Midnight Tides

  ‘Mother, Hannan Mosag’s sorcery was not Kurald Emurlahn.’ He did not need their expressions to realize that he had been the last among them to understand that truth. He grimaced. ‘Forgive me my foolish words—’

  ‘Foolish only in speaking them aloud,’ Uruth said. ‘Fear, take Trull and Rhulad. Go to the Stone Bowl—’

  ‘Stop this. Now.’ Tomad’s voice was hard, his expression dark. ‘Fear. Trull. Return to the house and await me there. Uruth, tend to the needs of the widows. A fallen warrior faces his first dusk among kin. Propitiations must be made.’

  For a moment Trull thought she was going to object. Instead, lips pressed into a line, she nodded and strode away.

  Fear beckoned Trull and they walked to the longhouse, leaving their father standing alone beside the canal.

  ‘These are awkward times,’ Trull said.

  ‘Is there need,’ Fear asked, ‘when you stand between Rhulad and Mayen?’

  Trull clamped his mouth shut. Too off-balance to deflect the question with a disarming reply.

  Fear took the silence for an answer. ‘And when you stand between them, who do you face?’

  ‘I – I am sorry, Fear. Your question was unexpected. Is there need, you ask. My answer is: I don’t know.’

  ‘Ah, I see.’

  ‘His strutting… irritates me.’

  Fear made no response.

  They came to the doorway. Trull studied his brother. ‘Fear, what is this Stone Bowl? I have never heard—’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he replied, then walked inside.

  Trull remained at the threshold. He ran a hand through his hair, turned and looked back across the compound. Those who had stood in welcome were gone, as were their warrior kin. Hannan Mosag and his K’risnan Cadre were nowhere to be seen. A lone figure remained. Tomad.

  Are we so different from everyone else?

  Yes. For the Warlock King has asked for Tomad’s sons. To pursue a vision.

  He has made us his servants. Yet… is he the master?

  ****

  In his dream, Udinaas found himself kneeling in ashes. He was cut and bleeding. His hands. His legs. The ash seemed to gnaw into the wounds with avid hunger. The tightness in his throat made him gasp for breath. He clawed at the air as he clambered onto his feet and stood, wavering – and the sky roared and raced in on all sides.

  Fire. A storm of fire.

  He screamed.

  And found himself on his knees once more.

  Beyond his ragged breathing, only silence. Udinaas lifted his head. The storm was gone.

  Figures on the plain. Walking, dust roiling up behind them like wind-tossed shrouds. Weapons impaled them. Limbs hung from shreds of tendon and muscle. Sightless eyes and expressions twisted with fearful recognition – faces seeing their own deaths – blind to his own presence as they marched past.

  Rising up within him, a vast sense of loss. Grief, then the bitter whisper of betrayal.

  Someone will pay for this. Someone will pay.

  Someone.

  Someone.

  The words were not his, the thoughts were another’s, but the voice, there in the centre of his skull – that voice was his own.

  A dead warrior walked close. Tall, black-skinned. A sword had taken most of his face. Bone gleamed, latticed with red cracks from some fierce impact.

  A flash of motion.

  Metal-clad hand crashed into the side of Udinaas’s head. Blood sprayed. He was in a cloud of grey ash, on the ground. Blinking burning fire.

  He felt gauntleted fingers close about his left ankle. His leg was viciously yanked upward.

  And then the warrior began dragging him.

  Where are we going?

  ‘The Lady is harsh.’

  The Lady?

  ‘Is harsh.’

  She awaits us at journey’s end?

  ‘She is not one who waits.’

  He twisted as he was pulled along, found himself staring back at the furrow he’d made in the ashes. A track reaching to the horizon. And black blood was welling from that ragged gouge. How long has he been dragging me? Whom do I wound?

  The thunder of hoofs.

  ‘She comes.’

  Udinaas turned onto his back, struggled to raise his head.

  A piercing scream.

  Then a sword ripped through the warrior dragging Udinaas. Cutting it in half. The hand fell away from his ankle and he rolled to one side as iron-shod hoofs thundered past.

  She blazed, blinding white. A sword flickering like lightning in one hand. In the other, a double-bladed axe that dripped something molten in its wake. The horse—

  Naught but bones, bound by fire.

  The huge skeletal beast tossed its head as it wheeled round. The woman was masked in flat, featureless gold. A headdress of arching, gilt scales rose like hackles about her head. Weapons lifted.

  And Udinaas stared into her eyes.

  He flinched away, scrabbling to his feet, then running.

  Hoofs pounded behind him.

  Daughter Dawn. Menandore—

  Before him were sprawled the warriors that had walked alongside the one dragging him. Flames licking along wounds, dull smoke rising from torn flesh. None moved. They keep dying, don’t they? Again and again. They keep dying—

  He ran.

  Then was struck. A wall of ridged bone smashing into his right shoulder, spinning him through the air. He hit the ground, tumbled and rolled, limbs flopping.

  His eyes stared up into swirling dust, the sky behind it spinning.

  A shape appeared in its midst, and a hard-soled boot settled on his chest.

  When she spoke, her voice was like the hissing of a thousand snakes. ‘The blood of a Locqui Wyval… in the body of a slave. Which heart, mortal, will you ride?’

  He could not draw breath. The pressure of the boot was building, crushing his chest. He clawed at it.

  ‘Let your soul answer. Before you die.’

  I ride… that which I have always ridden.

  ‘A coward’s answer.’

  Yes.

  ‘A moment remains. For you to reconsider.’

  Blackness closed around him. He could taste blood in the grit filling his mouth. Wyval! I ride the Wyval!

  The boot slipped to one side.

  A gauntleted hand reached down to the rope he used as a belt. Fingers clenched and he was lifted from the ground, arching, head dangling. Before him, a world turned upside down. Lifted, until his hips pushed up against the inside of her thighs.

  He felt his tunic pulled up onto his belly. A hand tearing his loincloth away. Cold iron fingers clamped round him.

  He groaned.

  And was pushed inside.

  Fire in his blood. Agony in his hips and lower back as, with one hand, she drove him up again and again.

  Until he spasmed.

  The hand released him and he thumped back onto the ground, shuddering.

  He did not hear her walk away.

  He heard nothing. Nothing but the two hearts within him. Their beats drawing closer, ever closer.

  After a time someone settled down beside Udinaas.

  ‘Debtor.’

  Someone will pay. He almost laughed.

  A hand on his shoulder. ‘Udinaas. Where is this place?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He turned his head, stared up into the frightened eyes of Feather Witch. ‘What do the tiles tell you?’

  ‘I don’t have them.’

  ‘Think of them. Cast them, in your mind.’

  ‘What do you know of such things, Udinaas?’

  He slowly sat up. The pain was gone. No bruises, not even a scratch beneath the layer of ash. He dragged his tunic down to cover his crotch. ‘Nothing,’ he replied.

  ‘You do not need divination,’ she said, ‘to know what has just happened.’

  His smile was bitter. ‘I do. Dawn. The Edur’s most feared Daughter. Menandore. She was here.’

  ‘The Letherii are not visited by Tiste Edur god
s—’

  ‘I was.’ He looked away. ‘She, uh, made use of me.’

  Feather Witch rose. ‘Wyval blood has taken you. You are poisoned with visions, Debtor. Madness. Dreams that you are more than the man everyone else sees.’

  ‘Look at the bodies around us, Feather Witch. She cut them down.’

  ‘They are long dead.’

  ‘Aye, yet they were walking. See this track – one of them dragged me and that is my trail. And there, her horse’s hoofs made those.’

  But she was not looking, her gaze instead fixed on Udinaas. ‘This is a world of your own conjuring,’ she said. ‘Your mind is beset by false visions.’

  ‘Cast your tiles.’

  ‘No. This is a dead place.’

  ‘The Wyval’s blood is alive, Feather Witch. The Wyval’s blood is what binds us to the Tiste Edur.’

  ‘Impossible. Wyval are spawn of the Eleint. They are the mongrels of the dragons, and even the dragons do not control them. They are of the Hold, yet feral.’

  ‘I saw a white crow. On the strand. That is what I was coming to tell you, hoping to reach you before you cast the tiles. I sought to banish it, and its answer was laughter. When you were attacked, I thought it was the White Crow. But don’t you see? White, the face of Menandore, of Dawn. That is what the Fulcra were showing us.’

  ‘I will not be devoured by your madness, Debtor.’

  ‘You asked me to lie to Uruth and the other Edur. I did as you asked, Feather Witch.’

  ‘But now the Wyval has taken you. And soon it will kill you, and even the Edur can do nothing. As soon as they realize that you are indeed poisoned, they will cut out your heart.’

  ‘Do you fear that I will become a Wyval? Is that my fate?’

  She shook her head. ‘This is not the kiss of a Soletaken, Udinaas. It is a disease that attacks your brain. Poisons the clear blood of your thoughts.’

  ‘Are you truly here, Feather Witch? Here, in my dream?’

  With the question her form grew translucent, wavered, then scattered like windblown sand.

  He was alone once more.

  Will I never awaken?

  Motion in the sky to his right drew him round.

  Dragons. A score of the creatures, riding distant currents just above the uncertain horizon. Around them swarmed Wyval, like gnats.

  And Udinaas suddenly understood something.

  They are going to war.

  ****

  Morok leaves covered the corpse. Over the next few days, those leaves would begin to rot, leaching into the amber wax a bluish stain, until the coin-sheathed body beneath became a blurred shape, as if encased in ice.

  The shadow in the wax, enclosing the Beneda warrior for all time. A haven for wandering wraiths, there within the hollowed log.

  Trull stood beside the corpse. The Blackwood bole was still being prepared in an unlit building to one side of the citadel. Living wood resisted the hands that would alter its shape. But it loved death and so could be cajoled.

  Distant cries in the village as voices lifted in a final prayer to Daughter Dusk. Night was moments from arriving. The empty hours, when even faith itself must be held quiescent, lay ahead. Night belonged to the Betrayer. Who sought to murder Father Shadow at their very moment of triumph, and who very nearly succeeded.

  There were prohibitions against serious discourse during this passage of time. In darkness prowled deceit, an unseen breath that any could draw in, and so become infected.

  No swords were buried beneath the threshold of homes wherein maidens dwelt. To seal marriage now would be to doom its fate. A child delivered was put to death. Lovers did not touch one another. The day was dead.

  Soon, however, the moon would rise and shadows would return once more. Just as Scabandari Bloodeye emerged from the darkness, so too did the world. Failure awaits the Betrayer. It could not be otherwise, lest the realms descend into chaos.

  He stared down at the mound of leaves beneath which lay the body of the warrior. He had volunteered to stand guard this first night. No Edur corpse was ever left unattended when darkness prowled, for it cared naught whether its breath flowed into warm flesh or cold. A corpse could unleash dire events as easily as the acts of someone alive. It had no need for a voice or gestures of its own. Others were ever eager to speak for it, to draw blade or dagger.

  Hannan Mosag had proclaimed this the greatest flaw among the Edur. Old men and the dead were the first whisperers of the word vengeance. Old men and the dead stood at the same wall, and while the dead faced it, old men held their backs to it. Beyond that wall was oblivion. They spoke from the end times, and both knew a need to lead the young onto identical paths, if only to give meaning to all they had known and all they had done.

  Feuds were now forbidden. Crimes of vengeance sentenced an entire bloodline to disgraced execution.

  Trull Sengar had watched, from where he stood in the gloom beneath a tree – the body before him – had watched his brother Rhulad walk out into the forest. In these, the dark hours, he had been furtive in his movement, stealing like a wraith from the village edge.

  Into the forest, onto the north trail.

  That led to the cemetery that had been chosen for the Beneda warrior’s interment.

  Where a lone woman stood vigil against the night.

  It may be an attempt… that will fail. Or it is a repetition of meetings that have occurred before, many times. She is unknowable. As all women are unknowable. But he isn’t. He was too late to the war and so his belt is bare. He would draw blood another way.

  Because Rhulad must win. In everything, he must win. That is the cliff-edge of his life, the narrow strand he himself fashions, with every slight observed – whether it be real or imagined matters not – every silent moment that, to him, screams scorn upon the vast emptiness of his achievements.

  Rhulad. Everything worth fighting for is gained without fighting. Every struggle is a struggle against doubt. Honour is not a thing to be chased, for it, as with all other forces of life, is in fact impelled, streaking straight for you. The moment of collision is where the truth of you is revealed.

  An attempt. Which she will refuse, with outrage in her eyes.

  Or their arms are now entwined, and in the darkness there is heat and sweat. And betrayal.

  And he could not move, could not abandon his own vigil above this anonymous Beneda warrior.

  His brother Fear had made a sword, as was the custom. He had stood before Mayen with the blade resting on the backs of his hands. And she had stepped forward, witnessed by all, to take the weapon from him. Carrying it back to her home.

  Betrothal.

  A year from that day – less than five weeks from now – she would emerge from the doorway with that sword. Then, using it to excavate a trench before the threshold, she would set it down in the earth and bury it. Iron and soil, weapon and home. Man and woman.

  Marriage.

  Before that day when Fear presented the sword, Rhulad had not once looked at Mayen. Was it the uninterest of youth? No, the Edur were not like Letherii. A year among the Letherii was as a day among the Edur. There were a handful of prettier women among the maidens of noble-born households. But he had set his eyes upon her thereafter.

  And that made it what it was.

  He could abandon this vigil. A Beneda warrior was not a Hiroth warrior, after all. A sea-gnawed corpse clothed in copper, not gold. He could set out on that trail, padding through the darkness.

  To find what? Certainty, the sharp teeth behind all that gnawed at his thoughts.

  And the worth of that?

  It is these dark hours—

  Trull Sengar’s eyes slowly widened. A figure had emerged from the forest edge opposite him. Heart thudding, he stared.

  It stepped forward. Black blood in its mouth. Skin a pallid, dulled reflection of moonlight, smeared in dirt, smudged by something like mould. Twin, empty scabbards of polished wood at its hips. Fragments of armour hanging from it. Tall, yet stoop-shoulder
ed, as if height had become its own imposition.

  Eyes like dying coals.

  ‘Ah,’ it murmured, looking down on the heap of leaves, ‘what have we here?’ It spoke the language of night, close kin to that of the Edur.

  Trembling, Trull forced himself to step forward, shifting his spear into a two-handed grip, the iron blade hovering above the corpse. ‘He is not for you,’ he said, his throat suddenly parched and strangely tight.

  The eyes glowed brighter for a moment as the white-skinned apparition glanced up at Trull. ‘Tiste Edur, do you know me?’

  Trull nodded. ‘The ghost of darkness. The Betrayer.’

  A yellow and black grin.

  Trull flinched as it drew a step closer and then settled to a crouch on the other side of the leaves. ‘Begone from here, ghost,’ the Edur said.

  ‘Or you will do what?’

  ‘Sound the alarm.’

  ‘How? Your voice is but a whisper now. Your throat is clenched. You struggle to breathe. Is it betrayal that strangles you, Edur? Never mind. I have wandered far, and have no desire to wear this man’s armour.’ It straightened. ‘Move back, warrior, if you wish to draw breath.’

  Trull held himself where he was. The air hissed its way down his constricted throat, and he could feel his limbs weakening.

  ‘Well, cowardice was never a flaw among the Edur. Have it your way, then.’ The figure turned and walked towards the forest edge.

  Blessed lungful of air, then another. Head spinning, Trull planted his spear and leaned on it. ‘Wait!’

  The Betrayer halted, faced him once more.

  ‘This – this has never happened before. The vigil—’

  ‘Contested only by hungry earth spirits.’ The Betrayer nodded. ‘Or, even more pathetic, by the spirits of uprooted Blackwoods, sinking into the flesh to do… what? Nothing, just as they did in life. There are myriad forces in this world, Tiste Edur, and the majority of them are weak.’

  ‘Father Shadow imprisoned you—’

  ‘So he did, and there I remain.’ Once again, that ghastly smile. ‘Except when I dream. Mother Dark’s reluctant gift, a reminder to me that She does not forget. A reminder to me that I, too, must never forget.’

  ‘This is not a dream,’ Trull said.