Face to the Light betrayed by the Dark Father Shadow lies bleeding Unseen and unseeing lost until his Children take the final path and in the solitude of strangers Awaken once more
Tiste Edur prayer
A HARD SILENCE THAT SEEMED AT HOME IN THE DENSE, IMPENETRABLE fog. The Blackwood paddles had been drawn from water thick as blood, which ran in rivulets, then beads, down the polished shafts, finally drying with a patina of salt in the cool, motionless air. And now there was nothing to do but wait.
Daughter Menandore had delivered a grim omen that morning. The body of a Beneda warrior. A bloated corpse scorched by sorcery, skin peeled back by the ceaseless hungers of the sea. The whispering roar of flies stung into flight by the arrival of those Edur whose slaves had first found it.
Letherii sorcery.
The warrior wore no scabbard, no armour. He had been fishing.
Four K’orthan longboats had set out from the river mouth shortly after the discovery. In the lead craft rode Hannan Mosag and his K’risnan Cadre, along with seventy-five blooded warriors. Crews of one hundred followed in the three additional raiders.
The tide carried them out for a time. It soon became clear that no wind waited offshore, so they left the three triangular sails on each ship furled and, thirty-five warriors to a side, had begun paddling.
Until the Warlock King had signalled a halt.
The fog enclosed the four raider longboats. Nothing could be seen twenty strokes of the paddle in any direction. Trull Sengar sat on the bench behind Fear. He had set his paddle down and now gripped the new iron-sheathed spear his father had given him.
The Letherii ships were close, he knew, drifting in the same manner as the Edur longboats. But they relied solely upon sail and so could do nothing until a wind rose.
And Hannan Mosag had made certain there would be no wind. Shadow wraiths flickered over the deck, roving restlessly, long-clawed hands reaching down as they clambered on all fours. They prowled as if eager to leave the confines of the raider. Trull had never seen so many of them, and he knew that they were present on the other longboats as well. They would not, however, be the slayers of the Letherii. For that, the Warlock King had summoned something else.
He could feel it. Waiting beneath them. A vast patience, suspended in the depths.
Near the prow, Hannan Mosag slowly raised a hand, and, looking beyond the Warlock King, Trull saw the hulk of a Letherii harvest ship slowly emerge from the fog. Sails furled, lanterns at the end of out-thrust poles, casting dull, yellow light.
And then a second ship, bound to the first by a thick cable.
Shark fins cut the pellucid surface of the water around them.
And then, suddenly, those fins were gone.
Whatever waited below rose.
Emerged unseen with a shivering of the water.
A moment, blurred and uncertain.
Then screams.
Trull dropped his spear and clapped both hands to his ears – and he was not alone in that response, for the screams grew louder, drawn out from helpless throats and rising to shrieks. Sorcery flashed in the fog, briefly, then ceased.
The Letherii ships were on all sides now. Yet nothing could be seen of what was happening on them. The fog had blackened around them, coiling like smoke, and from that impenetrable gloom only the screams clawed free, like shreds of horror, the writhing of souls.
The sounds were in Trull’s skull, indifferent to his efforts to block them. Hundreds of voices. Hundreds upon hundreds. Then silence. Hard and absolute. Hannan Mosag gestured.
The white cloak of fog vanished abruptly.
The calm seas now rolled beneath a steady wind. Above, the sun glared down from a fiercely blue sky. Gone, too, was the black emanation that had engulfed the Letherii fleet. The ships wallowed, burned-out lanterns pitching wildly.
‘Paddle.’
Hannan Mosag’s voice seemed to issue from directly beside Trull. He started, then reached down, along with everyone else, for a paddle. Rose to plant his hip against the gunnel, then chopped down into the water.
The longboat surged forward.
In moments they were holding blades firm in the water, halting their craft alongside the hull of one of the ships.
Shadow wraiths swarmed up its red-stained side.
And Trull saw that the waterline on the hull had changed. Its hold was, he realized, now empty.
‘Fear,’ he hissed. ‘What is going on? What has happened?’
His brother turned, and Trull was shocked by Fear’s pallid visage. ‘It is not for us, Trull,’ he said, then swung round once more.
It is not for us. What does he mean by that? What isn’t?
Dead sharks rolled in the waves around them. Their carcasses were split open, as if they had exploded from within. The water was streaked with viscid froth.
‘We return now,’ Hannan Mosag said. ‘Man the sails, my warriors. We have witnessed. Now we must leave.’
Witnessed – in the name of Father Shadow, what?
Aboard the Letherii ships, canvas snapped and billowed.
The wraiths will deliver them. By the Dusk, this is no simple show of power. This – this is a challenge. A challenge, of such profound arrogance that it far surpassed that of these Letherii hunters and their foolish, suicidal harvest of the tusked seals. At that realization, a new thought came to Trull as he watched other warriors tending to the sails. Who among the Letherii would knowingly send the crews of nineteen ships to their deaths? And why would those crews even agree to it?
It was said gold was all that mattered to the Letherii. But who, in their right mind, would seek wealth when it meant certain death? They had to have known there would be no escape. Then again, what if I had not stumbled upon them? What if I had not chosen the Calach strand to look for jade? But no, now he was the one being arrogant. If not Trull, then another. The crime would never have gone unnoticed. The crime was never intended to go unnoticed.
He shared the confusion of his fellow warriors. Something was awry here. With both the Letherii and with… us. With Hannan Mosag. Our Warlock King.
Our shadows are dancing. Letherii and Edur, dancing out a ritual – but these are not steps I can recognize. Father Shadow forgive me, I am frightened.
Nineteen ships of death sailed south, while four K’orthan raiders cut eastward. Four hundred Edur warriors, once more riding a hard silence.
It fell to the slaves to attend to the preparations. The Beneda corpse was laid out on a bed of sand on the floor of a large stone outbuilding adjoining the citadel, and left to drain.
The eye sockets, ears, nostrils and gaping mouth were all cleaned and evened out with soft wax. Chewed holes in its flesh were packed with a mixture of clay and oil.
With six Edur widows overseeing, a huge iron tray was set atop a trench filled with coals that had been prepared alongside the corpse. Copper coins rested on the tray, snapping and popping as the droplets of condensation on them sizzled and hissed then vanished.
Udinaas crouched beside the trench, staying far enough back to ensure that his sweat did not drip onto the coins – a blasphemy that meant instant death for the careless slave – and watched the coins, seeing them darken, becoming smoky black. Then, as the first glowing spot emerged in each coin’s centre, he used pincers to pluck it from the tray and set it down on one of a row of fired-clay plates – one plate for each widow.
The widow, kneeling before the plate, employed a finer set of pincers to pick up the coin. And then pivoted to lean over the corpse.
First placement was the left eye socket. A crackling hiss, worms of smoke rising upward as the woman pressed down with the pincers, keeping the coin firmly in place, until it melded with the flesh and would thereafter resist being dislodged. Right eye socket followed. Nose, then forehead and cheeks, every coin touching its neighbours.
When the body’s front and sides, including all the limbs, were done, melted wax was poured over the coin-sheathed corpse. And, when that had cooled, it was then turned over. More coins, until the entire body was covered, excepting the soles of the feet and the palms of the hands. Another layer of melted wax followed.
The task of sheathing consumed most of the day, and it was near dusk when Udinaas finally stumbled from the outbuilding and stood, head bowed, while the cool air plucked at the sweat on his skin. He spat in an effort to get the foul stench out of his mouth. Burnt, rotting flesh in the building’s turgid, oven-hot confines. The reek of scorched hair. No amount of scented oil and skin-combing could defeat what had seeped into his pores. It would be days before Udinaas had rid himself of that cloying, dreadful taste.
He stared down at the ground between his feet. His shoulder still ached from the forced healing done by Uruth. Since that time, he had had no opportunity to speak with Feather Witch.
To his masters, he had explained nothing. They had, in truth, not pressed him very hard. A handful of questions, and they’d seemed content with his awkward, ineffectual answers. Udinaas wondered if Uruth had been as unmotivated in her own questioning of Feather Witch. The Tiste Edur rarely displayed much awareness of their slaves, and even less understanding of their ways. It was, of course, the privilege of the conquerors to be that way, and the universal fate of the conquered to suffer that disregard.
Yet identities persisted. On a personal level. Freedom was little more than a tattered net, draped over a host of minor, self-imposed bindings. Its stripping away changed little, except, perhaps, the comforting delusion of the ideal. Mind bound to self, self to flesh, flesh to bone. As the Errant wills, we are a latticework of cages, and whatever flutters within knows but one freedom, and that is death.
The conquerors always assumed that what they conquered was identity. But the truth was, identity could only be killed from within, and even that gesture was but a chimera. Isolation had many children, and dissolution was but one of them – yet its path was unique, for that path began when identity was left behind.
From the building behind him emerged the song of mourning, the Edur cadence of grief. Hunh, hunh, hunh, hunh… A sound that always chilled Udinaas. Like emotion striking the same wall, again and again and again. The voice of the trapped, the blocked. A voice overwhelmed by the truths of the world. For the Edur, grieving was less about loss than about being lost.
Is that what comes when you live a hundred thousand years?
The widows then emerged, surrounding the corpse that floated waist-high on thick, swirling shadows. A figure of copper coins. The Edur’s singular use of money. Copper, tin, bronze, iron, silver and gold, it was the armour of the dead.
At least that’s honest. Letherii use money to purchase the opposite. Well, not quite. More like the illusion of the opposite. Wealth as life’s armour. Keep, fortress, citadel, eternally vigilant army. But the enemy cares nothing for all that, for the enemy knows you are defenceless.
‘Hunh, hunh, hunh, hunh…’
This was Daughter Sheltatha Lore’s hour, when all things material became uncertain. Smudged by light’s retreat, when the air lost clarity and revealed its motes and grains, the imperfections both light and dark so perfectly disguised at other times. When the throne was shown to be empty.
Why not worship money? At least its rewards are obvious and immediate. But no, that was simplistic. Letherii worship was more subtle, its ethics bound to those traits and habits that well served the acquisition of wealth. Diligence, discipline, hard work, optimism, the personalization of glory. And the corresponding evils: sloth, despair, and the anonymity of failure. The world was brutal enough to winnow one from the other and leave no room for doubt or mealy equivocation. In this way, worship could become pragmatism, and pragmatism was a cold god.
Errant make ours a cold god, so we may act without constraint. A suitable Letherii prayer, though none would utter it in such a bold fashion. Feather Witch said that every act made was a prayer, and thus in the course of a day were served a host of gods. Wine and nectar and rustleaf and the imbibing thereof was a prayer to death, she said. Love was a prayer to life. Vengeance was a prayer to the demons of righteousness. Sealing a business pact was, she said with a faint smile, a prayer to the whisperer of illusions. Attainment for one was born of deprivation for another, after all. A game played with two hands.
‘Hunh, hunh, hunh, hunh…’
He shook himself. His sodden tunic now wrapped him in damp chill.
A shout from the direction of the sea. The K’orthan raiders were returning. Udinaas walked across the compound, towards the Sengar household. He saw Tomad Sengar and his wife Uruth emerge, and dropped to his knees, head pressed to the ground, until they passed. Then he rose and hurried into the longhouse.
The copper-sheathed corpse would be placed within the hollowed trunk of a Blackwood, the ends sealed with discs of cedar. Six days from now, the bole would be buried in one of a dozen sacred groves in the forest. Until that moment, the dirge would continue. The widows taking turns with that blunt, terrible utterance.
He made his way to the small alcove where his sleeping pallet waited. The longboats would file into the canal, one after the other in the grainy half-light. They would not have failed. They never did. The crews of nineteen Letherii ships were now dead – no slaves taken, not this time. Standing on both sides of the canal, the noble wives and fathers greeted their warriors in silence.
In silence.
Because something terrible has happened.
He lay down on his back, staring up at the slanted ceiling, feeling a strange, unnerving constriction in his throat. And could hear, in the rush of his blood, a faint echo behind his heart. A double beat. Hunh hunh Huh huh. Hunh hunh Huh huh…
Who are you? What are you waiting for? What do you want with me?
Trull clambered onto the landing, the cold haft of his spear in his right hand, its iron-shod butt striking sparks on the flagstones as he stepped away from the canal’s edge and halted beside Fear. Opposite them, but remaining five paces away, stood Tomad and Uruth. Rhulad was nowhere to be seen.
Nor, he realized, was Mayen.
A glance revealed that Fear was scanning the welcoming crowd. There was no change in expression, but he strode towards Tomad.
‘Mayen is in the forest with the other maidens,’ Tomad said. ‘Collecting morok. They are guarded by Theradas, and Midik and Rhulad.’
‘My son.’ Uruth stepped closer, eyes searching Fear’s visage. ‘What did he do?’
Fear shook his head.
‘They died without honour,’ Trull said. ‘We could not see the hand that delivered that death, but it was… monstrous.’
‘And the harvest?’ Tomad asked.
‘It was taken, Father. By that same hand.’
A flash of anger in Uruth’s eyes. ‘This was no full unveiling. This was a demonic summoning.’
Trull frowned. ‘I do not understand, Mother. There were shadows-’
‘And a darkness,’ Fear cut in. ‘From the depths… darkness.’
She crossed her arms and looked away. Trull had never seen Uruth so distressed.
And in himself, his own growing unease. Fully three-fifths of the Tiste Edur employed sorcery. A multitude of fragments from the riven warren of Kurald Emurlahn. Shadow’s power displayed myriad flavours. Among Uruth’s sons, only Binadas walked the paths of sorcery. Fear’s words had none the less triggered a recognition in Trull. Every Tiste Edur understood his own, after all. Caster of magic or not.
‘Mother, Hannan Mosag’s sorcery was not Kurald Emurlahn.’ He did not need their expressions to realize that he had been the last among them to understand that truth. He grimaced. ‘Forgive me my foolish words-’
‘Foolish only in speaking them aloud,’ Uruth said. ‘Fear, take Trull and Rhulad. Go to the Stone Bowl-’
‘Stop this. Now.’ Tomad’s voice was hard, his expression dark. ‘Fear. Trull. Return to the house and await me there. Uruth, tend to the needs of the widows. A fallen warrior faces his first dusk among kin. Propitiations must be made.’
For a moment Trull thought she was going to object. Instead, lips pressed into a line, she nodded and strode away.
Fear beckoned Trull and they walked to the longhouse, leaving their father standing alone beside the canal.
‘These are awkward times,’ Trull said.
‘Is there need,’ Fear asked, ‘when you stand between Rhulad and Mayen?’
Trull clamped his mouth shut. Too off-balance to deflect the question with a disarming reply.
Fear took the silence for an answer. ‘And when you stand between them, who do you face?’
‘I – I am sorry, Fear. Your question was unexpected. Is there need, you ask. My answer is: I don’t know.’
‘Ah, I see.’
‘His strutting… irritates me.’
Fear made no response.
They came to the doorway. Trull studied his brother. ‘Fear, what is this Stone Bowl? I have never heard-’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ he replied, then walked inside.
Trull remained at the threshold. He ran a hand through his hair, turned and looked back across the compound. Those who had stood in welcome were gone, as were their warrior kin. Hannan Mosag and his K’risnan Cadre were nowhere to be seen. A lone figure remained. Tomad.
Are we so different from everyone else?
Yes. For the Warlock King has asked for Tomad’s sons. To pursue a vision.
He has made us his servants. Yet… is he the master?
In his dream, Udinaas found himself kneeling in ashes. He was cut and bleeding. His hands. His legs. The ash seemed to gnaw into the wounds with avid hunger. The tightness in his throat made him gasp for breath. He clawed at the air as he clambered onto his feet and stood, wavering – and the sky roared and raced in on all sides.
Fire. A storm of fire.
He screamed.
And found himself on his knees once more.
Beyond his ragged breathing, only silence. Udinaas lifted his head. The storm was gone.
Figures on the plain. Walking, dust roiling up behind them like wind-tossed shrouds. Weapons impaled them. Limbs hung from shreds of tendon and muscle. Sightless eyes and expressions twisted with fearful recognition – faces seeing their own deaths – blind to his own presence as they marched past.
Rising up within him, a vast sense of loss. Grief, then the bitter whisper of betrayal.
Someone will pay for this. Someone will pay.
Someone.
Someone.
The words were not his, the thoughts were another’s, but the voice, there in the centre of his skull – that voice was his own.
A dead warrior walked close. Tall, black-skinned. A sword had taken most of his face. Bone gleamed, latticed with red cracks from some fierce impact.
A flash of motion.
Metal-clad hand crashed into the side of Udinaas’s head. Blood sprayed. He was in a cloud of grey ash, on the ground. Blinking burning fire.
He felt gauntleted fingers close about his left ankle. His leg was viciously yanked upward.
And then the warrior began dragging him.
Where are we going?
‘The Lady is harsh.’
The Lady?
‘Is harsh.’
She awaits us at journey’s end?
‘She is not one who waits.’
He twisted as he was pulled along, found himself staring back at the furrow he’d made in the ashes. A track reaching to the horizon. And black blood was welling from that ragged gouge. How long has he been dragging me? Whom do I wound?
The thunder of hoofs.
‘She comes.’
Udinaas turned onto his back, struggled to raise his head.
A piercing scream.
Then a sword ripped through the warrior dragging Udinaas. Cutting it in half. The hand fell away from his ankle and he rolled to one side as iron-shod hoofs thundered past.
She blazed, blinding white. A sword flickering like lightning in one hand. In the other, a double-bladed axe that dripped something molten in its wake. The horse-
Naught but bones, bound by fire.
The huge skeletal beast tossed its head as it wheeled round. The woman was masked in flat, featureless gold. A headdress of arching, gilt scales rose like hackles about her head. Weapons lifted.
And Udinaas stared into her eyes.
He flinched away, scrabbling to his feet, then running.
Hoofs pounded behind him.
Daughter Dawn. Menandore-
Before him were sprawled the warriors that had walked alongside the one dragging him. Flames licking along wounds, dull smoke rising from torn flesh. None moved. They keep dying, don’t they? Again and again. They keep dying-
He ran.
Then was struck. A wall of ridged bone smashing into his right shoulder, spinning him through the air. He hit the ground, tumbled and rolled, limbs flopping.
His eyes stared up into swirling dust, the sky behind it spinning.
A shape appeared in its midst, and a hard-soled boot settled on his chest.
When she spoke, her voice was like the hissing of a thousand snakes. ‘The blood of a Locqui Wyval… in the body of a slave. Which heart, mortal, will you ride?’
He could not draw breath. The pressure of the boot was building, crushing his chest. He clawed at it.
‘Let your soul answer. Before you die.’
I ride… that which I have always ridden.
‘A coward’s answer.’
Yes.
‘A moment remains. For you to reconsider.’
Blackness closed around him. He could taste blood in the grit filling his mouth. Wyval! I ride the Wyval!
The boot slipped to one side.
A gauntleted hand reached down to the rope he used as a belt. Fingers clenched and he was lifted from the ground, arching, head dangling. Before him, a world turned upside down. Lifted, until his hips pushed up against the inside of her thighs.
He felt his tunic pulled up onto his belly. A hand tearing his loincloth away. Cold iron fingers clamped round him.
He groaned.
And was pushed inside.
Fire in his blood. Agony in his hips and lower back as, with one hand, she drove him up again and again.
Until he spasmed.
The hand released him and he thumped back onto the ground, shuddering.
He did not hear her walk away.
He heard nothing. Nothing but the two hearts within him. Their beats drawing closer, ever closer.
After a time someone settled down beside Udinaas.
‘Debtor.’
Someone will pay. He almost laughed.
A hand on his shoulder. ‘Udinaas. Where is this place?’
‘I don’t know.’ He turned his head, stared up into the frightened eyes of Feather Witch. ‘What do the tiles tell you?’
‘I don’t have them.’
‘Think of them. Cast them, in your mind.’
‘What do you know of such things, Udinaas?’
He slowly sat up. The pain was gone. No bruises, not even a scratch beneath the layer of ash. He dragged his tunic down to cover his crotch. ‘Nothing,’ he replied.
‘You do not need divination,’ she said, ‘to know what has just happened.’
His smile was bitter. ‘I do. Dawn. The Edur’s most feared Daughter. Menandore. She was here.’
‘The Letherii are not visited by Tiste Edur gods-’
‘I was.’ He looked away. ‘She, uh, made use of me.’
Feather Witch rose. ‘Wyval blood has taken you. You are poisoned with visions, Debtor. Madness. Dreams that you are more than the man everyone else sees.’
‘Look at the bodies around us, Feather Witch. She cut them down.’
‘They are long dead.’
‘Aye, yet they were walking. See this track – one of them dragged me and that is my trail. And there, her horse’s hoofs made those.’
But she was not looking, her gaze instead fixed on Udinaas. ‘This is a world of your own conjuring,’ she said. ‘Your mind is beset by false visions.’
‘Cast your tiles.’
‘No. This is a dead place.’
‘The Wyval’s blood is alive, Feather Witch. The Wyval’s blood is what binds us to the Tiste Edur.’
‘Impossible. Wyval are spawn of the Eleint. They are the mongrels of the dragons, and even the dragons do not control them. They are of the Hold, yet feral.’
‘I saw a white crow. On the strand. That is what I was coming to tell you, hoping to reach you before you cast the tiles. I sought to banish it, and its answer was laughter. When you were attacked, I thought it was the White Crow. But don’t you see? White, the face of Menandore, of Dawn. That is what the Fulcra were showing us.’
‘I will not be devoured by your madness, Debtor.’
‘You asked me to lie to Uruth and the other Edur. I did as you asked, Feather Witch.’
‘But now the Wyval has taken you. And soon it will kill you, and even the Edur can do nothing. As soon as they realize that you are indeed poisoned, they will cut out your heart.’
‘Do you fear that I will become a Wyval? Is that my fate?’
She shook her head. ‘This is not the kiss of a Soletaken, Udinaas. It is a disease that attacks your brain. Poisons the clear blood of your thoughts.’
‘Are you truly here, Feather Witch? Here, in my dream?’
With the question her form grew translucent, wavered, then scattered like windblown sand.
He was alone once more.
Will I never awaken?
Motion in the sky to his right drew him round.
Dragons. A score of the creatures, riding distant currents just above the uncertain horizon. Around them swarmed Wyval, like gnats.
And Udinaas suddenly understood something.
They are going to war.
Morok leaves covered the corpse. Over the next few days, those leaves would begin to rot, leaching into the amber wax a bluish stain, until the coin-sheathed body beneath became a blurred shape, as if encased in ice.
The shadow in the wax, enclosing the Beneda warrior for all time. A haven for wandering wraiths, there within the hollowed log.
Trull stood beside the corpse. The Blackwood bole was still being prepared in an unlit building to one side of the citadel. Living wood resisted the hands that would alter its shape. But it loved death and so could be cajoled.
Distant cries in the village as voices lifted in a final prayer to Daughter Dusk. Night was moments from arriving. The empty hours, when even faith itself must be held quiescent, lay ahead. Night belonged to the Betrayer. Who sought to murder Father Shadow at their very moment of triumph, and who very nearly succeeded.
There were prohibitions against serious discourse during this passage of time. In darkness prowled deceit, an unseen breath that any could draw in, and so become infected.
No swords were buried beneath the threshold of homes wherein maidens dwelt. To seal marriage now would be to doom its fate. A child delivered was put to death. Lovers did not touch one another. The day was dead.
Soon, however, the moon would rise and shadows would return once more. Just as Scabandari Bloodeye emerged from the darkness, so too did the world. Failure awaits the Betrayer. It could not be otherwise, lest the realms descend into chaos.
He stared down at the mound of leaves beneath which lay the body of the warrior. He had volunteered to stand guard this first night. No Edur corpse was ever left unattended when darkness prowled, for it cared naught whether its breath flowed into warm flesh or cold. A corpse could unleash dire events as easily as the acts of someone alive. It had no need for a voice or gestures of its own. Others were ever eager to speak for it, to draw blade or dagger.
Hannan Mosag had proclaimed this the greatest flaw among the Edur. Old men and the dead were the first whisperers of the word vengeance. Old men and the dead stood at the same wall, and while the dead faced it, old men held their backs to it. Beyond that wall was oblivion. They spoke from the end times, and both knew a need to lead the young onto identical paths, if only to give meaning to all they had known and all they had done.
Feuds were now forbidden. Crimes of vengeance sentenced an entire bloodline to disgraced execution.
Trull Sengar had watched, from where he stood in the gloom beneath a tree – the body before him – had watched his brother Rhulad walk out into the forest. In these, the dark hours, he had been furtive in his movement, stealing like a wraith from the village edge.
Into the forest, onto the north trail.
That led to the cemetery that had been chosen for the Beneda warrior’s interment.
Where a lone woman stood vigil against the night.
It may be an attempt… that will fail. Or it is a repetition of meetings that have occurred before, many times. She is unknowable. As all women are unknowable. But he isn’t. He was too late to the war and so his belt is bare. He would draw blood another way.
Because Rhulad must win. In everything, he must win. That is the cliff-edge of his life, the narrow strand he himself fashions, with every slight observed – whether it be real or imagined matters not – every silent moment that, to him, screams scorn upon the vast emptiness of his achievements.
Rhulad. Everything worth fighting for is gained without fighting. Every struggle is a struggle against doubt. Honour is not a thing to be chased, for it, as with all other forces of life, is in fact impelled, streaking straight for you. The moment of collision is where the truth of you is revealed.
An attempt. Which she will refuse, with outrage in her eyes.
Or their arms are now entwined, and in the darkness there is heat and sweat. And betrayal.
And he could not move, could not abandon his own vigil above this anonymous Beneda warrior.
His brother Fear had made a sword, as was the custom. He had stood before Mayen with the blade resting on the backs of his hands. And she had stepped forward, witnessed by all, to take the weapon from him. Carrying it back to her home.
Betrothal.
A year from that day – less than five weeks from now – she would emerge from the doorway with that sword. Then, using it to excavate a trench before the threshold, she would set it down in the earth and bury it. Iron and soil, weapon and home. Man and woman.
Marriage.
Before that day when Fear presented the sword, Rhulad had not once looked at Mayen. Was it the uninterest of youth? No, the Edur were not like Letherii. A year among the Letherii was as a day among the Edur. There were a handful of prettier women among the maidens of noble-born households. But he had set his eyes upon her thereafter.
And that made it what it was.
He could abandon this vigil. A Beneda warrior was not a Hiroth warrior, after all. A sea-gnawed corpse clothed in copper, not gold. He could set out on that trail, padding through the darkness.
To find what? Certainty, the sharp teeth behind all that gnawed at his thoughts.
And the worth of that?
It is these dark hours-
Trull Sengar’s eyes slowly widened. A figure had emerged from the forest edge opposite him. Heart thudding, he stared.
It stepped forward. Black blood in its mouth. Skin a pallid, dulled reflection of moonlight, smeared in dirt, smudged by something like mould. Twin, empty scabbards of polished wood at its hips. Fragments of armour hanging from it. Tall, yet stoop-shouldered, as if height had become its own imposition.
Eyes like dying coals.
‘Ah,’ it murmured, looking down on the heap of leaves, ‘what have we here?’ It spoke the language of night, close kin to that of the Edur.
Trembling, Trull forced himself to step forward, shifting his spear into a two-handed grip, the iron blade hovering above the corpse. ‘He is not for you,’ he said, his throat suddenly parched and strangely tight.
The eyes glowed brighter for a moment as the white-skinned apparition glanced up at Trull. ‘Tiste Edur, do you know me?’
Trull nodded. ‘The ghost of darkness. The Betrayer.’
A yellow and black grin.
Trull flinched as it drew a step closer and then settled to a crouch on the other side of the leaves. ‘Begone from here, ghost,’ the Edur said.
‘Or you will do what?’
‘Sound the alarm.’
‘How? Your voice is but a whisper now. Your throat is clenched. You struggle to breathe. Is it betrayal that strangles you, Edur? Never mind. I have wandered far, and have no desire to wear this man’s armour.’ It straightened. ‘Move back, warrior, if you wish to draw breath.’
Trull held himself where he was. The air hissed its way down his constricted throat, and he could feel his limbs weakening.
‘Well, cowardice was never a flaw among the Edur. Have it your way, then.’ The figure turned and walked towards the forest edge.
Blessed lungful of air, then another. Head spinning, Trull planted his spear and leaned on it. ‘Wait!’
The Betrayer halted, faced him once more.
‘This – this has never happened before. The vigil-’
‘Contested only by hungry earth spirits.’ The Betrayer nodded. ‘Or, even more pathetic, by the spirits of uprooted Blackwoods, sinking into the flesh to do… what? Nothing, just as they did in life. There are myriad forces in this world, Tiste Edur, and the majority of them are weak.’
‘Father Shadow imprisoned you-’
‘So he did, and there I remain.’ Once again, that ghastly smile. ‘Except when I dream. Mother Dark’s reluctant gift, a reminder to me that She does not forget. A reminder to me that I, too, must never forget.’
‘This is not a dream,’ Trull said.
‘They were shattered,’ the Betrayer said. ‘Long ago. Fragments scattered across a battlefield. Why would anyone want them? Those broken shards can never be reunited. They are, each and every one, now folded in on themselves. So, I wonder, what did he do with them?’
The figure walked into the forest and was gone.
‘This,’ Trull whispered, ‘is not a dream.’
Udinaas opened his eyes. The stench of the seared corpse remained in his nose and mouth, thick in his throat. Above him, the longhouse’s close slanted ceiling, rough black bark and yellowed chinking. He remained motionless beneath the blankets.
Was it near dawn?
He could hear nothing, no voices from the chambers beyond. But that told him little. The hours before the moon rose were silent ones.
As were, of course, the hours when everyone slept. He had nets to repair the coming day. And rope strands to weave.
Perhaps that is the truth of madness, when a mind can do nothing but make endless lists of the mundane tasks awaiting it, as proof of its sanity. Mend those nets. Wind those strands. See? I have not lost the meaning of my life.
The blood of the Wyval was neither hot nor cold. It did not rage. Udinaas felt no different in his body. But the clear blood of my thoughts, oh, they are stained indeed. He pushed the blankets away and sat up. This is the path, then, and I am to stay on it. Until the moment comes.
Mend the nets. Weave the strands.
Dig the hole for that Beneda warrior, who would have just opened his eyes, had he any. And seen not the blackness of the imprisoning coins. Seen not the blue wax, nor the morok leaves reacting to that wax and turning wet and black. Seen, instead, the face of… something else.
Wyval circled dragons in flight. He had seen that. Like hounds surrounding their master as the hunt is about to be unleashed. I know, then, why I am where I have arrived. And when is an answer the night is yet to whisper – no, not whisper, but howl. The call to the chase by Darkness itself.
Udinaas realized he was among the enemy. Not as a Letherii sentenced to a life of slavery. That was as nothing to the peril his new blood felt, here in this heart of Edur and Kurald Emurlahn.
Feather Witch would have been better, I suppose, but Mother Dark moves unseen even in things such as these.
He made his way into the main chamber.
And came face to face with Uruth.
‘These are not the hours to wander, slave,’ she said.
He saw that she was trembling.
Udinaas sank to the floor and set his forehead against the worn planks.
‘Prepare the cloaks of Fear, Rhulad and Trull, for travel this night. Be ready before the moon’s rise. Food and drink for a morning’s repast.’
He quickly climbed to his feet to do as she bid, but was stopped by an outstretched hand.
‘Udinaas,’ Uruth said. ‘You do this alone, telling no-one.’
He nodded.
Shadows crept out from the forest. The moon had risen, prison world to Menandore’s true father, who was trapped within it. Father Shadow’s ancient battles had made this world, shaped it in so many ways. Scabandari Bloodeye, stalwart defender against the fanatic servants of implacable certitude, whether that certitude blazed blinding white, or was the all-swallowing black. The defeats he had delivered – the burying of Brother Dark and the imprisonment of Brother Light there in that distant, latticed world in the sky – were both gifts, and not just to the Edur but to all who were born and lived only to one day die.
The gifts of freedom, a will unchained unless one affixed upon oneself such chains – the crowding host’s uncountable, ever-rattling offers, each whispering promises of salvation against confusion – and wore them like armour.
Trull Sengar saw chains upon the Letherii. He saw the impenetrable net which bound them, the links of reasoning woven together into a chaotic mass where no beginning and no end could be found. He understood why they worshipped an empty throne. And he knew the manner in which they would justify all that they did. Progress was necessity, growth was gain. Reciprocity belonged to fools and debt was the binding force of all nature, of every people and every civilization. Debt was its own language, within which were used words like negotiation, compensation and justification, and legality was a skein of duplicity that blinded the eyes of justice.
An empty throne. Atop a mountain of gold coins.
Father Shadow had sought a world wherein uncertainty could work its insidious poison against those who chose intransigence as their weapon – with which they held wisdom at bay. Where every fortress eventually crumbled from within, from the very weight of those chains that exerted so inflexible an embrace.
In his mind he argued with that ghost – the Betrayer. The one who sought to murder Scabandari Bloodeye all those thousands of years ago. He argued that every certainty is an empty throne. That those who knew but one path would come to worship it, even as it led to a cliff’s edge. He argued, and in the silence of that ghost’s indifference to his words he came to realize that he himself spoke – fierce with heat – from the foot of an empty throne.
Scabandari Bloodeye had never made that world. He had vanished in this one, lost on a path no-one else could follow.
Trull Sengar stood before the corpse and its mound of rotting leaves, and felt desolation in his soul. A multitude of paths waited before him, and they were all sordid, sodden with despair.
The sound of boots on the trail. He turned.
Fear and Rhulad approached. Wearing their cloaks. Fear carried Trull’s own in his arms, and from the man’s shoulders hung a small pack.
Rhulad’s face was flushed, and Trull could not tell if it was born of anxiety or excitement.
‘I greet you, Trull,’ Fear said, handing him the cloak.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Our father passes this night in the temple. Praying for guidance.’
‘The Stone Bowl,’ Rhulad said, his eyes glittering. ‘Mother sends us to the Stone Bowl.’
‘Why?’
Rhulad shrugged.
Trull faced Fear. ‘What is this Stone Bowl? I have never heard of it.’
‘An old place. In the Kaschan Trench.’
‘You knew of this place, Rhulad?’
His younger brother shook his head. ‘Not until tonight, when Mother described it. We have all walked the edge of the Trench. Of course the darkness of its heart is impenetrable – how could we have guessed that a holy site hid within it?’
‘A holy site? In absolute darkness?’
‘The significance of that,’ Fear said, ‘will be made evident soon enough, Trull.’
They began walking, eldest brother in the lead. Into the forest, onto a trail leading northwest. ‘Fear,’ Trull said, ‘has Uruth spoken to you of the Stone Bowl before?’
‘I am Weapons Master,’ Fear replied. ‘There were rites to observe…’
Among them, Trull knew, the memorization of every battle the Edur ever fought. He then wondered why that thought had come to him, in answer to Fear’s words. What hidden linkages was his own mind seeking to reveal, and why was he unable to discern them?
They continued on, avoiding pools of moonlight unbroken by shadows. ‘Tomad forbade us this journey,’ Trull said after a time.
‘In matters of sorcery,’ Fear said, ‘Uruth is superior to Tomad.’
‘And this is a matter of sorcery?’
Rhulad snorted behind Trull. ‘You stood with us in the Warlock King’s longboat.’
‘I did,’ agreed Trull. ‘Fear, would Hannan Mosag approve of what we do, of what Uruth commands of us?’
Fear said nothing.
‘You,’ Rhulad said, ‘are too filled with doubt, brother. It binds you in place-’
‘I watched you walk the path to the chosen cemetery, Rhulad. After Dusk’s departure and before the moon’s rise.’
If Fear reacted to this, his back did not reveal it, nor did his steps falter on the trail.
‘What of it?’ Rhulad asked, his tone too loose, too casual.
‘My words, brother, are not to be answered with flippancy.’
‘I knew that Fear was busy overseeing the return of weapons to the armoury,’ Rhulad said. ‘And I sensed a malevolence prowling the darkness. And so I stood in hidden vigil over his betrothed, who was alone in the cemetery. I may be unblooded, brother, but I am not without courage. I know you believe that inexperience is the soil in which thrive the roots of false courage. But I am not false, no matter what you think. For me, inexperience is unbroken soil, not yet ready for roots. I stood in my brother’s place.’
‘Malevolence in the night, Rhulad? Whose?’
‘I could not be certain. But I felt it.’
‘Fear,’ Trull said, ‘have you no questions for Rhulad on this matter?’
‘No,’ Fear replied drily. ‘There is no need for that… when you are around.’
Trull clamped his mouth shut, thankful that the night obscured the flush on his face.
There was silence for some time after that.
The trail began climbing, winding among outcrops of lichen-skinned granite. They climbed over fallen trees here and there, scrambled up steep slides. The moon’s light grew diffuse, and Trull sensed it was near dawn by the time they reached the highest point of the trail.
The path now took them inland – eastward – along a ridge of toppled trees and broken boulders. Water trapped in depressions in the bedrock formed impenetrable black pools that spread across the trail. The sky began to lighten overhead.
Fear then led them off the path, north, across tumbled scree and among the twisted trees. A short while later Kaschan Trench was before them.
A vast gorge, like a knife’s puncturing wound in the bedrock, its sides sheer and streaming with water, it ran in a jagged line, beginning beneath Hasana Inlet half a day to the west, and finally vanishing into the bedrock more than a day’s travel to the east. They were at its widest point, two hundred or so paces across, the landscape opposite slightly higher but otherwise identical – scattered boulders looking as if they had been pushed up from the gorge and mangled trees that seemed sickened by some unseen breath from the depths.
Fear unclasped his cloak, dropped his pack and walked over to a misshapen mound of stones. He cleared away dead branches and Trull saw that the stones were a cairn of some sort. Fear removed the capstone, and reached down into the hollow beneath. He lifted clear a coil of knotted rope.
‘Remove your cloak and your weapons,’ he said as he carried the coil to the edge.
He found one end and tied his pack, cloak, sword and spear to it.
Trull and Rhulad came close with their own gear and all was bound to the rope. Fear then began lowering it over the side.
‘Trull, take this other end and lead it to a place of shadow. A place where the shadow will not retreat before the sun as the day passes.’
He picked up the rope end and walked to a large, tilted boulder. When he fed the end into the shadows at its base he felt countless hands grasp it. Trull stepped back. The rope was now taut.
Returning to the edge, he saw that Fear had already begun his descent. Rhulad stood staring down.
‘We’re to wait until he reaches the bottom,’ Rhulad said. ‘He will tug thrice upon the rope. He asked that I go next.’
‘Very well.’
‘She has the sweetest lips,’ Rhulad murmured, then looked up and met Trull’s eyes. ‘Is that what you want me to say? To give proof to your suspicions?’
‘I have many suspicions, brother,’ Trull replied. ‘We have sun-scorched thoughts, we have dark-swallowed thoughts. But it is the shadow thoughts that move with stealth, creeping to the very edge of the rival realms – if only to see what there is to be seen.’
‘And if they see nothing?’
‘They never see nothing, Rhulad.’
‘Then illusions? What if they see only what their imagination conjures? False games of light? Shapes in the darkness? Is this not how suspicion becomes a poison? But a poison like white nectar, every taste leaving you thirsting for more.’
Trull was silent for a long moment. Then he said, ‘Fear spoke to me not long ago. Of how one is perceived, rather than how one truly is. How the power of the former can overwhelm that of the latter. Hov indeed, perception shapes truth like waves on stone.’
‘What would you ask of me, Trull?’
He faced Rhulad directly. ‘Cease your strutting before Mayen.’
A strange smile, then, ‘Very well, brother.’
Trull’s eyes widened slightly.
The rope snapped three times.
‘My turn,’ Rhulad said. He grasped hold of the rope and was quickly gone from sight.
The knots of these words were anything but loose. Trull drew a deep breath, let it out slowly, wondering at that smile. The peculiarity of it. A smile that might have been pain, a smile born of hurt.
Then he turned upon himself and studied what he was feeling. Difficult to find, to recognize, but… Father Shadow forgive me. I feel… sullied.
The three tugs startled him.
Trull took the heavy rope in his hands, feeling the sheath of beeswax rubbed into the fibres to keep them from rotting. Without the knots for foot- and hand-holds, the descent would be treacherous indeed. He walked out over the edge, facing inward, then leaned back and began making his way down.
Glittering streams ran down the raw stone before him. Red-stained calcretions limned the surface here and there. Flea-like insects skipped across the surface. The scrapes left by the passage of Rhulad and Fear glistened in the fading light, ragged furrows wounding all that clung to the rock.
Knot to knot, he went down the rope, the darkness deepening around him. The air grew cool and damp, then cold. Then his feet struck mossy boulders, and hands reached out to steady him.
His eyes struggled to make out the forms of his brothers. ‘We should have brought a lantern.’
‘There is light from the Stone Bowl,’ Fear said. ‘An Elder Warren. Kaschan.’
‘That warren is dead,’ Trull said. ‘Destroyed by Father Shadow’s own hand.’
‘Its children are dead, brother, but the sorcery lingers. Have your eyes adjusted? Can you see the ground before you?’
A tumble of boulders and the glitter of flowing water between them. ‘I can.’
‘Then follow me.’
They made their way out from the wall. Footing was treacherous, forcing them to proceed slowly. Dead branches festooned with mushrooms and moss. Trull saw a pallid, hairless rodent of some kind slip into a crack between two rocks, tail slithering in its wake. ‘This is the Betrayer’s realm,’ he said.
Fear grunted. ‘More than you know, brother.’
‘Something lies ahead,’ Rhulad said in a whisper.
Vast, towering shapes. Standing stones, devoid of lichen or moss, the surface strangely textured, made, Trull realized as they drew closer, to resemble the bark of the Blackwood. Thick roots coiled out from the base of each obelisk, spreading out to entwine with those of the stones to each side. Beyond, the ground fell away in a broad depression, from which light leaked like mist.
Fear led them between the standing stones and they halted at the pit’s edge.
The roots writhed downward, and woven in their midst were bones. Thousands upon thousands. Trull saw Kaschan, the feared ancient enemies of the Edur, reptilian snouts and gleaming fangs. And bones that clearly belonged to the Tiste. Among them, finely curved wing-bones from Wyval, and, at the very base, the massive skull of an Eleint, the broad, flat bone of its forehead crushed inward, as if by the blow of a gigantic, gauntleted fist.
Leafless scrub had grown up from the chaotic mat on the slopes, the branches and twigs grey and clenching. Then the breath hissed between Trull’s teeth. The scrub was stone, growing not in the manner of crystal, but of living wood.
‘Kaschan sorcery,’ Fear said after a time, ‘is born of sounds our ears cannot hear, formed into words that loosen the bindings that hold all matter together, that hold it to the ground. Sounds that bend and stretch light, as a tidal inflow up a river is drawn apart at the moment of turning. With this sorcery, they fashioned fortresses of stone that rode the sky like clouds. With this sorcery, they turned Darkness in upon itself with a hunger none who came too close could defy, an all-devouring hunger that fed first and foremost upon itself.’ His voice was strangely muted as he spoke. ‘Kaschan sorcery was sent into the warren of Mother Dark, like a plague. Thus was sealed the gate from Kurald Galain to every other realm. Thus was Mother Dark driven into the very core of the Abyss, witness to an endless swirl of light surrounding her – all that she would one day devour, until the last speck of matter vanishes into her. Annihilating Mother Dark. Thus the Kaschan, who are long dead, set upon Mother Dark a ritual that will end in her murder. When all Light is gone. When there is naught to cast Shadow, and so Shadow too is doomed to die.
‘When Scabandari Bloodeye discovered what they had done, it was too late. The end, the death of the Abyss, cannot be averted. The journey of all that exists repeats on every scale, brothers. From those realms too small for us to see, to the Abyss itself. The Kaschan locked all things into mortality, into the relentless plunge towards extinction. This was their vengeance. An act born, perhaps, of despair. Or the fiercest hatred imaginable. Witness to their own extinction, they forced all else to share that fate.’
His brothers were silent. The dull echoes of Fear’s last words faded away.
Then Rhulad grunted. ‘I see no signs of this final convergence, Fear.’
‘A distant death, aye. More distant than one could imagine. Yet it will come.’
‘And what is that to us?’
‘The Tiste Invasions drove the Kaschan to their last act. Father Shadow earned the enmity of every Elder god, of every ascendant. Because of the Kaschan ritual, the eternal game among Dark, Light and Shadow would one day end. And with it, all of existence.’ He faced his brothers. ‘I tell you this secret knowledge so that you will better understand what happened here, what was done. And why Hannan Mosag speaks of enemies far beyond the mortal Letherii.’
The first glimmerings of realization whispered through Trull. He dragged his gaze from Fear’s dark, haunted eyes, and looked down into the pit. To the very base, to the skull of that slain dragon. ‘They killed him.’
‘They destroyed his corporeal body, yes. And imprisoned his soul.’
‘Scabandari Bloodeye,’ Rhulad said, shaking his head as if to deny all that he saw. ‘He cannot be dead. That skull is not-’
‘It is,’ Fear said. ‘They killed our god.’
‘Who?’ Trull demanded.
‘All of them. Elder gods. And Eleint. The Elder gods loosed the blood in their veins. The dragons spawned a child of indescribable terror, to seek out and hunt down Scabandari Bloodeye. Father Shadow was brought down. An Elder god named Kilmandaros shattered his skull. They then made for Bloodeye’s spirit a prison of eternal pain, of agony beyond measure, to last until the Abyss itself is devoured.
‘Hannan Mosag means to avenge our god.’
Trull frowned. ‘The Elder gods are gone, Fear. As are the Eleint. Hannan Mosag commands six tribes of Tiste Edur and a fragmented warren.’
‘Four hundred and twenty-odd thousand Edur,’ Rhulad said. ‘And, for all our endless explorations, we have found no kin among the fragments of Kurald Emurlahn. Fear, Hannan Mosag sees through stained thoughts. It is one thing to challenge Letherii hegemony with summoned demons and, if necessary, iron blades. Are we now to wage war against every god in this world?’
Fear slowly nodded. ‘You are here,’ he told them, ‘and you have been told what is known. Not to see you bend to one knee and praise the Warlock King’s name. He seeks power, brothers. He needs power, and he cares nothing for its provenance, nor its taint.’
‘Your words are treasonous,’ Rhulad said, and Trull heard a strange delight in his brother’s voice.
‘Are they?’ Fear asked. ‘Hannan Mosag has charged us to undertake a perilous journey. To receive for him a gift. To then deliver it into his hands. A gift, brothers, from whom?’
‘We cannot deny him,’ Trull said. ‘He will simply choose others to go in our stead. And we will face banishment, or worse.’
‘Of course we shall not deny him, Trull. But we must not journey like blind old men.’
‘What of Binadas?’ Rhulad asked. ‘What does he know of this?’
‘Everything,’ Fear replied. ‘More, perhaps, than Uruth herself.’
Trull stared down once more at the mouldy dragon skull at the bottom of the pit. ‘How are you certain that is Scabandari Bloodeye?’
‘Because it was the widows who brought him here. The knowledge was passed down every generation among the women.’
‘And Hannan Mosag?’
‘Uruth knows he has been here, to this place. How he discovered the truth remains a mystery. Uruth would never have told me and Binadas, if not for her desperation. The Warlock King is drawing upon deadly powers. Are his thoughts stained? If not before, they are now.’
Trull’s eyes remained on that skull. A blunt, brutal execution, that mailed fist. ‘We had better hope,’ he whispered, ‘that the Elder gods are indeed gone.’