Not Cafal. ‘Not you, either, Hetan.’ She flung the soiled grasses away and helped Hetan to stand. ‘Here, your staff, lean on it.’ She grasped a handful of filthy shirt and began guiding the woman through the camp.
‘Don’t keep her too long!’ She glanced back to see a warrior behind them—he had been coming to take her and now stood with a grin that hovered on the edge of something dark and cruel.
‘They fed her shit—I’m taking her to get properly cleaned up.’
A flicker of disgust. ‘The children? Who were they? A solid beating—’
‘They ran before I got close enough. Ask around.’
Estaral tugged Hetan into motion once again.
The warrior did not pursue, but she heard him cursing as he wandered off. She didn’t think she’d run into many more like him—everyone was crowding around their clan cookfires, hungry and parched and short-tempered as they jostled and fought for position. There’d be a few flick-blade duels this night, she expected. There always were, night before battle. Stupid, of course. Pointless. But, as Onos Toolan might say, the real meaning of ‘tradition’ was . . . what had he called it? ‘Stupidity on purpose’, that’s what he said. I think. I never much listened.
I should have. We all should have.
They neared the western edge of the camp, where the wagons were already being positioned to form a defensive barricade. Just beyond, drovers were busy slaughtering stock, and the bleating cries of hundreds of animals filled the night. The first bonfires for offal had been lit using rotted cloth, bound rushes, dung and liberal splashes of lamp oil. The flames lit up terrified eyes from within crowded pens. Chaos and horror had come to the beasts and the air was thick with death.
She almost halted. She’d never before seen things in such a way; she’d never before felt the echo of misery and suffering assailing her from all directions—every scene painted into life by the fires was like a vision of madness. We do this. We do this all the time. To all these creatures who look to us for protection. We do this and think nothing of it.
We say we are great thinkers, but I think now, that most of what we do each and every day—and night—is in fact thoughtless. We will ourselves empty to numb us to our cruelty. We stiffen our faces and say we have needs. But to be empty is to have no purchase, nothing to grasp on to, and so in the emptiness we slide and we slide.
We fall.
Oh, when will it end?
She pulled Hetan to a position behind a wagon, the plains stretching westward before them. Thirty paces ahead, limned by the deepening remnants of the sunset, three warriors were busy digging a picket. ‘Sit down—no, don’t lift. Just sit.’
‘Listen, Strahl—you have done enough. Leave this night to me.’
‘Bakal—’
‘Please, old friend. This is all by my hand—I stood alone before Onos Toolan. There must be the hope . . . the hope for balance. In my soul. Leave me this, I beg you.’
Strahl looked away and it was clear to Bakal that his words had been too honest, too raw. The warrior shifted nervously, his discomfort plain to see.
‘Go, Strahl. Go lie in your wife’s arms this night. Look past everything else—none of it matters. Find the faces of the ones you love. Your children, your wife.’
The man managed a nod, not meeting Bakal’s eyes, and then set off.
Bakal watched him leave, and then checked his weapons one last time, before setting off through the camp.
Belligerence was building, sizzling beneath the harsh voices. It lit fires inside the strutting warriors as they bellowed out their oaths among the hearth circles. It bared teeth in the midst of every harsh laugh. War was the face to be stared into, or fled from, but the camp on a night such as this one was a cage, a prison to them all. The darkness hid the ones with skittish eyes and twitching hands; the bold postures and wild glares masked icy terror. Fear and excitement had closed jaws upon each other’s throat and neither dared let go.
This was the ancient dance, this ritualized spitting into the eyes of fate, stoking the dark addiction. He had seen elders, warriors too old, too decrepit to do anything but sit or stand crooked over staffs, and he had seen their blazing eyes, had heard their cracking exhortations—but most of all, he had seen in their eyes the pain of their loss, as if they’d been forced to surrender their most precious love. It was no quaint conceit that warriors prayed to the spirits for the privilege of dying in battle. Thoughts of useless years stretching beyond the warrior’s life could freeze the heart of the bravest of the brave.
The Barghast were not soldiers, not like the Malazans or the Crimson Guard. A profession could be left behind, a new future found. But for the warrior, war was everything, the very reason to live. It was the maker of heroes and cowards, the one force that tested a soul in ways that could not be bargained round, that could not be corrupted by a handful of silver. War forged bonds closer knit than those of bloodkin. It painted the crypt’s wall behind every set of eyes—those of foe and friend both. It was, indeed, the purest, truest cult of all. What need for wonder, then, that so many youths so longed for such a life?
Bakal understood all this, for he was indeed a warrior. He understood, and yet his heart was bitter with disgust. No longer did he dream of inviting his sons and daughters into such a world. Embracing this addiction devoured too much, inside and out.
He—and so many others—had looked into the face of Onos Toolan and had seen his compassion, had seen it so clearly that the only response was to recoil. The Imass had been an eternal warrior. He had fought with the warrior’s blessing of immortality, given the gift of battles unending, and then he had willingly surrendered it. How could such a man, even one reborn, find so much of his humanity still alive within him?
I could not have. Even after but three decades of war . . . if I was this moment reborn, I could not find in myself . . . what? A battered tin cup half-filled with compassion, not enough to splash a dozen people closest to me.
Yet . . . yet he was a flood, an unending flood—how can that be?
Who did I kill? Shy from that question if you must, Bakal. But one truth you cannot deny: his compassion took hold of your arm, your knife, and showed you the strength of its will.
His steps slowed. He looked round, blearily. I am lost. Where am I? I don’t understand. Where am I? And what are all these broken things in my hands? Still crashing down—the roar is deafening! ‘Save her,’ he muttered. ‘Yes. Save her—the only one worth saving. May she live a thousand years, proof to all who see her, proof of who and what the Barghast were. The White Faces.’ We hobble ourselves and call it glory. We lift to meet drooling old men eager to fill us to bursting with their bitter poisons. Old men? No, warleaders and warchiefs. And our precious tradition of senseless self-destruction. Watch it fuck us dry.
He was railing, but it was in silence. Who would want to hear such things? See what happened to the last one who held out a compassionate hand? He imagined himself walking between heaving rows of his fellow warriors. He walked, trailing the gutted ropes of his messy arguments, and from both sides spit and curses rained down.
Truths bore the frightened mind. Are we bored? Yes! Where is the blood? Where are the flashing knives? Give us the unthinking dance! Charge our jaded hearts, you weeping slave! Piss on your difficult thoughts, your grim recognitions. Lift up your backside, fool, while I seek to pound feeling back into me.
Stand still while I hobble you—let’s see you walk now!
Bakal staggered out from the camp’s edge. Halting ten paces beyond the wagons, he tugged loose the straps binding the lance to his back. Rolled the shaft into his right hand. His shoulder ached—the tears of tendon and muscle were not yet mended. The pain would wake him up.
Ahead was the banked berm of the picket’s trench. Three helmed heads were visible as lumps projecting above the reddish heap of earth.
Bakal broke into a trot, silent on the grasses as he closed the distance.
He launched the lance from twelve pa
ces behind the three warriors. Saw the iron point drive between the shoulders of the one on his left, punching the man’s body against the trench wall. As the other two jerked, heads snapping in that direction, he reached the trench—blades in hands—and leapt down between them. His cutlass bit through bronze skull-cap, split half the woman’s skull, and jammed there. The knife in his left hand slashed the back of the last warrior’s neck—but the man had twisted, enough to save his spinal cord, and spinning, he slammed a dagger deep into Bakal’s chest, just under his left arm.
Intimately close with his enemy in the cramped trench, he saw the warrior open his mouth to cry out the alarm. Bakal’s back-slash with his knife ripped out the man’s throat, even as the dagger sank a second time, the blade snapping as it snagged between two ribs.
Blood rushed up to fill Bakal’s throat and he fell against the dying warrior, coughing into the wool of the man’s cloak.
He was feeling so very tired now, but there were things still to be done. Find her. Save her. He crawled from the trench. He was having trouble breathing. A memory that had been lost for decades returned to him suddenly: the last time he’d been near death—the Drowning Fever had struck him down, his lungs filling up with phlegm. The thick poultices encasing his chest, the eye-stinging smell of ground mustard seeds—his mother’s face, a blurred thing, hovering, dread hardening to resignation behind her eyes. Crypt walls. We all have them, there inside—you don’t go there often, do you? It’s where you keep your dead. Dead relatives, dead dreams, dead promises. Dead selves, so many of those, so many. When you loot, you only take the best things. The things you can use, the things you can sell. And when you seal it all up again, the darkness remains.
It remains. Ah, Mother, it remains.
My crypt. My crypt walls.
He thought to regain his feet. Instead, he was lying on the ground, the trench pit almost within reach. Mother? Are you there? Father? Desorban, my son, oh precious son—I put that sword into your hand. I pretended to be proud, even as fear curled black talons round my heart. Later, when I looked down at your so-still face, when all the others were singing the glory of your brave moments—only moments, yes, all you had—I pretended that the music eased the hurt in my soul. I pretended, because to pretend was to comfort them in turn, for the time when they stood in my place, looking down on the face of their own beloved.
Son? Are you there?
Crypt walls. Scenes and faces.
In the dark, you can’t even see the paint.
Estaral struggled in the gloom to see that distant picket. Had something happened there? She wasn’t sure. From the camp behind the row of wagons at her back, she could hear a child shouting, something vicious and eager in the voice. A tremor of unease ran through her and she shot Hetan a glance. Sitting, staring at nothing.
This was taking too long. Warriors would be looking for their hobbled prize. Words would break loose—Estaral had been seen, dragging Hetan through the camp. Westward, yes. Out past the light of the fires.
She reached down and pulled Hetan to her feet. Took up the staff and pushed it into the woman’s hands. ‘Come!’
Estaral dragged her towards the picket. No movement from there. Something lying on this side, something that hadn’t been there earlier. Mouth dry, heart in her throat, she led Hetan closer.
The stench of faeces and urine and blood reached her. That shape—a body, lying still in death.
‘Bakal?’ she whispered.
Nothing. From the trench itself, a heavy silence. She crouched at the body, pulled it on to its back. She stared down at Bakal’s face: the frothy streaks of blood smearing his chin, the expression as of one lost, and finally, his staring, sightless eyes.
Another shout from the camp, closer this time. That’s Faranda—and that one, that’s Sekara. Spirits shit on them both!
Terror rushed through her. She crouched, like a hare with no cover in sight.
Hetan made to sink to her knees. ‘No!’ she hissed. ‘Stay up, damn you!’ She grasped the woman’s shirt again, tugged her stumbling round one end of the trench, out on to the plain.
Jade licked the grasses—a hundred paces ahead the ground rose, showing pieces of a ridge. The column had skirted round that, she recalled. ‘Hetan! Listen to me! Walk to that ridge—do you see it? Walk there. Just walk, do you understand? A man waits for you there—he’s impatient. He’s angry. Hurry to him or you’ll regret it. Hurry!’ She shoved her forward.
Hetan staggered, righted herself. For one terrible moment she simply stood where she was, and then the hobbled lurched into motion.
Estaral watched her for a dozen heartbeats—to be certain—and then she spun and ran back towards the camp. She could slip in unseen. Yes, she’d cleaned up Hetan’s face, and then had simply left her, close to the wagons—the bitch was dead behind the eyes, anyone could see that. She fled out on to the plain? Ridiculous, but if you want to go look, out where the Akrynnai are waiting, go right ahead.
She found shadows between two wagons, squeezed in. Figures were moving in and out of firelight. The shouts had stopped. If she avoided the hearths, she could thread her way back to where Strahl and the others were camped. She would have to tell him of Bakal’s death. Who would lead the Senan tomorrow? It would have to be Strahl. He would need to know, so he could ready his mind to command, to the weight of his clan’s destiny.
She edged forward.
Thirty paces on, they found her. Six women led by Sekara, with Faranda hovering in the background. Estaral saw them rushing to close and she drew her knife. She knew what they would do to her; she knew they weren’t interested in asking questions, weren’t interested in explanations. No, they will do to me what they did to Hetan. Bakal was gone, her protector was gone. There were, she realized, so many ways to be alone.
They saw her weapon. Avid desire lit their eyes—yes, they wanted blood. ‘I killed her!’ Estaral shrieked. ‘Bakal was using her—I killed them both!’
She lunged into their midst.
Blades flickered. Estaral staggered, spun even as she sank to her knees. Gleeful faces on all sides. Such bright hunger—oh, how alive they feel! She was bleeding out, four, maybe five wounds, heat leaking out from her body.
So stupid. All of it . . . so stupid. And with that thought she laughed out her last breath.
The massive bank of clouds on the western horizon now filled half the night sky, impenetrable and solid as a wall, building block by block to shut out the stars and the slashes of jade. Wind rustled the grasses, pulled from the east as if the storm was drawing breath. Yet no flashes lit the clouds, and not once had Cafal heard thunder. Despite this, his trepidation grew with every glance at the towering blackness.
Where was Bakal? Where was Hetan?
The bound grip of the hook-blade was slick in his hand. He had begun to shiver as the temperature plummeted.
He could save her. He was certain of it. He would demand the power from the Barghast gods. If they refused him, he vowed he would destroy them. No games, no bargains. I know it was your lust for blood that led to this. And I will make you pay.
Cafal dreaded the moment he first saw his sister, this mocking, twisted semblance of the woman he had known all his life. Would she even recognize him? Of course she would. She would lunge into his arms—an end to the torment, the rebirth of hope. Dread, yes, and then he would make it good again, all of it. They would flee west—all the way to Lether—
A faint sound behind him. Cafal whirled round.
The mace clipped him on his left temple. He reeled to the right, attempted to pivot and slash his weapon into the path of his attacker. A punch in the chest lifted him from his feet. He was twisted in the air, hook-blade flying from his hand, and it seemed the fist on his chest followed him down, driving deeper when he landed on his back. Bones grated, splintered.
He saw, uncomprehending, the shaft of the spear, upright as a standard, its head buried in his chest.
Shadowy shapes above him. The gauntle
ted hands gripping the spear now twisted and pushed down hard.
The point thrust through into the earth beneath him.
He struggled to make sense of things, but everything slipped through his nerveless fingers. Three, now four shapes looming over him, but not a word was spoken.
They watch me die. I’ve done the same. Why do we do that? Why are we so fascinated by this failure?
Because, I think, we see how easy it is.
The Akrynnai warrior holding the man down with his spear now relaxed. ‘He’s done,’ he said, tugging his weapon loose.
‘If he was scouting our camp,’ the mace-wielder said, ‘why was he facing the wrong way?’
‘Barghast,’ muttered a third man, and the others nodded. There was no sense to these damned savages.
‘Tomorrow,’ said the warrior now cleaning his spear, ‘we kill the rest of them.’
She stumbled onward, eyes on the black wall facing her, which seemed to lurch close only to recoil again, as if the world pulsed. The wind pushed her along now, solid as a hand at her back, and the thud of the staff’s heel thumped on and on.
When four Akrynnai warriors cut across her field of vision, she slowed and then halted, waiting for them to take her. But they didn’t. Instead, they made warding gestures and quickly vanished into the gloom. After a time, she set out once more, tottering, her breath coming in thick gasps now. The blisters on her hands broke and made the staff slick.
She walked until the world lost its strength, and then she sat down on the damp grasses beside a lichen-skinned boulder. The wind whipped at her shredded shirt. She stared unseeing, the staff sliding out from her hands. After a time she sank down on to her side, drawing her legs up.
And waited for the blackness to swallow the world.
It was as if night in all its natural order had been stolen away. Strahl watched as the White Faces fed their fires with anything that would burn, crying out to their gods. See us! Find us! We are your children! Goats were dragged to makeshift altars and their throats slashed open. Blood splashed and hoofed legs kicked and then fell to feeble trembling. Dogs fled the sudden, inexplicable slash of cutlass blades. Terror and madness whipped like the smoke and sparks and ashes from the bonfires. By dawn, he knew, not a single animal would be left alive.