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Kagamandra. Look at me now. I hold a hand to the place of my death, seeking to staunch the leak. The blood feels thick now. Thick as clay. It must be the cold.
And I feel an ache in my leg. I imagine I can curl my toes, scuff with the heel. Here, on this edge, I rebuild my broken form, as if preparing for what will come. No longer broken, but whole again. Rea
dy to walk into the darkness.
And yet … Kagamandra. Still I lie here, longing for you with every essence of my being. What holds me to life, if not desire? What vaster power exists? With it, I swear, I feel I can defy the inevitable. Weapon and shield, companion and ally, enough to make the world back away, enough to surmount the highest walls and cross the deepest chasms. Desire, you stand in place of a lover’s arms, and make your embrace such dark comfort.
She heard her own sigh, startling in its clarity, its harsh rattle. Beneath her cold-numbed hand, the gash felt strange, drawn together, the skin puckered and tender. The bunched fists of the rolled-up tendons and muscles no longer burned against her hip bone, as if with her hand she had simply pushed them back into place.
But that is not possible.
Disbelieving, Sharenas found the strength to sit up. Her right leg throbbed with the kind of ache that bespoke deep outrage, and yet it lived. Beneath her the spilled blood had mixed with dirty snow and then leaf-mould and mud. It felt hot to the touch and the steam rising from it did not slacken.
The greyness surrounded her still, palpable like an unseen presence. In her head she heard vague whispers, muttering and, now and then, a faint, distant cry. Blinking, Sharenas looked round. This part of the trail was slightly wider than usual, but otherwise unremarkable. She shared the space with three corpses. The spilled entrails, she saw, were frosted over.
How – how long?
Groaning, she pushed herself to her feet, stood tottering for a moment before she caught the glint of her fallen sword. She hobbled a step, crouched to retrieve the weapon, and straightened once more.
Now what?
The scouts had been stripped of food packs and water flasks, but tightly bound bedrolls and cooking gear remained, all secured to prevent noise when the scouts tracked her. Sharenas realized that she was desperately hungry, and fighting a thirst so fierce she eyed the black spatters of blood on the ground at her feet.
The greyness urged her to feast, revealing its own hunger, bestial and primitive. Sharenas studied the corpse of the woman nearest her, listening to the chorus of faint voices susurrating through her head.
Are you spirits? Did I summon you? Or was it this impossible sorcery – which I never knew I possessed – that drew you into my company? Do you, perhaps, remember what it was to be consumed with desire? Because that alone sustained me. Kagamandra, I have made the memory of you into my lover. Loyal ghost, I feel still your fiery embrace.
But this new hunger, this is a simpler thing. A need both raw and cold. I have lost too much blood. I must restore myself.
The chattering spirits crowded her, and like a soul dispossessed of physical form, she watched her own body, as it dragged the corpse of the woman to one side of the trail, and then set about cutting strips of red meat from one of the thighs.
Once this was done, she set about making a fire.
What now?
Now this.
FIFTEEN
‘I HAVE LIVED,’ SAID LORD HUST HENARALD, ‘IN A WORLD OF smoke.’ He sat on a stone bench in the chill garden, amidst leafless thickets and snow-capped boulders. Overhead the sky was thick with a grey blending of snowflakes and ash. Someone, perhaps a servant, had settled a thick robe on the lord, rough wool dyed burgundy, and it was draped unclasped across his shoulders like a mantle of old blood.
Galar Baras sat opposite. To his left was the low curving wall of the fountain. The mechanical pump had long ceased to function and the thick ice on the water was streaked and smeared with dead algae. Old layers of soot darkened the snow upon the ground.
‘It blinds the fools who dwell in its midst,’ Henarald continued, his vein-roped hands red with cold as he picked through a small heap of slag that rested in a pile upon the encircling stone wall. Occasionally, he brought one piece closer to his face for careful examination, eyes narrowing, before returning it to the heap. In the time that Galar had been in audience with the lord, a number of pieces of the ragged waste material had been examined more than once. ‘It stings, awakens tears, but leaves nothing seen to give comfort.’
‘Milord,’ Galar Baras ventured, not for the first time, ‘the armour you have sent us. The blades as well. Something now afflicts them—’
‘In smoke we dwell, shrouding us in the weariest of days. Do you see this ash? The last of the charcoal. Soon will come to us the stench of poor coal, and the iron will be brittle, red and short. It’s the sulphur, you see.’ He selected another piece of slag and peered at it. ‘We beat order into the world and make a song of smoke, but such music is too harsh, or not harsh enough, for the soul is never as strong as it believes itself, nor ever as weak as it fears. We are, in all, middling creatures, eager to bedeck our lives in trappings of grandeur. Self-importance. But still the smoke remains, blinding us, and what tears find our cheeks are but wet signifiers of irritation, damp whispers of discomfort. The air soon takes them away, to make each face a blank page.’ He set the rough piece of slag back down. ‘And now, this is all I see, here through the smoke. Faces like blank pages. I know none of them, yet imagine that I should. The confusion frightens me. I am stalked by what I once knew and haunted by the man I once was. You cannot know how that feels.’
‘Milord, what has happened to the Hust iron?’
Something flickered in Henarald’s blue eyes, like pale sunlight upon a blade. ‘Born of smoke – I never imagined how it would feel, this imprisonment. Is it any wonder we cry? Wrapped in flesh, drawn down, muscle to match the fuller’s peen, bent and swaged, the patina writ like poetry, yearning for a voice that might be music, only to yield nothing but cries of anguish. Iron is a prison, my friend, and escape is impossible when you are the bars.’
‘I never believed them alive, milord. In all my years, wielding this sword at my side, I told myself that I heard nothing living in its voice. Others swore otherwise. Many winced upon releasing the blade from its scabbard. They marched into battle with visages of dread. For one man, a fine soldier, that voice became his own cry of terror—’
Henarald waved dismissively. ‘Terror lives a brief span. When there is no possible escape, madness proves a quick and sure refuge.’ An odd smile twisted the old man’s gaunt features. ‘Iron and flesh alike.’
‘Milord—’
