The Pilgrims

sightings of them in remote places, usually from far away, those who saw them not having known what they saw, those who’d got too close not surviving to report it.

Through these nearly impassable crowds, Siel and Eric set out. That first day he slipped from his mount four times, miraculously escaping broken bones. They were fine steeds, tall and muscled as racing horses. Siel and Eric discovered why the ‘important folk’ hadn’t wished to brave travel on ground-level through the deadly stampede for the southern gate. On one nightmarish street half a dozen Tormentors had gathered to stand around motionless in strange poses, victims littered about their feet. The huge ones had slunk back towards the river as though all following the same impulse and, according to talk, stood motionless along the banks watching people flee, bodies impaled all over them, some still slowly writhing and screaming for help. The Tormentors loose in the city were bad enough; looters, invading soldiers, raging fires and occasional riots had not made things any safer.

The only light moment for Eric and Siel was when they found Loup patiently waiting by the roadside for them with a wide toothless smile and his own plundered horse.

Most on the road, Siel and Eric included, tried not to think about what they’d left behind. They tried to shut out the wailing of refugees unused to war so close at hand and no longer a distant abstraction, unused to being caught in the shadows of a man-god’s descending feet. It had all been so quiet for so long, the state of conflict between the Free and Aligned worlds … tense, but out of sight like an earthquake brewing. The shock on the refugees’ sleep-deprived faces said it all, the stagger of their walk as though under new and terrible weight, the disbelief as it sank in: We’re not going home tonight. There is no ‘home’.

Eric felt guilty at his relief on finally passing the grim-faced vanguard and leaving them behind on the road. Siel made no secret of hers. Loup whistled a tune like he hadn’t a care in the world.

Meanwhile the General leading the invasion had a far larger ‘mop-up’ operation on his hands than he had been led to expect. His men slammed open the city gates at last, lulled by the silence on the other side. He’d expected a few score of the creatures, a hundred at most, not several hundreds of them, all difficult to kill, some huge.

They made a dent in the monsters’ numbers before the last of the invading soldiers were killed or fled, enough to make the real mop-up a job at least possible. The General had missed something: that while men could be sacrificed, so too could generals who walked on ice that got thinner the closer they walked to the throne of power they served. The Strategists had long ago marked him as ‘ambitious’, a potential threat, and sought missions suitably deadly to throw him into, so he might have an honourable death for the rank and file’s gossip, and be useful as a martyr. That his ambition in reality had extended no further than his achieved rank was neither here nor there.

62

Pushing the horses to their limits and changing them frequently gave Sharfy a sour taste, for he felt horses were friends of men more than servants. Anfen believed that too, but something had changed in him since they’d set out. There was a light in his eye Sharfy didn’t much care for, nor did he like the grim silence of their journey, which made every second of it pass so heavily. The road went so much easier and faster with jokes, songs and stories.

Yet he understood what Anfen saw, what the invasion really was: the castle’s hand closing its fist around the world at last. If they could take the unconquerable city in one night — years of planning or not, it looked like one night’s work, and what your enemy thought you were capable of mattered as much as what you actually were capable of — then, surely, they could take the rest of the Free Cities at their leisure. And would. And the Mayors would begin to ponder whether they should resist the inevitable, or bargain and speed it up, to maintain their own places of power. That seemed, from Sharfy’s view, to be written in the lines on Anfen’s face.

Sure enough, such were the former First Captain’s thoughts. Anfen had been set for a lifetime of war against them. He had not expected his side to win, but nor had he expected to see the war’s end while he still lived. In one night he’d learned the final surrender could be only months away. If the Mayors panicked, as they just might, surrender by tonight was not impossible …

But mostly, he pondered how the Wall might be destroyed as the landscape clip- clopped by and his body was tossed up and down in the saddle. The great dividing road brought him closer and closer but no ideas came. Few of the confiscated readings had mentioned the Wall. He knew only that it had existed longer than the cities had, longer than humans had. The Wall may have been made by the dragon- youth, or the great Dragon, or by some like force on its other side.

As Otherworld existed on one end of Levaal, it was held there was a world on the Wall’s other side. This was claimed by ancient scrolls and artefacts left by the dragon-youth to the first generation of people, along with several other parting gifts of knowledge, all long lost. If Tormentors came from that side, and they weren’t some secret creation of the castle’s, what other horrors would pour across if Anfen’s mission succeeded?

But no. He was well past asking whether or not he should.

They kept trading horses at stables along the way as they upped their pace and put days and leagues behind them. Anfen was merciless. They went past good inns, to Sharfy’s growing dismay; he was sick to death of the road and had promised himself a lengthy rest if he made it back alive from their mission in the north. If he broke ranks and stayed at an inn, he had no doubt Anfen would go on without him. Maybe I should let him, Sharfy thought more than once, before realising: I’m not really here to destroy the Wall. Of course not. Stupid! It can’t even be done. I’m here to look after him. He’s coming unstuck like we all thought he might, one day …

The wall itself could soon be seen, though that didn’t mean they were yet close to it. It stretched as high up as the very roof of the sky, the Wall at its upper parts sky-white so that it blended in and was practically invisible. Lower down, it was a dull glassy blue. On sight of it, the absolute insane futility of the mission struck Sharfy as plainly as could be, and he began to wonder about his friend in other ways. Half a dozen disquieting theories came to him: the charm said no such thing, he misheard; Anfen’s been mad the whole time, war can do that to a man; the old Otherworlder’s disappearance had been planned and staged; Anfen works for the enemy, his whole defection was faked; this is not really Anfen, it is some conjured illusion … and more, yet they pressed on, and the mad gleam in the boss’s eye never dimmed, nor did the intensity of his silence relent for a moment. Nor did he seem to tire, and only by practically shoving food at his face did Sharfy remind him to eat.

Hour by hour, day by day of the endless clip clop of hoofbeats on paved stone. The Wall drew closer. The great dividing road, old as the Wall and splitting the world’s vast, reaching east and west realms, carried them mile by mile straight to the middle of World’s End.

63

Case had decided his fate long before the opportunity arose to act on his wish. For the meantime, he rode the giant wolf, suddenly feeling light-spirited and free.

For Case, it was a matter of: how. A drink would be nice beforehand, one final toast to those good memories, Eric’s friendship being one of the latest. Shelly too, how she’d visited him almost every weekend of his sentence with those little surprise gifts. His brother Charles, before they’d parted lives with poisonous words. His old father he’d forgiven, he supposed, but never felt at peace with — no harm in a toast to the man’s name. Hell, his first pet dog was worth tipping a cup for. So was the day he was released from gaol, and went to the beach as he’d dreamed of doing, even though it was winter, and just lay in the sand fully clothed, not moving for hours and hours and hours, listening to the waves murmur freedom. That was a good day.

His knee sizzled with pain as the wolf bounded along, panting and stinking. Case felt a moment’s sympathy for the mage, and for everything else sentenced to physical existence. Out of the trees they came at last, and good riddance to each one of them. And soon the ground sloped upwards, mountains came into view, and the answer was obvious. Just as soon as they were high enough. Right about … now.