Under A Colder Sun (Khale the Wanderer Book 1) (12 page)

Leste dozed fitfully.

She was awoken by a sharp, ragged pain. When she opened her eyes, she saw that he was suckling on her finger. Then, she looked again and saw the flesh was bleeding and that he was biting down, trying to reach the bone.

He caught her watching him and smiled widely. “Do you not like what you see, Leste Alen?”

Her eyes widened. She had not told him her name. “Let me go, or I swear I will cut you open.”

He opened his mouth slow, and let her withdraw the mauled finger.

“
Those men
... they had good cause to hunt you, after all.”

“Of course they did,” he said. “What I told you was true. Meat is rare enough to come by out here, so we must feed on what we have.”

“And you fed on some loved one of those men?”

“Oh, don’t think them to be so pure as to be mere victims. The old bastard was the father, and the rest were his sons. The one I ate was the youngest, and they all
loved
him if you take my meaning. I just loved him in a different way. You could say I put the poor child out of his misery.”

“Bastard creature.”

“One among many out here,” he said.

Leste suddenly felt very cold.

“Are things not as they seem, Leste Alen? Do you know not what
is
and what
seems to be
?” He was chuckling in his throat.

As she got to her feet, he looked at her. His eyes danced with a pale light not cast by the fire.

“What are you?” she asked in a low tone.

“A child of the wilderness.” He grinned, showing his filed teeth.

“How did you come to know my name?”

“Because the world is rotting, Leste, and things are no longer as well hidden as they once were, and those of us once bound are being set free.”

“That’s a lie.”

“Is it? Look at this wounded land, and then look at the wounds upon yourself. The mark on your hand that the Brother made. Where do you think this sickness comes from, if not from humanity, and from those like you?”

“Be silent.”

Leste kicked a spitting faggot at him. It spun through the air and landed in the dirt, where it went out.

There was nothing, and no-one, there. He was gone, like a lost thought.

Leste was alone.

She warily watched the shadows and shapes that danced around the fire until the dawn came up. He did not come back for her.

It was as if he had never existed.

This was not how it was meant to be,
she thought. For a moment, she wondered whether she should turn about and return to Colm, to Murtagh, to Yrena and Osta. But she couldn’t do it. She had made her decision, and she had decided to ride after Khale, to bring him down and to rescue Milanda so she might sit on the throne of Colm and rule, as her father had done before. But she had slain Hethe and defied Murtagh. She would not be able to return to Colm and rejoin the Watch, even if she had Milanda with her.

I have forsaken myself
, she thought,
and for what?
A dream, a romance that is already fast becoming a nightmare.

“What am I doing?” Leste cried to the empty land. “What have I done?”

It gave her no answer.

*

The next day, Leste came to an ancient henge, its stones leaning into the wind. She fed her horse its evening rations and then nibbled at her own, not feeling so hungry. The ground felt strangely cold under her. The small fire she was able to strike into life with a few stones and handfuls of parched grass did nothing to alleviate the chill in the soil. The archaic markings on the faces of the standing stones appeared to her as angry ghosts and frowning hollows in the low light, blustered by the wind.

She cooked, ate and shivered among them.

When exhaustion caught up on her, she dreamed of a shore beneath a scintillating aurorae, a shimmering ribbon, pulsing with numerous rhythms of colour. It split the sky as far as she could see, forming a second, false horizon. As Leste watched its hues and shades, she felt a drumming and saw figures moving down by the shoreline. She kept to the darkness cast by the towering cliffs and slowly approached the rear of the crowd. As she came closer, the rhythm of drums increased in tempo. Looking up, she saw that the pulsations emanating from the ribbon were becoming increasingly violent. The crowd was calm; waiting, watching.
This is a ritual, taught and practised many times over,
she thought.
Whatever is happening here has happened before, and they know what comes next.

As she watched, she saw the ribbon’s rhythm slowing once more, almost to a stop, but she knew this was not the beginning of its fading away. There was a tension in the way it rippled and shone, something was either being held back or was forcing its way through from the other side.

The drumming stopped. The crowd was hushed. And she was sure that the motion of the ocean’s waves had stilled too, impossible as that seemed. The silence and the stillness went on for what felt like forever but could have been no longer than the space of time between one heartbeat and the next.

Then, the ribbon
opened
.

It yawned wide, peeling back the sky as careful fingers peel the skin from a fruit, revealing …
what?

Where the sky had been, she saw there was naught but a great
roaring,
and it was lacking all colours, all shape, and all form.

And then, it was gone.

The ribbon was closing, but, before it closed completely, a small host of fragile forms came fluttering through. She saw them in silhouette against the reappearing sky. Along with the rest of the crowd, she watched them descend, drawn down to earth by a gravity and a reality that was steadily reasserting itself.

They were birds and they came to rest on the shoreline, where the waters that should have lapped over their taloned feet instead parted and flowed around them. These bedraggled crows  from the other side stood shuffling in the wet sand. Their eyes, intelligent, went from person to person in the crowd until they alighted upon her. And Leste realised, through some strange forward motion she could not recall, that she had moved to the very front of the crowd. They were as tightly packed behind her now as they had been when they obscured her from view. She looked to the people and saw they were shorn of hair, frail and dressed in the vestments of the Church. Their eyes were dead, their skin was mottled, and she knew these were Fathers, Sisters and Brothers who no longer served the Four on the earthly plane.

She turned to the crows waiting by the water. They were black and stained, as if doused in a crude oil, showing patches of skin that were livid and scaled like a reptile’s back. Their blinking eyes were yellow pearls. Dangling from the hooks of their beaks were limp, tattered morsels of enseamed matter.

One of the birds stepped fluidly towards her, its movements recalling the behaviour of liquid rather than of natural muscles. It reached forward its beak, making an offering of whatever the hook held. She stepped forward, still shaking a little, and knelt before the bird, holding out her hand. The matter slopped into her palm, cold and slippery as old tripe.

Tentatively, Leste raised it to her lips. She could already smell it. It was overripe and bad. She should fling it away into the sea now, right now. But then she was eating the stuff, swallowing it. Her stomach clenched hard and tight. She threw her hands out as she fell forward onto the sand, feeling pain as a hard burning, sinking into the base of her gut. And then, she heard a voice.

It was the voice of Voyane.

And Leste realised, with horror, that she was eating of the Blood-Creator’s flesh.

Chapter Eighteen

Khale watched Milanda sleep and wished she were no longer with him. Her questions and closeness to him had roused memories he would sooner have left forgotten, like so many others.

He remembered fighting back-to-back as dark hordes crowded in on himself and a companion, a long time ago.

Swords screamed and sang as they cut through tortured flesh and shattered tempered iron. Inhuman shrieks and very human shouts competed with the relentless clash and clatter of steel on steel. Bodies fell. Shields were sundered. Mouths champed with grinding teeth, seeming to laugh joylessly as the slaughter went on. Blood rained heavily upon the ground, soaking the earth until it turned into a sucking mire. Overhead, darkening clouds raced and chased one another in surging patterns, echoing with thunder and words of power that smote lightning upon the armies below. Some, as they lay dying, saw hideous faces congeal out of the storm’s billowing tumult; twisted, hateful visages that trailed pale grave-worms from between their jagged teeth.

Those dying soldiers looked upon the darkness wherein the Gods and their Black Madness writhed, and then they were overtaken by it and knew nothing more of the world. They felt themselves rising, leaving their bodies below, coming closer to those black faces in the sky. They saw that there were no worms writhing despairingly between those teeth, only the pale souls of the fallen, of men and women from the battlefield below.

Khale saw it all, felt it all, and still he fought on.

Death, when it came, was never like those fates of legend after all.

A wicked blade slithering in through the space between one plate of armour and the next. A moment when they did not touch and hold was all that it took. He heard her cry out. It was no demon who drove the sword home. It was a man, desperate and hungry, fearing for his life and his family. When Khale turned, the man’s fingers sprang away from the sword as if it burned him.

And, eyes wide, mouth streaming blood, she turned, took a step and fell dead into the mud; the one whom he had been fighting back-to-back with. Her eyes stared off into nothingness. The man stumbled away from her, away from Khale. He was shaking, sick, guilty and white-faced over what he had done.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” he said. “I’m supposed to be at home. Not here. Not doing this.”

His eyes were wet.

The eyes of Khale should have made him turn and run, but he did not. Swordless though he was, he knew what he had done. Khale watched what happened in the same way he once watched a wolf take down a deer. The blade of his sword pierced the man’s chest, driving in and then up under the breastbone. The mouth of the man brimmed over with blood as he died.

Khale let the corpse fall.

He knelt by her, and it was as if the battle had become a shifting dark silence around him. She was dead. She was gone. She was growing cold already. No last words. Nothing. None of that. Stabbed. Dead. Gone.

A tear fell.

Khale stood once more and closed his eyes. He could feel it. Every one of the centuries he had lived, bearing down upon him. Death shone bright. Life burned black. All was cold. All was hot. His blood was freezing. He cast his eyes to the skies above, where darkness churned, consuming the souls of the fallen.

He spoke a single word.

“Juular!”

It called the darkness down to earth, where it could feast upon the frenzy.

"Take them,”
he roared,
“all of them! For I care not for another soul on this earth!”

Incandescence. Delirium. Howling. Burning. Shrieking. Shattering. White darkness. Blackest light. The screams of a thousand dead and a thousand swords. And it was done. Silence fell. The blackness lifted. The storm abated. And all were dead from one end of the battlefield to the other ...

Khale remembered falling to his knees and howling his despair, because the Gods in Shadow had taken her corpse from him. They had stolen her, leaving him with nothing but memory and loss.

And now he had not even that, because Milanda made him remember, and, after all these years, he had forgotten the name of the woman who died for him. He could not even bring her face clear into his thoughts, or remember why she had died for him, or for what they had been fighting. She had not known he was a rapist; he knew that much. She had died believing in the lies of his life, in the Khale of legend.

From a far-gone and lost place in the night, Khale was sure he could hear the Gods in Shadow laughing at him.

Chapter Nineteen

Not long after daybreak, as the last of the hillocks dropped away and she descended onto the sparser ground that marked the beginning of the road to Traitors’ Gap, Leste dismounted at the gate to a farmstead. It would be good to get some supplies if the farmer was willing.

The haunted eyes of women acknowledged her, and a short man with a limp came forward. “You’re after him, aren’t you?”

Leste described Khale and Milanda to the farmer. He sighed and nodded at her words. “He came, with her. He threatened us, thought to torture us, I could see it in his eyes. He killed my boy; just a lad and already cold in the ground before his twelfth winter. I was an outrider for Colm and the King in my youth, before I took an arrow in the knee.”

Leste nodded, not sure what to make of his statement. She looked around at how worn the land and the farm were. Khale and Milanda had been fortunate, if that was the right word, to find people this far out.

“Why settle so far out, where the land is so barren? It can be little good for animals here.” Leste asked, not realising her thoughts were spoken until she was done.

“Because it wasn’t always so,” he replied. “The world grows frayed, and whatever’s out there in the Heart gnaws away at the edges. You can feel it in the night out here, when you’re trying to sleep. It’s a whisper on the wind and a coldness in the ground.

Leste thought of the numbness in the earth at the henge—and the dream she’d had there, as he went on.

“I had friends and trade in the villages that used to lie yonder—Wealdtun and Far Ormodtun, they were called—and there was the forest. Can you believe there was once forest at the foot of those mountains, spreading as far as the eye could see? The mages burned it down to cover their flight through Traitors’ Gap; that was when it all started—the rot. I don’t know whether it’s the fault of the mages, or our kings for hunting them down and driving them out. All I know is the world has been the worse for it, darker, and things don’t look to be getting better. My boy ...
my boy
... I couldn’t save him. I used to be a rider and fighter, but because of my damned knee ... he died for us. It should have been me.” His voice cracked and tears came.