Chapter 14 - Fifty Years Ago
The image of the boy, Heap, had gone but the scent of him hung above the water and beneath the rock. The trail of it led away along the banks of the Sweet Water. Hemar whined and dug his blunt claws into gravel; the cold stream made his fur flow. Instinct deeper than bone filled him with the need to pursue that trail. His heart told him to – Heap might not be pack, but Hemar's pack were gone. Heap had been the first and last living thing Hemar had touched since he ran from his home. Only fear kept Hemar there in the shade of the rock. Sometimes fear is all that's required.
"Domen are brave for the pack, fierce for a mate, and will die for their pup." Wise Odar taught that lesson to the youngsters, by the well where each breath carried the promise of water. "The domen fight together, each a warrior, bound by the howl, by the battle musk, by duty to each other."
But Wise Odar never spoke of a domen alone. As if such a thing were beyond imagining, as if it were without meaning. When Hemar gave his mother reason to grow cross with him, or the moon took her mood from sweet to sour, she would say he was as useless as one leg. Perhaps that's what a domen on his own amounted to. One leg.
"A broken child didn't build that dome." Hemar whispered it to himself. It sounded true. A child couldn't have woven that golden dome of power. Heap couldn't be protecting all of Sweet Water from the sect mind. It made no sense. They had left him to rot in that shed.
The thing Hemar had seen, or half seen, or rather had first caught the scent of and then glimpsed an edge of, had not looked like Heap. The thing Hemar had seen stood sideways to the world such that you could only see a flicker of it, and perhaps then only if you had second sight. It had looked like Ronson Greeves, but more like the idea of him, pure and woven from the light, young and tall, and fast. Even though he had moved without haste you could tell he was fast. And behind him had been a town, at once different and the same as what lay before him, cleaner, brighter, bursting with colour and life, overwriting the true Sweet Water. At first it had fooled Hemar, but such tricks of the eye can't keep a domen from the truth. Hemar had cleaned Heap's wound in the shack, drawn in the true scent of him beneath the dirt and sickness. And here by the rock he had seen past illusion, drawn in the scent of him once again and known him for what he was. He had named him too, and the name had power even though it seemed Heap himself had forgotten his own name.
Hemar whined. That name had hurt the boy. The woven light had fallen into bright fragments, the strong body melted away, and the broken boy's wandering spirit had fled or been drawn back to his true flesh, leaving only the faintest trail to point the way.
"Ah hell." Hemar had heard the man at the dice table say that a dozen times as he lost his gold, "Ah hell." It seemed like the phrase he needed. "Damnation." And the domen crossed the Sweet Water in three bounds and stepped out from the shadow of the rock.
****
Eb held a memory of the sun distorted by the water's surface, bright but distant, far too far above his head. Since he could no more swim than move himself from wherever the last person had set him down, and since no one would ever think that he could, Eb imagined the memory came from a time when someone tried to drown him. Still, as memories go it wasn't a bad one. At least it was pretty.
Waking from his long dream felt like rising toward that distant surface, rising from the serenity of a slow fade, rising back into the chaos and noise of a world he had almost escaped.
Eben Lostchild drew his first waking breath in forever. He opened his eyes and at once the stink and noise of the shack enfolded him, the air too cold, the board too hard beneath his back. He tried to speak and his mouth betrayed him with an incoherent moan. He tried to move but his twisted limbs only twitched and thrashed.
I'm Heap. They call me Heap, and they feed me only because they lack the courage to cut throats.
Eben lolled his head to the left. Sara Lostchild sat rocking on her bed, Robert Lostchild tethered to a stake, eyes vacant, chewing on chewed fingers. Kelly sleeping. Simon twitching through some or other seizure, his rags soiled and leaking, mouth locked in rictus, blood and saliva escaping clenched lips.
Voices outside. Men.
"—don't see why."
"Go and fuckin' check it. Then we'll sweep round past the Jenkins place and back into town."
"Why'd he send us iffn the sect had a beetle on the job?"
"Perhaps it came for another reason. Don't know. Don't care. Now check the goddamn shack."
"If I catch something offa these crips I'm gonna shoot you in the head, Eldreth." Louder, coming closer.
The door rattled, shook, a crash and it fell in, tearing the leather hinges from their nails.
"Hello kiddies!" A tall thin man in the bright rectangle of sky, a gun twirling in his hand, glittering. On the bed Sara started to rock faster. Kelly didn't wake but she twisted in her grey sheets and started to cry.
Often Eb could barely make out the faces around him, his eyes dim, the images they sent him patched and smeared. Of the man in the doorway he could see little past the darkness of his silhouette and glimmer of his gun. Faces usually eluded him, but Eb seldom failed to see the person. James Purbright, late of the Six-oh-Two, seventeen years and a head full of broken memories all sharp as glass. The boy's wickedness burned around him in dark aura flickered through with crimson and a green like poison. Eb could read him, read through him, but nothing more. Real people, real things, he had no more control over than he had over his own twisted limbs. Only the monsters feared him, the monsters no one but him could see, ones that tried night and day to find their way into Sweet Water and stalk its people, slipping in behind their eyes and souring their thoughts.
Purbright looked around at the gloom, half-blind, a sneer of amusement twitching his mouth.
That curl of the lips made Eb's skin crawl. He lay helpless, his only power over monsters that no one else could see . . . creatures that probably didn't even exist . . . just products of an imagination trapped and trammelled to the point of madness.
"I won't be needing this now, will I?" And as his eyes adjusted to the gloom Purbright spun his revolver into its holster and in its place withdrew a long and narrow knife. "It stinks in here," he said, sounding more pleased than annoyed. "Had me a school teacher when I was small. Used to say 'no sin should go unpunished'. She'd call the stench in here a sin would old Miss Grain." Purbright crouched before Robert, tethered on the floor, chewing where his nails used to be. "Was it you that made the stink in here, little boy?"
"Leave him alone," Eb wanted to shout, tried to shout, but all he did was moan, a trail of drool running down his neck. It proved enough.
"It was you?" Purbright looked up at him and lifted his thin knife to catch the light.
****
"I'm dead. I'm dead." Sally pushed the thought out, over and again. The trick that saved many a young hunska kit from the eagles' claws now kept three murderers from bothering to make sure of her. "I'm dead. I'm dead." Grit between her lips, the cold ground pressing against her face. She lay until the last clomp of boots had past beyond hearing, then lay some more. She waited for the cattle to start their complaints, but the steers kept silent.
"Holy crap! They're all dead!" A child's voice.
Sally moved only her eyes. Two small boys stood side by side, a bucket between them on leather handles, sloshing.
"She's not." The taller of the two, skinny in faded dungarees, barefoot despite the chill. He nodded at Sally.
"Course she is, Remos." The other boy frowned beneath a mop of dirty blond hair, more stocky this one, better dressed, booted.
Sally sat up. The bucket fell between the boys, throwing out a spray of water but keeping upright.
"Don't run," she said. "You know me. I'm Sally Hunska. And you're Remos Jax and Daveos . . ."
"Jones," Daveos Jones supplied, still frowning as if not yet convinced she wasn't dead.
"What happened here?" asked Remos. He couldn't have been more than nine but the eye he cast at the five dead men and the gore-spattered road seemed to see problems to be solved rather than horrors to run from.
"Everyone's dead," Daveos said, watching the corpses with suspicion now in case they too sat up and proved him wrong. He at least looked frightened.
"You need to run away," Sally said. "Get along with your water and forget you saw anything. If the men who did this knew I wasn't dead, they'd come after me pretty quick." Sally dug her claws into her palms. If she'd had her wits about her she'd have shown the boys a different face, lied about her name.
"Yes ma'am!" Daveos made to go, not bothering with the bucket.
"What's up with the steers?" Remos asked.
Sally turned to look. The cattle were crowded against fence as if dead men and taur blood held a particular fascination for them. Something in the roll of their eyes unnerved her more than the Joe Hall's corpse sprawled by her legs.
Standing took an effort. Fear had sapped her. Sally brushed the dirt off her skirts. Dusty and smeared with gore, her whoring dress looked a tawdry thing in the morning light. She shook her head. Time to leave town, in ska or not. Time to take her earnings and head into the wild. When she looked up the boys were still standing there.
"Get out of here! Git." She waved them both away. The shooting had brought them over. Before too long some adults would find their courage too and come out to clear the mess. Best to be gone by then.
Something ragged caught her eye. Sally looked out over the backs of the steers, past the thicket of their horns, to the sheltered feed-stall at the rear of the stockyard. The single plank wall supported a short roof to keep the worst of the weather off the feed. Some kind of black and tattered tarpaulin stretched from anchor points on the wall, out over the hay. Only it wasn't tarpaulin and it covered more than bales of hay. A hoof poked out at the far end, and the black stuff caught the light as if it were vitreous or slimy or both.
"Goddamn it!" Sally crossed quickly to the boys. "Run!" And she hauled them with her.
[next part on Thursday 1st of October. Which is also pre-order day for the Thorns special edition omnibus - check it out!
http://mark---lawrence.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/the-big-book-of-thorns-is-on-its-way.html
]