I do not love her. That much is clear. Nor do I wish her love. I am a ghost. I linger on through lack of will.
In the distance, riders had emerged from the wall of black grasses. Some led horses bearing what looked like bodies. He had been watching the troop for some time as they walked their mounts alongside the sharp edge of Glimmer Fate. They were now directly opposite him and would soon pass as they continued south.
There was an ancient saying his father had been wont to use, wielding the words like weapons to batter down his children. A hero’s name will live for ever. Die forgotten, and you have not lived at all. When Kagamandra had returned home from the wars, the lone survivor among his father’s children, he had been a hero of renown, a warrior raised high on the shield of nobility – gifted with title and honour. His father had stared at him with lifeless eyes and said nothing.
In the following year, the old man elected to waste away to nothing, behaving as if all his sons had died. He never again spoke Kagamandra’s name. You’d forgotten it, perhaps. And so I, who lived, never lived at all. Your favourite saying, Father, proved a lie, when at last it settled at your feet. Or was it you who failed it?
No matter. Not a single reward did not taste bitter once I returned home. I did not return to find my bride awaiting me. I did not return to my father, for the news had preceded my arrival, and when at last I came, he was already standing in the shadow of death.
He did not love Faror Hend. He’d not even wanted her. When he huddled under the furs at night, hearing the distant cries of the lizard wolves of Glimmer Fate, he thought not of that young woman. He thought, instead, of Sharenas.
How many fatal choices could a man make? Many, because even death need not be sudden. It can be measured out like sips of poison. Each day can be greeted as if it too had died, and but awaited your arrival. How many deaths could a man endure? I still walk a field of corpses, and not one of them has anything good to say, but I have learned to look them in the eye and not flinch. I thank my father for that.
He stepped away from the ledge, worked his way down the narrow, crooked path to his camp.
He fed the last of the forage to his horse and then gathered and bound his bed furs, strapped on his sword and checked over the rest of his gear before saddling his scrawny mount.
A short time later, astride his horse, he emerged from the defile, swung the animal over the crest and rode down a red slope of silts to the hard, frozen plain. Snowflakes spun down from the sky. He set out at a slow canter, to work some heat into the beast’s legs.
* * *
Bursa re-joined them. ‘It is Kagamandra Tulas, commander.’
Calat Hustain rode on for a moment longer, and then reined in. The rest of the troop drew up around their leader.
The veteran sergeant settled in the saddle, gloved hands resting on the horn. Since the day on the Vitr shore, Bursa had not slept well. Each night pulled him into a fevered world where dragons wheeled overhead whilst he ran across a vast, featureless plain. His arms were burdened with strange objects: a silver chalice, a crown, a sceptre, a small chest from which gold coins spilled.
In this nightmare, he was the lone protector of these treasures, but the dragons were not hunting him. They but circled overhead like carrion birds. They waited for him to fall, and onward he ran, flinching from their vast shadows that played over the ground ahead. The coins kept falling, bouncing and scattering in his wake – there seemed to be no end to them. And when the sceptre slipped through his grasp and fell, he found another one, identical to the last, still in his arms.
The crown, he saw, was broken. Mangled. The chalice was dented.
The Eleint were patient overhead. He could not run for ever, and there was no place in which to hide. Even the ground under his feet was too hard for him to make a hole, to bury his precious hoard.
Awakening in the dawn, he was red-eyed with exhaustion, and he found himself repeatedly searching the sky during the course of each day’s travel.
They had seen no further sign of the terrible creatures. The Eleint had plunged into this world through a gaping rent in the air above the Vitr, only to then vanish. Somehow, this was worse – and during the day Bursa almost longed to see one, a minute talon-slash of black off in the distance. But this desire never lasted the journey into sleep.
At Calat Hustain’s command he had ridden back to discern the identity of the lone rider following them. It seemed now that they would await the man. Bursa glanced across at Spinnock Durav, and felt a stab of something close to resentment. The young could weather anything, and among them there were those who stood out even among their peers, and Spinnock Durav was such a man. Was it his perfect features that made certain the founding stones of his confidence, or did some residue of untrammelled self-worth seep out to settle into his face, creating the illusion of balance and open equanimity?
Bursa was tasked with protecting the young Warden by none other than Captain Finarra Stone. But it had been Spinnock’s warning cry that had saved everyone, down at the shoreline. Or perhaps Bursa misremembered – it had been a fraught time. But when he revisited that shout in his memory, it came in Spinnock’s voice.
I begin to obsess. Again. All my life, this same game. I but move from one to another. No peace, no hope of rest. I run like the fool of my dreams, carrying the last treasures of Wise Kharkanas.
Eleint.
Spinnock Durav. She should never have charged me with this task. Should never have invited me to fix my attention upon him. Did she guess nothing of the envy hiding within me, and how it would find Durav? Obsession runs down the same path, again and again. Each time, the same stony trail. Envy is a sharp emotion. It has purpose and it has power. It needs someone to hate, and it seems I have found him.
Spinnock Durav caught his eye and smiled. ‘Another two days of this, sergeant, and then we’re home.’
Bursa nodded, tugging at the strap on his helm, where it had begun rubbing his throat raw. The air was cold and it was dry, and his skin never did well in this miserable season. He leaned back and scanned the dull sky. The snow spinning in the air seemed to fail in reaching the ground.
‘Cold up there, I’d think,’ said Spinnock, edging his mount up alongside Bursa. ‘Even for a dragon.’
Bursa scowled. Of course the man had noted his habit, and now teased him for it. ‘My bones ache,’ he said to Durav. ‘Tells me a storm is coming. I but seek its measure.’
Spinnock offered another quick smile and nodded. ‘I thought we might outrun it, sergeant.’ He twisted to watch the approach of Kagamandra Tulas. ‘But it seems not.’
Only then, in following the young man’s gaze, did Bursa see the swollen bank of the storm front, spread across the north horizon. Grunting, he shook his head. His thoughts stumbled with weariness, building reckless bridges in his mind.
Calat Hustain tapped heels against his horse’s flanks and worked his way free of his troop, reining in just beyond the last horses with their bound corpses as Kagamandra Tulas finally arrived.
‘Captain,’ said Calat in greeting. ‘You are far from the track between Neret Sorr and our winter camp – have you been looking for me? What dire Legion pronouncement must I face now?’
The grey-bearded warrior was unkempt, his heavy cloak filthy. The horse he rode was gaunt. He held up a gauntleted hand as if to forestall Calat’s questions. ‘No word from Urusander accompanies me, commander. I travel upon my own purpose, not that of the Legion.’
‘Then you have no news?’
Bursa saw Kagamandra hesitate, and then shrug. ‘Winter is a yoke upon all ambitions. But I would say beware the spring, Calat Hustain.’