Hedge studied the forested hills. ‘There are Imass in there.’
‘I believe that is so.’
‘Do you intend to seek them out, Emroth?’
‘Yes. I must.’
‘And what of your new god?’
‘If you would destroy me, do it now, Ghost.’ With that she turned and began walking towards the Refugium.
Hedge stood, shifted the cusser to his right hand, and gauged distance. The Crippled God would welcome more allies, wouldn’t he just? You go, Emroth, to meet this timeless kin. With your words marshalled to sway them, to offer them a new faith. Your kin. Could be thousands of them. Tens of thousands.
But they’re not what you came for.
Like me, Emroth, you’re heading for the gate. Starvald Demelain. Where anything is possible.
Including the destruction of the warrens.
It’s the blood, you see. The blood of dragons. Outside and inside. Dead and living. Aye, amazing the things you figure out once you’re dead. But not dead. Aye, it’s all about the will.
The cusser returned to his left hand.
Arm angled back. Then swung forward. He watched the cusser’s arc for the briefest of moments, then, as habit demanded, he pitched sideways, onto the ground—
Even as it lurched up to meet him, a stone cracking hard against his chin. The concussion had of course deafened him, and he stared about, spitting blood from his tooth-sliced tongue. His left arm was gone, as was most of his left hip and thigh. Snow and dust drifting down, sparkling in the sunlight. Pebbles and clods of frozen earth now landing all around him, bouncing, skittering. The snow in the air, sparkling like magic.
He spat more blood, felt his chin with his one remaining hand and found a deep gash there, studded with gravel. He scowled, dismissed these absurd details. No more blood, a tongue whole and ever eager to wag. Smooth chin, unmarred by any gash – well, more or less smooth, under all that stubble. New left leg, hip, arm. Aye, that’s better.
The sapper climbed to his feet.
The crater was appropriately large, suitably deep, reaching down past the skin of ice and snow to the ground underneath, that now steamed sodden and glistening. Pieces of Emroth here and there. Not many. Cussers were like that, after all.
‘Aye,’ Hedge muttered, ‘Fid’s the sentimental one.’
Thirty, then thirty-five paces on, reaching the first sward of riotous grass, the sapper came upon one more fragment of Emroth’s body. And he halted. Stared down for some time. Then slowly turned and studied the way he had come, the borderline between ice and earth.
Farl ved ten ara. Refugium indeed. ‘Shit,’ he muttered. Worse yet, she’d told him. A place without the Ritual itself.
After a long moment, Hedge turned back to the forest ahead. He stepped over the torn, severed left leg lying bleeding in the grass. Flesh and blood, aye. A woman’s leg. Damned shapely at that.
‘Shit,’ he said again, hurrying on. ‘Fid’s the soft-hearted one, that he is. Fiddler. Not me. Not me.’ Wiping at his cheeks, cursing the ghost tears on his ghost face, and alone once more in this insipid, uninspiring realm of the dead, the Bridgeburner went on. Undead for a few hundred thousand years. Broken, Fallen, then resurrected, enough to walk once more. And, finally, thirty or so paces from a return to life . . .
A grim lesson about keeping the wrong company.
Seeking the forest. Beneath the thick branches at last, the heavy fluttering of a new season’s painfully green leaves. Spin and whirl of insects, the chitter of birds. Into the forest, aye, beyond the sight of that severed limb, the borderland, the steaming crater.
Shit!
‘Damned soft of you, Fid. But we’re at war, like I keep telling you. We’re at war. And I don’t care if it’s a damned Jaghut Bridge of Death, it’s still a bridge, and you know what we do to bridges, don’t you?’
Refugium.
But no refuge for me.
The emlava kittens were heavy as cattle dogs but shorter of leg and nowhere near as energetic. All they wanted to do was sleep. And feed. For the first few days, carrying them invited deadly fits of lashing talons and terrifying lunges with jaws opened wide. Unmindful of macabre irony, Onrack used their mother’s skinned hide to fashion a sack. Ends affixed to a cut sapling, the Imass and either Quick Ben or Trull would then carry between them the two hissing, thrashing creatures in their ghastly bag.
The ay never came close again.
A male and a female, their grey fur not yet banded and the pale hue of ashes rather than the dark iron of their mother. In the cave there had been a third one, dead a week or more. From the condition of its body, its siblings had decided on eliminating it. So fared the weak in this and every other world.
Trull’s sense of wonder was reawakened every time he glanced across at Onrack. A friend in the flesh was truly a revelation. He had imagined himself long past such profound, prolonged astonishment. The day he had been Shorn by his brother, it had seemed to him that his heart had died. Chained to stone, awaiting the cold water and the rot that it promised, the muscle that forged the tides of his blood seemed to beat on in some kind of waning inertia.
The desiccated corpse that was Onrack, walking up to where he had been bound, had even then seemed an unlikely salvation.
Trull recalled he’d had to argue with the T’lan Imass to win his own release. The thought amused him still. Creaking sinew and cabled muscle and torque-twisted bone, Onrack had been the personification of indifference. As unmindful of life and its struggle to persist as only a lifeless thing could be.
And so Trull had simply tagged along, unwilling to admit to himself the burgeoning truth of his salvation – his reluctant return to life in the company of an undead warrior who had begun to discover his own life, the memories once thought surrendered, to time and cruel ritual, to wilful denial spanning tens of thousands of years.
What had bound them together? What improbable menagerie of terse conversations, unanticipated emotions and the shared extremity of combat had so thoroughly entwined them together, now as brothers yet more a brother than any of those with whom Trull Sengar shared blood? We stood side by side, together facing certain defeat. Only to find blessing in the timid hand of a creature not even half human. Oh, I know her well, that one.
Yet she is a secret I find I cannot share with Onrack, with my friend. Now, if only he was as coy, as guarded. Not this . . . this open regard, this casting away of every natural, reasonable defence. This childness – by the Sisters, Trull, at least find yourself a word that exists. But he seems so young! Not of age, but of cast. A species of unmitigated innocence – is such a thing even possible?
Well, he might know the answer to that soon enough. They had found signs as they trekked this youthful world. Camps, hearthstones lining firepits. Places where stone tools had been made, a flat boulder where an Imass had sat, striking flakes from flint, leaving behind a half-circle scatter of splinters. Refuse pits, filled with bones charred white or boiled to extract the fat, leaving them crumbly and light as pumice; scorched shell fragments from the gourds used to heat the bones in water; and the shattered rocks that had been plunged hot into that water to bring it to a boil. Signs of passing this way, some only a few weeks old, by Onrack’s estimations.
Did those Imass know that strangers had come among them? To this even Onrack had no answer. His kind were shy, he explained, and cunning. They might watch from hiding places for days, nights, and only when they so chose would they reveal enough to touch Onrack’s senses, his animal awareness with its instinctive whispering. Eyes are upon us, friends. It is time.
Trull waited for those words.
The emlava kits yowled, announcing their hunger.
Trull, who had taken point whilst Onrack and the wizard carried the beasts in their sack, halted and turned about.
Time for feeding. Else not a single moment of peace.
Groaning, Quick Ben set down his end of the sling-pole, watched bemusedly as the two kits spat and clawed thei
r way free of the skin, hissing at each other then at Onrack, who began withdrawing leaf-wrapped hunks of raw antelope. The meat was foul, but clearly this was no deterrent for the emlava cubs as they lunged towards him.
The Imass flung the meat onto the ground to spare his own hands, and then stepped away with an odd smile on his face.
Too many odd smiles these days, the wizard thought. As if the blinding wonder and joy had begun to dim – not much, only a fraction, yet Quick Ben believed it was there, a hint of dismay. He was not surprised. No-one could sustain such pure pleasure indefinitely. And, for all this seeming paradise – at least a paradise by Imass standards – there remained something vaguely unreal about it. As if it was no more than an illusion, already begun to fray at the edges.
No real evidence of that, however. The wizard could feel the health of this place. It was strong, and, he now suspected, it was growing. As Omtose Phellack waned on all sides. The end of an age, then. An age that had ended everywhere else long, long ago. But isn’t Tellann itself dead everywhere else? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s just changed, grown into itself. Maybe, everywhere else, what we’re seeing – what we’re living in – is Tellann ascendant, victor in the war of millennia past, dominant and secure in its maturity. Is that possible?
Yet that did not mesh with Onrack, with how he had been and how he was now. Unless . . . gods below, unlike everywhere else, this is one fragment of Tellann that lies, somehow, beyond the Ritual. That is why he is flesh and blood here. In this place, there was no Ritual of Tellann, no severing of Imass souls. Suggesting that the Imass living here know nothing about it.
So what would happen if Logros led his thousands here? If Kron— But no, Silverfox wouldn’t permit that. She needed them for something else. For another war.
It’d be nice to know how this fragment related to the one created for the Wolves at the end of the Pannion War. From what Quick Ben had understood, that Beast Hold, or whatever it had been called, had been seeded with the souls of T’lan Imass. Or at least the memories of those souls – could be that’s all a soul really is: the bound, snarled mass of memories from one life. Huh. Might explain why mine is such a mess. Too many lives, too many disparate strands all now tangled together . . .
Trull Sengar had set off in search of water – springs bubbled up from bedrock almost everywhere, as if even the stone itself was saturated with glacial melt.
Onrack eyed the cats for another moment then turned to Quick Ben. ‘There is a sweep of ice beyond these hills,’ he said. ‘I can smell its rot – an ancient road, once travelled by Jaghut. Fleeing slaughter. This intrusion, wizard, troubles me.’
‘Why? Presumably that battle occurred thousands of years ago and the Jaghut are all dead.’
‘Yes. Still, that road reminds me of . . . things. Awakens memories . . .’
Quick Ben slowly nodded. ‘Like shadows, aye.’
‘Just so.’
‘You had to know it couldn’t last.’
The Imass frowned, the expression accentuating his strangely unhuman, robust features. ‘Yes, perhaps I did, deep within me. I had . . . forgotten.’
‘You’re too damned hard on yourself, Onrack. You don’t need to keep yourself shining so bright all the time.’
Onrack’s smile held sadness. ‘I gift my friend,’ he said quietly, ‘for all the gifts he has given me.’
Quick Ben studied the warrior’s face. ‘The gift loses its value, Onrack, if it goes on too long. It begins to exhaust us, all of us.’
‘Yes, I see that now.’
‘Besides,’ the wizard added, watching the two emlava, their bellies full, now mock-fighting on the blood-smeared grass, ‘showing your fallible side is another kind of gift. The kind that invites empathy instead of just awe. If that makes any sense.’
‘It does.’
‘You’ve been making lots of paints, haven’t you?’
A sudden smile. ‘You are clever. When I find a wall of stone that speaks . . . yes, a different kind of gift. My forbidden talents.’
‘Forbidden? Why?’
‘It is taboo among my people to render our own forms in likeness to truth. Too much is captured, too much is trapped in time. Hearts can break, and betrayals breed like vermin.’
Quick Ben glanced up at Onrack, then away. Hearts can break. Aye, the soul can haunt, can’t it just.
Trull Sengar returned, waterskins sloshing. ‘By the Sisters,’ he said to Onrack, ‘is that a frown you’re wearing?’
‘It is, friend. Do you wish to know why?’
‘Not at all. It’s just, uh, well, a damned relief, to be honest.’
Onrack reached down and snagged one of the cubs, lifting it by the scruff of its neck. The beast hissed in outrage, writhing as he held it up. ‘Trull Sengar, you may explain to our friend why Imass are forbidden to paint likenesses of themselves. You may also tell him my story, so that he understands, and need not ask again why I am awakened to pain within me, recalling now, as I do, that mortal flesh is only made real when fed by the breath of love.’
Quick Ben studied Onrack with narrowed eyes. I don’t recall asking anything like that. Well, not out loud, anyway.
Trull Sengar’s relieved expression fell away and he sighed, but it was a loose sigh, the kind that marked the unbinding of long-held tensions. ‘I shall. Thank you, Onrack. Some secrets prove a heavy burden. And when I am done revealing to Quick Ben one of the details of your life that has served to forge our friendship, I will then tell you both of my own secret. I will tell you of the Eres’al and what she did to me, long before she appeared to us all in the cavern.’
A moment of long silence.
Then Quick Ben snorted. ‘Fine. And I’ll tell a tale of twelve souls. And a promise I made to a man named Whiskeyjack – a promise that has brought me all this way, with farther still to go. And then, I suppose, we shall all truly know each other.’
‘It is,’ Onrack said, collecting the second cub so he could hold both beasts up side by side, ‘a day for gifts.’
From beyond the hills there came the sound of thunder.
That faded, and did not repeat.
The emlava were suddenly quiet.
‘What was that?’ Trull Sengar asked.
Quick Ben could feel his heart pound in his chest. ‘That, friends, was a cusser.’
Fiddler made his way across the dirt floor of the barn to where Bottle slept. He stared down at the young soldier curled up beneath a dark grey blanket. Poor bastard. He nudged with his foot and Bottle groaned. ‘Sun’s set,’ Fiddler said.
‘I know, Sergeant. I watched it going down.’
‘We’ve rigged a stretcher. Just get up and eat something and then you’ve got a mobile bed for the rest of the night.’
‘Unless you need me.’
‘Unless we need you, aye.’
Bottle sat up, rubbed at his face. ‘Thanks, Sergeant. I don’t need the whole night – half will do.’
‘You take what I give you, soldier. Cut it short and we could all end up regretting it.’
‘All right, fine, make me feel guilty, then. See if I care.’
Smiling, Fiddler turned away. The rest of the squad was readying the gear, a few muted words drifting between the soldiers. Gesler and his crew were in the abandoned farmhouse – no point in crowding up all in one place. Poor tactics anyway.
There had been no pursuit. The drum had done its work. But that was four cussers lost, to add to the others they’d already used. Down to two left and that was bad news. If another enemy column found them . . . we’re dead or worse.
Well, marines weren’t supposed to have it easy. Good enough that they were still alive.
Cuttle approached. ‘Tarr says we’re ready, Fid.’ He glanced over at Bottle. ‘I got the sorry end of the stretcher to start, soldier. You better not have gas.’
Bottle, a mouthful of nuts and lard bulging his cheeks, simply stared up at the sapper.
‘Gods below,’ Cuttle said, ‘you’re eating one of
those Khundryl cakes, ain’t ya? Well, Fid, if we need us a torch to light the way—’
‘Permission denied, Cuttle.’
‘Aye, probably right. It’d light up half the night sky. Hood’s breath, why do I always get the short twig?’
‘So long as you face off against Corabb on that kind of thing,’ Fiddler said, ‘short’s your middle name.’
Cuttle edged closer to Fiddler and said in a low voice, ‘That big bang yesterday’s gonna draw down a damned army—’
‘Assuming they’ve fielded one. So far, we’re running into companies, battalion elements – as if an army’s dispersed, which is more or less what we expected them to do. No point in maintaining a single force when your enemy’s scattered right across Hood’s pimply backside. If they were smart they’d draw up reserves and saturate the region, leave us not a single deer trail to slink along.’
‘So far,’ Cuttle said, squinting through the gloom at the rest of the squad and massaging his roughly healed shoulder, ‘they ain’t been very smart.’
‘Moranth munitions are new to them,’ Fiddler pointed out. ‘So’s our brand of magic. Whoever’s in command here is probably still reeling, still trying to guess our plans.’
‘My guess is whoever was in command, Fid, is now Rannalled in tree branches.’
Fiddler shrugged, then lifted his pack onto his shoulders and collected his crossbow.
Corporal Tarr checked his gear one last time, then straightened. He drew his left arm through the shield straps, adjusted his sword belt, then tightened the strap of his helm.
‘Most people just carry their shields on their backs,’ Koryk said from where he stood by the barn’s entrance.
‘Not me,’ said Tarr. ‘Get ambushed and there’s no time to ready, is there? So I stay readied.’ He then rolled his shoulders to settle his scaled hauberk, a most familiar, satisfying rustle and clack of iron. He felt unsteady on his feet without that solid, anchoring weight. He had quick-release clasps for his pack of equipment, could drop all that behind him one-handed even as he stepped forward and drew his sword. At least one of them in this squad had to be first to the front, after all, to give them time to bring whatever they had to bear.