1
The stories of this age begin and end with betrayal, and mine is no exception.
It was midsummer when the bodies began to fill the ditches and the flies swarmed.
‘How many, do you think?’ Castus asked. He sat high, a slender figure atop a tall horse. I’d got down in the mud; I wanted a closer look.
‘Looks like an even dozen,’ I said. Flies in the air, flies landing on my hands, flies hoping to reach my eyes. The dead were off the road, down a goat track, slumped and tangled with one another in the trench.
‘You sure you want to do that?’ Castus said. No, I wasn’t. But I needed a closer look.
I half-slid down the bank and into the ditch. It was dry, everything was dry, the grass was baked yellow and the leaves were turning crisp on the trees. It was a summer for dying things. I reached out to touch the face of one of the dead, but despite the day’s savage heat, he was cold. He’d been in his twenties. Not so old. Not old enough to die. His throat was a ruin, the blood that had cascaded down the front of his shirt was brown, and dry as the land around it. The dead man had been wearing a night shirt. The flies hummed loud, clogging the air, clogging nostrils and mouths. Poor bastards. The people, not the flies.
They had been dead long enough to reek, not long enough to rot. I should have felt a little more—“poor bastards” wasn’t much to offer them. I suppose I didn’t think of these folk so much as people, as people-who-had-been. Since I’d been a small child, I’d seen the souls of the dead. I’d risen from a death of my own, then another, first throttled, then drowned. But there were no ghosts here. Only the insects, billowing clouds of flies, and the silent, graveless bodies. Without a ghost, without a soul, it’s all just so much spoiled meat.
‘Light Above, the stench of it,’ Castus said. He put a handkerchief up against his nose, but I doubted it would do much good. On the road he’d got into some kind of pissing contest with Sanvaunt about who could see the furthest. Both men were Draoihn of the First Gate. They’d mastered the trance of Eio, and proven their dedication to the Crown. As an apprentice, I could hold the trance steadily, but I was glad not to use it now. Eio could sharpen the trance holder’s vision enough to spot a field mouse at a thousand paces, let you sense the slight twitch of a muscle that was about to uncoil. But the First Gate was so much more than that. It expanded one’s consciousness out, out, into the whole misery and glory of the world around. The bodies had been ditch-dumped a half mile from the road, and with the First Gate drumming its rhythm, Castus had inhaled that stench like a fist to the nose. He and I had broken off from the rest of the group to investigate. There was a bet on whether it was just some dead cow, mouldering in a ditch. But it wasn’t, and it was horrible, and with only the First Gate to our names, there was little we could do to change it.
Had we been able to trance beyond the Second Gate we could have turned the dead flesh to stone, or liquified it with a touch. With the Third, the Gate of Taine, we could have burned them. There was nothing that Fier, the Fourth Gate of the mind, could have done to pry into their thoughts now, and they were long past the point when the Fifth Gate of healing could have helped them. That just left Skal, the Gate of Death. The Sixth Gate. And I didn’t think they needed much help in that arena.
The sun beat down from a cloudless sky, punishing the living and dead alike.
‘Who do you think they are?’ I asked. Seven men, five women. Only the one had been dressed for bed. The others wore shirts, tunics, breeches. Nothing denoted them as being special, save the savage manner of their deaths.
‘I think they were unlucky,’ Castus said. ‘First casualties of Arrowhead’s ambition, I guess. Stop touching them, you use those hands to eat with. That corpse smell won’t wash out easy.’
I ignored Castus and laboured hard enough to roll one of them over. My suspicion was confirmed, and it didn’t sit easy.
‘Hands were tied behind their backs,’ I said. ‘Executions. Why bring them all the way out here?’
‘Well that’s not good,’ Castus said. ‘I guess Arrowhead didn’t want the townsfolk to know what he was doing? Maybe these were the town’s leaders. You’ll probably find the mayor in there somewhere.’
His assessment didn’t sit right with me. I looked up and down the ditch at the poor, dead, trussed-up people. No, they weren’t a town council. They were too young. None of them looked past thirty. They’d been helpless, slaughtered like swine, and there were rules in conflict, even for the likes of Arrowhead who was doing his best to foment unrest and was stopping short of outright rebellion against the king, and Redwinter, by a hair’s breadth.
It wasn’t war. Not yet, anyway, but it was the fronting of war, the way that two drunks square up to one another outside a bar that should have closed hours ago, that moment of posturing before the blows start to fall.
‘Can you give me a minute here in private?’ I asked.
‘If you’re thinking of taking up looting, I disapprove,’ Castus said from behind his bunched handkerchief. ‘They don’t look to have had very good taste.’
‘I just want to say a few words,’ I said, which was honest. ‘They deserve a blessing to send them on their way.’ Which was also true, but not what I intended.
‘So?’
‘So go away. It’s a private thing. You’re too full of yourself to take it seriously. You make everything seem … juvenile.’
‘Fair,’ Castus said, and turned his horse back towards the road where the rest of our ambassadorial delegation awaited our return. I waited until he was a little way off, then slowly took a deep breath. It was supposed to be calming, but I regretted it immediately. The rot in the air filled my mouth, slithered across my gums. I coughed it out and spat until I’d emptied out what I could. I watched Castus move far enough away, his attention caught by angry nesting birds calling and swooping, and then I began.
Sometimes we act on instinct. Sometimes things can be forgiven when they happen automatically, a knee-jerk reaction to something out of the ordinary. Like when I’d fed my strength into a ghost to topple Kaldhoone LacShale. I hadn’t known what I’d been doing, not really, and I’d been desperate. We forgive those things. Or we should. This, what I was about to do, I should perhaps have feared more.
People fear what they don’t understand, but this was more than that. There is a finality to death that forms a constant in our lives. People live, then they are gone. To see the dead confuses that. It makes people afraid, and the price for that is to be stoned, or hanged, or burned. Fear evokes the highest of prices for its victims. To speak with spirits or command souls is to press close to the other worlds, the Rivers of Skuttis where the damned are taken, the thin veil of the Fault that separates one reality from another, and the Night Below, where demons dwell. Sometimes I wondered whether, had I never discovered this power, I would have been the same as the rest of them.
Sanvaunt knew the truth about me, but he hadn’t turned me in for it. If our situations had been reversed, I hoped I would have been like him. I wasn’t sure I had his goodness, though. Especially in light of what I was about to attempt on these stinking bodies.
This thing I was about to do, this disrespectful, wretched thing, I’d learned from the book. Not just any book, of course. It was a book that offered words I didn’t recognise, and when I whispered them to the night they tasted like corroding metal on my tongue. They buzzed in the air, and gave it substance. They were things of history, perhaps they were part of the history of our world, but they’d given me ideas. I’d told myself I wouldn’t use them. I’d told myself I wouldn’t go back to that dark place, that I’d already stepped too far down a road I didn’t want to travel. But that’s the thing about making yourself promises. They aren’t promises at all, they’re just a way to alleviate whatever shitty thing you’re feeling at the time. We tell ourselves, “No more of that,” but that’s just helpful for a few moments. The temptation comes and we jump right back in. Drink, rose-thistle, Olatte leaf, gorging on food, it doesn’t matter. We all crumble at the first hurdle.
I checked one more time that Castus had moved far enough away before I placed my hand on the dead man with the hole in his throat. I began to say the words. I’d read them in the book, though I could never have written them down. They were ideas more than actual words, like colours you’ve never seen before. I hadn’t tried to memorise them, but they flowed like a tune. There are seven spheres to existence, radiating out from us. There is the self, and there is the other. There is energy, and there is mind. There is life, and there is death. As a whole, we say there is a seventh, which is all of creation, but that is mere philosophy. As I gave voice to my song, I traced two circles. The sixth, the encompassing one, and just one more within, occupying half the diameter, isolating the sixth sphere from the others. A Sixth Gate within a Sixth Gate. I sought knowledge from only a single dimension of existence. It was death, obviously.
I wasn’t good at this. I’d tried it before when one of the house cats died, and that hadn’t gone well. My heart was thumping away, and even if the heat of the day had made me sweat, this drew more. I spoke the words, as best as I understood them. Maybe it didn’t matter if I only got some of them right. Distantly, internally, I heard a grinding, droning sound, like the dry turning of an iron wheel, as I looked into the empty void where a spirit should have lived.
I only got a few moments. A glimpse of the young man’s last few breaths. He’d struggled at the end. Shouted, just one shout among many. A distinctive accent. And then there was a face, stark and porcelain white in front of his, so thin she could have lived through famine. And then she opened her mouth, and her teeth were jagged yellow points. Most of his last moments were fear, and terrible pain, but he thought of a woman before he died. Resentment that he’d not get a chance to live out his life with her. And that was it. Done.
I shuddered, fell backwards against the ditch wall, found my breath coming fast and hard. I’d only had an image of that face, that dreadful, pale-eyed face, but it had been enough. Human? I thought so, though there were things that walked in human guise. But to drag these people out here had taken more than just one sharp-toothed thing. For a moment I had the impression of blood in my mouth. I spat, but it was only my imagination.
It had only taken a few moments. The man’s dead flesh was still cold beneath my hand. Idiot Raine! You said you wouldn’t do this again! Promised yourself! The regret was intense. This was the last time. What had happened to me that I’d grown so cocksure that I’d do this stupid thing fifty feet from Castus—a fully fledged, oxblood-wearing Draoihn? I mean sure, it was Castus, and he seemed to take his duties about as seriously as he did everything else in his life, which was to say not at all. But still. I hadn’t needed to do that. But like any addict, I’d just wanted to, so I’d taken the risk. Power is like a river, and restraint is the dam that stops it from sweeping you away. If you don’t allow a little water through, no matter how dangerous that trickle might be, the dam will surely burst. No matter that even if Castus suspected I had the grave-sight, things could turn on me quickly. Those things were stones, pitchforks, and burning torches. I wanted to leave it all behind me, but I had to do it sometimes. Didn’t I?
I could not have a life while the dark hunched over me. I felt it, slowly circling me. It didn’t want to be still. I would find an answer. I would unlearn what I knew, and I could try to have what everyone else took for granted. Ordinariness. The book, secreted in my pack, held the answer, the means to free myself from these urges. It had to. I had to believe that.
‘They were Brannish,’ I said as I climbed out, eager to make some noise, as though something different might chase away what I’d just done. ‘My bet is they’re the Gilmundy governor’s men. The foreign garrison.’
The Brannish ruled an empire to the south of Harran, and generously allowed us to govern ourselves—with the requisite tithes, governors and garrisons in place to bleed us dry. The garrisons weren’t popular—nobody wants to see their oppressor’s boot planted firmly in the middle of their town. But little was likely to bring wrath down faster on one’s head than slaughtering a garrison. This was madness.
‘How’d you figure that out?’ Castus asked.
‘Tattoos,’ I lied, and since Castus was never going to climb down into the ditch to take a look himself, it seemed a safe enough claim.
‘I thought Arrowhead was just expelling the Brannish governors and their men,’ he said. ‘This doesn’t bode well for our negotiations.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Corpses rarely do.’
* * *
Across a mile of heather and tumbledown land, sat upon both the northern and southern banks of the River Gil, Gilmundy looked much like any other market town, save for the grey-and-yellow banner that had replaced the king’s. There was no wall, and few buildings rose to two storeys. The governor’s residence, the mayoral estate and the church spire looked down across the thatched roofs, the triumvirate of power—or they had been.
‘Is this really a good idea?’ Castus asked. The rest of our small contingent had got stony-faced about the dead Brannish soldiers, but it hadn’t changed our course of action. Faces were set gravely, backs were pricked up straight.
A group of men in northern clan colours moved along the road to meet us. Five riders to match our number. We reined in along the sun-baked road to await them. Summer had risen fast and hard across the country, and rain felt a long way away.
‘Remember your manners, if you can,’ Sanvaunt LacNaithe said. He turned those sleepy-lidded eyes on Castus LacClune. ‘Better yet, don’t speak at all.’
‘I’ve already had enough of this business for one day,’ Castus said. ‘I didn’t even touch them and I can’t get the smell out of my nose.’ It sounded like whining, but Castus’s nonchalant disdain for the world was all part of a carefully cultivated façade. Where Sanvaunt was dark, Castus was fair. Where Sanvaunt was unshaven, Castus kept his face smooth—despite what appeared to be yet another monumental hangover. I considered them both my friends, but there’d been bad blood between Clan LacNaithe and Clan LacClune since before they had names. Regardless, the five of us were all here together, so an effort had to be made to get along as best we could.
There shouldn’t have been such inter-clan conflict among the Draoihn, but that was the way of it. We weren’t like other people.
‘I’ll handle it,’ the only other woman in our group said. She was less imposing than the men. They were fighters, wearing mail beneath their oxblood, but Liara was better dressed for a day in court than she was for battle. Red curls formed a bonnet around her head. Liara LacShale had passed her Testing earlier in the year, and her choice not to wear the Draoihn coat was a different form of intimidation. She was even more scornful of Castus’s nightly excesses than Sanvaunt, and that in turn knocked onto me when I joined him, which had been more often than not of late. ‘Let’s see if Arrowhead comes in person,’ she said.
‘He won’t,’ I said. ‘They’d be carrying his banner if they did.’
‘Best leave it to the Draoihn, Raine,’ Colban, the last of our delegation, said. ‘It’s not our place to talk. Just to watch.’
‘I wasn’t made to be a butterfly on the wall,’ I said. ‘I doubt they sent me just to look pretty.’
Colban was middle height, medium build, with ordinary brown hair. His features were even, and sometimes I thought he had the most average face possible. Nothing was small, or large, or pronounced, or weak. He was unexceptional to look at in nearly every way, the kind of young man you wouldn’t notice passing you on the street. We were both apprenticed to the same master, and I’d pondered more than once about exactly why the two of us had been sent on this mission. For all the noble blood running around, we were all mighty young. Sanvaunt was the oldest at twenty-four, Liara and I were only eighteen and Castus and Colban were somewhere in the middle. Draoihn or not, and as capable as Sanvaunt and Liara had proven themselves to be, they were inexperienced to be spearheading a negotiation that could determine the fates of thousands. Castus was heir to another of the three great clans, but even the most loving parent—which he certainly did not have—wouldn’t have been able to recommend him as a negotiator.
‘Want to run lines while we wait?’ Sanvaunt asked Liara. ‘We’ve got ten minutes before they get here.’
‘I think we should focus on the matter at hand,’ Liara said. ‘I need a clear head.’
‘If I have to hear you two pretending to be imaginary people even one more time, I’ll honestly have to take up drinking,’ Castus said. ‘I’m serious this time.’
‘They’re good lines though, aren’t they?’ Liara said. ‘You should come see the show when it’s done. Better yet, I’ll give you a part. First ass from the left.’
‘I would make a fabulous ass,’ Castus said.
‘You already do,’ I said.
The five horsemen approached at a steady pace, horses stepping a non-threatening walk, but they were armed and armoured. The warrior at their fore wore a full suit of armour, plates polished to a silver-bright sheen that caught the midday sun. He must have been baking in there, so he must really have wanted to put on a show. The other men were clan warriors, mail-clad and bearing the devices of the High Pastures upon their shields.
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