The Splintered Eye (The War of Memory Cycle) (2 page)

Part 3

Concordia

On the last hill overlooking Cantorin, where the protectorate of Wyndon ended and the kingdom of Amandon began, two shapes paused in the late afternoon light.  Behind them, the Mist Forest was already distant, its snowclad darkness furring the westward rise of the land.  Ahead, the only trees were ragged windbreaks, their branches iced and their roots bunched beneath crumbling walls that had once defined fields.

The city sprawled whitely in its thin cloak of snow.  A half-frozen river cut through it, north to south, with the hulks of caravans rumbling along the road that paralleled its length.  Too late for the barges, too early for the ice sledges.  On the far bank, the buildings huddled comfortably, squat and square and sober, the spires of a few Light temples rising from amongst them.  Icicles glittered on rain gutters and smoke ghosted up from the chimneys of high-peaked roofs.

On the near bank were ruins.

The Imperial Road ran down the hill beside the two watchers.  They had shadowed it through much of the trek east, but no forests shrouded its embankments now; it led down through a treeless expanse to the only gap in the low wall that surrounded the ruins.  A guard-post stood there, a few wagons rattling along the road beyond it toward the bridge and the living city, but there was no foot-traffic on the near side, only a wilderness of fallen columns and cannibalized structures.  It was like the river had cut the city in two, one half to thrive, the other to die.

“
What d’you think, Arik?” Cob mumbled through the muffle of his scarf.

The wolf, Arik, looked up at him with ears perked.  A northern quillwolf, he was big and bristly, pale grey in pelt, shoulder the height of Cob's hip—and Cob was a tall young man, if thin from too much exertion and too little food.  But Arik was more than just a big animal.  Though he preferred to stay in wolf-form, he could change his shape into that of a man or a monster, and over the past two weeks of trekking through the Mist Forest, he had become Cob’s friend.  A real one, not like the liars and criminals he had known before.  Now he wagged his tail encouragingly, which Cob knew was for his benefit; Arik was not a dog but sometimes acted like one so that he could understand.

“Yeah, I know,” Cob said, staring down at the city beyond the ruins.  “We have to go in.  I need the help.  But…”

He exhaled through the scarf.  It was not the first time that he had stood on the outskirts of civilization, more wary than wanting.  He did not like the crowds, the narrow streets, the corruption and darkness that seemed to breed around any tight-packed mass of humanity.  He had spent too much time as a legacy slave to have much faith in mankind.

But he could not break free on his own.

“
Don’t even have travel papers,” he muttered.  “They probably won’t let us in.  And then what d’we do, eh?”

The wolf leaned his head against Cob’s leg, staring up at him attentively, and Cob curled fingers in the thick grey ruff and tried to draw comfort from the companionship.  He knew he could not have made it through the woods without Arik.  Partly that was due to his ineptitude at hunting and gathering; years of living at the quarry and then the army camp had dulled his childhood skills, and in this land he could not tell poison from food.

The other part, though, was the solitude.  He used to like to be alone with his thoughts, but now bad memories assailed him at every turn.  After Darilan’s death, he had felt like a sleepwalker, and had seriously considered lying down in the snow and letting it pile over him like a blanket.  Closing his eyes and just letting go.  It would have solved his problems and set free the Guardian trapped inside him, an easy exit for everyone.

But Arik never let him.  The wolf had hunted for him, herded him, and was always there to stick a cold nose down the back of his coat or lick him somewhere uncomfortable, like the inside of his ear.  He had found it hard to stay desolate when he was busy grinding snow into an obnoxious waggy beast.  And now he felt all right.  Cold, tired, but not sad.

As long as he did not think about it.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on the Guardian.  Its presence was coiled down in the depths of his mind, just in range of conscious thought, silent but watchful—his reluctant passenger, a Dark spirit locked into his flesh and stitched to his soul by the mages of the Risen Phoenix Empire.  Sometimes it rode him, taking control when his consciousness lapsed, but usually it just watched.  He had spoken with it once in Thynbell, while it struggled to mend him from the damage inflicted by the necromancer Morshoc.

Or rather, spoken with
them
.  Five figures, each a former Guardian vessel, the last of them his father.  They had tried to teach him, tried to warn him, but he remembered little of what they had said, for he had been pursued through that dream by Imperial magic and a malicious shard of the Ravager—the Guardian’s predatory counterpart—in the person of Morshoc.

And once he had awoken, there had been little time for thought.  Seduced, shackled, ambushed, rescued and ultimately forced to fight his best friend and worst enemy while the Dark figures looked on in silence, he had made the only choices that seemed right.

The Guardian had not spoken to him since.

In its defense, he was not sure that it could.  It had sent him impressions before but nothing like speech.  At least it was awake now, if not talkative; in the Mist Forest he had barely been able to sense it.  Still, he would have appreciated some direction from the entity he was trying to free.

“Maybe they’ll let us in anyway,” he muttered, looking down to the guard-post.  He patted the pouch at his belt, the few coins in it clinking.  Like most of his gear—scarf, boots, hat, gloves, coat and pack—it was stolen from Wyndish homes they had passed on their way east, but he comforted himself with the knowledge that it was all essentially discards.  Wynds, it seemed, left their individual houses in winter and gathered in clan-halls, leaving behind cold hearths and holey clothes and the occasional forgotten coin.  Breaking in was easy; finding anything useful was not.

Though Cob felt bad about the burglary, he did not want to freeze.  And he had always closed up the houses afterward.

The wolf nudged his leg and looked expectant, and he sighed.  “Not gonna shift?”  In response, the wolf bent down to chew ice from between his furry toes.  “Yeah, I know it’s cold,” Cob said, used to the one-sided conversations, “but I’m not a city sort.  I mean, I know you’re not either, but y’still better-traveled than me…”

The wolf’s ears stayed perked, but he seemed more interested in the taste of his toes.  Cob blew out another sigh and said, “Fine.  I s’pose I gotta learn how to deal with people eventually.  But I dunno if they’ll let you in like this.  Light, you’re a wolf.”

With a huff of amusement, the wolf left off chewing and bounded a circle around him, then started down the slope.

Cob shook his head and followed after, the scarf hiding his smile.  The thin snow crunched under his boots, half-ice and half-thawed by the lowland sunshine.  It was a decent day for mid-early winter, the sky bright and the air less knife-like than up by Thynbell, but it was hard to see the mother moon from in the Mist Forest so he had lost track of its phase, and with it the date.

Which was fine.  He was not in a hurry even though he had a plan.  In fact, if not for his need to be rid of the Guardian, he would have run back into the woods and never come out.

First stage of the plan:
Find the Trifolders and beg for help
.  Second:
Kill Morshoc
.

He cursed the night that Morshoc had arrived and driven off Jasper, the kindly carter and secret Trifold priest.  If he had stayed with Jasper, he could have prevented more deaths than he cared to think about, and the fact that it had not been his choice—the fact that Morshoc had some power over the old man—did not alleviate the feeling of failure.

But Jasper had offered the Trifold’s support, in an oblique manner, and now that Cob knew more about the trouble he was facing with the Guardian and the Empire, he was prepared to accept it.  The Trifolders were heretics, which still mattered to him, but he had resolved to set that aside.  He followed the Imperial Light but as long as no one tried to convert him, he would not have to punch them.  He would keep his tongue in check, his opinions to himself, and let them do what they could.

He stepped onto the slate-paved road as they drew near the open gate, the wolf paralleling him through the snow.  At the guard-post, the two soldiers straightened and broke off their conversation.  They wore tan-and-purple livery over chainmail, with a badge on one shoulder of yellow crenelations surrounding a sheaf of grain.  Not Gold Army; probably kingdom militia.  They both had pikes and shields, but one wore a satchel slung across his body.  As Cob halted before them, he realized that their eyes were level with his chin though their bell-shaped helms made them look taller.  He felt suddenly conspicuous.

“Mountain folk, is it?” said the satchel-man.

Cob pulled down his scarf, wondering how they could tell.  “Yeah,” he said as the wolf drifted to his side.  “I’m on the pilgrimage, but I don’t have papers…”

“They never have papers,” muttered the pikeman.  Cob looked at him askance.

The satchel-man sighed, but rather than raise his weapon as Cob had half-expected, he just unsnapped the clasp of the satchel and pulled out a logbook and charcoal.  “Name.”

“Uh, what for?” Cob said.

The man looked up from under the bill of his helm, weathered face showing plainly that he considered Cob an idiot.  “For our records.  I know you Darronwayn don’t trouble yourselves with the likes of reading and writing and record-keeping, but down here in the civilized world we have this thing called ‘the law’.  You can buy yourself some papers at your embassy but I need your name and origin before we can let you in.”

Darronwayn?
Cob thought.  “Uh…”

“
Name,” the man prompted sternly.

“
Aloyan Erosei.”  It was not exactly a lie.  He had used the name before, and Aloyan Erosei the Younger was living in his head with the rest of the Guardian vessels.  Using his own name seemed more dangerous than using that of an ancient Kerrindrixi hero, since Cob was on the Crimson Army’s listing as a slave.

“
How do you spell that?”

“
I dunno.”

The pikeman snorted, but the other just shook his head and mouthed the name silently as he noted it down on a clean page.  “Place of origin?” he said.

“What?”

“
The last place you were in that had an actual name,” said the man with studied patience.

Cob furrowed his brows and wracked his brain for the name of somewhere in Darronwy.  It was the protectorate just north of Amandon, he knew, sandwiched between the bandit-riddled Khaeleokiel Mountains and the lowland swamps of Daecia.  But he had never met anyone from there and beside a vague impression of woods and mountains and bears, he knew nothing about it.  He was from Kerrindryr far in the west, not from Darronwy, and though evidently he shared his looks with the Darronwayn, he knew none of its cities.

“Thynbell,” he said finally.  “A while back.”

“
Thynbell in Wyndon?”

“
Yeah.”

“
But you don’t have papers.”

“
No.  I lost ‘em.” 
Along with Morshoc.

For a moment the memory swarmed him: the screams of horses and men, the vivid energy-wings, the corpse’s spine shattering in his clench.  His own blood streaming from freshly opened scars.  He swallowed bile and fixed his gaze on the guard, hoping his grimace would be mistaken for embarrassment.

The satchel-man hrmed and added a few more scribbles to his entry.  Cob forced himself to focus on the charcoal marks, wishing he could read.  He had a feeling the guard was not writing good things.  “And your wolf?” the man said.

“
He’s not a wolf.  He’s a big dog,” said Cob.

“
It’s a wolf,” said the pikeman flatly.

Cob glanced down at the wolf, who sat and lolled his tongue out in a fair impression of doggishness.  “He’s a dog,” he tried again.

The guards exchanged looks, then the satchel-man shook his head and made another note in the logbook.  “Don’t have to bullshit us,” he said.  “Some lunatic from the hills brought in a bear a few weeks ago.  Tame bear.  Had the papers for it though.  I don’t know what you people do up there with your critters and I don’t want to, but you’re going to need papers for your wolf too.  Just admit it to the embassy and don’t try to pretend it’s a dog.”

“
But—  All right,” Cob said lamely.  “Does that cost much?”

“
Probably.  And if it bites anyone, you’re both dead.  Now pay the toll.”

“
You toll pilgrims?”

“
We toll everyone.”

With reluctance, Cob pulled the coin-pouch from his belt and tugged it open.  There was mostly brass in it, and a few bronze bits.  “How much?”

“One man, one beast, no trade goods: five nar.”

"Nar, that's the—"