Darkness?’
‘I fear … no matter. Go, then, Nimander. Convince her to release Silanah.’
‘But — where will you go?’
‘The war. I will go with Dathenar and Prazek. Lord, I believe I know where the battle will be found. I hope that I am wrong. But … go. Walk where your father walked.’
* * * How long ago was it? She could not remember. She was young. The night before she had taken a boy to her bed, to remind herself that not everything was pain. And if she later broke his heart, she’d not meant to. But this was a new day, and already the night just past seemed centuries away.
She’d been with her brother’s hunting party. On the spoor of tenag. The day was warm, the sun bright and pleased with itself.
They heard his laughter first, a deep thing, hinting of thunder, and they followed it down into a depression thick with chokecherry and dogwood. A figure, lying against a slope. He was Imass, like them, but they did not recognize him, and this in itself was startling. Disturbing.
She could see at once, when she and her kin gathered close, that his wounds were fatal. It was a wonder he still lived, and an even greater wonder that he could laugh as he did, and through all the agony in his eyes, that mirth still shone when he looked up at them.
Her brother was first to speak, because that was his way. ‘What manner of stone do you wear?’
‘Stone?’ the dying man replied, showing a red smile. ‘Metal, my friends. Armour. A Tel Akai gift.’
‘Where have you come from?’
‘Clanless. I wandered. I came upon an army, my friends.’
‘There is no army.’
‘Jaghut. Tel Akai. Others.’
They were silenced by this. The Jaghut were despised. Feared. But an army of Jaghut? Impossible.
Were they now at war? Her clan? Her people? If so, then they would all die. An army of Jaghut — the words alone opened like Omtose Phellack in her soul.
‘I joined them,’ said the man, and then, lifting a mangled hand, he added, ‘Set no crime at my feet for that. Because, you see, I am the last left. They died. All of them. The Jaghut. The Tel Akai. The Jheck. All … dead.’
‘What enemy has come among us?’ her brother asked, his eyes wide with fear.
‘None but that has always been with us, friends. Think well on my words. When you slay a beast, when you hunt as you do now, and blood is spilled. When you close upon the beast in its dying, do you not see its defiance? Its struggle to the very last moment? The legs that kick, the head that tries to lift, the blood frothing from the nostrils?’
They nodded. They had seen. And each time they had felt something fill their hearts, choke in their throats. One needed to bite back on that. Things were as they were.
‘Bless the Jaghut,’ the stranger said, his head falling back. He laughed,but it was short, frail. ‘Why defy death, when you cannot help but fail? They would tell you why. No. They would show you why — if only you had the courage to see, to stand with them, to understand the true enemy of all life.’ His eyes found her, her alone, and once more he managed a smile. ‘Now I will die. I will … fail. But I beg of you,’ and his eyes glistened, and she saw that they were beautiful eyes, especially now, ‘a kiss. Many a woman cursed me in my youth. Even as they loved me. It was … glorious.’
She saw the life draining from those eyes, and so she leaned forward, to catch its leaving. With a soft kiss. His breath was of blood. His lips were cracked, but they were warm.
She held that kiss, as that warmth left. Held it, to give him as much of her as she could.
Her brother pulled her away, held her in his arms the way he used to, when she was much younger, when she was not so guarded with her own body.
They took the armour, before leaving his body to the wild. And she claimed that armour for her own. For that kiss.
And now, she wanted it back. Hissing in frustration, Apsal’ara scanned the empty chamber. She was far beneath the ground floor of the palace. She was where they’d put her armour and her mace, the first time she’d been captured in their midst. They’d been amused by her — it was always that way, as if Kharkanas held nothing worth stealing, as if the very idea of theft was too absurd to countenance.
But someone had stolen her armour!
Seething with outrage and indignation, she set out in search of it.
All reason had left the face of their lord. Froth foamed the corners of his mouth as he screamed his rage, driving the ranks into the maw of the gate, and it was indeed a maw — Aparal Forge could see the truth of that. The fangs descended again and again. They chewed his people to bloody shreds and splintered bones. And this was an appetite without end.
They could not push past, not a single damned step — denying the legions a foothold, a place into which their Soletaken masters could come, could veer and, in veering, at last shatter the opposition.
The commander on the other side had anticipated them. Somehow, he had known the precise moment at which to modify his tactics.
Aparal watched the mangled bodies being pulled from the swirling maelstrom of the gate, watched the way those bodies floundered like wreckage, bobbing on human hands and shoulders, out to the deep trenches already heaped high with the dead. Apart from the elite companies, hardly any soldiers remained. This iron mouth has devoured the population of an entire city. Look well, my Soletaken kin, and ask yourself: whom will you lord it over now? Who will serve you in your estates? Who will raise the food, who will serve it, who will make your fine clothes, who will clean your shit-buckets?
None of this was real. Not any more. And all the ordered precision of existence was now in shambles, a bloodied mess. There was nothing to discuss, no arguments to fling back and forth, no pauses in time to step back and study old tapestries on the walls and pray for the guidance of heroic ancestors.
Saranas was destroyed, and when this was done it would be as empty, as filled with ghosts, as Kharkanas. Light finds the face of Darkness, and lo, it is its own. Is this not what you wanted, Kadagar? But, when you finally possess what you wanted, who, O Lord of Ghosts, who will sweep the floors?
And now, at last, the elite ranks were pushing up against the gate — all the fodder had been used up. Now, then, arrived the final battle.
Aparal made his way down to where the wounded were being left, abandoned, alongside the trenches. The chorus of their cries was horrible beyond measure — to enter this place was an invitation to madness, and he almost welcomed that possibility. He pushed past the staggering, dead-eyed cutters and healers, searching until he found one man, sitting cradling the stump of his left arm, the severed end of which trailed wisps of smoke. A man not screaming, not weeping, not yet reduced to a piteous wretch.
‘Soldier. Look at me.’
The head lifted. A shudder seemed to run through the man.
‘You have been through the gate?’
A shaky nod.
‘How many left — among the enemy? How many left?’
‘I — could not be sure, Lord. But … I think … few.’
‘This is what we keep hearing, but what does that mean? Fifty? Five thousand?’
The soldier shook his head. ‘Few, Lord. And, Lord, there is laughter!’
‘Hust weapons, soldier. Possessed blades. Tell me what is few?’
