Authors: Nathan Hawke
T
here was a part of him that wanted to turn and leap into the darkness to get away. There was water at the bottom of the shaft, it wheedled, and it would break his fall, wouldn’t it? And it didn’t matter that he hadn’t the first idea how to swim, because if he took a deep breath he’d float once he threw off the furs, and then surely he could haul himself out into the tunnel, even if he’d once seen a Marroc man almost drown trying the same with three men to help him. He thought these things as he swung over the edge of the shaft and started climbing down the rungs as fast as he dared. But no, the water wouldn’t cushion his fall, not from this height, and chances were good he’d hit the wall on the way down and maybe the walkway at the bottom, and even if he didn’t, he’d break his bones and his clothes would drag him down, and he’d drown before he could shed them. If he was even still conscious.
Up above, the dim light of the
thing
– he had no idea what it was, some creature half dead and half like the Fateguard and the shadewalkers – lit up the shaft enough for him to see how far the water was below, black and glistening like a hungry mouth. He saw the air swirl around the entrance to the tomb.
It
, whatever it was, was making a wind to blow away his salt, and he could be thankful now that he hadn’t done such a good job of keeping it dry out with the Marroc in all that snow – it was sticky and crumbly and not the nice fine powder he might have wanted it to be. He tried not to
look up, only down, one foot after the next, hand over hand as fast as he could, and when he slipped on a loose rung, he simply let himself fall to the next and clung to it for dear life.
A whistling began. It filled the shaft and a low moan rose behind it. And then it stopped and everything was silent, and Oribas did look up now because he still wasn’t quite at the bottom of the shaft and the silence meant the wind had stopped and
that
meant . . .
It was looking down at him. Its pale blue eyes gleamed and there was a white wind swirling around it. It seemed to smile. ‘Aulian . . .’ whispered the white wind, and it whirled into the shaft overhead and dived towards him. Now he forgot about how hard the water might be. He threw off his cloak and let go of the rungs, all other thoughts and fears wiped away by the ghost-thing hurtling towards him. He fell straight as an arrow, arms stretched up, cringing inside. He didn’t even know how deep the water was, and then it hit him like a mountain, shaking his bones. It tore at his arms, almost pulling them from his shoulders, and snapped at his neck like a hangman’s noose. It gouged the air out of him.
The cold might have been what saved him, a deep killing ice-cold that forced itself into his nose and his mouth and the back of his throat and stabbed him awake as he felt the impact suck him away. It crushed into his ears, a deep hard pain, and all he could hear was a terrible roaring. The light was gone. He kicked, half expecting to find the bones in his knees and hips and spine shattered into fragments but to his amazement they seemed whole, and whatever pain they had waiting for him, the shock of the cold and the fear had killed it for now. He burst to the surface, floundered, grabbed at something that turned out to be his fur cloak floating beside him and began to sink again. He clawed at it, pulling himself some way or other. Caught a glimpse of the passage out of the mountain’s heart as he looked wildly around, and of the
walkway, and then of the ghost-thing above still arrowing down at him. Instinct made him duck under the surface, but as he began to sink again he knew his instinct was wrong. He needed salt for a ghost, not ice-water. That was for other things. Desert things.
The ghost plunged in beside him and for a moment they were face to face under the water, the empty sockets of its eyes boring into him. It seemed to speak, though it had no mouth.
I’ve never had an Aulian. Your skin is already on its way
. Oribas kicked away, frantic to escape. He surfaced again and the ghost floated beside him, mocking him, but he reached out of the water and clawed at the stone floor of the passage and hauled himself up into the tunnel, inch by freezing inch, dripping, already shivering, driven by terror. The ghost opened its mouth impossibly wide and swallowed him. He felt it run through him, a bone-shiver deeper than the shakes born of cold, a weight on his soul and on his consciousness, dragging him into a place far deeper and darker than the water of the shaft. His eyes began to close, so heavy that nothing would keep them open.
His bag! Right there beside him! His fingers reached it. Touched it as his eyes closed. Fumbled at the buckle as his mind began to drift. Reached inside and found what they were looking for. Salt. And then the weight was suddenly gone and he opened his eyes and the ghost was hovering above him, swirling and spitting. His fingers clenched tight, Oribas drew out another handful of salt and threw it and the ghost dissolved in a shower of light and sparks and was gone. From high up the shaft came a cry of fury. Oribas didn’t wait to see what followed. He stuffed his feet into his boots and snatched up his bag and another fistful of salt in case he needed it and stumbled away, forgetting in his fear how icy cold he was, how bitter the night air would be outside the cave to a man already soaked in freezing water. Forgot until he felt the first gasps of wind like knives into his skin.
In sight of the cave mouth he stopped. A monster was behind him, a cold seeping death ahead. Despair almost took him then but that wasn’t who he was, not who he’d been taught to be. He opened his bag and let his numb fingers feel at the pots and the parcels and the waxed paper wrappings and the glass vials, questing for something that would turn back the cold.
Saltpetre. He could set fire to himself.
That
would keep the cold back. He snorted bitterly and closed the bag and sat there for a moment in the dark, lost. Then uttered a tirade of Marroc curses that he’d been learning in the company of so many soldiers.
A spark of light flashed by the mouth of the cave. The spark of a man striking a flint. He started to laugh. That would do nicely, wouldn’t it? If there
had
been a Lhosir guarding the cave mouth after all and somehow they’d missed each other, and now maybe he wouldn’t die of the cold after all but something even worse. They’d wanted to hang him for what he’d done in this very tower, and sometimes in the dark at night, as he saw the flames again, he thought that a mere hanging would be a kindness. Then again he’d seen a Marroc made into a blood raven and that had been far less kind. On the whole, hanging sounded better then freezing, but freezing sounded better than having his ribs snapped off his spine and two metal spikes driven through his chest.
The spark flashed again. He could always go back and drown himself in the water. Not that drowning sounded all that pleasant either.
‘Oribas?’
He froze. ‘
Achista?
’
‘Oribas! What in the name of Modris are you doing?’
‘Shivering.’ He picked up his bag and ran. In the starlight he could see her standing inside the entrance. He threw himself at her, burrowing under her furs for her warmth.
‘Modris and Diaran! You’re freezing! And sodden! What were you doing here? What were you thinking?’
‘I was thinking that something hasn’t been right here for quite some time, even before the Lhosir king came. And now I know I was right.’
‘How?’
He shivered, squirming closer. ‘Ah, you’re so warm!’
‘And you’re freezing. What do you mean something not right?’
‘There’s a monster here.’
He felt the growl in Achista before he heard it. ‘I know. And we’ll find a way to cut off his head as well as his hand!’
‘No, not the Lhosir king. Something worse. The creature my ancestors imprisoned here has returned. And I know why, and the iron-skinned men are its children.’
She stepped away, or would have if he hadn’t been clinging to her like a leech. ‘Tell me later. You’re freezing. We need to get you shelter.’
‘We need to get back to the camp.’ To a fire, except the Marroc hiding up the mountain didn’t ever dare to light one.
‘No.’ Achista started to drag him down the mountain. ‘It’s too far. You’ll freeze.’
He ran after her, tumbling and slipping through the snow back to the trees. He was shaking uncontrollably, steadily freezing to death, but at the edge of the wood Achista stopped. Something was ahead of them, ploughing through the snow, and Oribas would have said it was a man from the steady sounds of its shuffling except what was any man doing out in the forest at the dead of night?
Achista reached for her bow. She pointed. In the starlight he saw something move. A shape shambling through the trees. They stood there, both of them frozen to the spot as the shadow moved through the wood and passed them by, and when it was gone Achista stared after it and Oribas had
no idea what it was that they’d seen. Tall enough to be a man. A bear, perhaps? ‘I can’t feel my face,’ he whispered. At least his boots were dry and warm. Otherwise he’d probably have lost his feet by now. Good chance he’d lose a finger or two.
Achista shook herself free of her wonder. She pulled him into the trees until she found a deep drift and made him dig a hole for them both. She took his wet furs off him and laid them out and then took off her own and squirmed into the burrow, and Oribas squirmed in after, pulling her furs too. They huddled there together, as close as could be, the two of them wrapped in a cocoon for the night, shivering.
And in the morning they rose, stiff and half frozen but alive, and saw three sets of footsteps ploughing through the trees towards Witches’ Reach. When they got back to the rest of Achista’s Marroc, the watchmen in the night said they’d seen shadewalkers and the iron devils of the Lhosir Fateguard too; and over the days that followed more of them came, and forkbeards crossed the Aulian Bridge until the Reach was full and their camp sprawled around it, and it was barely another week before Oribas wrote his last message from Achista the Huntress to Valaric the Wolf in Varyxhun:
The forkbeards are coming
.
T
he paths through the Crackmarsh were slow and winding. A month or two earlier and they might have simply walked straight over the frozen boggy ground. Another month, when the waters were at their highest, they might have poled their way on a flat-bottomed raft. But in these months of early spring while the waters were rising but still far from their peak, there were only so many ways to go. Reddic led the mules and the children took it in turns to ride them. Arda followed, then Jelira and Nadric. They stayed in the hideaways that riddled the water meadows and the swamps and Reddic took them to what was left of Hrodicslet; and when they were through it Arda led him along a trail that ran south and east into the hills among tiny clusters of farms tucked away in the valleys. The Vathen had never come this far, nor any forkbeards, but it was a path Reddic knew well. They all did, all the Crackmarsh men who’d marched with Valaric to Witches’ Reach.
They crossed the ravine where Valaric’s men had built a new bridge of ropes. On the other side lay the Devil’s Caves which ran right through the mountain to the Varyxhun valley. Marroc soldiers waited inside, Crackmarsh men, and when they saw Reddic and Arda their faces broke into smiles of welcome, though the smiles faded quickly when Reddic told them of the shadewalkers he’d seen. In the warmth of the caves, in the cathedral-like chamber of spires and columns near the passage out to the valley, Valaric’s
soldiers of the Crackmarsh told him in return of everything that had passed, of Sixfingers himself at Witches’ Reach only a half-day’s hard march away, of the forkbeard army that was massing, bigger and bigger, and more iron devils too.
‘You staying here?’ Arda asked him that night as they settled down around stones warmed beside the fires lit outside the caves.
Reddic shrugged. It would be nice to be among friends and to stay in one place for a while. To have other men around him so that he wasn’t the one to whom everything fell when difficult things needed to be done.
Arda cocked her head. ‘Well, you can do as it pleases you. No need for you to follow if you don’t want to. First thing in the morning we’re off to Varyxhun.’ In the dim flickering light of the few torches kept going under the ground Reddic saw a pair of eyes watching them from where Nadric and the children had lain down to sleep. Jelira. Arda saw them too. ‘We all are,’ she added sharply.
‘You should go back to your forge. To your home. You’d be safer. There’s a war coming here and people run away from wars.’
Arda stared as though she hadn’t heard.
‘He’s not here, you know.’
She looked at him hard now, as if she was waiting for more, but Reddic had nothing left to say. They both knew who he meant. ‘I know.’ She looked away at last. ‘I asked too.’
‘He killed a Marroc.’ Jelira was still watching them.
‘I heard. We didn’t come here for Gallow anyway. Middislet isn’t safe any more.’
Reddic had to laugh. Did she really believe her own words? ‘And Varyxhun is? Sixfingers is going to march an army on it any day now. He’ll sweep every Marroc in the valley out of his path. They’ll all go running to the castle and he’ll sit outside and wait until we all starve, because after Varyxhun there’s nowhere left to run.’
‘Still, it’s where I’m going. So you staying here, are you?’ She looked him over, and now he was the one who had to look away, though he stole a glance at Jelira as he did.
‘I don’t know.’
Arda smiled. ‘You should. You’ve done good for us. If you were my son, I’d be proud. At least here you’ve got a way out when the forkbeards come. Might not be much back the way we came but you’ll have a chance.’ She reached out a hand and touched his cheek, stroked his face. ‘You’re young, boy, and you have a good heart. Live.’ She touched his sword arm, still in its sling. The pain wasn’t quite as bad now, but only as long as he didn’t move it.
He put his other hand over hers but Arda pulled away and shook her head. ‘Live,’ she said again, and rose and backed away and lay down with her family, with her children and the old man Nadric, and Reddic watched as they huddled together and slowly fell asleep, one by one. He felt a great longing wash through him. He’d had a family of his own once, not all that long ago, and he’d thought of the Crackmarsh men as his new one; and they were too, but it only went so far.
He turned away. Forced himself to look somewhere else. Despite everything they’d been through he didn’t feel tired, not tonight.
Stay or go?
Varyxhun was a dead end. Sixfingers would have the Isset running red with Marroc blood. He wouldn’t leave anyone alive, not a man, woman or child. He’d wipe the valley clean and behind him there’d be nothing but a legion of blood ravens to be picked to bones by the crows. There weren’t many here who’d stay to fight that future, not those men who still had a way out through the caves.
Live?
He looked at Arda and her sleeping children. They’d need someone to look after them. Ought to go with them then. Except the more he thought of Arda, the more he thought
that maybe they didn’t need anyone at all, thanks very much. And besides, with his arm as it was, a fat lot of use he’d be when an army of forkbeards came sweeping up the valley.
Another hand touched his shoulder. ‘Hey.’ He turned quickly, thinking it was Arda again, but in the flickering light of the candles the face was much younger. Jelira. ‘So you’re not coming with us?’
Reddic tried to smile. ‘I don’t know. I sort of think I should actually, but what use am I?’ He shrugged. ‘And I don’t know the way.’
‘We stayed there for a while when I was younger. After . . . Gallow went away to fight and didn’t come back.’ A smile spread across her face. ‘It was so big! So many houses and so many people.’
‘He’s not there, you know.’
Her face hardened. ‘That’s what ma says but he’ll come. He will. He came back before.’
And left again
. That’s what Arda had said and her face had said a whole lot more – anger and despair and wanting and resentment, and even Reddic had thought better than to pry.
Jelira bit her lip and touched his injured arm, her fingers light as a falling feather. ‘You fought off those ghuldogs. That’s what use you are.’ Reddic lifted a hand and then didn’t know what to do with it. Before he dropped it again, Jelira took it and pressed his palm to her heart. He could feel it beating under her shift. ‘I want you to stay. But not like the other forkbeard did.’ Her eyes were huge in the candlelight. She put her other hand to Reddic’s chest.
‘Then I will.’ He shuffled closer. His hand stayed pressed to her heart, his eyes snaking past her to where Arda and Nadric and the children lay. Jelira stepped closer. She tipped back her head until the tips of their noses touched together.
‘If the forkbeards win, I don’t want to die alone.’
‘Nor do I.’ He reached his injured arm around her and pulled her closer still.
‘Forkbeards!’ A sudden shout split the rumble of snores and echoed through the cave. Reddic and Jelira jumped apart, looking about in panic as the shout came again: ‘Forkbeards! Forkbeards are coming!’ It ran through the caves like fire and suddenly Marroc everywhere were scrambling for their shields and their spears, jamming their helms on their heads while the few who had mail struggled into their shirts or hauberks. Reddic stood frozen. He stared at Jelira and she stared back, and then an old Marroc grabbed him by the arm and Jelira nodded and turned away.
‘Live!’ she cried after him.
‘This way, boy.’ The old Marroc ran up a slope at the side of the cavern and into the passage that led outside to a tiny valley beside a stream. A dozen Marroc soldiers were already there, clustered together with their shields held up and their spears wavering towards the night. Out in the snow Reddic saw figures moving in the moonlight. He couldn’t tell how many there were. As he watched, more Marroc came in ones and twos, running and out of breath.
‘Marroc!’ A forkbeard voice pierced the chill. ‘Traitors and rebels! This is your king. I’d ask you to throw down your arms but we both know that you won’t. Good enough. I don’t want you to. I don’t know how many of you are in there, but I haven’t brought many men. Most of them simply couldn’t be bothered with you. So I’m going to sit here and watch. Come and get me if you have the heart. If you have women and children with you, you may send them out. They’ll not be harmed. They may go back to their homes.’
In the semi-darkness figures formed into a line, a dozen of them, maybe a few more, but still less than half the number of Marroc now at the mouth of the caves. They came on slowly.
‘Those aren’t forkbeards.’ The old soldier who’d dragged him out frowned and let go of his arm. Reddic peered. ‘No spears. No shields.’
The moonlight caught them for a moment. The old Marroc gasped and Reddic felt himself wilt inside. The men coming towards him were clad in iron from head to toe like the devil that had led the last assault on Witches’ Reach. His mouth felt dry. He took a step back and the other Marroc around him did the same. He could taste the fear in the air. They began to back into the cave and it was all he could do not to turn and run. Iron devils. Men who couldn’t be killed. Already dead, some said, but they said it in fright-filled whispers. Then shouts rang out from the passage behind him too, and screams, and a moment later a half-dressed Marroc bolted out of the tunnel. ‘Shadewalkers!’ Maybe he didn’t see the iron devils or maybe he didn’t care. He ran straight at them. ‘Modris preserve us!’
The iron devils broke into a run, slow at first but building speed. The fleeing Marroc swerved from their path but one ironskin veered from the rest and cut him to the ground. The others charged in silence, each with an axe in one hand and a sword in the other, straight at the mouth of the cave. Faster and faster they came, while the Marroc soldiers wavered, wilted and then broke and turned and ran back into the tunnel before a single blow was struck, and Reddic ran with them, clutching his arm to his chest, and they were screaming in terror, only now there were Marroc fleeing the other way too, getting in their way. Someone barged Reddic from behind. He stumbled and tripped and fell as the iron devils crashed into the fleeing Marroc and began to cut them down. A man fell beside him, the back of his head split open by an axe. Another Marroc came the other way, bellowing with rage and fear, battering the iron devils back for a moment before they cut him to pieces. Reddic pulled himself free. Between the pressing walls of the tunnel someone trod on his leg, then his head. He managed to stagger to his feet but he could hardly see a thing and all he could hear were shrieks of terror, and there were men all around
him, thrashing to get past each other but with nowhere to go. He dropped his shield and pushed forward in the dark. Men kicked and cursed him, and he shouted at them to turn back because there was nothing waiting for them but the iron devils and at least a man could outpace a shadewalker, but no one heard. He pushed his way out of the passage at last to where the tunnel opened into the cathedral of stone and jumped down off the ledge, wincing as his ankle hit the cave floor below and as he jarred his damaged arm. Inside the caves he could hardly see a thing. The only light came from those few candles that hadn’t been tipped over and trodden out, yet sounds echoed everywhere, the rattle of iron on stone, the hiss of the shadewalkers, the scratch of steel, the shrill screams of men trapped with nowhere to go. ‘Arda! Jelira!’ A candle lit up a cluster of spires near where they’d been resting and he stumbled towards it. A lurching shape loomed at him out of the darkness. He yelped and jumped away but it was only a Marroc soldier with his arm almost hacked off at the shoulder, staggering in blind agony. ‘Arda!’
‘Reddic!’ He heard Jelira but he couldn’t see her. Another shape moved across the darkness in front of him. A shade-walker this time. He didn’t see it, didn’t see the swing of the sword until the very last moment, too late to do much except twist and lean back. The point of the shadewalker’s sword scraped down the front of his mail hard enough to spark, hard enough for his chest to feel as though he’d been ripped open. He tripped over a ridge in the stone floor and landed hard on his shoulder. His damaged arm exploded with pain and he screamed. The shadewalker came after him. He scrabbled back to his feet and stumbled away. Anywhere.
‘Reddic!’ A deeper voice. Arda this time. He almost walked into a stone column, and then an arm grabbed him and pulled him and suddenly he was in among a small huddle
of Marroc pressed tight against a cluster of the stone spires. Arda. He recognised her smell. And Nadric and Jelira and the children. ‘Stay still and be quiet, you daft bugger!’
‘Stay still?’ His arm was agony.
‘Yes!’
‘We have to leave! We have to run!’
Arda gripped his shoulder so hard it hurt. ‘Run where, boy? Now be
still
.’
Jelira’s hand took his. Squeezed tight and didn’t let go.