Chapter 37
not all flames may be extinguished
some burn perpetual, as is the way of the world
all matter trending inexorably towards fire.
—Archivist Splitwater
Declan sits in the room at the top of the tower for a long time after Shipwright and Shroudweaver have left. He watches the dust move in the light, watches the shadows shift over the map as the sun ticks slowly over the sky, hot against the fly-blown windows.
He tries to ignore that feeling in his chest, like a burnt stone. Foreboding. Deep and heavy as a well.
He doesn’t really want another war; never really expected one. Two should be enough for any lifetime.
‘One won, one lost. Same mess at the end of it all.’
He smiles bitterly at the thought, walks to the window and looks at the city, gathering speed as the day gathers light.
Already the shouts and songs of Peacock’s Rest filling the air, as the bars and brothels spill tempting shade out into the warming streets.
The distant pop and shimmer of fireworks.
Some noble brat’s birthday party, most like.
He hated them, the way they scared the animals.
Scared him, if he admitted it. Always just too close to the sound of war.
Altogether too many people around him fond of blowing things up.
That thought rustles his memory and he walks back to the table, stretching his hands out over the map. Vivid still, if food-stained and wine-spattered. Things couldn’t be kept pretty if you used them.
Amazing how much it had changed in a span of years.
Redrawn twice over. First to expunge the black stain of the Empire in the north, then again to scratch the remains of the city Crowkisser killed into the burnt mess of the south.
His fingers lingered there. That whole southern stretch just a ragged line below the villages of the Rim.
Nothing to sketch in. Nothing rebuilt. No one able to go there to see what, if anything, remained.
He reaches for his desk drawer, finds the bottle and pours. It was early, but somehow, it was always early these days. Pours, drinks, and swills the sour taste of his own teeth around his head.
Somewhere beneath his chest, the fading bruises of Slickwalker’s fists press against his gut. He takes another pull, half to dull the pain, half to try and put a little fire back into his bones.
Tallest walls on the whole Western seaboard and that ratshit had waltzed in like it was nothing, holding his wife’s name in his mouth as he beat him bloody.
He’d be bits and brains on the flagstones now if it wasn’t for Shipwright, and even that truth stunk.
The pair of them rolling in, old as they were, bowed as they were, still with power pulsing at their backs. Silver thread and spinner brass.
And what did he have? An ego, and enough money to back it up. A strong sword arm that got weaker by the day. A hip and a shoulder that ached with slow fire in the mornings and cold fire at nights.
He could stave it off, of course. He was old enough and smart enough to strike the pose and hurl the bluster. But it was all dance. All smoke and mirrors.
He ran on fire and spite these days, and even that fire was a guttering flame, death growing in the bone.
But that wasn’t what they saw. It wasn’t what he let them see. If he faltered, Hesper faltered, and he’d be gone to glass before he let that happen.
He’d always kept the watch. Always held the fort. Even when that meant being alone in the night, with an ache in the bone and another empty bottle.
And here he was holding down the fort again.
That seemed to be what he did these days.
Hold the fort while the fleet sails north.
Watch your friends, your wife, disappear over the horizon.
Hear nothing of use from bastard scouts for months.
Field requests from captains and guilds and traders, all jockeying like sharks in a shrinking tank.
Climb the seawall and watch the ocean painted with the bright flags of ships, hating every one for not being the one you want to see.
Then welcome them all, somehow, miraculously back.
Manage to build a life, in the aftermath, beyond the celebrations.
Have a kid. Watch it grow. Hear its words and wipe its snot and dry its tears and watch it grow. Into a person. A man.
Start to dream of another life. Of peace, and simple things.
Then catch rumours of something wrong. Storms in the south.
Ships lost in unseasonable drownings. The wind stinking of sulphur and dark earth.
The air carrying the sound of something vast, cracking and rolling across the sky.
Crows. Flocks upon flocks of crows arrowing down through the grey rain, skimming the fallow fields, bowing the branches and crowding the battlements as they rested before flying onwards, ever south.
Hearing your dearest friend warn you that something terrible was brewing, resolving to go yourself this time, because she’s got the baby and she shouldn’t travel, and anyway, wasn’t that what men did, what a real man would do?
Marshalling a smile on your face and trading all your goodwill like coin. Pulling the other cities behind you into a great fleet that stroked the surface of the water like an Emperor’s ego.
And finally, finally sailing south.
For a second, Fallon’s fingers linger on the map’s ragged southern scar, and he feels a similar, poorly healed itch in his mind.
No, not today. Today he would hold down the fort again while his friends once again went north, to seek allies, this time. Maybe to win this third war before it started; maybe, just maybe, to get them all enough peace to stretch them to the grave.
And wouldn’t that be a mercy.