Gallow (51 page)

They reached Horkaslet late in the afternoon to find that the Marroc and their strange Aulian friend had left the morning before; and since there was only one trail to be followed for the last few hours to Horkaslet and they hadn’t crossed paths, they both knew it was pointless to go in pursuit. They did anyway, Achista’s face tight with grief amid the joyful Marroc of Horkaslet, still drunk at the slaying of their shadewalker. They rode on into the night and found the farm where Addic and Oribas had stayed only the night before, and in the morning they rose with the dawn and set off for the mountain trail over the ridge into the next valley and Brawlic’s farm. Their Lhosir horse fell lame that afternoon and so they walked the last of the way along the mountain stream, back to the farmstead they’d fled together three nights before. Perhaps the walking was as well, for by the time they saw the gibbet they were both too tired to run. Achista stared while tears ran down her cheeks. Gallow’s stomach clenched with an old anger. At least the hanged man hadn’t been ripped open to have his lungs splayed like wings from his back. Then she ran and Gallow turned his head, not wanting to see any more. Beyard had done this. His oldest friend had hanged this man and Gallow couldn’t bring himself to see what else he’d done inside. He wished he had a sword with which to follow her in case Beyard’s Lhosir had lingered; but in time she came out again and there were others with her, Marroc women and children, and they stopped at the threshold and stared at him. They were too far away for him to read their faces but he felt their hate.

‘Go!’ Achista snatched the reins of the horse from his hand. ‘Filthy forkbeard. Just go!’

Gallow stared at the hanged man. ‘This is why I did what I did. This and far worse.’

Achista spat at him. ‘That was Brawlic. This was his farm. Those are his sons and his daughters. Would you like to see them weep for him?’

‘I’m sorry about your family.’

A useless thing to say but he couldn’t think of anything else. Her stare was a hard one and he deserved all of it. She shook her head. ‘They weren’t my family, but Brawlic was a good man. Then again, he’s not the first good man you forkbeards have murdered and he won’t be the last either. The iron devil of Varyxhun has taken my brother Addic and your Aulian friend too and I
will
avenge them, and if you see him before you die, you tell him that.’ She spat again, at his feet this time.

‘Where?’

Achista turned away, leading the Lhosir horse towards the barn. Grief had made her older.

An animal growl built in Gallow’s throat. He went after her, grabbed her by the shoulder and spun her around, and for a moment she was afraid of what she saw in him. ‘
Where
? Where did he take Oribas?’

She pulled herself free. ‘You don’t change, do you? Forkbeards for ever, whatever you say. Addic and your Aulian friend were here the night before last. The iron devil left for Varyxhun with a dozen forkbeards at first light this morning. Two days from now they’ll be in Varyxhun castle. The day after that Cithjan will hang them. They’re dead, Gallow. Your friend. My brother.’

Half her face cried out to him in pain. The other half saw just another forkbeard and looked at him full of furious murder. She walked away, and Gallow knew better than to follow.

‘Varyxhun.’ He nodded to himself. ‘Very well, old friend. I was heading that way anyway.’

They’d left the Marroc women and children alive and untouched, and that, Beyard knew, was right and decent. The Lhosir didn’t make war on women and children but the Marroc men were a different matter. He hanged the farmer and had the others bound and hooded. The Aulian he allowed to ride free. The Aulian, as best he could see, had done nothing wrong and the man made him curious.

‘Gallow was a friend once,’ he said, but the Aulian always had eyes full of terror and dread whenever Beyard looked at him and he soon gave up. No one ever had words for a Fateguard, only screams.

The road up to Varyxhun castle split from the Aulian Way a mile from the city gates and zigzagged back and forth up the mountainside, six tiers of it, through six impassable gates beneath six murderous walls. There Beyard handed over his prisoners for Cithjan to do as he wished, for they were his problem now. Gibbets for the Marroc at the very least, but the Aulian seemed valuable and, as far as Beyard could see, innocent; and so it came as a surprise some days later when he found the Aulian had been sent off to the Devil’s Caves with all the rest. The waste troubled him but he had other business.

‘So many years, old friend, but we are not ones to forget.’ He took off his iron gauntlets, opened Gallow’s locket and sniffed at the tiny snip of hair that lay inside. ‘I will find them, old friend. I will be waiting.’

R
eddic ran fast through the cold muddy water meadows of the Crackmarsh. The sunlight was fading. His lungs burned and his legs too, but he ran anyway because no amount of pain was worse than stopping, not with what was following him. He’d come into the swamp with an axe on his hip and a shield on his arm and two other men he barely knew. All those were gone now. The ghuldogs were all that was left.

He reached a small island, a low hump of sodden earth rising out of the shallow water, a few sickly old trees clutching it tight among a withered web of roots. He stopped for a moment, had no choice any more, just couldn’t go on without a moment to rest, leaning against hard wet bark before his legs gave way beneath him. Back through the haze of rain he couldn’t see anything except dull grey water and the scattered ghost shapes of other tree-crowned hummocks like watching sentinels. The ghuldogs were there, though, not far. Following him, steady and patient. Waiting for the dark. Waiting for his strength to fail. Waiting with their cold clammy limbs and their heartless rending claws and biting fangs.

A splash whipped his head round, desperate eyes searching for the source of the sound and finding nothing. He whimpered and pushed away from the trees, back into the water to run again. The clouds grew darker. The sun behind them sank further. The rain grew heavier. He was soaked. Freezing water ran against his skin and down into his sodden boots.

‘Modris!’ The wail burst out of him as his legs failed. He stumbled and slip-sprawled into the water. They were behind him, close, and they’d eat him if they caught him, and so he forced himself onto his hands and knees and looked up. Somewhere there had to be strength left in him.

Shapes moved through the haze. Bent and hunched. Two, then three, then half a dozen. They came slowly, sniffing him out. They fanned around him and he knew this was the end. He had nothing left. When he tried to stand, he couldn’t. On his hands and knees he watched them and wept his misery out. The ghuldogs sniffed closer. Cautious now that he wished they’d simply take him and be done with it. The closest of them stopped a stone’s throw away, near enough to see it clearly through the rain. The relic of a man, sallow and gaunt, but with the head of a savage wolf, patches of mangy fur clinging to its skull, eyes burning red, fangs bared, saliva dripping from its jaws into the swamp. It took a pace closer and then another, each step slow and delicate and precise. Stalking him, though the time for stalking was long past.

Reddic closed his eyes. He fingered the sign of Modris the Protector hung on a loop of leather around his neck. Begged the god of the Marroc to save him though there was clearly no salvation to be had. A haunting hooting cry rang through the wind and the rain. Something between the howl of a wolf and an anguished cry of despair. He waited for the end.

A hand took his shoulder. He flinched and whimpered and screwed up his eyes, but the hand was just a hand – no talons, no fangs – and when he opened his eyes and looked up it was a man standing over him. A hard-faced Marroc man in mail with a spear, and when Reddic rose shaking to his feet, he saw that the man wasn’t alone, that there were a dozen more in a cautious circle. The ghuldogs were still there as well, shapes in the rain-haze, watching.

The soldier helped him to his feet.

‘I was looking to find Valaric’s men.’ Reddic couldn’t keep the quaver out of his voice. ‘I want to fight.’

There and then he didn’t sound much like a man who’d picked up his axe and left his home to join the last free Marroc in their stand against the forkbeards but the soldier only nodded. There might even have been a hint of a grim smile. ‘Well, you found us. Welcome to the Crackmarsh, Marroc.’

O
ribas had told Gallow a lot of things when they’d crossed the desert together. More were forgotten than remembered but Gallow knew that the Aulians had come over the mountains once. Oribas said they’d never reached far into what were now the Marroc lands because the mountain valleys were too cold and wet for their liking, but they’d made their mark. Gallow had seen their work for himself: the fortress of Witches’ Reach at the far mouth of the gorge, the impossible span of the Aulian Bridge across the Isset beneath it, the road that reached as far as Tarkhun, halfway to the coast, and of course the unconquerable stone of Varyxhun castle, etched into the bluffs that overlooked the city.

They’d built the first town of Varyxhun too but there wasn’t much left to see of their handiwork now. It hadn’t ever been much to the Aulians, but then the Marroc had come to the valley, drawn by the peace the Aulians had brought, and the town had grown. Gallow passed silently through the open gates. Aulians had stood here once, and later King Tane’s huscarls, but now the soldiers who leaned on their spears and glowered at everyone who passed were Lhosir. They stared openly at Gallow’s shaven chin and he heard their muted growls.
Nioingr.
One of them spat at his feet as they passed. He let it go. Had to. For Arda. For Oribas.

He stopped and looked past them. The main street of Varyxhun ran straight as an arrow from the gates to the market square in the middle of the town. It was a river of half-frozen mud and slush, piles of dirty snow pushed up against the walls of the wooden houses that lined it. He’d come through here once long ago with the Screambreaker and his army, chasing after the fleeing Marroc king. They’d stopped for a while to throw a few spears and arrows at the walls of Varyxhun castle, perched up on the crags of the mountainside overlooking them, but not for long. Assaulting the castle was impossible. They’d already fought their way across the Aulian Bridge and then past the fortress of Witches’ Reach that defended the entrance to the valley. They’d been tired and battered and bloodied by the time they reached the city, and there had stood the castle as it did today, staring down at them from hundreds of feet of sheer rock, the single narrow road winding back and forth beneath a slaughter of walls, defended by gatehouse after gatehouse after gatehouse. They’d settled for helping themselves to the town, feasting on its food and its mead and its women. They hadn’t burned much, but then the Screambreaker had grown more thoughtful towards the end of his campaign. It was Tane he wanted, not the castle, and that meant making Varyxhun his home. They bled it dry but they hadn’t killed it, and then it turned out that Tane had slipped out right under their noses and died somewhere in the mountains, weeks earlier while he was looking to escape along the Aulian Way. The war was suddenly finished, and when the Screambreaker turned his eye to the castle once again, he’d found the gates hanging open, the huscarls who’d defended them dead by their own hands. And that had been enough. The Lhosir had quietly melted away. They’d gone to Andhun, the last Marroc stronghold, and after that most of them had gone home.

Now Lhosir in mail and helms walked through the mud of Varyxhun once more. Marroc hurried past them, eyes down. Gallow hadn’t been keeping track of the days, but Midwinter was surely close. In Middislet they’d celebrated for days, burning effigies of the Weeping God on Midwinter night and drinking mead until dawn to toast the birth of the sun and the first sunrise of the year, all of them roaring drunk. There were no hanging effigies of the Weeping God in Varyxhun though. Perhaps they had little to celebrate this midwinter.

Gallow wrapped himself in his furs, covering his face as best he could. The last time he’d been here had been in summer and these fringes of the town had been a sea of mud. The cold had changed that into hard frozen dirt covered in an inch of treacherous slime made of mud and animal dung and melted snow. At least the smell wasn’t as bad as he remembered. Along the street by the gates, hanged men dangled from gibbets, blackened and withered by time, skin pecked to shreds, twisting languorously back and forth in the wind. There were half a dozen of them, Medrin, or whoever ruled here in his name, always reminding the Marroc of their lords and of the price of dissent. There was a tavern by the gates. It had been the Horn of Plenty once, with some of the best Marroc ale in the valley, but it had changed its name now – to the King’s Hand, with a crude wooden six-fingered hand painted black hanging over the door. Whether the Marroc meant that as homage to their king or as mockery Gallow couldn’t guess. He looked further along the road towards the market square where traders and travellers congregated. If there was any word to be had of Nadric the smith or Fenaric the carter it would be there. But when he asked, the Marroc all saw his Lhosir face and shrugged or turned away. As far as he could tell, no one knew the names. If they did, they kept their knowledge to themselves.

He slept in a hen house and left Varyxhun the next morning, alone and on foot with nothing more than the clothes he wore – mail and a helm under thick furs. He stared up at Varyxhun castle, wondering if Oribas was there, if the Aulian was already dead or whether he was still alive and in a dungeon, waiting to hang. Stared and wondered what he could possibly do, alone against so many, then looked with his fingers for Arda’s locket around his neck and remembered again that it was gone. He bowed his head. No. There was nothing to be done. Alone he could make no difference.