Fall of Light (77 page)

‘Will you shut your mouth for once, Ristand?’

‘Why should I?’ He waved towards Kagamandra. ‘Even this estate’s lord tried talking us out of coming here. Why else tell us about Hustain’s return to the fort? Hunn Raal has the right of it – you fight for kin and the rest can go to the Abyss!’

Kagamandra cleared his throat, and then said, ‘You are welcome to stay, Wardens. But my invitation must be qualified—’

‘What’s that mean?’ Ristand’s head whipped round to his sergeant. ‘What’s he mean by that?’

‘I mean,’ Kagamandra resumed, ‘that we have Jhelarkan hostages here. Children. They are as near to feral as wolves. Your horses and mules are not safe, although we will endeavour to set a guard upon the stables.’

‘Jhelarkan?’ Ristand tugged at his snarled beard. ‘See, Savarro? What did I tell you? Qualified. He invites us into a nest of shapeshifting wolves! More horses to keep ’em fed and not eyeing us with hungry eyes! I should have voted against you.’

‘But you argued the most for coming here, Ristand!’

‘Because this lord here didn’t tell me the truth!’

‘He didn’t know!’

‘He does now!’

‘Ristand, get out of my face before I cut you into little strips! See to the animals, and arrange us a watch for them, two on guard at all times.’

‘They’re hostages, sergeant! We can’t harm them even if they’re chewing off our feet!’

‘Just beat them back. Flat of the blades. Milord, how many Jhelarkan hostages are here?’

‘Twenty.’

‘
Twenty?
’ Ristand shrieked.

His cry elicited howls from the main house, rising gleefully into the crepuscular air. Hearing them, Ristand swore under his breath and drew his sword. ‘I rescind my vote,’ he snapped. ‘You hear me, sergeant? I vote the other way. That makes it a majority. I’m not getting my feet chewed off.’

‘Ristand! Just go and arrange the guard postings, will you? The vote’s done with. We’re here now. Besides, I was only humouring all of you, about that majority stuff. I’m sergeant, highest rank left among us. It’s my decision.’

‘Cock curdling liar! Tit bag whore! I knew it!’

‘Go, you’re embarrassing us all.’

Ristand snarled and set off back to the others waiting by the gate.

Wiping at her brow, Savarro drew a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘Apologies, milord. Husbands, what can you do?’

  *   *   *

Four trackers were on her trail, two of them moving up alongside her. Sharenas Ankhadu caught glimpses of them through the crazed lattice of leafless branches and twigs to either side. The remaining pair had drawn up behind her on the track.

She was exhausted, and the day’s light would not fade in time to make any difference in her attempts to evade these hunters. Before dusk’s arrival she knew that blades would clash, shattering the silence of the frozen forest.

It would be an ignominious end, filled with bitter frustration and fraught with pathos.
A proper scene, highlighting the sheer indecency of civil war. Soldiers I fought alongside – now we close with murder in our eyes, weapons unsheathed.

Where, in all this, was the life I wanted? The victory of peace whispered so many promises. Kagamandra, we should have fled. Together, into the west, the lands of the Azathanai, or even the Dog-Runners. We should have damned the legacy of peace – you with your promised wife you did not love, me with a future empty of passion. Peace should have won us more. It should have won us a softening of all that was harsh and hard within us, an easing of the ferocity we all saw as necessary weapons in war.

Instead, too many of us turned fierce eyes upon these plain trappings, these quiet chambers. Too many of us still gripped bared iron, even as we walked into realms of peace, filled with the hope of living peaceful lives.

We were contemptuous of such lives, such living. It was beneath us warriors, us harbingers of blood and death. We could see in their eyes – in the eyes of loved ones, estranged friends, husbands and wives – that they knew nothing. Nothing of what truly mattered, what truly counted. They were shallow, ignorant of depravity’s depths. We saw them as fools, and then, as our souls hardened in our self-made isolation, we saw them as victims, no different from enemies upon the field of battle.

To us, they were blind to the ongoing war – the one we still fought, the one that left our souls wounded, bleeding, and then scarred. The one that cried out to us, demanding a lashing out, an eruption of violence. If only to break this brittle illusion of peace, which we knew to distrust.

But I dreamed of being among them, away from the killing and the terror. I dreamed of peace in every instant of war in which I lived.

Why, then, could I not find it? Why did it all seem so weak, so thin, so hopelessly shallow? So … false?

The trackers moving parallel to her had begun converging, while those in her wake had drawn close enough for her to hear their thudding footfalls. Desperate, Sharenas looked for somewhere to make her stand – the bole of an old tree, the root-wall of a toppled giant – but there was nothing like that nearby. She was among young dogwoods, elm thickets and young birch. No fire had rushed through any of this, and the leaf-mould was thick beneath the melting snow.

The soldier on her left voiced a strangled cry. Snapping a glance in that direction, she searched for the man, but could no longer see him.

At that instant, the two behind her rushed forward, even as the third scout swung in to flank her.

Mouth dry, sword-grip feeling greasy in her gloved hand, Sharenas spun round to face her attackers.

Both were women, and known to her, but now hatred twisted their features, and the blood was bright in their eyes.

There was no conversation, no pause in their attack.

Blades lashed out. She caught one, deflecting it, while sidestepping to evade the other. At that moment, the third hunter reached her, lunging with his sword.

The tip pierced the rounded flesh of her right hip, slicing it open to the bone. As the cut muscles and tendons parted, she felt them roll up beneath her skin, and her right leg simply gave way beneath her.

A blade struck her helm, dislodging it. Stunned, Sharenas fell on to her side. A savage blow against her sword knocked the weapon from her hand.

Disbelieving, she looked up into the face of one of the women, who now stood above her, bringing her sword around to push through Sharenas’s throat.

The woman paused, confusion clouding her face.

An arrow’s iron point was protruding from her neck. Blood was rushing down from the ragged tear its passage had made. The life in the woman’s eyes retreated, and then she dropped to her knees atop Sharenas.

Pushing the sagging body off, Sharenas dug in the heel of her one working leg and attempted to scrabble back. The other woman, she saw, was lying a few paces away, her midriff opened wide and its bundle of intestines tumbled out, steaming. Above her body crouched a grey-skinned girl. She held in her red hands long narrow knives, both slick with gore. Twisting round, Sharenas saw the third scout, lying face-down with the shafts of two arrows jutting from his back.

The girl advanced on Sharenas. ‘Plenty hunting you,’ she said. ‘Too many for just a deserter. No matter. You wear the wrong uniform.’

Another voice spoke. ‘No, Lahanis. Leave her.’

The girl scowled. ‘Why?’

‘She is bleeding out anyway, and the cut is too deep to mend. She is already dead. We gave you one.’

‘One is not enough.’

‘Come, we have cleared this part of the forest, but there are others. They will camp. Light fires. We have a night of killing ahead of us, Lahanis, enough to ease your thirst.’

The scene was dulling before Sharenas’s eyes, a grey too flat to be the arrival of dusk. She had one hand pressed against the gash in her hip, and the blood was pumping from the wound in hot waves. Her right leg was lifeless, a weight pinning her to the cold ground. The ache in her skull, and in the muscles and tendons on the left side of her neck, left her gasping, each breath frighteningly shallow.

She heard them move off after recovering their arrows and stripping the bodies.

Some time passed, but it was difficult to know how much. The dimness surrounding her felt disconnected from the sun’s vague departure. It was closer, crawling towards her from all sides, as if promising a warm embrace.

Kagamandra. Look at me now. I hold a hand to the place of my death, seeking to staunch the leak. The blood feels thick now. Thick as clay. It must be the cold.

And I feel an ache in my leg. I imagine I can curl my toes, scuff with the heel. Here, on this edge, I rebuild my broken form, as if preparing for what will come. No longer broken, but whole again. Ready to walk into the darkness.

And yet … Kagamandra. Still I lie here, longing for you with every essence of my being. What holds me to life, if not desire? What vaster power exists? With it, I swear, I feel I can defy the inevitable. Weapon and shield, companion and ally, enough to make the world back away, enough to surmount the highest walls and cross the deepest chasms. Desire, you stand in place of a lover’s arms, and make your embrace such dark comfort.

She heard her own sigh, startling in its clarity, its harsh rattle. Beneath her cold-numbed hand, the gash felt strange, drawn together, the skin puckered and tender. The bunched fists of the rolled-up tendons and muscles no longer burned against her hip bone, as if with her hand she had simply pushed them back into place.

But that is not possible.

Disbelieving, Sharenas found the strength to sit up. Her right leg throbbed with the kind of ache that bespoke deep outrage, and yet it lived. Beneath her the spilled blood had mixed with dirty snow and then leaf-mould and mud. It felt hot to the touch and the steam rising from it did not slacken.

The greyness surrounded her still, palpable like an unseen presence. In her head she heard vague whispers, muttering and, now and then, a faint, distant cry. Blinking, Sharenas looked round. This part of the trail was slightly wider than usual, but otherwise unremarkable. She shared the space with three corpses. The spilled entrails, she saw, were frosted over.

How – how long?

Groaning, she pushed herself to her feet, stood tottering for a moment before she caught the glint of her fallen sword. She hobbled a step, crouched to retrieve the weapon, and straightened once more.

Now what?

The scouts had been stripped of food packs and water flasks, but tightly bound bedrolls and cooking gear remained, all secured to prevent noise when the scouts tracked her. Sharenas realized that she was desperately hungry, and fighting a thirst so fierce she eyed the black spatters of blood on the ground at her feet.

The greyness urged her to feast, revealing its own hunger, bestial and primitive. Sharenas studied the corpse of the woman nearest her, listening to the chorus of faint voices susurrating through her head.

Are you spirits? Did I summon you? Or was it this impossible sorcery – which I never knew I possessed – that drew you into my company? Do you, perhaps, remember what it was to be consumed with desire? Because that alone sustained me. Kagamandra, I have made the memory of you into my lover. Loyal ghost, I feel still your fiery embrace.

But this new hunger, this is a simpler thing. A need both raw and cold. I have lost too much blood. I must restore myself.

The chattering spirits crowded her, and like a soul dispossessed of physical form, she watched her own body, as it dragged the corpse of the woman to one side of the trail, and then set about cutting strips of red meat from one of the thighs.

Once this was done, she set about making a fire.

What now?

Now this.

FIFTEEN

‘I
HAVE LIVED,’ SAID LORD HUST HENARALD, ‘IN A WORLD OF
smoke.’ He sat on a stone bench in the chill garden, amidst leafless thickets and snow-capped boulders. Overhead the sky was thick with a grey blending of snowflakes and ash. Someone, perhaps a servant, had settled a thick robe on the lord, rough wool dyed burgundy, and it was draped unclasped across his shoulders like a mantle of old blood.

Galar Baras sat opposite. To his left was the low curving wall of the fountain. The mechanical pump had long ceased to function and the thick ice on the water was streaked and smeared with dead algae. Old layers of soot darkened the snow upon the ground.

‘It blinds the fools who dwell in its midst,’ Henarald continued, his vein-roped hands red with cold as he picked through a small heap of slag that rested in a pile upon the encircling stone wall. Occasionally, he brought one piece closer to his face for careful examination, eyes narrowing, before returning it to the heap. In the time that Galar had been in audience with the lord, a number of pieces of the ragged waste material had been examined more than once. ‘It stings, awakens tears, but leaves nothing seen to give comfort.’

‘Milord,’ Galar Baras ventured, not for the first time, ‘the armour you have sent us. The blades as well. Something now afflicts them—’