CHAPTER TWELVE

Vendetta

‘Where are we going?’ demanded Nico as he hurried after Ash into the west wing of the monastery, along the main tiq-panelled corridor, down steps into a dim basement that held casks and boxes and various assortments of stock. Ash moved quietly to the centre of the wooden floor, his form casting a long shadow from the solitary lantern hanging above. Nico stopped by his side. He followed Ash’s gaze towards their feet.

The old man took a key from his robe. It was as thin as a carpentry nail, and fine-toothed at one end. He bent to insert it into a hole in the floor that Nico was unable to see. A twist and a click, and suddenly Ash was tugging open a trapdoor that uncovered a stone stairwell and a release of stale air. They descended in silence.

Twelve steps down, they reached a low, damp tunnel, and they followed it to a source of light at its very end.

‘We call it the watching-house,’ Ash explained softly, as he nodded a greeting to the two long-haired Rshun who knelt, back to back, in the centre of the brightly lit vault they now stood within. A ceiling of white plaster arched high over their heads, an occasional root poking through it to dangle as if lost in the smoky atmosphere. The ceiling curved down to meet a circular periphery of walls plastered in the same sad, damp white.

The walls were lit by countless lanterns, and punctuated by rows of identically tiny alcoves, hundreds upon hundreds of them. Inside many of these alcoves Nico could see the familiar dark shapes of seals hanging from hooks. There were thousands all around.

What might ordinarily have been a solemn experience, standing deep beneath the ground surrounded by their sheer multitude, was instead something creepy and surreal, owing to the fact that all the seals were moving. Nico peered closer at them. It took several moments, as though his mind refused to see things for what they really were, but suddenly the scene snapped into clearer focus and he could see that steadily, perhaps five times in a minute, these thousands of seals were breathing in and out like tiny leathery lungs.

All of them, except for one.

They moved to stand before it, Nico’s breath sounding loud in his ears, while Ash explained in a low drone about how it had died during the night, and how he hoped it was merely an accidental or natural death, and not murder and thus requiring vendetta. And, with that, Ash plucked it from its hook and swept out of the watching-house with Nico scurrying in his wake.

They left the monastery at a fast trot.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Nico, as they turned to hike a path up the valley floor.

‘To see a man,’ Ash replied over his shoulder. ‘A man I should have taken you to visit long before now.’

‘So why didn’t you?’

The farlander leapt over a small slope of stones, and kept walking without reply. Nico scrabbled up after him, increasing his pace to catch up as the dry grasses clutched at his legs.

‘Who is this man?’ he called out.

‘A Seer. He will read the seal for us, and then tell us what occurred in the night.’

‘It’s true, then?’ panted Nico. ‘What the other apprentices say, that he’s a miracle-man?’

‘No. The Seer merely understands subtle wisdom. With technique, and great stillness, he can do things that others can achieve only by chance, if at all.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I know.’

They followed the stream for a short time, then angled away from it, treading across marshy ground that sucked at their sandalled feet. Ash continued walking without effort, as though he was taking an afternoon stroll. Nico, by his side, was now sweating.

‘The Seer is our order’s most valued member, boy. Remember this when you meet him. Our lore, our history, all of it has been passed down through the line of Seers. Without a Seer we would become blind, without direction. He alone can look into the heart of a seal and tell us what we must know from it. He can look equally into the heart of a novice, and judge if he is worthy. In a way, he will do so with you.’

‘I am to be judged?’

‘You will not know it. Mostly he will concentrate on the seal.’

‘I still think he sounds like a miracle-man.’

‘Boy, there are no miracles. What the Seer does is wholly natural.’

‘In the bazaar of Bar-Khos, I once saw a man who could stand upside-down balanced on his lips. He could do press-ups of a kind when he pursed his lips against the ground. If that’s not a miracle, I don’t know what is.’

Ash gave a dismissive toss of his head. ‘The Seer is what you Mercians call a . . . prodigy. They have not always been so, our Seers, but this one . . . this one is a man of learning as well as of intuition. When we first came here, to the Midèrs, he heard of Zanzahar and the many things they imported there from the Isles of Sky. He travelled to the city to study them, though it was not always clear what those things had been designed for. The seeds of the mali tree, for instance. They are sold in that city as rare charms capable of bonding to their wearer. They store a person’s life in some way, so the wearers, if they practise certain techniques, can relive those events in dreams of their own choosing. The Seer – it was he who discovered how to bisect those seeds and twin them, so we could use them for our own purposes. In that way he invented the seals.’

‘So how did you conduct vendetta before then?’

‘With great difficulty.’ Ash cast a backward glance at his apprentice. There was a sparkle to his dark features, a vitality that seemed to have been absent for some time. ‘Your wounds have healed well,’ he observed to his apprentice.

‘Yes,’ Nico agreed.

It was true. The wounds caused by Aléas had been small enough cuts, as it turned out. They had not even require stitching. Nico had simply applied beeswax to them, as Aléas himself had suggested, whereupon the wounds had not bruised but stayed red and raw for some days, before scabbing over, causing the discomfort of constant itching more than anything else. When Nico had later caught his reflection, backlit by candle flame, in the glass of one of the kitchen windows, he was even somewhat taken with what he saw. The small scars made him look older, he decided.

The Seer lived alone in a little hermitage further up the valley. His hermitage sat on a hump of grass in the bend formed by a small, frothy brook that ran between rocks turned green with algae. Trees protected it on the windward side, gnarly jupes in full bloom and a large weeping willow whose leaves trailed in the current of water and sparred with its passing. The hermitage itself was nothing more than a shack, with a rectangular hole cut in one wall to overlook the brook, and which served as both window and door.

‘Remember what I have told you,’ said Ash as they approached.

Nico followed him inside. For a moment, in the dusty sunlight filtering past him though the doorway, he wondered if they had come to the wrong place.

In the centre of the tiny hut, the Seer sat cross-legged on a mat of woven rushes, facing the door with his eyes half closed. He was a skinny, ancient man, with a milky film covering his hooded eyes, and skin like that of fruit left too long in the sun. He was a farlander, obviously, and his dark skin contrasted sharply with the great puffs of white hair sprouting from his nostrils and ears. His scalp was bald. His earlobes, ritually mutilated, hung obscenely down to his shoulders in a manner Nico had never seen before.

Nico turned with open mouth to Ash to find him kneeling on the ground. With a jerk of his head, he indicated for Nico to kneel beside him.

The ancient farlander stared at Nico silently, in a way that reminded him of one his mother’s cats, as if gazing at something that was not even there. The old man blinked slowly, then spread his lips into a grin that exposed his toothless gums. He nodded once, as though in greeting, seeming pleased at the sight of the young man before him, or amused at the very least.

He became serious as he turned to Ash who, without comment, passed the dead seal into the old man’s shaking hands.

They waited expectantly. A chant filled the air as the old Seer whined something in the farlander tongue, and scratched at the lice infesting his robe. Eventually he fell silent, sitting entirely motionless with his eyes closed, the occasional grassfly settling on his bald, liver-spotted head. It was like those initial sessions of practising meditation on the Falcon, in which Nico had been unable to settle, and the aches of his body had eventually turned to agony. Indeed, he tried to settle into meditation, but it was useless, for he was too impatient to find out what would happen next. Absently, he chewed at his lip and stared at the damp-stained planks lining the opposite wall.

It was a blessed relief when the old Seer finally broke his meditative silence, smacking his dry lips and leaning away from the lifeless seal cradled in both hands.

‘Shinsh ta-kana . . .’ he croaked in a high-pitched voice. ‘Yoshi, li-naga!’ And then he nodded his head and frowned quite sadly.

‘Murder,’ Ash translated for the boy, his voice hard.

*

That evening, as the Rshun finished their supper around the tables in the large dining hall that occupied much of the north wing of the monastery building, and the candles brightened against the fading light coming through its many windows, a sudden ringing of cutlery against glass silenced the quiet chatter.

Nico looked up from the table where he sat with the other apprentices, still chewing on the last of his rice cake. Aléas stopped talking to him, and did the same. From the back of the room, a wizened far-lander rose slowly from his wooden chair. He was older than Ash, though not as ancient and withered as the Seer. Nico knew him to be Osh, the head of the order, the man who had founded this very monastery here in the mountains of Cheem. He had several times seen him limping around the place, but never before had he heard him speak.

The old Rshun’s voice echoed with a clear resonance around the hushed room.

‘My friends,’ he declared to the multitude of faces now turned towards him. ‘We have, on this night, a task incumbent upon us of an exceptional nature. One of our patrons has taken to the High Road. The Seer informs us that it was murder. He has also told us, through his wisdom, of the culprit responsible for this act.’ Osh paused and studied each face in turn, measuring them for attention, or perhaps some other quality only he could perceive.

‘Tonight we must declare vendetta on a priest of Mann. Not merely any priest, take mind. No, as always, life refuses to be as straightforward as that. Tonight, we declare vendetta on Kirkus dul Dubois – that is, the son of Sasheen dul Dubois, the Holy Matriarch of Mann.’

Murmurs broke out around the room. Nico stole a glance towards Ash, who sat at the same high table as the old leader. Ash merely sipped from his goblet of water, his expression neutral.

‘We have declared vendetta many times upon citizens of the Empire, but never against one of such standing. To do so tonight will be a hazardous venture for our order. Kirkus was aware that his victim wore a seal and was thus under our protection. Therefore, the Empire must know that we will seek vendetta against him. No doubt, they will do all in their power to stop us, including, I suspect, engineering our total destruction. He is, after all, the only child of the Matriarch herself.

‘I believe their first response will be to target our agents scattered around the Midèrs ports, in the false belief that our people there in the cities will know the whereabouts of our location here. Since we have no other contact with our patrons save through our agents, that is all the Mannians can do for now. Tonight, I have already instructed that carrier birds be sent out to all of them, warning them to be vigilant.

‘Being of consequence to all of us, I have chosen to speak here at a time and place where we come together to share in simple nourishment. We must be, every one of us, aware of what we undertake tonight. In such a spirit, I select no one to be sent on this vendetta. Instead, I ask for three volunteers.’

A pause, and then in the centre of the dining hall a man stood with a scrape of his chair and clasped his hands before him. Almost as quickly, a dozen more Rshun rose from their seats.

‘Thank you.’ Osh smiled. ‘Now, let me see, who do we have? Ah, Anton, you shall go. And Kylos of the little islands. And you – yes, Baso, I see you – you shall go also. Good, three of our finest.’ The others returned to their seats, leaving those three standing alone above a sea of heads. ‘You must leave tonight, I am afraid. We may already be too late to intercept Kirkus dul Dubois before he is able to return to Q’os, but we must still make haste before the Empire has sufficient chance to prepare for our retaliation. For retaliate we must, despite the obvious threat to our own order.

‘Remember, an innocent woman lies dead tonight. Her life ill-taken by this young priest. For once, and we all know this for the rarity that it is, the righteousness of our task is clear. This time, we are not merely hunting the killer of a wealthy thug, or a patrician who has caught his brother sleeping with his wife, or a woman cornered into actions in which she had no reasonable alternative. There is no greyness here, as there so often is, and for which we so often seek forgiveness in our hours of quietness.’

Heads nodded in agreement, but there was a notable exception, Nico noticed. Baracha, sitting beside Ash, looked troubled and obviously wished to speak.

‘We hunt a monster of the very real kind. And we have a pledge to keep, which we shall fulfil regardless of the cost. For truly, if we Rshun are to be of any worth to the world, then we must prove it now. This is it.’

He bowed his head. ‘That is all.’

*

‘It is a bad business,’ announced the head of the Rshun order, the next morning, from the padded chair in his study at the top of the monastery tower. He spoke in their native Honshu, its syllables harsh and short-lived, as he always did when they were alone together.

Ash, sitting on the window seat at the other side of the room, did not respond.

‘We take on an entire empire by pursuing this one vendetta,’ continued Osh. ‘I pray it will not prove our undoing.’

‘We have stood against powerful enemies before, master,’ Ash reminded him softly.

‘Aye, and lost all.’

A muscle in Ash’s jaw flinched at that remark.

‘Perhaps we had no other choice then,’ he replied. ‘As we have none now. What else can we do but honour our pledge, and act from our Cha?’

It was an interesting word, Cha. In the common language of Trade, many words would be needed to describe it, like ‘centre’, or ‘stillness’, or ‘clear heart’.

‘Cha? . . .’ mused Osh, irony evident in his vague smile. ‘My Cha seems always clear to me, my friend, when I slice cheese or drink chee or fart in my old pine bed. But when I sit and ponder such things as this, affecting the future of the monastery itself, and the many hazards I must be aware of for the sake of all our futures, my Cha muddies itself with uncertainty. And then I wonder if perhaps I have not lost my way.’

‘Nonsense,’ snapped Ash. ‘Last night you stood and explained to us why we must pursue this vendetta, regardless of the consequences. Your actions decided the issue. What more certainty can you expect?’

Osh sighed. He responded quietly, as though talking only to himself. ‘And all the time, I wondered if my words were not leading us to yet another massacre, or at the very least, another exile from our home.’

Ash returned his gaze to the window. He felt tired today, like on every other day since his return to the monastery, for his head pains had grown more common, and he had been sleeping poorly. Ash had been expecting this to happen. Often, when intent on a vendetta, his body would wait until it had reached a safe haven again before allowing any sickness or injury to run its natural course.

He had always tended to keep his own company while living here in the monastery. Since returning, though, he had become even more secluded than before. When he felt well enough, he trained outside the monastery walls, or undertook long walks through the mountains, avoiding others he spotted on their own hikes, his young apprentice amongst them. Mostly, though, he stayed alone in his cell, sleeping when he could manage it, or reading poetry from the old country, or just meditating. He did not wish the other members of the order to perceive that he was ill.

‘It is not that kind of certainty I ask for,’ Osh pressed. ‘I have been more in my life than merely Rshun. I have led armies in the field, you recall? I have commanded a fleet across the great ocean of storms. My dear Ash, I once slew an overlord in a chance encounter that lasted for the entirety of three seconds. ‘No, it is not certainty in my actions that I am lacking, or have ever lacked. I think perhaps it is Chan that I have lost, and I fear it makes my decisions weak.’

Another interesting word, Chan. Like Cha, in Trade it could mean many things: passion, faith, love, hope, art, blind courage. Sometimes, it could mean the mysteriously clever ways of the Fool. It was, in actuality, the outer manifestation of Cha in action.

‘I grow tired of this business, that is all. Too much of my life have I spent as Rshun; soldier, general, nothing more. It has become a life hardly worthy of breath. When the time is right I will hand over the reins to Baracha. He is much more the scheming politician than I, even if his Cha is unclear.’

‘Phff, if he were in charge now, he would have us parlaying with the Mannians and discussing a pay-off in return for the young priest’s life.’

‘Then perhaps Baracha is wise beyond his years. Who is to say he would be wrong, if it resulted in our survival?’

Ash felt the blood rush to his face, but kept silent.

‘You were never Rshun; back in the old country, Ash, as I was,’ continued Osh. ‘You do not know how it was – not truly. Our patrons there wore a simple medallion for all to see and if they were slain, we gathered what information we could that might lead us to the killer. It was a messy business, I assure you. Sometimes we killed the wrong person. Often we were never able to track down the true culprit at all. Even today, here in the Midèrs, with our seals and our mali trees imported all the way from the Isles of Sky, we have sometimes failed to finish vendetta.’

‘Yes, but we have always tried. It is the promise that we make.’

‘Our promise, yes,’ Osh agreed. ‘But in the old country, our promise was always a practical one. I doubt that we would have ever risked our entire order in such a way as this.’

Ash shook his head. ‘That may be. But we are a different thing here, in this land, than the old assassins. We have remained detached from the politics of the world, and neither do we manoeuvre for our own gain. We simply offer justice for those that are in need of it. If we do not risk ourselves now, then our promise to all those people means nothing, and we mean nothing, and all we have ever lived for is merely a sham.’

Osh considered his words. It seemed he could not find fault with them.

Ash continued: ‘What did you yourself always say to me when I was most anxiously facing a decision?’

‘Many things, most of them nonsense.’

‘Yes, but what was the same thing you said to me, time after time?’

‘Ah,’ growled the old general. ‘Grin, and roll the dice.’

‘A worthy sentiment, I always thought.’

Osh’s sigh was audible. It was an expression of release, though, not exasperation, and he relaxed further into his deep chair, his eyes regarding something on the chee-table set in the middle of the room, perhaps the play of sunlight across its surface. The table itself was of wild tiq, carved from the planking of one of those ships that had brought them both here all the way from Honshu thirty years before.

Ash studied this old man he had known for so much of his life. His master seemed unaware of his own hand scratching idly at his left leg. Ash noticed it, though, and he smiled to himself, without commenting.

It appeared that, in some way, the debate was settled for now. They fell into one of their comfortable silences, the kind that could last for hours without any need for talk. A clatter sounded somewhere beneath the floorboards, distant enough to be subdued, probably someone dropping an armful of training weaponry, or perhaps a stack of platters from the nearby kitchen. Nearly lunchtime, Ash thought, so more likely platters. Friendly smells wafted in though the open window: keesh baking, and spicy stew.

Osh stirred in his chair, glanced down at his hand, saw it scratching his leg. He snatched it away, bemused. ‘Over twenty years I’ve been with this wooden leg of mine, and still I scratch at phantom itches as though they really existed.’

Ash barely heard him though. The dull ache in his head was worsening, and he clasped a hand to his forehead.

‘Are you all right, old friend?’

Osh arose into continuing silence, adjusted his false leg and limped across the room to where Ash perched on the deep, sunlit window seat.

‘Yes,’ replied Ash, but with his voice shaking. He pressed both temples with his fingers, trying to squeeze away the pain.

‘The headaches again?’ inquired Osh, resting a hand on his shoulder.

‘Yes.’

‘They grow worse, then?’

Ash fumbled deep inside his robe, then produced his pouch. His fingers shook as he opened it and drew out a dried dulce leaf. He placed it in his mouth, settling it between tongue and cheek.

‘They have grown so bad recently, sometimes I cannot see at all.’

Osh’s hand squeezed his shoulder. It was not like him, to offer a gesture of comfort.

Ash drew out another leaf and placed it inside his mouth, against the other cheek.

‘Is there anything I can do for you? Ch’eng, perhaps?’

‘No, master. He cannot help me.’

‘Please, enough of the master. You ceased to be my apprentice a long, long time ago.’

The pain slowly subsided. Enough at least for Ash to smile back at him – though he avoided his master’s eyes, which had grown watery and dark all of a sudden.

‘We grow older than we think,’ he said in an attempt at lightening the mood.

‘No,’ said Osh, as he shuffled back to his padded chair. ‘You grow older than you think. I am already aware of my decrepitude, and plan to retire as soon as possible with what little dignity remains to me.’

‘I have been pondering the same thing,’ admitted Ash.

The old general settled back in his chair and fixed Ash with a look that was familiar after these long years – his head tilted back, his sharp features drawn in concentration, his hooded eyes appraising whoever was before them. ‘I had hoped as much, when I saw you with an apprentice after all these years. What prompted your change of mind?’

‘I have not changed my mind. But we had a conversation, you and I, some months ago. In my head.’

‘When you were on the ice?’

He nodded.

‘Perhaps, then, it was more than that. I had a dream some months back. It was very cold. You did not think you were going to make it.’

‘No, I did not. But you offered me a bargain, and a promise that I would make it home alive if I agreed. So I took it.’

‘I see. And what was this bargain?’

‘That you would not stop me from my work, so long as I was training an apprentice.’

Osh chuckled. ‘Ah, that would explain it. Yes, a fair bargain – one that I will stand by.’

‘Good.’

‘Tell me, then. How did you choose him?’

Ash was unsure of how to answer that. For a moment he was back in Bar-Khos, drifting in dreams during the long hot siesta, as a young man sneaked into his room to steal his purse.

Ash had been dreaming of home then: the little village of Asa, snuggling deep into a twist of the high valley floor – the view pitching sharply downwards past the many terraces of rice and barley to an endless stretch of blue sea that reached as far as the horizon.

Butai, his young wife, had been there, too. She was standing in the doorway of their cottage, a basket of wild flowers in her arms. She had a gift for making them into subtle perfumes, forever surprising him with new fragrances, and she was watching their son for a moment as he chopped wood in an easy, practised way; a boy of perhaps fourteen.

Ash had waved to them, but they did not see him – they were laughing instead at something the boy had said. Beautiful in her laughter, his wife looked as girlish as she ever had.

And then Ash had awakened in a strange room, in a strange city, in a strange land, in a strange life that was not in any way his own . . . his eyes wet with grief, the sense of loss within him as raw as though it had happened only yesterday. Pain washed through his head so sharply it was enough to blind him. He had called out to someone nearby, thinking for a moment that it was his son – yet, even as he did so, he knew that it could never be his son. In that same moment he had felt an isolation so all-consuming that he could not move for it. I will die alone, he had thought. Like this, blind, with no one by my side.

‘It seems’, he heard himself say to Osh, ‘as though he was chosen for me.’

Osh accepted this, at least partly. ‘For what purpose, do you wonder?’

‘I do not know, but it is as though we both have need of each other in some way. I cannot say how.’

Osh nodded, with a knowing smile, but whatever it was that he suspected he chose not to voice it. Instead, he said, ‘So you have not changed your mind about taking over the reins from me? I thought perhaps that you might, if I goaded you enough with Baracha’s name.’

Ash could no longer meet his master’s eyes.

‘What would be the point? The illness is growing worse, and I do not think I have much time left to me. You know of my father, and his father before him. After their blindness struck, they went with great speed in the end.’

The smile on Osh’s face faded, as a soberness came over him. He inhaled a sharp breath. ‘I feared as much,’ he admitted. ‘But I hoped otherwise. I am deeply sorry, Ash. You are one of the few true friends I have left.’

A bluebird was singing outside in the courtyard. Ash turned his attention to it, away from his friend’s untypical display of emotion.

The young Osh would never have been so open-hearted – not that Osh who had trained as Rshun back in the old country and in the old ways where only a few ever survived the ordeal. The same Osh who had left the original Rshun order after they had sided with the overlords, and who later became a soldier and fought at Hakk and Aga-sa, and somehow survived them both too; who had gone on to win honour after honour in the long war against the overlords, creating a name for himself, earning a high command in the ultimately doomed People’s Army. Back then, it would have been unimaginable to hear the general lamenting so openly over the fate of a comrade. Even less so as he subsequently led them into exile, the only general able to fight his way out with his body of men intact after surviving the final, fateful trap that had destroyed the People’s Revolution once and for all.

Osh had been lean and strong and tough in those days, a hard bastard in truth. His firm command had held them together on their long voyage to the Midèrs, when most of those in the fleet, including a grief-stricken Ash, had simply wished for death after their defeat and the loss of their loved ones either fallen in battle or left behind. When they had finally made it here to the Midèrs, and others in the fugitive fleet had taken up arms to serve as mercenaries for the Empire of Mann, or else turn against it, Osh had struck out on a different and much more uncertain path. The path of Rshun.

Yet here he was a withered old man on a withered old chair, both he and the chair sprouting tufts of hair and creaking every time their age-worn bodies shifted their weight; allowing his regrets to flow freely from his heart, as he finally looked towards the end.

Ash peered out from the high turret window over to the mali trees that clustered in the centre of the courtyard. The singing bluebird could be seen perching down there, its sky-blue plumage distinct against the bronze leaves.

‘To be sad at passing is to be sad at life,’ Ash quipped.

‘I know,’ said the old general, with a shake of his head.

The two veterans sat there in the dusty sunlight, listening for a time to the brief, fresh song of the late-summer bird. Calling out for a mate, Ash thought. A partner lost to it.

‘I only wish . . .’ Osh managed at last, but he faltered, and let the rest of his words hang there without being voiced.

‘To see once more the Diamond Mountain,’ Ash finished for him, reciting the old poem. ‘And lay my lips on those I love.’

‘Yes,’ said Osh.

‘I know, old friend.’