Fall of Light (102 page)

‘Your esteem is a miserly thing, Tathe Lorat.’

‘I’ve not your hero’s blood, Infayen, to give clout to my claims.’

Infayen watched as Hunn Raal slipped from sight, down between ramshackle buildings. ‘He’s not making for the keep.’

‘No.’

‘Some other task commands him.’

‘Hunn Raal will grant us no favours in the court, Infayen.’

‘No, he will turn on us all.’

‘We need to consider our … options.’

‘That is your need, Tathe Lorat, not mine. The Infayen line finds a grave in every battle. That said, perhaps you would take my daughter under your care when that time comes.’

‘You trust me in this? I will see her sullied. The light of her young eyes dulled with use. Children are like dolls, and this woman here at your side plays rough.’

Infayen turned and smiled at her. ‘You’ve not met my daughter yet, have you?’

Tathe Lorat shrugged. ‘Have you met mine?’

‘Menandore is no fool.’

‘Nor is Sheltatha Lorat, I assure you.’

Infayen frowned. ‘And yet …’

Shrugging, Tathe Lorat drew her heavy cloak about her shoulders and turned back to the camp. ‘Break them young, and all that they make of themselves afterwards lies thinly over the scars.’

Infayen swung round and joined the other captain as they walked back into the army’s encampment. She sighed. ‘Some mothers should never be mothers at all.’

‘I expect both our daughters would agree with you, Infayen Menand.’

  *   *   *

The master blacksmith of Urusander’s Legion was a squat, broad, scar-faced man of middle years. He stood with his back to his forge, limned in its fiery glow, his small eyes narrowed on Hunn Raal. ‘Now what?’

The Mortal Sword of Light glared at the smith. ‘Maybe it’s not big enough,’ he said.

‘Big enough for what?’

‘Legion discipline seems to have failed your manners, Bilikk.’

‘The commander sent me to work in Gurren’s stead. I’m as much the town’s smith as the Legion’s. Besides,’ he added, ‘word is you don’t take the title of captain no more. Mortal Sword? What the fuck is that? Ain’t no Legion rank I ever heard of. You lookin’ for worshippers now? Fuck that on a stick.’

There was a sound from the door to Gurren’s old house and Witch Hale emerged, drawing a tattered shawl about her narrow shoulders. ‘Hunn Raal,’ she said, making the name a sneer. ‘What you’re calling for here isn’t Legion work. Heard you went and stood in a fire. Burned half your clothes off, but left you uncharred. That’s ugly magic, Raal. You want to stay away from the flame bitch, she’s got appetites you don’t want to know.’ She cocked her head, regarding Hunn Raal. ‘Or maybe it’s too late. It is, isn’t it?’

‘You were not invited, witch,’ Hunn Raal said. ‘Don’t test my patience. Go.’

‘Me and Bilikk got history between us now,’ Hale replied. ‘Where he goes, I go.’

‘This is Liosan business.’

‘And we all got stained, didn’t we? Only, when your mind decides it’s not sure, why, the glow fades.’ She lifted an arm, letting the loose sleeve slip down, revealing her scrawny, ashen wrist. ‘’Tis strange purity that washes off, don’t you think?’

‘The stains of your sins hardly surprise me, witch. Your magic’s a sordid thing. Unwelcome on this sanctified ground, and do not think for a moment that all of Neret Sorr isn’t sanctified, in the name of Tiste Liosan.’

‘I feel it,’ she said. ‘But I don’t fear it. Neither does the flame bitch.’

‘You think you can stand against me?’

‘I don’t care about you, Raal. It’s Bilikk I mean to guard this night.’

‘And I need him – do you think I would not protect him?’

‘Once his use is past, no. You won’t give him a second thought.’

He studied her, curious. ‘What do you think is about to happen here, witch?’

‘What did she offer you?’

This night was not going as planned.
Build me a fire,
she’d said.
I will guide you to the First Forge. A sceptre must be made. And a crown … or did she say that could wait? She’d made me drunk on her. Not wine, not ale, but her strong grip on my damned cock.

A goddess of some sort. A demon of the fire. Flame bitch? That will do, I suppose.

Fucked up my memory, to be certain. Sceptre, crown … throne?

‘You are addled,’ Hale said. ‘Already lost in the unnatural heat of Bilikk’s forge – see how nothing burns away? How the flames grow even unfed? She’s coming—’

The forge behind Bilikk suddenly erupted. A tongue of fire arced out like a whip, striking Witch Hale, who shrieked as she was flung back through the doorway of the house, landing crumpled on the wooden floor, where her body began burning like resinous wood. In moments the floor and then one wall of the house were alight.

Stunned, terrified, Hunn Raal sought to back away.

Impossibly fast, the entire house was wreathed in flames. From the second level came screams.

His apprentices.

Fires now rose along the low walls of the smithy, encircling Raal and Bilikk. The stacks of charcoal raged, the buckets of water boiled and spat, the woodshed vanished inside an incandescent maelstrom.

Their clothes burned, and yet neither man was harmed, even as the heat engulfed them, and the air itself was devoured by the torrent of flames.

She spoke then.
‘This will do. Two young lives in the rooms above. Cousins to a slain man, both of them filled with grief. I have purged their torment, taken away the feel of poor Millick’s fists. Now
that
was a senseless thing, wasn’t it? But all ashes now, all bedded in peace.

‘And the witch! Delightful sacrifice!’

Bilikk cried out something then, but his words were lost in the roar of the conflagration surrounding them.

Tentacles of flames snared the smith, dragging him screaming into the forge, where he vanished inside the white fire.

‘Come along then, Hunn Raal. I was summoned to the fashioning of one sceptre, and now another. I attend the flames. I feed the First Forge all that it needs. The blood in my womb, the lust we ignite between us, the seed you and your kind all spill into me. Step forward, it is time. We await you.’

He was helpless against her invitation. Suddenly without need to draw breath, his skin untouched by the heat and flames, Hunn Raal strode forward.

Where the smith’s forge had been there was now only white incandescence, and yet, at its core, there waited something like a gateway, framed in flickering flames.

The Mortal Sword stepped through.

The world beyond was a thing of ashes and blasted earth, the sky blindingly white.

She spoke in his head, her being filling him, like folds of flesh closing about his soul in a mockery of an embrace.
‘Love remains at the heart of this, Hunn Raal. It is shapeless to begin with, a thing of sensations. Warmth, comfort, safety. So it resides in the newborn child, fanned to life by the one who bore it. This bond takes time, but once made, it is unbreakable, and to challenge it is to awaken fire.’

‘You are a goddess of the hearth,’ Hunn Raal said. Raging flames marred the horizon, as if they had come upon an island in a sea of fire. The ash filling the air drifted on sullen currents. ‘You devour, and behind your warmth there is the promise of pain.’ He saw Bilikk, kneeling a short distance ahead. Just beyond the blacksmith the ground lifted into a rough cone, and from its ragged mouth smoke rose in sinuous coils, shimmering amidst intense heat. ‘Goddess,’ Hunn Raal continued, ‘you know nothing of love.’

‘Every gift of warmth awakens memory of the womb, Mortal Sword. But the child within you drowned in wine long ago. Shall I raise up its tiny corpse? Here, look upon what you have killed.’

He saw before him the body of a small child. For a moment he thought it sheathed in blood, and then he realized the fluid dripping from its limbs, running lazy tracks down its round face, was not blood, but wine. He staggered back a step. ‘Go to the Abyss!’

‘I can return it to life, Hunn Raal. This dead child within you. Dead and deadened. Stained beyond all innocence.’

As he stared in horror, the creature opened its eyes, revealing the perfect blue of the newborn. ‘Stop this! Why do you torment me? This speaks not of love, you cursed bitch!’

‘Oh, we are all mothers to what spawns inside us, for us to nurture or neglect, to love or cast away, to comfort or abuse, feed or starve. To worship as life, or sacrifice with death. No soul exists, Hunn Raal, that does not kneel before a private altar, blessing in one hand and a dagger in the other. What choice do you make for your life? Do you mark each morning with gratitude, or death?

‘That dagger can be many things,’
she continued remorselessly.
‘It serves as the tool of slaying, and no matter how blunt the edge, it draws blood each and every time. Blink sleepy eyes open, Hunn Raal, and reach for the goblet – to numb every cut you make upon your own soul.’

‘No more, I beg you—’

‘Who will bless your beloved altar? That question is asked again and again, day upon day, year upon year. A lifetime of that one question. Set that gift of blessing outside the borders of your flesh, or claim it as your own – the choice matters not.

‘But should you curse instead of blessing, Hunn Raal, ah, that is entirely of your own making. And so wounding yourself, you make a habit of wounding others. A life’s habit.

‘And yet,’
she added in vicious contempt,
‘your Urusander dares speak of justice. If he would have it, who would be left standing?’

The child, hovering in the air, flecked with ashes, blinked languidly.

‘Send it away,’ he whispered.

The conjuration vanished.
‘Balance. The blessing and the knife. The time has come, Mortal Sword, to forge us the symbols you will need.’

As if tugged, Hunn Raal stumbled forward, and moments later found himself standing beside Bilikk. The blacksmith was weeping, but no tears survived the scalding heat.

‘The First Forge. Oh, it manifests in myriad ways. I doubt Draconus found it beneath a sky of white. In his place of finding, it would be dark, with the sky sheathed in impenetrable smoke. Only the glow from the forge’s eager mouth to guide him. Hunn Raal, have you brought what I asked?’

The Mortal Sword reached to the hide-wrapped object he had strapped to his weapon-belt. He loosened the bindings and let the hide fall away, revealing a length of bone, sun-bleached and weathered. ‘Dog,’ he said. ‘Or wolf, if it matters.’

‘One more elegant in its irony than the other, Hunn Raal. The dogs of my children, or their wild brethren. Found on the plain, yes?’

‘Yet another of my commands that left the scouts bemused, but they found what you asked for, goddess. But is this all we are to have? A thigh bone to make the Sceptre of Light? What need for a forge?’

‘Light’s essence dwells in fire.’
He sensed her amusement.
‘You have recovered your arrogance, Hunn Raal. Your sly superiority – the drunk’s first and only game. But you remain utterly ignorant. He kept you all children, and that was a mistake. And in your isolation … when at last he offered you all a mother, it was too late.’

‘Enough of your insults. Bilikk waits – guide him in what must be done.’

‘I am not the one to guide your blacksmith,’
she replied
. ‘Here, the will of the First Forge commands. It chooses whom to use. If you had come alone, your lack of talent, the dearth of your knowledge and skill, would have yielded a poor result. But this one, I imagine, will prove a worthy source.’

Bilikk had remained kneeling, motionless, his head lowered with his chin on his chest.

Proffering the thigh bone, Hunn Raal said, ‘Here, take this.’

But the man made no response.

Tapping his shoulder with one end of the thigh bone elicited nothing. Crouching, Hunn Raal leaned close to peer at Bilikk’s face. ‘Abyss take us, the fool’s dead.’

‘Well, yes. You have need of his skills and experience. I think we are ready—’

As if he had been punched, Hunn Raal’s head snapped back, and in the stunned confusion filling his mind, he was assailed by a sudden rush of memories not his own. Fragments, shredded and momentarily nonsensical, images flashing in his thoughts, igniting behind his eyes
– the village was little more than his extended family. He knew them all, and there was warmth, and any child – every child – was safe. In those years, had he known it, he had lived in a paradise, in a realm where love abounded, and even the common petty rivalries and disputes as might plague any large family proved rare and quick to wither on the vine.

There was something there. The commonplace was made somehow sacred. There was no reason for it, nothing he could point to, and dwelling in its midst felt wholly natural, and in those early years he had no sense that the world beyond the village was any different. He – I—

How we lived was how we were meant to live. How we lived was, I soon discovered to my horror, what others only aspired to, or dreamed of, or cynically dismissed as impossible.

I was a child there, and then an apprentice to Cage, learning the art of the forge. For all the hard tools of the farmers and the coopers and wheelwrights, Cage’s greatest love was in the making of toys. From castoffs, from tailings, from whatever he could find. And not simple creations for the village children, either! No, my friends, Cage crafted tiny mechanisms, physical riddles and elaborate jokes that confounded and delighted all.

For all his size, he was a gentle man, was Cage. Until the day he left the smithy and walked to the far end of the village, went into the house of Tanner Harok, and there broke the man’s neck.

Paradise was a living thing, like a tree, and occasionally, among its many roots sunk deep into the rich earth, one root turned foul and infected, and finally rotten.

Infidelity. A word I’d not even understood until then. A crime of betrayal. The victim was trust, and its death sent shock through the entire village.