‘Careless is keeping me alive, you miserable little wretch,’ she said.
‘Ah, perhaps I deserved that. Come, you must drink.’
‘What if I refuse?’
‘Then, with your inevitable death, you are defeated. By me. Are you sure you want that, Scholar?’
‘You urge me to stubborn resistance. I understand. The sadist needs his victim alive, after all. For as long as humanly possible.’
‘Dehydration is a most unpleasant way to die, Janath Anar.’
He lifted the spigot of a waterskin to her mouth. She drank.
‘Not too quickly,’ Tanal said, stepping back. ‘You will just make yourself sick. Which wouldn’t, I see, be the first time for you.’
‘When you see maggots crawl out of your own wastes, Yathvanar… Next time,’ she added, ‘take your damned candle with you.’
‘If I do that,’ he replied, ‘you will go blind-’
‘And that matters?’
He stepped close once again and poured more water into her mouth.
Then he set about washing her down. Sores had opened where stomach fluids had burned desiccated skin, and, he could see, she had been pulling on her bindings, seeking to squeeze her hands through the shackles. ‘You are looking much worse for wear,’ he said as he dabbed ointment on the wounds. ‘You cannot get your hands through, Janath-’
‘Panic cares nothing for what can and can’t be done, Tanal Yathvanar. One day you will discover that. There was a priest once, in the second century, who created a cult founded on the premise that every victim tallied in one’s mortal life awaits that one beyond death. From the slightest of wounds to the most grievous, every victim preceding you into death… waits. For you.
‘A mortal conducts spiritual economics in his or her life, amassing credit and debt. Tell me, Patriotist, how indebted are you by now? How vast the imbalance between good deeds and your endless acts of malice?’
‘A bizarre, insane cult,’ he muttered, moving away. ‘No wonder it failed.’
‘In this empire, yes, it’s no wonder at all. The priest was set upon in the street and torn limb from limb. Still, it’s said adherents remain, among the defeated peoples-the Tarthenal, the Fent and Nerek, the victims, as it were, of Letherii cruelty-and before those people virtually disappeared from the city, there were rumours that the cult was reviving.’
Tanal Yathvanar sneered. ‘The ones who fail ever need a crutch, a justification-they fashion virtue out of misery. Karos Invictad has identified that weakness, in one of his treatises-’
Janath’s laugh broke into ragged coughing. When she recovered, she spat and said, ‘Karos Invictad. Do you know why he so despises academics? He is a failed one himself.’ She bared her stained teeth. ‘He calls them treatises, does he? Errant fend, how pathetic. Karos Invictad couldn’t fashion a decent argument, much less a treatise.’
‘You are wrong in that, woman,’ Tanal said. ‘He has even explained why he did so poorly as a young scholar- oh yes, he would not refute your assessment of his career as a student. Driven by emotions, back then. Incapable of a cogent position, leaving him rife with anger-but at himself, at his own failings. But, years later, he learned that all emotion had to be scoured from him; only then would his inner vision become clear.’
‘Ah, he needed wounding, then. What was it? A betrayal of sorts, I expect. Some woman? A protege, a patron? Does it even matter? Karos Invictad makes sense to me, now. Why he is what he has become.’ She laughed again, this rime without coughing, then said, ‘Delicious irony. Karos Invictad became a victim.’
‘Don’t be-’
A victim, Yathvanar! And he didn’t like it, oh no, not at all. It hurt-the world hurt him, so now he’s hurting it back. And yet, he has still to even the score. But you see, he never will, because in his mind, he’s still that victim, still lashing out. And as you said earlier, the victim and his crutch, his virtue of misery-one feeds the other, without cessation. No wonder he bridles with self-righteousness for all his claims to emotionless intellect-’
He struck her, hard, her head snapping to one side, spittle and blood threading out.
Breathing fast, chest strangely tight, Tanal hissed, ‘Rail at me all you will, Scholar. I expect that. But not at Karos Invictad. He is the empire’s last true hope. Only Karos Invictad will guide us into glory, into a new age, an age without the Edur, without the mixed-bloods, without even the failed peoples. No, just the Letherii, an empire expanding outward with sword and fire, all the way back to the homeland of the First Empire. He has seen our future! Our destiny!’
She stared at him in the dull light. ‘Of course. But first, he needs to kill every Letherii worthy of the name. Karos Invictad, the Great Scholar, and his empire of thugs-’
He struck her again, harder than before, then lurched back, raising his hand-it was trembling, skin torn and battered, a shard of one broken tooth jutting from one knuckle.
She was unconscious.
Well, she asked for it. She wouldn’t stop. That means she wanted it, deep inside, she wanted me to beat her. I’ve heard about this-Karos has told me-they come to like it, eventually. They like the… attention.
So, I must not neglect her. Not again. Plenty of water, keep her clean and fed.
And beat her anyway.
But she was not unconscious, for she then spoke in a mumble. He could not make it out and edged closer.
‘… on the other side… I will wait for you… on the other side…’
Tanal Yathvanar felt a slither deep in his gut. And fled from it. No god waits to pass judgement. No-one marks the imbalance of deeds-no god is beyond its own imbalances-for its own deeds are as subject to judgement as any other. So who then fashions this afterlife? Some natural imposition? Ridiculous-there is no balance in nature. Besides, nature exists in this world and this world alone-its rules mean nothing once the bridge is crossed…
Tanal Yathvanar found himself walking up the corridor, that horrid woman and her cell far behind him now-he had no recollection of actually leaving.
Karos has said again and again, justice is a conceit. It does not exist in nature. ‘Retribution seen in natural catastrophes is manufactured by all too eager and all too pious people, each one convinced the world will end but spare them and them alone. But we all know, the world is inherited by the obnoxious, not the righteous.’ -
Unless, came the thought in Janath’s voice, the two are one and the same.
He snarled as he hurried up the worn stone stairs. She was far below. Chained. A prisoner in her solitary cell. There was no escape for her.
I have left her down there, far below. Far behind. She can’t escape.
Yet, in his mind, he heard her laughter.
And was no longer so sure.
Two entire wings of the Eternal Domicile were empty, long, vacated corridors and never-occupied chambers, storage rooms, administration vaults, servant quarters and kitchens. Guards patrolling these sections once a day carried their own lanterns, and left unrelieved darkness in their wake. In the growing damp of these unoccupied places, dust had become mould, mould had become rot, and the rot in turn leaked rank fluids that ran down plastered walls and pooled in dips in the floors.
Abandonment and neglect would soon defeat the ingenious innovations of Bugg’s Construction, as they defeated most things raised by hands out of the earth, and Turudal Brizad, the Errant, considered himself almost unique in his fullest recognition of such sordid truths, indeed, there were other elders persisting in their nominal existence, but they one and all fought still against the ravages of inevitable dissolution. Whereas the Errant could not be bothered.
Most of the time.
The Jaghut had come to comprehend the nature of futility, inspiring the Errant to a certain modicum of empathy for those most tragic of people. Where was Gothos now, he wondered. Probably long dead, all things considered. He had written a multiple-volumed suicide note-his Folly-that presumably concluded at some point, although the Errant had neither seen nor heard that such a conclusion existed. Perhaps, he considered with sudden suspicion, there was some hidden message in a suicidal testimonial without end, but if so, such meaning was too obscure for the mind of anyone but a Jaghut.
He had followed the Warlock King to the dead Azath, remained there long enough to discern Hannan Mosag’s
