Fall of Light Read online

  Thus emptying Urusander’s camp. But that would have made Raal’s intent too clear.

  ‘Ah, see the left flank! Our cavalry is through!’

  She looked, and relief gave way to elation. ‘I beg you, cousin, let me join them!’

  ‘Go on, then. No, wait. Hold together your troop, Sevegg. Wet your swords by all means, but only on the edges – I want you riding for Ilgast Rend. He does not escape. Chase him down if necessary. He will face me in chains today, do you understand me?’

  ‘Alive then?’

  ‘Alive. Now, go, have your fun.’

  Too quick to call me the fool, cousin. I won’t forget these public humiliations, and when I next have you in my arms, I’ll remind you of pleasure’s other side. Waving to her troop, she set off along the crest.

  * * *

  Kicking, Havaral tried pushing his way out from under his dead horse. The beast’s weight was immense, trapping one leg, and yet still he struggled. When the pinned knee succumbed to the relentless pull, and the bone popped from its joint, he shouted in pain.

  Blackness washed through him, and, gasping, he fought to remain conscious.

  Well, that is that. I go nowhere.

  Somewhere behind him, beyond sight, the Legion cavalry was savaging the centre. The captain had failed to hold them back, and now, he knew, the battle was lost.

  Bodies and carcasses lay in heaps around him. Blood and spilled entrails made a glistening carpet on the ground, and he was covered in the same. The mosquitoes swarmed so thick around his face they filled his mouth like soft cornmeal, choking him as he swallowed them down again and again. The insects seemed both frenzied and baffled by this unflinching bounty, and though they clustered in such numbers as to blacken nearby corpses in their hunger, it appeared to be futile, as though they could not draw blood without the pressure of their prey’s pumping heart.

  Havaral assembled these observations, holding on to his musings as if the rest of the world, with all its drama, and all its wretched desperation, was now beneath notice. Even his lover was gone from the field, and those faces that he could see, whether Warden or Legion, were one and all made strangers by death. He knew none of them.

  He heard voices nearby, and then a guttural shout, and moments later a rider appeared, reining in and suddenly looming above him. The sun was high, casting the figure in silhouette, but he knew the voice when she spoke. ‘Old man, such fortune in finding you.’

  Havaral said nothing. Mosquitoes kept drowning in the corners of his eyes, making them water all the more. He thought he had wept himself dry long ago. The high sun disturbed him. Surely they had fought longer than that?

  ‘Your Wardens are broken,’ Sevegg said. ‘We slaughter them. They thought we would permit a retreat, as if honour still lived in this day and age. Had any of you possessed a soldier’s mind, you wouldn’t have been so naїve.’

  Blinking, he studied the dark shadow where her face should be.

  ‘Will you say nothing now?’ she asked. ‘Not even a curse or two?’

  ‘How fits shame, lieutenant?’

  To that query she made no reply, but quickly dismounted, and then moved to crouch beside him. At last he could see her face.

  She was studying him curiously. ‘We captured Lord Rend. My troop now delivers him to Hunn Raal. I will grant Ilgast this – he did not flee us, and looks to accept his fate as just punishment for failing on this day.’

  ‘Today,’ agreed Havaral, ‘marks a day of failures.’

  ‘Well, let me give you this. You’ll not scorn my pity, I hope. I see you at last. Old and useless, with every pleasure long behind you now. This hardly seems a fitting end, does it? Alone, with only me to caress your eyes. So, at the very least, I choose to offer you a gift. But first, I see you covered in blood and guts – where is your wound? Do you feel much pain, or has that faded?’

  ‘I feel nothing, lieutenant.’

  ‘That’s good then.’ She laughed. ‘Here I was going on and on, too unmindful by far.’

  ‘I’ll take the sharp point of your gift now, Sevegg, and deem it the sweetest kiss.’

  Sevegg frowned briefly, as if struggling to understand the meaning of his invitation. Then she shook her head. ‘No, I cannot do that. I’ll let you bleed out instead.’

  ‘This is your first field of battle, isn’t it?’ he asked.

  Her frown deepened. ‘Everyone has a first.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose that’s true. I will concede your innocence here, then.’

  The furrows of her brow beneath the helm’s rim faded, and, smiling, she said, ‘That’s generous of you. I think now we could have been friends. I could well have looked on you as a father.’

  ‘A father to you, Sevegg Issgin? Now you curse me in earnest.’

  She bore that well and nodded, looking off to one side for a moment before returning her attention to him. ‘So there’s still some fire in you. Not a daughter, then. We’ll imagine the lover instead. More blessed then my gift.’ She reached down and grasped the wrist of his left hand, tugging off the gauntlet. ‘Here, old man, one last time, a soft pleasure.’ And she moved his hand up under her leather breastplate. ‘You can squeeze if you’ve the strength.’

  He met her eyes, feeling the swell of her tit cupped by his calloused palm. And then he laughed.

  Confusion clouded her face, and at that moment, as he brought up his other hand and drove the knife it held up under her rib cage, using all his strength to pierce the leather, and felt it slide home to take her heart – at that moment, he looked hard at her face, seeing no one but a stranger. And this pleased him even more than the surprise he saw in that visage.

  ‘I bear no wounds,’ he said to her. ‘A veteran would have checked, woman.’

  The weapon sobbed as she slipped back from him and fell awkwardly on to her heels.

  Someone shouted in dismay. There was hurried motion. A sword flashed in Havaral’s eyes, like a lick of blinding sunlight, and at the same instant something slammed into his forehead, delivering a new, unexpected surprise.

  Peace.

  * * *

  Soldiers had brought camp-stools to the summit overlooking the valley of the slain, with one to take Hunn Raal, as he contended with the grief of his cousin’s treacherous murder. The captain sat with a jug of wine balanced on one thigh, the other leg flung out, the foot resting on its outer ankle. He was indifferent to the activity around him, and the wine in his gut felt heavy and sour, yet comforting all the same.

  He had ill news to deliver to Serap, who had become the last survivor among his kin. There was greater need now in keeping her close by Urusander’s side, as a valued officer in the commander’s staff. On the day that Urusander took the throne beside Mother Dark’s, she would be well placed in the new court. But he was running out of pawns.

  Some hurts were not worth looking at, and if his display here before his soldiers – that of a captain reduced to a man, and a man reduced to a grieving child in a family twice broken – if all that yielded pity he could use, well, he would.

  Drunks were well known as master tacticians. Seductively familiar with strategies of all sorts. The hurting thirst of his habit had honed him well, and he would not refuse his own tempered nature. Drunks were dangerous, in every way imaginable. Especially in matters of faith, trust and loyalty.

  Hunn Raal knew himself, down to the core – to that dark, gleeful place where he invented new rules for old games, and made small excuses kneel in servitude to their father and master, their mother and mistress, all of whom were one and the same. Where the me within me sits. My very own throne, my very own slippery seat of imagined power.

  Urusander, you will take what we give you. What I give you, and what our new High Priestess gives you. I see now the fantasy of your elevation, your return to glory. But you will suffice, and I will empty the libraries of every scholar across Kurald Galain to keep you buried to your neck in mouldy scrolls, and so content in what little world you would live in. This is a
kindness beyond imagining, milord, beyond imagining.

  He could weather any amount of berating from his commander, and anticipated a tirade to end this triumphant day. It would not sour Hunn Raal. Not for a moment. If anything, he would struggle to keep a smile from his face. Now was not yet the time for contempt.

  Eventually, he looked up, to the nobleborn commander who had been bound in chains and made to kneel on the cold, hard ground opposite him. The distance between them was modest, and yet impossibly vast, and this notion made Hunn Raal drunker than any jug of wine could achieve. ‘Do you recall,’ he now said, ‘how we rode together out to the Wardens’ summer camp?’

  ‘I should have cut you down then.’

  ‘In conversation with my friends,’ Hunn Raal said, ignoring Rend’s pointless, redundant assertion, ‘with you lagging out of earshot, I made a comment about you. There was laughter. Do you, perchance, recall that moment?’

  ‘No.’

  Hunn Raal said nothing as he slowly leaned forward, and then he smiled and whispered, ‘I think you lie, friend.’

  ‘Think what you like. Deliver me to Urusander now. This scene grows tired.’

  ‘What words, like rotten fruit, have you collected up, Ilgast, to deliver to my commander, I wonder?’

  ‘I leave you to tend that garden alone.’

  Hunn Raal waved his free hand. ‘You know, you impressed me today. Not the whole day, mind you. Your desire to seek this battle, for example, was ill conceived. But I saw your genius in that clash against my pikes – I would think only the Wardens could have managed that. The finest riders this realm has ever known. And see what you’ve done – you’ve thrown them away. If in the name of justice I would deliver you to someone, surely it would be Calat Hustain.’

  At that, he was pleased to see, Ilgast Rend flinched.

  The pleasure did not last, and he felt a sudden regret. ‘Oh, Ilgast, look what you’ve done this day!’ The words came out in pain, in honest anguish. ‘Why did you not bring the Wardens to our cause? Why did you not come here to embrace our desire for what’s right? How differently this day would have played out.’

  ‘Calat Hustain refused your invitation,’ Ilgast said, trembling. ‘I could not in honour betray that.’

  Hunn Raal scowled in exasperated disbelief. ‘My friend!’ he whispered, leaning still closer. ‘By your honour you could not betray him? Ilgast – look upon the field behind you! Yet you would fling those words at me? Honour? Betrayal? Abyss below, man, what am I to make of this?’

  ‘Not even you can deepen my shame, Hunn Raal. I am here, clear-eyed—’

  ‘You are nothing of the sort!’

  ‘Deliver me to Urusander!’

  ‘You’ve taken your last step, my friend,’ Hunn Raal said, leaning back. Closing his eyes, he raised his voice and said, in a weary tone, ‘Have done with it, then. This man is a criminal, a traitor to the realm. We’ve already seen how the nobleborn can bleed like any other mortal. Go on, I beg you, execute him now, and show me no corpse when I next open my eyes.’

  He heard the solid chop of the sword blade, a moment’s worth of choked sob, and then the man’s body falling along with his head. Fingers playing on the ear of the wine jug, he listened as both offending objects were dragged away.

  A soldier then spoke. ‘It is done, sir.’

  Hunn Raal opened his eyes, blinking in the bright glare, and saw that it was so. He waved his soldiers away. ‘Leave me now, to my grief, and make a list of heroes. It has been a dark day, but I will see light born of it nonetheless.’

  Overhead, the winter sun offered little heat. The cold air invited sobriety, but he was having none of that. He’d earned his right to grieve.

  * * *

  Renarr watched the other whores moving among the corpses below, and the children running this way and that, their thin cries drifting up as they found a precious ring or torc, or a small bag full of coins or polished river pebbles. The light was fading as the short day hurried to its close.

  She was chilled to the bone, and not yet ready to think of the boldness of the men who would find her in the evening to come, but her imagination defied such aversion. They would taste different – she was sure – but not on the tongue. This would be a deeper change, something to absorb from sweat and from what they leaked in their passion. It was a taste she would glean wherever their flesh met. She could not yet know, of course, but she did not think it would be bitter, or sour. There would be relief, and perhaps something of the despondent, in that intimate flavour. If it burned, it would burn with life.

  She caught sight of the girl whose killing had started the day. She walked with followers now, regal as a queen among the dead.

  Renarr studied her, and did not blink.

  * * *

  You could find a kind of justice in Urusander’s fate, although I will grant you, his ascension to the title of Father of Light made justice a mockery. So yes, indulge me now and give this blind old man a moment or two to catch his breath. This tale has far to go, after all. Free me to muse on the notions of righteous consequence, since they lie scattered before us like stepping stones across history’s torrent.

  I have no doubt Urusander was no different from you or me, or rather, no different from most thinking creatures. For myself, I make no common claim. The poet’s view of justice is a secret one, and you and I need not discuss its rules. A few deft twitches on the fingers of one hand bind us in hidden kinship, with strangers none the wiser. So I am certain that you too will hold back when I speak of Urusander’s similitude.

  To be plain, he saw justice as a clear thing, and from that raging river of progress, which ever tugs us along, he longed to dip a hand in at any point and raise to the heavens a pool of clean water, sparkling in the cup of his palm.

  We look upon this same torrent and see the silts of flood waters, of banks breached, and islands of detritus crowded with shivering refugees. To steal a palm’s worth is to look down upon a cloudy, impenetrable world, a microcosm of history’s messy truth. And in the anguish and despair with which we contend, upon observing our dubious prize, we can hardly call our vision a virtue.

  Virtue. Surely, of all words that might belong to Lord Vatha Urusander, it is that one. Such clear justice, in hand as it were, must indeed be a worthy virtue. So, Urusander was a man who longed to cleanse the waters of history, through the sluice of hard judgement. Must we fault him in that noble desire?

  There is that old saying, couched as a truism, and to utter it is to assert its primacy: justice, we say, is blind. By this we mean that its rules defy all the seeming privileges of the wealthy and the highborn. Laudable, without question, if from the rules of justice we are to fashion a civilization worthy of being deemed decent and righteous. Even children can be stung in the face of what they perceive to be unfair. Unless, of course, they are the ones profiting from it. And in that moment of comprehension, of unfairness to the other also being a reward to oneself, that child faces – for the first but not the last time – the inner war we all know so well, between selfish desire and the common good. Between injustice, clutched so possessively deep in the soul, and a justice that now, suddenly, stands outside that child, like a stern foe.

  With luck, the regard of others will force submission upon the child, in the name of fairness, but make no mistake, it is indeed forced. Wrenched from small hands, and then indifferent to the child’s raging impotence. Thus in our childhoods we learn the lessons of strength and weakness, and violence delivered in the name of justice. We deem this maturity.

  Father Light. Such a bold title. Sire to the Tiste Liosan, observing all of his children from a place of clear, unopposed light. A place of purity, then, eternal bane to darkness. A father to lead us into history. The god of justice.

  Of course he adored the Forulkan, barring those hundreds who slid lifeless down the blade of his sword. After all, their worship of justice was intransigent in the virtue of its purity. As unassailable, whispers this poet, as a blind man’
s darkness. But then, we poets suffer our imperfections, do we not? We are seen, in our seeming equivocations and indecision, as weak of spirit. Gods help a kingdom ruled by a poet!

  What? No, I do not know King Tehol the Only. Will you interrupt me again?

  So. I sense you manning still the ramparts of your admiration for the Son of Darkness. Will I never scour that romance from your vision? Must I beat you about the head with his flaws, his errors in judgement, his obstinacy?

  You are eager for the tale. No patience left for an old man trying to make a point.

  Kadaspala etched his god, in the end. Did you know that? He etched that god into life, and then, appalled at the long-awaited perfection of his talent, he killed them both.

  What are we to make of that?

  No matter. We have already seen Kadaspala find the promise of peace, delivered by his own hands, in a time of unbearable grief. The visionary is the first to be blinded, if a civilization is to fall. Set him aside. He is no longer relevant. Leave him to his small chamber in the Citadel, muttering his madness. His work is done. No, another artist must be dragged to the fore. Another sacrifice necessary to advance a people’s suicide.

  In this tale, then, look to the sculptor’s hands …

  … as he carves his monument. I leave the choosing of its title to you, my friend. But not yet. Hear the tale first. There is only so much we can indulge, before the chorus grows restless, and gives voice to its displeasure.

  I am known to flirt with impatience? Now, surely, that is an unjust accusation.

  TWO

  BARELY A SMUDGE AGAINST THE GLOOM, THE SUN WAS FADING IN the sky over the city of Kharkanas. The two lieutenants from the Houseblades of Lord Anomander, Prazek and Dathenar, met on the outer bridge and stood leaning on one of its walls, forearms on the stone. Like children, their upper bodies were tilted forward as they looked down upon the waters of the Dorssan Ryl. To their right, the Citadel stood like a fortress of night, defying the day. To the left, the city’s jumbled buildings crowded up against the flood wall as if caught in the act of marching over the edge.