‘I argued for your staying, Rancept. You’re too old for battle. But Lady Hish Tulla said it was your decision to make. I disagree. It was hers. It remains hers. I will speak to her again.’
‘I would rather you didn’t, milady,’ Rancept replied, collecting his quilted shirt and working his way into it, his breaths harsh and loud.
‘They will use sorcery.’
‘I expect so, yes.’
‘Your armour won’t help any of you against that, will it?’
‘Probably not.’
‘You’re going to die.’
‘I will do my best to avoid that, milady. Is it not time for your lessons? Go and lighten Skild’s mood for a change.’
She set her goblet down on a ledge. ‘Here, that needs tying up the back.’
‘Summon a maid.’
‘No, I’m here and I’ll do it.’ He crouched down again and she moved up behind his broad, misshapen back. She tugged at the drawstrings, then released them suddenly and flung herself against him, arms wrapping tight. ‘Don’t go,’ she pleaded, eyes filling with tears.
He touched one of her hands, the gesture tentative. ‘Milady – Sukul, all will be well. I promise this.’
‘You can’t!’
‘I will return.’
‘You don’t know that – I’m not a child! The Houseblades cannot stand long against Urusander’s Legion!’
‘We have the Hust—’
‘No one has the Hust!’
‘Milady. Something you’ve not considered. Something, it seems, that no one has considered.’
‘What?’
‘The Hust blades. The Hust armour. Against sorcery, what answer will they give?’
He now slowly, tenderly, prised loose her grip around his neck, and then straightened and swung round to face her. His blunt hands settled on her shoulders.
Through tears, she looked up at him. ‘What – what do you mean?’
‘I know only a little of Hust iron, milady, but what I do know is the anger within those swords, and now, perhaps, that armour. It is my belief that the Tiste have possessed sorcery for some time now, much longer than most would believe. There is something elemental in those weapons, in that iron.’
She stepped back, slipping free of his hands and shaking her head. ‘Their rightful owners are all dead, Rancept. Now criminals carry them!’
‘Indeed, and what will come of that?’
‘Your faith is misplaced.’
He shrugged. ‘Milady, I served my own time in the mining pits – a criminal, as you say.’
What?
His smile was a terrible thing to witness. ‘Think you this bent frame was the one I was born with? I was a lead rock-biter. Five years in the tunnels.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I was a thief.’
‘Does Lady Hish Tulla know this?’
‘Of course.’
‘Yet … she made you castellan!’
‘Not at first,’ he said. ‘I needed to earn her trust, of course. Well, her mother’s trust, come to that. It was all long ago.’
‘I don’t want you to go.’
He nodded. ‘I know.’
‘I want to say how much I hate you right now.’
‘Aye.’
‘But it’s the opposite of hate.’
‘I suppose it is, milady.’
‘Don’t get killed.’
‘I won’t. Now, can you tie those strings? But not too tightly. My muscles swell with swinging that mace.’
He turned again and crouched down. She looked at his broad back, the massive bulges of strange muscles, so uneven, like knots on a tree trunk. ‘Rancept,’ she asked as she stepped forward, ‘how old were you, when you were in the mines?’
‘Eleven. Left when I was sixteen.’
‘A lead rock-biter – is that what it was called? You were made that at eleven?’
‘No. Had to earn that, too. But I was a big lad even then.’
‘What did you steal?’
‘Food.’
‘Rancept.’ She pulled at the strings, tied a knot.
‘Milady.’
‘Ours is a cruel civilization, isn’t it?’
‘No crueller than most.’
She thought about that and then frowned. ‘That sounds … cynical.’
He said nothing.
They worked together in silence, getting Rancept readied for war. Through it all, Sukul Ankhadu waged a war of her own, against the despair that threatened to overwhelm her.
But when at last they were done, he reached to rest a finger against her cheek. ‘I think of you, milady, not as a hostage, but as a daughter. I know, I am presumptuous.’
Unable to speak, she shook her head, and felt, in a rush of emotion, the despair swept away, as if before a flood.
TWENTY-ONE
‘THE WAYS OF TISTE CONFUSE,’ SAID HATARAS RAZE, SLIPPING free of the heavy bhederin furs as the sun’s light clawed through the high clouds, leaving her naked from the hips upward.
Fighting his incessant chill, Listar looked away. He was leading all three horses, as the two Bonecasters refused to ride the animals, although they examined them often, running their red-painted hands across the sleek hides. It was, Listar had come to realize, a habit of theirs, this endless touching, caressing, palms resting firm upon flesh. Most nights, the two Dog-Runner women were busy doing that with each other. Even more disconcerting, they seemed indifferent to the cold.
In response to Hataras’s observation, Listar shrugged. ‘Crimes must be punished, Bonecaster.’
‘All that work,’ said the younger of the two women, Vastala Trembler. ‘Build fire in winter. Against the stone. Then cold water. Stone cracks, tools can be made.’
‘But you see these weapons I wear, Vastala? They are iron. The rock must be broken and then melted. I do not know the intricacies. I just hauled the rubble up from the pits.’
‘As punishment,’ said Hataras.
‘Yes.’
‘For iron, which all Tiste use.’
‘Yes.’
‘And find pleasure in.’
He sighed. ‘It’s just our way, Bonecaster. As yours are different from ours.’
Vastala Trembler had bundled up all her skins and furs, and was carrying them on one shoulder. She wore hide moccasins and nothing else, barring an obsidian knife bound to a leather thong around her neck. ‘The Ay get restless.’
Listar frowned, looked about for the huge wolves, but the rolling plain with its windswept drifts of old snow seemed empty of life. As if to give credence to their name, the Dog-Runners had company wherever they travelled. Twice since departing the encampment, Listar had seen a half-dozen of the enormous beasts paralleling them in the distance. But the last time had been three or four days past. He’d thought them gone. ‘What has made them restless?’ And more to the point, how do you even know?
‘They wonder,’ Vastala replied, ‘when it’s time to eat horse. As do we.’
‘We’re not starving, are we?’
‘Fresh meat better.’ She lifted one red hand and made a strange, elaborate gesture.
A step behind her, Hataras laughed. ‘Then take him, fool.’
‘Punished Man,’ said Vastala, moving up alongside him. ‘Would you like to lie with me tonight? It is privilege. Bonecasters can have anyone.’
‘I will take him night after,’ Hataras said. ‘Too much waiting. He thinks us ugly, but in dark he will feel our beauty.’
‘I’ve not told you my crime,’ Listar said, edging away from Vastala. ‘You’ll want nothing to do with me. I had a mate. I killed her.’
‘No you didn’t,’ Vastala retorted, drawing close again.
‘You know nothing of it!’
‘You have never taken a life.’
A snort from behind them, and then, ‘Insects. Lice. Gnats.’
Vastala glared back at Hataras. ‘A Tiste life, then. You know this. Nothing stains him.’
‘Mice, spiders, fish.’
In a flash, Vastala spun and launched herself at Hataras. Both went down scratching and snarling, biting and kicking.
Listar halted, the horses nervously gathering up around him. He squinted northward, waiting for the scrap to work through to its exhausted, sex-filled conclusion. It was not the first fight between these women. He could not recall what had set them at each other the first time, but he had stared at them, alarmed, and then bemused, as the vicious grappling soon found nipples and the tangled thatch between their legs, and before too long the struggling grew rhythmic, with moans and gasps instead of snarls, and he had looked away then, his face burning.
These were the women he was escorting to the Hust Legion, the women who were meant to give shape to a ritual of some kind of absolution. Beyond the unlikelihood of success, Listar was troubled by such notions of forgiveness. Some things did not deserve what captains Prazek and Dathenar sought.
He knew Rance had been the killer in the camp. He had awaited her knife, and would have welcomed it. Instead, she had danced around him, until the anticipation left holes burning in his gut. And then he had been sent away, out into the wild plains of the south, as if there’d been no thought of his fleeing, running away from all that he was.
The women were now coupling, in the way that women did when together, each with her face in the other’s crotch. At least, he assumed that was a typical position, although he could not be certain. A few other times, fingers had been involved.
They would be at this for some time. Sighing, he looked away, drew off his satchel and crouched down, unclasping the flap. Hands upon horseflesh. A judgement of meat. No wonder they run with dogs, not horses. He drew out the makings of a meal and set to preparing it. ‘We are not far from the camp,’ he said.
As he expected, neither woman replied.
‘We’re not eating the horses. You two were supposed to ride with me, to deliver us quickly to the Hust camp. We are short of time.’
Hataras lifted her head, licked her lips and then said, ‘A ritual of cleansing, yes. Stains taken away. You ride, we run.’
Vastala rolled over and sat up. ‘The Ay now hunt. Mother will provide.’
Studying the two of them as they recovered, their flushed faces and glowing cheeks, the wetness of sex on their sloping, almost non-existent chins, he said, ‘This Mother you speak of, the one you cry out to when … when doing what you just did. She is your goddess?’
Both women laughed. Hataras climbed to her feet. ‘Womb of fire, the promise that devours.’
‘Child Spitter. Swollen Spring.’
‘Guardian of the Dreamer. False Mother.’
‘Deadly when spurned,’ Vastala said. ‘We appease to keep her claws sheathed. She is masked, is Mother, but the face of blood-kin is a lie. Azathanai.’
‘Azathanai,’ echoed Hataras, nodding. ‘She keeps the Dreamer asleep. The longer the sleep, the weaker we become. Soon, Dog-Runners will be no more. One dream ends. Another begins.’
‘Mother whispers of immortality,’ said Vastala, making a face. ‘A path out from the dream. Let her sleep, she says.’
‘We do not fear Mother,’ added Hataras, walking over to run a hand along a horse’s flank. ‘We fear only the Jaghut.’
Listar frowned. ‘The Jaghut? Why?’
‘They play with us. Like Azathanai, only more clumsy. They think us innocent—’
‘Children,’ Vastala cut in.
‘But look into our eyes, Punished Man. See our knowing.’
‘The Dreamer birthed us and we are content. Our lives are short.’
‘But fullest.’
‘We struggle to eat and stay warm.’
‘But love is never a stranger.’ Hataras stepped away from the horse and approached Listar. ‘Punished Man, will you wait with others? Or we give you ritual now? We end torment in soul.’
‘How, Bonecaster? How will you do such a thing, to any of us?’
Vastala settled down beside him. ‘Many dreams are forgotten upon awakening, yes?’
He glanced away from her appallingly open expression. ‘But not memories,’ he said. ‘They just rise up, like the sun. Each morning, after a moment’s bliss, they return. Like ghosts. Demons. They return, Vastala, with all the fangs and claws of the truth. We awaken to what’s real, what was and can’t be taken back.’
She reached out with a tanned, blunted hand and touched his cheek. ‘There is no real, Punished Man. Only dreams.’
‘It feels otherwise.’
‘There is fear in awakening,’ she replied, ‘even when the dream displeases. In the voice in your head, even as it cries out, begs to wake up, another voice warns you. You awaken to a world unknown. This is cause for fear.’
‘We need our guilt, Vastala Trembler. Without it, all conscience dies. Is that what you would do to me? To us? Take away our conscience? Our guilt?’
‘No,’ answered Hataras, who now crouched opposite him, her eyes bright and wet. ‘There is another path.’
‘What is it?’
‘Only what must be felt, in the heart of the ritual. Shall we ease you now?’
He shook his head and swiftly began packing up the leavings of his meal. ‘No. I am a Hust soldier now. I will stand with my comrades.’
‘Your fear speaks.’
He paused. ‘Fear? More like terror.’
‘If you are made to surrender the lie of your crime of murder,’ said Vastala, ‘you will face the crime of your innocence.’
‘For which,’ Hataras said, ‘you feel greater guilt than could any bloodied blade in your hand.’
‘She killed herself,’ Listar whispered, ‘out of spite. She arranged it to make it seem her death was by my hand.’ Shivers rippled through him, and he sank back down, bringing his hands to his face. ‘I don’t know what I did to earn that … but it must have been something. Something.’ Abyss below, something …
Their hands were upon him now, surprisingly soft and warm. They left heat wherever they touched.
‘Punished Man,’ said Hataras, ‘there was nothing.’
‘You can’t know that!’
‘Her ghost is chained. You drag it behind you. You have always done.’
‘This was what she wanted,’ said Vastala. ‘At first.’
‘It was madness, Punished Man. Her madness. A spirit broken, a dream lost in the mists.’
‘We will wait,’ said Vastala. ‘But for her, we cannot.’
‘Her dream is a nightmare, Punished Man. She begs like a child. She wants to go home.’
‘But no home waits for her. The hut where you lived – with all its rooms – still screams with her crime. To send her there is to send her to a prison, a pit, the very fate of your punishment – but an eternal one.’
‘No,’ he begged. ‘Don’t do that to her. I tell you – she had a reason! There must have been – something I did, or didn’t do!’
‘Be at ease, Punished Man,’ said Hataras. ‘We will make her a new home. A place of rest. Peace.’
‘And love.’
‘You will feel her from there. Feel her anew. Her ghost will touch you again, but with tender hands. As the dead owe to the living, no matter their state. The dead owe it, Punished Man, to salve your grief, and to take from you the grief you feel for yourself.’
He wept, while their hands slipped from him, and their voices fell into a cadence, making sounds that seemed less than words, yet truer somehow, as if they spoke the language of the souls.
After a time he thought he heard her then. His wife. The sounds of weeping to answer his own. He felt their shared grief washing back and forth, cool and impossibly bittersweet. The madness of long ago, the endless torment of uncertainty each time he stepped into a room where she waited, the dread of what might come the instant he looked into her wild, panicked eyes.
If there was magic in the world worthy of its power, this was surely it.
I must tell everyone. There is another kind of sorcery. Awake in the world, awake in our souls.
And so he had, returning home filled with a new hope, and yet something trembled beneath the surface of his thoughts, a visceral fear. Hope, he now knew, was a vicious beast. Every thought a delusion, every imagined scene perfect in its resolution and yet utterly false; and when he found her, with the braided cord about her neck that she must have slipped over the bedroom door’s latch – in a house emptied of servants, who each later swore that they had been sent away by Listar’s express command – and when he comprehended the power of the will that kept tightening the cord while she sat against the door, only then did he understand the blessing of her love for him.
Illness, a mind bent, a soul broken, wherein every cruel impulse had slipped its leash. He knew now the horror behind her eyes, the fleeing child within who had nowhere to run.
He lowered his hands, wiped at his eyes, and looked to the two Bonecasters kneeling opposite him. So many undeserved gifts.
But the Dream will fade. The Dog-Runners will die out.
Abyss take us, that loss is beyond all recompense.
Something left him then. He did not know what it was, could not know, but its departure was like a sob, a relinquishing of unbearable pain. And in its absence, there was … nothing.
Faintly, as he sank to the ground, he heard one of the Bonecasters speak. ‘She makes the home ready. For her husband, for the day he joins her.’
‘It is well,’ the other replied. ‘But still, they make ugly huts.’
‘Let him sleep now – no, stop that, Vastala, leave his lovely black cock alone.’
‘This is my payment. I will have his seed.’
‘He does not give it freely.’
‘No, but I take it freely.’
‘You are such a slut, Vastala.’
‘We can keep him asleep. You can have him after me, when this cock recovers.’
‘He may be asleep, but it surely is awake. Don’t empty him, Vastala. I want my share. Don’t be greedy.’
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