The Gauntlet and the Fist Beneath, page 31
16
THE BEAR & HER DAUGHTER
‘Benazir does not understand why I chose the gauntlet over the balanced blade. Benazir will sit on the Grand Council one day, of this I have no doubt – but when the hard job needs doing as in Urforren and Fallow Fen, you don’t need a politician, or delicacy. You need a soldier who will work until the job is done. Artollen will put on her gauntlets and she will keep us safe, if she must kill Lothal’s ghost itself.’ – Private Diary, Commander Salem Starbeck
Petron was praying when the new prisoners woke up. His wounds itched and he found prayer a distraction, forcing himself to meditate on the power of the great bear and all she represented. The prisoners had been carried in unconscious: a slim man with dark hair and clothing and a Stormguard Commando tabard, and a huge Tullioch with deep green scales and a black spine ridge. When the Tullioch came in, they had all looked to the single Tullioch prisoner. She did not speak Isken, and she ignored their questions and mimes. Most of the time she stared at the altar or her own hands, but now she stared at the unconscious Tullioch. The goblins chained them up and two aged crow-men checked the manacles before leaving.
There were only six prisoners left: the Tullioch, one Antian, Petron, and three children. The youngest children had been left, and Petron thought Varratim perhaps hoped not to have to use them, but truly he did not know. He tried to comfort them but they were shackled far down the wall, and his wounds pained him grievously; they itched dreadfully now, and those he could see were red and swollen and leaked pus constantly. The man with the dark hair slowly opened his eyes. One side of his face was swollen and split, the eye almost occluded by the bruised flesh. He touched fingers to it gingerly.
‘Where are we?’ he said, and pulled himself into a crouch. The chains would not allow him to stand.
‘The sacrifice cavern,’ Petron found himself saying, and the man squinted at him. The only lights were the ever-present fungi and the sickly runes, but luckily the runes were half hidden by the altar at this angle.
The man spat, and blood came out. He pushed at the Tullioch, who did not stir.
‘You Petron?’ he asked, and then waggled his jaw and probed at a tooth with a dirty finger.
‘Yes!’ Petron yelled. ‘Yes, yes, that’s me. How do you know who I am?’
The strain of speaking so loudly and pushing against his manacles opened a hundred tiny cuts on his body and he shrank back in pain.
‘Been looking for you,’ the man said. ‘I’m Tomas. Skein-mage from the wall. Been helping Floré find her wayward kids, and now here I am. The cavalry is here.’
He shook his chains and then sighed.
‘The sergeant is all right? Is… is… do you know… do you know who else is…’
Petron couldn’t continue the question. He began to weep, and when he managed to wipe his eyes and raise his head Tomas was staring at him.
‘They didn’t go easy on you, did they,’ he said, and Petron shook his head, sniffing.
‘Your brother Cuss is alive. Yselda Hollow too – you know her? Them, me, this hunk of lizard have been trying to track you. That demon bastard has Artollen’s daughter.’
Tomas grimaced and tested at his shackles. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘enough of this.’
Tomas closed his eyes and furrowed his brow, and Petron almost laughed.
‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘The crow-men – it’s all chaos or nothing. No pattern.’
‘All right,’ said Tomas, sitting back against the wall, ‘all right. Trickier. Tell me then. Tell me everything.’
Petron spoke for long minutes, about Varratim, the skein, his search for a skein-wreck, his god-killing dagger, and Tomas’s face grew grave and pale.
‘Much to think about,’ he mumbled, staring at the unconscious Tullioch, and then they sat in silence. Petron knew he was still tied and captured, doomed to die alone and in pain, but he smiled broadly. Cuss was alive!
~
Cuss started complaining when they turned straight south, and Yselda tried to shush him.
‘She is an Orubor, Cuss,’ she said. ‘She knows what she is doing a million million more times than we do. We have to trust her.’
‘South,’ Cuss said, ‘isn’t north.’
He sulked all morning. They stopped for a break by a clear brook in the foothills of Ossen-Tyr, and from there could see Tollen’s folly, a long-abandoned fort of one of the old Undalor chieftains. Tullen One-Eye had turned it to solid stone, it was said. Nobody was sure, now, but the tower of the castle was all that was left, accreted with rough stone that filled every room seamlessly.
‘Where are we going, Ash?’ Yselda asked as Ash refiled their waterskins in the brook. ‘I know the answer is Orubor, but how are we going to Orubor by heading south?’
Ash peered about the glade, and then actually smiled. The smile showed her serrated teeth, but also wrinkles that formed on her pale blue skin over the red tattoos.
‘Soon,’ she said in response to Yselda’s question, but would say no more on it. They sat by the brook for an hour, eating and resting.
‘What are the red tattoos?’ Cuss asked her after a long silence, and Yselda spat out a mouthful of water. Ash eyed him, and then removed her cloak and rolled up her sleeves. Her wrists and hands were coated in the red sigils, just like her face. They were ever so slightly raised from her skin.
‘Not tattoos,’ she said, offering a wrist for him to touch, ‘though human skein-mages have been known to use those. These are scars.’
Cuss recoiled for a moment but then slowly reached his hand out, and when Ash put her arm further forward he traced his finger along a pattern.
‘What do they mean? Mister Janos had them.’
Ash smiled at them. ‘The skein is pattern,’ she said. ‘All is pattern. Life is a pattern, and so is death. Skein-mages and crow-men, your Janos, they seek to alter the pattern. When they do so, they must create it. If you already have the pattern made… it is not so hard.’
She rolled down her sleeves and began to pack up their gear.
‘It is just a representation,’ she said, ‘not the pattern itself. You train your mind to associate that rune, that tattoo, that scar, with a moment. It is a pattern that calls to another pattern, deeper and more complex than the first. This way, you reach your pattern quickly.’
She shouldered her bow and stared up at the skies. North of them, purple and black clouds were gathering over the smoke and ash that rose from Ossen-Tyr.
‘I don’t like the look of that,’ Yselda said, and she remembered the rotsurge in Hookstone. Does the storm follow the orbs?
‘Are you a skein-mage?’ Cuss asked Ash, and she looked at him and smiled.
‘No, Cuss,’ she said. ‘I am an Orubor. Now – for some real magic! There is pattern in many things.’
Turning to the glade alongside the brook, she sang forth in a clear voice, high and true. Cuss could not predict the melody, or understand the words, but there was a refrain that returned and returned. After a long minute of singing, from the woods a deer stepped forth. Its coat was suffused with amber light, and its eyes were faceted diamonds.
‘A bogle,’ Yselda whispered. She had only seen one bogle before, at night in Hookstone forest. Shand had taken her out onto the loch, and a huge eel had surfaced beside them. The old man of the loch. The eel had turned over and over, its long jaw snapping slowly under the water. Its eyes were black pits and its teeth shone with green light, and its mottled yellow body had sparkled under the starlight. Shand had given her a fish, and told her to throw it in. Yselda had been terrified, but he had put his hand on hers and smiled at her on the still waters of Loch Hassel.
‘It never hurts to give thanks to the local gods,’ he had said in his soft low voice. ‘Anshuka be praised, you never know who might be hungry.’
She had slipped the fish into the water, and the huge eel had taken it and curled around itself in a complex endless loop before disappearing back to the depths.
In the glade with her friend Cuss behind her and the strange Orubor beside her, Yselda let go of the handle of her shortsword, and she smiled at the memory of Shand, the cold air of Loch Hassel at night. The deer stepped closer. Its amber coat cast a glow across the nearby grass, and its diamond eyes seemed fixed on the three of them. It licked its lips. Ash spoke to it in her high clear voice, incomprehensible strings of what sounded like lilting poetry, and Yselda felt Cuss’s hand slip into hers and squeeze tight.
Ash’s cadence rose and the deer stepped forward and then walked a slow circle, before bobbing its head once and then it jumped once, twice, and was away into the woods.
Ash sniffed and scratched her nose.
‘Bogle is such a terrible word,’ she said, ‘for such a beautiful thing. Come! We haven’t much time.’
Where the deer had circled in the grass a faint trace of orange light remained, and inside it the grass looked different – coarser, longer. Holding one of their hands each Ash led them forward and into the circle and Yselda felt her hair stand on end as if before a lightning storm.
‘What do Orubor call bogles?’ she said quietly, and around them the circle began to glow brighter. Ash looked down at her with her orb eyes and smiled, showing all her sharp teeth.
‘Gods, little one. We call them gods.’
There was a flash of light, and then the glade by the brook in the Ossen-Tyr foothills was empty.
~
Varratim came, and Tomas stared but was silent. Petron watched Tomas watching Varratim. He did not come alone or with his usual few attendants, but with a dozen crow-men and at least twenty goblins behind them. When they were aligned in front of the altar, Varratim drew his obsidian blade and raised his hands.
‘You pay prices, my brothers and sisters,’ he said, ‘such terrible prices. Each flight takes its toll, and steals years. The gifts we have found, these wondrous weapons, these orbs of light, exact their toll. I am sorry. One day this may not be so, but for now it is the price we pay. We avenge Ferron, and we free our people from the chain of the bear-bitch Anshuka, curse her name to every hell!’
The crow-men cheered raggedly and the goblins joined in, though Petron was unsure if they could understand. Tomas was watching thoughtfully.
‘A final sacrifice and the blade is honed. I can feel this. I took this blade from the hands of fallen Tullen One-Eye, once our greatest hero. This is the blade that killed Nessilitor the lover. This is the blade that can kill Anshuka. With this blade, Ferron is freed to rise again.’
Varratim pointed a hand at the chained prisoners and the goblins rushed over. They started at the Tullioch youth with her mottled green chest and her colourful head crest, and she shied back and hissed at them. The goblins reared back and reached for one of the human children, the littlest one, instead. Petron had never heard her speak. A tumble of brown curls, matted with dirt and grime fell around her face. Petron felt his chest heave. She could only be four years old. She was about the same age as his little sister Jana. Petron swallowed and felt the tears in the skin at his throat, the endless cuts pulling at each other. He pictured Cuss, and a boat at night. What would Cuss do? He looked at Tomas but the skein-mage sat back, resigned.
‘Do something!’ he hissed at Tomas, but the man shrugged and held up his manacled hands, and averted his gaze. The goblins began to unshackle the girl and she wailed.
‘No,’ Petron shouted, ‘no. Take me instead. Willingly. Varratim. Varratim! Take me. Leave her. Let her be. If you need one more, let it be me.’
The crow-men parted and the goblins paused, looking to Varratim. He looked at Petron and nodded. Petron felt tears running down his cheeks and he turned to Tomas.
‘Idiot boy,’ Tomas said. ‘What in the hells are you doing?’
‘If you live,’ he said in a rush, ‘tell Cuss I love him, tell the sergeant I did my best, tell…’
Tomas stared at him silently his mouth downturned, and then the goblins had Petron. A dozen of them, pulling at his shackles. They bundled him to the altar and he did not resist. Every touch on his skin woke a hundred cuts, and in a moment he was face down on the stone altar. The rune by his face burned white, and he could feel the others around him, not as heat or light, but as presences. Varratim tightened the bonds himself and then leaned down.
‘I like you, Petron,’ he said, ‘which makes this harder – but that is as must be. You are a lesson to me, in your sacrifice. Understand this. I heed the lesson, in that even an Undal may be ennobled by their action. You save a child, and this is a good thing, Petron. Do you have any final words?’
Petron stared past the crow-men and the goblins and saw Tomas with his swollen eye watching him. He turned his gaze up to Varratim and breathed in, and out, and reached for the skein but there was only chaos, and burning towers of unfathomable skein in these runes that sent his head reeling.
‘Petron?’ Varratim prompted, and Petron felt himself shiver.
‘Praise Anshuka,’ he said, ‘praise to the breaker of chains, praise to the strength in our hearts. Praise Anshuka, the mother bear. All glory to the bear-god, wrath of Ferron, protector of Undal. Praise Anshuka. Mother, protect us. Mother, help us help ourselves.’
Petron began the litany again, louder, and he felt the knife drive into his back and then he felt the skein – it was back – and he saw the pattern, and he saw a nexus and a tangle and then it began to fade. It all began to fade.
~
Varratim came to Floré again and this time it was not so simple.
‘I leave tonight,’ he said, ‘for Orubor to kill the god-bear.’
A crow-man stood beside him held out a rod of iron tipped with a faceted green gem, and faster than she could dodge a beam of green light cut across the room and hit her in the stomach. She toppled, paralysed and limp but awake and aware. She tried to blink, tried to move her fingertips, but to no avail. Goblins came, six of them, and stripped her bare and the aged crow-men – demons, men and women both – carried her down long corridors of stone to a room with dark stone walls and tied her to a metal bench. Varratim bade them all leave, and then produced a metal rod with a blue gemstone at its end. Squinting at it in the dimness of the room, Floré could see the gem was inscribed with intricate runes. Varratim pointed it at her stomach and there was a cone of light. A layer of thin scratches appeared, like cat scratches.
‘I did this, and worse, to Petron for over a day,’ he said, his voice strained, ‘and finally I had to threaten to do it to Marta, before he broke and told me about Janos, about you. The skein-wreck and the bolt-captain, two war criminals playing house in the forest whilst Ferron is turned to acid and hell.’
He pressed the gem to her leg. A flash of light, and then deeper this time, cuts through skin, into fat and muscle. She felt a trickle of blood.
‘I’m starting to realise,’ he said, ‘that there is no point in this conversation. You don’t know anything about being a skein-wreck. How could you, a dullard like you? There might be some secret in his blood, but you… you are just sword. Not even a sword. A pair of fists and nothing else. Do you understand me? Can you speak, yet?’
Floré began to laugh at that, and realised she could blink. She tried to flex her fingers and felt a little movement, though she was now securely bound to the table.
‘I understand you, crow-man,’ she said, and her tongue felt thick. ‘I understand my lad Petron at thirteen summers had you beaten. You are a child. The Stormguard will find you, and they will kill you. There is always another pair of fists.’
Light, pain. Her leg again. She could see he was breathing heavily; his pale skin was mottled red.
‘I killed him,’ he said. Floré stared at the ceiling.
‘Artollen, Floré, Stormguard Commando,’ she said. ‘Bolt-Captain of Stormcastle XII. Special skills: close combat. Knowledge of the skein: none.’
She started laughing again and felt tears in her eyes. A flash of light, pain again. The other leg.
‘You kidnapped me to learn how to be a skein-wreck?’ she asked, wincing as she laughed. ‘Are you serious, Varratim? Judge’s eyes, I’m the heavy hand. Janos spent a lifetime of study to become a skein-wreck. I asked him once – want to know the secret?’
Varratim pressed forward and held the green gem to her face, pressing it into her cheek sharply.
‘I killed Petron,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you hear me? I killed your boy and now my blade is honed and your mother bear is as good as dead. I found Tullen One-Eye and took his history lessons, and took his knife. I crossed the Stormwall. I found Ferron’s orbs, uncovered their secrets. I found the runewands, weapons of kings and gods.’
Floré stared at him, at the frustration etched in his face, and tears for Petron flowed down her cheeks. The wand flashed and she felt a rune cut into her cheeks, felt her tears trickle into the flow of hot blood.
‘He told me it was poetry,’ she said, smiling though it hurt to speak, ‘as simple as poetry. And that is all I knew, or cared to ask.’
Varratim punched her then, his fist closed around the rod, once, twice, three, four, five times in the face. She laughed as he did it, felt her nose break and a tooth crack. She spat blood at him. He stepped back and wiped his face on his sleeve, breathed deeply, and she locked her gaze with his.
‘I’m taking your daughter,’ he said, ‘and I’m going to kill the god-bear. And then I’m going to come back and I’ll kill you with the same knife I used to kill Petron, and Anshuka both. That is what I’m going to do. I don’t need to be a skein-wreck – I am Varratim of the Endless Storm.’
He turned and stalked from the room and Floré strained with everything in her against the bonds. Sinew and muscle and tendon and bone straining, every part of her pulling and pushing against the bonds.
‘I’ll kill you, Varratim. I’LL KILL YOU, YOU HEAR ME, YOU BASTARD!’
She yelled until she collapsed back from lack of air and blinked blood from her eyes.
‘Varratim of the Endless Storm,’ she said. ‘Stupid fucking name.’
Alone in the dark, Floré continued to strain against her bonds.
