Fall of Light (The Kharkanas Trilogy 2)

‘No matter what,’ Anomander said, ‘we will not leave you helpless. That said, I have no notion of the extent of Brood’s own power. He proved adept enough in lifting and moving heavy stones, and has spoken of the earth’s own magic, as would a man familiar with it. Does he possess anything beyond such things? As to that, I am as curious as anyone might be. We will discuss the matter this evening.’

‘I thank you, milord.’

‘In this, Ivis, I am but the bridge. It will be Caladan Brood upon the other side. My modest charge is to invite you across it.’

‘Even so, milord, I am grateful.’

‘The evening draws upon us, friend,’ said Anomander. ‘Shall we quit this tower top?’

‘My chilled bones would indeed welcome some heat, milord.’

* * *

Too much of Lady Sandalath reminded Wreneck of his own mother. Whilst she was being dressed for the dinner, he had slipped out of her chambers and now wandered the corridors of the keep. At intervals he came upon pairs of guards bearing lanterns and gripping shortswords. They eyed him warily, and more than one had admonished him for being unattended.

They saw him as still a child. He might have told them otherwise. He might even have reminded them that it was children they now guarded against, children who so frightened them that they walked through rooms and down passageways with drawn weapons, starting at shadows. The old ways of thinking, the ones that pushed children into childlike things, were now gone. The truth of that was obvious to Wreneck. Whatever was coming in this new world, it would divide people into the ones being hurt and the ones doing the hurting, and he was done with being hurt. Age made no difference. Age had nothing to do with it.

The voices in his head, which spoke most clearly in the moments before sleep, still came to him in his waking moments, but muted, murmuring words he often could not make out. He could not be sure, but they all seemed afraid, and at times he was startled by some internal cry, a warning no one else heard, as if they saw dangers unseen by anyone else.

He found it difficult to believe that they were as they said they were. Dying gods. Such beings, dying or not, had no interest in Wreneck, the stable boy, who had done nothing worth much in his whole life, and who thought of the future as a single moment, a spear’s point jabbing down, punching through skin, sliding into meat and whatever else the skin protected. A spear taking a life away, and in his mind his list of names, each one fading before his eyes with each thrust of the spear, each in turn, one by one, until the list was gone, and all that was left to him was empty.

This was his only future, and when it ended, when his task was done, there would be nothing but a vague, blurry world of his life spent with Jinia. But even there, something whispered of oblivion, inviting him into a world of imagination, like an island surrounded by the Abyss.

Abyss. That was a word he’d heard spoken as a curse and as a prayer, as if two faces hid in the darkness, and who knew which one groping hands might find?

He could have told the guards about his thoughts, to show that they weren’t thoughts anyone would expect from a child. But something held him back. He was beginning to suspect that being seen as a child was in itself a kind of disguise, one that he might be able to use, come the night when he did murder.

Perhaps the dying gods had warned him against revealing too much, but he was not convinced of that – in any case, he’d told Lady Sandalath nothing of his plans, and he was certain that the First Son and the Azathanai would both remain silent on the matter. He had no choice but to show himself to her as only a child, a friend of Orfantal who, with her and with Wreneck himself, was all that remained of House Drukorlat. Jinia was another, of course, but she too had become Wreneck’s secret, his way of protecting her from anyone and everyone.

It was complicated, and troubling, and the lady’s need to hold him close, so tight that sometimes he could barely draw a breath, just made him uncomfortable. He had no desire to stay in this keep.

He reached a portal that opened on to the landing of a spiral staircase. The light spilling in from the oil lamps set in the niches in the corridor behind him did not reach far, and by the first turn of the stone steps Wreneck found himself in darkness. He continued upward.

Towers interested him. He had never been higher than a single level above the ground, and that had been in Lady Nerys’s estate, and the house had been burning down around him and Jinia. Climbing trees had shown him how everything changed when seen from any height, but often the thick canopies of other trees blocked most of his view downward. From atop a tower, he believed, there would be nothing to impede his view.

Everything below, when he reached that height, would be familiar, and yet each thing would be transformed in his eyes, becoming something new. This notion seemed to displease the dying gods in his head.

At the level just below the top floor of the tower, he came to a landing and found himself facing a blackwood door. Beads of water ran down its furrowed face. The pool at its base had spread out over the flagstone landing, cold enough to form slush here and there, and thin, crackling layers of ice. Standing before the door, he could feel waves of cold coming from it.

Eyes on the heavy latch, Wreneck stepped forward.

‘Don’t!’

He spun round.

A small girl was crouched on the stairs above the landing, wearing little more than rags. Her thin, smudged face was pale but not white. This told Wreneck that she belonged to neither Mother Dark nor Lord Urusander. She was, in that respect, the same as him. ‘You’re one of the daughters,’ he said. ‘The ones who killed people.’

‘Send them away.’

‘Who?’

‘The spirits. The ghosts. The ones swarming around you. Send them away and then we can talk.’

‘They’re all hun

ting you,’ Wreneck said. ‘Everyone here in the keep. They say you killed your sister, the youngest one.’

‘No. Yes.’