The sundered seal

Chapter Eight: Veyrath Revealed, and the First Clone Seen

The man in grey arrived at Dawnhollow at first light, and he came on foot.

The watchman who saw him first, a young man named Tobin Ash who had been on the wall for fourteen hours and could no longer feel his hands, thought at first that he was dreaming. The mist lay thick over the northern pasture, and out of it, calm as a traveller approaching an inn, a single figure was walking along the road. He wore plain grey clothes, cut like a clerk's, and he carried nothing. He was not hurrying. He was not hiding. He looked, if anything, mildly pleased to be there.

"Captain," Tobin called, and his voice came out thin. "Captain Voss. There is a man."

Brenna Voss was beside him in three strides, spear in hand. She followed his pointing finger and went very still.

Behind the grey figure, in the thinning fog, the abominations were moving. Dozens of them, perhaps hundreds, shambling and loping across the field with their yellow eyes fixed on the wall. They were close enough now that the watchmen could hear their wet, rasping breath. But they did not rush the gate. They did not so much as snarl. As the man walked forward they parted around him like water around a stone, and the nearest of them bowed their ruined heads as he passed.

"Wake the marshal," said Brenna, very quietly. "Wake the twins. Now."

By the time Kaelen and Lyra reached the northern gate, the stranger had stopped a hundred paces from the palisade and was standing with his hands clasped behind his back, gazing up at the timber with an air of polite interest. The sun had cleared the eastern hills, and in the clean gold light he looked even more ordinary than before. His hair was brown. His face was neither young nor old. If Kaelen had passed him in the market, he would not have looked twice.

That, he would think later, was the most frightening thing about him.

"Good morning," called the man. His voice was soft and pleasant and carried across the field without effort. "I wonder if I might speak with whoever leads Dawnhollow. I would not trouble you, but I have come a very long way."

"Do not answer him," Brenna muttered. "It is a trick."

"It is not a trick," said Kaelen slowly. He had gone pale. Something inside him, the warm place where the light lived, had drawn tight and cold, as though a hand had closed around it. "Everything out there is bowing to him. Look at them. Whatever he is, he is the reason they are here."

Lyra said nothing. She had already stepped to the edge of the walkway, and the air around her had begun to stir.

"I am Lyra of Dawnhollow," she called down. "I speak for this settlement. Who are you?"

The man smiled, and for the first time Kaelen saw something move behind his eyes. It was not malice. It was far worse. It was warmth.

"Veyrath," he said. "Only Veyrath. I never found a surname I cared for."

The name meant nothing to the watchmen. But Kaelen felt the whole world tilt, and Lyra's hands closed slowly into fists.

"You," she said. "You broke the seal."

"I did." Veyrath inclined his head, almost modestly. "Though I would rather say that I opened a door that was never meant to be locked. It has been a long labour. I am pleased you appreciate the effort."

"You made the curse."

"I did that, too." He sighed. "I apologise for the Fenwick children. I am told they suffered. That was not intended. Nothing in this world is ever perfectly clean."

The words fell across the wall like a stone dropped into still water. Down the walkway, a watchman made a small choked sound, and Brenna Voss's knuckles went white around her spear.

"Why?" Kaelen heard himself say. His voice shook. "Why would you do this?"

Veyrath turned to him, and his gaze settled on Kaelen with a gentle, appraising attention, like a craftsman studying a promising piece of work.

"Ah," he said. "You must be the Ascendant."

Kaelen did not answer.

"I have heard about you. A healing light. A remarkable gift." Veyrath tilted his head. "You have already guessed, I think, that you are unique. You will understand, then, why I ask you to hear me out, because what I have to say concerns you more than anyone."

"Speak," said Lyra coldly. "Quickly."

"Thank you." Veyrath took a slow breath, as though gathering his thoughts, and when he began to speak, his voice was calm and even, the voice of a teacher explaining an obvious truth to a slow pupil.

"Look at this world," he said. "Look closely. Four thousand people in a shallow valley, and ninety-nine in a hundred of them can never rise above the lowest rank. They are born small, they live small, they die small. And above them, a handful of the gifted sit in their halls and call themselves leaders, though they have never been tested. This is the order of things. Weakness is rewarded with comfort. Strength is hoarded and wasted."

"You are a murderer," said Brenna Voss.

"I am a gardener." He did not raise his voice. "A garden that is never pruned grows weak. The old growth chokes the new. I have watched humanity for a very long time, Captain, and I have learned that it does not improve in peace. It improves in fire. In hunger. In the long, cruel grinding that burns the dross away and leaves only what is true. The curse is not a punishment. It is a sieve."

Kaelen stared at him. "You are mad."

"No, no." Veyrath smiled sadly. "Madness is an excuse. I have simply seen further than you. When this is finished, the weak will be gone, the strong will be remade, and the world will at last be what it was always meant to be. And you, Kaelen of Dawnhollow, will be at the very heart of it."

The silence on the wall was absolute.

"Come with me," said Veyrath gently. "Walk out through that gate, and I will leave this valley untouched. Every soul within it will live. I give you my word. All I ask is that you stand beside me while the old world burns."

Lyra moved before her brother could speak.

She had not needed to be told. She had heard enough. The wind rose around her in a sudden shriek, and the torches along the wall bent flat, and she threw both arms forward with a cry that was half grief and half fury. A blade of compressed air, wider and sharper than anything she had ever conjured, tore across the field.

It struck Veyrath at the waist.

For an instant the pasture seemed to hold its breath. Then the grey figure came apart in two neat halves, upper body toppling backward, legs staying upright a moment longer before collapsing in a spray of red. The abominations howled. The watchmen cheered, raggedly, in shock.

"Lyra!" Kaelen gasped.

"He is dead," she panted. "He is dead. Look."

Kaelen looked. And he saw the body lying in the grass, and he saw that the face, even in death, was smiling.

"Well," said a voice behind them. "That was rude."

Every head on the wall turned.

Standing on the walkway, ten paces to the left, was a man in plain grey clothes, with brown hair and an unremarkable face. He was dusting a speck of ash from his sleeve. He looked, if anything, faintly amused.

Brenna Voss was the first to scream. A dozen watchmen scrambled backwards, spears levelled, and Lyra wheeled around with wind roaring at her fingertips. But the man only raised an open hand, mildly, and the nearest abomination, which had somehow crept over the palisade unnoticed, froze with its claws a foot from Lyra's throat.

"Please," said Veyrath. "I did not come here to fight. I came to offer, and I have offered. I will not be offended that you declined." He glanced down at the field, where the first body still lay. "That one was a good vessel, too. It took me almost a year to grow. Never mind."

"How?" whispered Tobin Ash.

"I have been very thorough," said Veyrath. He smiled at the boy, kindly, and the boy took an unsteady step back. "There is no single me. There are many. I have scattered them across every corner of the land, and each of them is as much myself as the one before you. If you kill this one, I shall simply open my eyes in another, and I will remember every word we have spoken."

He turned slowly, and his gaze came to rest on Kaelen, and this time there was no warmth in it at all.

"You will find me difficult to end, Ascendant. I would advise you to reconsider my offer. I am a patient man. But I am not infinitely patient."

Kaelen felt something strange then, a faint flicker, a thread of cold light at the edge of his senses. He had felt it before, in the shepherd and in Holt and in Dorran's wound, but it was fainter here and far more distant. It ran from this grey figure like a wire pulled taut across the sky, away to the north and to the east and the south, a hundred pale lines spreading outward, each one attached to another man who looked exactly like this one.

"There are so many of you," he said hoarsely.

"Yes." Veyrath's smile returned. "That is rather the point."

He stepped backwards off the edge of the wall.

He did not fall. He hung in the air for a moment, hands in his pockets, and then he rose, slowly and easily, until he hovered level with the highest watchtower. His clothes did not stir in the wind. In the morning light he looked almost holy.

"I will give you three days," he said. "Think on what I have said. Think on what you are, and what you could become." He looked down at them all, and the pity in his voice was the most dreadful thing of all. "When I return, I will not ask a second time."

Then he turned and flew north, small and steady against the pale sky, and the abominations in the field wheeled about and followed him like hounds.

For a long time, no one on the wall moved.

It was Lyra who finally broke the silence. She was kneeling on the walkway, one hand pressed against her chest, breathing hard. Her face was streaked with tears she had not noticed shedding.

"He said he would spare us," she whispered. "He said all of it would end. If you walked out of the gate."

"I know," said Kaelen.

"Would you have done it?"

Kaelen looked out across the empty field, at the body that lay alone in the grass, still smiling, and felt the cold thread of light slowly fading from his mind.

"No," he said. "But I think he already knows that."

Far away, in a cold stone chamber beneath a mountain, a man in plain grey clothes opened his eyes, and breathed in deeply, and smiled.