‘Well, there are indeed some, even other scholars, who find comfort in the belief that past ages in history can be seen as phases of our childhood, thus absolving them of knowing any better, and thus absolving us, in the present, of any lingering sense that maybe, once, long ago, life was better than it is now.’
‘Is this the reason for summoning me? I’d rather a rough draught on a tattered scroll set upon my desk, where I can get to it a few decades from now, when at last I have the time.’
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Rise Herat replied, still studying the Azathanai bronze. ‘But things are not better, are they?’ He turned, waved a hand in a broad sweep. ‘See here, in our Tarnished Chamber, our surrendered ideals. Such childish optimism!’
Cedorpul began turning away. ‘If that is all—’
‘Speak to me of sorcery.’
The priest paused, twisted to regard him. ‘What do you wish to know?’
‘The reach of your power. Your control over it.’
‘And in this, you are taking an academic interest?’
‘No. In this, I work at the bidding of the High Priestess.’
A faint shadow seemed to crease Cedorpul’s cherubic features, as if showing, in an unguarded instant, his old man’s face belonging to some distant future. ‘She has cause to doubt me now?’
‘Perhaps it is our newfound need, priest, to protect us from ourselves. Cast me in the cloak of a spy. Familiar ground to ease your discomfort.’
‘As court seneschal, I will not embarrass her.’
‘Then you claim to some prowess.’
‘I claim sufficient confidence.’
‘I think, Cedorpul, that both prowess and confidence have swept away the young, cheerful man that I once knew.’
‘Is there more you would ask me?’
‘Who is your enemy?’
‘My enemy?’
‘If you are gathering power – those streams of sorcery – against whom will you unleash it?’
‘I am a servant of Mother Dark.’
‘That kind of servant she has not asked for, Cedorpul.’
The priest suddenly bared his teeth. ‘Ah, yes, I recall now. Your mysterious audience with Mother Dark, in the company of Lanear and that Azathanai. But the details of that meeting? Why, none of you deigned to inform me, or anyone else for that matter. I hear that you earned Lord Silchas Ruin’s ire, and even this did not sway you. Thus, a well of secret knowing that you can draw from at will, as it suits your moment of need.’
‘You already know enough. She refused Lord Anomander’s desire to march on Urusander. She commanded him to keep sheathed his sword.’
‘Am I to be commanded to do nothing as well? If so, then let her speak such words to me.’
‘And if I told you that we did not speak with Mother Dark? That our journey ended abruptly, and that we were guided out from that realm by Lord Draconus?’
‘Then you further undermine your authority to advise me on her behalf.’
A surge of anger silenced Rise Herat. He turned back to study the Azathanai bronze, breathing deeply as he mastered his emotions. ‘Authority? Oh how we all strain to see into the darkness, pleading for its heavy but sure hand. Settled well upon one shoulder, guiding us on to the true path.’
‘I will be the seneschal,’ said Cedorpul. ‘I will be the authority when it comes to the collective sorcerous capabilities of the Citadel, of the Tiste Andii.’
‘And whose authority supersedes your own?’
‘Mother Dark’s, of course. I but await her guidance—’
‘Knowing that it will not come. Cedorpul, am I witness to a usurpation of power?’
‘When Lord Anomander returns to Kharkanas, historian, I will announce to him that I stand at his side, and that it is the express wish of the seneschal that he draw his blade. That he fight in the name of Mother Dark. And upon the field of battle, why, there I will stand, with my cadre, to lend magic to his might.’
Rise Herat focused anew on ‘The Savaging of the Hound’. He could almost hear its howls. Not many, but one. And no end to this violence but death’s sure promise. That merchant. She said that she’d paid nothing for it. That the unknown sculptor among the Azathanai offered it as a gift to the Tiste.
Ideals are like a bitch hound. What she spawns might prove vicious. What she spawns might, in time, turn upon her. Is this what this work announces? No, but I will read into it what I choose, and by that choice, the language of art can never die. All it takes is a little effort.
But then, whenever has that exhortation convinced anyone?
After a long moment, Cedorpul said, ‘Report back to the High Priestess. Ensure that she understands.’
‘Of course.’
He listened to the man walk away, the echoes of his footfalls filling the unlit spaces between marble and bronze.
Chambers that came to house forgotten works of art, Rise Herat reflected, were little more than repositories of sorrow, and all the more heartbreaking if this was where innocence was lost. He decided that he would not return.
* * *
The door had been left ajar and the boy had followed the dog into the room, surprising Emral Lanear where she sat behind veils of smoke, the huge filigreed bowl of the water-pipe on the table at her side, heavy and gravid with its sly promise. Lids low, playing the mouthpiece across her lips, she observed her unexpected guests.
The dog collected a small pillow that had slipped down from a divan. With the pillow clamped possessively in its mouth, the animal spun round, dropping down and holding its head close to the polished floor, its eyes bright and fixed on the boy.
He edged forward.
Claws clattering, the dog bolted, dodging first to one side and then to the other, deftly evading the boy’s reach, and then the animal was past, out through the door with its prize.
Hissing in frustration, the boy tensed as if to set off in pursuit, but after a moment his shoulders dropped, and he straightened.
‘The dog chooses the game,’ Lanear said.
The boy glanced over, and then shrugged. ‘I like playing, too. Only he’s so fast.’
‘You are the hostage Orfantal.’
‘I know I’m supposed to be with a tutor. But Cedorpul decided he won’t teach me any more.’
‘Oh? Why is that? Were you unmindful? Rude?’
Orfantal nodded. ‘He was showing me a conj … conjuration. Magic, I mean.’
‘I know the word, yes,’ said Lanear, gesturing with the mouthpiece. ‘Do continue.’
‘It was making sounds. I didn’t like them. So I dispelled it – the conjuration.’
‘You dispelled it?’
‘It wasn’t hard.’
Lanear drew on the mouthpiece, briefly wondering when she had grown so careless with propriety. But the sharpness blossoming in her lungs swept away the moment’s disquiet. ‘Do you rival his power, then?’
‘Oh no. He’s not very good.’
She laughed out a cloud of smoke. ‘Oh, dear. Careful, Orfantal. Cedorpul is a certain kind of man one finds on occasion. Round of form, soft to the eye, with a childish modesty still held on to, until the gift of his youth assumes the pose of affectation, sufficient to irritate his more mature fellows, even as it seduces weak-minded women. That said, such a man has the capacity for venality and spite.’
‘I shouldn’t make him angry at me?’
‘Yes, as I said. Not wise.’
Orfantal approached, settling down rather close to her knees on a padded footstool she had moved aside earlier in order to give room to her folded legs. The boy’s eyes were dark, liquid, and perhaps not as innocent as they should have been. ‘Are you a priestess?’
‘I am the High Priestess, Orfantal. Emral Lanear.’
‘Do you have any children?’
‘From my womb? No. But of the realm? Perhaps it could be said, all of the Tiste Andii.’
‘Why is it that no one gets to know their mothers?’
‘What do you mean?’
>
His gaze slipped away. ‘This is a nice room. The smoke smells like incense. It shows me the currents.’
‘What currents? Ah, the draughts—’
‘Not those currents. The other ones. The ones of power. Dark. Kurald Galain. What bleeds from that pattern in the floor in the outer room by the front doors.’ He lifted a small hand towards the mouthpiece she held, and delicately prised it from her grip. Angling the end upward, he watched as smoke curled free.
She waited for him to try it. She waited for his expression of shock, and then his coughing. She waited, she realized with a faint shock, for some company.
Instead, Lanear’s eyes widened as the swirl of smoke thickened, stretched out, making a sinuous dance as it found a serpentine form. The smoke then swung a viper’s head towards her, hovering opposite her face. She saw darkness where its eyes should have been, as liquid as Orfantal’s own.
‘Who,’ she asked in a faint gasp, ‘who stares at me from those eyes, Orfantal?’
‘Just me.’
The snake of smoke then withdrew, as if drawn back through the mouthpiece. In moments it was gone.
Smiling, Orfantal handed the mouthpiece back to her. ‘Cedorpul is collecting mages.’
Blinking, she focused on him once again. ‘Is he?’
‘He wants everyone to work on sorcery that breaks things, or hurts people. He says we need that, because the Liosan have it, and to stop them using it on us, we have to use it on them first.’
Lanear leaned back. She drew again on the pipe, but this time the smoke felt almost solid as it slithered down into her lungs. Startled, she looked down at Orfantal, but the boy was staring at something at the side of the chamber. She sent a stream of white towards the ceiling, and then said, ‘Orfantal, what do you think of Cedorpul’s reasoning?’
The boy frowned. ‘Is that what it is?’
‘He anticipates a battle, doesn’t he? Between magicks.’
‘Gallan says that darkness can only retreat. But then he says that retreating is the only way to win, because sooner or later the light passes, and what flows in behind it? Darkness. Gallan says Light’s victory is mortal, but Dark’s victory is eternal.’
‘I did not think,’ ventured Lanear as she studied this strange young boy, ‘Gallan had much time for children.’
‘No, but he liked my pet.’
‘Your dog?’
Orfantal rose. ‘No, not Ribs. My other pet. Ribs isn’t mine, but maybe,’ he added, moving towards a side door – the one he had been looking at earlier, ‘I’m his.’
He opened the door, and she saw now the dog, Ribs, lying as if about to pounce in the side passage, the pillow still in its mouth.
Orfantal rushed forward.
Spinning round, Ribs fled up the passage.
The boy followed, his bare feet light upon the floor, as if borne on feathers.
She heard the chase, dwindling away, until all was silent once more.
Careful, boy. Now you’re playing Gallan’s game.
Rustleaf offered none of the escape that came with d’bayang. Instead, it but enlivened the brain. For this moment’s repast, she’d chosen wrongly. And the loss of … company … left her feeling bereft.
* * *
Endest Silann set out from the Citadel, in search of decency. Crossing the two bridges, he made his way into the city, where the cold had drawn most people indoors. The snow had retreated to places less travelled, up against walls and in alleys where the white smears were dusted with grey soot. He moved between high estate walls, passing barred gates of iron and wood. Where the street ascended the bank, away from the river and above the floodplain, the estates burgeoned in size, and many of the long walls bore niches in which stood old statues, the marble figures painted in lifelike colours, with oversized eyes in each face offering a dispassionate regard to the cloaked man shuffling past.
In more ways than he deemed healthy, Endest preferred their blank stares over the intensity that plagued him in the Citadel. Followers stalked him now, fixing upon his every gesture with febrile attention, leaning into his every word, his every passing comment. He had met the need for a prophet with denial, and, when that failed, with silence. But this did little more than intensify their regard, crowding with imagined significance all that he did.
Any catalogue of mortal deeds could only assemble a list of flaws. Perfection belonged to the dead, where in the act of passing from what the senses could observe to what the memory reinvented, any fool could ascend into legend. But Endest Silann was not yet dead, not yet freed from mortal constraints. Sooner or later, prophets returned to their god, only to slip beyond and away, sliding their cold flesh into apocrypha – holy texts and blessed scrolls – and this was an impatient passage for the would-be witnesses waiting in the wings. He felt that he was already outliving his usefulness, and those who would pontificate and interpret his life would rather that life ended soon, if only to get him out of the way.
He walked towards the Winter Market grounds, and thirty paces behind him, as they had done since the Citadel, a score or more priests tracked him. They would do better with Cedorpul, but for all the manifestations of magic his old friend now commanded, there was nothing sacred in curious games with smoke and shadows, and even darkness made to flow like blood left no trail on the stones.
That gift, it seemed, belonged to Endest Silann alone.
His hands were wrapped in gauze that needed changing a dozen times a day. Mother Dark’s eyes saw through red tears and blotted linen, or, as was increasingly the case, they saw nothing at all, as he had taken to sliding his hands into the thick sleeves of his woollen robe, a habit the other priests now copied.
Behind him, in the Citadel, a plague had come, a kind of fever. In a body with nothing to do, the mind will dance. But that was the least of it. Some dances mapped steps into madness, with ferocious momentum. He was weary of the spies, the small groups huddled whispering in corners, the strange glances and guarded expressions. Even more tiring, beneath all that he was witness to roiled an undercurrent of fear, and that was difficult to swim against.
The future was a place of uncertain promise in the best of times, where hope and optimism warred with doubt and despair, and there were those who fought such battles in the streets, or in the home, with the enemy no longer the shadow in one’s own soul, but someone else – a neighbour, a wife or a husband, a liege or a peasant. Doubt is the enemy. Despair a weakness, and hope becomes not something to strive for, but a virtue eager to draw blood from every sceptic.
‘Turn me away from the unsightly!’ the optimists cry. ‘Yield this dream to joy, to revelry and laughter. Enough confabulation and noise to drown the distant cries of the suffering, to blind me to the world’s woes! What care I for tragedies not of my own making? Such things are beyond my control, anyway, and indeed beyond my ability to change.’
In many ways, Endest had no argument with such views. The heart’s capacity was finite. So people explained, again and again, to justify all that had grown cold and lifeless within them. If imagination had no limits, surely the soul did.
And yet, what thing of certain limit can in turn create something limitless? This seems a breaking of some fundamental law. The unbound from the bound, the infinite from the finite. How can such things be?
Eyes in his hands, to make witness to all that he did. He had set out in search of decency, and now, striding into the Winter Market, his own eyes watering to the sudden heat beneath the cloth roof, the redolent odours of myriad people, foodstuffs and animals. The first thing his gaze found was a wall of tiny wooden cages, stacked high, each cage home to a songbird.
There was no song in their voices. Instead, a cacophony of terrible stress and fear assailed him. As if of their own accord, his hands slid out from his sleeves.
A young man sat on a stool in front of the cages, grease on his lips and his fingers as he ate from a skewer of meat and vegetables. Seeing Endest Silann, he nodded. ‘Half to the temple, for the yo
ung women, but I was not expecting you for weeks yet.’ He indicated the cages behind him with a tilt of his head. ‘They save their songs for spring. Who would want these shrieks, hey?’
Endest Silann felt her then, his goddess, stealing into him, suddenly attentive, curious. ‘Where are they from?’ he asked.
The man shrugged. ‘The countryside, and to the south. Caught in fine nets during their migrations.’ He then made a face. ‘Getting fewer every year, though.’
‘And this is your living?’
The man shrugged. ‘It serves me well enough, priest.’
Endest’s followers had arrived by now, and others were drawing close, as if tasting something new in the air.
‘You make a living from the imprisonment of wild creatures.’
The man suddenly scowled, and stood up, tossing the skewer to the ground and wiping at his hands. ‘Not just me. Trappers, too. But it is not my coin that buys them, is it? If not for your own temple, priest, I might be a different man from the one you see here.’
‘And where is your own cage? The one in your skull.’
The scowl grew dark, menacing.
‘The one,’ Endest continued, ‘that traps your conscience?’
‘Look to your own for that!’
Other merchants and hawkers pushed closer now.
Endest held out his hands, watching as the bandages sagged, unfurled sodden to dangle and then slip down on to his wrists. He felt the blood welling, trickling down his palms.
The mongers before him backed away.
‘If only,’ Endest Silann said, ‘you gave her reason to fight.’ He glanced back over a shoulder and met the eyes of the nearest acolyte. ‘Take these cages back to the Citadel. All of them.’ Facing the hawker, he shook his head. ‘This is your last day here. You will be paid for these birds, but no more, and never again. In the name of Mother Dark, the capturing and selling of wild creatures is now forbidden.’
Voices rose in outrage.
The hawker bared his teeth. ‘Will you send soldiers after me, then? Because I will defy you—’
‘No, you will not. I understand you, sir, the pleasure you take from what you do, you hoarder of all you can never feel, or hope to feel.’
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