‘Double or nothing, then?’
‘Oh yes, why not? But you owe me the treasuries of a hundred thousand empires already, dear Setch-’
‘Knuckles, my love.’
‘Dear Knuckles.’
‘I am certain it is you who owes me, Mother.’
‘For but a moment longer,’ she replied, now rubbing those huge hands together. ‘I am so close. You were a fool to offer double or nothing.’
‘Ah, my weakness,’ Knuckles sighed as he walked over to Bruthen Trana with the goblet. Meeting the Tiste Edur’s eyes, Knuckles winked. ‘The grains run the river, Mother,’ he said. ‘Best hurry with your solution.’
A fist thundered on the dais. ‘Do not make me nervous!’
The echoes of that impact were long in fading.
Kilmandaros leaned still further, glowering down at the array of bones. ‘The pattern,’ she whispered, ‘yes, almost there. Almost…’
‘1 feel magnanimous,’ Knuckles said, ‘and offer to still those grains… for a time. So that we may be true hosts to our new guest.’
The giant woman looked up, a sudden cunning in her expression. ‘Excellent idea, Knuckles. Make it so!’
A gesture, and the wavering light of the lantern ceased Its waver. All was still in a way Bruthen Trana could not define-after all, nothing had changed. And yet his soul knew, somehow, that the grains Knuckles had spoken of were time, its passage, its unending journey. He had just, with a single gesture of one hand, stopped time.
At least in this chamber. Surely not everywhere else. And yet…
Kilmandaros leaned back with a satisfied smirk and fixed her small eyes on Bruthen Trana. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘The house anticipates.’
‘We are as flitting dreams to the Azath,’ Knuckles said. ‘Yet, even though we are but momentary conceits, as our sorry existence might well be defined, we have our uses.’
‘Some of us,’ Kilmandaros said, suddenly dismissive, ‘prove more useful than others. This Tiste Edur’-a wave of one huge, scarred hand-‘is of modest value by any measure.’
‘The Azath see what we do not, in each of us. Perhaps, Mother, in all of us.’
A sour grunt. ‘You think this house let me go of its own will-proof of your gullibility, Knuckles. Not even the Azath could hold me for ever.’
‘Extraordinary,’ Knuckles said, ‘that it held you at all.’
This exchange, Bruthen Trana realized, was an old one, following well-worn ruts between the two.
‘Would never have happened,’ Kilmandaros said under her breath, ‘if he’d not betrayed me-’
‘Ah, Mother. I have no particular love for Anomander Purake, but let us be fair here. He did not betray you. In fact, it was you who jumped him from behind-’
Anticipating his betrayal!’
‘Anomander does not break his word, Mother. Never has, never will.’
‘Tell that to Osserc-’
‘Also in the habit of “anticipating” Anomander’s imminent betrayal.’
‘What of Draconus?’
‘What of him, Mother?’
Kilmandaros rumbled something then, too low for Bruthen Trana to catch.
Knuckles said, ‘Our Tiste Edur guest seeks the place of Names.’
Bruthen Trana started. Yes! It was true-a truth he had not even known before just this moment, before Knuckle’s quiet words. The place of Names. The Names of the Gods.
‘There will be trouble, then,’ Kilmandaros said, shifting in agitation, her gaze drawn again and again to the scatter of bones. ‘He must remember this house, then. The path-every step-he must remember, or he will wander lost for all time. And with him, just as lost as they have ever been, the names of every forgotten god.’
‘His spirit is strong,’ Knuckles said, then faced Bruthen Trana and smiled. ‘Your spirit is strong. Forgive me- we often forget entirely the outside world, even when, on rare occasions such as this one, that world intrudes.’
The Tiste Edur shrugged. His head was spinning. The place of Names. ‘What will I find there?’ he asked.
‘He forgets already,’ Kilmandaros muttered.
‘The path,’ Knuckles answered. ‘More than that, actually. But when all is done-for you, in that place-you must recall the path, Bruthen Trana, and you must walk it without a sliver of doubt.’
‘But, Knuckles, all my life, I have walked no path without a sliver of doubt-more than a sliver, in fact-’
‘Surprising,’ Kilmandaros cut in, ‘for a child of Scabandari-’
‘I must begin the grains again,’ Knuckles suddenly announced. ‘Into the river-the pattern, Mother, it calls to you once more.’
She swore in some unknown language, bent to scowl down at the bones. ‘I was there,’ she muttered. ‘Almost (here-so close, so-’
A faint chime echoed in the chamber.
Her fist thundered again on the dais, and this time the echoes seemed unending.
At a modest signal from Knuckles, Bruthen Trana drained the fine wine and set the goblet down on the marble tabletop.
It was time to leave.
Knuckles led Bruthen Trana back into the corridor. A final glance back into that airy chamber and the Tiste Edur saw Kilmandaros, hands on knees, staring directly at him with those faintly glittering eyes, like two lone, dying stars in the firmament. Chilled to the depths of his heart, Bruthen Trana pulled his gaze away and followed the son of Kilmandaros back to the front door.
At the threshold, he paused for a moment to search Knuckles’s face. ‘The game you play with her-tell me, does such a pattern exist?’
Brows arched. ‘In the casting of bones? Damned if I know.’ A sudden smile, then. ‘Our kind, ah, but we love patterns.’
‘Even if they don’t exist?’
‘Don’t they?’ The smile grew mischievous. ‘Go, Bruthen Trana, and mind the path. Always mind the path.’
The Tiste Edur walked down onto the pavestones. ‘I would,’ he muttered, ‘could I find it.’
Forty paces from the house, he turned to look upon it, and saw nothing but swirling currents, spinning silts in funnels.
Gone. As if I had imagined the entire thing.
But I was warned, wasn’t I? Something about a path.
‘Remember…’
Lost. Again. Memories tugged free, snatched away by the ferocious winds of water.
He swung round again and set off, staggering, step by step, towards something he could not dredge up from his mind, could not even imagine. Was this where life ended? In some hopeless quest, some eternal search for a lost dream?
Remember the path. Oh, Father Shadow, remember… something. Anything.
Where the huge chunks of ice had been, there were now stands of young trees. Alder, aspen, dogwood, forming a tangled fringe surrounding the dead Meckros City. Beyond the trees were the grasses of the plains, among them deep-rooted bluestems and red-lipped poppies that cloaked the burial mounds where resided the bones of thousands of people.
The wreckage of buildings still stood here and there on their massive pylons of wood, while others had tilted, then toppled, spilling out their contents onto canted streets. Weeds and shrubs now grew everywhere, dotting the enormous, sprawling ruin, and among the broken bones of buildings lay a scatter of flowers, a profusion of colours on all sides.
He stood, balanced on a fallen pillar of dusty marble allowing him a view of the vista, the city stretching to his left, the ragged edge and green-leafed trees with the mounds beyond on his right. His eyes, a fiery amber, were fixed on something on the far horizon directly ahead. His broad mouth held its habitual downturn at the corners, an
