Fall of Light (The Kharkanas Trilogy 2)

‘To those never touched by it, it is a weakness. To those in its bittersweet embrace, it lives a life besieged.’

‘A weakness? Surely a judgement born of envy. As to the siege of which you speak …’ Grizzin sighed again and shook his head. ‘What profundity can I find? After all, I fled my wife.’

‘Is your love stretched?’

Grizzin seemed to consider the notion for a moment, and then said, ‘Alas, not in the least. As for hers … I wager she could throw a pot across half a continent as easily as spanning a room.’

‘Well,’ Draconus said with a smile, ‘I have on occasion seen you duck at the slightest sound.’

‘Aye, her love is hard as iron.’

Neither man spoke for a few moments longer, and then Draconus moved forward, towards the door.

Grizzin turned but took no step to follow. ‘Draconus?’

The Consort seemed to flinch, but then he glanced back. ‘Yes?’

‘Where will you go?’

‘Far enough, I suppose, to hear its snap.’

Grizzin turned away quickly, to hide the sudden emotion that threatened to crumple his features. He blinked at the darkness. And heard the door open and then close. Only when alone did he whisper, ‘Forgive me.’

Then he set off to find her. There would be no stretching this love, nothing made so taut as to snap. The words he would bring to Mother Dark were a knife’s cut. He was, after all, the Protector of Nothing.

* * *

When citizens take to the streets of a city, driven there by something agitated and ineffable, a strange fever descends upon them in the course of their restive milling. As if it was a contagion carried on sullen currents of air – too vague and wayward to be a breeze or wind – this thief of reason longed for violence. There were times when a people collectively stumbled, staggering beyond the borders of the civil commons, out into light or plunging darkness, out into screams in the night or the blistering kiss of fire. At other times, this sidestep was something else, less obvious and far more profound. A revelation, breaking the fever with sudden cool air upon the brow and the last of the chills falling away, the sweat drying, a new day begun. A revelation, alas, that delivered a crushing truth to all who discovered it.

We of the multitudes, we of the civil commons, we are the flesh and blood of an enslaved body. This sidestep carried us into the path of an executioner’s axe, and the head is no longer our master. It rolls unanchored, the echoes of the severing cut making it rock to and fro, at least for a time. Motion some might mistake for life. Flickering eyelids and eyes that could have flashed with intelligence, but the glitter is now no more than reflected light. The mouth hangs open, lips slack, the cheeks flaccid and sagging towards the floor.

Once enslaved, we wander without purpose, and yet a rage burns within us. This, we tell each other, was not our game. It was theirs. This, we cry to the gathering crowd, is our final argument with helplessness.

An end! An end to it all!

But mobs are stupid. Venal leaders rise like weeds between the cobblestones. They cut each other down, with nails and teeth. They carve out pathetic empires in a tenement building, or upon a corner where streets conjoin. Some rise up from the sewers. Others plunge into them. Bullies find crowns and slouch sated on cheap thrones. The dream of freedom is devoured one bloody bite at a time, and before too long a new head enslaves the body, and quiescence returns.

Until the next fever.

Surely, thought Rise Herat as he and Emral Lanear rode towards the open gates of Kharkanas, moments from pressing into the crowd, surely, there must be another way. An end to the cycle thus described. That sidestep belongs to a people beaten senseless by the careless onslaught of injustice. For there to be any change – any change at all – it seems the revolution must never end. Instead, it must roil like a storm feeding itself, on the very edge of calamity and loss of all control, tottering imbalanced but never quite falling. With none to rule, all must rule, and for all to rule, they must first rule themselves. With none to guard the virtues of a just society, each must embody those virtues of justice. But this demands yet more – ah, Abyss take me, I have indeed lost my mind.

My very own fever burns in my skull, that of hope and optimism. With love, even, like Endest Silann’s dragon, ever circling overhead.

The severed head on the floorboards is still making faces, still twitching. That glitter in the eyes is indeed the flicker of intelligence, dimming to be sure – as the armies prepare to meet – but alas, this remnant is without reason.

We man ramparts with nothing at our backs. We face a future that has no face but our own, older and no more the wiser. This weariness comes with the tide, rides in the current, and no eddy offers secure respite.

What had Silchas Ruin done? What had he said to Lord Draconus? Assuming the Consort deigned to meet the man. And what of these crowds, the faces now turning to regard us? Strangers. But even that word, ‘stranger’, arose from a time of kin-hearths and a half-dozen huts marking the very limits of a people, a realm, a temporary nest in the seasonal rounds – when we lived in nature and nature lived in us and no other divide existed beyond what was known and what was unknown.

Strangers. We’ve bred and multiplied into the isolation of anonymity, too many to count, no point in trying. Let my eyes

glaze over these unfamiliar faces before me. The alternative is too ghastly, should I see in each visage my own longing for something better, and for somewhere else, a place in which we all belonged. A place without strangers, a civilization of friends and family.

But the notion mocked him as soon as his mind uttered it. Civilization entrenched the old words, like ‘stranger’, replete with all the anachronistic fears that had spawned them in the first place. Different ways of doing things, forever jarring us with confusion – and when confusion takes us, every primitive thought returns, weak as an ape’s whimper, savage as a wolf’s snarl. We return to our fears. Why? Because the world wants to eat us.

His snort of bitter amusement was louder than he’d intended, drawing Lanear’s attention even as they drew up to the gateway.

‘Irony,’ she said to him, ‘is a cheap pleasure.’