‘Olar Ethil, he is not yours to protect.’
‘Even so.’
After a moment he nodded and took it from her.
Draconus then squeezed her shoulder and began walking away.
She brushed fingers across her belly but the wound had closed once more. ‘I forgot to ask, what name did you give him?’
Draconus paused and glanced back at her. When he told her, she made a startled sound, and then began laughing.
* * *
Arathan slept fitfully, haunted by dreams of the corpses of children floating on a pool of black water. He saw ropes coming from their bellies, as if each one had been tied to something, but those ropes were severed, the ends hacked and shredded. Staring upon this scene, he felt a sudden certainty – in the way of dreams – that the spring, far beneath the surface, spilled out not water but these drowned babies, and the flow was endless.
When he walked out upon them he felt their soft bodies give under his weight, and with each step he grew somehow heavier, until, with a sound like breaking ice, he plunged through—
Only to awaken, slick with sweat, his chest aching from a breath held overlong against imaginary pressures.
He sat up to see that it was still night. His father was standing near the horses under the strange trees, and it seemed that he stared eastward – into the village or perhaps beyond it. For all Arathan knew, Draconus might be looking upon Kharkanas itself, and the Citadel, and a woman hidden in darkness seated on a throne.
Throne of Night. He settled back into his blanket and stared up at the stars overhead. Their twisted pattern made him think of fevers, when nothing was right with the world and the wrongness was terrifying – tormenting a small boy who was already filled with confused visions of icy cold water and shards of ice and who cried out for a mother who never came and never answered.
He had been that boy once. But even questions had a way of going away, eventually, when no answers were possible. He thought of the gift he would bring to the Lord of Hate, and knew it to be paltry, useless enough to be an insult. But he had nothing else to give.
Raskan believed that Olar Ethil was Arathan’s mother, but he knew that she was not. He had no reason for his certainty; still he did not question it. If anything, the witch reminded him of Malice, when she was younger and fatter – in the days when the girl first walked and was in the habit of wandering everywhere, smiling and singing since she did not yet know the meaning of the name she had been given. Something in their faces, young and old, seemed to be the same.
Bootsteps sounded and he tilted his head to find his father standing over him. After a moment Draconus sank into a crouch. He was holding in his hands a clay figurine, a thing that seemed to cry out sex, in an excess of sensuality that struck Arathan as grotesque. One of the witch’s gifts.
‘For you,’ Draconus said.
Arathan wanted to refuse it. Instead he sat up and took it from his father’s hands.
‘It will be light soon,’ Draconus went on. ‘Today I send back Rint, Feren and Raskan.’
‘Back?’
‘You and I shall ride on, Arathan.’
‘We leave them behind?’
‘They are no longer needed.’
And somewhere ahead, you will leave me behind, too. No longer needed. ‘Father,’ he said, hands clutching the figurine, ‘don’t hurt her.’
‘Hurt who?’
‘Feren,’ he whispered. And the child she carries. My child.
He could see his father’s frown, and how it slowly twisted into a scowl. It was, he realized, never too dark to see such things. ‘Don’t be foolish, Arathan.’
‘Just leave them alone, please.’
‘I would do no other,’ Draconus said in a growl. He quickly straightened. ‘Go back to sleep if you can,’ he said. ‘We have far to ride today.’
Arathan settled back on to the hard ground once more. He held the figurine like a baby against his chest. He had stood up to his father. He had made a demand even if it had sounded like a plea. A true son knew to draw lines in the sand and claim what he would for himself, for his own life and all that he deemed important in it. This was what growing up meant. Places to claim, things owned and things defended. It was a time of jostling, because the space was never big enough for the both of them, for both father and son. There was pushing and there was pulling, and comfort went away if it had ever existed; but maybe someday it would come back. If the father permitted it. If the son wanted it. If neither feared the other.
Arathan wondered if he would ever stop fearing his father, and then he wondered, as he studied the swirl of stars fading in the paling sky overhead, if there would come a time when his father began fearing him.
He thought he heard the witch whisper in his mind.
For the fire, boy. When your love is too much. Too much to bear.
For the fire.
The smooth curves of the figurine felt warm in his hands, as if promising heat.
When he closed his eyes the nightmare returned, and this time he saw a woman at the bottom of the pool, reaching into her belly and dragging free babies, one after another. She bit through the ropes and sent the babies away with a push. They thrashed until they drowned.
Along the edge of the pool now, women had gathered, reaching down to collect the limp, lifeless forms. He watched them stuff those bodies inside their bellies. And then they walked away.
But one woman remained, and the water before her was clear – no corpses in sight. She stared down into it, and he heard her singing in a soft voice. He could not understand the words, only the heartbreak in them. When she turned away and walked, he knew it was to the sea. She was going away and she was never returning to this place, and so she did not see the last boy rise up, still thrashing, fighting shards of ice, reaching for a hand that was not there.
And upon a stone, overlooking all this, sat his father. Cutting ropes. Into, Arathan surmised, manageable lengths.
* * *
Raskan woke late in the morning, the sun’s light lancing into his brain like jagged spears. Cursing his own fragility, he slowly sat up.
The two Borderswords were sprawled out in the shade of the trees. Behind them stood the horses, still tethered, but some, he realized, were missing. He wondered why, but a terrible thirst rose from within and he looked round, with sudden desperation, for a waterskin. Someone had left one within reach and he dragged it close.
As he drank, perhaps too greedily, Rint sat up and looked across at him. ‘There’s still some breakfast,’ the Bordersword said.
Raskan lowered the waterskin. ‘Where have they gone?’ he asked.
Rint shrugged.
I have shamed my lord. ‘Where have they gone?’ he demanded, pushing himself to his feet. The pain in his head redoubled and he gasped, feeling his guts churn. ‘What was I drinking last night?’
‘Mead,’ Rint replied. ‘Three flasks.’
Feren had climbed to her feet, brushing grasses and dried leaves from her clothes. ‘We’re to go back, sergeant. They went on without us. It was the Lord’s command.’
After a long moment, Raskan realized that he was staring – stupidly – at the woman. He could see the beginning of a swell on her, but that was impossible. Perhaps, he told himself, she’d always carried some extra weight. He tried to recall, but then gave up on the effort.
‘Something changed,’ Rint said to him. ‘We do not know what it was. He discharged us and orders you to return to House Dracons. That is all we know, sergeant. For most of the journey back, it seems reasonable that we should travel together, and so we waited.’
Raskan looked away, but then he nodded. I failed him. Somehow – no, do not lie to yourself, Raskan. It was that witch’s curse. It was how you broke, fled like a coward. Draconus will throw you away, just as he did Sagander. He thought then of Arathan, now riding at his father’s side, and shot another glance at Feren.
But she was carrying her saddle to her horse.
The bo
y commanded me. I remember that much at least. He showed his father’s iron, and yet, in his words to me, he was generous. Arathan, fare you well. I do not think I will see you again.
‘Clouds to the south,’ Rint said. ‘I smell the approach of rain.’ He turned to Raskan. ‘Get some food in your stomach, sergeant. If we are lucky we can ride free of the rain, and, if Mother Dark wills it, we shall meet Ville and Galak.’
Feren snorted. ‘Dear brother,’ she said, ‘she may well be a goddess now, but Mother Dark sets no eyes upon us, not here. We are not in Kurald Galain and even if we were, do you truly believe she is omniscient?’
‘Wherever there is night,’ he said, glowering.
‘If you say so,’ she replied as she led her horse out from under the trees. ‘I’ll wait for you at the spring.’
Raskan winced, and saw that Rint was now staring at his sister with an expression of dread.
‘If I see that witch,’ Feren said to her brother, one hand reaching up to the stitched gash on her cheek, ‘I’ll be sure to say hello.’ Swinging into the saddle, she loosened the sword in the scabbard belted at her side, and then set out, back towards the village.
Rint hurried over to his own saddle. ‘Wake up, sergeant – I’m not leaving her alone down there with that witch.’
‘Go, then,’ said Raskan. ‘Do not wait for me. I will find you on the other side of the village.’
‘As you will,’ he replied. ‘But she’s right in one thing – you’ll need to water your horse first.’
‘I know.’
* * *
Feren didn’t know if it was possible to kill an Azathanai, but she meant to try. She hoped the witch was wandering, as she had been the night before, since Feren had no desire to begin kicking down doors in this wretched village. She’d had enough of feeling used. The Azathanai did not understand propriety – even Grizzin Farl had pushed into her world of secrets, and if he laughed to soften the insult, an insult it remained.
She had suffered the touch of a dead Thel Akai, and now bore the scar of a witch’s curse. She had earned the right to fight back.
She knew what she was doing; she knew the value of anger, and how it could scour away other feelings. In her rage she did not have to think about the child growing within her; she did not have to think about Arathan and what she – and Draconus – had done to him. She did not have to think about the hurts she had delivered to her own brother. This was the lure of violence, and violence did not begin at the moment of physical assault; it began earlier, in all the thoughts that led up to it, in that storm of vehemence and venom. Rage beckoned violence, like those call-and-answer songs among the Deniers.
She rode through the village, through cool morning air, using the crumbled gaps in the walls as they had done the day before, and guided her mount down to the spring with its ugly statue and depthless waters. But she did not find the witch. Instead, she found Ville and Galak, watering their horses.
At the sound of her horse’s thumping hoofs as she approached, both men turned. And the smiles they gave her shattered the fury within her, and she rode out from it as if from under a cloud.
* * *
In the night just past, as Rint lay in his sleeping furs and listened to Arathan’s soft moans from the other side of the fire – and Feren’s soft weeping much closer to hand – he had thought about killing Lord Draconus. A knife to the throat would have done it, except that it seemed the man never slept. Again and again through the night Rint had opened his eyes and looked across to where the huge figure was standing, seeing only that he remained, motionless, a silhouette strangely impenetrable.
Shivering under his furs, Rint began to believe in the power of Night, in the inescapable breath of Mother Dark. Wherever the sun set, she would then rise, as if bound now to the raw truths of the universe. She had ceased being a Tiste. Even the title of goddess now seemed paltry and insufficient to evoke what she had become.
He did not understand how a mortal could make that journey, could become something other. But clearly she had done so. And Lord Draconus stood at her side and, Rint now suspected, shared something of the power his lover possessed.
The Azathanai met Draconus eye to eye, as equals, and even, on occasion, in deference. The Suzerain of Night: he had heard that title used for Draconus before, but it was not a popular one among the Tiste, who objected to its presumption, its arrogant impropriety. Well, as far as Rint was now concerned, they were all fools to denigrate Draconus’s claim to that title. Whatever it meant, it was a thing of power, brutally real and profoundly dangerous.
There was no question now in Rint’s mind that Draconus posed a threat. The highborn were right to fear the Consort and his influence in the court. They were right to want him ousted, and if not ousted, then brought down, discarded and driven away in disgrace.
Months past, Urusander’s agents had come among the Bordersword villages. They had argued their case – the need for a husband for Mother Dark, rather than a consort, and the obvious choice for that husband: Vatha Urusander, commander of the Legion. Those agents had gained little ground among the Borderswords. Their cause rode currents of conflict, and the Borderswords had lost their thirst for war. Those fierce fools had left in frustration.
Rint knew that his opinion counted for something among the loose council of his people, and he vowed that the next time such an agent visited, he would lend his support. Draconus needed to go. Even better, someone should kill the man and so end this deadly rise to power.
He had seen enough, here on this journey, to choose now to stand with Urusander. Hunn Raal and his comrades were not so blinded by personal ambition as Rint and his kin had believed. No, the next time will be different.
When Draconus announced that the contract had ended, concluded to the Lord’s satisfaction, Rint had struggled to hide his relief. Now he could take Feren away from all this: from the Lord’s cruel needs and the son’s pathetic ones. They would accompany Raskan as far as Abara Delack, because the man deserved that much – it was hardly Raskan’s fault that he served a beast.
They could now leave the lands of the Azathanai.
He rode hard to catch up to his sister, only to find his fears unfounded and, better still, that she was in good company.
* * *
‘I am not always cruel.’
Raskan spun round at the words. The saddle slipped from his hands and he staggered back. ‘No,’ he moaned. ‘Go away.’
Instead Olar Ethil drew closer. ‘Yours is an unhealthy fire,’ she said. ‘Let me douse it. Let me heal you.’
‘Please,’ he begged.
But this denial she received as an invitation. She reached out, as Raskan sank to his knees, and took his head in her hands. ‘Poisons of desire are the deadliest of all. I can cure you and so end your torment.’ She paused and then added, ‘It will give me pleasure to do so. Pleasure such as you cannot conceive. You are a man and so cannot know what it is to be sated – not in those few panting breaths following release that is all you can ever know – but the swollen bliss of a woman, ah, well, Gate Sergeant Raskan, this is what I seek and it is what I can offer you.’
The hands, pressed against the sides of his head, felt cool and soft, plump and yielding as they seemed to meld into his skin, and then the bones of his face, the fingers reaching through his temples. The heat of his thoughts vanished at their touch.
‘Open your eyes,’ she said.
He did so and found only her bared belly. It filled his vision.
‘Whence you came, Raskan.’
He stared at the scars and would have turned his head but she held him fast. He reached up to pull away her hands but found only her wrists – the rest had flowed into him, merging with the bones. In horror, he felt his fingertips track a seamless path from the skin of her wrists to his own face.
She drew him closer to her belly. ‘Worship is a strange thing,’ she said. ‘It seeks … satiation. Revelation is nothing without it. As you are fulfilled, I am filled.
As you revel in surrendering, I delight in your gift. You need no other gods than this one. I am your only goddess now, Raskan, and I invite you inside.’
He wanted to cry out but no sound came from his throat.
She pressed his face against her belly, and he felt a scar open, splitting ever wider. Blood smeared his cheeks, leaked past his lips. Choking, he sought to draw a breath. Instead, fluids filled his lungs.
He felt her push his head into her belly, and then the edges of the gash tightened round his neck. His body was thrashing, but her power over him was absolute, even as the wound began to close, cutting through his neck.
His struggles stilled. He hung limp in her grip, blood streaming down his chest.
A moment later, in a sob more felt than heard, his body fell away. Yet he remained, blind, swallowed in flesh. And in his last moments of consciousness, he touched satiation and knew it for what it was. The blessing of a goddess, and, with it, joy that filled his being.
* * *
Olar Ethil wiped her bloodied hands on her distended belly, and then stepped over the headless corpse crumpled at her feet.
She went to the nearest tree and clambered up into its branches. The strange black lichen enwreathing those branches now gathered round her, growing in answer to a muttering of power from her full, blood-tinted lips. Thoroughly hidden now, she waited for the return of the dead man’s companions. She wanted to see the pregnant woman again, and that sweet wound on her cheek.
Not always cruel, it was true. Just most of the time.
* * *
‘It was boredom that had us riding half through the night,’ Ville was saying as they rode back to find Sergeant Raskan. ‘That and finding water. Without that spring we would’ve been in trouble.’
‘The sooner we’re gone from these lands the better,’ Galak said, glancing at the stone houses they rode past. ‘I don’t mind us riding all this way only to turn round and go back again. I don’t mind it at all.’
‘The tutor?’ Rint asked.
‘Quiet the whole way,’ Galak replied. ‘Seemed happy enough to see the monks.’