ghosts with every chamber and down every corridor it traversed.
She glanced away from her regard of Silchas Ruin, irritated at her own fascination with the savage, unearthly warrior, the way he could hold himself so perfectly still, even the rise and fall of his chest barely discernible. Buried for millennia, yet he did indeed live. Blood flowed in his veins, thoughts rose grimed with the dust of disuse. When he spoke, she could hear the weight of barrowstones. It was unimaginable to her how a person could so suffer without going mad.
Then again, perhaps he was mad, something hidden deep within him, either constrained by exigencies, or simply awaiting release. As a killer-for that surely was what he was-he was both thorough and dispassionate. As if mortal lives could be reduced in meaning, reduced to surgical judgement: obstacle or ally. Nothing else mattered.
She understood the comfort of seeing the world in that manner. The ease of its simplicity was inviting. But for her, impossible. One could not will oneself blind to the complexities of the world. Yet, for Silchas Ruin, such seeming complexities were without relevance. He had found a kind of certainty, and it was unassailable.
Alas, Fear Sengar was not prepared to accept the hopelessness of his constant assaults upon Silchas Ruin. The Tiste Edur stood near the triangular portal they would soon pass through, as if impatient with this rest stop. ‘You think,’ he now said to Silchas Ruin, ‘that I know virtually nothini of that ancient war, the invasion of this realm.’
The albino Tiste Andii’s eyes shifted, fixed on Fear Sengar, but Silchas Ruin made no reply.
‘The women remembered,’ Fear said. ‘They passed thr tales to their daughters. Generation after generation. Yes, I know that Scabandari drove a knife into your back, there on that hill overlooking the field of battle. Yet, was this the first betrayal?’
If he was expecting a reaction, he was disappointed.
Udinaas loosed a low laugh from where he sat with hiis back to the scaled wall. ‘You two are so pointless,’ he said ‘Who betrayed whom. What does it matter? It’s not as if we’re relying on trust to keep us together. Tell me, Fear Sengar-once-master of mine-does your brother have any idea of who Ruin is? Where he came from? I would suggest not. Else he would have come after us personally, with ten thousand warriors at his back. Instead, they toy with us. Aren’t you even curious why?’
No-one spoke for a half-dozen heartbeats, then Kettle giggled, drawing all eyes to her. Her blink was owlish. ‘They want us to find what we’re looking for first, of course.’
‘Then why block our attempts to travel inland?’ Seren demanded.
‘Because they know it’s the wrong direction.’
‘How could they know that?’
Kettle’s small, dust-stained hands fluttered like bats in the gloom. ‘The Crippled God told them, that’s how. The Crippled God said it’s not yet time to travel east. He’s not ready for open war, yet. He doesn’t want us to go into the wildlands, where all the secrets are waiting.’
Seren Pedac stared at the child. ‘Who in Errant’s name is the Crippled God?’
‘The one who gave Rhulad his sword, Acquitor. The true power behind the Tiste Edur.’ Kettle threw up her hands. ‘Scabandari’s dead. The bargain was Hannan Mosag’s, and the coin was Rhulad Sengar.’
Fear stood with bared teeth, staring at Kettle with something like terror in his eyes. ‘How do you know this?’ he demanded.
‘The dead told me. They told me lots of things. So did the ones under the trees, the trapped ones. And they said something else too. They said the vast wheel is about to turn, one last time, before it closes. It closes, because it has to, because that’s how he made it. To tell him all he needs to know. To tell him the truth.’
‘Tell who?’ Seren asked, scowling in confusion.
‘Him, the one who’s coming. You’ll see.’ She ran over to where Fear stood, took him by one hand and started tugging. ‘We need to hurry, or they’ll get us. And if they get us, Silchas Ruin will have to kill everyone.’
I could strangle that child. But she pushed herself to her feet once more.
Udinaas was laughing.
She was inclined to strangle him as well.
‘Silchas,’ she said as she moved close, ‘do you have any idea what Kettle was talking about?’
‘No, Acquitor. But,’ he added, ‘I intend to keep listening.’
Chapter Three
We came upon the fiend on the eastern slope of the Radagar Spine. It was lying in a shallow gorge formed by flash flooding, and the stench pervading the hot air told us of rotting flesh, and indeed upon examination, conducted with utmost caution on this, the very day following the ambush on our camp by unknown attackers, we discovered that the fiend was, while still alive, mortally wounded. How to describe such a demonic entity? When upright, it would have balanced on two hugely muscled hind legs, reminiscent of that of a shaba, the flightless bird found on the isles of the Draconean Archipelago, yet in comparison much larger here. The hip level of the fiend, when standing, would have been at a man’s eye level. Long-tailed, the weight of the fiend’s torso evenly balanced by its hips, thrusting the long neck and head far forward, the spine made horizontal. Two long forelimbs, thickly bound in muscle and hardened scales providing natural armour, ended, not in grasping talons or hands, but enormous swords, iron-bladed, that seemed fused, metal to bone, with the wrists. The head was snouted, like that of a crocodile, such as those found in the mud of the southern shoreline of the Bluerose Sea, yet, again, here much larger. Desiccation had peeled the lips back to reveal jagged rows of fangs, each one dagger-long. The eyes, clouded with approaching death, were nonetheless uncanny and alien to our senses.
The Atri-Preda, bold as ever, strode forward to deliver the fiend from its suffering, with a sword thrust into the soft tissue of its throat. With this fatal wound, the fiend loosed a death cry that struck us with pain, for the sound it voiced was beyond our range of hearing, yet it burst in our skulls with such ferocity that blood was driven from our nostrils, eyes and ears.
One other detail is worth noting, before I expound on the extent of said injuries. The wounds visible upon the fiend were most curious. Elongated, curving slashes, perhaps from some form of tentacle, but a tentacle bearing sharp teeth, whilst other wounds were shorter but deeper in nature, invariably delivered to a region vital to locomotion or other similar dispensation of limbs, severing tendons and so forth…
– Factor Breneda Anict, Expedition into the Wildlands, Official Annals of Pufanan Ibyris
He was not a man in bed. Oh, his parts functioned well enough, but in every other way he was a child, this Emperor of a Thousand Deaths. But worst of all, Nisall decided, was what happened afterwards, as he fell into that half-sleep, half-something else, limbs spasming, endless words tumbling from him in a litany of pleading, punctuated by despairing sobs that scraped the scented air of the chamber. And before long, after she’d escaped the bed itself, drawing a robe about her and taking position near the painted scene in the false window, five paces distant, she would watch him crawl down onto the floor and make his way as if crippled from some spinal injury, the ever-present sword trailing in one hand, across the room to the corner, where he would spend the rest of the night, curled up, locked in some eternal nightmare.
A thousand deaths, lived through night upon night. A thousand.
An exaggeration, of course. A few hundred at most.
Emperor Rhulad’s torment was not the product of a fevered imagination, nor born of a host of anxieties. What haunted him were the truths of his past. She was able to identify some of his mutterings, in particular the one that dominated his nightmares, for she had been there. In the throne room, witness to Rhulad’s non-death, weeping there on the floor all slick with his spilled blood, with a corpse on his throne and Rhulad’s own slayer lying half upright against the dais-stolen away by poison.
Hannan Mosag’s pathetic slither towards that throne had been halted by the demon that had appeared to collect the body of Brys Beddict, and the almost indifferent sword thrust that killed Rhulad as the apparition made its way out.
The Emperor’s awakening shriek had turned her heart into a frozen lump, a cry so brutally raw that she felt its fire in her own throat.
But it was what followed, a short time after his return, that stalked Rhulad with a thousand dripping blades.
