and in this comprehension Galar did not for an instant consider the ebon cast to Henarald’s skin.
A soul made weary of life longed for sordid ends. Rise Herat climbed for the tower, his refuge from which any escape was downward, and the height of which reduced entire lives to smudges crawling on faraway streets, like insects examining the crevices between pavestones. He had earlier this day walked those streets, wandering through stained Kharkanas and its uneasy multitudes. He had looked upon faces by the hundred, watching people hide in plain view, or cleave close to companions and loved ones while offering suspicious regard to every stranger who dared look their way. He had witnessed smug wealth, worn like precious cloaks of invulnerability, and saw in those visages the wilful guarding of things that could not be guarded. He had seen the poverty that every concourse exhibited, figures like bent and tattered standards of ill-luck and failure, although to all others that measure of ill- luck was in itself failure. He had seen flashes of envy and malice in veiled glances; he had heard laughter loud enough to draw the attention of others, and knew it for the diffident bravado it was — that child-like need for attention like a weed’s root wanting water — but no confidence grew straight and bold from such things, and the eyes ever gave it all away, in pointless bluster and ready challenge.
And those rare gestures of recognition and kindness, they appeared like remnants left behind from a better age. The modern guise was indifference and self-absorption, with every face offering a mask of imperturbability and cynical pessimism.
Rise was an historian who wrote nothing down, because history was not in ages past, not in ages either gilded or tarnished. It was not a thing of retrospection or cogent reflection. It was not lines scratched on parchment, or truths stained deep in vellum. It was not a dead thing to reach back towards, collecting what baubles caught one’s eye, and then sweeping the rest from the table. History was not a game of relevance versus irrelevance, or a stern reordering of convictions made and remade. Nor was it an argument, nor an explanation, and never a justification. Rise wrote nothing, because for him history was the present, and every detail carried its own story, reaching roots into antiquity. It was nothing more than an unblinking recognition of life’s incessant hunger for every moment, like a burst of the present that sent shockwaves into the past and into the future.
Accordingly, he saw nothing that he had not seen before and would not see again, until such time as death took him away, to shutter at last his weary witnessing of the rancorous, motley mess.
He opened the trap door and climbed up on to the tower’s heat-baked, shadowless roof. Even solitude was an illusion. Conversations in clamour, lives crowding now in the ghostly haunts of memory, his mind’s voice babbled without surcease and could torment him even in sleep. It was easy for him to imagine the Citadel below as but an extension of that chaos, with the priests hunting faith like rat-hunters in the grain, with liars tending their seeds under lurid candlelight in all the small rooms that so cramped their ambitions, and the foragers who plucked rumours from the draughts as if whipping nets through the air.
If history was naught but that which was lived in the present, then it was history’s very unruliness that doomed the players to this headlong plunge into confusion. None of the future’s promises ever quite drew within reach; none resolved into something solid or real; and none made bridges to be crossed.
He looked down at the river, winding its way through Kharkanas, and saw it as a metaphor of the present — hardly an original notion, of course — except that to his eyes it was crowded beyond measure, with the swimming and the drowning, the corpses and those barely holding on, all spun about and swirling on unpredictable currents. Those bridges that reached into the future, where dwelt equity, hope and cherished lives so warmly swathed in harmony, arced high overhead, beyond all mortal reach, and he could hear the wailing as the flow carried the masses past every one of those bridges, into and out of those cool shadows that were themselves as insubstantial as promises.
Such shadows could not be walked. Such shadows offered no grip for the hand, no hold for the foot. They were, in truth, nothing more than ongoing arguments between light and dark.
He could fling himself from this tower. He could shock innocent strangers upon the courtyard below, or the street, or even the bridge leading into the Citadel. Or he could vanish into the depths of Dorssan Ryl. A life’s end sent ripples through those that remained. They could be vast, or modest, but in the scheme of this living history, most were barely noticed.
We are all interludes in history, a drawn breath to make pause in the rush, and when we are gone, those breaths join the chorus of the wind.
But who listens to the wind?
Historians, he decided, were as deaf as anyone else.
A soul made weary longed for sordid ends. But a soul at its end longed for all that was past, and so remained trapped in a present filled with regrets. Of all the falls promised me by this vantage, I will take the river. Each and every time, I will take the river.
And perhaps, one day, I will walk in shadows.
He looked out upon the haze of smoke above the forest beyond the city, the foul columns lifting skyward, leaning like the gnarled boles of wind-tilted trees. That wind made cold every tear tracking down from his eyes, and then gave him a thousand breaths to dry each one.
He thought back to the conversation he had just fled, down in a candlelit chamber far below. As witness he was but an afterthought, in the manner of all historians. Cursed to observe and cursed again to reflect on the meaning of all that was observed. Such a stance invited a sense of superiority, and the drudging internal pontification of the coolly uninvolved. But he knew that for the sour delusion of a frightened fool: to think that he could not be made to bleed, or weep, or even lose his life as the current grew wild with rage.
There were a thousand solutions, and each and every one was within grasp, but the will had turned away, and no exhortation or threat would turn it back.
‘We have lost a third of our brothers and sisters,’ Cedorpul had announced upon entering the chamber, and the candles had dipped their flames with his arrival — surely not the portent of his words. Behind him was Endest Silann, looking too young for any of this.
High Priestess Emral Lanear stood like a woman assailed. Her face was wan, her eyes sunken and darkly ringed. The strength of her title and eminent position had been swept away along with her faith, and every priest and priestess lost to Syntara clearly struck her as a personal betrayal.
‘Her cause,’ Cedorpul said then, his small eyes grave in his round face, ‘is not the Deniers’ cause. We can be certain of that, High Priestess.’
Rise Herat still struggled with the physical transformation among Mother Dark’s children in the Citadel, this birth of the Andii that even now spread like a stain among her chosen. Night no longer blinded, or hid anything from sight. And yet still we grope. He had always believed himself the master of his own body, barring those vagaries of disease or injury that could afflict one at any moment. He had not felt Mother Dark’s touch, but that she had claimed him could not be denied. There had been no choice in the matter. But I now know that to be wrong. People have fled her blessing.
When Emral Lanear said nothing in response to Cedorpul’s words, the priest cleared his throat and resumed. ‘High Priestess, is this now a war of three faiths? We know nothing of Syntara’s intentions. She seems to position herself solely in opposition, but that in itself offers modest cause.’
‘And probably short-lived,’ Endest Silann added.
Emral’s eyes flicked to the acolyte as if without recognition, and then away again.
The glance Cedorpul then turned on Rise Herat was beseeching. ‘Historian, have you thoughts on any of this?’
Thoughts? What value those? ‘Syntara sought refuge in Urusander’s Legion. But I wonder at the measure of their welcome. Does it not confuse their cause?’
Cedorpul snorted. ‘Is it not confused enough? Beating down the wretched poor to challenge the eminence of the highborn could not be more wrong-footed.’ He faced Emral again. ‘High Priestess, it is said they strike down Deniers in Mother Dark’s name. She must disavow this, surely?’
At that Emral seemed to wince. Shakily she drew out a chair from the table dominating the chamber, and then sat, as if made exhausted by her own silence. After a long moment she spoke. ‘The faith of holding on to faith… I wonder’ — and she looked up and met the historian’s eyes — ‘if that is not all we have. All we ever have.’
‘Do we invent our gods?’ Rise asked her. ‘Without question we have invented this one. But as we can all see, in each other and in such mirrors as we may possess, our faith is so marked and gives proof to her power.’
