The Crippled God

Drukorlat?’

Yan Tovis frowned. Her gaze wandered from the Tiste Andii woman standing before her, wandered out to the kneeling Tiste Andii, and then, at last, to the huddle of her own people, her so few survivors. And then, as if borne by an impossible strength, she climbed to her feet. Brushed feebly at the sand clinging to her bloody clothes. Straightened. ‘Korlat, daughter of Sandalath Drukorlat, the Sister of Night in the House of the Shake is not for one of the pure blood-’

‘Forgive me, Queen, but my blood is not pure.’

Yan Tovis paused, and then continued, ‘The blood of the Eleint-’

‘Queen, my blood is not pure.’

Withal suddenly comprehended Korlat’s meaning. Cold dread curled in his chest. No, Korlat will have no place in the palace of Queen Sandalath Drukorlat. And how was it, after all that had happened, here on the First Shore, that his heart could still break?

One more time.

Oh … Sand.

Yan Tovis spoke. ‘Korlat, Daughter of Sandalath Drukorlat, I welcome you into the House of the Shake. Sister of Night, come to me.’

One more time.

‘What are you doing?’ Sharl asked. She was lying down on the ground again, with no memory of how she’d got there.

‘Pluggin’ the hole in your gut,’ Brevity said.

‘Am I going to die?’

‘Not a chance. You’re my new best friend, remember? Speaking of which, what’s your name?’

Sharl tried to lift herself up, but there was no strength left in her. She had never felt so weak. All she wanted to do was close her eyes. And sleep.

Someone was shaking her. ‘Don’t! Don’t you leave me alone!’

Her body felt chained down, and she wanted free of it. I never knew how to fight.

‘No! I can’t bear this, don’t you understand? I can’t bear to see you die!’

I’m sorry. I wasn’t brave enough for any of this. My brothers, they died years ago, you see. It was only my stubbornness, my guilt — I couldn’t let them go. I brought them with me. And those two boys I found, they didn’t mind the new names I gave them. Oruth. Casel.

I couldn’t stop them dying. It was hunger, that’s all. When you have no land, no way through, when they just step over you in the street. I did my best. We were not good enough — they said so, that look in their eyes, stepping over us — we just weren’t good enough. Not clever enough, not brave enough.

Casel was four when he died. We left him in the alley behind Skadan’s. I found a bit of sacking. I put it over his eyes. Oruth asked why and I said it was what they did at funerals. They did things to the body. But why? he asked. I said I didn’t know. When Oruth died a month later, I found another piece of cloth. I put it over his eyes. Another alley, another funeral.

They were so little.

Someone was crying. A sound of terrible, soul-crushing anguish. But she herself was done with that. Let the chains fall away. And for my eyes, a cloth.

It’s what they do.

With the Sister of Cold Nights standing close, Yan Tovis sat once more beside the body of her brother. She looked down on his face, wondering what seemed so different about it now, wondering what details had now arrived, here in death, that made it seem so peaceful.

And then she saw. The muscles of his jaw were no longer taut, bunched by that incessant clench. And suddenly he seemed young, younger than she’d ever seen him before.

Yedan Derryg, you are beautiful.

From all sides, she now heard, there rose a keening sound. Her Shake and her Letherii were now mourning for their fallen prince. She let the sound close round her like a shroud.

Welcome home then, brother.

CHAPTER TWENTY

‘We stood watching the bodies tumbling and rolling down the broad steps. Half the city was on fire and out in the farm-holdings terrified slaves were dragging the diseased carcasses into enormous heaps while lamplighters wearing scarves poured oil and set alight the mountains of putrid flesh, until the black columns marched like demons across the land.

‘In the canals the corpses were so thick we saw a filthy boy eschew the bridge for a wild scramble, but he only made it halfway before falling in, and the last we saw of him was a small hand waving desperately at the sky, before it went down.

‘Most of the malformed and wizened babies had already been put to death, as much an act of mercy as any kind of misplaced shame, though there was plenty about which we rightly should be ashamed, and who would dare argue that? The animals were gone, the skies were empty of life, the waters were poisoned, and where paradise had once beckoned now desolation ruled, and it was all by our own righteous will.

‘The last pair of politicians fell with hands around each other’s throat, trailed by frantic toadies and professional apologists looking for a way out, though none existed, and soon they too choked on their own shit.

‘As for us, well, we leaned our bloodied pikes against the plinth of the toppled monument facing those broad steps, sat down in the wreckage, and discussed the weather.’

Sadakar’s Account. The Fall of Inderas

The sun had set. The boy, awake at last, tottered into the Khundryl camp. He held his arms as if cradling something. He heard the woman’s cries — it was impossible not to — and all the Khundryl had gathered outside a tent, even as the rest of the army pushed itself upright like a beast more dead than alive, to begin another night of marching. He stood, listening. There was the smell of blood in the air.

Warleader Gall could hear his wife’s labour pains. The sound filled him with horror. Could there be anything crueller than this? To deliver a child into this world. By the Fall of Coltaine, have we not shed enough tears? Do we not bear their scars as proof?

He sought to roll over in his furs, wanting none of this, but he could not move. As if his body had died this day. And he but crouched inside it. Born to a dying mother. Who gathers round her now? Shelemasa. The last of the surviving shoulder-women. But there are no daughters. No sons with their wives. And there is not me, and with this child, this last child, for the first time I will not witness my wife giving birth.

A knife pressed against his cheek. Jastara’s voice hissed in his ear. ‘If you do not go to her now, Gall, I will kill you myself.’

I cannot.

‘For the coward you are, I will kill you. Do you hear me, Gall? I will make your screams drown out the world — even your wife’s cries — or do you forget? I am Semk. This whole night — I will make it your eternal torment. You will beg for release, and I shall deny it!’

‘Then do it, woman.’

‘Does not the father kneel before the mother? In the time of birth? Does he not bow to the strength he himself does not possess? Does he not look into the eyes of the woman he loves, only to see a power strange and terrible — how it does not even see him, how it looks past — or no, how it looks within? Does not a man need to be humbled? Tell me, Gall, that you refuse to see that again — one final time in your life!