Reaper's Gale

  All of this seemed to go on for a long time.

  Until something loomed out of the darkness ahead. Blockish, heaped on one side with what seemed to be detritus – drifts of wreckage, tree branches and the like. Bruthen Trana stumbled closer, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

  A house. Enclosed by a low wall of the same black stone. Dead trees in the yard, their trunks thick, stubby, each rising from a root-heaved mound. A snaking path leading to three sagging, saddled steps and a recessed, narrow door. To either side of this entrance there were square windows, shuttered in strips of slate. To the right, forming a rounded corner, rose a squat, flat-topped tower. A small corniced window at the upper level was lit from within with a dull yellow glow, fitful, wavering.

  A house. On the floor of the ocean.

  And someone is home.

  Bruthen Trana found himself standing before the gate, his eyes on the snaking path of pavestones leading to the steps. He could see blooms of silts rising from the mounds to either side, as if the mud was seething with worms. Closer now to the house, he noted the thick green slime bearding the walls, and the prevailing current – which had heaped up rubbish against one side – had done its work on the ground there as well, uprooting one of the dead trees and sculpting out the mound until it was no more than a scatter of barnacled boulders. The tree leaned against the house with unyielding branches from which algae streamed and swirled against the backwash of the current.

  This is not what I seek. He knew that with sudden certainty. And yet . . . he glanced up once more at the tower, in time to see the light dim, as if withdrawing, then vanish.

  Bruthen Trana walked onto the path.

  The current seemed fiercer here, as if eager to push him off the trail, and some instinct told the Tiste Edur that losing his footing in this yard would be a bad thing. Hunching down, he pushed on.

  Upon reaching the steps, Bruthen Trana was buffeted by a sudden roil of the current and he looked up to see that the door had opened. And in the threshold stood a most extraordinary figure. As tall as the Tiste Edur, yet so thin as to seem emaciated. Bone-white flesh, thin and loose, a long, narrow face, seamed with a mass of wrinkles. The eyes were pale grey, surrounding vertical pupils.

  The man wore rotted, colourless silks that hid little, including the extra joints on his arms and legs, and what seemed to be a sternum horizontally hinged in the middle. The ripple of too many ribs, a set of lesser collarbones beneath the others. His hair – little more than wisps on a mottled pate – stirred like cobwebs. In one lifted hand the man held a lantern in which sat a stone that burned with golden fire.

  The voice that spoke in Bruthen Trana’s mind was strangely childlike. ‘Is this the night for spirits?’

  ‘Is it night then?’ Bruthen Trana asked.

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well,’ the figure replied with a smile, ‘neither do I. Will you join us? The house has not had a guest for a long time.’

  ‘I am not for this place,’ Bruthen Trana said, uncertain.

  ‘I think . . .’

  ‘You are correct, but the repast is timely. Besides, some current must have brought you here. It is not as if just any old spirit can find the house. You have been led here, friend.’

  ‘Why? By whom?’

  ‘The house, of course. As to why,’ the man shrugged, then stepped back and gestured. ‘Join us, please. There is wine, suitably . . . dry.’

  Bruthen Trana ascended the steps, and crossed the threshold.

  The door closed of its own accord behind him. They were in a narrow hallway, directly ahead a T-intersection.

  ‘I am Bruthen Trana, a Tiste Edur of—’

  ‘Yes, yes, indeed. The Empire of the Crippled God. Well, one of them, anyway. An Emperor in chains, a people in thrall’ – a quick glance over the shoulder as the man led him into the corridor to the right – ‘that would be you, Edur, not the Letherii, who are in thrall to a far crueller master.’

  ‘Coin.’

  ‘Well done. Yes.’

  They halted before a door set in a curved wall.

  ‘This leads to the tower,’ Bruthen Trana said. ‘Where I first saw your light.’

  ‘Indeed. It is, alas, the only room large enough to accommodate my guest. Oh,’ he stepped closer, ‘before we go in, I must warn you of some things. My guest possesses a weakness – but then, don’t we all? In any case, it has fallen to me to, uh, celebrate that weakness – now, yes, soon it will end, as all things do – but not quite yet. Thus, you must not distract my dear guest from the distraction I already provide. Do you understand me?’

  ‘Perhaps I should not enter at all, then.’

  ‘Nonsense. It is this, Bruthen Trana. You must not speak of dragons. No dragons, do you understand?’

  The Tiste Edur shrugged. ‘That topic had not even occurred to me—’

  ‘Oh, but in a way it has, and continues to do so. The spirit of Emurlahnis. Scabandari. Father Shadow. This haunts you, as it does all the Tiste Edur. The matter is delicate, you see. Very delicate, for both you and my guest. I must needs rely upon your restraint, or there will be trouble. Calamity, in fact.’

  ‘I shall do my best, sir. A moment – what is your name?’

  The man reached for the latch. ‘My name is for no-one, Bruthen Trana. Best know me by one of my many titles. The Letherii one will do. You may call me Knuckles.’

  He lifted the latch and pushed open the door.

  Within was a vast circular chamber – far too large for the modest tower’s wall that Bruthen Trana had seen from outside. Whatever ceiling existed was lost in the gloom. The stone-tiled floor was fifty or more paces across. As Knuckles stepped inside, the glow from his lantern burgeoned, driving back the shadows. Opposite them, abutting the curved wall, was a raised dais on which heaps of silks, pillows and furs were scattered; and seated at the edge of that dais, leaning forward with forearms resting on thighs, was a giant. An ogre or some such demon, bearing the same hue of skin as Knuckles yet stretched over huge muscles and a robust frame of squat bones. The hands dangling down over the knees were disproportionately oversized even for that enormous body. Long, unkempt hair hung down to frame a heavy-featured face with deep-set eyes – so deep that even the lantern’s light could spark but a glimmer in those ridge-shelved pits.

  ‘My guest,’ Knuckles murmured. ‘Kilmandaros. Most gentle, I assure you, Bruthen Trana. When . . . distracted. Come, she is eager to meet you.’

  They approached, footfalls echoing in this waterless chamber. Knuckles shifted his route slightly towards a low marble table on which sat a dusty bottle of wine. ‘Beloved,’ he called to Kilmandaros, ‘see who the house has brought to us!’

  ‘Stuff it with food and drink and send it on its way,’ the huge woman said in a growl. ‘I am on the trail of a solution, scrawny whelp of mine.’

  Bruthen Trana could now see, scattered on the tiles before Kilmandaros, a profusion of small bones, each incised in patterns on every available surface. They seemed arrayed without order, nothing more than rubbish spilled out from some bag, yet Kilmandaros was frowning down at them with savage concentration.

  ‘The solution,’ she repeated.

  ‘How exciting,’ Knuckles said, procuring from somewhere a third goblet into which he poured amber wine. ‘Double or nothing, then?’

  ‘Oh yes, why not? But you owe me the treasuries of a hundred thousand empires already, dear Setch—’

  ‘Knuckles, my love.’

  ‘Dear Knuckles.’

  ‘I am certain it is you who owes me, Mother.’

  ‘For but a moment longer,’ she replied, now rubbing those huge hands together. ‘I am so close. You were a fool to offer double or nothing.’

  ‘Ah, my weakness,’ Knuckles sighed as he walked over to Bruthen Trana with the goblet. Meeting the Tiste Edur’s eyes, Knuckles winked. ‘The grains run the river, Mother,’ he said. ‘Best hurry with your solution.’

  A
fist thundered on the dais. ‘Do not make me nervous!’

  The echoes of that impact were long in fading.

  Kilmandaros leaned still further, glowering down at the array of bones. ‘The pattern,’ she whispered, ‘yes, almost there. Almost . . .’

  ‘I feel magnanimous,’ Knuckles said, ‘and offer to still those grains . . . for a time. So that we may be true hosts to our new guest.’

  The giant woman looked up, a sudden cunning in her expression. ‘Excellent idea, Knuckles. Make it so!’

  A gesture, and the wavering light of the lantern ceased its waver. All was still in a way Bruthen Trana could not define – after all, nothing had changed. And yet his soul knew, somehow, that the grains Knuckles had spoken of were time, its passage, its unending journey. He had just, with a single gesture of one hand, stopped time.

  At least in this chamber. Surely not everywhere else. And yet . . .

  Kilmandaros leaned back with a satisfied smirk and fixed her small eyes on Bruthen Trana. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘The house anticipates.’

  ‘We are as flitting dreams to the Azath,’ Knuckles said. ‘Yet, even though we are but momentary conceits, as our sorry existence might well be defined, we have our uses.’

  ‘Some of us,’ Kilmandaros said, suddenly dismissive, ‘prove more useful than others. This Tiste Edur’ – a wave of one huge, scarred hand – ‘is of modest value by any measure.’

  ‘The Azath see what we do not, in each of us. Perhaps, Mother, in all of us.’

  A sour grunt. ‘You think this house let me go of its own will – proof of your gullibility, Knuckles. Not even the Azath could hold me for ever.’

  ‘Extraordinary,’ Knuckles said, ‘that it held you at all.’

  This exchange, Bruthen Trana realized, was an old one, following well-worn ruts between the two.

  ‘Would never have happened,’ Kilmandaros said under her breath, ‘if he’d not betrayed me—’

  ‘Ah, Mother. I have no particular love for Anomander Purake, but let us be fair here. He did not betray you. In fact, it was you who jumped him from behind—’

  ‘Anticipating his betrayal!’

  ‘Anomander does not break his word, Mother. Never has, never will.’

  ‘Tell that to Osserc—’

  ‘Also in the habit of “anticipating” Anomander’s imminent betrayal.’

  ‘What of Draconus?’

  ‘What of him, Mother?’

  Kilmandaros rumbled something then, too low for Bruthen Trana to catch.

  Knuckles said, ‘Our Tiste Edur guest seeks the place of Names.’

  Bruthen Trana started. Yes! It was true – a truth he had not even known before just this moment, before Knuckle’s quiet words. The place of Names. The Names of the Gods.

  ‘There will be trouble, then,’ Kilmandaros said, shifting in agitation, her gaze drawn again and again to the scatter of bones. ‘He must remember this house, then. The path – every step – he must remember, or he will wander lost for all time. And with him, just as lost as they have ever been, the names of every forgotten god.’

  ‘His spirit is strong,’ Knuckles said, then faced Bruthen Trana and smiled. ‘Your spirit is strong. Forgive me – we often forget entirely the outside world, even when, on rare occasions such as this one, that world intrudes.’

  The Tiste Edur shrugged. His head was spinning. The place of Names. ‘What will I find there?’ he asked.

  ‘He forgets already,’ Kilmandaros muttered.

  ‘The path,’ Knuckles answered. ‘More than that, actually. But when all is done – for you, in that place – you must recall the path, Bruthen Trana, and you must walk it without a sliver of doubt.’

  ‘But, Knuckles, all my life, I have walked no path without a sliver of doubt – more than a sliver, in fact—’

  ‘Surprising,’ Kilmandaros cut in, ‘for a child of Scabandari—’

  ‘I must begin the grains again,’ Knuckles suddenly announced. ‘Into the river – the pattern, Mother, it calls to you once more.’

  She swore in some unknown language, bent to scowl down at the bones. ‘I was there,’ she muttered. ‘Almost there – so close, so—’

  A faint chime echoed in the chamber.

  Her fist thundered again on the dais, and this time the echoes seemed unending.

  At a modest signal from Knuckles, Bruthen Trana drained the fine wine and set the goblet down on the marble tabletop.

  It was time to leave.

  Knuckles led Bruthen Trana back into the corridor. A final glance back into that airy chamber and the Tiste Edur saw Kilmandaros, hands on knees, staring directly at him with those faintly glittering eyes, like two lone, dying stars in the firmament. Chilled to the depths of his heart, Bruthen Trana pulled his gaze away and followed the son of Kilmandaros back to the front door.

  At the threshold, he paused for a moment to search Knuckles’s face. ‘The game you play with her – tell me, does such a pattern exist?’

  Brows arched. ‘In the casting of bones? Damned if I know.’ A sudden smile, then. ‘Our kind, ah, but we love patterns.’

  ‘Even if they don’t exist?’

  ‘Don’t they?’ The smile grew mischievous. ‘Go, Bruthen Trana, and mind the path. Always mind the path.’

  The Tiste Edur walked down onto the pavestones. ‘I would,’ he muttered, ‘could I find it.’

  Forty paces from the house, he turned to look upon it, and saw nothing but swirling currents, spinning silts in funnels.

  Gone. As if I had imagined the entire thing.

  But I was warned, wasn’t I? Something about a path.

  ‘Remember . . .’

  Lost. Again. Memories tugged free, snatched away by the ferocious winds of water.

  He swung round again and set off, staggering, step by step, towards something he could not dredge up from his mind, could not even imagine. Was this where life ended? In some hopeless quest, some eternal search for a lost dream?

  Remember the path. Oh, Father Shadow, remember . . . something. Anything.

  * * *

  Where the huge chunks of ice had been, there were now stands of young trees. Alder, aspen, dogwood, forming a tangled fringe surrounding the dead Meckros City. Beyond the trees were the grasses of the plains, among them deep-rooted bluestems and red-lipped poppies that cloaked the burial mounds where resided the bones of thousands of people.

  The wreckage of buildings still stood here and there on their massive pylons of wood, while others had tilted, then toppled, spilling out their contents onto canted streets. Weeds and shrubs now grew everywhere, dotting the enormous, sprawling ruin, and among the broken bones of buildings lay a scatter of flowers, a profusion of colours on all sides.

  He stood, balanced on a fallen pillar of dusty marble allowing him a view of the vista, the city stretching to his left, the ragged edge and green-leafed trees with the mounds beyond on his right. His eyes, a fiery amber, were fixed on something on the far horizon directly ahead. His broad mouth held its habitual downturn at the corners, an expression that seemed ever at war with the blazing joy within his eyes. His mother’s eyes, it was said. But somehow less fierce and this, perhaps, was born of his father’s uneasy gift – a mouth that did not expect to smile, ever.

  His second father, his true father. The thread of blood. The one who had visited in his seventh week of life. Yes, while it had been a man named Araq Elalle who had raised him, whilst he lived in the Meckros City, it had been the other – the stranger in the company of a yellow-haired bonecaster – who had given his seed to Menandore, Rud Elalle’s mother. His Imass minders had not been blind to such truths, and oh how Menandore had railed at them afterwards.

  ‘I took all that I needed from Udinaas! And left him a husk and nothing more. He can never sire another child – a husk! A useless mortal – forget him, my son. He is nothing.’ And from the terrible demand in her blazing eyes, her son had recoiled.

  Rud Elalle was tall now, half a hand taller than even his m
other. His hair, long and wild in the fashion of the Bentract Imass warriors, was a sun-bleached brown. He wore a cloak of ranag hide, deep brown and amber-tipped the fur. Beneath that was a supple leather shirt of deerskin. His leggings were of thicker, tougher allish hide. On his feet were ranag leather moccasins that reached to just below his knees.

  A scar ran down the right side of his neck, gift of a boar’s dying lunge. The bones of his left wrist had been broken and were now misaligned, the places of the breaks knotted protrusions bound in thick sinews, but the arm had not been weakened by this; indeed, it was now stronger than its opposite. Menandore’s gift, that strange response to any injury, as if his body sought to armour itself against any chance of the same injury’s recurring. There had been other breaks, other wounds – life among the Imass was hard, and though they would have protected him from its rigour, he would not permit that. He was among the Bentract, he was of the Bentract. Here, with these wondrous people, he had found love and fellowship. He would live as they lived, for as long as he could.

  Yet, alas, he felt now . . . that time was coming to an end. His eyes remained fixed on that distant horizon, even as he sensed her arrival, now at his side. ‘Mother,’ he said.

  ‘Imass,’ she said. ‘Speak our own language, my son. Speak the language of dragons.’

  Faint distaste soured Rud Elalle. ‘We are not Eleint, Mother. That blood is stolen. Impure—’

  ‘We are no less children of Starvald Demelain. I do not know who has filled your mind with these doubts. But they are weaknesses, and now is not the time.’

  ‘Now is not the time,’ he repeated.

  She snorted. ‘My sisters.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They want me. They want him. Yet, in both schemes, they have not counted you a threat, my son. Oh, they know you are grown now. They know the power within you. But they know nothing of your will.’

  ‘Nor, Mother, do you.’

  He heard her catch her breath, was inwardly amused at the suddenly crowded silence that followed.

  He nodded to the far horizon. ‘Do you see them, Mother?’