The Crippled God

Yan Tovis frowned at the young woman before her. ‘Is it blood you want?’

Eyes widened.

She held out her wrists. ‘This?’

‘You need to kneel before the Shore!’

‘No,’ she growled. ‘Not yet. Go away, I’m done with you. The islanders are fighting — go down to them, kneel yourselves. In the sand beside the wounded and the dying — both of you. Look in their faces, and tell them it was all worth it.’ Yan Tovis lunged forward, pushing them so that they staggered. ‘Go! Tell them!’

You want me to kneel? To sanctify all of this? Shall I be yet one more ruler to urge my subjects to their deaths? Shall I stand tall and bold, shouting fierce promises of glory? How many lies can this scene withstand? Just how empty can words be?

‘Kneel,’ she whispered. ‘Yes. Everyone. Kneel.’

CHAPTER NINE

I am fallen prey

There was a time

When fangs sank deep

My body dragged

And flesh howled

Fear’s face was cold

With instinct’s need

There was a time

When strangers took me

And the unfamiliar

Whispered terror

And the shock of desires

We could not expect

Lit eyes so like our own

There was a time

When a friend twisted

Before my eyes

And all my solid faiths

Washed free underfoot

Unknowing the world

With new and cruel design

There was a time

When kin drew the knife

To sever sacred law

With red envy

And red malice

The horror visits

The heart of home

Do you see this journey?

What began in shadows

And dark distance

Has drawn ever closer

Now I am fallen prey

To the demon in my soul

And the face twisting

Is my own

Railing at failures

Of flesh and bone

The spirit withers

And I fall prey

We have listed

A world of enemies

And now we fall prey

We fall prey

Faces of Fear, Fisher kel Tath

Broken at last, the body slumps and the spirit pulls free, the spirit wings away in flight and the sound of its wings is a sigh. But this, he knew, was not always the case. There were times when the spirit staggered loose with a howl, as broken as the body left behind. Too long inside tortured flesh, too long a sordid lover of punishing pain.

The sound of his horse’s hoofs was hollow, the creak of its tendons like the settling of an old, familiar chair, and he thought of a warm room, a place heady with memories threaded through with love and grief, with joy and suffering. But there was no pocket within him to hold tears, nothing he could squeeze in one fist just to feel the wet trickling down between his fingers. No gestures left to remind himself of who he had once been.

He found her rotted corpse, huddled in the lee of a boulder. There were red glints in her hair, beneath wind- blown dust. Her face was tucked down, sunken cheeks pressed against the knees. As if in her last moments she sat, curled up, staring down at the stumps of her feet.

It was all too far gone, he told himself. Even this felt mechanical, but disjointed, on the edge of failure; a measure of stumbling steps, like a man blind and lost, trying to find his way home. Dismounting, boots rocking as the bones inside them shifted and scraped, he walked to her, slowly sat down on the boulder, amidst the creaks of tendon, bone and armour.

Broken-winged, the spirit had staggered from this place. Lost even to itself. How could he hope to track it? Leaning forward, he settled his face into his hands, and — though it made no difference — he closed his one eye.

Who I am no longer matters. A chair, creaking. A small room, acrid with woodsmoke. Crows in the rafters — what mad woman would invite them into this place? The hunters have thundered past and the wolf no longer howls. She has no breath for such things, not now, not running as she must. Running — gods, running!

She knows it’s no use. She knows they will corner her, spit her with spears. She knows all about hunting, and the kill, for these were the forces of law in her nature. So too, it seems, for the ones pursuing her.

And the woman in the chair, her eyes are smarting, her vision blurs. The chimney needs cleaning, and besides, the wild is dead, for ever dead. And when next the hunters thunder past, their quarry will be on two legs, not four.

Just so.

Do you dream of me, old woman? Do you dream of a single eye, flaring in the night, one last look of the wild upon your face, your world? Gods below, I am tearing apart. I can feel it.

The horns sound their triumph. Slain, the beast’s heart stills its mad race.

In her creaking chair, the old woman reaches up one hand, and gouges out one of her eyes. It rests bloody in her palm while she gasps with pain. And then she lifts her head and fixes her one remaining eye upon him. ‘Even the blind know how to weep.’