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Paul Kearney: The Mark of Ran

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Paul Kearney The Mark of Ran

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The horsemen mastered their mounts and charged the two figures, swords swinging. The crossbowmen paused fifty yards from Rol’s hiding place and began to reload their weapons. Serioc was shouting at his fellow villagers to stand fast. A loose phalanx of the more resolute among them leveled their pikes and advanced back the way they had run, fear white in their faces under the branched flare of the lightning.

It could not be real. These things were impossible.

Rol started to his feet, but a strong hand grasped the back of his neck and forced his face down into the scratch and drip of the heather, and his grandfather’s voice said hoarsely, “Be still.”

They both watched as the villagers and horsemen closed in on whatever it was Morin and Ayd had become. Bodies and parts of bodies went flying through the air. Crossbow bolts rained down on a choked, writhing, screaming mass of boiling humanity and horseflesh, and the lightning played garishly overhead. The crossbowmen reloaded time after time, and edged closer to the cottage, the better to aim into the melee. Grandfather seized Rol’s hand. “Come with me.”

He ran like a young man, trailing Rol after him. The pair went unnoticed in the glare and the murk and the shining curtain of the rain. They did not stop until they were at the foot of the hagrolith that watched over the headland, some quarter mile from the house. Eyrie was burning from within by then, flames licking brightly out of the front door and curling up into the turf of the roof. Up on the roof the cat-thing that might have been Ayd snapped and snarled as the crossbow bolts rained down on her. Morin was a great broken carcass lying before the house, a beached whale that men flensed to pieces with sword and pike and halberd, the dark blood splashing up past their knees.

Grandfather leaned with his back to the hagrolith, and there was pain in the rasp of his breath. He put a hand to his side and Rol saw a crossbow bolt protruding obscenely there, the white flights blackened with the old man’s blood. Rol thought to take hold of it, but the old man slapped away his hands irritably. “No good. Leave it be.”

They watched the bright flames roar up in the night as Eyrie’s roof timbers gave with a groan, the house dying in agony whilst about it the surviving Dennifreians thrashed the heather with their weapons, and a knot set up two dark, dripping trophies upon stakes fashioned out of hewn saplings. Some men were still mounted, though most of the horses lay torn and lifeless about the house. One that was thrashing blindly in its own entrails was put out of its misery with a sword-thrust.

“They’ll find us,” Rol whispered. He was wet through and shivering. “We have to get away.”

“No. She’ll protect us. She’ll hide us from them.” And Grandfather looked up at the tip of the mossy stone above him and smiled through his pain. “Twenty years she has kept them from our door. But times change, it seems.” He shut his eyes for a moment and some kind of febrile strength left him. He was an old, withered man shot through the guts and bleeding his life out in the rain.

“Take Gannet, Rol. Leave this place and never come back.”

“Where shall we go?” Amazing that he could sit and talk calmly like this, when his whole life was burning down in front of his eyes, and all he knew lay dying or dead about him. But his mind seemed remarkably clear. The palm of his left hand had ceased its burning.

“I stay here. You must go alone”-a hand held up to silence Rol’s protest-“and go now. You must go to Gascar. It’s six days’ sail with a fair wind, and this storm could not have been pointed better; you’ll have it on the larboard quarter. Steer west-nor’west-” He coughed, and something black as crushed berries was spat into his beard. Rol wiped it away, dry-eyed and staring.

“In the capital, Ascari, you must ask about the wharves for a man named Michal Psellos. Tell him you are a Cortishane. He is-he is a friend.”

“Why?” Rol asked. “Why did all this happen? Morin and Ayd-”

“You are not human,” the old man said harshly. “Morin and Ayd were your guardians. I summoned them for that purpose.”

“What am I?”

But the old man’s eyes were glazing over. “The pain is going now,” he whispered. “Never a good sign. Leave me, Rol.” And he shoved the boy away with surprising strength. Rol knelt and watched him struggle to breathe through the blood that was flooding his lungs. Once he said clearly, “Emilia,” and smiled up at the lightning.

When God withdrew from the world, to punish us He took with Him all hope of life after death. So nothing but the worm awaits us all. No justice for the persecuted, no punishment for the wicked…

He died with his eyes open, and there was a distinct tremor in the ground about the hagrolith. Rol clenched his fists in his hair, and the rain beat the tears from his eyes. Behind him, he heard the shouts of the men who had destroyed his family carry over the burgeoning roar of the storm. He turned. With the death of the old man they had seen him at last, and at least two dozen were laboring through the knee-deep heather to the tip of the headland.

When Rol turned back to look at his grandfather, the old man’s body was gone. In its place was a great leaning stone, a second hagrolith that had erupted out of the ground beside the first. Now the two leaned in against each other as if exchanging a kiss.

Rol got to his feet and began to run.

He could not take Gannet -she had been beached too high, and was too heavy for him alone to shift. He ran with no clear idea in his head except to get away from the men with bloody swords, to find some black corner wherein he could collect his thoughts.

But they had spread out like beaters flushing game onto the spears of the hunters, and behind them now half a dozen men on horseback came riding, their mounts stumbling and tripping on the heather roots but making a good pace all the same. Rol halted. There was nothing for it but the sea, then, nowhere else to go.

The wind was a heavier roar as he came over the lip of the higher ground, toward the cove where Gannet lay beached. It smote his face in spiteful glee, and drove rain into his eyes. The tide would be far in-there was only a black moon tonight, but it would still be high.

Lightning struck the turf ten yards ahead of him as though lighting his way, and with that he felt the wind backing and noted its changed direction with the automatic seagoing part of his mind. He scrambled down the steep clifflike bank where swifts nested in summer, and slid down the slick grass to the black rocks below.

The sea was before him, dancing to Ran’s Music in the wind. It looked stark black and white, furious, explosive. Rol had never seen breakers so high. So far up the shingle had it come that Gannet was lurching and bobbing there, fighting her anchor rope. She was afloat, ungrounded-the storm had been good for that much at least.

He heard the shouts up the slope behind him, turned, and saw a man in armor standing outlined against the sky, pointing down. Rol waited no more. He waded into the sea, the white cold shock of it clearing his brain of all thought. The waves buffeted him, swung Gannet broadside on. He grabbed her side and pulled himself up over the rail. The wherry leaped and bucked under him like a wild, sentient thing. He crawled to the bow and began sawing at the wet anchor rope with his dirk. The rope was thick, wet, and stubborn; it came apart strand by strand.

A crowd of men at the edge of the breakers, the spray dancing and leaping about them. They hesitated, confronted by the sheer naked violence of the waves, but then one mustered his courage and began wading out, sword upraised.

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