Deadhouse Gates

Earlier that day, at a time when the train had ground to a temporary halt, Captain Lull had joined the historian to share some rations. Few words passed between them to start, as if the events at Vathar Crossing were something not to be talked about, even as they spread like a plague through every thought and echoed ghostlike behind every scene around them, every sound that rose from the camp.

Lull slowly put away the remnants of their meal. Then he paused, and Duiker saw the man studying his own hands, which had begun trembling. The historian looked away, surprised at the sudden shame that swept through him. He saw List, wrapped in sleep on the buckboard, trapped within his prison of dreams. I could in mercy awaken the lad, yet the power for knowledge has mastered me. Cruelty comes easy these days.

The captain sighed after a moment, hastily completing the task. 'Do you find the need to answer all this, Historian?' he asked. 'All those tomes you've read, those other thoughts from other men, other women. Other times. How does a mortal make answer to what his or her kind are capable of? Does each of us, soldier or no, reach a point when all that we've seen, survived, changes us inside? Irrevocably changes us. What do we become, then? Less human, or more human? Human enough, or too human?'

Duiker was silent for a long minute, his eyes on the rock-studded dirt that surrounded the boulder upon which he sat. Then he cleared his throat. 'Each of us has his own threshold, friend. Soldier or no, we can only take so much before we cross over… into something else. As if the world has shifted around us, though it's only our way of looking at it. A change of perspective, but there's no intelligence to it — you see but do not feel, or you weep yet look upon your own anguish as if from somewhere else, somewhere outside. It's not a place for answers, Lull, for every question has burned away. More human or less human — that's for you to decide.'

'Surely it has been written of, by scholars, priests. . philosophers?'

Duiker smiled down at the dirt. 'Efforts have been made. But those who themselves have crossed that threshold … well, they have few words to describe the place they've found, and little inclination to attempt to explain it. As I said, it's a place without intelligence, a place where thoughts wander, formless, unlinked. Lost.'

'Lost,' the captain repeated. 'I am surely that.'

'Yet you and I, Lull, we are lost late in our lives. Look upon the children, and despair.'

'How to answer this? I must know, Duiker, else I go mad.'

'Sleight of hand,' the historian said.

'What?'

'Think of the sorcery we've seen in our lives, the vast, unbridled, deadly power we've witnessed unleashed. Driven to awe and horror. Then think of a trickster — those you saw as a child — the games of illusion and artifice they could play out with their hands, and so bring wonder to your eyes.'

The captain was silent, motionless. Then he rose. 'And there's my answer?'

'It's the only one I can think of, friend. Sorry if it's not enough.'

'No, old man, it's enough. It has to be, doesn't it?'

'Aye, that it does.'

'Sleight of hand.'

The historian nodded. 'Ask for nothing more, for the world — this world — won't give it.'

'But where will we find such a thing?'

'Unexpected places,' Duiker replied, also rising. Somewhere ahead, shouts rose and the convoy resumed its climb once more. 'If you fight both tears and a smile, you'll have found one.'

'Later, Historian.'

'Aye.'

He watched the captain set off back towards his company of soldiers, and wondered if all he'd said, all he'd offered to the man, was nothing but lies.

The possibility returned to him now, hours later as he trudged along on the trail. One of those random, unattached thoughts that were coming to characterize the blasted scape of his mind. Returned, lingered a moment, then drifted away and was gone.

The journey continued, beneath clouds of dust and a few remaining butterflies.

Korbolo Dom pursued, sniping at the train's mangled tail, content to await better ground before another major engagement. Perhaps even he quailed at what Vathar Forest had begun to reveal.

Among the tall cedars there were trees of some other species that had turned to stone. Gnarled and twisted, the petrified wood embraced objects that were themselves fossilized — the trees held offerings and had, long ago, grown around them. Duiker well recalled the last time he had seen such things, in what had been a holy place in the heart of an oasis, just north of Hissar. That site had revealed ram's horns locked in the wrapped crooks of branches, and there were plenty of those here as well, although they were the least disquieting of Vathar's offerings.

T'lan Imass. No room for doubt — their undead faces stare out at us, from all sides, skulls and withered faces peering out from wreaths of crystallized bark, the dark pits of their eyes tracking our passage. This is a burial ground, not of the flesh-and-blood forebears of the T'lan Imass, but of the deathless creatures themselves.

List's visions of ancient war — we see here its aftermath. Crumpled platforms were visible as well, stone latticework perched amidst branches that had once grown around them, closing up the assembled bones like the fingers of stone hands.

At the war's end, the survivors came here, carrying those comrades too shattered to continue, and made of this forest their eternal home. The souls of the T'lan Imass cannot join Hood, cannot even flee their prisons of bone and withered flesh. One does not bury such things — that sentence of earthen darkness offers no peace. Instead, let those remnants look out from their perches upon one another, upon the rare mortal passages on this trail. .

Corporal List saw far too clearly, his visions delivering him deep into a history better left lost. Knowledge had beaten him down — as it does us all, when delivered in too great a measure. Yet I hunger still.

Cairns had begun appearing, heaps of boulders surmounted with totemic skulls. Not barrows, List had said. Sites of engagement, the various clans, wherever the Jaghut turned from flight and lashed out.

The day was drawing to a close when they reached the final height, a broad, jumbled basolith that seemed to have shed its limestone coat, the exposed bedrock deeply hued the colour of wine. Flat, treeless stretches were crowded with boulders set out in spirals, ellipses and corridors. Cedars were replaced by pines, and the number of petrified trees diminished.

Duiker and List had been travelling in the last third of the column, the wounded shielded by a battered rearguard of infantry. Once the last of the wagons and the few livestock that remained cleared the slope and made level ground, the footmen quickly gained the ridge, squads scattering to various vantage points and potential strongholds commanding the approach.

List halted his wagon and set the brake, then rose from the buckboard, stretched and looked down at Duiker with haunted eyes.

'Better lines of sight up here, anyway,' the historian offered.

'Always has been,' the corporal said. 'If we make for the head of the column, we'll come to the first of them.'

'The first of what?'

The blood leaving the lad's face bespoke another vision flooding his mind, a world and a time seen through unhuman eyes. After a moment he shuddered, wiping sweat from his face. 'I'll show you.'

They moved through the quiet press in silence. The efforts at making camp they saw on all sides looked wooden, refugees and soldiers alike moving as automatons. No-one bothered attempting to erect tents; they simply laid out their bedrolls on the flat rock. Children sat unmoving, watching with the eyes of old men and women.

The Wickan camps were no better. There was no escape from what had been, from the images and remembered scenes that rose again and again, remorselessly, before the mind's eye. Every frail, mundane gesture of normal life had shattered beneath the weight of knowledge.

Yet there was anger, white hot and buried deep, out of sight, as if mantled in peat. It had become the last fuel with any potency. And so we move on, day after day, fighting every battle — those inside and those without — with an unyielding ferocity and determination. We are all in that place where Lull now lives, a place