The Sword of Sighs

by Greg James

  But the same was not said about prisoners.

  ~ ~ ~

  Sarah was back in the grove. She could smell rot setting in, as deep and as dark as the roots of the trees, mildew and mould giving way to canker and carcass. White, livid spots spread across tree bark. She could see that the stuff seemed to bubble. Breathing the air of the grove made her feel queasy and light-headed. She soon found the faun. He was sicker than before, nearer to death. His fur fell away in ragged clumps. His eyes were no longer warm, and wept yellow tears rather than golden ones. Slime dribbled over his blistering lips. His tongue flickered out on occasion to lick away the fluid, only for it to catch in his throat. His teeth were gone.

  Sarah went from the faun to the brook, and from the brook to the faun, cupping water in her hands and feeding it to the ailing creature, hoping it would help. The faun’s tongue scraped skin from her fingers and palms, but Sarah didn’t wince or cry out.

  The faun’s pain was more than hers could ever be.

  She sat by his side, stroking his flanks and spine where bone was showing. His skin was losing its sun-baked lustre, taking on the hue of the death. Sarah knew that she could do nothing for the faun. Telling Momma would do no good. Telling the cops or teachers would do even less. There were places for kids who told stories about the strange things they saw in the world.

  No, she wasn’t going to go to one of those places.

  So she stayed by the faun’s side until it got dark and the only sound was its laboured breathing.

  ~ ~ ~

  U’Uan watched the old man and the girl being made to kneel over the smoking bowls. They were kneeling inside an enlarged chimney cut into the side of one of the trenches that led to the encampment’s bolt-holes and tunnels. In the covered chamber, the packed earth absorbed the smoke. It was large enough for two people, both crouched and hunched. Even if they tried not to inhale the fumes from the bowls, the nature of the chamber meant they could not draw breath without taking in lungfuls of the sickly sweet perfume. U’Uan had tied a cloth mask over his face to protect himself, but the pungency still made his eyes run. Despite the smarting, he stayed at his post, standing guard over the captives. As well as doing his duty, he was doing this because he was curious. He wanted to see what nightmares they would have before they talked.

  Southerners never came this far west anymore.

  They would confess their purpose soon enough.

  ~ ~ ~

  The grove was grey and dark now, twisted grim with vines and stringy tangles of growth that hung in black knots from branches. Everything looked like it was being worn away into shadow. Patches of colour burst here and there, but all faded into shades of grey. Sarah took care not to tread in the spreading, shimmering darkness as she crept through, searching for the faun. The sucking mud was littered with broken bottles and tattered Coke cans. A path led her to the brook itself, which was scummy and soiled with oil-black stains.

  There was nothing good in it left to drink.

  Sarah crept on through the snarls of leafless brush, taking scratches that could have been bites from broken branches. The air was not good. Maybe she could help the faun escape, if it wasn’t dead.

  A tightness clutched at her insides.

  No. He can't be dead.

  She hurried on through the dark.

  ~ ~ ~

  Sarah’s eyes were streaming. She could hear Ossen hacking in his throat. The pungent fumes from the ashes were scalding. She could feel the burning in her nasal passages, throat, and the lining of her lungs. Her head hummed with burnt perfume, and the taste in her mouth was a tepid, bitter rosewater. She tried to spit, but her mouth was too dry. A headache clustered beneath her temples. Sickly stars crawled across her eyes, stretching and moving like underwater tentacles. Her stomach was an aching web of hunger, trapping only smoke that had gone down the wrong way. Everything blurred into charcoal smears, and then was gone.

  ~ ~ ~

  The faun was not dead, but he was different: naked of hair and fur and as pale as the long-dead. He was lying on his side, on the ground. Everything about him was shrunken and puckered. The sockets of his horns were flaking holes in his head. His thin skin, too tight in places, had torn open and bled. His fingernails and hooves were the colour of cockroaches.

  But worst of all were his eyes. Dull and black. Bright and terrible. So alive, and yet so dead. And they were drawing Sarah closer. Step after step. But Sarah still cared, still loved. She still wanted to help. She let it draw her close. She reached out her hand, as it once had to her.

  But the thing that was once a faun made a sound in its throat, one she had heard before in the Norn Valleys—feral, high, and vile. Her eyes flashed wide with understanding. She snatched back her hand. Turned to run. Moving in slow motion. Too slow. The faun was upon her. Blood, like a red rain, began steadily falling.

  "I take your life again, O Flame. I win. Always, I win."

  ~ ~ ~

  “I think they have had enough, U’Uan. Get them out of there. Now.”

  U’Uan mumbled something inaudible and disrespectful through his cloth mask.

  “U’Uan, you will do as I say.”

  “I take my orders from true Kay’lo, M’Eoa. You are only here as a courtesy.”

  “U’Uan, this is not the time to fight. Their noise may endanger us. You know what is out there in the Plains.”

  U’Uan looked into M’Eoa’s eyes. His pole-arm twitched involuntarily in his hand, his body reacting without thought. The lines around his dark eyes creased.

  Then he did as he was told.

  ~ ~ ~

  M’Eoa entered the Sick Hut, a simple rectangular structure with sheet hangings, rather than walls, to maintain privacy. She glanced at Ossen and Sarah. They were staring into space. H’Aoa was busy caring for the comatose prisoners.

  “U’Uan should have killed them. They are taking up too much of our supplies. We cannot afford to be wasting this much rice.”

  “You do not wish to learn their story, H’Aoa?” M’Eoa admonished her.

  “What do you mean, M’Eoa?”

  “Have you not listened to them? In their sleep, they talk of the Fallen One and the blight—this sickness that stains us all.”

  “So? That is how the Rosara carna affects everyone: madness and dark dreams.”

  “You remember the stories of the Fallen One, don’t you, H’Aoa?”

  “Perhaps. You listened to too many romances when you were in Yrsyllor, M’Eoa. If you had grown up in Lo’a’Pan, such rubbish would have been purged from your mind. You would not be concerned about what sick people say in their sleep.”

  “Don’t lecture me, H’Aoa. Your devotion doesn’t impress me. I have suffered the same as you. We all have. I come from a rich family who sent me south to study in my youth. That is true. But since then, I have given up everything from that life. I am Kay’lo. The same blood as you.”

  Without pause, M’Eoa unbuttoned her linen top and showed H’Aoa the puckered marks on her skin, the dried blisters studded with white, doughy scars. H’Aoa did not blink or turn away.

  “You do not impress me with your war wounds, M’Eoa. Privilege is privilege. You can burn and beat a woman, but if she is raised a romantic, a romantic she will stay to the end of her days.”

  “You are a hard woman, H’Aoa. What have you done to become so?”

  “Perhaps terrible things were done to me also. Only I do not speak of them or parade them like badges for all to see, as you do.”

  “Maybe so. All the same, what you say is sad to hear.”

  “It is nothing,” H’Aoa said. “Life is merely the absence of death. I intend to endure it right through to the end. That is all. That is the way of the Kay’lo.”

  M’Eoa leaned over to the younger woman, resting her hand on her shoulder, about to reply when, in the distance, there came a sound. Low and insistent. Rhythmic and steady. The rumbling of an underground storm. A stampede closing in.

  “They are coming,
” said M’Eoa.

  Trembles ran through the undergrowth, rushing like the waves swept up by an oncoming tidal wave. The air droned all around, and angry tones burrowed into tired bones and aching eyes.

  “We must go,” M’Eoa told U’uan when she found him. “They will leave none alive who stay here.”

  They peered deep into the trees, hoping and fearing for a glimpse of what was coming.

  Then, there they were.

  “Dionin...” whispered U’uan.

  ~ ~ ~

  There was no time to flee.

  Dionin poured into the camp, and with them the sensation of drowning, being trapped, weighed down on the bed of a grim, growling sea. Everything shuddered. Splintered. Shattered. Fell apart. Gravity twisted loose as they struggled free from the ground. A hundred sinuous forms seethed out and surged over the Kay’lo—all running, shouting and screaming. All flailing their arms as they were overrun by grey and grotesque worms of the earth. The Dionin had human faces but their teeth were razors and their eyes were orbs of ebony glass. Their hair was long, greasy, and lank, but their faces … so human.

  Kay’lo fell from the trees. Dionin shook them like dogs savaging torn dolls; then they hurled them away, hard and far. The open houses of the encampment collapsed, their frames splitting as the soil they stood in separated. Cracks opened up in the ground. Trench walls wept, disintegrating over the shaking people who cowered within them. On hands and knees, those who could still move, chased each other into the crumbling entrances of bolt-holes, only to scream in horror as the Dionin burrowed in after them. They would leave nothing on, or under, the ground alive.

  ~ ~ ~

  Sarah blinked and rubbed her eyes. Then, with a cry, she snatched at the branches of the tree she clung to and looked around, breathing hard.

  “How did I get up here?”

  A sound came from behind her. She turned her head. It was Ossen, still unconscious, and the Sworn was crouching over him.

  “You saved us from those ... things.”

  The Sworn nodded and turned back to Ossen.

  “But how?”

  The Sworn said nothing, continuing to minister to Ossen. Sarah turned her eyes to what was happening below. The ground seemed to flow and churn, like billowing clouds in the sky. Earth burst open here. Soil scattered there. Teeth ground through the screaming Kay’lo. All of them were dying.

  All because of me...

  Sarah shook the thought away; it was silly—plain ridiculous. But those things looked like they could have something to do with the Fallen-born.

  Long hours passed in the tree, and twilight began to darken the world. Sarah was sure she had dozed off a couple of times, despite her precarious position. A hand fell on her shoulder at last.

  It was Ossen.

  “You’re awake.”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “No.”

  “Those flowers—”

  "Later, Sarah. For now, let us get down from here and move on. The Dionin will only stay in the bolt-holes, feasting on the dead, for so long. Come on, both of you.”

  They climbed down from the tree, and Sarah gasped at the final desolation of the encampment. It was not the same as watching it from on high, being down here among the dead. Matchsticks and mangled tree stumps jutted like broken bones from the grievous injuries made in the earth.

  Ossen grabbed her arm roughly. “Come, Sarah, and you, O Sworn. This is no time to mourn those who might have killed us.”

  The Kay’lo were bad guys.

  Bang-dead!

  As they hurried through trees and undergrowth and out onto the open ground, Sarah looked at Ossen. He was stiffer in his posture and manner than before. His eyes flickered like shards of flint. What had happened to him? she wondered. When he breathed in the fumes from those bowls, what personal horrors did he see? It must have been something that had hurt him and made him stop caring for the dead, even when they were Kay’lo. A shudder passed through her at the thought, at how he might be if the nightmare he had seen remained with him, if it poisoned him irrevocably.

  If it put out the Flame.

  Bang-dead!

  ~ ~ ~

  Rain fell as they slogged on, soaking them to the skin. Days passed among the hills and scattered trees. Sarah couldn’t remember the last time she’d been dry, never mind clean, or the last time a footstep had not squelched. She felt sick and queasy inside as she sank her feet into yet more slurry. Miles upon miles of drenched grimness seemed to stretch ahead and behind them. Sarah looked at Ossen. Just a glimpse said all he was feeling. Whatever they had breathed in at the Kay’lo camp was still stewing inside his brain. She could feel it without asking him, because it was still touching on her senses too, creating strange flares of colour, dancing opalescent lights and helter-skelters that wound away into off-white spirals. The world looked like the one she had known, but there were shades of difference to it now. Textures felt simultaneously grittier and softer, more dissolute. The rain sometimes felt like she was passing through melting layers of wax and plastic. Light shone dimly, dissipating oddly; it was as if she could hear it as whispers that rustled away into depths. Depths that were drawing them in, drawing them on, leading them deeper and further away.

  On towards the Mountains of Mourning.

  ~~~

  Chapter Eighteen

  They soon came to an empty village. Each of the huts was a collapsing skeleton of boards and hole-riddled timber. The edges of the holes bore the marks of teeth.

  “More of the Dionin’s work,” muttered Ossen.

  “Ossen,” Sarah said, “you said we might have been responsible for what happened at the camp...?”

  “We might have been. The Dionin are creations of the Fallen One, and doubtless he has them seeking us as much as his Fallen-born.”

  Sarah took a hard breath and then asked, “Seeking us or seeking me?”

  Ossen turned his eyes upon her, and she saw the hardness that had marked them since the attack in the camp dissolve a little. A shadow of his old warmth returned. “I am sorry, Sarah. I see you are beginning to understand.”

  “Why do they have to hound me and kill people because of me? Why?”

  "Because you carry the Flame. The Fallen One will do whatever He must to extinguish it and kill you. Even now, I think, He watches us from the Shadowhorn. He knows where we are bound, and He means to ensure that you die before you reach its foothills.”

  The rain fell harder—it would pour down later—and the wind keened, making their teeth chatter. There would be no more walking that night.

  “But we must rest here before we go on. I will take the first watch.” The Sworn's hand rested on Ossen’s shoulder, fingers digging in hard.

  “Very well, O Sworn. You may take the watch rather than myself.”

  The Sworn relaxed its grip.

  Ossen led them into one of the huts. Its roofing was still in one piece, and it was dark, musty, and draughty inside, but dry. They squeezed water out of their clothes as best they could. The grey light that streamed in through the windows did no more to disturb the darkness inside than a single small candle might illuminate the void of outer space. A bed in a weak-looking frame squatted close to the ground. The hollows made by those who once slept there showed as mould in the decaying mattress. The stove was broken, and the dwelling looked ready to collapse in on itself at any time.

  It was not easy to sleep. The killings had happened not so long ago, and they had left a taint in the air, a slight taste that kept Sarah awake. She felt as if she would die from suffocation if she lay down to sleep there; that the night’s dark matter might crawl inside and fill her heart. She got to her feet and went over to Ossen. He was on second watch, staring off into space. The fire he lit had dwindled until only ashes and embers remained. The Sworn slept, a dark mound not far from the shrinking circle of light. The Wayfarer and Sarah sat together, and he wrapped her in the excess of his voluminous robes. Their eyes wandere
d with the drifting paths of smoke tendrils and the dying dance of embers.

  “Why do we live in such dark times, Ossen?”

  “Because the will of men has worked upon the World and made it so. But past times were not so much better, and let no-one tell you otherwise. There have been darker ages than this, wholly because those who lived in them thought, without question, that they served reason, purity, and light. In fact, they were ferocious fools who wandered from the Path into madness, sterility, and darkness. The Light and the Dark are One, Sarah, in truth. Neither is other and to be feared. Neither must be damned and burned away from our lives. Without the light, we are lost, but without the darkness, how would we know there is beauty in the arctic shine of that steadfast north star?”

  “Your words make me feel better, Ossen.”

  “My words are a part of life and of the Flame. They are not my own. No more than your words are your own. They, like the Flame, have been since the dawn of time and will be until all things are extinct and the world grows dark and cold.”

  “The Flame ... I feel it but only sometimes. What does it mean for me, having the Flame inside?”

  “It means there is a better chance you will ascend the Fellhorn alive, rather than fall dead upon the Path.”

  Sarah was silent for a moment, thinking. “Do you know what the Flame is, Ossen?”

  “The Old Words say that, at the border between the Dark and the Light, there is a Flame and it burns Eternal.”

  “And what is the Fallen One?”

  “There is a rot, a blackness that flows through existence, moving, changing, eating, decaying.”

  “This rot, this blackness, that’s where it comes from?”

  “No, rot and decay are as natural as birth and life. Remember what I said about how Light and the Dark are one? The Fallen One is that rot and decay out of its place, taken out of time. He is a shadow that should not be—the Darkness That Is Not Darkness—as are all who serve Him and the fell beings created by Him.”

  “What does all that mean?”

  “It means that the shadows cast by twilight are as much a danger as the shadows that live in the hearts of men and women. The Fallen One and His spawn can be in all of them, watching and waiting.”