Chapter 10 : Under Avarice

Argolan laid quiet alow the ledge. Its fey tangle slept eerily under a black shroud. Night was not yet come, but Argolan’s gap of earth hiked its horizon and the sun soon hid. Eritle glimpsed the waning light. Beams of a drab saffron crept quietly between the boards of the cliff-town. Its denizens knew they had a last instance to savour day, then nightfall was to be theirs again. Then, the Scourge was to crawl back up the rocks. An evening so sombre meant only that the doors could again not go unbarred, and then it was that Eritle cowered with its sun.

Rain hastened against that sodden mound, and with a crack of thunder torrents joined the descent to soak its old wood and sink its roofs. Some shambling silhouettes darted across the street, submerged in cloaks with hoods drawn low to fend off that hail they knew so well. A scarce few crossed into the town’s tavern: Ellimon’s Bale, and the rest vanished behind closed doors. A glow of chrome gathered rank between homes as cabalder fumes climbed. The roads of Eritle puddled, became rivers. A worthy rush of rainwater patrolled each downward path, but if they were without the wail of the clouds they would sit silent, and if without the yellow fog they would lie lifeless.

Powerless to do otherwise, the captives of Eritle, whether by illness or guilt, swayed from their iron heights, devastated by the fanged hail. Their prisons were without canopies or warmth, and so it seemed the will of Galehaven was for its caged to die cold. By an edacious rust or some careless mishap, there was, however, a cage come undone. Out from its bars seeped an older fellow, deathly ill, hacking blood about. His skin was only thick enough to cover bone. He was granted a wide berth on his waddle up the hill-roads, for the guards, in rain, kept to their ales and Eritle’s brothel, and the common folk had no quarry with the plagued.

Nude under dark skies, the elder itched his skin until it bled, stumbled about to fall hard and often against homesteads and the rush of the street itself. In that chrome mist, he was concealed, and the gaunt shape of him alone could show through. Those that did glimpse him believed they beheld some lesser beast wandered in from the plains, and quickened from sight. Up he crept, muttering madness to his own ear and staring impossibly wide at everything that moved yet at nothing material. Soon he reached that great ledge behind the brothel, where the cage of the bald woman hun. She watched him stagger—muttering—past her hang to that wild drop. Then off he stepped.

There was no scream, nor pound of impact. He was given soundlessly to the depths below; swallowed by Argolan. It was a miserable spectacle, but aside from the mockeries of drunken guards and the chants of the diseased above, it was the sole spectacle she had witnessed for some time. Indeed, she preferred the lack thereof. Hurt, the woman watched the ledge for a long while after. Her face drooped down the bars. She expected something; a wail of misery from his plummet; the first finger that would climb back up; or the howl of a beast that set teeth into his corpse, but there was nothing. Nothing at all, she thought, and while the sight indeed sickened her she felt compelled to grin.

Death’s insignificance was a freeing notion. Without eyes to cry for or voices to curse the bodies that fell, they were nothing more than meat. She—grinning—was nothing more than meat. It was a joyful thing, to her, to her starving belly and her sleepless gaze. It was a wonderful joy indeed to know she did not need to carry on or fight out or find a goodness in the world. She could starve and rot in that cage, then know with all her heart that that was right.

Perhaps this would be the night, she wondered, when death knocked at last. A low eye could spot her heaving ribs. A drizzle could and did chill her to the bone. There was much room in that coming night to die, and so when she blinked through her weariness and saw the falling sun, she saw too a comfort; the warm hand of an old friend, consoling, telling her that she had done enough.

She released the bars, forgot the old man fed to the pit and slumped back against that hard iron. Rust stung her spine, but what did it matter? Head high, she embraced the cold of rain and laid her limbs wide to hug death.

“So tired…” she whispered, so faint her words were hardly audible. “So weak, after so long…”

It would be a calm storm to die in, and a quiet night to eat her soul. But silence in Arakvan was a distrusting thing. When noise swells, folk dream of the quiet in the plains. And when they are alone in that expanse, with only the gales to whisper to them and the ghostly grass to bring them touch, they close their eyes and clasp their ears, and pretend there is a town over the next hill to drown out that silence and all that stalk in it. A quiet comes when it is feared and, when relished, it strays far.

And so it was that rain’s rhythm was hastily brought company that evening. From an attic, down between the alley of Ellimon’s Bale, up along the edge of the main road, between the curve of higher rock and the sump of crooked earth where water pooled deepest, came uncaring things in long cloaks of black. Bundled tight, every inch of underneath was concealed under their dark drapes, and to hide the wildness of their eyes that was most unbefitting of Eritle they dipped sharp hoods. The fogs turned them to shades. The rain blurred even black. With an aura of decrepitness, of a long wayfaring, the two spoke in whispers from their alley coven to the ledge that had just swallowed a soul. When they reached the terrace looming at the brothel’s back, the valley in their glimpse lost its last light. They, in the fall of the sun, became invisible, unreal.

Yet their voices were left behind. Slowly, the itch of nearby mutterings awoke those collapsed senses of the bald woman. Ached, irritated, she dragged up her sights to find them, which proved trying enough to prone her once more. Once found she kept them in sight. Through a curiosity that sought some souvenir for the afterlife; some modicum of held spirit, she stayed with their words a time, while her belly howled, quivered, and in the cold her skin paled.

Hushed words emitted from those hoods like wells yawning echoes of the fell. Bottomless, gushing disembodied callings. One pitch belonged to a woman, stern and with the gravity of command. The other was deep—too deep for a man, but horridly etched as if it mouthed the pain of monsters.

“Some days, yet,” it said. “Then we ride south again.”

“Do you have to sound so plain about it?” the woman asked. “Chance Odr has it right. Maybe you really do prefer it out here, in the rain and wind. And shit.”

And in answer, the wind hardened down upon them. She brought her hood lower, though he stayed unmoving, consumed by Argolan’s lurch.

“Winter comes,” he said. “In time, we will wish it were only rain.”

“It’s the meantime I’m concerned with,” she said. “Never thought I’d say it, but I’m ready to see Galehaven again. He owes us a great deal for this. All of it. I would sooner see myself paid in copper than suffer another night in lonely Eritle.”

“Yet we’ve done precious little,” he lamented.

Now she looked to him curiously, nearing frustration. “Little?” she asked, bewildered. “Was Arrenfaeld a little deed? What of the Haddlebush and the farmers hung from it? Was that meagre before the mighty Nadaar?”

And Veil Nadaar shrugged, gazed onward. “All of it is. All of it—only shallow evils.”

“Shallow?”

“They will bring us nowhere,” he knew.

“A village lies in ash, Veil,” she reminded, firmly, trembling under an undecided ire. “Its people are dead. Burnt.”

Veil Nadaar heard her well, but the pat of hail parted him from his care. He lifted his eyes—gold stabs—skyward and from under his hood came what seemed a snout of scales. Razored teeth shone between his words, and so it was even in calm he came dangerous.

“Do you think it will rain tomorrow, too?” Veil wondered, adrift.

Many things was Arawn: a warrior of no more than thirty summers, without a scar for any. A knight, come crestfallen with the demise of the kingdom she served. A killer, who thought too much for her own good. But there were many things too she was not. She was not patient for forlorn ramblings, and she was not immune to the cut of rain. Arawn Dandril shook her head, and from her shift swung black locks. She had often a squint masking her gaze, but the truth of her eyes was a green vulnerability, that sought to understand what they witnessed and, at times, to forget what they watched. Her face was a graceful mold, most becoming of a noble but, at its sharp, strong-jawed edges, tainted with a hue of resilience inheritable only from a generation’s toil. Now her stare was short of sympathy and with an emerald irritance she abandoned Veil to her peripheral.

“Great,” she sighed. “Veidt has us chasing dreams, and you’re off in the clouds.”

Again, thunder sang, but a tame thing it was. Almost like a lullaby, she thought, to soothe the sun into its slumber. Seeing the sleeping fields and hearing the miserly snores of Argolan below them, Arawn wondered when a proper rest would come for them again; beyond the hay of an inn or in a sleeping roll below the stars. When could she close her eyes again? Arawn wondered sourly.

“I’ll fight for this relic he craves so deeply,” she told him, “but I will not die amidst these swards—battling peasants. Burning farms.” She spat, and her coarseness barely disguised her discomfort. “This is beneath us all,” Arawn lied. “Certainly, it is beneath him. We stake our lives over myth.”

The rain hardened, and so her last words were forced into a crueler pitch. While to her the gaining torrent begged a tightening of the cloak around her, to Veil it was nothing. Still, his face aimed skyward. In the folly of wonder, Arawn looked against him, which was always a vile thing, and immediate was her regret and the effort to hide her gaze. But already had Veil caught it in the golden pool of his serpentine head. There seemed only emptiness in those hard sockets, but something did indeed tighten around her from deep inside of his skull.

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Veil was one of the kinnit: horribly misshapen men, mutated from Arakvan’s curse or some underearth taint, and born with the skin or the claws or the sickness of beasts. Most mothers who fostered such horrors counted it a blessing that they survived the ordeal, for to be sure kinnits were strong, and they seldom awaited their own birth to see the world. It was the awful truth that many parents bled to death, when the kinnits within them bursted out of their own volition. It was a truth all the worse that when those mothers did survive, most wrapped their babes tightly in cloth, vanished without a word, and were not seen again until they had visited the river and come back alone.

But some were too wise for slaughter, too loving for murder, or too scared to drown their sons and daughters with a warmth so new in their hearts. So kinnits did spread through the land, pushed to the wilds or the drabbest nooks poverty could conquer, to live out the hard, scavenging lives of beggars. Veil Nadaar was no different; a son of starvation who knew how to run from a knife before he could walk from his cradle. But where others succumbed to ruin, or made themselves servient, or ran off to join the Baelgarth, Veil tired of his persecution. As a child, he donned a blade, and before it ever dried he was a man. Slaughter had made him, but just as harsh as it made his soul it instilled an evil vigour in his eyes, which Arawn now found herself trapped within.

Of the kinnits, he was a wyrm-man. His ears were winged scales. His skin was rough and craggy, like the armour of a drake, coloured a green of immense dark. Where a nose would run, his face jutted out wickedly and fostered a snout. Now it slid askew and Arawn shuddered at the teeth within, dulled by years spent chewing on things stronger than bone.

“Take heed, Arawn,” he warned. “I’ve seen many question their orders. In Njall, when the food ran bare…” Veil saw bloody memory in the clouds. “But Veidt is our lord. Forsake him, and I will ensure you die in these fields.”

Arawn Dandril was no stranger to threats. When words of warning struck her, she rose tall and served them a steel answer. Yet Veil spoke without malice or lust, for carnage was as ordinary to him as the sun to the sward, and Arawn knew in a moment that it was a promise. Too swift and too strong to count among the power of men, Veil Nadaar was alone, prey to no one and mightiest of the Crimson Clad.

“Of course,” Arawn said with a nod. “But if our good lord has us chasing fairy tales much longer, you won’t need to unsheathe your sword for me to die.” She turned away. “Enjoy the rain, Veil. Our storm is forever yet.”

Her cloak flapped behind her as if the gales sought to drag her back, but in a step she was alley-cast, and in two she was shadow. Veil was uncaring still. For reasons beyond even a sage soul’s wager, the rain maintained its entrancement against him; a drab spell that returned to him naught but a soaked cape. The hail struck centerfold to his very pupils, but his wrongful nature let him stay unblinking. The water glistened down his snout, sliding between the cracks of his scales and completing him with a smooth, opaque filling. He did not relish the cold, yet unruffled he dared to wonder and always did his rogue thoughts settle on violence. So Veil Nadaar made himself chill, and savoured an unthinking mind.

A kinnit was a rare sight anywhere that was not unnamed. The bald woman gawked at the wyrm-man, only fascinated further by the ferocity of his words. Perhaps here, she thought, was some excitement to be claimed before hunger left her limp and the guards remembered their duty to chuck her over the ledge. Then she paused, while the thought sullied her, and hoped in good faith they would burn her instead. Leaning against her bars drearily, she chirped to him.

“Didn’t think they let your ilk in any place with roads,” she said, earning her a golden side-eye of disinterest. “Though I’d wager you’re not one to be ‘let’ anywhere. Are you, kinnit?”

He did not answer and, excited, the woman leaned further.

“Or should I call you Veil?”

Now he did see her in full. With his turn, she saw him too: a cold jade wrath in swirls of black. Veil took a few steps nearer, strafing her cage. He saw the hunger skinning her, the exhaustion resting under her eyes, as well as the apathy fattening within. Settling some distance from the bald woman, closer to the cliff than her cage, careless while the wind and rain ruffled his garb, Veil faced her directly. Hail stole their colour and left them both solemn, but still did he see a brilliance of will within her. Intrigued, it drove Veil even closer, so near in fact that she did not need to strain herself to be heard, but from between the bars she beheld not his courtesy, and instead only the powerful steps and the haunting eyes.

“Are you afraid, child?” asked Veil, with all of his age suddenly rank in his deep speech.

“Should I be?” she retorted, making some effort to seem unaltered before him.

He raised a fist high and from it extended a cracked finger. She followed it, then found herself stranded against a higher cage, where a young fellow had keeled over. His scrawny little hands hugged the bars even in death, petitioning mercy to this world and the next. All over his stripped frame were scabs of white. The Patch had claimed him.

“He was,” Veil said simply. “Held his bars so long his palms lost their skin.”

The bald woman strained her eyes in disbelief. She did not understand how he could perceive a thing so high and hidden, but it would be foolish to hear the grate of his tone and think it false. So she leaned back, impressed, and nodded.

“Better to die here than below the earth, where there’s nothing to see but rock.”

“Is it?” he asked, gravely, before turning to see that lightless horizon. “With the sky above us, we think of all that lies under, all that the sun can touch. It makes us bold, inspired. It makes us believe there is more for us to take and more for us to feel. More to live on for.” Then he turned back, and his eyes were bloodshot. “In rock, there is only rock.”

“And are you so cursed with hope, kinnit?” she asked, deflated of her whimsy.

“I am cursed,” Veil confessed, while the rain came harder, “as its killer.”

She listened truthfully now, with her mind stricken of any intrigue or jest. The rain, despite its fierceness, was quiet before the power in his words, and all the darkness of the world was dim next to that gold burn of his gaze.

“I’d imagine there’s nothing duller than to live like a blade,” she said, earnest. “Trudging from battle to battle, with your soul worth only what it takes. Perhaps hope to you is a lie. Or maybe you’re the lie, to think another killing leaves you any different than the day before.”

Veil drew close then, towering over her in her squalor.

“Doesn’t it?” he asked, with the hilt of his broadsword becoming a clearer thing.

She was unshaken, and rose to one knee before him like a stone shore to a wave.

“Well, tell me, Veil the kinnit…” she began. “How many lie dead because of you, and how many days have you gone weeping in the rainfall like life is some curse?”

Now he eased back, seeing her courage confirmed. She was not some wildman or one of the plagued as were her neighbours. She was something much more, and for a moment, Veil shortened beneath her and her short prison of contempt.

“Indeed you earned this cage, if only for your tongue,” he said, then turning again to the horizon. “But where you see the sun rise, I see a great fire that can… immolate us all—like flies under glass.” Veil shook his head and the rain lightened. “It is easy for a dying woman to speak of hope, when she does not need to suffer tomorrow.”

She surrendered to a sit, feeling his words, then shared his stare against the night. “What ease is there in dying young, between rusted old iron and held under the cries of madmen?”

Now Veil scoffed, as if she danced around some verity they both felt.

“What ease?” he asked, smiling in so crooked a way it seemed he had never grinned before—not truly. “The ease of not needing to want,” said Veil. “Not needing to know that you failed desire. That you gave up on purpose and called it happenstance. The ease of living under avarice.” He looked to her over his shoulder, while she tautened with all the weight of that malice stained in his eyes. “You can say all you want of our world, but your words are wind until you’ve seen it to its bitter end.”

Her defences overcome, the bald woman sank lower and offered her thin fingers through the bars as one offers tribute. There they shook, then steadied, and the barren stretch of her chapped palms was answer enough.

“Am I not caged?” she asked, her voice falling frail with a stressed uncertainty.

“You are,” Veil nodded. “But you are not hollow yet to die so meekly. Ask yourself, girl, are you ready for what’s next? For oblivion? Or does the land of the living scare you more?”

His words fell with might despite the lowness of his tone. They bashed her sidelong, opened her up to the cold of hail and the stab of crude iron into her back. Suddenly, her rags felt too thin and her cage seemed too small, and a moment reigned where fear was paramount within her, and she could only quiver, pale and stammer with words unformed from thoughts unknown. Each drag of rain down her shoulder was an accusation against her and finally did they melt away the stubbornness of her scowl. An empty visage rose up from that crumple of sickly limbs. Dead eyes, mouth agape, she met nightfall anew, but now there was doubt heavy within her. The all-encompassing black seemed too immense to stomach.

Then she considered it, truly, for the first time in a very long time: the end. She saw the rolling clouds of darkness and forced her eyes up to see their tears; feel the fury they fell with. There was a cruel, unforgiving anguish with each beat. There was a furious thunder that cursed the land below it like a child scorned. Then there was the majesty of those dark skies, stretching forever, promising every embrace and every cast of the earth, and as a light between shadow-doors it found her, vastened against her, and she hearkened to it as if it were a beckoning god. It existed, and it was true, buried under an infinite broil of air and evil. It was a goodness in a sea of wrong, and she had to know for certain if it could dare be witnessed by mortal eyes.

“Maybe there’s something after…” she thought, awestruck. “Maybe it’s beautiful… or the wind just runs on, and Arakvan forgets.”

Veil heard her, then heard too the quake of her fear. He nodded, and looked with her to that swallowing sky. So long had he searched and so bloody was his blade, but still he could not call tomorrow his. In that hail, the cold told him it was only darkness, but the gall in her finding gaze made him look longer, harder, until it could be thought true.

Then he shook his head.

“A time will come when this land carries on no longer. When the horizon stops,” said Veil. “Arakvan will collapse under its sins and fall into the earth. It has to.” He turned and walked away down an alley, his cloak blending with night’s shade until he existed in voice alone. “Nothing can live ashamed forever.” Then the voice too was gone.

Her solace was returned, though hardly noticed. Night deepened. She sat for some hours in that cage, while the moon came wide and blue upon her, while the howls of the swards shook the sky. The moon was imposing, but its blue soothed the eye. The howls were ferocious, but some whose throats shrieked ate naught but berries and leaves. There was something more to be witnessed, she thought—there had to be—and at once her surrender felt sheepish. She tensed with the idea of her own bleak death, where her eyes would eventually close and she would sprawl sideways in her little iron grave. A little white puppet, to be tossed to the rocks. It nearly made her sob, and in pain she dug her nails into her bald head until there were sure to be scars against her skull. The challenge bled her. The storm’s rally concussed any truth she could grasp onto. Yet her eyes then dried, just before the first tear could form, as while there was indeed a great wound within her, Ander was a coward no more.

In a burst of action, she sprung against the bars and rammed her jaw into their iron—once, twice, and again and again until her head bobbed and a pair of teeth came loose. She gripped one tight, wobbled it while blood ran down her bruised chin, then tore. Ander screamed in terrible pain, but a string of her gums held the tooth in place. Panting, abrasive, she pinched it firmer between her finger and thumb, then with a deep breath and a deafening roar, ripped it from her mouth. It snapped from its bonds, spat blood at the bars.

It was then, in the quiet twilight, that Ander began her work. Sleepless, starved, she bent over the plucked tooth like it was some unburied treasure. Time after time she scraped it against the iron, until it started to chip. At its edge, a sharpness ensued, if only so slightly.

Wonder brought light to her eyes.

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