house.
Darkness came swiftly, a cloudless, moonlit night turning the snow into folds of blue silver and laying out a vast panorama of stars above him. If Caenis had been here he could have named all the constellations but Vaelin could pick out only a few of the more obvious ones; the Sword, the Stag, the Maiden. Caenis had told him of a legend that claimed the first souls of the Departed had cast the stars into the sky from the Beyond as a gift for the generations to come, making patterns to guide the living through the path of life. Many claimed to be able to read the message written in the sky, most of them seemed to congregate in market places and fairs, offering guidance for a palmful of copper.
He was wondering at the meaning of the Sword pointing towards the south when his sense of wrongness hardened into cold certainty. Scratch tensed, lifting his head slightly. There was no scent, no sound, no warning at all, but something wasn’t right.
Vaelin turned, glancing over his shoulder at the unmoving foliage behind him. So silent, he wondered, a little awed. No assassin could be that skilful.
“ If you’re hungry, brother,” he called. “I have plenty of meat to spare.” He turned back to the fire, adding some logs to keep the flames high. After a short interval there was a crunch of boots on snow as Makril stepped past him to crouch opposite, spreading his hands to the fire. He didn’t look at Vaelin but glowered at Scratch.
“ Should’ve killed that bloody thing,” he grumbled.
Vaelin ducked into his shelter to fetch a portion of meat. “Deer.” He tossed it to Makril.
The stocky man speared the meat with his knife and arranged a small mound of rocks to secure it over the fire before spreading his bedroll on the ground to sit down.
“ A fine night, brother,” Vaelin said.
Makril grunted, undoing his boots to massage his feet. The smell was enough to make Scratch get up and slink away.
“ I am sorry Brother Tendris did not find my word trustworthy,” Vaelin continued.
“ He believed you.” Makril picked something from between his toes and tossed it into the fire where it popped and hissed. “He’s a true man of the Faith. Whereas I am a suspicious, gutter born bastard. That’s why he keeps me with him. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a man of many abilities, finest horseman I ever saw and he can extract information from a Denier quicker than you could blow your nose. But in some ways he’s an innocent. He trusts the Faithful. For him all the Faithful have the same belief, his belief.”
“ But not yours?”
Makril placed his boots near the fire to dry. “I hunt. Tracks, signs, spoor, a scent on the wind, the rush of blood that comes from a kill. That’s my Faith. What’s yours boy?”
Vaelin shrugged. He suspected a trap in Makril’s openness, luring him into an admission best kept silent. “I follow the Faith,” he replied, forcing certainty into his words. “I am a brother of the Sixth Order.”
“ The Order has many brothers, all different, all finding their own path in the Faith. Don’t kid yourself the Order is filled with virtuous men who spend every spare moment grovelling to the Departed. We’re soldiers, boy. Soldier’s life is hard, short on pleasure and long on pain.”
“ The Aspect says there’s a difference between a soldier and a warrior. A soldier fights for pay or loyalty. We fight for the Faith, war is our way of honouring the Departed.”
Makril’s face took on a sombre cast, a craggy, hairy mask in the yellow fire light, his eyes distant, focused on unhappy memories. “War? War is blood and shit and men maddened with pain calling for their mother as they bleed to death. There’s no honour in it, boy.” His eyes shifted, meeting Vaelin’s. “You’ll see it, you poor little bastard. You’ll see it all.”
Suddenly uncomfortable, Vaelin added another log to the fire. “Why were you hunting that girl?”
“ She’s a Denier. A Denier most foul, for she has power to twist the hearts of virtuous men.” He gave a short, ironic laugh. “So I think I’d be safe if she ever met me.”
“ What is it? This power?”
Makril tested the meat with his fingers and began to eat, biting off small mouthfuls, chewing thoroughly then swallowing. It was the practised, unconscious action of a man who did not savour food but merely took it into himself as fuel. “It’s a dark tale, boy,” he said, between mouthfuls. “Might give you nightmares.”
“ I’ve got those already.”
Makril raised a bushy eyebrow but didn’t comment. Instead he finished his meat and fished in his pack for a small leather flask. “Brother’s Friend,” he explained, taking a swig. “Cumbraelin brandy mixed with redflower. Keeps the fire in a man’s belly when he’s walking a wall on the northern frontier waiting for Lonak savages to cut his throat.” He offered the flask to Vaelin who shook his head. Liquor wasn’t forbidden in the Order, but it was frowned upon by the more Faithful masters. Some said anything that dulled the senses was a barrier to the Faith, the less a man remembered of his life the less he had to take with him to the Beyond. Clearly Brother Makril didn’t share this view.
“ So you want to know about the witch.” He relaxed, resting his back against a rock, intermittently sipping from his flask. “Well, the story goes she was arrested on Council orders following reports of Unfaithful practises. Allegations are usually a load of nonsense; people claiming to have heard voices from the Beyond that don’t come from the Departed, healing the sick, communing with beasts and so on. Mostly it’s just frightened peasants blaming each other for their misfortunes, but every once in a while you get one like her.
“ There’d been trouble in her village. She and her father were outsiders, from Renfael. Kept to themselves, he made a living as a scribe. A local landowner wanted him to forge some deeds, something to do with a dispute over the inheritance of some pasture. The scribe refused and ended up with an axe in his back a few days later. The landowner was a cousin of the local magistrate so nothing was done. Two days later he walked into the local tavern, confessed his crime and cut his own throat from ear to ear.”
“ And they blamed her for that?”
“ It seems they had been seen together earlier in the day, which was odd because there was said to be hatred between them even before the bastard killed her father. They said she touched him, a short pat on the arm. Didn’t help that she was mute, and an outsider. Being a little too pretty and a little too smart didn’t do her any favours either. They always said there was something about her, she wasn’t right. But they always say that.”
“ So you arrested her?”
“ Oh no. Tendris and me, we only hunt the ones that run. Brothers from the Second Order searched her house and found evidence of Denier activity. Forbidden books, images of gods, herbs and candles, the usual stuff. Turned out she and her father were followers of the Sun and the Moon, a minor sect. They’re pretty harmless mostly since they don’t try to convert others to their heresy, but a Denier’s a Denier. She was taken to the Blackhold. The next night she escaped.”
“ She escaped the Blackhold?” Vaelin was unsure if Makril was mocking him. The Blackhold was a squat, ugly fortress in the centre of the capital, its stones stained with soot from the nearby foundries, famed as a place where people were taken and didn’t come out again unless it was to walk the path to the gallows or the gibbet. If a man went missing and his neighbours heard he was taken to the Blackhold they stopped asking when he would return, in fact they didn’t mention him at all. And no-one ever escaped.
“ How is such a thing possible?” Vaelin wondered.
Makril took a long pull from his flask before continuing. “Did you ever hear of Brother Shasta?”
Vaelin recalled some of the more lurid battle stories told by the older boys. “Shasta the Axe?”
“ That’s him. A legend in the Order, a great brute of a man, arms like tree trunks, fists like hams, they said he’d killed over a hundred men before they sent him to the Blackhold. Truly he was a hero… and quite the stupidest shit-head I ever met. Mean with it too, ‘specially when he’d had a drink. He was her gaoler.”
“ I had heard he was a great warrior who did the Order much service,” Vaelin said.
Makril snorted. “The Keep is where the Order puts its relics, boy. The ones that survive their fifteen years who’re too stupid or too mad to be masters or commanders, they get sent to the Keep to live out their time locking up heretics, even if they’re no bloody good at it. I’ve seen plenty of Shastas, big, ugly, brutish idiots with no thought in their heads but the next battle or the next tankard of ale. Usually they don’t last long enough to be a problem but if they’re big and strong enough they linger, like a bad smell. Shasta lingered long enough to be sent to the Blackhold, Faith help us.”
“ So,” Vaelin ventured carefully, “this oaf left her cell open and she walked out?”
Makril laughed, a hard unpleasant sound. “Not quite. He gave her the keys to the front gate, took his axe
