She walked to where Kilava Onass had stationed herself to watch the battle, and it was no small mercy that she had elected not to veer into her Soletaken form, that, indeed, she had left the clans of the White Face Barghast the freedom to do what they did best: kill in a frenzy of explosive savagery.
Hetan saw that Kilava stood near where a lone rider had fallen-killed by the weapons of the K’Chain Che’Malle, she noted. A typically vicious slaying, stirring in her memories of the time when she herself had stood before such terrible creatures, a memory punctuated with the sharp pang of grief for a brother who had fallen that day.
Kilava was ignoring the legless, one-armed body lying ten paces to her left. Hetan’s gaze settled upon it in sudden curiosity.
‘Sister,’ she said to Kilava-deliberate in her usage of the one title that Kilava most disliked-‘see how this one wears a mask. Was not the war leader of the Awl so masked?’
‘I imagine so,’ Kilava said, ‘since he was named Redmask.’
‘Well,’ Hetan said, walking to the corpse, ‘this one is wearing the garb of an Awl.’
‘But he was slain by the K’Chain Che’Malle.’
‘Yes, I see that. Even so…’ She crouched down, studied that peculiar mask, the strange, minute scales beneath the spatters of mud. ‘This mask, Kilava, it is the hide of a K’Chain, I would swear it, although the scales are rather tiny-’
‘Matron’s throat,’ Kilava replied.
Hetan glanced over. ‘Truly?’ Then she reached down and tugged the mask away from the man’s face. A long look down into those pale features.
Hetan rose, tossing the mask to one side. ‘You were right, it’s not Redmask.’
Kilava asked, ‘How do you know that?’
‘Well, Awl garb or not, this man was Letherii.’
Hood, High King of Death, Collector of the Fallen, the undemanding master of more souls than he could count-even had he been so inclined, which he was not-stood over the body, waiting.
Such particular attention was, thankfully, a rare occurrence. But some deaths arrived, every now and then, bearing certain… eccentricities. And the one lying below was one such arrival.
Not least because the Wolves wanted his soul, yet would not get it, but also because this mortal had evaded Hood’s grasp again and again, even though any would see and understand well the sweet gift the Lord of Death had been offering.
Singular lives, yes, could be most… singular.
Witness that of the one who had arrived a short time earlier. There were no gifts in possessing a simple mind. There was no haze of calming incomprehension to salve the terrible wounds of a life that had been ordained to remain, until the very end, profoundly innocent.
Hood had not begrudged the blood on Beak’s hands. He had, however, most succinctly begrudged the heartless actions of Beak’s mother and father.
Few mortal priests understood the necessity for redress, although they often spouted the notion in their sermons of guilt, with their implicit extortions that did little more than swell the temple coffers.
Redress, then, was a demand that even a god could not deny. And so it had been with the one named Beak.
And so it was, now, with the one named Toc the Younger.
‘Awaken,’ Hood said. ‘Arise.’
And Toc the Younger, with a long sigh, did as Hood commanded.
Standing, tottering, squinting now at the gate awaiting them both. ‘Damn,’ Toc muttered, ‘but that’s a poor excuse for a gate.’
‘The dead see as they see, Toc the Younger. Not long ago, it shone white with purity.’
‘My heart goes out to that poor, misguided soul.’
‘Of course it does. Come. Walk with me.’
They set out towards that gate.
‘You do this for every soul?’
‘I do not.’
‘Oh.’ And then Toe halted-or tried to, but his feet dragged onward-‘Hold on, my soul was sworn to the Wolves-’
‘Too late. Your soul, Toe the Younger, was sworn to me. Long ago.’
‘Really? Who was the fool who did that?’
‘Your father,’ Hood replied. ‘Who, unlike Dassem Ultor, remained loyal.’
‘Which you rewarded by killing him? You bastard piece of pigsh-’
‘You will await him, Toe the Younger.’
‘He lives still?’
‘Death never lies.’
Toe the Younger tried to halt again. ‘Hood, a question-please.’
The god stopped, looked down at the mortal.
‘Hood, why do I still have only one eye?’
The God of Death, Reaper of Souls, made no reply. He had been wondering that himself.
Damned wolves.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I have seen the face of sorrow
She looks away in the distance
Across all these bridges
From whence I came
And those spans, trussed and arched
Hold up our lives as we go back again
To how we thought then
To how we thought we thought then
I have seen sorrow’s face,
But she is ever turned away
And her words leave me blind
Her eyes make me mute
I do not understand what she says to me
I do not know if to obey
Or attempt a flood of tears
I have seen her face
She does not speak
She does not weep
She does not know me
For I am but a stone fitted in place
On the bridge where she walks
Once, long ago, Onrack the broken committed a crime. He had professed his love for a woman in fashioning her likeness on the wall of a cave. There had been such talent in his hands, in his eyes, he had bound two souls into that stone. His own… that was his right, his choice. But the other soul, oh, the selfishness of that act, the cruelty of that theft…
