Gallow (79 page)

Someone fired an arrow from the Marroc ship into the melee. Then another, and then Heronhand saw they were bringing up a brazier, ready to set their arrows aflame. They were still close though, very close. Close enough. He ran and jumped onto the rail of the Moontongue’s ship and hurled himself across the churning water between the two ships and almost made it. He hit the side of the Marroc ship and grabbed at it, slid, dropped his axe and caught hold of the rail with one hand. He swung his other arm, still with his shield strapped to it and still holding the golden case, and hooked his arm over the rail. He started to haul himself over when he found himself staring up at a Marroc with a spear aimed at his face. The spear jabbed him right under the nose, hard enough to break two of his teeth and rip half his upper lip.

‘Stay on your own ship, forkbeard.’ The spear drew back and then paused as the Marroc saw what he had in his hand. He dropped the spear and picked up an axe instead. ‘Give it, forkbeard. Give it and I’ll let you live.’

The Lhosir shook his head. The Marroc grinned and brought the axe down on Heronhand’s arm, breaking it through the mail. Baldi Heronhand screamed. As he fell, he felt the golden case torn out of from his fingers; and then the freezing water of the Ice Mountain Sea swallowed him and he sank like a stone.

No one saw the Moontongue fall and lived to tell of it. Maybe he never did. The Marroc set fire to his ship and sailed away and left it adrift and maybe the fire took him before the Fateguard could bring him down, or maybe they were still fighting when the storm broke some hours later and sent them all to the bottom. But either way, that was where it ended, out in the Ice Mountain Sea, with Farri Moontongue, the Crimson Shield of Modris and twelve of the Fateguard all sent to the bottom of the sea together. And some years later, if one of the Fateguard was seen to come to the temple in Nardjas with a misshapen mask split open at the side by a fierce blow from an axe and smelling faintly of the sea, there was no one left from that day who might have noticed and started to wonder.

WITCHES’ REACH

NATHAN HAWKE

The wagon drove slowly over the new road the Aulians had built. It ran from where they were still constructing their mountain castle to where a freshly raised tower looked out over the rush of the Isset gorge and beyond. Another few miles along the river past the tower, where the gorge was narrowest, they’d already erected an immense scaffold that stretched right across the river. They were building a bridge, or so they said. Missa had gone to look at it last week and taken a right earful and almost a beating for wandering so far, but it had been worth it. She’d never seen a thing like it. Men hanging from ropes a hundred feet up in the air over the roaring water, and stones the size of houses being slowly levered and rolled down the road and lined up along the bank. They were building a stone arch and they’d nearly finished it, but when she’d asked one of the Aulians if that was the bridge, they’d only laughed at her and said no, the arch was only the beginning, and something about it being there to support a second arch, and that second arch itself only being built to support the construction of last and much greater arch that would support the bridge itself. It left her wondering if she’d be old before it was done, but the laughing stonemasons said no, it might take another year or a bit more depending on the winter, but then it would be done and they could all go home.

She crept from her perch looking down on the road and ran after the wagon as far as the tower. It was full of what looked like sand, except it was clumpy and course and an odd pale colour, a sort of off-white brown. Every time the wagon took a bump or a rut in the road, it shook and some of the sand fell off. She picked up a handful of it and took a closer look and found it stuck to her damp fingers; and when she sucked at them a few minutes later, they tasted of salt. She put some in her mouth to see and that’s what it was. Salt. A wagon full of priceless salt. After that, she made sure to scoop up whatever fell out.

A dozen workmen were waiting outside the tower. They already had shovels and as soon as the wagon stopped they started scooping the salt out into sacks. Missa watched them a while until she was bored. She was about to leave when she saw that there was something hidden under the salt, slowly being uncovered.

It took them another hour to clear it out. What was left was a body – at least, it had two arms and two legs and a head. Missa supposed it was some sort of soldier since it was dressed from head to foot in armour made out of plates of dark metal. The workmen put down their shovels and set about dragging the body out of the wagon and into the tower. It took all twelve of them to carry it, resting on a sturdy plank of wood that in turn rested on their shoulders. When they were inside, Missa slipped in after them. No one paid her much attention. There weren’t many children out here in the valley and the few there were tended to get treated well by the soldiers and the stonemasons. Reminded the Aulians of home, they said, where they all fervently wished they could be.

The procession moved through the tower’s open hall and down a set of spiral steps. It took a good long time to manage that, with a great deal of swearing and cursing, and then there was another one, a lot longer than the first. It ended in an odd room, hexagonal, with the stairs through the centre and six stone benches set one into each wall, one for each of the Ascendants and each with an alter except for one, where instead of a wall there was a wide circular opening. The men were already carrying the body inside, and when Missa moved to follow them, one turned back and shot her a warning glance. ‘No, Missa. Wait out there. This isn’t for you.’

There were more men inside and so Missa hung in the doorway and craned her head to see what they were up to, but when the workmen put down the body and came back out, they shooed her away. They went back up and carried their sacks of salt down into the tomb and then came out again. Missa waited until they were back to whatever else it was they were supposed to be doing and then crept in to look again, but by now the men inside the tomb were done and were coming out. They frowned at her when they saw her but they didn’t send her away like the others and so she stayed, pressed against the back wall, watching. As the soon as the last man came out they all started to work on dragging a stone across the opening to block it, and she saw that the stone was a door, rolling sideways across the gap between two walls as thick as she was. To the right of the rolling door, four burnished bronze wheels stuck out of the wall, each engraved with symbols. There were six signs on each wheel, animals, the totems for each of the six Ascendants who stood guard over the empire. She stared at the way the wheels were set while the men wrestled with the stone. Snake, dragon, bear, fish.

The men finished moving the stone and stepped away, catching their breath with an air of relief and satisfaction as though they’d finished some great work they’d never quite been sure wouldn’t go terribly wrong. One of them, the oldest, went to the bronze wheels and turned them all a few careless turns. It puzzled Missa when the men all went back to trying to move the stone to open the door again, puzzled her even more when it didn’t budge and more still when the men stopped and grinned and laughed as though that was exactly the way things were supposed to be. They filed off up the stairs, carrying their lanterns with them, and Missa hurried after, not wanting to be left alone in the dark. She didn’t know what she’d seen, but no one had minded her seeing it so at least she wouldn’t be in any trouble. The door and the bronze wheels were interesting though, and she found herself thinking about them as she left.

Later that day she decided she’d play a game and pretend she had her own special door with its odd lock. She scratched a circle on a wall of rock to pretend to be the door and four more circles to be her bronze wheels, and then scratched a little symbol by each one, the way they’d been when she’d first seen them before the men had closed the tomb. Snake, dragon, bear, fish.

‘There,’ she said to the rock. ‘And now you’re open and I can go in,’ and she danced off, imagining what might be on the other side.

She forgot about her pretend door soon enough and the real one too and moved on to other things as children do, but the rock never forgot the marks she’d scratched into it. It held them patiently and bore them on its skin long after Missa was gone, long after the last Aulian followed, long after every man in the valley had forgotten what was buried so carefully under Witches’ Reach. Held them, waiting.