Traveller considered for a time. He studied the broad, churned-up track. A thou-sand or five thousand; when people were moving in column it was always difficult to tell. The carriage itself would be a thing worth seeing, however, and the direction just happened to be the one he needed to take. The prospect of being forced into a detour was unacceptable. ‘If your friend is smart, he won’t do anything overt. He’ll hide, as best one can on these plains, until he sees an advantage-though what that advantage might be, against so many, I can’t imagine.’
‘So you will stay with me for a while longer?’
He nodded,
‘Then I should tell you some things, I think.’
They guided their horses on to the track and rode at the trot.
Traveller waited for her to continue.
The sun’s heat reminded him of his homeland, the savannahs of Dal Hon, although in this landscape there were fewer flies, and of the enormous herds of countless kinds of beasts-and the ones that hunted them-there was little sign. Here on the Lamatath there were bhederin, a lone breed of antelope, hares, wolves, coyotes, bears and not much else. Plenty of hawks and falcons overhead, of course-but this place did not teem as one might expect and he wondered about that.
Had the conflagration at Morn wiped everything out? Left a blasted landscape slow to recover, into which only a few species drifted down from the north? Or were the K’Chain Che’Malle rabid hunters, indulging in a slaughterfest that did not end until they themselves were extinct?
‘What do you know of the Emperor of a Thousand Deaths?’
He glanced across at her. ‘Not much. Only that he cannot be killed.’
‘Right.’
He waited.
Locusts crawled across the dusty track amidst shredded blades of grass, as if wondering who had beaten them to it. Somewhere high above a raptor loosed a piercing cry, the kind intended to panic a bird in flight.
‘His sword was forged by the power of the Crippled God. Possessing levels of sorcery to which the wielder can reach, each time, only by dying-fighting and dying with that weapon in his hands. The Emperor, a poor ravaged creature, a Tiste Edur, knew that death was but an illusion. He knew, I am certain of it, that he was cursed, so terribly cursed. That sword had driven him mad.’
Traveller imagined that such a weapon would indeed drive its wielder insane. He could feel sweat on the palms of his hands and shifted the reins into his right hand, settling the other on his thigh. His mouth felt unaccountably dry.
‘He needed champions. Challengers. Sometimes they would kill him. Some-times more than once. But as he came back again and again, ever stronger, in the end the challenger would fall. And so it went.’
‘A terrible fate,’ Traveller muttered.
‘Until one day some ships arrived. On board, yet more champions from distant lands. Among them, Karsa Orlong, the Toblakai. I happened to be with him, then.’
‘I would hear the story behind such a partnership.’
‘Maybe later. There was someone else, another champion. His name was Icarium.’
Traveller slowly twisted in his saddle, studied the woman across from him, Some unconscious message told the gelding to hull.
Samar’s Jhag horse continued on for a few steps, then she reined it in and turned to meet Traveller’s eyes. ‘I believe, if Icarium had met the Emperor, well, the dying would still be going on, spreading like a wildfire. An entire continent.,, pretty much incinerated. Who knows, perhaps the entire world.’
He nodded, not trusting himself to speak.
‘Instead,’ Samar Dev said, ‘Karsa was sent for first.’
‘What happened?’
Her smile was sad. ‘They fought.’
‘Samar Dev,’ Traveller said, ‘that makes no sense. The Toblakai still lives.’
‘Karsa killed the Emperor. With finality.’
‘How?’
‘I have some suspicions. I believe that, somewhere, somehow, Karsa Orlong spoke with the Crippled God-not a pleasant conversation, I’m sure. Karsa rarely has those.’
‘Then the Emperor of a Thousand Deaths-•’
‘Gone, delivered unto a final death. I like to believe Rhulad thanked Karsa with his last breath.’
If there was need for such a thought she was welcome to it. ‘And the sword? Does the Toblakai now carry it as his own?’
She collected her reins and nudged her mount onward. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Another reason why I have to find him.’
‘Did he?’
He urged his horse forward, came up alongside her once more. ‘What other possibility is there?’
And to that she grinned. ‘Ah, but that is where I know something you don’t, Traveller. I know Karsa Orlong.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It’s his favourite game, you see, pretending to be so… obvious. Blunt, lacking all subtlety, all decorum. Just a savage, after all. The only possibility is the obvi-ous one, isn’t it? That’s why I don’t believe that’s what he’s done.’
‘You don’t wish to believe, you mean. Now I will speak plain, Samar Dev. If your Toblakai wields the sword of the Crippled God, he shall have to either yield it or draw it against me. Such a weapon must be destroyed.’
‘You set yourself as an enemy of the Crippled God? Well, you’re hardly alone in that, are you?’
He frowned. ‘I did not then,’ he said, ‘nor do I desire to do so now. But he goes too far.’
‘Who are you, Traveller?’
‘I played the game of civilization once, Samar Dev. But in the end I remain as I am, a savage.’
‘Too many have put themselves into Karsa Orlong’s path,’ she said. ‘They do not stand there long.’ A pause, and then, ‘Civilized or barbarian-those are but words the cruel killer can wear all the costumes he wants, can pretend to great causes and hard necessities, God’s below, it all sickens me, the way you fools carry on. Over the whole damned world it’s ever the same.’
He answered this rant with silence, for he believed it was ever the same, and that it would never change. Animals remained just that, whether sentient or not, and they fought, they killed, they died. Life was suffered until it was over, and then… then
An end. It had to be that. It must be that.
Hiding on, now, no words between them. Already past the telling of stories, the recounting of adventures. All that mattered, for each of them, was what lay ahead.
With the Toblakai named Karsa Orlong.
Some time in his past, the man known as the Captain had been a prisoner to some-one. At some point he had outlived his usefulness and had been staked out on the plain, wooden spikes driven through his hands, his feet, hammered to the hard earth to feed the ants, to feed all the carrion hunters of Lamatath. But he’d not been ready to die just then. He had pulled his hands through the spikes, had worked his feet free, and had crawled on elbows and knees half a league, down into a valley where a once-mighty river had dwindled to a stream fringed by cottonwoods.
His hands were ruined. His feet could not bear his weight. And, he was con-vinced, the ants that had crawled into his ears had never left, trapped in the tun-nels of his skull, making of his brain a veritable nest-he could taste their acidic exudations on his swollen, blackened tongue.
If the legend was true, and it was, hoary long-forgotten river spirits had squirmed up from the mud beneath the exposed bank’s cracked skin, clawing like vermin to where he huddled fevered and shivering. To give life was no gift for such creatures; no, to give was in turn to take. As the king feeds his heir all he needs to survive, so the heir feeds the king with the illusion of immortality. And the hand reaches be-tween the bars of one cage, out to the hand reaching between the bars of the other cage. They exchange more than just touch.
