Deadhouse Gates

Duiker the smile was strained. It was well that spirits were high, the strange melancholy that came with victory drifting away, but the spectre of what lay ahead nevertheless loomed with monstrous certainty. The historian had felt his own spirits deepening to sorrow, for he'd long since lost the ability to will himself into blind faith.

The captain spoke again. 'This forest beyond the river, what do you know of it?'

'Cedar,' Duiker replied. 'Source of Ubaryd's fame in shipbuilding. It once covered both sides of the River Vathar, but now only the south side remains, and even that has dwindled close to the bay.'

'The fools never bothered replanting?'

'A few efforts, when the threat was finally recognized, but herders had already claimed the land. Goats, Captain. Goats can turn a paradise into a desert in no time at all. They eat shoots, they strip bark entirely around the boles of trees, killing them as surely as a wildfire. However, there's plenty of forest left upriver — we'll be a week or more travelling through it.'

'So I'd heard. Well, I'll welcome the shade …'

A week or more, indeed. More like eternity — how does Coltaine defend his vast winding train amidst a forest, where ambushes will come from every direction, where troops cannot wheel and respond with anything like swiftness and order? Sulmar's concerns about the dry lands beyond the forest are moot, as far as I'm concerned. And I wonder if I'm alone in thinking that?

They rode between wagons loaded with wounded soldiers. The air was foul here with flesh rotting where forced healing had failed to stem the advance of infection. Soldiers in fever raved and rambled, delirium prying open the doors of their minds to countless other realms — from this nightmare world into countless others. Only Hood's gift offers surcease. .

Off to their left on the flat grassland, the train's dwindling herds of cattle and goats moved amidst turgid clouds of dust. Wickan cattle-dogs patrolled the edges, accompanied by Weasel Clan riders. The entire herd would be slaughtered at the River Vathar, for the lands beyond the forest would not sustain them. For there are no spirits of the land there.

The historian found himself musing as he eyed the herd. The animals had matched them step for step on this soul-destroying journey. Month after month of suffering. That is one curse we all share — the will to live. Their fates had been decided, though thankfully they knew nothing of that. Yet even that will change in the last moments. The dumbest of beasts seems capable of sensing its own impending death. Hood grants every living thing awareness at the very end. What mercy is that?

'The horse's blood had burned black in its veins,' Lull said suddenly.

Duiker nodded, not needing to ask which horse the captain meant. She carried them all, such a raging claim on her life force, it seared her from within. Such thoughts took him past words, into a place of raw pain.

'It's said,' Lull went on, 'that their hands are stained black now. They are marked for ever more.'

As am I. He thought of Nil and Nether, two children curled foetally beneath the hood of the wagon, there in the midst of their silent kin. The Wickans know that the gift of power is never free. They know enough not to envy the chosen among them, for power is never a game, nor are glittering standards raised to glory and wealth. They disguise nothing in trappings, and so we all see what we'd rather not, that power is cruel, hard as iron and bone, and it thrives on destruction.

'I am falling into your silences, old man,' Lull said softly.

Duiker could only nod again.

'I find myself impatient for Korbolo Dom. For an end to this. I can no longer see what Coltaine sees, Historian.'

'Can you not?' Duiker asked, meeting the man's eye. 'Are you certain that what he sees is different from what you see, Lull?'

Dismay slowly settled on his twisted features.

'I fear,' Duiker continued, 'that the Fist's silences no longer speak of victory.'

'A match to your own growing silence, then.'

The historian shrugged. An entire continent pursues us. We should not have lived this long. And I can take my thoughts no further than that, and am diminished by that truth. All those histories I've read. . each an intellectual obsession with war, the endless redrawing of maps. Heroic charges and crushing defeats. We are all naught but twists of suffering in a river of pain. Hood's breath, old man, your words weary even yourself-why inflict them on others?

'We need to stop thinking,' Lull said. 'We're well past that point. Now we simply exist. Look at those beasts over there. We're the same, you and I, the same as them. Struggling beneath the sun, pushed and ever pushed to our place of slaughter.'

Duiker shook his head. 'It is our curse that we cannot know the bliss of being mindless, Captain. You'll find no salvation where you're looking, I'm afraid.'

'Not interested in salvation,' Lull growled. 'Just a way to keep going.'

They approached the captain's company. In the midst of the Seventh's infantry stood a knot of haphazardly armed and armoured men and women, perhaps fifty in all. Faces were turned expectantly towards Lull and Duiker.

'Time to be a captain,' Lull muttered under his breath, his tone so dispirited that it stung the historian's heart.

A waiting sergeant barked out a command to stand at attention and the motley gathering made a ragged but determined effort to comply. Lull eyed them for a moment longer, then dismounted and approached.

'Six months ago you knelt before purebloods,' the captain addressed them. 'You shied away your eyes and had the taste of dusty floors on your tongues. You exposed your backs to the whips and your world was high walls and foul hovels where you slept, where you loved, and gave birth to children who would face no better future. Six months ago I wouldn't have wasted a tin jakata on the lot of you.' He paused, nodding to his sergeant.

Soldiers of the Seventh came forward, each carrying folded uniforms. Those uniforms were faded, stained and restitched where weapons had pierced the cloth. Resting atop each pressed bundle was an iron sigil. Duiker leaned forward on his saddle to examine one more closely. The medallion was perhaps four inches in diameter, a circlet of chain affixed to a replica Wickan dog-collar, and in the centre was a cattle-dog's head — not snarling, simply staring outward with hooded eyes.

Something twisted inside the historian so that he barely managed to contain it.

'Last night,' Captain Lull said, 'a representative of the Council of Nobles came to Coltaine. They were burdened with a chest of gold and silver jakatas. It seems the nobles have grown weary of cooking their own food, mending their own clothes … wiping their own asses-'

At another time such a comment would have triggered dark looks and low grumbling — just one more spit in the face to join a lifetime of others. Instead, the former servants laughed. The antics of when they were children. Children no more.

Lull waited for the laughter to fall away. 'The Fist said nothing. The Fist turned his back on them. The Fist knows how to gauge value …' The captain paused, a slow frown descending on his scarred features. 'There comes a time when a life can't be bought by coin, and once that line's crossed, there's no going back. You are soldiers now. Soldiers of the Seventh. Each of you will join regular squads in my infantry, to stand alongside your fellow soldiers — and not one of them gives a damn what you were before.' He swung to the sergeant. 'Assign these soldiers, Sergeant.'

Duiker watched the ritual in silence, each issuing of uniform as a man or woman's name was called out, the squads coming forward to collect their new member. Nothing was overplayed, nothing was forced. The perfunctory professionalism of the act carried its own weight, and a deep silence enveloped the scene. The historian saw inductees in their forties, but none was unfit. Decades of hard labour and the culling of two battles had ensured a collection of stubborn survivors.

They will stand, and stand well.

The captain appeared at his side. 'As servants,' Lull softly rumbled, 'they might have survived, been sold on to other noble families. Now, with swords in their hands, they will die. Can you hear this silence, Duiker? Do you know what it signifies? I imagine you do, all too well.'

With all that we do, Hood smiles.