Fall of Light (84 page)

‘I believe it to be so, milord,’ said Ivis, his gaze dropping to study the barrows edging the killing field.

‘I saw something,’ Anomander resumed. ‘When the priest appeared upon the threshold of the house, blood started from his hands, from wounds that opened fresh, though he took no blade to them. Blood is answered with blood. It seems that faith will be written in what we lose, my friend.’

Uneasy, Ivis shivered. ‘I grieve for that priest, milord. Surely, he would rather bless with something other than his own blood.’

‘I am beset by dreams – nightmares – of that meeting. I confess, Ivis, that in my visions I come to the certitude that the wounds upon that man’s hands, with their tears of blood, are the eyes of a god. Or goddess. The priest raises them between us, his hands, the wounds, and my stare – which I cannot break – fixes upon those crimson eyes. What they leak arrives like a promise. In these dreams, I flee as would a soul broken.’

‘A place not holy then, milord, but cursed.’

Anomander shrugged. ‘We come upon circles of stones, the ancient holy sites of the Dog-Runners, and proclaim them cursed. What future beings, I wonder, will find the ruins of our own sacred sites, and name them the same?’ The breath hissed from him. ‘I am cold to these notions of faith, Ivis. I cannot but distrust the ease of our proclamations, so ephemeral their arrival, so facile their dismissal. Look at the war now upon us. Look to the fate of the Deniers. Look now to the birth of the Liosan. Faith stalks our land like a reaper of souls.’

At last, Anomander’s thoughts had brought Ivis to the place he desired. ‘Milord, I have heard nothing from Lord Draconus. He responds to not a single missive. In such absence, I must be bold. Upon the day of battle, milord, I will lead the Houseblades of Draconus to you, and submit to your command.’

Anomander said nothing. His gaze held upon the lowering clouds in the north, even as the first flakes of snow spun down to join the sleet.

‘Milord—’

‘Lord Draconus will return, Ivis. I am done with this pointless hunt. If Andarist and I are to become estranged, then I will bear the wound. I intend to leave for Kharkanas in the next day or so. Grief may well dress itself in the hair shirt of wounded pride, but vengeance matches its indulgence.’

‘Milord,’ said Ivis, ‘it would be better if you did not. Return to Kharkanas, I mean. Leave Draconus to … to the place he has chosen for himself. I cannot explain this seduction of darkness, except that it is, somehow, the essence of his gift to the woman he loves. His decision seems beyond sanction, does it not? As well, there are the nobles to consider – your allies upon the field of battle.’

‘They will fight for me, Ivis.’

‘If Lord Draconus—’

‘They will fight for me,’ Anomander insisted.

‘And if they do not?’

‘Then they will learn to rue their failing.’

The threat chilled Ivis. He studied the heavy clouds weaving their wind-tangled skeins of snow and sleet. In the kitchen below, dinner was being prepared, a feast to honour their unexpected guests. In the main hall, the Azathanai, Caladan Brood, sat like a half-tamed bear in the only chair that could take his bulk – Lord Draconus’s own. The surgeon, Prok, had taken to sitting with the High Mason.

In her private chambers, Lady Sandalath lavished attention upon Wreneck, as if he could stand in place of her own son – the son no one was permitted to acknowledge. The boy was mostly recovered from his ordeals, but he wore solemnity with the natural grace of a veteran of too many wars, and already he had begun to chafe under her obsessive ministrations. It was well enough that Wreneck had been a friend of Sandalath’s son, but years spanned the two children, with Wreneck the elder, and nothing in his life thus far belonged to a pampered nobleborn child. Ivis saw his strained patience when in the lady’s company.

Elsewhere in the keep, house-guards patrolled the corridors, walked the rooms and hallways, stamped up and down tower stairs.

‘Milord,’ ventured Ivis. ‘You said you would speak with your Azathanai companion, regarding the daughters of Draconus.’

Grunting, Anomander nodded. ‘I shall, this evening, Ivis. He is not entirely unaware of something amiss in this keep. For myself, even the mention of sorcery makes me uneasy. That said, they are the children of Draconus, and as to his relationship with them, you know better than do I. How would he respond to such horrors?’

‘As of yet, milord, he has made no response at all.’

‘You cannot be sure of his seeming indifference,’ Anomander replied. ‘It is quite possible that no messages or reports have reached him.’

‘Milord? But I dispatched urgent—’

‘All such missives are set just beyond the door to the Chamber of Night, upon a low table the servants can barely see. Has it yet occurred to Draconus that messages await his attention? Possibly not. So again, I ask: how would he respond to the news of one of his daughters dying at the hands of the remaining two? Or the slaughter of his servants in the keep?’

Ivis hesitated. ‘Milord, I have pondered such questions unto exhaustion, and am no closer to any sure reply. He took away his bastard son, Arathan, into the west lands. A natural boy of seventeen at the time. Eighteen now. But his daughters … they remained children. Their younger half-brother had grown past them all. It is uncanny, sir.’

‘Did he hold them close?’

‘The daughters?’ Ivis thought about the notion, and then eventually shook his head. ‘He tolerated them. The names he gave the three tells its own tale, I wager. Envy, Spite and Malice. Malice was the one murdered and then burned in a bread oven.’

Anomander blinked. ‘Such details still shock me, my friend.’

‘Not a night easily forgotten,’ Ivis said. ‘We could have smoked them out long ago, milord, if not for our fear of the sorcery they possess.’

‘Perhaps, with Caladan Brood in our company, now might be the time, Ivis.’

‘But you are both soon to leave us, milord. Can mere shackles hold them?’

‘No matter what,’ Anomander said, ‘we will not leave you helpless. That said, I have no notion of the extent of Brood’s own power. He proved adept enough in lifting and moving heavy stones, and has spoken of the earth’s own magic, as would a man familiar with it. Does he possess anything beyond such things? As to that, I am as curious as anyone might be. We will discuss the matter this evening.’

‘I thank you, milord.’

‘In this, Ivis, I am but the bridge. It will be Caladan Brood upon the other side. My modest charge is to invite you across it.’

‘Even so, milord, I am grateful.’

‘The evening draws upon us, friend,’ said Anomander. ‘Shall we quit this tower top?’

‘My chilled bones would indeed welcome some heat, milord.’

  *   *   *

Too much of Lady Sandalath reminded Wreneck of his own mother. Whilst she was being dressed for the dinner, he had slipped out of her chambers and now wandered the corridors of the keep. At intervals he came upon pairs of guards bearing lanterns and gripping shortswords. They eyed him warily, and more than one had admonished him for being unattended.

They saw him as still a child. He might have told them otherwise. He might even have reminded them that it was children they now guarded against, children who so frightened them that they walked through rooms and down passageways with drawn weapons, starting at shadows. The old ways of thinking, the ones that pushed children into childlike things, were now gone. The truth of that was obvious to Wreneck. Whatever was coming in this new world, it would divide people into the ones being hurt and the ones doing the hurting, and he was done with being hurt. Age made no difference. Age had nothing to do with it.

The voices in his head, which spoke most clearly in the moments before sleep, still came to him in his waking moments, but muted, murmuring words he often could not make out. He could not be sure, but they all seemed afraid, and at times he was startled by some internal cry, a warning no one else heard, as if they saw dangers unseen by anyone else.

He found it difficult to believe that they were as they said they were. Dying gods. Such beings, dying or not, had no interest in Wreneck, the stable boy, who had done nothing worth much in his whole life, and who thought of the future as a single moment, a spear’s point jabbing down, punching through skin, sliding into meat and whatever else the skin protected. A spear taking a life away, and in his mind his list of names, each one fading before his eyes with each thrust of the spear, each in turn, one by one, until the list was gone, and all that was left to him was empty.

This was his only future, and when it ended, when his task was done, there would be nothing but a vague, blurry world of his life spent with Jinia. But even there, something whispered of oblivion, inviting him into a world of imagination, like an island surrounded by the Abyss.

Abyss.
That was a word he’d heard spoken as a curse and as a prayer, as if two faces hid in the darkness, and who knew which one groping hands might find?

He could have told the guards about his thoughts, to show that they weren’t thoughts anyone would expect from a child. But something held him back. He was beginning to suspect that being seen as a child was in itself a kind of disguise, one that he might be able to use, come the night when he did murder.

Perhaps the dying gods had warned him against revealing too much, but he was not convinced of that – in any case, he’d told Lady Sandalath nothing of his plans, and he was certain that the First Son and the Azathanai would both remain silent on the matter. He had no choice but to show himself to her as only a child, a friend of Orfantal who, with her and with Wreneck himself, was all that remained of House Drukorlat. Jinia was another, of course, but she too had become Wreneck’s secret, his way of protecting her from anyone and everyone.

It was complicated, and troubling, and the lady’s need to hold him close, so tight that sometimes he could barely draw a breath, just made him uncomfortable. He had no desire to stay in this keep.

He reached a portal that opened on to the landing of a spiral staircase. The light spilling in from the oil lamps set in the niches in the corridor behind him did not reach far, and by the first turn of the stone steps Wreneck found himself in darkness. He continued upward.

Towers interested him. He had never been higher than a single level above the ground, and that had been in Lady Nerys’s estate, and the house had been burning down around him and Jinia. Climbing trees had shown him how everything changed when seen from any height, but often the thick canopies of other trees blocked most of his view downward. From atop a tower, he believed, there would be nothing to impede his view.

Everything below, when he reached that height, would be familiar, and yet each thing would be transformed in his eyes, becoming something new. This notion seemed to displease the dying gods in his head.

At the level just below the top floor of the tower, he came to a landing and found himself facing a blackwood door. Beads of water ran down its furrowed face. The pool at its base had spread out over the flagstone landing, cold enough to form slush here and there, and thin, crackling layers of ice. Standing before the door, he could feel waves of cold coming from it.

Eyes on the heavy latch, Wreneck stepped forward.

‘Don’t!
’

He spun round.

A small girl was crouched on the stairs above the landing, wearing little more than rags. Her thin, smudged face was pale but not white. This told Wreneck that she belonged to neither Mother Dark nor Lord Urusander. She was, in that respect, the same as him. ‘You’re one of the daughters,’ he said. ‘The ones who killed people.’

‘Send them away.’

‘Who?’

‘The spirits. The ghosts. The ones swarming around you. Send them away and then we can talk.’

‘They’re all hunting you,’ Wreneck said. ‘Everyone here in the keep. They say you killed your sister, the youngest one.’

‘No. Yes.’

‘You burned her in an oven.’

‘She was already dead. Dead but not knowing it. The oven. That was us being merciful. We’re not the same as the rest of you. We’re not even Tiste. What’s your name?’

‘Wreneck.’

‘Send the spirits away, Wreneck.’

‘I can’t. I don’t know how. They can’t do anything. They’re dying.’

‘Dying, but not dead yet.’

‘They’re scared right now.’

The girl smiled. ‘Because of me?’

‘No.’ He gestured. ‘The door, and what’s behind it, I think.’

The smile vanished. ‘Father’s secret room. You can’t open it. It’s locked. Sealed. Warded by magic. If you touch that latch, you’ll die.’

‘What’s a Finnest?’

‘A what?’

‘Finnest. The dying gods keep screaming about a Finnest.’

‘Don’t know. Never heard of it. Do you have anything to eat?’

‘No. Which sister are you?’

‘Envy.’

‘Where’s the other one?’

Envy shrugged. ‘She tried strangling me with my hair. I fought her off. I beat her good. That was this morning. She crawled away and I’ve not seen her since.’

‘You two don’t like each other.’

Envy held out her hand, palm-up. A lurid red glow appeared, floating above it. ‘We’re coming into our power. If I wanted to, I could become a woman. Right here. I could grow up right in front of your eyes.’ The glow now sent out a tendril, curling like a serpent as it entwined her hand and then snaked up her wrist. ‘Or I could make myself look just like … what’s her name again? Oh, like Jinia.’

Wreneck said nothing.

Envy stretched out her other hand, and another serpent of fire appeared to match the first one. ‘I can reach into your mind, Wreneck. I can, if I want, pull things out and crush them. Your love for her. I could kill it.’ Her arms lifted, and the tendrils of flame acquired snakeheads, jaws opening to reveal fangs that glittered like diamonds. ‘My bite is venomous. With it, I can make you my slave. Or make you love me more than you ever loved Jinia.’

‘Why would you do that? I’m just a boy.’

‘A boy blessed by old gods – you might think they’re dying. They might even tell you that. But maybe they’re not dying at all, Wreneck. Maybe you’re keeping them well fed, with your dreams of blood and vengeance. The older things are, the hungrier and thirstier they get.’