‘No. For the time of night, when you wake. When you rise and walk the camp. The time of night when your haunts return to you. Your nerves tremble. A restless thing takes you, a thing you cannot name, unless you clothe it in your deepest fears. You wake and stand, when others would fight back into sleep, into losing themselves again. This is a terrible vigil, a solitary vigil. It is the vigil of one who stands alone.’
With the toe of one boot, Narad pushed the end of a branch deeper into the fire. He could think of nothing to say. The other names he had earned had stung. But not this one. He wondered why.
‘My hunters honour you,’ said Glyph.
‘What? No, they ignore me.’
‘Yes, just so.’
‘You call that honouring? You Deniers – I don’t understand you.’
‘The Watch is always alone. Their story makes them so. We see in your eyes, friend, that you have never known love. Perhaps this is necessary, for the task awaiting you.’
Narad thought about Glyph’s words. He had set for himself a task. That much was true. But he had doubt as to the purity of his purpose: after all, that Legion troop was witness to his shame, and the faces he saw, at night – the ones that started him awake with the sky black overhead – were ones he wanted to cut away, cut down, crush under his heel. My shame. Each of them. All of them. He could raise high his vow, voice her name like a prayer, and announce himself the weapon of her vengeance. And even then, he would hear his own whispered hunger, heart-wounded and pathetic, for something like redemption.
There were mines where worked the fallen and the failed, the unforgivable fools who carried with them their unforgivable deeds. They crawled into the earth, burrowed under heavy stone and layers of rock. They dug their way through their unforgiving world, and deemed that a kind of penance. He should have gone to such a place. If only to shatter the bedrock holding that iron stake, shatter it, see me burst free, to run a straight path – straight as an arrow, straight over the nearest cliff.
To Glyph he now said, ‘My task is vengeance. Against my own shame. Others took … bits of it. I need to hunt them down and take it back. If I can do that … if I can reach that, that place …’
‘You will then be redeemed,’ said Glyph, nodding.
‘Which must not be, Glyph. Must never be allowed to happen. For what I did … no redemption is possible. Do you understand?’
‘The Watch, then, must guard a bridge destined to fall. The Watch who stands, and stands fast, is our harbinger of failure.’
‘No. What are you saying? This – this crime of mine – it has nothing to do with you Deniers. Your cause is just. Mine isn’t.’
‘The two must recognize each other, friend, and then together look upon the deed between them. See how it is, in the end, one and the same.’
Narad studied the warrior. ‘It seems you have already invented me, Glyph. Found a way to, well, hammer me into your way of seeing the world. I am an awkward fit, don’t you think? Best find another, someone else, someone with less … less history.’
But Glyph shook his head. ‘We do not fear this … your awkward fit. Why fear such a thing? A world made smooth allows no purchase. Neither a way into it nor a way out from it. It is closed on itself. It makes its own answer, and so lies undisturbed by doubt.’
Narad scowled at the fire. ‘What are we waiting for, Glyph? There are soldiers I need to find and kill.’
Glyph waved a hand, and then straightened. ‘Visitors are coming. They will soon be here.’
‘All right. Coming from where?’
‘From a holy shrine. From an altar black with old blood.’
‘Priests? What need have we for priests?’
‘They walk the forest. For days now. We have been following their progress, and it seems that it will bring them here, to this camp. So we wait, to see what comes of it.’
Narad rubbed at his face. The ways of the Deniers remained a mystery. ‘When do they arrive, then?’
Glyph set a hand on Narad’s shoulder. ‘Tonight, I think. In your time of waking.’
In his dream Narad walked a shoreline of fire. He held a sword in his hand, but trailed its tip through the sand, and the sand was spitting sparks and flaring as embers were pushed to the sides of the wavering furrow left by the weapon’s point. The blood on the blade had burned, curled black. He was exhausted, and he knew that somewhere behind him he had left behind a much larger wake, one made up of corpses piled to either side.
Flames surrounded him, rising high as burning trees. Ash rained down.
There was a woman beside him. Perhaps she had always been there, but he had no sense of time. He felt as if he had been walking this shoreline for ever.
‘You’ll find no love here,’ the woman said.
He did not turn to her. It was not yet time to see her, to meet her eyes. She walked like a sister, not a lover, or perhaps just a companion, but not a friend. When he answered, a tremble of shock followed his own words. ‘Yet here I will stand, my queen.’
‘Why? This is not your war.’
‘I have been thinking on that, highness. On war. I have been thinking that it does not matter where the war is, or who fights it. Or whether we hold blood ties to the slayers, or not. It could well be on the other side of the world, fought by strangers, for reasons we cannot even understand. None of that matters, highness. It is our war nonetheless.’
‘How so, Yedan Narad?’
‘Because, in the end, nothing divides us. Nothing distinguishes us. We commit the same crimes, taking lives, holding ground, yielding ground, crossing blood-drenched borders – lines in the sand no different from this one here. With fires at our backs, and fires ahead – I thought I understood this sea, highness, but now I see that I did not understand it at all.’ He raised his sword and pointed its tip at the shimmering, flame-wrought surface beyond the shore. The weapon bucked and trembled in his hand, as if bound to its very own will. ‘That, my queen, is the realm of peace. We dream of swimming it, but when at last we do, we but drown.’
‘Then, O brother, you give us no hope, if war defines our existence, and peace our death.’
‘We all commit violence on ourselves, highness. It is more than just brother against brother, sister against sister, or any other combination you care to imagine. Our thoughts wage savage mayhem in our skulls, with no respite. We fight desires, wave banners of hope, tear down the standards of every promise we have dared utter. In our heads, my queen, is a world that is without peace, and by that description we define life itself.’
‘You question your purpose, brother,’ she said. ‘After all this. It is no surprise.’
‘I was a lover of men, Twilight-’
‘No. That is not you.’
Confusion took him and he almost stumbled. Drunkenly righting himself, he let the sword drop again, the point sending up a burst of sparks as it struck the sands. They walked on. He shook his head. ‘Forgive me, it nears the time.’
‘Yes. I understand, brother. The night crawls; even should we lie in sleep and so see nothing of it, still, it crawls.’
‘I would have you, my queen, uproot the spike.’
‘I know,’ she replied in a soft voice.
‘Their faces were my shame.’
‘Yes.’
‘So I cut them all down.’
‘White faces,’ she murmured. ‘Not sharing our … indecision. We are their only shadow, brother, and in that, we can never lie to them. You did what you had to do. You did what they demanded of you.’
‘I died in my sister’s arms.’
‘Not you.’
‘Are you sure, my queen?’
‘Yes.’
He halted, shoulders hunching, head bowing. ‘Highness, I must ask you – who set this world afire?’
She reached out to him, one soft gore-smeared hand touching the line of his jaw, lifting his gaze to her own. The rapists had done their work. There was no forgetting that. He remembered the feel of her broken body beneath him, and the ragged mess that had been her wedding dress. With dead eyes, she looked upon him, and her dead lips parted, to utter the dead words, ‘You did.’