Steven Erikson - Forge of Darkness

He remembered something his grandfather used to say. ‘ The man patrolling his prejudices never sleeps.’ As a boy, Ivis had not quite understood what Ivelis had meant by that. But he thought he understood now. No matter. The philosophers dug deep moats around their definitions of things like the soul; moats that no animal could breach, since animals spoke the wrong language and so could never argue their way across. Still, when Ivis looked into a horse’s eyes, or a dog’s, or a felled deer’s in the last moments when the beast shudders and blinks with eyes filled with pain and terror, he saw the refutation of every philosopher’s argument.

Life did more than flicker. It burned with fire. He knew it to be a fire for the simple reason that eventually it burned itself out. It ate up all the fuel it possessed, and dimmed and waned, and then was gone.

But were life and soul one and the same? Why the division at all?

Anyone could draw circles in the dust, but in the greater scheme of things, it made for a pathetic moat.

His Houseblades had pushed away their weariness and were attending to their mounts. Saddles were pulled off, brushes drawn. Hands stroked down the length of muscles, felt along tendons and brushed bones under stretched hide. The animals stood motionless: Ivis never knew if they but tolerated the attention, or were comforted by it. He’d seen mischief in animals, but none of them could smile. And always, their eyes were but wells of mystery.

Corporal Yalad moved up alongside him. ‘Sir, they wheeled with precision, didn’t they? Never seen anything so perfect.’

Ivis grunted. ‘You want compliments, corporal? Maybe even a kiss? Go find that maid you keep rocking up the wall back of the stables. I’m the wrong man to make you feel good, and if I wanted a conversation I’d find someone with more than half a brain.’

Yalad backed a step. ‘Apologies, sir.’

The captain knew that his foul mood was the subject of plenty of barracks talk. If no one knew the cause of it, all the better as far as Ivis was concerned. It just made them work harder trying to please him, or at least avoid a dressing down. If they knew, they’d think him mad.

There was something in the air, in this summer heat, that felt… wrong. As if malice had a smell, a stink, and even the hot winds blew through it and left it untouched, and the sun could not beat it down and all the ripening crops could not burn it away.

Days like this were making his skin crawl. He’d seen lone riders skirting the estate grounds, cutting fast and hard across Dracons land. He’d caught the faint smell of bad smoke, the kind of smoke that came from burnt clothes, burnt possessions, burnt hair and flesh — but never enough to be entirely certain, to even so much as sense a direction or possible source.

He had taken to watching sunsets, wandering out into the trees or drifting along the forest’s edge, and in the failing of light he found moments of frightening stillness, as if even in a held breath some breath was lost, the faintest exhalation, smelling of something wrong.

If all life possessed a soul, then perhaps it too was a burning fire, and just as life burned out when it had used itself up, so too did a soul. But maybe it took longer to wink out. Maybe it took for ever. But just as life could sicken, so too could a soul — sometimes one could tell, if there were eyes to look into, if there was an easy focus to that wrongness. When he walked through the dusk, along the forest’s dark line, he thought he could feel the land’s soul — a soul made up of countless smaller souls — and what he felt was something sickening.

Ivis turned to Corporal Yalad. ‘Round everyone up and head back. Walk the horses on to the track, then everyone dog-trot up to the gate. Shake out those muscles. Everyone cleans up before mess.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘I’ll be in later.’

‘Of course, sir.’

The forest, preserved by an edict from Lord Draconus, ran like a curled finger between hills, following the line of an ancient valley’s riverbed. Its tip, where it was thinnest, was at this field’s edge, where it stretched to almost touch Dracons Hold. If he walked northward, up the track of that finger, the forest thickened, and if one persisted in the simile, spread out to form the hand where the valley opened on to a floodplain. This was the forest’s ancient heart.

It had been years since Ivis last ventured there. Few people did, as Draconus had forbidden the harvesting of its wood or the hunting of whatever animals dwelt within it. Ivis had been instructed to patrol its edges on a regular basis, but at random intervals. Poaching was always a risk, but the punishment was death and that punishment could be carried out by the patrols, and this discouraged the petty hunters and wood cutters. But the real deterrent was the Lord’s own generosity. No one starved on his lands, and no one had to brave the winter without fuel. It was, to the captain’s mind, extraordinary what was possible when those people who could do something, did. He knew that not everyone appreciated it enough. Some poachers just liked poaching; they liked working outside the laws; they liked secrecy and deceit and that sense of making fools of their betters.

Ivis suspected that there weren’t many of those people left on the lands of Lord Draconus, or they were biding their time. The last hanging of a poacher had been three seasons past.

He walked through the forest. The few game trails he came across had been made by small animals. The larger game had been hunted into extinction long ago — long before the arrival of Draconus. There was a kind of deer, no higher than the captain’s knee, but they were nocturnal and so rarely seen. He’d heard the eerie cries of fox and had noted owl scat, but even these signs could not disguise the impoverishment of this remnant forest. His senses felt the absence all around him, like the pressure of silent, unrelieved guilt. He’d once enjoyed wandering these woods, but no longer.

The day’s light was fading. As if searching for something he knew he wouldn’t find, Ivis pushed on, deeper into the forest, where it spread out and occasional ancient trees still remained, their black bark sweating in the shadows. He saw slashes of red here and there, from trees that had toppled and split. The flesh of the blackwood was too much like muscle, like meat, to the captain’s eyes. It had always unnerved him.

He wondered at his own impulse, at this seemingly thoughtless push to continue onward. Was he fleeing what he knew was coming? There was nowhere he could run to. Besides, he had duties. His lord relied upon him, to train these Houseblades, to prepare them for the sudden loss of control that was civil war. Lord Draconus did not make use of spies. Dracons Hold was isolated. Unknown events swirled around them.

He found himself upon a trail, this one clear to a man’s height. The boles of the trees lining it looked misshapen. Ivis stopped. He studied one, peering through the gathering gloom. The trunk made a shape, as if hands had moulded the wood itself. It bulged outward. He made out a vaguely feminine form, but bloated. He saw something similar in the next tree, and upon others, all lining this trail. A chill crept through him.

He had not known that there were Deniers living in this forest; but then, never before had he walked into its ancient heart. He knew that he had nothing to fear from them, and that they would probably hide from him. It was likely that he had already been seen. But that sense of sickness would not leave him.

Mouth dry, he continued on.

The avenue of trees opened out on to a glade studded with wooden stakes, driven into the ground in a tight pattern, impenetrable and threatening. They stood high as his hips. In the centre of this spiral was a body, impaled through its back, through its arms and its legs. The tips thrusting up through the broken flesh glistened in the faint starlight.