Falling.
Strange, to fall was relaxing in its own way. To be free of the pressure of the land, the constant wearing of it on his muscles, the friction of traction and movement, the weight of thought and the constant fight just to be.
This was freedom.
This was an end.
He would fall and he would hit the ground and never have to think or worry again. How far was the ground? He did not know. Maybe they would fall forever.
Inside something roared, something fought and screamed and wanted. With it came a sure and certain belief; a knowing. He was wrong. There would be no freedom, there would be no crushing impact followed by death and silence and escape and a foot upon the Star Path. Not for him. In his desperation he had given himself over to something terrifying and dark and it had him. He belonged to it. His body was its puppet, who he was, his essence, would be pushed back into the corner of his mind while the rot within him raged.
If he broke his body it would fix it.
It wanted him. It needed him.
The only reason it did not have him was because of the woman, Sorha.
And the fall would most certainly kill her.
She was falling below him, bits of bridge spinning and twisting around her. Her arms flailing as she clawed at the air, trying desperately to slow her plummet. She deserved death. She was the catalyst of everything, an easy figure for him to blame. A woman who gloried in the pain of others, the essence of what it was to be Rai, hateful and concerned only with herself.
But if she died?
What happened to him if she died?
A roaring within. A fire waiting to be kindled.
Iftal’s star, he could not let her die.
He brought his arms in close to his body, angled himself like a spearseed, copying the way they made a flat plain against the air that sped them through the air to bury themselves in the ground. Air rushing past him, bits of debris hitting him as he hurtled towards Sorha. Darkness closing in, light fleeing. Only one chance, if he missed her that was it. He would have too much speed and he could not fly, to go back upwards. Swaying back and forth. Altering his direction. Closer and closer and closer. Darker and darker. Soon he would be unable to see her. At the last moment, as he was about to hit her she saw him and spun in the air, twisting out of his way. He cried out.
“No!”
Shooting past, the air howling in his ears, wind whipping his hair about his face, blind from the moisture being forced out of his eyes. Blinded by the lack of light. Reaching. One last desperate action. His hand closed on material. He pulled. Felt her struggling against his grip, they began to spin. Dancing through a veil of windborne tears, she struggled, trying to slip out of the topcoat that he had grabbed. He pulled harder, getting another hand on her arm. The smooth sheen of her armour. Hard to grip but he would not let go. She was hitting him. Screaming at him. But there was no skill in her attack. She was overwhelmed by the terror of the fall. It had driven all sane thought from her mind and left her a scratching, biting, unthinking creature, wanting only to escape death and in her panic attacking the only thing that could waylay it. Him.
He pulled. Harder. Dragged her closer. Nails raking his face. Her breath loud enough he could hear it over the whistling wind. She began shrieking, screaming in fury and then he had her. Spinning her round so her back was against his front. Clasping her with his arms and legs, moving so his back was to the ground and his body would be a cushion against the impact that surely must come soon, and the last thing he heard before they hit, before the darkness took him, was her voice.
“I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!”
“Wake up.”
Everything hurt.
“Wake up!” Another hurt added to the rest. A pain on the side of his face. “Wake up!” His eyes opened. The night almost absolute, no luminescent animals pierced the darkness. He could just make out a face above his, a weight on his body adding to the agony of knitting bones and stitching muscle. He tried to focus. Failed. He could feel his body mending, faster than it ever had before and it distracted him. At the same time it did not feel quite like his body. As if what fixed him was not the substance of who he was, it was something other. He squinted, focused on the face above his. Sorha.
“Why?” She let out the word as a grunt of pain. “Why did you save me?” He couldn’t reply. His mouth was wrong. Whatever was fixing him was concentrating on what mattered most. He could feel it as heat in the trunk of his body, ribs and organs knitting. His skull burning as it corrected fractures. For a moment he did not know who or where he was. The world blurred again. “Tell me or…” Her words fell away, overwhelmed by pain that came out of her mouth in a great rolling grunt. Blood running from her nose. Make-up smeared and dirt on her face. “Tell me or I will…” The words dying away, she was shaking, wavering. “I will… I will slit your throat.” He couldn’t tell her, his mouth would not open. His lungs were swimming in his own blood. “I will…” Then she fell forward, slumped against him and darkness took him again.
He woke. The pain had subsided and Sorha was gone. Relief, swiftly followed by panic. Expecting the thing within him to rise up and take him. It did not happen, instead it wallowed in his belly like a heavy meal, threatening sickness.
She had to be near.
Cahan forced himself to sit, every muscle making its presence known, his body alien and unfamiliar but it obeyed him and that was what mattered. It did what he wanted. Cahan rolled over until he was on all fours. Took a breath, the air down here was different, damper. It felt like the air in the forest after the circle winds had brought rain. But there was no rain here, no circle winds. The air was completely still.
Vague shapes in the darkness, buildings? They were huge, strange. Not like any buildings he had seen before. He tried to reach out the way he did with his cowl, but what stopped the rot within taking him over also stopped him being able to sense the world around him. Instead he peered into the black. Eventually seeing something against the base of one of the buildings, a faint glimmering, the reflection of something white. He crawled towards it, hoping it was her. Staying aware of what was in him in case it began to grow. His hand found something in the dirt of the cavern. If it was dirt, it felt strange, more like gravel. A knife, it must be hers. He must be going in the right direction. He pushed the knife inside his greaves.
It was her.
Still alive but only just. He wondered if something of her cowl remained, it must for her to survive such a fall. Without something to help her she would not have survived at all. One of her arms was twisted. The white he saw was the bone of her thigh where it had pierced the skin. He stared at her, taking her in. She would have lost a lot of blood but her leg must be fixed. He took off the belt around her middle and split it down the centre lengthwise with the knife. It took all his energy and he had to sit down afterwards. Rest, unsure for how long. No way of telling how much time had passed down here. When he felt like he had enough strength he straightened her leg, even weakened and unconscious she cried out. A sob in the dead quiet of this strange place. That done he took his axes and placed them either side of her thigh, lashing them in place with the belt to make a splint.
It took almost all he had. With the last of his strength he straightened her arm, and this elicited no more than a groan. Then he lay in the strange dirt of this strange place and slept once more.
She sat leaning against the wall when he woke next. Little more than a collection of gleaming lines in the darkness where the small amount of light touched the hard edges of her armour. When she spoke her voice was thick with pain.
“You bound my wounds.” He saw her move, heard the creak of the crownhead leather beneath her armour. “Why?”
He pushed himself up, his muscles complaining and bones aching. It was very quiet, this underneath place. No sound of animals, no rush of wind or brush of leaf against leaf. Unnatural.
“If what we are told is true,” he began, his words came haltingly, his voice sounded wrong. It was as if the vast silence of this place ate the sound up, as if hungry for noise. “Well, this is where the Osere reside. I would be fool to go on alone.”
“And you would rather have an enemy who would stab you in the back than be alone?” She sounded disbelieving. “A wounded one too, one who will slow you down?”
“You will heal quickly,” said Cahan, “that part of your power clearly still lives within you.” He saw her nod, the way the highlights on her skin changed. Then she laughed.
“You make no sense,” she said. “You are Cowl-Rai, I saw your strength up there. You do not need to carry a threat around with you, and especially not one who will slow you, make you weaker by her presence.”
“Look around,” he said quietly. “What is there to feed a cowl down here? What is there to feed anyone?”
Silence. A great and oppressive silence in a great and oppressive darkness.
Or was it lighter than it had been? Did the air have a faint glow to it? Was he becoming used to this place, adapting to it?
“Do you even need life any more, Cahan Du-Nahere?” He did not like what she said, what he knew would come next. “I saw you in the Slowlands, I saw what you became. Barely even one of the people, something monstrous. Is that the way of the Cowl-Rai?” He could feel her studying him, even though he could barely see her. “I feared you as you came at me. I thought I stood no chance, even when I took away your…” Her voice tailed off. Cahan thought he heard water dripping somewhere very far away. Laughter from her. No humour in it, a cold and unpleasant noise. “You do not fear the Osere,” she said. “You fear yourself.” He said nothing. Stood, turned his back on her. The laughter continued. “What have you done, Cahan Du-Nahere? What have you let yourself become that you loathe yourself even more now than you did when we first met? That you frighten yourself so much?” He had nothing to say to her. “You think I do not see it? How little you wish to be powerful, how foolish you were to think you could survive without power in Crua?” He turned, advancing on her without realising. Anger rising within.
“It is not me!” The words a roar. Dagger in his hand. “Something dwells within me and it is not me.” As he approached he heard her move, the glint of a weapon in the darkness. In the two steps it took him to cross to her she had produced a second dagger. She held it to her throat.
“Stop!” she shouted. He did and she smiled, not that he could see, but he could hear it when she spoke. “You need me. You need me to keep whatever has you in its grasp at bay. Come any closer and you lose me.” Her teeth glittered. There was definitely more light. “I will end myself.”
“If you do,” said Cahan, slowly, “everything will be destroyed.”
“You are that powerful and that out of control?”
“I will no longer be me.” The words dull, flat. “Something darker than even you can imagine has me.” She stared at him, still smiling.
“But I will not care, Cahan Du-Nahere. I will be dead.” He was about to rage, to scream at her but he did not. Instead he took a deep breath.
“No,” he said, “you will not be. I saw the way you fought for life as you fell. You will not take your own life.”
“That was the animal in me, the shock of it.” Did she sound ashamed? He could not quite tell. “It is different to make the choice yourself. To realise revenge leads you along the Star Path.” Her voice was drifting, he wondered if he was wrong. If her pain was outweighing the fierce need to live he had seen in her before.
“I do not think there is a Star Path, not now,” he said. He crouched, had told no one what he thought before. Strange, that he should be unburdening himself here, to his sworn enemy.
“You would say anything,” she spat.
“You saw how I did not want to take life.” She was watching him, her eyes locked on his. “To fight you in Harn, the trees gave me power, but that was a one-time gift. When I needed it again it was not there. The land denied me. So I sought another way.”
“You made a deal with the Osere.” He shook his head.
“Crua is a cycle,” said Cahan, and he no longer looked at her, he looked into his past, at a decision made he would do anything to take back. “All things are brought back, the trees take power from the Light Above, but they also take power from death, from what decays.”
“That power is denied us, all know it. Only the Cowl-Rai who made the Reborn understood death and that knowledge is lost.” She sounded fascinated, malice gone just for a moment. Cahan shook his head.
“If it was true it would be good, the Reborn should not exist. All that mattered to them is lost. Taste, love, pleasure, all gone.” He wondered if the Reborn would come down here in search of him so he could fulfil his promise of death for them. “I sought to take power from death, and found I could not. The same way a person cannot eat gasmaw or littercrawler flesh, the power of death was denied to me.”
“So what are you, then?”
“I thought I had found a way to use it, death,” he said, “that I need not kill to protect those I love. The bluevein sickness was a way in, in my mind the worst that could happen was that it would make me ill.”
“But you were not strong enough to control it,” she said, almost a laugh, though it died on her lips.
“I controlled it until the Slowlands. But the power needed to save Furin overwhelmed me. Bluevein is not a sickness, it is a symptom of something deeper. And it is aware of us, of me. It wants me.”
“Why?”
“It wants to destroy.”
From his past a voice came back to him.
You are the fire.
No, it could not be. He would not be.
“If I help you,” he said, “can you walk?” She shook her head.
“Not yet.” Cahan nodded. Put aside his own weakness.
“Wait here.” He walked away, careful not to go too far from Sorha. It was definitely getting lighter and that the light had a direction. Lighter to his left, darker to the right. He followed the light. A thin alley between two of the strange buildings, just enough light to see by. He could go no further than this, the corruption within was growing, roaring in his mind. The buildings that lined the alley had a strange skin over them, not wood, not stone or cloth. Cold to the touch, in places it was holed and flaking. He pulled at part of it and to his surprise found it came away from the building. Beneath he found a wall of strange smooth material as odd as the skin he had pulled off. He could make a travois with this stuff, and pull Sorha along. He picked up the material.
And saw the first body.
Mostly bone, but with a film of skin. It looked like it had died in agony, the limbs twisted in impossible ways. He looked more closely. Fire? It looked like fire had done it. As if something had burned them alive. As he stared he began to smell it, the scent of cooked flesh. This was recent. Cahan looked around, he did not want to be here if whatever had done this came back. He did not want to meet the people of this place either because he knew what lived below. Osere. Was this one of their servants, a punishment? Or were there Rai down here? Rai of the Osere who had fed from this body?
Cahan had no wish to find out.
He returned to Sorha, and now he had seen one body he found more. His eyes became used to finding shapes in the darkness that marked other burned corpses. How had they got down here? There were many, tens, maybe even hundreds.
Was it those sent here to be punished? Had he been sent here to be punished?
“I’ll put you on this,” he said to Sorha as he knelt by her.
She began to reply but he did not give her time. Made her cry out as he pulled her roughly on to the sheet of material. Then he took her outer tunic from her, cut the long coat into strips.
“Why are you in such a hurry?” she said. “There is nothing here.”
“I do not think that is the case.” As he said it he felt something, huge and powerful and hungry, though not hungry in a way he understood. Not hungry for food. Behind the hunger a purpose. Implacable purpose. He tied Sorha onto the travois, strung a handle and wished he had enough material to make something that went over his shoulder, but he did not. Instead he had to drag the travois behind him in a way that would be uncomfortable and tiring.
“Where are we going?” she said. Something of his urgency must have infected her as she was no longer mocking him.
“Away,” he said. “Away from this place.”
They moved off into the darkness.