They call me a monster and if it were untrue the weight of my crimes would pin me to the ground. I have maimed and I have murdered and if this mountain stood but a little higher I would cut the angels from their heaven. I care less for accusations than for the rain that soaks me, that runs down every limb. I spit both from my lips. Judgment has always left a sour taste.

"Keep moving!" And he strikes me across the shoulders. The staff is thick and polished from hard use. I imagine how he'll look when I make him eat it. Avery, they call him.

There are five left to guard us now, twenty when they found us on the Orlanth Road. A man like the Nuban doesn't give up easy but two against twenty are poor odds, especially when one of the two is a child. He surrendered before the Select had even drawn their horses up around us. It took me longer to reach the same decision, hampered by my pride.

"Pick it up!" The stick catches me behind the knee and I stumble, loose rocks scattering beneath my feet, rolling away down the steep path. Rope chafes at my wrists. We exchanged our weapons for rope, but at least the odds have narrowed. They set only five men to take us into the mountains for judgment. Two against five are the best odds I've had in a while.

The Nuban is ahead of me, huge shoulders hunched against the downpour. If his hands were unbound he could throttle four of them while I fed Avery his staff.

Back on the Orlanth Road the Nuban had shrugged off his crossbow and let it fall. Set his short sword on the ground, leaving only the knife in his boot against the chance of discovery.

"One black as the devil and the other's not thirteen!" Avery had called out when they surrounded us, horses stamping, tails flicking.

A second rider leaned from his saddle and slapped Avery, a cracking blow that set the white print of his hand on a red cheek.

"Who judges?" A thin man, gray, but hard-eyed.

"The arch, Selector John." Avery pushed the words past clenched teeth, his scowl on me as if it were my handprint on his face.

"The arch." And Selector John nodded, looking from one man to the next. "The arch judges. Not you, not I. The arch speaks for heaven." He rode between us. "And if the man, or this boy, are Select then they will be your brothers!"

And now the pair of us walk, soaked, freezing, beaten toward judgment on the mountain, wrists bound. With Avery's staff to encourage us on, and four more of the Select to see we don't stray from the path.

I choose each step, head down, rain dripping from the black veil of my hair. I wonder at this arch of theirs, puzzle how an arch could judge, and what it might say. Certainly its words have power. The power to bind Selector John's disparate band together and hold them to his command.

"If you are Select you will ride with me," he had said.

"If not?" the Nuban rumbled.

"You won't."

And that seemed to be all that underwrote the Select, feared across the north counties of Orlanth, famed for their loyalty and discipline. Men taken at random from the road and judged in secret, bound by nothing but the good word of some arch, some relic of the Builders no doubt, some incomprehensible toy that survived their war.

The water runs in rivulets between my boots, their frayed leather black with it.

"Hell—" Avery's cry turns into something inarticulate as his slip turns into a sprawl. Even his staff can't save him. He lies for a moment, embracing the mountainside, stunned. As he starts to rise I skip forward and allow myself to fall, letting the whole of my weight land behind my knee as it hits the back of his neck. The sound of bone breaking is almost lost in the rain. With my bound hands pressed to his shoulder blades I manage to stand before the others reach me. Avery does not stand, or move, or complain.

Rough hands haul me back, a knife at my throat, colder than the wind. John stands before me, a hint of shock in pale eyes unused to such expression.

"You murdered him!" he shouts, fingers on the hilt of his sword, closing on it, opening, closing.

"Who judges?" I shout back and a laugh rips its path from me.

I slept until my ninth year, deep in the dream that blinds us to the world. The thorns woke me. They gave me sharp new truths to savour. Held me as my little brother died, embraced me for the long slow time it took my uncle's men to kill my mother. I woke dark to the world, ready to give worse than I got.

"I will see this arch and listen to its pronouncement," I say. "Because if it speaks for heaven then I have words of my own to speak back."

Deep in the cloudbank lightning ricochets, making the thunderheads glow, a flat light edging the slopes for a heartbeat. The rain hammers down, pricked with ice, but I'm burning with the memory of those thorns and the fever they put in my blood. No absolution in this storm—the stain of sin is past water's touch. The wounds the thorns gave turned sour, beyond cleansing. But heaven's arch waits and suddenly I'm eager to let it speak of me.

The hand on John's sword spasms open. "Let's go." A curt nod, scattering water, and he strides off. I follow, impatient now, the slope seeming less steep. Only the Nuban spares a backward glance for Avery, still hugging the mountainside, and a second glance for me, watchful and beyond reading. The glow of my small victory fades, and not for the first time it's the Nuban's silence rather than his words that make me want to be better than I am.

Another of the Select takes up the rear guard. Greb they call him. "Watch your footing," I say. "It gets slippery."

We crest the lip of a valley and descend into shadows where the wind subsides from howls to muttered complaint. The light is failing but where the trail snakes down the slope I can see something is wrong. I stop and Greb stumbles into me, cursing.

"There's something wrong with the rain." I stare at it. Across a wide swath the rain seems to fall too slowly, the drops queuing to reach the ground and making a grey veil of falling water.

"Slow-time." John says, not turning or raising his voice.

Greb kicks my calf and I carry on. I've heard of slow-time. Tatters of it wreath the Arcada mountains, remnants from when the Builders broke the world. We discovered the same thing, the Builders and me; if something shatters your world then afterward you find the rules have changed. They had the Day of a Thousand Suns. I had the thorns.

I follow the Nuban into the slow-time, a band of it two or three yards wide. From the outside the rain within seems to fall at its leisure. Passing into the region all that changes is that now only where I'm walking are things right. Ahead and behind the rain powers down as if each drop were shot from a ballista and would punch holes in armour. And we're out. Greb's still wading through it behind me, moving like a street-mummer, slower than slow, until he's free and starts to speed up. The slow-time sticks to him, reluctant to release its prisoner, as if for ten yards it's still clinging to his skin before finally he's walking at our pace once more.

We advance and a shoulder of rock reveals the strangest sight. It's as if a bubble of glass, so clear as to be invisible, has been intersected by the mountainside. Rain streams off it, turned from its path by unseen currents. At the heart of the half-sphere, close to the ground, a wild blue light entices, part diamond, part promise. And all about it statues stand.

"Idiots." John waves an arm at them as we pass. "I can understand the first one being trapped, but the other seven?"

We're close enough to see they're not statues now. Eight travellers, the closest to the light dressed in fashions seen only in dusty oil paintings on castle walls. Flies in amber, moths drawn to the light of the fire in which we burn. What world will be waiting for them when they think to turn around and walk back out?

"Do all time-bubbles have a handy warning light at the centre?" I wonder it aloud but no one answers.

I glance back at them once before the distance takes them. All of them held there like memories while the days and months flicker past outside. I have time-bubbles in my head, places I return to over and again.

When I killed my first man and left the Healing Hall in flames, sick with poison from the wounds the hook-briar gave, they tell me it was Father Gomst who found me, unconscious, black with smoke. I escaped from Friar Glenn's care again within the hour, and again it was Father Gomst who found me. Memory takes me to that tower-top where I leaned out, watching the flames spiral and the lanterns moving far below as Father's guards hunted me. We stand on that tower, trapped in those minutes, we two, and often I pass by, pausing to study it once more, and learning nothing.

Father Gomst raises both hands. "You don't need the knife, Jorg."

"I think I do." The blade trembles in my grip, not from fear but from what the fever puts in me. A sense of something rushing toward me, something thrilling, terrible, sudden ... my body vibrating with anticipation. "How else would I cut?"

"Give it to me." He doesn't reach for the knife. Around his neck a gold cross, and a Builder talisman, a fone, the ancient plasteek fractured, part melted, chased with silver like the church icons. He says God hears him through it, but I sense no connection.

"The thorns wouldn't let me go," I tell him. Sir Jan had thrown me into the middle of the briar. The man had slabs of muscle, enough to tear the carriage door off and throw me clear before my uncle's soldiers caught us. A strong man can throw a child of nine quite a way.

"I know." Father Gomst wipes the rain from his face, drawing his hand from forehead to chin. "A hook-briar can hold a grown man, Jorg." If he could truly speak to God he would know the judgment on me and waste no more words.

"I would have saved them." The thorns hid me in their midst, held me. I had seen little William die, three flashes of lightning giving me the scene in frozen moments. "I would have saved them." But the lie tastes rotten on my tongue. Would anything have held William from me? Would anything have held my mother back. Anything? All bonds can be slipped, all thorns torn free. It's simply a matter of pain, and of what you're prepared to lose.

Greb jabs me and I'm back on the mountain. The stink of him reaches me even through the rain. "Keep moving." It's as if he didn't even see me kill Avery for the same damn thing. Judgment ... I'm ready for it.

"Here." John raises his hand and we all stop. At first I don't see the arch, and then I do. A doorway rather than an arch, narrow and framed by the silver-steel of the Builders. It stands on a platform of Builder-stone, a poured surface still visible beneath the scatter of rocks. Twenty yards beyond is a pile of bones, an audience of skulls, some fresh, some mouldering, all cleaned of flesh by the dutiful ravens. "What happens if we're not Select?" Dead men's grins answer the Nuban's question.

John draws his sword, an old blade, notched, the iron stained. He goes to stand beyond the arch. The other three men take position around it, and Greb, who took over Avery's position as Jorg-poker, pulls his knife. "You, big man. You're first."

"When you pass through stand still and wait for the judgment. Move and I will kill you, without the mercy of the ritual." John mimes the killing thrust.

The Nuban looks around at the faces of the Select, blinking away raindrops. He's thinking of the fight, wondering where his chance will come. He turns to me, making a single fist of his bound hands. "We have lived, Jorg. I'm glad we met." His voice deep and without waver. He walks to the arch of judgment. His shoulders almost brush the steel on either side.

"Fail—" The arch speaks with a voice that is neither male or female, nor even human.

Move aside." John gestures with his blade, contempt on his face. He knows the Nuban is waiting his chance, and gives him none. "You next." The Nuban is secured by two Select.

I step forward, watching the reflections slide across the Builder-steel as I approach. I wonder what crimes stained the Nuban. Though he is the best of us you cannot live on the road and remain innocent, no matter the circumstance that put you there. With each step I feel the thorns tearing at me. They can't hold me. But they held me on that night the world changed.

"Judge me." And I step through. Ice runs down my spine, a cold fire in every vein. Outside the world pauses, the rain halts in its plunge for an instant, or an age. I can't tell which. Motion returns almost imperceptibly, the drops starting to crawl earthward once more.

"Faaaaaiiiiilllllllu—" The word stretches out for an age, deeper than the Nuban's rumble. And at the end it's snatched away as if a knife sliced the throat it came from.

I believe in the arch. I deserved to fail, because I am guilty.

Even so.

"Join your friend." John waves his sword toward the Nuban. His voice is wrong, a touch too deep.

"The rain is too slow," I say. The quick-time is fading from me but still the arch's effects linger. I step back through the silver doorway. God made me quick in any event, God or the Devil, and the Builders made me quicker. This time the arch has no comment, but before the Select can close on me I step through once more.

Again the cold shock of transition. I ignore the arch's judgment and dive forward, wrapped in quick-time, trailing it with me. John hardly flinches as I sever the ropes around my wrists on the sword he is so kind as to hold steady for me.

"Sssssseeeeeellllect m—" While the arch speaks I take John's knife from his belt and cut him a new smile. And before the blood comes I'm off, sprinting toward the Nuban. I'm still quick, but less so as I reach him and stab the first of his guards through the eye. I twist the blade as I pull it free, grating over the socket. The Nuban breaks the second man's face with the back of his head.

I chase Greb down. He runs although he has the bigger knife, and he thinks I'm as old as thirteen. My arm aches to stick John's blade into the man, to sink it between his shoulders and hear him howl. But he sprints off a drop in the half-light before I reach him. I stop at the top and look down to where he sprawls at broken angles.

Returning to the arch, I take slow steps. The rain comes in flurries now, weakening. The cold is in me at last, my hands numb. The Nuban is sat upon a rock by the bone pile, checking his crossbow for damage. He looks up as I draw near. It's his judgment that matters to me, his approval.

"We failed." He nods toward the arch. "Maybe the Builders have been watching us. Wanting us to do better."

"I don't care what they think of me," I say.

His brow lifts a fraction, half puzzled, half understanding. He puts the crossbow across his knees. "I'm as broken a thing as my gods ever made, Jorg. We keep bad company on the road. Any man would look good against them." He shakes his head. "Better to listen to the arch than me! And better to listen to neither of us." He slaps a hand to his chest. "Judge yourself boy." He returns his gaze to his work. And more quiet, "Forgive yourself."

I walk back to the arch, stepping around the corpses of the Select. I wonder at the ties that bound them, the bonds forged by the arch's judgments. Those bonds seem more pure, more reasoned that the arbitrary brotherhood of the road that binds me to my own band of rogues, links forged and broken by circumstance. A yard from the arch I can see my reflection warped across the Builder-steel. The arch called "fail" for me, condemned me to the bone pile, and yet seconds later I was Select. Did I validate myself in the moments between?

"Opinions are well and good," I tell it. I have a rock in my hands, near as heavy as I can lift. "Sometimes it's better not to speak them." I throw the rock hard as I can and it slams into the cross support, breaking into jagged pieces.

I set a hand to the scar left on the metal.

"FAILure to connect," the arch says.

And in the end the arch has the right of it.

Footnote – There are many opportunities in Jorg's story for seeing elements of our world through new eyes. You'll see old buildings repurposed, everyday objects venerated. Here, standard messages from our age: "Failure to connect." and "Select mode." become the basis for a brotherhood not dissimilar to Jorg's. The idea reflects on the arbitrary nature of so many loyalties, friendships, and loves.

The theme of brotherhood is written through the Broken Empire trilogy. Brothers by birth, leading into the larger issue of family. Brothers by association, leading to the issues of belonging, groups, and leadership. Brothers through friendship, leading to issues of loyalty and duty.

And here we have the Nuban too and mentions of Father Gomst. Two very different kinds of father-figure, both playing a role in the life of a young man whose own father leaves much to be desired. The Nuban, whose comparative moral superiority seems to be integral to the man, and Father Gomst who represents religious ideals and at the same time the difficulty men with no great strength of character have in embodying such ideals.

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STOP PRESS:   This and 9 other short stories concerning Jorg and/or his Road Brothers are now available in:

"Select Mode" is actually the least popular of the 10 Broken Empire stories in "Road Brothers : Tales from the Broken Empire" so if you liked it - you should love the rest :)

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Road Brothers : Tales from the Broken Empire

US

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UK

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