“Pertak!” Erlin called to the stocky man, smiling in welcome then gesturing to Vaelin and Astorek as he spoke on.
“He says he brings many allies to the Laretha,” Astorek reported. Vaelin noted the deep unease on the shaman’s brow. “This is foolishness, Raven’s Shadow. These people offer only death to outsiders.”
Vaelin nodded at Erlin, now approaching the chieftain with arms spread. “But not to him.”
Erlin halted a few feet short of the chieftain, his words soft and lost to them, though the tribesman’s countenance lost some of its fierceness, if none of its suspicion. After a few moments Erlin turned and beckoned them forth. “Pertak, Chieftain of the Laretha, demands tribute if you are to besmirch his lands with your presence,” he said, though Vaelin had yet to see the stocky man speak.
“Tribute?” he asked.
“A symbolic offering only,” Erlin explained. “If he allows you to stay without it he appears weak and one of the younger men will challenge him.”
The chieftain spoke, pointing one of his axes at the assembled ranks of ice folk and voicing a guttural demand. Vaelin followed its course to find the axe pointed to where Dahrena stood holding Scar’s reins. “He wants my horse?”
“Ah, no.” Erlin gave a tight smile. “He wants your woman.”
“That is not acceptable.” Vaelin’s hand went to a pouch on his belt, loosing the ties to extract a stone, a finely cut ruby of medium weight given to him by Governor Aruan at the Linesh dockside barely two years ago, though it seemed like many more now. There had been times when he had been tempted to sell it, especially when on the road, Reva being so constantly hungry, but the blood-song had flared in warning whenever he considered it. He hoped this was why.
The chieftain dropped one of his axes to catch the gem as Vaelin tossed it to him, eyes wide with instant fascination. The warriors on either side of him forgot their discipline to crowd round, every face lit with an enthralled greed. Pertak snarled something, raising his remaining axe in warning, and they shrank back, though their gaze returned continually to the ruby.
Pertak spoke again, directing his question to Vaelin as he held the ruby up to the light. “He wants to know what power it holds,” Astorek translated, a faint note of contempt colouring his voice.
“The mountains are rich in ore,” Erlin said, “but not gems. They have a certain irrational regard for them.”
“Tell him it has the power to capture men’s souls,” Vaelin said. “He really shouldn’t stare at it for too long.”
A brief gleam of fear shone in the chieftain’s eyes as Erlin related the warning, his fist closing over the stone in a fierce grip before he raised his gaze to Vaelin, squinting in contemplation. He grunted a short clipped sentence and, with considerable deliberation, turned his back and walked towards the settlement, his small host following close, all concern at the arrival of such a large body of intruders now apparently vanished.
“You may stay one day and one night,” Erlin said. “A most generous concession, I must say.”
“Is that enough?” Vaelin asked him. “For our purposes?”
Erlin looked up at the mountain towering above the settlement, the flattened summit part obscured by a thin mist. “You’ll find time loses its meaning here, brother.”
• • •
He forbade anyone but Vaelin from accompanying him, though Dahrena and the other Gifted protested loudly. “We have come so far,” Cara said. “To be denied knowledge now . . .”
“I seek to preserve,” Erlin broke in, “not to deny. Trust me, you would not thank me for this knowledge.”
He led Vaelin to a track that curved around the Laretha settlement to the base of the mountain, halting amidst a cluster of ruins. Vaelin scanned the granite blocks and part-tumbled walls, finding a familiarity in the way they had been shaped, the elegance of their line and the wind-blasted motifs carved into the stone. “The Fallen City,” he said. “This place was built by the same hands.”
“Not quite,” Erlin replied. “Though they shared the same language.” He gestured to a stairwell rising from the ruins to join with the flank of the mountain, Vaelin’s eyes picking out more steps carved into the stone, ascending in a winding track all the way to the top. “And the same gods.”
“So,” Erlin said as they climbed, the steps damp from the perennial mist and the air growing chill around them, “you no longer hold to the Faith.”
“A man can’t hold to a lie.”
“The Faith was never a lie. Confused in some regards, overly wedded to dogma in others. But having seen what the rest of the world has to offer in regards to the divine, I find it suits me well enough.”
“When we first met you said you had no choice but to follow the Faith. When I came to understand who you were I thought you meant the legend was true, the Departed had cursed you for denying the Faith.”
“Cursed? I thought so for a long time, when I was driven from the village of my birth, still seemingly a man in his thirties whilst those I had grown up with became ever more stooped and wrinkled. My wife was chief among my persecutors, grown bitter with envy at my continued youth, hating me for the grey in her hair and the absence of lust in my gaze. I had never been particularly observant of the Faith, mouthing the catechisms without real thought as to their meaning, occasionally muttering caustic words at the brothers and their tedious moralising. ‘Denier!’ my hating wife called me, desperate to find reason in this mystery. ‘The Departed have cursed you.’ I suppose that’s where it all began, a bitter old woman’s insult birthing a legend.”
“So you never heard their voice? You were not denied the Beyond?”
Erlin paused, breath misting as his face became sombre. “Oh I heard them, but not until many years later. Despite appearances, brother, I am not in fact immune to death. I do not age and I do not sicken. But without food I starve, and if cut, I bleed the same as any man. I can die, and once, long ago, I did. Or at least came so close it makes scant difference.
“I travelled far after the villagers drove me away, the length and breadth of the four fiefs, for there was no Realm in those days. I suppose I was searching for something, an answer to the enigma of my unending life, but had little notion of how to find it. Mystics and charlatans were not hard to find, all promising wisdom in return for gold, and all proving themselves mad or dishonest in time. One day I paused in a Nilsaelin tavern and heard a minstrel sing of the strange ways of the Seordah, how they preserved their forest home with Dark enchantments. It seemed a good place to seek answers, I was just one man after all, and certainly no warrior. What threat would they see in me? I think I walked for half a day beneath the trees before a Seordah put an arrow in my belly.
“He came to watch me bleed, a tall fellow with a hawk face that betrayed little reaction as I begged for aid. In time his face faded and the chill blackness of death came for me. It was then I heard them, the voices, whispering, shouting, pleading . . . There were so many. ‘This is the Beyond?’ I thought. ‘Just a void echoing with the voices of the dead?’ No endless serenity and wisdom. No eternity of calm. I must say, it was quite the disappointment.
“I realised the voices had faded, taking a collective breath as if suddenly muted in fearful expectation. Then one spoke, it was not like the others. They were thin, like the last echoes of a whispered song. This was the full, strong voice of a complete soul, but old, so very old.”
“The Ally,” Vaelin said, recalling the ancient chill in the voice he had heard as Dahrena dragged him from the Beyond.
“A name I didn’t hear until much later. But yes, it was he. And he had an offer to make. ‘I will return you,’ he said, ‘if you will be my vessel.’ I was awash in terror, not only of him but also of the prospect of eternity in this terrible void. The fear was such I might have agreed in an instant, but for something I heard in his voice: a boundless, desperate hunger, a need for what he sensed in me. It was overpowering, sickening, and I knew then there were worse fates than death.
“He felt my refusal, my repulsion, and I felt his will. The Beyond is a place that is not a place, a place of souls, but a place also of pain, if you know how to inflict it, and he did. I could feel him tearing at me, stripping away shreds of my being as his will lashed at me, not in hate but in precise, agonising flares. ‘Serve me,’ he said again, ‘Whilst you still have a soul capable of service.’ There was no hate in that voice, for I think he was beyond hate by then, formed by the ages into a being of purest purpose.
“I thrashed, I screamed, I wept . . . I begged. But still, I refused. It was then I felt another surge of will, but not his. This was something else, something not so old, but in its own way just as powerful, powerful enough to rend me from his grip. I could feel my soul re-forming then, though still much had been stripped away, memories of childhood and friendship lost forever. Even today I cannot recall my mother’s face, or the name of the wife who grew to hate me.
“My rescuer spoke to me, a woman’s voice, her will so different from his. Soothing where he hurt, banishing the terror he sought to instill. ‘You are not done,’ she told me. ‘I have seen your end, man of many lives, and this is not it. Seek out those like you, preserve all you can, for when you return, it is their strength that will sustain you, and bring the end you will come to crave.’ Then she said just three more words before casting me from the void and back into my body. The Seordah was still there, starting in surprise as my eyes flew open. From the blood seeping through my fingers I judged I had been gone for only a few seconds. The Seordah said something, sounding faintly annoyed, and drew a knife from his belt . . . then dropped it when I spoke the three words I had last heard in the Beyond, ‘Nersus Sil Nin.’”