“And take your stinking heads with you,” hissed Greenway.
“Don’t be a cunt!” roared Stour, spraying spit, and all around the hall men jerked up, stepped forward, put hands to their weapons, like dogs might bare teeth at their master’s anger. Greenway backed off, white and trembling, no doubt thinking the Great Leveller had a hand on his shoulder.
Then Stour grinned bigger’n ever. And he squatted down on his haunches, that beautiful wolfskin cloak dragging in the mess the heads had left. He took the biggest one in his hands and set it right-side up, its great spiked helmet still on and its great long bloated tongue hanging from its oversized jaws.
“I want to look at ’em.”
The Demon That Breaks All Chains
“By all the dead,” croaked Rikke as she lifted her head. Her mouth tasted like graves, her empty stomach squelched and bubbled. Felt like there was a mace hanging behind her eyes, bashing painfully against the inside of her skull with every movement. But at least time was going all one way.
She’d been sleeping in a nest of furs but with hard rock underneath, and she dragged a dusty old deerskin around her shoulders, stumbling from the darkness, eyes almost closed against the stabbing light.
It wasn’t raining but there was a chilly damp in the air that turned everything dark. No wind. No sound. Everything still as the land of the dead. Tall trees, black wood and black needles. Jumbles of black rock jutting on the slopes. Tall black mountains in the far-off distance, white-bearded and white-capped like grumpy old warriors. Dark shingle sloped down from the cave-mouth to the dark water, and in its mirror the trees and the rocks and the mountains all reflected, still and perfect and darker than ever. A woman stood there, tattered skirts tucked into her belt, up to her thin, pale, veiny calves in the lake. Stood so still she didn’t make a ripple.
Rikke puffed out her cheeks. When she bent to roll up her trouser legs, her head throbbed so hard she nearly fell. She hitched the bald hide up around her shoulders then tottered towards the water, crunching shingle sharp between her bare toes. It was that cold it surely should’ve frozen. But it’s better to do it than live with the fear of it, as her father occasionally told her, so she sloshed out, wincing and shivering, ripples catching the peaceful trees, and the still mountains, and shattering them into dancing fragments.
“Chilly as winter’s arse,” she gasped as she wobbled up next to the woman. From the side she looked about normal. Old and deep-lined, cool blue eyes fixed on the horizon.
“The cold has a wonderful way of clearing the mind.” Not the witchy croak Rikke had expected. A young voice, smooth and full of music. “It fixes you on what counts. Draws your attention inwards.”
“So… you do it to gather your magic… or something?”
“I do it because fools rarely follow a woman into cold water with their problems.” She turned, and Rikke could only stare, because her face was just the way she’d seen it in her vision.
A great pink-grey scar ran down the centre of her buckled forehead, from hairline to mouth, one eye and one brow higher than the other, as though her skull had been entirely split and set back together by a drunken surgeon. There was a crazy zigzag of stitches through the puckered skin. Stitches of golden wire that gleamed in the morning sun.
“I am Caurib,” she said, in that soft, soft voice. “Or I was. A sorceress, from the utmost North. Or I was. Now I am the witch of the forbidden lake.” She turned back to the horizon. “I find that suits me better.”
Rikke had grown up in the North where a man with no scars was no man at all, but she never before saw a scar the like of this. She looked down at the water, already settling around her own sharp shin bones and holding a dark reflection of herself. “What happened to you?”
“An axe happened, as axes do.”
“Didn’t see it coming, then?”
Caurib slowly raised one brow. Looked like it took some effort, skin stretching around the stitches. “I do not need to tell you that the Long Eye comes when it comes. If you are hoping it will keep you safe from all life’s axes, you will be disappointed. But then it is the fate of hope to end in disappointment, as it is the fate of light to end in darkness and life in death. They are still worth something while they last.”
Rikke wiggled her numb toes and watched the ripples spread. “Bit of a bleak message.”
“If you sought optimism from a hermit whose head is stitched together with golden wire then you are a bigger fool even than you look. Which would be quite an achievement.”
Rikke stole a glance sideways, but Caurib was looking ahead again. “I thought what I saw in the visions, the golden wire, might be, you know…”
“I do not know. Try saying the words.”
“A metaphor?”
“For what?”
“I just see the visions, I don’t understand them.”
The witch gave a hiss of disgust. “It is not the seer’s task to understand her visions, girl, any more than it is the potter’s task to understand her clay.”
“I’m guessing…” Rikke winced as she tried to shift her foot on the slippery lake bed and caught her toe on a pointed rock. “We’re not actually talking about pots now? Or are we talking about pots now?”
The witch gave a hiss of disappointment. “It is the potter’s task to impose her will upon the clay. To shape the clay into something useful. Or something beautiful.”
“So… I have to impose my will upon my visions? Shape them into something beautiful?”
“Ah! A ray of sunshine penetrates the long night of your ignorance.” The witch gave a hiss of scorn. She could do a lot with a hiss. “And I only had to waste half my morning explaining it to you.”
“But—”
“I am not your mentor, girl, nor your teacher, nor your wise grandmother. You want me to give you the rules, but there are no rules. You are like those old fools the magi, who want to chain the world with laws. You are like those old fools the Eaters, who want to cage the world with prayers. You are like these new fools who want to bind the world with iron and make it obey. The Long Eye is magic, girl!” She raised her withered arms, screaming it towards the mountains. “It is the devil that cannot be caged! It is the demon that breaks all chains!” She let her arms drop. “If there were rules it would not be magic.”
“Guess I’ll have to find my own answers, then,” said Rikke, mournfully.
Caurib looked down at her feet, hidden in the lake. “Fear is like cold water. A little is a fine thing, it fixes you on what counts. But too much will freeze you. You must make a box inside your mind, and put your fear inside, and lock it.”
“That sounds a lot like something a mentor would say.”
“No doubt I’d be a wonderful one. But I’m not yours.”
Rikke heard crunching footsteps behind, turned with a smile thinking to see Shivers or Isern walking down the shore. Instead she saw a Shanka, coming with a lurching gait as it had one leg longer than the other, clawed foot sending a shower of shingle sideways with each step. It had fish threaded onto a spear, one still twisting and flipping, scales glinting silvery in the morning sun.
“Ah!” Caurib smiled, and the great scar through her top lip stretched about the wire in a way Rikke found most unsettling. “Breakfast.”