Rythe Falls (21 page)

Chapter Forty-One

Renir was barely aware of anything on the short walk back to the castle. The song of steel,  perhaps, still ringing out in the darkness outside the walls of Castle Naeth. As he neared the castle, he became, dimly, aware of murmurs among the men, the odd half-hearted cheer to see reinforcements in the shape of the men from Gern's Crest. A few horse among them, too, and they'd brought three wagons of supplies, which they managed to negotiate through the odd pitched battle within the stone houses and cobbled streets. Somehow, with Renir and Bear and Sutter striding through fires and smoke at the head of their little convoy, it must have looked as though the trio had guided the men through the five hells themselves.

             
To scant safety, though, thought Renir, absently. He noted things he might not have, once, but he was a simple man, a plain man, even...but not stupid. He noted the numbers and the state of the men waiting outside the castle wall, waiting for brothers and friends to fight their way back. Waiting until the last possible moment before the great portcullis would close, before the massive gates would be bared outside. Waiting for that moment when their commander decided that the loss of the few would have to serve to save the many.

             
Renir saw Quintal and Cenphalph there, still in their pretty white cloaks. Masters of war, for sure. Beside Quintal, a captain whom Renir had never even spoken with. Not a guardsman, but once a Thane's man, perhaps. A man who knew war and the city both.

             
The three were in conversation at the base of the thick castle walls, surrounded by fighting men. The three of them were safe enough, though Renir knew they were arguing the best moment to close the gates to their advantage. That would hurt any man...to close a door on so many lives.

             
How many townfolk within, and how many lost without, outside the walls, raped or murdered or hurt for sport? What had they lost? Renir tried to imagine how they thought, as a king might.

             
Lost maybe a thousand men, even more townsfolk. What's left? How much food inside? How long can we stand a siege? Enough horses for the most important among us to flee the slaughter come the end...or to serve as food, should all fail?
             

             
Renir tried to think like those men there, in their shining armour. Those men bred for war. But he couldn't. Crown or not, he still thought like a fisherman.

             
To him, war was a talent he'd found later in his young life, but he'd never be so enamoured with it as to find it glorious. It was a sordid business, war. Even Selana, dead for longer than Renir could imagine, knew that life had weight, had import.

             
War saw the brown ordure of men who shit themselves, the blood and bone. Was that glorious?

             
And the Draymar...the perfect fighting machine...could he hate them? See them as demons, or rapists, or murders? They were dark-hearted bastards, yes...but hate them?

             
Renir walked on, thinking, and as he did so the crowd of soldiers outside the walls continued to murmur and whisper. The susurration of rumours spreading reached his ears and travelled on through the castle. Even to the simple folk within the temporary safety of the castle's thick walls. His people. More so, Renir, thought, that the soldiers and shining warlords of the Sard.

             
Shorn, maybe. Shorn would understand Renir's heart on the matter. Bear, his grizzled friend Bourninund. Tirielle, even. That woman had a true heart.

             
Once more, he saw Quintal and Cenphalph talking low to the Captain he didn't know. He imagine their words.

             
The poor fighters die easiest. They always die first. Got a good, hard contingent of men, now.

             
Renir saw the truth in it. There was nothing about war that was beautiful to the eye, but if you looked without passion you could, maybe, see the strongest blossoming as the weak fell by the wayside.

             
It still didn't mean it was a good way to look at the deaths in a battle, though, like it was a mere cull to let the strongest flourish. The longer this war went on, the harder the veterans on both sides would become. And those hard men...what would they need, come the quiet, to still their warrior's hearts?

             
More war.

             
And in that way, Renir thought, wars were won and made at the same time.

             
You can win a war. You can't beat war itself.

             
And as the first of the men waiting at the gates took a knee, Renir wasn't gladdened at all, but saddened.

             
Was he but war's fool, now?

             
More men took the knee, and behind them, Quintal himself strode forward, beautiful and terrible in his war-garb.

             
'No...Quintal...no...' said Renir, but to no avail.

             
The leader of the order of the Sard, too, knelt before the new king, drew his long, workman's sword, and held it out to the King.

*

Chapter Forty-Two

Caeus' understanding of the world of Rythe was far deeper than that of his brothers and sisters, the returning Elethyn.

             
While, to them, Carious and Dow were nothing more than fuel, to him they were a guide in the wilds of time. The Elethyn misunderstood this, as they always had. Human kind, they set store by the movements and vagaries of the suns. The seasons marked the passage of their years, short though they were. Perhaps the Elethyn had understood this, once, and forgotten it. Maybe they never came to this knowledge at all. It had been such a long time now that the Red Wizard himself did not know how or why he felt the shifting moods of the suns within his soul.

             
But the suns, the moons, the planet herself...they were not separate. There was a strange kind of symbiosis between the five bodies. Rythe turned about the suns, and the suns influence was felt in the warmth of the sky or the growth of crops. Seasons came and went, life was birthed or passed to dirt and dust whether the suns shone or not. But it was not the doing of the suns alone.

             
Hren and Gern, the twin moons...they exerted a strange pull upon Rythe, more subtle, sometimes, but no less powerful for their subtlety.

             
The raising of the Seafarer's cursed land was no miracle. It was merely timing. Caeus cursed them, once, to forsake the touch of their land until their geas was fulfilled...but even a man such as Caeus...to sink an island?

             
As he landed on that very island, the ground still quaked from shifting. It was night now on this side of the world.

             
The Elethyn followed, like bright bolts in the black sky.

             
Moonless, tonight. As Caeus knew it would be. No light from the suns to reach this place. On the other side of the world, too, it would be dark, for just a few moments. And in these moments all the light of the suns would be blocked from the world by the perfect conjunction of the moons, shielding the suns from the surface of Rythe. A lunar eclipse, one that happened but every thousand years.

             
The Elethyn landed.

             
My God...

             
Even Caeus was shocked to see those he remembered as himself now look so awful.

             
They were terrible in their sentinel armour. The shifting abomination of souls trapped within the strange metal. Sentinel armour, the making of which was long forgotten.

             
His brothers and sisters were now far larger than he remembered - bloated by power, perhaps, and by their unshakeable confidence and utter disregard for every aspect of life except theirs.

             
Life was theirs to take, to own, by blood right and their power and their whims.

             
Once, Caeus had known that kind of confidence.

             
No more, though.

             
Now...he felt...doubt? Yes. Doubt was setting in, somewhere between Caeus' throat and his gut...and it was...wondrous.

             
I can't defeat them all. I can't. But...I'm going to try. This has been a long time coming. Too long.

             
His hands, he noted, shook. A small film of sweat covered his entire body.

             
Is this how the human kind feel?

             
Drun the priest, with his faith in the sun and history, the Sard with their swift swords and their sharp minds, or Renir Esyn, born with no choice but to take a crown he didn't want?

             
Is this how they feel all the time?

             
They should have been crippled with it, this terrible and beautiful uncertainity...and yet they fought and railed against the darkness, no matter their doubt. No matter their fear.

             
Caeus smiled, enjoying his moment.

             
I am ready to die, I think.

             
'You think we did nothing?' said one Elethyn through a narrow slit in his sickly, shifting armour. Caeus could see the anguish of the souls trapped there. 'Two thousand years, bastard brother, and we have grown while you were stagnant. We are refreshed with the light of a thousand suns while you rot and wither. You were ever a fool for the allure of life.'

             
Caeus laughed because he knew it would hurt the Elethyns' pride, and he wanted them angry. Anger made even Gods stupid.

             
'You want my life, is that it?' Caeus turned, returned the stares of the thousand or more Elethyn all around him. 'You still fear me? Me, alone, who defeated you all, every one of you?'

             
'Old glories. Forgotten now. We live not for revenge. We will feed. You will be dead. Life, death, you were stuck on the one and forgot the other.'

             
So did you
, thought Caeus, but guarded his thoughts more completely than he ever had.

             
'Then kill me, if you will,' said Caeus. 'If you...'

             
He did not finish his sentence, even, before their power burned the land and the sky for less, even, than a second...and then Caeus felt it. A dimming in them, a screaming storm of power within himself, bolstered not by the power of the suns but by his connection with the land, with his love of it. A thing of wonder that the Elethyn would never know.

             
On the other side of the world, for an instant, Rythe's twin moons blocked the light. And for the merest moment, Caeus drew on the power contained within every love and every life throughout the entire world of Rythe. He drew on memory and history, on the beasts and the higher creatures, the power of the Rahken and the Hath'ku'atch, the passions and joys on humans, the hapless meandering pleasures of the fish and the whales and the Kurmidon down in the deeps, the worms in the mud and the scorpions in the sands, the mirs in their trees and the skies, the helting mirs in their caves, happiest as ever in the dark. He drew on these things, felt them course through his veins in a burst of power so vast that one man alone could not contain it, nor bear to feel it. The heart of a billion creatures and the stench of the dirt and the chill embraces of the blackest, deepest seas, the roar and whisper of winds and dry leaves holding tight to the trunks of trees and he could not hold it, could not bear it without losing his very self to the feeling of belonging...

             
But he did not have to.

             
All he had to do was be a vessel, a simple channel, a focus.

             
That he was. Less than a second, a concentration of something so strong he buckled, then, let it fly...from him...to the Elethyn. The Sun Destroyers were momentarily robbed of their strength, insensible, lacking focus and power.

             
The sentinel armour sent the blast back at Caeus tenfold, and he had nothing to fear because it was happiness and love, not horror, not pain. He took it and it pulsed from him, to them, in waves, growing in power with each blast.

             
The pressure and power built in Caeus until he was giddy with it, roaring with laughter and howling with tears while the Elethyn screamed, at last, under the onslaught of pure joy.

             
When at last the suns' rays broke the edge of the moons, it was done.

             
Caeus staggered, then fell to his knees. With stubborn effort, he crawled to the nearest Elethyn and, still laughing as a nexus of such a thing of beauty might, the Red Wizard drew the creature's visor up to reveal the thing's face. The armour was robbed of its power, the tortured souls that gave it strength destroyed. And the creatures within?

             
Just sad, withered husks remained. Things that looked just like Caeus, once, but now...dry, parchment skin stretched over bone.

             
So tired,
he thought.
So tired.

             
A thousand, at least, since he'd last slept.

             
Now would be a good time to start.

             
He laid his head against the hard armour of the dead Elethyn. To him, if felt like a pillow. He closed his blood-red eyes, and slept.

*