Rythe Falls (22 page)

Chapter Forty-Three

Tirielle rounded on the witch Queen. 'They could all die! All, right now...and you'd have me sit here in your lair doing nothing...for what? I can help...I'm no little girl. I don't need to be coddled. If they fight, I would stand by their side. This...this is not me.'

             
Selana simply smiled and shook her head.

             
'Tirielle...your heart is big and strong. You are brave. You brought Caeus from his slumber, woke the Seer. You've suffered loss and pain. But you think you can stand against what comes in your shift, with your rahken blades, and take on the Draymar empire? No, Tirielle...I did not take you for a fool, not for a moment. I took you for a witch, a woman with sense and guile.'

             
That disarmed her, a little.

             
'But this...I sit, do nothing. Men are dying...I...I hear their pain, up there...'

             
And she did. Like echoes, through the thick rock. Cries of such terror, shouts of rage and joy and victory and defeat. Blood and steel and fire and smoke...all above. Her friends, the Sard, her new friends...

             
'Renir's a good man. You sent him to face a nation with a flimsy crown of gold to protect him and a head full of childish dreams. So, he's a king. A king of what?'

             
'And would you have sent the man to battle with no hope? With fear in his heart? Would that have served him better?'

             
'I...'

             
'Hertha had more sense than you, Tirielle,' said the Queen, but she was not being hard or harsh, but spoke the words sadly. 'She knew herself...fishwife or not, she was born to witching. You come to it late.'

             
'Witch, witch...I'm no witch.'

             
'You hear thoughts in your head, woman. You smell blood through stone, feel the pain of this land even though it is not your own. And Tirielle A'm Dralorn, your blood smells of witch, whether you wish it or not.'

             
'I do not. I wish to fight with my friends. I wish to see the Protectorate slain and avenge my people and...'

             
'Fool girl. The Protectorate you hate so hard are nothing but pretty dead statues in a lake of glass. They are all dead. You hate the ghosts of an army of fools. Think before you speak. You think Caeus put magic in this land on a whim, for his own folly? You think I created witch kin and bound your kind with my blood because I like stubborn women? No. We fight a long war, Caeus and I, each in our own way, with our own tools.'

             
'I...' She began, but then she started to think.

             
What, Tirielle? What is it you want?

             
The truth was, with the Protectorate gone, the Elethyn remaining, the Draymen pouring into the city above, friends and allies lost to death or fate so wide she could not see the shape of things...

             
'I am lost,' she said, finally, and she knew it for the truth.

             
'And I found you,' said Selana. 'I don't ask trust or love. But I can show you your path. Witch kin are rare, and your blood comes from me, whether you wish it or not. As Renir could not fight his, you cannot fight yours. It is a gift, one forgotten through the ages...but no less valuable than those pure blades up your sleeves...and one that, with acceptance, could be far more powerful. Our kind won a small war, once. You want to fight? Fight with the tools you have. You have no armour, no sword. You are not a warrior. Do not try to be. The world has enough of those. You are a witch. Embrace it, Tirielle A'm Dralorn, and learn what it means.'

             
Tirielle hung her head and thought, and as she did so, she happened to touch the sharp point of the tooth broken so long ago, while a captive of the Protectorate. The tooth remained, ever a reminder...but...they were gone, weren't they? They were no longer the enemy.

             
Yet the war still rages.

             
And witch? Maybe. But the Queen was right. She wasn't a warrior. The world was full of warriors.

             
But her passion remained, her love of the land of Lianthre and even, yes, this strange new world she found herself in. She'd lost friends, lost allies, lost battles.

             
But did that mean she shouldn't fight?

             
A fighter doesn't have to wear armour.

             
She looked up. 'You're right,' she said, finally.

             
'Your battle is far from done,' said Selana. 'You will return to your lands...but not alone. And when you do, you will know yourself as few do. With new allies...this war will not be won by men in armour or blasting fire from their eyes. It will be won, though. It will. And you will see it, Tirielle A'm Dralorn. You
will
see the end.'

*

Chapter
Forty-Four

Klan Mard hadn't slept a single minute since losing most of his skin to the fiery lava within the great volcano at the heart of Teriythyr. On a clear day, here in the north of Sturma, he imagined a man might be able to see Thaxamalan's Saw and the whiteness of the range's many peaks. He had little desire to see snow again, and even these lands would be covered, frozen, within the next month, most likely.

             
He hated Sturma because the climate suited him. His skin hurt him constantly, and while he enjoyed, even relished the agony of his thousand lesions and oozing sores, the soft, cool rain of late autumn on these shores was a kind of relief. And that was why he hated Sturma. The weather lessened his pain and took an edge from his fury. Fury was the only thing keeping him alive, and the thing that drove the power within.

             
How could he fight on with comfort in his black soul? He, the last of his kind and something other at the same time...the Myrmidion, the crossroads of knowledge, the keeper of the Bone Archive. The last living being with the knowledge of the past to guide his future.

             
The gentle rain dripped on his face, onto his teeth because he had no lips left. His words were clear enough, though, even so.

             
'Your men fight like angry pigs, Ranth of the Hound Clan. Tomorrow, you will breach the walls.'

             
Ranth bristled at the mild insult, just like a pig. Klan didn't care. Show no weakness. Mard bowed to no man, and now men bowed to him.

             
It was more than a thousand years since the clans of the Draymen had united with a common cause. It had taken a stranger with no skin to achieve the feat. Klan was that stranger, now, and forever would be, no matter what land he travelled to.

             
'Dor Blackteeth. You blades look to be very clean. Did you even fight yesterday, or spend the day pissing your pretty swords all shiny?'

             
'Leather-man,' grunted the foul-faced man. He spat into the trampled grass at his feet and drew one of those shining swords. 'I killed thirty or more with this blade alone. You insult me, you insult my clan. You die, Leather-man.'

             
Klan ignored him. 'Your son, beside you. He's but a baby. Screams like a baby, too. And still worth ten of you.'

             
Dor's son, a long-armed butcher with a stolen heavy mace, took a step toward Klan.

             
'Like a baby,' said Klan and the young man's skin erupted with flame. Dor's son screamed, then, loudly, beautifully, while the clan leaders stared in horror. Magic was all but unknown on the endless plains. Pain and torture were not. But few men could elicit such screams as Klan. Few had such a wondrous skill.

             
The man tumbled to the floor, smoking and still and silent but for the sizzling of his fat as it cooled in the rain.

             
Dor Blackteeth eyed his blade. Klan could see him itching to kill Leather-man, kill him with steel or hand or his rotten ugly teeth. But Klan merely grinned back. A grin was all he could manage.

             
'Lessons are hard, Draymen. Learn them well. You want me your enemy? Consider this...my enemies are Gods. You think I care for your steel or your hate? I survived fire and the death of my entire people and I'm still here, right here, and you bastards...go to war. I have no more patience.'

             
'Big castle. Strong walls,' said an older Drayman. Klan didn't begrudge him his words. The man was beyond long-of-tooth - he only had one tooth left in his head, right there in the front of this mouth. He'd be dying soon, in battle or just of tiredness.

             
'Then bash the door in with Ranth's thick head. I care not. Get it done, Draymen. Legends, all of you...out there in the dirt and boring dry waste. You want this land, with the grass and wet dirt, the seas and rivers and lakes? You want their soft, white women for your own, you want their good steel and their stone...well, grunting like a woman shitting out a child won't do it. Kill them all, take this land. It's yours. Kill the man with the golden helm and they'll fall, soon enough. But get it done while it's warm enough to feel your fingers. Draymen cry like...him,' said Mard, pointing to the charred corpse on the grass, 'when they get a nip of frost on their balls. Now go, I'm bored.'

             
Grunting, complaining, all the while speaking in their witless language, the Draymen did as he bid.

             
You could rule easy enough with a man's heart in your hands, but that took time. Men like the Draymen, and their fierce women, too...they understood the coarse language of pain and fear. They bowed to power. Might be they weren't happy about it, but he didn't want dancing, capering fools. He wanted angry and crazy murderous bastards.

             
And he had them. Legions of them, and him at their back whipping them with words and fear toward the thing they hated more. The Sturmen.

             
The castle will fall today,
he thought, and knew he was right.

*

Chapter Forty-Five

Do the Gods dream?

             
Caeus had no idea. Was he a god? What was a god, if there was such a thing, but a creature beyond the understanding of those who worshipped it? If that was all there was to being a deity, then maybe he was a god.

             
But dreaming? What could a god dream of? The universe, the suns spread like holes in the dark right across the endless void of space? Strange blooms in the dark as suns were birthed, or turned to gaping maws when they exploded in death? Worlds and the creatures therein, or those monsters that roamed the darkest reaches of the void, devouring themselves or moons or living on the detritus of creation itself?

             
No. Nothing so lofty. Caeus dreamed of his sister and a brief remembrance of mortality. Mundane, perhaps, but he saw her, her features, and felt the moment her body turned cold and she left his world of life and learning to live in the darkness.

             
He dreamed of Selana, as she was, even though she was now long gone and dead to him. As he dreamed of her, her voice came to him, and he remembered.

             
'There is not one world, brother, but two. And you forget...you always do. You forget the dead and the past and the darkness because you love the light so. You are a creature of life and it will be your destruction, brother.'

             
She looked, to him, beautiful still, and Caeus' heart seemed to ache...but a god would not know heartache or loss...would he?

             
'But I love you for it. I love you for your hope and your trust. I always will. Now go. Do not see me anymore. I will be dead, a thing of the world you do not see. Remember me, brother, perhaps when the suns go down and darkness rules once more. Remember me when you sleep, for I will not sleep again. The dead do not rest...as you are the Guardian of the world of light, the darkness needs a shepherdess, too. Easier, I think, to get lost in the dark.'

             
Her voice held power and sway, even twice removed through death and dreaming.

             
With a soft groan and her wisdom echoing down the ages, Caeus opened his eyes to find that he had slept after all.

             
Dreaming and sleeping weren't so difficult, after all.

             
He lifted his head from his pillow - the Elethyn's armour was now the creatures tomb, until it turned to dust out here on the still-roiling land of the Seafarers. He'd tricked his kind once, millennia ago. Last night, to destroy so many with the same trick had been...

             
Luck,
he thought, and the thought actually made the mad wizard smile with honest mirth.

             
But he knew wouldn't trick them again. And they hadn't lied. His people had grown strong in the two thousand years since he had banished them. The time to fight alone was past. Pride could destroy not just him, now, but the entire world.

             
No gaudy trail of fire to mark his passage so that the Elethyn might find him this time. He was just...gone.

*

Gurt's armour, his weapons, too, were a ruin. He'd discarded them when their saviour Essgren brought he and the warrior Perr to their haven, this home under the earth. It had the feel of a giant burrow, tunnels heading this way and that. The few times Gurt wandered alone in the rahken's great home, he had soon been lost.

             
Embarrassing, really, for a man of Gurt's years to be lost quite so often.

             
In their shared room (just a large hole in the rock, really) Perr performed exercises. Fist and foot, stretching, kick, punch...

             
Very repetitive,
thought Gurt, just tired from watching. Practise was a young man's game. Old men needed to save their energy.

             
The rahken, it seemed, had no need for privacy, and Essgren came, unapologetically, straight into their quarters.

             
Gurt did not mind at all. The reason he and Perr could move around at all was because of the rahken healer that came to stand before him.

             
Perr stopped performing his fancy tricks and turned to listen.

             
'Good,' said Essgren. 'I found you both. Humans, it seems, tend to wander.'

             
Gurt felt like he was chastised. Perr grunted a short laugh.

             
'No matter, though.' The rahken seemed to think for a moment, as though gathering his thoughts.

             
'A strange thing is happening...my kind have elders...and the elders call us all, now, each second for the last...day, nearly. A tone, I think, you cannot hear. It is an ancient call. One I never thought I'd hear in my life. Come, Gurt and Perr...I think your time here comes to a close...as does ours.'

             
Without further words, the rahken bustled from their rooms and along a hall, leaving the two warriors a choice; follow Essgren, stay, or get lost alone.

             
Perr shrugged at Gurt. Gurt sighed and pushed himself from his stone perch and followed the creature to whatever mystery came next.

             
'Curiosity's a young man's game,' said Gurt.

             
'Better than old men's games,' said Perr. His face, even without his armour, might as well have been steel for all the expression the man showed. And yet, often, Gurt felt as though the man joked in every word. He just didn't get the joke.

             
Maybe joking, too, was a young man's game. Either way, Gurt was too damn old to be worrying about things he didn't understand. He turned his suspicious gaze from Perr and concentrated on following the hustling rahken instead.

*

Caeus was under the bright skies of the Feewar land, with the smell of the sea suffusing his soul, and then he was surrounded by hard, dark rock. The rock, rough hewn, of the outer caverns of the rahken's home beneath the surface of Rythe. The artifice and skill of the rahken would become evident further in. But he needed allies, and the rahken had stood by his side once, so long ago.

             
He was sure they felt his approach.

             
Deeper within their great nation carved from the rock, the beast races came to greet him. Hand signals passed, as they did of old, before Caeus granted them the power of speech as his gift, in return for their aid. But it gladdened his heart to see the nation prosper, and keep to the old ways, still.

             
His keen noted two mildly bemused humans in their midst. No time to wonder now.

             
One rahken stood before him when he reached the central cavern. Looking up, he saw a mural upon the ceiling, and grinned despite himself, to see himself so boldly depicted in this vision of the glorious past.

             
'Lord of Light,' said the rahken. 'We waited. We stand ready.'

             
Caeus nodded and bowed his ancient head in respect to these, the oldest of his allies.               'For time immemorial, knowledge has been sought out and destroyed, hidden, subverted with lies, rediscovered again. But magic is immutable and timeless, not subject to  lies. The way...have the rahken kept the way?

             
'We have,' said the old rahken in the rough voice of their kind, words gnarled by their throats and mouths, not evolved for speech, but a thing granted through the will of a creature than might, perhaps, even be a god. 'We abide in the lore. The truth lives in us.'

             
'Then I call on you,' said that god. Insane, yes, thought Caeus, but so full of the love of life...the only thing, ever, that set him apart from his brethren. Caeus' smile was warm, despite the chill below the suns and the gravity of what he asked.

             
'Old friends,' he said, turning to take in the might of the rahken nation...maybe not even a tenth of which stood before him in the great cavern. 'The battle is now and I cannot do it alone...'

             
'We stand, Lord of Light. As before, until the suns above have forgotten all.'

             
'Then I am gladdened. The Elethyn wait. Are your hearts at peace?'

             
'They are.'

             
'Then I will call them down and we will meet. Perhaps we will create history anew...and this time one that will stand forevermore.'

             
'Elethyn...brothers...enemies...' intoned Caeus there in the great hall of the rahken.

             
The history of their joined past, Caeus and the rahken, was bright and bold on the high ceiling above. He looked up for a moment.

             
The Feewar are free, now. Soon, the rahken.

             
Caeus knew regret, and despair, but he freed himself of the shackles of such emotions as he stood and called on his kind. As he freed himself of the darkness, he embraced the light completely.

             
For thousands of years, the Feewar served my geas. For longer, still, the rahken lived in my debt. No longer.

             
Humankind owed him nothing, and yet he had been pushing and pulling, interfering. A benevolent god full of the best of intentions...and had he ever made anything better?

             
Time to rectify that,
he thought.

             
It is time this world was free of my kind...and free of me.

             
'The oldest place...we will meet and live or die in the old ways. Brethren, sistren of the Elethyn...I, Caeus, call you to battle!'

             
To words such as this, rock, distance, nor wind mattered. Words such as this cannot failed to be heard, if spoken with heart and the power of a god.

             
Caeus smiled and bowed his head to his most ancient allies, the rahken.

             
'Come, friends. It is time we were done.'

*

A shimmer in the air and dust and dirt swirling, for moments, only, then,
Caeus and the entire rahken nation were gone.

             
Gurt blinked. One second, the cavern was full. The next, only he and Perr remained. The air smelled like fire and wet dirt.

             
'Good trick,' said Perr. He shrugged. 'Coming?'

             
'What?' said Gurt, feeling as though he'd been one step behind everyone else for the last few years. 'What?'

             
Perr, robed in a simple thing, his armour and weapons as useless as Gurt's, slapped Gurt on the shoulder and began to walk.

             
'Where are you going?' said Gurt.

             
Perr said nothing. Gurt followed.

             
'No sense in sticking here, is that it? Like...staying too long at a wedding. Or a funeral. Rather find a drink, eh?'

             
Perr nodded. He kept walking.

             
Gurt shrugged and followed after. It seemed it might be quite nice to feel the suns on his face, and a drink in his belly.

             
'Think they'll be any taverns left?' he said.

             
'Who knows?' Perr said, and Gurt realised why the man spoke so little. Because he was joking, all the time, and Perr was a man who got the greatest joke of all. Creatures like the thing that had called away the rahken? The rahken themselves, the great, the good? They didn't get it.

             
Perr did. And Gurt was beginning to catch up.

             
By and large, he figured, what you did, what you said, made no difference at all, so why worry?

             
Together, the two warriors headed into the tunnels, the caverns, and onward, hopefully back to the light, and, eventually, if they were lucky, a tavern and a good solid mug of something strong and wet. For some reason, even there, lost in the gloom, both men smiled a little while they walked, and the spoke barely at all.

*