Chapter Fourteen - The Promise

(Part II)

He blinked. The Old Man looked back at him as they walked, eyes flashing amber.

‘We are here.’

He stared through the trees, and the ruined tower blinked back in the sunlight, black and smooth and gleaming. Rising from a pile of ruined stones, crawling with green. He frowned.

‘What is it?’

‘A stormtower.’ the Old Man told him. ‘After the Breaking, when the Gods left the earth, few were left who remembered their whispers.’

‘Temur’s Chosen.’

‘Just so.’ the Old Man replied, and his eyes gleamed. ‘They raised the towers, to watch the way East. To watch for the Darkness. Filled them with men of purpose.’

‘But they are all empty?’

‘Are they?’ the Old Man asked him. The boy blinked, looking down at the ruined stones again.

‘What’s that?’ he asked, pointing at a gleam of silver.

‘A stormcatcher.’ the Old Man told him. ‘Every torch has a flame. And only a storm can break the dark.’

The boy stared up at the tower, blinking, and it stared back, ancient and ruined and cold. The something in the dirt beside them gleamed silver.

‘There is so much that no one remembers.’ the boy said sadly.

‘Not no one.’ the Old Man told him. ‘Every man wants to be remembered. But we are all just children, scratching our names in the sand. It is every man’s fate to be forgotten.’

The boy blinked, and the ruined tower gleamed, and the clouds gathered over the mountains, spilling black over the bones of the earth.

*

Cal was walking.

He wandered for a while, though he had no clear idea where he was going. The wandering itself seemed enough. Drifting through endless trees. The pain was almost too much to bear, when he began. Creeping, crawling, scraping over his skin. But soon even that was fading into the bleak blur of his thoughts, and his footsteps wore on, numb with aching.

The world around him was calm, frozen with the familiar, but he felt the difference. A needle in the tapestry of its stillness. The very air seemed to have changed. Was it so long ago, now, that he had listened to the Old Man’s stories? That he had run carelessly over the stones, leaping through the stream-water. Each day stretched out like an eternity behind him. The trees were empty, still, silent as the grave. No shadows to flee from. No fire to scorch his throat. But his knowing was broken, and the names of things receded around him into the bareness of the trees. The hills were his place, the only one he’d ever had, but now even they felt wrong somehow, like the end of an old dream. And there is nothing to fear from dreams.

Time stretched out ahead of him, endless and streaked with cloud. Still, he walked, numb feet and numb skin, eyes full of fog. The sun was dipping low over the western flats when he found himself still again. Standing above the village, a shadow hidden in the edge of the trees, looking down over the little trails of chimney smoke and lamplight. The villagers were returning home from their toils. Miners trudged through the stones, soot-faced and weary. A hunter struggling towards the butcher’s block with a deer carcass slung over her shoulder, a splash of crimson at its breast. He saw Forley steer his little flock of goats into their pen near the trees’ edge, traced his footsteps to where Priss was waiting for him in a little window of firelight. He looked for any sign of strangers, but there were none to be found. The Nest glittered and gleamed from a dozen windows, and he watched that longest of all, waiting for a glimpse. To see something. Anything.

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But nothing stirred behind the windows, and the little numb knot in his gut coiled a little tighter.

He closed his eyes. The Old Man. Lokk, Carel. The Blacksmith. Faces he barely knew, now. His knowing was coming apart at the seams. His head ached, and pain swelled again in red waves across his slashed skin. It was done, he knew. It was time. It had been what he wanted, after all. To leave. His skull was bursting at the edges, stuffed full with half-seen dreams and imagined shadows. His knowing had outgrown this place, and there was more out there to be found, beyond the hills. He and Lokk had always spoken of it. The great adventure, down in the Lowlands, among the Stones, full of people and possibilities.

But it was a dream, and nothing more. Perhaps he had always known that he would be going alone. Lokk was as much a part of this place as the rest, and there would be no changing it. Maybe it was better, this way. He never would have had the heart to tell him.

So he began to walk again. He walked until his feet ached and his joints stiffened. Through trees and over rocks. Up little hills of razor stones. Over brooks of frothing whitewater. Then he ran. Ran until his breath came in gasps, until his lungs burned and his head ached. Till his battered body screamed, wailed, fell quiet, numb with cold. He ran until his breath was fire in his chest, till his throat was raw as winter.

But not away. Not yet. Now that it came to it, he felt unready. It was done, he knew. But how to do it? The hills burned in his legs, an endless slope of shale, but he barely felt it. The paths he knew, where only his feet had trod. No phantom footprints chased him through the trees. No shadows snarled at him from the dark. It was all a dream, and there is nothing to fear from dreams.

He did not know how long he climbed. The sun was all but gone, leaving but a smudge of angry orange light in the west. He was standing over the place where he had buried him. The little patch of upturned earth where the water trickled down over the rocks. He would have liked this place. Behind him, where the black maw of the cave opening in the rock, nothing stirred. The smell of burning had gone, snatched away by the wind, but he could see the faint scorched-black outline of the fire on the rocks beside it. He stood for a time, listening to the creaking of the trees, the whisper of the wind, the crackle of distant hearths, savouring it. Every end means a beginning. He knew enough, still, to know that. And every beginning is worth remembering.

West, then. Out of the hills. Away from the Teeth and their dry-black peaks. Away from the village and the cave and the Blacksmith. He would sleep in the old stormtower, tonight. A little shelter, such as it was. Tomorrow he would come back down out of the hills. He would take what he needed, before the village was awake. Just what he needed, and nothing more. A light pack. Some string for snares. A good skin. An old bow and some arrows if he could find them. He had his little knife, pressed against the inside of his boot, if he needed it. Then he would be away. Ten days out of the hills, a week if the weather held. That again to the valley towns. A month to Uldoroth, all told, by foot.

It was a start. A good start. He had always told the Old Man he wanted to see the white cities. Mountains made by man. Towers that touched the sky. He’d always liked the stories of the Chosen most of all. The Blacksmith had always told him it was foolishness. But the Old Man had understood.

He watched the grave for a time, watched the water trickling down over the rocks from above. He allowed himself to think of him, then. Of the word he had spoken over the fresh earth. In the dimming light, he fancied that it had been a prayer, almost. A prayer for farewell. He smiled. At least he had done one thing right, in this ending of things.

So he came down out of the hills a way, bound on slopes of shale for his rest. His body ached, but the pain was less, now, and his steps were unhurried. The trees peeled back around him as he came, calling him on to his sleep. At last, the black stones of the ruined stormtower were peeking darkly through the pines, glimmering. Not far now. He squinted into the thickening twilight, picking out the faint outline of the clearing through the boughs. Was that the stormdrinker he could see, gleaming in the dirt?

He blinked. Something was stirring beyond the trees. Something black. He stopped in his tracks. Was he dreaming? He hesitated, staring, frozen in place. Or was he awake? Something was moving. Something darker than the gloom. Footsteps without footprints. He squinted into the dim blur, but he couldn’t make it out. What was it? What was here?

He knew he should turn back. He should go home. Back to Rindon. To the little cottage in the trees with its nightwood chest and endless questions. To his waiting. If a word could be broken, it could be remade.

But he didn’t. He couldn’t. So, instead, he took a step forward. Towards the ruined stones. Towards the shapeless shifting of the dusk.

A gasp was all he managed, as the heavy air broke with sound. Just a flinch, a lurch in the gathering dark. Then something hard cracked him on the back of his head, and the night swallowed him up.