Yet now the time drew near. He would see Bivatt’s head on a spear. He would see mud and Letherii and Tiste Edur corpses in their thousands. Crows wheeling overhead, voicing delighted cries. And he would stand on the wooden platform, witness to it all. To his scaled Guardians, who had found him, had chosen him, rending mages limb from limb, scything through enemy lines-
And the face of the elder rose once more in his mind. He had revelled in that vision, at first, but now it had begun to haunt him. A face to greet his dreams; a face hinted at in every smear of stormcloud, the bruised grey and blue hues cold as iron filling the sky. He had thought himself rid of that fool and his cruel secrets, in that weighing look-like a father’s regard on a wayward son, as if nothing the child did could be good enough, could be Awl in the ways of the people as they had been and would always be.
As the work continued on all sides, Redmask mounted the platform. Cadaran whip at his belt. Rygtha axe slung from its leather straps. The weapons we were once born to, long ago. Is that not Awl enough? Am I not more Awl than any other among the Renfayar? Among the warriors gathered here? Do not look so at me, old man. You have not the right. You were never the man I have become-look at my Guardians!
Shall I tell you the tale, Father?
But no. You are dead. And I feel still your feeble neck in my hands-ah, an error. That detail belongs to the old man. Who died mysteriously in his tent. Last of the Renfayar elders, who knew, yes, knew well my father and all his kin, and the children they called their own.
Fool, why did you not let the years blur your memories? Why did you not become like any other doddering, hopeless ancient? What kept your eyes honed so sharp? But no longer, yes. Now you stare at stone and darkness. Now that sharp mind rots in its skull, and that is that.
Leave me be.
The first spatters of rain struck him and he looked up at the sky. Hard drops, bursting against his mask, this scaled armour hiding dread truth. I am immune. I cannot be touched. Tomorrow, we shall destroy the enemy.
The Guardians will see to that. They chose me, did they not? Theirs is the gift of glory, and none but me has earned such a thing.
By the lizard eyes of the K’Chain Che’Malle, I will have my victory.
The deaf drummer began his arrhythmic thunder deep within the stormclouds, and the spirits of the Awl, glaring downward to the earth, began drawing their jagged swords.
CHAPTER TWENTY
We live in waiting
For this most precious thing:
Our god with clear eyes
Who walks into the waste
Of our lives
With the bound straw
Of a broom
And with a bright smile
This god brushes into a corner
Our mess of crimes
The ragged expostulations
We spit out on the morn
With each sun’s rise
We live in waiting, yes
In precious abeyance
Cold-eyed our virtues
Sowing the seeds of waste
In life’s hot earth
In hand the gelid iron
Of weapons
And with bright recompense
We soak this ground
Under the clear sky
With the blood of our god
Spat out and heaved
In rigour’d disgust
— Our Waiting God
Towers and bridges, skeletally thin and nowhere the sign of guiding hands, of intelligence or focused will. These constructs, reaching high towards the so-faint bloom of light, were entirely natural, rough of line and raw in their bony elegance. To wander their spindly feet was to overwhelm every sense of proportion, of the ways the world was supposed to look. There was no air, only water. No light, only the glow of some unnatural gift of spiritual vision. Revealing these towers and arching bridges, so tall, so thin, that they seemed but moments from toppling into the fierce, swirling currents.
Bruthen Trana, tugged loose from the flesh and bone that had been home to his entire existence, now wandered lost at the bottom of an ocean. He had not expected this. Visions and prophecies had failed them; failed Hannan Mosag especially. Bruthen had suspected that his journey would find him in a strange, unanticipated place, a realm, perhaps, of myth. A realm peopled by gods and demons, by sentinels defending long-dead demesnes with immortal stolidity.
‘Where the sun’s light will not reach.’ Perhaps his memory was not perfect, but that had been the gist of that fell prophecy. And he was but a warrior of the Tiste Edur-now a warrior bereft of flesh beyond what his spirit insisted out of some wilful stubbornness, as obstinate in its conceits as any sentinel.
And so now he walked, and he could look down upon his limbs, his body; he could reach up and touch his face, feel his hair-now unbound-sweeping out on the current like strands of seaweed. He could feel the cold of the water, could feel even the immense pressure besieging him in this dark world. But there were no paths, no road, no obvious trail wending around these stone edifices.
The rotted wood of ship timbers burst into clouds beneath his feet. Clotted rivets turned underfoot. Fragments that might be bone skittered and danced along the muddy bottom, carried every which way by the currents. Dissolution seemed to be the curse of the world, of all the worlds. All that broke, all that failed, wandered down to some final resting place, lost to darkness, and this went beyond ships on the sea and the lives on those ships. Whales, dhenrabi, the tiniest crustacean. Plans, schemes and grandiose visions. Love, faith and honour. Ambition, lust and malice. He could reach down and scoop it all into his hands, watching the water tug it away, fling it out into a swirling, momentary path of glittering glory, then gone once more.
Perhaps this was the truth he had been meant to see, assuming the presumption of his worthiness, of course-which was proving a struggle to maintain indeed. Instead, waves of despair swept over him, swept through him, spun wild out of his own soul.
He was lost.
What am I looking for? Who am 1 looking for? I have forgotten. Is this a curse? Am I dead and now wandering doomed? Will these towers topple and crush me, leave me yet one more broken, mangled thing in the muck and silt?
I am Tiste Edur. This much I know. My true body is gone, perhaps for ever.
And something, some force of instinct, was driving him on, step by step. There was a goal, a thing to be achieved. He would find it. He had to find it. It had to do with Hannan Mosag, who had sent him here-he did recall
