The Crippled God

slain.’

‘Can you breathe? Take a breath, woman! A deep breath, and that’s an order!’

‘C-captain?’

‘You heard me!’

Sharl couldn’t see her — somewhere behind her head — and her voice was barely recognizable, but who else would it be? Who else could it be? The ground trembled beneath her. Where was that trembling coming from? Like a thousand iron hearts. Beating. Beating. She drew fetid air into her lungs. Deeper, and deeper still. ‘Captain! I can breathe!’

‘Then you’ll live! Get up! I want you with me — till the end, y’understand?’

Sharl tried to sit up, sank back in gasping pain. ‘Been stabbed, Captain-’

‘That’s how y’get into this damned club! Stand up, damn you!’

She rolled on to her side — easier this way to draw up her legs, to make her way to her hands and knees.

Brevity was gasping out words. ‘Girl without a friend … Nothing worse! Know what happens when a girl’s got no friend?’

‘No, Captain.’

‘They get married!’

Sharl saw a sword nearby — a corpse was gripping it. She reached out and prised the weapon free. ‘All right, Captain,’ she said, ‘I’ll be your friend.’

‘Till the end?’

‘Till the end.’

‘Swear it!’

‘I swear! I swear!’

A hand reached under an armpit, lifted her up. ‘Steady now, love. Let’s go kill us some men.’

Zevgan Drouls had killed his debt-holder, and then the bastard’s whole family. Then he had burned down the estate and with it all the records of the hundreds of families swindled into indebtedness by a man who thought he had the right to do whatever he damn well pleased with as many lives as he could chain and shackle. Zevgan had gone on to burn down the bank, and then the Hall of Records — well, only half of it, to be sure, but the right half.

Not that anyone could prove a single thing, because he was no fool. Still, enough suspicions ended up crowding his feet, enough to get him sent to the prison islands. Where he’d spent the last twenty-one years of his life — until the exodus. Until the march. Until this damned shore.

Too old to fight in the ranks, he now knelt on the berm overlooking the First Shore, alongside a dozen or so others in the Children’s Guard. The lame, the ancient, the half blind and the half deaf. Behind them, huddled in the gloom of the forest edge, all the young ’uns and the pregnant women, and those too old or, of late, too badly wounded to do any more fighting — and there were lots of those.

Zevgan and his crew — and the ten or so other squads — waited to give their lives defending the children of the Shake and the Letherii islanders, the children and those others, but it was the children Zevgan kept thinking about.

Well, it wouldn’t be much of a defence, he knew — they all knew it, in fact — but that didn’t matter. Why should it? Those are children behind us, looking up to us with those scared eyes. What else counts?

Mixter Frill pushed up closer beside him, wiping at his nose. ‘So you’re confessing, are ya?’

‘Y’heard me,’ Zevgan replied. ‘I did it. All of it. And I’d do it again, too. In fact, if they hadn’t a stuck me on that island, I would never have stopped. I woulda burned down all the banks, all the Halls of Records, all the fat estates with their fat lenders and their fat wives and husbands and fat whatevers.’

‘You murdered innocents, Zev, is what you did. They shoulda hung you.’

‘Hung. Tortured, turned me inside out, roasted my balls and diced up my cock, aye, Mix. Errant knows, messing with how things are made up for the people in power — why, there’s no more heinous crime than that, and they’d be the first to tell you, too.’

‘Look at ’em dying out there, Zev.’

‘I’m looking, Mix.’

‘And we’re next.’

‘We’re next, aye. And that’s why I’m confessing. Y’see, it’s my last laugh. At ’em all, right? Ain’t strangled, ain’t inside out, ain’t ball-roasted, ain’t dick-diced.’

Mix said something but with all the noise Zev couldn’t make it out. He twisted to ask but then he saw, on all sides, figures rushing past. And there were swords, and that raging forest behind them, with all that deafening noise that had been getting closer and closer, and now was here.

Mix was shouting, but Zev just stared.

Skin black as ink. Tall buggers, all manner of weapons out, hammering the rims of shields, and the look in their faces — as they threaded through the camp where all the children huddled and stared, where the pregnant women flinched and shied — the look on their faces — I know that look. I saw it in the mirror, I saw it in the mirror.

The night I took ’em all down.

The two black dragons would not last much longer — it was a wonder they still lived, still fought on. Leaving them to his kin, Kadagar Fant descended to fly low over the Shore. He could see the last of the hated enemy going down to the swords and spears of the elites — they were surrounded, those wretched murderers, stupidly protecting their leaders — the dead one and the woman kneeling at his side.

Soon he would land. He would semble. Kadagar wanted to be there when that woman was the only one left. He wanted to cut her head off with his own hands. Was she the queen? Of all Kharkanas? He believed she was. He had to acknowledge her bravery — to come down to the First Shore, to fight alongside her people.

But not all bravery was worthy of reward, or even acknowledgement, and the only reward he intended for this woman was a quick death. But a squalid one. Maybe I’ll just choke the life from her.

This realm was thick with smoke, distant forests alight, and Kadagar wondered if the enemy sought to deny him the throne by perniciously burning the city to the ground. He could easily imagine such perfidy from this sort. But I will rebuild. And I will loose the light upon this realm. Scour away the darkness, the infernal shadows. Something new will be born of this. An age of peace. Blessed peace!

He saw one of the black dragons spin past, pursued by two of his kin. That one, he knew, was moments from death.

Aparal, you should never have gone through first. You knew he would be waiting for you. But his brother, his most loyal servant and friend, was now sembled, a lone, motionless body lying at the foot of Lightfall. From this height, pathetically small, insignificant. And this was improper — he would raise a monument to Aparal’s sacrifice, to the glory of his slaying the wielder of the Hust sword. There, at the base of Lightfall itself, he would-

Black as midnight, a tide was flooding out from the forest edge below. Kadagar stared in horror as it rushed across the strand and slammed into his Liosan legions.

Tiste Andii!

He wheeled, crooked his wings, awakening the sorcery within him, and sped down towards his hated foes. I will kill them. I will kill them all!

Something spun past him in a welter of blood and gore — one of his kin — torn to shreds. Kadagar screamed, twisted his neck and glared upward.

To see a red dragon — a true Eleint, twice the size of his kin — close upon a brother Soletaken. Fire poured from it in a savage wave, struck the white dragon. The body exploded in a fireball, torn chunks of meat spinning away trailing smoke. And now, more black dragons sailed down from the sky.

He saw two descend on the kin that had been pursuing the lone dragon, saw them crash down on them in a deluge of fangs and claws.

The lone hunter below them banked then, and, wings thundering the air, rose towards Kadagar.

Against him, she would not last. Too wounded, too weakened — he would destroy her quickly, and then return to aid his kin. This cannot end this way! It must not!