Utterly.’ And, by Mother’s own breath, it would destroy us as well.
‘Seerdomin awaits you,’ she said, ‘and wonders, since you are ever punctual.’
Spinnock Durav hesitated, then nodded. Hoping that this woman’s god had more wisdom than she did; hoping, too, that the power of prayer could not bend the Redeemer into ill-conceived desires to reach too far, to seek what could only destroy him, all in that fervent fever of gushing generosity so common to new believers.
‘Priestess, your claim that the Great Barrow lies beyond my Lord’s responsibilities is in error. If the pilgrims are in need, the Son of Darkness will give answer-’
‘And so lay claim to what is not his.’
‘You do not know Anomander Rake.’
‘We need nothing from your Lord.’
‘Then perhaps I can help.’
‘No. Leave now, Tiste Andii.’
Well, he had tried, hadn’t he? Nor did he expect to gain more ground with Seerdomin. Perhaps something more extreme was required. No, Seerdomin is a private man. Let him. be. Remain watchful, yes, as any friend would. And wait.
If he had walked from the nearest coast, the lone figure crossing the grasslands of north Lamatath had travelled a hundred leagues of unsettled prairie. Nowhere to find food beyond hunting the sparse game, all of it notoriously fleet of foot and hoof. He was gaunt, but then, he had always been gaunt. His thin, grey hair was unkempt, drifting out long in his wake. His beard was matted, knotted with filth. His eyes, icy blue, were as feral as any beast of the plain.
A long coat of chain rustled, swinging clear of his shins with each stride. The shadow he cast was narrow as a sword.
In the cloudless sky wheeled vultures or ravens, or both, so high as to be nothing but specks, yet they tracked the solitary figure far below. Or perhaps they but skirled in the blue emptiness scanning the wastes for some dying, weakening creature.
But this man was neither dying nor weak. He walked with the stiff purpose characteristic of the mad, the deranged. Madness, he would have noted, does not belong to the soul engaged with the world, with every hummock and tuft of grass, with the old beach ridges with their cobbles of limestone pushing through the thin, patched skin of lichen and brittle moss. With the mocking stab of shadow that slowly wheeled as the sun dragged itself across the sky. With the sounds of his own breath that were proof that he remained alive, that the world had yet to take him, pull him down, steal the warmth from his ancient flesh. Madness stalked only an inner torment, and Kallor, the High King, supreme emperor of a dozen terrible empires, was, in his heart, a man at peace.
For the moment. But what mattered beyond just that? This single moment, pitching headlong into the next one over and over again, as firm and true as each step he took, the haul ground reverberating up through the worn heels of his boots, The tactile affirmed reality, and nothing else mattered and never would.
A man ol peace, yes indeed. And that he had once ruled the lives of hundreds of thousands, ruled over their useless, petty existences; that he had once, with a single gesture, condemned a surrendered army of fifteen thousand to their deaths; that he had sat a throne of gold, silver and onyx, like a glutton stuffed to over-flowing with such material wealth that it had lost all meaning, all value… ah well, all that remained of such times, such glory, was the man himself, his sword, his armour, and a handful of antiquated coins in his pouch. Endless betrayals, a sea of faces made blurry and vague by centuries, with naught but the avaricious, envious glitter of their eyes remaining sharp in his mind; the sweep of smoke and lire and faint screams as empires toppled, one after another; the chaos of brutal nights fleeing a palace in flames, fleeing such a tide of vengeful fools that even Kallor could not kill them all-much as he wanted to, oh, yes-none of these things awakened bitter ire in his soul. Here in this wasteland that no one wanted, he was a man at peace.
Such truth could not be challenged, and were someone to rise up from the very earth now and stand in such challenge, why, he would cut him to pieces. Smiling all the while to evince his calm repose.
Too much weight was given to history, as far as Kallor was concerned. One’s own history; that of peoples, cultures, landscapes. What value peering at past errors in judgement, at mischance and carelessness, when the only reward after all that effort was regret? Bah! Regret was the refuge of fools, and Kallor was no fool. He had lived out his every ambition, after all, lived each one out until all colour was drained away, leaving a bleached, wan knowledge that there wasn’t much in life truly worth the effort to achieve it. That the rewards proved ephemeral; nay, worthless.
Every emperor in every realm, through all of time itself, soon found that the lofty title and all its power was an existence devoid of humour. Even excess and indulgences palled, eventually. And the faces of the dying, the tortured, well, they were all the same, and not one of those twisted expressions vouchsafed a glimmer of revelation, the discovery of some profound, last-breath secret that answered all the great questions. No, every face simply pulled into itself, shrank and recoiled even as agony tugged and stretched, and whatever the bulging eyes saw at the last moment was, Kallor now understood, something utterly… banal.
Now there was an enemy-banality. The demesne of the witless, the proud tower of the stupid. One did not need to be an emperor to witness it-scan the faces of people encircling an overturned carriage, the gleam of their eyes as they strain and stretch to catch a glimpse of blood, of broken limbs, relishing some pointless tragedy that tops up their murky inkwells of life. Watch, yes, those vultures of grief, and then speak of noble humanity, so wise and so virtuous.
Unseen by the ravens or condors, Kallor had now bared his teeth in a bleak smile, as if seeking to emulate the face of that tragically fallen idiot, pinned there beneath the carriage wheel,.seeing the last thing he would see, and finding it in the faces of the gawkers, and thinking, Oh, look at you all. So banal. So.,, banal.
He startled a hare from some scrub, twenty paces away, and his left hand flashed out, underhand, and a knife sped in a blur, catching the hare in mid-leap, flipping it round in the air before it fell.
A slight tack, and he halted to stand over the small, motionless body, looking down at the tiny droplets of spilled blood. The knife sunk to the hilt, driven right through just in front of the hips-the gut, then, not good. Sloppy.
He crouched, pulled loose the knife then quickly sliced open the belly and tugged and tore out the hare’s warm intestines. He held the glistening ropes up in one hand, studied them and whispered, ‘Banal.’
An eye of the hare stared up sightlessly, everything behind it closed up, gone away.
But he’d seen all that before. More times than he could count. Hares, people, all the same. In that last moment, yes, there was nothing to see, so what else to do but go away?
He flung the guts to one side, picked up the carcass by its elongated hind limbs and resumed his journey. The hare was coming with him. Not that it cared. Later, they’d sit down for dinner.
High in the sky overhead, the black specks began a descent. Their equally empty eyes had spied the entrails, spread in lumpy grey ropes on the yellow grasses, now in the lone man’s wake. Empty eyes, but a different kind of emptiness. Not that of death’s banality, no, but that of life’s banality.
The same kind of eyes as Kallor’s own.
And this was the mercy in the hare’s swift death, for unlike countless hundreds of thousands of humans, the creature’s last glimpse was not of Kallor’s profoundly empty eyes-a sight that brought terror into the faces of every victim.
The world, someone once said, gives back what is given. In abundance. But then, as Kallor would point out, someone was always saying something. Until he got fed up and had them executed.
Chapter Five
Pray, do not speak to me of weather
Not sun, not cloud, not of the places
Where storms are born
I would not know of wind shivering the heather
Nor sleet, nor rain, nor of ancient traces
On stone grey and worn
