'Wait. . .!' he cried, too late; there was a sudden soft fall of dust, and he could see nothing before him except Karel thundering forward on his giant destrier.
Imber pulled off his mailed gauntlet, ran his hand over the prickling cold sweat on his face, and wondered what in the world he should say to his cousin.
5
A Heating Possession
Blaise had thought that nothing could frighten him more than the company he kept these days, until he made his first journey into the Kings Eye. When he was there, he thought that nothing would ever frighten him more than simply being in that place; now he thought that he'd been twice wrong. Soon he would have to go back there, to report his failure to the man who had sent him on this mission. He dreaded facing Magister Fulke, to confess that failure; he thought that the marshal's anger would be a more frightening thing than any that he'd yet seen.
He had called them a rabble, the people that he followed, but that wasn't strictly true. A rabble is disorganised, and loud. This was neither. The preacher led and his disciples marched behind - like an army, almost, except that it was an army of the poor, dressed in rags and lacking weapons. More like penitents in a procession, then, silent and involved, their thoughts turned to holy matters. Except that the preacher only ever spoke about Surayon, the need to cru
sh heresy, to
bring the Gods light to unbelievers. Which made it an army indeed, intent on victory, though Blaise had no idea how that victory could ever be achieved. It was all a mystery to him, as much now as it had been on the first day; and that was his failure, that he was so frightened to admit.
He walked behind the procession like a camp-follower, he was so far reduced; and he was just one among the many, many who did the same. These really were a rabble. Some were relatives of those the preacher had healed. They had seen their husbands or wives or children called back from certain death, had seen them rise up and abandon family and village and all to follow the preacher, and had felt drawn to follow in their turn. Blaise had spoken to a few of them; he'd seen and heard and to some extent shared their confusion, their distress. Their loved ones shunned their company and would not speak. Those whom the preacher healed might as well have died, he thought, for all the good their resurrection did.
Others among his companions had heard the preacher speak, and answered more simply to the call. Men and boys largely, they had seized what few weapons they owned or could improvise and set off to do what the long generation of their fathers had failed to do. They would pit knives against nothing, mattocks against magic, and Surayon would open before them like a flower to a probing bee, because the preacher said it would.
And then there were those who would follow any band of men, for what gain or comfort they could find; and those who would follow any voice that cried to them to follow, wherever it might lead.
And among them all — the worried and the warriors, the women and the weak - there was Blaise, who was one alone and quite unlike any whom he walked beside. Both worried and a warrior, neither woman nor weak and yet he felt so, he might as well be both for all the good he could accomplish here. Sent for a spy, he had foundered beyond rescue. The preacher spoke to no one when he was not preaching, and his disciples spoke to no one at all. What could a man uncover, in the face of such inhuman silence?
Nothing, nothing at all. Blaise had known and lived under the strictures of the Ransomers' Rule, with its penalties for idle or inappropriate talking; he knew how young men kept such rules, and how they broke them also. Since he left the Order he had served on the borders of Elessi, he had fought raiders and been a raider himself. He could hear a voices whisper in a wind; as the sergeant of a young troop, he had learned to read the movement of a finger or the twitch of an eye, to know when lads were sending messages under the uttermost silence of his glare.
There was none of that here, nothing at all. The disciples, the healed ones walked at a steady pace all day, behind the preacher who led them; they spoke not a word, they passed not a sign between them. Nor a mouthful to eat, nor to drink. They would eat at dawn and at days end if they were offered food - and they were, always, by villagers or family — but they showed no hint of need between. Even the hardest-trained army would sling waterskins along the line when the sun was high, and whatever dried meat or biscuit fell to hand, something to chew against the tedium of the road and the heat and the ache of wounds, perhaps, the bite of blisters. These, not. When they marched, they marched and did nothing other. As when they sat — in the evenings, in the villages, around a fire or a well while the preacher spoke -they sat and did nothing other, until they were fed or sent away to sleep. They did seem to listen to the preacher, but Blaise thought that it was only seeming. He thought that mans words fell as far short of them now as their wives' words did, or their brothers'. It wasn't to them or for their sake that he spoke, in any case; they were his already, as though he claimed their souls in payment for their lives.
Reluctantly, whipped into something fearful by his greater fear of Magister Fulke, Blaise limped ahead of the murmuring crowd. He'd had to change his good soldier's boots for a poor man's sandals when he put on this guise of a landless labourer; the straps had rubbed his heels raw, the thin rope soles were no protection against the sharp stones of the road and every step was a fresh reminder of futility.
He walked forward, to join the tail of the disciples' lines. For a while he made his way beside them, as silent as they were themselves; not a head lifted, not an eye turned aside to find him. He might have been invisible, a ghost in a parade of ghosts.
Eventually, he came up next to a boy whose name he knew, whom he'd had some conversation with just two nights earlier. It happened sometimes that the disease tracking ahead of them would turn suddenly to snap at their heels; that those who followed would wake in the morning to find one of their number weak and lethargic, unable to rise. Then the disciples would come to claim the victim, the preacher would work his abiding miracle in the dawnlight, and there would be one more disciple to trail dumb and obedient in his wake.
No one ever fell sick in the daytime, on the march. Blaise couldn't decide if that was sinister or meaningless. He'd like it to mean something; he'd like to believe that the preacher gave poison to his victims and then stole their souls while they were weak and failing. That would be a thing to say to Magister Fulke. He couldn't make any sense of it, though, no matter how he strained. If the preacher came slipping through the camp at night, it would be known, however light his tread; if he sent one of his disciples, it would be the talk of all the company. And if he did either one — or if he sent his poison by the birds, if an earthworm carried it, a zephyr — there was still no reason in his choices. Man or woman, young or old: whether in the villages ahead of him or among the followers behind, the sickness struck at random, as a sickness should. Perhaps the man was a monster, perhaps he fed on souls and cared not if they were virgin and innocent or raddled with age and sin; but why drag their emptied bodies behind?
Fess was a boy of fourteen, who reminded Blaise painfully of himself at that same turn of life. Born to be big but born without a father, without name or place in the world, he'd scavenged for bread and begged for work since he was a child; that showed on his skin, tight-stretched over raw bones and muscles like bowstrings, no flesh at all. Too many years of short commons and short sleep, it would take years longer to mend, to fill him out to the man he should have been. Blaise knew.
Like Blaise before him, Fess had been waiting till he was old enough to be sworn a military man: for the God or for his local lord, no matter. But then the preacher had come and Fess had seen a way to overleap his age, to be blooded young and so present himself a soldier ready-made.
He'd followed the march with the light of that ambition in his eyes, a burning hunger when Blaise had spoken to him, and thrilling at the chance to make it happen. Thrilling at the food, too, surrendering a lifelong hunger, eating with both hands at every halt. The villagers were generous, with their storehouses full of that year's second crop; or else they were afraid, such a rabble dogging such a strange parade and camping in their fields or their lord's pastures. Fear could make anyone open-handed, however little they had to spare. If Fess fancied that a soldier always ate like this - well, he would learn. And regard the lesson lightly, no doubt. Even barrack fare would seem like feasting, after a diet of cabbage-water and scorched grains gleaned from others' fields. Blaise knew.
Blaise had helped the boy to treat and dress a gash on his forehead, the result of a stone flung by a nervous goatherd; just a small cut, but it bled freely as scalp-wounds always do. After that they'd sat half the night over a glowing fire, while Fess talked and Blaise listened, sharing his memories in silence.
The following morning, the boy had lain stiff and still in his blanket, seemingly awake but unstirring, his eyes wide and blank as though his spirit were snared in horror. Blaise had struggled in vain to rouse him, finally had to be pulled away by others as the disciples gathered round. He'd been barely aware of the voices urgent in his ear, 'Let the preacher have him, let him be healed, there's nothing you or any of us can do for him now.' He'd wanted to fight with fists or knife, with whatever it took to keep Fess from a walking nightmare; better to let him die and bury him a stranger in a land where he'd never found a home.
It was only later, too late, that he'd thought he might have put his knife to another use, to help Fess to a speedy death. Instead he'd stood slackly, uselessly, while the boy was snatched up and hurried off to where the preacher waited. He hadn't watched the healing. He'd seen too many of those tainted miracles already; he'd busied himself with sifting through Fess's few belongings, keeping the short sword and rolling the rest into the boy's ragged blanket, which he would carry himself in impotent fury at the preacher, at the world, above all at himself. Once more he'd failed, the boy had needed saving and Blaise had let him slip.
So now he walked beside Fess, or the semblance of Fess. The boy looked as well as ever he had, and yet he looked utterly different, almost unrecognisable as he paced steadily along on stiff, inexhaustible legs. He used to walk with an ungainly slouch, awkward yet in his growing body; now he carried himself almost like the soldier he'd yearned to be, except that it seemed to Blaise as though something else carried him. There was nothing boyish, little that was even human in his gait; his face was blank of any feeling, and his eyes were strangely dark where they had been blue before.
'Fess? How is it with you?'
Nothing, no response.
'Fess, speak to me, lad. It's me, Blaise, I have your things
...'
Again, nothing. The rough bandage was gone from the boy's head, and only a pale scar showed where the skin had been so badly torn only two days before; the preacher's healing touched more than the sickness. But Blaise had known that already. Cripples walked when they were blessed by the saints dead hand, the blind moved about without guidance, lepers lost their sores. Whether the power lay in the preacher or in his blessed relic, even that much Blaise had not yet contrived to learn. The only certainty — at least to Blaise's eyes - was that no power passed to the one healed, there was no true strengthening in this medicine.
He believed in miracles, he had to, he had seen them in all their swift brutality; but he was losing his faith in miracle cures. There was nothing holy here. Seized back from death, these bodies had been seized by another's will, and marched to his desire. There was no healing in them, and only the illusion of health; they might as well be the animated dead of heathen tales. The preacher's cause might be sanctified, if he truly meant war against heretic Surayon, but what he had done to achieve it was pure wickedness and could not be forgiven.
Blaise tried again and yet again to speak to Fess, and won not the slightest reaction. In his frustration, he forgot to watch where he was treading; his foot came down on a sharp flint in the road. It cut through the ragged sole of his sandal and bit deeply into his instep. He cried out at the sharp stab of it, and still saw no reaction from Fess or any of the disciples. Hobbling, he lost his place, and was swept up in the following crowd. Someone there passed him a staff to lean on; even with that he could barely keep up, and was soon struggling in the dust at the rear of the march.
The road was roughly made, and it seemed that at every step his foot would come down on a stone, and hurt the more. At last he had to stop, to bind it up; he bound rags around the sandal too, and then around the other to forestall another accident. With both feet lame, he'd lose touch altogether with the preacher and his band. As it was, he had to hasten after with a cripple's gait, using the staff to cover great stretches of ground, hop and swing, before he could catch them up again. He'd been on forced marches that were faster, but not by much. The mountains were a constant high shadow to the east; they'd already passed the border between Tallis and Less Arvon, and another week or so should bring them to where the land was Folded, the impossible, impassable barrier that hid Surayon. What would happen there, Blaise couldn't conjecture. He was only sure that the preacher had an intent, a purpose that was equally hidden. There was something inexorable about their progress, something sinister and significant in the way that they could bypass settlements all d
ay where the people were perfectl
y healthy; it was only in those villages where they stopped for the night that they found the sickness waiting.