The Pilgrims

decapitated, as clearly as if it were real. He had, whilst hearing Sharfy’s account of Kiown’s stupidity, seen the battered soldier’s jaw break off and drop to the ground. A blink later, it was merely Sharfy’s ugly, trustworthy face before him. He wondered if they had a name for this curse, or illness: whatever it was that caused the years of bloodshed and violence he’d been part of to flash before his eyes. It came and went, sometimes for weeks, and most commonly with newly met people.

Eric’s face was normal again. Nobility, Kiown had claimed, as though this made up for what he’d done. Anfen wondered. The young man was well fed, had no visible scars, had good teeth and grooming. His clothes seemed formal and well made. It was possible.

Anfen checked the sky again but saw no sign of any Invia. How long would his luck hold? He was Marked, and they’d see him from a long way away. He picked up the deadstone, rubbing it across his sword’s face: scrape, scrape, scrape. He could have had the sword enchanted with some useful effect, but preferred deadstone’s ability to bother and distract mages. Having to rub it on the blade every day, however, was a pain.

The sound made the Otherworlder stir. Anfen saw his eyes open a crack, then close, feigning more sleep. ‘Good morning,’ said Anfen. ‘There’s stew in the pot. Loup blessed it. It tastes better than it smells and looks.’

Eric yawned and sat up. He took in his surrounds, looking behind them at the cave cut into the hillside, through which Kiown and Sharfy had carried him. He said, ‘Are you going to cut my head off with that sword, or are you just sharpening it?’

Anfen tried to soften his manner, for he knew he looked flinty-eyed and that each battle and kill had changed his appearance, however minutely, so that by now death hung about him like a veil. So it felt. ‘Your head is safe enough. Nor am I sharpening this. Eskian blades don’t need much sharpening. They hold their edges. They’d want to, for the price.’

Eric stumbled to the fireside and took some stew from the pot. Anfen saw him hesitate, possibly unsure of the etiquette: how much should he take? ‘Have it all, if you’ve room for it. A hard road lies ahead. Worse than the one you came here by, no doubt. I know your name already. I’m Anfen.’

Eric ate ravenously, pausing once to feel the bulge in his pockets, checking that something was still there. Anfen saw a bloody mess in one of the young man’s eye sockets, an eye recently gouged out, the face black with bruises. He saw one arm broken in two places and lying inert and useless, still clutching the wooden bowl half full of stew. He shut his eyes and things had become normal again when he opened them. ‘You’re nobility, I’m told,’ he said.

Eric glanced up at him. ‘Sort of.’

‘Sort of? How do you mean? What exactly is your title?’

Eric’s mouth was too full to speak. He chewed for a while, which conveniently gave him time to ponder an answer. He said, ‘We have a custom, where I come from, not to give details of our families and how they’re connected. I am not the highest placed, or even especially highly placed.’

‘But your absence would be noticed?’

‘Yes. It will be.’

So, he was not sent or ordered to come. Did he wish me to think so? ‘Do they know where you went?’

‘I left word of it. I don’t think the door itself is something widely known. Yet.’

‘They will close the entry point soon,’ said Anfen, setting his blade back in its scabbard, for the Otherworlder’s eyes kept nervously returning to it. ‘What are the likely consequences, do you think, of your absence? An expedition here?’

The young man pondered that for a while. ‘I’d say if my world — Earth, we call it — found out about this one, they would make a very big fuss. They’d probably send in some explorers and the like first. If those were attacked, they might send armies. What would result from that I couldn’t tell you.’ Eric frowned. ‘Your fire,’ he said. ‘There’s no smoke. I smell it but can’t see it.’

‘We are on a hilltop in enemy country,’ said Anfen with a shrug. ‘Why wouldn’t we have treated the wood? We have a magician with us.’

For some reason Eric laughed. ‘Right you are. Silly me.’ He attacked his food for a while, then said, ‘I just remembered something. Kiown said you own me now. Is that how you’d put it too?’

‘We don’t own you. You’re free to go at any time, if you wish.’ A lie, of course; why not first try things the easy way? ‘My advice is that you come with us back to the Council of Free Cities in Elvury, the nearest Free City. It is the safest thing for you. This is Aligned country. Wild things and Inferno cultists infest the rural parts. In Aligned cities, you’ll be enslaved or killed. Even if you find some place to dwell and hide out, you’ll likely starve. They are short on food these days, except when the citizens decide to eat each other. You will be safe and fed with us, at least.’

Eric set aside his empty bowl. It seemed he could spot a lie when he saw one. ‘So, I’m really free to just up and walk away.’

‘You are as free to do that as you are to jump from this hilltop right now and bounce your skull on the road below. The results would be similar. A waste.’

The Otherworlder sighed. ‘A friend of mine may have come through the door after me. Your friend Sharfy stopped me from going back to save him from that thing, that war mage. I won’t tell you I’m happy about that.’

‘And just how would you have saved him, Eric?’

Eric winced. Ah yes, there is a secret or two here, thought Anfen. What is it? A weapon? A power of some kind? Not enough to overwhelm Sharfy’s knife, obviously, but enough to flummox a mage? Enough to get past a mage in the first place — some kind of disguise?

The Otherworlder quickly said, ‘I don’t know how I would have saved him. I don’t know why it spared me. You’re right. Maybe the second time around, it wouldn’t have.’

‘Then perhaps you owe Sharfy some thanks.’

‘Maybe so. And you’re right about all the rest. If you’ll have me, I’ll come. But … you don’t want me just from the kindness of your heart, do you?’

Anfen smiled. ‘No. What your presence means to the Mayors I can’t say. They delight in confounding my predictions and advice. But they would prize you.’

Eric weighed this up, too. ‘Why do I understand things the rest of you can’t? Sharfy said it was some magic in the door itself. Or something.’

Anfen pondered, staring into the distance. He was glad to look away from Eric’s face, which had now peeled and shrivelled as though it were long dead. ‘The question is deeper than you may think,’ he said. ‘There were scholars and mages who studied Pilgrims like you, and the entry point, and Levaal’s very creation itself. But their work has been destroyed or seized. I was high-ranked in their armies; I did some of the seizing.’ I co-ordinated it, ordered it, kicked down doors with my own boots, killed with my own hands, ordered ditches dug by roadsides and in the woods, filled them with corpses by the dozen. And I was very, very good at it all. ‘Then I began to read some of the books instead of burning them. And I decided to stop taking the castle’s orders. Far too late, of course.’ Because it’s nice to be promoted and made a hero, isn’t it, and be told sweet noble words about the foul things you’ve done? He sighed heavily. ‘All I can tell you is that all things here, people, events and forces, are like little numbers in a puzzle being solved by a great mind.’

A log popped on the fire with a shower of sparks. ‘Whose mind?’

‘The Dragon’s. Don’t confuse It with those lesser ones you may hear of, the dragon-youth, imprisoned in the sky. I refer to that which made this world, or at least decided its natural laws. Perhaps the Dragon meant for people to travel between worlds, and wanted knowledge to be exchanged, or stolen. More little numbers gathered for the solving of that enormous puzzle. That may be why It laid such a condition at the boundary. You may be an ordained Pilgrim, long ago predicted. Who knows? The easiest way to put it is a phrase you may have heard by now: as the Dragon wills.’

Eric looked both impressed and sceptical. ‘This Dragon. Is it real? I mean, are you giving me a religious explanation? An actual history? Do you worship it?’

What strange questions, Anfen thought, especially that last one. He frowned. ‘It’s real, though none have seen It in the flesh. We have only seen signs of its passing, from times It roamed the land, huge and awake. Footprints hammered into the world’s crust, shed scales buried deep. We suspect It sleeps underground, near the castle, for there’s heavy magic in those parts, and the gods do not go near it. No one swears to It, that I know of.