The chill and the flat light would give hue to his memories of loss, to the surrendering of his heart that, it had since turned out, was no surrender at all. He could rattle the chains he dragged in his wake, marvelling at the blue of their iron links, or the snaking trails they made through dustings of snow and frost.
He had come, forlornly, to the belief that love was given but once. No doubt, as Gothos had suggested, there was a plethora of feelings that sought the guise of love, but in truth proved to be lesser promises, guarded commitments, alliances of sympathy, and so, when exposed, revealed their fragile illusions. It was likely, in fact, that Feren had held him in such a state, with her love for him nothing more than a thinly disguised need, and in his giving her the child she wanted, she dispensed with the child whose furs she shared. It was a hard admission, to accept his inability to understand what had happened, to know that he had indeed been too young, too naive. And none of that recognition, in his misguided self, did much to ease his resentment of his father.
It was no surprise that Draconus knew Gothos, or that they shared something like friendship. The old would give account to a wisdom mutually shared, like some tattered blanket against the long night’s chill, and offer up a threadbare corner for the young to grasp – if only they would. But that was but one more burden on a young spirit, but one more thing to slip from the grasp, or see torn loose by an unexpected tug. He could not hold on to what he had not yet earned.
These notions did nothing to ease the loss that haunted him. His love for Feren was the only real emotion within him, the chains wrapped tight. It was the only truth he had earned, and every fragment of wisdom, crumbled loose, shedding like rust from the creaking links, was bitter in his heart.
A pewter cup struck his left knee, sharp enough to make him start, and as the cup chimed like a muted bell while it rolled on the floor at his feet, Arathan looked across to glare at Gothos.
‘More tea,’ said the Lord of Hate from his chair at the desk.
Arathan rose.
‘And less angst,’ Gothos added. ‘Make hasty your flight from certainty, Arathan, so you can stumble the sooner into our aged, witless unknowing. I am tempted to curse you as in a child’s tale, giving you a sleep centuries long, during which you gather like dust useful revelations.’
Arathan set the pot back on to the embers. ‘Such as, lord?’
‘The young have little in their satchel, and so would make of each possession something vast. Bulky, heavy, awkward. They end up with a crowded bag indeed – or so they believe, when we look upon it and see little more than a slim purse dangling jauntily from your belt.’
‘You belittle my wounds.’
‘Cherish the sting of my dismissal, won’t you? I’ll see it fiery and swollen, inflamed and then black with rot, until all your limbs fall off. Oh, summon the Abyss, and dare it be vast enough to hold your thousand angry suns. But if mockery wounds so readily—’
‘Forgive me, lord,’ Arathan interrupted, ‘I fear the old leaves in this pot may prove bitter. Shall I sweeten what I serve you?’
‘You imagine your silence does not groan like a host of drunk bards lifting heads to the dawn?’ Gothos waved a hand. ‘The older the leaves the more subtle the flavour. But a nugget of honey wouldn’t hurt.’
‘Was it Haut who said the tusk sweetens with age, lord?’
‘Sounds more like Varandas,’ muttered Gothos. ‘The fool shits coddled babies at the sight of a lone flower sprung from between stones. On his behalf I do invite you to his company on the next maudlin night, which would be any night you choose. But I should warn you, what begins as a gentle passing between you of your sore, broken hearts will soon turn into a hoary contest of tragedies. Gird yourself to the battle of whose past wounds have cut deepest. Come morning, I’ll send someone to clean up the mess.’
Arathan collected up the cup and poured tea. He dropped a nugget of honey into it. ‘There was a stabler, on my father’s estate, who made and ate rock candy. His teeth had all rotted away.’ He strode over to set the cup down on the desktop.
Gothos grunted. ‘An affliction when the child is taken too soon from the mother’s tit. Spend the rest of your days sucking on something, anything, everything. There are Dog-Runners who slip in among the herds they hunt, to suckle animal teats in the season. They too have no teeth.’
‘And none of these Dog-Runners are trampled?’
‘Obsession incurs risk, Arathan.’
Arathan stood studying the Lord of Hate. ‘I imagine something like your Folly must incur many risks, lord. How is it you have avoided such dread pitfalls?’
‘In itself, a suicide note involves no particular obsession,’ Gothos replied, collecting up the cup. ‘My haunting is both singular and modest, in that I mean to get it right.’
‘And when you do, lord? When you finally get it right?’
‘Proof against the accusation of obsession,’ the lord answered, ‘since what drives me is simple curiosity. Indeed, what will happen when I finally get it right? Be sure I will find a means of letting you know the day that occurs.’
‘I hesitate to say that I look forward to it, lord, lest you mistake my meaning.’
‘Ah,’ said Gothos after sipping, ‘did I not warn you that old leaves hold a most subtle flavour? You have over-sweetened your offering, Arathan, as the young are wont to do.’
Arathan turned at a sound from the doorway, to see Hood standing in the threshold. The cowled Jaghut studied Arathan for a moment, and then stepped inside. ‘I smell that foul tea you so adore, Gothos.’
‘Properly aged as is appropriate,’ Gothos responded. ‘Arathan, fill him a cup, in which he may drown his sorrows, sweetly.’
‘I despaired,’ Hood said, collecting up a chair.
‘This is your story, yes.’
‘Not that, you gas-bloated goat. Day and night I am assailed. The questions alone invite my hunger for death. Imagine, the fools clamour for organization! Pragmatic necessities! Supply equipage, cooks and meals!’
‘Is it not said that an army travels on its stomach?’
‘An army travels on its griping, Gothos, which surely sustains it beyond all fodder.’
‘I too have been besieged, Hood,’ said the Lord of Hate, ‘for which you are to blame. This day, it was your officers who made a mess of my afternoon, as Arathan is my witness. So, as I feared, you are the cause of sorrows not just your own—’
‘That cause for sorrow not my own,’ Hood growled.
‘No,’ Gothos said. ‘But your answer to tragedy surely is. As for me’ – he paused to hold up his cup, as if he could somehow see through the pewter to admire the hue of the tea – ‘I would have set out hunting Azathanai, the ones with blood on their hands. Tragedy sits still as a frozen pond, upon which no firm footing is possible. Vengeance, on the other hand, can silence any army, in that grim, teeth-grinding way we both know all too well.’
Hood grunted. ‘The offence taken by innocent Azathanai will serve what need there may be for vengeance.’
‘Hardly. They’re almost as useless as we are, Hood. Expect nothing concerted, not even a proclamation of … oh, what would it be? Censure? Decided disapproval? Disagreeable frown?’
‘I am scoured of vengeance,’ Hood said. ‘Made hollow as a bronze urn.’
‘And so I shall think of you from now on, Hood. As a bronze urn.’
‘And when I think of you, Gothos, I shall imagine a book without resolution, a tale without end, an endeavour without purpose. I shall think of pointlessness, in a pointed fashion.’
‘Perhaps,’ Gothos said, leaning back. ‘Of course, that all depends on who outlives the other.’
‘Does it?’
‘Possibly. It was a thought, presumably relevant.’
Hood’s cold eyes fixed on Arathan – who sat once more beside the last surviving brazier – and the Jaghut said, ‘This one, Gothos, I will send back to you. Before we cross a threshold where no return is possible.’
?
??I thought as much,’ Gothos said, sighing.
‘Unless you’d rather I didn’t.’
‘No. That is, I’d rather you did. Send him back, if not here, then somewhere else. Just not there.’
Arathan cleared his throat. ‘And I see that neither of you imagines that I might have a say in all this?’
Hood looked to Gothos. ‘Did the pup speak?’
‘Some semblance of speech, yes,’ Gothos said. ‘It does not mark his more admirable trait.’
Arathan said, ‘I will speak my piece, to you, Lord Hood, when the time comes – when we reach that threshold you describe. And you will hear me, sir, and make no argument against my continuing on, in your company.’
‘I will not?’
‘Not, sir, when you hear what I will say.’
‘He knows our minds, you see,’ said Gothos to Hood. ‘Being young and all.’
‘Ah, that. Yes, of course. Forgive me for forgetting.’ With that, Hood leaned back and stretched out his legs, his pose matching that of Gothos.
Arathan stared at them both.
A moment later, Gothos started tapping on the arm of his chair. Glancing over, Arathan saw Hood nodding off to sleep.
SEVEN
A MAN WITHOUT DAUGHTERS, SHARENAS ANKHADU REFLECTED as she studied her commander, knew little of subtlety. Vatha Urusander faced south, his back to the keep’s outer wall, the detritus from the chute leading from the kitchen heaped behind him, at the base of a wedge-shaped stain on the stone wall. He stood with his boots in scraps of rubbish. Knucklebones blushed pink, tubers black with rot, broken pottery, peels and lumps of fat too rancid to burn. Despite the late afternoon’s bitter cold, steam rose from that mound like the smoke from some hidden peat fire. There was, she decided, fecundity in what rotted, but hardly the appetizing kind.
In her absence, the list of the slain had grown. Curious, for a war as yet undeclared. She eyed her commander, wondering if she knew him at all. Aching from the long ride, she waited at a distance, her clothes spattered with mud, her hands quickly growing numb with cold beneath the soaked-through leather riding gloves.
Winter was the season of isolation. Worlds closed in, crowded up one against another. Trapped in such confines, surrounded by forbidding cold and frozen land, one could obsess on what was still to come, speaking heated words, making the season of spring into a promise of fire. She had ridden far in her exploration of the realm, through bleak wastelands, scorched forests, winding through hills silvered by snow and frost. And like anything coming in from the cold, she was rarely made a welcome guest. It did not take an ice-locked keep to forge solitude. Winter’s isolation belonged as much to the mind as to the world outside it.
A painter of portraits would grin at the image before her now, in that cruel, superior way of artists who saw all that they needed to see. Complexity was confusion more often than not, while clarity could gift one with simplicity. In any case, the backside of a fortress was sordid enough in its mundane truths. Gatehouses, formal lanes and a bold façade all served what was required of them, elevating the titled few and their claims of privilege and wealth, and of course such edifices fronted the building, like a tapestry hiding a crumbling wall.
No different from men and women, then: buildings shit out a hole in their backside.
The notion made her think of Hunn Raal and his smile, the one he saved for the people he despised. Knowledge assembled secret hoards, and the man now leading the Legion in all but name was greed’s own tyrant these days. Worse, there was now something else about him, an emanation of sorts, beyond the usual rank wine staining his breath and souring his sweat. Sharenas wondered if she was alone in sensing that change – perhaps, simply, she had been gone too long.
Too long, and ill timed this departure. We went our separate ways, Kagamandra Tulas. You and I, so long ago now, it seems. Have you found your betrothed yet? Did you flinch, or did you stand in the manner of the man you would be? Kagamandra, I have come back to Neret Sorr, and I miss you.
When at last Urusander shifted his gaze and saw her, she noted his surprise. ‘Captain! I did not know you had returned to us.’
‘I have but just arrived, sir,’ she said.
She studied him as he approached. Like an apparition, he wore winter’s skin, white and vaguely translucent, as if clad in ice. The lines of his face were etched deep in the fading light. This transformation still startled her. The High Priestess Syntara names it purity. But I see a season of thought, the details of belief and conviction, all frozen in place. We are invited into sleep, drawn ever deeper into a world of extremes, where our hearts are locked.
Light yields no empathy. This is not the man I once knew.
Urusander said, ‘Tell me, I beg you, that Toras Redone has seen reason. I will not see a repeat of Lord Rend’s mad attack upon us, when we remain here, at peace.’
He hesitated then, and she could guess at the reason. He had ever been a reluctant commander, too severe for court politics, uncomfortable in the presence of the nobles of the Great Houses and their subtle, ambivalent ways. Nor was he a man known for being loquacious. But now, and here, there was little choice.
‘This is not how it was meant to be,’ he said. ‘If I did not move, it was with reason. If I chose to suspend judgement, I had good cause. Sharenas, we are not as we once were.’ He gestured, indicating his face, and then studied his hand, as it hovered before him. ‘Not this. The High Priestess sees far too much in such mundane attire. No, what has come to us – to us all – is a kind of ambiguity, as if our spirit has stumbled, suddenly lost.’ His gaze narrowed as he studied his bleached hand. ‘And yet, does this not invite the very opposite? The marks of faith?’ He glanced at her. ‘I am unchanged in that. She would call me Father Light, but that title is like a blow to the chest.’ Shaking his head, he looked away, letting his hand drop.
Father Light. High Priestess, have you no sense of irony? This father here has done poorly with his charges, true-born and adopted. Worse still, his soldiers run wild, like a family torn loose. He is father to thousands.
Commander, what will you do about your children?
‘Sir, Syntara would set you opposite, but equal, to Mother Dark. It is, I know, somewhat … simplistic. But perhaps that offers its own appeal.’
‘You cannot hold it in,’ he muttered, as if suddenly distracted. ‘Not for ever. No mortal has that capacity.’
‘Sir?’
His voice hardened. ‘Anger, Sharenas, is an unruly beast. We chain it daily, seeking the civil mien. Witness to injustices on all sides, appalled at the brazen abuse of that most basic notion of fairness, so arrogantly abrogated. And then, there is the effrontery. Indeed, humiliation. I would have walked away from it. You know that, Sharenas, don’t you?’
She nodded.
He went on. ‘But the beast broke free and now runs hard – but to where? Seeking what? Reparation or vengeance?’ He shifted to face south, as if he could somehow look upon the Citadel itself. ‘He painted what he saw, and now … now, Abyss take me, he sees nothing. By this terrible act of self-mutilation’ – he turned his head to meet her gaze – ‘did he make vow to the triumph of Dark? This is what I ask myself, again and again.’
Before me stands a man with too many thoughts and too few feelings. ‘Sir, Kadaspala was driven mad, by what he found, by what had been done to his sister and his father. There was no intent in what he did to himself, unless it was to claw out the anguish filling his head.’
After a moment, Urusander grunted, and his tone turned wry. ‘I lost grip on the chain and that beast is well beyond my reach now. I understand how it must seem, to Anomander, and to all the other highborn. Vatha Urusander waits in Neret Sorr, eager to begin the season of war.’
To that, she said nothing.
‘Sharenas, what word do you bring?’
What word? Well, an expected question, under the circumstances. Still … blessed Abyss, what island have I stumbled upon? What forbidding seas surround it? Was I alone
in riding into the face of winter, looking upon freshly made barrows? Here you stand, seeking word of the outside world. Your island, sir, is lost on every map. Kadaspala? Forget that fool! We now gather with all swords drawn! Urusander, how do I venture close? ‘Sir, Commander Toras Redone is presently indisposed. Broken, I am told, by grief.’
The bleached visage before her revealed no hint of subterfuge as he frowned. ‘I do not understand. Has she lost a dear one, then?’
Sharenas hesitated. This was not a challenge to her courage – she would speak the truth here, as befitted Urusander’s most loyal captain. But this man’s innocence frightened her – an innocence, it seems, won in the slipping free of a chain. I see less a father and more a child. Reborn, Syntara? Indeed, and it’s a cold, cold cradle. ‘Sir, it seems that Hunn Raal has told you little of his various missions across Kurald Galain. I but rode into his wake, sir, and made of it all I could glean, although, it must be said, I was rarely welcome.’
At the mention of Hunn Raal’s name, Urusander’s expression twisted. ‘He is censured, I assure you, captain. This war against the Deniers is an absurd dissembling of our cause. It has done more harm than good. The man does not comprehend justice, nor even propriety, it seems.’ He half turned, to gaze southward again, and set a hand to his face, but cautiously, as if uncertain what his touch would find. ‘What is it, Sharenas, which you must speak? And why this hesitation?’
‘In a moment, sir, if you will forgive me. Since I last departed here, there have been changes.’
He shot her a look. ‘You doubt your footing?’
You fool. I doubt yours. ‘The High Priestess holds to a lofty station now. Is it Hunn Raal who sits cupped in her hand? What of Captain Serap? Sir, I must know – who advises you on affairs of the state?’