The boy saw that no herds remained on the hillsides, wolves had come down, perhaps, uncontested; or the other villagers had driven the beasts with them. After all, a sanctuary would have such needs as food and water, milk and cheese.
He set off on the north trail, the dogs accompanying him.
They were happy, he saw. Pleased that he now led them. And the sun overhead, that had been blinding, was blinding no longer. The boy had come to and now crossed a threshold, into the fourth and final time.
He knew not when it would end.
With languid eyes, Felisin Younger stared at the scrawny youth who had been brought in by the Unmanned Acolytes. Just one more lost survivor looking to her for meaning, guidance, for something to believe in that could not be crushed down and swept away by ill winds.
He was a Carrier – the swellings at his joints told her that. Likely, he had infected the rest of his village. The nodes had suppurated, poisoning the air, and everyone else had died. He had arrived at the gates of the city that morning, in the company of twelve half-wild dogs. A Carrier, but here, in this place, that was not cause for banishment. Indeed, the very opposite. Kulat would take the boy under his wing, for teaching in the ways of pilgrimage, for this would be his new calling, to carry plague across the world, and so, among the survivors in his wake, gather yet more adherents to the new religion.
Faith in the Broken, the Scarred, the Unmanned – all manner of sects were being formed, membership defined by the damage the plague had delivered to each survivor. Rarest and most precious among them, the Carriers.
All that Kulat had predicted was coming to pass. Survivors arrived, at first a trickle, then by the hundred, drawn here, guided by the hand of a god. They began excavating the long-buried city, making for themselves homes amidst the ghosts of long-dead denizens who still haunted the rooms, the hallways and the streets, silent and motionless, spectres witnessing a rebirth, on their faint, blurred faces a riot of expressions ranging from dismay to horror. How the living could terrify the dead.
Herders arrived with huge flocks, sheep and goats, the long-limbed cattle called eraga that most had believed extinct for a thousand years – Kulat said that wild herds had been found in the hills – and here the dogs recollected what they had been bred for in the first place and now fended the beasts against the wolves and the grey eagles that could lift a newborn calf in their talons.
Artisans had arrived and had begun producing images that had been born in their sickness, in their fevers: the God in Chains, the multitudes of the Broken and the Scarred and the Unmanned. Images on pottery, on walls painted in the ancient mix of eraga blood and red ochre, stone statues for the Carriers. Fabrics woven with large knots of wool to represent the nodules, scenes of fever patterns of colour surrounding central images of Felisin herself, Sha'ik Reborn, the deliverer of the true Apocalypse.
She did not know what to make of all this. She was left bewildered again and again by what she witnessed, every gesture of worship and adoration. The horror of physical disfigurement assailed her on all sides, until she felt numb, drugged insensate. Suffering had become its own language, life itself defined as punishment and imprisonment.
And this is my flock.
Her followers had, thus far, answered her every need but one, and that was the growing sexual desire, reflecting the changes overtaking her body, the shape of womanhood, the start of blood between her legs, and the new hunger feeding her dreams of succour. She could not yearn for the touch of slaves, for slavery was what these people willingly embraced, here and now, in this place they called Hanar Ara, the City of the Fallen.
Around a mouthful of stones, Kulat said, 'And this is the problem, Highness.'
She blinked. She hadn't been listening. 'What? What is the problem?'
'This Carrier, who arrived but this morning from the southwest track.
With his dogs that answer only to him.'
She regarded Kulat, the old bastard who confessed sexually fraught dreams of wine as if the utterance was itself more pleasure than he could bear, as if confession made him drunk. 'Explain.'
Kulat sucked at the stones in his mouth, swallowed spit, then gestured. 'Look upon the buds, Highness, the buds of disease, the Many Mouths of Bluetongue. They are shrinking. They have dried up and are fading. He has said as much. They have grown smaller. He is a Carrier who shall, one day, cease being a Carrier. This child shall lose his usefulness.'
Usefulness. She looked upon him again, more carefully this time, and saw a hard, angular face older than its years, clear eyes, a frame that needed more flesh and would likely find it once again, now that he had food to eat. A boy still young, who would grow into a man. 'He shall reside in the palace,' she said.
Kulat's eyes widened. 'Highness-'
'I have spoken. The Open Wing, with the courtyard and stables, where he can keep his dogs-'
'Highness, there are plans for converting the Open Wing into your own private garden-'
'Do not interrupt me again, Kulat. I have spoken.'
My own private garden. The thought now amused her, as she reached for her goblet of wine. Yes, and we shall see how it grows.
So carried on her unspoken thoughts, Felisin saw nothing of Kulat's sudden dark look, the moment before he bowed and turned away.
The boy had a name, but she would give him a new name. One better suited to her vision of the future. After a moment, she smiled. Yes, she would name him Crokus.
Chapter Fifteen
An old man past soldiering his rivets green, his eyes rimmed in rust, stood as if heaved awake from slaughter's pit, back-cut from broken flight when young blades chased him from the field.
He looks like a promise only fools could dream unfurled, the banners of glory gesticulating in the wind over his head, stripped like ghosts, skulls stove in, lips flapping, their open mouths mute.
'Oh harken to me,' cries he atop his imagined summit, and I shall speak – of riches and rewards, of my greatness, my face once young like these I see before me – harken!'
While here I sit at the Tapu's table, grease-fingered with skewered meat, cracked goblet pearled in the hot sun, the wine watered to make, in the alliance of thin and thick, both passing palatable.
As near as an arm's reach from this rabbler, this ravelling trumpeter who once might have stood shield-locked at my side, red-hued, masked drunk, coarse with fear, in the moment before he broke broke and ran and now he would call a new generation to war, to battle-clamour, and why? Well, why – all because he once ran, but listen: a soldier who ran once ever runs, and this, honoured magistrate, is the reason the sole reason I say for my knife finding his back.
He was a soldier whose words heaved me awake.
Within an aura redolent and reminiscent of a crypt, Noto Boil, company cutter, Kartoolian by birth and once priest of Soliel, long, wispy, colourless hair plucked like strands of web by the wind, his skin the hue of tanned goat leather, stood like a bent sapling and picked at his green-furred teeth with a fish spine. It had been a habit of his for so long that he had worn round holes between each tooth, and the gums had receded far back, making his smile skeletal.
He had smiled but once thus far, by way of greeting, and for Ganoes Paran, that had been once too many.
At the moment, the healer seemed at best pensive, at worst distracted by boredom. 'I cannot say for certain, Captain Kindly,' the man finally said.