The great conspiracy among the kingdoms of Saphinand, Bolkando, Ak’ryn, and D’rhasilhani that culminated in the terrible Eastlands War was in numerous respects profoundly ironic. To begin with, there had been no conspiracy. This fraught political threat was in fact a falsehood, created and fomented by powerful economic interests in Lether; and more, it must be said, than just economic. Threat of a dread enemy permitted the imposition of strictures on the population of the empire that well served the brokers among the elite; and would no doubt have made them rich indeed if not for the coincidental financial collapse occurring at this most inopportune of moments in Letherii history. In any case, the border kingdoms and nations of the east could not but perceive the imminent threat, especially with the ongoing campaign against the Awl on the north plains. Thus a grand alliance was indeed created, and with the aforementioned foreign incentives, the war exploded across the entire eastern frontier.
Combined, not entirely accidentally, with the punitive invasion begun on the northwest coast, it is without doubt that Emperor Rhulad Sengar felt beleaguered indeed…
– The Ashes of Ascension, History of Lether, Vol. IV, Calasp Hivanar
She had been no different from any other child with her childish dreams of love. Proud and tall, a hero to stride into her life, taking her in his arms and sweeping away all her fears like silts rushing down a stream to vanish in some distant ocean. The benediction of clarity and simplicity, oh my, yes, that had been a most cherished dream.
Although Seren Pedac could remember that child, could remember the twisting anguish in her stomach as she yearned for salvation, an anguish delicious in all its possible obliterations, she would not indulge in nostalgia. False visions of the world were a child’s right, not something to be resented, but neither were they worthy of any adult sense of longing.
In Hull Beddict, after all, the young Seren Pedac had believed, for a time-a long time, in fact, before her foolish dream finally withered away-that she had found her wondrous hero, her majestic conjuration whose every glance was a blessing on her heart. So she had learned how purity was poison, the purity of her faith, that is, that such heroes existed. For her. For anyone.
Hull Beddict had died in Letheras. Or, rather, his body had died there. The rest had died in her arms years before then. In a way, she had used him and perhaps not just used him, but raped him. Devouring his belief, stealing away his vision-of himself, of his place in the world, of all the meaning that he, like any other man, sought for his own life. She had found her hero and had then, in ways subtle and cruel, destroyed him under the siege of reality. Reality as she had seen it, as she still saw it. That had been the poison within her, the battle between the child’s dream and the venal cynicism that had seeped into adulthood. And Hull had been both her weapon and her victim.
She had in turn been raped. Drunk in a port city tearing itself apart as the armies of the Tiste Edur swept in amidst smoke, flames and ashes. Her flesh made weapon, her soul made victim. There could be no surprise, no blank astonishment, to answer her subsequent attempt to kill herself. Except among those who could not understand, who would never understand.
Seren killed what she loved. She had done it to Hull, and if the day ever arrived when that deadly flower opened in her heart once more, she would kill again. Fears could not be swept away. Fears returned in drowning tides, dragging her down into darkness. I am poison.
Stay away. All of you, stay away.
She sat, the shaft of the Imass spear athwart her knees, but it was the weight of the sword belted to her left hip that threatened to pull her down, as if that blade was not a hammered length of iron, but links in a chain. He meant nothing by it. You meant nothing, Trull. I know that. Besides, like Hull, you are dead. You had the mercy of not dying in my arms. Be thankful for that.
Nostalgia or no, the child still within her was creeping forward, in timid increments. It was safe, wasn’t it, safe to cup her small unscarred hands and to show, in private oh-so-secret display, that old dream shining anew. Safe, because Trull was dead. No harm, none at all.
Loose the twist deep in her stomach-no, further down. She was now, after all, a grown woman. Loose it, yes, why not? For one who is poison, there is great pleasure in anguish. In wild longing. In the meaningless explorations of delighted surrender, subjugation-well, subjugation that was in truth domination-no point in being coy here. I surrender in order to demand. Relinquish in order to rule. I invite the rape because the rapist is me and this body here is my weapon and you, my love, are my victim.
Because heroes die. As Udinaas says, it is their fate.
The voice that was Mockra, that was the Warren of the Mind, had not spoken to her since that first time, as if, somehow, nothing more needed to be said. The discipline of control was hers to achieve, the lures of domination hers to resist. And she was managing both. Just.
In this the echoes of the past served to distract her, lull her into moments of sensual longing for a man now dead, a love that could never be. In this, even the past could become a weapon, which she wielded to fend off the present and indeed the future. But there were dangers here, too. Revisiting that moment when Trull Sengar had drawn his sword, had then set it into her hands. He wished me safe. That is all. Dare I create in that something more? Even to drip honey onto desire?
Seren Pedac glanced up. The fell gathering-her companions-were neither gathered nor companionable. Udinaas was down by the stream, upending rocks in search of crayfish-anything to add variety to their meals-and the icy water had turned his hands first red, then blue, and it seemed he did not care. Kettle sat near a boulder, hunched down to fend off the bitter wind racing up the valley. She had succumbed to an uncharacteristic silence these past few days, and would not meet anyone’s eyes. Silchas Ruin stood thirty paces away, at the edge of an overhang of layered rock, and he seemed to be studying the white sky-a sky the same hue as his skin. ‘The world is his mirror,’ Udinaas had said earlier, with a hard laugh, before walking down to the stream. Clip sat on a flat rock about halfway between Silchas Ruin and everyone else. He had laid out his assortment of weapons for yet another intense examination, as if obsession was a virtue. Seren Pedac’s glance found them all in passing, before her gaze settled on Fear Sengar.
Brother of the man she loved. Ah, was that an easy thing to say? Easy, perhaps, in its falsehood. Or in its simple truth. Fear believed that Trull’s gift was more than it seemed; that even Trull hadn’t been entirely aware of his own motivations. That the sad-faced Edur warrior had found in her, in Seren Pedac, Acquitor, a Letherii, something he had not found before in anyone. Not one of the countless beautiful Tiste Edur women he must have known. Young women, their faces unlined by years of harsh weather and harsher grief. Women who were not strangers. Women with still-pure visions of love.
This realm they now found themselves in, was it truly that of Darkness? Kurald Galain? Then why was the sky white? Why could she see with almost painful clarity every detail for such distances as left her mind reeling? The Gate itself had been inky, impenetrable-she had stumbled blindly, cursing the uneven, stony ground underfoot-twenty, thirty strides, and then there had been light. A rock-strewn vista, here and there a dead tree rising crooked into the pearlescent sky.
At what passed for dusk in this place that sky assumed a strange, pink tinge, before deepening to layers of purple and blue and finally black. So thus, a normal passage of day and night. Somewhere behind this cloak of white, then, a sun.
A sun in the Realm of Dark? She did not understand.
Fear Sengar had been studying the distant figure of Silchas Ruin. Now he turned and approached the Acquitor. ‘Not long, now,’ he said.
She frowned up at him. ‘Until what?’
He shrugged, his eyes fixing on the Imass spear. ‘Trull would have appreciated that weapon, I think. More than you appreciated his sword.’
Anger flared within her. ‘He told me, Fear. He gave me his sword, not his heart.’
‘He was distracted. His mind was filled with returning to Rhulad-to what would be his final audience with his brother. He could not afford to think of… other things. Yet those other things claimed his hands and the gesture was made. In that ritual, my brother’s soul spoke.’
She looked away. ‘It no longer matters, Fear.’
‘It does to me.’ His tone was hard, bitter. ‘I do not care what you make of it, what you tell yourself now to avoid feeling anything. Once, a brother of mine demanded the woman I loved. I did not refuse him, and now she is dead. Everywhere I look, Acquitor, I see her blood, flowing down in streams. It will drown me in the end, but that is no matter. While I live, while I hold madness at bay, Seren Pedac, I will protect and defend you, for a brother of mine set his sword into your hands.’
He walked away then, and still she could not look at him. Fear Sengar, you fool. A fool, like any other man, like every other man. What is it with your gestures? Your eagerness to sacrifice? Why do you all give yourselves to us? We are not pure vessels. We are not innocent. We will not handle your soul like a precious, fragile jewel. No, you fool, we’ll abuse it as if it was our own, or, indeed, of lesser value than that-if that is possible.
The crunch of stones, and suddenly Udinaas was crouching before her. In his cupped hands, a minnow. Writhing trapped in a tiny, diminishing pool of water.
‘Plan on splitting it six ways, Udinaas?’
‘It’s not that, Acquitor. Look at it. Closely now. Do you see? It has no eyes. It is blind.’
‘And is that significant?’ But it was, she realized. She frowned up at him, saw the sharp glitter in his gaze. ‘We are not seeing what is truly here, are we?’
‘Darkness,’ he said. ‘The cave. The womb.’
‘But… how?’ She looked round. The landscape of broken rock, the pallid lichen and mosses and the very dead trees. The sky.
‘Gift, or curse,’ Udinaas said, straightening. ‘She took a husband, didn’t she?’
She watched him walking back to the stream, watched him tenderly returning the blind minnow to the rushing water. A gesture Seren would not have expected from him. She? Who took a husband?
‘Gift or curse,’ said Udinaas as he approached her once again. ‘The debate rages on.’
‘Mother Dark… and Father Light.’
He grinned his usual cold grin. At last, Seren Pedac stirs from her pit. I’ve been wondering about those three brothers.’
Three brothers?
He went on as if she knew of whom he was speaking.
‘Spawn of Mother Dark, yes, but then, there were plenty of those, weren’t there? Was there something that set those three apart? Andarist, Anomander, Silchas. What did Clip tell us? Oh, right, nothing. But we saw the tapestries, didn’t we? Andarist, like midnight itself. Anomander, with hair of blazing white. And here, Silchas, our walking bloodless abomination, whiter than any corpse but just as friendly. So what caused the great rift between sons and mother? Maybe it wasn’t her spreading her legs to Light like a stepfather none of them wanted. Maybe that’s all a lie, one of those sweetly convenient ones. Maybe, Seren Pedac, it was finding out who their father was.’
She could not help but follow his gaze to where stood Silchas Ruin. Then she snorted and turned away. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Does it matter? Not right now,’ Udinaas said. ‘But it will.’
‘Why? Every family has its secrets.’
He laughed. ‘I have my own question. If Silchas Ruin is all Light on the outside, what must he be on the inside?’
‘The world is his mirror.’
But the world we now look upon is a lie.
‘Udinaas, I thought the Tiste Edur were the children of Mother Dark and Father Light.’
‘Successive generations, probably. Not in any obvious way connected to those three brothers.’
‘Scabandari.’
‘Yes, I imagine so. Father Shadow, right? Ah, what a family that was! Let’s not forget the sisters! Menandore with her raging fire of dawn, Sheltatha Lore the loving dusk, and Sukul Ankhadu, treacherous bitch of night. Were there others? There must have been, but they’ve since fallen by the wayside. Myths-prefer manageable numbers, after all, and three always works best. Three of this, three of that.’
‘But Scabandari would be the fourth-’
Andarist is dead.’
Oh. Andarist is dead.’ And how does he know such things? Who speaks to you, Udinaas, in your nightly fevers?
She could find out, she suddenly realized. She could slide in, like a ghost. She could, with the sorcery of Mockra, steal knowledge. I could rape someone else’s mind, is what I mean. Without his ever knowing.
There was necessity, wasn’t there? Something terrible was coming. Udinaas knew what it would be. What it might be, anyway. And Fear Sengar-he had just vowed to protect her, as if he too suspected some awful confrontation was close at hand. I remain the only one to know nothing.
She could change that. She could use the power she had found within her. It was nothing more than self-protection. To remain ignorant was to justly suffer whatever fate awaited her; yes, in lacking ruthlessness she would surely deserve whatever befell her. For ignoring what Mockra offered, for ignoring this gift.
No wonder it had said nothing since that first conversation. She had been in her pit, stirring old sand to see what seeds might spring to life, but there was no light reaching that pit, and no life among the chill grains. An indulgent game and nothing more.
I have a right to protect myself. Defend myself.
Clip and Silchas Ruin were walking back. Udinaas was studying them with the avidness he had displayed when examining the blind minnow.
I will have your secrets, slave. I will have those, and perhaps much, much more.
Udinaas could not help but see Silchas Ruin differently. In a new light, ha ha. The aggrieved son. One of them, anyway. Aggrieved sons, daughters, grandchildren, their children, on and on until the race of Shadow wars against that of Darkness. All on a careless word, an insult, the wrong look a hundred thousand years ago.
But, then, where are the children of Light?
Well, a good thing, maybe, that they weren’t around.
.
Enough trouble brewing as it was, with Silchas Ruin and Clip on one side and Fear Sengar and-possibly-Scabandari on the other. But of course Fear Sengar is no Mortal Sword of Shadow. Although he probably wants to be, even believes himself to be. Oh, this will play badly indeed, won’t it?
Silent, they walked on. Across this blasted, lifeless landscape. But not quite! There are… minnows.
The quest was drawing to a close. Just as well. Nothing worse, as far as he was concerned, than those legends of old when the stalwart, noble adventurers simply went on and on, through one absurd episode after another, with each one serving some arcane function for at least one of the wide-eyed fools, as befitted the shining serrated back of morality that ran the length of the story, from head to tip of that long, sinuous tail. Legends that bite. Yes, they all do. That’s the point of them.
But not this one, not this glorious quest of ours. No thunderous message driving home like a spike of lightning between the eyes. No tumbling cascade of fraught scenes ascending like some damned stairs to the magical tower perched on the mountain’s summit, where all truths were forged into the simple contest of hero against villain.
Look at us! What heroes? We’re all villains, and that tower doesn’t even exist.
Yet.
I see blood dripping between the stones. Blood in its making. So much blood. You want that tower, Silchas Ruin? Fear Sengar? Clip? You want it that much? You will have to make it, and so you shall.
Fevers every night. Whatever sickness whispered in his veins preferred the darkness of the mind that was sleep. Revelations arrived in torn fragments, pieces hinting of some greater truth, something vast. But he did not trust any of that-those revelations, they were all lies. Someone’s lies. The Errant’s? Menandore’s? The fingers poking into his brain were legion. Too many contradictions, each vision warring with the next.
What do you all want of me?
Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to give it. He’d been a slave but he was a slave no longer.
This realm had not been lived in for a long, long time. At least nowhere in this particular region. The trees were so long dead they had turned to brittle stone, right down to the thinnest twigs with their eternally frozen buds awaiting a season of life that never came. And that sun up there, somewhere behind the white veil, well, it too was a lie. Somehow. After all, Darkness should be dark, shouldn’t it?
He thought to find ruins or something. Proof that the Tiste Andii had once thrived here, but he had not seen a single thing that had been shaped by an intelligent hand, guided by a sentient mind. No roads, no trails of any kind.
When the hidden sun began its fade of light, Clip called a halt. Since arriving in this place, he had not once drawn out the chain and its two rings, the sole blessing to mark this part of their grand journey. There was nothing to feed a fire, so the dried remnants of smoked deer meat found no succulence in a stew and lent no warmth to their desultory repast.
What passed for conversation was no better.
Seren Pedac spoke. ‘Clip, why is there light here?’
‘We walk a road,’ the young Tiste Andii replied. ‘Kurald Liosan, Father Light’s gift of long, long ago. As you can see, his proud garden didn’t last very long.’ He shrugged. ‘Silchas Ruin and myself, well, naturally we don’t need this, but leading you all by hand…’ His smile was cold.
‘Thought you were doing that anyway,’ Udinaas said. The gloom was deepening, but he found that there was little effect on his vision, a detail he kept to himself.
‘I was being kind in not stating the obvious, Letherii. Alas, you lack such tact.’
‘Tact? Fuck tact, Clip.’
The smile grew harder. ‘You are not needed, Udinaas. I trust you know that.’
A wince tightened Seren Pedac’s face. ‘There’s no point in-’
‘It’s all right, Acquitor,’ Udinaas said. ‘I was getting rather tired of the dissembling bullshit anyway. Clip, where does this road lead? When we step off it, where will we find ourselves?’
‘I’m surprised you haven’t guessed.’
‘Well, I have.’
Seren Pedac frowned across at Udinaas and asked, ‘Will you tell me, then?’
‘I can’t. It’s a secret-and yes, I know what I said about dissembling, but this way maybe you stay alive. Right now, and with what’s to come, you have a chance of walking away, when all’s said and done.’
‘Generous of you,’ she said wearily, glancing away.
‘He is a slave,’ Fear Sengar said. ‘He knows nothing, Acquitor. How could he? He mended nets. He swept damp sheaves from the floor and scattered new ones. He shelled oysters.’
And on the shore, one night,’ Udinaas said, ‘I saw a white crow.’
Sudden silence.
Finally, Silchas Ruin snorted. ‘Means nothing. Except perhaps a presentiment of my rebirth. Thus, Udinaas, it may be you are a seer of sorts… Or a liar.’
‘More likely both,’ Udinaas said. ‘Yet there was a white crow. Was it flying through darkness, or dusk? I’m not sure, but I think the distinction is, well, important. Might be worth some effort, remembering exactly, I mean. But my days of working hard at anything are done.’ He glanced over at Silchas Ruin. ‘We’ll find out soon enough.’
‘This is pointless,’ Clip announced, settling back until he was supine on the hard ground, hands laced behind his head, staring up at the black, blank sky.
‘So this is a road, is it?’ Udinaas asked-seemingly of no-one in particular. ‘Gift of Father Light. That’s the interesting part. So, the question I’d like to ask is this: are we travelling it alone?’
Clip sat back up.
Udinaas smiled at him. ‘Ah, you’ve sensed it, haven’t you? The downy hair on the back of your neck trying to stand on end. Sensed. Smelled. A whisper of air as from some high wind. Sending odd little chills through you. All that.’
Silchas Ruin rose, anger in his every line. ‘Menandore,’ he said.
‘I would say she has more right to this road than we do,’ Udinaas said. ‘But Clip brought us here out of the goodness of his heart. Such noble intentions.’
‘She tracks us,’ Silchas Ruin muttered, hands finding the grips of his singing swords. Then he glared skyward. ‘From the sky.’
‘For your miserable family feuds are the only things worth living for, right?’. ‘
There was alarm in Fear Sengar’s expression. ‘I do not understand. Why is Sister Dawn following us? What cares she for the soul of Scabandari?’
‘The Finnest,’ Clip said under his breath. Then, louder, ‘Bloodeye’s soul, Edur. She seeks to claim it for herself. Its power.’
Udinaas sighed. ‘So, Silchas Ruin, what terrible deed did you commit on your sun-locked sister? Or daughter, or whatever relation she is? Why is she out for your blood? Just what did you all do to each other all those millennia ago? Can’t you kiss and make up? No, I imagine not.’
‘There was no crime,’ Silchas Ruin said. ‘We are enemies in the name of ambition, even when I would not have it so. Alas, to live as long as we have, it seems there is naught else to sustain us. Naught but rage and hunger.’
‘I suggest a huge mutual suicide,’ Udinaas said. ‘You and all your wretched kin, and you, Clip, you could just jump in to appease your ego or something. Vanish from the mortal realms, all of you, and leave the rest of us alone.’
‘Udinaas,’ Clip said with amusement, ‘this is not a mortal realm.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘Not as you think of one, then. This is a place of elemental forces. Unfettered, and beneath every surface, the potential for chaos. This is a realm of the Tiste.’
Seren Pedac seemed startled. ‘Just “Tiste”? Not Andii, Edur-’
‘Acquitor,’ Silchas Ruin said, ‘the Tiste are the first children. The very first. Ours were the first cities, the first civilizations. Rising here, in realms such as this one. As Clip has said, elemental.’
‘Then what of the Elder Gods?’ Seren Pedac demanded.
Neither Clip nor Silchas Ruin replied, and the silence stretched, until Udinaas snorted a laugh. ‘Unwelcome relatives. Pushed into closets. Bar the door, ignore the knocking and let’s hope they move on. It’s ever the problem with all these creation stories. “We’re the first, isn’t it obvious? Those others? Ignore them. Imposters, interlopers, and worse! Look at us, after all! Dark, Light, and the gloom in between! Could anyone be purer, more elemental, than that?” The answer, of course, is yes. Let’s take an example, shall we?’
‘Nothing preceded Darkness,’ said Clip, irritation sharpening his pronouncement.
Udinaas shrugged. ‘That seems a reasonable enough assertion”; But then, is it? After all, Darkness is not just absence of light, is it? Can you have a negative definition like that? But maybe Clip wasn’t being nearly so offhand as he sounded just there. “Nothing preceded Darkness.” Nothing indeed. True absence, then, of anything. Even Darkness. But wait, where does chaos fit in? Was that Nothing truly empty, or was it filled with chaos? Was Darkness the imposition of order on chaos? Was it the only imposition of order on chaos? That sounds presumptuous. Would that Feather Witch was here-there’s too much of the Tiles that I’ve forgotten. All that birth of this and birth of that stuff. But chaos also produced Fire. It must have, for without Fire there is no Light. One might also say that without Light there is no Dark, and without both there is no Shadow. But Fire needs fuel to burn, so we would need matter of some kind-solids-born of Earth. And Fire needs air, and so-’
‘I am done listening to all of this nonsense,’ Silchas Ruin said.
The Tiste Andii walked off into the night, which wasn’t night at all-at least not in the eyes of Udinaas, and he found he could watch Silchas Ruin as the warrior went on for another forty or so paces, then spun round to face the camp once more. Ah, White Crow, you would listen on, I would you? Yet with none to see your face, none to challenge you directly.
My guess is, Silchas Ruin, you are as ignorant as the rest of us when it comes to the birth of all existence. That your notions are as quaint as ours, and just as pathetic, too.
Fear Sengar spoke. ‘Udinaas, the Edur women hold that the Kechra bound all that exists to time itself, thus assuring the annihilation of everything. Their great crime. Yet that death-I have thought hard on this-that death, it does not have the face of chaos. The very opposite, in fact.’
‘Chaos pursues,’ Clip muttered with none of his characteristic arrogance. ‘It is the Devourer. Mother Dark scattered its power, its armies, and it seeks ever to rejoin, to become one again, for when that happens no other power-not even Mother Dark-can defeat it.’
‘Mother Dark must have had allies,’ Udinaas said. ‘Either that, or she ambushed chaos, caught her enemy unawares. Was all existence born of betrayal, Clip? Is that the core of your belief? No wonder you are all at each other’s throats.’ Listen well, Silchas Ruin; I am closer on your trail than you ever imagined. Which, he thought then, might not be wise; might, in fact, prove fatal. ‘In any case, Mother Dark herself had to have been born of something. A conspiracy within chaos. Some unprecedented alliance where all alliances were forbidden. So, yet another betrayal.’
Fear Sengar leaned forward slightly. ‘Udinaas, how did you know we were being followed? By Menandore.’
‘Slaves need to hone their every sense, Fear Sengar. Because our masters are fickle. You might wake up one morning with a toothache, leaving you miserable and short-tempered, and in consequence an entire family of slaves might suffer devastation before the sun’s at midday. A dead husband or wife, a dead parent, or both. Beaten, maimed for life, blinded, dead-every possibility waits in our shadows.’
He did not think Fear was convinced, and, granted, the argument was thin. True, those heightened senses might be sufficient to raise the hackles, to light the instincts that something was on their trail. But that was not the same as knowing that it was Menandore. I was careless in revealing what I knew. I wanted to knock the fools off balance, but that has just made them more dangerous. Tome.
Because now they know-or will know, soon enough-that this useless slave does not walk alone.
For the moment, however, no-one was inclined to challenge him.
Drawing out bedrolls, settling in for a passage of restless sleep. Dark that was not dark. Light that was not light. Slaves who might be masters, and somewhere ahead of them all, a bruised stormcloud overhead, filled with thunder, lightning, and crimson rain.
She waited until the slave’s breathing deepened, lengthened, found the rhythm of slumber. The wars of conscience were past. Udinaas had revealed enough secret knowledge to justify this. He had never left his slavery behind, and now his Mistress was Menandore, a creature by all accounts as treacherous, vicious and cold-blooded as any other in that ancient family of what-might-be-gods.
Mockra whispered into life in her mind, as free as wandering thought, unconstrained by a shell of hard bone, by the well-worn pathways of the mind. A tendril lifting free, hovering in the air above her, she gave it the shape of a serpent, head questing, tongue flicking to find the scent of Udinaas, of the man’s very soul-there, sliding forward to close, a touch-
Hot.’
Seren Pedac felt that serpent recoil, felt the ripples sweep back into her in waves of scalding heat.
Fever dreams, the fire of Udinaas’s soul. The man stirred in his blankets.
She would need to be more subtle, would need the essence of the serpent she had chosen. Edging forward once more, finding that raging forge, then burrowing down, through hot sand, beneath it. Oh, there was pain, yes, but it was not, she now realized, some integral furnace of his soul. It was the realm his dream had taken him into, a realm of blistering light-
Her eyes opened onto a torn landscape. Boulders baked red and brittle. Thick, turgid air, the breath of a potter’s kiln. Blasted white sky overhead.
Udinaas wandered, staggering, ten paces away.
She sent her serpent slithering after him.
An enormous shadow slid over them-Udinaas spun and twisted to glare upward as that shadow flowed past, then on, and the silver and gold scaled dragon, gliding on stretched wings, flew over the ridge directly ahead, then, a moment later, vanished from sight.
Seren saw Udinaas waiting for it to reappear. And then he saw it again, now tiny as a speck, a glittering mote in the sky, fast dwindling. The Letherii slave cried out, but Seren could not tell if the sound had been one of rage or abandonment.
No-one likes being ignored.
Stones skittered near the serpent and in sudden terror she turned its gaze, head lifting, to see a woman. Not Menandore. No, a Letherii. Small, lithe, hair so blonde as to be almost white. Approaching Udinaas, tremulous, every motion revealing taut, frayed nerves.
Another intruder.
Udinaas had yet to turn from that distant sky, and Seren watched as the Letherii woman drew still closer. Then, five paces away, she straightened, ran her hands through her wild, burnished hair. In a sultry voice, the strange woman spoke. ‘I have been looking for you, my love.’
He did not whirl round. He did not even move, but Seren saw something new in the lines of his back and shoulders, the way he now held his head. In his voice, when he replied, there was amusement. ‘“My love”?’ And then he faced her, with ravaged eyes, a bleakness like defiant ice in this world of fire. ‘No longer the startled hare, Feather Witch-yes, I see the provocative way you now look at me, the brazen confidence, the invitation. And in all that, the truth that is your contempt still burns through. Besides,’ he added, ‘I heard you scrabbling closer, could smell, even, your fear. What do you want, Feather Witch?’
‘I am not frightened, Udinaas,’ the woman replied.
That name, yes. Feather Witch. The fellow slave, the Caster of the Tiles. Oh, there is history between them beyond what any of us might have imagined.
‘But you are,’ Udinaas insisted. ‘Because you expected to find me alone.’
She stiffened, then attempted a shrug. ‘Menandore feels nothing for you, my love. You must realize that. You are naught but a weapon in her hands.’
‘Hardly. Too blunted, too pitted, too fragile by far.’
Feather Witch’s laugh was high and sharp. ‘Fragile? Errant take me, Udinaas, you have never been that.’
Seren Pedac certainly agreed with her assessment. What reason this false modesty?
‘I asked what you wanted. Why are you here?’
‘I have changed since you last saw me,’ Feather Witch replied. ‘I am now Destra Irant to the Errant, to the last Elder God of the Letherii. Who stands behind the Empty Throne-’
‘It’s not empty.’
‘It will be.’
‘Now there’s your new-found faith getting in the way again. All that hopeful insistence that you are once more at the centre of things. Where is your flesh hiding right now, Feather Witch? In Letheras, no doubt. Some airless, stinking hovel that you have proclaimed a temple-yes, that stings you, telling me I am not in error. About you. Changed, Feather Witch? Well, fool yourself if you like. But don’t think I’m deceived. Don’t think I will now fall into your arms gasping with lust and devotion.’
‘You once loved me.’
‘I once pressed red-hot coins into Rhulad’s dead eyes, too. But they weren’t dead, alas. The past is a sea of regrets, but I have crawled a way up the shore now, Feather Witch. Quite a way, in fact.’
‘We belong together, Udinaas. Destra Irant and T’orrud Segul, and we will have, at our disposal, a Mortal Sword. Letherii, all of us. As it should be, and through us the Errant rises once more. Into power, into domination-it is what our people need, what we have needed for a long time.’
‘The Tiste Edur-’
‘Are on their way out. Rhulad’s Grey Empire-it was doomed from the start. Even you saw that. It’s tottering, crumbling, falling to pieces. But we Letherii will survive. We always do, and now, with the rebirth of the faith in the Errant, our empire will make the world tremble. Destra Irant, T’orrud Segul and Mortal Sword, we shall be the three behind the Empty Throne. Rich, free to do as we please. We shall have Edur for slaves. Broken, pathetic Edur. Chained, beaten, we shall use them up, as they once did to us. Love me or not, Udinaas. Taste my kiss or turn away, it does not matter. You are T’orrud Segul. The Errant has chosen you-’
‘He tried, you mean. I sent the fool away.’
She was clearly stunned into silence.
Udinaas half turned with a dismissive wave of one hand. ‘I sent Menandore away, too. They tried using me like a coin, something to be passed back and forth. But I know all about coins. I’ve smelled the burning stench of their touch.’ He glanced back at her again. ‘And if I am a coin, then I belong to no-one. Borrowed, occasionally. Wagered, often. Possessed? Never for long.’
‘T’orrud Segul-’
‘Find someone else.’
‘You have been chosen, you damned fool!’ She started forward suddenly, tearing at her own threadbare slave’s tunic. Cloth ripped, fluttered on the hot wind like the tattered fragments of some imperial flag. She was naked, reaching out to drag Udinaas round, arms encircling his neck-
His push sent her sprawling onto the hard, stony ground. ‘I’m done with rapes,’ he said in a low, grating voice. ‘Besides, I told you we have company. You clearly didn’t completely understand me-’ And he walked past her, walked straight towards the serpent that was Seren Pedac.
She woke with a calloused hand closed about her throat. Stared up into glittering eyes in the gloom.
She could feel him trembling above her, his weight pinning her down, and he lowered his face to hers, then, wiry beard bristling along her cheek, brought his mouth to her right ear, and began whispering.
‘I have been expecting something like that, Seren Pedac, lor some time. Thus, you had my admiration… of your restraint. Too bad, then, it didn’t last.’
She was having trouble breathing; the hand wrapping her throat was an iron band.
‘I meant what I said about rapes, Acquitor. If you ever do that again, I will kill you. Do you understand me?’
She managed a nod, and she could see now, in his face, the full measure of the betrayal he was feeling, the appalling hurt. That she would so abuse him.
‘Think nothing of me,’ Udinaas continued, ‘if that suits the miserable little hole you live in, Seren Pedac. It’s what wiped away your restraint in the first place, after all. But I have had goddesses use me. And gods try to. And now a scrawny witch I once lusted after, who dreams her version of tyranny is preferable to everyone else’s. I was a slave-I am used to being used, remember? But-and listen carefully, woman-1 am a slave no longer-’
Fear Sengar’s voice came down from above them. ‘Release her throat, Udinaas. That which you feel at the back of your own neck is the tip of my sword-and yes, that trickle of blood belongs to you. The Acquitor is Betrothed to Trull Sengar. She is under my protection. Release her now, or die.’
The hand gripping her throat loosened, lifted clear-
And Fear Sengar had one hand in the slave’s hair, was tearing him back, flinging him onto the ground, the sword hissing in a lurid blur-
‘NO!’ Seren Pedac shrieked, clawing across to throw herself down onto Udinaas. ‘No, Fear! Do not touch him!’
‘Acquitor-’
Others awake now, rising on all sides-
‘Do not hurt him!’ I have done enough of that this night, ‘Fear Sengar-Udinaas, he had that right-‘Oh, Errant save me-‘He had that right,’ she repeated, her throat feeling torn on the inside from that first shriek. ‘I-listen, don’t, Fear, you don’t understand. I… I did something. Something terrible. Please…’ she was sitting up now, speaking to everyone, ‘please, this is my fault.’
Udinaas pushed her weight to one side, and she scraped an elbow raw as he clambered free. ‘Make it day again, Silchas Ruin,’ he said.
‘The night-’
‘Make it day again, damn you! Enough sleep-let’s move on. Now!’
To Seren Pedac’s astonishment, the sky began to lighten once more. What? How?
Udinaas was at his bedroll, fighting to draw it together, stuff it into his pack. She saw tears glittering on his weathered cheeks.
Oh, what have 1 done. Udinaas-
‘You understand too much,’ Clip said in that lilting, offhand tone of his. ‘Did you hear me, Udinaas?’
‘Go fuck yourself,’ the slave muttered.
Silchas Ruin said, ‘Leave him, Clip. He is but a child among us. And he will play his childish games.’
Ashes drifting down to bury her soul, Seren Pedac turned away from all of them. No, the child is me. Still. Always.
Udinaas…
Twelve paces away, Kettle sat, legs drawn under her, and held hands with Wither, ghost of an Andii, and there was neither warmth nor chill in that grip. She stared at the others as the light slowly burgeoned to begin a new day.
‘What they do to each other,’ she whispered.
Wither’s hand tightened around hers. ‘It is what it is to live, child.’
She thought about that, then. The ghost’s words, the weariness in the tone, and, after a long time, she finally nodded.
Yes, this is what it is to live.
It made all that she knew was coming a little easier to bear.
In the litter-scattered streets of Drene, the smell of old smoke was bitter in the air. Black smears adorned building walls. Crockery, smashing down from toppled carts, had flung pieces everywhere, as if the sky the night before had rained glazed sherds. Bloodstained cloth, shredded and torn remnants of tunics and shirts, were blackening under the hot sun. Just beyond the lone table where sat Venitt Sathad, the chaos of the riot that had ignited the previous day’s dusk was visible on all sides.
The proprietor of the kiosk bar limped back out from the shadowed alcove that served as kitchen and storehouse, bearing a splintered tray with another dusty bottle of Bluerose wine. The stunned look in the old man’s eyes had yet to retreat, giving his motions an oddly disarticulated look as he set the bottle down on Venitt Sathad’s table, bowed, then backed away.
The few figures that had passed by on the concourse this morning had each paused in their furtive passage to stare at Venitt-not because, he knew, he was in any way memorable or imposing, but because in sitting here, eating a light breakfast and now drinking expensive wine, the servant of Rautos Hivanar presented a scene of civil repose. Such a scene now jarred, now struck those who had weathered the chaos of the night before, as if lit with its very own madness.
A hundred versions clouded the riot’s beginning. A money-lender’s arrest. A meal overcharged and an argument that got out of hand. A sudden shortage of this or that. Two Patriotist spies beating someone, and then being set upon by twenty bystanders. Perhaps none of these things had occurred; perhaps they all had.
The riot had destroyed half the market on this side of the city. It had then spilled into the slums northwest of the docks, where, judging from the smoke, it raged on unchecked.
The garrison had set out into the streets to conduct a brutal campaign of pacification that was indiscriminate at first, but eventually found focus in a savage assault on the poorest people of Drene. At times in the past, the poor-being true victims-had been easily cowed by a few dozen cracked skulls. But not this time. They had had enough, and they had fought back.
In this morning’s air, Venitt Sathad could still smell the shock-sharper by far than the smoke, colder than any bundle of bloody cloth that might still contain pieces of human meat-the shock of guards screaming with fatal wounds, of armoured bullies being cornered then torn apart by frenzied mobs. The shock, finally, of the city garrison’s ignoble retreat to the barracks.
They had been under strength, of course. Too many out with Bivatt in the campaign against the Awl. And they had been arrogant, emboldened by centuries of precedent. And that arrogance had blinded them to what had been happening out there, to what was about to happen.
The one detail that remained with Venitt Sathad, lodged like a sliver of wood in infected flesh that no amount of wine could wash away, was what had happened to the resident Tiste Edur.
Nothing.
The mobs had left them alone. Extraordinary, inexplicable. Frightening.
No, instead, half a thousand shrieking citizens had stormed Letur Anict’s estate. Of course, the Factor’s personal guards were, one and all, elite troops-recruited from every Letherii company that had ever been stationed in Drene-and the mob had been repulsed. It was said that corpses lay in heaps outside the estate’s walls.
Letur Anict had returned to Drene two days before, and Venitt Sathad suspected that the Factor had been as unprepared for the sudden maelstrom as had the garrison. In Overseer Brohl Handar’s absence, Letur governed the city and its outlying region. Whatever reports his agents might have delivered upon his return would have been rife with fears but scant on specifics-the kind of information that Letur Anict despised and would summarily dismiss. Besides, the Patriotists were supposed to take care of such things in their perpetual campaign of terror. A few more arrests, some notable disappearances, the confiscation of properties.
Of course, Rautos Hivanar, his master, had noted the telltale signs of impending chaos. Tyrannical control was dependent on a multitude of often disparate forces, running the gamut from perception to overt viciousness. The sense of power needed to be pervasive in order to create and maintain the illusion of omniscience. Invigilator Karos Invictad understood that much, at least, but where the thug in red silks failed was in understanding that thresholds existed, and to cross them-with ever greater acts of brutality, with paranoia and fear an ever-rising fever-was to see the illusion shattered.
At some point, no matter how repressive the regime, the citizenry will come to comprehend the vast power in their hands. The destitute, the Indebted, the beleaguered middle classes; in short, the myriad victims. Control was sleight of hand trickery, and against a hundred thousand defiant citizens, it stood no real chance. All at once, the game was up.
The threshold, this time, was precisely as Rautos Hivanar had feared. The pressure of a crumbling, overburdened economy. Shortage of coin, the crushing weight of huge and ever-growing debts, the sudden inability to pay for anything. The Patriotists could draw knives, swords, could wield their knotted clubs, but against desperate hunger and a sense of impending calamity, they might as well have been swinging reeds at the wind.
In the face of all this, the Tiste Edur were helpless. Bemused, uncomprehending, and wholly unprepared. Unless, that is, their answer will be to begin killing. Everyone.
Another of Karos Invictad’s blind spots. The Invigilator’s contempt for the Tiste Edur could well prove suicidal. Their Emperor could not be killed. Their K’risnan could unleash sorcery that could devour every Letherii in the empire. And the fool thought to target them in a campaign of arrests?
No, the Patriotists had been useful; indeed, for a time, quite necessary. But-
‘Venitt Sathad, welcome to Drene.’
Without looking up, Venitt gestured with one hand as he reached for the wine bottle. ‘Find yourself a chair, Orbyn Truthfinder.’ A glance upward. ‘I was just thinking about you.’
The huge, odious man smiled. ‘I am honoured. If, that is, your thoughts were of me specifically. If,, however, they were of the Patriotists, well, I suspect that “honour” would be the wrong word indeed.’
The proprietor was struggling to drag another chair out to the table, but it was clear that whatever had caused the limp was proving most painful. Venitt Sathad set the bottle back down, rose, and walked over to help him.
‘Humble apologies, kind sir,’ the old man gasped, his face white and beads of sweat spotting his upper lip. ‘Had a fall yestereve, sir-’
‘Must have been a bad one. Here, leave the chair to me, and find us another unbroken bottle of wine-if you can.’
‘Most obliged, sir…’
Wondering where the old man had found this solid oak dining chair-one large enough to take Orbyn’s mass-Venitt Sathad pulled it across the cobbles and positioned it opposite his own chair with the table in between, then he sat down once more.
‘If not honour,’ he said, retrieving the bottle again and refilling the lone clay cup, ‘then what word comes to mind, Orbyn?’
Truthfinder eased down into the chair, gusting out a loud, wheezing sigh. ‘We can return to that anon. I have been expecting your arrival for some time now.’
‘Yet I found neither you nor the Factor in the city, Orbyn, upon my much-anticipated arrival.’
A dismissive gesture, as the proprietor limped up with a cup and a second bottle of Bluerose wine, then retreated with head bowed. ‘The Factor insisted I escort him on a venture across the sea. He has been wont to waste my time of late. I assure you, Venitt, that such luxuries are now part of the past. For Letur Anict.’
‘I imagine he is in a most discomfited state at the moment.’
‘Rattled.’
‘He lacks confidence that he can restore order?’
‘Lack of confidence has never been Letur Anict’s weakness. Reconciling it with reality is, alas.’
‘It is unfortunate that the Overseer elected to accompany Atri-Preda Bivatt’s campaign to the east.’
‘Possibly fatally so, yes.’
Venitt Sathad’s brows lifted. ‘Have some wine, Orbyn. And please elaborate on that comment.’
‘There are assassins in that company,’ Truthfinder replied, frowning to indicate his distaste. ‘Not mine, I assure you. Letur plays his own game with the Overseer. Political. In truth, I do not expect Brohl Handar to return to Drene, except perhaps as a wrapped, salted corpse.’
‘I see. Of course, this sparring of his has now put him at a great disadvantage.’
Orbyn nodded as he poured his cup full. ‘Yes, with Brohl nowhere in sight, the blame for last night’s riot rests exclusively with the Factor. There will be repercussions, no doubt?’
‘Truthfinder, that riot is not yet over. It will continue into this night, where it will boil out from the slums with still greater force and ferocity. There will be more assaults on Letur’s estate, and before long on all of his properties and holdings throughout Drene, and those he will not be able to protect. The barracks will be under siege. There will be looting. There will be slaughter.’
Orbyn was leaning forward, rubbing at his oily brow. ‘So it is true, then. Financial collapse.’
‘The empire reels. The Liberty Consign is mortally wounded. When the people learn that there have been other riots, in city after city-’
‘The Tiste Edur will be stirred awake.’
‘Yes.’
Orbyn’s eyes fixed on Venitt Sathad’s. ‘There are rumours of war in the west.’
‘West? What do you mean?’
An invasion from the sea, that seems to be focused on the Tiste Edur themselves. Punitive, in the wake of the fleets. A distant empire that did not take kindly to the murder of its citizens. And now, reports of the Bolkando and their allies, massing along the border.’
A tight smile from Venitt Sathad. ‘The alliance we forged.’
‘Indeed. Another of Letur Anict’s brilliant schemes gone awry.’
‘Hardly his exclusively, Orbyn. Your Patriotists were essential participants in that propaganda.’
‘I wish I could deny that. And so we come to that single word, the one that filled my mind in the place of “honour”. I find you here, in Drene. Venitt Sathad, understand me. I know what you do for your master, and I know just how well you do it. I know what even Karos Invictad does not-nor have I any interest in enlightening him. Regarding you, sir.’
‘You wish to speak for yourself, now? Rather than the Patriotists?’
‘To stay alive, yes.’
‘Then the word is indeed not honour.’
Orbyn Truthfinder, the most feared man in Drene, drained his cup of wine. He leaned back. ‘You sit here, amidst carnage. People hurry past and they see you, and though you are, in features and in stature, barely worth noting, notice you they do. And a chill grips their hearts, and they do not know why. But I do.’
You comprehend, then, that I must pay Letur Anict a visit.’
Yes, and I wish you well in that.’
‘Unfortunately, Orbyn, we find ourselves in a moment of crisis. In the absence of Overseer Brohl Handar, it falls to Letur Anict to restore order. Yes, he may well fail, but he must be given the opportunity to succeed. For the sake of the empire, Orbyn, I expect you and your agents to assist the Factor in every way possible.’
‘Of course. But I have lost thirty-one agents since yesterday. And those among them who had families… well, no-one was spared retribution.’
‘It is a sad truth, Orbyn, that all who have been rewarded by tyranny must eventually share an identical fate.’
‘You sound almost satisfied, Venitt.’
The Indebted servant of Rautos Hivanar permitted a faint smile to reach his lips as he reached for his cup of wine.
Orbyn’s expression flattened. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘you do not believe a mob is capable of justice?’
‘They have been rather restrained, thus far.’
‘You cannot be serious.’
‘Orbyn, not one Tiste Edur has been touched.’
‘Because the rioters are not fools. Who dares face Edur sorcery? It was the very inactivity of the local Edur that incited the mobs to ever more vicious extremes-and I assure you, Letur Anict is well aware of that fact.’
‘Ah, so he would blame the Tiste Edur for this mess. How convenient.’
‘I am not here to defend the Factor, Venitt Sathad.’
‘No, you are here to bargain for your life.’
‘I will of course assist Letur Anict in restoring order. But I am not confident that he will succeed, and I will not throw away my people.’
‘Actually, you will do just that.’
Orbyn’s eyes widened. Sweat was now trickling down his face. His clothes were sticking patchily to the folds of fat beneath.
‘Truthfinder,’ Venitt Sathad continued, ‘the Patriotists have outlived their usefulness, barring one last, most noble sacrifice. As the focus of the people’s rage. I understand there is a Drene custom, something to do with the season of storms, and the making of seaweed fisher folk-life-sized dolls with shells for eyes, dressed in old clothes and the like. Sent out to mark the season’s birth, I believe, in small boats. An offering to the sealords of old-for the storms to drown. Quaint and unsurprisingly bloodthirsty, as most old customs are. The Patriotists, Orbyn, must become Drene’s seaweed fisher folk. We are in a season of storms, and sacrifices are necessary.’
Truthfinder licked his lips. ‘And what of me?’ he asked in a whisper.
‘Ah, that particular session of bargaining is not yet complete.’
‘I see.’
‘I hope so.’
‘Venitt Sathad, my agents-there are wives, husbands, children-’
‘Yes, I am sure there are. Just as there were wives, husbands and children of all those you happily arrested, tortured and murdered all in the name of personal financial gain. The people, Orbyn, do understand redressing an imbalance.’
‘This is as Rautos Hivanar demands-’
‘My master leaves the specifics to me. He respects my record of… efficiency. While the authority he represents no doubt bolsters compliance, 1 rarely make overt use of it. By that I mean I rarely find the need. You said you know me, Truthfinder, did you not?’
‘I know you, Venitt Sathad, for the man who found Gerun Eberict’s murderer and sent that half-blood away with a chest full of coins. 1 know you for the killer of a hundred men and women at virtually every level of society, and, no matter how well protected, they die, and you emerge unscathed, your identity unknown-’
‘Except, it seems, to you.’
‘I stumbled onto your secret life, Venitt Sathad, many years ago. And I have followed your career, not just within the empire, but in the many consulates and embassies where your… skills… were needed. To advance Letherii interests. I am a great admirer, Venitt Sathad.’
Yet now you seek to cast in the coin of your knowledge in order to purchase your life. Do you not comprehend the risk?’
‘What choice do 1 have? By telling you all I know, I am also telling you I have no illusions-I know why you are here, and what you need to do; indeed, my only surprise is that it has taken Rautos Hivanar so long to finally send you. In fact, it might be you have arrived too late, Venitt Sathad.’
To that, Venitt slowly nodded. Orbyn Truthfinder was a dangerous man. Yet, for the moment, still useful. As, alas, was Letur Anict. But such things were measured day by day, at times moment by moment. Too late. You fool, Orbyn, even you have no real idea just how true that statement is-too late.
Tehol Beddict played a small game, once, to see how it would work out. But this time-with that damned manservant of his-he has played a game on a scale almost beyond comprehension.
And I am Venitt Sathad. Indebted, born of Indebted, most skilled slave and assassin of Rautos Hivanar, and you, Tehol Beddict-and you, Bugg-need never fear me.
Take the bastards down. Every damned one of them. Take them all down.
It seemed Orbyn Truthfinder saw something in his expression then that drained all colour from the man’s round, sweat-streamed face.
Venitt Sathad was amused. Orbyn, have you found a truth?
Scattered to either side of the dark storm front, grey clouds skidded across the sky, dragging slanting sheets of rain. The plains were greening along hillsides and in the troughs of valleys, a mottled patchwork of lichen, mosses and matted grasses. On the summit of a nearby hill was the carcass of a wild bhederin, hastily butchered after dying to a lightning strike. The beast’s legs were sticking up into the air and on one hoof was perched a storm-bedraggled crow. Eviscerated entrails stretched out and down the slope facing Brohl Handar and his troop as they rode past.
The Awl were on the run. Warriors who had died of their wounds were left under heaps of stones, and they were as road-markers for the fleeing tribe, although in truth unnecessary since with the rains the trail was a broad swath of churned ground. In many ways, this uncharacteristic carelessness worried the Overseer, but perhaps it was as Bivatt had said: the unseasonal bank of storms that had rolled across the plains in the past three days had caught Redmask unprepared-there could be no hiding the passage of thousands of warriors, their families, and the herds that moved with them. That, and the bloody, disastrous battle at Praedegar had shown Redmask to be fallible; indeed, it was quite possible that the masked war leader was now struggling with incipient mutiny among his people.
They needed an end to this, and soon. The supply train out of Drene had been disrupted, the cause unknown. Bivatt had this day despatched a hundred Bluerose lancers onto their back-trail, seeking out those burdened wagons and their escort. Food shortage was imminent and no army, no matter how loyal and well trained, would fight on an empty stomach. Of course, bounteous feasts were just ahead-the herds of rodara and myrid. Battle needed to be joined. Redmask and his Awl needed to be destroyed.
A cloud scudded into their path with sleeting rain. Surprisingly cold for this late in the season. Brohl Handar and his Tiste Edur rode on, silent-this was not the rain of their homeland, nothing soft, gentle with mists. Here, the water lanced down, hard, and left one drenched in a score of heartbeats. We are truly strangers here.
But in that we are not alone.
They were finding odd cairns, bearing ghastly faces painted in white, and in the cracks and fissures of those tumuli there were peculiar offerings-tufts of wolf fur, teeth, the tusks from some unknown beast and antlers bearing rows of pecules and grooves. None of this was Awl-even the Awl scouts among Bivatt’s army had never before seen the like.
Some wandering people from the eastern wastelands, perhaps, yet when Brohl had suggested that, the Atri-Preda had simply shaken her head. She knows something. Another damned secret.
…
They rode out of the rain, into steaming hot sunlight, the rich smell of soaked lichen and moss.
The broad swath of churned ground was on their right. To draw any closer was to catch the stench of manure and human faeces, a smell he had come to associate with desperation. We fight our wars and leave in our wake the redolent reek of suffering and misery. These plains are vast, are they not? What terrible cost would we face if we just left each other alone? An end to this squabble over land-Father Shadow knows, no-one realty owns it. The game of possession belongs to us, not to the rocks and earth, the grasses and the creatures walking the surface in their fraught struggle to survive.
A bolt of lightning descends. A wild bhederin is struck and nearly explodes, as if life itself is too much to bear.
The world is harsh enough. It does not need our deliberate cruelties. Our celebration of viciousness.
His scout was returning at the gallop. Brohl Handar raised a hand to halt his troop.
The young warrior reined in with impressive grace. ‘Overseer, they are on Q’uson Tapi. They did not go round it, sir-we have them!’
Q’uson Tapi, a name that was found only on the oldest Letherii maps; the words themselves were so archaic that even their meaning was unknown. The bed of a dead inland sea or vast salt lake. Flat, not a single rise or feature spanning leagues-or so the maps indicated. ‘How far ahead is this Q’uson Tapi?’
The scout studied the sky, eyes narrowing on the sun to the west. ‘We can reach it before dusk,’ he said.
‘And the Awl?’
‘They were less than a league out from the old shoreline, Overseer. Where they go, there is no forage-the herds are doomed, as are the Awl themselves.’
‘Has the rain reached Q’uson Tapi?’
‘Not yet, but it will, and those clays will turn into slime-the great wagons will be useless against us.’
As will cavalry on both sides, I would wager.
‘Ride back to the column,’ Brohl Handar told the scout, ‘and report to the Atri-Preda. We will await her at the old shoreline.’
A Letherii salute-yes, the younger Edur had taken quickly to such things-and the scout nudged his horse into motion.
Redmask, what have you done now?
Atri-Preda Bivatt had tried, for most of the day, to convince herself that what she had seen had been conjured from an exhausted, overwrought mind, the proclivity of the eye to find shapes in nothing, all in gleeful service to a trembling imagination. With dawn’s light barely a hint in the air she had walked out, alone, to stand before a cairn-these strange constructions they now came across as they pushed ever further east. Demonic faces in white on the flatter sides of the huge boulders. Votive offerings on niches and between the roughly stacked stones.
They had pried apart one such cairn two days earlier, finding at its core… very little. A single flat stone on which rested a splintered fragment of weathered wood-seemingly accidental, but Bivatt knew differently. She could recall, long ago on the north shores, on a day of fierce seas crashing that coast, a row of war canoes, their prows dismantled-and the wood, the wood was as this, here in the centre of a cairn on the Awl’dan.
Standing before this new cairn, with dawn attempting to crawl skyward as grey sheets of rain hammered down, she had happened to glance up. And saw-a darker grey, man-shaped yet huge, twenty, thirty paces away. Solitary, motionless, watching her. The blood in her veins lost all heat and all at once the rain was as cold as those thrashing seas on the north coast years past.
A gust of wind, momentarily making the wall of water opaque, and when it had passed, the figure was gone.
Alas, the chill would not leave her, the sense of gauging, almost unhuman regard.
A ghost. A shape cast by her mind, a trick of the rain and wind and dawn’s uncertain birth. But no, he was there. Watching. The maker of the cairns.
Redmask. Myself. The Awl and the Letherii and Tiste Edur, here we duel on this plain. Assuming we are alone in this deadly game. Witnessed by naught but carrion birds, coyotes and the antelope gracing on the valley /loors that watch its pass by day after day.
But we are not alone.
The thought frightened her, in a deep, childlike way-the fear born in a mind too young to cast anything away, be it dreams, nightmares, terrors or dread of all that was for ever unknowable. She felt no different now.
There were thousands. There must have been. How, then, could they hide? How could they have hidden for so long, all this time, invisible to us, invisible to the Awl?
Unless Redmask knows. And now, working in league with the strangers from the sea, they prepare an ambush. Our annihilation.
She was right to be frightened.
There would be one more battle. Neither side had anything left for more than that. And, barring more appalling displays of murderous skill from the mage-killer, Letherii sorcery would achieve victory. Brohl Handar’s scout had returned with the stunning news that Redmask had led his people out onto Q’uson Tapi, and there would be no negation of magic on the flat floor of a dead sea. Redmask forces the issue. Once we clash on Q’uson Tapi, our fates will be decided. No more fleeing, no more ambushes-even those Kechra will have nowhere to hide.
Errant, heed me please. If you are indeed the god of the Letherii, deliver no surprises on that day. Please. Give us victory.
The column marched on, towards the ancient shore of a dead sea. Clouds were gathering on the horizon ahead. Rain was thrashing down on that salt-crusted bed of clay and silt. They would fight in a quagmire, where cavalry was useless, where no horse would be quick enough to outrun a wave of deadly magic. Where warriors and soldiers would lock weapons and die where they stood, until one side stood alone, triumphant.
Soon now, they would have done with it. Done with it all.
Since noon Redmask had driven his people hard, out onto the seabed, racing ahead of the rain-clouds. A league, then two, beneath searing sun and air growing febrile with the coming storm. He had then called a halt, but the activity did not cease, and Toc Anaster had watched, bemused at first and then in growing wonder and, finally, admiration, as the Awl warriors set down weapons, divested themselves of their armour, and joined with the elders and every other non-combatant in pulling free from the wagons the tents and every stretch of hide they could find.
And the wagons themselves were taken apart, broken down until virtually nothing remained but the huge wheels and theit axles, which were then used to transport the planks of wood. Hide and canvas were stretched out, pegged down, the stakes driven flush with the ground itself. Wooden walkways were constructed, each leading back to a single, centrally positioned wagon-bed that had been left intact and raised on legs of bundled spear-shafts to create a platform.
The canvas and hides stretched in rows, with squares behind each row, linked by flattened wicker walls that had been used for hut-frames. But no-one would sleep under cover this night. No, all that took shape here served but one purpose-the coming battle. The final battle.
Redmask intended a defence. He invited Bivatt and her army to close with him, and to do so the Letherii and the Piste Edur would need to march across open ground-Toc sat astride his horse, watching the frenzied preparations and occasionally glancing northwestward, to those closing stormclouds-open ground, then, that would be a sea of mud.
She might decide to wait. I would, if I were her. Wait until the rains had passed, until the ground hardened once again. But Toe suspected that she would not exercise such restraint. Redmask was trapped, true, but the Awl had their herds-thousands of beasts most of whom were now being slaughtered-so, Redmask could wait, his warriors well fed, whilst Bivatt and her army faced the threat of real starvation. She would need all that butchered meat, but to get to it she had to go through the Awl; she had to destroy her hated enemy.
Besides, she might be less dismayed than Redmask would think, come the day of battle. She has her mages, after all. Not as many as before, true, but still posing a significant threat-sufficient to win the day, in fact.
Redmask would have his warriors standing on those islands of dry ground. But such positions-with reserves on the squares behind them-offered no avenue of retreat. A final battle, then, the fates decided one way or the other, Was this what Redmask had planned? Hardly. Praedegar was a disaster.
Torrent rode up. No mask of paint again, a swath of red hives spanning his forehead. ‘The sea will live once more,’ he said.
‘Hardly,’ Toc replied.
‘The Letherii will drown nonetheless.’
‘Those tarps, Torrent, will not stay dry for long. And then there are the mages.’
‘Redmask has his Guardians for those cowards.’
‘Cowards?’ Toc asked, amused. ‘Because they wield sorcery instead of swords?’
‘And hide behind rows of soldiers, yes. They care nothing for glory. For honour.’
‘True: the only thing they care about is winning. Leaving them free to talk about honour and glory afterwards. The chief spoil of the victors, that privilege.’
‘You speak like one of them, Mezla. That is why I do not, trust you, and so I will remain at your side during the battle.’
‘My heart goes out to you-I am tasked with guarding the children, after all. We’ll be nowhere close to the fighting.’ Until the fighting comes to us, which it will.
‘I shall find my glory in slitting your miserable throat, Mezla, the moment you turn to run. 1 see the weakness in your soul; I have seen it all along. You are broken. You should have died with your soldiers.’
‘Probably. At least then I’d be spared the judgements of someone with barely a whisker on his spotty chin. Have you even lain with a woman yet, Torrent?’
The young warrior glowered for a moment, then slowly nodded. ‘It is said you are quick with your barbed arrows, Mezla.’
‘A metaphor, Torrent? I’m surprised at this turn to the poetic’
‘You have not listened to our songs, have you? You have made yourself deaf to the beauty of the Awl, and in your deafness you have blinded that last eye left to you. We are an ancient people, Mezla.’
‘Deaf, blind, too bad I’m not yet mute.’
‘You will be when I slit your throat.’
Well, Toc conceded, he had a point there.
Redmask had waited for this a long time. And no old man of the Renfayar with his damned secrets would stand poised to shatter everything. No, with his own hands Redmask had taken care of that, and he could still see in his mind that elder’s face, the bulging eyes, vessels bursting, the jutting tongue as the lined face turned blue, then a deathly shade of grey above his squeezing hands. That throat had been as nothing, thin as a reed, the cartilage crumpling like a papyrus scroll in his grip. And he had found himself unable to let go, long after the fool was dead.
Too many memories of his childhood had slithered into his hands, transforming his fingers into coiling serpents that seemed not satisfied with lifeless flesh in their grip, but sought that touch of cold that came long after the soul’s flight. Of course, there had been more to it than that. The elder had imagined himself Redmask’s master, his overseer to use the Letherii word, standing at the war leader’s shoulder, ever ready to draw breath and loose words that held terrible truths, truths that would destroy Redmask, would destroy any chance he had of leading the Awl to victory.
Yet now the time drew near. He would see Bivatt’s head on a spear. He would see mud and Letherii and Tiste Edur corpses in their thousands. Crows wheeling overhead, voicing delighted cries. And he would stand on the wooden platform, witness to it all. To his scaled Guardians, who had found him, had chosen him, rending mages limb from limb, scything through enemy lines-
And the face of the elder rose once more in his mind. He had revelled in that vision, at first, but now it had begun to haunt him. A face to greet his dreams; a face hinted at in every smear of stormcloud, the bruised grey and blue hues cold as iron filling the sky. He had thought himself rid of that fool and his cruel secrets, in that weighing look-like a father’s regard on a wayward son, as if nothing the child did could be good enough, could be Awl in the ways of the people as they had been and would always be.
As the work continued on all sides, Redmask mounted the platform. Cadaran whip at his belt. Rygtha axe slung from its leather straps. The weapons we were once born to, long ago. Is that not Awl enough? Am I not more Awl than any other among the Renfayar? Among the warriors gathered here? Do not look so at me, old man. You have not the right. You were never the man I have become-look at my Guardians!
Shall I tell you the tale, Father?
But no. You are dead. And I feel still your feeble neck in my hands-ah, an error. That detail belongs to the old man. Who died mysteriously in his tent. Last of the Renfayar elders, who knew, yes, knew well my father and all his kin, and the children they called their own.
Fool, why did you not let the years blur your memories? Why did you not become like any other doddering, hopeless ancient? What kept your eyes honed so sharp? But no longer, yes. Now you stare at stone and darkness. Now that sharp mind rots in its skull, and that is that.
Leave me be.
The first spatters of rain struck him and he looked up at the sky. Hard drops, bursting against his mask, this scaled armour hiding dread truth. I am immune. I cannot be touched. Tomorrow, we shall destroy the enemy.
The Guardians will see to that. They chose me, did they not? Theirs is the gift of glory, and none but me has earned such a thing.
By the lizard eyes of the K’Chain Che’Malle, I will have my victory.
The deaf drummer began his arrhythmic thunder deep within the stormclouds, and the spirits of the Awl, glaring downward to the earth, began drawing their jagged swords.