Slowly, the T’lan Imass swung round once more. ‘My enemies? I do not recall saying that I had any, Edur.’
‘Oh, but you do. I should know. I was once one of them, and indeed that is why you find me here, for I am your enemy no longer.’
‘You are now a renegade among your own kind, then,’ Onrack observed. ‘I have no faith in traitors.’
‘To my own kind, T’lan Imass, I am not the traitor. That epithet belongs to the one who chained me here. In any case, the question of faith cannot be answered through negotiation.’
‘Should you have made that admission, Edur?’
The man grimaced. ‘Why not? I would not deceive you.’
Now, Onrack was truly curious. ‘Why would you not deceive me?’
‘For the very cause that has seen me Shorn,’ the Edur replied. ‘I am plagued by the need to be truthful.’
‘That is a dreadful curse,’ the T’lan Imass said.
‘Yes.’
Onrack lifted his sword. ‘In this case, I admit to possessing a curse of my own. Curiosity.’
‘I weep for you.’
‘I see no tears.’
‘In my heart, T’lan Imass.’
A single blow shattered the chains. With his free right hand, Onrack reached down and clutched one of the Edur’s ankles. He dragged the man after him along the top of the wall.
‘I would rail at the indignity of this,’ the Tiste Edur said as he was pulled onward, step by scuffing step, ‘had I the strength to do so.’
Onrack made no reply. Dragging the man with one hand, his sword with the other, he trudged forward, his progress eventually taking them past the area of weakness on the wall.
‘You can release me now,’ the Tiste Edur gasped.
‘Can you walk?’
‘No, but-’
‘Then we shall continue like this.’
‘Where are you going, then, that you cannot afford to wait for me to regain my strength?’
‘Along this wall,’ the T’lan Imass replied.
There was silence between them for a time, apart from the creaks from Onrack’s bones, the rasp of his hide-wrapped feet, and the hiss and thump of the Tiste Edur’s body and limbs across the mud-layered stones. The detritus-filled sea remained unbroken on their left, a festering marshland on their right. They passed between and around another dozen catfish, these ones not quite as large yet fully as limbed as the previous group. Beyond them, the wall stretched on unbroken to the horizon.
In a voice filled with pain, the Tiste Edur finally spoke again. ‘Much more… T’lan Imass… and you’ll be dragging a corpse.’
Onrack considered that for a moment, then he halted his steps and released the man’s ankle. He slowly swung about.
Groaning, the Tiste Edur rolled himself onto his side. ‘I assume,’ he gasped, ‘you have no food, or fresh water.’
Onrack lifted his gaze, back to the distant humps of the catfish. ‘I suppose I could acquire some. Of the former, that is.’
‘Can you open a portal, T’lan Imass? Can you get us out of this realm?’
‘No.’
The Tiste Edur lowered his head to the clay and closed his eyes. ‘Then I am as good as dead in any case. None the less, I appreciate your breaking my chains. You need not remain here, though I would know the name of the warrior who showed me what mercy he could.’
‘Onrack. Clanless, of the Logros.’
‘I am Trull Sengar. Also clanless.’
Onraek stared down at the Tiste Edur for a while. Then the T’lan Imass stepped over the man and set off, retracing their path. He arrived among the catfish. A single chop downward severed the head of the nearest one.
The slaying triggered a frenzy among the others. Skin split, sleek four-limbed bodies tore their way free. Broad, needle-fanged heads swung towards the undead warrior in their midst, tiny eyes glistening. Loud hisses from all sides. The beasts moved on squat, muscular legs, three-toed feet thickly padded and clawed. Their tails were short, extending in a vertical fin back up their spines.
They attacked as would wolves closing on wounded prey.
Obsidian blade flashed. Thin blood sprayed. Heads and limbs flopped about.
One of the creatures launched itself into the air, huge mouth closing over Onrack’s skull. As its full weight descended, the T’lan Imass felt his neck vertebrae creak and grind. He fell backward, letting the animal drag him down.
Then he dissolved into dust.
And rose five paces away to resume his killing, wading among the hissing survivors. A few moments later they were all dead.
Onrack collected one of the corpses by its hind foot and, dragging it, made his way back to Trull Sengar.
The Tiste Edur was propped up on one elbow, his flat eyes fixed on the T’lan Imass. ‘For a moment,’ he said, ‘I thought I was having the strangest dream. I saw you, there in the distance, wearing a huge, writhing hat. That then ate you whole.’
Onrack pulled the body up alongside Trull Sengar. ‘You were not dreaming. Here. Eat.’
‘Might we not cook it?’
The T’lan Imass strode to the seaside edge of the wall. Among the flotsam were the remnants of countless trees, from which jutted denuded branches. He climbed down onto the knotted detritus, felt it shift and roll unsteadily beneath him. It required but a few moments to snap off an armful of fairly dry wood, which he threw back up onto the wall. Then he followed.
He felt the Tiste Edur’s eyes on him as he prepared a hearth.
‘Our encounters with your kind,’ Trull said after a moment, ‘were few and far between. And then, only after your… ritual. Prior to that, your people fled from us at first sight. Apart from those who travelled the oceans with the Thelomen Toblakai, that is. Those ones fought us. For centuries, before we drove them from the seas.’
‘The Tiste Edur were in my world,’ Onrack said as he drew out his spark stones, ‘just after the coming of the Tiste Andu. Once numerous, leaving signs of passage in the snow, on the beaches, in deep forests.’
‘There are far fewer of us now,’ Trull Sengar said. ‘We came here-to this place-from Mother Dark, whose children had banished us. We did not think they would pursue, but they did. And upon the shattering of this warren, we fled yet again-to your world, Onrack. Where we thrived…’
‘Until your enemies found you once more.’
‘Yes. The first of those were… fanatical in their hatred. There were great wars-unwitnessed by anyone, fought as they were within darkness, in hidden places of shadow. In the end, we slew the last of those first Andu, but were broken ourselves in the effort. And so we retreated into remote places, into fastnesses. Then, more Andu came, only these seemed less… interested. And we in turn had grown inward, no longer consumed with the hunger of expansion-’
‘Had you sought to assuage that hunger,’ Onrack said as the first wisps of smoke rose from the shredded bark and twigs, ‘we would have found in you a new cause, Edur.’
Trull was silent, his gaze veiled. ‘We had forgotten it all,’ he finally said, settling back to rest his head once more on the clay. ‘All that I have just told you. Until a short while ago, my people-the last bastion, it seems, of the Tiste Edur-knew almost nothing of our past. Our long, tortured history. And what we knew was in fact false. If only,’ he added, ‘we had remained ignorant.’
Onrack slowly turned to gaze at the Edur. ‘Your people no longer look inward.’
‘I said I would tell you of your enemies, T’lan Imass.’
‘You did.’
‘There are your kind, Onrack, among the Tiste Edur. In league with our new purpose.’
