The Ember Carrion: What The Mire Remembers

The mist came off the moor like something living, rolling low across the broken stones of the cairn-marker until it pooled in the hollows where the dead had once been buried. Soren Ashveil crouched behind a half-fallen menhir and counted breaths. Three horses. Three men. One of them was Hask.

Pira pressed close to his left side, small enough to vanish into the grey if she stayed still. She did not stay still. Her fingers worked at the frayed hem of her coat, pulling threads loose one by one, and her breath came in quick little pulls through her nose. He set his hand on her shoulder. The shivering stopped. Mostly.

Below the rise, the mercenaries had stopped arguing and started dividing.

Soren watched the geometry of betrayal arrange itself. Hask stood apart from the other two, his back to a slab of granite carved with names too weathered to read. The younger mercenary, Ren, had his hand on the lead rope of all three horses. The third man, taller, with a beard gone copper with rust and sweat, held an unstrung bow across his chest like a staff. He did not look at Hask. He looked at the mist behind Hask, where the path curved back toward Harrow's End and the easier road south.

"We're done," Ren said. His voice cracked on the second word, youth fighting the effort to sound harder than he was. "The contract said retrieve the relic. It didn't say walk into the Cinderwood after what those Wardens did to the last column."

Hask did not turn. His shoulders moved a fraction, the way a dog's ears would if it heard something too small for a man to notice.

"You'll walk back to the Coil office," Hask said, "and you'll explain to the Factor why you abandoned a paid binding. Or you'll walk into the wood, and the wood will take you, and the Factor will forget your name before your body's cold."

"That's enough of the Factor." The bearded man's voice was quieter, rougher, older. "Hask. Listen to me. The horses, the silver, the three of us, we can be in Harrow's End before dawn. The Factor takes a loss. He takes losses. He eats them for breakfast."

Hask turned then, slowly, the way a key turns in a stubborn lock. His face was the color of tallow, and his eyes had the flat sheen of a man who had already decided everything. He did not raise his voice. He never raised his voice.

"You signed papers. Ink and seal. The seal is the Coil's. The Coil does not eat losses. The Coil eats the men who make them."

Soren felt the ember behind his sternum stir, a low heat like a coal breathed on. He breathed against it. The god inside him was not patient, and it was never content to wait, and when it woke hungry it woke the wrong part of him.

"They'll kill him," Pira whispered. She had stopped pulling threads. Her hand had gone to the small knife at her belt, a thing barely longer than her palm. "They're going to try and run and he's going to kill them and we'll have to watch."

"You won't watch." Soren kept his voice under his breath. "When I move, you go down the slope to the south and you don't stop until you reach the rowan."

"I don't leave you."

"You do tonight." He did not look at her. He watched Hask's hand drift toward the short sword at his hip. "Because if you don't, you'll see me do something I don't want you to see."

Pira said nothing. Her chin set in the way he had come to recognize as the particular stubbornness that lived in the hollow of her throat. She would not leave. He knew it. She knew he knew it. The ember knew, and the ember approved.

Below, Ren had made his choice. He pulled the lead rope taut and stepped back, bringing all three horses behind him in a knot of tossing heads and rolling eyes. The bearded man unslung the bow and began to string it with hands that did not tremble.

Hask drew.

The sword came out without sound. That was the part Soren had always hated about him. Hask killed quietly. He crossed the distance to Ren in three strides and opened the younger man's sword-arm at the elbow in one clean cut, a stroke so precise it took Ren a heartbeat to understand what had happened. The second heartbeat was the scream. The horses pulled sideways, stamping and screaming their own smaller screams.

"Hask." The bearded man had his bow up, half-drawn, an arrow nocked but not yet loosed. His voice had gone high and thin. "Hask, stand down, we can talk about this, we can walk back together, you don't have to, Hask, Hask, Hask."

Hask did not stand down. Hask advanced.

The arrow went wide. It hissed past Hask's ear and buried itself in the menhir behind him, and Hask did not even blink, and the bearded man dropped the bow and ran. He ran into the mist toward the south road, and the mist took him the way mist takes a man, swallowing him whole until there was only the sound of his boots fading and then nothing.

Ren had fallen. He lay in the wet grass with his arm bent at the wrong angle and he was looking up at Hask with the face of a boy who had not yet understood that he was going to die. Hask stood over him with the sword dripping. He did not raise it.

"You'll tell me where the relic is," Hask said. "And then I'll let you bleed out in a minute instead of an hour."

Soren stood up from behind the menhir.

He did not mean to. He had planned to wait. He had planned to let the bearded man go and to follow Hask until Hask was alone and tired and certain that the wood had swallowed everything. He had planned well, and he had planned for a long time, and the ember did not care about any of it. The ember rose in his chest like a struck bell, and the bell kept ringing, and the ringing was not sound. It was a pull, deep and directionless, that hooked itself under his ribs and told him to move.

He moved.

He came down the slope in long strides, his boots sliding in the wet grass, his hand already on the hilt of his own blade. Hask heard him. Hask always heard everything. The older mercenary turned, and for the first time in the long history of their acquaintance, Soren saw something move behind Hask's flat pale eyes. Recognition. And beneath it, a thin bright thread of something that might, in a lesser man, have been fear.

"Ashveil." Hask spoke the name like a fact. "The Warden's dog. I thought Coil had bought your leash."

"Coil tried." Soren stopped ten paces out. The mist curled between them. "Your employer doesn't have the kind of silver I'd take."

"Your employer," Hask said, "is a dead god in a dead man's chest. I have read the report. I have read all the reports. The Conclave's sealed files. The wardens' testimony. The priest who survived the Harrow's End burning. I know what you did, Ashveil. I know what was in you then and I know what is in you now."

Soren said nothing. The ember said plenty. It pressed against the inside of his ribs like a thing that wanted out.

"You are a relic," Hask said. "You are the relic. And I am going to take you back to the Coil in pieces if that's how it has to be done, but I am going to do it."

Ren had stopped screaming. He was watching the two men with his one good arm pressed against the ruin of the other, and his mouth was open, and no sound came out. The horses had quieted too. They stood in a knot, ears flat, breath steaming.

Pira was somewhere behind Soren. He could not turn to look. If he turned, he would see her, and if he saw her, he would not be able to do what needed doing.

"You knew Maren Cael," Soren said.

The name landed wrong. He had not meant to say it. It came up out of him like something dredged, and Hask's face did not change but his weight shifted onto his back foot, a movement so small that only a man who had studied killing for a living would have noticed.

"I knew the name," Hask said. "I did not know the woman."

"You knew her." Soren's voice had gone rough in a way that had nothing to do with the Highland in his throat. "You knew her well enough to know that she carried a child. You knew her well enough to write the letter that put her on the road the night of the burning. You knew her well enough to send her to Harrow's End to die."

Hask's sword came up. The flat of the blade caught the grey light and threw it back at Soren's eyes.

"I know many letters," Hask said. "I have written many letters. The Coil employs me to write letters. That is what I do. I write letters and I clean up after the men who cannot read them."

Soren stepped in.

The first exchange was ugly. Hask was a professional, and a professional with a blade was a different creature than a professional with a ledger, and Soren had known this about him, had known it the way a man knows the taste of his own spit. Their swords met in the mist with a sound like a wet branch breaking, and Hask turned his wrist and disengaged and came in again from a different angle, and Soren took the cut on his forearm because he had chosen to take it, because the cut was shallow and the angle it opened was the one he wanted.

Hask saw the angle. Hask understood angles. For the first time his face changed. The flat sheen broke. Something underneath it surfaced, and what it was, was a man who knew he had made a mistake that could not be taken back.

Soren's blade came up under Hask's guard and found the soft place at the hinge of the jaw.

It made a sound. It made the sound a wet log makes when the axe goes through it right. Hask's body did not fall so much as it folded, the way a man folds into a chair when he is tired. The sword dropped from his hand. The hand dropped from the sword. He went down into the wet grass and he stayed there, and the blood came up out of him the way water comes up out of a well, slow at first and then faster than anyone would have thought.

Soren stood over him. The ember in his chest was ringing so loud he could not hear the world. He breathed. He breathed again. The ringing began to fade.

"He is dead," Pira said from behind him.

Soren did not turn. "Yes."

"Is he going to stay dead?"

"Yes."

"Even though he knew her?"

"Yes." Soren wiped his blade on the side of his own thigh. The cloth came away black in the failing light. "Even though he knew her. Dead is dead. That is the only mercy in it."

Ren was staring at him from the grass. The younger man's face had gone the color of old paper. He had stopped trying to hold his ruined arm. He was trying to crawl backward into the mist and failing at it because his legs would not do what he asked of them.

"Go," Soren said. He did not look at Ren. He looked at the shape of Hask's body in the grass, and at the shape of his own hands, which were steady and which he hated for being steady. "Take yourself back to Harrow's End. Tell them what you saw. Tell them the dog of the Conclave is loose in the north and he has the taste for Coil blood now."

Ren went. He left his arm and his pride and his dead colleague and all three horses, and he went into the mist, and the mist took him the way mist takes a man.

The horses stood. The mist moved. Somewhere to the south, the rowan tree that Pira had not gone to waited for her with the patience of a thing that did not know how to be disappointed.

Soren turned at last.

Pira was ten paces behind him. Her knife was in her hand. Her face was the face of a child who had decided something and would not be moved from it. She looked at Hask's body. She looked at Soren's hands. She looked at Soren's face.

"You said you didn't want me to see."

"I did."

"You lied."

"I did."

She sheathed the knife. She walked past him and took the lead rope of the nearest horse and began to walk it toward the south road. The horse followed her with the docility of a thing that had decided she was the new authority in the field.

Soren watched her go. The ember settled in his chest like a coal into ash. Above the moor, through a tear in the mist, a single pale star showed itself, and then the mist closed over it again, and the dark came down, and the dark was where they would have to walk now.

The dark was not empty. It moved with them.

Pira walked at the head of the small procession, one hand on the lead rope, the other hand on the hilt of her knife. She did not look back. She had decided that she was the one who knew the way, and the way was south, and so south was what they went.

Soren walked behind her, the second horse on a rope of his own. Hask's body lay where they had left it, somewhere in the mist to the north, and he did not look back either. He had decided something too, and the thing he had decided was that the past was a country he could no longer afford to visit.

The horses breathed. Their breath came out in pale plumes that the mist drank before the plumes could climb. The ground under their hooves was soft and giving, and the smell of it was the smell of cold tea left too long in a cup, the sour vegetal tang of water that had forgotten what it was for.

Pira stopped. Soren stopped. The horses stopped, and the silence came back in to fill the space their steps had made.

"It's thin here," she said. Her voice came out small and certain at once. "The ground. You can feel it going down."

He could. The hoof of his horse went lower than it should have. The mist pooled in the little dimple the hoof had made and did not rise again.

"The Mire," he said.

"The Mire."

They went on.

By the time the dark began to thin toward the color of a bruise, they had left the moor behind. The road, if it could be called a road, was a strip of packed ash between two low ridges, and the ridges were not ridges at all but the broken backs of old walls. Pira led them along the strip with the ease of a creature that had been born knowing how to walk in the ribs of dead places.

Soren watched her. The ember in his chest gave off its thin heat, and the heat answered something ahead of them, the way a bell answers a bell across a valley. He could feel the Blight before he could see it. It sat in the air like a held breath.

"Stop," he said.

Pira stopped.

"Stay with the horses."

"You said that before."

"I mean it now."

She turned and looked at him. In the gray pre-dawn her face was all sharp angles and too-large eyes. She was twelve years old, and she had killed a man that night, and she had not yet learned how to make her face agree with that fact.

"I heard you the first time," she said. "I'm not deaf."

"Then stay."

He walked past her. He laid his hand on her head as he went, the way a man might lay his hand on a doorframe he had just walked through, and then he went on alone toward the place where the ridge fell away and the world opened into something worse.

The Burnt Mire began at a line of standing stones. They had been tall once. They were not tall now. They leaned inward like old men listening to a story they had heard too many times, and the story was wearing them down to the bone. Between them, the ground dropped away into a wide shallow bowl, and the bowl was the bowl of what had been a city.

Soren stood at the lip of it and looked down.

He had been told, in the way wardens are told things, that the Mire was a place of rot. He had been told that the Blight was a sickness in the soil, a fouling of the waters, a consequence of the Veiled King's careless war against the gods. He had been told that it was unsafe to cross, and that no one crossed it, and that the reasons were pragmatic and not romantic.

He had not been told that the city was still dying.

He stood at the lip and watched it die.

The bowl was two miles across, maybe more. The shapes of buildings rose out of the ash the way broken teeth rise out of a gum. Walls leaned. Towers leaned lower. A bridge lay across what had been a river and the river was gone from under it, and the bridge held its shape out of habit, and the habit was all that was left of it. Every surface was the color of old paper. Every surface wept.

Not water. Something thicker than water, something gray and slow. It ran down the walls in thin lines that paused and resumed and paused again. It ran off the broken edges of the bridge in pale threads. It welled up between the cobbles of streets that no one walked anymore and spread outward in shallow fans, and the fans did not reach the edges of the bowl before they dried, and then the same fans began again from the same place, and the beginning and the drying were one continuous motion, a pulse, a heartbeat, the slow systole and diastole of a place that had forgotten how to stop.

Soren's hand went to the stump of his right arm before he remembered that the hand was not there. He put the place where the hand had been against his chest, against the ember, and he held it there.

The city remembered.

He could see it. Not as a vision, not as a dream, but as a thing happening in the air above the broken stone. Thin shapes, more felt than seen, moved through the streets. A woman carried a bundle on her head and walked with the sure steps of a person who knew the way. A man led a donkey loaded with what might have been grain. Two children ran across an open square chasing a ball of rag. They ran and they did not stop. The same woman walked the same street. The same man led the same donkey. The same children ran the same chase.

Over and over.

They did not see Soren. They did not see each other. Each loop was its own moment, sealed inside itself, and the loops ran on top of one another like the colors of a stained glass window held up against a fire. The woman and the man and the children walked through each other, through the ash, through the weeping stone, and the weeping stone kept weeping because the weeping was the only thing left of them that could still move.

Soren went down into the bowl.

He did not decide to. His feet decided. The ember in his chest answered something in the ground, and his body answered the ember, and the answer was a step, and then another step. The ash gave under him in a way ash should not give. It gave like a thing remembering how to be mud.

The weeping thickened as he went down. It came up over the toes of his boots. It was warm. He had expected it to be cold, and the warmth of it was worse than the cold would have been, because cold is a thing that happens to a place and warmth is a thing a place does on purpose.

He walked into a street. The walls on either side of him leaned toward him as if they wanted to tell him something. The gray threads ran down the walls and across the street and up the opposite wall, and the threads were not random. They traced the path of a body that had fallen from a height. They traced the path of a body that had been dragged. They traced, in one place near his left foot, the careful slow swirl of a pool of blood that had once spread itself out to dry.

He followed the street because the street went where the street went. At its end a square opened up. A fountain stood in the middle of the square, dry and weeping from a hundred small cracks. The square was full of the thin shapes. He walked through them. They did not feel him. He was a stone in a river. The river went past him.

At the edge of the square a building still stood four stories tall. Its face had fallen away and he could see into it the way a man can see into a dollhouse. The floors were layered one above the other like the pages of a book, and on every floor the same scene was happening, in different times.

On the lowest floor a woman sat at a table and fed a child from a bowl. On the next floor up the same woman sat at the same table and the child was older, and on the next the child was gone and the woman sat alone with her bowl, and on the highest floor the table was broken and the woman was gone and the bowl lay on its side spilling nothing.

The loops ran up the building like water running uphill.

Soren stood in the square and breathed. The air tasted of ash and of something sweeter under the ash, the sweetness of a thing burning slow, the sweetness of a thing that had been sweet once and was not sweet now. The ember in his chest flared. He pressed his hand harder against it. The flare did not go down.

A sound began at the far edge of the bowl. It was not a sound he had heard before and it was a sound he had heard a thousand times. It was the sound of a great many people crying out at once, but spread thin across a great many years, so that each individual cry was a single note and the notes did not harmonize and did not clash and simply existed in the same air at the same time. It was the sound the city made in the moment of its ending, stretched out across the centuries like a single drop of blood on a sheet of paper, still wet, still waiting to dry.

He did not know how long he stood in the square. He did not know when he knelt. He found himself kneeling with his forehead against the wet stone of the street and his hand against his chest and the crying of the city running through him like a current through a wire, and the ember in his chest was burning now in earnest, burning the way a coal burns when a breath finally finds it, and the burning was almost a voice, and the voice almost had words.

He lifted his head. The shapes in the square were looking at him.

Not all of them. One of them.

A boy. A boy of nine or ten, standing near the dry fountain, with a rag ball tucked under his arm. The boy was not running his loop. The boy was standing still. The boy was watching Soren with the patient attention of a thing that had been waiting a long time to be seen.

Soren's mouth opened. He did not know what he was going to say.

From the lip of the bowl, behind him, a voice came down.

"Soren."

Pira. High and clear and not afraid and not careful.

She had not stayed with the horses.

Soren turned.

Pira stood at the lip of the bowl, her silhouette small against the low sky. The wind pressed her hair flat against her skull. One hand shaded her eyes. The other pointed past him, toward the treeline that ringed the ruin.

"Soren." Her voice carried down the slope without effort, the way a child's voice carries, as if the air itself made room for it. "There's something coming."

He rose to his feet. His knees ached. The wet stone had soaked through his trousers and the cold climbed into his joints and stayed there, humming. The shapes in the square were gone. The boy with the rag ball was gone. The dry fountain held only rain and a single dead leaf turning slow in the drain.

"What kind of something?"

"The kind that breaks branches when it walks."

He crossed the square at a lope. Pira met him halfway down the bowl's curve, grabbing his sleeve with one grimy hand. Her fingers were cold. Her breath smelled of the dried apple she had been eating.

"Big," she said. "Real big. With horns."

"Horns like what?"

She thought about it. Her mouth worked. She was trying to be precise, the way he had taught her to be precise, and the effort made her brows draw down.

"Like hands," she said. "Like a lot of hands. I saw them against the sky."

The ember in his chest flinched. It was a small motion, the way a coal flinches when a draft finds it, but he felt it all the way up into his throat. His hand went, without his permission, to his left wrist. The skin beneath his sleeve prickled as if something beneath it had heard her.

"Get to the horses," he said. "Saddle them. If I'm not back in a quarter-hour, ride south and don't stop until you hit the Ashveil road."

"I'm not leaving you."

"Pira."

"I'm not."

He looked at her. She looked back. Her chin was set in the particular way that meant argument was pointless, that he had spent three months learning to recognize, that he was going to spend the rest of his life failing to argue against.

"Stay behind the fountain," he said. "Do not come into the square. Whatever you hear."

She nodded once and ran.

He walked to the edge of the trees.

The elk came out of the Cinderwood the way a ship comes out of fog: first the antlers, then the head, then the shoulders, then the tremendous slow weight of the body. It was the color of a bruise. Its hide was wrong, mottled in patches that seemed to move when he did not look directly at them, the way rot moves under the skin of a fruit that is only beginning to spoil. Its eyes were the pale green of river water over deep stone, and they were not the eyes of any deer he had ever seen. They were aware. They were tired. They were full of a sorrow so old it had calcified into something that only resembled rage.

The antlers branched wide, twelve points to a side, and every point was a hand.

He knew the hands. He knew some of them. There was the hand of the woman who had sold him bread in Harrow's End on the morning of the massacre, the one with the flour still dusted in the lines of her palm. There was the hand of the boy who had begged him for a copper on the steps of the garrison and whom he had ignored because he was late for his watch. There was the hand of his sergeant, who had been a good man in a bad uniform and who had died with his mouth open and his sword still in his grip. The fingers twitched. The fingers reached. Some of them were still wearing rings. Some of them were still holding things: a spoon, a comb, a folded letter that the rain had begun to soften at the edges.

The elk breathed out, and the sound it made was not a breath. It was the same stretched crying he had heard in the square, thinned to a single voice, the voice of the Cinderwood itself, weeping through the animal that had once been its proudest creature.

"Little warder," the elk said.

The voice came from the mouth and from the antlers and from the ground beneath Soren's boots. It was the voice of something that had once been a stag and was now a reliquary, a box for the unquiet.

"I know what you carry," the elk said. "I can taste it from here. It burns the way my children burned."

"I am not here to harm you."

"You are here because you carry it. That is harm enough."

The elk lowered its head. The hands spread. They began to walk down the antlers toward the points, fingers flexing, as if they meant to climb off the bone and come for him on their own. Soren heard the faint rasp of nails against the dead keratin, and beneath it, thinner, the sound of skin sliding over skin.

He unrolled his left sleeve.

The sigil was there, just below the wrist, set into the skin the way a coin is set into a cobblestone. It was black bone, sewn in by a physicker who had since been hanged, in a town whose name he had been careful to forget. The sigil was not a ward. It was not a charm. It was a command, written in the old shorthand of the Conclave's corpse-wardens, the ones who had been taught to speak to the dead as if the dead were still obliged to listen.

He had not used it in four years. He had hoped to die before he needed it again.

He pressed his thumb into the sigil.

The pain was immediate and specific. It felt like a needle being driven lengthwise under the nail of his thumb, then along the bone of the forearm, then into the socket of the shoulder. His vision went white. The white held for a count of three. Then the color came back, and the world came back, and the elk was still there, but the hands on its antlers had stopped climbing.

"I know you," Soren said.

The elk's breath shuddered.

"I know the woman with the bread. I know the boy with the copper. I know your sergeant. I know all of them. They were mine before they were yours."

The elk took a step forward. The ground cracked under its hoof, and the crack ran all the way back to the lip of the bowl, a thin black line in the wet grass.

"They were no one's," it said. "They were the land's. The land took them back."

"The land did not take them. The Veiled King did."

The elk made a sound. The sound was not a word. It was the sound a tree makes when it falls, translated into breath and given to an animal that should not have known how to make it.

"Do not speak that name to me."

"Then give them back to me."

The elk considered this. Its green eyes moved from Soren's face to his wrist, to the sigil, to the ember that he knew was beginning to show through his shirt as a faint orange glow, the way a coal shows through a torn paper bag.

"You cannot carry them," the elk said. "You are already carrying too much."

"I have carried too much for a long time. I am used to the weight."

"You do not understand. They are not yours to carry. They are the price the land is paying. If you take them from me, the land will not forgive you."

"I am not asking the land to forgive me."

He pressed harder.

The sigil woke fully. The black bone flared with a light that was not light, that was the absence of light given a shape, that was the color of a closed eye. The sigil was a command, and the command was a single word in the old tongue, and the word meant release.

The hands on the antlers screamed.

Not with one voice. With a thousand. The sound of a city ending, the sound he had heard in the square, but now in his ears, now in his teeth, now in the marrow of his arms. He felt each hand let go. He felt each hand fall through the air, fingers trailing, rings catching what little light the clouds allowed. He felt each hand land in the wet grass of the bowl, and he felt each hand become a hand again, just a hand, just bone and old skin and the rings they had been wearing, and the air above the elk's head went empty.

The elk shuddered. Its antlers were bare. They were the antlers of a stag again, bone-pale, twelve points to a side, beautiful and terrible in the way that only the untouched things of the Cinderwood could be.

The elk looked at Soren. Its eyes were no longer green. They were brown. The brown of an animal. The brown of a thing that did not know his name and did not want to.

The elk turned and walked back into the trees. The branches closed behind it. The bowl was quiet.

Soren tried to watch it go. The world went out.

Not dimmed. Not blurred. Out. The black came up from the edges like a tide, and the last thing he saw was Pira running toward him across the bowl, her mouth open, her hands out, and then there was nothing but the sound of her feet in the grass and the sound of his own breathing and the sound of the ember in his chest, ticking like a clock, ticking like a heart, ticking the half-day down until his eyes would come back.

He knelt in the grass. He put his hands over his face.

"Pira," he said.

"I'm here." Her voice was close. Her hand found his shoulder. "I'm here. What happened."

"I can't see."

A pause. Then her small fingers were on his face, turning it toward where she was, and her palm settled against his cheek. Her skin smelled of woodsmoke and apples and the clean iron of the rain.

"It's all right," she said. "I can see for both of us."

He laughed. It was a broken sound. He put his hand over hers and held it there, and the bones of her wrist felt smaller than a sparrow's, and he thought, for no reason he could name, of the woman who had sold him bread, and how her hand had been the same size, and how he had never once thought to learn her name.

Above them, the empty sky began to clear. Somewhere in the bowl, the dry fountain caught a single drop of rain and held it on its rim, and the drop caught the light that was not yet sun, and threw it back, and threw it back, and threw it back, until Pira said, in her high and clear and not afraid voice, "There's a rainbow, Soren. There's a rainbow over the fountain."

He could not see it. He could not see anything.

He could see her hand in his, and that, for now, was enough.