Rythe Falls (3 page)

Chapter Three

Reih didn't look back. They left Iron Hill, dead fort and dying town both, in the dust at their back. The suns were still high when they rode on south.

             
When they rode, it was with plenty of food, water, weapons, and more coin probably, than the entire village.

             
No one remarked on Perr's armour. He would have said nothing, Reih imagined, just glowered them down through his slit-visor. A few people looked at Reih's face, thought they sharply looked away. They didn't remark on her countenance, either, she noted.

             
Didn't matter to her. She'd been fine enough to look at, once, she imagined.

             
Did it matter anymore? Did it ever?

             
First month out she'd lost her right eye. The wound was still angry.

             
In a way, even though the pain and the memory of it still woke her most nights, it was the best disguise she could have hoped for.

*

That first month out of the capital, Reih had been proud and held her head high, like a woman born to the heights. And she was, after all, wasn't she? Clinging to her fine dresses, her gold. The lady, looking down on the little folk, splashing her money around like a fool. Being, in fact, a fool.

             
Right up until the night she'd told Perr she didn't need him and it had turned out she had.

*

They'd rode pretty easily away from their old life, just the Imperator roughing it with a chest full of gold and her sworn man to protect her. Rode straight as they could to a town just north of Beheth, a good way south of Lianthre and the things she'd known. The only life, it turned out, that she'd known.

             
Thought she was wise.

             
Funny how you can be wise and stupid all at once,
she remembered.

             
She took a room in the finest inn in the town. The Wayfarer's Star. She remembered that, if not the name of the town itself. Good cotton, soft bed, fine wine, hot food. A gold coin for the night, and she'd put another with the Innkeeper for the rest. Perr, dismissed for the night, went to scout ahead and Reih rested up. He'd protested, but he was her bodyguard and he followed her wishes, always had. He hadn't liked it. Of course he hadn't. But he didn't shout, or argue, he just turned and left the Inn, and left her feeling like a spoiled child, so she ate alone, thinking, and drank angrily, not thinking quite as much and not minding that at all. A lifetime of tiptoeing through the halls of power, where every glance and thought and word could mean someone's death.

             
And then, a night alone in a good inn, drinking a thick, sweet wine. The night had been warm and she'd been flushed with a good solid drunk like she'd never in her life known, her mind almost entirely numb, but it had been bliss. Angry, yes, angry with Perr and the Protectorate and the fools, blind, who thought they served the people of Lianthre while they only served themselves.

             
Angry, becoming maudlin as the evening wore along and she moved to a second bottle of wine, alone in a fine inn in a town south of Lianthre where no one knew her, nor wanted anything of her.

             
A man slid onto the bench beside her. A fine-looking man, and two bottles of heavy wine into the evening, the clientele gradually drifted to their homes or their rented rooms. Reih couldn't remember the last time she'd had a fine man in her bed or anywhere else for that matter.

             
Three bottles in, sharing, and gold passing to the innkeeper and the serving girls grinning at the loud, drunk rich woman taking a strange man to her bed...but it weren't none of their business, was it?

*

The two rode south of Iron Hill, for the remainder of the day. As Carious' last light faded from the purpling sky they set their camp. Night fell swiftly in the south. For some reason, Dow seemed to chase Carious more quickly as they neared the swamp. These things were not written in the maps Reih had known.

             
Reih knew her country well enough...on a map. On the road? Everything was different. Roads that looked short on a map took forever on horse, while winding roads turned out to be straight. Hills were mountains, valleys were rivers. Seemed map-makers only cared a damn about the roads and towns and cities of the north, near the capital. Elsewhere, it was slapdash - more guesswork. The further from the capital, the more the maps seemed a fancy guide than the honest truth. The plains south of Arram were a splodge on a map. It had taken them nearly a month to traverse, Reih's missing eye packed with weeds and mud and weeping the whole time. The tincture she drank all day, all night, made that month seem longer. The pain made it seem endless.

             
Perhaps it was, she thought, as they lay down to take their rest. It was still missing, wasn't it?

             
Reih and Perr laid in their separate bedrolls under the spinning stars. Perr stripped his armour to sleep. The only time he ever did.

             
'Sleep well,' she said. He grunted, rolled in his blankets, his sword near to hand as always.

             
Reih kept her long knife close, too. She had since she'd woken in The Wayfarer's Star.

*

She woke with her head pounding. Drunk as any man had ever been. She looked around and found the room dim, the candle burned low. Her thighs were wet, and she smelled of...man.

             
Had she...had she really?

             
Doubt flew away as she heard a sound in the darkness. The chest beneath her bed, dragging across the sanded floorboards of her fine room.

             
She turned her head. The room swam, or she did, or the walls...

             
Drunk enough to take a man...and not remember a thing.

             
She didn't feel ashamed, but stupid. She felt rather like an idiot.

             
A roll in the bed with no memory of it, thudding head and vomit waiting somewhere in her future, possibly before Carious' first light...and the bastard was after taking her travelling gold?

             
'Stop,' she croaked. Even the effort taken to speak made her head pound and her guts roll. But even so, she managed to push herself to sitting.

             
The room swayed, she swayed, and before she could rise properly the man hit her with the flat of his hand. She was so stunned for a moment the room ceased to lurch and everything boiled down to a bright hand-shaped swathe of pain across her cheek and temple.

             
Reih had never in her life fought for anything. Truth be told, even the gold in the chest was given to her. All her life, anything she wanted could have been hers. She was fortunate. Coddled, even. Was standing in council with aching hips hard work? Maybe...

             
Not soldiering hard, though, or tilling a field hard. Not hard like giving birth or being broken-boned under a falling horse.

             
The slap shocked her, and she didn't think she'd ever been as shocked in her life.

             
The man turned from her like she was nothing to him but an obstacle. Without even thinking, more with a kind of indignation, she kicked the man before her in the crack of his arse and sent him tumbling across the room. His head bashed into a low cabinet and when he turned she saw a line of blood across his forehead.

             
Not even that handsome, she thought. But he was angry. He was pulling a knife from his belt and she didn't know how to fight, wasn't armed, and she'd sent Perr away.

             
I need you, Perr
, she thought, stupidly.

             
'Remember you being a sight more friendly earlier,' said the man. Angry, but grinning.

             
'You're not taking that,' said Reih.

             
'Well, I figure I'll take it, and we'll call it services rendered, right?'

             
'For what? A drunken roll in a bed I can't even remember? Couple of coppers worth? Get out, before I call...'

             
But Reih wasn't a fighter and the man was. As she spoke, he figured she'd make a fuss, maybe make some noise, maybe quite a lot. He'd seen the colour of her gold in the bar, thought about it, made the most of the night and planned on climbing out the window, him the richer for it and her still alive.

             
He was a fighter, but mostly he was a thief, and the first thing a person needs to know about thieving is the cardinal rule: Don't get caught.

             
A thief's not much good dead and hanged.

             
'Get out, before I call...' she said, but that was as far as she got, because she was already starting to make a noise and the man wouldn't be caught.

             
She spoke, he stabbed her in the face.

             
The man would've kept on stabbing, too, maybe lived to be a better thief, if not for Perr smashing through the door and putting his good long steel into the man's head.

             
Reih was on the bed, half-blind, in shock, her eye already ruined. Perr picked her off the bed and slung her one-armed over his back. Crouched, took the chest and left everything else.

             
Reih remembered little after that. Jouncing on Perr's rock-hard, steel-encased shoulder. Her blood and the remains of her dead eye pouring down his back. They fled, no time to heal or pack her wound, no time for explanations or the guard or even a moment's respite.

             
They fled because murder and death preceded questions. Questions from the Protectorate.

             
Back then there would have been questions. The Wayfarer's Star, a month out of Lianthre, when those things still mattered? The Protectorate hadn't been called back to Arram back then. They would have been arrested, questioned. Then, tortured before ultimately, Reih Refren A'e Eril and her bodyguard Perr would have simply...disappeared.

             
Now? The Protectorate were gone. The law was dead, the land was abandoned and murder was less than nothing.

*

Chapter Four

Creation, life...it is not little thing. A creature like Caeus understood this. Living is a trick, but not the sole province of those with consciousness, nor the soul, but a happenstance repeated throughout the universe. Elethyn and Dragon, Hath'ku'atch and Jemandril, human and Rahken...worlds upon worlds spreading across the black tide of space, further than even the boundaries of imagination. Yet, once again, Caeus found himself drawn to Rythe. His attention, his focus, always turning toward that fair world.

             
Renir and Caeus above, and below? His mutt-children, the Protectorate, swarming across the dirt and the plains, across deserts and seas and snow, all drawn back to their hive, this Arram, the place where they swarmed from once, so many years ago, and now they headed back.

             
At the borders of the swamps in the south of Lianthre, the wetlands that had long hid Sybremreyen, two travellers lay down for the night. Caeus could see their future, a short, inconsequential thing to him, but he understood that such things were of great consequence to them.
Soon, they will be alone no longer,
he thought.
In the parched void above Rythe Caeus shrugged.

             
Giant or flea, all the creatures have a part to play in something greater.

             
Caeus watched over Renir and Rythe both for some time. Saw the ancient ones wake from their long slumber and the seas boil as the seafarer's cursed land was returned to them. In the freezing white wastes a volcano was cooling, a blackening mass in a white plain that could not have gone on forever, because past a line of mountains that men called Thaxamalan's Saw, and further south, and on, and on, the Draymen rode.

             
The Draymen had forgotten the song of the sword, but not all. The Bladesingers would sing yet, before the end days.

             
Caeus saw these things and more. Endless, chaotic, and above all
possible
.

             
Everything was possible. He knew he was not alone in knowing this one, simple truth.

             
But it was certainly a rare thing. Maybe a handful of people saw things as he did, and even he, far above the world, with its dark earth and bright seas, with the white clouds coiling around like serpents, even he was nothing special, was he?

             
He could feel the white-eyed one - the girl. The girl who could see everything.

             
He could feel the ancients, donning their terrible armour now that they woke.

             
He could see the red light that was bleeding from the suns into everything upon the world that he loved.

             
No, he was nothing remarkable. A creature out of time, perhaps...and there were plenty of those.

             
Caeus closed his eyes for a moment, there in the black, slippery nothing above the world.

             
Perhaps he could salve Carious' burden, now that the red light was here. Perhaps he could save the people from oblivion, keep this world spinning around for a million years, a billion years. Perhaps there was a chance.

             
And yet, confidence or insanity, pride or hubris, there was something still that rankled. He knew his facets, his strengths, his weakness...but there was a dark spot within the fates, like a splinter in his remarkable, blood-stained, blighted eyes.

             
A splinter of black, a shard of blindness, down there, somewhere upon the whole of Rythe, there was a blind spot.

             
I can see the ends of the universe, I can speak to the suns. I can hear a dragon hatch in a field of stars so far distant that the stars themselves have yet to be born...and yet I cannot see past this...

             
And that troubled him more greatly than the return of his kin.

             
Caeus was insane. He knew he was insane, because his kind killed suns and destroyed worlds on a whim...and yet he cared.

             
Once, I lived in a gaol outside of time. I made a friend. A Lu, a keeper of the soul. Was he ever my friend?

             
A thousand years, near enough, a prisoner once. And then a thousand years more, held inside the belly of a creature out of time. A thing that lived in the fire inside a volcano. The revenant.

             
Am I mad, still? Has near on two thousand years, captive of one kind or another, send me tumbling from the edge of sanity?

             
But then, would a mad man worry so over a tiny blind spot? A simple, insignificant sliver of nothing.

             
Is it my undoing? The undoing of the world? The triumph of the Elethyn?

             
Caeus found himself clenching his long, elegant fingers compulsively as he worried more and more about the one simple thing, and even though he was isolated from the harshness of the void above Rythe, he felt the cold keenly.

             
He turned his gaze from everything that ever was, ever would be, to the man before him. Renir Esyn. The blood of kings, but...

             
...diluted over a millennium. Was his blood no better than water, now?

             
Caeus did not know. But though Esyn might not have a king's name, nor a king's crown...he
would
be King.

             
Whether he wished it or not. A man can't outrun fate.

             
Can't outrun me, either,
thought Caeus, and without gesture or word, but will alone, he brought them both hurtling through cloud and sky and stone to a city called Naeth, where once, history was made.

             
And where, perhaps, it might end.

*

Renir tried to open his eyes and found them gummy and reluctant. He groaned, but even his groan was lacklustre. It felt as though he had sand in his eyes, on his skin. His mouth was dry, his body tired and sore. His head thudded with dehydration.

             
He decided to give up on the whole opening of the eyes and just rest for a while longer while he tried to figure out what hurt the worst. But nothing, after a moment taken to inquire after his bodies wellbeing, seemed to be terminal.

             
He'd been dreaming, of course. Not of the revenant, but the black spaces between worlds.

             
Just a dream, of course. He'd always been a good dreamer.

             
Is that what the world feels like? Rolling around, waiting to turn toward glory each and every day?

             
He managed to push himself from his sheets (
not my sheets...these are far too fine. Where have I ended up? On my feet, for once?
). With his fingers and no little effort he prised his stuck eyelids apart and yelled at the sight of a terrible alien face not a foot from his bed. The creature's skin was pale and taut. Hair hung askew, lank, across the thing's face. But it was the eyes that caused Renir to cry out in horror.

             
Those burning bloody eyes seemed to glow, to brighten the entire room.

             
He shouted out again, blathering something intelligible even to himself and not even mildly ashamed at his panic. His feet padded against the soft bedding and pushed him back, far away from the thing as he could get, like an ordinary man might have...

             
But I'm not ordinary, am I? No longer...I...

             
Renir's terror broke and a simple thought brought a spark of hope.

             
My axe...

             
Before Renir could finish thinking, or find some way to escape from the awful face of insanity before him, three warriors burst into the room. The door cracked and a hinge came free, leaving the door hanging and swaying. The three men wore armour so bright the glint of light from them hurt his eyes anew. White cloaks trailed down their backs and each man - golden haired, he saw - held straight, true blades like men who knew their business.

             
Their business is war...

             
The terrible creature with blood for eyes waved them back, impatiently.

             
I know...I've seen these men before...

             
They seemed reluctant...but far from stupid. They nodded (
no bow?
Renir's terrified mind somehow catalogued each and every moment as though they might be his last) and the last man (
paladin?
) closed the door behind himself.

             
The door fell open again, at the bottom this time, when the warriors retreated. The creature at the foot of Renir's bed watched the door for a moment. While the creature with the bloodied eyes was turned, Renir's hand wandered toward his axe.

             
'I know your blood, Renir Esyn,' said the awful thing.

             
As suddenly as Renir found his trusted weapon in his hand, understanding and memory collided hard with one heavy thought.

             
He is...the Red Wizard.

             
The axe tumbled from Renir's hand. It hit the stones, blade to handle, with a loud crash that seemed to set Renir's memory racing. It ran on, Renir helplessly dragged along, like he was a rider with his foot caught in a stirrup. One moment he'd dreamed of the glory of the suns, the next, he flailed at his head. Pain, fear, terror - each dark and hurtful emotion buffeted Renir. He hit himself in the cheek, forehead, pounded at his ears and his eyes, as though trying to scrub at his own mind, or maybe even trying to die. Anything to stop the memories from bursting his head apart.

             
He only succeeding in fattening his own lip and knocking himself from the bed to the floor.

             
Renir groaned and moaned, insensible. He scrambled back from the Red Wizard once more, now on cold stone, his naked arse, back, elbows, all burning with friction.

             
A bolt of memory made him curl into a ball upon the flagstones. He clutched his pounding head again, screamed.

             
The Red Wizard's birth - born from the carcass of the terrible beast, the Revenant, born in fire and blood and pain. The death of the hero Roth...his sacrifice.

             
The stench of the Rahken's flesh as he burned.

             
Renir's stomach was empty, but he heaved.

             
His memory would not free him. Clawing at his face, his head through his hair, he knelt on the cold, cold stones of this borrowed room and tried to make his memories fit back inside his head.

             
The Red Wizard pursed his tight, thin lips and watched the man's agony.

*

He's breaking now, just with the memories of his own tiny life. What will he do when the Crown of Kings is on his head and he sees the history of this land in a moment? Will his head blow apart, showering me with skull and blood and hair? Will blood run from his ears? Will the first King in a thousand years be nothing more than a dribbling imbecile in a circlet of gold?

             
Caeus watched Renir's agony and listened to his cries with no more expression than a rock. His was a stern face that fitted well on his sharp, long bones. Yet, for a creature of such ability, so long lived, he was not entirely unmoved. He could understand the man's pain, empathise, even...as far as one of his kind was able.

             
He'd taught himself to do as much, long ago.

             
But he was detached, too...almost as though he watched the man's agonies through a glass, stained with many colours, or at a remove, like the reflection of pain in nothing more than a grimy mirror.

             
Caeus closed his eyes for one moment, thinking about the nature of pain, about the nature of mortals. He could hear the King-to-be growling in agony, but it was a mere trick of his will to make it...distant. A Jemandril's roar through river water, nothing more. He closed his ears against the man's torment and sat, patiently and purposely deaf to the mortal's cries.

             
Perhaps the reason he didn't see or hear Renir's fist whistling through the air.

*

Renir's pain turned to fury, and he lashed out at the only thing he could - the wizard, sitting so  calmly...so...damn...calm.