‘Venitt Sathad, my agents-there are wives, husbands, children-’
‘Yes, I am sure there are. Just as there were wives, husbands and children of all those you happily arrested, tortured and murdered all in the name of personal financial gain. The people, Orbyn, do understand redressing an imbalance.’
‘This is as Rautos Hivanar demands-’
‘My master leaves the specifics to me. He respects my record of… efficiency. While the authority he represents no doubt bolsters compliance, 1 rarely make overt use of it. By that I mean I rarely find the need. You said you know me, Truthfinder, did you not?’
‘I know you, Venitt Sathad, for the man who found Gerun Eberict’s murderer and sent that half-blood away with a chest full of coins. 1 know you for the killer of a hundred men and women at virtually every level of society, and, no matter how well protected, they die, and you emerge unscathed, your identity unknown-’
‘Except, it seems, to you.’
‘I stumbled onto your secret life, Venitt Sathad, many years ago. And I have followed your career, not just within the empire, but in the many consulates and embassies where your… skills… were needed. To advance Letherii interests. I am a great admirer, Venitt Sathad.’
Yet now you seek to cast in the coin of your knowledge in order to purchase your life. Do you not comprehend the risk?’
‘What choice do 1 have? By telling you all I know, I am also telling you I have no illusions-I know why you are here, and what you need to do; indeed, my only surprise is that it has taken Rautos Hivanar so long to finally send you. In fact, it might be you have arrived too late, Venitt Sathad.’
To that, Venitt slowly nodded. Orbyn Truthfinder was a dangerous man. Yet, for the moment, still useful. As, alas, was Letur Anict. But such things were measured day by day, at times moment by moment. Too late. You fool, Orbyn, even you have no real idea just how true that statement is-too late.
Tehol Beddict played a small game, once, to see how it would work out. But this time-with that damned manservant of his-he has played a game on a scale almost beyond comprehension.
And I am Venitt Sathad. Indebted, born of Indebted, most skilled slave and assassin of Rautos Hivanar, and you, Tehol Beddict-and you, Bugg-need never fear me.
Take the bastards down. Every damned one of them. Take them all down.
It seemed Orbyn Truthfinder saw something in his expression then that drained all colour from the man’s round, sweat-streamed face.
Venitt Sathad was amused. Orbyn, have you found a truth?
Scattered to either side of the dark storm front, grey clouds skidded across the sky, dragging slanting sheets of rain. The plains were greening along hillsides and in the troughs of valleys, a mottled patchwork of lichen, mosses and matted grasses. On the summit of a nearby hill was the carcass of a wild bhederin, hastily butchered after dying to a lightning strike. The beast’s legs were sticking up into the air and on one hoof was perched a storm-bedraggled crow. Eviscerated entrails stretched out and down the slope facing Brohl Handar and his troop as they rode past.
The Awl were on the run. Warriors who had died of their wounds were left under heaps of stones, and they were as road-markers for the fleeing tribe, although in truth unnecessary since with the rains the trail was a broad swath of churned ground. In many ways, this uncharacteristic carelessness worried the Overseer, but perhaps it was as Bivatt had said: the unseasonal bank of storms that had rolled across the plains in the past three days had caught Redmask unprepared-there could be no hiding the passage of thousands of warriors, their families, and the herds that moved with them. That, and the bloody, disastrous battle at Praedegar had shown Redmask to be fallible; indeed, it was quite possible that the masked war leader was now struggling with incipient mutiny among his people.
They needed an end to this, and soon. The supply train out of Drene had been disrupted, the cause unknown. Bivatt had this day despatched a hundred Bluerose lancers onto their back-trail, seeking out those burdened wagons and their escort. Food shortage was imminent and no army, no matter how loyal and well trained, would fight on an empty stomach. Of course, bounteous feasts were just ahead-the herds of rodara and myrid. Battle needed to be joined. Redmask and his Awl needed to be destroyed.
A cloud scudded into their path with sleeting rain. Surprisingly cold for this late in the season. Brohl Handar and his Tiste Edur rode on, silent-this was not the rain of their homeland, nothing soft, gentle with mists. Here, the water lanced down, hard, and left one drenched in a score of heartbeats. We are truly strangers here.
But in that we are not alone.
They were finding odd cairns, bearing ghastly faces painted in white, and in the cracks and fissures of those tumuli there were peculiar offerings-tufts of wolf fur, teeth, the tusks from some unknown beast and antlers bearing rows of pecules and grooves. None of this was Awl-even the Awl scouts among Bivatt’s army had never before seen the like.
Some wandering people from the eastern wastelands, perhaps, yet when Brohl had suggested that, the Atri- Preda had simply shaken her head. She knows something. Another damned secret.
They rode out of the rain, into steaming hot sunlight, the rich smell of soaked lichen and moss.
The broad swath of churned ground was on their right. To draw any closer was to catch the stench of manure and human faeces, a smell he had come to associate with desperation. We fight our wars and leave in our wake the redolent reek of suffering and misery. These plains are vast, are they not? What terrible cost would we face if we just left each other alone? An end to this squabble over land-Father Shadow knows, no-one realty owns it. The game of possession belongs to us, not to the rocks and earth, the grasses and the creatures walking the surface in their fraught struggle to survive.
A bolt of lightning descends. A wild bhederin is struck and nearly explodes, as if life itself is too much to bear.
The world is harsh enough. It does not need our deliberate cruelties. Our celebration of viciousness.
His scout was returning at the gallop. Brohl Handar raised a hand to halt his troop.
The young warrior reined in with impressive grace. ‘Overseer, they are on Q’uson Tapi. They did not go round it, sir-we have them!’
Q’uson Tapi, a name that was found only on the oldest Letherii maps; the words themselves were so archaic that even their meaning was unknown. The bed of a dead inland sea or vast salt lake. Flat, not a single rise or feature spanning leagues-or so the maps indicated. ‘How far ahead is this Q’uson Tapi?’
The scout studied the sky, eyes narrowing on the sun to the west. ‘We can reach it before dusk,’ he said.
‘And the Awl?’
‘They were less than a league out from the old shoreline, Overseer. Where they go, there is no forage-the herds are doomed, as are the Awl themselves.’
‘Has the rain reached Q’uson Tapi?’
‘Not yet, but it will, and those clays will turn into slime-the great wagons will be useless against us.’
As will cavalry on both sides, I would wager.
‘Ride back to the column,’ Brohl Handar told the scout, ‘and report to the Atri-Preda. We will await her at the old shoreline.’
A Letherii salute-yes, the younger Edur had taken quickly to such things-and the scout nudged his horse into motion.
Redmask, what have you done now?
Atri-Preda Bivatt had tried, for most of the day, to convince herself that what she had seen had been conjured from an exhausted, overwrought mind, the proclivity of the eye to find shapes in nothing, all in gleeful service to a trembling imagination. With dawn’s light barely a hint in the air she had walked out, alone, to stand before a cairn-these strange constructions they now came across as they pushed ever further east. Demonic faces in white on the flatter sides of the huge boulders. Votive offerings on niches and between the roughly stacked stones.
They had pried apart one such cairn two days earlier, finding at its core… very little. A single flat stone on which rested a splintered fragment of weathered wood-seemingly accidental, but Bivatt knew differently. She could recall, long ago on the north shores, on a day of fierce seas crashing that coast, a row of war canoes, their prows
