Fall of Light (The Kharkanas Trilogy 2)

Let us hold on a while longer, to this delusion of control.

Reaching the door to Emral Lanear’s chamber, Herat gave a single tug on the silk cord hanging in its vertical niche in the wall. Hearing her muffled invitation, he opened the heavy door and stepped into the room beyond.

Until recently, there had been a full-length mirror of polished silver set against the wall opposite the door that had commanded the entire chamber with its play of motion and seemingly sourceless light. Rise Herat had found it disquieting, as the polish was far from perfect, and indeed there were strange dips and exaggerations in the reflection the mirror offered, making it an enemy to vanity. Of late, however,

a thick tapestry had covered the mirror, as it did now. Initially, Herat had wondered at the gesture, but not for long. This was not the time, he understood, for catching glimpses of oneself, like flitting thoughts or hints of something that might be guilt.

The tapestry covering the mirror was an old one, depicting a scene from an unfamiliar court, a crowded throne room in which figures bedecked in barbaric furs were arrayed in a half-circle, their backs to the viewer, all facing a vaguely female form seated on a throne. This woman was either asleep or dead. The splendour of the throne room offered a stark contrast to the savages gathered there, displaying such riches as to make the chamber more like a royal vault than a court. For all Rise Herat’s knowledge of history, he could place neither the artist nor the scene.

But nothing of the past held any relevance, not any more. It had become a realm made perfect by virtue of being unreachable. For all that, its lure remained, as seductive as ever. Entire revolutions, he knew, could be unleashed in the name of some impossible, mostly imagined past. A creation fashioned as much from ignorance as from knowledge. Such dreamers invariably ended up wallowing in blood, and should they ever win their desire, their world proved to be one filled with repression and terror. There was too much anger, when the dream was revealed as being impossible, and when others failed to match the ideal, and before long many were made to kneel, broken by either fear or despair, while the bodies of those who refused to kneel made heaps in hastily dug pits.

Simple observations, my friends. I am not one for judgement, but one might whisper, now and then, to those dreamers, and say: dream not of the impossible past, but of the possible future. They are not one and the same. They cannot ever be the same. Know this. Understand this. Make peace with this. Else you fight a war you can never win.

Emral Lanear emerged from her bedroom beyond the reception chamber. She wore plain silks, of a hue of deep grey, its sheen like dull pewter. Her hair was drawn up, but roughly so – by her own hand rather than that of a handmaid. There were shadows under her eyes, the smudge of exhaustion that was as much spiritual as physical.

‘Historian. It’s late. Is it late?’

‘No, High Priestess, we are upon the sixth bell.’

‘Ah,’ she said in a vague murmur, and then gestured. ‘Will you sit? I sent them all away. Too much chattering. One day, I fear, our world will be inundated with a multitude of people with little to say, but all the time in the world in which to say it. The cacophony will deafen us all, until we are insensate, drunk on the trivial. Upon that day, civilization will die with little fanfare, much less anyone’s noticing.’

Herat smiled as he took a seat in the chair she had indicated. ‘They will but step over the cracks in the street, the rubbish upon their doorsteps, and make displeased faces at the foulness in the air they breathe and in the water they drink. Still, their prattle will prattle on.’

She wavered slightly where she stood, and Herat wondered if she was drunk, or in the fumes of d’bayang, the faint scent of which now reached him from the bedroom.

‘High Priestess, are you not well?’

‘Oh, dispense with the pleasantries – or will we make our own prattle? What have you gleaned of him? How solid does he stand?’

Herat glanced away, blinked at the tapestry scene. ‘If he could,’ he ventured, ‘he would straddle the gap. A warrior Silchas may be, but he has no stomach for crossing blades with those who were once his friends. Honour holds him to his brother’s side, but in his heart he shares a deep detestation for the Great Houses, and all the pretensions of the highborn.’

When he looked back to her, he found her studying him from beneath half-lowered lids. ‘Then he will serve, won’t he?’

‘To make the insult sting? Yes. His temper undermines him.’

‘What else?’

For a moment, he was not sure what she meant, but then he sighed. ‘The Court of Mages. There was a scene, High Priestess. Sorcery, yes, but Gallan discarded its value. He did not linger. Silchas made plain his frustration.’

‘And Endest Silann?’

‘He bled.’

‘I felt that,’ Emral Lanear said, turning away, as if moments from dismissing him and retreating once more to her bedroom. Then she halted and brought a hand to her face. ‘She rushes to him, to the wounds. For all that she seems to hide, Herat, she betrays a needful thirst.’

‘Then ignorance is not her flaw.’

The High Priestess flinched, and shot him a glower. ‘I would it were,’ she snapped. ‘To stand as a valid excuse. No, it is the alternative that wounds like a knife, against which we have no defence.’

‘None,’ said Herat, ‘but to ever raise the stakes.’ He well knew the alternative to which she alluded, as it was a flavour to sour every historian and every scholar, artist and philosopher. This dread fear, this welter of despair. The guiding forces of the world, not awkward in ignorance, but turned away, in indifference.

By this we name the Abyss, and see in our souls a place devoid of hope.

Mother Dark, are you indifferent to us?

If so, then our goddess has by nature become cold, and rules with a careless hand. By this, she reduces our beliefs to conceits, and mocks all that is longing within us. ‘Emral,’ said Herat, ‘if this is so’ – our indifferent mother – ‘then what point in saving Kurald Galain?’

‘I have had swift reply from Syntara.’