Carol Berg - Flesh and Spirit

The warriors were on us then, great looming shadows in the dark—distant daylight outlining their bulk. The tight passage restricted Voushanti’s opponents to two at once, preventing a quick slaughter. I kept to the deepest shadows behind Voushanti, positioning Brother Victor’s slight body across my shoulders while the Evanori efficiently dispatched two, then four, then five pursuers in a blurring flail of sword and ax.

“Now,” he gasped as the sixth man fell, “run!”

I bolted. I could have carried two of Brother Victor without slowing, yet we had no route but through the mob. Those outside the walls could not know we were the objects of Sila Diaglou’s wrath, and so it was not deliberate opposition that forced us to a standstill, but merely the crush of overexcited bodies.

“Stand aside,” shouted Voushanti, over and over, forcing a path through the press, angling toward the side where the crowd was thinner. “Our brother…wounded by raiders…by Karish infidels…Let us through!”

Voushanti’s ferocity and our orange scarves gave us passage. But the mardane’s cloak had been torn halfway off. We had reached no more than halfway across the square, when a woman noticed the Evanori blazon on his surcoat. “Damn all, he’s the Bastard’s man!”

Haggard, starving faces, alight with manic fever, closed in, pressing us toward one fiery border of the square, crowding between us and our escape. “Who are you?” yelled a hollow-cheeked man. “What are you about? Who’ve you got there?”

“The Bastard defies the Gehoum…thinks to rival them…” The murmurs grew hostile. “Don’t trust him.”

Voushanti waved them off, spinning a half circle with his fouled ax and the bloody tip of his blade. Yet inevitably they pressed us backward, ever closer to a row of blazing houses. Even through the layers of wool, my back blistered. Brother Victor moaned and shifted in my arms. In moments the mob would devour or shove us into the fire, unless the Moriangi soldiers who had begun slashing a ruthless path through the mob got to us first.

I closed my eyes and imagined my hands penetrating the muck beneath the cobbles, summoning the ruined landscape I had touched with mind and magic: the fortress like an angry wound on the world…the dingy remnants of lives lived solely in its vile shadow…the present devastation—half walls, scorched rubble, fallen beams, blazing tenements leaning sideways at precarious angles now that their supporting neighbors had collapsed…and the past—ancient stones, broken and buried beneath centuries of filth…beneath shifting land and blighted building. Necessity…desperation…escape… Certainty flooded into my bones.

“This way,” I shouted into Voushanti’s back. I whipped my heavy cloak over Brother Victor and my own head, leaving only enough of a gap to see my way. Then I turned my back on Voushanti and the mob and dashed straight through the wall of fire.

“Wait, fool!”

Veils of red and orange and blue snapped and roared, engulfing the tall house. To my dismay, we found no sanctuary beyond the dissolving timbers. Flaming debris and flared ash rained down as I clutched the limp body and leaped over a blazing beam. I had no hands free to knock away the embers that singed the back of my hands or set the damp wool of my cloak smoldering. My boots stank of scorched hide, and my feet screamed in agony as I waded through coals and ash. I could not hear for the belching thunder as another wall or bench or barrel exploded into flame, could not think for the suffocating smoke and fear.

Where was the safe, secure stone? I felt it here. Its pattern lived in my mind. Instinct told me we needed to go down. Smoke and garish flames made the patches of darkness too deep to penetrate with watering eyes, yet I dared not slow enough to hunt. To the right the hillside angled sharply upward. To my left a half-timbered wall groaned and sagged as moisture boiled away. Behind me, Voushanti yelped and cursed as an exploding barrel shot burning staves into the air like the brands of Syan fire jugglers. I had to let my feet guide as they would…and, in moments, my boot skidded on the brink of emptiness. Littered with charred debris and rills of flame, an ancient stone stair plunged into the earth. Unhesitating, I sped downward.

The stair led into a stone-lined trench. A sewer, I thought at first, so narrow I almost cracked Brother Victor’s head on the wall. But as the way angled across the hillside and behind the rows of burning houses, worn steps broke the walls here and there, leading off into jumbles of stone and earth that might once have been far older houses. So perhaps this was an ancient street, its worn base and shoulder-high walls laid with native stone, only this bit of it exposed.

Though fire raged beyond the walls on either side, air flowed gently through the trench, just enough to shift and cool the falling ash without fanning it to flame. The lane widened slightly into a small high-walled courtyard. In its center a stone ring encircled a gnarled apple tree, astonishingly untouched by fire. I hurried past the tree. By the time I thrashed through a snag of dead brush and half-frozen offal and stumbled into an abandoned tanner’s yard, all traces of the ancient stone had crumbled into the hillside rubble, and we had left Riie Doloure well behind.

Coughing, gasping, welcoming even the lingering stench of a tanner’s vats, I sank to my knees and untangled my cloak. I threw it down on a crusted drift of snow and laid Brother Victor on top of it. His cowl and gown had been stripped away, leaving only his torn and bloody shirt that could neither keep him warm nor cover the vile evidence of his battering. A painful shudder racked his frail body with each wheezing gasp. Broken ribs, like enough, but at least he breathed. His abraded neck had swollen around the arrowed gouge of the noose, but not enough to choke him. One eye socket had been crushed, the eye now little more than pulp.

“We can’t stay here,” said Voushanti. The warrior was bent over a few steps away, hawking and spitting, one hand planted on his knee. His left arm dangled slack, blood welling from a filthy wound just above the elbow. “Get him up. We have to go.”

Brother Victor’s hands and body jerked frantically, as if he were trying to defend himself, and his lips moved in a constant soundless stream of words. I bundled the charred edges of my cloak around him. “Easy, Brother,” I whispered, wishing I could tell him he was safe. What could Osriel want with a holy monk? “I’ll try not to hurt you.”

“Valen?” His undamaged eye blinked open—a bruised hollow overflowing with pain. “Iero’s grace, you’ve come.”

The spark of hope in his bleak face stung worse, by far, than my seared skin. The implication of his greeting, that his god had somehow ordained me to make things right, choked me with bile. I needed to be designing some strategy, constructing some spellworking to protect him, but the events of the morning floated and churned in my sluggish thoughts like refuse in an oily backwater: Gildas and nivat, blood and fire and Jullian, Bayard’s vengeance and Osriel’s inscrutable purpose. How could I rescue a man from the Harrowers, only to turn him over to Osriel the Bastard?

A quick glance over my shoulder revealed Voushanti well across the yard, plunging his sword into an ice-crusted drift that still displayed some areas of white through its mantle of soot and ash. His fouled ax lay on the ground beside him. His wounds and heaving exhaustion had eased an unspoken fear that he was something other than human. Perhaps, if I could divert his attention and retrieve the ax before he picked it up…

I grabbed a scrap of old hide from the ground and began shaping a divexi—a noisy or frightening illusion designed to ensnare a watcher’s attention. But I stumbled through the steps. How did you determine what manner of beast had worn this skin? I could not remember, and without knowing, I could not steal its noise or motion to infuse the spell. I floundered with the interlocking threads of enchantment.