Fall of Light

  He looked her way once more, but again only for a moment before his gaze skittered away. ‘Anomander’s Houseblades will not be enough.’

  ‘Lord Silchas Ruin, acting in his brother’s place, is already assembling allies.’

  ‘Yes, the gratitude of chains.’

  She flinched, and then sighed. ‘Rise Herat, lighten my mood, I beg you.’

  At that he swung round, leaned his back against the wall and propped his elbows atop it. ‘Seven of your young priestesses trapped Cedorpul in a room. It seems that in boredom they had fallen to comparing experiences at their initiations.’

  ‘Oh dear. What lure does he offer, do you think?’

  ‘He is soft, one supposes, like a pillow.’

  ‘Hmm, yes, that might be it. And the pillow invites, too, a certain angle of repose.’

  The historian smiled. ‘If you say so. In any case, he sought to flee, and then, when he found his path to the door barred, he pleaded his weakness for beauty.’

  ‘Ah, compliments.’

  ‘But spread out among all seven women, why, their worth was not much.’

  ‘Does he still live?’

  ‘It was close, High Priestess, especially when he suggested they continue the conversation with all clothing divested.’

  Smiling, she walked to the wall beside the man. ‘Bless Cedorpul. He holds fast to his youth.’

  The historian’s amusement fell away. ‘While Endest Silann seems to age with each night that passes. I wonder, indeed, if he is not somehow afflicted.’

  ‘In some,’ she said, ‘the soul is a hoarder of years, and makes a wealth of burdens unearned.’

  ‘A flow of blood from Endest Silann’s hands is yet another kind of blessing,’ Rise observed, twisting round to join her in looking out upon the city. ‘At least that is done with, now, but I wonder if some life-force left him through those holy wounds.’

  She thought of the mirror in her chamber, that so obsessed her, and there came to her then, following the historian’s words, a sudden fear. Does it steal from me, too? Thief of my youth? Or is time alone my stalker? Mirror, you show me nothing I would want to see, and like a tale of old you curse me with my own regard. She shrugged the notion off. ‘The birth of the sacred in spilled blood – I fear this precedent, Rise. I fear it deeply.’

  He nodded. ‘She did not deny it, then.’

  ‘By that blood,’ said Emral Lanear, ‘Mother Dark was able to see through Endest’s eyes, and from it all manner of power flowed – so much that she fled its touch. This at least she confessed to me, before she sealed the Chamber of Night from all but her Consort.’

  ‘That is a precious confession,’ Rise said. ‘I note your burgeoning privilege, High Priestess, in the eyes of Mother Dark. What will you do with it?’

  She looked away. At last they had come to the reason for her seeking out the historian. She did not welcome it. ‘I see only one path to peace.’

  ‘I would hear it.’

  ‘The Consort must be pushed aside,’ she said. ‘There must be a wedding.’

  ‘Pushed aside? Is that even possible?’

  She nodded. ‘In creating the Terondai upon the Citadel floor, he manifested the Gate of Darkness. Whatever arcane powers he had, he surely surrendered them to that gift.’ After a moment she shook her head. ‘There are mysteries to Lord Draconus. The Azathanai name him Suzerain of Night. What consort is worth such an honorific? Even being a highborn among the Tiste is insufficient elevation, and since when did the Azathanai treat our nobility with anything but amused indifference? No. Perhaps, we might conclude, the title is a measure of respect for his proximity to Mother Dark.’

  ‘But you are not convinced.’

  She shrugged. ‘She must set him aside. Oh, give him a secret room that they might share—’

  ‘High Priestess, you cannot be serious! Do you imagine Urusander will bow to that indulgence? And what of Mother Dark herself? Is she to divide her fidelity? Choosing and denying her favour as suits her whim? Neither man would accept that!’

  Emral sighed. ‘Forgive me. You are right. For peace to return to our realm, someone has to lose. It must be Lord Draconus.’

  ‘Thus, one man is to sacrifice everything, but gain nothing by it.’

  ‘Untrue. He wins peace, and for a man obsessed with gifts, is that one not worthwhile?’

  Rise Herat shook his head. ‘His gifts are meant to be shared. He would look out upon it as if from the wrong side of a prison’s bars. Peace? Not for him, that gift. Not in his heart. Not in his soul. A sacrifice? What man would willingly destroy himself, for any cause?’

  ‘If she asks him.’

  ‘A bartering of love, High Priestess? Pity is too weak a word for the fate of Draconus.’

  She knew all of this. She had been at war with these thoughts for days and nights, until each became a wheel turning in an ever-deepening rut. The brutality of it exhausted her, as in her mind she set Mother Dark’s love for a man against the fate of the realm. It was one thing to announce the necessity for the only path she saw through this civil war, measuring the mollification of the highborn upon the carcass, figurative or literal, of the Consort, in exchange for a broadening of privilege among the officers of Urusander’s Legion, but none of this yet bore the weight of Mother Dark’s will. And as to that will, the goddess was silent.

  She will not choose. She but indulges her lover and his clumsy expressions of love. She is as good as turned away from all of us, while Kurald Galain descends into ruin.

  Will it take Urusander’s mailed fist pounding upon the door to awaken her?

  ‘You will have to kill him,’ Rise Herat said.

  She could not argue that observation.

  ‘The balance of success, however,’ the historian went on, ‘will be found in choosing whose hand wields the knife. That assassin, High Priestess, cannot but earn eternal condemnation from Mother Dark.’

  ‘A child of this newborn Light, then,’ she replied, ‘for whom such condemnation means little.’

  ‘Urusander is to arrive to the wedding bed awash in the blood of his new wife’s slain lover? No, it cannot be a child of Lios.’ His gaze fixed on hers. ‘Assure me that you see that, I beg you.’

  ‘Then who among her beloved worshippers would choose such a fate?’

  ‘I think, on this stage you describe, choice has nowhere to dance.’

  She caught her breath. ‘Whose hand do we force?’

  ‘We? High Priestess, I am not—’

  ‘No,’ she snapped. ‘You just play with words. A chewer of ideas too frightened to swallow the bone. Is not the flavour woefully short-lived, historian? Or is the habit of chewing sufficient reward for one such as you?’

  He looked away, and she saw that he was trembling. ‘My thoughts but spiral to a single place,’ he slowly said, ‘where stands a single man. He is his own fortress, this man that I see before me. But behind his walls he paces in fury. That anger must give us the breach. Our way in to him.’

  ‘How does it sit with you?’ Emral asked.

  ‘Like a stone in my gut, High Priestess.’

  ‘The scholar steps into the world, and for all the soldiers that comprise your myriad ideas, you finally comprehend the price of living as they do, as they must. A host of faces – you now wear them all, historian.’

  He said nothing, turning to stare out to the distant north horizon.

  ‘One man, then,’ she said. ‘A most honourable man, whom I love as a son.’ She sighed, even as tears stung her eyes. ‘He is all but turned away already, and she from him. Poor Anomander.’

  ‘The son slays the lover, in the name of the man who would be his father. Necessity delivers its own madness, High Priestess.’

  ‘We face difficulties,’ Emral said. ‘Anomander is fond of Draconus, and this sentiment is mutual. It is measured in great respect and more: it possesses true affection. How do we sunder all of that?’

  ‘Honour,’ he replied.

  ‘How so??
??

  ‘They are two men who hold honour above all else. It is the proof of integrity, after all, and they choose to live that proof in all that they do.’ He faced her again. ‘A battle is coming. Facing Urusander, Anomander will command all the Houseblades of the Greater and Lesser Houses. And, perhaps, a resurrected Hust Legion. Paint this picture I offer, High Priestess. The field of battle, the forces arrayed opposite one another. Where, then, do you see Lord Draconus? At the head of his formidable Houseblades – who so efficiently annihilated the Borderswords? He will stand on his honour, yes?’

  ‘Anomander will not deny him,’ she whispered.

  ‘And then?’ Rise asked. ‘When the highborn see who would stand with them in the battle to come? Will they not in rage – in fury – step to one side?’

  ‘But wait, historian. Surely Anomander will blame his highborn allies for abandoning the field?’

  ‘Perhaps at first. Anomander will see that defeat is inevitable. Thus, there will be the humiliation of the surrender to Urusander, and he cannot but see the Consort’s gesture as the cause of that. A surrender forced by Draconus’s pride, and when the Consort remains unrepentant – he can do no other, as he will see the surrender as a betrayal, as he must; indeed, he will understand it as his own death sentence – then, Lanear, we see them set upon one another.’

  ‘The highborn will acclaim Anomander’s disavowal of that friendship,’ she said, nodding. ‘Draconus will end up isolated. He cannot hope to defeat such united opposition. That battle, historian, will be the last of the civil war.’

  ‘I love this civilization too much,’ Rise said, as if tasting the words for himself, ‘to see it destroyed. Mother Dark must never know any of this.’

  ‘She will never forgive her First Son.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Honour,’ she said, ‘is a terrible thing.’

  ‘All the more egregious our crime, High Priestess, in forging a weapon in the flames of integrity, a fire we will feed until it burns itself out. You see him as a son. I do not envy you, Lanear.’

  A voice screamed in her mind, rising up from her wounded soul. The pain that birthed that scream was unbearable. Love and betrayal on a single blade. She felt the edge turn and twist. But I see no other way! Must Kharkanas die in flames? Will Urusander’s soldiers be made into crass thugs, and as thugs take power unopposed, unchecked? Are we doomed to make lovers of war into our rulers? How soon, then, before Mother Dark reveals a raptor’s eyes, with talons gripping the arms of the throne? Oh, Anomander, I am sorry. Roughly, she wiped at her eyes and cheeks. ‘I will trap the crime in my mirror,’ she said in a broken voice, ‘where it can howl unheard.’

  ‘And to think how Syntara underestimates you.’

  She shook her head. ‘No longer, perhaps. I have written to her.’

  ‘You have? Then it begins in earnest.’

  ‘We will see. She is yet to reply.’

  ‘Did you address her as an equal, High Priestess?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Then you make your language familiar, in the ancient sense of the word. She will preen in that plumage.’

  ‘Yes. Vanity was ever the breach in her walls.’

  ‘We assemble a sordid list here, Lanear. When fortresses abound, we make sieges life’s daily habit. In such a world, we each stand alone at day’s end, and face in fear our barred door.’ The strain deepened the lines on his face. ‘A most sordid list.’

  ‘Each one a single step upon the path, historian. No longer can you hold to this post, high above the world. Now, Rise Herat, you must walk among the rest of us.’

  ‘I will write none of this. The privilege is gone from my heart.’

  ‘It is just the blood on your hands,’ she replied, without much sympathy. ‘When it is all said and done, you can wash them clean in the river below. And in time, as that river flows on and on, the truth will be dispersed, until none could hope to discern your crimes. Or mine.’

  ‘Then I will see you kneeling at my side on that day, High Priestess.’

  She nodded. ‘If there can be whores of history, Rise, then we are surely in their company.’

  He was studying her, with the face of a condemned man.

  See now, woman? The mirrors are everywhere.

  * * *

  Step by step, pilgrims made a path. Seeking a place of tragedy deemed holy, or a site sanctified by nothing more than a truth or two scraped down to the bone, the ones who sought out such places transformed them into shrines. Endest Silann understood this now: that the sacred was not found, but delivered. Memory spun the thread, each pilgrim a single strand, stretched and twisted, spun, spun into life. It did not matter that he had been the first. Others among his priestly kin were setting out, into the face of winter, to arrive at the ruined estate of Andarist. They walked in his footsteps, but left no blood on the trail. They arrived and they stood, looking upon the site of past slaughter, but did so without comprehension.

  Their journey, he knew, was a search. For something, for a state of being, perhaps. And in that contemplation, that silent yearning, they found … nothing. He imagined them stepping forward into the clearing before the house, walking around, eyes scanning the worthless ground, the crooked stones and the withered grasses that would grow thick and green in patches come the spring. Finally, they crossed the threshold, walking over the flagstones hiding the mouldering corpses of the slain, and before them, in the chill gloom, waited the hearthstone, now a sunken altar, with its indecipherable words carved upon its stone face. He saw them looking around, imaginations conjuring up ghosts, placing one here, another there. They sought, in the silence, for faint echoes, the trapped cries of loss and anguish. They took note, without question, of the black droplets of blood everywhere, not understanding their meandering way, not understanding Endest’s own senseless wandering – no, they would seek some vast meaning in that trail on the stones.

  Imagination was a terrible thing, a scavenger that could grow fat on the smallest morsels. Hook-beaked, talons scraping and clacking, it lumbered about casting a greedy eye.

  But in the end, it all meant nothing.

  His fellow acolytes then returned to the Citadel. They looked on him with envy, with something like awe. They looked to him, and that alone was like the reopening of wounds, because there were no worthy secrets hiding in Endest’s memories. Every detail, already blurring and blending, was meaningless.

  I am the priest of the pointless, seneschal to the hapless. You see my silence as humility. You see the wear in my face as some burden willingly taken on, and so give me a gravity of countenance I hardly deserve. And in your debates, you ever turn to me, seeking validation, revelation, a pageant of wise words behind which you can dance and sing and bless the darkness.

  He could not tell them the source of his weariness. He could not confess the truth, much as he longed to. He could not say, You fools, she looked through my eyes and made them weep. She bled through my hands and saw in horror that it sanctified, dripping tears of power. She took hold of me only to then flee, leaving behind nothing but despair.

  I will age as hope dies. I will bend to the weight of failure. My bones will creak to the crumbling of Kurald Galain. Do not look to my memories, my brothers and sisters. Already they twist with doubt. Already they take on the shape of my flaws.

  No. Do not follow me. I but walk to the grave.

  A short time earlier, while he sat on the bench of the inner garden, huddled against the bitter cold, beneath a thick cloak of bear fur, he had seen the young hostage, Orfantal, run alongside the fountain with its black frozen pool. The boy held a practice sword in one hand, and the dog, Ribs, ran beside him as if it had rediscovered its youth. Now free of worms, it had gained weight, that beast, and showed the sleek muscles of its hunting origins. Together, they played out imaginary battles, and more than once Endest had come upon Orfantal in his death-throes, with Ribs drawing close beside the boy as he lay on the ground, spoiling the gravitas of the scene with a cold
wet nose snuffling against Orfantal’s face. He’d yelp and then curse the dog, but it was difficult to find malice in the love the animal displayed, and before long they would be wrestling on the thin carpet of snow.

  Endest Silann was no indulgent witness to all of this. In the dull, half-formed shadows cast by child and dog, he saw only nightmares in waiting.

  Lord Anomander had left the wretched house of his brother – scene of recent slaughter – in the company of the Azathanai High Mason, Caladan Brood. They had struck north, into the burned forest. Endest had watched them from the bloodstained threshold.

  ‘I will hold you to your promise of peace,’ Anomander had said to Brood, just before they left, when they all still stood in the house.

  Caladan had regarded him. ‘Understand this, Son of Darkness, I build with my hands. I am a maker of monuments to lost causes. If you travel west of here, you will find my works. They adorn ruins and other forgotten places. They stand, as eternal as I could make them, to reveal the virtues to which every age aspires. They are lost now but will be rediscovered. In the days of a wounded, dying people, these monuments are raised again. And again. Not to worship, not to idolize – only the cynics find pleasure in that, to justify the suicide of their own faith. No, they raise them in hope. They raise them to plead for sanity. They raise them to fight against futility.’

  Anomander had gestured back to the hearthstone. ‘Is that now another one of your monuments?’

  ‘Intentions precede our deeds, and then are left lying in the wake of those deeds. I am not the voice of posterity, Anomander Rake. Nor are you.’

  ‘Rake?’

  ‘Purake is an Azathanai word,’ Brood said. ‘You did not know? It was an honorific granted to your family, to your father in his youth.’

  ‘Why? How did he earn it?’

  The Azathanai shrugged. ‘K’rul gave it. He did not share his reasons. Or, rather, “she”, as K’rul is wont to change his mind’s way of thinking, and so assumes a woman’s guise every few centuries. He is now a man, but back then he was a woman.’

  ‘Do you know its meaning, Caladan?’

  ‘Pur Rakess Calas ne A’nom. Roughly, Strength in Standing Still.’