‘But is it hers?’ Emral asked.
Cedorpul moved forward, and went down on one knee beside her. He took hold of her left hand and clasped it. ‘High Priestess, doubt is our weakness as it is their weapon. We must find resolve.’
‘I have none,’ she replied.
‘Then we must fashion it with our own hands! We are the Children of Night now. An unknown river divides the Tiste and we fall to one side or the other. We are cleaved in two, High Priestess, and must make meaning from that.’
She studied him with reddened eyes. ‘Make meaning? I see no meaning beyond division itself, this ragged tear between ink and unstained parchment. Regard the historian here and you will see the truth of that, and the desolation it promises. How would you want me to answer our losses? With fire and brutal zeal? Look well upon Mother Dark and see the path she has chosen.’
‘It is unknown to us,’ snapped Cedorpul.
‘The river god yielded the holy places,’ she replied. ‘The birth waters have withdrawn. There is no war of wills between them. Syntara was not driven away; she but fled. Mother Dark seeks peace and would challenge none in its name.’
Cedorpul released her hand and straightened. He backed away a step, and then another, until his retreat was brought to a halt, against the tapestry covering the wall. He struggled to speak for a moment, and then said, ‘Without challenge, there can only be surrender. Are we so easily defeated, High Priestess?’
When Emral made no answer, Rise said, ‘“Beware an easy victory.”’
Emral looked up at him sharply. ‘Gallan. Where is he, historian?’
Rise shrugged. ‘He has made himself a ghost and walks unseen. In times such as these, no poet is heeded, and indeed is likely to be among the first to hang from a spike, in clacking consort with crows.’
‘Words win us nothing,’ Cedorpul said. ‘And now Anomander leaves the city, and with him his brothers. The Hust Legion is leagues to the south. The Wardens crouch in Glimmer Fate. The nobleborn do not stir, as if disaster and discord are beneath them all. Upon which threshold do they stand, and which step taken by the enemy is a step too far?’ He no longer held pleading eyes on Emral Lanear as he spoke, and Rise understood that the priest had dismissed her, seeing in the High Priestess an impotency that he was not yet ready to accept. Instead, he glared at the historian during the course of his tirade. ‘Is this our curse?’ he demanded. ‘That we live in a time of indifference? Do you think the wolves will hold back, when all they see before them is weakness?’
‘The wolves are true to their nature,’ Rise said in reply, ‘and indifference plagues every age and every time, priest. Our doom is to be driven to act when it is already too late, and to then give zeal to our amends. And we beat our brows and decry that indifference, which we never own, or loudly proclaim our ignorance, which is ever a lie. And old women drag brooms through the streets and graves are dug in even rows, and we are made solemn before the revealed fragility of our ways.’
Cedorpul’s eyes tightened. ‘Now even you advise surrender? Historian, you mock the value of past lessons, making you worthless in all eyes.’
‘Past lessons deserve mockery, priest, precisely because they are never learned. If you deem that stance worthless, then you miss the point.’
Anger darkened Cedorpul’s round face. ‘We blather on and on — even as poor dwellers in the countryside fall beneath blade and spear! At last I understand what we are — we who hide in this chamber. You know of us, historian, you must! We are the useless ones. It is our task to fritter and moan, to cover our eyes with trembling hands, and bewail the loss of everything we once valued, and when at last there is no one else left, they will crush us like snails under their marching heels!’
Rise said, ‘If the wolves are indeed loose among us, priest, then we surrendered some time ago. Yet you berate my mockery of lessons unheeded. Vigilance is an exhausting necessity, if one would protect what one values. We lose by yielding in increments, here and there, a slip, a nudge. The enemy never tires in this assault and measures true those increments. They win in a thousand small victories, and know long before we do when they stand over our corpses.’
‘Then climb to your tower,’ Cedorpul said in a snarl, ‘and leap from its edge. Better not to witness the dregs of our useless demise.’
‘The last act of an historian, priest, is to live through history. It is the bravest act of them all, because it faces, unblinking, the recognition that all history is personal, and that every external truth of the world is but a reflection of our internal truths — the truths that shape our behaviours, our decisions, our fears, our purposes and our appetites. These internal truths raise monuments and flood sewers. They lift high grand works as readily as they fill graves. If you blame one appetite you blame all of our appetites. We all swim the same river.’
‘In which,’ muttered Emral, ‘even the wolves will drown.’
‘“Destruction spares no crown and I say this unto the lords behind every door, from hovel to palace.”’
‘Gallan again!’ spat Cedorpul. He swung to Endest Silann. ‘Let us go. Like keepsakes, they will rest upon shelves even as the flames enter the room.’
But the young acolyte hesitated. ‘Master,’ he said to Cedorpul, ‘did we not come here to speak of Draconus?’
‘I see no point,’ the priest replied. ‘He is but one more keepsake. Mother Dark’s own.’
Emral Lanear stood as one who would at last face her accuser. ‘Do you now go to join Sister Syntara, Cedorpul?’
‘I go in search of peace. I see in you the tragedy of standing still.’
He left the chamber. Endest bowed to the High Priestess but made no move to depart.
Sighing, Emral waved a hand. ‘Go on, keep him safe.’
When he slipped out, looking more broken than ever, she turned to Rise. ‘You said nothing of value, historian.’
‘Daughter of Night, the other has made me hoarse.’
Emral studied the tapestry Cedorpul had been leaning against. ‘She is young,’ she said. ‘Rigour of health and polish of beauty are seen as righteous virtue, and by this Syntara triumphs. Over me, surely. And over Mother Dark, whose darkness hides every virtue and every vice and so makes of them both a singular aspect… and one that yields nothing.’
‘That may be her intention,’ observed Rise.
She glanced at him and then back to the tapestry. ‘You claim to have written nothing, historian.’
‘In my younger days, High Priestess, I wrote plenty. There are fires that burn bright and so make youthful eyes shine like torches. Any wood pile, no matter how big, will one day be gone, leaving only memories of warmth.’
She shook her head. ‘I see no end to the fuel, sir.’
‘For lack of a spark, it does rot.’
‘I do not understand this image here, Rise.’
He drew up alongside her and studied the tapestry. ‘Creation allegory, one of the early ones. The first Tiste heroes, who slew a dragon goddess and drank of her blood and thus became as gods. So fierce was their rule and so cold their power, the Azathanai rose as one to cast them down. It is said that all discord reveals a touch of draconean blood, and that it is the loss of our purity that wields the hand of our ills in all the ages since that time.’ He shrugged, eyeing the faded scene. ‘A dragon with many heads, according to this unknown weaver.’
‘Always the Azathanai, like a shadow to our conscience. Your tale is obscure, historian.’
‘A dozen or more creation myths warred for eminence once, until but one survived. Alas, the victor was not this one. We seek reasons for what we are and how we imagine ourselves; and every reason strives to become justification, and every justification a righteous cause. By this a people build an identity and cleave to it. But it is all invention, High Priestess, to make clay into flesh, sticks into bone, and flames into thought. No alternative sits well with us.’
‘What alternative would you have?’
He shrugged. ‘That we are meaningless. Our lives, our selves, our pasts and most of all, our existence in the present. This moment, the next, and the next: each one we find in wonder and near disbelief.’
‘Is this your conclusion, Rise Herat? That we are meaningless?’
‘I try not to think in terms of meaning, Daughter of Night. I but measure life in degrees of helplessness, and in the observation of this, we find, in totality, the purpose of history.’
