Chapter 13 : All That You Wish

Winter’s first fall proved a capricious dust and soon did the clouds recede all advance. Quicker than first they formed, the snows melted away, and that fitful storm reclined into some shadow of the horizon where it would not be seen again. Yet its breach had caught the world undertow unaware, and so petals of summer sank grey and wheat-yards blenched under dismay. It was so, in the hours thereafter, that the trealderflies and the great horonails—who glided on lard and gaped to swallow the bold but most premature of clouds—went south with some haste. In vivid feathers and elsewhere scaled grey, they would be a frightening sight amidst the low swards and reign as kings of wherever they lay. Yet in the sky Arakvan’s taint was scorched from them, the sun fostered a loving grace, and like brute angels since survived the storm, they came with shining scutes and quills that blazed, guiding all others to better earths.

From below a tangle of hard trees, Ulf and his furrfiends peered up at the otherworldly thing through their oaken web, while it coursed opposite of them. It surfed light. Its yawns were gladdening thunder. But it was in moments beyond them, and the sky was empty and sad again in the wake of the mighty horonail. Horral seemed in particular effect at the sight, as if he imagined that the whale-like monarchs abandoned the land below not to nobler kin. There were still scars on his chest from those powers that loathed the sun.

Though winter was far off yet and the Faraday Solstice a distant dream, its winds went uninformed. The land was cold, worsened while their path winded upward to steeper steppes. The grass shrunk ankle-side. It dried of its colour and crushed under rock, and stone conquered the realm ahead with grey salts and sheer monoliths worsted by time’s hand. It was a plateau of crawled, impoverished earth, that grasped at the esteem of mountains from mounds of waylaid ore. Sound moved heavily there, and though the trees were scarce, where they grew they grew crooked and brawn. Blair hogs stalked the distant country. Birds of fierce ilk cawed when hunt was given between that bouldered affray, and in shadowed slouches of sod they made their home. All routes were an oxbowing contrition of land, vast and molested, prey under the giant barbs of Teroe in the realm of Thedrun. The journey from then on hassled the boot, so by Eidrik was Thedrun again cursed. They could be by naught alleviated whilst under the dark of the Cleft. Not even the man-sized flyers drew so high as to grace its image.

In their stroll, Horral began upon its history. He claimed mystics of the under-Isyncra and the outer-plain gnatkins might too recall, but do so dubiously, that the barren mountain of Teroe was once whole, sporting health in its shadow in aeons past. Though in times of honour and glory, before that tyranny of Scourge and Patch, when Arakvan was yet young and unnamed, a king called Taerovin marched north, for battle against an enemy long forgotten in the bowels of the Morlen Saints. Yet the young mountain defied his passage, said Horral, so with a sword of onyx the King tore the old rock asunder, from sky to root, and through that carved Cleft tread he and his warband. Behind their advance, the land sickened, feeling of its wound. Its flourish dissipated and its beasts fell to frenzy, and ever did the clouds hail. It was told that the mountain fathered that wretched stretch of earth, so that in its death its kin went wild and untamed and, above all, uncared for. Myth alone could well recall that the King Taerovin and his warband never arrived at the great lurch of the Morlen Saints, but that the sons of the Cleft, with fang and claw, followed those men into the stricken heart of the mountain, and there laid them to waste.

Storymen and their arts would have it believed that those fallen of the army unsung still manned their passage, though in sight of its dejected perimeter and all banal and miserable flush within, myth was indeed optimistic. The land before them was denied the triumph of the tales it inspired, but possessed the sorrow of a thing embraced by time alone. It simply was and forever had it been. In aeons more, when language was to be forgot, it would persist. Horral dared to ponder if he and his compatriots could ever belong to some such fool’s myth of the neighbour era. It was joy and dread to imagine what awaited them in the ancient hollows of rock.

Frail was the Whilderwheats’ claim to that morose sprawl. Maps marked it as the border battling between Thedrun and the wheats and as so it sat the sulky crafts of division. At the end of that glum crawl higher, the Cleft perched like a lighthouse, and its height was such that the mounds slumbering cumbersome at its feet seemed flatter than dirt; depressed waves. The mountain stood alone, a spiral in a sea, and all around it lurked the half-damned and the sore-eyed that could survive and feed still in a place so barren—so dolefully starved. Wolves wearing skin rotten and not their own; elk under antlers slathered in tar; reptiles with most bone revealed; and Ulf, Eidrik, and old Horral, who tread amongst them as both vigorous enemies and outland thralls, unbeknownst yet to the new hardness of Teroe’s Shade, and thus lesser than prey. It was a subdued, cackling land; a wart in the world, befouled but in secret. They could not catch its dire crafts neatly in the eye.

From atop faraway cliffs, the ridges of distant caves, uncanny glints came against them, but hooves did not trot and talons did not reach. They were guests, honoured in some chilling order like soundless sacrifice, as if their meat was to be stored for worthier fiends, or perhaps what once marauded and devoured then roamed sick and feeble, and so the Shade had no defences left to mount in its graveyards. Eidrik doubted that comfort. The winds reported to and fro, betwixt crags as if to herald schemes. When his eyes met to Ulf, he wondered if the outlander too could hear them. The trees were slender, unwell shrouds, too akin to stalking folk when in the periphery. Eidrik pondered with what ease his axe could crack them.

Over that badland were old dooms they slipped along and over. A hill very near them yet still a spyglass apart, became a battlefield in the attuned study. Aged smokes still wafted about it, slothfully up from the bedrock. The scent of decay ran rank in the passing gales. And over stone and dirt, the slain lay abandoned in their crummy irons. Much were of a crest blue and gold and cheaply clad, bearing polearms and broadswords. Others bent—broken—under broadcloths of violet with grizzled, uneven chins itching out of their halfhelms. Capes of navy hung from upped lances like flags in the breeze. Sigils of a hand half-man and half-monstrous, with a bandaged thumb, marked the burly dead.

Horral, aloud, wagered Galehaven had again overstepped in its claims of Arakvan’s north, where in a season gone only the snow would rule, and surmised that the Baelgarth had descended to remind their lords why the Cleft was for so long and by so many unwalked. Yet glory belonged to neither, as far did the carnage splash to scour the crannies of shallow Thedrun, and from all the woe and bloodshed no new flags were raised and no new thrones were fashioned. Eidrik shrugged, adamant that it mattered none. When curiosity called and they glanced at Ulf to see how he fared before the slaughter of a land not his own, they discovered in their lapse that the outlander had left them, and with a frustrated haste rebounded towards him, who amidst the unknown and the ghastly quickly emerged as an authority.

His step seemed detachment, though they guessed some learned foresight governed it, to bade him ever on. Evil did live in those burning hills. Shambling in the brooks were wilted things, born of fire. Each of their triad had sound tell of which ways to reject. In the calm of composed paths, Horral told tales of intahrin: men revived, at the will of maggots. Black skulls smoked of colour, sweeps of sluggish rusts. Charred, ceaseless things rose up, and Horral vowed that they knew contempt for those yet to join them in death. Their witless floundering could do naught to ensnare the trialed however, so as tales they remained.

Forward they marched, through the trickle of undeath and down a bank to a lowly, pitted terrace, where a stream of murky foams and—in them—fish flowed. There, the sentries did not dabble. Dribbling, it led lower and revealed, below an eave of underbrush, a pond; bubbling wan and silver. Pine trees numbered downcast, gluttonous over the basin to dip to its hoary boons, sought by a tentative cold on its edges and a glimmer quite sickly to its depth, as if sipped in passing by the Deln arr’ Chnek. But alas, day aged, tiredness thinned the muscle of the calf, and the furrfiends could forgo their hunger not an hour longer, as could the outlander at their helm.

They stalled there, in search of cod and prowlus, appreciative of the shade that kept the crows from them and cooled those festering binds of their soles and shins. Eidrik found pleasure in avoiding the sight of the Northman, though Horral could not help but gawk through some old astonishment at his endless, malnourished gravity. He wondered if perhaps there was not a man at all in their company, but instead some wicked hybrid of the Scourge that learned to speak like one. It could be, under all his scars and leather, that Ulf bore the body of a kinnit and procured through that animosity his stamina, but his demeanour did wield all the ache of man. Not even a kinnit nourished in the slights of despotism could achieve the sulk of his brow. No, thought Horral, he is far too monstrous to be anything but man.

Eidrik sludged into the shallow brim of the pond. He snapped a gnarly root from its tree and poised it overhead like a spear, then worked to fetch supper. His jabs could catch nothing, though when time waned and chance struck, what fell impaled by his makeshift lance was too diseased or puny for men to eat unailed. Horral sat himself in the thorned wreath of a young hornbeam. From his perch, he dangled his feet boyishly then turned to taunt Eidrik, with sharp jests of his slowness, but Eidrik carried on, unamused in his labours, and Horral laughed alone. Ulf stood very near, still with his back to the water and his focus upon the surrounding hills that dwarfed their gullet. Always vigilant he was, and in that thought Horral succumbed to a pity that glummed his callow lounge and brought a softness down to that form of cold black studs.

“Trees won’t grab you, friend,” he joked. “The soil here is timid, forgone by nastier things. You can let yourself lay a moment.”

“Only a moment,” said Ulf. “Such is the quicker thing’s kill.”

“I don’t believe it. Don’t think I can: that you came all this way, from the faraway North, never sleeping an hour late, never feasting where you could starve and still live.” Horral bowed to the wilderness and questioned their barbarism anew. “I wouldn’t make it a week if that week was just wandering and carving. Not without our fisherman here at least, to catch the hand when it falls. Not without a pie there and again, to reward my good efforts, of course.”

To no surprise, Ulf did not receive him and, to some displeasure, he did not answer.

“But we are worlds apart, I suppose,” continued Horral, less proud and himself. “I wager from where you hail, my pies and jests would leave me quite still, pale under the snow. Though all your power and your will, alow the roofs of our sort, would rend you perhaps the most miserable guest there ever was.” He chuckled. “Aye, the sward’s best come only hopeless to a dinner table. But by the campfire, there’s none you’d want more, to tend to you in the bleakest loss of day. It’s a good thing Arakvan is all cold and grey, Northman. I fear we both would not belong otherwise.”

Some spur of flies, some wind through leaves stole Ulf’s attention, to Horral’s humour and wonder both. “You have a home?” Ulf asked simply, careless.

“Oh, I have hundreds, my friend. On the rug of every soul I’ve saved and every town I’ve shielded, aye, I’ve a place to lay my head a little while. ‘Course it’s all hard and shit-spewn hay, but I say anywhere out from under the stars is worth giving thanks for.”

“Until your host cuts you in the night and gratitude leaks out over your chest,” Ulf groaned. “You’ll find allies on your road, but there is no end to the march where folk forget their hunger nor where the silver’s hid.”

“They’d be disappointed,” said Horral through a giggle. “I’m afraid goodwill earns little in the way of fortune. Enough for an inn’s stay and to keep the cane razored, scarce more. But I’d not have it otherwise, not in this life or another. So many lords, so many noble families over Galehaven her people never recall… What is their extravagance worth, I wonder, if all that look up against it loathe the shimmer?”

“A man of the people.”

“Then you’re accustomed?” Horral asked. “What, someone you slew spoke similar?”

Ulf came divided by a sudden breeze, as if it dragged birds of prey behind it. “Good-minded folk do well being slain on their own,” he dismissed.

“I’m caught off-guard, Northman,” said Horral slowly. “Here I thought it would not be till we were in the jaws of S’va Kotai that you at last denied me my evil, in sight of the truth of what lay under the skin. But it is strange that we may call each other good, without names to go with it.”

“Your mind is good,” he said bluntly. “Your deeds are another thing, Horral.”

Their bond, with only that spoken soreness to shear the air of it, was made uneven. Eidrik glanced at the pair behind him, suspending his search for a short moment to gaze warningly upon their phantom, who knew more than he should and lied longer than he must.

“Arrenfaeld, then,” the older man realized, leaning back in his wreath with a gape of fascination, a tinge of mild spite. “You followed us longer than you let us believe… My deeds are bloody, Northman,” Horral admitted. “Certainly; a mark of the territory. Evil even, by meek standards you have without doubt abandoned. But at day’s end, when my blade comes slack to my side again and at last, the world is left a blood-splat better. A yard, known to one fewer fear.” He puzzled himself, wobbled with his certainties. “It is a weight adrift, I suppose, quite elusive to any satisfaction I may mount, but real when my hands come to it. And you, stranger of no name, with steel, secrets tight ever to your chest—can you say Arakvan is greater with you than it was without? Hrm? Might you lay claim to whatever goodness it is that you dream of then deny in me?”

Their offense, their ponderings, all the passion of their stock and the assiduity for their trade meant nothing to Ulf. His cloak flapped past them like the backhand of patent neglect and returned to the plains he was. When his voice came, it came sombre and forbidding, and in deliverance that wretched place coarsened, quieted to bless its chorale.

“No,” said Ulf Eldric, “for it does not exist. And if you must have my name then call me Ulf, but you may rue the burden of it.”

There it rang and in the wind it hung, befouling of all below it. It was a name spoken like a curse; the trapped air of a centuried crypt escaping out under the finding sun; the dead air at discovery’s end. Fate could indeed prove Ulf a bane against them all, yet Horral was not so young and sporadic to align with fret in the face of the first shudder. He bided his time, chewed his words, glared enraptured upon the shade afloat in their midst, wafting with its last fragment of identity; the echo that sought. So sheer was the dark of his garb, it appeared to mortal eyes that the air around him altered, tormented by his touch, tangled to grant the churl his proper canvas. So immense seemed his presence, the wilds could do naught to stomach him.

“Hrm,” nodded a reckoning Horral. “Ulf. Fitting, for a man of so few words.” He hopped down from his tree and paced before the Northman, earning his steady watch. “But I find it almost misleading… aye. It’s far too simple for one as riddled as you.”

“You imagine every leaf has a story,” said Ulf, turning apart again.

“And they all do,” he pressed, slipping with him away. “A happening needn’t be grand to become a tale. It might stay as simple as the fall from the tree and the stomping into dust. Beaten about by wind, plain-to-plain, then dried over grass till Winter’s coming, when a boot cracks it at last down to shards.” He strode alongside the outlander, and shoulder-to-shoulder they beheld the stirring cliffs of Teroe’s Shade. “Some stories are duller than our dour minds can imagine, others are so extraordinary a lifetime by quill couldn’t capture the sense of it, but a leaf is a leaf, and all have their part when the gale rides through.”

Ulf said nothing, and Horral spoke on.

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“We are no different—no nobler, of course. Some of us will die vain, falling to long and arduous respites. Blind ever to any glint of any joy. The boy orphaned by the beast and soulless by its killing. Yes, some hug the bastard sorrow forever, and like winter greens they fade off into nothing… but every leaf might in time shed new colour, no? Turn gem from dross; blow off and out from its divot to see the sunrise again. Someday, aye. Our tales are left to us to decide, and though they may come without the ink and the snap-escape of their agonies as does a book, they are not frightless. Not easy, to walk as well as they write. They take everything we have and leave only bone, and at the fading we must wonder if our tale was one ever worth being told. It is a marvelous cost, to be remembered.”

They shared that horizon. Its vast, vacuous embrace—flickering gold and tempered by goring hills—stained them, and in its silence the gales were all; couriers for the absolute.

“I fear it every day, y’know,” said Horral, older under evening’s light. It was a scouting flash, ensuring there was not a youth aboard the earth that could still be believed to be everlasting. “Dying for nothing… that old thought does haunt me, Ulf. Even when I know what I do is good, it serves me no escape. Not a second of certainty. Why, it’s folly to try. All men and women and maybe beasts too have to fight what they are. They have to decide, eventually, amidst the toiling and the unbearable, if they’ll seek out purpose, or if they are to be that purpose themselves.”

“And what are you?” asked Ulf, plain.

“An old fool,” he sighed. “Whose lived too long and thought too hard on things that will far outlast him.”

“Then were your years worth it?”

Horral grinned and the sun filled his teeth. “That, my friend, will be told at my tale’s end. We can do nothing but hope until then. And I do. I hope, truly, it is a wonderful end.”

Ulf stared into that endless sprawl of stone and field. He narrowed his gaze against it, striving to see something more, something at its end that could be worth all that barred it away. But he could see only a sly, winking light and a scowl set in.

“Hope cannot aid us,” he said. “It offers no arms to quell the world’s feral.”

“Nothing can,” Horral concurred. “But still, we march on, track our shins through wheat. And we fight, whilst calluses take even the spared finger. Still, we journey to the plain’s end, intent on seeing something mayhaps a spot better… don’t we? It’s between here and there and all the leagues between that we decide what that is.”

“And if there is nothing?” asked Ulf. “Nothing to be… nothing to want. If it’s only fields, then the frosts and an ever fainter delusion that it’ll end? What have you left, by sunset, Horral? Only the truth that you were wrong and a shame you must meet to death.”

“If that’s what you believe, Ulf,” said Horral, earnest, “then you would not have carried on this long. You know same as I that Arakvan cannot be wholly evil. You’re just yet to find something good enough to blot out the bad. This, I know. The struggle finds us all.”

Ulf scoffed. “And this you have for me?” he guessed. “You’ve a purpose, tucked to your sleeve or your next false arm, so noble it will make me cast off my journeyman’s cloak and blade, and join you in song?”

“You did not need to aid us against the Gleeman,” he said with a sternness. “But you did, and in doing so betrayed your own efforts to seem soulless, so speak no more of my songs. There is a worthier fight for us both than what these swards and cliffs can offer, Ulf. There is a fight for Arakvan’s heart, in distant plains, and my vanity is the trust that your wicked blade should number one day among the victors.”

“Many men I’ve seen, Horral, with goodwill a gloss upon them,” Ulf said, with the harsh aura of threat. “Many men I’ve seen buried in the name of dreams half-made. All that you wish, however tender it may touch the mind, is but damnation when hands blacken to make it true. And there you are left, in the scattered clouds of your long fantasy, with nothing left to grasp at but a memory of a time better.”

His last words were loud pelts and battered the peace of Horral’s resolution. In impatience and dire nerve, Ulf strode to the mouth of the pond where Eidrik splashed and sprung failingly, and in a swift unsheath and a brutal thrust, a stark-gilled sterlet came up impaled from the basin. He tossed the slaughtered thing to Eidrik, who caught it against his chest, then Ulf was gone up the cliffside beyond.

They were very quiet then on, and quietly it was that Eidrik pleaded his caution to Horral with nothing more than slanted eyes. Yet the aged furrfiend only shrugged and fell towards the Northman’s shadow. Uneasily, Eidrik stalked after them, with fish and axe in-hand and a frown set upon his face, that failed to match the green primality of his gaze. With them was a wolf, yet decided on its supper, but again, Horral clinged to his faith. The wetness of the fish darkened Eidrik’s glove. The cut into its gills was precise and whole. By the slit, it was well hollowed.

That putrid excuse of a lake proved to be their last solace, as beyond, the land accented, walled them away with piling crags. Walking was then only for the ridges between climbs, and after an hour of scraping hands against stone and lining fingers with the dirt of those sharp ascents, the trio breached the plateau of Teroe. Though conniving branches and starved moss swarmed along the cliffsides to their flank, there the land was deprived of right life. So it was with rock that the expanse stretched some ways, through the uncouth and many broken boulders. At the plateau’s heart, like the door at the end of a disorderly stairwell, laid the mighty mountain, split atwo. The path between was coarse, ragged, jumbling between altitudes for a distance, and at its sides the mountain stacked to curve over it and pinch the sky. This, they named the Cleft, and indeed it was a cleaved thing, brutishly askew, hewed seemingly by a colossal garrote. Wind rode through the path and to their ears, even from afar, it was a daunting, sinister whisper, luring them into those great stone jaws. The plateau continued to climb all the way to the doorway, so up the rock they lugged themselves unopposed.

“There she lies,” heaved Horral, prevailing upon his hundredth mount. “What madness can drive a man to seek such a forsaken road, I can only wonder,” he glanced at Ulf, “and you can only sheathe to your frown. At least we know it dire.”

“Don’t be daunted,” said Eidrik to the Northman. “The Baelgarth prey on Galehavenin stock. We step carefully, keep our voices low, and only the wind might assail us, but she too rides cruelly when the boot sits unsteady.”

The Baelgarth, whose title was a groan of caution, were kinnits, who for only survival banded together and by rumor had Ulf become accustomed to. Through what decree called just persecution, the half-men learned enervation, and through fatigue at last they learned violence. It was so when Galehaven, at command of the Pale Vithicar when he was yet young and without veins to count his faults, pushed the first kinnit paradise—a ragged slum—into the sea, that they scattered and, blood-sewn, understood without arms they would go accosted to earth’s end. Many learned embrace and retreated to the outer realm, while others rallied, then returned assault. Through their spoils they came apt for war, and word spread plague-like through the lands of their presence that would not succumb again. The kinnits of Arakvan, from then on, were offered a choice at their very conception, if they survived their mother’s knife: Embrace suffering and long flight, or become all that was feared in them and own a walk of earth again. Sanctuary could not reside on a cloud. What emerged from the dwindling was battle-tested and larger than any coffin that had ever come for them.

Solitude became what man could not soon reach, and so in cliffsides and caves and some horrid slots of the underearth they gathered. It was so rumoured and feared amidst the streets of Galehaven that one year, wind would break, the cold would freeze the Clergy’s steel, and down from their hills the Baelgarth would come, with patient fury and long without mercy. With each frigid gale that fell through the Cleft of Teroe, a warped ear followed it.

“I do hope you understand what you face,” said Horral, raising over a scarp. “The Cleft makes for quick passage north, if the time is desperate and its purse spilling, but for wise cause it is shunned.”

Ulf blew up the cliff face; his steps precise and his mantles firm. “I have seen a hundred shunned lands, Horral. Your mountain will not turn me.”

“And how is it you’ve discovered such skill that great dangers are little things to you, eh?” he wondered. “Surely, the Gargantan alone could not teach you all your power, else our Clergy would march to melt the snows with each season changed.”

“It taught me sight,” he said staidly. “True sight, unburdened. When that is learned, the rest arrives with ease.”

“Am I to believe you are without fear? That will be a handy insight indeed, when I must save your spine from the joust of Baelgarth.”

“Your beliefs are your own and so they should stay, but of course I fear a many things.”

“Yet nothing clawed, furred, or steep, it seems.”

Ulf stopped then and turned at a low summit to watch Horral scamper up the side. When he stood with him on that rock, the Northman parried all Horral’s gall back against him.

“A soldier does not fear a sword, does he? He fears its cut and this you know well, rebel,” said Ulf. “What then lower than a soldier am I, to fear the grandfather’s fable?”

“You’d prefer silence all the way up the mountain?” Horral laughed.

“You come too easily distracted, too keen for your grinning comforts. This will slow us,” hissed Ulf. “If we are slowed to a stop, I’ll see you and your curiosities plummet from the Cleft.”

Eidrik was last to reach the summit and up he came with stiff paranoia widening his eye. He strode between Horral and Ulf and threw the latter a warning ire; his frown stuffed in threat. Ulf swerved aside in swift forfeit, for an intolerance of delay and an urge to find worthier focus. Slowed not for their inquisitions, his silhouette vanished behind the crowns of sharper bluffs.

Horral grinned at his expertise, yet to be bothered by it. His smile shined, as though the Northman left them in his tracks then, before he did indeed have the heart to make his pace light. Eidrik was not subject to that same adoration and he stopped there upon the cliff, confronting over a dry valley the Cleft and, coveting some unspoken thing, Eidrik looked to his companion. There was a fullness in his disfavour and, knowing the sight of severity, Horral’s pleasure fell away.

“Aye,” granted Horral. “He’s far from the kindest we’ve shared our road with.”

Eidrik watched while his old friend spoke, then paced past him, to gaze unattuned upon the looming mountain that was a dagger to stars. Evening had come. With it came harsher winds, dimmer depths but with more unknown to fear within them, and a discomfort of the spirit that bade words sharp and willed aches unignored.

That plain and all its blight was a reckoning in wait and beyond waited nothing better. There was Eritle, a village of squalor, sickness, behind a curtain of utter rock that laid teeming with half-beasts and their predators, whose wild malice was complete. All of it was to be suffered and all of it endured, for the sake only of a stranger with his cold heart and unyielding blade, so blood-etched it may well have been his own limb. Eidrik struggled there, in sight of that bedeviled rock, to see some goal in the outlander, or some greatness in Eritle, or even a goodness to be unearthed in the march between. He found risk and ruin alone and his shoulders sank.

“What is it, Horral…?” he asked. “What is it you hope to find out here?”

“Same as ever,” Horral answered. “A way out, for us all.”

“A way out, you say?” Eidrik echoed, doubtful.

A brood came over Horral, with all the Cleft’s peril fat in his gawk. His words slowed, lessened. Through them came a vagueness of intent; an irresolute spirit. “It has to be out here…” he hoped, with the rasp of many years melding his tongue. “Something we missed, a risk we didn’t take before… a secret our eyes lapped…!”

And Eidrik heard Horral’s age flush out his heart. “A secret, heh?” Eidrik watched his friend carefully then. By bladework, done day through night, and wayward strides from gully to rock and everywhere amidst, he suspected if in part Horral fell away from what was real; split to despair by that intangible breadth. Fashioned from sorrow into an aspirant of change, he laboured through the need to not be no one; to live as more than a cog in that infernal engine. The old fellow may well have attached himself to the dream of something better, so tautly the skin tore. But better was few and far between, Eidrik knew, and now that high wish aimed daring to the mountain of old Teroe and its visitor ghost. “And you’ve found it…” he reasoned, trying to see sense. “In this… runaway butcher.”

“I know you miss them,” said Horral, nodding his faith. “I know. It’s been long… but we can return ourselves, or in-hand with something new, Eidrik. Something that stands a chance to change things, to prick the red fist…! I know you want—”

“What I want is for our friends to know we’re still alive!” Eidrik cut. “I’ve no want to sleep soundly knowing each night, they stare out over the walls, guessing if they might never see us come under ‘em again, while we’re off in the hills playing at some fantasy—some game. I don’t want to sleep, Horral, knowing each night they fear for us—I can’t!”

“And what then is our second choice?” Horral demanded, his ire whetted. “To run home with nothing? To stake them all, for our greed to not walk alone any longer?” He shook his head. “The path is hard, Eidrik—yes, but it must run a ways yet, or it shall keep hard forever. And not only for we who walk the plains, but for each in the byways too. I know you’ve not forgotten! For the sons and daughters of the vile—”

“Valiant words are as good as any to die on,” said Eidrik, “but your rich soul means naught if it’s snuffed out mountainside—”

“For the Clergy’s plighted—!”

“—while our blades belong south! And not with this—this dark wanderer!”

“They belong where there is good to be done!” Horral snapped. “Where they might aid another! Galehaven is of a thousand protectors, Eidrik, but what has Eritle? What has every home and farm alow the Haddlebush? What had Arrenfaeld!”

“For silver, we carve up monsters,” Eidrik scolded, his bother become antipathy, set to smoulder. “That’s all we do. Arrenfaeld was awful—a shut eye to the All-Father that its like comes never again—but it would be a lie to meet awful things to low odds, as if we might stand in way of ‘em. How long will you pretend cutting down a hulkat is any nobler than slitting a soldier’s throat? How long, to your eye, will evil bear flags?”

“Until all those evils are ash,” came a swift retort. “That’s the charge, Eidrik. That’s always been why we’re here, why we toil and till sunset bleed.”

“This is not duty. Not in a place like this. Not with him.”

“Oh, there is more in him than you see,” Horral said in a swivel.

“No, Horral,” Eidrik groaned, weaker, with Ulf’s cut still high upon his brow. “No. I fear, in him, there is nothing at all.”

“Ulf is a chance,” said Horral, returned at once. “That has to be enough.”

“A chance at damnation! He said it himself; we’re fools to see a friend in him.”

“I will not abandon this, Eidrik,” said the old furrfiend, standing firm. “Indeed, I could be wrong. He could very well be only evil and with him I might even die. And that thought—failing, here, without ever granting to our friends a right goodbye—it sickens me. It does! But that is the cost for the dream I will suffer. Our dream.”

“I know you will,” Eidrik groaned in relinquishment. “And know I will suffer that cost with you. Until the end, as I always have and as ever I will. But this is not hope here you grasp at. This is just another stowaway, with terrible strength. Bowing his iron not to crush us is no virtue, I name it a devil’s sloth. And under it lurks something all the worser.”

“So it’s just alley stabbings, then?” shrugged Horral, abrupt and trembling. “Burnings? Theft and murder, all under night? Is that then to be our creed, forever?”

“I do not relish it,” Eidrik said, his chin low.

And to that Horral fell exasperated and came loud. “Oh, All-Father’s eyes!” he cried, rubbing his head at the mountain.

“But what else is there? But him?” feared Eidrik. “But danger!”

“No, you don’t believe it,” said Horral, shaking off the thought as if it might infect him. “I won’t think it so.”

But Eidrik’s reply came doughy and true and, under its sound, his watch was a tint dimmer; part of him spent in service of truth. “Don’t I?” he asked.

“There’s nothing out here, then?” said Horral, vexed. “You really believe that, Eidrik? That we toil for nothing—that nothing in these endless plains can ever aid us?”

“I won’t fall to your fantasies, Horral,” said Eidrik, stern still, but with a mourning in his words, as if in his speech a wound was offered. “Perhaps he will aid you, but he is a killer still.”

The thought glummed Horral. Apace, nervous, he stammered aside. “If that’s true… if there really is nothing out here, not in him, or his might, or Eritle, or Arrenfaeld, or what the blue-golds seek in the underearth, or any of it…!” He shook his head, and his eyes came full and feeble upon Eidrik. “If it’s just Galehaven forever… then we are far better off giving up now.”

Eidrik could not answer, for an answer did not exist. Silent, his woe fell to Horral, who in a soft stare saw all the hesitation and gaining fright; the unsettled speculation that this path led astray. Yet it was too late, and they would not live to war forever, so Horral again shook his head, ridding himself of his doubts, then scampered to the next descent in hastened pursuit of Ulf. His words trailed behind him, though while quiet they fell crude and hard, as an axe strikes earth.

“And that I will not do.”

_____