“You remember the letters, brother?” Vaelin asked. “The letters you found on the body of the archer I killed. The letters that set us to war with Cumbrael.”
It was only a slight change in the angle of his head, a small shift in the set of his shoulders, a new curve to his lips, but suddenly Barkus was gone, like smoke in the wind. When he spoke Vaelin was unsurprised to hear a familiar voice, the voice of two dead men. “Do you really think you’re going to serve a Queen of Fire, brother?”
Vaelin’s heart plummeted like a stone. He had been nurturing a withered hope that he might be wrong, that Antesh had been lying and his brother was still the noble warrior sailing away with the morning tide. Now it was gone and there was just the two of them, alone on the beach with death coming swiftly. “I’m told there are other prophecies,” he replied.
“Prophecies?” The thing that had been Barkus grated a harsh, ugly laugh. “You know so little. All of you, scribbling down your fumbling attempts at wisdom, calling it scripture when it’s just the rantings of the mad and the power-hungry.”
“The Test of the Wild. Is that when you took him?”
The thing wearing Barkus’s face grinned. “He wanted to live so badly. Finding Jennis was a gift of life but his sense of brotherhood was so strong he couldn’t bring himself to do what was necessary.”
“He found Jennis’s body frozen, with no cloak.”
The thing laughed again, harsh, grating, enjoying its cruelty. “His body and his soul. Jennis was still alive, half dead with cold, but still breathing, whispering pleas for Barkus to save him. Of course there was nothing he could do, and he was so very hungry. Hunger does strange things to a man, reminds him he is just an animal, an animal that needs to feed, and flesh is just flesh. The temptation sickened him, the hunger driving him beyond the edge of madness, and so he wandered out into the snow and lay down to die.”
Hentes Mustor, One Eye, the carpenter who burned Ahm Lin’s house, all once close to death. “Death is your gateway.”
“They call to us, across the hateful void, the plaintive call of a soul near death, like a lost lamb drawing a wolf. Not all can be taken, only those with the seed of malice and the gift of power.”
“Barkus had no malice.”
Another venomous cackle. “If there’s a man without malice in his heart I’ve yet to meet him. Barkus had hidden his so deep he barely knew it was there, festering like a maggot in his soul, waiting to be fed, waiting for me. It was his father you see, the father who had sent him away, who hated and envied his gift. He saw the wondrous things the boy could do with metal and hungered for the power. It is the way of things for those of us with gifts. Wouldn’t you agree, brother?”
“Were you always him? Every word spoken since, every deed, every kindness. I can’t believe it was all you.”
The thing shrugged. “Believe what you wish. They come close to death, we take them, from that moment they are ours. We know what they know, makes it so easy to maintain the mask.”
The blood-song whispered, a faint but jarring note. “You’re lying. Hentes Mustor was not fully within your command, was he? That’s why you killed him before he could tell me the lies you whispered to him in the voice of his god. And when you came for Aspect Elera you had three men under your yolk yet they attacked separately, no doubt your business with Aspect Corlin at the house of the Fourth Order taxed your abilities. I don’t think you can fully control more than one mind at once, and I’ll wager your grip can be broken.”
The thing inclined Barkus’s head. “Battle Sight is a powerful gift indeed. Soon you’ll be close to death and one of us will come to claim it. Lyrna loves you, Malcius trusts you. Who better to guide them through the difficult years ahead? What malice lurks in your breast I wonder? Your Master Sollis perhaps? Janus and his endless schemes? Or is it the Order? After all, they sent you here to draw me out and in doing so robbed you of the woman you love. Tell me there is no malice there, brother.”
“If it’s my song you want why have you sought my death twice now? Sending hirelings into the Urlish to kill me during the Test of the Run, sending Sister Henna to my room the night of the Aspect Massacre.”
“What use have we for hirelings? And Henna’s mission was conceived in haste, so troublesome to find you at the House of the Fifth Order that night of all nights, before we knew what power you could offer us. She sends her regards, by the way. So sorry she couldn’t be here.”
He searched for some guidance from the blood-song but found only silence. This thing was not lying. “If not you, then who?” His voice faded as it came to him, borne on a despairing chord from the blood-song: Brother Harlick’s fear in the Fallen City. Have you come to kill me? “The Seventh Order,” he murmured aloud.
“Did you really think they were just a bunch of harmless mystics labouring in service to your absurd faith? They have their own plans, their own agents. Do not delude yourself that they would hesitate to seek your death should you prove an obstacle.”
“Then why have they not attacked me since?”
The thing shifted Barkus’s body in badly concealed unease. “They are biding their time, waiting for their chance.”
Another lie, confirmed by the blood-song. The wolf. The Seventh set its hirelings on me but the wolf killed them. Had they seen it as evidence of some Dark blessing, protection afforded by a power they feared? Questions. As ever, there were always more questions.
“Were you once a man?” he asked it. “Did you have a name?”
“Names mean much to the living but to those who’ve felt the depthless chill of the void they seem the conceit of children.”
“So you were alive once. You had a body of your own.”
“A body? Yes I had a body. Torn by the wilderness and wasted by hunger, pursued by hate at every turn. I had a body born of a raped mother they called a witch. We were driven out because her gift could turn the wind. The man who fathered me lied and said she had used the Dark to compel him to bed her. Lied that he refused to stay with her when the spell faded. Lied that she had used her gift to spoil the crops in revenge. With stones and rotting filth they drove us into the forest where we lived like animals until the hunger and the cold took her from me. But I lived on, more a beast than a boy, forgetting language and custom, forgetting everything but revenge. And in time I took it, in full measure.”
“‘He called forth the lightning,’” Vaelin quoted. “‘And the village burned. The people fled to the river but he swelled it with rain until the banks burst and carried them away. Still his vengeance was not sated and he brought down a blast of wind from the far north to encase them in ice.’”
The thing formed a smile, chilling in its complete lack of cruelty, a smile of fond remembrance. “I can still see his face, my father, frozen in the ice, staring up at me from the depths of the river. I pissed on it.”
“The Witch’s Bastard,” Vaelin whispered. “The story must be three centuries old.”
“Time is as much a delusion as your faith, brother. To look into the void is to see the vastness and smallness of everything at once, in an instant of terror and wonder.”
“What is it? This void you talk of?”
The thing’s smile became cruel once more. “Your faith calls it the Beyond.”
“You lie!” he spat, even though there was no sound from the blood-song. “The Beyond is a place of endless peace, complete wisdom, sublime unity with the everlasting souls of the Departed.”