goddess. She had worn tores once, sworn to Treach, and this now marked her.
War could not exist without rivals, without enemies, and this was as true in the immortal realm as it was in the mortal one. The pantheon ever reflects the nature of its countless aspects. The facets deliver unerring truths. In winter, war was the lifeless chill of dead flesh. In summer, war rotted in fetid, flyblown clouds. In autumn, the battlefield was strewn with the dead. In spring, war arose anew in the same fields, the seeds well nurtured in rich soil.
She fought through a dark forest of black spruce and firs. Her fingers dropped off one by one. She stumbled on stumps. The winter assailed her, the winter was her enemy, and the wolves drew ever closer.
Through a mountain pass, then; brief flashes of awareness and each time they arrived, lifting her out of oblivion, she found the landscape transformed. Heaped boulders, eskers, ragged peaks towering overhead. A tortured, twisted trail, sud-denly pitching sharply downward, stunted pines and oaks to either side. Bestial howls voicing their rage high above, far behind her now.
A valley below, verdant and rank, a jungle nestled impossibly close to the high ranges and the whipping snow- sprayed winds-or perhaps she had traversed con-tinents. Her hands were whole, her bare feet sinking into warm, wet loam. Insects spun and whirred about her.
From the thicket came an animal cough, a cat’s heavy growl.
And another hunter had found her.
She hurried on, as if some other place awaited her, a sanctuary, a cave that she could enter, to emerge upon some other side, reborn. And now she saw, rising hap-hazardly from the moss and humus and mounds of rotted trunks, swords, blades encrusted, cross-hilts bedecked in moss, pommels green with verdigris. Swords of all styles, all so corroded and rusted that they would be useless as weapons.
She heard the cat’s cough again, closer this time.
Panic flitted through her.
She found a clearing of high swaying grasses, a sea of emerald green that she plunged into, pushing her way across.
Something thrashed into her wake, a swift, deadly rush.
She screamed, fell to the ground.
Snapping, barking voices surrounded her, answered by a snarl from some-. where close behind her. Picker rolled on to her back. Humanlike figures crowded her, baring their teeth and making stabbing gestures with lire- hardened spears towards a leopard crouched down not three paces from where she was lying. The beast’s cars were flattened back, its eyes blazing. Then, in a flash, it was gone.
Picker pushed herself to her feet, and found that she towered over these people, and yet they were one and all adults-even through the fine pelt of hair covering them she could see that. Five females, four males, and the females were the more robust between them, with wide hips and deep rib cages.
Luminous brown eyes fixed upon her with something like worship, and then the spears were brought around and she was being prodded along, on to a trail cutting across the path she had been taking.
They hurried down the trail, a trail never meant for one as tall as Picker, and she found branches scraping across her face again and again. Before long they reached another clearing, this one at the foot of a cliff. A wide, low rock shelf prelected over a sipping cave-mouth from which drifted woodsmoke. Two ancients were squatting at the entrance, both women, with a gaggle of children staring out behind them.
There was none of the expected squealing excitement from the children-indeed, no sounds were uttered at all, and Picker felt a sudden suspicion: these creatures were not the masters of their domain. No, they behaved as would prey. She saw stones to either side of the cave, heaped up to be used to make a barricade come the dusk.
Her captors drove her into the cave. She was forced to bend over to keep from scraping her head on the pitched, blackened ceiling. The children fled to either side. Beyond the flickering light from the lone hearth the cave continued on into darkness. Coughing in the smoke, she stumbled forward, round the fire, and into the depths. The shafts of the spears urged her on. The floor of packed earth beneath her feet was free of rubble, but the slope was getting ever steeper and she felt herself sliding, losing purchase.
Suddenly the shafts pressed hard against her and shoved.
Shouting in alarm, Picker pitched forward, slid on the damp floor as if it was layered in grease. She fought to grasp hold of something, but nothing touched her flailing hands-and then the floor vanished beneath her, and she was falling.
Harllo’s sudden unexpected plummet ended quickly amidst sharp-edged boulders. Gashes ripped across his back, one thigh and the ankle of the same leg. The impact left him stunned. He vaguely heard something strike the rocks nearby, a terrible snapping, crunching sound.
Eventually, he stirred. The pain from the wounds was fierce, and he could feel blood trickling down, but it seemed he’d broken no bones. He crawled slowly to where he’d heard Bainisk land, and heard ragged breathing.
When his probing hands touched warm flesh, he found it wet, broken. And at the brush of his fingertips it flinched away.
‘Hiiinisk!’
A low groan, and then a gasp.
‘Bainisk, it’s me. We made it down-we got away.’
‘Harllo?’ The voice was awful in its weakness, its pain. ‘Tell me…’
He pulled himself up along Bainisk, his eyes making out a rough shape. He found Bainisk’s face, tilted towards him, and Harllo drew himself on to his knees, and then he eased up his friend’s head-feeling strange shards moving under his hands, beneath Bainisk’s blood-matted hair-and then, as gently as he could manage, he settled the head on to his lap.
‘Bainisk.’
The face was crushed along one side. It was a miracle that he could speak at all. ‘I dreamed,’ he whispered. ‘I dreamed of the city. Floating on the lake… going wherever the waves go. Tell me, Harllo, tell me about the city.’
‘You’ll see it soon enough-’
‘Tell me.’
Harllo stroked his friend’s brow. ‘In the city… Bainisk, oh, in the city, there’s shops and everybody has all the money they need and you can buy whatever you want. There’s gold and silver, beautiful silver, and the people are happy to give it away to anyone they like. No one ever argues about anything-why should they? There’s no hunger, no hurts, no hurts of any kind, Bainisk. In the city every child has a mother and a father… and the mother loves her son for ever and ever and the father doesn’t rape her. And you can just pick them for yourself. A beautiful mother, a strong, handsome father-they’d be so happy to take care of you-you’ll see, you’ll see.
‘They’d see how good you are. They’d see right through to your heart, and see it pure and golden, because all you ever wanted to do was to help out, because you were a burden to them and you didn’t want that, and maybe if you helped enough they’d love you, and want you to be with them, to live with them. And when it didn’t work, well, it just means you have to work harder. Do more, do everything.
‘Oh, Bainisk, the city… there are mothers…’.’
He stopped then, for Bainisk had stopped breathing. He was perfectly still, his whole broken-up body folded over the sharp rocks, his head so heavy in Harllo’s lap.
Leave them there, now.
The city, ah, the city. As dusk closes in, the blue fires awaken. Figures stand in a cemetery surrounded by squat Daru crypts, and they are silent as they watch the workers sealing the door once more. Starlings flit overhead.
Down at the harbour a woman steps lithely on to the dock and breathes deep the squalid air, and then sets out to find her sister.
Scorch and Leff stand nervously at the gate of an estate. They’re not talking much these nights. Within the compound, Tarvald Nom paces. He is not sure
