The Last Bastion (7 page)

And that was how Reddic found him, Torvic gasping and gurgling while his blood ran out of him over his belly and down his legs and dripped off his dangling feet to pool blackly in the snow, and the shadewalker on the other side of him, crushing his throat. For an instant Reddic was paralysed, and in that second the only sound was the snap of bones as the shadewalker finally crushed Torvic’s throat. Reddic struggled for breath and backed away. The shadewalker dropped Torvic and looked at him. It stepped forward, almost into the doorway, and that was when Reddic remembered there were five more people in the house behind him and three of them were children.

‘Shadewalker!’ He slammed the door in its face and hurled himself against it. ‘Shadewalker! Stannic! By Modris! Get up! Run!’ He was screaming now, willing the others to get out of their beds and into their furs as fast as they possibly could. There wasn’t anything to do when a shadewalker came except run, every Marroc knew that. Even the forkbeards didn’t try to fight them because they couldn’t be killed, and they couldn’t be killed because they were already dead. They wandered aimlessly, served no purpose. No one knew what they were or why, save that they came across the mountains from Aulia now and then,

The door rattled. The shadewalker slammed into it hard enough to knock Reddic back a step. The Marroc were piling out of the night room, the children already wailing in fear. Stannic pulled on his boots and wrapped another fur
around himself and picked up a hay fork. He threw open the other door and roared at everyone to get out. Against Reddic’s shoulder the door rattled again. The shadewalker pushed it open another inch.

‘I’ll hold it here as long as I can.’ Reddic wasn’t sure why he’d said that except that he was the one holding the door closed and no one was helping him and so he was pretty much stuck with it and never mind how much he wanted to piss himself and sink to the floor. Stannic was still throwing cloaks and furs and blankets to his wife and his children. Reddic’s feet slipped back. A gap opened wide enough for a finger to slip through and then for two and then three, and that was when he turned and let go, and Stannic was out the other door a step ahead, still carrying armfuls of furs. Stannic ran, glancing over his shoulder now and then, while Reddic shot past them all, legs pumping as hard as they’d go, flailing and floundering in the snow. After a minute he stopped to catch his breath. When Stannic’s wife caught him, gasping with her children pecking at her heels, Stannic snapped at them all to wait. He stood and stared back at the farm and at the tracks they’d left behind them in the snow. The shadewalker was following, out in the open now, walking fast and steady, clear as anything.

Stannic stared at it as he handed out the furs, then met Reddic’s eye. ‘Not the first time I’ve had to run from a shadewalker and probably won’t be the last. They’re not so quick and they don’t run but they don’t give up easy neither, and they don’t feel the cold. Follow us until sunrise, this one, most likely, and pick off whoever drops. So we go steady, quick as we can but slow enough we don’t have to stop much, and we keep warm, and we don’t leave anyone behind. I’ll take the front, you take the back. Keep your eyes on it, lad, and if the cold bites too hard, you shout for help and I’ll come.’ He slapped Reddic on the shoulder. ‘You did good, lad. Held it back long enough so we got what we need.
Modris walks with us and we’ll all live to see the sun again.’ The shadewalker was getting closer. Stannic set off. ‘Shout to me, lad, if it gets too close.’

Sometimes Reddic forgot he wasn’t many years from being boy. Others he felt it sharp as an Aulian knife.

7

MIRRAHJ

‘F
orkbeard king’s on the move.’ Gallow woke up slumped over the back of a horse. The ground was right in front of him, swaying from side to side, lurching up and down with the animal’s gait. He flinched. His hands were tied behind his back, his ankles bound together and the whole of him lashed tight to the saddle beneath. His head throbbed. Bits and pieces of Vathan conversation drifted over him. ‘Where?’ ‘Somewhere down south.’ He tried to remember what had happened the night before. Trouble. Fighting. He’d been drunk. Marroc running and screaming and men on horses . . . Vathen. And then the Vathan woman, and then . . . And then he didn’t remember.

A dozen Marroc trailed along behind the horsemen, hands bound, pulled by ropes tied to Vathan saddles. If anyone fell then the Vathen wouldn’t stop. Gallow closed his eyes again. No point letting them know he was awake because then they’d only drag him like the others. He let himself drift, trying to doze away the throbbing between his eyes.

The sun was still high when the Vathen finally stopped and made a small camp. They threw together a fire and sat around it roasting haunches of meat while they left their animals to graze. The horses looked thin and hungry and the Vathen tucked into their feast like starving men. Some of them taunted the Marroc with strips of fat, dangling them and then whipping them away again, but they stopped when
the woman from Hrodicslet came past and barked at them. Gallow’s eyes followed her. The other Vathen deferred to her. She was their bashar then. And now he dimly remembered. Hadn’t she told him that before . . . before whatever had happened?

She saw him watching her, and while the other Vathen stamped out the fire and rounded up their horses, she cut the ropes that held him and tipped him onto the ground and poked him with her toe.

‘Come on, forkbeard, move. Else I’ll think you’re dead. You might think I’ll leave you and you’ll slip your ropes and escape, but there are some things I want from these Marroc, and I’m thinking that if I let them bleed a forkbeard it might loosen their tongues a little.’

Gallow rolled onto his back and looked up at her. ‘Lhosir make poor slaves. What do you want from me, Vathan?’

‘Right now for you to get to your feet.’ She tied a rope to the horse’s saddle. As Gallow struggled to rise she hauled him up and then strung the rope around his waist. When that was done she cut the ropes around his feet. She didn’t touch the ones around his wrists.

‘It’s easier to walk with your hands at the front.’

She flashed him an unkind smile. ‘So it is. You want to know what I want from you?’ She walked a little way to her own horse and led it back and tapped at the scabbard tied across its saddle.
His
scabbard. ‘I want to know where to find the sword that goes with this.’

Gallow shrugged, but she was laughing before he could even open his mouth. ‘Of course, forkbeard, of course you don’t know, haven’t the first idea, can’t even imagine what I’m talking about. Save your breath for the walk since I won’t believe a word you say right now. When you’re ready you can tell me how you came to have the scabbard, at least. Or do you propose to tell me that some Marroc hung it on you for a joke when you were drunk last night?’

Gallow twisted his neck from side to side, trying to ease out the knots in his muscles. He felt the joints and the bones crack. ‘I’ll tell you exactly, Vathan, for I see no secret to it. My name is Gallow. Some once called me Truesword. Most call me Foxbeard now. I fought beside the Screambreaker at Andhun. I was there when he defeated your giant and took the red sword and I was beside him when he fell. That’s how I came to be carrying both that scabbard and the sword you’re looking for. Is that what you wanted to hear?’

The Vathan cocked her head. ‘Go on.’

Gallow closed his eyes. ‘Let your Marroc slaves go.’

The woman howled with laughter. ‘A forkbeard asking mercy for Marroc slaves? There’s a thing. I’m sure
they
won’t beg for
you
.’

‘No.’ Gallow bowed his head.

‘Well, if ever you find a Marroc prepared to take your place, I’ll let you go, forkbeard. But for now there are other things I want from these Marroc and so you’ll have to tell me more about what happened to Solace as we walk. Do you think you can manage that?’

‘You told me to save my breath.’

She smirked. ‘Are you the forkbeard who threw Solace off the cliffs of Andhun into the sea?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you jumped right after it?’

‘Yes.’

The woman looked at him askance. Behind her the rest of the Vathen were getting ready to leave. ‘I’ve stood at the top of that cliff, forkbeard, so I’m quite sure I don’t believe you. But suppose for a moment that I did: how are you still alive?’

Gallow wasn’t sure he had much of an answer to that. When he didn’t speak, the Vathan woman laughed and her eyes called him a liar. She turned away and vaulted onto her horse. She didn’t free his wrists so he could walk more easily
but as the Vathen rode off, she circled back to take the reins of his horse and led him to the front where everyone could see and had him trot along behind her. She didn’t once look back at him.

The Vathen rode at a hard pace for walking. Gallow didn’t see what happened to the Marroc at the back of the ride, but when they stopped again in the evening on a ridge looking down over a steep valley, most were still there. No one came to untie him so Gallow sat down and stretched his legs while the Vathen set out their camp and lit their fires. He looked down at the valley. He knew this place. At the bottom was the road that ran from Hrodicslet and round the hills to Fedderhun. On its way it passed Middislet only a few miles from Nadric’s forge.
From home and from Arda
. As he gazed he walked deep among those memories, so deep he didn’t notice the Vathan woman until she squatted beside him, drinking water from a deerskin bottle. ‘I imagine you could keep up that pace for days.’ She drank deeply.

‘I imagine I could.’ Gallow closed his eyes. The sun was setting and the air would get cold quickly even this far from the mountains.

‘Yes. A forkbeard like you should manage well enough. I’m guessing three more days to Fedderhun and then we’ll pick the pace up. Another five or six to Andhun.’

‘I’d like some water, please. Walking makes me thirsty.’

‘Polite too?’ She laughed. ‘But where’s your beard, forkbeard? I feel stupid calling you that when you haven’t got one.’

‘I cut it off.’

‘Why?’

‘Talking makes me thirsty too.’

‘Sit up then.’ When Gallow managed to get himself sitting, the woman moved closer and tipped the bottle against his mouth. She was careful and he managed to drink more than she spilled.

‘This is your ride. The others answer to you. You’re the bashar here?’

‘So I am. Where’s the sword, forkbeard?’

‘I left it behind.’

‘Where?’

‘A place I passed through.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s cursed.’

She snorted. ‘I hear the Marroc say so. I thought you forkbeards knew better.’

Gallow turned and smiled at her, though there was no friendliness there. ‘I carried the red sword for long enough to know that the Marroc are right. If I had it, I’d give it to you.’

She laughed. ‘I doubt that very much, forkbeard.’

‘That doesn’t make it any less true.’

‘You’re not going to tell me where it is. But you know. I can see that. That or it’s all been lies right from the start and you just found the scabbard empty washed up on the shore somewhere. I think if I try to beat it out of you, I might kill you before you talk, and the ardshan would have my hide for that. So you can keep your secrets, forkbeard. I’ll take you to Andhun and the ardshan can try. I’ll be curious to see if it can be done.’

‘It’s a long way to Andhun, Vathan. A lot could happen.’

‘It could.’ She stood up and took the bottle away. ‘Hungry yet?’

‘I’ll live.’

‘I bet.’ She chuckled. ‘I’ve killed forkbeards. Two. Three years ago in Andhun. I hated your people once but not so much now. Don’t think for a moment that’ll help you if I have to hunt you down. I’m the bashar of this ride, as you say. Challenge me and I’ll open your throat and damn whatever it is you might know.’ She turned and started off, then stopped and looked back. ‘One thing puzzles me, forkbeard.
What were you doing in that Marroc town, just you and none of the rest of your kind?’

‘Looking for a place to get drunk.’

‘In a town full of Marroc?’ She hooted with glee. ‘You forkbeards are mad. I’m surprised they didn’t slit your throat.’

‘But they didn’t.’

She went away then, back to the fires to be among her men, but later, when it was dark and the Vathen were settling to sleep for the night, she returned with a ragged half-eaten leg of fire-burned meat, cold again now, with the fat congealed among the flecks of charred flesh and skin. She poked Gallow with her foot until he stirred, and when he sat up she dropped the meat on his lap. He wriggled until he had it wedged between his knees. Doubled over he could reach it with his teeth. He tore at it carefully, wary of dislodging it. The woman watched him. ‘You’re a strange one, forkbeard. The Marroc all scream and cry and wail to be let go. They beg and wave their hands. The forkbeards I’ve met before were all full of curses and threats. They never gave an inch and they all came to bad ends. But you? You just sit here as though none of this really matters.’ She snorted and laughed at the same time, an odd squeaking sound.

Gallow glanced up between mouthfuls. ‘Your ropes are strong and your knots are good, Vathan. I told you already that Lhosir make poor slaves and I’ll be no different, but why waste my strength fighting what cannot be fought?’

The Vathan shook her head as she got up. ‘You intrigue me, forkbeard, but that was a dull answer. Do better.’

He slept as best he could in the lashing winds blowing off the Storm Coast to the north. In the morning the Vathan woman poked him in his shivering ribs until he was on his feet and they were away again. She ignored him for the rest of that day and for most of the next one too, until his throat was swollen with thirst and his legs ached and his
belly knotted with hunger, but on the third night, as the Vathen camped amid a wind that howled like a fury and whipped the trees and the grass and staggered men whenever they took a careless step, she came back to him again. She held water and meat still warm and dripping from the fire in front of him, and shouted over the gale, ‘Amuse me, forkbeard. Never mind the sword, if that somehow troubles your honour. Tell me the story of how a drunken forkbeard found himself in a Marroc town so far from his fellows and then simply didn’t care when a Vathan bashar took him for her slave.’

Another day without water would be the end of him. He wasn’t sure if the Vathan woman would let that happen but the smell of hot fat drove him wild. And in the end what did it matter? He laughed. ‘Strange that you should ask that tonight.’ The land around them had been familiar for hours. He remembered riding across it with the Screambreaker after Lostring Hill. Middislet was less than a dozen miles away, somewhere to the south and the west – Middislet and Nadric’s forge and Arda and home – but he didn’t dare breathe a word of any of that. So he told her instead how the ghost of the Screambreaker had been waiting for him after he’d thrown himself into the sea from the cliffs of Andhun, of the choices he’d been given there and of the choice he’d made. Of how storms and slavers had taken him ever further from his home. A year as a slave, an arena fighter, then a wanderer and a corsair, and finally on a ship again, looking for the way home and yet another storm that sank him and washed him up on a beach in a distant land to the very far south. And always he had the sword. He told her how he’d clung to it, gone back for it, always kept it somehow with him in each escape, the red sword and his old shield of Medrin’s Crimson Legion. He watched her eyes as he told her and saw the hunger there, and so each night he told her more.

The Vathen reached Fedderhun and then the sea and the coast road to Andhun. The gales blew themselves out and in their place a stillness settled in the air. A cold was coming, a bitter cold drifting down from the Ice Wraiths in the distant north. The Vathen stopped in Marroc villages, each one quietly getting on with its life until a hundred Vathan riders threw them out of their homes and hearths for a night and ate their food and moved on. In a Marroc house around a Marroc fire Gallow told the Vathan woman of Oribas – how the Aulian had found him washed up on the beach with the last of his crew and nursed them all back to life – and of the Rakshasa, the great monster they’d hunted together while Gallow always looked for roads north that would take him home. As snow fell outside, he spoke of how he found the pass through the mountains, the Aulian Way to the Varyxhun valley, and at the same time the secret that would kill the Rakshasa, how he’d gone back to the desert and to Oribas to finish their hunt and how he’d lost the red sword in that battle, the one and only lie in everything he said. She looked at him hard when he told her that and asked many questions, and he knew she didn’t know whether to believe him but here and now he didn’t care. In a way he was speaking himself out, since the Vathen in Andhun would surely kill him once they knew who he was. They’d ask him about the sword over and over, and either he’d break as they tortured him or he wouldn’t but the end would be the same.

She came back, that was what mattered, and when the cold came as he knew it would and the snow lay thick and men shivered and died under their blankets at night, she made sure they kept him warm. He got her name out of her. Mirrahj Bashar. He couldn’t think of much reason to lie about the rest and so he told her how it was: how a forkbeard had come across the mountains after three years of looking for the way home and found himself caught between the Marroc and his own people. How other forkbeards had been
looking for the sword too and how they wouldn’t let him be. How he’d found himself fighting his own brothers of the sea, killed the man who’d been his best friend in the world and found his family at last only to leave them again. How his wife had sent him away. How the Marroc had thrown him out and how he’d long ago burned all bridges with his own kin.