‘Enough!’ Krughava’s bellow sent all the Bolkando flinching back.
The Chancellor was first to recover. ‘Is this to be the manner of your vaunted honour, Mortal Sword?’ he demanded, red-faced, eyes bright. ‘Can you not comprehend our newfound caution—nay, our distrust? Have we been led to expect such treachery—’
‘You go too far,’ said Krughava, and Tanakalian saw the faint curl of a smile on her lips—a detail that took his breath away.
It seemed to exert a similar effect upon the Bolkando dignitaries, as Rava paled and Avalt settled a mailed hand on his sword.
‘What,’ demanded Rava in a rasp, ‘does that mean?’
‘You describe a local history of internecine treachery and incessant betrayal, sirs, so much so as to be part of your very natures, and then you express horror and outrage at the supposed betrayal of the Khundryl. Your protestations are melodramatic, sirs. False in their extremity. I begin to see in you Bolkando a serpent delighting in the cleverness of its own forked tongue.’ She paused in the shocked silence, and then added, ‘When I invited you into the illusion of my ignorance, sirs, you slithered with eager glee. Who here among us, then, is the greater fool?’
Tanakalian gave credit to both men as he saw the rapid reassessment betrayed in their features. After a tense moment, Krughava continued in a quieter tone, ‘Sirs, I have known Warleader Gall of the Khundryl Burned Tears for some time now. In the course of a long ocean voyage, no duplicities of character remain hidden. You assert the uniqueness of the Grey Helms, and in this you clearly reveal to me your lack of understanding with respect to the Khundryl. The Burned Tears, sirs, are in fact a warrior cult. Devoted to the very heart of their souls to a legendary warleader. This warleader, Coltaine, was of such stature, such honour, that he earned worship not among his allies, but among his putative enemies. Such as the Khundryl Burned Tears.’ She paused, and then said, ‘I am assured, therefore, that Warleader Gall and his people were provoked. Possessed of admirable forbearance, as I know him to be, Gall would have bowed as a sapling to the wind. Until such time as the insults demanded answer.
‘They have raided and conducted wholesale looting? From this detail I conclude Bolkando merchants and the King’s agents sought to take advantage of the Khundryl, imposing usurious increases in the price of essential supplies. Furthermore, you state that they broke out of their settlement. What manner of settlement requires a violent exit? The only one that comes to mind is one under siege. Accordingly, and in consideration of such provocation, I reaffirm the alliance between the Khundryl Burned Tears and the Grey Helms. If enemies to us you choose to be, sirs, then we must consider that we are now at war. Attend to your brigade, Conquestor—it is tactically imperative that we obliterate your presence here prior to invading your kingdom.’
For all his doubt and suspicions and, indeed, fears, Tanakalian was not averse to revelling in pride at this moment; seeing the effect of the Mortal Sword’s words upon the Chancellor and the Conquestor he felt savage pleasure. Play games with us, will you? The Khundryl may sting, but the Perish shall rend and tear.
They would not call Krughava’s bluff, for it was no bluff, and they both clearly knew it.
Nor, Tanakalian knew, would they accede to a state of war—not here against the Perish, and not, by extension, against the Burned Tears. The fools had miscalculated, badly miscalculated.
And now would begin the desperate renewal of negotiations, and the footing that had heretofore been on a matching level—as courtesy demanded—was level no longer.
After all, you may at this moment face two bridling, angry armies, my friends, and find yourselves shaking with terror.
Wait until you meet the Bonehunters.
He watched as, following hasty reiterations of a desire to work things through peacefully, the Chancellor and the Conquestor retreated back down the slope—not even bothering with the ridiculous chairs. The slaves stumbled after them in a fan-waving mob.
Beside him, Krughava sighed, and then said, ‘It occurs to me, sir, that the Bolkando expected the Khundryl to prove little more than a minor irritant, confined to the region surrounding their settlement. Easily contained, or, indeed, quickly driven over the border into the Wastelands. That notion led, inevitably, to the conceit that we here could be isolated and dealt with at their leisure.’
‘Then an ambush was intended all along?’
‘Or the threat thereof, to win further concessions.’
‘Well,’ said Tanakalian, ‘if the Khundryl will neither remain close to their settlement nor retreat over the border, then it follows that but one course remains.’
She nodded. ‘As a barbed spear,’ she said, ‘Gall will lead his people into the very heart of the kingdom.’ She rolled her shoulders in a rustle of chain and buckles. ‘Shield Anvil, inform the legion commands that we are to march two bells before dawn—’
‘Even if that means we are pursued by the Bolkando escort?’
She bared her teeth. ‘Have you gauged those troops, sir? They could be naked and not keep up with us. Their baggage train alone is thrice the size of their combatants in column. That,’ she pronounced, ‘is an army used to going nowhere.’
She set off, then, to beat down the two Bolkando delegates, from flickering daggers to misshapen lumps of lead.
Tanakalian, on the other hand, made his way to the Perish camp.
The insects were maddening, and from the rushes lining the river birds screamed.
The rain thrashed down, making the world grey and turning the stony track into a foaming stream. The tall black boles of the trees to either side loomed into view and then receded in rippling waves as Yan Tovis guided her horse down the now treacherous trail. Her waxed cloak was drawn tight about her, the hood pulled over her helm. Two days and three nights of this and she was chilled and soaked through. Ever since she had departed the Cities Road, five leagues from Dresh, cutting northward to where she had left her people, league after league of this forest had begun to weigh upon her. Her descent to the coast was also a journey into the past, civilization fading into ghostly hopes in her wake. Patches of clear-cut meadow, bordered by snarled bomas of cut branches, hacked brush and root stumps, the triple ruts of log-tracks wending in and out; the rubbish of old camps and the ash heaps and trenches of charcoal makers: these marked the brutal imposition of Dresh’s hunger and need.
As with the islands of Katter Bight, desolation was the promise. As she had ridden through the old timber camps, she had seen the soil erosion, the deep rocky channels cutting through every clearing. And when in Dresh, resigning her commission, she had noted the nervousness among the garrison troops. Following a royal decree halting logging operations, there had been riots—much of the city’s wealth came from the forest, after all, and while the prohibition was a temporary one, during which the King’s agents set about devising a new system—one centred on sustainability—the stink of panic clogged the city streets.
Yan Tovis was not surprised that King Tehol had begun challenging the fundamental principles and practices of Lether, but she suspected that he would soon find himself a solitary, beleaguered voice of reason. Even common sense was an enemy to the harvesters of the future. The beast that was civilization ever faced forward, and in making its present world it devoured the world to come. It was an appalling truth that one’s own children could be so callously sacrificed to immediate comforts, yet this was so and it had always been so.
Dreamers were among the first to turn their backs on historical truths. King Tehol would be swept aside, drowned in the inexorable tide of unmitigated growth. No one, after all, can stand between the glutton and the feast.
She wished him well, even as she knew he would fail.
In the midst of pelting rain she had left the camps behind, taking one of the old wood-bison migration routes through virgin forest. The mud of the ancient track swarmed with leeches and she was forced to dismount every bell or so to tug the mottled black and brown creatures from her hors
e’s legs, until the path led down on to a sinkhole basin that proved to be a salt-trap—the plague of leeches ended abruptly and, as she continued down-slope, did not return.
Signs of the old dwellers began to appear—perhaps they were Shake remnants, perhaps they belonged to a people now forgotten. She saw the slumping humps of round huts covered in wax-leaved vines. She saw on the massive trunks of the most ancient trees crumbled visages, carved by hands long since rotted to nothing. The wooden faces were smeared in black-slime, moss and lumps of sickly fungi. She halted her mount beside one such creation and stared at it through the rain for a long time. She could think of no finer symbol of impermanence. The blunted expression, its pits of sorrow that passed for eyes: these things haunted her long after she had left the ruined settlement.
The track eventually merged with a Shake road that had once joined two coastal villages, and this was the path she now took.
The rain had become a deluge, and its hissing rose to a roar on her hood, a curtain of water sheeting down in front of her eyes.
Her horse halted suddenly and she lifted her head to see a lone rider blocking her path.
He seemed a figure sculpted in flowing water. ‘Listen to me,’ she said, loud, unexpectedly harsh. ‘Do you truly imagine that you can follow us, brother?’
Yedan Derryg made no reply—his typical statement of obstinacy.
She wanted to curse him, but knew that even that would be useless. ‘You killed the witches and warlocks. Pully and Skwish are not enough. Do you understand what you have forced upon me, Yedan?’
He straightened in his saddle at that. Even in the gloom she saw his jaws bunching as he chewed for a time on his reply, before saying, ‘You cannot. You must not. Make the journey, sister, upon the mortal path.’
‘Because it is the only one you can follow, banished as you are.’
But he shook his head. ‘The road you seek is but a promise. Never attempted. A promise, Yan Tovis. Will you risk the lives of our people upon such a thing?’
‘You have left me no choice.’
‘Take the mortal path, as you said you would. Eastward to Bluerose and thence across the sea—’
She wanted to scream at him. Instead, she bared her teeth. ‘You damned fool, Yedan. Have you seen the camp of our—my—people? The population of the whole island—old prisoners and their families, merchants and hawkers, cut-throats and pirates—everyone joined us! Not even including the Shake, there are close to ten thousand Letherii refugees in my camp! What am I to do with them all? How do I feed them?’
‘They are not your responsibility, Twilight. Disperse them—the islands are very nearly under water now—this crisis belongs to King Tehol—to Lether.’
‘You forget,’ she snapped, ‘Second Maiden proclaimed its independence. And made me Queen. The moment we arrived on the mainland, we became invaders.’
He cocked his head. ‘It is said the King is a compassionate man—’
‘He may well be, but how will everyone else think—all those people whose lands we must cross? When we beg for food and shelter? When our hunger grasps tight our souls, so that begging becomes demands? The northern territories have not yet recovered from the Edur War—fields lie fallow; the places where sorcery was unleashed now seethe with nightmare creatures and poisonous plants. I will not descend upon King Tehol’s most fragile subjects with fifteen thousand desperate trespassers!’
‘Take me back, then,’ Yedan said. ‘Your need for me—’
‘I cannot! You are a Witchslayer! You would be torn to pieces!’
‘Then find a worthy mate—a king—’
‘Yedan Derryg, move aside. I will speak with you no longer.’
He collected his reins and made way for her to pass. ‘The mortal path, sister. Please.’
Coming alongside, she raised a gloved hand as if to strike him, then lowered it and kicked her horse forward. Feeling his gaze upon her back was not enough to twist her round in her saddle. The weight of his disapproval settled on her shoulders, and with a faint shock she discovered that it was not entirely unfamiliar. Perhaps, as a child . . . well, some traits refused to go away, no matter the span of years. The notion made her even more miserable.
A short time later she caught the rank smell of cookfires dying in the rain.
My people, my realm, I am home.
Pithy and Brevity sat on a rolled-up, half-buried log at what used to be the high-water mark, their bare feet in the lukewarm water of the sea’s edge. The story went that this precious, magical mix of fresh rain and salty surf was a cure for all manner of foot ailments, including bad choices that sent one walking in entirely the wrong direction. Of course, life being what it is, you can’t cure what you ain’t done yet, though it never hurts to try.
‘Besides,’ said Brevity, her short dark hair flattened on to her round cheeks, ‘if we didn’t swing the vote, you and me, why, we’d be swimming to the nearest tavern right about now.’
‘Praying that there’s still some beer on tap,’ Pithy added.
‘It was the ice melt, dearie, that done in the island, and sure, maybe it would’ve subsided some, maybe even enough, but who wanted to hold their breaths waiting for that?’ She pulled a sodden rustleaf stick from some fold in her cloak and jammed it in the corner of her mouth. ‘Anyway, we got us a Queen now and a government—’
‘A divided government, Brevity. Shake on one side, Forters on the other, and the Queen hogtied and stretched in between—I can hear her creaking day and night. What we’re looking at here is an impasse and it won’t hold that way for much longer.’
‘Well, with only two witches left, it’s not like the Shake can do nothing but wave a bony fist our way.’ Pithy kicked her feet, making desultory splashes quickly beaten down by the rain. ‘We need to make our move soon. We need to swing the Queen over to our side. You and me, Brev, we should be leading the contingent to King Tehol, with a tidy resettlement scheme that includes at least three chests heaped with coins.’
‘One for you, one for me, and one for Twilight’s treasury.’
‘Precisely.’
‘Think she’ll go for it?’
‘Why not? We can’t stay here on this rotten coast much longer, can we?’
‘Good point. She saved us from drowning on the island, didn’t she? No point in then having us drown here in the Errant’s endless piss. Fent’s Toes, what a miserable place this is.’
‘You know,’ said Pithy after a time, ‘you and me, we could just abandon ’em all. Make our way to Letheras. How long do you think it’d take us to get reestablished?’
Brevity shook her head. ‘We’d get recognized, dearie. Worse, our scheme ain’t going to work a second time—people will see the signs and know it for what it is.’
‘Bah, every five years by my count you can find another crop of fools with too much money. Happy to hand it over.’
‘Maybe, but it’s not the marks I was thinking about—it’s the authorities. I ain’t in no mood to get arrested all over again. Twice offending means the Drownings for sure.’
Pithy shivered. ‘Got a point there. All right, then we go the honest politician route, we climb the ladder of, uh, secular power. We soak and scam legitimately.’
Brevity sucked on the stick and then nodded. ‘We can do that. Popularity contest. We divide up our rivals in the Putative Assembly. You bed one half, I bed the other, we set ourselves up as bitter rivals and make up two camps. Get voted as the Assembly’s official representatives to the court of the Queen.’
‘And then we become the choke-point.’
‘Information and wealth, up and down, down and up. Neither side knowing anything but what we decide to tell ’em.’
‘Precisely. No real difference from being the lying, cheating brokers we once were.’
‘Right, only even more crooked.’
‘But with a smile.’
‘With a smile, always, dearie.’
______
Yan Tovis rode down into th
e camp. The place stank. Figures stumbled in the mud and rain. The entire shallow bay offshore was brown with churned-up runoff. They were short of food. All the boats anchored in the bay sat low, wallowing in the rolling waves.
The mortal path. Twilight shook her head.
Unmindful of the countless eyes finding her as she rode into the makeshift town, she continued on until she reached the Witch’s Tent. Dismounting, she stepped over the drainage trench and ducked inside.
‘We’s in turble,’ croaked Skwish from the far end. ‘People getting sick now—we’s running outa herbs and was’not.’ She fixed baleful eyes on Twilight.
At her side, Pully smacked her gums for a moment, and then asked, ‘What you going t’do, Queenie? Nafore everone dies?’
She did not hesitate. ‘We must journey. But not on the mortal path.’
Could two ancient women be shocked?
Seemed they could.
‘By my Royal Blood,’ Twilight said, ‘I will open the Road to Gallan.’ She stared down at the witches, their gaping mouths, their wide eyes. ‘To the Dark Shore. I am taking us home.’
He wished he could remember his own name. He wished for some kind of understanding. How could such a disparate collection of people find themselves stumbling across this ravaged landscape? Had the world ended? Were they the last ones left?
But no, not quite, not quite accurate. While none of his companions, bickering and cursing, showed any inclination to glance back on their own trail, he found his attention drawn again and again to that hazy horizon whence they had come.
Someone was there.
Someone was after them.
If he could find out all the important things, he might have less reason to fear. He might even discover that he knew who hunted them. He might find a moment of peace.
Instead, the others looked ahead, as if they had no choice, no will to do otherwise. The edifice they had set out towards—what seemed weeks ago—was finally drawing near. Its immensity had mocked their sense of distance and perspective, but even that was not enough to account for the length of their trek. He had begun to suspect that his sense of time was awry, that the others measured the journey in a way fundamentally different from him—for was he not a ghost? He could only slip into and through them like a shadow. He felt nothing of the weight of each step they took. Even their suffering eluded him.
The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen Page 846