‘An unwelcome name,’ she replied. Then, catching once more that odd expression on Gripp’s lined face, she frowned. ‘Have you something to say to me?’
‘Milady?’
‘I was never so wrathful as to make you shy. Speak your mind.’
His eyes fell from hers. ‘Forgive me, milady, but it’s good to see you again.’
A tightness took her throat and she almost reached out to him, to show that his affection was not unwelcome and that, indeed, it was reciprocated, but something held her back and instead she said, ‘That leg is likely to collapse under you. I insist we summon a healer.’
‘It’s on the mend, milady.’
‘You’re a stubborn old man.’
‘Our time is short if we are to meet them.’
‘You see me standing ready, do you not? Very well, let us bring your unpleasant news to your master, and weather as best we can Andarist’s outrage at our martial intrusion. The boy will be fine here in the meantime.’
Gripp nodded. ‘It was ill luck, I wager, and not an attempt at assassination. The boy has little value after all, to anyone.’
‘Except in death on the road,’ she replied. ‘The unwanted child as proof of unwanted discord in the realm. I would we had for him another name. Come, we will ride for the Citadel gate.’
* * *
Galar Baras was blind, but he sensed Henarald still standing at his side. The darkness within the Chamber of Night was bitter cold and yet strangely thick, almost suffocating. As he stared unseeing, he heard the Lord of Hust draw a sharp breath.
A moment later a woman’s soft voice sounded, almost close enough for Galar to feel its breath upon his face. ‘Beloved First Son, what value my blessing in this?’
Anomander replied, but Galar could not sense from where the words came, or where he stood. ‘Mother, if we are but your children, then our needs remain simple.’
‘But not so easily met,’ she returned.
‘Is clarity not a virtue?’
‘You will now speak of virtue, First Son? The floor beneath your pacing holds firm underfoot, and you would trust in that.’
‘Until I trip, Mother.’
‘And you think this blade will ease your doubts? Or is it my blessing that will serve you thus?’
‘As a blade sliding into a scabbard, Mother, I would have both.’
Mother Dark was silent for a moment, and then she said, ‘Lord of Hust, have you thoughts on virtue?’
‘I know of virtues,’ Henarald answered, ‘but I fear my thoughts are little better than hounds nipping their heels, receiving only a hoof’s kick in reward.’
‘But dogged they remain … those thoughts?’
Henarald’s grunt may have been an appreciative laugh, but Galar could not be certain. ‘Mother Dark, might I suggest now, and here, that the finest virtues are those that flower unseen.’
‘My First Son, alas, paces not through a garden, but on hard stone.’
‘His boots strike expectantly, Mother Dark.’
‘Just so,’ she replied.
There was a frustrated hiss from Anomander. ‘If you have found new strengths, Mother, then I beg to know of them. If not in form then in flavour. In this realm of yours, so like a void desperate to be occupied, we all await the fulfilment of our faith.’
‘I cannot but retreat before your desires, First Son. The more I come to understand this gift of Darkness, the more I comprehend its refusal as necessary. The risk, I now believe, is to be found in the chaining of what must not be chained and the fixing in place of that which must be free to wander. After all, in the measure of every civilization, wandering must one day end; and when it ends, so too ends an unchanging future.’
‘If nothing changes, Mother, then hope must die.’
‘Lord of Hust, would you call peace a virtue?’
Galar felt the old man shift uneasily beside him, and suspected that the sword cradled in Henarald’s arms was growing heavy. ‘My peace is ever an exhausted peace, Mother Dark.’
‘An old man’s answer,’ she murmured, without derision or scorn.
‘I am that,’ Henarald replied.
‘Shall we consider exhaustion a virtue, then?’
‘Ah, forgive me, Mother Dark, this old man’s retort. Exhaustion is no virtue. Exhaustion is failure.’
‘Even if it wins peace?’
‘That is a question for the young,’ Henarald said, his tone sounding abrasive.
‘One day, Hust Henarald, you will be a child again.’
‘Then ask me again, Mother Dark, when that time comes, and I will give you the simple answers you seek, as seen from a simple world, a life lived simply as only a child can live, where a question can drift away before fades the echoes of its utterance. Ask the child and he may well bless you in the name of unknowing peace.’
‘First Son,’ said Mother Dark, ‘there is war in Kurald Galain.’
‘Give me leave to take up the sword, Mother.’
‘In my name? No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because, dear son, I am the prize. What is it you seek to protect? My sanctity? I yield its blunting borders. My virtue? That horse has flown and even the dogs have ceased their howl. My holiness? I knew a life of flesh and blood and not so long ago as to forget. In any case, I admit to not understanding the very notion of holiness. Where is the sacred to be found except in each and every one of us, and who can find it in anyone else when they cannot find it in themselves? The conceit is to look outward, to quest elsewhere and to dream of better worlds beyond this one. For ever at the edge of your reach, brushing the tips of your fingers, and how you all stretch and how you all yearn! I am the prize, First Son. Reach for me.’
‘You will not bless this sword, then?’
‘Dear Anomander, the weapon was blessed in its making. It waits for you, in the trembling arms of the Lord of Hust, for whom this exhaustion is neither peace nor virtue. A most restless child, that blade.’
‘Mother,’ said Anomander, ‘where has Draconus gone?’
‘He would bring me a gift,’ she replied.
‘It seems that is all he does.’
‘Do I hear resentment, First Son? Be careful. Draconus is not your father and therefore cannot suit being your target in such matters. Though there is no shared blood between you, nevertheless he is mine and wholly mine. As are you.’
‘You go too far,’ said Anomander then, in a rasp. ‘By title I call you so, as you ask of me, but mother to me you are not.’
‘Then wash the darkness from your skin, Anomander Purake.’
Her cold tone shivered through Galar Baras. Beside him, he heard Henarald gasping like a man in pain. Galar moved closer to him, felt contact, and reached to take the sword from his lord’s failing arms. As the full weight of the weapon settled in Galar’s hands, he grunted – it felt as if he was holding up an anvil.
Henarald sank to his knees beside Galar, shuddering uncontrollably.
Anomander spoke. ‘Devoid of sanctity, lost to virtue, and oblivious of all that’s holy, what manner of prize are you?’
‘If you would seek me, look inward.’
‘Perhaps that satisfies the priests, Mother, and you to see their feathers twitch above the vellum as if to mock the flight of your fancies. But I am a warrior and you name me your protector. Give me something to defend. Tell me not my enemies, for I already know them well. Advise no strategies, for that is my garden and it is well tended. Touch lips to no banner I raise, for all honour is found in the warrior at my side and my pledge to him or her. Give me a cause to fight for, Mother, to die for if need be. Shall we war over faith? Or fight in the name of justice or against injustice? A sword striking down the demons of inequity? A campaign to save the helpless, or just their souls? Do I fight for food on the table? A dry roof and a warm bed? The unfettered promise of a child’s eyes? Name yourself the prize if you must, but give me a cause.’
There was silence in the chamber.
Galar
started at an oath from Anomander – close to his side – and he felt the sword taken hold of and then pulled from his hands, snatched away light as a reed.
Boots sounded behind him and suddenly the door was swung open and pale light spilled on to the stone floor around his feet. He looked across to see Kellaras, his skin the breath of midnight, stumbling into his master’s wake as Anomander strode from the chamber.
Galar crouched to help lift Henarald to his feet.
The old man seemed barely conscious, his eyes closed, his head lolling, and the spit hanging from his mouth had frozen solid. ‘What?’ the Lord of Hust whispered. ‘What has happened?’
I know not. ‘It is done, Lord.’
‘Done?’
‘The sword is blessed, Lord.’
‘Are you certain?’
Galar helped Henarald across the threshold, and then reached back to pull shut the door. He looked around and saw that Anomander and Kellaras were already well down the corridor. ‘All is well,’ he told the Lord of Hust.
‘The child … the child …’
‘He has it, Lord. In his hands. He has the sword.’
‘Take me home, Galar.’
‘I shall, Lord.’
The old man he helped down the corridor was not the old man who had walked into the Chamber of Night, and in this comprehension Galar did not for an instant consider the ebon cast to Henarald’s skin.
* * *
A soul made weary of life longed for sordid ends. Rise Herat climbed for the tower, his refuge from which any escape was downward, and the height of which reduced entire lives to smudges crawling on faraway streets, like insects examining the crevices between pavestones. He had earlier this day walked those streets, wandering through stained Kharkanas and its uneasy multitudes. He had looked upon faces by the hundred, watching people hide in plain view, or cleave close to companions and loved ones while offering suspicious regard to every stranger who dared look their way. He had witnessed smug wealth, worn like precious cloaks of invulnerability, and saw in those visages the wilful guarding of things that could not be guarded. He had seen the poverty that every concourse exhibited, figures like bent and tattered standards of ill-luck and failure, although to all others that measure of ill-luck was in itself failure. He had seen flashes of envy and malice in veiled glances; he had heard laughter loud enough to draw the attention of others, and knew it for the diffident bravado it was – that child-like need for attention like a weed’s root wanting water – but no confidence grew straight and bold from such things, and the eyes ever gave it all away, in pointless bluster and ready challenge.
And those rare gestures of recognition and kindness, they appeared like remnants left behind from a better age. The modern guise was indifference and self-absorption, with every face offering a mask of imperturbability and cynical pessimism.
Rise was an historian who wrote nothing down, because history was not in ages past, not in ages either gilded or tarnished. It was not a thing of retrospection or cogent reflection. It was not lines scratched on parchment, or truths stained deep in vellum. It was not a dead thing to reach back towards, collecting what baubles caught one’s eye, and then sweeping the rest from the table. History was not a game of relevance versus irrelevance, or a stern reordering of convictions made and remade. Nor was it an argument, nor an explanation, and never a justification. Rise wrote nothing, because for him history was the present, and every detail carried its own story, reaching roots into antiquity. It was nothing more than an unblinking recognition of life’s incessant hunger for every moment, like a burst of the present that sent shockwaves into the past and into the future.
Accordingly, he saw nothing that he had not seen before and would not see again, until such time as death took him away, to shutter at last his weary witnessing of the rancorous, motley mess.
He opened the trap door and climbed up on to the tower’s heat-baked, shadowless roof. Even solitude was an illusion. Conversations in clamour, lives crowding now in the ghostly haunts of memory, his mind’s voice babbled without surcease and could torment him even in sleep. It was easy for him to imagine the Citadel below as but an extension of that chaos, with the priests hunting faith like rat-hunters in the grain, with liars tending their seeds under lurid candlelight in all the small rooms that so cramped their ambitions, and the foragers who plucked rumours from the draughts as if whipping nets through the air.
If history was naught but that which was lived in the present, then it was history’s very unruliness that doomed the players to this headlong plunge into confusion. None of the future’s promises ever quite drew within reach; none resolved into something solid or real; and none made bridges to be crossed.
He looked down at the river, winding its way through Kharkanas, and saw it as a metaphor of the present – hardly an original notion, of course – except that to his eyes it was crowded beyond measure, with the swimming and the drowning, the corpses and those barely holding on, all spun about and swirling on unpredictable currents. Those bridges that reached into the future, where dwelt equity, hope and cherished lives so warmly swathed in harmony, arced high overhead, beyond all mortal reach, and he could hear the wailing as the flow carried the masses past every one of those bridges, into and out of those cool shadows that were themselves as insubstantial as promises.
Such shadows could not be walked. Such shadows offered no grip for the hand, no hold for the foot. They were, in truth, nothing more than ongoing arguments between light and dark.
He could fling himself from this tower. He could shock innocent strangers upon the courtyard below, or the street, or even the bridge leading into the Citadel. Or he could vanish into the depths of Dorssan Ryl. A life’s end sent ripples through those that remained. They could be vast, or modest, but in the scheme of this living history, most were barely noticed.
We are all interludes in history, a drawn breath to make pause in the rush, and when we are gone, those breaths join the chorus of the wind.
But who listens to the wind?
Historians, he decided, were as deaf as anyone else.
A soul made weary longed for sordid ends. But a soul at its end longed for all that was past, and so remained trapped in a present filled with regrets. Of all the falls promised me by this vantage, I will take the river. Each and every time, I will take the river.
And perhaps, one day, I will walk in shadows.
He looked out upon the haze of smoke above the forest beyond the city, the foul columns lifting skyward, leaning like the gnarled boles of wind-tilted trees. That wind made cold every tear tracking down from his eyes, and then gave him a thousand breaths to dry each one.
He thought back to the conversation he had just fled, down in a candlelit chamber far below. As witness he was but an afterthought, in the manner of all historians. Cursed to observe and cursed again to reflect on the meaning of all that was observed. Such a stance invited a sense of superiority, and the drudging internal pontification of the coolly uninvolved. But he knew that for the sour delusion of a frightened fool: to think that he could not be made to bleed, or weep, or even lose his life as the current grew wild with rage.
There were a thousand solutions, and each and every one was within grasp, but the will had turned away, and no exhortation or threat would turn it back.
‘We have lost a third of our brothers and sisters,’ Cedorpul had announced upon entering the chamber, and the candles had dipped their flames with his arrival – surely not the portent of his words. Behind him was Endest Silann, looking too young for any of this.
High Priestess Emral Lanear stood like a woman assailed. Her face was wan, her eyes sunken and darkly ringed. The strength of her title and eminent position had been swept away along with her faith, and every priest and priestess lost to Syntara clearly struck her as a personal betrayal.
‘Her cause,’ Cedorpul said then, his small eyes grave in his round face, ‘is not the Deniers’ cause. We can be certain of that, High Priestess.’
Rise Herat still struggled with the physical transformation among Mother Dark’s children in the Citadel, this birth of the Andii that even now spread like a stain among her chosen. Night no longer blinded, or hid anything from sight. And yet still we grope. He had always believed himself the master of his own body, barring those vagaries of disease or injury that could afflict one at any moment. He had not felt Mother Dark’s touch, but that she had claimed him could not be denied. There had been no choice in the matter. But I now know that to be wrong. People have fled her blessing.
When Emral Lanear said nothing in response to Cedorpul’s words, the priest cleared his throat and resumed. ‘High Priestess, is this now a war of three faiths? We know nothing of Syntara’s intentions. She seems to position herself solely in opposition, but that in itself offers modest cause.’
‘And probably short-lived,’ Endest Silann added.
Emral’s eyes flicked to the acolyte as if without recognition, and then away again.
The glance Cedorpul then turned on Rise Herat was beseeching. ‘Historian, have you thoughts on any of this?’
Thoughts? What value those? ‘Syntara sought refuge in Urusander’s Legion. But I wonder at the measure of their welcome. Does it not confuse their cause?’
Cedorpul snorted. ‘Is it not confused enough? Beating down the wretched poor to challenge the eminence of the highborn could not be more wrong-footed.’ He faced Emral again. ‘High Priestess, it is said they strike down Deniers in Mother Dark’s name. She must disavow this, surely?’
At that Emral seemed to wince. Shakily she drew out a chair from the table dominating the chamber, and then sat, as if made exhausted by her own silence. After a long moment she spoke. ‘The faith of holding on to faith … I wonder’ – and she looked up and met the historian’s eyes – ‘if that is not all we have. All we ever have.’
‘Do we invent our gods?’ Rise asked her. ‘Without question we have invented this one. But as we can all see, in each other and in such mirrors as we may possess, our faith is so marked and gives proof to her power.’
‘But is it hers?’ Emral asked.