Forge of Darkness

  Every step was torture. The commander would feed him, offer him wine. Find him a comfortable chair and a bed and a woman or two – why not? He would earn such rewards. A religious war, when what we had feared was something different, something more confused. Instead, we get this. Simple, the lines sharply drawn and mutual slaughter the only way through.

  He imagined himself, at the end, emerging from the smoke and ashes, on a road like this one, with naught but charred bones left in his wake. His rivals dead, their opinions meaningless, their judgements a wasted breath. Draconus: Consort to a corpse. Arathan, gutted, with his entrails wrapped round the shaft of a spear. Raskan – so gentle in pouring hot blood down Sagander’s throat – well, he would drown in the same. And as for the Borderswords … Ville and Galak had been kindly enough, though misers with their commiseration. In return, he would spare them little when their time came.

  The triumphs ahead, at the end of this cobbled road, shone with a sceptre’s light, raised high as a torch in the darkness. Flames closed the mouth of my leg – that horrid stump – seared it for ever shut, trapping the howls inside me. I will let them out another way.

  By sceptre’s light, this I vow.

  Mounted soldiers were gathering below, emerging from the village. It seemed he would not have to walk all the way after all.

  * * *

  They saw a rider ahead of them on the road. The horse was walking and the figure was slumped as if half asleep in the saddle. Their two scouts had reined in halfway between the parties and now faced Cryl and his troop of Houseblades.

  Beside Cryl, Sergeant Agalas grunted and then said, ‘No uniform.’

  ‘We’ll question him.’

  The scouts fell in as they continued on.

  The man looked up as they cantered closer, as if startled awake. His face was badly bruised and its bones poorly knitted from what must have been a savage beating. One eye was shot with red. Dirt stained his clothes, as did blackened spots of dried blood. He halted his horse.

  Agalas gestured and the troop drew up and formed a line behind her and Cryl. The two of them then rode forward to rein in before the stranger.

  ‘You’ve seen some trouble,’ said Cryl.

  The man shrugged. ‘I lived.’

  Agalas spoke. ‘Have you seen soldiers of the Legion on this road?’

  ‘Urusander’s Legion or the Hust Legion?’

  Cryl blinked. ‘Hust? No, Urusander’s, sir.’

  The man shook his head. ‘Seen no one and been riding all day.’

  ‘Riding where?’ Agalas asked.

  ‘Kharkanas. Thought I might hire on. Did some caravan guarding once, might do it again. The country’s unruly these days.’

  Agalas seemed annoyed with this response. ‘Where did you come down from?’

  ‘Riven Keep. Thought to try the Borderswords, but they wasn’t looking to take anyone on, now that peace has come.’

  ‘That’s a long journey,’ Cryl observed.

  The man nodded. ‘Sorry I can’t help you. Of course,’ he added, ‘if there was soldiers about, there’d be less trouble on the roads.’

  Cryl turned to the sergeant. ‘Let’s go. We’ll see what we see.’ To the stranger he said, ‘There’s an armed procession ahead of you. You’d be safe enough near to them if you rode a little quicker, sir.’

  ‘Thank you,’ the man replied. ‘That’s a decent offer.’

  Agalas waved the Houseblades forward and they all rode past the stranger.

  ‘That wasn’t much help,’ Cryl said as they continued on up the road.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ said Agalas, ‘but I’m not buying it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, sir, he wasn’t quite right. Not sure.’

  ‘I could see him as a caravan guard.’

  She nodded. ‘But his horse was a damned good animal, well groomed and well fed, and the tack was clean.’

  Cryl considered. ‘Any man long on the road would do well to take care of his mount and tack.’

  ‘As to that, sir, he wasn’t carrying much gear. I don’t know, is all I’m saying.’

  ‘Wonder who gave him that beating. He was armed, after all.’

  She shot him a look and then reined in hard. The Houseblades veered past her, drawing up in confusion. Cryl halted his own horse and swung round to face the sergeant. ‘What is it?’

  ‘His sword, sir. It was Legion issue.’

  Cryl frowned. ‘Hardly surprising – those weapons must have flooded the market stalls after the disbanding.’

  ‘You’d think so, sir, but they didn’t. Maybe you heard different, but I’m saying they didn’t. Soldiers kept their gear.’

  ‘No, I believe you. I only assumed.’ He looked back down the road but the stranger was already out of sight. ‘So he’s ex-Legion. Might be riding to join up with a renegade troop—’

  ‘Sir, we went with the Lord this morning. We saw the Deniers, that village, it was a place of slaughter. The killers just cut ’em all down. Children too. It was butchery.’

  ‘So what was he, then?’ Cryl asked. ‘A scout? If so, he was coming from the wrong direction and heading the wrong way.’

  ‘I don’t know, sir. I don’t know what to think, but it feels all wrong here. All of it.’

  He studied her weathered face, the flat eyes. If she was in an excited state, he’d not know it from looking at her. ‘Sergeant, a word alone, please.’

  They rode on ahead and then reined in again.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Cryl confessed. ‘Lord Jaen commanded us to return to Enes House. He fears for his household. If that lone rider’s a scout, then the renegades must be somewhere ahead and that would mean that they’d already hit the estate – assuming they were planning on doing so. But I see no dust above the way ahead, and we’re not close enough to see smoke if they attacked the Lord’s house.’

  She said nothing, watching him, her gloved hands folded on the saddle horn.

  ‘But they wouldn’t attack a wedding procession,’ Cryl said.

  ‘We need to keep an eye on the road, sir. Study the tracks ahead. Lone rider or lots of riders? Headed which way? Problem is, sir, there’s trails through the forest, some of ’em running parallel with this road.’

  ‘Is this your suggestion, sergeant?’

  ‘We can reach Enes House before dusk, sir.’

  ‘They wouldn’t attack a wedding procession,’ Cryl said again. ‘Deniers – well, you’ve seen the proof of that.’ Still he hesitated. Lord Jaen had promoted him, given him this command, and the orders were explicit. Return to Enes House. Muster the full garrison of Houseblades. Prepare for an attack. ‘Abyss below, one lone stranger on the road and suddenly nothing is clear!’

  ‘I told you he was wrong, sir. And he is. All wrong.’

  ‘That beating was days old—’

  ‘More like a week, sir, or even two. That wasn’t swelling, just dead nerves.’

  Cryl fidgeted, hating himself, hating his indecision. Lord Jaen had but eight Houseblades in that train. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said again.

  She frowned. ‘Sir, you got your orders. Lord Jaen rides to a gathering of highborn.’

  ‘And no one would dare attack a wedding procession.’

  ‘Unless they’ve lost their minds. Sir, it’s all down to that rider.’

  ‘Should we ride back and question him?’

  ‘If you give me leave, sir, me and two of my Houseblades will do just that. If I have to, I’ll ask my questions with the point of my knife. Why’s he riding south? That’s the key to it all. It don’t make sense.’

  ‘Take two with the strongest mounts, sergeant, and waste no time,’ Cryl commanded. ‘We will continue on and you ride to catch us up – or you send one rider and take yourself and the other to Lord Jaen, if – well, if it’s necessary. No, wait, take four, not two.’

  ‘Yes sir. We shouldn’t be long.’

  ‘If he’s an innocent, I
feel for him,’ Cryl said.

  ‘If he’s an innocent,’ Agalas replied, ‘his run of bad luck ain’t ending soon.’

  They rode back. Cryl watched the sergeant select four Houseblades and set off at a gallop. He eyed the eight who remained. She’d left him Corporal Rees, a round-faced veteran with a caustic sense of humour, but there was little amusement in the man’s visage today. ‘Corporal Rees, I’ll have you ride at my side.’

  ‘Send scouts ahead, sir?’

  ‘Yes. But we will now ride without rest.’

  ‘Understood, sir,’ Rees replied. ‘Don’t worry about the sergeant, sir – she’ll get the bastard to talk.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘Agalas’s been on the other end of torture, sir.’

  ‘She has?’

  Rees nodded severely. ‘I got drunk one night and cornered her. Told her my whole life story, sir. But she survived. Most of her sanity intact, too.’

  Cryl shot the corporal a look. ‘It’s already a day of blood, corporal. I really don’t think you’ll win much laughter with comments like that one.’

  ‘Wasn’t thinking about laughter, sir.’

  Cryl let it pass.

  They cantered on, horse hoofs thundering under them.

  * * *

  Ever since the huts and their dead, and the soldiers he’d found camped further along the trail, everything had gone wrong for Kadaspala. His mule had plunged a hoof down a burrow hole and snapped its foreleg in half. The artist had toppled from the animal’s back, landing awkwardly on his paint box, and then received a solid kick from the braying, thrashing beast, leaving his left thigh so bruised he could barely walk.

  He had considered making his way back to the soldiers, but by then they had been a half-day behind him – assuming they’d not moved on. His agitation deepened when he realized that he had lost track of the date – that he was, perhaps, at risk of arriving too late to accompany the procession from Enes House. Once his father and sister arrived at the site of Andarist’s new estate, there would be two days of preparations before the ceremony. Even half lame and loaded down with equipment as he was, he expected to reach them before the ceremony. It was, he decided, the best he could hope for.

  Cutting the mule’s throat had proved messy and brutal, leaving him sprayed in blood and sickened by the deed.

  When he looked down at his stained hands and clothes, he felt as if he had caught a curse from the Deniers’ camp, and blood was now following him everywhere, a trail of culpability steeped in death and dying. The child’s dead face returned to him, no longer ghostly, no longer sketched in the air by the fingers of one hand, but hard with accusation now. That child had made him a consort with the ending of lives, Tiste and beast, the wild into the tamed and the tamed into the decrepit, and all was sullied, all was ruined.

  He limped on through the afternoon, the straps rubbing his shoulders raw, the insects biting through his sweat – but with all that he carried he could not brush or wave them away, forcing him to suffer their frenzy.

  Art failed reality. Each and every time, it failed in the essence of experience. A work could but achieve the merest hints of what was real and immediate: the tactile discomforts, the pangs of disequilibrium, the smells of endeavour and the shaky unease of a rattled mind. It pawed bluntly at immediate truths and fumbled blindly through all the lies one told oneself in every passing instant, every eternal moment.

  He saw now that there was no beginning to anything, and no end, either. Moments fell forward in seamless progression and then fell behind in gathering haze. Colours washed away the moment the observing eyes lost appreciation; or they grew stark and hard when the senselessness of things struck home. He saw now, at the ends of his scraped and stung arms, one hand that etched out creation, and the other that erased it: and by these twin measures he existed, and his entire purpose in living was to insist that he was here, and that this was now, and once those hands fell still, eternally still, all that he proclaimed of himself would vanish.

  In his irretrievable absence, they could walk the halls between his paintings; they could walk as things of flesh and heat, blood and bone, thought and unthought, while to either side ran windows on to flattened worlds and reduced lives that were in total all Kadaspala had ever achieved, and with sharpened nail they could poke through those false worlds, and behind them find naught but mortar and stone.

  I have always been a liar. I cannot help what I am – and that is the first lie, the one I uttered to myself long ago. Others accepted it, by virtue of my talent, and in accepting it, they let me live the lie. Sweet of them, and such a relief – that I fooled them – and if my contempt now dogs their shadows, wherever I walk in their wake, well, it is no surprise.

  Give me the lie and I will take it.

  And then give it back to you. In vibrant otherworldly colours – that godly language uttered by ungodly tongues – and yearn for the adoration in your eyes. It’s what I feed on, after all. Give me what I need, to keep the lies alive. To keep me alive.

  He kept his honest thoughts to himself, for himself. He risked nothing that way, because if artists were liars first and foremost, in close second were they cowards.

  One day he would paint beauty. He would capture its essence, and once it was captured, at the pinnacle of his talent, he could lie back, close his eyes, and drift into death. He would be done, and done with the world. It would have nothing left to give him.

  But for now, he would paint in blood.

  The trail opened ahead, in tangled scrub and severed stumps, and beyond that was the raised river road.

  I leave the wild behind me, with all its perils of raw truth and senseless death. I step into civilization, its shaped stones and lifeless wood, its sun-baked clay and its crowded streets filled with furtive moments we boldly name people. If he had a free hand, his fingers would awaken to paint the scene, in all its desultory glory, and so make things anew, in all the old ways.

  If the colours are gods, then another god waits in the death of all colour; in black lines and swaths of drowned light. My hand and my eye are creators of entire worlds, creators of new gods. Behold, artist as creator and world upon world to unfurl, inscribe, delineate, destroy.

  He clambered slowly up on to the road, wincing, and swung left – south – and set off.

  To a wedding, where beauty was offered up to the sole promise of being sullied, made mundane by mundane necessities and the drudgery of day upon day, night upon night, the host of insipid demands that pulled flesh down, dulled the eyes, made puffy and irresolute the regard – no, he would never paint beauty. It was already too late.

  But the scene haunted his mind. The flower petals upon the path, tears of colour already wilting and trodden upon, the bright eyes of the two now bound as one and the lascivious envy of the onlookers. Enesdia’s was a transient beauty, its perfect day almost done, almost in the past. Handfuls of crushed petals thrown into the river, riding the currents down and away. Tree branches hanging low over the water as if weighted with sorrow. The colours watery and muted, as if seen through cold tears. A sky empty of life. The Wedding of Andarist and Enesdia.

  If he could – if he dared – he would steal her away. Lock her in a tower like some mad lover in a wretched poem fraught with twisted notions of possession. His hands alone knew the truth of her, and brother or not he would show her every one of those truths, in pleasures she had never imagined – oh, he knew the crimes of such thoughts, but thoughts lived well in realms of the forbidden – he’d seen as much in the eyes of every victim he painted. He could play out his defiance of taboos here in his mind, as he walked this road, and imagine the brush of his fingers as they painted skin and flesh, as they painted gasp and ecstasy, lurid convulsion and spent sigh. Before his talent everything would surrender. Everything.

  There had been riders on the road. He saw scores of hoof prints in the dust and dirt, leading in both directions. But the air felt dead, empty, drained of urgency. Here and there, in faint str
eaks beneath the signs of riders, he saw the tracks of a carriage.

  He was indeed behind the procession then, but despite all the traffic suggested by the hoofprints, Kadaspala walked alone and no one else was in sight.

  The Wedding of Andarist and Enesdia. Painted with rage. The Wedding of Andarist and Enesdia. Erased by fury. He had the power of both, here in his hands. Such thoughts lived well in this forbidden realm.

  Behold, artist as god.

  Bruised and scraped and stung, he limped down the road beneath his burden of paints and brushes.

  The smell of smoke rode the wind, the smell of dying colours.

  * * *

  Once the Houseblades were out of sight, Narad nudged his mount into a fast trot. Sweat trickled down beneath his shirt, but he felt chilled. He had seen the suspicion in that woman’s hard eyes. Corporal Bursa had sent him on to the road, while the troop travelled along a parallel track in the forest. They needed to know how many were ahead, and Narad now had good news for them. A full dozen Houseblades and an officer were riding back to Enes House.

  His nerves were ruined. This wasn’t what he wanted. He had heard that other companies were on the move, and even now death was being delivered across Kurald Galain. This had gone beyond the Deniers, the wretched poor in their foul huts. Things were spiralling out of control. Urusander’s Legion had saved the realm. They were heroes. But they had been treated badly; they had grievances.

  He thought about Haral, that old Legion veteran. He thought about the emptiness in that bastard’s eyes when he was breaking Narad’s face – and the others watching, like that ogre, Gripp, as if fists were proper arguments, as if brutality belonged in the company of men and women, and children. That nobleborn brat, with Gripp on his shoulder like a sour crow – who said that that boy was better than anyone else? What made him worth more than Narad, or any of those dead Deniers?

  The world was full of lies. And people keep telling us we need them, all in the name of peace. But the peace we got was poison. It’s all kept in place to feed the few – the ones in charge, the ones getting rich off our backs, our sweat. And they sell us the virtue of obeying, and keeping our heads down, and not taking what we want – what they got and we don’t got. They say they worked for it but they didn’t. We did, even when we did nothing – by staying in the shadows, in the alleys, in small filthy rooms, by shovelling the shit they dump on us when they walk past noses in the air.