the two within Rance … please, don’t.’
‘Lieutenant,’ said Dathenar, though he held his gaze fixed upon Rance, ‘you see but one side of this – the Rance now sitting before us. She, in turn, knows only this world as well. And yet what of the one hiding behind her eyes? The one cursed to darkness, and horror?’
With his knife, Prazek tapped the side of the pewter plate before him. ‘While they continue to avoid one another, each circling the truth of the other, a single question remains, and upon that question balances the future of Rance.’ He waved the knife. ‘Perhaps yes, there is a kind of mercy, at least insofar as sits the woman before us at this moment. And perhaps indeed, we are driven – out of that most honourable mercy – to spare her.’
‘If not for that one question,’ Dathenar said. ‘They must be made to meet. Only in that moment, and all that follows, is forgiveness possible. One for the other, and back again.’
‘More to the point,’ Prazek added, ‘there is no one else capable of telling the mage to stop the killing.’
Rance was trembling, shaking her head in refusal, yet she seemed unable to speak.
Dathenar sighed. ‘We cannot execute an innocent woman.’
‘Justice must not be seen to stumble,’ said Prazek. ‘Not here, not now. The test before us will measure our own worth.’
‘The ritual must be attended by all—’
‘Ritual?’ Wareth stared at Dathenar. ‘What ritual?’
‘We sent a rider last night,’ Prazek said. ‘Southwest, to the Dog-Runners.’
‘Why?’
‘We seek a Bonecaster,’ Dathenar said. ‘It will be understood,’ he added, ‘that a demon possesses Rance, one that needs to be exorcized. But this ritual – and comprehend well what I mean here, both of you – will speak in answer not just to Rance, but to the prisoners – every prisoner – and, indeed, to the Hust Legion itself.’
‘The demons need exposing,’ said Prazek. ‘Dragged into the day, as it were.’
‘And then extirpated.’
Wareth stared at the two men. ‘Dog-Runners? Sirs, we are soldiers in the service of Mother Dark. You would invite a witch of the Dog-Runners? We are the Hust Legion!’
‘Indeed,’ said Dathenar. ‘And as it stands, lieutenant, we are also, to not put too fine a point on it, royally fucked.’
‘We believe,’ added Prazek, ‘that Galar Baras will return with Commander Toras Redone. What of her demons, lieutenant?’
‘But our goddess—’
Prazek leaned forward, his eyes suddenly hard. ‘A ritual, sir, to make the iron howl. Until we turn about this imbalance of power, until we stand as masters over our own blades, over the links sheathing us, we are nothing. The crimes crowding us are vast, countless, of such myriad details as to paralyse us all. This legion, and all within it, needs purging.’ He nodded, not without sympathy, towards Rance. ‘And she will lead us. Face to face with what she was, and is. A child-slayer.’
Faror Hend remained at a distance, but within sight of the tent entrance, and watched as Rance emerged. The woman seemed almost too weak to remain upright, and when Wareth appeared, moving quickly to take her weight, she pushed him away and stumbled into an alley, where she fell to her knees and was sick.
Prazek and Dathenar had sent Listar away in the depth of the night just past. Upon one horse, with two more trailing, the man had set out on to the plain.
There were many rituals in the world, private and public, honest and false. At some point, in each and every one, some kind of transformation was invited in the participant, to be embraced with belief. And, at that same instant, those who were there to observe were in turn invited into participation, and with it, that selfsame belief.
She understood all of that. A mirror was held up, one purporting a truth that could be hitherto believed hidden, unseen, or simply unrecognized. And a single step was invited, from one reflection into the other. In this step, she knew, an entire world could change. Irrevocably.
Listar, haunted man, wearing his accusation as if it truly fitted him, rode to find a witch, or a shaman – a Bonecaster of the Dog-Runners, a people unlike the Tiste, a people brushing shoulders with something wild and primitive.
Rituals. Spirits of earth and sky, of water and blood. Headdresses of antler and horn, furs of the hunter and hide of the hunted. This shall be the Legion’s own mirror.
Mother Dark, where are you in all of this?
The morning was bright and cold. Upon the camp, along every pathway and track, smoke hung in wreaths low over the frozen ground, as the Legion wakened to the new day.
SIXTEEN
‘IT IS OUR CURSE, ONCE WE ARE PAST CHILDHOOD, TO LOOK UPON innocence through a veil of sorrow.’
Standing bes
ide Lord Anomander as they gazed out across the landscape, Ivis grunted. ‘Milord, it’s only what we’ve lost that makes innocence sting so.’
Their breaths plumed, quickly whipped away in the building north wind. The day’s eerie gloom was deepening.
After a moment, Anomander shook his head. ‘I would hold, my friend, that what you describe is but one side of the matter, and indeed one that looks only inward, as if the borders of your life enclose everything to be valued, while what lies beyond is of no worth whatsoever.’
‘Perhaps I misunderstood, milord.’
‘Consider this, Ivis. The sorrow belongs also to our sense of what awaits that child. The harsh lessons, the wounds taken and felt but not yet understood, the losses and the failures – those the child is destined to make, and those made by others. The battering of belief, and the loss of faith, which begins with oneself and then comes, in a relentless storm, from loved ones – parents, tutors or guardians. By such wounding is innocence lost.’
Thinking on his own childhood, Ivis grunted.
Anomander sighed, and then said, ‘Sympathy is not a weakness, Ivis. To grieve for the loss of innocence is to remind yourself that yours is not the only life in this world.’
Before them, from this height of the tower, the forest to the north was a matt, greyish dun, its canopy of twigs and branches like a rumpled carpet of thorns. Bruised clouds were smeared across the sky above the trees, the hue of iron. The icy spit in the wind stung the face. Snow was coming.
‘There is no other path possible,’ Ivis said after a time. ‘We are hardened to the ways of living, and of life itself. These things cannot be avoided, milord. In any case, from what we’ve heard, young Wreneck has already had more than his share of suffering.’
‘And yet, has he once uttered a question about any of it, Ivis? Has he ever voiced in wonder why things are as they are?’
‘Not that I have heard,’ Ivis confessed, scratching at his beard and feeling icy crystals tangled in the whiskers. ‘In that way, milord, perhaps he is older than his years.’
‘Must it fall to the child to ask questions no adult dare ask?’
‘Possibly. If so, then the lad has missed his chance, and now thinks nothing of all that. He’s decided what he must do, and the vengeance he has avowed is anything but childlike. Some fated aspect of his nature has set him upon the path. He does not question it.’ Ivis paused, considering, and then he shrugged. ‘Perhaps he is something of a simpleton.’
‘It is truly a cynical world, Ivis, when we see stupidity and innocence as the same thing.’
‘Civil war makes cynics of us all, milord.’
‘Does it now?’ Anomander shifted slightly from where he leaned on the merlon, eyeing Ivis for a moment. ‘This hunger for change,’ he said. ‘It sets for itself a future in which every desire is appeased, each one won by sword, or blood, or an enemy brought to its knees. And at that instant, Ivis, so brightly painted in triumph, does the world freeze? Does time itself cease, nothing crawling on; not a single moment following in its usual tumble? But what world offers this impossibility? Only the one begat in a mind, and then raised in chains, never to be set free. The fashioning of nostalgia, my friend, imprisons us.’
‘Milord, did we not fight for our homeland? You, me, Draconus and all the others? Did we not fight to throw back invaders? Did we not win our freedom?’
‘We did. All those things we did, Ivis. Yet, has time stood still? From that moment of victory? Do you still see us all standing triumphant and flushed, as if trapped in one of Kadaspala’s paintings? Victory belongs on canvas, not in the real world. No, here, we move on. Urusander and his soldiers stumble from the field, to find tavern corners and bleak mornings. The nobles? Back to their estates, to frown at children grown into strangers, and wives or husbands with love gone cold.’ He shook his head again, turning back to the vista beyond the estate walls. ‘Still the echo chases us, and so we dream of making the moment eternal.’
‘I have heard, milord, that you refused Kadaspala’s request. For a portrait. And now, alas, it is too late.’
‘Too late? Why is that?’
‘Why, milord, because he is now blind.’
‘I would trust his hand more now than when he had eyes to see, Ivis. Yes, I believe I would accept his request. He is at last free to paint what he will, with no argument from the world beyond.’
‘I doubt he will approach you, milord.’
‘Agreed, but for reasons of which you may not be aware.’
‘Milord?’
‘He blames me, Ivis. For the rape and murder of his sister. For the death of his father.’
‘He is mad with grief.’
‘We tarried,’ Anomander said. ‘In no hurry to reach the place of the wedding.’
Ivis watched as Anomander reached down with one hand to rest it upon the pommel of the sword at his hip. ‘Had I named it Grief, perhaps … but in this, why, I stand with young Wreneck. Vengeance, I said, avowed with a child’s bright eyes, so sure, so unerring with fiery conviction. Since that day, Ivis, I cannot but wonder, have I made a mistake?’
‘You seek Andarist, milord. You seek your brother, to make it right.’
‘We will speak, yes. But what words will be exchanged? I do not know. By all rights, I should turn back now, to Kharkanas. If my brother will hold to his sense of betrayal, let him continue. Are there not greater matters at hand than one man’s grief?’
‘Or another’s vengeance?’ Even as he spoke, Ivis cursed himself for a fool.
But, surprisingly, Anomander replied with a bitter laugh and then said, ‘Well spoken, Ivis. I admitted to fear, did I not? But it is the fear that drives me in pursuit of Andarist. The fear of unknown words, not yet spoken, which I now race to answer … as if every moment of silence between us pulls another stone from the bridge one of us must cross.’
‘So, in your courage, milord, you are the one taking the steps.’
‘Is that courage now, Ivis?’
‘It is, sir. All too often cowardice wears the habit of wounded pride.’
Anomander was silent for some time, and then said, ‘There was a priest. I met him upon the road. As it turned out, we were both upon the same pilgrimage.’ He paused. ‘The estate house my brother built is now a shrine. As if horror and blood had the power to sanctify.’
‘I believe it to be so, milord,’ said Ivis, his gaze dropping to study the barrows edging the killing field.
‘I saw something,’ Anomander resumed. ‘When the priest appeared upon the threshold of the house, blood started from his hands, from wounds that opened fresh, though he took no blade to them. Blood is answered with blood. It seems that faith will be written in what we lose, my friend.’
Uneasy, Ivis shivered. ‘I grieve for that priest, milord. Surely, he would rather bless with something other than his own blood.’
‘I am beset by dreams – nightmares – of that meeting. I confess, Ivis, that in my visions I come to the certitude that the wounds upon that man’s hands, with their tears of blood, are the eyes of a god. Or goddess. The priest raises them between us, his hands, the wounds, and my stare – which I cannot break – fixes upon those crimson eyes. What they leak arrives like a promise. In these dreams, I flee as would a soul broken.’
‘A place not holy then, milord, but cursed.’
Anomander shrugged. ‘We come upon circles of stones, the ancient holy sites of the Dog-Runners, and proclaim them cursed. What future beings, I wonder, will find the ruins of our own sacred sites, and name them the same?’ The breath hissed from him. ‘I am cold to these notions of faith, Ivis. I cannot but distrust the ease of our proclamations, so ephemeral their arrival, so facile their dismissal. Look at the war now upon us. Look to the fate of the Deniers. Look now to the birth of the Liosan. Faith stalks our land like a reaper of souls.’
At last, Anomander’s thoughts had brought Ivis to the place he desired. ‘Milord, I have heard nothing from Lord Draconus. He responds to not a sing
le missive. In such absence, I must be bold. Upon the day of battle, milord, I will lead the Houseblades of Draconus to you, and submit to your command.’
Anomander said nothing. His gaze held upon the lowering clouds in the north, even as the first flakes of snow spun down to join the sleet.
‘Milord—’
‘Lord Draconus will return, Ivis. I am done with this pointless hunt. If Andarist and I are to become estranged, then I will bear the wound. I intend to leave for Kharkanas in the next day or so. Grief may well dress itself in the hair shirt of wounded pride, but vengeance matches its indulgence.’
‘Milord,’ said Ivis, ‘it would be better if you did not. Return to Kharkanas, I mean. Leave Draconus to … to the place he has chosen for himself. I cannot explain this seduction of darkness, except that it is, somehow, the essence of his gift to the woman he loves. His decision seems beyond sanction, does it not? As well, there are the nobles to consider – your allies upon the field of battle.’
‘They will fight for me, Ivis.’
‘If Lord Draconus—’
‘They will fight for me,’ Anomander insisted.
‘And if they do not?’
‘Then they will learn to rue their failing.’
The threat chilled Ivis. He studied the heavy clouds weaving their wind-tangled skeins of snow and sleet. In the kitchen below, dinner was being prepared, a feast to honour their unexpected guests. In the main hall, the Azathanai, Caladan Brood, sat like a half-tamed bear in the only chair that could take his bulk – Lord Draconus’s own. The surgeon, Prok, had taken to sitting with the High Mason.
In her private chambers, Lady Sandalath lavished attention upon Wreneck, as if he could stand in place of her own son – the son no one was permitted to acknowledge. The boy was mostly recovered from his ordeals, but he wore solemnity with the natural grace of a veteran of too many wars, and already he had begun to chafe under her obsessive ministrations. It was well enough that Wreneck had been a friend of Sandalath’s son, but years spanned the two children, with Wreneck the elder, and nothing in his life thus far belonged to a pampered nobleborn child. Ivis saw his strained patience when in the lady’s company.
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