the beast off.
Tongue lolled, jaw hanging in silent laughter.
So much for lessons in hubris.
There were times, Kallor reflected, when he despised his own company. The day gloried in its indifference, the sun a blinding blaze tracking the turgid crawl of the landscape. The grasses clung to the hard earth the way they always did, seeds drifting on the wind as if on sighs of hope. Tawny rodents stood sentinel above warren holes and barked warnings as he marched past. The shadows of circling hawks rippled across his path every now and then.
Despising himself was, oddly enough, a comforting sensation, for he knew he was not alone in his hate. He could recall times, sitting on a throne as if he and it had merged into one, as immovable and inviolate as one of the matching statuesHillside the palace (any one of his innumerable palaces), when he would feel the oceanic surge of hate’s tide. His subjects, tens, hundreds of thousands, each and every one wishing him dead, cast down, torn to pieces. Yet what had he been but the perfect, singular representative of all that they despised within themselves? Who among them would not eagerly take his place? Casting down foul judgements upon all whose very existence offended?
He had been, after all, the very paragon of acquisitiveness. Managing to grasp what others could only reach for, to gather into his power a world’s arsenal of weapons, and reshape that world in hard cuts, to make of it what he willed-not one would refuse to take his place. Yes, they could hate him; indeed, they must hate him, for he embodied the perfection of success, and his very existence mocked their own failures. And the violence he delivered? Well, watch how it played out in smaller scenes everywhere-the husband who cannot satisfy his wife, so he beats her down with his fists. The streetwise adolescent bully, pinning his victim to the cobbles and twisting the hapless creature’s arm. The noble walking past the starving beggar. The thief with the avaricious eye-no, none of these are any different, not in their fundamental essence.
So, hate Kallor even as he hates himself. Even in that, he will do it better. Innate superiority expressed in all manner of ways. See the world gnash its teeth-he answers with a most knowing smile.
He walked, the place where he had begun far, far behind him now, and the place to where he was going drawing ever closer, step by step, as inexorable as this crawling landscape. Let the sentinels bark, let the hawks muse with wary eye. Seeds ride his legs, seeking out new worlds. He walked, and in his mind memories unfolded like worn packets of parchment, seamed and creased, scurried up from the bottom of some burlap sack routed as rats, crackling as they opened up in a rain of flattened moths and insect carcasses.
Striding white-faced and blood-streaked down a jewel-studded hallway, dragging by an ankle the corpse of his wife-just one in a countless succession-her arms trailing behind her limp as dead snakes, their throats slashed open. There had been no warning, no patina of dust covering her eyes when she fixed him with their regard that morning, as he sat ordering the Century Candles in a row on the table between them. As he invited her into a life stretched out, the promise of devouring for ever-no end to the feast awaiting them, no need to ever exercise anything like restraint. They would speak and live the language of excess. They would mark out the maps of interminable expansion, etching the ambitions they could now entertain. Nothing could stop them, not even death itself.
Some madness had afflicted her, like the spurt and gush of a nicked artery-there could be no other cause. Madness it had been. Insanity, to have flung away so much. Of what he offered her. So much, yes, of him. Or so he had told himself at the time, and for decades thereafter. It had been easier that way.
He knew now why she had taken her own life. To be offered everything was to be shown what she herself was capable of-the depthless reach of her potential depravity, the horrors she would entertain, the plucking away of every last filament at sensitivity, leaving her conscience smooth, cool to the touch, a thing maybe alive, maybe not, a thing nothing could prod awake. She had seen, yes, just how far she might take herself… and had then said no.
Another sweet packet, unfolding with the scent of flowers. He knelt beside Vaderon, his war horse, as the animal bled out red foam, its one visible eye fixed on him, as if wanting to know: was it all worth this? What has my life purchased you, my blood, the end of my days?
A battlefield spread out on all sides. Heaps of the dead and the dying, human and beast, Jheck and Tartheno Toblakai, a scattering of Forkrul Assail each one surrounded by hundreds of the fallen, the ones protecting their warleaders, the ones who failed in taking the demons down. And there was no dry ground, the blood was a shallow sea thickening in the heat, and more eyes looked upon nothing than scanned the nightmare seeking friends and kin.
Voices cried, but they seemed distant-leagues away from Kallor where he knelt beside Vaderon, unable to pull his gaze from that one fixating eye. Promises of brotherhood, flung into the crimson mud. Silent vows of honour, courage, service and reward, all streaming down the broken spear shaft jutting from the animal’s massive, broad chest. And yes, Vaderon had reared to take that thrust, a thrust aimed at Kallor himself, because this horse was too stupid to understand anything.
That Kallor had begun this war, had welcomed the slaughter, the mayhem.
That Kallor, this master now kneeling at its side, was in truth a brutal, despicable man, a bag of skin filled with venom and spite, with envy and a child’s selfish snarl that in losing took the same from everyone else.
Vaderon, dying. Kallor, dry-eyed and damning himself for his inability to weep. To feel regret, to sow self- recrimination, to make promises to do better the next time round.
I am as humankind, he often told himself. Impervious to lessons. Pitiful in loss and defeat, vengeful in victory. With every possible virtue vulnerable to exploitation and abuse by others, could they claim dominion, until such virtues became hollow things, sweating beads of poison. I hold forth goodness and see it made vile, and do nothing, voice no complaint, utter no disavowal. The world I make I have made for one single purpose-to chew me up, me and everyone else. Do not believe this bewildered expression. I am bemused only through stupidity, but the clever among me know better, oh, yes they do, even as they lie through my teeth, to you and to themselves.
Kallor walked, over one shoulder a burlap sack ten thousand leagues long and bulging with folded packets. So different from everyone else. Ghost horses run at his side. Wrist-slashed women show bloodless smiles, dancing round the rim of deadened lips. And where dying men cry, see his shadow slide past.
‘I want things plain,’ said Nenanda. ‘I don’t want to have to work.’ And then he looked up, belligerent, quick to take affront.
Skintick was bending twigs to make a stick figure. ‘But things aren’t plain, Nenanda. They never are.’’I know that, just say it straight, that’s all.’
‘You don’t want your confusion all stirred up, you mean.’
Nimander roused himself. ‘Skin-’
But Nenanda had taken the bait-and it was indeed bait, since for all that Skintick had seemed intent on his twigs, he had slyly noted Nenanda’s diffidence. ‘Liars like confusion. Liars and thieves, because they can slip in and slip out, when there’s confusion. They want your uncertainty, but there’s nothing uncertain in what they want, is there? That’s how they use you-you’re like that yourself sometimes, Skintick, with your clever words.’
‘Wait, how can they use me if I am them?’
Desra snorted.
Nenanda’s expression filled with fury and he would have risen, if not for Aranatha’s gentle hand settling on his arm, magically dispelling his rage.
Skintick twisted the arms of the tiny figure until they were above the knotted head with its lone green leaf, and held it up over the fire so that it faced Nenanda. ‘Look/ he said, ‘he surrenders.’
‘Do not mock me, Skintick.’
‘On the contrary, I applaud your desire to have things simple. After all, either you can cut it with your sword or you can’t.’
‘There you go again.’
The bickering would go on half the night, Nimander knew. And as it went on it would unravel, and Skintick would increasingly make Nenanda into a thick-witted fool, when he was not anything of the sort. But words were indeed ephemeral, able to sleet past all manner of defences, quick to cut, eager to draw blood. They were the perfect weapons of deceit, but they could also be, he well knew, the solid pave-stones of a path leading to comprehension-or what passed for comprehension in this murky, impossible world.
There were so many ways to live, one for every single sentient being-and perhaps for the non-sentient ones
