Fall of Light (The Kharkanas Trilogy 2)

He grunted. ‘Hardly. A wolf’s canines in the mouth of a weasel. Even a bear would run from such a beast.’

‘Yet they were the ones that fled, warlock.’

He licked chapped lips. ‘We’d killed five of them.’

She shrugged, glancing back to Caplo. ‘He would not have accounted for even one more. Leaving just you, surrounded, beleaguered on all sides. Armour or no, warlock, they would have taken you down.’

‘I know.’

When he said nothing more, she sighed. ‘Forgive me. I intrude upon your grief with my questions.’

‘You intrude with your presence, captain, but give no cause for the bitter taste in my mouth.’

‘It is said the Jheck of the south are a smaller breed.’

‘Not Jheck,’ Resh replied. ‘They were as I described them. Some animal long since vanished from the world.’

‘Why do you say that?’

He leaned forward and rubbed at his face, knuckling hard at his eyes. ‘Dispense with the scene itself, if you would understand its significance. Ruvera, my wife, discovered something ancient, buried. It slept in the manner of the dead. We believe that sleep to be eternal, do we not?’ And he looked up at the captain, his small eyes squinting.

‘Who can say?’ she replied. ‘Who can know? I have heard tales of ghosts, warlock, and spirits that once were flesh.’

‘This is a world of many veils,’ Resh said, ‘only one of which our eyes are meant to pierce. Our vision strikes through to what seems a sure place, solid and real and, above all, wholly predictable – once the mystery is expunged, and be sure: no mystery is beyond expunging.’

‘Those are not a warlock’s words,’ Finarra observed, studying him.

‘Aren’t they? By my arts do I not seek order, captain? The rules of what lies beyond the visible, the tactile? Find me answers to all things, and at last my mind will sit still.’

‘I would not think that journey outward,’ she said.

He shrugged. ‘Yes. There is symmetry. Outward, inward, the distances travelled matched and so doubled, yet, strangely, both seeking the same destination. It is a curious thing, is it not? This invitation to the impossible, and the faith that even the impossible has rules.’

She frowned.

Resh continued, ‘My wife spoke of the need for blood, for a price to be paid. I believe that she only half understood the meaning of that. To draw something back, from deep in death, into the living world, must – perhaps – demand the same among the living. If a warlock seeks to journey both outward and inward, in search of the one place where they meet, then the corollary is one of contraction, to collide in the same place, the same existence. For the dead to walk back into life, the living must walk into death.’

‘Then Ruvera’s life was the coin for this spirit’s resurrection?’

He sighed. ‘It is possible. Captain, the veils are … agitated.’ After a moment, he cocked his head, his gaze still fixed upon her. ‘Coin? I wonder. It may be … not coin, but food. Power, consumed, offering the strength to tear the veil between the living and the dead, and so defy the laws of time.’

‘Time, warlock? Not place?’

‘They may be one and the same. The dead dwell in the past. The living crowd the present. And the future waits for those yet to be born, yet in birth they are flung into the present, and so the future ever remains a promise. These too are veils. With our thoughts we seek to pry our way into the future, but those thoughts arrive as dead things – it is a matter of perspective, you see. To the future, both present and past are dead things. We push through, and would make the as yet unknown world a better version of our own. But with nothing but lifeless weapons to hand, we make lifeless victims of those yet to be born.’

She shook her head, feeling a strange, disquieting blend of denial and uncertainty. For all she could tell, Resh’s mind had broken, battered by shock and grief. She saw no clarity of purpose in his musings. ‘Return, if you will,’ she said, ‘to this notion of power.’

The man sighed, wearily. ‘Captain, there has been a flooding of potentialities. I know of no other way to describe sorcery – the magic now emerging. I spoke of three veils, the ones through time. And I spoke of the veil between life and death, which may indeed be but a variation, or a particularity, of the veils of time. But I now believe there are many, many veils, and the more we shred them, in our plucking of such powers, in our clumsy explorations, the less substantial they become, and the weaker the barriers between us and the unknown. And I fear what may come of it.’

Finarra looked away. ‘Forgive me, warlock. I am a Warden and nothing more—’

‘Yes, I see. You do not comprehend my warning here, captain. The newborn sorcery is all raw power, and no obvious rules.’

She thought of this man’s wife, Ruvera. It was said that the beasts had torn her limb from limb. There was shock in this, and for the Shake, terrible loss. ‘Have you spoken to the other warlocks and witches among your people?’

‘Now you begin to glean the crisis among us,’ Resh replied. He slowly lifted his hands and seemed to study them. ‘We dare not reach, now. No thoughts can truly pierce this new future.’

‘What of Mother Dark?’