Here in Cold Hell

Sixth Volume

PLACE OF STONES AND DARK MOON

‘So dark it is, how can I see my way?’

‘You will find the path more easily if you are blind. If you are blind, you will have to.’

Song of Lalt: Simisey

ONE

The sun was blue.

He lay staring up at it, because it did not dazzle him; yet it gave light.

After a while he turned his head a little on the hard, smarting surface, to see what the sun gave light to.

Stones, shards and flints lay all around him, save in one direction where, about four shield-lengths off perhaps, they ended in dull and viscous water. That was the open sea. He thought so. But it did not really move, there were no waves, only an occasional sluggish rippling.

So cold. So cold …

He had been deep inside the sea, which was like a deadly beating womb. Then he must have been cast ashore. A ship – he must have been on a ship, which had foundered.

He could not remember any ship, except one with seventeen masts stuck in ice and grounded. And even the ice – not so cold – as this.

The man lying on the long broken beach closed his eyes, but his hand reached out emptily across the stones, and closed inadvertently on something that was of a different, smoother shape. At first he examined it only by touch. What was it? Was it his? He drew it in and held it to his face to look. But he was still unsure what it was. Nevertheless, for some reason his hand shut tighter on it and tears ran out of his eyes.

The next time he woke it was because a baleful sound, like that of a mooing beast or of a trumpet, was echoing out across the vast space inland, behind him.

Slowly now he sat up, and gazed inland, but it was a sort of nothingness, the beach of shards stretching for ever, and in the distance clouds, maybe, slowly moving, low against the earth.

He put the unknown wooden thing he had found inside his shirt, under his heavier outer clothing, which seemed made of leather and wool.

Just then terror came, glittering and wild, into his mind and he thrust it away.

Where was this country? He did not know.

Who am I? He did not know.

The trumpet or beast mournfully called again, inland.

His shadow fell from him, transparent in the sapphire sunlight.

When he stood up, it was because a disturbance started in the sea-pond. Unlike the pure fear which had to do with confusion, no alarm rose in him at the twisting waters. Actually he was quite glad to see it. It might give him something to do.

He put his right arm across his body and located a sheathed knife thrust in at his belt.

The water parted, thick as soup. A dark round object rose from it. A seal? But the roundness gave way to a head containing features, a mane of hair, a pillar of neck and wide shoulders – a muscular man of some height and girth was striking up now from the depths. Swiftly he stood clear of the sea and stepped out on the beach.

The newcomer was not wet. Neither his clothing nor his shaggy black hair had any liquid on or in them. His look was bleak, and blank. He took a single further step, then fell straight down on his face on the shore.

I too did that. So it must have been.

Even as he thought this, another figure started to come up out of the thick and turgid sea – and then another and another.

Watching them he thought instantly, I’m no longer alone. I must have a name. He put his hand to his face. It was a brown, young hand, with long strong fingers and a callused palm. Looking at it a moment, he knew what each callus represented – use of a sword, a bow, the reins of a chariot …

The other new arrivals – there were ten by now and still others plunged up and in – took no notice either of the man already standing on the shore, or of any of those who had also just come there. But each man, reaching the stones, fell over, on to either his face or his side, and one, dropping initially to his knees, curled up in the position of the unborn foetus.

I must have a name …

Twenty men now were on the beach. Two more came wading in, and of these one glanced into the standing watcher’s eyes. The watcher did not know this man – and yet there was something familiar about him. His hair was white although he too was quite young. The white-haired man raised one hand uncertainly, as if in greeting.

Unlike all the rest, additionally, he stayed upright after he had got out of the sea, despite heavily swaying this way and that.

‘Where did it go?’ he said, in a language the watcher knew very well, but could not name either.

‘What?’

‘The – city – the Gullah – the world – where?’

Something flashed in the watcher’s mind. He remembered a chariot. He remembered speed and shouting and his own red hair blown like a flag, and now, putting back his hands, he pulled this long hair in over his shoulder, to stare at and be sure. Yes, it was red and savage as fire.

‘If I answer where all that went, my friend, then you must name me before I tell it.’

‘Oh. A riddle? Then you are – you are …’ White-hair faltered. Great trouble smoked over his pale eyes. ‘I can’t,’ he said, ‘tell you your name. Though I saw you often, once … But then,’ despairingly he added, ‘who am I?’

The watcher felt a pulse of heat run through his blood, strengthening him. He said, ‘For now, you’ll call me Nameless.’

‘Nameless …’

‘And, for now also, until you recall your own name, you shall be called Kuul. Which means One, or First, but in another tongue than that we speak now. As for the city and the … Gullahammer, the Brotherhood – that was lost. It’s been left behind.’ Nameless paused, considering what he had said, and that he seemed to know yet did not understand it. ‘Here too there’ll be things to accomplish.’

The man with white hair, Kuul, looked about the shore at the other men who had fallen over, swooning or sleeping. He yawned suddenly, then shook his head, as if both to clear it and to deny. ‘I was a long while in that filth of a sea. I couldn’t find my way. I won’t waste time asleep like these fools. They must be western trash. Or Olchibe. We’re Jafn, you and I. We only really sleep when we are dead.’ And then his eyes widened. A deep agony filled his face and hung there. He repeated, quietly, ‘We are dead.’

Nameless laughed. He had to force the laugh from him, but it sounded convincing enough. And Kuul smiled a little, wanting to be steadied.

‘Do you feel dead, Kuul?’

‘No – no.’

One further man had emerged from the sea and sunk down. No more appeared. The pond was flat, sullen and ungiving.

But the beast or trumpet brayed again abruptly, and much more raucously, over the shingle. It seemed closer than before.

‘What’s that?’

‘God knows,’ said Nameless, monotheistically in the Jafn manner. ‘But I think someone else is on their way. So probably we’ll learn.’

They checked their garments and weapons, of which last both men, and all the others from the look of it, had plenty, though some were of odd designs. Kuul clubbed back his hair and bound it with three strips of dried dog-gut.

Hair-tying for battle – that will make no difference to me, Nameless thought. Why was that? It must be he was benignly spelled, some witch or mage had made him invulnerable.

Of course, for surely he had been a king?

The idea of a fight was cheering, was it? He had fought a lot, previously, in the area beyond the dead sea, the world they had lost or left behind.

He noticed the men strewn on the beach were waking up again, some quite quickly, others slow and melancholy, as he had been.

Nameless was glad none of them had seen him lying weeping there on the cold shore, like a little boy wanting his mother.

‘Yes, something’s coming,’ said Kuul. He turned to the waking men and shouted in a solid brazen tone, ‘Hey, get up, you dreamers. Some urgent business is galloping towards us. Do you want to be caught on your backs like girls?’

And each of the men began scrambling upright, rubbing his face, searching out his personal armament of bows and daggers and spears.

Warriors, all of them. Perhaps they had been in a sea-battle with reivers … Vorms? Yes, that was the barbarian name, Vorms and Fazions – but no, these peoples had allied with the Brotherhood, the Gullahammer. Some other rubbish of the outer seas then.

Nameless looked upward at the sun again. It had moved a little, like a proper sun, and faint cloudlets were blowing across it.

He had seen a blue sun before. But not, he thought, in the sky—

The ground rumbled. The lesser stones began to jump, some of them, small pebbles and flinders flying up. As yet, however, nothing was visible of what approached.

All the men ranked themselves alongside Nameless and Kuul. Some of them even called out the name of Nameless – the Jafn version of it. Had they heard in sleep?

He turned to the big, black-maned man who had come out of the sea the first, after Nameless himself.

‘I’ve forgotten how you’re called, brother. Excuse me. It’s been a long journey.’

‘Years,’ agreed the black-haired man. ‘But call me, for now, Choy.’

Nameless nodded. Choy meant Two, or Second, but only in the language of Gech, or sometimes Olchibe. And this man’s skin was not yellow. He came from another nation.

It seemed also then Nameless had somehow named them all. He called along the line, ‘Every man, say your name. We may need to shout to each other in the war that’s coming.’

And they cried back their names – all numbers, though all in different tongues, and he believed all in tongues not their own – Olchibe again, or Jafn, or Urrowiy – like the unJafn name of First he had coined for Kuul, the first who spoke. Others had number-names which were from languages and dialects the Nameless one had never known.

Whatever else, they were a named band now, First and Second, and otherwise three to twenty-three.

By then a sort of haze was visible in the distance, murkier than the clouds which still drifted along there over the land. The rumble in the ground became a roar.

Then out from the fog burst a wall of rushing shapes, grey-black and golden, burning oddly in the cool sunlight, and the material of the beach flew off from either side of it like wings of water or ice.

Nameless flexed his body. He felt pleasantly hot now, and limber, ready to spring forward and leap among the enemy.

He raised the long knife, which was Jafn from its look. And next raised himself on to the balls of his feet to sprint.

In that second the amalgam which raced towards the twenty-four men on the shore exploded into visibility and nearness.

The waiting men howled. Yet none of them broke the line or fled. Instead, voicing berserk screams, they rushed forward, Nameless just ahead of them, his blue eyes wide as two furious suns.

The clash came awesomely, and reverberated along the shore for thousands of uncharted miles.

Nameless found himself lying now on his back, just as Kuul had warned the others not to be. Something stood on his chest and belly, panting hypnotically into his face.

It was heavy as lead, but in form lean, almost emaciated. Its muzzle and jaw dripped a scalding, stinging, stinking saliva. There were thin white teeth. The rest was bluish, a bluish hound, but it had no eyes.

Even pinned as he was, this blind fanged thing’s mouth an inch above his throat, Nameless thought, I’ve seen such animals before – not dogs – but creatures without eyes and needing none.

The bellow of the numbered fighters had dropped, through fast stages of other noise, to silence.

One of the riders loomed, nearly above Nameless. Like the hound he was dark bluish, clad in black and coiled in strands of golden metal. He had a human similarity, but his hair seemed to be made of gold snakes, tied back rather as Kuul had done it, but hissing and struggling. And his eyes, if he had eyes, were masked by a sombre vizor.

The other riders were the same, and Nameless saw them sitting astride their mounts all along the line of now fallen men. As for what they rode, Nameless thought of the fish-horses the sea-peoples favoured. But then Nameless forgot those. These horses had neither scales nor single horns; they did not reek of herring either. They were metal, black and gold, and each of them had eight legs. At first he told himself, a fallen hero, that the shell of these animals was only armour, and maybe the legs only artistic extras added on to frighten any foe. But he saw how they moved, how the legs moved, and that in the holes the gilt blinders left bare white sparks spattered, and nothing else.

The eyeless dog panted, not tearing out Nameless’s throat. The snake-haired rider who towered over him on the eight-legged horse spoke in a soft, emotionless, peculiar voice.

‘When the jatcha lets you go, get up. You will run before us, to the Place.’

‘What pl—’ Nameless began to say.

At once the hound – the jatcha – thrust its dripping muzzle against and almost into his mouth.

It smelled of butchery and old death. Nameless – and several men who had tried to speak and got the same treatment – retched and choked, unable to roll aside.

Then the jatchas padded off them. Men vomited into the stones. Nameless did not. He spat and stood up.

He looked into the face of the vizored thing on the unhorse with spider legs, and nodded.

Turning to the fallen men as they realigned themselves snorting, wiping mouths, raging and in an extreme of horror, Nameless then shook his head: Do not resist what is irresistible.

They obeyed him. What option?

On their feet they trotted through the crowd of mounted beings as it made way for them, and out along the sharded shingle.

‘Where the clouds move,’ said the soft omnipresent voice. Nameless saw that each of the several riders uttered at once and as one. ‘There is the Place. Run now. Run along.’

Nameless and his men ran along. Towards the Place.

He had seen cities. He recalled that he had. He could not exactly picture them, but knew he had thought them small, quaint perhaps, and far less than what had been described by those who did so beforehand. After the hours-long jog over the broken shore, they ran among thick cloud, the sort encountered only on the tops of high mountains, and not always there. Then for another hour they ran inside the cloud, the obscene riders and dogs only glimpsed behind them, but sounding always with the jingle of their harness and battle-mail. The cloud dissolved without warning. And there was the Place.

Nameless stopped. All of them staggered to a halt.

Their guards did not prevent this, or try to force them on. They brought their spider-horses to a standstill, dismounted, and stood clasping their mailed fists to their hearts, shouting out a single word, which must be the true name of the Place. ‘Shabatu! Shabatu!’

‘Face of God, what is it?’ whispered Kuul.

Choy, on Nameless’s other side, said, ‘A great cliff, carved—’

‘A city,’ said Nameless. ‘It’s a city.’

Up it swarmed, far into the crystallized grey sky, vanishing there in a tapering perspective, while the blue sun perched on the highest limits, and lit it in streaming blue rays. It was pale, walled – walls within walls – up and up, on and on. One vast gateway broke the smooth frontage, and had doors of iron, fast shut. Above the gate was carved an open bestial mouth, fringed by black iron teeth. And from this mouth now erupted the beast-trumpet note heard on the far shore. Here it rang the air like a colossal bell.

Men covered their ears, moaned.

‘Don’t bother,’ said Nameless. ‘It can’t hurt you now.’

Because, he thought, we are, as Kuul noted, dead.

The city had convinced him, it seemed.

But then anyway the guards were there, thrusting each man down on his knees.

‘Greet the Place. The city of Shabatu.’

‘I salute Shabatu,’ said Nameless, flat as a slate.

The other men of his band followed his example, and in the same way.

Nameless thought, I can’t fathom the meaning of its name …

But everything now was names, known and unknown, to be invented or lost in amnesia. Also shapes, and new discouraging events. This was what a child must deal with, every second, once it had been born. But children lived and grew tough, throwing off their shackles.

Nameless glanced around at his men. ‘Cheer yourselves up, my warriors,’ he said, ‘think how fortunate we are, to witness such sights denied to other men. Think of the tales we can tell when we go home.’

I was a king. A king inspires and never shares his trouble, save with some close relative or friend. Did I have those, ever? It’s my duty to hold these few together. They’ve been given into my hand.

He took a step towards the city called Shabatu, and immediately one of the blind-yet-seeing jatcha hounds came around him and was in his path, blocking it.

It was not, then, permissible to go on.

He looked at the dog, at the area where its eyes should be.

‘Good hound. Thanks for your kind instruction.’

It was dog-size, but a very large dog, like the greatest and best bred of the Jafn hunting hounds, or the Urrowiy pack-dogs that carried whole travelling kitchens on their backs.

As the jatcha sidled by, returning to its station with the guards, Nameless put his hand towards its muzzle. It paused, sniffing at him.

‘Know me,’ said Nameless. ‘I will be your friend.’ The hound still paused, and no one had called it away. ‘Your name,’ said Nameless, ‘shall be Star-Dog. A secret. Only I and you will know.’ He leaned down then to the dog’s ear and it growled, a strange gravelly menace. But Nameless only said, ‘Live well, brother.’

The instant he straightened, one of the guards was there, clouting him across the back.

Nameless found again he fell. No, he was not spelled invulnerable. At least, not for the moment.

Yet he leapt upright again, facing the guard who had struck him.

‘You should tell us, sir,’ he said, ‘what’s disallowed. Then we won’t disobey and annoy you so.’

‘Everything is or may be disallowed,’ said the guard, the guards, for just as before they all spoke at once.

Nameless looked round. His men watched him. He smiled at them. The blow had not hurt him.

Over the last of the shingle shore, another note sounded on the long beach. The tall black gates of the city were undoing themselves. A procession was emerging.

Some sort of priest was at the procession’s head, like the priests of one of those lesser cities Nameless had visited elsewhere. The Jafn, of course, did not have priests, nor the other nations of the north and east, except the Olchibe, whose leaders were also the priests of their vandal bands. They relied instead on the powers of their magicians. Again, he had remembered something.

This priest figure wore deep blue, and lifted his arms to the sky. Behind him came others, all male, holding golden cups in which smouldered some type of incense. The aroma of it reached Nameless. It was like burning flowers.

The procession halted about a hundred paces away.

Only the foremost priest, thin as a stick, still advanced, walking over the stones and smiting them as he came with a long black staff.

Nameless watched him carefully. The man’s face was pallid and had such small flattened nose, mouth, chin and brows it seemed unformed, or constructed by some careless god. The others were too distant to be certain if they were the same.

The priest’s long hair resembled crawls of tallow. Like the snakes of the guards, this hair too appeared to be made of some other substance.

Now the priest was in front of them.

‘Shabatu welcomes you.’ A reedy voice, like a weak wind shivering through a hole in a narrow cave. ‘Here is what you have earned and deserved. Shabatu is a Place of War. Behold the Battle Gates of Shabatu. Go now, join your Brotherhood, your Horde, your Gullahammer, your Army, your Legion, your Cesh, your Valmat, your Jihax, your Vandal-Sack …’ The list went on. New names, new words, all of which meant war, meant the pride and prowess and honour and glory of war, and men banded together to make it.

I am at the Battle Gates. Where I belong.

Bitterness flooded Nameless. He embraced it. He was remembering, and must remember. But for now – for now they were driven aside, and along under the endless soaring walls of the city called Shabatu, Place of War, to join their regiment, the king and his twenty-three men.

A war camp. It lay in the lee of the walls, northwards, Nameless had concluded from the angle of the sun that now was setting.

Rank on rank of tents and bivouacs were spread out, some neatly positioned, and many haphazard and untidy. Fires burned between, flames anaemic in the light, but gaining in redness as the sun clotted in cloud and went down.

The sky to the west – it must be the west – was richly blue, a peacock colour. To the east, where night was starting to stir, a few campfire stars woke above, very big but not so brilliant. Maybe the unremitting cold had robbed them of their sparkle.

Moons would rise. Or would they? Nameless had known three moons, and nights of triple moonrise when dark was vivid as day. That was when he had been a king and ruled many thousands of men.

He stood up on the slope in the stone-littered landscape, looking mostly away to the north, or the west. In those two quarters, other lights than stars were becoming dimly visible. Presumably they blazed in the war camp of Shabatu’s enemies.

All the men who had come with him from the sea, the men called by numbers, were accustomed to fighting. They had dropped easily into a pre-battle stance, part tension, part bravado, and part resignation. They had no tent, but made a fire down the slope, using flints from the beach, and sat there now, below.

There was food. Thin, small-featured persons, like the priests but dressed in secular style, brought round baskets of bread and citrus fruits, while others turned spits over several larger fires, roasting carcasses that seemed to be those of deer or some bovine animals. There was liquor too, wine and beer, even raw spirits. You could discover what you wanted, what you liked. One man – Seventeen – had already asked a passing snake-haired guard if tonight women would be available. The guard failed to answer. Nor did any women manifest. ‘We haven’t earned them yet,’ said Eighteen. ‘It’ll be tomorrow, after we fight.’ The guards must have said this at some point – or else other men already in the camp had said it. It seemed there had been for the camp a wait, an interval, until enough men were present to provide an equal force to that of the enemy. A couple of the men already in the camp had complained that Nameless’s band had kept them hanging about for a year. ‘A year? Can it be?’ ‘No. He’s cracked.’

The camp was very great, as befitted an army under such gigantic walls as Shabatu’s. And also, going on the fires, the enemy camp seemed enormous. Had all these warriors had to linger on the advent of twenty-four more men?

Kuul had come up the slope. He brought Nameless a chunk of roast meat that smelled enough like beef, and a jug of black Jafn-like wine.

They ate and drank for a time in silence. Then Kuul said, ‘You are a Borjiy. I’ve recalled. You were my Chaiord. I think that was it.’

‘What garth are you from?’ asked Nameless, finding that the right words came now, or seemed to.

‘Irhon.’

‘Yes, Irhon. I know you – but still I can’t remember—’

‘My name. Nor I. Nor can I yours. Only my people. Oh, and I think I can recollect my wife, but her name’s gone too. I can only see her hair and breasts and her sweet lower mouth.’

‘Not too bad a bargain, then.’

They laughed.

All through the camp men were laughing, play-sparring, wrestling, shooting at marks, telling tales, burnishing and honing weapons.

Familiar, this, as his own skin.

And across the landscape, in the second camp, no doubt it was just the same.

‘They don’t know or won’t say who we’re to fight,’ said Kuul, very low. ‘Do you reckon it’s human? I’ve seen no seefs or glers or such here, but God only knows. This is a weird and wondrous spot. It’s like a dream – or a legend.’ Nameless said nothing. Kuul swigged wine. He said, ‘We are dead. I believe so.’

‘Then,’ said Nameless, ‘if dead, death means life, for we live.’

‘You think this is the Other Place? The land beyond the world? I thought that would be merry. And not so biting cold.’

‘I think I live, and you live. I can smell you, Kuul. Even in the biting cold.’

Kuul grinned.

The sun was all down. The sky was growing luminously black, and more huge stars scattered out, thick as the shards on the beach, but even now not bright. As yet there was no sign of any moon.

‘Look there,’ said Kuul.

Nameless gazed behind him.

Shabatu, the War City, was slowly lighting up. It was not that torches, lamps or windows appeared. The walls themselves began to gleam and glow with a pale golden translucence. Around their fire, all twenty-two of Nameless’s other men had got up and were staring, impressed, at this spectacle. But everyone else either took no notice, or mocked the newcomers’ amazement.

‘Tomorrow,’ murmured Kuul, ‘I mean to fight my best, and take the damned leer off their faces. We are Jafn.’

But the city shone like radiant golden ice. Who would need a moon, with such a city? Perhaps none, for no moon rose all through the long, cold night.

During the night, too, much of the camp slept. The slumber involved most of the men from Nameless’s group. The Jafn Kuul naturally spurned sleep as most nights Jafn did, and Nameless felt no need of it. But eventually the one called Choy came up the slope with another man, Lifli – Five – who seemed to be a Kelp of the north seas. His nation was known for going seven days and nights awake at a stretch. The Kelp’s face was sad and bewildered, but he had painted it with stripes for war. Nameless did not know him, nor did the Kelp know Nameless, but they sat down together on the slope and drank, looking at the city, or away to the east for sun-up. Choy too kept awake with the others. He said he had never slept very well.

If we live, how do we stand this extreme of cold? If we are dead, why do we need sleep or to stay insomniac?

‘We are far from home,’ lilted Kuul, who had a fine light singing voice. After the song he told them the Jafn story of the hero Star Black, made by God from snow to aid the garth of the Kree. ‘When he came alive at God’s breath, he also became blacker than night.’ Later, Choy said that in his country there were black men, though not perhaps as black as that. They were all remembering – their women, their sons, their histories and fights, their myths and peoples. Only Nameless, despite his earlier optimism, felt the sightlessness still enfold acres of his memory in dense ice. He recalled no kindred, no lover, no friend. He recalled no Jafn stories, and certainly not his own. He waited for the dawn.

TWO

In the morning the sun that rose was transparent as a glass. Its edges only had any blue, and from it poured beams of frigid light.

Nameless saw how the sky was like a piece of palest grey marble, veined and polished, probably tactile, if you could reach.

After all, Choy had lapsed asleep.

Lifli was praying to a small image made of shell, with four arms and the head of a wicked-looking bird.

Kuul had gone but now came back with bread and beer. ‘They’re on the move.’

‘The enemy.’

‘Yes. See – you can make out the sun catching points on spears – or shields—’

‘That’s a big Cesh,’ said Choy. He meant, Nameless knew, a war force. It was one of the words the priest had used. Choy scowled and for a split second reminded Nameless of … someone.

But already the hideous mouth-trumpet was yowling from the gates of Shabatu. All around men were prancing up. The cold, colourless air was also full of shouts and curses.

The snake-heads were coming too, riding through the disrupted tent lanes on their spider-horses with the jatchas running to heel, lean heads down, seeing their way by scent.

Nameless swung about among his men. He drank with them, passing round the cup, and reviewed the weapons they demonstrated. All were eager now, or to seem so. He congratulated them. Nameless this far felt no excitement such as he had known on the beach. He guessed that would change, once he could properly make out their foe.

Despite the guards, no other here was mounted, and there were no chariots. What of the enemy?

‘Come on,’ said Nameless. ‘Let’s get down. We’ll take the front. There’s no organized plan – they don’t know what they’re at, but we do.’ He put his hand on their shoulders, and they looked at him in the way he remembered, and did not know why. He had bound them to him. Therefore he must take care of them.

They advanced, loping, exchanging banter with those they passed, some of whom then trotted after, through the sprawled camp, out on to the plain of stones. No one now turned any of them back or tried to argue.

‘You stay with me,’ called Nameless. ‘I go ahead, then you. Hold together. Look out for each other, as I will.’

‘We’ll be first – more glory.’

‘Listen,’ said Nameless, ‘we’re immortal now. Not one of us can die.’ Their faces barely altered. Some smiled, nodding, others flinched, afraid of that where danger had not distressed them. But it was tepid and soon over. ‘This,’ said Nameless, ‘is to prove us to be what we know we are. Warriors. Stay together. This enemy – we’ll smash their fucking souls to pulp. Tonight, women and feasts. If not, we’ll take what we need and go on to where they appreciate us. Either this is the Afterlife, or we’re still in the world under some magic limitation. We have only to fight to be free.’

They sent up a cry for him, even those who had only followed his twenty-three did that. But all across the amassing armies other such affiliations rose. There was no coherence, and no commander over all.

At the front of the horde they pulled out, clear of the main force, and posted themselves on the stones. Again, there was no remonstrance from the guards. Several more of the other bands poured down to join them.

Every man looked into the north and west, and a few minutes after, you could see the foe. At first they were only like a hurriedly moving mass, but presently it was apparent they were a mirror image, a second horde of men, jewelled with the blaze of metal, running towards them over the plain.

Nameless bounded across the stones. Though aware of them, he no longer, despite his promise, properly saw any of his own men. His eyes were fixed irreparably it seemed on what came to meet him.

Then something strange suggested itself about the advancing battalions.

It did not slow him, yet his brain began to work in another way, and at the same time he heard the ones following him shouting out the news, deriding and exclaiming.

‘They don’t bear any weapons …’

‘No swords – not even knives …’

‘Shields – that’s all – see, one shield slung on each arm …’

‘What will they do, flap them together and clap us to death?’

They still spoke of death, but Nameless noted their fierce laughter. He saw something else. The enemy were slowing down, stopping. They were motionless, and still a quarter-mile away.

That was when he experienced the unknown power, which rushed into him, from the atmosphere or the ground. It was like the strongest wine, although wine had never much affected him, he thought – had he ever been drunk? Now he was. Still running forward, he seemed suddenly to have achieved an additional, incredible speed, beyond anything possible to him in the world, and in his skull electric fires ignited, so his vision began to tinge everything with crimson …

At his back now he could sense that the others had been imbued with a similar genius. Growls and brayings erupted from them, like the outcry of contesting stags or elephants that charged.

Nameless, even running, stretched himself. He believed he felt himself grow much larger – every sinew, muscle, bone – even sexually he rose up, angry, not to enjoy, the phallus only another weapon … His body was fluid, invincible – Borjiy berserker – the spell he had thought had been made for him there about him once more. Opening his jaws, he too roared.

There were lions in his voice, grey lions with beaded manes, and wolves, snarling under their silver pelts …

Lion – wolf—

I am—

I am Lionwolf—

And I will tear them all in shreds—

He was far in front of the whole Gullahammer now, and the bellowing of a beast detonated from his heart, throat and mouth. Cool above his own tumult, a diamond in his mind assessed the assault. Two minutes until he struck the enemy forward line – they could not stand against him. He, he alone, could shatter them into bits.

It had happened before.

This was when he finally saw the faces of those he was to destroy.

Had he ever truly seen that in the past?

Conceivably not. It shocked him, but only with delight. What did they matter? They were his to rend and splinter.

His hand that held the knife, his other hand that held the sharp stone he had picked up, combined with the long thick talons which his nails had become. Was his face that of an animal? A lionwolf?

There was one face in front of him, there in the enemy vanguard. He noticed it more than the rest. What was that face? It was only the face of a man …

The sun was low in the east, but it burned on the shields the enemy held before them. Did they intend to form a shield-wall? That would do them no service. Two shields to every man, defence not aggression: insanity.

Then the shields moved. Running full tilt Nameless – the Lionwolf – watched the shields draw in, fold out wide—

Something changed.

The forward line of the foe was breaking, lifting into the air, the sky—

The shields flared. They had changed their nature.

They were great wings.

Every man of the opposing force was going up into the air, and swooping now in over the racing, bestially roaring army of Shabatu.

And that face, that one face – the dark eyes had marked Lionwolf, even as Lionwolf’s eyes – no longer blue, blood-red now as his hair – marked the stranger’s.

Lionwolf sprang upward. It was a jump no man, however mighty, could ever have accomplished, the wrath-frenzied vault of a lion. As he did so, the winged man stooped low to seize him.

They met, between sky and land.

The impact was gargantuan, as if two mountains collided.

Lionwolf felt his talons sink through flesh, even as the talons of his enemy nailed themselves into his own. The flyer’s hands were unimpeded – the wings independent.

They were eye to eye, like lovers struggling to a climax of death. But there could be no death now. Then what could there be, what invented alternative to destruction?

Like Lionwolf’s the man’s features had set in a rictus of fury; he might have been carved from bronze.

Lionwolf roped his adversary with his legs. This lock of limbs seemed impervious, but somehow the other dismantled it. In turn, he twined Lionwolf, and raked up one hand, clawed like that of the giant bird he had half become, to grip Lionwolf’s neck.

Lionwolf instantly broke this hold, both of legs and hand. The stranger leaned away to give himself room and smote Lionwolf across the torso, a blow like that of a hammer. The stone Lionwolf had secured was gone.

They reeled apart.

The flyer, graceful as a hawk, balanced on the beating, dull-shining wings. He glanced behind and under him, searching it seemed to see how his comrades fared.

Lionwolf too looked down. His opponent and he had met some distance from the earth, then gone up higher, borne by the winged adversary’s flight. Let go in nothing, Lionwolf found he did not drop, and was not astonished. Wingless, he too had the knack of withstanding gravity.

Below, he saw his own men, those first twenty-three, and many more, battling, kicking and writhing in the clasp of flying men, or crashing the flyers to the plain, rolling over them, stabbing with blades—

Lionwolf spun in air. He launched himself again straight at the one who had chosen to fight him and whom he had chosen to fight. Why procrastinate? Lionwolf thrust his knife up into the other’s guts. There was slight resistance. The flyer had no armour, only leather and woollen garments like Lionwolf’s own. The muscles beneath were hard enough, but not any match for steel.

The flyer showed his teeth in pain, but Lionwolf saw also he was amused.

‘No death,’ the flyer said, and pulled out the knife and slung it down the sky to the plain.

Lionwolf once more took hold of him then. He bent the flying man backward to snap his spine – but the flyer coiled and veered and lunged, seizing Lionwolf instead and pummelling his body so the punches rang.

‘This is beguiling. You fight so nicely, like a lovely girl,’ the flyer said, rocking back from the complementary blows Lionwolf slammed at his jaw.

Lionwolf kissed his lips to the flyer, grabbed his shoulders above the roots of the wings, and tore out his throat with teeth that were those of lions and wolves.

As the blood filled Lionwolf’s mouth, even then, some memory, dank as despair, slunk through him. But he did not let go. He could feel the other weaken, toppling – and then a tilting judder as some shaft hurled from the ground went through one of the wings.

When he raised his head, face half masked in blood, hair of blood, eyes of blood, the Lionwolf saw the barely open eyes of the other watching back at him. The flyer could not speak, but somehow he swerved in the air, and, taking hold once more of Lionwolf’s own neck – broke it.

Broke it. The ghastly grinding snap screamed through Lionwolf’s skull and brain.

Death. There was death.

Deaf and unseeing, darkness like a cloud – falling now in an insulting rain of feathers shaken from the wings of what still clutched him—

Before they smashed into the stones, Lionwolf felt life come back. But it was too late. Healing, nevertheless he plummeted on rocks and on the mattressing bodies of men. He lay some minutes, only part living, and next to him the other – his foe – also part living, also coming back.

When he could turn his head, Lionwolf turned it. He looked again into the eyes of the other fallen man.

All that could come so far from either man’s voice box was a hoarse whisper.

‘I will kill you tomorrow, then,’ rasped the winged one.

‘And I you.’

The mantra it seemed was no longer ‘No death’.

‘Tell me your name, so I can be sure to find you again,’ said the winged man, ‘when you turn tail to run away.’

Lionwolf decided to hide his recovered name. He gave another version of it to this enemy.

‘Know me. I am Vashdran. You?’

‘You can know me by the name of Curjai.’

The spilled blood on his throat was already flaking off, the skin and tendons beneath were whole.

Lionwolf Vashdran lay looking up once more at the polished sky of the deathland, the bones of his spine thrumming as they knit. He thought, If ever I doubted, now I know. I’ve died before.

The other was already up and away before Lionwolf could rouse himself. But all around, beneath the lifting of the morning sun blue as an iris, countless quantities of men, winged, wingless, lay immobile.

It was like any battlefield. Yes, he could recall battlefields. Heaped corpses, decorated by blood, covering miles.

How could this be?

Kuul helped haul Lionwolf to his feet. Kuul said at once, ‘I’ve remembered my name. But I don’t want it, not here. I prefer Kuul.’

Lionwolf said, in a voice whose use still hurt, ‘Do you remember the name of your wife?’

‘Jasibbi.’

Others were moving up, the men who had been with Lionwolf – Nameless – the night before. Not all, however, not all.

‘How have they died?’ said Eleven, looking everywhere around. ‘You can’t die here. Can’t be injured that will last. I had some bastard’s bird claws through my eye – but it healed. Yorrin here, he got a slice in the heart – see him now.’ They looked at number nine, Yorrin. The shirt and leather hung off in a stripe, all bloody, but under it the flesh was firm and closed, unscarred.

Lionwolf looked down. He saw, where he had been lying, Choy, who had been for Lionwolf a softer cushion than the stones. And how, under his healing neck, had lain the little wiry Kelp Lifli, who prayed to a shell.

‘This place—’ said Lionwolf. He stopped himself. He stared at them, all the ones who remained. ‘We live. We will hold the rest in our memories. And we stick together like honey to a hive.’

They cheered. But all across that dreadful extensive battle-ground, aching and repaved with dead, cheers were eerily rising, for delegated leaders, for those who survived.

Lionwolf turned again