Steven Erikson - Fall of Light

Pausing, he looked into the narrow alley beside the tavern, thinking to see the one-armed man who had been Orfantal’s mother’s secret friend, since the alley was where the man lived. But he wasn’t at his usual place on the steps to the cellar. Then he caught a faint motion deeper in the alley’s shadows, something small and huddled, trying to keep warm beneath a thin blanket.

Wreneck headed over, stepping quietly, as if sneaking up on a nesting bird. He couldn’t remember the man’s name, so he said nothing.

When the figure started and looked up, Wreneck halted. He saw, shining out from a grimy face, eyes that he knew well.

‘Jinia?’

At the name the girl shrank back, pushing up against the stone wall and turning her face away. Her bare feet pushed out from under the thin blanket, and their soles were black and cracked.

‘But why didn’t you go to your family? Ma said you did. She said you went off in the night, when I was asleep. When I was still getting better.’

She said nothing.

‘Jinia?’ Wreneck edged closer. ‘You need to come back home with me.’

Finally, she spoke, her voice thin and sounding tired. ‘She didn’t want me.’

‘Who?’

Still she kept herself turned away, her face hidden. ‘Your mother, Wreneck. Listen. You’re a fool. Go away. Leave me alone.’

‘Why didn’t she want you? I saved you!’

‘Oh, Wreneck, you don’t know anything.’

Confused, he looked around, but no one was in sight. The people in front of the tavern had not come to help, or even look. He didn’t understand grown-ups at all.

‘I’m broken inside,’ she said, in a dull voice. ‘I won’t have babies. Everything down there will hurt, always. This is my last winter, Wreneck, and it’s how I want it. There’s no point. No point to any of this.’

‘But,’ said Wreneck, ‘I’m broken inside, too.’

She was so quiet he thought she hadn’t heard him, and then she sobbed.

He went to her. Knelt at her side and put a hand on her shoulder. She smelled bad. She smelled like what the old men had begun distilling in their sheds, and only now did Wreneck see the rotting heap of potato skins nearby, that she had been eating. ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to die. If you did you wouldn’t be eating that. And you wouldn’t be trying to stay warm. I love you, Jinia. And that brokenness. That hurt. It’s just what lives inside. That’s all it is. On the outside, you’re always the same. That’s what we’ll give each other – everything that’s on the outside, do you see?’

She wiped at her face and then looked up at him, the eye that wasn’t wandering meeting his gaze. ‘That’s not how it is, Wreneck. That’s not love at all. You’re too young. You don’t understand.’

‘That’s not true. I’m eleven now. I’ve made a spear, and I’m going to hunt them down and I’m going to kill them. Telra and Farab and Pryll. I’m going to stick my spear in them until they’re dead. And you’re going to watch me do it.’

‘Wreneck-’

‘Come with me. Let’s go explore the monastery.’

‘I’m too drunk to walk.’

‘It’s just what you’ve been eating.’

‘It kills the pain.’

‘So you can walk and it won’t hurt.’ He reached down and helped her stand. ‘I’m going to take care of you,’ he said. ‘From now on.’

‘Your mother-’

‘And after the monastery, we’re going away. I told you. We’re going hunting, for the people who did that to you.’

‘You’ll never find them.’

‘I will.’

‘They’ll kill you.’

‘They tried that already. It didn’t work.’

She let him take her weight and when he felt it there was a stab of dull pain from the sword-scar. They tottered for a moment, and then hobbled out of the alley.

As they turned to make their way up the street, one of the men in front of the tavern called out, ‘You’re wasting your time, son. All you’ll get is a lot of blood.’

The others laughed.

Wreneck swung round. ‘You grown-ups make me ashamed!’

They were silent then, as he and Jinia slowly walked up the main street. She leaned hard against him, but he was still big, still strong, and where the soldier had stabbed him it only hurt a little bit now, not like the first time, when he thought that maybe something had ripped.

Everyone was broken inside. It was just that some were more broken than others, and when they were broken bad inside, it was all they could do to keep the outside looking normal. That took all the work and that’s what living was – work. He had years of practice.

‘You’re sweating,’ Jinia said when at last they reached the outskirts of town and looked up to the hill and its summit where huddled the scorched ruins of the monastery, showing them a gap-toothed wall and a gateway with no gate.

‘It’s hot.’

‘No, it’s cold, Wreneck.’

‘I’m just working hard, Jinia. I’m used to that, and it’s good and you know why?’

‘Why?’

He thought about how he would say what he felt, and then nodded. ‘It reminds me that I’m alive.’

‘I’m sorry, Wreneck,’ she said. ‘For your burns, from when you carried me through the burning rooms. I should have said that before. But I was mad at you.’

‘Mad at me? But I saved your life!’

‘That’s why, Wreneck.’

‘They weren’t much,’ he said after a moment. ‘Those rooms, I mean. There was hardly anything in them. So the places where rich people live, why, they’re still just rooms.’

They had begun the ascent, much slower now. At his words, Jinia snorted. ‘They would tell you otherwise.’

‘I saw them. Those rooms. They can try telling me anything they like. I saw them.’

‘You were friends with Orfantal.’

Wreneck shook his head. ‘I was a bad friend. He hates me now. Anyway, I won’t be that again. The nobleborn grown-ups don’t scare me any more. Orfantal wasn’t like them, but I’m sorry that he hates me.’

‘Nobleborn,’ she mused, and he smelled her sweet breath. ‘It seems I’ve found one of my own.’

He didn’t understand what she meant. She was still a little drunk.

Then they ran out of breath with which to talk, as the hill was steep and the track slippery under its thin coat of snow. The monks were all dead for sure, since they would have swept this clear. There was nothing living in sight. Even the crows had long gone.

At last, they reached the summit, and Jinia stepped away from him, to stand on her own, but she reached across and took his hand.

Suddenly cowed by her gesture, and the feel of her thin fingers and her pinched palm, so easily swallowed up by his too-big hand, Wreneck said nothing. But he felt very grown up.

‘I’m not so cold any more,’ she said. ‘Not so drunk, either. But the pain’s back.’

He nodded. Yes, it was back, and not just where the soldier had stabbed him. It was back in other places, too, all through his insides. Aches. Deep, deep aches. When he could stand them no longer and he had to move, he stepped forward, and she fell in at his side, and they walked towards the shell of the tumbled wall’s gate.

‘They used to bring food into town and give it away to the poor,’ Jinia said. ‘But only once or twice a year. The years they didn’t, everyone hated them. But it was just bad harvests. When they only had enough to feed themselves. Still, everyone hated them.’

They passed beneath the arch and strode into the littered compound, and were halted by the sight of all the snow-covered corpses.

Jinia pulled sideways at his hand, stretching out his arm.

But all the pain he’d been fighting against inside was suddenly too much, and blood had leaked out from his sword-wound, and once it leaked out, the battle was over. Darkness took him, and he sank into it, although in the instant before he knew nothing, he heard Jinia cry out as his hand tugged loose from her grasp.