People will grieve. For the dead, for the living. For the loss of innocence and for the surrender of innocence, which are two entirely different things. We will grieve, for choices made and not made, for the mistakes of the heart which can never be undone, for the severed nerve-endings of old scars and those to come.
A grey-haired man walks through the Estate District. No more detailed description is necessary. The blood on his hands is only a memory, but some memories leave stains difficult to wash away. By nature, he observes. The world, its multitude of faces, its tide-tugged swirling sea of emotions. He is a caster of nets, a trailer of hooks. He speaks in the rhythm of poetry, in the lilt of song. He understands that there are wounds in the soul that must not be touched; but there are others that warm to the caress. He understands, in other words, the necessity of the tragic theme. The soul, he knows, will, on occasion, offer no resistance to the tale that draws blood.
Prise loose those old scars. They remind one what it is to grieve. They remind one what it is to live.
A moment for mirrors, a moment for masks. The two ever conspire to play out the tale. Again and again, my friends.
Here, take my hand.
He walks to an estate. The afternoon has waned, dusk creeps closer through the day’s settling dust. Each day, there is a moment when the world has just passed by, leaving a sultry wake that hovers, suspended, not yet stirred by the awakening of night. The Tiste Edur worship this instant. The Tiste Andii are still, motionless as they wait for darkness. The Tiste Liosan have bowed their heads and turned away to grieve the sun’s passing. In the homes of humans, hearthfires are stirred awake. People draw into their places of shelter and think of the night to come.
Before one’s eyes, solidity seems poised, moments from crumbling into dissolution. Uncertainty becomes a law, rising supreme above all others. For a bard, this time is a minor key, a stretch of frailty, a pensive interlude. Sadness drifts in the air, and his thoughts are filled with endings.
Arriving at the estate, he is quickly and without comment escorted into the main house, down its central corridor and out into a high-walled garden where night flowers stream down the walls, drenched blossoms opening to drink in the gathering dusk. The masked bodyguard then leaves him, for the moment alone in the garden, and the bard stands motionless for a time, the air sweet and pungent, the sound of trickling water filling the enclosed space.
He recalls the soft songs he has sung here, unaccompanied by any instrument. Songs drawn from a hundred cultures, a dozen worlds. His voice weaving together the fragments of Shadow’s arrival, drawing together the day just past and the night eager to arrive.
There were secrets in music and poetry. Secrets few knew and even fewer understood. Their power often stole into a listener subtle as the memory of scent on a drawn breath, less than a whisper, yet capable of transforming the one so gifted, an instinctual ecstasy that made troubles vanish, that made all manner of grandeur possible – indeed, within reach.
A skilled bard, a wise bard, knew that at certain moments in the course of a cycle of day and night, the path into the soul of a listener was smooth, unobstructed, a succession of massive gates that swung open to a feather’s touch. This was the most precious secret of all. Dusk, midnight, and that strange period of sudden wakefulness known as the watch – yes, the night and its stealthy approach belonged to the heart.
Hearing a footfall behind him, he turns.
She stands, her long black hair shimmering, her face untouched by sun or wind, her eyes a perfect reflection of the violet blossoms adorning the walls. He can see through the white linen of her dress, to the outlines of her body, roundness and curves and sweeps of aesthetic perfection – those forms and lines that murmured their own secret language to awaken desires in a man’s soul.
Every sense, he knows, is a path into the heart.
Lady Envy watches him, and he is content to let her do so, as he in turn regards her.
They could discuss the Seguleh – the dead ones in the casks, the living ones serving in this estate. They could ponder all that they sensed fast approaching. He could speak of his anger, its quiet, deadly iron that was so cold it could burn at the touch – and she would see the truth of his words in his eyes. She might drift this way and that in this modest garden, brushing fingertips along trembling petals, and speak of desires so long held that she was almost insensate to the myriad roots and tendrils they had wrought through her body and soul, and he would perhaps warn her of the dangers they presented, the risk of failure that must be faced and, indeed, accepted – and she would sigh and nod and know well he spoke with wisdom.
Mocking flirtation, the jaw-dropping self-obsession, all the ways in which she amused herself when engaging with the mortals of this world, did not accompany Lady Envy to this garden. Not with this man awaiting her. Fisher kel Tath was not a young man – and there were times when she wondered if he was mortal at all, although she would never pry in search of truth – and he was not at all godlike with physical perfection. His gifts, if she could so crassly list them, would include his voice, his genius with the lyre and a dozen other obscure instruments, and the mind behind the eyes that saw all, that understood far too much of what he did see, that understood too the significance of all that remained and would ever remain hidden – yes, the mind behind the eyes and every faint hint he offered up to reveal something of that mind, its manner of observance, its stunning capacity for compassion that only blistering fools would call weakness.
No, this was one man whom she would not mock – could not, in fact.
They could have discussed many things. Instead, they stood, eyes meeting and held, and the dusk closed in with all its scents and secrets.
Storm the abyss and throw down a multitude of astounded gods! The sky cracks open from day into night, and then cracks yet again, revealing the flesh of space and the blood of time – see it rent and see it spray in glistening red droplets of dying stars! The seas boil and the earth steams and melts!
Lady Envy has found a lover.
Poetry and desire, fulminations one and the same and oh this is a secret to make thugs and brainless oafs howl at the night.
Has found a lover.
A lover.
‘I dreamt I was pregnant.’
Torvald paused inside the door and hesitated just a little too long before saying, ‘Why, that’s great!’ Tiserra shot him a quizzical look from where she stood at the table bearing her latest throw of pottery. ‘It is?’
‘Absolutely, darling. You can go through all the misery of that without its being real. I can imagine your sigh of relief when you awoke and realized it was nothing but a dream.’
‘Well, I certainly imagined yours, my love.’
He walked in and slumped down into a chair, stretching out his legs. ‘Something strange is going on,’ he said.
‘It was just a passing madness,’ she said. ‘No need for you to fret, Tor.’
‘I mean at the estate.’ He rubbed at his face. ‘The castellan spends all his time mixing up concoctions for diseases nobody has, and even if they did, his cures are liable to kill them first. The two compound guards do nothing but toss bones and that’s hardly something you’d think renegade Seguleh would do, is it? And if that’s not weird enough, Scorch and Leff are actually taking their responsibilities seriously.’
At that she snorted.
‘No, really,’ Torvald insisted. ‘And I think I know why.
They can smell it, Tis. The strangeness. The Mistress went to the Council and claimed her place and there wasn’t a whisper of complaint – or so I heard from Coll – and you’d think there’d be visitors now from various power blocs in the Council, everyone trying to buy her alliance. But . . . nothing. No one. Does that make sense?’
Tiserra was studying her husband. ‘Ignore it, Tor. All of it. Your task is simple – keep it that way.’
He glanced up at her. ‘I would, believe me. Except that all my instincts are on fire – as if some damned white-hot dagger is h
overing at my back. And not just me, but Scorch and Leff, too.’ He rose, began pacing.
‘I haven’t begun supper yet,’ Tiserra said. ‘It’ll be a while – why don’t you go to the Phoenix Inn for a tankard or two? Say hello to Kruppe if you see him.’
‘What? Oh. Good idea.’
She watched him leave, waited for a few dozen heartbeats to ensure that he’d found no reason to change his mind, and then went to one of the small trapdoors hidden in the floor, sprang the release and reached in to draw out her Deck of Dragons. She sat at the table and carefully removed the deerskin cover.
This was something she did rarely these days. She was sensitive enough to know that powerful forces were gathering in Darujhistan, making any field she attempted fraught with risk. Yet Tiserra, for all her advice to Torvald to simply ignore matters, well knew that her husband’s instincts were too sharp to be summarily dismissed.
‘Renegade Seguleh,’ she muttered, then shook her head and collected up the Deck. Her version was Barukan, with a few cards of her own added, including one for The City – in this case, Darujhistan – and another – but no, she would not think of that one. Not unless she had to.
A tremor of fear rushed through her. The wooden cards felt cold in her hands. She decided on a spiral field and was not at all surprised when she set the centre card down and saw that it was The City, a silhouetted, familiar skyline at dusk, with the glow of blue fires rising up from below, each one like a submerged star. She studied it for a time, until those fires seemed to swim before her eyes, until the dusk the card portrayed began to flow into the world around her, one bleeding into the other, back and forth until the moment was fixed, time pinned down as if by a knife stabbed into the table. She was not seeking the future – prophecy was far too dangerous with all the converging powers – but the present. This very instant, each strand’s point of attachment in the vast web that now spanned Darujhistan.
She set down the next card. High House Shadow, The Rope, Patron of Assassins. Well, that was not too surprising, given the latest rumours. Yet she sensed the relationship was more complicated than it at first appeared – yes, the Guild was active, was snarled in something far bloodier than it had anticipated. Too bad for the Guild. Still, The Rope never played one game. There were others, beneath the surface. The obvious was nothing more than a veil.
The third card clattered on to the tabletop, and she found her hand would not rest, flinging out the next card and yet another. Three tightly bound, then. Three cards, forming their own woven nest. Obelisk, Soldier of Death, and Crown. These needed a frame. She set down the sixth card and grunted. Knight of Darkness – a faint rumble of wooden wheels, a chorus of moans drifting like smoke from the sword in the Knight’s hands.
Thus, The Rope on one side, the Knight on the other. She saw that her hands were trembling. Three more cards quickly followed – another nest. King of High House Death, King in Chains, and Dessembrae, Lord of Tragedy. Knight of Darkness as the inside frame. She set down the other end and gasped. The card she wished she had never made. The Tyrant.
Closing the field. The spiral was done. City and Tyrant at beginning and end.
Tiserra had not expected anything like this. She was not seeking prophecy – her thoughts had been centred on her husband and whatever web he had found himself trapped in – no, not prophecy, nothing on such a grand scale as this . . .
I see the end of Darujhistan. Spirits save us, I see my city’s end. This, Torvald, is your nest.
‘Oh, husband,’ she murmured, ‘you are in trouble indeed . . .’
Her eyes strayed once more to The Rope. Is that you, Cotillion? Or has Vorcan returned? It’s not just the Guild – the Guild means nothing here. No, there are faces behind that veil. There are terrible deaths coming. Terrible deaths. Abruptly, she swept up the cards, as if by that gesture alone she could defy what was coming, could fling apart the strands and so free the world to find a new future. As if things could be so easy. As if choices were indeed free.
Outside, a cart clunked past, its battered wheels crackling and stepping on the uneven cobbles. The hoofs of the ox pulling it beat slow as a dirge, and there came to her the rattle of a heavy chain, slapping leather and wood.
She wrapped the deck once more and returned it to its hiding place. And then went to another, this one made by her husband – perhaps indeed he’d thought to keep it a secret from her, but such things were impossible. She knew the creak of every floorboard, after all, and had found his private pit only days after he’d dug it.
Within, items folded in blue silk – the silk of the Blue Moranth. Tor’s loot – she wondered again how he’d come by it. Even now, as she knelt above the cache, she could feel the sorcery roiling up thick as a stench, reeking of watery decay – the Warren of Ruse, no less, but then, perhaps not.
This, I think, is Elder. This magic, it comes from Mael.
But then, what connection would the Blue Moranth have with the Elder God?
She reached down and edged back the silk. A pair of sealskin gloves, glistening as if they had just come up from the depths of some ice-laden sea. Beneath them, a wateretched throwing axe, in a style she had never seen before – not Moranth, for certain. A sea-raider’s weapon, the inset patterns on the blue iron swirling like a host of whirlpools. The handle was an ivory tusk of some sort, appallingly oversized for any beast she could imagine. Carefully tucked in to either side of the weapon were cloth-wrapped grenados, thirteen in all, one of which was – she had discovered – empty of whatever chemical incendiary was trapped inside the others. An odd habit of the Moranth, but it had allowed her a chance to examine more closely the extraordinary skill involved in manufacturing such perfect porcelain globes, without risk of blowing herself and her entire home to pieces. True, she had heard that most Moranth munitions were made of clay, but not these ones, for some reason. Lacquered with a thick, mostly transparent gloss that was nevertheless faintly cerulean, these grenados were – to her eye – works of art, which made the destruction implicit in their proper use strike her as almost criminal.
Now, dear husband, why do you have these? Were they given to you, or did you – as is more likely – steal them?
If she confronted him, she knew, he would tell her the truth. But that was not something she would do. Successful marriages took as sacrosanct the possession of secrets. When so much was shared, certain other things must ever be held back. Small secrets, to be sure, but precious ones none the less.
Tiserra wondered if her husband foresaw a future need for such items. Or was this just another instance of his natural inclination to hoard, a quirk both charming and infuriating, sweet and potentially deadly (as all the best ones were).
Magic flowed in endless half-visible patterns about the porcelain globes – another detail she suspected was unusual.
Ensorcelled munitions – what were the Blue Moranth thinking?
Indeed, whatever were they thinking?
Two empty chairs faced Kruppe, a situation most peculiar and not at all pleasing. A short time earlier they had been occupied. Scorch and Leff, downing a fast tankard each before setting out to their place of employment, their nightly vigil at the gates of the mysterious estate and its mysterious lady. Oh, a troubled pair indeed, their fierce frowns denoting an uncharacteristic extreme of concentration. They’d swallowed down the bitter ale like water, the usual exchange of pleasant idiocies sadly muted. Watching them hurry out, Kruppe was reminded of two condemned men on the way to the gallows (or a wedding), proof of the profound unfairness of the world.
But fairness, while a comforting conceit, was an elusive notion, in the habit of swirling loose and wild about the vortex of the self, and should the currents of one collide with those of another, why, fairness ever revealed itself as a one-sided coin. In this fell clash could be found all manner of conflict, from vast continent-spanning wars to neighbours feuding over a crooked fence line.
But what significance these philosophical meanderings? Nary effe
ct upon the trudging ways of life, to be sure. Skip and dance on to this next scene of portentous gravity, and here arriving hooded as a vulture through the narrow portal of the Phoenix Inn, none other than Torvald Nom. Pausing just within the threshold, answering Sulty’s passing greeting with a distracted smile, and then to the bar, where Meese has already poured him a tankard. And in reaching over to collect it, Torvald’s wrist is grasped, Meese pulling him close for a few murmured words of possible import, to which Torvald grimaces and then reluctantly nods – his response sufficient for Meese to release him.
Thus sprung, Torvald Nom strode over to smiling Kruppe’s table and slumped down into one of the chairs. ‘It’s all bad,’ he said.
‘Kruppe is stunned, dear cousin of Rallick, at such miserable misery, such pessimistic pessimism. Why, scowling Torvald has so stained his world that even his underlings have been infected. Look, even here thy dark cloud crawls darkly Kruppe’s way. Gestures are necessary to ward off sour infusion!’ And he waved his hand, crimson handkerchief fluttering like a tiny flag. ‘Ah, that is much better. Be assured, Torvald, Kruppe’s friend, that “bad” is never as bad as bad might be, even when it’s very bad indeed.’
‘Rallick left a message for me. He wants to see me.’
Kruppe waggled his brows and made an effort at leaning forward, but his belly got in the way so he settled back again, momentarily perturbed at what might be an expanding girth – but then, it was in truth a question of angles, and thus a modest shift in perspective eased his repose once more, thank the gods – ‘Unquestionably Rallick seeks no more than a cheery greeting for his long lost cousin. There is, Kruppe proclaims, no need for worry.’
‘Shows what little you know,’ Torvald replied. ‘I did something terrible once. Horrible, disgusting and evil. I scarred him for life. In fact, if he does track me down, I expect he’ll kill me. Why d’you think I ran away in the first place?’
‘A span of many years,’ said Kruppe, ‘weakens every bridge, until they crumble at a touch, or if not a touch, then a frenzied sledgehammer.’