In a low voice Sandalath said, ‘Your Nachts-the Jaghut were inveterate jokers. Hah hah. That was a Forkrul Assail. It seems the Shake stirred things up somewhat- they’re probably all dead, in fact, and this one was backtracking with the intention of cleaning up any stragglers-out through the gate, probably, to murder every refugee on that shoreline we’ve just left behind. Instead, he ran into us-and your Venath demons.’
Withal wiped blood from his eyes. ‘I’m, uh, starting to see the resemblances-they were ensorcelled before?’
‘In a manner of speaking. A geas, I suspect. They’re Soletaken… or maybe D’ivers. Either way, this particular realm forced a veering-or a sembling-who can say which species is the original, after all?’
‘Then what do the Jaghut have to do with any of this?’
‘They created the Nachts. Or so I gathered-the mage Obo in Malaz City seemed to be certain of that. Of course, if he’s right and they did, then what they managed to do was something no one else has ever managed-they found a way to chain the wild forces of Soletaken and D’ivers. Now, husband, get cleaned up and saddle a new horse-we can’t stay here long. We ride as far as we need to on this road to confirm the slaughter of the Shake, and then we ride back out the way we came.’ She paused. ‘Even with these Venath, we’ll be in danger-if there’s one Forkrul Assail, there’s bound to be more.’
The Venath demons had evidently decided they were done with the destruction of the Forkrul Assail, as they now bounded up the road a few paces to then huddle round the club and examine the damage to their lone weapon.
‘Withal.’
He faced her again.
‘I’m sorry.’
Withal shrugged. ‘It will be all right, Sand, if you don’t expect me to be what I’m not.’
‘I may have found them infuriating, but I fear for Nimander, Aranatha, Desra, all of them. I fear for them so.’
He grimaced, and then shook his head. ‘You underestimate them, I think, Sand.’
‘I hope so.’
He went to work loose the saddle, paused to pat the animal’s gore-soaked neck. ‘Should’ve given you a name, at least. You deserved that much.’
Her mind was free. It could slip down among the sharp knuckles of quartz studding the plain, where nothing lived on the surface. It could slide beneath the stone- hard clay to where the diamonds, rubies and opals hid from the cruel heat. All this land’s wealth. And deep into the crumbling marrow of living bones wrapped in withered meat, crouched in fever worlds where blood boiled. In the moments before the very end, she could hover behind hot, bright eyes-the brightness that was the final looking upon all the surrounding things-all the precious vistas-that announced saying goodbye. That look, she now knew, did not shine forth solely among old people, though perhaps they were the only ones to whom it belonged. No, here, in this gaunt, slow, slithery snake, it was the beacon blazing in the eyes of children.
But she could fly away from such things. She could wing high and higher still, to ride the fuzzy backs of capemoths, or the feathered tips of vultures’ wings. And look down wheeling round and round the crawling, dying worm far below, that red, scorched string winking with dull motion. Thread of food, knots of promise, the countless strands of salvation-and see all the bits and pieces falling off, left in its wake, and down and down low and lower still, to eat and pick at leather skin, pluck the brightness from eyes.
Her mind was free. Free to make beauty with a host of beautiful, terrible words. She could swim through the cool language of loss, rising to touch precious surfaces, diving into midnight depths where broken thoughts fluttered down, where the floor fashioned vast, intricate tales.
Tales, yes, of the fallen.
There was no pain in this place. Her untethered will recalled no aching joints, no crusting flies upon split, raw lips; no blackened, lacerated feet. It was free to float and then sing across hungry winds, and comfort was a most natural thing, reasonable, a proper state of being. Worries dwindled, the future threatened no alteration to what was and one could easily believe that what was would always be.
She could be an adult here, splashing water on to pretty flowers, dipping fingers into dreaming fountains, damming up rivers and devouring trees. Filling lakes and ponds with poison rubbish. Thickening the air with bitter smoke. And nothing would ever change and what changes came would never touch her adultness, her perfect preoccupation with petty extravagances and indulgences. The adults knew such a nice world, didn’t they?
And if the bony snake of their children now wandered dying in a glass wilderness, what of it? The adults don’t care. Even the moaners among them-their caring had sharp borders, not far, only a few steps away, patrolled borders with thick walls and bristling towers and on the outside there was agonizing sacrifice and inside there was convenience. Adults knew what to guard and they knew, too, how far to think, which wasn’t far, not far, not far at all.
Even words, especially words, could not penetrate those walls, could not overwhelm those towers. Words bounced off obstinate stupidity, brainless stupidity, breathtaking, appalling stupidity. Against the blank gaze, words are useless.
Her mind was free to luxuriate in adulthood, knowing as it did that she would never in truth reach it. And this was her own preoccupation, a modest one, not very extravagant, not much of an indulgence, but her own which meant that she owned it.
She wondered what adults owned, these days. Apart from this murderous legacy, of course. Great inventions beneath layers of sand and dust. Proud monuments that not even spiders could map, palaces empty as caves, sculptures announcing immortality to grinning white skulls, tapestries displaying grand moments to fill the guts of moths. All this, such a bold, joyous legacy.
Flying high, among the capemoths and vultures and rhinazan and swarms of Shards, she was free. And to look down was to see the disordered patterns writ large across the glass plain. Ancient causeways, avenues, enclosures, all marked out by nothing more than faint stains-and the broken glass was all that remained of some unknown civilization’s most wondrous chalice.
At the snake’s head and in front of it, the tiny flickering tongue that was Rutt and the baby he named Held in his arms.
She could descend, plummeting like truth, to shake the tiny swaddled form in Rutt’s twig-arms, force open the bright eyes to the glorious panorama of rotted cloth and layers of filtered sunlight, the blazing rippling heat from Rutt’s chest. Final visions to take into death-this was the meaning behind that brightness, after all.
Words held the magic of the breathless. But adults turn away.
They have no room in their heads for a suffering column of dying children, nor the heroes among them.
‘So many fallen,’ she said to Saddic who remembered everything. ‘I could list them. I could make them into a book ten thousand pages long. And people will read it, but only so far as their own private borders, and that’s not far. Only a few steps. Only a few steps.’
Saddic, who remembered everything, he nodded and he said, ‘One long scream of horror, Badalle. Ten thousand pages long. No one will hear it.’
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘No one will hear it.’
‘But you will write it anyway, won’t you?’
‘I am Badalle, and all I have is words.’
‘May the world choke on them,’ said Saddic, who remembered everything.
Her mind was free. Free to invent conversations. Free to assemble sharp knuckles of quartz into small boys walking beside her endless selves. Free to trap light and fold it in and in and in, until all the colours became one, and that one was so bright it blinded everyone and everything.
The last colour is the word. See it burn bright: that is what there is to see in a dying child’s eyes.
‘Badalle, your indulgence was too extravagant. They won’t listen, they won’t want to know.’
‘Well, now, isn’t that convenient?’
‘Badalle, do you still feel free?’
‘Saddic, I still feel free. Freer than ever before.’
‘Rutt holds Held and he will deliver Held.’
‘Yes, Saddic.’
‘He will deliver Held into an adult’s arms.’
‘Yes, Saddic.’
The last colour is the word. See it burn bright in a dying child’s eyes. See it, just this once, before you turn away.
‘I will, Badalle, when I am grown up. But not until then.’
‘No, Saddic, not until then.’
‘When I’ve done away with these things.’
‘When you’ve done away with these things.’
‘And freedom ends, Badalle.’
‘Yes, Saddic, when freedom ends.’
Kalyth dreamed she was in a place she had not yet reached. Overhead was a low ceiling of grey, turgid clouds, the kind that she had seen above the plains of the Elan, when the first snows came down from the north. The wind howled, cold as ice, but it was dry as a frozen tomb. Across the taiga, stunted trees rose from the permafrost like skeletal hands, and she could see sinkholes, here and there, in which dozens of some kind of four-legged beast had become mired, dying and freezing solid, and the wind tugged and tore at their matted hides, and frost painted white their curved horns and ringed the hollow pits of their eyes.
In the myths of the Elan, this vista belonged to the underworld of death; it was also the distant past, the very beginning place, where the heat of life first pushed back the bitter cold. The world began in darkness, devoid of warmth. It awakened, in time, to an ember that flared, ever so brief, before one day returning to where it had begun. And so, what she was seeing here before her could also belong to the future. Past or in the age to come, it was where life ceased.
But she was not alone.
A score of figures sat on gaunt horses along a ridge a hundred paces distant. Wrapped in black rain-capes, armoured and helmed, they seemed to be watching her, waiting for her. But terror held Kalyth rooted, as if knee-deep in frozen mud.
She wore a thin tunic, torn and half-rotted, and the cold was like the Reaper’s own hand, closing about her from all sides. She could not move within its intransigent grip, even had she wanted to. She would will the strangers away; she would scream at them, unleash sorcery to send them scattering. She would banish
