 
The Pale Maraud

by Andrew McEwan

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Copyright 2012 Andrew McEwan

Smashwords Edition

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Cover design by Andrew McEwan

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Smashwords Edition License Notes

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Chapter One - The Mute Jeriant

His mother took shelter from the storm in a cave whose entrance was screened from both wind and eyes by a thick wall of leaves shaped like spear points. Her sodden cloak outlined her swollen belly as she rocked tearfully, wretched, cast out by family and village, her own mother beaten when the pregnancy was discovered. They would have beaten her too, but it was considered ill luck to harm one with child, no matter how that child was conceived. The talk was of magic. Certainly, this witch had no husband. Her father had been given no choice other than to load his daughter onto a cart and abandon her far from home. No one in the village would tend her or witness such a birth. Her mother's crime was punishable. His mother, soon to guess the colour of his hair and wash his tiny face with spit, to lift him to her breast - her plight was inadmissible, the sad result of a soldier's courting, his helm rich with feathers and his sword's blade dazzling.

The war-tide had taken him. She wished that tide on her village as she lay dying.

Rain lashed from the sky. The pain inside her matched the violence without, livid stalks of lightning stretched taut from earth to cloud, the space between streaked like burnt iron. A livid blue echo that cut to the bone. On such a night and in such a place was her son born, pushing from his bloody mound into his bloody world; from death to life, a pathetic creature wrapped in slick tissue, delivered onto cold stone. She was too exhausted to move. Her limbs were as weak as his, feeble knots of flesh and bone exposed to the vagaries of the combative elements. This the winter season, the breath in their lungs cold and raw.

Her head propped against the cave wall, her fingers gripping roots, she saw her child, his withered right arm and clawing left, the slant of his cheek, the distortion of his face, one eye still closed. His strangled cries frightened her more than the wind. If he had been born in the village the women attending would have taken him to be drowned. But he was not, and would live. She was sure of that; his survival perhaps his fate. In his good hand was a strength, a will, a purpose. That which had silenced his father would suffer defeat in challenging him. She named him then, Jerian, from jeria, meaning outcast, for already he was friendless, alone, couched between her stiffened legs, his name pressed in the shape of her thumb on his forehead. He would remember it, she reassured herself. He did not need her past morning...

Struggling free of the afterbirth his mother shielded him, turning her back to the outside elements. She would teach him to suckle and that was all, laying him across her arm so that when she died he would have use of her nipple. Her body, curled to surround him, would serve as a cradle, and her skin, warmed by his own, would be his blanket, her ragged cloak stretched like a tent above. If in time he grew empty and did not wish to leave the safety of the cave, he could burrow into her chest and fashion both a meal and a refuge, eating more of her as the days passed. Ultimately the decision to explore beyond the cave mouth would be made for him. Hunger, gnawing at his own chest, would drive the young wolf from his lair, and once he had seen the sun and moon, and grown accustomed to the stars, not even his mother would be able to stop him venturing deep into that sphere where corpses laughed and danced, cavorting with one another before falling down and rotting.

She wondered how Jerian would fare. His mother wished him well

It was a world of blood and gore he entered.

*

The boy crawled amongst the thorn bushes on his knees, his one hand sweeping the tall sharp grass from his eyes, alert to the bloated feast of worms, the filling berries, succulent fruits which these stunted trees had in plenty. He stopped to read his name in a puddle as he had done countless times before, the breeze sifting fingers through his hair and whispering in his ear. There was a sunny rock on which he liked to stretch when his belly was full. There were grooves criss-crossing it, and Jerian traced these with his thumb.

An owl watched him through the summer months.

When snow fell he sheltered in the cave, digging under his feet with a bone. Jerian used this talent to uncover a stream, and was happy to drink, the water gurgling stories of bears and lichens, goats and dragonflies.

He budded with the leaves come leaf-time.

When he was strong enough to climb as far as the topmost branches of the tallest trees, he learned the bird's names. He dreamed at night of flying like them; but no bird could fly with just one wing.

Chasing a rabbit he tripped and fell. Yet he caught that rabbit another day...

He could not talk. He had nothing to say. He laughed emptily and swung from tree to ground, racing over the damp earth in the wake of a shower having spied a horseman on the road. The air in his lungs lifted him, drove him, Jerian with a crude wooden spear. Something had fallen from the rider's saddle, something that glittered as if spangled in dew, the boy's curiosity matching his stomach for guile. Pausing, breathless at the road, two jumps wide, he watched the horse vanish into the mist before grabbing the object and running back to his rock to inspect the find. He turned it in his five fingers and pushed it against his tongue, but could not determine its use. It was not a knife as he had hoped. It was hollow, tapered at one end, etched with complex designs that shattered the light into blue and gold, ice and fire sitting together on his palm. Sometimes oxen dragged hay wagons along the road. It wound in both directions for as far as he had explored, narrow and twisting. Jerian collected the straw that drifted between the lats. There was a hollow oak where people left the entrails of chickens and pigs, fat-smeared packages of bark and toothless lower jaws. He had opened a package once and found it to contain a set of wrinkled toes, ten in all, bound together with human hair. All the world passed down the road.

In winter fewer travellers braved the mud.

Sat on the rock or in the cave he would picture their many faces and compare them to his own. He had run alongside a cart one year and the children riding in it had thrown apples at him. A horseman had tried to crush him under metal-banded hooves, mount spitting foam, eyes rolling, the boy too fast for his whip. The episode had taught him to be cautious; but the apples were good.

Autumn found him picking more.

He tied his hair in a knot, strapped his spear to his back and the silver object about his waist. The owl, gliding from branch to branch, was leading him through the woods. Its beak instructed him to follow, having scratched his name in the scales of a fish, silver like his find, blue and gold as it shimmered towards death. Jerian understood the owl to be his friend. He was not afraid when the bird led him from this valley to the next, out of the wood and out across a wide grassy plain. The day was warm and long, sweet-smelling, the clouds as thin as frost in the sky. The owl hovered high overhead, sweeping down on occasion in order to steer him in the right direction, the boy easily distracted, apt to stray, such were the many delights of the open, toads and flowers whose names Jerian did not know.

He walked into summer again...

The rush of a stream cooled his feet, bright water trilling as it plunged the length of the valley wall, slowing as it coiled like a snake through the village. People meandered between brick and thatch, busy with saw and brooms, wood dust forming clouds to be swept. Jerian watched everything, himself unobserved by all save the owl, an eye to jutting elbows and stunted horses, woven baskets and threadbare skirts. He watched as a girl ran screaming in circles, hands in the air, chased by a boy even younger, naked to the waist and streaked with dirt. Painted, other children crawled about the shadows gripping mock weapons, twig spears and plank swords. Old men laughed and wheezed at even older stories, and young men kicked stones, restless and bored - condemned to a life of ploughs and herds, steel ax death the option favoured by those bucks still hot below the belt for spilt blood of any kind, the truth of their lusts always close enough to come as a surprise.

Jerian felt no kinship. Was that why the owl had brought him here? He was aware of these people, singularly and in small groups, having witnessed their passing over numerous seasons, walking, riding, trundling along the road. He knew himself to be like them, of their kind. But no greater ties bound him. He was alone.

He sat and watched them the long afternoon. The bird was never far away. Jerian absorbed the lesson, although he remained puzzled. The owl, however, was well satisfied. It puffed its feathers and disappeared over the irregular valley horizon, a brief flurry of brown-white plumage set off against green-mottled stone.

*

A figure moved clumsily through the dark, upsetting rocks and snapping the limbs of trees, trampling vegetation while leaving no mark in the soft earth.

It was shapeless and far from home. Lost, the figure dragged its mournful head, cast its blind gaze around, sighting nothing but stars. Deaf to the complaints of the forest and forgetful of the cause of its wanderings, the figure shouldered its way, mumbling like thunder.

Jerian was shaken from his perch. He had been dozing between branches, the night no different to the day, simply cooler and blacker. His fall slowed by leaves, the boy rolled to his feet as he had seen the fox cubs do, then scrambled after the intruder, shaking dreams from his eyes as he had been shaken awake. But no matter how fast he ran or how keenly he listened for clues, the source of the disturbance was not to be located. Instead a soundless release, a collective, easy sigh emanated from the woody milieu, and in place of chaos there was tranquility, relief in the wake of a storm. All traces of damage were eradicated by sunrise, light spilling like new flesh over minor wounds.

He hunted for lizards that morning, knowing them to be slick and fast, catching four by midday, not one now longer than his good arm. The character of the surrounding trees was changing, reddened towards slumber as if subtly coloured by age, his own skin and bark a deeper shade, strengthened with threaded hairs, further toned, the lizard meat insufficient to fill his rapidly expanding belly where a year ago four such lizards would have been food enough for two days. Jerian's hunger was becoming more than a match for his skills at stalking prey. Endowed with the arts of a man, this once-boy looked back at the winters he had survived, the passing of each marked by unmistakable signs. It seemed to him he was possessed of a full set of memories, the past thus arrayed, composed of images and thoughts. What he lacked, Jerian realised, was a place outside, a place to go. The owl had shown him the village that lay at the end of the dirt road; but the road ran elsewhere, away from that one drab source. Deep into the heart of the world it stretched, winding like a stream - with a current like a stream, weak or strong, a human flow dependant on factors not necessarily related to the seasons, linked rather to questions Jerian was unable to verbally pose, the answers scattered across country, there to be harvested and graded, fruits and berries and fat round worms the man himself was called upon to pluck and gauge. A whole new feast over the border...

A dangerous place.

Perhaps the figure was headed there, deaf and blind. And the outcast, mute and deformed: ought he to follow?

Chapter Two - The Chalic Horde

Washing up on the beach like surf, the armies of the Chalian king gathered momentum for the climb, the defeat of nature's obstacles a first test, the plundering of village and town the prize. They had raided before. The pickings were easy, the coast several day's ride from the nearest city, and that a mud-hole thrice ransacked. No, these coarse lands held little fear for the Sea Lords.

They rose with the moon and the quiet tide, secured the headland before daybreak, assembled like green-blue blades of grass on a sandy plain, the tree country beyond awakening to steel and blood, its brown earth reddened before nightfall, when the beacon fires cast silent fists at the stars and the dead were newly tall...

Their scales were hammered and their horses decorated, not one less than twenty hands.

They came from another world. The seabed, some would say, man and beast with fins and gills beneath armour fashioned from crab and turtle shells.

Whatever the truth, the army's advance was as swift as it was devastating. In two days they had driven all but the most foolhardy and adventurous deep into the forest and high into the mountain chills, taking what they would of those belongings left behind, of homes and families, dealing harshly with any who challenged, the few motley groups that remained scoring disproportionate losses. Ruthlessly, these were hunted down, put to the sword and other uses as night by night the fires changed from yellow to green, the communities, the farmsteads and animals burned, slaughtered, tinting the flames along with powders and invocations. The gods of the Sea Lords rampaged.

The fighting men wore massive helms, stony basins studded with melted copper and ornamented in complex designs, outlines highlighted, jewelled, garnets and aquamarines prevalent, also beryl and onyx, topaz denoting lower ranks, sapphires and tourmaline the higher. Their faces were obscured, completely covered, protected by a heavy metal gauze, and their hands shone equally brightly, seeming extensions of the blue-stained weapons they bore. They had no need for reins, steering their mostly grey horses with their knees, the panting beasts clawing this foreign soil with shod hooves as silver manes were tossed. Neither did these horsemen employ a battle cry, or were they ever heard to shout between themselves, or offer instruction, instead charging as one individual, no matter if they were ten or a hundred. Indeed, it was rare to find one of their number alone.

Supported by lesser men on foot whose leather cuirasses were crude and unembellished, whose voices and hammers were heard to ring out, who built the fires and butchered the swine, who were, if anything, more vicious than their masters, gaming with woman and child, the host of the Chalian king spread terror in their wake as they marched.

At the gates to a city they raised strings of flags, colours of every shape and size emblazoned with lurid devices. These they tied to lances rising stiffly from the backs of captured woodsmen, shepherds, any poor man or woman unfortunate enough to find themselves or their works in the army's path. A cutting swathe of smoke and ruin heralded their coming. A cruel passage, stripped of life and sowed with pain.

*

He carried a great shining ax, Jerian saw, its blade finely honed, rippling the severed air like the moon's ocean reflection. The horse's head, slack through injury or exhaustion, hung as low as his own, blood marking the creature's neck and side, an arrow buried deep in this lord's thigh. The ax was borne over his shoulder. He sat motionless, surrounded by darkened trees, the night pricked by stars and fires. Jerian circled him three times and then emerged from cover to his left with his spear balanced across his palm. He circled a fourth time, closing, not taking his eyes of that magnificent helm. The horse watched him intently, snorting with apprehension, yet receiving no command, remaining steady, holding its ground, the rider tall on its back and disdaining to either to run or fight with what appeared little more than a boy.

Or was there another explanation? A trick to lure him into striking distance, the lord's strength almost gone? Jerian could not be sure.

The man was perfectly still. Dead still, he thought, stood now before the horse.

A knight of the Chalian king; there was much blood on his soul, the weave of it coloured a virulent red, a tapestry depicting unknown glories, numerous campaigns. His armour, flowing like the sea it championed, an elaborate housing, sheathed him from the skull down, a rich overlapping of curves, polished metal the hue of oil-fired steel, all but the most prominent details confused by dancing shades.

Jerian never let his spear waver, nor lost his aim. As previously he had grown in body he grew in mind, strong and patient as he waited for the warrior to fall. For fall he must, the outcast was convinced. He had sought an isolated place to die. In peace he sat upon his horse and in peace Jerian spaced his feet before him, as still as the rider until that rider slowly leaned, dragged from his delicate saddle by the rising sun, illuminated as light stabbed through leaves, dealing the final blow to his years.

The ax stuck in the ground.

Jerian pulled it free, weighed it in his hand, his single hand that had known only the rough shaft of the spear. It was heavy, smooth and sharp, a blur at its edge enhanced by the blue tinge. Its balance was surprising, however, and Jerian found he could swing it with ease.

Standing the ax he once more regarded its bearer. The lord was truly peaceful, the first time on this shore, his bloody soul leached, his life unwound. A dewy gauze not dissimilar to that encasing his features shrouded his metal corpse. The armour was punctured about the throat and beneath one arm, wounds made by a straight thrust sword, the owner of that weapon a rare individual, quick of wrist, precise of eye and nerve as he ducked under the slicing ax and bunched his shoulders. Jerian wondered briefly who he may have been, the soldier who dealt the killing blow. It was not important. Neither did he wish to strip the plate off the dead rider and peer at his face.

It might be beautiful, he reasoned, pleased to have met its end, happy in the defeat of its threat...

The horse turned in circles as if lost. Its load eased, the ashen beast searched for purpose in the dew-soaked grass. Finally, as Jerian looked on, it lay down on its stained flank and slowed its breath, coiling steam about itself until its lungs slackened and its heart ceased to pump.

He took the ax, having waited the night for it. He left the spear, its uses waned - but he would fashion another, as no ax was much use in catching fish. The spear was all he had to barter. To the ghost of the Chalian knight it was fair exchange.

Birdsong lifted him and he began to move faster through the wood, ears alerted by tunes of a different order, the day's work started, abutting flimsy walls, the flesh and leather of foot soldiers bracing spears and stretching bows, their voices raised, joined, raised again, giving pitiless battle to those seeking only to defend their homes. The city lay over the horizon, rocky outcrops deflecting sound while blocking vision. Jerian chose not to run in that direction. He had followed the army's progress, hiding in brake and tree as both master and thrall laid waste to field and hovel, leaving nothing to stand, nothing to breathe save the crows, black wings spinning mockingly, false combat in the sky. And Jerian had tired of their laughter. He made his way back to familiar land, amongst trees he knew to be friends. The air was freshening by the day and soon snow would fall, yet he had not been able to desert the place of his birth. He knew he must, had no wish to be tormented by a summer owl. Only it was harder than he had imagined. Something bound him to the soil and the cave. Returning there, he lay on the rock where he had dozed away so many afternoons. The silver object clanked against the stone. Holding it up to his eyes, the light just then failing, Jerian at last saw a use for the thing. Wasting no more time, he chipped at the rock, lodged a dull shard down the silver throat, blocking one end. Next he rushed to the cave and, on hands and knees, located other tokens there, pushing them in turn after the stone, eventually jamming it full, grains of sands and scraps of cloth, strands of hair and splinters of bone making of that object a symbol, a source in miniature of the force binding him to one small corner of a larger world.

Chapter Three - The Damned

Their feet were naked and cold. Their hands twisted, thin fingers bunched packets of sharp bone. They wore only grey. Jerian passed amongst them. They hid their faces, covered their wounds, hugging their guts to them and gripping their still hearts. They were the dead of the wars. No rest awaited them. A pall of souls, they drifted throughout the forest, clinging like fog to bark, sticking in the outcast's lungs. He saw the damned as no living man did. They touched him. A few even dogged his heels. They recognised him, understood his gift of perception. He was alive - the world of the dead shrouded him.

The damned whispered as once had the flowers and leaves, speaking their names in a thousand tongues, expressing their need of Jerian. Their entreaties assaulted his ears, his other senses. He shut them out.

Jerian marked his path and followed. These wasted spirits, abused in death as in life, would not leave him alone. But he ignored their words. He did not wish them for a cause. Brighter things occupied his mind. Richer things danced across his consciousness, colourful spectres whose lures were far more inviting, teasing the youth whose innocence was strong, his fate yet to manifest; always just out of reach, like his manhood.

All winter he travelled south, the snow a blanket, the trees bent by its weight, the rivers frozen and the sky bleached with cloud. He crossed vast icy plains, rolling hillsides, skirted villages and battlefields, the two often one, strewn with pathetic corpses, men, women and children gutted by swords and transfixed by arrows, their homes burnt, their flesh given to the fire. Often Jerian would come upon a settlement, and, moving carefully, not wishing to be exposed, find the dwellings empty, the surrounding woodland torched, overturned carts pulled by rotting oxen, geese and chickens silent, necks broken, filling the stomachs of Chalian lords. What emotions he experienced were confusing. The destruction sickened him; yet to Jerian the victims were far from quiet. Rising from the earth, the ashes, the mounds, the dead enveloped him, part of the land, a land haunted now, irredeemable, the armies of the ocean having swept far and wide, scattered feathers and scales, flights and armour green-blue and visible despite the snow, shining like gems at the bottom of a pond.

He did not linger. Jerian pressed on, curious, fascinated, the razed villages, the larger towns, the cities made with dense black smoke...

The world was one of sadness.

Tiring, he curled above ground, lodged in a tree, at rest midst naked branches, fingering the withered hand of his lame and shrunken right arm, tracing the ciphers engraved on the silver object's casing. Those tokens of home he carried were comforting. The metal was warm to his flesh, bound to that useless limb. Part of himself, as bone and sinew. His strength in some measure derived from it. He bore his wretched mother much as she had borne him.

Sleep was freedom. Ensconced in the tree, the traveller was beyond the realm of ghosts and pleadings. The world of sleep, separate from the world of waking, was as yet uncontaminated by souls whose restless nature barred them.

A brief respite, but a welcome one.

Coming awake the chorus of stolen lives rose anew, drowning even the crows, lost and stricken.

Jerian continued as before, swinging the ax and spearing fish with saplings cut and sharpened, eating them raw so as not to occlude the sky further. His progress was neither hurried nor slowed by the grey-clad petitioners, their number dwindling as he crossed into mountainous regions, fording a river whose banks were sheer and water thunderous, chill as death itself, a current he went against with equal vigour.

Into spring he walked, the mountain's southern slopes alive with heather and roses, a feast of purple that softened his features and reflected in the ax's steel like sunset.

A new land, across the border.

Chapter Four - A Wood Carver's Marionette

Twilight quilted his eyes and the smells of juniper and honeysuckle suffused his lungs. Here, he imagined, was peace in abundance.

The days were warm and quiet, the wind soft and the rain, when it fell, gentle, welcome. Slender trees sprouted crowns of a lush green, fruits dangling like thorny baskets. They protected their seeds well, as most of the trees were slick and dangerous to climb. Jerian slept beneath rock-faces and upon broken slabs of land. Rabbits skipped from shallow burrows and deer paced him without fear. Jerian then, could not bring himself to kill either.

It was on his fourth day that he began to notice signs of human habitation. First was a red scarf, torn and spiked on some bushes. Second a doused fire, cold ashes that took his mind beyond the mountains. And thirdly, colouring the afternoon, a young woman. More girl than woman, she danced happily, vigorous and alone, twirling long skirts of green and yellow, her skin the hue of pine. Her eyes were a vivid blue, and as Jerian watched her they grew bright and wide. The girl spun on a hilltop thirty paces from him, open mouthed, a trilling laugh that disappeared with her over the rise. Unthinkingly, he chased her, this apparition, drawn on by those eyes, swept along with the afternoon on a warm tide of deception. The girl vanished into a deep hollow. Jerian never hesitated; he plunged in after, the sky darkening as the sun was blotted out by successive layers of ponderous, mouldy leaves. The hollow was steep-sided and the vegetation thicker the farther he descended, slashing with the ax, angry swipes at heavy limbs that spilled putrid sap, greasing the earth under his naked feet. Occasional rushes of colour marked the girl's winding passage. Jerian pursued her stubbornly, moving in near blackness about the slick wall, sliding deeper, unable now to clamber out, fear and panic discovering fertile soil in the confusion he felt, the light of day, the freshness of the country above lost to him as he slipped helplessly towards the hollow's rocky centre. Blind and desperate and unable to stop as the ground subsided beneath him, he was then falling past wooden expressions, masks adorning smooth verticals, lit from within like garish lanterns, blurred smiles and mocking snouts as he tumbled towards seeming death.

A net caught him, snatched him, hugged his arms, the whole and the wizened, buckled his legs, stiff fibres cutting him much as the ax cut the enfolding strands, tipping Jerian unconscious into a thick bed of suffocating moss.

The wanderer bled and dreamed. The laughing, dancing girl was hung on a hook.

*

On a broad tree stump in a watery, sonorous cavern, the wood carver sat below the earth, hinged sections of dark oak between his like-coloured knees, a glinting chisel in his hands, a family of tools, sharp planes and fine knives, elegant racks to house them cut from the ancient rootstock at his feet.

Jerian watched passively, legs crossed on a polished stone, a child whose eyes were beech knots quietly braiding his washed hair, her fingers cool against his neck. He was clean and refreshed, his one hand occupied with a puppet of sticks that swam clumsily through the moist air, attached by rough lengths of string to his playful digits.

The carpenter's name was Odil and his children were young and many, some splashing like otters, others motionless on rock shelves or leant against the aged stump awaiting repairs to lost ears and damaged thumbs, their features as their patience, stolid and lasting. Presently Odil was at work on an arm for Jerian, its lustre matching his own, smoothed like him with pungent oils, its texture that of flesh scrubbed and exercised to a healthy tone. The shoulder was bound in thick leather, part of a brass-pinned corslet, light and flexible. Brass links formed the joints of the oaken limb, enhancing the wood's crafted subtlety. Anxiously, Jerian anticipated its fitting.

His actual shrunken right arm itched and trembled with a song. The cavern echoed, resonant with ardent music, a host of children's voices uplifted, stemming from the resolute carver and his array of chisels. Odil had fashioned those voices, throat and tongue. He might have given voice to the wanderer as easily, but chose not to. A strong arm was what Odil required, and a strong arm was what he had in Jerian, separated from his ax, weighted by new burdens and bathed in the cloy waters that ran through the demesne, bathed now a second time, hand grasping hand, a greater strength to each as the dead mass of the sculpted limb dragged its wearer down. Underwater, the song glinted in silver ribbons, pearly verses that implored him to rise - but to rise Jerian had to master the heavy arm, make it his.

Breath held, he struggled. The leather creased and tightened, crushing heat from his torso as it moulded afresh the contours of skin and bone. The arm felt numb, but that it was felt at all encouraged him to focus his thoughts. Steadily life drained into the hard oak, softening it, making pliable its gifted sheen. After a few moments he was able to bend it. Surfacing, opening his lungs, he reached with both hands and was helped from the pool, the children grinning, silenced, next returned to their shelves.

Odil rubbed his chin. He looked the young man, the remade man over, ran the heel of his knurled palm from chest to elbow, twisting and shaking the newly fastened appendage until satisfied the bond had taken, a compact of flesh and wood that he meant to finish in metal.

The grip was sound.

Jerian had never been in a position to bargain. From the moment of his enticement, his sighting of the dancing girl, the moment of his fall, he owed his life to the purposeful shaper of smiles and gulling laughter.

Jerian was tricked at heart. Defenceless, he was easy prey. With the unfamiliar arm at his side, unpractised and solid, he slept as the carver bade him, troubled by spurious dreams.

*

A crystal sky, it stretched impossible distances, pale and hazed, the sun a languid yellow as it leaned over the grubby trees comprising the horizon. Where the sun sat, quenched in fiery ocean, was Jerian's goal. The road he followed had for the first time a destination; not an end in itself, he knew, but a point of calling. The wood carver directed him there. Odil asked that he return with the severed head of that sun's ephemeral mistress, for she had stolen from him in the past and so indebted herself to his chisels.

Jerian did not question this task. The girl whose skirts had entrapped him blew him kisses now from the depths of the hollow, tokens that would lead him back. He carried no weapon, neither blade nor ax, the latter's presence missed by his left hand and craved by his right. The carver had explained that such needs would be filled in time, weapons brought to him, as Jerian understood, when he had proper need of them. How Odil planned their transportation, the placing of blue steel in his doubled fingers at the necessary instant, puzzled him. The father of so many children, however, had other ends in sight. He cherished the Chalian ax. It bit deep into the hardest wood. He sent his assassin off quickly, the sooner he might return, kicking his feet from the leather sandals Odil had furnished him, continuing west, inland, the journey long to the ocean...

Threads of parting tugged at his neck and the wooden limb quivered, fist clenched, tendons proud, swinging fitfully at his hip.

The sun drew in his shadow as it climbed to overtake him, peering in his malformed skull as it dropped. The world was wide, unfamiliar beyond the mountains.

Time had contracted below ground.

The wanderer scratched.

Chapter Five - Pale Weavers' Mare

The land was rugged and unfriendly. Bears prowled the night, their breath a crackling storm. Jerian no longer slept in trees, for these had grown twisted and stunted, ugly boles and knotted limbs that the birds themselves avoided. If he were to spend his dreams in their embrace he might never wake come morning. The grass too was flawed, sapped of colour - everything about the land was altered.

As the ground rose the summer waned and a perpetual mist clung round his shoulders, new and old. His oaken arm pulsed hotly at times, further warping his features, a deformity Odil had not sought to correct. Perhaps it suited the wood carver's purpose. An assassin should not be beautiful, thought the wanderer. The single direction Odil's bequest had imposed on him angered Jerian. But he could not turn aside. He would return with the head of the sun's mistress, or not at all. A sadness rooted in his stomach. It had not been his intention to become indebted. Odil had tricked him, lured him from the over world to the under. The true debt was to himself, for he had fallen prey so easily...

*

The stars accused Jerian. They bubbled like running water and shone like diamonds. What was it he had killed? A fox? Not a rabbit. His hands were sticky with blood. He did not recognise the animal. He was hungry. Names were forgotten.

The silhouettes of tall trees and steep rock walls were a tangible weight about him. The air's dank chill caused him to shake like a wet dog, hair whipping, leather darkened with sweat as he tore into the carcass. Thus sated he rose from his crouch and turned a circle. Was he followed? Something moved around him, stepped quietly through the leafage. Rocks deceived Jerian. Their stone faces, wholly black, gaped momentarily as if at a passing lantern. Dismissing his fears he continued walking. A stream ran, the walls narrowing, its bed cold and slick, affording the only path. Jerian clambered upwards, feet frozen, ankles numbed by the liquid, searching out fixed stones while those he loosened tumbled down. There was to be no rest this side of the mountains. Did these swing north to join the others he had climbed? Was he crossing back? If so, then he might count himself amongst the damned.

He reached a plateau, the stream widening above a shallow fall, and lingered a while before again pushing west, the new sun at his back, tormented in his soul, wondering how many times that sun would overtake him, quenching itself in the distant ocean, its mistress's loins a destination they had in common, the sun to seed, the assassin to rob of its blossoming. The wood carver wished darkness on the world. There could be no greater motive. That this woman had done him ill in the past was, he believed, a deception, a romanticism Odil perpetuated in his vanity. Jerian, as his tool, would not avenge an insult or correct a misunderstanding. He would murder the dawn, make it barren. His was a bold destruction. Whatever she had stolen, her theft was nothing, the lesser crime.

Hands caressed him, questioned his crooked features and probed the juncture of flesh and wood. Their questions were manifold and indecipherable. Jerian was blind, lost, the ground beneath him softened, fallen away. He could neither walk nor breathe with certainty, as the mist clung to him ever more tightly. If he had had some sharp weapon, a blade, something with an edge, he may have been able to cut himself free; but he possessed not so much as a knife, and the ax had been denied him. He was helpless, struggling in the winding grip of a living vapour...

Out of this miasma transpired an equally living horse.

Chapter Six - The Burnished Moon

The horse's girth was deep and its shoulders full, its mane drifting like the mist from which it was made, its back short like that of a Chalian steed. Jerian had never ridden before and the experience served to mitigate and fears he had as to the nature of the creature speeding him towards his master's goal. Buffeted, he gripped the mane in both hands, its diaphanous strands slipping through his fingers, the horse running silently as its hooves did not strike the earth but whispered across it like a gloaming, its coming a motion that reduced the day to a blur of greens and browns. Clouds scudded, filling the sky with a cold offering of rain.

Such dampness was this creature's medium.

Jerian relaxed his new hand and stretched the muscles of wrist and elbow, soothing aching ligaments, their brass origins invisible. He pulled the hair from his eyes, rubbed the wire of his beard. The world formed and reformed about him, blended one incarnation with the next, like stirred images in a pond, the scents of animals caught fleetingly and confused, spoors mixed to suggest a truly extraordinary predator, the monster trailing him and his mare, outpacing them as if in the sun's employ, a servant raised as the horse had been raised, given shape and instruction, perhaps charged with protecting the woman at the edge from Odil's wandering lion.

The sensation grew with his thirst; a threat perceived. The light strove to weaken the mare, stubborn rays dispersing the body that had formed between his knees. Jerian moistened his lips and fixed his gaze ahead, splitting the horse's fading ears, poll and forelock waning as noon passed and the ground sloped steeply downwards.

As the sun came level with his brow, shaping concentric circles before his eyes, and the horizon appeared as illusive as it had that morning, he felt the magic begin to waver, the horse's breath no longer visible, its flanks heaving, warm under his thighs. The world turned more brown than green, shading to gold, amber and red, orange tufts of grasses and vermilion sands replacing stunted bushes and crazily angled trees, the land flattening, the mountains dwindling to his rear - their cloak of dense fog beginning to unwind. The wool was spun backwards, gathered in, trailing like smoke from a torch. The wind, salt-laden, was unravelling.

He was aware of the white mist-flesh weakening, its labour drawing to a close.

Twilight promised dissolution.

A last rise presented Jerian with a glimpse of the sea, the sun choosing that moment to settle upon it, basking in glorious munificence, its fiery head meeting the spangled pillow beyond an island crowned with windows, smothered with steam, a silver wave shot through with yellow and purple. A host of vying colours rebounded upwards from the cliffs that locked the beach, washing Jerian from his vaporous mount and laying him flat, prey to beasts of every order, the night, the world, all creation passing over his supine form, the tail of it, the present time, disappearing to be at the van of a new day in the east as the silver quietness settled in behind, its source and guardian the bloated, smiling moon.

Steel reflected in the brass studs of his corslet. Jerian stood and walked to the cliff edge, peered at the fortress, the island he must reach and conquer.

Languid on the black water was a sail.

And behind him? Turning, he filled his eyes with emptiness, as the world had vanished, the mountain ranges sunk into the earth and the sky curved to shroud that vacancy, permeating his senses like the bars of a cage, a cage he shared with another, the haunter of his waking hours and scatterer of his dreams. Facing that monster, wooden arm twitching, he did not see the moon's smile change.

Chapter Seven - Shadow And The Walker

The darkness shone, populating the night world with smooth curves and jagged points, rock formations and reflective vegetation.

Jerian sank to his knees and cupped his hands beneath the hidden surface of a shrouded pool of fresh water.

Drinking, he listened.

The stars no longer cared what he did. They were higher now, distant memories. No clouds interfered with their vision; but what they saw lay beyond this mute outcast, resided below the ocean. As every night, they mourned their brother.

No sound reached Jerian.

Splashing fingers broke the silence. The noise of his washing was answered by an incredible, agonised roar. Jerian froze, expecting the beast to seize him - but no, the roar diminished, the terrible pain it carried hanging all round him, poised in the air like a blade, one whose arc ran incomplete as he crouched defencelessly, awaiting its bite, suspended in space and time, the moment his life, his life prolonged by something he had neither the will to fight nor the energy to flee, the predator of many spores that stalked him.

Would the beast prey on another?

It could not, thought Jerian; it was his own monster, his mistaken invention...

Rising, he moved slowly towards the edge, careful not to get too close, and stared at the one lit window that marked the fortress. When the sun had set there had seemed hundreds, glass portals blazing, the island a pillar of lights at the world's end. He let his eyes fall to the beach, rocks there glinting in the gentle swell.

There was no sign of the sail.

The roar again. Jerian spun to face it. Quickly he shifted position, hunched low as he ran from the precipice, his right hand clenched in an oaken fist. He could feel every ripe muscle of that arm bunch powerfully, his shoulder hard against the brass-pinned corslet. Using his left hand he massaged its length, the wood yielding and warm under his fingers, skin tight against his palm, the veins therein pronounced ridges. His tongue flicked, tasting the air.

Nothing.

*

Shadows pressed him. His feet naked in the heavy sand at the water's edge, the cliff overhanging him appeared composed of an army of stone shields, flaking lances behind which stood the incised faces and buckled limbs of men and horses, packed bodies that peered defiantly out to sea. A forgotten bulwark against an aggressor whose encrusted hordes had passed elsewhere, the result of their stout defence, a static victory on a bloodless beach. Jerian was taken by their black stares. The tide threatened. There would be no rest on this front. The stone army remained vigilant, patient, eyes across the tempestuous ocean, their numbers reduced, crumbling - but there were always others to take those places, jostling from behind like eager salmon.

As dawn broke, swallowing the sky from the east, the army began to move, its shadows deepen, metal glint, ranks assemble from half-slumber, preparing for the assault all were convinced the waves would bring.

Jerian lifted his feet from the swirling tidal water. The sea was their sole enemy. Perhaps unknown to them, they fought a battle they could not win. A multitude of hopeless eyes set deep in stony faces, arrowheads chinking, swords fingered, the forgotten soldiers gazed down at Jerian, he who walked like a commander before them, a leader who had crossed this continent from ocean to ocean. Leaning on their spears they watched him. In their anticipation they viewed him as the embodiment of a cause expressed in every bone of their situation, rank upon rank of men, ageless and waiting, fractured and tumbling to sand.

Meekly, he turned his back on them. He felt neither pity nor contempt, he simply had no wish to heed their campaign. They grew increasingly animate. Jerian ignored them. He spied his sail and chased it, borne in on the tide a small boat whose slats were green with seaweed as it nudged ashore between cliff-fallen horses.

He climbed on board without hesitation and pushed clear of the strand. The wind barely disturbed the sail. Jerian fumbled with the oars, eventually positioning them correctly in the rowlocks. He had observed such craft on a river, fishermen casting fine nets from their bobbing sides, and understood their method. In practice though he slipped clumsily, the boat spinning as the dour soldiers looked on, silently massing, fathers and sons, the salt spray eating their shoes.

Jerian had located a crude path during the night, a stairway composed of helmets. The shadows had not inhibited him; had, in fact, bent their many necks to his feet, the quicker he might reach the corpse-strewn apron where their dead were unchained by the sea.

The day was full now, the sun concealed behind that host, the sky a whitened blue. Struggling with the boat, Jerian cast glances instead of nets, fishing for currents, sunken rocks in the emerald swell, the island elusive, apparently shifting with the light, seeming to float. The ocean's surface gave no hint of its depth, and while he could swim, he thought it unwise to range his skills against the cunning water. He pulled harder on the oars, steering as best he could, striving to narrow the distance between himself and the fortress. Clouds advanced from the north, harried by gusts that rocked the boat and speckled his cheek with icy rain. Disregarding the portent, he rowed. Waves raised him almost to cliff height, the soldiers bedecked in gulls. His right arm, distant kin to the vessel, worked to turn his course, direct the boat, its sail stretched as it caught the wind and lurched, tipping Jerian forwards. He sensed the wakened empathy of the boards, oak fingers next gripping the rudder his flesh had failed to put a use to previously, riding the elements...

A reef guarded the island. The water was quieter on its southern quarter, sheltered from the rain that blurred the ocean and frosted the army of the shore. He jumped from the boat, fearing he would be swept out to sea. A gust threw him. He stumbled, and the craft was lost. Jerian watched it drift back towards the mainland, the current tossing it, conducting the weed-coloured vessel to a rendezvous with the stone horses that lay crumbling on the beach.

The day had turned the shade of granite now, and he sought purchase on the slick foundations of the cloud-topped edifice, cautiously circling its girth as he looked for an entrance, some means of gaining access. Any doubts he had were put from his mind. Concentrating on the task, the assassin, pelted by rain and seawater, advanced up the pile whenever opportunity afforded progress, clinging desperately to the near vertical stone, hoping his life would not be falsely spent on the rocks below. Hands raw, he clung on, leaning out in order to see higher. Above him, the stone dressed at its base, a window made an arch, a depression in the increasingly uniform wall. Jerian stretched his right arm, that newly created, the palm of his left flat to the stone. Every tendon in his body ached. He teetered painfully, muscles protesting, legs strained, feet bleeding as fingers brushed the ledge. The weather steadily worsened, peeling him loose, undermining his grip. Lowering the arm he manoeuvred to one side, found a hold that enabled him to slide his body higher; only now the window was further out of reach. Although its glass was visible, tantalising, he risked a fall greater than that from the boat should he miss this jump.

The sun broke through the clouds then, blinding him. And a howling, the storm's death, tore at his ears.

The casement rattled invitingly. There was a moment when everything, sun, wind, ocean, was still. Jerian filled his lungs, tensed involuntarily, released his grip, and lunged, oak hand fastening while flesh slipped, the scream his own as the wood violently jarred his merged shoulder, wrenched it loose. His face scrapped the wall as he dangled. He swung briefly, then hauled himself up.

Standing amongst the litter of broken glass, Jerian let his breaths come in ragged bursts. Exhausted, he wanted to rest, but could not risk sleep in this place. He had his task to perform. The wood carver influenced his actions through the oaken limb. Even strained and torn, the polished muscles made a fist of his hand, the blood squeezed between chiselled fingers, knuckles darkened with what he recognised as a falsehood: the red drops a lie.

The corslet had ripped, spitting brass pins to the smooth flags. The room was square, six paces wide. The heavy door was unbolted and he moved straight away into a dim passage, feet making wet prints that quickly dried, creating flimsy ghosts in the crisp air. A draught stroked his calves. Stray noises echoed from wall to wall, diminishing as he walked the bare stretches, winding deeper into the fortress past other doors that looked not to have moved in years, rust eating their hinges, boards rotting and nails corroded. None of these boasted locks. Turning at random, Jerian was puzzled by the vague constancy of the yellow light. He pressed his face to gratings and searched the spaces beyond for windows, but found none. He retraced his steps at one point, yet failed to find his way back to that first corridor. He could not believe Odil would aid his mission so far only to allow him to be casually trapped. One door here must open onto a stair. Whether that stair wound down or up was of little consequence. Jerian battered the nearest with leathered shoulder, the shock hurting his teeth. The portal, for all its obvious age and decay, proved immovable. He tried a second, a third, angry and desperate as his head spun and his body objected. But he succeeded only in wasting his strength. No door opened more than a finger's breadth, those that gave spilling choking dust as he shifted their ponderous lintels. Should he manage to force one, the wall might topple and crush him.

What choice did he have? Sweating profusely, he forced a likely door inwards. The darkness on its far side spewed fetid odours, which his jaded mind judged favourably. A good sign. A promising difference. The door budged minutely, coaxing a grotesque smile from his contorted features. Saliva ran out of his mouth, but the gap remained insufficient. He stood back. As with the window, he realised, there was one chance, a single valid attempt at access, and to take it, to gain, meant risking all. He must throw his whole body at the door, break it down, unseat the stones above it, and in doing so gamble, hazard failure. If his effort was not great enough, if he lacked the will, then he would not make progress. It was a test, he saw. The woman, Odil's enemy and the sun's mistress, had contrived this defence. Perhaps if he walked along every passage he would discover any number of corpses, the fractured spines of earlier puppets, those that had balked and become stranded, not able to find their way out again.

Jerian had no wish to add to that failure. He stared hard at the door he had chosen, measured its parts, its steel, the solidity of its frame. There was a delight in the challenge. The obstacle was possessed of a grim perversity.

And what of the woman who had planed it? Jerian charged the braced timbers, seeking her.

Chapter Eight - The Fey Woman Of Orange

The sands in her glass trickled, a bright stream of moments, tiny granules whose precious hearts beat the rhythm of the hours, structuring the day and wheeling the sun and moon on an axis that itself turned in accordance with the prevalent season. She was alone but for her instruments. Clocks and compasses and telescopes occupied the garret. Gold workings oiled the gloom. She often wept until nightfall.

Her lover rode the heavens, came each morning to quench his lust in the ocean.

Her name was Ista. Aware of the intruder, the man even now walking her orange-painted halls, a glinting madness, a barely suppressed fury in his eyes, she sat with her neck bared in a window, facing west. The window was tall and wide, casements open to the blue horizon. Ista's orange dress spilled at her feet, a match for the orange carpet. Orange tapestries hung on the walls, filling the room with fire - still the gloom dominated.

A broad ladder angled to a hatchway in the ceiling. On the flat roof stood a golden sundial, black numerals of inlaid jet dividing its fringe.

The day represented a glut of time. The sands could not move quickly enough. When at last the sun touched the sea Ista felt she would live the instant forever, the blood stopped in her veins. But it was not to be. Her existence at the world's end was most vulnerable as long as the sun remained in the east, hidden from her. She lived in a fugue, soul adrift above the island, supported by her dreams.

It had not always been such...

Once the sun had circled the earth, brash and new. It cared little for those who would make of its image a tool for gain, either the trees whose fruits and foliage stored its energy or the men who later released that force, spawning flame. The sun was tireless, yet sleepy. Summers divided, became autumn and spring as the youth it had long enjoyed matured towards middle-age. It grew lazy, and winter came. Beneath the earth the sun was deaf to cries. It languished, subdued, until the cold seeped down through the rocks and threatened to snuff it entirely. Afraid, the sun rose, weakened by its long rest, impaired through idleness. It found a world sickened, hateful, ravaged by war, its people starved, itself enervated. The sun took its rightful place in the sky and there began a healing process; but it lacked the vigour of old and could not maintain its original cycle.

And so patterns were laid. The summer was no longer predominant, and winter, having established a presence on land, now had its place on the calendar. In despair the sun waned further, sliding from its central arc, and the snows fell heaviest on the mountains. The moon, which shone on the dead as the sun on the living, seeing this, asked of its cousin the reason. The sun answered that it saw no purpose in its daily regeneration if it served only to perpetuate the business of dying. Would the moon not be pleased to have the world under its silver aegis? Tempted, the moon gave this thought. However, a balance was necessary; it argued, that only that way could it guarantee its own survival, for death followed life as surely as night followed day, and if life were to cease then ultimately stagnation would triumph and the very stuff of its being would disintegrate. Moreover, that life in all its complexity was the sun's true purpose. Even diminished it had a duty to those sustained by it. And the sun, chagrined, agreed. But sadness clung to it and it drew no pleasure from its journey. The heart was gone from the sun. Blinded by its own light it failed to recognise the offers made it. The moon intervened a second time, telling of how the dead had become a part of itself, its feet and hands upon the surface. Could not the sun do likewise? Did it not sense the worth of its power? Surely it was entitled to some role, a position amongst men relative to its value? But such direct involvement with the lives it made possible did not interest the sun. They were too many. Unlike the moon, it saw no profit in being intrusive. Filled with remorse, the sun wished to mellow and die. But it could not. Life was bound to it after all. Life treasured it, shaped its image. All that was born owed its birth to the sun. Its breath and growth derived from just one source. And life, comprehending this, reciprocated in turn, giving up its past for fuel...

Or so Ista read from the tapestries. Would the sun mourn her passing? She touched her face, unsure.

*

Making little of his bruises, the wounds clogged with debris, etched in blood, Jerian proceeded with a single-mindedness in keeping with his object and the wood carver's design. The orange spaces were peripheral to his vision. He only saw the way forwards, the next turn, stair or door. He was unaware of how much time passed, lost in this web of rooms. He ascended the fortress, its myriad windows concealed. The yellow light deepened to gold, a rich emission of picture frames and curious ornaments, with neither the images nor the forms making any lasting impression. Flames danced in a hearth, crackling about logs that must have been collected on the mainland. Before the fire rested a golden bath, the water it contained steaming. From a door to his right a woman emerged, her dress vivid, her eyes cool, an embroidered cloth over one arm.

Jerian stared. She walked timidly to the centre of the room and held out her hand.

Grimly, Ista welcomed death. Still, she thought, death should be clean.

He stood next to her, her features plain, her copper hair combed straight, curling on her shoulders. Ista dropped the decorative towel and began tugging at the soiled material knotted round his waist and loins, tearing it as he remained passive, doing nothing to help or hinder, offering no threat save by his presence in her sea-locked abode. Seeing his arm confirmed her suspicions: he was Odil's. Whatever his name, his misshapen face displayed alarm when next she removed the corslet, slipping it from his back to reveal an ugly scar, while he prodded his flesh and made no sound. His disfigurement unsettled her. His skin was coarse, thick with dirt. She sat him in the golden bath, and taking a dish of scented liquid from the mantle, used it and her fingers to work the filth and pain from his scalp and his soles.

Jerian made no protest. Not having experienced such human kindness, lacking memory of his birth, he permitted the woman to do as she would. She fetched a knife, shaved him, cut short his hair, her expression unchanging, his fear of the blade insubstantial. If she wanted to kill him she had only to slice his throat. But that was not Ista's choice.

His flesh scrubbed she left him once more, this time returning with food, bread and fruit and cheese on a tray, such things as he had not tasted. Jerian ate greedily. Ista smiled. She brought him sweet wine and drank herself from a cup of gold while her guest stood naked in front of a dying fire.

When again she left Jerian followed her, encountering the array of burnished instruments, the open window, the ocean radiant as the sun neared its rest. A shallow flight of stairs had brought him to the garret. Ista was there, picking clothes, hauling armour from a chest incongruously bracketed in iron. Facing her killer, that future almost upon her, Ista held up a thick leather jerkin reinforced with bluish articulated plates. The gold light failed to colour its hinges. She dressed him first in a cotton shirt and leggings, then the jerkin, which snapped closed around his ribs. The leather was dark, almost black. There were breeches to match, threaded with strong, flexible wires. And unfamiliar boots.

The sword came last, with it a helm as ugly as his face, hammered from the same dull metal as the blade that tapered symmetrically to a point; its hilt long, a hand-and-a-half, pommel spherical and without embellishment. This she laid on a table.

The garret was swamped. Red seabirds speckled the horizon. The sun gazed in through the window, a brilliant furnace on a few bold wave crests, its reflection bleeding into the water - purple fingers caressed the ocean, dallied with it, tested its depth, and purple fingers laced in the woman's copper hair, smoothing it over her ears, draping it across her breasts, exposing her delicate, flushed neck.

Jerian lifted the sword, unhurried. He took a step towards her, this woman sat before an open window, dress piled at her feet. The sun blurred her image, and yet, unblinkingly, she gazed upon it.

Where there tears in her eyes? Jerian felt there were in his own. As the sun went down he swung the blade, cut the head from the body, the flesh from the wood.

Chapter Nine - Revenant

The shields they bore were many and richly decorated, hanging in the dark sky like pennons. The lances were inverted, their sharp points casting sparks from the stone. Jerian walked in the midst of this escort, responding to the acid pull of his soul. Death had renewed the world in his image and death was not to be thwarted. The outcast had an audience. His new clothes and his masked face, the bloodied sword and the fleshed limb that had wielded it, marched as one to their fate...

The blows rang night and day.

Summer was there for the taking.

And the warriors knelt.

He had made no speech in their presence. He was unable. But words were not required of him. It was deeds, and deeds alone, that would mark the way ahead.

The future was his to behold - the wanderer's sad countenance had only to see.

And believe.

But did he wish it? Perhaps the owl could say. Death took the crooked in his arms and embraced him while the damned still walked the earth and the armies of lord's and city's prepared to engage.

Jerian had no shield of his own. His gruesome helm exhibited no crest.

These were things to earn.

Chapter Ten - The Daughter

He carried her severed head in a sack emptied of sea coal. The journey was long and his alone. He walked without sleep, boots softening upon the earth and stride balanced by the weights of arm and sword. Metal and flesh, the metal dulled and hard, the flesh blood-spotted and stiff. His belly went without food. Jerian walked and dreamed...

Dreamed of death.

*

The stumps of dark trees gripped the cracked rocks at the entrance to a cavern, the stone wall it mouthed giving the lie to the low heavens, the perpetual night. What Jerian saw above were not stars but sparkling gems fixed in a black roof of granite. He had travelled below the earth, the wood carver guiding his quiet steps.

Shapes emerged from the cavern, limbed and wooden; naked and small, they bore knives and short bows. Notched arrows caught the faint light, bobbing like fish in the wet heart of a subterranean pool. Were they blind? A fist clenched at his side. Once a forest had cloaked these dim surfaces. Trees had risen here, remote from the sun, branches supporting leaves whose metallic remnants clogged hidden watercourses, spewing onto visible mountain slopes like drowned, formless insects from a dead lizard's guts.

Odil had felled the trees and worked the timber. The ax had made it easy.

Jerian wrapped the neck of the sack around his left forearm, advanced with the sword in his free hand, the hand Odil had planed and hinged, smoothed and fitted. The heavy blade pointed downwards. He followed its weaving nose over fractured steps, the wooden shapes thin shadows at his back. Jerian had no fear of them. A waterfall splashed, its echo composed of green and yellow light, streaks of animate colour that painted the interior depths, hurling images of grief and pain across chest and helm. A sour odour reached him. The outcast gripped his prize firmly to himself. He expected the lean wood carver to spring from the black, to demand the head of the lady, Ista's human skull which had perched on a body of his making, her uplifted shoulders hewn from beech, her torso from close-grained ash. In fact Odil sat cross-legged amidst the tools and scrapings of his trade, immersed in false tones, ignoring Jerian as the man he had helped make whole stood before him. Odil cut grooves between toes, piles of sculpted feet disguising his ankles.

The wanderer squatted; the sack unwound. Still gripping the sword Jerian tipped the head from its stained confinement and watched as its eyes rolled open. The wound was sealed, clean, the neck not so much as bruised. She seemed alive, pale Ista. Would Odil place her atop a new body, one he controlled? Jerian stared at the man, hunting for clues in his crumpled visage, trying to reconcile the reality of those lineaments with the memory of a much younger individual. The wood carver had changed. He appeared less sure, no longer trusting his environment. Perhaps he had anticipated failure - the dead woman's eyes, her gaze disturbed him.

The waterfall was silenced. Motion stirred. The wanderer, now returned, tensed. He wound his fingers in Ista's matted hair and straightened. The head had grown heavier since its release. He could barely lift it. It was, he thought, as if the body were again attached, the true flesh, the mortal, invisible in the cavern, intangible under this sham illumination. And the wood carver, much aged, gnarled like the earth-pillars he had felled, crippled now as they, shambled aimlessly on all fours, a broken creature, his works undone. Arrows struck him, pinning his waxy limbs as he clawed at the bare stone, groaning, injured, wasted. His children, their numbers swollen, shaped from the trees beyond the cavern he had previously been unable to cut, his success with Jerian's ax his failure as what he had fashioned from those ancient boles took their revenge, sticking him with arrows and knives, their poison sap in his veins. His avid spawnings, the offspring of his arts and hands, assailed their father, their common parent, their maker, hacking and beating him, countless bodies swarming out of the quiet darkness, each to collect a piece of his skin, a sliver of his bone, stretching and pounding these materials until nothing of Odil remained.

His scattered tools were gathered together, vanishing with this small army

into the vaulted recesses outside the cavern, beneath the gem-studded

firmament.

Jerian lay Ista's head down, sheathed his sword. His own flesh seemed weakened and his mind reeled. The breath in his lungs, unnoticed for so long, suddenly gushed from him, throwing him off his feet, exhaustion slamming his every fibre as sleep finally overcame...

*

Now that Odil was gone, Jerian, voiceless, was freed from his bind. The arm remained - fingers stroked it. His sleep was without image, sound and deep, and her growth went unseen by any save the few lost tree spirits who glided without purpose about the linked fastness of the caves. Most of their number had infused woody creatures of the carver's manufacture, their newfound mobility leading them inexorably groundwards, to that realm they had previously yearned for, denied passage due to the fixity of their roots.

Some of the oldest had no desire to climb, however, and so lingered, perhaps to seed the forest anew. They felt no antipathy towards Jerian, even though he was responsible for the Chalian ax that had brought their destruction, as primeval trunks were felled by a steel whose edge they were unable to resist. The spirits discerned, and recognised, the torn features of another across the buckled slant of his face.

The girl touched him, bathed him as her mother had, her mother's head from which, like a flower from its bulb, she had sprouted. As yet she lacked a name. As yet her womb was vacant. She was new, and being new wished to prosper. She lay with the man in his slumber, straddling him as ghost lights from the water coloured her flesh and her gentle rocking quickened the next life inside her.

To kiss him, Ista's daughter raised the unlovely helm, only to lower it, afraid and shocked by the equal harshness of his appearance, the obvious disharmony of his mien. She pressed her belly, knowing the swell of it, and with her mother's eyes shed tears of hopeful blessing.

*

Jerian found the silence unbearable. He no longer considered himself safe in the cavern. Standing, a woman's corpse came into view, obscured behind the stump of Odil's earth-tree, her knees folded to her chin, cradling a child in her arms. A confused state overtook him. He knew her as a thing of wood, a golem dispatched by his sword; but clearly she was not. He had no memory of the babe. He listened to its breathing, mistaking it for his own, and then plucked the child from her cooling hands. He could not tell how she had died. He could barely see. Strapping the sword to his back he made his way carefully into the darkest regions of these hollows, towards fresh air and light, the former a draught he hitched his nose to, the latter what he hoped most of all to find.

The infant was quiet against his chest. Jerian hungered for the scents of day, for an end to this oppressive stone, to once more feel grass under his feet. That he wore boots, was tall and whole, surprised him. Perhaps he had always been so and had imagined his disfigurement. And he had a brother - how could he not have known?

Jerian halted.

Mother?

There was a gleam, the ax's polished head borne across another's high shoulder...

He felt the child stiffen, and looking down, saw what he carried to be made of sticks; tied by strings to his fingers, a lifeless puppet.

He yelled, a noise wrenched from his creased throat like a blade from a wound. And he remembered.

Dropping the tight bundle, its clatter submerged below the tide of his anger, the outcast, truly abandoned, chased that mocking gleam out into the frozen night. Snow lay deep and cold on the surface. The wind jumped and laughed.

A bird's silhouette, outlined against a drift of silver, inclined its hooked beak towards the new moon.

Jerian coughed. Startled, he spoke the bird's name in a whisper.

But what was lost?

Chapter Eleven - The Castle Dawn

Gifts. He pondered their nature. The bird was the owl of his youth, delivering into his open palm the rag and earth filled object lost by a nameless rider, prized by Jerian, its finder, and here returned to him.

The patterned metal shone brightly. He tapped its length, pulled out stones and hair and other trinkets, scattering those tokens over the virgin snow. Emptied, he raised the instrument's thin end to his lips and blew. A single high note rang out, alerting the world to the use of a whistle.

Perhaps he summoned the gloom, the rain and chill. It was not yet his to know.

The owl left him to wander as before. Jerian picked the only visible star and followed it. After an uncertain time he smelled the sea. The rain had stopped and the clouds parted, drawn aside like curtains, uncovering the lank assemblies of sorry bushes to either hand, buds and fruit shimmering in icy wonder, clustered like dead mice. Where the snow had blown clear the ground seemed laced with sickly grasses. The moon waxed to full as he walked, its umbral brashness disdainful of the sun's rightful position. But did time move and that sun rise over this world? Or had he killed it? Were the gods whose works he attended, grim and petulant, squabbling? Or did mere men dictate the course of battles and win or lose according to their luck on the day and the thickness of helmets?

He had no answers. As it had before, the ocean beckoned.

Jerian found no army on the shore. No towering cliffs stood guard at this frontier. Was it even the same coast? He did not think so. The dunes rolled east in the direction of promise, dirty and pocked with large stones, which might have fallen in place of snowflakes from the sky. Moving between them, Jerian fancied they were extinguished stars, snuffed globes knocked from their pedestals. He dug one out with his sword and carried it to the water, where it floated.

Standing ankle deep, the swell of hissing waves pulling endless threads of currents about his booted feet, he strained his eyes to watch the tumbling progress of the stone as it was washed out to sea. He could taste the salt, smell the corruption, the palsied fish in their liquid abode swept back and forth like shale, the stinking residue contained in some enormous drinking vessel. An inky line marked where the ocean joined the sky. The horizon undulated, broiled like the clouds. A freshening wind buffeted the sands, a burgeoning gale that tore at his helm and froze the salt into a thin glaze, a layer of rime that stiffened his leggings and whitened the leather jerkin. He might have stood there, without motion, dim and frosted, for past centuries, waiting as the waves thrashed in voracious torment and the tides rose and fell, climbing above his head, dipping below his feet, but powerless to move him. A storm brewed, its seed the fallen star, that floating messenger. At the horizon a violent union was to take place, a re-enactment, the fulfilment of a solemn pledge, the words of which leapt and spumed in the language of briny deeps, to the music of shells. A song to mark the greatest promise of all, the raw coming of day, the rising sun a magnificent castle of light, red and scorching, orange and hot, yellow and mild as it rolled in a lazy arc through the heavens, a melter of snows and a creator of wild, luxuriant gardens, the guardian of hearths and stoves...

It burned his eyes. It branded his flesh. It turned the ice first to water and then to steam. It spread a soft blanket upon the earth and bade him lie down and rest. It grew food, stuffing him with its harvest. It coloured streams and trimmed rivers with the mazy images of leaves.

He was forgiven. But not for his crimes.

Chapter Twelve - The River

Had he counted the stars, he would have found there to be an even number.

They fell in pairs: in this world and another.

Jerian waded inland against the estuary current, the water white and silver, the new dawn awakening its trilling heart, rousing the speech of fish and bees. Bubbles collected around wet stones like jewels. Birdsong freshened with the morning and the grass on either distant bank was young and green. The light falling across Jerian warmed the air trapped under his clothes. He loosened the jerkin, but was wary of removing it entirely. In his eyes, suspicion gleamed. To the wanderer, the outcast, it was like any other beginning, and a full belly served only to heighten his awareness. He watched the world unfold; and the world watched him.

There was curiosity in leaf fronds. His stride through the water caused eddies that wound out to sea.

Dunes rose beside the river, and beyond these could be glimpsed the tops of trees. Jerian had no immediate desire to abandon the watercourse. He continued to walk against the flow, the river's depth shrouding him to the knees. He wondered what awaited him on dry land; what, if anything, lay at the source of this bright stream. He had knowledge, Jerian imagined, of a rugged mountain gorge, of cloudy peaks and crested tors, of eagles and snow turned blue with age. Maybe the river divided, upstream the confluence of many lesser flows.

Maybe it had no end at all...

Beneath the glinting riparian surface, lost in the dim thrall of weeds, shapes moved. Jerian felt their passing as fingers running over his calves, pressing his feet as they impressed the base loam, disturbing newts and sands. The river grew steadily rougher, its bottom rocky, the drag of those hands stronger as he advanced, the water climbing to thighs and waist. But still he held his course. Soon he would be submerged, the sun lost to sight, above a liquid roof that folded the world into a far smaller space, compressing light and sound, reducing his perception to brown whorls of foam as he struggled to move and breathe. That time had not yet come though, when the first bodies thrust themselves upon him. These were the drowned, unfortunates seeking life in flesh, his flesh that was occupied, the outcast's soul firmly ensconced in its lopsided abode. Jerian wrestled with them, the encounter turbulent and brief as the current levered their bloated grip from his bones.

He came to a fall, the sun at its zenith making the vertical water shine. And standing behind this curtain, dripping on a smooth, polished stone, he cried.

Tears filled the warrior's dark eyes. Visions of slaughter, of battles past and future, streaked through his head as salty runs spread down inside the mask of his second face. He allowed the display, knowing of no reason to halt it. Feeling no sadness, no single distinct emotion, and unable to explain his role in the bloody events of which his mind told, Jerian could do nothing but stand on the gleaming, slippery outcrop, stand and wonder at the pain leaking from his skull much as the water from the rock overhead, spinning and pooling in a great ferment of spray. His own sounds, if any, were lost in the spuming roar. A noise like stampeding horses, trampling hooves, crushing ax, divided shield-walls, split helms and throats, opened torsos, a screaming memory of every war, a bizarre reflection of those same.

Listening, Jerian heard. And watching, saw.

Thus he was forewarned.

*

The unpractised voice which Jerian found sprang from his open mouth as he ran through woodland, forced outwards from behind the dubious shelter of his teeth by his excited lungs. The young man shouted names, spiking trees with their epithets and frightening creatures of dell, brake and glade. He was suddenly carefree, buoyant, full of himself as he ran and ran towards either hell or home.

He put aside being an adult. He wished to relive earlier times, moments, although precious few, when he had not yet felt the weight of ghosted hands nor the call of songs raised by the advance of opposing armies; innocent days, when neither palm nor word made their manipulative presence felt and he was free to roam. Then an arrow struck him, grazed his chest, and as he fell a wall of silence transfixed the world.

The blood hardened in his veins. Jerian lay on his side, the longsword drawn. He had been foolish, and paid. Surrounded, he waited for his assailants to move. The trees offered cover but left him blind.

From out of that silence sounds emerged, telltales he used to number and locate his attackers. They were four, although one made more noise than three, suggesting three was the real measure of his opponents, the one a child or captive. Jerian slid on his belly, prepared his feet. The light slanted past noon through the gauzy vegetation, disguising shapes. He caught the soft glint of an arrowhead; the bowman stooped and cloaked, the shaft of the arrow dark. The wanderer never saw his face. Springing from hiding, noiseless and quick, he slid the blade across the man's throat, blood spotting the quarrel's flights as the string released its energy, sailing this messenger on a dying curve into the woods.

Jerian kept moving now, hoping to confuse the remaining bowmen, force them to shoot wide. He spotted one, slowed a fraction, then dived over a fallen trunk, the arrow finding bark. There were shouts ringing through the trees, scramblings and curses as the body was found, argument and indecision that allowed him to pick his moment. Sprinting, he leapt between two men, decapitating the first even as he brought the sword round to strike the other. A bow sang, and its iron-shod projectile clawed his shoulder, sticking beneath the thick leather without piercing flesh. Nonetheless, his thrust fell short and the frantic bowman escaped with his life unbleeding, abandoning a small girl in a long white shift, slack-mouthed and bewildered as she took in the carnage. Jerian yanked the arrow loose and snapped it. The girl watched him, frightened, her dark eyes aglow with moisture. Breathing deeply, he wiped his sword before regarding her, thin and dirty, feet bare and toes curled in the powdery leaf litter. It did not occur to Jerian that he was her rescuer. He expected the child to run away. Wished it, that she disappear like an angel. But the girl remained, his now to shelter, to clothe and feed until he could be free of the obligation.

*

The river had narrowed considerably when next he came upon it, the white shape of the girl in tow. She smiled at the water, dropped the grimy shift and broke its placid surface. It was evening, and he marvelled at how her pale limbs shone, kicking and splashing, a plume of foam rising from her shoulders, her long hair spilling sheets of flashing silver as twilight closed about them.

He squatted uneasily on the grassy shore. The sky was clear and the air warm; her laughter sprinkled with a thousand glassy jewels. She had whispered something to herself during the hours of the waning afternoon, poetry the heart knew best, as her language was not his own. Jerian had learned her name at least. It was Udioe, and she came from a city of tall men, a place beyond the horizon that was gold.

Chapter Thirteen - The Bright Lands

They proceeded north and east, the sun creamy and the sky mellow, the hills gentle and the land at seeming peace. Jerian made no attempt to talk with the girl. Her words were soft and strange to hear, spoken to no one close at hand. He thought to learn a few, but not to break her recitation. Udioe's voice floated like a mist, a transaction she and the elements indulged in, requesting sunny days and cool nights in return for words of honey. For Jerian, it felt strange not to be alone.

Udioe took his hand as they walked through a valley speckled in wildflowers. Her tongue was still, the humming that of myriad industrious bees. Letting go she chased a butterfly, yellow wings flickering erratically as she danced with green stalks. And he watched her as he had in most things, taken by her simple beauty, the childish flurry of arms and tangled mass of hair. She was summer itself, her presence a mystery; her identity also. For what was she beyond a name? Who? Had the bowmen intended to ransom her? There were many answers he did not know. He followed where the girl led. He might have picked his own direction - but why, when it was unlikely to differ from this?

Everything was fresh. There was an abundance of ripe fruit, apples and strawberries and others Jerian failed to recognise but which both he and Udioe ate with zest. The days were long and he seldom tired. The river lay to the south, yet they forded numerous broiling streams. Small deer, like rabbits, capered in groups of up to twelve, darting through copses and bushes; but he never did kill one of them.

Udioe pelted him with juicy berries and scampered away, laughing, her white shift washed and dazzling.

Jerian raced after, found the girl slumped in the languid shade of a tree, its bole ancient and peeling. He sat next to her. They rested.

He must have dozed.

Horses roused him, pounding the dry earth, six or eight at a gallop. He looked around for Udioe, but there was no sign of her. The low sun reflected off the riders' gleaming armour. Just five, their mounts stretching and the men on their backs poised and tall.

Luckily Udioe had gone unnoticed. The day after their first meeting Jerian had fashioned her shoes from bark; she had worn these to please him, it transpired, for soon they were lost. Barefoot she had charged off in pursuit of the racing horses, and now returned. It was not long before she was smiling.

On the fourth day since leaving the wood, the ground began to rise and fir trees cloak each hill's steeply sloping mantle. The weather held for the most part, although they were forced to find shelter the night past when it had rained heavily. Against the moonlit clouds the descending water had sparkled, each of millions of tumbling gems polished to perfection. The water had enticed him into making a cup of his lips, Jerian recalled. Outcrops of stone broke the monotony, grey and brittle intrusions about which grew heather and fern. Udioe was excited. She skipped ahead, impatient, while he measured his pace, teasing her, his eyes on the firs, his boots creaking. They came upon a gravel road, the highway well maintained and the first he had encountered in this land, following it a short distance before the girl once again struck a more direct route up what was fast becoming a mountain to dwarf any Jerian had climbed or seen. It was midday. By sun-fall they had wound a course to that mountain's farther side.

The sky turned purple in advance of night's black lid. Housed in a narrow valley, the pale rock adopting the colour of bruises, was a cool lake in which they bathed, the quiet a guardian, neither wind nor animal disturbing the sheltering trees. Dressed, the day's march washed from his skin, Jerian wandered as far as a loose gradient of scree. From this vantage he could see down into the greater valley, lights at its heart, the captured flames of dwellings. Udioe stood beside him, her arm looping his. The yellow stars mirrored the silver.

This was her home, he realised. He was afraid, had no wish to enter it - but unless he did his duty to the shining girl would not be done.

Sleeping, he wandered again. And waking, felt Udioe next to him.

Chapter Fourteen - Illhaven

The walls were of dressed stone and unfamiliar to Jerian. For one hundred paces around the earth was scoured of vegetation. The broad, paved road ascended a low rise, a man-made hill sitting falsely amongst the upthrust crowns of nature. What lay behind the walls the wanderer had no way of knowing, as this was a human work beyond any he had experienced. Udioe's mood was similarly impenetrable. Jerian had thought her to be delighted, this return for her a happy one; but could no longer be sure. The girl was listless, her smile forced, her poetry contrived, her descriptive voice undecided. Looking up at him as they approached, he saw both sorrow and victory in her large eyes, a gaze portentous and grim...

There was a rusting portcullis above which shield-men stood watching. They were not they only traffic on the road, but the girl seemingly drew attention. Jerian walked in a half world of blur and mumble. People turned their faces from him, palms outwards as if in refutal. The girl took his hand, his own dry palm itching for the security of metal. But he was not here to fight. He brought Udioe, was her escort, and yet the nearer he came to the drab walls and aged iron, the more dire and threatening the gestures. He could see into the city, the houses and dim streets hung with produce, the wheeled carts and buckled animals. He wanted to run, to flee the closing net. Udioe's grip felt like stone. And then suddenly he was engulfed by shadow; the interior lightened, appeared less foreboding, the relief hitting his stomach like a cold draught of spring water. Shapes resolved into bustling lives, sounds into arguments and speeches. His fear vanished, was replaced by fascination. So many people. So much talk. So little room in the tall men's city.

Udioe pulled him along. Everywhere was life and colour, foodstuffs and barrels, hectic activity. Hammers fell, striking orange sparks from blazing steel. Goats and sheep clustered in crude pens hastily knitted from saplings. Flags and banners capped every rooftop, while underfoot the street ran wet with sewage.

The deeper they roamed into the city the more congested it became, with goods piled on goods, people on people, many layers of sustenance and function: chickens, potatoes, tailors and soldiers. These latter shuffled confusedly at their passing, weapons to hand, expressions questioning. However, none made any direct challenge. Jerian guessed they recognised the girl. Surprise registered, thus the perplexed manoeuvring. He saw that a number of soldiers ran ahead. There was a second wall inside the first, the street they followed ending at a sturdy gate that filled its arch like a pressed tongue the gap left by a missing tooth. This gate, or door, was divided in two. The left side ground open without echo and a woman stepped through the portal, slim and elegant in a gown trimmed at neck and hem with gold threads, scrolled borders. Udioe, after a moment's hesitation, let go of Jerian's hand and laced her delicate fingers with those of the woman's. The girl was next led through the gate which closed behind her.

Jerian was abandoned, accorded neither thanks nor recognition, cut loose in the damp street like a beast of burden, a loyal but stupid donkey. He stood a while, undecided, then turned his back on the gate. He was a stranger, the city a vast unknown. Hunger gnawed at his belly and his joints felt swollen. Where from here? People cast him anxious glances. A few of the soldiers lingered.

He began walking down the narrow, dirty street, retracing his steps amidst the stink and tilting houses, his senses assaulted from every angle. Without Udioe to act as guide his sole desire was to leave this place, to cast his gaze fully upon the mountains he could now barely glimpse over and between staggered, rotting eaves and towering stacks of crates, to view once more the unbroken horizon. Everything was so close in the city. He could not breathe. Everything was wretched, human, false. He recalled the village the owl had shown him years past, what he had thought then - and now, here, where the clustered world of countless individuals threatened to wash him away on a tide of alien filth and images, compressed shadows sawing at his eyes, their proximity, so many people, scorching his throat with bile.

The soldiers followed. Jerian was soon lost. The street branched crazily and the buildings seemed all alike, dense and crowded. A thousand faces regarded him, the stranger whose own warped countenance was shielded in a gruesome helm. Perhaps he had been foolish to wear it; but it had not occurred to him to remove the dull metal. The girl had shown no fear of his mask. The girl, it appeared, had protected him.

Slowing his advance, staying the burgeoning panic, Jerian forced himself to look at his surroundings more intimately. It was still early morning and the city was about its usual business. Or was it? Was the panic he sensed entirely his own, or did others, the common folk within the walls, feel equally uneasy? A greater trepidation? They faced an external threat. Was that the reason? No wonder he was viewed with suspicion. If the people were preparing for a siege, their overt hostility towards him was justified and necessary. For who was this veiled warrior? Friend or enemy? A spy or a mercenary? He had been foolish to leave so many questions unanswered. In truth, Udioe had enthralled him. Jerian had learnt his mistake, and now must act on it. He walked a short distance farther, coming to a market square. Trestles leaned at precarious angles and people milled excitedly. The buildings here were gaudy, two and three storeys, roofs slated, tiles blue and red, making chequered patterns. Men and woman poured in and out of these buildings, drunk and laughing, panic swamped with bravado and feigned confidence. He picked a door at random and entered. If nothing else, he hoped to lose the soldiers. Inside was smoky and dark, the noise redoubled, kegs and tankards spilling pungent brews, a merriment that at once repelled and attracted. The language spoken was unknown to Jerian, but he had been able to translate some of the words the girl used often, enough with luck to more fully understand the situation. And here the folk of this walled fastness chattered freely, paying him scant attention as he wandered amongst them.

An army was expected, he discovered; but not its direction or number. There was much debate, a simmering violence. The nature of the enemy remained a mystery. That the battle was close no one doubted. Its outcome, however, was less sure and a rich source of argument. Farmers and woodsmen had fled to the city, more and more people whose lives were disordered. They were mostly native city-dwellers who thronged the taverns, and there was in their voices a growing hatred. If the true adversary did not ring them down, they might tear at their unwelcome cousins' innards. Or if the siege was long, those that had come seeking refuge might find instead themselves falling victim to a growing band of the disaffected seeking to lay blame at another's door, even if such actions meant their ultimate destruction. There would be shortages. There would be envy. There would be justice...

But not all in this drinking house were so vociferous. A group of men, five in total, sat quietly round a table, each, mug in hand, the equal of Jerian in terms of attentiveness. They were tall men, residents, he thought, of that demesne bordered by the inner wall. Whether or not they cared to hear the drunkards' talk, he could not tell. Only that, like himself, they listened.

*

Once again he walked below the earth. The dead walked with him, spears inverted, faces expressionless.

All the world unfolded before him, his to trample, theirs to conquer. It was an unfinished world, blurred where it should be focused, blunt where it might be sharp. It was a world of summer, even in the mountains.

Jerian realised this world's pain. In his skull it manifested, and in his heart it froze.

The world leaked into his body as he lay unconscious, cut and naked on a stone floor matted with rotting straw. They had stripped him of clothes and helmet, beaten him with the golden pommels of swords. But they had not killed him; believed he could not die. They had imprisoned him instead.

His flesh torn, Jerian dared not move. The light was poor, what little there was draining in through a metal grille in the ceiling. A sick yellow light; fitful, it pooled around him like rancid butter. He lay still, waking, sleeping, making no effort to reach the water lowered to him, a stygian host of rustling beetles scrambling over the scraps and crusts dropped from above. The cell was warm, and although he lay paralysed his joints did not stiffen. Slowly the muscles wasted, yet they were muscles no longer bruised.

When next he woke from indeterminable slumber, Jerian tensed from head to toe. He was weak, his movements ungainly, but he managed first to balance on his knees and second to stand, head tipped to the grate, drinking the light if not the water he found there.

Shadows afflicted him, a guard or some other bending to witness his climb. Then the light again, the shadows vanished, footfalls, a shout of alarm...

Moments later another figure obscured the wan illumination. Jerian caught a glimpse of a man's gaunt face. The light flooded back, stronger now, and a scream of corroded iron resounded in the dank cell as the grille was levered from its bed. An improvised wooden ladder was lowered and the gaunt man descended. A moment more and he stood in front of Jerian, lips parted as if to speak, eyes hollow, black, staring, unable to comprehend.

The wanderer had not made it beyond the pale walls of the city. Trapped against them, he had chosen not to fight. The soldiers treated him roughly, but that was as nothing compared to what awaited him at the hands of the tall men whose walled enclave was centred by a windowless keep. Horses grazed and were stabled outside this fortress within a fortress, beasts of war who were afforded more space than any of the cramped city-folk. A trench moat surrounded the stone keep, crossed via a drawbridge and in turn centred by the deepest of wells, the key to outlasting a siege. The people here were few and aloof, a race apart. With words and gestures they bade him remove his mask. He did so, they exchanged glances, two men and two women in a gravel courtyard beneath a noon sky the hue of frosted glass. One of the women held up a small mirror and had him look into it. His face was lean and whole. No disfigurement. Jerian thought to conceal his surprise, but the woman had studied him, witnessed the shock the unsullied reflection had caused. She stepped back, spoke a word, and the men drew swords. But again Jerian refused to fight, for even if he was successful against this pair surely there would be others, and no matter how many he killed, still he would remain lost in the city's human maze.

So they beat him, stripped him, threw him into a cell the stone walls of which were warm.

The man's face hardened. He clambered back up the ladder and the rusted grate lowered. The yellowed light flickered and went out. As he had in the beginning, Jerian felt afraid. His mind drifted, pictured Udioe. Was she unharmed? Had he been betrayed?

The stranger raised trembling hands to his mended features, his face that was changed.

What was contained in those hands?

The blackness revealed nothing. There was the punishing grind of stone against stone, the chill and shock of gushing water, what had previously been offered by the cup now whipping his enervated body like the squalls of icy whales. The liquid weight forced Jerian off his feet, submerged him, breath trapped in lungs as he was swept along, tumbling helplessly. He spun with the current as it seemingly melted the rock of his darkened cell, carrying him like a twig, flushing him from the city bordered in filth and trimmed with gold...

Chapter Fifteen - The Marsh King

The reeds were tapered and black; they shone like cat's fur beneath the stars some piercing the full moon to its silver heart.

He lay in a shallow pool of darkest water, ripples breaking the vague plant shadows, cutting the fragile world into lesser and greater rings.

He was alive, the breath creeping in his lungs.

And then there were arms under his arms, his shoulders raised against wood, the scrape of bare feet, the suck and splash of a pole as it was dragged from amidst mud and rushes. A bird flapped noisily, hidden wings blocking the moon from view, a moment wherein the presence of others registered, their bodies a reality, their vessel solid, dry, mist-wrapped as yellow arrows scorched the near dawn sky...

Jerian closed his eyes. In his head was trapped the sound of crashing water, a broiling maelstrom, its wakened memory casting a chill through muscles and joints. The boat ran smoothly, brushed the tall reeds aside, the man guiding it one of two, the second hunched, tensed, as the wanderer opened his eyes to admit the first light of a new day, patiently stringing a bow.

*

They did not bind him. They did not offer him clothes. They did not beat him as the men of the city had, nor did they make threats, or deprive him of food and drink; indeed, the men of the marsh welcomed him with a plate and a fire, meat and warmth to strengthen flesh and bones.

He had recognised them from the first as being men of that power he had fought within the wood. And one of those three had survived, escaped, perhaps returned here - to describe his face? Tell of him as five or ten? The wanderer relaxed. Udioe had been their prisoner, their bargaining chit. They were the enemy the city feared. But so few? The men were squat and poorly organised. They hardly looked like the vanguard of a great army. They had only light weapons: knives and bows. They watched him eat, seemingly convinced he would not run away. Jerian lacked the strength; but they fed him well.

As the fire died and the day advanced, sun burning through the mist, the sixteen men of this group shouldered provisions and fastened cloaks, made ready to abandon the small island bordered in spindly trees. They directed him to a boat larger than that he had travelled aboard earlier, and he sat cross-legged on a sack of flour or salt, made no protest, as he was keen to see more and learn of their quarrel, their motives for taking the shining girl, what they hoped to achieve in any war with the castle.

The country hereabouts was much different to that higher up the valley. It was impossible to catch sight of the stark mountains, yet Jerian knew them to be near, the city below the tarn in which he and Udioe had bathed poised in their generous lap like a dish whose cracked base was shaped from clay scooped from its people's hearts, whose sides were the thickness of two separate walls, the keep at its centre resounding to the ring of swords and hooves...

There was something; more than an expression, an intimation of violence, of blood in the streets, wounds screaming wide, blood a vivid red, clogging the gutters, spilling between his fingers, running over his hands, a sudden painful vision of blood and death and bone-white sand.

*

His skull quietly empty of thought, all gory spectres quelled, put aside, he sat erect in the gently rocking vessel, a tapered skiff bearing five others, six men, amongst them the stranger wan and pale. Jerian's fatigue washed the colour from his skin - but it was warm, the air moist, insects stirring in its embrace as the day nipped back the overlapping shades of plant fronds, green and brown here and there splashed with raw colour, red and blue, violet and orange blossoms, fruits, dangling petals like dogs' exhausted tongues, the marsh an environment distinct within borders of fern and alder.

Three skiffs manoeuvred silently through reeds and over drowned grasses, nosing past broad floating leaves, scraping under branches that were perhaps random obstacles, perhaps subtle guides to hidden, aqueous roads. That the bowmen had a destination, that these roads led somewhere tangible, Jerian was beyond doubting. Their words were few and grunted. They mocked his nakedness, he assumed. They treated him, however, with a respect born of uncertainty.

Into the winding marsh they ventured, farther and deeper, the pools shrinking, the way more convolute. A fog settled above the swamp, diffusing light and spangling the liquid world in all its guises, air and water, splashing and dripping rainbows that hung around them. The silence was hushed now, the boats gliding, massive trees standing like braces between the twin surfaces of earth and sky, as if to keep them apart, not to allow this space to be squashed from existence. A fragile reality, centred nowhere, into whose uncanny midst Jerian was escorted.

They made land, the great trees a mist-woven horizon, this foreign shore muted in hue, although its ground was reassuringly firm. Jerian stretched, cracking joints. One man led him by an elbow along a path that soon turned to stone. The remaining bowmen dissolved to either side as if plucked from their boots. Staring intently into the near distance, he fixed his gaze on the farthest solid-seeming object and counted the paces until that object either proved false, a trick of the light, or reared up before him, a tree or a dwelling. Twelve paces; then nineteen... Thirty paces, the mist lifting, the shapes varied, an encampment. Fifty, and the few permanent features offered a secret cache of detail: the colour of a boy's avid stare, an inscription above a doorway, the carved faces guarding another portal, one through which he was steered into the mellow glow of a peat fire.

A burly man greeted him, sat him down. His guide left him and the smiling occupant alone. There were numerous stools about the fire. The man had taken counsel. And decided? What was Jerian to them? Whose fate altered whose in this smoky building?

Meat cooked in the subdued flames, causing the wanderer's belly to rumble.

The smiling man slapped his knees and laughed.

Once again Jerian struggled to gauge his circumstances. He took the meat, although none had been offered, burning his lips as he sought to tear the hot flesh with his teeth, flesh that was spitted, rich in blood-juice. His host's laughing subsided; he talked instead, a lyrical voice unlike the bowmen's crude utterings, his tongue expressive, and aided by gestures Jerian came to understand some of his meaning. Much he did not comprehend, however, but felt certain that at all times the man was talking about him, the stranger his men had attacked in the wood, to whom they had lost their booty, the swordsman that had returned the girl to her city. But what he expected of Jerian was a mystery. He stood, waved his arms, made walls he crushed with his fist. He feigned death and then rose from amongst the corpses. He brought the taste of wine of his breath, introduced his puzzled guest to the ruddy glow itself, the stranger at first gulping from the cup, only for the marsh king to admonish him playfully, his words suspended, grilled like the meat, sinking into the fire, warm and full and bleary-eyed as the unfamiliar drink coaxed him to sleep, lying next to his toppled stool, his dreams the imaginings of madmen...

A cloak was draped over his naked form as the gathered lords retook their places in the timbered hall, some nervous of the heap, others excited. They numbered seven including the stocky king of the marsh into whose wide palm the stranger had foundered. Jerian was the eighth amongst them, weakened and unconscious. He had entered the tall men's city. They had ejected him, sought to cleanse their world within a world, perhaps hoping he would drown. The cold mountain waters were theirs to command. But when those waters reached the valley floor their power was spent and the marsh king had only to raise and lower his oar. Might not, he argued, the tall men be defeated also?

They had failed to rid themselves of the stranger, after all.

Chapter Sixteen - The Two Islands

Divided against himself, the wanderer along life's road found he occupied two islands. The two islands rose, each the image of the other, from the clear blue waters of a deep ocean. They were the only land, two small outposts amidst the endless sea, the realms of man dwarfed by the realm of fishes.

On either island stood a fortress, a walled demesne guarded by one man alone, crowned with jutting battlements and scarred with slit windows, the better for firing arrows. Each was surrounded by a moat. Each had a drawbridge bristling with spikes. Neither man had ever visited the other. They were enemies.

Why were they enemies? Neither man knew.

They plotted one another's downfall, had no purpose beyond their adversary's destruction. But how to go about the campaign? To launch an attack would mean leaving their fortress undefended. They were too wise for that. So, the tactics these implacable enemies settled on, each identical, revolved around the idea of somehow luring the other out into the open. But how? Again, the question dogged them. They could do nothing until one or the other made a mistake.

The occupant of the east island built a great ship, armouring it with decorative shields, erecting a tall mast. His counterpart, seeing this, was unsure whether or not to do the same and construct a vessel of equal strength. Might not he be falling into a trap? Undecided, the occupant of the west island elected to set a trap of his own; he would not build an actual ship but a mock one, a facade incapable of sailing, its magnificent prow a dragon's head, its graceful oars facing the other's stronghold. The two ships completed, both men stood on deck brandishing their weapons, challenging their sworn foe to do battle on the neutral ocean whose intervening blue neither had ever crossed. But neither would put to sea first, and so battle was avoided.

Some time passed, the enemies patrolled their fortresses and all was as it had been, until one night, the moon full and the waves slapping the rocks, there was an earth-shaking, a screaming outpouring of molten rock that boiled the ocean and shook the opposing strongholds, reducing them to crumbling stones.

When the sun rose and the two climbed from amidst the rubble, they found the sea had vanished, that all that now separated them from their nemesis was a trackless waste strewn with rotting debris. Their first instinct on such a morning was to attack while the other was vulnerable. But as one was exposed was not the other? East and west, naked, bruised, discovered all obstacles between them removed. They tip-toed forwards, both injured, covering their wounds, hoping not to give the other an advantage, hoping not to show any weakness as the moment of final confrontation drew near. The two men were out of breath, shocked and dismayed by what had become of the world, yet nonetheless prepared to let the game run its course.

Approaching noon they were starved and exhausted, their feet burnt on the searing rock of the melted ocean floor, their clothes fouled and torn, yet almost within striking distance of one another. They stooped to pick up stones, hurling these as the first drops of rain fell from a whitened sky, drops that exploded into steam, the two dizzy with effort as this meeting, so long delayed, was made the more difficult by howling wind and knifing hail. The storm was like none before, pelting them with water frozen and unfrozen even as they pelted each other, wiping one man's shape from his brother's half shut eyes...

What became of the two men Jerian did not know. Perhaps they were not two but one, the real and the imagined, the ocean separating them a necessary veil, a sham. Whatever their true identities his sleep-spawned thoughts were mostly wiped from the mirror of his dreams upon wakening. The image left a residue, a soreness of tongue he found discomforting - but his surroundings provided no lack of water.

Forgetful of his circumstances, this man wrapped about him the cloak under which he had slept and walked from the beamed hall out into the fresh light of day. A smiling man gripped his shoulders. Other men nodded or glanced away. There were clothes, two javelins, a shield. The smiling man made it plain he was to fight. But with whom?

That he had enemies he was sure. Was it against one of these he was expected to perform? Then where was he? Jerian, suitably refreshed, did not know. He recognised none of the faces around him. He fingered his own, but failed to find any hint or clue in the features he might only see in reflection. A phalanx of squat soldiers marched with him to a small boat whose shrouded helmsman waited patiently for the warrior to clamber aboard, those left ashore to push the boat free. A drizzle began to form, seeming to hang in the tight air like beads, the world's own sweat deliberately flouting the natural laws of that same world's peripheries.

Jerian was taken out onto the broad belly of a river, flat and grey. The vessel glided through the knotted vegetation that sought to bind its draught; but the boat was without a keel and not so easily halted. The helmsman leaned on a long pole, his back to the warrior, a figure obscured by a clinging mass of white strands, a thickening pall that laced the faded sky to every side. There was neither sound nor direction. He slid his wrist through the loop of the wooden shield and gripped its leather handle. The boat nudged solid ground and he stepped from its shallow boards.

If anything the mist was thicker here, the light softer, the colours bleached, his shadow lost amongst the milky gloom. He walked an unknown path, perhaps stalked. And there was no noise, nothing, no true shade of plant or flower. His skin appeared waxen, translucent. It was an opaque land to which the helmsman had delivered him.

The warrior circled, followed the barely discernible line of the island's perimeter, relying on a smudge in the clouded firmament to guide his steps, be his marker. Keeping the water to his right, the shield facing inland, Jerian moved cautiously, unsure if his enemy could hear him or whether he too was handicapped, placed on equal terms by this soundless medium. Or was the stranger at a disadvantage? His gaze to the barely visible trees, Jerian worked his way around the arena, guessing it to be no more than a cast of a javelin from edge to centre. But there was little chance of a clean throw. It seemed this was to be an uneven contest. For him alone? That remained to be seen.

He snapped one javelin across his knee, stabbing with it as he started into the island's choked interior. Everything herein was half-made, yet oddly tangible. The white mist was pierced by steel-blue limbs. His feet sank intermittently. No shape was accurately definable, no surface without deceit. A smashing blow collided with him, cracking his shield and throwing him, a diluted wetness leaking from his thigh. He rolled instinctively, spied the wildly swinging arm of a man above him, his combatant dragging a curved blade through reeds and branches, decapitating an array of pallid stalks as he attempted to locate his wounded foe.

He was blind, Jerian realised. Blindness to deafness; each was made vulnerable.

He had done the only thing he could and lain in waiting, listening to his approach...

Now he had lost that advantage. But was he aware of Jerian's limitations? Did he think him blind too? The man had frozen, his breathing still. Jerian could never hope to match that silence. The stranger, being deaf to his environment, simply had no way of knowing if he made any noise at all. He was forced to take the initiative.

He flung his legs behind him, hips over shoulders. The blade sliced down. The atmosphere blurred his vision. But the blind man, his opponent, was not able to make use of the cover; the swordsman could not risk keeping still any longer; if he was the only one unseeing, as Jerian had speculated that he was the only one unhearing, then his enemy would know of that weakness now, and exploit it. The man had no choice but to rely on his other senses and charge, slashing, the sight of him elusive, a whirling mass of flailing arms to the stranger's rear, an adversary made all the more terrifying by the utter silence of his onslaught - cutting and trampling, craving the throat-torn blaze of noises that meant his weapon had drawn wounds in flesh.

But Jerian voiced no such cries. Branches swept roughly over his face. Grasses threatened to trip him. Yet he kept is feet. The water promised an end to his running. Forced then to turn, he flung the riven shield to his attacker's left, and as the enraged figure beat at it, reducing the wood to flying splinters, the warrior leapt at him, the broken javelin gripped in two hands, a combination of the blind man's clumsy momentum and the deaf's resolute thrust driving the steel tip up through the lightly armoured belly, high behind the natural protection of sturdy ribs, exiting at the juncture of neck and chin in a spray of toneless blood that was absolutely, sickeningly quiet.

Jerian twisted aside to avoid falling under the other's dead weight.

Ominously, he was reminded of the two men in their castles, of the two islands those men occupied, about what he had dreamed: the real and the imagined - whatever their true identities...

But this, he thought, was no dream. Standing, Jerian emptied his bladder over the corpse.

It made no difference in the end, whether or not they were enemies.

Chapter Seventeen - Summer's Hold

His own wounds were light. He wielded the curved sword now, having plucked it from amongst the rushes. The stranger had become a mercenary.

Jerian was no longer a young man; he had aged inexorable, his hair and beard grown lank. While not yet grey there was time clearly braided in his curls. After the coming battle he would have it shorn. But if he was to die either side of the tall men's walls, he wished to appear as if he had outlasted his days.

He rode up now to join his troop, the horse he straddled a reddish-brown, sleek and autumnal, a bay stallion the marsh king had made Jerian a gift of on his return from the isle of silence, teaching him the art of its riding, to grip with his knees as he pulled taut the string of a bow...

The sun had risen on the third day of the siege.

The outer wall of the nameless city was blackened by fire and smoke, its pale stone battered from repeated assaults. An army, a diverse alliance of far-flung powers, lay in part broken before the sturdy defences of the tall men's fastness, the living remainder camped a short distance away midst the uniform trees, the needled foliage. A number occupied the open ground between, the stranger amongst them, riders and ladder-bearers, soldiers kneeling behind oval wooden shields as others wound the mechanical engines of their profession, cast flaming spears into the structured forest across the blocked and cemented barrier. The distance separating the two camps was not great, a hundred paces, and the return fire from the battlements, with the advantage of elevation, was as cruel as it was sudden, the defenders flinging lighted containers of oil and cracking open foolish heads with rocks and the butts of ax. On the first day the tall men's gathered enemies had made no direct attack, satisfied to linger at the edge of the firs. On the second they began moving forwards, closing from two directions, all but ignoring the city's iron-screened gateway, bellowing shapelessly as they levered crude ladders against the as yet undamaged fortifications, firing volley after volley of colourfully flighted arrows even as the dawn ignited the whites of eyes, stabbing with a grim resolution unmatched by either faction. The assault lasted all day and well into the night, until the dead could no longer be easily distinguished from the merely exhausted. And thus had come a pause.

This third day would see more war. The sporadic exchanges he witnessed were a preamble, the true contest to begin when the commanders of the many belligerents agreed, as Jerian knew they must, to repeat the tactic of storming the wall, losing ten for one, a campaign of attrition that would succeed in the end through superior numbers, fear and the knowledge that not all men are equal.

Jerian, for one. The marsh king had presented his champion with a cloak of flowing silver that rippled on the breeze as the stranger rode, his flank protected in this instance by a hammered shield, enamelled metal whose visible pattern was composed of vertical black and white stripes each four fingers wide; argent and sable, unknown to Jerian the twin hues of the hidden city's mistress, she of the central keep, the hated mother whose blue five-pointed star radiated from the heart of this monochromatic field. It was insult he offered her; once more in his ignorance an unwitting tool.

*

Fires tore asunder the veil of night, red and yellow tongues of searing flame that ripped the air from houses and lungs, wrapped itself like a crushing vine around skeletons of wood and bone, casting slate, skin and brick, sloughing the leather hides of men and animals; ensconced in so many orifices, the sooty breath, burning a passage through flesh that was hacked and alive.

Screams arose, the baleful excrement of a thousand torn throats and twisted mouths...

Anguished cries.

Jerian was oblivious. His horse had died under him, its forelegs cut away. He had tumbled amidst a chaos of noise. He had killed.

And gone on killing. Killing was this mercenary's role.

The curved blade swung, the hampering cloak discarded, steel connecting with panicked flesh as it slowed in its arc. The metal shield rang, fending directed blows as the stranger bearing it continued on foot, deeper and deeper into the torrid, fire-ravaged city. The joined armies camped outside its walls had broken the stone from the earth and like water from behind a holed dam burst inwards to lay waste and practice murder, their honed lust here enacted as they took bloody pleasure on the horrified populace. There was no soldiery to match them on the inside. No tall men were seen to fall under this bright wave, the attackers' singing bows seeding death and engendering the swelling, near liquid inferno.

It was a terrible scene. Bodies, dismembered, clogged the already congested streets, the produce lining these narrowed ways unrecognisable, all images warped beneath a luminous patina, the animate conflagration overwhelming shape and colour as it devoured, a spreading frenzy of gaseous coition whose blistering energy was drawn from sources as varied as silk ribbons and copper bowls.

But Jerian was looking for Udioe. His gaze fixed ahead, his sword cutting left and right, the stranger advanced towards the city's middle, that goal his only legitimate end. He killed as he went, women and children, their entrails sliding, their limbs flailing as he slashed and gouged, certain that nothing could stand in his way. Still there was no sign of the tall; safe behind their inner circle. They abandoned the folk of the outer to their flaming homes, perhaps convinced the army, in its delirium and abuses, would somehow exhaust itself, glutted and weakened upon the lesser corpse.

Then a counter attack? Nothing was for sure. Jerian had no intention of waiting till morning, the revealing day to expose - a more immediate revelation drove him, led him as far as the barred gate at which he had last seen the girl.

It was as if he had stepped from the war. The clamour receded, the heat also, his own ragged breathing to be felt and heard. He pushed at the barrier and to his surprise it gave.

What lay beyond? He might be cut down like the stallion the moment he passed below the arch, his head separated from his body by a golden sword...

But nothing occurred; nothing so drastic. He met neither death nor destruction. Instead, the wanderer's feet settled first on gravel, second on grass, deserted pasture.

Darkness reigned, closing about him like a hand, fingers cool, palm damp, the sky empty of cloud and the sickle moon clasped to an armoured chest of stars. He walked on, eyes piercing the night, the distant sounds of battle thinned to an echo. There was no hint of outline, no telltale light from the keep. The grass dragged at his boots, longer and thicker, and the air carried scents not of man but of meadow. Jerian halted. Dare he look back? No, back was no longer a true direction; he must continue forwards. The curved blade shone wetly in the moonlight. And from the midst of his shield the blue star detailed his whereabouts.

But no cast spear found its mark. The stranger was swamped in odours, sweet aromas and bitter tangs that drifted over him, filled his mouth and nostrils.

Summer fragrances, they reminded him of Udioe, the shining girl in her white shift amongst the firs, pale limbs splashing, dark hair whirling as she swam naked in the chill lake high in the mountains.

So was it summer's hand that closed about him?

Or no?

Jerian commenced once more his walking...

Chapter Eighteen - A Matron Of Elms

His hair was flattened against his face by a sudden breeze, the loose material of his riding garb to billow. He thought to hear running water. The moat? That could not be. By the moon's translucent glow no water reflected, quiet or stirred to motion. No encircling obstacle mirrored the lunar crescent under a surface of starry glimmers.

The air's movement help sweep him along, a secret tide whose direction seemed to match his own. The sword's bloody tip trailed freely through the invisible grass, like a pen across parchment, although the stranger had no way of knowing what it was he wrote in red ink. The moon's luminescence was insufficient to distinguish between shape and shadow, its wan light spread too thin, offering a few spectral hints; but nothing of substance emerged beneath its lazy sickle. Jerian maintained his grip on both blade and shield. He stumbled into wilder growths, was reminded of the silent isle where he had slain the blind, his adversary. Trees, young and supple, interfered with his passage then as now, only now he was lacking that fatal vision. He tensed, wary of attack. No extraneous sound came to him. Even the water's murmuring had vanished. Was he to have all his senses inhibited? Or was there truly no noise and the cause of is blindness outside him, beyond his bearded, naked skull, the wanderer's eyes as sharp as a squirrel? He imagined it so. There was no smell of fear, either his own or another's, on the cool draughts that nudged him.

Shades, hollow figures accompanied Jerian. He fancied they were the ghosts of slaughtered children, death's mutilated progeny here assembled from darkness and breath. There were amongst them a number this mercenary had dispatched with careless strokes to a grave of gutters and ashes, hacked to pieces and part burned, their wounded souls occupying a world forever fenced beyond sleep, a world of loss and pain.

They pleaded with him.

They were drawn to him, Jerian's wandering having once more led him into a world unmade...

And the girl? Was she here? The image of her white shift stung his eyes.

*

Dawn revealed many things. In separating the sky from the earth, the new day proffered the illusion of wholeness, of a complete reality, a picture whose frame extended as far as and farther than the woody horizon. Jerian lay in a hollow, his face to the clouds, the shield covering his body, the sword sheathed and the sheath loose to his side. He imagined the trees to have sprung up overnight. The thought amused him. His belly rumbled and laughter escaped him. But it was weak, those mirthful sounds fading a short distance above his lips. Recalling the violent stream of events that had brought him to this peaceful spot, the blood he had let and the open gate through which he had passed, he was suddenly bitter at the protracted nature of his fate. He did not feel he could die, and was less of a man for that. He could not say which of the emotions he was experiencing, this day and others, belonged to him. Indeed, if he held claim to any. Might they not all be false? But then, equally true - products of self, greedy and vengeful traits that were entirely his, unnatural desires and cruel, deceitful needs. Where lay the responsibility for his actions if not with himself? A morality of such complex features simply muddled him. Between the twinned poles of his psyche there raged a conflict. The mute aspect he had again engendered, imposed unconsciously, his failure to speak and communicate with those around him, to use the voice grown inside, was testament to his lack of courage in facing his own secreted humanity.

He was a stranger. The wanderer had been led astray, the gift of words stolen from him, the finished mien reflected in still water a lie; a series of bogus guises, masks pulled tight over his skull, characteristics, expressions that were not of his making.

These weapons he bore were not his. They belonged to another, a hireling. He was no king's champion. No archer. No rider. He was a broken child wrapped in an adult's bruised and hoary skin.

Jerian stood and shook himself. Dropping the shield, the sword abandoned at his feet, he continued his luckless journey, penetrating deep into the wood. The trees were young, identical, of a type, slender elms whose leafy outlines dappled the air in the likeness of swarming butterflies. In searching for Udioe he hoped to be striving towards an end he had chosen himself. But he could not be sure of that. However, should the opposite prove the case and he have no volition, then he was justified in all he did. Such a man could be blamed for nothing.

Not even his own misfortune.

So what manner of creature was he?

*

She appeared, a misted shape, her dress the north wind, cold and fresh as it meandered through the straight trees. At first Jerian ignored her, thinking her an apparition, a ghost escaped from his past, a wraith of darkness here draped in milky light. Her persistence belied this. Her mocking smile told of greater substance, of hidden strength. She was of herself, outside him, not a figment dragged from one world into the next. The lady was true to life.

It seemed to him obvious that she knew who he was and why he was here. Jerian was reminded of the elegant woman who had taken Udioe's hand at the gate.

Might she help? Was she benign? Her own master? Or was she the messenger of some implacable god?

Might he ask?

He could not open his mouth.

Her billowing dress, translucent and fine, brushed chill folds across his chest.

She wished to dance for him, her smile less mocking than playful, hers a realm where everything was firmly rooted to the ground.

Perhaps if he were to accompany her...

Might she lead somewhere? He did not know, was too afraid, or merely unsure, to talk.

But Jerian followed.

The lady floated, passed easily through the inanimate trees, elms whose spirits composed her, a coolness that was motion in her gauzy limbs. The warmth of the sun lifted her feet and skirts off the woodland floor, a daytime wonder whose fleeting existence might pass unnoticed, as dampness rising, an especially vibrant fog.

Jerian was not concerned by her strangeness. He chased her imagined shadow, tripping on the indistinct hem, her swirling dress disturbing birds and leaves, colours that blurred in her wake. She was a joy, full of the day, the few clouds no more than a distant menace. The largely uninterrupted rays poured languid, golden spoonfuls into the generated vessel of the elm wood's collective dream.

*

It seemed knowledge of his circumstances was of little or no help to him. He had been born. He had not died. He had been gifted an arm, a sword, and taken many lives. He had worn a helm that covered one ugliness with a second, and neither had lasted, both had fallen away. He had walked day and night on a road to the other side. And yet it was always so far from him, the place where roads melted into gases, gases into ether, ether in whose grasp the moon and stars abided. Whatever course of action Jerian chose, the road remained his sole means of attainment. He could but walk, filling mind and belly while his enemies prepared to ambush him, the outcast, the jeria so rightly named from his mother's bitter tongue...

To fight was all. To fight was everything.

*

The trees had aged and thinned, the grasses taller between, the afternoon lengthened and the dancing lady more substantial as the light slanted in thicker bars through the branches of an increasingly fragmented canopy. Her form was leant greater definition. Her dress sparkled with pearly jewels. This enhanced detail encouraged Jerian; she was no mere phantasm to glint and fade, but a purposeful herald, a credible guide amongst the boles.

That he perceived no direct threat in the wood did not serve to diminish her value, for he might easily become lost in so mysterious a place. The ground was flat, the trees, although older, grown to maturity, were likened one unto another, a rough backdrop of serrated foliage against whose staunch presence the sun itself might be intimidated into straying from course.

Brown and green. Bark and leaves. Blue and white. Sky and dress, her flushed pink and her laughter the sun-bloated consequences of smiles.

And who practised what deceits?

He was bound to her as if by strings.

Chapter Nineteen - The Wych Queen And The Wyvern

And there was Udioe...

Glistening.

*

Rain swept the trees, the space between each upright bole diminished, streaking silver-blue water over the wounds of the elms as the ax connected. The heavy metal head bit hard, bit deep, its sound, the sound of cut wood, reverberating all round Jerian, that ax the same he had taken from the ground by the armoured corpse of the Chalian lord, that lord a proud warrior from beyond the horizon, beneath the sea...

The world was twilit and sodden, the lady dispersed to mist in the sun's absence, the grey sky cloud-filled and turbulent, an ocean of water wrung from its skirts.

A blue star, born of steel, fired by motion, swam blindingly in the charged air, scything through bark to the pale flesh of an ancient elm, a tree whose thin canopy swayed in protest, its angry snapping amplified as the once generous crown toppled to running earth.

And now the ax was singing, the stark outline of a massive figure wielding it, perhaps Death incarnate, perhaps the ghost of that knight of the Chalic king, a soldier of Hell whose fury was infinite.

Cold and frozen, Jerian could not run.

Another tree was felled, and another, the elms' contorted trunks fracturing like dry reeds, old residents of the forest parted from their life-soil and sent crashing down, tearing at their neighbour's arms even as they were levelled, churning the soft loam, the sap bleeding from stems and roots washed away by the rain.

The axman was demented. Could he see? Did he appreciate the damage he wrought? Was he deaf to screams? The wanderer, himself transfixed, did not know. He waited his turn, the falling of blue steel as he raised his outstretched fingers...

Then, water pooling in his eyes, blood swelling his tongue, Jerian lay amongst the elms.

As night wrapped him in silence and the downpour slackened, he listened to water dripping. A red moat surrounded him. The wood lay shattered, trembling - but not all was ruin; many a tree still stood. He had not been sliced in two. He had simply lost what he had gained, his right arm severed, hacked in one stroke from his shoulder, perhaps another there to bud, or his withered own to show. He could sense the dampness in the knuckles, the oaken digits of that fostered limb. It was real in his mind, if separated from his body, the carved appendage Odil had grafted to him.

*

His chin clean, as yet smarting from the knife, Jerian woke amongst white sheets, his head on a pillow. The ceiling was low and beamed, the beams hung with steel and copper pots of every shape and size. There was a fire in a hearth of bricks and a burnished kettle issuing pungent steam. Yellow light filtered through an ill-fitting door and a single window whose murky glass was draped with a thin curtain. Dried flowers and grass-tied bunches of herbs adorned the stone walls. Living flowers, bluebells and orchids stood upright in patterned vases on a slight wooden table and in niches shaped into the chimney breast, their liquid fragrance rising from the sheets, the bandages criss-crossing his chest, from the skin itself that he wore.

He did not touch his face. He would rather his features remained anonymous.

The door opened, startling him. It had come ajar, pushed by a curious wind, an intrusive draught that washed the cottage of its pleasing garden odours and replaced them with a harsh smell of burning. A haze of soot discoloured the fresh linen, shadows deposited in its gentle folds.

Jerian climbed from the bed, the legs under him insecure at first, their memory of walking dulled. He stumbled nakedly to confront the breeze, the outside world a familiar one of uniform firs, steepled green. It occurred to Jerian that he had dreamed of the city, its vanished rulers, the keep at its heart behind an inner wall. Bt the death he had sown was real; the stump of his right arm not without pain. How long had he lain here, and who had tended him that time? There was no sign of anyone. A lone chicken, the heads of cabbages and onions, a broken-wheeled cart; these were the clues to the identity of the cottage owner. He walked around the building, discovered warm bread in a metal oven to the rear of the chimney, some rusted farm tools abandoned in the long grass, and an ax.

A chopping ax, it nevertheless caught his attention. He wrenched it loose from the riven trunk into which it had been swung. The edge was blunt, the weight good. There was nothing to suggest the presence of his saviour, that person to whom his life was owed.

It amused him, thinking himself mortal after all.

Yes, he whispered inwardly, a dream.

*

He set out at dawn the following day, choosing a direction contrary to the prevailing, soot-laden wind. If that wind blew from anywhere, Jerian imagined, it was the past.

The now polished, sharpened ax rested across his shoulder. He went barefoot, dressed only in bandages and rags. The sky was crisp and high, scarred with the remnants of clouds. It felt good to be walking again. His naked feet offered a fresh perspective on the terrain, images of a pristine land jouncing up his spine, a land yet to experience the travails of man. Its edges were soft, its colours soothing, its contours idealised. The surrounding trees looked almost as if they had been planted, deliberately arranged, as if to some grand design, features, along with the grasses and flowers, of some wondrous garden, a manicured paradise - lacking animals. Birds there were. He had seen finches, heard thrushes; but there were no squirrels, foxes or moles.

Jerian did not let it worry him. If he were in some cage, artificially contained, then that caged world was a fantastic place. And he was here for a purpose. The land sloped ever upwards, its camber easy, and he longed to know what lay over the horizon, there perhaps to discover the truth extant in his bones. He was strong this morning, having breakfasted on the last of the bread, on fruit and cheese he found inside the cottage, sat at the fragile table as the sun rose to the east. His severed right arm caressed by warm rays, Jerian stepped from the welcome sanctuary of those stone walls, his thoughts drifting to others, his body restored, healed, the arm a stubborn figment, administered to by unknown hands.

The trees thinned as the distance unrolled and soon he was passing through lush meadow, vibrant greens and scintillating yellows, each of many hues and shades, the billowing grassland awash with scents and blooms, winged insects, the colour-heaped imagines of once lazy caterpillars. Onwards he marched, the breath potent in his lungs, firing blood and heart as the mellow skyline beckoned, an undulating curve naked of all but waving grasses, dancing amongst these the fine shoots of iris and poppy...

Finally, the rise gave out to pale air, a precipice as sheer as it was sudden, a lip of green overhanging mica dotted limestone. The drop was ten times the height of a man. Jerian sensed the cool updraught under his toes. And saw in the space beyond, removed by many a stone's throw, the city keep, blank and aloof on a hill.

There was no visible moat. Nor did horses scamper at its foot. There was only the cylindrical tower, without windows, the sun cast above it like the flame of a candle, detailing the ground it stood upon as dusty and black.

The cliff here reminded Jerian of another, one perhaps in a world related to this; only beyond that cliff raged and ocean. And beyond that ocean?

He could not answer.

Did and army, still and crumbling, occupy the strata at whose top he stood? If yes, was that army any less resilient for being composed of sediment? True, granite was tougher, but there were no battering waves at this site, just metallic glimmers.

As before, the wanderer made his way carefully down the near vertical slope, stepping in daylight, the shoulders of infantrymen and the cracked helmets of legions his precipitous rungs, armour draped to their knees. The way was narrow and the stone brittle, his weight against their shields and chests, his face close to the faces of an embattled host, locked and thwarted defenders of a land that once must have resided at the seabed, lifted by gargantuan forces, staring now into emptiness. He did not want to look too closely, afraid of what he might see in their eyes. He had been petitioned on that prior occasion, begged for a release he did not believe to be in his power to grant. He had no wish to travel at the head of an army, no matter what the cause, no burning desire to set into motion a fractured, silent escarpment. Jerian's sole aim was to redeem Udioe, to acquaint himself once more with the poetry of the shining girl, whose body at least he thought to lie in the keep.

Continuing from the base of the cliff, not turning to regard its formations, he found the earth rougher, the grass thinner, the flowers sparse, as if a poisoned stream leaked from hiding between the rocky feet of the lowest ranks of soldiers, the verdant stalks above out of reach of its strangling tendrils, while here the ground sloped downwards, prone to assault and flood. Even the air tasted stale in this false valley. Boulders, a number scarred with what looked like the signatures of swords and spears, patterns the result of anger, lay scattered at random, some as tall as himself, mighty stones abandoned, smoothed and rolled, deposited, maybe, by the coursing of a vanished river, engines of attrition left surrounded by foul gases as the torrent lessened and disappeared, the mud of the bottom dried and contracted, hard enough now to walk on. Had this been the moat? Exaggerated, grown, as the keep seemed grown. Indeed, the edifice, what he could discern of it, appeared suddenly no bigger, but much farther away. And Udioe? Might she have grown also? A woman, imagined Jerian, not unlike the milky lady of the elm wood, lithe and illusive as she danced, a storm tumbling from the sky in her wake.

Or were there more falsehoods and untruths in this life than arms of oak and helms of moon silver could explain?

Whatever the answer, and he was convinced the question's basic nature was one of change, Jerian advanced, bare feet impressing sediments, his passage written into rocks not yet formed; for regardless of the world awaiting his arrival, a world he could neither name nor know, he remained certain that a world there was, perhaps even an end to his road, beginning at the next shore.

*

The sun rested like a wheel on the western horizon, its thin rays warming his ghosted right arm, dusk as dawn, a spectre of feeling whose true home was amongst the forest roots where it had fallen, separated from his paralysed body by the swift downstroke of a Sea Lord's ax. Jerian faced the opposite direction, but those rays were the same. Everything turned, he thought.

The twilight served to further blacken the earth. He stood ankle deep in coarse sand, splines of wood or bone protruding, suggesting the buried carcasses of men or boats. Before him the keep shed its vague shadow across the world, the uniform curve of it slipping unseen to Jerian's left. Something moved there, a shade concealed, a stygian guardian to this impassive fortress. A limbless worm.

Jerian leapt from its path, the giant creature twice his breadth, sinuous and loud as it uncoiled. Stumbling backwards, he offered no threat, and the rippling beast did not attack. The ground rose sharply prior to abutting the wall, the worm above head height as the wanderer once again planted his toes in the black sand. That the serpent had lain so close and yet remained invisible caused his heart to stutter, the blood to thump in his head. Regarding it now, the thing as if newly born, coated in mucus, Jerian found he could not trace its full length: shadow was its mother and its mother its tail. Did it encircle the keep? The features collected about the worm's visible extreme were ill-fashioned, half-made. As it uncoiled the nascent stumps of legs appeared. Next, the soft, folded membranes of crude wings. But it could not fly. Perhaps once it had swum, a true serpent of the deep that had become trapped as the river dried, a magical beast whose adaptation, from water to land, was unfinished.

Vulnerable, the worm arrayed its twisting body in defence of the keep, a wriggling newborn whose transformation had not run its course - but still a formidable opponent for a man whose one arm toted an unproven blade, whose naked flesh wore only the loose armour of bandages, whose staring eyes slid helplessly off its growing extent. If then battle were to be met, it had better be this side of dark.

The shimmering worm ignored the interloper, however. Did it perceive him at all? Or was there another reason for it coming forth, mused Jerian, not his presence but the closeness of night? Could it be the swelling mantle of stars coaxing the beast from its lair, the now gibbous moon to anneal its scales?

So, he might pass unscathed...

Slowly he climbed towards the wall. The sand rasped beneath his soles. The sky darkened, its host of stars bright and silver. Silhouetted against the deepened firmament the worm's rounded head was raised, the culmination of its wide blunt body lifted as if drawn by a thread to the heavens. Jerian allowed his own head to tip back, his short neck to curve as he peered upwards. Over the keep was suspended another light, a star coloured blue, its gentle luminescence mirrored in the long flank of the serpent, icy points under a liquid surface whose sheen passed through the beast, a glowing tidal procession infusing it from the nose, enticing his sight to the left, following the prickling blue light along the creature's side.

The day's last vestiges were finally smothered, the keep a tremendous weight against the sky, black as the sand around his feet, the spangled tail of the worm casting the merest gleam; enough for Jerian to see by, enough to illuminate this latest twist in his path.

And then the tail was whipped away, Jerian knocked to the ground as the last of the beast emerged in a sheen from the darkness, a brief squall of dust forcing shut the stranger's eyes, burning his skin, hot air dragged from an opening, a hollow in the rise whose brittle collar yawned blindly about a hole.

*

Glistening, fair Udioe...

Chapter twenty - The Hollow Sky

Movement was inhibited by the suffocating closeness of the walls. Jerian crawled on his belly much as the worm, the ax pushed ahead, the tunnel slick with the half-formed creature's excreta, a cloy and lubricious substance whose own dank odour was subsumed by the stinking hot breath of the keep itself, a raw, noxious stench that cut into the back of his throat.

Eyes stinging, tears streaking his mended cheeks, he dragged himself deeper and deeper, following the worn contours of the worm's passage. He wondered if it might not return before he was clear, expecting at any moment to be forced into its oily lair. But nothing came behind him. And soon the tunnel widened, enabling Jerian to rise to his knees, catch his breath, a branching of the passage teasing his nostrils with a sudden variety of temperatures and scents, some cool, fragrant, some scorched and foul. All mingled in the blank space before his newly contorted features, hopelessly mixed so that he feared he would have no choice but to gamble, choosing a route at random as opposed to trusting the confused evidence of touch, smell and taste.

There were no turns visible. Everything was black.

This first tunnel emptied into a larger, rounded space, a bulb whose surface was pocked with openings, a number smaller than his head, the biggest an arm's length across, a stinking pit into which Jerian barely avoided tumbling, as it occupied the invisible sphere's nadir. Aside from those inaccessible, and the hungry void at his feet, there was nothing to distinguish one narrow corridor from the next. In fact all seemed equally dire, mouths without promises. He attempted to trace those exits most frequented by the worm - although whether he would choose either the beast's favourite or least favourite path he could not say. Only no such choice was there to make; each felt damp, sticky, vile. He shrugged. Did it matter? All the tunnels might join, all lead to the same place. So what to do? Let the ax point? Again, questions clouded his mind. Jerian turned around. He clambered into the glutinous shaft to the left and above the original channel; somehow, a decision made...

The blade bit deep and he pulled himself up, squirming between layers of stiff clay. This was a passage unused by the worm, or else shaped, forced through the packed mud some time ago and since dried. Whichever, he was pleased to have escaped the viscous trail.

The shaft levelled off after a short distance, its sides becoming flatter, harder, dusty, as if hewn from solid rock. Filled with the same stagnant air, the fetid mixture his lungs had become accustomed to, Jerian found his nose still lacking clues, information that might lead him to the surface. But any discernible movement in the air seemed to be caused by his awkward progression, his stirring of dormant gases. Or another's. The image stiffened his limbs. Locked, the joints of legs and arm radiated their discomfort. It was probable other tunnels connected with the one the stranger inhabited. And inhabiting those? Perhaps beasts less passive than the half-made serpent whose darkened burrow he had found. Jerian's real enemy lay in the absence of light to fuel his vision. Without that precious commodity his eyes were useless, and the black left to be furnished with creatures dwelling beyond any natural framework or posture.

He started moving again, fear contracting his throat, a chill weight over his heart as he imagined the maze of passages surrounding him, broad and narrow, an invisible labyrinth through which he crawled, bleeding and grazed, faced with the very real possibility that he may at any moment be called upon to defend himself from attack, his assailant man or animal, grouped or alone...

The sweat poured off him. His breathing grew ragged as the foul air burned in his lungs. The massive presence of the keep's foundations squeezed him like an orange, the pips his organs pressed through his sides while his skull resonated, abruptly the destination of a multitude of frantic noises. Jerian screamed, his own pathetic sound rushing past his lips like vomit.

But unheard?

Dogs barked, their slavering at his heels, jaws snapping, claws raking stone, hot tongues against his thighs.

Birds dived, their wings buffeting him, a storm from their breasts that deafened him with thunder and seared him with vivid blue stalks of lightning, their sharp beaks striking him like hail.

Horses charged, mounted cavalry, a thousand spear points whose gleaming heads sought to transfix his own, whose long hafts would shatter his ribs, force them apart, his guts to spill like rotten fruit, his blood to spurt like wine from a punctured gourd.

Old women, their features writhing, their flesh bubbling with gorging maggots, stabbed at him with sharpened sticks, their hideous voices accusing, warped and shrill, morning the loss of their sons. But one amongst them fought against the others, her thin arms seeking to embrace him, to defend him from the shrieks and outpourings of their combined hatred, the wounds opening in that woman a match for the most defiled of corpses - yet her body, however corrupted, would heal itself, her protection continue even as the assault continued, her arms thrown about his neck, her warmth smothering him, the pounding of her heart now the pounding of the horses' hooves and the birds' wings, the thunder her protests, the lightning the dagger-sharp sticks the old women had cut from the saplings marking the crude graves of their loved ones, their frenzied accusations the myriad greedy barks of the dogs whose bloodlust spilled over their teeth even as the maggots seethed in their twisted mouths...

But his mother would not let him go.

His mother had brought him into the world. Of his father he knew nothing, a soldier, perhaps an adventurer, his bones like any bones, his grave anonymous, his mother amidst this madness that filled Jerian, the outcast the focus of a thousand daughters, a thousand mothers, a thousand matriarchs, tears whose diamond edges fell like rain.

And he could see them clearly, the thousand stood before him, another thousand behind each of them.

And he crawled like a maggot through every spleen and liver, a maggot whose gorging was life.

The strangeling worm, he was no more complete than that other outside the keep, a creature whose limbs were unformed, whose eyes were raised plaintively to the stars.

But for what did he wish? What did he mourn? Was his loss great or small?

As the walls grew apart he climbed unsteadily to his feet, the ax in his single hand.

Under his dirty skin wriggled a thousand souls. They burst from him, ripped his tired flesh, a thousand angry cries, a thousand laments, each as old as the sky. And when the last had prised its way from his body, the maggots devoured in turn, Jerian recognised himself as the corpse.

Death though, made him whole again.

Father?

The souls illuminated the stone walls containing him. They sparked, colliding, giving shape, lifting the darkness even as they intensified the cold.

The souls reflected on water. For a moment they hovered above the liquid superficies, then, as a single entity, they extinguished themselves, flooding the passage, sucking him under, boiling the medium in which he had already failed to drown...

Jerian floated, not even the heavy ax weighing him. Light played across his damp face, tugged open his eyes. Stung by the naked glow, he squinted, but there was no mistaking the hollowness of the space above him, a perfect circle of blue atop a chimney whose sides were green with lichen and moss. A lone cloud crossed from left to right, and on the rim of the well, perched on her elbows, was the face of a young woman.

The moon's likeness, her long hair shaded her brow, the girl's countenance trained on his own.

Chapter Twenty-One - The Sundered

And then she disappeared.

Jerian tasted bile, a glue on his tongue. He did not know how he might escape from the well. Its bricks were closely fitted and in good repair, its sides too far apart to climb, his nakedness wedged between back and heels. The ax would be of little help to him. Could he wait for the water to rise? A rope, it dropped from the rim where Udioe had stood. She must have fixed the farther end, he supposed.

Jerian began to haul himself up this narrow ladder through the efforts of his sound left arm. His toes dug like claws, finding purchase in the mosses, while the polished head of the ax lay hooked over his bunched and jolting shoulder. He feared it would shake loose with each sapping jump of his reddened palm.

The yellow sun entered the shaft pausing to regard the emerging as he ascended, their struggles joined, the rays making light his burden as both advanced to the highest point of the day. But what that day revealed came as a surprise to Jerian, his belly scraped as he heaved himself past the low, crumbling lip of the well.

The keep was a ruin. The rope he had clambered up was tied to a stunted tree, the knot worn, the end frayed, the skinny bole grown round rotting plaits of horse hair. Winding the length about his wrist Jerian gave the rope a sudden tug, and it broke, filling the air with dust.

Time, he realised, had separated him, had parted him from the girl as surely as it had corrupted these strands. The security of his temporal existence was a mockery. His glimpses of Udioe proved malicious, manipulative. There was nothing of substance binding them.

He could see beyond the toppled keep wall, the countryside warm and green, trees and bushes forming gnarled ranks across its undulating slopes. There was no evidence of the bleak landscape he had encountered prior to entering the worm's slippery abode. The black sand and desolation had been covered, populated by all manner of seeds, its poisons tamed or blown away. Perhaps if he were to venture outside the collapsed fortress he might find buried the scarred boulders of the sometime river-bed. Yet something told him he would not soon be leaving this place. There was more here than met the eye, Jerian felt sure. Hidden in the ruin, concealed behind fallen stone lintels and blocked stairways, locked in huge buckled chests or secreted in caches beneath granite hearths, was all the treasure of the tall, the gold and silver, ruby and emerald, ivory and pearl of their wealth. And amongst this, worthless, priceless, rested a simple metal flute, the patterned whistle whose intricate design might hold the key to his fate, its single note all he had ever heard, as he was hearing it now, high and clear, rebounding off the cracked masonry, absorbed and returned by the surrounding rock. The note, pristine and ageless, called from every direction, from future and past, swelling like a chorus of birdsong. The note, sustained, passed each way through his skull, inducing pleasure and rage, a note so pure he felt his flesh tremble as if at the kiss of a knife. A note, sharp and exact as that same knife piercing his unprotected side, skewering his liver, a note to herald the arrival of death as its thrust disturbed the order long held inside, the visceral parts of the wanderer to bind and writhe. His blood lubricated the blade, aiding its cut, opening the wound to spores of lavender and fennel, perfumes and flavourings whose addition to the remains of Jerian went some way to quelling the fervour of those swarming insects whose purpose was to speed the life-cycle within...

But such was not his finish.

Chapter Twenty-Two - The Walled City

The seasons warred. Leaves, green and vibrant in the full throes of a heady summer, shared their boughs with the dead brown curls of autumn. Leaves also, but employing a different calendar, frost to nip their dry stalks, frost which threatened those tender shoots whose life was contrastingly ample. Roses might blossom in the snow, bright anachronisms, like red swans on a lake of marble; alive if cold.

It was a thousand days in one. The sun and the moon were abroad, neither setting, and the winds howled and the rain poured while the heat of a long afternoon coaxed the heads of shy daffodils to blush and grow. Not that any of the seasons were allied. Each, although dependent on its neighbours for its works, felt it should be uppermost. By proxy then, did confusion reign. A throne set over the living.

If anything could be said of the dead, it was that they were of a single purpose.

Amongst them, Jerian, no longer mute, no more able to shut out the massed voices of the damned than to deny the silence of his heartbeat, sat in greyness, in perpetual twilight, a group of ten or twenty ragged corpses at his beck and call, his unspoken words relayed to countless others, as their oaths and pledges were received by him. No time passed for this rare assembly, and yet all of time lay stretched to the misty edge of the world, the onwards marching horizon like a great wave, its crest and clouds. The land seemed to rear skywards as if joined by prodigious strands of woven fibres to a pair of equally massive needles, all of the dead, their monuments and their possessions, piled in the knitter's lap, to the living world as the coarse, unrefined lining of an ostentatious jacket.

They were the fallen, the wretched, the diseased, the abused, the vanquished, the blighted; the weak and the strong, the rich and poor whose restless bodies disturbed only stagnant gases; the murderers and the victims, all ghosts suspended in this place that was no place, a void given substance through the interaction of negative forces. They were forbidden peace, condemned to strive, driven to combat, to take sides and mount offensives, in thrall to the turbulent generals above. Soldiers, conscripts every one, of the armies of Winter and Spring, set against each other in an endless struggle, for they could die again and knew well the looming emptiness of oblivion. A fear as sharp and solid as a blade, a greater terror than death itself, as to be killed a second time would mean never to have lived. Such was the wanderer's fate then, to champion the dead.

Hell was nearly spawned. Every occurrence here reflected another on the surface. This place did not exist. Yet it was real enough.

War raged, and the pale tenants of the after, whose final moments had proved unnatural, their lives stripped from them, were drawn forth to fight. Many had fought before, losing the gift for a human cause. But what they faced now was far more terrible, and more final. No redemption beckoned, nor hope of reward. No, to die again was to lose for good, to slip from every world and be forgotten even by those who may have once professed their love.

Hell was a landscape of memories. Indistinct and torn, the grasses and hills were coated in fog, clouds of forgetfulness and negation, a drizzle whose borders were advanced, in whose embrace was the dissolution of time and the destruction of light.

The cycle of creation, halted, divided against itself, was engaged in a sinking process of despair. Like the wheel of a cart trapped in mud, it did not know which way to turn, and its failure, for whatever reason, was made worse by the unthinking nature of its spokes. There were no minds, no strategies behind these forces; only ignorance, and a desire, perverse without motion, to continue the essence of rolling while missing the fact.

So did everything happen at once.

*

Across his road now stood a wall. Beyond lay the future, as yet a dream.

But what of his task?

Numberless sepulchral eyes fixed on him.

But why?

It was like a siege. Jerian had knowledge of that, of being camped outside a city. He wondered at the tall men's part in this. Did they peer down from some lofty vantage? Were they instrumental in the construction of the barrier, a defence against \- against what?

The wanderer, his journey curtailed, his life spent, his murder having exposed his ribs, knew then, if he were ever to dwell in that future, if he was to answer those myriad stares, he would first have to raise the wheel from the mire, his shoulder braced to its curve. The energy of that curve was the focus of life, of age, of growth, the turning of moon and stars, all of which had stalled.

All save the blue.

Chapter Twenty-Three - Fass The Giant

This giant named Fass, steeped in misery, walked the earth in search of its edge, a fruitless quest begun in the remote past after a woman had stolen his heart. Grieving, the giant put out his eyes in order that he not be reminded of her face; but it had not been enough: the birds singing in the trees brought him echoes of her voice. To escape their cries, Fass had blocked his ears with clay scooped from a river bottom; only the clay had dried and cracked and fallen out, leaving him with no alternative but to push sharpened tree-trunks in either lobe of his weary head. He bled tears, devoured whole deer, drank of the sea. He walked without pause, spinning the world beneath his feet.

And then he stopped.

That heart, having been returned to his chest, beat once more, sealing the blood in his veins, plugging the leaks in his skull, quelling the dread in his step.

His cheek was kissed. He smelled her hair. Laughter, high and glad, coloured his thoughts, bloomed in his mind like lights.

Stunned by such good fortune and dreaming incessantly, he slept.

And the fog of hell was his breath...

*

Still the outcast had no wish to front an army. Dressed in some nebulous armour, sat astride a black horse whose flanks were caked in sweat, a hundred or more pale warriors at his back, Jerian could do no more than contemplate. In the valley below, spread across its dim floor, a battle was in sluggish motion, its speed that of an aged river, a resistance of dead bones, a reluctance on every side to maim and destroy, a realization that the sum total of their efforts was as nothing to the wrestling clouds above, those less turgid powers whose momentum was unceasing, whose passion and fervour had yet to slow, and perhaps would not.

It was madness. Jerian proved stronger than most, but his strength was waning, a mimicry of life already in his mount, a false wisp of condensation about its face. Soon his own lungs would stretch and the hunger in his bowels rupture the fragile bubble of his will, robbing him of volition, sending him and his troop off in a disorderly charge down the hill, there to add to the mayhem, the butchering of corpses on a field briefly coloured red.

The moment could not be held at bay. Its approach was heralded by limpid hues of yellow and orange, blue and green, as the mist was lifted like the hem of a skirt to reveal the spurious world of the living to the sallow countenances of the damned, their slack organs pulled taut like reins, their spirits intoxicated, imbued with a lust deeper than that for wine by a drunk, a bee for a flower rich in nectar, the glint and smell of honey as a promise on their swollen tongues as the hundred were goaded into the fray, apples shaken from a tree, their blood suffused with dire notes, sour music borne of an evil wind, helpless, like arrows from a bow, spears dipped as they rode towards their enemy.

Jerian absorbed the slaughter. He watched in fascination as heads came apart. The business of war was a pleasure to him. Men, gouged, spit out their guts, ludicrous smiles on their faces as steam rose from the ground between their toes and the hardness of their loins proved their last. Men, hewn like timbers, sat with earnest expressions as amidst the chaos the tried patiently to refit their legs. Men, trampled by hooves and hacked by swords, danced with imaginary ladies, winked at their partners and even risked their fingers playing the secret game of folds. Men, dazed and babbling, picked over the burdens, now given up, of friends, as if looking for bargains amongst the clutter of a market stall. Men, unblinking through fear, prayed.

Such was the madness of war.

Fatigued, yet exulting, Jerian divided the length of a child. The boy fell cleanly in two, allowing his slayer to ride his foaming horse across the space vacated by his brain and kidneys.

The stumps of limbs were waved and knocked aside by his sword, adding further hinges to the purple flesh.

Skin was peeled to uncover old wounds whose puckered lips were again open to the press of metal.

Joints were crushed.

Such was the unending battle.

*

In his dreams, the giant was presented with horrors. He knew agony, the memory of pain-filled days reawakened as he slept, images of strife he had not witnessed for an eternity suddenly emblazoned over the blank, featureless tracts of his mind.

Tears shook him, thick and salty - he did not cry out of loneliness, but remembered the turning world he had fostered, its lakes and forests, plains and mountains he had pushed behind him with his feet, his constant walking and steady pace that had night following day, sun after rain, new life growing from old. He experienced guilt and longing. There was a soreness in his muscles, a discomfort. Fass the giant was no longer content with slumber. But he could not rise. He felt his heart beating within, its rhythm lulling him to rest. The woman who brought him affection lay curled like a cat in the crook of his elbow.

*

Hell, by its nature, was perishable; nothing lasted. There was a contradiction in its being, for neither time nor space sustained it, but the actions of gods. It was always and it was never.

The greyness permeated, blurring form and diluting colour until the battlefield resembled a swathe of dirty snow. The air was crisp and white, a clean haze whose roof was a murky sky. The black shape of his horse stood nearby, head lolling, snout closed to vapours. Jerian imagined he could see its bones through its hide. He peered at his own dead hand. His withered right arm twitched, the stubs of aborted fingers wet with frost, the shrunken wrist locked, shrouded in hair, the rounded shoulder a confusion of knotted flesh, thwarted nerves and bunched tendons. There had never been any use of that wasted appendage until now. Subsumed, its role miscast while yet in the belly of his mother, next usurped by the oak of the wood carver, the limb had remained undeveloped, quiet, unmoving, unfeeling till this moment.

A warmth occupied its short length, stretching its feeble girth.

Kneeling in the snowlike ruin of the field, Jerian sensed the arm's burgeoning vigour, its life, its belated maturation, growing here stout and firm, belonging without question to the world above, the living world to whose tints and dyes it was the key, even if joined to his tortured cadaver.

He gazed at the fresh pink of his finished palm. Complete, the hand was a match for its opposite, but soft as a babe's, weak and unused to the heft of a sword.

The skin seemed to burn in the chill, the knuckles proud and aching, their redness a harbinger of calm, so different from the fleeting red stain of war...

*

And she purred like a fire in a hearth, this lady who was tall.

Chapter Twenty-Four - FASHIONED IN WOOD AND IRON

The blade he toted was a hand-and-a-half. Jerian had no real knowledge of its pedigree, the steel polished till the letters of its name had vanished; but in his right hand the sword felt solid and with the buttressing of his left he was able to cut the air in ever broader arcs.

It had passed through the dead with ease. How would it cope with the living?

Time would tell. And time there was in this place, albeit time detached from the revolving earth, unhinged as the stygian lid of the sky.

He walked towards an imaginary point, about where the nose met the forehead, the vacant eye of the moon on one side and the blinding orb of the sun on the other. It seemed the obvious direction. Both sun and moon remained where they were, pinned against the firmament like buttons, broiling clouds obscuring these twins like cilia, a winking procession of rain and wind and thunder, benign wisps and shady awnings depending on the state of the campaign, the uppermost general, each bruising encounter, carcass upon carcass, each subsequent, pointless debacle.

Where the horizon ended, as surely it must, there would he find his answer. But Jerian was no longer so naive as to think his journey straightforward. If he had learned anything on his travels, it was that around every curve of the land there existed, or came into existence, an entirely new obstacle, a threat natural or man-made, through whose demesne he would have to pass, whose challenge, whether playful or life-endangering would have to be met, and whose face was as much a mystery as his own. That his mortal life had terminated around just such a bend served to emphasize the unknown - also the unseen, Jerian thought, and gazed at limb and sword hanging from his newly balanced shoulder. He saw Odil's features ahead, the clouds forming his likeness about the heavenly eyes. Had the wood carver taken his revenge? The ghost of that arm the axe had severed, its weight not then forgotten, turned against its recent master by its old...

Only at the very centre of the worlds could such a thing happen.

It was away from that centre he walked now.

In his path was a settlement: a large village, a small town. Surrounding this community were orchards, some hung with fruit, others lashed by hail. Ploughed fields, freshly sewn, and fields of ripe grain stretched between low walls and echoed to the shouts of children and the grunts of labour. Whether chasing or catching, planting or harvesting, all was apparently normal. These people had adapted to the seasons. Here were no violent upheavals; it was as if they could predict the temper of gales.

The many houses were of wood thatched with straw. From the undefended perimeter of the settlement he descried two stone buildings, one circular and probably for grain, the other narrow, rectangular, with no visible entrance. Jerian stood like a fool, some travelling player. No one challenged him. A man nodded, his face home to a smile, and the wanderer felt his marrow stir and his body reclaim, for however short a time, his soul.

The gift of life had spread from his arm. Together with an urge to eat came the heavy tiredness of the endless day. He stumbled inwards, head bowed, yet filled with such a powerful well-being he could not imagine lying down or feeding on anything less than the excitement of these dirty streets. Livestock, tethered and loose, created a raucous din that was both provocative and satisfying. Workshops resounded with the sounds of metal on metal, an industrious clangour as rich as that of bees overburdened with pollen, a surfeit of nectar, energy to brace the shadow-fixed afternoon as surely pillars did an ornamented ceiling. It was hard work he sensed, and pleasure taken in it. It was strength and confidence, a belief that they had overcome their enemies. They were not concerned with palisades. The hills about them were not crowned by watch-towers. It was the arts of peace occupying the citizens of this fenceless borough.

Jerian was distantly suspicious. Despite his fears, he continued, pausing outside the wide doors of a carpenter's shop, a number of men greeting him, next moving on to the similarly broad threshold of a house with many windows, by the noise and smell a tavern, this knowledge granted him, he reasoned, in exchange for his patronage. Grateful, he stepped inside and sat at a hurriedly cleared table. Others there raised pitchers and hands; he was to be their guest, they implied, although if they spoke using words or communicated entirely through gestures, augmenting this physical language with clicking tongues and the rap of fingers on benches, he could not say, a mirth of knuckles and pine that swam as the froth on his beer, choosing a variety of routes to his brain.

*

Half awake, he groped for his sword, but it was not by his side. He lay on a rough mattress in a lit room, shafts of sun like bars of gold through the rafters. The room was full of sacks of apples, the planks of its floor warped and knotted, the ground visible beneath, the height of a man separating his face from a stream into whose musical passage Jerian manage to interpose a chorus. His head throbbed with a separate rhythm, the joy of his pulse in his ear.

He was dressed no more in broken armour but in supple leather, boots and gloves that were an exact fit to feet and hands, the latter poking from the former as he had slept with the extremities of his body uncovered. He lay for a while on the mattress, but the light did not change, until finally he recalled the permanence of the day-star.

Taking an apple and biting into it, Jerian opened the door, was swamped in brilliance. There were neither steps nor a ladder. He shrugged, puzzled, and flexed his toes in the finely tooled boots, removed the gloves and stuffed them in a pocket before jumping to the grass below.

His arrival amongst the people of this dwelling caused no agitation. Indeed, attired much as they, Jerian received nods of greeting, smiles from girls and laughter from children, so that he soon felt at home and forgot all about the flagrant purpose of his mission. He had no need of a voice here and yet was indulged, it seemed to him, in a dozen or more pleasant conversations. These people knew and understood him. Their happy faces conveyed familiarity. More than one enquired as to the health of his mother.

She was fine, his eyes informed them, he had just this moment left her.

Jerian met with friends outside the smithy. Together they boarded a cart drawn by oxen and rode out to the forest, there to resume the felling of maples, the stripping of twigs and bark, the collection of sap in barrels. The gloves were a good protection against the heat and rub of a saw. A snowstorm halted their labour only briefly, and the cold was outdone by the warmth. The woodsmen stopped again to make a meal of bread and cheese spiced with vinegar, joking and throwing acorns at one another before returning with renewed vigour to the tasks of marking and cutting, the strongest amongst them dragging whole trees to the river where they were floated downstream the short distance to the mill, the best timber selected and the remainder burned for charcoal.

The light unaltered, blanked by cloud at irregular intervals, the men nevertheless left for home after a good day's work, a vitality in their lungs as they collected their tools and once more boarded the ox-cart, squeezed between barrels for the journey. The ride was slow and bumpy. Jerian did not care. He was fully absorbed by the to and fro, the messages and tales of wrists and elbows, shoulders and fingernails, a host of scrapings, drummings and inclines to speak of beer and boast of women and assignations...

On returning to the community he immediately sought out a broad variety of vegetables, carrots, leeks, potatoes and a quantity of oil, long-beans and cabbage and mushrooms to stew with the beef, the liquid a soup for his ailing mother, her pallid flesh in need of support, Jerian himself chewing the meat for her to swallow, feeding her, head propped against a sack of apples, the breathing of the fruit to calm her chest, from his own bowl with his own spoon, that which his father had carved on his son's birth, his coming into the world that was his the everlasting day, his father past, drowned, his mother taken sick having survived the flood the child recalled via the memory of snapping trees, his frail young body saved by its closeness to hers, sucking at her nipple through the storm.

The walls were washed by rain now. Baked by sun, they buckled and cracked. Jerian bounded down the steps, lingered at the bottom, scratched his chin and then wandered blithely to the tavern.

Once inside everything was as it had always been. The beer flowed and laughter, high and merry, spilled across floor and table. There were arguments, but few. The people here had all worked hard to earn these draughts, so any dispute was quickly suppressed; nothing could be allowed to spoil the enjoyment of the men and women whose hearts and minds were in concord with the moment. And yet Jerian felt a nagging sense of loss, of abandonment, as if to smile with an honest benevolence was more and more difficult, more and more at odds with his true feelings. He became uneasy; shuffling on a bench, hip to hip with a girl he had known all his life, he was suddenly afraid, inexplicably outraged by the suffering of his mother. The girl took his face in her hands and kissed him on the lips. He closed his eyes that she might not look in them, look and see the wild thoughts behind their glaze, perhaps her own image there, starved and ruined - images unknown to her, of his worst nightmares, those dreams of which he had never told, the fire and death of the world.

Troubled, he ran from the tavern, shuffled aimlessly through the wheel-indented streets, and came as if guided, no-one there to witness, to the hidden door of the narrow building, its brickwork pristine and neat, that door leading, but once in a lifetime, to the throne of the dark and the truth.

The building appeared little wider than the spread of his arms, the door occupying half its width. The stone lintel jutted out, a warning to any passing that a great weight, if wrongly shifted, altered the balance to the detriment of timorous bones. Only the brave might seek advice at this altar; but other things than bravery could drive a man inside.

Did he dare it? What evidence were stories?

Jerian gazed back twice, once over each shoulder. There was a simple latch mechanism. He was alone. Lifting it, red flakes of iron stained his fingers. Pushing the door open, grey splinters of wood fell in his eyes. And within resided blackness, the emptiness of a cave...

His mother's skeleton, marked with the scores of his teeth, lay amongst rags and animal skins, a clutch of lesser skulls abutting her own. Her flesh had sustained him. A golden light uncovered her now, its source a figure whose armour-plate was studded with emeralds, traced with fine shell-like spirals, a great axe between his knees, its double head resting on the floor, the shaft curving gently, as if fitted to his shape in his chair, the blue of its twin edges alluring. Jerian did not know what to make of him. A king of Summer, perhaps; yet his brightness was cold.

It was this absence of heat which betrayed him. Sat upright on his throne, the golden knight was exposed. The luminescence of his armour revealed its flaws, its base nature, the peeling veneer cracked like baked mud and seamed with the tell-tale coral of rust. The throne was painted and his helm, composed of flames and serpents, was wood. Seeing through the fraud, Jerian approached. The massive axe was blunt, the emeralds fractured shards of glass, the plate thin iron hammered flat over a scaffold, the knight's prominent knees immovable, solid, fixed like all his joints, without pivots or hinges so that he could not have stood had any petitioner challenged his authority, questioned his power to wield boons and curses, mocked the frailty of his expression behind the patriarchal sternness of his mask. Still, the golden light of his mien was intimidating. Jerian circled to the figure's rear, the illusions collected about him falling from his mind, the bones and flesh of his mother slipping from sight. Aware he had been fooled, blinded by more than the clever reflection of fire in a mirror, the wanderer discovered his multiplication smeared across walls of silver, the aspect returned him sanguine, if hollow.

Stepping outside he found the buildings much as before; but the people were missing.

Walking around the settlement, the streets fading, the houses decayed, he was accompanied by an absolute quiet. Not a bird called or a breeze stirred. The sky was void of cloud. The sun warm, the moon full and his breath held as it seemed that at that very moment it would either crumble to white dust or fall as a hammer on the world...

Neither happened.

Sounds came, borne on a hot wind like the breath of an oven, a temperature sufficient to ignite the thatched roofs of these empty dwellings, to cast sparks amidst the ready tinder of beams and panels, frames and carts. The wind gorged on moisture, devouring the bubbling stream that ran under the stilted house of apples where he had thought to nurse his mother, she from whose dying womb he had sprung, whose ghost he had fed soup, a lie hidden amongst lies as the thirst of the wind sucked dry buildings and earth.

Jerian was blown along, buffeted repeatedly, unable to turn and face the gale. Trees, bled of sap and split down the middle, divided as if by lightning, had their hearts stolen, branches and leaves burnt to ashes. Animals scattered, but the air was consumed in their lungs and they died without a scream as the hot wave advanced cross-country like an invading army, a maddened horde whose sole aim was to reduce everything to a colourless sand, to lay waste forest and pasture and raze every construct of man, to scour the land with a cruelty that was savage in its momentum, to push before it he who was fool enough to question the ravening of the dead, those sublunaries to whom he was champion, an unwilling advocate, a soul compelled to wander, he who had failed them even as he failed them now, the heat at his back scorching, the many tongues of a molten lash.

Numb with pain he ran, while all about him was wrapped in flames and the wind beat him, a spreading desert indented with no other footprints than his own. He ran on, mind purged of thoughts, continuing long after the flailing of his shoulders had ceased and the oven-breath mellowed. He ran until he dropped, tripping at last on a shred of hardened leather, a twisted remnant of his boots. The desert captured him then, rolling him like a baby in its arms, sharp and arid as it cut open his cheeks and palms and invested a harrowing soreness under his skin, his hands and face becoming so inflamed Jerian was sure they would burst if he made any attempt to soothe them. And in his reveries he imagined the bars of this fantastic cage were dripping icicles, and the agony of their closeness, near yet unattainable, compounded every suffering, the damned and their misfortunes his to experience through eternity, for it was certain there would be no end to the drought...

A bitterness filtered through him. The desert was summer at its most extreme, and whoever had control of it tipped the balance, siding with one of the four in a bid to unmake sky and earth, to shape anew stars and continents, to usurp the role of nature and fashion out of these rendered carcasses a perfect, singular existence, building into the new world's fabric a mechanism by which to order and determine the number of its inhabitants, to maximize production while minimalizing aggression, the whole to function as a stable unit, pure and static and without the need of blood to run from veins. A magical garden of reason in whose pungent arbours the outcast, once glorious death, had no part.

Not a leaf could fall without him. Perfection tolerated no mistakes.

Chapter Twenty-Five - THE WATER'S FAR CRY

Many shells began to appear, pale or florid, small fans and larger spirals, hard and knife-sharp. Jerian would pluck them from the dunes and gaze at their contours, curved and iridescent. The desert began to take on the aspect of a beach. Indeed, the air rippled like water on the horizon, wisps of surf towards which he shambled. But he never reached the promised strand, only plodded soundlessly, the burning sun a constant companion, until his eyes could see no more. No shade was offered him, nor sustenance beyond the pain of wretched souls. It was the restless ghosts of the damned who maintained Jerian, their cause and their agonies which gave him strength, as he suffered what they had suffered. And it was their will he go on.

In the midst then of the desert he found and raised a shell as big as his skull, and pressing his ear to its out-folding mouth heard the cool, deep voice of the ocean.

Words swelled on a damp breeze, the lilt and song of rain and fishes.

The truth and dark in a whisper.

Chapter Twenty-Six - MOUNTAIN TALL

Night fell, bringing with it chaos. There was neither moon nor sun to light his path, only lightning, the crash of thunder reverberating.

Blue flashes revealed naked rock, upthrust peaks like the notched blades of swords.

Elsewhere a giant's head was hacked from his body. Yet the giant stood, arms and legs invigorated, a health in his bones as Fass began to once more turn the earth on its axis, free at last of love and dreams, unburdened.

The woman who had returned his heart, the same who had cut through his neck, discovered herself trapped now in the thick mesh of his beard and hair. Tears of defeat slid over her cheeks; she could not free herself as she had the giant. She was made to drag the head of Fass, joined to it by the chains of love's denial.

Her cries and lamentations shook the ground.

They listened in the keep, the tall men, as she was one of their own. But they did not leave the enclave to help. They polished their weapons, curried their mounts. They could no longer hide, and had the dead to fight.

Rain drenched everything. No army marched, although many were abroad, slowed and sinking as they clambered upon stone in the hope of making camp above the mud.

Hell was afoot.

Jerian laughed.

The wanderer had chosen the highest mountain to climb. He squinted against the downpour. The heavy rain pummelled each profile of rock and armour.

He was followed...

The ascent proved treacherous, slippery, but he never once considered abandoning the attempt. Jaws slavered beneath him, while overhead clouds tore sparks off the upmost peak.

Jerian was sheathed, brow to heel in a hardness other than metal. He carried no sword or lance, nor any weapon besides his feet and hands. Encased in his own shell, flesh screened behind a grown shield, he progressed upwards into hail and ice, wind tearing at the rigid hull of his carapace, brown, black, yellow and green, an extruded covering his body had assembled about him...

And the salt of his skin was the salt of the sea.

Time had wrapped itself around Jerian, shifting the disputed centre of the world, raising the stone faces up whose howling nostrils he dragged his flesh, ascending with screams and odours. His visor had become one with his features, just as these rocks had sprouted like granite horns from the vast relief of the surface, ossified crags and flaking points of quartz and silica, flint-severed tendons and cartilaginous ears, the roots and folds of exotic limbs. Both the mountain and Jerian carried their skeletons.

The rain tore at them with equal vigour. All the winds ever born sounded notes brash and eloquent, calamitous tones and surprising music through the reeds and turns of gauntlets and crevices, the fingers within dictating the passage of often deafening, occasionally beautiful tunes.

Jerian climbed.

The beast at his ankles flittered between light and shadow, the flame of its breath glinting, echoed by the fiery tongues above.

*

A great stone tower housed his footfalls, the spiral's massive newel to his right, each twisting, chiselled step representing a day in his life. Below him, lost beyond the turn, was his fated birth, and ahead the certainty of his death - but the steps did not end there. Blood ran over the stone, his own mixed with others, the moment of his killing lost to him. Iron sconces set into the outer wall held orange bowls of light, a heat without warmth.

He walked on through smoke and darkness, a number of the lights having expired. The stair became greasy underfoot, but always there was the promise of a roof or gallery so high he might view the entire world, even past the horizon to where lingered the sunrise...

No sound of the storm reached him. The air, although stale, was quiet.

Chapter Twenty-Seven - THE THUMB OF THE YEAR

At the summit, in silence and darkness, it was as if the world had never existed; or had come to a close: the snow at his feet was as black as the yawning emptiness and he could see neither land nor stars. All might never have been but for the presence of a fifth season.

This season had no name, was like a thumb to the year, able to grip and oppose, the fingers of Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer its daughters and sons, brides and uncles as each was tempered and reborn.

And the thumb employed Jerian now. He was to confront the four, to do battle with their strongest. He was to redress the balance and defeat the insurgent tall. Shelled like a crab on the peak, the wanderer called forth the dawn...

*

Autumn wept like a thief. The drizzle of its remorse scoured his cheeks. Next to winter, autumn was farthest removed from summer's arbitrary passion. Many were the colours of autumn, hues displayed in grasses and trees, its homeland the forest and the lesser hills, moss its sponges and heather its fur, a shy creature goaded by frost to shed the blazing canopy of its fastidious art, all that it had leached from the soil returned. A season of transition then, a buttress between short and long days; animated, a minor divinity.

Jerian walked through its midst. Leaves red and gold lay piled, awaiting the collection of worms. Fruits filled the grateful bellies of thrushes and crows, their seeds cast out and their flesh transformed. Jerian strode along a ruddy vista of trees. The sky was grey with cloud. His eyes tracked every motion. The undergrowth disguised movement, but his nose discerned the spoor of foxes, his sight the tracks of a bear. He was both the hunter and the hunted. He elected to tackle this wood closer to the earth, feet and hands thickly padded and the likenesses of paws.

Better attuned to his environment, Jerian turned a full circle, shuffling on stout limbs. To run on four legs was to cover a greater swathe of ground, and through waves of speckled ferns he ran, muzzling aside branches and vaulting streams, the scent of his quarry deep in his lungs, a bear like himself that was this season's most fearsome combatant. But this was to be no contest of arms, rather a test of strength, of skill and guile, autumn's native cunning against the wanderer's given ability to learn and survive. So far he had successfully adapted to the conditions. It would be easy to grow complacent in such a powerful guise; however, Jerian remained cautious and sought only to maximize those advantages inherent within an essentially human mind.

He rested frequently and ate of the generous windfalls, drank from a stream whose depths were streaked with the silver of fish, lodes he had the inclination, if not the leisure, to mine. It saddened him to depart from the feast, but then maybe the enormity of his hunger was a means designed to slow him down. Truly there was much to harvest, and by the wealth of nearby odours, many bears to oblige.

Perched on an outcrop of stone upstream from a rapids, Jerian counted a family group of six, the largest more black than brown, an individual whose restless instincts warned of danger, but remained unsure of its source. The animal was old, yet unchallenged. Still, it took all that bear's voice and commotion to rouse its subordinates, waking some and discouraging the others' mischief.

Jerian climbed from the rocks, a roar in his throat as he went to meet his adversary. Autumn's diffuse light sent a ripple through his fur, silver-grey around his intense eyes, the cubs scattering, afraid, the dominant male answering his call. Next the wanderer felt his host's impulses taking over, choking him, blotting his senses, his responses. Almost too late did he realise the trick. He struggled with the bear he had become, the other closing, perhaps aware of his difficulty and prepared now to exploit the weakness where earlier it would most likely have growled angrily, sadly, lacking the will to fight, the outsider younger, stronger - yet inhibited, for there might be no way back.

Quickly he shed those heightened reflexes, lost the shape of the ursine body that had carried him here. His rival, no longer crestfallen, newly emboldened, stood erect before him, forelegs raking the air. Jerian slid on the shore, retreated into the water. The bear charged. He dived under, kicked clear as the superior weight of the animal crashed the liquid surface, opening a wound in the river that gushed foam and spray, a white curtain of bubbles drawn above and below. The world of fish erupted. The bear scrambled furiously, its body slowed. The man deployed his own elongated fins and paddled out into deeper water. He was unsure if he needed air; it filled his lungs, giving him buoyancy. But was it necessary for him to breathe? He could ponder it later. Now his head emerged into the dry, giving the bear sight of him, and the creature gave all its power, reaching him as he went under, spewing gases, pulling the enraged beast down. Surrounded by water they embraced, and Jerian felt every bone and fibre of his being protest in a crushing grip that lessened only gradually, for the bear was distressed as much as he and this territory so near to dark was not its own; here it wore the strange flesh, but unlike Jerian in his bear coat the mantle of water was not one the bear could remove. Its heart burst, the hold relaxed, and the wanderer allowed the river to carry him on his way...

*

Winter was that season most vehemently opposed to summer and as such would be the hardest to placate. Winter sought to trap him not in flesh, but ice. Its grip was fierce and cold. The waters of the world became sluggish. Jerian melted them with breath, its uses stretching beyond life. He drank much and urinated, the insulation of his bladder providing warmth. But it was not enough. Icicles grew from his own stream and the heat of his body was sapped. The wanderer began to freeze. And yet winter's hold was fragile, easily broken. The rime in his nostrils and the snow in his mouth was loosened by a scream. The scream rose through him, the man a conduit between earth and sky. It was the moving of rocks, the bubbling of strata, all the pressures of the crust amassing, the man a volcano as he disgorged lava and flame, the serpent rising in him as the winter condensed into turbulent clouds and the elements were free again to pull at themselves and each other, wreaking havoc and soothing brows as they created waves and converted gases, a sibling rivalry whose consequences extended into every peculiar niche of humanity, populated night and day, joined men and women together and pole-axed trees, reduced mountains to rubble even as stone was laid on stone and new ranges forced up...

The tall men might easily have taken winter as their model, for winter and summer were much alike. The elements drove them both, as they drove autumn and spring, a chemical engine of eternal youth, fuelled by stresses and governed by the elasticity of space.

*

Spring.

A celebration of life, rich and varied, colourful and aromatic, was inaugurated by the rise in temperature, the sweetening of rain, the spreading of seed and pollen on wind and wing. Jerian watched as flowers burst through the tumbled soil and stretched, unfolding leaves and fronds, petals in every shade to compliment the green of the meadow. Trees ached and groaned, stiff from sleep, inhaling great draughts of light and air as they drew forth the quiescent sap from their toes. The buzz of multitudinous insects and the secret laughter of mammals filled his ears.

There was abundance, a wealth of living - he passed as a nemesis, sad and resigned.

Now the most vibrant of seasons offered no overt resistance, sending out no representative to match him. It had no need. It did not desire conflict, only growth, succession, and made an unwilling opponent. Like autumn, spring was weak, being too self-possessed ever to enjoy the rigours of war. Nonetheless, its arts were subtle, and the precursor of summer, although lacking ambition, was eager to claim its share...

Spring would seek to win him over. Jerian was presented with gifts in the forms of happenings, burgeonings, conceptions and manifestations. Images of splendour were his to enjoy. An aura of fine perfumes composed a medium on which his mind could float. All was love. Blossoms tinted his pale cheeks and grasses appeased his feet, their echoes infusing his lips with a smile. His sorrows were taken up into bushes whose yield was poison and so remained untouched, those sorrows transferred to branches and suspended like hanged men.

All except one.

This fruit swelled prodigiously, drawing nourishment into itself from the bush on which it grew, threatening to break its gallows as it sucked the juices of its shrivelling ilk and squashed them under it, a drupe whose poison was stronger than its host's, an unease spreading through the ground as that bush died back, strangling amongst roots, infesting soil and bowel and causing many a creature to abort. It was a perversion of everything that was spring, a canker, a foulness crawling through animal and plant. In trying to absorb his presence, spring had exposed its soft underbelly, and the consequences of its folly struck like a late frost or a violent storm, clogging its veins and piercing its heart.

Jerian watched in horror as the fruit matured. His fear meant he could not avert his eyes. A girl's flaccid limbs came into being; a smooth torso was shaped, the skin contracting as if round a frame. He trembled as hands emerged, small and delicate. The form was rightly beautiful, but lacked a navel. Her neck came last, the body stirring. Yet there was to be no face, only a woody mass that as he gazed parted from the branch which snapped back, whipping the assembled flies. The child sat, her movements slow. Jerian already knew her name. The buds of flowers, compact and opening, bloomed from a nest of twisted stems between her gently sloping shoulders. But this show of life was an abomination. Spring could not tolerate such a warping of its design. It sought to take back the love with which it had attempted to bribe him, for the year's thumb might do permanent damage to spring's brittle character. The wanderer meanwhile had knelt and she had risen above him, a woman crowned in thorns.

What could come of their union? This was the realm of new beginnings, Jerian thought. He peered at her ripening femininity, felt a quickening in his loins, a yearning to communicate that wakened seed, to impregnate her.

But what life he had been given was not his own. He was dead once already, and only death could rise in him. Yet the lust he experienced was great.

Taking then his sorrow and holding it to him, he absolved this season, swallowed his pain, endured his grief. He denied she was Udioe, denied his flesh and hers, placed that sadness again in his mind, a weight under which he struggled to stand, water spilling from his eyes...

And reflected in each tear was the cruel beak of an owl.

Chapter Twenty-Eight - TWOCHILDS

The armies of the dead assembled on a field of bleached yellow stalks. Much as the clatter of arms raised a tumult echoed by the carrion-eaters above, the shoeless feet of men and horses lifted clouds of fine dust that found their equal in the red and white plumes of the enemy ranks glinting wetly under a remorseless sun. The tall occupied the only hill, their host arrayed with a precision so exact it was like a first blow, the true and the dark reeling, blinded, colliding one with another as the leaders amongst them clambered up onto their mount's backs in an effort to speak and see.

As the dust settled the sun was still, a sharp facet of summer whose raw illumination was perpetual.

The moon appeared vague and faint, somehow less than full; but it remained in place.

Jerian sought to empty his mind by threading grasses, his fingers weaving and bending the arid spears.

Nothing breathed.

To his rear the souls of the damned awaited his order. A single word...

The Lady of the Tall had altered her colours. No longer did her standards bear the twin stripes of black and white, or even carry the motif of the blue star; these had been false and deceitful, that secret unveiled by the insult the champion of the marsh king paraded, those colours soon his own. She displayed red now, stark and bright, the white reduced to a shadowless neighbour, a mere gap between bars. The smiling Lady was revealed; high on her hill her head was uppermost, her painted breasts seeming to dance in all the glitter of day.

*

To begin, each man and woman would fight their own battle, fight to be born, fight for air, for sustenance. Jerian lived once more the blur of his younger days.

Thereafter each fought against death - Jerian died as he searched, dispatched by an unseen foe, a man or woman whose faith and cause were directed by an unknown fear.

His body fell, his spirit rose, the worms devoured, the breeze instilled, the flesh withered, the strength returned, the arm in its newness reached across a distance greater than either pain or hope.

The dead walked the earth, conscripted into the armies of seasons whose hearts had never encompassed warfare. They were ignorant if not innocent generals. It was an alien order the tall wished to impose, an order not of this world.

The wanderer pulled it down, defiled it. He straddled the horse that, like every other, would fight next for the chance to be made anew, recast in its own image, its faults intact and its hide blemished, men and beasts in this company who fidgeted, grinding hollow teeth as they fixed their sight on the high ground the enemy had surrounded with steel and ditches. A large number, perhaps two thirds of their strength, might be spent in crossing trenches too wide to jump; but whether a thousand or ten thousand were needed to bridge the gap, many hundreds more would be left to grind bone against metal in an assault upon the hill Jerian knew with a certainty would prove unsuccessful, a failure not of tactics but objectives, because the central figure and the focus of this conflict, would no doubt escape. He understood it as fact, and yet the agony of the charge was necessary, for it was the wave that would carry him past the physical barrier and beyond, propel him far into the country of the tall, a land that was encircled by an ever more wrathful sea.

*

A cavalry of the brave and the foolhardy advanced at a trot, the dust shielding those behind whose horses dragged wooden planks and poles, the rudiments of countless bridges. Behind these marched a ramshackle assemblage of once-dead soldiers and defeated warriors, their peeling faces and vacant eyes slack and expressionless, their voided minds slowly filling with the sound of grating armour, the stink of faeces, the terrible images of battles fought and lost. Ghosts inhabited their shells, human and warm, throats drying as they neared the pit and the wall. The summer rekindled their lives, but few were convinced of its permanence. Those who broke rank soon collapsed, wasted, dead a final time, damned for eternity. Redemption lay in a single direction.

They were grey and pitiful, line upon line of dispossessed individuals united for a common purpose. Jerian rode with the first, waving a crude banner imprinted with blood. He could not read what was written there, but delighted in the message, its letters black until this approach, running red as he closed, red as the blood in his veins, red as the gaudy plumes on the helmets of the tall; yet as long as he persevered, a red the Lady could neither order nor control.

Hooves pounded, the speed increased. All hell was loosed, swamping the ditches, the ramparts, arrows singing from the hill, the circle of metal at its base undented. Jerian wheeled his mount, saw chaos around him, exulted as the armies of the doomed crashed to every side, spilling heads from shoulders, piling limply into the ready grave. The dust shortened his vision, panicked his captains, some hacking at their horse's skulls, most of the bridge parts lost amidst the yellow grass, what remained scattered randomly, waiting for men on foot to raise them.

The defenders front appeared seamless, each man joined to the next as if welded, volleys of heavy arrows arcing over the attackers. Through the choking grime these men took on the aspect of a machine, a glinting engine of war that fired without pause. The idea sickened Jerian, for his infantry surge risked breaking apart on meeting that formation. The battle was overly one-sided. But then the arrows became fewer, the fusilades less devastating, the ground spiked with shafts and corpses. There were no archers in his company; he had doubted their effectiveness; they would re-supply the enemy. Instead, what was recognizable as his vanguard divided left and right, riding to either flank as the soldiers behind arrived under cover of their retreat, men to slide pole and plank out across the stacked bodies of the fallen. This done, two or more crossings established, the horsemen charged again, no few stumbling from the makeshift bridges, toppling under the pitched weights of their terrified steeds even as others continued the onslaught, lances scraping, sweat pouring, full in the throes of death and their voices.

A significant throng hit the wall and were repelled. Gaps opened. Men rushed over the ditches, Jerian amongst them, his mount lost, having buckled, tripped by the punctured carcass of another. In a frenzy he tore at the red verticals adorning shield after shield, swinging no mace or sword but his fists, battering the image of the invincible machine, his madness pumping, spears clattering off his chest and arms as the dead pressed forwards, disadvantaged by the gradient, their sheer numbers now beginning to tell, although at a price beyond counting, those killed a second time providing the steps by which their comrades ascended.

Farther up the hill the dust thinned considerably and Jerian caught a glimpse of the figures central to his efforts, the Lady highest in their midst, her naked torso boasting the twinned heads of children, a boy and girl whose mouths foamed, whose eyes rolled in greed or anguish, the truth of her breasts he had thought painted, obscene jewellery - a boy and girl, their features twisted, innocents he recognized from untold villages. The twins seized his awareness. A blow dented his helm, fractured the toughened shell enough to explode pain in his skull, robbing him of any view of the summit. Jerian tumbled backwards, mind reeling, fighting harder than ever, desperate not to lose consciousness. The line of the attack faltered. Panic spread further. He had to tear away a piece of the visor before vision was returned to him. And with that redoubled his fury.

In everything he saw now those breasts swung, heads whose necks gave into the ribs of the tallest woman. She had taken them as her own, as her people had endeavoured to take this world, making it part of their domain, its destruction from the roots up their mode of conquest, once scoured of all its species to be reconstructed in a manner best suited to their goals. It came to him then that this was but one fragment of a larger campaign. Perhaps not the first, for there were many worlds, many lands. The scale of the tail's ambition, the ruthlessness of their rule, the two heads of the children made redundant any lingering doubts concerning his role, his fate written at length and in a language he could not fail to comprehend.

Necks he wrung, his grip on the pale hordes unbroken. A flash of blue at the hilltop called on his every resource, for the axe was another treasure Jerian would regain...

Chapter Twenty-Nine - A STRONGER FLESH

Loneliness was his strength. He had to believe that, for however he yearned, for whomever he reached out, he knew no strange hands but his own.

He walked across a naked expanse of rock, faults and crevices offering the only comfort to his eye, the sun to his rear, a yellow blot tainted red-orange, the wound like a pupil, his shadow divided before him, a lesser and a greater, although the two overlapped for most of their area, the result a hazy blur. He did not realise it then, but these shadows would move apart; there was not one sun but two.

The landscape was desolate. Nothing grew. In the distance the rocks rose up to form a jagged horizon, the semblance of fractured wrists and elbows.

The whole was an unhappy scene.

Jerian walked as he had all his life - beyond life, his footfalls breaking the silence. The air was fresh and crisp, imbued with a bitter tang, like some acrid fruit. The sky was an eggshell blue, uniform and hard, as stony in its way as the earth beneath. Truly then, this was a lonely place.

The battle seemed impossibly distant. He had taken one step and was no longer part of it, the rage subsumed by the quiet, the violence by the stillness, the wave of damned souls lifting him above even the tallest heads. There had been no identifiable border, just a change of everything constituting one locality for everything constituting another. Briefly, Jerian's thoughts filled with those he had abandoned. But he felt no guilt. It was vital that he get here, to find and kill.

The horizon drew closer as the going steepened and he was slowed by the climb, rocks piling on rocks as if tipped from a barrow. Behind him the yellow sun dipped below an ocean as dull and featureless as the bare ground he had crossed, a surface now tinged violet, shaded with false rivers of crimson, the red sun ascending a sky less blue than pink. He wondered if night ever truly came. No stars were visible, no moon to echo his dead heart.

Reaching the top he paused. This world presented him with its stark interior, a panorama of stone stretching as far as the eye could see.

Peering intently, the shades thick, the wanderer descried the rounded face of a keep. A second, farther away, and a third and fourth, perhaps more, others screened, hidden from view

Must he lay siege to every one? And, on finding the first empty, travel to the next? The prospect of searching endlessly through all these circular monoliths daunted him. Surely, he would wear his bones to shale before happening upon the prize of his enemy...

But there was no alternative, he told himself, and in so doing began the descent.

His shattered features bore the imprint of a hammer, the most recent of countless blows which had shaped him. His face was as ugly now as it had been at the beginning. The visor had fallen away completely, the bone around it cross-crossed with tiny fissures not unlike those threading the rocks over which he travelled. He set his gaze on the keep closest to him and walked unhurriedly in that direction. In this world, he knew, the outcast had no end of time.

Nearing the structure, its brickwork clean, its windows narrow and high, Jerian caught sight of a lone figure on the battlements. The entrance was unbarred. The keep's foundations blended with the surrounding stone. A central courtyard, a well, the darkened interior visible through a single arch. He passed under its curve, its width sufficient for two horses, its length three loping strides, and emerged facing an old man, his back bent, his hair matted as with difficulty he cranked an iron handle, slowly raised a wooden bucket, the rope frayed, winding to a stop as the bucket jounced against a spindle. Jerian approached the man, who laboured blindly, struggling to keep the handle from spinning loose as he reached for the bucket, and failing, the mechanism turning wildly as the old man's grip weakened, the rope burning his fingers and the bucket dropping out of control, the sound of a splash reverberating up the chimney of the well. It was a sight, which filled Jerian with pity.

He took hold of the handle, but was pushed off. The old man wanted no help; his hands were a ruin, yet he persisted, his body radiating pain as he began once more to lift the heavy bucket from the well. Jerian stood aside. Suspicious, he glanced over the stone lip and saw not water but gold shimmering, the bucket full to the brim with refulgent metal. He wondered how many times the man had lifted his greed only to see it fall. Surprisingly, his pity increased. And what if he succeeded? Or what if the rope snapped? Jerian was refreshed by the old man's sadness. Neither of these things, he presumed, could ever happen.

The gold was gold nonetheless, retaining both weight and colour in the purple light.

The figure he had glimpsed earlier appeared now at the foot of some steps, an old woman whose eyes bulged from their orbits like dappled eggs, bloated and intense, diseased as was her flesh, her gaunt height barely covered by a filthy garment, her arms outstretched as she greeted him, her stench taking hold of him moments before she herself did, a stiff embrace he found impossible to avoid. The old woman kissed him, her lips flaking as they pressed his, her tongue swollen and vile as it entered his mouth. She repulsed him, but he could not escape. Bile stung his throat as he retched uncontrollably. He swallowed hard, her foul spittle locking his teeth, his jaw hers alone to open as she made him drink, her own acid liquids twisting like gutted snakes as he swallowed again, the reflex overwhelming any desire to vomit, his legs shuddering, his entrails polluted, contaminated with all the woman ejected, her wastes and hatred, her years and sickness churning his blood as he shook.

Victim to her poison, his fine scales of armour began to rot from within, their bony roots turned soft, their smooth outer layers speckled like exotic fungi as each contiguous plate distorted, warped and powdery as they loosened...

Thus was he naked.

Standing amidst this debris, stripped of protection, Jerian was vulnerable: the red sun burnt his neck, the skin of his shoulders a mirror reflecting its vanity even as the yellow sun rose above the wall in front of him, streaming into the courtyard, its passage much the quicker, its direction opposite, the two destined to forever merge in their cycles. The paler light drenched him, crawled over his chest and thighs like the hot sweat of a dream, melded to a deep orange around the joint horizons of his limbs. The hair was next to fall from his body; then the teeth.

And underneath it all he was beautiful, made firm and young again.

The old woman smiled; she had mastered him. She shed her clothes and her age and holding the supple palm of his hand guided him back through the arch, the old man still at his task, for this was his keep, and she led Jerian out amongst the bare rocks and displayed him to a third primary, a life-giving green. This third sun was larger than the other two. Its light was soothing and cool, his shadow muted. It crossed the sky at a different angle than either red or yellow, whose paths, albeit contrary, diverged only slightly. Even so, it was possible for all three to be aligned. And where there was a green sun, might there not also be a blue?

And was this new body a gift or a theft?

Jerian was left with these imponderables.

The old woman had deserted him, taken her restored youth, leaving him with his.

She had muttered only a few lines of poetry.

Chapter Thirty - THE NINTH WORLD

The second keep he approached with no more caution. His gums felt bony and even; his tongue tasted sweet. Within its circular wall the rock gave way to a plot of rich earth and the well to a great tree, a towering fir whose cone of branches blocked most of the light, whose silvery foliage captured a moist gauze of dew. Jerian wandered a while beneath its generous eaves, imagining an array of sounds, vague stirrings in the living wood, the rustling of innumerable needles.

Was this a tree of fate then? In just such a place had Hell been woven, his own unfulfilled weird...

If he had the Chalian axe, would he have cut it down? He could not say.

Outside the green sun had risen imperceptibly, the red and yellow setting on opposite horizons.

He continued on to the third.

Inside a lone buck deer grazed a stunted bush, the deer placid, methodic in its chewing, the leaves of the shrub on which it fed small and curled, the young fronds of a potted bramble.

The juice of blackberries stained the deer's tongue. The wanderer thought there was nothing to learn here, unless the animal was offering him clues to the nature of its flesh, and so he carried on.

The fourth keep was considerably farther removed, the rocks about it cracked and steep. He had to climb, groping for holds in the slope. And the blank wall was higher, its circumference enlarged, sat atop these folded cliffs and crowned with singing birds. The well at its heart was shallow and full; no old man laboured here; finches and starlings bathed and drank, flicking bright water from their wings and rising into the skyless heights of the fortress. Jerian stared upwards. He could see many a flickering silhouette, numberless feathers like sparks briefly illuminating the upper reaches. But these were creatures of the air, and their world he could never really know.

Next was a pond, the keep the fifth, its proportions equal to that before save for the much decreased stature of its ring wall. The interior was resplendent with spangled hues, the coloured light bent and refracted by the water that in a variety of ways paralleled the sky of the fourth, as remote and deep, only here there were not feathers but scales and the singing birds were dancing fish. Jerian lay on his belly for a closer look. Bubbles dotted the surface. There was a splash of fins and tails. He accepted the gift of a drink, realising then how like dreams the birds had been, swift and aloof.

An engine was housed in the sixth, its complex whirrings and slowly turning gears suggestive of old age and reason. But there was youth here too, spinning cogs and blurred weights falling and gyrating, levers and springs of greased metal, brass and steel, a flurry of assembled motion whose purpose seemed intrinsic, as much a part of itself as the bones occupying Jerian's newly fortified limbs. Perhaps this machine kept the suns rolling across the firmament - or the suns the machine animated, powered by invisible windings. It was a mystery he carried with him to the seventh.

First he had to cross another escarpment, the steepest yet, its gradient, like its fissures, perilous.

Secrets were in the keep of the next world, its precincts riddled with holes. In truth there may well have existed more than one interior, for the bricks and the niches appeared to shift before his eyes, a trick of the green light that was prevalent.

In the fullness of the sun's bloom he felt the woman had returned to his side. She stroked his neck, her fingers cool, his muscles lean and taut. In her presence he was able to focus solely on the aspect of the niches, placed in each a small jewelled casket.

She begged him to choose one. What was it he wished? What information? Which question was uppermost in his mind? If he could begin to comprehend his life and death, in whose coffin might he look?

His own? His father's?

Yes...

But although sorely tempted, the wanderer did not lift the lid.

The woman was furious. Tearing the casket from his hands she opened it for him.

But all that came out was dust.

And the seventh keep became the eighth, which was death.

Jerian proceeded to the ninth, this the last he could see on the rocky plain, the exterior wall seeming to flatten as he neared, to broaden, the suns grouped close, a swelling of hues at his feet as he moved towards the arch that had eluded him for so long, beyond it the future he sought, all possible futures from which crop he had to pluck a single day, a single blade of grass from a meadow as wide and full as the heavens, for in the future lay the ninth world, and it was power.

Chapter Thirty-One - AMBELLA'S GARDEN

So this was where summer was hiding, in all her fecundity and growth. Jerian wandered casually through the garden, naked as a newborn infant, bloody and unbowed as he burst from womb to wilderness - wilderness to womb in this instance, for the Lady whose realm he violated strove to pry apart the nine worlds and separate earth and sky. Jerian understood the many keeps to be a model of that scheme. Ignorance was its every tool and design. Deliberately, he plucked a flower, a radiant orchid, and heard in the distance a cry.

He might have plucked a hair from between her thighs.

The glorious vegetation was static. A huge blue sun filled the void.

Everything complicated was simple: it could live or die. Except here; here nothing was alive and death was banished, claiming her every work by its absence, as this was a garden doomed to fade.

Her name was Ambella.

Jerian crushed the perfection of grasses as he strode, brushing aside streamers of ivy, plumes of colourful vines whose bulbous fruits were always ripe, florescent walls of greenery from whose generous cups spilled not insects but odours, scents vivid and pungent that gave the hideaway the air of a seraglio, a privileged haven out of which marched a vicious doctrine, a many-toothed ideal of universality, a fear of truth in all its diversity, a shame and a weakness that would destroy before attempting to investigate, that wished to blame and deceive, and which succeeded in creating only hatred.

And yet perhaps she was well intentioned, credulous, the Lady Ambella who shied from her navel.

It made no difference...

From the viewpoint of the garden Jerian embodied negation; the abundant flora quickly blackened, withered and falling to ruin as he passed, turning the atmosphere fetid. But still he walked unopposed through the verdant scenery, the great mass of plants unaffected, the route of his wanderings etched like a maze in the vestments of summer. He might become lost in these reaches, vanished in a labyrinth of his own making, or he might triumph, find his right fist squeezing the blood from her heart.

*

Five horsemen faced him. Their raiments were plain, bleached white trimmed with gold, their horses snorting, heads shaking as they scraped the hard earth.

He thought it a dream.

Then where did he lie?

Udioe placed the axe in his hands, her spirit inhabiting the blade, its two edges her two souls. Jerian felt once more its balance, a precise orientation of ghosts.

There was no army at his back, no boots on his feet. He swung the Chalian steel and the ocean cracked, spuming foam, assailing the stalwart cliff.

The tall men drew longswords, steadied their mounts and advanced. One broke into a gallop, his sword flashing in a lazy arc as man and beast bore down on Jerian, who spread his heels prior to chopping all six legs from his attacker. Others came at him, in that moment realising their destruction. And yet they charged...

So cowardly. So brave.

*

The garden opened onto a ripening field of golden corn. The growth was lush and tall. Jerian cut a fatal swathe, snapping stems between his toes, bringing famine to those people who had ploughed and sown this ground. Rain turned the soil to mud, what was harvested soon to rot, home to vermin and disease, stinking and black like the sores on the arms and backs of the townsfolk.

He wandered through cramped dwellings touching the foreheads of young and old.

He watched as a militia was raised, and rode with it, bringing war to neighbouring lands.

A pestilence took the swampy earth in its grip, lurid and final.

Desolation leaked from his bones.

Ambella taunted him from afar, her children spitting phlegm as with their voices she mocked his efforts, blaming him for each injustice, citing him as the cause of so much pain. And viewing his actions Jerian could think of no retort. Everything in the garden was now besmirched. But he was not dissuaded. He knew the virtue of flames.

*

She challenged his morality. He her hypocrisy. She stroked the chins of her breasts and attempted to bribe him with gold. Jerian held fast to his purpose. The air in the world grew charged. This was her hold. Summer enveloped them both. Snow exited with his breath and spring and autumn were present in his gaze.

He held up his thumb and Ambella dissolved.

The shrill note of a whistle crashed in his ears. The blade of the axe quivered.

Out of a gentle woodland his nemesis staggered, transforming the dark.

Night came as a surprise to Jerian; he had not thought to see it here, in the garden. Now, however, the truth of the dark was interpreted differently.

A howling rose, then quiet. It moved slowly, circling, sniffing, the beast he could no longer avoid. It had followed him from the first, the outset, the birth. His smell was at home in its nostrils and it would devour him. And Jerian was caught.

Deafened by the piping that had summoned the monster and robbed of his sight in the blackness, he found he could not draw air and odour through his nose; the bellows of his lungs remained folded, collapsed in his chest like ancient pears. His hands were numb and his body cold. No sensations fed his brain. He was stranded, disabled, his senses nulled, without warning as the beast closed. Unaware of the act he raised his fingers to his mouth and licked the skin of knuckles and palm. It tasted salty, the sea's bitter tang on his tongue, the strength of tides and currents extant in his saliva as he swallowed, waves of foam surging outwards, surrounding him, rebuffing his nemesis with squalls of spray and sand and wind.

Gulls spun through his flesh, wheeled and dived, snatched at fish, thus joining two worlds.

Man in his hunger brought down the deer where it grazed, roasting the meat, birds and lesser mammals to scavenge the remains.

Lightning had uncovered the secret of fire.

Trees were felled, the ax of stone, copper, bronze, and from villages cities were born.

There were ever more complex engines of war.

And power was always the goal.

That left death. Without death the unfolding world would be overrun.

Chapter Thirty-Two - THE FALL OF SUMMER

Jerian walked amidst the corpses of the tall, slicing open bellies and finding neither guts nor stomachs. The puzzle did not baffle him for long. And whereas they did not eat, they were not sexless, able then to procreate and raise their numbers. Men and women, in life so graceful, here reduced to the status of cadavers, their nascent souls huddled together in cloying mists, their flesh reclaimed and dismantled, such treatment a fact of defeat.

They blew away like leaves...

Chapter Thirty-Three - THE WASTING

What colour will the sun be when it rises? pondered Jerian, the earth solid underfoot, the stars hot white irons. On the battlefield he had stumbled across the decapitated body of an owl, its bloody plumage a twisted ruin, its wings encumbered as gradually it sank in the mud.

Red? Green?

Sounds filled the night, murmurings of the damned, notes of dissatisfaction, the slamming of shields and helms. There was thirst and anger amongst them, the aftermath of carnage, all the frustrations of victory.

Yellow?

Nothing was certain; soldier's gambled.

The farmers refashioned their maces and javelins. The artists made jewellery from arrowheads. Shopkeepers opened for business and masons were occupied, sculpters and carpenters augmenting their buildings with post-war confidence. But a significant few chose to retain their weapons and morbid livery, knowing no other trade, preying upon strangers whose flesh was new, vital, warm.

They were the pale and they haunted the land, taking the fight to the quick and uncovering fresh enemies. The wanderer pursued these renegades, their trail one of fear and waste, a ragged troop of disparate adventurers whose faces were ever changing, whose niche in the world was cut from greed, carved in wealth and misunderstanding. Jerian could not expect to catch them all. His task was unending. If the sun did not rise this day, still he and the earth were in motion.

It was a heavy toll they exacted, the ravening consequences of disorder, a price demanded in full. But dawn, the outcast knew, was only ever delayed, never suspended.

Wondrous orange in her wakening, the mother of light cast her spell on the sky, illuminating clouds and prising loose the dreams of beasts and forests. Shadows yawned, lingering, and the nine worlds deserted the past as one.

Saddling a nameless horse, Jerian brooded over yesterday's confrontations, the challenges met and the adversaries killed or conquered. As always he felt disheartened; the blood ran thick in his veins and his bowels clenched with anticipation, yet he was ageless, forever wedded to the cause he championed.

He could have no fear of death - but remained frightened, a small boy inside a large man, confused and emotional, driven by something bigger, a subsequent flesh inside which he babbled and cringed, the words he would not speak reverberating in his skull like trapped insects, fragments of countless lives he had no choice but to assemble, doing the best he could, failing often, retracing his steps and trying again, the occasional success down more to luck than cunning, on that persons lips a smile.

And a smile was his only reward. Udioe was lost to him, her comfort a memory...

The closeness another woman's.

He cried in her arms. He did not love or number his children. He wore his hair short and bathed in the wildest rivers, sometimes drifting out to sea where the fish could nibble him. His mind travelled free of his bones.

Through contemplation the nature of his tremors were made clear to him. It was a truth scaring Jerian, the knowledge that given the chance he would eschew his victories, would have stood by as summer and the Lady triumphed, if Udioe was his, the conclusion of his wanderings a shared grave, her hands in his own. There would be no more doubts, no more guilt, no more whispers, just the shining girl, limp and fragile, a love in death and silence...

But there was no such promise; never had been. So Jerian swallowed his pain and rode.

