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Scars

One by one, Ferro took out the stitches—slitting the thread neatly with the shining point of her knife, working them gently out of Luthar's skin, dark fingertips moving quick and sure, yellow eyes narrowed with concentration. Logen watched her work, shaking his head slowly at the skill of it. He'd seen it done often, but never so well. Luthar barely even looked in pain, and he always looked in pain lately.

'Do we need another bandage on it?'

'No. We let it breathe.' The last stitch slid out, and Ferro tossed the bloody bits of thread away and rocked back on her knees to look at the results.

'That's good,' said Logen, voice hushed. He'd never guessed that it could come out half so well. Luthar's jaw looked slightly bent in the firelight, like he was biting down on one side. There was a ragged notch out of his lip, and a forked scar torn from it down to the point of his chin, pink dots on either side where the stitches had been, the skin around it stretched and twisted. Nothing more, but for some swelling that'd soon go down. 'That's some damn good stitching. I never saw any better. Where d'you learn healing?'

'A man called Aruf taught me.'

'Well he taught you well. Rare skill to have. Happy chance for us that he did it.'

'I had to fuck him first.'

'Ah.' That did shine a bit of a different light on it.

Ferro shrugged. 'I didn't mind. He was a good man, more or less, and he taught me how to kill, into the bargain. I've fucked a lot of worse men for a lot less.' She frowned at Luthar's jaw, pressing it with her thumbs, testing the flesh round the wound. 'A lot less.'

'Right,' muttered Logen. He exchanged a worried glance with Luthar. This conversation hadn't gone at all the way he'd imagined. Maybe he should've expected that with Ferro. He spent half the time trying to prise a word out of her, then when she did give him something, he didn't have a clue where to go with it.

'It's set,' she grunted, after probing Luthar's face for a moment in silence.

'Thank you.' He grabbed hold of her hand as she moved back. 'Truly. I don't know what I'd have—'

She grimaced as if he'd slapped her and snatched her fingers away. 'Fine! But if you get your face smashed again you can stitch it yourself.' And she got up and stalked off, sat down in the shifting shadows in the corner of the ruin, as far away from the others as she could get without going outside. She seemed to like thanks even less than she liked any other kind of talk, but Luthar was too pleased to finally have the dressings off to worry much about it.

'How does it look?' he asked, peering down cross-eyed at his own chin, wincing and prodding at it with one finger.

'It's good,' said Logen. 'You're lucky. You might not be quite so pretty as you were, but you're still a damn sight better-looking than me.'

'Of course,' he said, licking at the notch in his lip, half-smiling. 'It isn't as though they cut my head right off.'

Logen grinned as he knelt down beside the pot and gave it a stir. He was getting on alright with Luthar now. It was a harsh lesson, but a broken face had done that boy a power of good. It had taught him some respect, and a lot quicker than any amount of talk. It had taught him to be realistic, and that had to be a good thing. Small gestures and time. Rarely failed to win folk over. Then he caught sight of Ferro, frowning at him from the shadows, and he felt his grin sag. Some folk take longer than others, and a few never really get there. Black Dow had been like that. Made to walk alone, Logen's father would have said.

He looked back to the pot, but there wasn't much encouragement in it. Just porridge with some shreds of bacon and some chopped-up roots. There was nothing to hunt out here. Dead land meant what it said. The grass on the plain had dwindled to brown tufts and grey dust. He looked round the ruined shell of the house they'd pitched camp in. Firelight flickered on broken stone, crumbled render, ancient splintered wood. No ferns rooted in the cracks, no saplings in the earth floor, not even a shred of moss between the stones. Seemed to Logen as if no one but them had trodden there in centuries. Maybe they hadn't.

Quiet too. Not much wind tonight. Only the soft crackling of the fire, and Bayaz' voice mumbling away, lecturing his apprentice about something or other. Logen was good and glad the First of the Magi was awake again, even if he did look older and seem grimmer than ever. At least now Logen didn't have to decide what to do. That had never worked out too well for anyone concerned.

'A clear night at last!' sang Brother Longfoot as he ducked under the lintel, pointing upwards with huge smugness. 'A perfect sky for Navigation! The stars shine clearly for the first time in ten days and, I do declare, we are not a stride out from our chosen course! Not a foot! I have not led us wrong, my friends. No! That would not have been my way at all! Forty miles to Aulcus, as I reckon it, just as I told you!' No congratulations were forthcoming. Bayaz and Quai were deep in their ill-tempered muttering. Luthar was holding up the blade of his short sword and trying to find an angle where he could see his reflection. Ferro was frowning in her corner. Longfoot sighed and squatted down beside the fire. 'Porridge again?' he muttered, peering into the pot and wrinkling up his nose.

'Afraid so.'

'Ah, well. The tribulations of the road, eh, my friend? There would be no glory in travel without the hardship.'

'Uh,' said Logen. He could have managed with a lot less glory if it meant a decent dinner. He prodded unhappily at the bubbling mush with a spoon.

Longfoot leaned over to mutter under his breath. 'It would seem our illustrious employer is having some further troubles with his apprentice.' Bayaz' lecture was growing steadily louder and more bad-tempered.

'… being handy with a pan is all very well, but the practice of magic is still your first vocation. There has been a distinct change in your attitude of late. A certain watchfulness and disobedience. I am beginning to suspect that you may prove a disappointing pupil.'

'And were you always a fine pupil?' There was a trace of a mocking smile on Quai's face. 'Was your own master never disappointed?'

'He was, and the consequences were dire. We all make mistakes. It is a master's place to try to stop his students making the same ones.'

'Then perhaps you should tell me the history of your mistakes. I might learn to be a better student.'

Master and apprentice glared at each other over the fire. Logen did not like the look of Bayaz' frown. He had seen such looks before on the First of the Magi, and the outcome had never been good. He couldn't understand why Quai had shifted from abject obedience to sullen opposition in the space of a few weeks, but it wasn't making anyone's life easier. Logen pretended to be fascinated by the porridge, half-expecting to be suddenly deafened by the roar of searing flame. But when sound came it was only Bayaz' voice, and speaking softly.

'Very well, Master Quai, there is some sense in your request, for once. Let us talk of my mistakes. An expansive subject indeed. Where to start?'

'At the beginning?' ventured his apprentice. 'Where else should a man ever start?'

The Magus gave a sour grunt. 'Huh. Long ago, then, in the Old Time.' He paused for a moment and stared into the flames, the light shifting over his hollow face. 'I was Juvens' first apprentice. But soon after starting my education, my master took a second. A boy from the South. His name was Khalul.' Ferro looked up suddenly, frowning from the shadows. 'From the beginning, the two of us could never agree. We both were far too proud, and jealous of each other's talents, and envious of any mark of favour the other earned from our master. Our rivalry persisted, even as the years passed and Juvens took more apprentices, twelve in all. In the beginning, it drove us to be better pupils: more diligent, more devoted. But after the horror of the war with Glustrod, many things were changed.'

Logen gathered up the bowls and started spooning steaming slop out into them, making sure to keep one ear on Bayaz' talk. 'Our rivalry became a feud, and our feud became a hatred. We fought, with words, then with hands, then with magic. Perhaps, left to ourselves, we would have killed each other. Perhaps the world would be a happier place if we had, but Juvens interposed. He sent me to the far north, and Khalul to the south, to two of the great libraries he had built long years before. He sent us there to study, separately and alone, until our tempers cooled. He thought the high mountains, and the wide sea, and the whole breadth of the Circle of the World would put an end to our feud, but he misjudged us. Rather we each raged in our exile, and blamed the other for it, and plotted our petty revenges.'

Logen shared out the food, such as it was, while Bayaz glared at Quai from under his heavy brows. 'If I had only had the good sense to listen to my master then, but I was young, and headstrong, and full of pride. I burned to make myself more powerful than Khalul. I decided, fool that I was, that if Juvens would not teach me… I had to find another master.'

'Slop again, eh, pink?' grunted Ferro as she pulled her bowl from Logen's hand.

'No need to thank me.' He tossed her a spoon and she snatched it out of the air. Logen handed the First of the Magi his bowl. 'Another master? What other master could you find?'

'Only one,' murmured Bayaz. 'Kanedias. The Master Maker.' He turned his spoon over and over thoughtfully in his hand. 'I went to his House, and I knelt before him, and I begged to learn at his feet. He refused me, of course, as he refused everyone… at first. But I was stubborn, and in time he relented, and agreed to teach me.'

'And so you lived in the House of the Maker,' murmured Quai. Logen shivered as he hunched down over his own bowl. His one brief visit to the place still gave him nightmares.

'I did,' said Bayaz, 'and I learned its ways. My skill in High Art made me useful to my new master. But Kanedias was far more jealous of his secrets than ever Juvens had been, and he worked me as hard as a slave at his forges, and taught me only such scraps as I needed to serve him. I grew bitter, and when the Maker left to seek out materials for his works, my curiosity, and my ambition, and my thirst for knowledge, drove me to stray into parts of his House where he had forbidden me to tread. And there I found his best-guarded secret.' He paused.

'What was it?' prompted Longfoot, spoon frozen halfway to his mouth.

'His daughter.'

'Tolomei,' whispered Quai, in a hiss barely audible.

Bayaz nodded, and one corner of his mouth curled upwards, as though he remembered something good. 'She was unlike any other. She had never left the Maker's House, had never spoken to anyone besides her father. She helped him with certain tasks, I learned. She handled… certain materials… that only the Maker's own blood could touch. That, I believe, is why he fathered her in the first place. She was beautiful beyond compare.' Bayaz' face twitched, and he looked down at the ground with a sour smile. 'Or so she seems to me, in memory.'

'That was good,' said Luthar, licking his fingers and setting down his empty bowl. He'd become a great deal less picky with his food lately. Logen reckoned a few weeks of not being able to chew was sure to do that to a man. 'There any more?' he asked hopefully.

'Take mine,' hissed Quai, thrusting his bowl at Luthar. His face was deathly cold, his eyes two points of light in the shadows as he glared across at his master. 'Go on.'

Bayaz looked up. 'Tolomei fascinated me, and I her. It seems strange to say, but I was young then, and full of fire, and still had as fine a head of hair as Captain Luthar.' He ran one hissing palm over his bald scalp, then shrugged his shoulders. 'We fell in love.' He looked at each of them in turn, as though daring them to laugh, but Logen was too busy sucking salty porridge from his teeth, and no one else so much as smiled.

'She told me of the tasks her father gave her, and I began, dimly, to understand. He had gathered from far and wide some fragments of material from the world below, left over from the time when demons still walked our earth. He was trying to tap the power of these splinters, to incorporate them into his machines. He was tampering with those forces forbidden by the First Law, and had already had some success.' Logen shifted uncomfortably. He remembered the thing he had seen in the Maker's House, lying in the wet on a block of white stone, strange and fascinating. The Divider, Bayaz had called it. Two edges—one here, one on the Other Side. He had no appetite now, and he shoved his bowl down by the fire, half-finished.

'I was horrified,' continued Bayaz. 'I had seen the ruin that Glustrod had brought upon the world, and I resolved to go to Juvens and tell him everything. But I feared to leave Tolomei behind, and she would not leave all she knew. So I delayed, and Kanedias returned unexpected, and found us together. His fury-was…' and Bayaz winced as though the memory alone was painful '… impossible to describe. His House shook with it, rang with it, burned with it. I was lucky to escape with my life, and fled to seek sanctuary with my old master.'

Ferro snorted. 'He was the forgiving type, then?'

'Fortunately for me. Juvens would not turn me away, despite my betrayal. Especially once I told him of his brother's attempts to break the First Law. The Maker came in great wrath, demanding justice for the violation of his daughter, the theft of his secrets. Juvens refused. He demanded to know what experiments Kanedias had been undertaking. The brothers fought, and I fled. The sky was lit with the fury of their battle. I returned to find my master dead, his brother gone. I swore vengeance. I gathered the Magi from across the world, and we made war on the Maker. All of us. Except for Khalul.'

'Why not him?' growled Ferro.

'He said that I could not be trusted. That my folly had caused the war.'

'All too true, surely?' muttered Quai.

'Perhaps, in part. But he made far worse accusations also. He and his cursed apprentice, Mamun. Lies,' he hissed at the fire. 'All lies, and the rest of the Magi were not deceived. So Khalul left the order, and returned to the South, and sought for power elsewhere. And he found it. By doing as Glustrod had done, and damning himself. By breaking the Second Law, and eating the flesh of men. Only eleven of us went to fight Kanedias, and only nine of us returned.'

Bayaz took a long breath, and gave a long sigh. 'So, Master Quai. There is the story of my mistakes, laid bare. You could say they were the cause of my master's death, of the schism in the order of Magi. You could say that is why we are now heading westwards, into the ruins of the past. You could say that is why Captain Luthar has suffered a broken jaw.'

'The seeds of the past bear fruit in the present,' muttered Logen to himself.

'So they do,' said Bayaz, 'so they do. And sour fruit indeed. Will you learn from my mistakes, Master Quai, as I have, and pay some attention to your master?'

'Of course,' said the apprentice, though Logen wondered if there was a hint of irony in his voice. 'I will obey in all things.'

'You would be wise to. If I had obeyed Juvens, perhaps I would not have this.' Bayaz undid the top two buttons of his shirt and pulled his collar to one side. The firelight flickered on a faded scar, from the base of the old man's neck down towards his shoulder. 'The Maker himself gave it to me. Another inch and it would have been my death.' He rubbed sourly at it. 'All those years ago, and it still aches, from time to time. The pain it has given me over the slow years… so you see, Master Luthar, although you bear a mark, it could be worse.'

Longfoot cleared his throat. 'That is quite an injury, of course, but I believe I can do better.' He took hold of his dirty trouser leg and pulled it right up to his groin, turning his sinewy thigh towards the firelight. There was an ugly mass of puckered grey scar flesh almost all the way round his leg. Even Logen had to admit to being impressed.

'What the hell did that?' asked Luthar, looking slightly queasy.

Longfoot smiled. 'Many years ago, when I was yet a young man, I was shipwrecked in a storm off the coast of Suljuk. Nine times, in all, God has seen fit to dump me into his cold ocean in bad weather. Luckily, I have always been truly blessed as a swimmer. Unluckily, on this occasion, some manner of great fish took me for its next meal.'

'A fish?' muttered Ferro.

'Indeed. A most huge and aggressive fish, with a jaw wide as a doorway and teeth like knives. Fortunately, a sharp blow on the nose,' and he chopped at the air with his hand, 'caused it to release me, and a fortuitous current washed me up on shore. I was doubly blessed to find a sympathetic lady among the natives, who allowed me to recuperate in her abode, for the people of Suljuk are generally most suspicious of outsiders.' He sighed happily. 'That is how I came to learn their language. A highly spiritual people. God has favoured me. Truly.' There was a silence.

'I bet you can do better.' Luthar was grinning across at Logen.

'I got bitten by a mean sheep once, but it didn't leave much of a mark.'

'What about the finger?'

'This?' He stared at the familiar stub, waggling it back and forward. 'What about it?'

'How did you lose it?'

Logen frowned. He wasn't sure he liked the way this conversation was going. Hearing about Bayaz' mistakes was one thing, but he wasn't that keen to delve into his own. The dead knew, he'd made some bad ones. Still, they were all looking now. He had to say something. 'I lost it in a battle. Outside a place called Carleon. I was young back then, and full of fire myself. It was my stupid fashion to go charging into the thick of the fighting. That time, when I came out, the finger was gone.'

'Heat of the moment, eh?' asked Bayaz.

'Something like that.' He frowned and rubbed gently at the stump. 'Strange thing. For a long time after it was gone, I could still feel it, itching, right in the tip. Drove me mad. How can you scratch a finger that's not there?'

'Did it hurt?' asked Luthar.

'Like a bastard, to begin with, but not half as much as some others I've had.'

'Like what?'

That needed some thinking about. Logen scratched at his face and turned over all the hours, and days, and weeks he'd spent injured, and bloody, and screaming. Limping around or trying to cut his meat with his hands all bandaged up. 'I got a good sword cut across my face one time,' he said, feeling the notch Tul Duru had made in his ear, 'bled like anything. Nearly got my eye poked out with an arrow,' rubbing at the crescent scar under his brow. 'Took hours to dig out all the splinters. Then I had a bloody great rock dropped on me at the siege of Uffrith. First day, as well.' He rubbed the back of his head and felt the lumpy ridges, under his hair. 'Broke my skull, and my shoulder too.'

'Nasty,' said Bayaz.

'My own fault. That's what you get when you try and tear a city wall down with your bare hands.' Luthar stared at him, and he shrugged. 'Didn't work. Like I said, I was hot-headed in my youth.'

'I'm only surprised you didn't try and chew through it.'

'Most likely that would've been my next move. Just as well they dropped a rock on me. At least I've still got my teeth. Spent two months squealing on my back while they laid siege to the city. I only just healed in time for the fight with Threetrees, when I got the whole lot broken again, and more besides.' Logen winced at the memory, curling up the fingers of his right hand and straightening them out, remembering the pain of it, all smashed up. 'Now that really did hurt. Not as much as this, though,' and he dug his hand under his belt and pulled his shirt up. They all peered across the fire to see what he was pointing at. A small scar, really, just under his bottom rib, in the hollow beside his stomach.

'Doesn't look like much,' said Luthar.

Logen shuffled round to show them his back. 'There's the rest of it,' he said, jerking his thumb at what he knew was a much bigger mark beside his backbone. There was a long silence while they took that in.

'Right through?' murmured Longfoot.

'Right through, with a spear. In a duel, with a man called Harding Grim. Damn lucky to live, and that's a fact.'

'If it was in a duel,' murmured Bayaz, 'how did you come out alive?'

Logen licked his lips. His mouth tasted bitter. 'I beat him.'

'With a spear through you?'

'I didn't know about it until afterwards.'

Longfoot and Luthar frowned at each other. 'That would seem a difficult detail to overlook,' said the Navigator.

'You'd think so.' Logen hesitated, trying to think of a good way to put it, but there was no good way. 'There are times… well… I don't really know what I'm doing.'

A long pause. 'How do you mean?' asked Bayaz, and Logen winced. All the fragile trust he'd built over the last few weeks was in danger of crumbling round his ears, but he didn't see any choice. He'd never been much of a liar.

'When I was fourteen, I think, I argued with a friend. Can't even remember what about. I remember being angry. I remember he hit me. Then I was looking at my hands.' And he looked down at them now, pale in the darkness. 'I'd strangled him. Good and dead. I didn't remember doing it, but there was only me there, and I had his blood under my nails. I dragged him up some rocks, and I threw him off onto his head, and I said he fell out of a tree and died, and everyone believed me. His mother cried, and so on, but what could I do? That was the first time it happened.'

Logen felt the eyes of the group all fixed on him. 'Few years later I nearly killed my father. Stabbed him while we were eating. Don't know why. Don't know why at all. He healed, luckily.'

He felt Longfoot easing nervously away, and he hardly blamed him. 'That was when the Shanka started coming more often. So my father sent me south, over the mountains, to look for help. So I found Bethod, and he offered me help if I'd fight for him. I was happy to do it, fool that I was, but the fighting went on, and on. The things I did in those wars… the things they told me I did.' He took a long breath. 'Well. I'd killed friends. You should have seen what I did to enemies. To begin with I enjoyed it. I loved to sit at the top of the fire, to look at men and see their fear, to have no man dare to meet my eye, but it got worse. And worse. There came one winter that I didn't know who I was, or what I was doing most of the time. Sometimes I'd see it happening, but I couldn't change it. No one knew who I'd kill next. They were all shitting themselves, even Bethod, and no one more scared of me than I was.'

They all sat for a while in gaping silence. The ruined building had been seeming like some kind of comfort after all that dead and empty space on the plain, but it didn't any more. The empty windows yawned like wounds. The empty doorways gaped like graves. The silence dragged on, and on, and then Longfoot cleared his throat. 'So, for the sake of argument, do you think it's possible that, perhaps without intending to, you might kill one of us?'

'It's more likely I'd kill all of you than one.'

Bayaz was frowning. 'Forgive me if I feel less than entirely reassured.'

'I wish at least that you had mentioned this earlier!' snapped Longfoot. 'It is the type of information a travelling companion should share! I hardly think that—'

'Leave him be,' growled Ferro.

'But we need to know—'

'Shut your mouth, stargazing fool. You're all a long way from perfect.' She scowled over at Longfoot. 'Some of you make a lot of words and are nowhere near when the trouble starts.' She frowned at Luthar. 'Some of you are a lot less use than you think you are.' She glared at Bayaz. 'And some of you keep a lot of secrets, then fall asleep at bad times and leave the rest of us stranded in the middle of nowhere. So he's a killer. So fucking what? Suited you well enough when the killing needed doing.'

'I only wanted to—'

'Shut your mouth, I said. 'Longfoot blinked for a moment, then did as he was told.

Logen stared across the fire at Ferro. The very last place he'd ever have hoped to get a good word. Out of all of them, only she'd seen it happen. Only she knew what he really meant. And still she'd spoken up for him. She saw him looking, and she scowled and shrank back into her corner, but that didn't change anything. He felt himself smile.

'What about you, then?' Bayaz was looking at Ferro as well, touching one finger to his lip as though thinking.

'What about me?'

'You say you don't like secrets. We have all spoken of our scars. I bored the group with my old stories, and the Bloody-Nine thrilled us with his.' The Magus tapped his bony face, full of hard shadows from the fire. 'How did you get yours?'

A pause. 'I bet you made whoever gave you that suffer, eh?' said Luthar, a trace of laughter in his voice.

Longfoot started to chuckle. 'Oh indeed! I daresay he came to a sharp end! I dread to think of the—'

'I did it,' said Ferro.

Such laughter as there was sputtered and died, the smiles faded as they took that in. 'Eh?' said Logen.

'What, pink, you fucking deaf? I did it to myself.'

'Why?'

'Hah!' she barked, glaring at him across the fire. 'You don't know what it is, to be owned! When I was twelve years old I was sold to a man called Susman.' And she spat on the ground and snarled something in her own tongue. Logen didn't reckon it was a compliment. 'He owned a place where girls were trained, then sold on at a profit.'

'Trained to do what?' asked Luthar.

'What do you think, fool? To fuck.'

'Ah,' he squeaked, swallowing and looking at the ground again.

'Two years I was there. Two years, before I stole a knife. I did not know then, how to kill. So I hurt my owner the best way I could. I cut myself, right to the bone. By the time they got the blade away from me I had cut my price down to a quarter.' She grinned fiercely at the fire as if it had been her proudest day. 'You should have heard him squeal, the bastard!'

Logen stared. Longfoot gaped. Even the First of the Magi looked shocked. 'You scarred yourself?'

'What of it?' Silence again. The wind blew up and swirled around inside the ruin, hissing in the chinks between the stones and making the flames flicker and dance. No one had much left to say after that.