Gallow (46 page)

‘Two?’

‘The other will die in a few days. I am ironskin, so I know his fate.’

‘What of the Aulian who was with me?’

Beyard put the mask and crown back over his head. ‘You should know how it is with our kind. They threw him into the gorge of the Isset.’

Which left him with nothing. Gallow held his head in his hands. ‘All this way. I brought him all this way. I told him he didn’t have to follow.’

‘A man can’t escape his fate. I’d plead for you, for the sake of the friendship we once shared, but you turned on your kin, Gallow. You should not have done that.’ Beyard stood in the door of the cell and turned, face hidden now behind bars of iron. ‘Does the red sword swim beneath the waves below the cliffs of Andhun? Did you lose it on the other side of the world?’

Gallow froze, head bowed and eyes filled with tears for those he’d never see again. The sword. Solace, the Comforter, the Peacebringer, all those names the Marroc and the Vathen had given it, and it had done nothing but mock him from the moment he’d held it in his hand. Oribas called it by its Aulian name: the Edge of Sorrows, for the Aulians had always seen the truth of the curse it carried. ‘I never lost it, Beyard,’ he said, slowly looking up as he did. ‘I carried it out of the sea of Andhun and I carried it across the world and back again. I carried it across the ruins of Aulia and along the length of the Aulian Way. The men I killed? It tasted their blood.’

Beyard stiffened. ‘It’s here? In Varyxhun?’

‘If the men I fought didn’t think to bring it back then it’s lying beside the Aulian Way. In a place where only I will find it.’

The Fateguard stepped back inside and stood over Gallow, eyes boring down into him. ‘Where, old friend? Where is it?’

Gallow shook his head. ‘I’ll not give it to Medrin. Not for nothing.’

Beyard’s iron-gloved hands reached around Gallow’s neck and tore the locket with the snip of Arda’s hair away from him. ‘I will find them. Whoever they are. I will punish them until you show me.’

Gallow met his eyes, unflinching. ‘Will you? You were my friend once and a far better man than that. Has the iron skin of the Eyes of Time taken the Beyard I knew?’

‘I am Fateguard,’ Beyard hissed, but his eyes flicked away in a flash of shame.

‘All I ask is to know whether my family lives.’

‘And what use is that knowledge? If you find they’re all dead, if your woman has another man, if your children are scattered and gone, will you go to the hangman more easily? For these are all likely things. Or if you find that they wait and still mourn after all this time and all is as it was and could be again, will you die at peace?’

‘Let me see them and I’ll show you where the sword is hidden.’

Beyard shook his head. ‘Take me to the sword and you’ll live until you have what you came here for.’

‘For your blood oath, Beyard, I’ll do that.’

Again Beyard shook his head. ‘I’ll swear to you on the Fates themselves. For my kind that is an oath cast in iron, but I cannot give you a blood oath. I am Fateguard, Gallow. I have no blood to offer.’

T
he Marroc let Oribas rest for three days, eyeing him watchfully, talking among themselves in careful huddles while Oribas took care never to pry and spent his time staring into the fire and helping around the house as best he could – simple chores that needed little strength or skill. They fed him plenty of greasy stew and he held his nose and smiled and tried not think too much about the delicate care that his own kin put into the feasting tables of his homeland. The big Marroc Brawlic still made the sign of evil when he thought Oribas wasn’t looking and the thin one still wanted to murder him. Sometimes Oribas caught Achista looking at him and then looking quickly away with a smile, but she was rarely in the house and it was the older woman who brought him his food now, Brawlic’s wife Kortha. But on the third evening when Achista came into the house, she looked at him and didn’t smile and instead pulled Addic and Jonnic away from the fire where they’d been whittling wood. The three of them talked in urgent whispers until Addic nodded and slipped his whittling knife back into its sheath. Then he came and sat beside Oribas. ‘Aulian, there’s a shadewalker.’ He stared at Oribas hard. ‘It’s been seen again. Near Horkaslet. If you still say you can lay it to rest, then you and Jonnic and I can leave to hunt it in the morning.’

Oribas stretched out his hands. When the Marroc talked to him, they talked of little but shadewalkers and sometimes the Edge of Sorrows and what he knew about both. They’d been waiting for this. ‘Salt? Iron? Water? Fire? You have these things?’

‘You have the fire. Water is all around you. Iron and salt we have. Jonnic?’

Jonnic disappeared outside. When he came back, he was holding a sword in a scabbard crusted with snow. He looked Oribas in the eye and leaned into him and drew out the blade. It was old but clean and meticulously oiled. ‘Not a forkbeard sword, this. An old Marroc one. Hard iron.’ He slammed it back into its scabbard and handed it to Addic.

They left not long after the next dawn on the back of three mules, ploughing a path through the fresh snow down the little valley from Brawlic’s farm, following a small fast river until it turned to run between two peaks towards the valley of the Isset. Jonnic led them to a place where one of the great Varyxhun pines had fallen across the water. He dismounted and gingerly led his mule across the giant trunk. Oribas and Addic followed, and together they climbed a steep twisting trail that rose up the other side of the valley towards the next ridge. The Marroc didn’t talk, and by the end of the day they were across a high snow-bound pass and into the next valley along. They spent the night in the barn of some farmer that both Addic and Jonnic knew, the Marroc leaving Oribas with the mules while they went into the house. Addic came back out with a bowl of stew despairingly similar to the ones Oribas had so happily left behind. They slept not long after sunset and rose again early in the morning, reaching a hamlet by the middle of the day that was little more than a dozen houses and barns. Addic talked to one of the Marroc, who nodded and pointed and made a sign against evil, and Oribas didn’t need to hear a word to understand perfectly.
Shadewalker. That way
. So they set off across snow-covered fields, all of them more upright in their saddles now. Jonnic held his head craned forward, making little jerking movements from side to side. Addic’s foot twitched. About a mile from the hamlet they stopped at the edge of a dense stand of pines, black against the mottled mountainside, and Addic pointed. ‘It’s in there.’

‘I’ve never faced a shadewalker before,’ Oribas told him. ‘I know what they are and I know what will stop one but I’ve never faced one.’ Shadewalkers preferred dark places. Places with no sun, which was why they rarely came to the desert.

‘You should have told us that before we left, Oribas.’ Addic slipped off the back of his mule.

Jonnic stayed where he was. He spat. ‘If we were going to get rid of this Aulian, here would do. Far enough away from old Brawlic that the forkbeards would never suspect even if they found him.’

Addic snorted. ‘And bring them down on Ronnelic and Jonna and Ylya and Massic and the rest? Why, have they done something to offend you?’

Oribas yawned with a careful precision. ‘In Aulia it is considered impolite to discuss a man’s murder while he’s standing right in front of you. I would hate to inconvenience your friends with my death. Perhaps it would be more convenient for us all if I were to stay alive?’

Addic laughed. ‘I’m sorry about Jonnic. He hasn’t quite grasped the idea that there are people in the world who are neither his Marroc friends nor forkbeards out to hang him.’

‘I’ve quite grasped the Vathen,’ snapped Jonnic. He glared at Oribas. ‘When I cut a man’s throat, his body goes in the Isset. Won’t be a trouble to anyone. No
inconvenience
.’

Oribas spared him a smile. ‘Then I shall remain glad that it’s Addic and not you who carries the iron sword.’ He turned away from Jonnic with as much bad grace as his Aulian manners could muster. ‘An iron sword driven through the shadewalker’s heart will kill it. Steel will sometimes work but more usually the creature appears to have been slain only to rise again in the days or weeks that follow. I’ve heard of the same shadewalker being put to rest four times before it stayed at peace, but when you truly kill it, you will know. There will be no doubt.’ Just saying the words made him think of the Edge of Sorrows and all the names that the Marroc and the Lhosir had for the red sword. Was
that
what it was for? Putting shadewalkers to rest? ‘Shadewalkers were knights once, soldiers of the Aulian emperor. They remember little of who they were but they have not forgotten their skill. Most still carry their old swords and armour.’

‘We know.’ Addic’s lips were pressed tight together. ‘We’ve seen them. Too many of them.’

‘The sword-dancers learn to fight with such skill that they can cut the armour from a shadewalker’s skin and pierce its dead bones with one thrust. The shadow-stalkers learn ways to make a shadewalker so weak that it can barely move. We have neither here, but we will confront it as though we have both. Whoever takes the sword must make the final thrust, but you must also defend us while I weaken it. Where’s the salt?’

Addic jerked his thumb at a sack strapped to the back of his saddle.

‘Addic, if you carry the sword then your friend Jonnic will need a torch and some of the salt as well. The shadewalker cannot cross a line of salt. I’ll trap it in a circle. Once that is done, the rest is much easier. I will throw furnace powders over the creature and Jonnic will set his torch to it. When it flares you must all stand back, but be ready, for it will only burn a moment. As the flames die we throw pure water and more salt. If we strike well, it will fall as though dead, but don’t be fooled. The iron sword must finish the creature. Is your point good and sharp?’

‘You know all this but you’ve never faced one of these creatures?’ Jonnic looked ready to run.

‘I’ve seen it done. Where I come from there were men who would hunt them and bring them to my school just so that we could be shown.’

They entered the trees on foot, the pines packed too closely for mules and so dark that they would quickly be lost. Addic took the lead, Jonnic came at the rear. They moved slowly and with care, squeezing between the branches.

‘You’ll need to lure the creature into open ground,’ Oribas whispered. A circle of salt would be almost impossible amid these trees.

‘And how will I do that?’ hissed Addic.

‘My understanding is that shadewalkers are very easily lured.’

‘Lured how?’

Oribas tried to sound unconcerned, as though he was talking about trapping a badger or a hare. ‘As with any hungry animal, one baits one’s trap with food, Addic.’ They all knew he meant them.

‘Have you ever see a man taken by a shadewalker, Aulian?’ whispered Jonnic behind him. ‘Their faces are . . .’ His words faded. Oribas understood. The faces of their victims were the worst. They were unrecognisable. Thin and stretched as though they’d been sucked to nothing from the inside.

‘Yes,’ he said quietly. ‘I have. I lost a friend once and I’ve seen other victims too.’ The friend had been more Gallow’s friend than his but they’d travelled for many miles and many days together. He’d died in the foothills along the Aulian Way and Oribas hadn’t been there to tell Gallow and his sailors how to fight them. Too busy chasing a monster of his own.

The trees shivered and rustled ahead of them. Too much for a small forest creature and something as large as a deer wasn’t likely to come into a wood like this. A bear? Oribas wasn’t sure but the idea of a bear frightened him even more than a shadewalker. Salt wouldn’t stop a bear. His fingers drifted to his belt, opening the pouches lined with waxed paper that held his saltpetre and the fierce-burning powdered grey metal that came from the alchemists near his old home. Would a flash of fire scare off a bear? He had no idea. Deserts didn’t have bears. From the way Gallow had talked, probably not.

A branch cracked. A shape emerged from the gloom ahead, ragged clothes hanging over rusting mail, an old round wooden shield, scarred and stained, and a long notched sword almost trailing in the blanket of needles that covered the forest floor. Face as pale as the snow, eyes wide open, skin taut over the bones of its face, the shadewalker came towards them at a steady pace, without a sound save for its footsteps and the whip of a branch now and then as it brushed across its shield. In front of Oribas, Addic froze.

‘Modris protect us,’ he croaked.

‘Diaran!’ cried Jonnic behind them. He took a pace back and then another. As the shadewalker advanced, he turned and ran. Jonnic, who held the torch and so their fire. Oribas stumbled as Addic backed into him.

‘What do I do?’ the Marroc quavered.

Oribas backed away too, grabbing a fistful of salt from the bag over his shoulder. A man could always outrun a shadewalker if his legs were good. Why were these Marroc so afraid?

The shadewalker lifted its sword as it came closer, one of the old blades of the Aulian emperor’s guard. Fine swords if you could find one in good repair and they reminded Oribas of the long-bladed Edge of Sorrows. The Marroc had left the red sword at home and he thought now they might wish they hadn’t. Addic lifted his shield to defend himself, but he was still backing away and he was white with fear.

‘It’s just a man who forgot when to die,’ hissed Oribas. He stepped around Addic and threw a handful of salt at the shadewalker’s face. It rained down in a fine dust. The shadewalker stopped and hissed; for a moment its guard was down but Addic was too gripped by fear to strike at it. Oribas threw down a line of salt across the earth between them. ‘It cannot cross!’ He shifted around between the trees, laying down more salt, trying to encircle the shadewalker.

The creature cleared its eyes. It advanced on Addic again and then reached the salted earth and stopped. Its head whipped around to Oribas as though it understood exactly what the Aulian was doing.