Impatient, Gall left his two Tear Runners to deal with the gift of skins and rode back to the camp alone. A formidable woman, this Queen. Thick, long hair the hue of flames. Clever eyes, brown so deep as to be almost black. Stolid enough to give Krughava a tangle in the spit-circle with some lucky man the prize. And I’d like to see that match—why, they’re both enough to make me uncertain whether I was in bed with a woman or a man. The thought enlivened him and he shifted in the saddle. Bult’s balls, never mind that, you old fool.
They would not be quit of Abrastal and her Evertine Legion any time soon, he suspected. All the way to the border and perhaps even beyond. But he did not anticipate betrayal—the Khundryl had done enough to keep the fools honest—honest in that frightened, over-eager way that Gall so appreciated. Sometimes war did what was needed. Always easier—and lucrative—dealing with a reeling foe, after all.
He was well enough pleased with how the parley had played out, although some unease remained, like a yurt rat chewing on his toes. Kolanse. What do you know, Adjunct? What is it you are not telling us?
You’re moaning like an old man shivering under furs, Gall. The Khundryl, the Perish Grey Helms and the Bonehunters. No army can hope to stand against the three of us combined. Bolkando is small. Queen Abrastal rules a tiny, insignificant realm. And the only empire she knows is the one the marines shattered.
No, we have nothing to fear. Still, it will be good to learn what the Queen knows.
A cadre of wing and sub-wing officers awaited him at the edge of the encampment. He scowled at them as he rode up. ‘Seems they want to keep their kingdom after all. Send out word—hostilities are at an end. Recall all the raids.’
‘What of the wings attacking the flanking armies?’ one of the warriors asked.
‘Too late to do anything about that, but send Runners in case they’re still fighting. Order them to withdraw to the main camp—and no looting on the way!’
‘Warleader,’ said another warrior, ‘your wife has arrived and awaits you in your tent.’
Gall grunted, kicking his horse onward.
He found her sprawled on his cot, naked and heavy as only a pregnant woman could be. Eyeing her as he drew off his cape, he said, ‘Wife.’
She glanced up with lidded eyes. ‘Husband. How goes the killing?’
‘Over with, for now.’
‘Oh. How sad for you.’
‘I should have drowned you in a river long ago.’
‘You’d rather have my ghost haunting you than this all too solid flesh?’
‘Would you have? Haunted me?’
‘Not for long. I’d get bored.’
Gall began unstrapping his armour. ‘You still won’t tell whose it is?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘So it could still be mine.’
She blinked, and a sharper focus came to her regard. ‘Gall Inshikalan, you are fifty-six years old. You’ve been crushing your balls on a horse’s back for four and a half decades—no Khundryl man your age can seed a woman.’
He sighed. ‘That’s the problem. Everyone knows that.’
‘Are you humiliated, husband? I did not think that was possible.’
Humiliation. Well, though he’d never wanted it, he’d done his share of humiliating this woman, who had been his wife for most of his life. He had been fifteen. She had been ten. In the old days they would not lie together even when married, until she’d had her first bleed. He remembered the women’s celebration when that time finally arrived for his wife—they bundled the pale girl away for a night of secret truths, and what had been a frightened child at the beginning of that night came back to him the following dawn with a look of such knowing in her eyes that he was left … uncertain, feeling foolish for no reason, and from that day onward, that he was five years older than her had ceased to be relevant; in fact, it seemed as if she was the elder between them. Wiser, sure of herself, and stronger in every way.
He had worshipped that truth in all the years they had been together. In fact, he realized with a sudden flush, he still did.
Gall stood, looking down at his wife, trying to think of the words he lacked to tell her this. And other things besides.
In her eyes, as she studied him in turn … something—
A shout from outside the tent.
She looked away. ‘The Warleader is summoned.’
Just like that, the moment was gone, closed up tight. He turned away, stepped back outside.
The scout—the woman—he had sent with Vedith stood before him. Spattered in dried blood, dust, slick gore, stinking like a carcass. Gall frowned. ‘So soon?’
‘We crushed them, Warleader. But Vedith is dead.’
‘Did you take command?’
‘I did.’
He tried to recall her name, glancing away as she went on.
‘Warleader, he was leading the first charge—we were arrayed perfectly. His horse stepped into a snake hole, went down. Vedith was thrown. He landed poorly, breaking his neck. We saw how his body flopped as he rolled and we knew.’
Gall was nodding. Such things happened, yes. Unexpected, impossible to plan around. That hoof, those shadows on the uneven ground, the eyes of the horse, that hole, all converging into a single fatal moment. To think too much of such things could drive one mad, could tip one into an all-consuming rage. At the games of chance, the cruel, bitter games.
‘Warleader,’ the scout continued after a moment, ‘Vedith’s command of the ambush was absolute. Every raid set about its task though we all knew he had fallen—we did this for him, to honour him as we must. The enemy was broken. Fourteen hundred dead Bolkando, the rest weaponless and in flight across the countryside. We have nineteen dead and fifty-one wounded.’
His gaze returned to her. ‘Thank you, Rafala. The wing is now yours.’
‘It shall be named Vedith.’
He nodded. ‘See to your wounded.’
Gall stepped back inside the tent. He stood, not sure what to do next, where to go. Not sure why he was here at all.
‘I heard,’ said his wife in a low tone. ‘Vedith must have been a good warrior, a good commander.’
‘He was young,’ said Gall, as though that made a difference—as though saying it made a difference—but it didn’t.
‘Malak’s cousin Tharat has a son named Vedith.’
‘Not any more.’
‘He used to play with our Kyth Anar.’
‘Yes,’ Gall said suddenly, eyes bright as he looked upon her. ‘That is right. How could I have forgotten?’
‘Because that was fifteen years ago, husband. Because Kyth did not live past his seventh birthday. Because we agreed to bury our memories of him, our wondrous first son.’
‘I said no such thing and neither did you!’
‘No. We didn’t need to. An agreement? More like a blood vow.’ She sighed. ‘Warriors die. Children die—’
‘Stop it!’
She sat up, groaning with the effort. Seeing the tears he could not wipe away she reached out one hand. ‘Come here, husband.’
But he could not move. His legs were rooted tree-trunks beneath him.
She said, ‘Something new comes squalling into the world every moment of every day. Opening eyes that can barely see. And as they come, other things leave.’
‘I gave him that command. I did it myself.’
‘Such is a Warleader’s burden, husband.’
He fought back a sob. ‘I feel so alone.’
She was at his side, taking one of his hands. ‘That is the truth we all face,’ she said. ‘I have had seven children since then, and yes, most of them are yours. Do you ever wonder why I cannot give up? What it is that drives women to suffer this time and again? Listen well to this secret, Gall, it is because to carry a child is to be not alone. And to lose a child is to be so wretchedly alone that no man can know the same … except perhaps the heart of a ruler, a leader of warriors, a Warleader.’
He found he could meet her eyes once ag
ain. ‘You remind me,’ he said, voice rough.
She understood. ‘And you me, Gall. We forget too easily and too often these days.’
Yes. He felt her callused hand in his, and something of that loneliness crumbled away. Then he guided their hands down on to her rounded belly. ‘What awaits this one?’ he wondered aloud.
‘That we cannot say, husband.’
‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘we shall call all our children together. We shall eat as a family—what do you think?’
She laughed. ‘I can almost see their faces, all around us—the looks so dumbfounded, so confused. What will they make of such a thing?’
Gall shrugged, a sudden looseness to his limbs, the tightness of his chest vanishing in a single breath. ‘We call them not for them but for us, for you and me, Hanavat.’
‘Tonight,’ she said, nodding. ‘Vedith plays with our son once more. I can hear them shouting and laughing, and the sky is before them and it does not end.’
With genuine feeling—the first time in years—Gall took his wife into his arms.
Chapter Fifteen
People will not know the guilt
they cannot deny, cannot escape.
Blind the gods and fix their scales
with binding chains and pull them
down like the truths we hate.
We puzzle over the bones of
strangers and wonder at the world
when they danced free of us
blessedly long ago and we are
different now, but even to speak
of the men and women we were
then, tempts the whirlwind ghosts
of our victims and this will not do
as we treasure the calm and the
smooth of pretend—what cruel
weapons of nature and time
struck down all these strangers
of long ago, when we were
witness in a hapless if smug way?
We dodged the spear-thrusts of
mischance where they stumbled
too oafish too clumsy and altogether
inferior—and their bones you will
find in mountain caves and river clay,
in white spider crevasses above
white beaches, in forest shelters of
rock and all the places in between,
so many that one slayer, we say,
cannot be responsible; but many
the weapons of nature—and the
skittish thing in our eyes as they
slide away, perhaps mutters, to a
sharp ear, the one constant shadow
behind all those deaths—why, that
would be us, silent in guilt, undeserving
recipients of the solitary gift
that leaves us nothing but the bones
of strangers to tumble and roll
beneath our arguments.
They are wordless in repose but
still unwelcome, for they speak
as only bones can, and still we will
not listen. Show me the bones of
strangers, and I become disconsolate.
UNWELCOME LAMENT
GEDESP, FIRST EMPIRE
H
e saw a different past. One that rolled out after choices not made. He saw the familiar trapped inside strangeness. Huddling round fires as winds howled and new things moved in the darkness beyond. The failure of opportunities haunted him and his kind. A dogged rival slipped serpent-like into the mossy cathedrals of needled forests, sliding along shadow streams, and life became a time of picking through long-dead kills, frowning at broken tools of stone different from anything ever seen before. This—all of this—he realized, was the slow failure that, in his own past, had been evaded.
By the Ritual of Tellann. The sealing of living souls inside lifeless bone and flesh, the trapping of sparks inside withered eyes.
Here, in this other past, in that other place, there had been no ritual. And the ice that was in his own realm the plaything of the Jaghut here lifted barriers unbidden. Everywhere the world shrank. Of course, such challenges had been faced before. People suffered, many died, but they struggled through and they survived. This time, however, it was different.
This time, there were strangers.
He did not know why he was being shown this. Some absurdly detailed false history to torment him? Too elaborate, too strained in its conceptualization. He had real wounds that could be torn open. Yes, the vision mocked him, but on a scale broader than that of his own personal failures. He was being shown the inherent weakness of his own kind—he was feeling the feelings of those last survivors in that other, bitter world, the muddy knowledge of things coming to an end. The end of families, the end of friends, the end of children. Nothing to follow.
The end, in fact, of the one thing never before questioned. Continuation. We tell ourselves that each of us must pass, but that our kind will live on. This is the deeply buried taproot feeding our very will to live. Cut that root, and living fades. Bleeding dry and colourless, it fades.
He was invited to weep one last time. To weep not for himself, but for his species.
When fell the last salty tear of the Imass? Did the soil that received it taste its difference from all those that came before? Was it bitterer? Was it sweeter? Did it sting the ground like acid?
He could see that tear, its deathly drop dragged into infinity, a journey too slow to measure. But he knew that what he was seeing was a conceit. The last to die had been dry-eyed—Onos Toolan had witnessed the moment here in this false past—the wretched brave lying bound and bleeding and awaiting the flint-toothed ivory blade in a stranger’s hand. They too were hungry, desperate, those strangers. And they would kill the Imass, the last of his kind, and they would eat him. Leave his cracked and cut bones scattered on the floor of this cave, with all the others, and then, in sudden superstitious terror, the strangers would flee this place, leaving nothing behind of themselves, lest wronged ghosts find them on the paths of haunting.
In that other world, the end of Tool’s kind came at the cut of a knife.
Someone was howling, flesh stretched to bursting by a surge of rage.
The children of the Imass, who were not children at all, but inheritors nevertheless, had flooded the world with the taste of Imass blood on their tongues. Just one more quarry hunted into oblivion, with nothing more than a vague unease lodged deep inside, the mark of sin, the horror of a first crime.
The son devours the father, heart of a thousand myths, a thousand half-forgotten tales.
Empathy was excoriated from him. The howl he heard was rising from his own throat. The rage battered like fists inside his body, a demonic thing eager to get out.
They will pay—
But no. Onos Toolan staggered onward, hide-bound feet crunching on frozen moss and lichen. He would walk out of this damning, vicious fate. Back to his own world’s paradise beyond death, where rituals delivered curse and salvation both. He would not turn. He was blind as a beast driven to the cliff’s edge, but it did not matter; what awaited him was a death better than this death—
He saw a rider ahead, a figure hunched and cowled as it waited astride a gaunt, grey horse from which no breath plumed. He saw a recurved Rhivi bow gripped in one bony hand, and Onos Toolan realized that he knew this rider.
This inheritor.
Tool halted twenty paces away. ‘You cannot be here.’
The head tilted slightly and the glitter of a single eye broke the blackness beneath the cowl. ‘Nor you, old friend, yet here we are.’
‘Move aside, Toc the Younger. Let me pass. What waits beyond is what I have earned. What I will return to—it is mine. I will see the herds again, the great ay and the ranag, the okral and agkor. I will see my kin and run in the shadow of the tusked tenag. I will throw a laughing child upon my knee. I will show the children their future, and tell them how all that we are shall continue, unending, for here I will find an eternity of wishes, for ever fulf
illed.
‘Toc, my friend, do not take this from me. Do not take this, too, when you and your kind have taken everything else.’
‘I cannot let you pass, Tool.’
Tool’s scarred, battered hands closed into fists. ‘For the love between us, Toc the Younger, do not do this.’
An arrow appeared in Toc’s other hand, biting the bowstring and, faster than Tool could register, the barbed missile flashed out and stabbed the ground at his feet.
‘I am dead,’ said Tool. ‘You cannot hurt me.’
‘We’re both dead,’ Toc replied, his voice cold as a stranger’s. ‘I will take your legs out from under you and the wounds will be real—I will leave you bleeding, crippled, in terrible pain. You will not pass.’
Tool took a step forward. ‘Why?’
‘The rage burns bright within you, doesn’t it?’
‘Abyss take it—I am done with fighting! I am done with all of it!’
‘On my tongue, Onos Toolan, is the taste of Imass blood.’
‘You want me to fight you? I will—do you imagine your puny arrows can take down an Imass? I have snapped the neck of a bull ranag. I have been gored. Mauled by an okral. When my kind hunt, we bring down our quarry with our own hands, and that triumph is purchased in broken bones and pain.’
A second arrow thudded into the ground.
‘Toc—why are you doing this?’
‘You must not pass.’
‘I—I gifted you with an Imass name. Did you not realize the measure of that honour? Did you not know that no other of your kind has ever been given such a thing? I called you friend. When you died, I wept.’
‘I see you now, in flesh, all that once rode the bone.’
‘You have seen this before, Toc the Younger.’
‘I do not—’
‘You did not recognize me. Outside the walls of Black Coral. I found you, but even your face was not your own. We were changed, the both of us. Could I go back …’ He faltered, and then continued, ‘Could I go back, I would not have let you pass me by. I would have made you realize.’
‘It does not matter.’
Something broke inside Onos Toolan. He looked away. ‘No, perhaps it doesn’t.’
‘On the Awl’dan plain, you saw me fall.’
Dust of Dreams Page 65
