‘Wandering,’ Varandas replied.
Another added in a deep voice, ‘Looking for something to kill.’
Toc glanced again at the antelope’s sightless eye. ‘You picked the wrong continent. The T’lan Imass have awakened.’
All at once, the amusement surrounding him seemed to vanish, and a sudden chill gripped the air.
Toc set down his knife and dragged loose the antelope’s guts.
‘We never faced them,’ said Varandas. ‘We were dead long before their ritual of eternal un-life.’
A different Jaghut spoke. ‘K’Chain Nah’ruk, and now T’lan Imass. Doesn’t anyone ever go away?’
After a moment, all began laughing again.
Through the merriment Varandas stepped close to Toc and said, ‘Why have you killed this thing? You cannot eat it. And since that is true, I conclude that you must therefore hunt for others. Where are they?’
‘Not far,’ he replied, ‘and none are any threat to you.’
‘Too bad.’
‘Nah’ruk—were they Iskar Jarak’s favour?’
‘They were.’
‘What were they after?’
‘Not “what”. Who. But ask nothing more of that—we have discussed the matter and can make no sense of it. The world has lost its simplicity.’
‘The world was never simple, Jaghut, and if you believe it was, you’re deluding yourself.’
‘What would you know of the ancient times?’
He shrugged. ‘I only know recent times, but why should the ancient ones be any different? Our memories lie. We call it nostalgia and smile. But every lie has a purpose. And that includes falsifying our sense of the past—’
‘And what purpose would that serve, Herald?’
He wiped clean his knife in the grasses. ‘You shouldn’t need to ask.’
‘But I do ask.’
‘We lie about our past to make peace with the present. If we accepted the truth of our history, we would find no peace—our consciences would not permit it. Nor would our rage.’
Varandas was clearly amused. ‘Are you consumed with anger, Herald? Do you see too clearly with that lonely eye? Strong emotions are ever a barrier to perception, and this must be true of you.’
‘Meaning?’
‘You failed to detect my mocking tone when I spoke of the world’s loss of simplicity.’
‘I must have lost its distinction in the midst of the irony suffusing everything else you said. How stupid of me. Now, I am done with this beast.’ He sheathed his knife and lifted the carcass to settle it across his shoulders. ‘I could wish you all luck in finding something to kill,’ he said, ‘but you don’t need it.’
‘Do you think the T’lan Imass will be eager to challenge us, Herald?’
He levered the antelope on to the rump of his horse. The eyes, he saw, now swarmed with flies. Toc set a boot in the stirrup and, lifting wide with his leg to clear the carcass, lowered himself into the saddle. He gathered the reins. ‘I knew a T’lan Imass once,’ he said. ‘I taught him how to make jokes.’
‘He needed teaching?’
‘More like reminding, I think. Being un-alive for as long as he was will do that to the best of us, I suspect. In any case, I’m sure the T’lan Imass will find you very comforting, in all that dark armour and whatnot, even as they chop you to pieces. Unfortunately, and at the risk of deflating your bloated egos, they’re not here for you.’
‘Neither were the Nah’ruk. But,’ and Varandas cocked her helmed head, ‘what do you mean they will find us “comforting”?’
Toc studied her, and then scanned the others. Lifeless faces, so eager to laugh. Damned Jaghut. He shrugged, and then said, ‘Nostalgia.’
After the Herald and the lifeless antelope had ridden away on the lifeless horse, Varandas turned to her companions. ‘What think you, Haut?’
The thick-limbed warrior with the heavy voice shifted, armour clanking and shedding red dust, and then said, ‘I think, Captain, we need to make ourselves scarce.’
Suvalas snorted. ‘The Imass were pitiful—I doubt even un-living ones could cause us much trouble. Captain, let us find some of them and destroy them. I’d forgotten how much fun killing is.’
Varandas turned to one of her lieutenants. ‘Burrugast?’
‘A thought has occurred to me, Captain.’
She smiled. ‘Go on.’
‘If the T’lan Imass who waged war against the Jaghut were as pitiful as Suvalas suggests, why are there no Jaghut left?’
No one arrived at an answer. Moments passed.
‘We need to make ourselves scarce,’ Haut repeated. And then he laughed.
The others joined in. Even Suvalas.
Captain Varandas nodded. So many things were a delight, weren’t they? All these awkward emotions, such as humility, confusion and unease. To feel them again, to laugh at their inherent absurdity, mocking every survival instinct—as if she and her companions still lived. As if they still had something to lose. As if the past was worth recreating here in the present. ‘As if,’ she added mostly to herself, ‘old grudges were worth holding on to.’ She grunted, and then said, ‘We shall march east.’
‘Why east?’ Gedoran demanded.
‘Because I feel like it, lieutenant. Into the birth of the sun, the shadows on our trail, a new day ever ahead.’ She tilted back her head. ‘Hah hah hah hah hah!’
Toc the Younger saw the gaunt ay from some distance away. Standing with the boy clinging to one foreleg. If Toc had possessed a living heart, it would have beaten faster. If he could draw breath, it would have quickened. If his eye were swimming in a pool of tears, as living eyes did, he would weep.
Of course, it was not Baaljagg. The giant wolf was not—he realized as he rode closer—even alive. It had been summoned. Not from Hood’s Realm, for the souls of such beasts did not reside there. The Beast Hold, gift of the Wolves. An ay, to walk the mortal world once again, to guard the boy. And their chosen daughter.
Setoc, was this by your hand?
One-eyed he might be, but he was not blind to the patterns taking shape. Nor, in the dry dust of his mind, was he insensitive to the twisted nuances within those patterns, as if the distant forces of fate took ghastly pleasure in mocking all that he treasured—the memories he held on to as would a drowning man hold on to the last breath in his lungs.
I see you in his face, Tool. As if I could travel back to the times before the Ritual of Tellann, as if I could whisper in like a ghost to that small camp where you were born, and see you at but a few years of age, bundled against the cold, your breath pluming and your cheeks bright red—I had not thought such a journey possible.
But it is. I need only look upon your son, and I see you.
We are broken, you and me. I had to turn you away. I had to deny you what you wanted most. But, what I could not do for you, I will do for your son.
He knew he was a fool to make such vows. He was the Herald of Death. And soon Hood would summon him. He would be torn from the boy’s side. Unless the Wolves want me to stay. But no one can know what they want. They do not think anything like us. I have no control . . . over anything.
He reached the camp. Setoc had built a small fire. The twins had not moved from where they’d been earlier, but their eyes were fixed on Toc now, as if he could hold all their hopes in his arms. But I cannot. My life is gone, and what remains does not belong to me.
I dream I can hold to my vows. I dream I can be Toc the Younger, who knew how to smile, and love. Who knew what it was to desire a woman forever beyond his reach—gods, such delicious anguish! When the self would curl up, when longing overwhelmed with the sweetest flood.
Remember! You once wrote poems! You once crawled into your every thought, your every feeling, to see and touch and dismantle and, in the midst of putting it all back together, feel wonder. Awed, humbled by complexity, assailed by compassion. Uncomprehending in the face of cruelty, of indifference.
Remember how you thought: How can pe
ople think this way? How can they be so thoughtless, so vicious, so worshipful of death, so dismissive of suffering and misery?
He stared at the wolf. Baaljagg, not Baaljagg. A mocking reflection, a crafted simulacrum. A Hairlock. He met Setoc’s slightly wide eyes and saw that she had had nothing to do with this summoning. The boy. Of course. Tool made me arrows. His son finds me a companion as dead as I am. ‘It is named Baaljagg—’
‘Balalalalalalalalala!’
Sceptre Irkullas sat, shoulders hunched, barricaded from the world by his grief. His officers beseeched him, battering at the high walls. The enemy was within reach, the enemy was on the move—an entire people, suddenly on the march. Their outriders had discovered the Akrynnai forces. The giant many-headed beasts were jockeying for position, hackles raised, and soon would snap the jaws, soon the fangs would sink deep, and fate would fill the mouth bitter as iron.
A conviction had burrowed deep into his soul. He was about to tear out the throat of the wrong enemy. But there were no thorns to prick his conscience, nothing to stir to life the trembling dance of reason. Before too long, loved ones would weep. Children would voice cries unanswered. And ripples would spread outward, agitated, in a tumult, and nothing would be the same as it once was.
There were times when history curled into a fist, breaking all it held. He waited for the crushing embrace with all the hunger of a lover. His officers did not understand. When he rose, gesturing for his armour, he saw the relief in their eyes, as if a belligerent stream had once more found its destined path. But he knew they thought nothing of the crimson sea they now rushed towards. Their relief was found in the comfort of the familiar, these studied patterns preceding dread mayhem. They would face the time of blood when it arrived.
Used to be he envied the young. At this moment, as the sun’s bright morning light scythed the dust swirling above the restless horses, he looked upon those he could see—weapons flashing like winks from a thousand skulls—and he felt nothing but pity.
Great warleaders were, one and all, insane. They might stand as he was standing, here in the midst of the awakening machine, and see nothing but blades to cut a true path to his or her desire, as if desire alone was a virtue, a thing so pure and so righteous it could not be questioned, could not be challenged. This great warleader could throw a thousand warriors to their deaths and the oily surface of his or her conscience would reveal not the faintest swirl.
He had been a great warleader, once, his mouth full of iron shards, flames licking his fingertips. His chest swollen with unquestioned virtues.
‘If we pursue, Sceptre, we can meet them by dusk. Do you think they will want to close then? Or will they wait for next dawn? If we are swift . . .’
‘I will clench my jaws one more time,’ Irkullas said. ‘I will keep them fast and think nothing of the bite, the warm flow. You’d be surprised at what a man can swallow.’
They looked on, uncomprehending.
The Akrynnai army shook loose the camp of the night just past. It lifted itself up, broke into eager streams flowing into the wake of the wounded foe, and spread in a flood quickened to purpose.
The morning lost its gleam. Strange clouds gathered, and across the sky, flights of birds fled into the north. Sceptre Irkullas rode straight-backed on his horse, riding the sweaty palm, as the fist began to close.
‘Gatherer of skulls, where is the fool taking us?’
Strahl, Bakal observed, was in the habit of repeating himself, as if his questions were a siege weapon, flinging stones at what he hoped was a weak point in the solid wall of his ignorance. Sooner or later, through the dust and patter of crumbling mortar, he would catch his first glimpse of the answers he sought.
Bakal had no time for such things. If he had questions, he burned them to the ground where they stood, smiling through the drifting ashes. The wall awaiting them all would come toppling down before too long. To our regret.
‘We’ve left a bloody trail,’ Strahl then added, and Bakal knew the warrior’s eyes were fixed upon Hetan’s back, as she limped, tottered and stumbled a short distance ahead of them in the column. Early in the day, when the warriors were still fresh, their breaths acrid with the anticipation of battle—perhaps only a day away—one would drag her from the line and take her on the side of the path, with others shouting their encouragement. A dozen times since dawn, this had occurred. Now, everyone walked as slowly as she, and no one had the energy to use her. Of food there was plenty; their lack was water. This wretched land was an old hag, her tits dry and withered. Bakal could almost see her toothless grin through the waves of heat rising above the yellow grasses on all sides, the nubbed horizon with its rotten stumps of bedrock protruding here and there.
The bloody trail Strahl spoke of marked the brutal consolidation of power by Warchief Maral Eb and his two brothers, Sagal and Kashat. And the widow, Sekara the Vile. What a cosy family they made! He turned his head and spat, since he found the mere thought of them fouled the taste on his tongue.
There had been two more attempts on his life. If not for Strahl and the half-dozen other Senan who’d elected themselves his guardians, he would now be as dead as his wife and her would-be lover. A widow walked a few steps behind him. Estaral would have died by her husband’s hand if not for Bakal. Yet the truth was, his saving her life had been an accidental by-product of his bloodlust, even though he had told her otherwise. That night of storms had been like a fever coursing through the Barghast people. Such a night had been denied them all when Onos Toolan assumed command after Humbrall Taur’s drowning—he had drawn his stone sword before all the gathered clan chiefs and said, ‘The first murder this night will be answered by me. Take hold of your wants, your imagined needs, and crush the life from them.’ His will was not tested. As it turned out, too much was held back, and this time everyone had lunged into madness.
‘They won’t rest until you’re dead, you know.’
‘Then they’d best be quick,’ Bakal replied. ‘For tomorrow we do battle with the Akrynnai.’
Strahl grunted. ‘It’s said they have D’ras with them. And legions of Saphii Spears.’
‘Maral Eb will choose the place. That alone can decide the battle. Unlike our enemy, we are denied retreat. Either we win, or we fall.’
‘They think to take slaves.’
‘The Barghast kneel to no one. The grandmothers will slide knives across the throats of our children, and then sever the taproot of their own hearts.’
‘Our gods shall sing and so summon us all through the veil.’
Bakal bared his teeth. ‘Our gods would be wise to wear all the armour they own.’
Three paces behind the two warriors, Estaral stared at Bakal, the man who had killed her husband, the man who had saved her life. At times she felt as if she was walking the narrowest bridge over a depthless crevasse, a bridge reeled out behind Bakal. At other moments the world suddenly opened before her, vast as a flooding ocean, and she flailed in panic, even as, in a rush of breathless astonishment, she comprehended the truth of her freedom. Finding herself alone made raw the twin births of fear and excitement, and both sizzled to the touch. Estaral alternated between cursing and blessing the warrior striding before her. He was her shield, yes, behind which she could hide. He also haunted her with the memory of that terrible night when she’d looked into her husband’s eyes and saw only contempt—and then the dark desire to murder her.
Had she really been that useless to him? That disgusting? He could not have always seen her so, else he would never have married her—she remembered seeing smiles on his face, years ago now, it was true, but she could have sworn there had been no guile in his eyes. She measured out the seasons since those bright, rushing days, seeking signs of her failure, struggling to find the fatal threshold she had so unwittingly crossed. But the memories swirled round like a vortex, drawing her in, and everything blurred, spun past, and the only thing she could focus on was her recollection of his two faces: the smiling one, the one ugly with malic
e, flitting back and forth.
She was too old to be desired ever again, and even if she had not been so, it was clear now that she could not keep a man’s love alive. Weak, foolish, blind, and now widow to a husband who’d sought to kill her.
Bakal had not hesitated. He’d killed her man as she might wring the neck of a yurt rat. And then he had turned to his wife—she had stood defiant until his first step towards her, and then she had collapsed to her knees, begging for her life. But that night had been the night of Hetan’s hobbling. The beast of mercy had been gutted and its bloody skin staked to the ground. She’d begged even as he opened her throat.
Blood flows down. I saw it doing just that. Down their bodies, down and down. I thought he would turn to me then and do the same—I witnessed his shame, his rage. And he knew, if I had been a better wife, my husband would never have fixed his eyes upon his wife. And so, the failure and the crime was mine as well.
I would not have begged.
Instead, he had cleaned his knife and sheathed it. And when he looked upon her, she saw his fury fall away, and his eyes glistened. ‘I wish you had not seen this, Estaral.’
‘You wish he’d already killed me?’
‘No—I came here to stop them doing that.’
That had confused her. ‘But I am nothing to you, Bakal.’
‘But you are,’ he said. ‘Without you, I would have no choice but to see this night—to see what I have done here—as black vengeance. As the rage of a jealous man—but you see, I really didn’t care. She was welcome to whoever she wanted. But she had no right—nor your husband there—they had no right to kill you.’
‘You are the slayer of Onos Toolan.’ She still did not know why she had said that then. Had she meant that the night of blood was his and his alone?