Faintly, Crone heard a manic laugh rise up to meet her, then the puppet gestured.
The power that engulfed Crone was Iowri;cse, far beyond anything she anticipated. Her defences held but she found herself buffeted, as if fists punched her from every direction. She cried out in pain, spinning as she fell. It took all her strength and will to; MM out her battered wings and catch a rising current of air. She voiced an outraged, alarmed shriek she climbed higher into the night sky. A tffice down revealed that the puppet had returned once again to its Warren, for nothing magical was visible.
«Aye.» She sighed. «What a price to pay for knowledge! Elder Warrren indeed, the eldest of them all. Who plays with Chaos? Crone knows naught. All things are gathering, %.L=.- here.» She found another stream of wind and angled south. This was something Anomander Rake must know of, never mind Caladan The '110 instructions that the Ti And? lord be kept ignorant of almost 4- i;;&~thing. Rake was good more than Brood credited him. VMMM Met, for one.» Crone laugh «And death. Good at death!»
She picked up speed, so did not notice the, — dead smudge on the plain below her, nor the woman camped in its centre. There was no me there to speak of, in any case.
Adjunct Lorn squatted by her bedroll, her eyes scanning the night sky. «Tool, was all that connected to what we witnessed two nights ago?»
The T'lan Imass shook his head. «I think — sro-t, Adjunct. If anything, concerns me more. It is sorcery, and it 1wres the barrier I have around us.»
«How?» she asked quietly.
«There is only one possibility, Adjunct. It is Eldering, a lost Warren ages past, returned to us. Whoever its wielder might be, we must assume it tracks us, with purpose.»
Lorn straightened wearily, then stretched her back, feeling her vertebrae pop. «Is its flavour Shadowthrone's?»
«No.»
«Then I will not assume it's tracking us, Tool.» She eyed her bedroll.
Tool faced the woman and watched in silence as she prepared to sleep.
«Adjunct,» he said, «this hunter appears able to penetrate my defences, and thus it may open its Warren's portal directly behind us, once we are found.»
«I've no fear of magic,» Lorn muttered. «Let me sleep.»
The T'lan Imass fell silent, but he continued staring down at the woman as the hours of night crawled on. Tool moved slightly as dawn lightened the east, then was still again.
Groaning, Lorn rolled on to her back as the sunlight reached her face.
She opened her eyes and blinked rapidly, then froze. She slowly raised her head to find the T'lan Imass standing directly above her.
And, hovering inches from her throat, was the tip of the warrior's flint sword.
«Success,» Tool said, «demands discipline, Adjunct. Last night we witnessed an expression of Elder magic, choosing as its target ravens. Ravens, Adjunct, do not fly at night. You might think the combination of my abilities with yours ensures our safety. That is no guarantee, Adjunct.» The T'lan Imass withdrew his weapon and stepped to one side.
Lorn drew a shaky breath. «A flaw,» she said, pausing to clear her throat before continuing, «which I admit to, Tool. Thank you for alerting me to my growing complacency.» She sat up. «Tell me, doesn't it strike you as odd that this supposedly empty Rhivi Plain should display so much activity?»
«Convergence,» Tool said. «Power ever draws other power. It is not a complicated thought, yet it escaped us, the Imass.» The ancient warrior swung his head to the Adjunct. «As it escapes their children. The Jaghut well understood the danger. Thus they avoided one another, abandoned each other to solitude, and left a civilization to crumble into dust. The Forkrul Assail understood as well, though they chose another path. What is odd, Adjunct, is that of these three founding peoples, it is the Imass whose legacy of ignorance survived the ages.»
Lorn stared at Tool. «Was that an attempt at humour?» she asked.
The T'lan Imass adjusted his helmet. «That depends on your mood, Adjunct.»
She climbed to her feet and strode to check her horses. «You're getting stranger every day, Tool,» she said quietly, more to herself than to the Imass. Into her mind returned the first thing she had seen when she opened her eyes-that damned creature and his sword. How long had he stood like that? All night?
The Adjunct paused to test her shoulder tentatively. It was healing quickly. Perhaps the injury had not been as severe as she'd first thought As she saddled her horse she chanced to glance at Tool. The warrior stood staring at her. What kind of thoughts would occupy someone who'd lived through three hundred thousand years? Or did the Imas live? Before meeting Tool she had generally thought of them as undead, hence without a soul, the flesh alone animated by some external force.
But now she wasn't so sure.
«Tell me, Tool, what dominates your thoughts?»
The Imass shrugged before replying. «I think of futility, Adjunct.»
«Do all Imass think about futility?»
«No. Few think at all.»
«Why is that?»
The Imass leaned his head to one side and regarded her. «Because Adjunct, it is futile.»
«Let's get going, Tool. We're wasting time.»
«Yes, Adjunct.»
She climbed into the saddle, wondering how the Imass had meant that.
BOOK FOUR ASSASSINS
I dreamed a coin with shifting face-so many youthful visages so many costly dreams, and it rolled and rang «round the gilded rim of a chalice made for gems
Life of Dreams Mares the Hag
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The night held close as I wandered my spirit unfooted to either earth or stone unravelled from tree undriven by iron nail but like the night itself a thing of air stripped of light so I came upon them, those masons who cut and carved stone in the night sighting by stars and battered hand.
«What of the sun?» asked I of them «Is not its cloak of revelation the warmth of reason in your shaping?»
And one among them answered «No soul can withstand the sun's bones of light and reason dims when darkness falls-so we shape barrows in the night for you and your kin.»
«Forgive my interruption, then,» said I.
«The dead never interrupt,» said the mason, «they but arrive.»
Pauper's Stone Darujhistan of
«Yet another night, yet another dream,» KRUPPE MOANED, «With naught but a scant fire to keep this wanderer company.» He held his hands over the flickering, undying hearth that had been stoked by an Elder God. It seemed an odd gift, but he sensed a significance to it. «Kruppe would understand this meaning, for rare and unwelcome is this frustration.»
The landscape around him was barren; even the ploughed earth was gone, with no sign of habitation in sight. He squatted by the lone fire in a tundra wasteland, and the air had the breath of rotting ice. To the north and to the east the horizon gleamed green, almost luminescent though no moon had risen to challenge the stars. Kruppe had never before seen such a thing, yet it was an image fashioned within his mind.
«Disturbing, indeed, proclaims Kruppe. Are these visions of instinct, then, unfurled in this dream for a purpose? Kruppe knows not, and would return to his warm bed this instant, were the choice his.»
He stared about at the lichen- and moss-covered ground, frowning at the strange bright colours born there. He'd heard tales of Redspire Plain, that land far to the north, beyond the Laederon Plateau. Is this what tundra looked like? He'd always pictured a bleak, colourless world. «Yet peruse these stars overhead. They glisten with a youthful energy, nay, sparkle as if amused by the one who contemplates them. While the earth itself hints of vast blushes of red, orange and lavender.»
Kruppe rose as low thunder reached him from the west. In the distance moved a massive herd of brown-furred beasts. The steam of their breath gusted silver in the air above and behind them as they ran, turning as one this way and that but ever at a distance. He watched them for some time.
When they came closest to him he saw the reddish streaks in their fur, and their horns, sweeping down then up and out. The land shook with their passage.
«Such is the life in this world, Kruppe wonders. Has he travelled back, then, to the very beginning of things?»
«You have,» said a deep voice behind him.
Kruppe turned. «Ah, come to share my fire, of course.» He saw before him a squat figure, covered in the tanned hides of deer or some such similar animal. Antlers stretched out from a flat skull-cap on the man's head, grey and covered in fuzzy skin. Kruppe bowed. «You see before you Kruppe, of Darujhistan.»
«I am Pran Chole of Cannig Tol's Clan among the Kron Tlan.» Pran stepped close and crouched before the fire. «I am also the White Fox, Kruppe, wise in the ways of ice.» He glanced at Kruppe and smiled.
Pran's face was wide, the bones pronounced beneath smooth, gold skin. His eyes were barely visible between tight lids, but what Kruppe saw of them was a startling amber in colour. Pran reached out long, supple hands over the fire. «Fire is life, and life is fire. The age of ice passes, Kruppe. Long have we lived here, hunting the great herds, gathering to war with the Jaghut in the southlands, birthing and dying with the ebb and flow of the frozen rivers.»
«Kruppe has travelled far, then.»
«To the beginning and to the end. My kind give way to your kind, Kruppe, though the wars do not cease. What we shall give to you is freedom from such wars. The Jaghut dwindle, ever retreat into forbidding places. The Forkrul Assail have vanished, though we never found need to fight them. And the K'chain Che'Malle are no more-the ice spoke to them with words of death.» Pran's gaze swung back to the fire. «Our hunting has brought death to the great herds, Kruppe. We are driven south, and this must not be. We are the Tlan, but soon the Gathering comes, and so shall be voiced the Rite of Imass and the Choosing of the Bone Casters, and then shall come the sundering of flesh, of time itself.
«With the Gathering shall be born the T'lan Imass, and the First Empire.»
«Why, Kruppe wonders, is he here?»
Pran Chole shrugged. «I have come for I have been called. By whom, I know not. Perhaps it is the same with you.»
«But Kruppe is dreaming. This is Kruppe's dream.»
«Then I am honoured.» Pran straightened. «One of your time comes. Perhaps this one possesses the answers we seek.»
Kruppe followed Pran's gaze to the south. He raised an eyebrow. «If not mistaken, then Kruppe recognizes her as a Rhivi.»
The woman who approached was perhaps middle-aged, heavy with child. Her dark, round face bore features similar to Pran Chole's, though less pronounced. Fear shone in her eyes, yet there was a grim determination about her as well. She reached the fire and eyed the two men, most of her attention drawing to Pran Chole. «Tlan,» she said, «the Tellann Warren of the Imass of our time has birthed a child in a confluence of sorceries. Its soul wanders lost. Its flesh is an abomination. A shifting must take place.» She turned to Kruppe and swept back the thick woven robe she wore,
