‘I would not think that journey outward,’ she said.
He shrugged. ‘Yes. There is symmetry. Outward, inward, the distances travelled matched and so doubled, yet, strangely, both seeking the same destination. It is a curious thing, is it not? This invitation to the impossible, and the faith that even the impossible has rules.’
She frowned.
Resh continued, ‘My wife spoke of the need for blood, for a price to be paid. I believe that she only half understood the meaning of that. To draw something back, from deep in death, into the living world, must – perhaps – demand the same among the living. If a warlock seeks to journey both outward and inward, in search of the one place where they meet, then the corollary is one of contraction, to collide in the same place, the same existence. For the dead to walk back into life, the living must walk into death.’
‘Then Ruvera’s life was the coin for this spirit’s resurrection?’
He sighed. ‘It is possible. Captain, the veils are … agitated.’ After a moment, he cocked his head, his gaze still fixed upon her. ‘Coin? I wonder. It may be … not coin, but food. Power, consumed, offering the strength to tear the veil between the living and the dead, and so defy the laws of time.’
‘Time, warlock? Not place?’
‘They may be one and the same. The dead dwell in the past. The living crowd the present. And the future waits for those yet to be born, yet in birth they are flung into the present, and so the future ever remains a promise. These too are veils. With our thoughts we seek to pry our way into the future, but those thoughts arrive as dead things – it is a matter of perspective, you see. To the future, both present and past are dead things. We push through, and would make the as yet unknown world a better version of our own. But with nothing but lifeless weapons to hand, we make lifeless victims of those yet to be born.’
She shook her head, feeling a strange, disquieting blend of denial and uncertainty. For all she could tell, Resh’s mind had broken, battered by shock and grief. She saw no clarity of purpose in his musings. ‘Return, if you will,’ she said, ‘to this notion of power.’
The man sighed, wearily. ‘Captain, there has been a flooding of potentialities. I know of no other way to describe sorcery – the magic now emerging. I spoke of three veils, the ones through time. And I spoke of the veil between life and death, which may indeed be but a variation, or a particularity, of the veils of time. But I now believe there are many, many veils, and the more we shred them, in our plucking of such powers, in our clumsy explorations, the less substantial they become, and the weaker the barriers between us and the unknown. And I fear what may come of it.’
Finarra looked away. ‘Forgive me, warlock. I am a Warden and nothing more—’
‘Yes, I see. You do not comprehend my warning here, captain. The newborn sorcery is all raw power, and no obvious rules.’
She thought of this man’s wife, Ruvera. It was said that the beasts had torn her limb from limb. There was shock in this, and for the Shake, terrible loss. ‘Have you spoken to the other warlocks and witches among your people?’
‘Now you begin to glean the crisis among us,’ Resh replied. He slowly lifted his hands and seemed to study them. ‘We dare not reach, now. No thoughts can truly pierce this new future.’
‘What of Mother Dark?’
He frowned, gaze still fixed on his hands – not an artist’s hands, but a soldier’s, scarred and blunt. ‘Darkness, light, nothing but veils? What manner the gifts given to her by Lord Draconus? What is the meaning of that etching upon the floor in the Citadel? This Terondai, that now so commands the Citadel?’
‘Perhaps,’ she ventured, ‘Lord Draconus seeks to impose rules.’
His frown deepened. ‘Darkness, devoid of light. Light, burned clean of darkness. Simple rules. Rules that distinguish and define. Yes, Warden, well done indeed.’ Resh pushed himself upright. He glanced at the unconscious form of his lifelong friend. ‘I must see this Terondai for myself. It holds a secret.’ Yet he did not move.
‘You have not long to wait,’ Finarra said quietly.
‘I have been contemplating,’ Resh said, ‘a journey of another sort. Into the ways of healing.’
She glanced at Caplo Dreem. ‘I imagine, warlock, the temptation is overwhelming, but did you not just speak of the dangers involved?’
‘I did.’
‘What will you do, then?’
‘I will do what a friend would do, captain.’
‘This is sanctioned?’
‘Nothing is sanctioned,’ he said in a growl.
Finarra studied the warlock, and then sighed. ‘I will assist in any way I can.’
Resh frowned at her. ‘The Shake refuse your petition. You are blocked again and again. You find us obdurate and evasive in turn, and yet here you remain. And now, captain, you offer to help me save the life of Caplo Dreem.’
She drew off her leather gloves. ‘Your walls are too high, warlock. The Shake understand little of what lies beyond.’
‘We see slaughter. We see bigotry and persecution. We see the birth of a pointless civil war. We see, as well, the slayers of our god.’
‘If these things are all that you see, warlock, then indeed you will never understand my offer.’
‘How can I trust it?’
She shrugged. ‘Consider my purpose as most crass, warlock. I seek your support. I seek to win your favour, that you might add your weight when I next speak to Higher Grace Skelenal.’
He slowly leaned back. ‘Of no value, that,’ he replied. ‘The matter is already decided. We will do nothing.’
‘Then I will leave as soon as I am able. But for now, tell me what I can do to help you heal your friend.’
‘No god looks down, captain, to add to your ledger of good deeds.’
‘I will measure my own deeds, warlock, good and bad.’
‘And how weighs the balance?’
‘I am a harsh judge of myself,’ she said. ‘Harsher than any god would dare match. I look to no priest to dissemble on my behalf.’
‘Is that a priest’s task?’
‘If not, then I would hear more.’
But he shook his head, rising with a soft groan. ‘My own dissemblers have grown quiet of late, captain. I look for no sanction now, in what I do. And for the Shake, no god observes, no god judges, and in that absence – forgive us all – we are relieved.’
She walked to the cell door and dropped the latch, and then faced the warlock. ‘And now?’
‘Draw your blade, captain.’
‘Against what?’
He managed a strained smile. ‘I have no idea.’
* * *
Caplo was being dragged across rough ground, a stony slope. Though his eyes were open, he could make out very little. A flare of light blurred his vision, perhaps from a fire, and the grimy hand gripping his ankle pulled him along as if he weighed nothing. He could see the strange splaying of his toes, and feel hairs being pulled by the stranger’s calloused hand, and the sharp stones gouged his bare back, tugging at still more hair.
Into a cave, then, rank with animal smells, rotting meat, and woodsmoke. The stone floor was greasy beneath him. There was no strength left in his body, and he felt his arms like thick, bristly ropes against the sides of his face as the limbs trailed up past his head. The cold, damp stone formed a crevasse into which his body slipped easily, as if it had gone this way a thousand times before. From somewhere deeper in the cave there was a dull, droning sound.
The passage narrowed, dipped and then climbed. His captor’s breath sounded harsh, whistling. The slap of its feet on the floor echoed ahead, like a drumbeat.
Everything drifted away, and when it returned the motion had ceased, and the space on all sides was filled with shifting bodies, barely seen in the light of embers filling skull-cups set on ledges on the walls. There was paint on those walls, he now saw. Beasts and hatchwork, handprints and upright stick figures, all rendered in red, yellow and black.
He t
ried sitting up, only to find that he was bound at the wrists and ankles. The thick ropes snapped taut then, raising him from the stone floor. He felt his head fall back, bouncing once, but then hands closed around the back of his skull, lifting until he could see down the length of his own body.
But the body was not his. Wiry hair covered it. His chest bulged like a bird’s. The strain on his joints burned, lancing pain down the length of his limbs to where the knotted ropes dug tight. He could not feel his hands and feet.
Dog-Runners hunting. I was asleep in a tree, my belly full. Above the scrubland, beyond the flats with their thin courses of trickling water slicking the clay. Animals licked the ground there with swollen tongues. They died in the heat, and there was food for all.
Dog-Runners hunting. No glory in driving a spear into a bloated carcass. They wanted a leopard, for its fur, its fangs and claws. Nothing to eat on a leopard. The liver kills. The heart is bitter. Leopards hate dying. They die in rage. They die filled with spite. Dog-Runners hunting leopard, eyes on the trees, shapes sprawled on thick branches. Blood-trails, streaks up the dusty boles, the prancing clashes of vultures and kites in a dance around the tree. The leopard looks down, interested but sleepy. Flies feed on its stained muzzle, tickling the whiskers.
All of this timeless, the ticking of the day’s heat, the night to come. No change comes to this scene. It could as easily be painted on a cave wall.
Dog-Runners hunting. I was asleep in a tree. One of me only. They saw me and thought, ah, the last of the Eresal in the hills, in the woodland, in the scrubland they now claimed. A young male, doomed to wander in search of a mate, a troop, but he was alone now. No other Eresal, not here, and how the others screamed when they died! They screamed, while the huge beasts they ran with fled the Dog-Runner spears, or died their own deaths in thrashing fury.
The very young had their skulls broken, their flesh cooked, their livers eaten raw.
Dog-Runners hunting.
Slingstones brought me down. Stunned by the fall. They rushed upon me, beat me senseless.
Leopard spirit. Claws marked the tree. They paid no heed.
We who lived fell away. We who lived returned to the tall grasses, the dark nights echoing with the yelps of hyena and the coughs of lion. We slunk back into the unseen rivers, when the world was timeless. We reached out to the spirits. We touched their hearts, and those hearts opened to us.
The ropes pulled with savage tugs, a panicky motion to mark sudden consternation. From the outer chambers of the cave there were screams now, echoing horribly closer and closer still.
Touch the leopard, run with the leopard, live the ways of the leopard.
They hunt alone.
Until the night the Eresal came to them. In the shifting grasses, the eye is easily deceived. But this is no flaw of the beholder, no weakness of the witness. This is the blurring of magic. Who brought us this gift? This escape from extinction? There was talk of a mother who would rut everything in sight. A hoarder of seeds, a living vessel of hope.
A Mahybe.
In the cave, his kin were coming, committing terrible slaughter in the blood-splashed chambers.
He was one, bound here. He was many, and the many now came.
Hoarse cries rising around him, the ember light bursting as a skull was knocked to the floor. Rushing, jostling bodies, the clatter of weapons, and then his kin were among them.
The ropes fell slack, dropping him to the floor.
A body fell hard against him, one hand closing to make a fist in the hair of his head. In the crazed half-light, something gleamed. The Dog-Runner straddled him and he looked up into its face. The pale blue eyes were lit with terror. Then the hunter lifted into view a flint knife and drove it into his chest.
In his dying breath, he laughed.
Because it was too late.
* * *
The cell had grown unnaturally hot. Finarra Stone sweated in her armour, her grip on the leather-bound handle of the sword slick and uncertain. Warlock Resh had knelt beside Caplo Dreem’s cot, head bowed, his hands resting palm-up on his thighs. She had not seen him move in some time.
Her stay in this monastery had gone from days to weeks. News from beyond the walls was virtually non-existent. And yet she found something almost comforting in this imposed ignorance, as if by remaining here, witness to the small lives bound up in all their small gestures of priestly custom, she could hold back the world beyond – as if, indeed, she could halt history in its tracks. She now believed she understood something of what drew men and women to places such as this one. A deliberate blindness to invoke the lure of simplicity seemed the gentlest of rituals, with only a drop or two of blood spilled.
If gods could truly offer up a simple world, would not every mortal soul fall to its knees? As buildings crumbled, as fields fell fallow, as injustices thrived in blessed indifference. She had seen temples and sacred monuments as gestures of diffidence, stone promises to permanence, but even stone cracked. There was nothing simple in the passing of lives, in the passing of entire ages. And yet, for all her convictions – that verged on the worship of complexity – something deep in her heart still cried for a child’s equanimity.
But the Shake places of worship were now lifeless. They had become tombs to their slain god. The faith of these people here was blunted, like fists pounding a sealed door. The simplicity they had found, she realized, was no virtue, and if a child’s face could be conjured from this, it was dark and obstinate.
They would stand to one side, Resh said. But she believed that position was suspect. They would find themselves not to one side at all, but in the middle.
This warlock here, risking his life for his friend, was the last soldier available to Skelenal and Sheccanto, although ‘soldier’ was perhaps the wrong word. These men and women were trained in the ways of battle. But of leaders they had but one, now. A grieving man, a man consumed with doubts.
It was difficult to gauge the passage of time, but she was growing weary of standing, and the strain of staying alert clawed down the length of her nerves. She let the tip of her sword rest against the wooden boards of the floor.
‘Abyss below!’
Resh’s bellow startled her and she staggered back a step. Before her, the warlock had lurched upright, flinging himself on to the body of Caplo Dreem, as if seeking to hold the unconscious man down.
Wondering, frightened, she dropped her sword and lunged forward.
Caplo Dreem was not resisting Resh – he was not struggling at all – and yet she saw his form blur, as if it was moments from vanishing. The warlock grasped the assassin’s right arm and leaned down on Caplo’s chest. ‘Take the other arm!’ he shouted. ‘Do not let him leave!’
Leave? Baffled, she moved round to the left side of the cot and grasped Caplo’s left arm with both hands. The stump, she saw, had bled through the heavy knot of bandages. Horrified, she saw the talons pierce the gauze. ‘Warlock! What is happening?’
‘Admixture of blood,’ Resh said in a rough hiss. ‘The old one within him mocks the child still – he drags it along. No abandonment. No murder. They will dwell together – I hear it laughing.’
‘Warlock, what has your magic unleashed here?’
The talons had sliced through the bandages, fingers splaying as they grew. On Caplo’s sweat-lathered arm, Finarra saw a mottled pattern forming on the skin, darkening to form a map of dun spots that seemed to float on a shimmering surface of gold and yellow. The flesh under her grip felt as if it was melting away.
‘Not my doing,’ Resh said in something like a snarl. ‘I couldn’t get in. Even with the sorcery I awakened, I couldn’t get in!’
A guttural growl emerged from Caplo, and she saw that he had bared his teeth, although his eyes remained shut.
‘He must not veer,’ said Resh.
‘Veer? Then indeed they were Jheck—’
‘No! Jheck are as children in the face of this – this thing. It is old, captain – gods, it is old! Ah, Ruve
ra …’
The spots were fading. She saw the talons retracting into fingers. His forearm and hand had grown back, slick with blood and the torn fragments of scorched flesh. The wounds of the thigh were but faint scars now, all signs of infection gone.
‘He retreats,’ Resh said in a frail gasp. He looked across at her, his eyes wide and frightened. ‘Understand me, captain, none of this was my doing. They but wait, now.’
‘They?’
‘I spoke of the revenant awakened by my wife – how one became many.’
‘And this now afflicts Caplo Dreem?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it an illness? A fever?’
‘I think … no. It is—’ He shook his head. ‘I cannot be certain. It is … an escape.’
‘From what?’ She leaned back, released Caplo’s arm, and studied the warlock. ‘From death itself? He was going to die—’
‘No longer. But I can say nothing more, captain.’
‘And when he awakens? Your friend – will he be as he once was?’
‘No.’
The fear in his eyes would not fade. Looking into them, she thought of caged beasts.
‘Remain with me,’ he then said. ‘Until he awakens.’
Straightening, she searched the floor until she spied her abandoned sword. She strode over, crouched and closed her hand about the damp, cold grip.
Someone pounded on the door, startling them both.
‘Go away!’ Resh roared.
* * *
The line of hills ended in a series of ridgebacks, steep-sided and bare of all growth. The soil was stony, the hue of rust, forming fans at the base that spread out over the edge of the plain. Sharp-edged rocks studded these fans, glinting like gems in the pale, wintry light.
Kagamandra Tulas stood facing east, looking out over the flats to the distant line of black grasses. Below him the red fans of silt had the look of draining wounds, bleeding out across the dull grey clays of the plain. He had made his camp just behind this last serrated line of the hills, sheltered against the bitter winds that swept down from the northeast. In the midst of tumbled, fractured boulders, near a massive nest of withered branches and trunks from some seasonal flood, he had built a small wooden shelter, tucked against an overhang. The opening faced on to a small firepit, where he cooked his meals, slowly working through the serendipitous cache of fuel. A dozen paces along the crevasse was a cut to one side that led to a cul-de-sac where he had hobbled his horse.