Authors: Nathan Hawke
‘There are only four wheels, Oribas.’
‘I don’t think Night is right, not for a place like this. Earth, River, Sky, Sun. Those are the clearest. Bear, fish, bird, dragon. We’ll try that first.’
They wrestled with the wheels. As the final one ground into place, the stone groaned and shifted. The wall shook and a deep rumble echoed through the passageway. Oribas backed away. ‘If you can move it, I think the door will open now. Have a care, Achista. I have no idea what lies beyond.’
‘I know.’ She nodded at several of the Marroc, who started to lever the stone aside. Her smile was a weak one.
The Marroc pulled the stone back far enough for someone to squeeze through. They all looked at Oribas expectantly. He shook his head. ‘Did any of you bring salt? No? Thought not. Well don’t expect me to go ah—’ But Achista was already worming her way through and so he didn’t have any choice but to follow her. ‘The old Aulian priests made these seals to keep the very worst of their demons locked away,’ he hissed. ‘Things worse than any shadewalker. Believe me when I say I know what sort of creatures they were. If there’s a way into the tower, it may have another seal like this one, one that can’t be opened at all from the inside.’ Whatever they’d put here, there would be other wards though, surely.
Laid out in salt
, and salt was a ward to those creatures. Perhaps they could creep through and creep out the other side and . . .
‘It’s the only way to the forkbeards, Oribas.’ She held up her torch. ‘Besides, look!’
His skin was a-prickle from head to toe but at last he saw what Achista was trying to show him: the tomb wasn’t a tomb at all. It was a Lhosir storeroom. They were in the cellars of the tower.
‘I told you there was another door, one already opened,’ said Achista. ‘Some say the Marroc prince who lived here took the treasure he found and went north, and others that something terrible came out and everyone died. And there’s some who say he wasn’t a Marroc at all. But it was all hundreds of years ago, and whatever was here is long gone. Today there are only forkbeards.’
G
allow didn’t look back. Not once. He walked away in stolen boots from the Marroc victory and from the last friend he had left to him after three years of searching for his home. He wore the furs of a dead kinsman and the mail and helm that the Screambreaker had given him outside Andhun. He carried a spear and a sword and an axe and a shield all scavenged from battlefields, and three years of longing in his heart.
The Marroc farmers’ trail was marked by cairns of stones that rose from the snow so that even in the winter a traveller wouldn’t lose his way. As the light fell he sought shelter where he could find it. A woodsman’s hut the first night, the next at a farm among the animals where frightened Marroc stared wide-eyed at his steel, prayed to their gods that in the morning he’d be gone and then thanked them when he was. The only tracks he saw in the snow were of animals crossing from the shelter of one stand of trees to another. The path wound down a sharp-sided valley through stands of giant Varyxhun pine that towered over everything, around boulders strewn about a stream that danced through its heart. Twice he had to wade through snow as deep as a house, cutting a path through a great broken swathe of it that had tumbled down from the slopes above. He had nothing he could use to make any fire and so when twilight fell and there was no shelter to be found he simply walked on through the darkness, guided by the stars and the moon, the only way to keep warm. The cold nipped and bit at him like an angry puppy but it held no fear. He’d crossed the Aulian Way after all, higher and colder and longer than this.
The sides of the valley broke apart. The slopes became more gentle. The stands of pine became a great forest of lesser trees and the stream beside him swelled to a river as other waters joined it. The air grew warmer, the snow under his feet thinner and more broken. He reckoned on being a day away from Hrodicslet when he came to a camp beside the road where the embers of a fire were still warm under his fingers. He sat down beside it and rubbed his hands and blew at the ash but it was too old to glow and light into flames again. There was nothing else to see save for a few marks in the snow where men had sat not long ago and a simple shelter made of branches, a place for a man to sleep out of the wind and the snow. He felt eyes watching him but nothing more. He didn’t go looking.
Cold and exhausted and hungry, he reached Hrodicslet. Now at every farm Marroc slammed their doors in his face. They were hospitable folk to their own kind, or so the carter Fenaric had once said, but no one had shelter for a forkbeard.
‘I’ll pay you! I’ll work for you!’ he shouted at their doors, but none of them opened again. When the sun began to set and yet another barrage of curses turned him away, he kicked the door open again before the Marroc inside could bar it. There were three of them, an old man and a younger one and another who was little more than a boy. ‘What Marroc turns a starving freezing man from their door?’ The words sounded hollow even as he spat them to the floor. Any Marroc, that was the answer, if the starving man was a forkbeard.
The men backed away from him. Animals milled around, pigs and goats and chickens all driven inside for warmth and shelter. The young one snatched up a lump of firewood. The old one yelled a curse through gritted teeth, never taking his eyes off Gallow. ‘What do you want, forkbeard?’
A dog like a wolf padded out from between the hanging furs that separated the night room from the rest of the house, sending the chickens squawking and flapping away. It bared its teeth and growled at Gallow.
‘Make your dog be still or I’ll kill it!’ But the Marroc didn’t move. The dog snarled and drew back to its haunches and still the Marroc did nothing, and then the dog sprang. Gallow lifted his shield. The dog scrabbled for purchase, bit at the wood and then fell. It crouched, glowering and snarling, and then launched itself again, this time at Gallow’s arm. Gallow raised his axe out of the dog’s reach and twisted to let it fly past. It snapped at him, seizing his furs in its jaws and almost spinning him around.
He brought the axe down on the back of its head and the dog fell dead. The Marroc boy screamed and threw himself at Gallow, swinging his lump of wood. Gallow bashed him away with his shield and there was his hatchet again, singing through the air straight at the boy’s head. He pulled the blow at the last but for a moment he’d meant it. For a moment he’d happily have killed the lot of them.
He shoved the boy away. They all stared at him in hatred.
‘Damn you, Marroc!’
‘Damn you too, forkbeard,’ hissed the old man. ‘Take what you want and be gone.’
‘I’ll do that. Where are the women and children?’
The old man glanced at the night room. The younger one clenched his fists and shook his head.
So that’s what they thought of forkbeards, was it?
And then he thought of the way it had been with the Screambreaker’s army and wondered how he could possibly blame them. ‘Make sure they stay there. You two go and be with them.’ He pointed his axe at the old man. ‘Not you. You stay.’
‘What do you want, forkbeard?’
Gallow growled and raised his fist and they did as he asked. He made the old man show him where they kept their food. He took as much as he could carry and a leather bag with a strap to carry it. Everywhere he went would be like this until he was home. There’d be no shelter, no charity, nothing for the hated forkbeard. Fate again, laughing at him. ‘I didn’t want to kill your dog, old Marroc. I have nothing against dogs.’ The old man’s face stayed as it was, a mask of hidden fear and sullen hate. ‘I’ll take my rest in your house tonight. You’ll stay in your night room, all of you. If you do as I say then I’ll be on my way in the morning and you’ll not see me again. If you come out, if you seek help, if any one of you raises a single hand or word against me, I’ll kill every person here. I’ll burn your farm. I’ll go back to my kin and they’ll burn your neighbours. We’ll hunt you until every single Marroc here lies bloody in the snow. Do you understand me, old man?’
The words hissed out of him. ‘I understand you, forkbeard.’
‘Then go to your night room and keep your kin there with you, close.’
He pushed the corpse of the dog outside and closed the door behind it. After nights in the mountain snow the house was deliciously warm. In the morning he left with a clutch of fresh eggs. The Marroc had seen just another forkbeard and so that’s what he’d become. The realisation haunted him. This was how it was for the Lhosir here; and what if some forkbeard happened upon Nadric’s forge, hungry and desperate? Would Arda have the sense to keep her peace?
He skirted around Hrodicslet to the edge of the Crackmarsh, the quickest way home. The fringes of the marsh were boggy but not waterlogged, not like the water meadows they became each spring. The ghuldogs were mostly quiet in the winter, hiding in their burrows. Nothing much came out into this dead open landscape with its stands of twisted trees, not at this time of year. He crossed it without trouble, walking on through the night to keep warm, dozing in the warmest hours of the day, surviving on the food he’d stolen.
Stolen. He’d never been a thief before. At least, he’d never seen himself like that. The Screambreaker’s army had plundered the Marroc lands, taking what pleased them, burning whatever caught their eye to burn. The spoils of war though, not thieving, although from where he stood now it was hard to see the difference.
The edge of the Crackmarsh took him to the caves and the woods where the villagers of Middislet had hidden when they’d thought the Vathen were coming, all of them except Arda, who’d stayed alone to defend Nadric’s forge because she was fed up with soldiers coming and taking everything that was hers. He remembered that day well, as clear as he remembered the day he’d first seen her, and the memories made a longing that drove him onward, heedless of the pain in his feet and his legs, the weariness in his bones. He couldn’t be sure that she was there, whether any of them were even still alive, but each time he closed his eyes he saw her, waiting all this time.
One way or another, he was coming home.
‘T
here’s something else I want from you, Loudmouth.’ Three years ago Tolvis Loudmouth had stood beside the Screambreaker. It was the morning before the battle that would see the Screambreaker take the red sword from the dead hands of the Weeping Giant and then fall in his turn. Tolvis was hardly ready to be asked for any other favours, given what the Screambreaker had just told him about keeping Twelvefingers from burning Andhun, but you didn’t say no to the old man so he’d kept his mouth shut for once. ‘If I die tomorrow, take my body and speak me out in secret. I’ll have no great celebration for all the things I’ve done. Then take this where it belongs.’ He’d handed over a fat purse of silver. Tolvis knew exactly what it was because it was the same fat purse he’d given to Gallow Truesword a couple of weeks earlier when he’d traded it for Truesword’s plundered Vathan horses.
A hundred men saw the Screambreaker die later that same day, moments before the Lhosir broke the Vathan army. Afterwards, when they couldn’t find his body, they built a pyre to him anyway and spoke him out. And then Twelvefingers turned on Andhun and the Marroc there, and Tolvis had led a band of the Screambreaker’s men to stop him, and Gallow had chopped off Medrin’s hand and turned him into Sixfingers instead of Twelve; and then the Vathen had turned out not to be as broken as everyone thought and by the next sunrise half of Andhun belonged to the horsemen, someone burning the bridge across the Isset was the only thing keeping them out of the other half, and Sixfingers was on a ship back across the sea, hovering somewhere between life and death. Tolvis had watched Gallow fall from the cliffs into the sea and thought maybe he’d seen a man with a boat trying to haul someone out of the water or maybe not, but either way it was hard to be sure because the air over his head had been full of Vathan arrows and javelots at the time and mostly he’d been trying not to die.
He hadn’t gone home nor sought the remnants of the Lhosir army. By then he’d had enough of it all, and so he’d gone inland instead, all on his own, because Gallow had been a friend, and being a friend had to be worth something. He’d gone to Varyxhun and poked his nose around for Arda Smithswife and eventually found her and gave her the purse full of silver that Gallow had always meant her to have, and she’d taken it with thanks. And maybe it came from living with a Lhosir for eight years or maybe it was simply the way she was, but it didn’t seem to trouble her much that he was a forkbeard. He’d stayed a while because he wasn’t quite sure whether Gallow was dead or alive, but if he was alive then he’d certainly find a way back home from Andhun and it seemed only right that he should keep an eye on his friend’s family until then. A week grew into a month and then two. Varyxhun filled with Lhosir looking for Gallow Foxbeard, the traitor, the
nioingr.
Tolvis kept away. They’d have been happy enough to hang Loudmouth too.
Two months turned into three. By then they all knew that Gallow wouldn’t be coming back, though none of them said it; and he still stayed, and Arda never minded about that as long as he made himself useful, and none of them said anything about the Lhosir looking for the Foxbeard. When the Fateguard came, they left, quietly, going back to Nadric’s old forge in Middislet, and the months turned into a year without any of them quite noticing. Nadric was getting too old to earn his living at his forge but Tolvis knew how to work a farm and he had a strong arm and a quick enough wit to learn the simple things. As that first winter came, Arda took to being away for days at a time. Tolvis never asked, not then, and she never said, but she came back with food, and more than they needed. There were Marroc in the Crackmarsh, bandits and renegades sworn to fight the forkbeards. He knew that was where she went, but it wasn’t his business and so he left her to it. The villagers in Middislet weren’t that keen on forkbeards just like all the other Marroc, but Middislet wasn’t Varyxhun or Andhun and they’d never had blood ravens lining the roads. Mostly everyone got quietly on with their lives, and if Arda had swapped one forkbeard for another, so what? Loudmouth had a quiet suspicion that half the Marroc thought he was Gallow just come back from the fighting with a big mess made of his face. Besides, that first winter was a hard one and there were plenty of people grateful for the food Arda brought out of the Crackmarsh.