Cold Redemption (11 page)

‘Where?’

Achista turned away, leading the Lhosir horse towards the barn. Grief had made her older.

An animal growl built in Gallow’s throat. He went after her, grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her around, and for a moment she was afraid of what she saw in him. ‘
Where
?
Where did he take Oribas?’

She pulled herself free. ‘You don’t change, do you? Forkbeards for ever, whatever you say. Addic and your Aulian friend were here the night before last. The iron devil left for
Varyxhun with a dozen forkbeards at first light this morning. Two days from now they’ll be in Varyxhun castle. The day after that Cithjan will hang them. They’re dead, Gallow. Your
friend. My brother.’

Half her face cried out to him in pain. The other half saw just another forkbeard and looked at him full of furious murder. She walked away, and Gallow knew better than to follow.

‘Varyxhun.’ He nodded to himself. ‘Very well, old friend. I was heading that way anyway.’

They’d left the Marroc women and children alive and untouched, and that, Beyard knew, was right and decent. The Lhosir didn’t make war on women and children but the
Marroc men were a different matter. He hanged the farmer and had the others bound and hooded. The Aulian he allowed to ride free. The Aulian, as best he could see, had done nothing wrong and the
man made him curious.

‘Gallow was a friend once,’ he said, but the Aulian always had eyes full of terror and dread whenever Beyard looked at him and he soon gave up. No one ever had words for a Fateguard,
only screams.

The road up to Varyxhun castle split from the Aulian Way a mile from the city gates and zigzagged back and forth up the mountainside, six tiers of it, through six impassable gates beneath six
murderous walls. There Beyard handed over his prisoners for Cithjan to do as he wished, for they were his problem now. Gibbets for the Marroc at the very least, but the Aulian seemed valuable and,
as far as Beyard could see, innocent; and so it came as a surprise some days later when he found the Aulian had been sent off to the Devil’s Caves with all the rest. The waste troubled him
but he had other business.

‘So many years, old friend, but we are not ones to forget.’ He took off his iron gauntlets, opened Gallow’s locket and sniffed at the tiny snip of hair that lay inside.
‘I will find them, old friend. I will be waiting.’

R
eddic ran fast through the cold muddy water meadows of the Crackmarsh. The sunlight was fading. His lungs burned and his legs too, but he ran
anyway because no amount of pain was worse than stopping, not with what was following him. He’d come into the swamp with an axe on his hip and a shield on his arm and two other men he barely
knew. All those were gone now. The ghuldogs were all that was left.

He reached a small island, a low hump of sodden earth rising out of the shallow water, a few sickly old trees clutching it tight among a withered web of roots. He stopped for a moment, had no
choice any more, just couldn’t go on without a moment to rest, leaning against hard wet bark before his legs gave way beneath him. Back through the haze of rain he couldn’t see anything
except dull grey water and the scattered ghost shapes of other tree-crowned hummocks like watching sentinels. The ghuldogs were there, though, not far. Following him, steady and patient. Waiting
for the dark. Waiting for his strength to fail. Waiting with their cold clammy limbs and their heartless rending claws and biting fangs.

A splash whipped his head round, desperate eyes searching for the source of the sound and finding nothing. He whimpered and pushed away from the trees, back into the water to run again. The
clouds grew darker. The sun behind them sank further. The rain grew heavier. He was soaked. Freezing water ran against his skin and down into his sodden boots.

‘Modris!’ The wail burst out of him as his legs failed. He stumbled and slip-sprawled into the water. They were behind him, close, and they’d eat him if they caught him, and so
he forced himself onto his hands and knees and looked up. Somewhere there had to be strength left in him.

Shapes moved through the haze. Bent and hunched. Two, then three, then half a dozen. They came slowly, sniffing him out. They fanned around him and he knew this was the end. He had nothing left.
When he tried to stand, he couldn’t. On his hands and knees he watched them and wept his misery out. The ghuldogs sniffed closer. Cautious now that he wished they’d simply take him and
be done with it. The closest of them stopped a stone’s throw away, near enough to see it clearly through the rain. The relic of a man, sallow and gaunt, but with the head of a savage wolf,
patches of mangy fur clinging to its skull, eyes burning red, fangs bared, saliva dripping from its jaws into the swamp. It took a pace closer and then another, each step slow and delicate and
precise. Stalking him, though the time for stalking was long past.

Reddic closed his eyes. He fingered the sign of Modris the Protector hung on a loop of leather around his neck. Begged the god of the Marroc to save him though there was clearly no salvation to
be had. A haunting hooting cry rang through the wind and the rain. Something between the howl of a wolf and an anguished cry of despair. He waited for the end.

A hand took his shoulder. He flinched and whimpered and screwed up his eyes, but the hand was just a hand – no talons, no fangs – and when he opened his eyes and looked up it was a
man standing over him. A hard-faced Marroc man in mail with a spear, and when Reddic rose shaking to his feet, he saw that the man wasn’t alone, that there were a dozen more in a cautious
circle. The ghuldogs were still there as well, shapes in the rain-haze, watching.

The soldier helped him to his feet.

‘I was looking to find Valaric’s men.’ Reddic couldn’t keep the quaver out of his voice. ‘I want to fight.’

There and then he didn’t sound much like a man who’d picked up his axe and left his home to join the last free Marroc in their stand against the forkbeards but the soldier only
nodded. There might even have been a hint of a grim smile. ‘Well, you found us. Welcome to the Crackmarsh, Marroc.’

O
ribas had told Gallow a lot of things when they’d crossed the desert together. More were forgotten than remembered but Gallow knew that the
Aulians had come over the mountains once. Oribas said they’d never reached far into what were now the Marroc lands because the mountain valleys were too cold and wet for their liking, but
they’d made their mark. Gallow had seen their work for himself: the fortress of Witches’ Reach at the far mouth of the gorge, the impossible span of the Aulian Bridge across the Isset
beneath it, the road that reached as far as Tarkhun, halfway to the coast, and of course the unconquerable stone of Varyxhun castle, etched into the bluffs that overlooked the city.

They’d built the first town of Varyxhun too but there wasn’t much left to see of their handiwork now. It hadn’t ever been much to the Aulians, but then the Marroc had come to
the valley, drawn by the peace the Aulians had brought, and the town had grown. Gallow passed silently through the open gates. Aulians had stood here once, and later King Tane’s huscarls, but
now the soldiers who leaned on their spears and glowered at everyone who passed were Lhosir. They stared openly at Gallow’s shaven chin and he heard their muted growls.
Nioingr.
One
of them spat at his feet as they passed. He let it go. Had to. For Arda. For Oribas.

He stopped and looked past them. The main street of Varyxhun ran straight as an arrow from the gates to the market square in the middle of the town. It was a river of half-frozen mud and slush,
piles of dirty snow pushed up against the walls of the wooden houses that lined it. He’d come through here once long ago with the Screambreaker and his army, chasing after the fleeing Marroc
king. They’d stopped for a while to throw a few spears and arrows at the walls of Varyxhun castle, perched up on the crags of the mountainside overlooking them, but not for long. Assaulting
the castle was impossible. They’d already fought their way across the Aulian Bridge and then past the fortress of Witches’ Reach that defended the entrance to the valley. They’d
been tired and battered and bloodied by the time they reached the city, and there had stood the castle as it did today, staring down at them from hundreds of feet of sheer rock, the single narrow
road winding back and forth beneath a slaughter of walls, defended by gatehouse after gatehouse after gatehouse. They’d settled for helping themselves to the town, feasting on its food and
its mead and its women. They hadn’t burned much, but then the Screambreaker had grown more thoughtful towards the end of his campaign. It was Tane he wanted, not the castle, and that meant
making Varyxhun his home. They bled it dry but they hadn’t killed it, and then it turned out that Tane had slipped out right under their noses and died somewhere in the mountains, weeks
earlier while he was looking to escape along the Aulian Way. The war was suddenly finished, and when the Screambreaker turned his eye to the castle once again, he’d found the gates hanging
open, the huscarls who’d defended them dead by their own hands. And that had been enough. The Lhosir had quietly melted away. They’d gone to Andhun, the last Marroc stronghold, and
after that most of them had gone home.

Now Lhosir in mail and helms walked through the mud of Varyxhun once more. Marroc hurried past them, eyes down. Gallow hadn’t been keeping track of the days, but Midwinter was surely
close. In Middislet they’d celebrated for days, burning effigies of the Weeping God on Midwinter night and drinking mead until dawn to toast the birth of the sun and the first sunrise of the
year, all of them roaring drunk. There were no hanging effigies of the Weeping God in Varyxhun though. Perhaps they had little to celebrate this midwinter.

Gallow wrapped himself in his furs, covering his face as best he could. The last time he’d been here had been in summer and these fringes of the town had been a sea of mud. The cold had
changed that into hard frozen dirt covered in an inch of treacherous slime made of mud and animal dung and melted snow. At least the smell wasn’t as bad as he remembered. Along the street by
the gates, hanged men dangled from gibbets, blackened and withered by time, skin pecked to shreds, twisting languorously back and forth in the wind. There were half a dozen of them, Medrin, or
whoever ruled here in his name, always reminding the Marroc of their lords and of the price of dissent. There was a tavern by the gates. It had been the Horn of Plenty once, with some of the best
Marroc ale in the valley, but it had changed its name now – to the King’s Hand, with a crude wooden six-fingered hand painted black hanging over the door. Whether the Marroc meant that
as homage to their king or as mockery Gallow couldn’t guess. He looked further along the road towards the market square where traders and travellers congregated. If there was any word to be
had of Nadric the smith or Fenaric the carter it would be there. But when he asked, the Marroc all saw his Lhosir face and shrugged or turned away. As far as he could tell, no one knew the names.
If they did, they kept their knowledge to themselves.

He slept in a hen house and left Varyxhun the next morning, alone and on foot with nothing more than the clothes he wore – mail and a helm under thick furs. He stared up at Varyxhun
castle, wondering if Oribas was there, if the Aulian was already dead or whether he was still alive and in a dungeon, waiting to hang. Stared and wondered what he could possibly do, alone against
so many, then looked with his fingers for Arda’s locket around his neck and remembered again that it was gone. He bowed his head. No. There was nothing to be done. Alone he could make no
difference.

I’m sorry. But I came here to go home, not to die.

He didn’t give much thought to where he’d sleep or what he’d eat. He’d come this far. Fate would provide, and if he had to chop wood every night for a barn to sleep in
and a bowl of soup, that’s what he’d do. Middislet was maybe a dozen days away, fewer if he crossed the Crackmarsh. If Nadric had left Varyxhun then Arda would have gone with him and
that’s where they’d be. After three years of trying to get home, a few more days didn’t seem like it should be too much bother, but he felt her closeness now, an urgency that grew
quietly inside him. Every time he touched the place where her locket had once sat warm against his skin and found it missing, its absence felt like a fresh wound.

He avoided the Lhosir he saw on the road. The Marroc in turn steered away from him as soon as they saw his face and his eyes and knew what he was. He spent the first night in a barn and chopped
wood even though the Marroc farmer was clearly terrified and desperate for this strange beardless forkbeard to go away. While he had an axe to borrow, he cut himself a staff for walking. A new pair
of boots would have been nice. The old ones had seen him across the Aulian Way and the desert before. They leaked and had holes in their soles and his feet were wet and freezing.

Every time he stopped, he looked back, thought of Oribas and almost turned around, then thought of Arda and made himself go on. It felt wrong though. Weak. When one day he stood before the
Maker-Devourer’s cauldron and faced the challenge
Did you live your life well
? what could he say? Yes, I did, except for the day when I turned my back on a friend.

But I have a wife who needs a husband. Children who need a father. And one man against a castle? Even the Screambreaker didn’t try it and he had a whole army.
Yet it still seemed
wrong to simply leave. It was enough to make any man weep, a choice like that, but he knew he’d chosen what a Marroc would choose, not a Lhosir. He’d lessened himself.

On the third morning out of Varyxhun a pair of Lhosir warriors on horseback trotted by. They shouted as they came, warning him off the road, and a few minutes later he saw why. A heavy wagon
appeared, a great creaking wooden cage of a thing pulled by six plodding oxen. Another Lhosir sat at the front, shouting and cursing at the beasts. In the back a dozen men were penned in the cage.
Gallow stood off the road to watch them pass. The captives were mostly Marroc, shivering and freezing in nothing but rags despite the biting wind and huddled all together, but in their midst he saw
another face, darker than the rest. Unmistakable. An Aulian.