CAST A COLD LIGHT

Mini Conto — No Quarter 73

Just one day ago, the sniper had lain next to Artem on a frozen, shadow-drenched ridge, the snow battering them in the unexpected winds, their rifles on the snow between them like relics to be discovered in some future thaw. Artem’s beard and eyebrows had crystallized. His cheeks were the same bright red as his armor, and his nose was darker, bloody. His eyes focused, faded, and then came back again but weaker. She had to make a decision. She could lose him. She had already lost Lev and Oksana to this mission, but Artem was the most important one. To her, at least.

The military caravan from the south was not coming, she was certain. It couldn’t. To call what was below them a pass was a stretch. Nothing might pass through the snow banks blocking the canyon trail now. Even through her rifle’s scope, she could no longer see the place where the soldiers would enter her kill zone. Instead, the sudden, intense blizzard that had already taken a heavy toll on her team was freezing them to death and had blinded her.

So, she made the call for both of them. This was easy; Artem no longer had enough sense to recognize it as dereliction of duty or to recognize that she planned to cross the line into true desertion.

“It is not cowardice,” she assured him, though he’d neither complained nor criticized. He’d simply allowed her to drag him down the narrow shelf along the precipice away from their rocky snipers’ nest. When they were out of the wind and in the trees below the Llaelese Mountains, she could finally see he was shivering.

“Besides, they do not expect us to return.” She shouldered his rifle for him. It was so heavy, or she was so weak. “We’re expected to die on this mission. So, we can run. It will be at least a day before they know we’re gone.”

Artem groaned. It was enough for her. She’d always trusted Artem’s judgment. And she had left the field of battle before with less encouragement.

In a place where the trees were thick enough to hide them, she encouraged him to sleep, and when he did, she talked to him. She explained aloud why she’d been the only survivor of a patrol last summer — it had little to do with her flight from the ambush, she told him. It was just common sense — the Winter Guard she’d been supporting were doomed. They were dead before they recognized they’d been overrun. Resistance fighters were everywhere; they were taking no prisoners. She was lucky to have found a way to give them the slip and escape. Artem was agreeably silent. She was grateful. She’d never told him before.

At dawn, without breakfast, she got him moving again. The day was hardly brighter than the night; the sun found few opportunities to light their way through the furious blizzard. She thanked Morrow for those rare moments, but she cursed the god whenever Artem fell or when she became disoriented in the storm.

She was kneeling next to him to force Artem to drink from her canteen, banging it against a rock to break up the ice within, when she saw a light approaching between the trees. It seemed to bob on the end of a walking stick or perhaps a cane. As she set her rifle against her shoulder, she doubted this could be their unit — they wouldn’t know how badly the mission had gone, and so they would have no reason to come looking for them yet. Then, she could distinguish a solitary shape: a soldier — but not one of theirs. The armor was wrong. As it closed on them with a determination she found disconcerting, Artem found his tongue for the first time since they’d abandoned the ridge.

“What the hell is that thing?” he whispered.

She could not look away from the light of the lantern coming relentlessly through the blowing snow, but her peripheral vision filled in the creature. Its skin was desiccated and tight, its features expressionless; it could not be alive. Its eye sockets were as empty as a skull’s. Its mouth was a toothless gaping hole. Yet, it emanated an aura of both dread and serenity, a combination she struggled to understand, and it disturbed her worse than the freezing wind. Its eyeless stare made her feel like a mouse being stalked by a ravenous cat. It shambled, twitching, as if it had only just discovered its limbs and was not yet sure how they worked together, but she had no doubt it could move quickly enough once its prey was vulnerable.

It made a sound and raised its lantern higher. It was the sound of wind in a tunnel.

“We have to move,” she whispered to Artem, grabbing his arm.

Artem did not move. He only stared at the cold lantern light, his head cocked. A strange smile crept across his face.

“Yes,” he said to no one, his gaze far away. “I love this place.”

She tugged at him, but he was dead weight now, seemingly frozen in place by the light. So, for the third and final time in her life, she fled the field of battle. Only after she was stumbling down the hill behind where they had camped, tears streaming from her eyes to warm her freezing cheeks, did it occur to her that she could have shot the horror. But she told herself that the bullet would have accomplished nothing. It would have just given the thing more time to ensnare both of them.

She fell several times, but always got up. The first time she did, she looked back, and there was the light. It did not hurry; it just moved along her path, following her with a dispassionate tenacity. She ran. The storm pummeled her but also protected her, she was certain. In time, when she saw nothing behind her, she felt certain the storm prevented the thing with the lantern from pursuing her.

“We were overrun,” she whispered to herself. “The ambush was perfect. I would have just been another dead soldier. I was the only smart one. I found a way through their lines. That’s why I survived, isn’t it?”

The next time she fell, she struck her head against a tree trunk. Blood ran into one of her eyes, ones Artem had once called the most beautiful eyes he’d ever seen. She moaned and struggled to get up and moving again.

“The Cygnarans weren’t coming into that pass, I swear it.” She dropped Artem’s rifle in the snow; it was just too heavy to carry both of them. “We would have frozen to death on that ridge like statues. For what? For the army’s glory? No, we’d never get the shot. It wasn’t cowardice.”

The day had passed, though she couldn’t remember how. She blinked, and it was over. Long shadows stole the color from the world, leaving only black and white. She could tell by the slope of the land that she was still headed south, but the grid she could normally imagine to determine where she was had been lost to her since yesterday. Her arms and legs were numb, but her chest felt warm. She caught herself on the verge of sleep, sinking to lie down in the snow.

Then, there were lights in the trees down the hill below. Shapes appeared. People. She could make out horses. A flag. Her unit. The wind blew a wall of snow between them, and they disappeared again.

“Thank Morrow,” she breathed, her lips hurting. She dragged herself back to her feet. She would have to give them a reason why she’d fled the ridge. Why she’d —

The wind died down for a moment. The sheet of snow parted, and Artem stood before her as if he had been there all along.

She did not have the air to scream or the tears to weep. His face was corrupted, the flesh pulled taut over his skull. His eyeballs had faded to small, dried orbs floating in the cavities of their sockets. Most of his teeth had vanished — those that remained looked like tombstones scattered in a forgotten graveyard. As he raised his head higher, one slipped free from his mouth and fell into the snow at his feet. His lips were dried worms encircling his mouth.

“It was going to kill us both,” she whispered to him. “Didn’t you want me to run?”

She did not wait for his answer. As she turned to flee, the lights from below began to move up the hill. Her unit was coming. She took three ragged steps in the deep snow before she went down one more time, sinking down to her knees. She could no longer feel her legs at all.

With blurry eyes, she saw a single lantern approach from higher up the hill. The figure holding it shambled as it closed on her.

It wasn’t cowardice, she wanted to plead, but her throat constricted. She could barely breathe the frigid air that made her lungs ache. I just wanted to live.

The man with the lantern stood over her now. She could hear voices shouting in Khadoran — her people were close. She thought she could hear their words — her name, calls for support, a rallying cry. She thought she heard the word deserter, but the voice that cried it sounded distant — and too much like her own. She would have protested that she had withdrawn, not deserted, but then the light from the lantern filled her vision, and she remembered.

Early morning, nowhere to be, no promises to keep. Far from the base, even farther from the field. The dawn after their first night together. The sun shines through the bedroom window with the warmth of a fireplace on a winter morning. She loves the light. And she feels beautiful. Artem is waking beside her. Then he carefully lays his ear to her breast. “I hear your heartbeat,” he whispers. She runs her fingers through his hair. He says, “I hear your life in your heartbeat.” She recognizes what she has been feeling for him is actually love.

The face behind the lantern, a shell of a human, a face with no compassion or humanity, leaned in closer to her. She could feel the urge to let tears of shame and guilt flow down her cheeks, but she had nothing to give. The lantern man grew hazy in her vision.

The frozen skin of her face began to tighten. The agony was excruciating, as if someone were peeling her flesh away with a blade. But then, as if a light

had been snuffed, there was no more pain, just an empty hollow place where it had been. And this, too, vanished as her fear turned to remembrance.

Artem doesn’t talk about war or how short their love might last. He just lifts his ear from her chest, looks up at her, and smiles when she asks if he is happy here with her. He says, “Yes. I love this place. And I hope you know — ”

I’m sorry, she thinks before he speaks her name in this memory that is already starting to disappear. She expects to hear gunfire, but it doesn’t come. Instead, the cold light disappears as if it has never been. So does she.