‘I don’t believe you. I will not live for ever. Nothing does, not even the gods.’
‘And what do you know of gods?’
‘Nothing.’ Everything. I stood with them, at the window.
In the dark of the trunk, the eyes saw nothing, yet knew it not. She could have taken the dolls out before she left. Set them out in a row upon the windowsill, among the dead flies, and pressed their flat faces against the grimy glass. She could have told them to see all there was to be seen.
But, goddess that she had once been, she was never so cruel.
We are not flies.
One day she had come to the window only to find all the flies gone. The sun’s warmth had brought them all back to life. That day had been the most frightening day of her young life.
I should have fed them to the spiders. If I had not swept their homes away.
In this place… ‘I have begun remembering things,’ she said.
He grunted, not turning, not slowing his stride. ‘And are these memories yours?’
‘I think so. Who else’s?’
‘That remains to be seen, hostage. But it has begun.’
Mahybe. The vessel waiting to be filled. Trunk of dolls. Reach in, quickly now! Choose one, upon your life — choose one!
Another memory assailed her, but it could not be real. She was outside the tower, hovering in the hot summer air. Before her, the window, and through its grey glass, she saw row upon row of faces. She floated, looking upon them, wondering at their sad expressions.
Now at last, I think I know what the gods and goddesses were all looking at.
Jewels crunched and rolled under her feet. She imagined herself old, bent and broken, with at her hand all the gold, silver and gems of the world, and in her heart there was yearning, and she knew that she would give it all up… for one child’s dream.
Children died. Feren held those words in her mind, swaddled and snug-tight in bitter embrace. Some fell from the womb with eyes closed, and the warmth of the blood upon their faces was cruel mockery. They were expunged in waves of pain, only to lie still in dripping hands. No woman deserved that. For others, there were but a handful of years which only later seemed crowded, cries of hunger, small hands grasping, luminous eyes that seemed wise in the ways of things not spoken. And then one day, those eyes stared out from half-closed lids, seeing nothing.
Mischance was scurrilous. Fate had a way of walking into empty rooms with smug familiarity. Children died. The laments of the mothers were hollow sounds to anyone’s ears. People turned away and studied the ground, or some feature upon the horizon, as if it were changing before their eyes.
She remembered the look on Rint’s face, her beloved brother, and how it crumpled with comprehension. She remembered the old women working quietly, businesslike, and not meeting her gaze. She remembered her fury at the sound of youths laughing nearby, and then hearing the bark of someone hushing them. It was not that death was rare. In dogged step it ever remained close, cold as a shadow. The blunt truth was, the world beat upon a soul until bones bent and hearts broke.
Since then, she had been crawling away, and it had been years and for all that she had aged since that time she felt but a day older, the bruise of grief still fresh beneath her skin, with the echo of insensitive laughter hard in her ears.
As they travelled across Bareth Solitude, each night she took to her bed the young man, bastard son of Draconus, and told herself that it was because the Lord had asked it of her. But it was getting more and more difficult to meet her brother’s eye. Arathan was pouring his seed into her, twice, three times a night, and she did nothing to prevent what might come of that; just as she had done nothing the night that she slept with Grizzin Farl, but at least then she’d had the excuse of being rather drunk. Something wayward had taken hold of her, a rushing towards fate, eager to sink into dire consequences.
She had no fear of her own future, and to be mired in circumstances of one’s own making offered its own delusion of control. But she was claiming that which belonged to others — the years ahead of them, the lives they would be made to lead. Mothers who lost could become obsessed with protectiveness and that might well find Feren, and for that her child would suffer through life. Arathan could sire a bastard and so show his father a mirrored reflection, and the eyes in their self-regard would be cold and unforgiving. Her brother, disarmed anew, might flee from an uncle’s love, stung by the pain of a loss still too sharp to bear.
Arathan was the same age her son would now be, a young man spread-eagled beneath the world, as all young men were. He was not her son, but he could give her a son. Indeed, she was certain that he would. Her brother had seen something of this strange, macabre compact in her mind, this blending of fates, one empty, the other fast filling. She was convinced of that.
It was one thing to use for pleasure. It was another thing entire to just use. She taught Arathan the ways of lovemaking, whispering of grateful women in the future. But who were these women, who would give thanks to Feren for all that she’d given the man in their bed? Where would he find these women, this frail bastard son, soon to be abandoned among the Azathanai? Not a question with which she need concern herself, of course; and she reminded herself of this often, to little avail. He would be what she made him, and in turn he would make in her what he could never be: a son. And afterwards, in the dark and the heat, she would stroke his hair, and make his hands into fists — soft tips and absent nails — which she then closed her own hands around — and in fleeting ecstasy, sick with guilt, she imagined the boy’s fists to be smaller than they were, as if by the strength of her grip she could crush them down to proper proportions.
There was a kind of recklessness in women. To open her legs was to invite it in, and with the invitation came surrender. Each night, the taste of that surrender stole into her like a drug. Her brother could see it, and was right to fear it. A woman who does not care is a dangerous woman.
Each day, as they rode across the barren land, she longed for the night to come, for the boy’s helpless eagerness, for the shudders of his body against hers, for the waves that seemed to steal away his life — so much of it, rushing into her. She meant to use that life.
Children died. But a woman could make more children. Sons were born and sometimes they died, but there were many sons. And even dreams of the future held in hands, places of darkness.
Riding at his sister’s side, trapped in the silence between them, Rint studied the lie of the land, wishing that monuments might rise before them, erupting from the hard ground, halting them in their tracks. All forward progress denied: nothing to do but turn round and return to Kurald Galain.
When she took with child, she would flee, like a thief down a street, into hidden alleys, secret courses that none could follow. A prize in her womb, she would draw knife and hiss at any who drew near. Even her brother.
He cursed Draconus, cursed this entire venture; he felt his body weaken with anguish at the sight of young Arathan, riding so proud at his father’s side. He’d thought better of his sister. The world, crowding close round this meagre party, had grown sordid.
The day was drawing to a close, shadows stretched into their path from the lead riders, ephemeral and misshapen. To either side the plain rolled out, rippled like a dislodged rug, threadbare on the rises where the winter winds cut like knives for months on end. The deeper basins were bleached white, made lifeless by leaching salts.
They had passed some ruins just after noon. Foundation stones of pitted granite formed a rectangle on a level span just above a broad, shallow basin. The scale of the structure seemed oversized for Azathanai, and Rint saw little sign of their legendary stone-working skills in the roughly hewn granite. The walls had long since tumbled, forming a scree down the slope on the basin side and lying in heaps upon the opposite side. There was no evidence that anyone had ever harvested the rubble. Apart from the lone building, Rint saw no other signs of habitation — no pen walls, no field enclosures, and the ground bore no evidence of ploughing. He wondered at it as they rode by.
Only ignorance emptied the past. Fools built the world from nothing — the whim of a god, some bold acclamation of existence in the Abyss. None of these visions of creation did more than serve the vanity of those holding them. As if all was made for them; for their eyes to witness, for their wonder to behold. Rint did not believe it. The past had no beginning. Something always existed before, no matter how far back one reached. It was the
