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Glyph and the other men had left their camps when the leaves turned brown. They trekked into the north, out on to the barrenlands, seeking the last, dwindling herds that had summered in the forest. Bearing bows and javelins, they gathered into hunting parties, seeking hoof-sign, and at night they told tales of past hunts, of hundreds of beasts slain where the herds crossed the cold rivers. They spoke of the wolves that joined them, and became comrades in the slaughter. Wolves they all came to know by sight – and surely, it was the same for the wolves – and like old friends they were given names. Odd-eye. Silvermane. Broketooth.
And, as the fires died down and darkness closed in with the moaning wind, the hunters sought to find the names the wolves had for each of them.
Fartwind. Sackscratch. Prickpump. Nubhide.
Laughter bit the cold from the air on those nights.
The layering of memories built tradition’s high walls, until the place made by those walls became a prison.
Glyph now saw how the very last tradition, when all the others had done their grisly work, was just this: a prison. The tales told, the memories gathered up like clay and then made into something hard as stone. It was what the elders of the lake had clung to, with their bleeding fingers. It was what Glyph and his fellow hunters had clung to, on those empty nights so filled with empty words.
He walked through the scorched bones of the forest, and the bitter ash on his tongue had become a kind of mortar, and he felt himself beginning the building of his own wall. A modest two or three stones. A meagre wall. But he would find more to work with, he was certain of that. Constructed from new memories. These memories …
The failed hunt just past. The cruel pathos of the stories told at night out in the barrens. The hopeless search for hoof-sign. The wolves that did not come and did not howl with the fall of dusk.
The long return to the forest, hungry and silent with shame. The smoke to the south, above the treeline. The sudden scattering of the parties, as family members drew together and then split away, rushing to the camps of their kin. The wandering among the slain. The dead wife, the dead sister who had made it halfway out of her burning hut before a sword slid into her back. The dead son whose neck had been snapped.
The desperate journey to the monasteries of Yedan and Yannis. The beseeching of the priests and priestesses within. The bitter bargain offered.
Bring us your children.
The hunters wailed. They cried, What children?
On that day, Glyph took for himself that vicious title the people of the towns and the city had given them. He was now a Denier.
The name had become his promise. His destiny, in fact. Denier. Denier of life. Denier of truth. Denier of faith.
Dusk had arrived when he finally found the camp of the Legion soldiers whom he had been tracking. There were three of Urusander’s ilk, travelling east, making for Neret Sorr as had so many others before them. Glyph crept his way closer in the darkness, safe beyond the dungchip fire’s pool of light. He still possessed all his arrows, a half-dozen of them bearing iron barbs. The others were flint-tipped.
When he was in place, beside a stump and behind the tree that had toppled from it, he silently removed three arrows, the first two iron-headed, the last one bearing his best flint – long-bladed and sharp-edged under the single strand of gut binding it to the end of the shaft. Each arrow he set point-down into the ground beside him, making a neat row.
Two men and a woman. They were talking. The two men were arguing over who would lie with the woman this night. She was laughing as she set one against the other. They sat round the fire, under the cold night’s bright stars. Glyph concluded, as he waited, that she wanted neither of them.
He selected the first iron-barbed arrow and set it to his bow’s gut string. Lifted the weapon clear of the black trunk and drew on the string as he did so, pulling until it pressed against his lower lip.
Then he released the arrow.
The man directly opposite Glyph made a choking sound, toppling backward.
His friend on his right barked a laugh, as if the dead man was jesting. But then the woman spied the fletching jutting from the dying man’s throat, and she cried out.
Glyph was already drawing the bow. The second iron arrow sank deep under her left breast. With a small gasp, she fell on to her side.
The last man unsheathed his sword, wheeling round, but blinded still by the firelight.
The flint-tipped arrow buried itself in his stomach. He shrieked, doubling over. The arrow’s shaft tilted and then, at his frantic scrabbling, it fell to the ground. The long flint head remained in his gut.
Glyph settled back, watching.
The man sank to his knees, moaning.
Shaking his head, Glyph spoke. ‘You will run.’
The head snapped up, revealing a face pinched with fierce pain. ‘Come here, you fucking turd, so I can cut you down before my last breath!’
‘You will run,’ Glyph repeated. ‘Or I will put another arrow in you, and you’ll not be able to hold up your sword. Then I will come to you and with my knife I will slice off your cock. Then your sac, and throw them on to your pretty fire. I will drag you half across that fire, and add the remaining chips over your legs, and we’ll watch you roast down there.’
‘Fuck!’ The man groaned to his feet, still doubled over, and then he staggered out from the firelight.
