Chapter Twenty-Three

A Winter’s Tale

Thawn bid Lore Wenderson’s runner farewell and folded the letter into his satchel. He skulked through the trees in hopes of killing time in quiet rumination. But a kid was already sat on the log by the time he got there.

'You look lonely,’ the boy observed, not peering up from his snow-kissed bench. He swiped a fistful into the rivulet running beneath his feet and his eyes followed it upstream.

Thawn said nothing in reply, mounting the log to sit beside the boy. It lay slanted between two trees either side of the stream. The forest was decorated in lashings of snow where winter has struck. Beyond, they saw distant hedgerows cleaving the land into the fields of scattered farmhouses. Thawn could only see the flecks of cabins and barns to draw out the distance still ahead of him.

‘It’s a habit,’ Thawn said eventually. ‘I’m just waiting.’

The kid scuffed his heels on the underside of the log. ‘You look like a pilgrim,’ he said. ‘Are you a pilgrim?’

‘Of a sort. But not Jask’s kind. That doesn’t scare you?’

The boy shook his head. ‘I’m used to pilgrims, and besides, you’re different to the others,’ he said, and Thawn spotted the mangling of bruises and scars up his sleeves. The boy was underdressed for the weather, and there wasn’t a town for miles he might have come from, except Eden itself.

A runaway. Thawn looked up and spied the distant tip of the Red Cathedral, beyond the fields and marshes. The sight unsettled him. This was as close as he’d come to Eden for many years. Over three hundred.

‘Thank you,’ Thawn said at last.

‘Wasn’t particularly a compliment. Just an observation.’

‘They say a Cerberusless sky brings good luck,’ said Thawn, noting the boy’s stare hang on the thick cloud.

The kid ignored him. ‘If you’re gonna take me back, just get it over with,’ he said.

‘I don’t come from Eden. I am going there though.’ Thawn tilted his head towards the boy, wondering if he may retreat at the facelessness of Thawn’s helmet. But he did no such thing, instead seeming to pierce right through the glass bowl on Thawn’s shoulders, and deep into the ancient pilgrim’s eyes.

'Why?’ he said. ‘Are you from one of the other Seats?’

‘No, I—’

‘I know Winter control the Wetlands.’

‘I’m n—’

‘Or actually you sound like a Salamm type.’

‘I’m a traveller,’ Thawn said simply. ‘I don’t come from anywhere, not for a long time. You could say I have nothing to do with Winter, not anymore.’

‘No one who’s nothing to do with Winter goes Eden, so what are you?’ the kid said, as if it were some immutable fact, and Thawn were a violation against nature. He was right to be sceptical, Thawn thought. In a way, the kid reminded him of himself. Questions. Questions. They are the root of all reason. Does an observation align with one’s facts? If it does not, it must be interrogated, understood, for ignorance is the death of decorum, of debate. Even now, Jaho’s words pierced Thawn.

‘I’m not from Colony Two.’ His words baited the boy for a reaction, but it never came. His gaze only scrutinised Thawn.

‘So why would you even come here then?’ he said.

‘Ah, well, you see I am looking for someone. Someone at Eden. That’s why I’m going.’

'You said you were waiting?’ Hells, the boy was sharp, thought Thawn. He was focusing intensely, well-trained by his minders. None of the subtleties of Thawn’s intonation, no offhand comment, went unprocessed.

‘For my opportunity,’ Thawn clarified. ‘For Jask to make a mistake.’

‘You’ll be waiting a long time. He never leaves the Cathedral.’

‘I have been,’ said Thawn. ‘But it wouldn’t be the first time. He let his guard slip once. I almost succeeded. I’m patient enough to wait for another opportunity.’

‘What will you do while you wait?’

‘I walk. I could never stay in one place for too long though, Jask would hear of it. So, I keep moving. Fort to fort, town to town. Anywhere Winter hasn’t touched.’

‘You must spend a long time looking for somewhere to live then?’ the boy noted.

Thawn smirked. ‘I live a long time. If I’ve been everywhere, and I have, eventually no one remembers me. Then I start again.’

‘I see. So who are you looking for?’

Thawn shook his head. ‘This is all my fault, you see,’ he said abstractly. Again, the boy’s stare strangled him, but he waited for Thawn to continue. ‘I knew Jask a long time ago. There was an accident, one where I could have saved him, but didn’t. That was my first mistake.’

‘And the second?’

‘Not making sure he was dead.’ By the old gods, how in hells did he survive that fall, Thawn thought. His chest was sheered open. His mind clenched, and he felt himself transported to the dunes of Forlorn for a moment.

The kid considered Thawn again. ‘What was the third mistake?’ he asked perceptively.

Thawn smiled. Children are the custodians of curiosity. A pity their successors are so otherwise inclined, Jaho’s voice said whimsically.

‘I loved someone else, a woman.’

The boy recoiled, evidently disgusted. He picked at some bark and rubbed it between his fingers. ‘You loved the Old One?’ Again, he caught onto every facet of Thawn’s meaning.

‘Not the man you know now. A long, long time ago.’ Once more, the boy stewed on Thawn’s words, taking him at his word, even the apparent impossibility of his age. ‘You see, the person I’m looking for is her son. I believe Jask is taunting me. Punishing me for loving her.’ He was sure of it.

‘I’m not really old enough to understand stuff like that. When I run away, I usually just talk to myself,’ the boy said. ‘It’s nice to have someone to talk to. Even if you are funny.’ For the first time he showed a flash of vulnerability.

‘It’s not the first time?’ Thawn asked. The kid shook his head. ‘I can take you somewhere else, if you like. You don’t have to go back.’ Oh, but what life would that be? Thawn cursed himself. The child surviving hand-to-mouth, town to town, on the roads, alone. It was no way for a boy to grow. At Eden, he was fed, clothed and well-rested. An irony, Thawn thought, that the safest way of life was under Winter’s thumb. Travelling was a dangerous game for the ill-prepared. It’s why vagrants always travelled in packs.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

The boy looked at Thawn, apparently unsure as to how to react, a tautness in his features. He shook his head furiously. ‘I have friends at Eden. The masters feed me.’

From his satchel, Thawn produced a wrap of spit-roasted boar he had lifted from a fort some miles back. He offered it to the boy who snatched without hesitation, mumbling his thanks through a full mouth.

The pilgrim chuckled then and looked down to see plates of ice gathering at the banks of the stream. The cold was coming in.

Thawn wondered how long the Patents might wait for him until they lost all patience. Certainly not forever. How cunning and perfect of Jask to make Thawn’s mission his own blood. That, to succeed, and clear his debt to the machines, Thawn must trade his own son to them. A son he had never known but a son nonetheless. It was enough to sow a drop of doubt in Thawn’s mind, to restrain him from storming Eden’s gate without regard. And hope that with caution there was a middle way, where the boy might survive his ordeal.

But Thawn knew there was no redemption from this. Moonwater was a fatal disease. His son would die eventually, and he would have to meet him before he did.

Abbadiah Thawn had allowed Jask to live for far too long, his second mistake, and that made the fate of Colony Two his own doing.

Man and child were split by a long silence. ‘Will you take me back?’ the kid said. It was a request, not a question, and Thawn caught his stare linger on the spires of the Red Cathedral, where Jask lay in wait.

He nodded. The boy skipped from the log to the edge of the stream.

‘I’ll take you as far as the marshes,’ announced Thawn. The farmhouses were likely empty in this weather. The spotters’ posts might be deserted too.

Thawn’s plan had always been one of patience. Jask had Erebus. Jask’s fortress was impenetrable. So, he would wait, for error or uprising, to rid Jask of his security. But neither came. In all his time on Colony Two, Jask had swatted away only minor rebellions, like petty flies, and Thawn could count the number on one hand.

Agloff Ashborne was his other opening. Jask would open his gates with open arms to that boy. Why he had not simply given up, Thawn could not say. After all, it hardly seemed reasonable for a teenage boy to reappear hundreds of years after they went missing. But Agloff’s body was never found. Everyone in the massacre of the Underground had been accounted for, save a handful.

Such was the strength of Jask’s conviction that Agloff was not dead, he was prepared to wait it out. Colony Two was Jask’s last stand against Thawn.

A curious stalemate. The entire Colony was the scene of two men’s standoff.

‘If you aren’t Jask’s kind of pilgrim, what sort of pilgrim are you?’ the child asked as they filtered from the trees, onto the first of a row of farmers’ fields.

Thawn sighed. ‘Jask modelled Winter after an ancient religion. You see, Winter was a part of this bigger order called the Sign of the Tondrus, thousands and thousands of years ago, back when people here still lived in caves.’ Thawn paused to see how confused the boy looked. Content that he was following, Thawn continued. ‘The Sign, and Winter with it, spread, built on dozens of worlds. And each world had its own Arm of Winter. We called this world Torgan. You see, children whose parents couldn’t look after them were taken into the Church of Winter.’

'You mean their parents were dead?’ the boy asked.

‘Or criminals. I never knew mine. I guess we have that in common,’ he said, and the boy smiled, warmed by this fact. ‘Jask and I clung to the old gods, to the Tenets, where most folk forgot. You see, Winter was a military church, raised on warfare, and when war was over… well, the Sign thought it best forgotten.’

‘We were taught about the Tenets. Order and Disorder; Arrar and Vannar.’

‘Exactly,’ Thawn replied, amused that Jask, in all his butchering of Winter, had at least preserved its founding doctrine. ‘Like how it’s easier to knock a snowman over than it is to make one, the universe favours Disorder—’

‘Vannar,’ the boy interjected.

‘Quite. So, to maintain Order, Arrar, it must be manually enforced. Left alone indefinitely, society always tends to disorder and anarchy.’

‘We were also told about Arval-Harra,’ the boy said.

Thawn smiled, transported again to his lessons at the old citadel, and the cold walls of the Church. He would sit cross-legged before Jaho, a class of no more than half a dozen, as she commanded their attention with made-up words like Arrar and Vannar.

'Ah yes. Arval-Harra. The Wilful Balance. That’s what I was saying, that in order to enforce Arrar, Vannar needs manual correction. Balance only exists between order and entropy if you will it so, else the universe favours entropy.’

The boy dragged his foot like a snake through the snow, looked at Thawn, ‘We were told Arval-Harra only applies to people and societies though. The natural world must always tend to Vannar. It cannot be resisted.’ The boy’s voice was reliably precise and careful. Thawn could see him deliberating on each word, like he were reciting for an exam. Like Thawn, he was probably used to the whip if he got it wrong.

‘That’s right. There is a distinction between the worlds of Pillion and Iyarra.’

‘What?’ the boy said with a quizzical look.

‘Pillion and Iyarra. Man and nature. You were never taught them?’ The boy shook his head and Thawn hmmph’d. ‘The real Winter had three dualisms; order-disorder, man-nature, known-unknown.’ Thawn’s voice began to tail off as he spoke to himself. ‘Weird he’d remove the other two.’

'So, our Winters are different?’ the boy asked.

Thawn nodded down at him. ‘Would seem so. Do you believe in it? Arval-Harra?’

The boy nodded. ‘Yeah, I guess. It makes sense, from what we’re taught. You have to work at something to make it good. Doesn’t just happen.’

‘I agree. I never objected to Arval-Harra. Society needs order and you cannot trust it to find its way on its own. I disagree though, with Winter’s methods. Assassination, manipulation, decimation, or, in Colony Two’s case, subjugation. There are other routes to order.’ Thawn could feel his mind drift, but he snapped it back.

The boy shrugged his shoulders, stuffing his hands into his pockets. ‘Meh, if it works, it works. Jask said everyone under Cerberus used to be criminal and no-good vagabonds. The only way to stop them hurting each other was to control them, teach them. Now people live longer and better.’

Thawn could see in the boy the same infallible conviction in the system that he once had. That Winter’s brutal way was the only way.

‘Do you not resent the fact Winter takes you from your home and beats you. If you didn’t, why run away?’ He said, intrigued by the boy more and more. It was like staring into a mirror, where he could interrogate his younger self.

The kid shrugged limply. ‘Why did you leave Winter?’ he replied accusingly.

‘I never quite did. Me and Jask were created to fight a war against machines. Winter experimented, created super soldiers by mutilating children. Me, and Jask. We can’t die, at least like you can. But we can be killed through very particular means. Even starving yourself takes hundreds of years. And it hurts.’

‘You did that?’ the boy said, horror-struck. The child needed no convincing of the absurdity of Thawn’s truth. He simply accepted it as was.

‘Our bodies are wired otherwise. Makes us stronger, faster, better reflexes. We’re less prone to insanity too, able to cope with minimal mental stimulation. I can’t change what Winter did to me. I will always be a part of that.’ The boy was an outlet, more than he was a conversationalist. Thawn was telling truths he had told none but himself.

Death was a curious thing. Its inevitability spurred its avoiders. Give a man forever in which to do something and he would surely never get around to it. Give a man till tomorrow, well, he’ll be getting on with it right away.

‘What actually happened to your Winter in the end, after the war I mean?’

‘We were hunted, burned like witches. Fire is a good way to kill us. They called it the Long Hunt. Jask and I were exiled. He later took Winter, and a handful of devotees, and remade it in his name.’

‘But why?’

Thawn took a deep breath. ‘I think he wanted to remind me.’ Again, Thawn felt himself walking through the dunes to the Tower on Forlorn. The snow became sand, and the sky turned clear, its uncaged sun baking down over the desert, with no relief. ‘Or maybe he wanted to hurt me.’

Thawn was then distracted by some distant animal racing across the fields. He could see the edge of the farmland a quarter mile or so hence, and the Cathedral had grown unsettlingly large in his eyeline. ‘I think this is far as I go. This is where we part, young one,’ he said at a line of shrubs and barbed wire. They were close to the outskirts of the old city.

‘I’m gonna miss you, Sir.’ The boy craned his neck at Thawn and wrapped his wiry arms around the pilgrim’s leg.

Thawn stooped to his knee. He reached a finger to the side of his helmet, and it hissed, and the tint shrouding his face subsided. ‘And I, you, little one. Come here.’ The child swung himself around Thawn again. ‘No matter what, promise me you’ll look out for yourself. Question everything. Be scared. Be curious. And do the right thing. Every single time. Okay?’

‘I promise,’ the boy said, his face gawking up at Thawn’s.

The kid had made the day pleasant, let alone palatable. Raising a hand, Thawn waved the boy farewell, strangely spellbound.

He then reached into his satchel and produced the folded letter the runner had handed him at last. It bore the seal of Lore Wenderson: the head of an ox, caught in a spider’s web. It was addressed simply, ‘Wolf’. Thawn broke the wax and read:

Wolf,

The day is at hand now. I hear whispers, solid enough, that Malvo Jask himself is near bed-ridden. He is without hope the boy will ever return. And his other pursuits fare equally grimly I am told. Though the Apostle Ardul of Stormdown stands well-placed as his successor, I am sure that any transition would be messy, uncertain, even under the most favourable conditions for Winter. The Spider insists now is our moment.

But a spanner is in our works, brother. Come in haste. I have a gift for you.

The Ox

Thawn folded it back into his satchel and sighed. The end of their war was near now, he was sure; a damp chill on the air told him things were about to change, for better or worse. One of them, Thawn or Jask, were bound to wind up dead in front of the other, Thawn knew. It was a satisfying thought, regardless of the outcome.

With that, Thawn turned back whence he came, and trudged through his footsteps in the other direction, wondering what gift Lore Wenderson might have waiting for him.