“why?” or “what point?” If you don’t know the answer just say so.’
‘I don’t know the answer. But I should correct one of your assumptions. I did not dwell in here alone, although I do so now, excepting you, of course, but your company I do not expect to last. That legion of headlong fools you call your people no doubt pine for your return. Blood awaits your daggers, your pouch thirsts for the coins that will fill ii with *viry lite you steal. And so on.’
‘If you weren’t alone before, Raest…’
‘Ah, yes, I distracted myself with notions of human futility. The Master of the
Deck of Dragons was, in the common language, a squatter here in the house, for a time.’
‘And then?’
‘He left.’
‘Not a prisoner, then, this Master.’
‘No. Like you, indifferent to my miserable fate. Will you now exploit your privilege, assassin?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Will you now leave, never to return? Abandoning me to eternal solitude, with naught but cobwebs in my bed and bare cupboards in the kitchen, with mocking draughts and the occasional faint clatter of dead branches against shutters? And the odd scream or two as something unpleasant is devoured by earth and root in the yard. Will you simply leave me to this world, assassin?’
Rallick Nom stared at the Jaghut. ‘I had no idea my unconscious presence so eased your loneliness, Raest.’
‘Such insensitivity on your part should not surprise me.’
‘My answer is yes, I will indeed leave you to your world.’
‘ You lack gratitude.’
Rallick drew his cloak round his shoulders and checked his gear. There was old blood but it simply flaked off like black snow. ‘Forgive me. Thank you, Raest, for the kick in the head.’
‘You are welcome. Now leave-I grow bored.’
The door opened with a loud, groaning creak. Beyond was night, yet darkness was driven back, pushed skyward, by the defiant blue fires of Darujhistan. Somewhere out of sight from where he stood at the landing, streets seethed and churned with drunken revelry. Another fete, another half-mindless celebration of survival.
The thought stirred some anticipation in Rallick Nom’s soul, blowing aside the last dust of what he suspected had been a long, long sleep. Before the door behind him was closed he turned about and could just make out Raest’s elongated form, still standing in the corridor. ‘Why did you wake me?’ he asked.
In answer, the Jaghut stepped forward and shut the door with a thunderous slam that woke birds to panic and sent them bolting into the night.
Rallick turned back to the path, saw roots writhing like serpents in the mulch to either side.
Checking his knives once more, he drew yet tighter his cloak, then set out to rediscover his city.
And so the denizens of Darujhistan grew raucous, enough to give the city itself a kind of life. Headlong indeed, with nary a thought for the future, be that the next moment or a year hence. Gas hissed into blue flame, acrobats and mummers whirled through crowds, a hundred thousand musical instruments waged war on the plains of song, and if it was said by some scholars that sound itself was undy-ing, that it rode unending currents that struck no fatal shore, neither in space nor through time, then life itself could be measured by its cry. In the times of free, blue clarity, and in the times of gathering clouds, in the chorus of pronouncements that sang out… arrivals, worlds lived on, as immortal as a dream.
On the rooftop of a bastion tower, on this night, there stood a woman all in black. Eyes cold as a raptor’s looked down upon the sprawl of rooftops, spark-lit chimneys in the distant slums of the Gadrobi District, and, drifting silent over all, this woman thought long and thought hard of the future.
On a street close to Coll’s estate, a cloaked man paused, stood rooted like a stone whilst the fete swirled round him, and even as he concluded that a public return, such as had first occurred to him, might prove unwise, so walked another man-younger but with the same look in his hardened eyes-on his way to the Phoenix Inn.
Far in this one’s wake, down at the quayside, a blacksmith, his halfwit servant, and a woman whose generous curves drew admiring glances from all sides, ambled their way towards the night markets of the Gadrobi, seeing all with the wonder and pleasure only foreigners could achieve when coming for the first time upon one of the greatest cities in the world.
Closer to the ship from which they had disembarked, a High Priest of Shadow scurried for the nearest shadows, pursued mostly unseen by spiders drifting on the lake breeze, and on the trail of both scampered a score of bhokarala-many burdened with new offerings and whatever baubles they claimed as rightful possessions-a fang- bearing squall that flowed through crowds accompanied by shouts of surprise, terror and curses (as their collection of possessions burgeoned with every pouch, purse and jewel within reach of their clawed hands).
Aboard the ship itself, the captain remained. Now she was wearing loose, flowing robes of black and crimson silks, her face white as moonlight as she frowned at the city before her. A scent on the air, some lingering perfume redolent with memories… oh, of all places, but was this truly an accident? Spite did not believe in accidents.
And so she hesitated, knowing what her first step on to solid stone would reveal-perhaps, she decided, it would do to wait for a time.
Not long.
Just long enough
In another part of Darujhistan, a merchant of iron dispatched yet another message to the Master of the Assassins’ Guild, then retired to his secret library to pore once more over ancient, fraught literature. Whilst not too far away sat a merchant guard with fading barbed tattoos, frowning down at a cup of spiced, hot wine in his huge, scarred hands; and from the next room came a child’s laughter, and this sound made him wince.
Down among the new estates of certain once-criminal moneylenders who had since purchased respectability, a destitute Torvald Nom stealthily approached the high, spike-topped wall of one such estate. Debts, was it? Well, fine easily solved. Had he lost any of his skills? Of course not. If anything… such talents had been honed by the rigours of a legendary journey across half the damned world. His glorius return to Darujhistan still awaited him. Come the morning, aye, come the morning…
At this moment, in a small chamber above the taproom of the Phoenix Inn, a man was lying on his back on a bed, still weak from blood loss, and in his thoughts he walked the cemetery of his past, fingers brushing the tops of weathered tombstones and grave markers, seeing the knots of tangled grass climbing the sides of dusty urns, while stretching away in his wake was the shadow of his youth-fainter, longer, fraying now at the very edges. He would not lift his hand yet to feel his own face, to feel the wrinkles and creases that wrote out in tired glyphs his age, his waning life.
Oh, flesh could be healed, yes…
Below, amidst a mob of bellowing, reeling drunks and screeching whores of both sexes, a small round man, seated as ever at his private table, paused with his mouth stuffed full of honeyed bread, and, upon hearing the tenth bell sound through the city, cocked his head and settled his tiny, beady eyes upon the door to Phoenix Inn.
Arrivals.
Glory and portent, delightful reunion and terrible imminence, winged this and winged that and escapes and releases and pending clashes and nefarious demands for recompense over a single mouthful of spat wine, such a night!
Such a night!
Chapter Four
We were drowning amidst petals and leaves
On the Plain of Sethangar
Where dreams jostled like armies on the flatland
And to sing of the beauty of all these blossoms
Was to forget the blood that fed every root
