Chapter The Second

Dawn was gnawing at the edge of the star-crusted sky as they crested the Spine. The horses were swift for what they were, but there was a unspoken chasm between what they were and what they were not. They were friendly. They ate from the hand. They attempted to devour not a one amongst the motley horde that moved, a roiling herd of dark garments and obsidian weapons, across the shoulder of the mountain range, racing the sunrise to retain the sanctuary of the gloom.

None had burned this night. It was almost enough to make a man of Sixth weep.

Was it proximity to the wretched rock which stirred his nostalgia so?

He might have compared it to a cruel lover – fortunately there were none to take offence on either count, none alive and no-one. Then again, no human soul could have leadened his heart as did their progress across the backbone of the world. Retracing these steps after so long abroad felt like crawling back into the skin of the man he had been: tight around the wrists, restrictive around the throat, an identity that strained over the biceps and threatened to split each time he moved too quickly.

He did not need to move quickly. A summons was a summons – and it could not be denied, nor resisted, nor escaped – but he did not need to make haste – but a summons was a summons. He had crossed two continents because he had been ordered home. A chevalier was once and always a chevalier, no matter how fast or far they ran.

One flesh, one end.

Of course, he would not do the thralls in his acquaintance the disrespect of comparing it to captivity. If it was, it was merely spiritual, a kind of self-imposed cage with bad dreams in the place of iron bars. No-one would deny that he was a good chevalier, when it counted. A good chevalier would not have gone in the first place, no-one would have said; a good chevalier would have needed no cause but the command of their scion, no-one would have said.

What, then, was Naoise Svaiscín?

Naoise the Sixth was tired. Stranger might have been the answer of his current company, but no-one would have said coward. He was, then, stranger among strangers, and perhaps coward among cowards – he did not know the convoy well enough to judge them thus. There were two Mkhedrebi among them, one bannerman and one thrall, orange-painted horsemen with braided hair and bronze manacles; there was a single red-robed pyromancer, returning from service in the Eighth House, hands blackened and hair singed; and the rest: merchants from the Fourth Land, fattened on good ground and bronzed from good sun, who had ventured dangerously west in search of the coast and the faintest sight of the continent. The commercial boats usually looped around to the islands of Third for the sake of safety, but there were, periodically, intrepid men and women who would take it upon themselves to wander into the wild lands in a vain attempt to eke out a more expeditious route.

Fools all: this lot had lost three men since summer and had naught to show for it but a few bagfuls of bruised peaches.

Nor were they good peaches. One of the Mkhedrebi had taken a bite of a pilfered fruit, and their face had soured, and they had pulped it from their teeth so that the juice ran down their chin and streaked their warpaint.

"Disgusting," they had said, in the language of their people, with a tone that smacked of unwarranted betrayal.

Aye. Naoise, silently sympathetic, had handed them his flask of uisge so that they could rinse their mouth. He had carried naught with him but the essentials: uisge, blade, and the letter which had bade him return. He would, he suspected, be travelling ever lighter, for the Mkhedari bannerman seemed inclined to drain the flask. Perhaps that would have been for the best: it was strong stuff for a man who had not slept in days.

And their silent companion had booted the dropped peach over the edge of the world – if the Spine was the whole of the world, and one could almost believe it, so sharply did the cliffs break off into oblivion, so far away lurked the land, so lonely these grey lands wreathed in fog.

All three had feigned ignorance of the matter when the merchants came looking for the thief, but the bannerman had known by then that Naoise spoke their language and they had retreated back into a stony quiet alongside their thrall, busying themselves with the horses and with studying the terrain. They were, one willing and one unwilling, in the service of the Eighth Lord, who had sent them to accompany the outsiders safely to the borders of his land. After all, dangerous sorts roamed in this part of the world, searching for horses and meat and wandering souls upon which to avenge themselves for the loss of their land and their loved ones. One of the toviscei had raised a war-horde to assail the Eighth House, and hints of their ravages could be glimpsed at intervals: what might have once been a village, stone walls crumbling, wooden foundations reduced to charcoal; the rotting carcasses of sheep and goats in whom wild roses had taken root; fallen shards of bone and discarded scraps of metal; and once, a loosed horse racing riderless across a nearby steppe, reins whipping a black line through the cropped grass, blood staining its hindquarters.

The bannerman picked their route carefully, each horse in the queue stepping into the exact tracks of the one that had gone before; the thrall had ridden a few hundred yards afield, to watch for encroachments. Only once had she whistled for an attack; Naoise the Sixth had drawn his black sword, and, after several long moments of anticipation as he studied the sky, he had sheathed it again.

The merchants, who had all seemed so disdainful of the bannerman, seemed a little more grateful for their company after that. The pyromancer had worried his cuffs until the skin around his wrists had been rubbed raw. The bannerman of the Eighth House ridden back along the line, reassuring them smilingly: "just bodies. Just bodies."

This little the Eighth Lord could do to assert control over his lands. This little he had not offered Naoise – but it had been natural to fall into their company, when they were taking the same roads, when they were moving at the same pace. They had given him a few coins for his trouble and for his sword. It was the same sort of work he had done in Domhan Mor; it required little effort, when he was going in that direction anyway.

They parted at the border. Not a one looked behind as they left.

Naoise wondered whether the peach was still falling.

The sky in the Eighth Land was perpetually storm-streaked, swelling around the cusp of the horizon like a bruise. But here, at the jaggedmost edge of the Spine, where the land sloped, treacherously gentle, into the territory of the First House, the day seemed a little bluer than most he had spent; the sun burned a little brighter than it had before. He welcomed it. It warmed his face. It steadied his heart. He had spent seven long days thinking of naught but his own mortality – worse again, the mortality of another – and now, if he squinted, he thought that perhaps he could glimpse hell across the water.

It was too late in the day for the dread priests to be moving about their frozen cities, but there was nonetheless silent motion in the mist, something unknowably enormous and enormously unknowable shifting its weight in the depths of the fog that shrouded the ice-locked docks of the Seventh House. The Mkhedrebi were right again, he thought. There was something about necromancers that he would never be able to trust. Not until the day he died. Not until the day they brought him back. Not until the day he died again.

Your delusions of grandeur are exceptional, said no-one in particular, the very same no-one who had hung over his shoulder, as though from a gallows, all these long nights past. None wanted you when you were alive; none will want you when you're dead.

He had to agree with no-one.

A few more days, then, across the First Land – gentle hills and beautiful villages and roadways busy with women on carts and men walking to market. He would glimpse more life in a mile than he had seen for a hundred here in Seventh. The sky would be clear, and blue, and frightfully clear.

The gods don't think of you, said no-one. Do you believe yourself so important that you can fear the open sky?

And then on to Sixth, provided that he could avoid its shadow until he reached its shores. Strange that a mere letter could feel so heavy in his pocket. The Selection – at last, the Selection, finally, the Selection, here was the end and it loomed with the Selection. He would go; he would pledge to his Lord and his scion; he would serve.

One flesh, one end.

He was a good chevalier. A good chevalier was a good shadow. He would do his duty, and then he could rest. He was ready to rest. He was tired of waiting for the world to become beautiful; he had tired of searching for a place in the world that was properly good and kind. Naoise Swanskin had tired of running. Oh, no-one said, lo, and there are a thousand that would gasp to hear such unexpected news. What on earth will they think, to hear something so unlike our Naoise?

What would they think, indeed, when he took a knife and cut the world in two, to inspect the grave-black worms eating at its rind?