Torgan,

Some time later

Thawn followed the steps beneath ground to a stone passage, towards the Priestern’s chambers. The ceiling arched above him at several times his height, and the path ahead was lit only by the traces of light from the entrance far behind him.

Thawn assumed he would make this walk one day. Every pilgrim did, sooner or later. But he always thought it would be later. Esther had been right. His curiosity carried a heavy price. Her and Asher now glimpsed the horizon of the great beyond, while Labban and Ulpysses had paid in their bodies, broken and unbroken by magick. Thawn though, Thawn had seen too much. The cost of his transgressions was to forget they ever happened. To be corrected.

They called it Skimming.

It would be six months of sickness and reconditioning. Another thirty-six of combat rehabilitation. The alternative was decommissioning. Pilgrims weren’t privy to the luxury of retirement.

Thawn looked up, calmed in the certainty that he would never have to know what he lost. That his grief was temporary. Statues, monuments to Winter’s prouder days stared judgingly from plinths dug into the walls. Their faces were struck in contempt, in their timeless poses. One keeled over a longsword the height of a normal man, and half as wide. The Baron Chastain, the Baron of Norgarth, he was known. He was the kind of man history changed its opinion on like the seasons. Once a paragon of heroes, then a crook. Now, they called him grey, complex, but great in all its extremes. Thawn wondered how his own actions might be remembered, if indeed there was anyone to remember them.

There came a blast of cool air from the opening behind and a candlelit lantern swung above the door to the Priestern. Thawn didn’t wait to knock. He just prodded it open.

The Priestern Jaho sat there pensively at an oaken desk, thin-faced and pale. ‘Ahh, of course,’ she said.

Thawn withdrew his helmet. ‘Of course?’

‘Of course it’s you.’

‘The Leger recommended me for Skimming.’

As was custom, any pilgrim due for a Skimming would come to their Priestern and seek answers, to argue and atone, before their minds were reset, minus all forbidden knowledge.

‘I was told. I’m sorry for your loss, Thawn. But, if it’s any consolation, Ellaga fell as intended, so, congratulations for that. The Leger Kieffer commended you highly. Said you were instrumental in the operation’s success.’

Thawn sighed. ‘I don’t think so.’

The Priestern chuckled a little. ‘The older you get, the more you’ll take what you can get. In war especially. The day was won, was it not? Revel while you can.’

‘At what cost?’

This time, Jaho sighed. ‘That… is ignorance talking. War’s cost is unknowable, Thawn. Because no one is entitled to know everything. Why else would you have been sent back to Torgan to forget what you saw? While many glimpse the war in part, the whole is seen by none. Such that it is life as well. I doubt even the Primal herself knows all of the Sign’s secrets.’

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The sanctity of this place was absolute. While the Priseterns weren’t above Skimming, the confidentiality of the knowledge bestowed upon them was absolute, their vows unbreakable. The whispers that passed through these walls could topple men that stood on the shoulders of gods.

Thawn shrugged then. ‘If people are going to go and die, people deserve to know the truth of what they’re dying over. Esther and Asher died so some Cardac could get high.’

Again, Jaho chuckled, then tilted her head curiously. ‘The truth will have its day, Thawn. It always does. Even if truth is just the wisdom of the day. Truth was that Allus Dar was our enemy. Now it’s the Patent machine. The truth is that Bakh was a traitor to the Sign. An insurgent’

‘But he wasn’t. He just resented the Cardacs. He wanted better than that for his daughter.’

‘That’s what they’ll say though. He was the unruly ruler of Ellaga, a problem. And that is the truth history will remember. Your actions, his actions, may be forgotten in memory, but they are remembered in the chain of events that will come to follow.’

‘The truth has it’s day,’ Thawn repeated.

‘Indeed.’

‘What of Lady Ellaga?’

‘She’s resigned her titles, forced to take her late beloved’s name, Taro. The Wiser, Brakkis, is overseeing the operation there now, I believe, until a new house receives the fief.’

‘Will she be okay?’

‘One would presume not. But the Bakhs are of a stiff manner. She will move on because she has to. Kieffer said the Princess is emigrating, to Asthathet.’

‘It’s meant to be nice there,’ Thawn said. He had heard it was a land of hills and lakes, where the horizon rose and fell in all directions. The tilt of the planet’s axis saw the sun ripple over the valleys in shallow waves. It was a paradise world.

‘Hmm, House Bakh survives in her as House Taro. Is this not the best outcome for all involved?’

Thawn said nothing. He was not wise enough of the world to answer that question. In its ebbs and flows, in its dealings and turnings. It was the best outcome for the Cardacs, but it was not an outcome they deserved.

‘The Count is dead,’ he replied eventually. ‘Hardly seems fair on him.’

‘A childish reply. What’s done is done, Thawn. The past is immutable. Perhaps your attentions are best directed towards the future.’

‘Still.’

‘The Cardacs are not the enemy. Malicious, no doubt. But the enemy? No. You are young, raw. In turn, you will learn these things as a matter of fact.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Thawn said gruffly.

‘It is not something to apologise for. You will learn, boy.’ Jaho placed a cutting emphasis on her last word, and Thawn bowed his head, chastened.

‘Does it hurt?’ he asked then. ‘The Skimming.’

Jaho’s lips twisted. She looked at him a time then nodded. ‘Like the hells themselves.’

‘Will I remember?’

‘Your mind, no. But your body will remember when you wake. Pain that lingers. In your bones.’

‘It’s cruel.’

‘Hmm. But when have you ever known otherwise? We are monsters after all.’

For every jab, Jaho had her sharp reply. What was the point in arguing? Let the pain come. Let it wash over him and through him. Let the memory of Esther, of Asher be lost in that awful place. Let it break him and unmake him. Let it remake him stronger, faster, more thoughtless in action. Let the world be someone else’s worry.

He said nothing then, and Jaho nodded as a shadow passed over Thawn. He didn’t resist as two bodies closed around him and he was lifted from where he sat. Their strength matched his own, and he felt almost weightless, the tips of his toes dragged at right angles to the ground. Jaho watched with that regretful look. Carried, Thawn moved back through the passage. Her thin face shrank into the outline of the doorway, as stone walls passed Thawn on all sides.

He was pulled and turned down right angles and staircases, through a maze of stone and misery, to the very foundations of the cathedral. Vague arrows of light struck him in grey from an occluded window to the outside. He wouldn’t remember this of course. Perhaps his brain could skip to that part.

Thawn was punched into a long chair, and his wrists and ankles parcelled in binders. His masters had nothing to say to him. For whatever was said would shortly be without meaning. As another strap tugged at his forehead, Thawn thought of the mud of Ellaga, and felt grateful the girl, Islet, had been spared the misery of that place.

As the light above the chair wound down over him, and a tingling sensation passed over his temples, Thawn supposed he wouldn’t stay grateful for long.