****
Seren Pedac staggered out into the street. Pushed, spun round, knocked to her knees by fleeing figures.
She had woken in a dark cellar, surrounded by empty, broken kegs. She had been robbed, most of her armour stripped away. Sword and knife gone. The ache between her legs told her that worse had happened. Lips puffed and cut by kisses she had never felt, her hair tangled and matted with blood, she crawled across greasy cobbles to curl up against a stained brick wall. Stared out numbly on the panicked scene.
Smoke had stolen the sky. Brown, murky light, the distant sound of battle – at the harbour front to her left, and along the north and east walls ahead and to her right. In the street before her, citizens raced in seemingly random directions. Across from her, two men were locked in mortal combat, and she watched as one managed to pin the other, then began pounding the man’s head against the cobbles. The hard impacts gave way to soft crunches, and the victor rolled away from the spasming victim, scrambled upright, then limped away.
Doors were being kicked down. Women screamed as their hiding places were discovered.
There were no Tiste Edur in sight.
From her right, three men shambling like marauders. One carried a bloodstained club, another a single-handed sickle. The third man was dragging a dead or unconscious girl-child by one foot.
They saw her. The one with the club smiled. ‘We was coming to c’llect you, Acquitor. Woke up wanting more, did ya?’
She did not recognize any of them, but there was terrible familiarity in their eyes as they looked upon her.
‘The city’s fallen,’ the man continued, drawing closer. ‘But we got a way out, an’ we’re taking you with us.’
The one with the sickle laughed. ‘We’ve decided to keep you to ourselves, lass. Don’t worry, we’ll keep you safe.’
Seren curled tighter against the wall.
‘Hold there!’
A new voice. The three men looked up.
Iron-haired, blue-eyed – she recognized the newcomer. Maybe. She wasn’t sure. She’d never seen armour like that before: she would have remembered the blood-red surcoat. A plain sword at the stranger’s left hip, which he was not reaching towards.
‘It’s that foreign bastard,’ the man with the club said. ‘Find your own.’
‘I just have,’ he replied. ‘Been looking for her the last two days—’
‘She’s ours,’ said the sickle-wielder.
‘No closer,’ the third man growled, raising the child in one hand as if he meant to use the body for a weapon.
Which, Seren now saw, he had done already. Oh, please be dead, child. Please have been dead all along…
‘You know us, foreigner,’ the man with the club said.
‘Oh yes, you’re the terrors of the shanty town. I’ve heard all about your exploits. Which puts me at an advantage.’
‘How so?’
The stranger continued walking closer. She saw something in his eyes, as he said, ‘Because you haven’t heard a thing about mine.’
Club swung. Sickle flashed. Body whipped through the air.
And the girl-child was caught by the stranger, who then reached one hand over, palm up, and seemed to push his fingertips under the man’s chin.
She didn’t understand.
The man with the club was on the ground. The other had his own sickle sticking from his chest and he stood staring down at it. Then he toppled.
A snap. Flood and spray of blood.
The stranger stepped back, tucking the girl-child’s body under his right arm, the hand of his left holding, like a leather-wrapped handle from a pail, the third man’s lower jaw.
Horrible grunting sounds from the staggering figure to her right. Bulging eyes, a spattered gust of breath.
The stranger tossed the mandible away with its attendant lower palate and tongue. He set the child down, then stepped closer to the last man. ‘I don’t like what you did. I don’t like anything you’ve done, but most of all, I don’t like what you did to this woman here, and that child. So, I am going to make you hurt. A lot.’
The man spun as if to flee. Then he slammed onto the cobbles, landing on his chest, his feet taken out from under him – but Seren didn’t see how it had happened.
With serene patience, the stranger crouched over him. Two blurred punches to either side of the man’s spine, almost at neck level, and she heard breastbones snap. Blood was pooling around the man’s head.
The stranger shifted to reach down between the man’s legs.
‘Stop.’
He looked over, brows lifting.
‘Stop. Kill him. Clean. Kill him clean, Iron Bars.’
‘Are you sure?’
From the buildings opposite, faces framed by windows. Eyes fixed, staring down.
‘Enough,’ she said, the word a croak.
‘All right.’
He leaned back. One punch to the back of the man’s head. It folded inward. And all was still.
Iron Bars straightened. ‘All right?’
All right, yes.
The Crimson Guardsman came closer. ‘My fault,’ he said. ‘I had to sleep, thought you’d be safe for a bit. I was wrong. I’m sorry.’
‘The child?’
A pained look. ‘Run down by horses, I think. Some time past.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘Trate’s falling. The Edur fleet held off. Until Nekal Bara and Arahathan were finished. Then closed. The defences were swarmed by shadow wraiths. Then the warriors landed. It was bad, Acquitor.’ He glanced over a shoulder, said, ‘At about that time, an army came down from inland. Swept the undermanned fortifications and, not a hundred heartbeats ago, finally succeeded in knocking down the North Gate. The Edur are taking their time, killing every soldier they find. No quarter. So far, they’ve not touched non-combatants. But that’s no guarantee of anything, is it?’
He helped her to stand, and she flinched at the touch of his hands – those weapons, stained with murder.
If he noticed he gave nothing away. ‘My Blade’s waiting. Corlo’s managed to find a warren in this damned Hood-pit – first time in the two years we been stuck here. What the Edur brought, he says. That’s why.’
She realized they were walking now. Taking winding alleys and avoiding the main thoroughfares. The sound of slaughter was on all sides. Iron Bars suddenly hesitated, cocked his head. ‘Damn, we’ve been cut off.’
****
Dragged into the slaughter. Bemused witness to the killing of hapless, disorganized soldiers. Wondering if the moneylenders would be next. Udinaas was left staggering in the wake of the emperor of the Tiste Edur and twelve frenzied warriors as they waded through flesh, cutting lives down as if clearing a path through reeds.
Rhulad was displaying skill that did not belong to him. His arms were a blur, his every move heedless and fearless. And he was gibbering, the manic sound punctuated every now and then by a scream that was as much terror as it was rage. Not a warrior triumphant. Neither berserk nor swathed in drenched glory. A killer… killing.
An Edur warrior near him fell to a Letherii soldier’s desperate sword-thrust, and the emperor shrieked, lunged forward. The mottled sword swung, and blood splashed like water. His laughter pulled at his breath, making him gasp. Edur faces flashed furtively towards their savage ruler.
Down the street, carving through a rearguard of some sort. Udinaas stumbled over corpses, writhing, weeping figures. Blind with dying, men called for their mothers, and to these the slave reached down and touched a shoulder, or laid fingertips to slick foreheads, and murmured, ‘I’m here, my boy. It’s all right. You can go now.’
The apologetic priest, chain-snapped forward step by step, whispering hollow blessings, soft lies, forgiving even as he prayed for someone – something – to forgive him in turn. But no-one touched him, no fingertips brushed his brow.
For the burned villages. Retribution. Where were the moneylenders? This war belonged to them, after all.
Another hundred paces. Three more Edur were down. Rhulad and eight brethren. Fighting on. Where was the rest of the army?
Somewhere else.
If one could always choose the right questions, then every answer could be as obvious. A clever revelation, he was on to something here…
Another Edur screamed, skidded and fell over, face smacking the street.
Rhulad killed two more soldiers, and suddenly no-one stood in their path.
Halting in strange consternation, trapped in the centre of an intersection, drifts of smoke sliding past.
From the right, a sudden arrival.
Two Edur reeled back, mortally wounded.
The attacker reached out with his left hand, and a third Edur warrior’s head snapped round with a loud crack.
Clash of blades, more blood, another Edur toppling, then the attacker was through and wheeling about.
Rhulad leapt to meet him. Swords – one heavy and mottled, the other modest, plain – collided, and somehow were bound together with a twist and pronation of the stranger’s wrist, whilst his free hand blurred out and over the weapons, palm connecting with Rhulad’s forehead.
Breaking the emperor’s neck with a loud snap.
Mottled sword slid down the attacker’s blade and he was already stepping past, his weapon’s point already sliding out from the chest of another Edur.
Another heartbeat, and the last two Tiste Edur warriors were down, their bodies eagerly dispensing blood like payment onto the cobbles.
The stranger looked about, saw Udinaas, nodded, then waved to an alley-mouth, from which a woman emerged.
She took a half-dozen strides before Udinaas recognized her.
Badly used.
But no more of that. Not while this man lives.
Seren Pedac took no notice of him, nor of the dead Edur. The stranger grasped her hand.
Udinaas watched them head off down the street, disappear round a corner.
Somewhere behind him, the shouts of Edur warriors, the sound of running feet.
The slave found he was standing beside Rhulad’s body, staring down at it, the bizarre angle of the head on its twisted neck, the hands closed tight about the sword.
Waiting for the mouth to open with mad laughter.
****
‘Damned strangest armour I’ve ever seen.’
Seren blinked. ‘What?’
‘But he was good, with that sword. Fast. In another five years he’d have had the experience to have made him deadly. Enough to give anyone trouble. Shimmer, Blues, maybe even Skinner. But that armour! A damned fortune, right there for the taking. If we’d the time.’
‘What?’
‘That Tiste Edur, lass.’
‘Tiste Edur?’
‘Never mind. There they are.’
Ahead, crouched at the dead end of an alley, six figures. Two women, four men. All in crimson surcoats. Weapons out. Blood on the blades. One, more lightly armoured than the others and holding what looked to be some sort of diadem in his left hand, stepped forward.
And said something in a language Seren had never heard before.
Iron Bars replied in an impatient growl. He drew Seren closer as the man who’d spoken began gesturing. The air seemed to shimmer all round them.
‘Corlo’s opening the warren, lass. We’re going through, and if we’re lucky we won’t run into anything in there. No telling how far we can get. Far enough, I hope.’
‘Where?’ she asked. ‘Where are we going?’
A murky wall of blackness yawned where the alley’s blank wall had been.
‘Letheras, Acquitor. We got a ship awaiting us, remember?’
Strangest armour I’ve ever seen.
A damned fortune.
‘Is he dead?’
‘Who?’
‘Is he dead? Did you kill him? That Tiste Edur!’
‘No choice, lass. He was slowing us up and more were coming.’
Oh, no.
****
Vomit spilling out onto the sand.
At least, Withal mused, the shrieks had stopped. He waited, seated on grass just above the beach, while the young Edur, on his hands and knees, head hanging down, shuddered and convulsed, coughed and spat.
Off to one side, two of the Nachts, Rind and Pule, were fighting over a piece of driftwood that was falling apart with their efforts. Their games of destruction had become obsessive of late, leading the Meckros weaponsmith to wonder if they were in fact miming a truth on his behalf. Or the isolation was driving them insane. Another kind of truth, that one.
He despised religion. Set no gods in his path. Ascendants were worse than rabid beasts. It was enough that mortals were capable of appalling evil; he wanted nothing to do with their immortal, immeasurably more powerful counterparts.
And this broken god in his squalid tent, his eternal pain and the numbing smoke of the seeds he scattered onto the brazier before him, it was all of a piece to Withal. Suffering made manifest, consumed by the desire to spread the misery of its own existence into the world, into all the worlds. Misery and false escape, pain and mindless surrender. All of a piece.
On this small island, amidst this empty sea, Withal was lost. Within himself, among a host of faces that were all his own, he was losing the capacity to recognize any of them. Thought and self was reduced, formless and untethered. Wandering amidst a stranger’s memories, whilst the world beyond unravelled.
Nest building.
Frenzied destruction.
Fanged mouth agape in silent, convulsive laughter.
Three jesters repeating the same performance again and again. What did it mean? What obvious lesson was being shown him that he was too blind, too thick, to understand?
The Edur lad was done, nothing left in his stomach. He lifted his head, eyes stripped naked to the bones of pain and horror. ‘No,’ he whispered.
Withal looked away, squinted along the strand.
‘No more… please.’
‘Never much in the way of sunsets here,’ Withal mused. ‘Or sunrises, for that matter.’
‘You don’t know what it’s like!’
The Edur’s scream trailed away. ‘The nests are getting more elaborate,’ Withal said. ‘I think he’s striving for a particular shape. Sloped walls, a triangular entrance. Then Mape wrecks it. What am I to take from all that?’
‘He can keep his damned sword. I’m not going. Over there. I’m not going over there and don’t try to make me.’
‘I have nothing to do. Nothing.’
Rhulad crawled towards him. ‘You made that sword!’ he said in an accusatory rasp.
‘Fire, hammer, anvil and quenching. I’ve made more swords than I can count. Just iron and sweat. They were broken blades, I think. Those black shards. From some kind of narrow-bladed, overlong knife. Two of them, black and brittle. Just pieces, really. I wonder where he collected them from?’
‘Everything breaks,’ Rhulad said.
Withal glanced over. ‘Aye, lad. Everything breaks.’
‘You could do it.’
‘Do what?’
‘Break that sword.’
‘No. I can’t.’
‘Everything breaks!’
‘Including people, lad.’
‘That’s not good enough.’
Withal shrugged. ‘I don’t remember much of anything any more. I think he’s stealing my mind. He says he’s my god. All I need to do is worship him, he says. And everything will come clear. So tell xn Rhulad Sengar, is it all clear to you?’
‘This evil – it’s of your making!’
‘Is it? Maybe you’re right. I accepted his bargain. But he lied, you see He said he’d set me free, once I made the sword. He lies, Rhulad. That much I know. I know that now. This god lies.’
‘I have power. I am emperor. I’ve taken a wife. We are at war and Lether shall fall.’
Withal gestured inland. ‘And he’s waiting for you.’
‘They’re frightened of me.’
??
?Fear breeds its own loyalty, lad. They’ll follow. They’re waiting too right now.’
Rhulad clawed at his face, shuddered. ‘He killed me. That man – not a Letherii, not a Letherii at all. He killed us. Seven of my brothers. And me. He was so… fast. It seemed he barely moved, and my kin were falling, dying.’
‘Next time will be harder. You’ll be harder. It won’t be as easy to find someone to kill you, next time. And the time after that. Do you understand that, lad? It’s the essence of that mangled god who’s waiting for you.’
‘Who is he?’
‘The god? A miserable little shit, Rhulad. Who has your soul in his hands.’
‘Father Shadow has abandoned us.’
‘Father Shadow is dead. Or as good as.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because if he wasn’t, he’d have never let the Crippled God steal you. You and your people. He’d have come marching ashore…’ Withal fell silent.
And that, he realized, was what he was coming to. A blood-soaked truth.
He hated religion, hated the gods. And he was alone.
‘I will kill him. With the sword.’
‘Fool. There’s nothing on this island that he doesn’t hear, doesn’t see, doesn’t know.’
Except, maybe, what’s in my mind now. And, even if he knew, how could he stop me? No, he doesn’t know. I must believe that. After all, if he did, he’d kill me. Right now, he’d kill me.
Rhulad climbed to his feet. ‘I’m ready for him.’
‘Are you?’
‘Yes.’
Withal sighed. He glanced over at the two Nachts. Their contested driftwood was a scattering of splinters lying between them. Both creatures were staring down at it, bemused, poking fingers through the mess. The Meckros rose. ‘All right then, lad, let’s go.
****
She was behind the black glass, within a tunnel of translucent obsidian, and there were no ghosts.
‘Kurald Galain,’ Corlo said in a whisper, casting a glance back at them over one shoulder. ‘Unexpected. It’s a rotten conquest. That, or the Edur don’t even know it, don’t even know what they’re using.’
The air stank of death. Withered flesh, the breath of a crypt. The black stone beneath their feet was greasy and uncertain. Overhead, the ceiling was uneven, barely a hand’s width higher than Iron Bars, who was the tallest among the group.