Gu’Rull had plundered the pathetic memories of the Destriant, and therefore knew that no salvation would be found to the east, on the plains known as the Elan. Sag’Churok and Gunth Mach had set out westward, into the Awl’dan, and there too they found only failure. The north was a forbidding, lifeless realm of ice, tortured seas and bitter cold.
Thus, they must journey south.
The Shi’gal had not ventured outside Ampelas Rooted in eight centuries. In that short span of time, it was likely that little had changed in the region known to humans as the Wastelands. Nonetheless, some advance scouting was tactically sound.
With this in mind, Gu’Rull unfolded his month-old wings, spreading the elongated feather-scales so that they could flatten and fill out under the pressure of the wind.
And then the assassin dropped over the sheer edge of Brow, wings snapping out to their fullest extent, and there arose the song of flight, a low, moaning whistle that was, for the Shi’gal, the music of freedom.
Leaving Ampelas Rooted . . . it had been too long since Gu’Rull felt this . . . this exhilaration.
The two new eyes beneath the lines of his jaw now opened for the first time, and the compounded vision—of the sky ahead and the ground below—momentarily confused the assassin, but after a time Gu’Rull was able to enforce the necessary separation, so that the vistas found their proper relationship to one another, creating a vast panorama of the world beyond.
Acyl’s new flavours were ambitious, indeed, brilliant. Was such creativity implicit in madness? Perhaps.
Did that possibility engender hope in Gu’Rull? No. Hope was not possible.
The assassin soared through the night, high above a blasted, virtually lifeless landscape. Like a shred of the murdered moon.
The Wastelands
He was not alone. Indeed, he had no memory of ever having been alone. The notion was impossible, in fact, and that much he understood. As far as he could tell, he was incorporeal, and possessed of the quaint privilege of being able to move from one companion to another almost at will. If they were to die, or somehow find a means of rejecting him, why, he believed he would cease to exist. And he so wanted to stay alive, floating as he did in the euphoric wonder of his friends, his bizarre, disjointed family.
They traversed a wilderness ragged and forlorn, a place of broken rock, wind-rippled fans of grey sand, screes of volcanic glass that began and ended with random indifference. Hills and ridges clashed in wayward confusion, and not a single tree broke the undulating horizon. The sun overhead was a blurred eye that smeared a path through thin clouds. The air was hot, the wind constant.
The only nourishment the group had been able to find came from the strange swarms of scaled rodents—their stringy meat tasting of dust—and an oversized breed of rhizan that possessed pouches under their wings swollen with milky water. Day and night capemoths tracked them, waiting ever patient for one to fall and not rise, but this did not seem likely. Flitting from one person to the next, he could sense their innate resolve, their unfailing strength.
Such fortitude, alas, could not prevent the seemingly endless litany of misery that seemed to comprise the bulk of their conversation.
‘What a waste,’ Sheb was saying, clawing at his itching beard. ‘Sink a few wells, pile these stones into houses and shops and whatnot. Then you’d have something worth something. Empty land is useless. I long for the day when it’s all put to use, everything, right over the surface of the world. Cities merging into one—’
‘There’d be no farms,’ objected Last, but as always it was a mild, diffident objection. ‘Without farms, nobody eats—’
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ snapped Sheb. ‘Of course there’d be farms. Just none of this kind of useless land, where nothing lives but damned rats. Rats in the ground, rats in the air, and bugs, and bones—can you believe all the bones?’
‘But I—’
‘Be quiet, Last,’ said Sheb. ‘You never got nothing useful to say, ever.’
Asane then spoke in her frail, quavering voice. ‘No fighting, please. It’s horrible enough without you picking fights, Sheb—’
‘Careful, hag, or you’re next.’
‘Care to try me, Sheb?’ Nappet asked. He spat. ‘Didn’t think so. You talk, Sheb, and that’s all you do. One of these nights, when you’re asleep, I’m gonna cut out your tongue and feed it to the fuckin’ capemoths. Who’d complain? Asane? Breath? Last? Taxilian? Rautos? Nobody, Sheb, we’d all be dancing.’
‘Leave me out of this,’ said Rautos. ‘I suffered enough for a lifetime when I was living with my wife and, needless to say, I don’t miss her.’
‘Here goes Rautos again,’ snarled Breath. ‘My wife did this, my wife said that. I’m sick of hearing about your wife. She ain’t here, is she? You probably drowned her, and that’s why you’re on the run. You drowned her in your fancy fountain, just held her down, watching as her eyes went wide, her mouth opened and she screamed through the water. You watched and smiled, that’s what you did. I don’t forget, I can’t forget, it was awful. You’re a murderer, Rautos.’
‘There she goes,’ said Sheb, ‘talking about drowning again.’
‘Might cut out her tongue, too,’ said Nappet, grinning. ‘Rautos’s, too. No more shit about drowning or wives or complainin’—the rest of you are fine. Last, you don’t say nothing and when you do, it don’t rile nobody. Asane, you mostly know when to keep your mouth shut. And Taxilian hardly ever says nothing anyway. Just us, and that’d be—’
‘I see something,’ said Rautos.
He felt their attentions shift, find focus, and he saw with their eyes a vague smudge on the horizon, something thrusting skyward, too narrow to be a mountain, too massive to be a tree. Still leagues away, rising like a tooth.
‘I want to see that,’ announced Taxilian.
‘Shit,’ said Nappet, ‘ain’t nowhere else to go.’
The others silently agreed. They had been walking for what seemed forever, and the arguments about where they should go had long since withered away. None of them had any answers, none of them even knew where they were.
And so they set out for that distant, mysterious edifice.
He was content with that, content to go with them, and he found himself sharing Taxilian’s curiosity, which grew in strength and if challenged would easily overwhelm Asane’s fears and the host of obsessions plaguing the others—Breath’s drowning, Rautos’s miserable marriage, Last’s meaningless life of diffidence, Sheb’s hatred and Nappet’s delight in viciousness. And now the conversations fell away, leaving naught but the crunch and thud of bare feet on the rough ground, and the low moan of the ceaseless wind.
High above, a score of capemoths tracked the lone figure walking across the Wastelands. They had been drawn by the sound of voices, only to find this solitary, gaunt figure. Skin of dusty green, tusks framing its mouth. Carrying a sword but otherwise naked. A lone wanderer, who spoke in seven voices, who knew himself by seven names. He was many, but he was one. They were all lost, and so was he.
The capemoths hungered for his life to end. But it had been weeks. Months. In the meantime, they just hungered.
There were patterns and they demanded consideration. The elements remained disarticulated, however, in floating tendrils, in smears of loose black like stains swimming in his vision. But at least he could now see, and that was something. The rotted cloth had pulled away from his eyes, tugged by currents he could not feel.
The key to unlocking everything would be found in the patterns. He was certain of that. If only he could draw them together, he would understand; he would know all he needed to know. He would be able to make sense of the visions that tore through him.
The strange two-legged lizard, all clad in black gleaming armour, its tail nothing more than a stub, standing on a stone landing of some sort, whilst rivers of blood flowed down gutters to each side. Its unhuman eyes fixed unblinking on the source of all that blood—a dragon, nailed to a latticework of enormous wood
en beams, the spikes rust-hued and dripping with condensation. Suffering roiled down from this creature, a death denied, a life transformed into an eternity of pain. And from the standing lizard, cold satisfaction rose in a cruel penumbra.
In another, two wolves seemed to be watching him from a weathered ridge of grasses and bony outcrops. Guarded, uneasy, as if measuring a rival. Behind them, rain slanted down from heavy clouds. And he found himself turning away, as if indifferent to their regard, to walk across a denuded plain. In the distance, dolmens of some sort rose from the ground, scores of them, arranged without any discernible order, and yet all seemed identical—perhaps statues, then. He drew closer, frowning at the shapes, so oddly surmounted by jutting cowls, their hunched, narrow backs to him, tails curled round. The ground they crouched on glittered as if strewn with diamonds or crushed glass.
Even as he closed in on these silent, motionless sentinels, moments from reaching the nearest one, a heavy shadow slipped over him and the air was suddenly frigid. In wrought despair, he halted, looked up.
Nothing but stars, each one drifting as if snapped from its tether, like motes of dust on a slowly draining pool. Faint voices sinking down, touching his brow like flecks of snow, melting in the instant, all meaning lost. Arguments in the Abyss, but he understood none of them. To stare upward was to reel, unbalanced, and he felt his feet lift from the earth until he floated. Twisting round, he looked down.
More stars, but emerging from their midst a dozen raging suns of green fire, slashing through the black fabric of space, fissures of light bleeding through. The closer they came, the more massive they grew, blinding him to all else, and the maelstrom of voices rose to a clamour, and what had once felt like flakes of snow, quickly melting upon his heated brow, now burned like fire.
If he could but draw close the fragments, make the mosaic whole, and so comprehend the truth of the patterns. If he could—
Swirls. Yes, they are that. The motion does not deceive, the motion reveals the shape beneath.
Swirls, in curls of fur.
Tattoos—see them now—see them!
All at once, as the tattoos settled into place, he knew himself.
I am Heboric Ghost Hands. Destriant to a cast-down god. I see him—
I see you, Fener.
The shape, so massive, so lost. Unable to move.
His god was trapped, and, like Heboric, was mute witness to the blazing jade suns as they bore down. He and his god were in their path, and these were forces that could not be pushed aside. No shield existed solid enough to block what was coming.
The Abyss cares nothing for us. The Abyss comes to deliver its own arguments, against which we cannot stand.
Fener, I have doomed you. And you, old god, you have doomed me.
Yet, I no longer regret. For this is as it should be. After all, war knows no other language. In war we invite our own destruction. In war we punish our children with a broken legacy of blood.
He understood now. The gods of war and what they meant, what their very existence signified. And as he stared upon those jade suns searing ever closer, he was overwhelmed by the futility hiding behind all this arrogance, this mindless conceit.
See us wave our banners of hate.
See where it gets us.
A final war had begun. Facing an enemy against whom no defence was possible. Neither words nor deeds could fool this clear-eyed arbiter. Immune to lies, indifferent to excuses and vapid discourses on necessity, on the weighing of two evils and the facile righteousness of choosing the lesser one—and yes, these were the arguments he was hearing, empty as the ether they travelled.
We stood tall in paradise. And then called forth the gods of war, to bring destruction down upon ourselves, our world, the very earth, its air, its water, its myriad life. No, show me no surprise, no innocent bewilderment. I see now with the eyes of the Abyss. I see now with my enemy’s eyes, and so I shall speak with its voice.
Behold, my friends, I am justice.
And when at last we meet, you will not like it.
And if irony awakens in you at the end, see me weep with these tears of jade, and answer with a smile.
If you’ve the courage.
Have you, my friends, the courage?
Book One
The Sea Does Not
Dream of You
I will walk the path forever walked
One step ahead of you
And one step behind
I will choke in the dust of your passing
And skirl more into your face
It all tastes the same
Even when you feign otherwise
But here on the path forever walked
The old will lie itself anew
We can sigh like kings
Like empresses on gift-carts
Resplendent in imagined worth.
I will walk the path forever walked
Though my time is short
As if the stars belong
Cupped here in my hands
Showering out these pleasures
That so sparkle in the sun
When down they drift settling flat
To make this path forever walked
Behind you behind me
Between the step past, the step to come
Look up look up once
Before I am gone
TELLER OF TALES
FASSTAN OF KOLANSE
Chapter One
Abject misery lies not in what the blanket reveals, but in what it hides.
KING TEHOL THE ONLY OF LETHER
W
ar had come to the tangled, overgrown grounds of the dead Azath tower in the city of Letheras. Swarms of lizards had invaded from the river’s shoreline. Discovering a plethora of strange insects, they began a feeding frenzy.
Oddest among the arcane bugs was a species of two-headed beetle. Four lizards spied one such creature and closed in, surrounding it. The insect noted threats from two directions and made a careful half-turn, only to find two additional threats, whereupon it crouched down and played dead.
This didn’t work. One of the lizards, a wall-scampering breed with a broad mouth and gold-flecked eyes, lunged forward and gobbled up the insect.
This scene was played out throughout the grounds, a terrible slaughter, a rush to extinction. The fates, this evening, did not appear kind to the two-headed beetles.
Not all prey, however, was as helpless as it might initially seem. The role of the victim in nature is ephemeral, and that which is fed upon might in time feed upon the feeders in the eternal drama of survival.
A lone owl, already engorged on lizards, was the sole witness to the sudden wave of writhing deaths on the rumpled earth below, as from the mouths of dying lizards, grotesque shapes emerged. The extinction of the two-headed beetles proved not as imminent a threat as it had seemed only moments earlier.
But owls, being among the least clever of birds, are unmindful of such lessons. This one watched, wide-eyed and empty. Until it felt a strange stirring in its own gut, sufficient to distract it from the wretched dying below, that array of pale lizard bellies blotting the dark ground. It did not think of the lizards it had eaten. It did not take note, even in retrospect, of the sluggish efforts some of them had displayed at escaping its swooping talons.
The owl was in for a long night of excruciating regurgitation. Dimwitted as it was, from that moment on and for ever more, lizards were off its menu.
The world delivers its lessons in manners subtle or, if required, cruel and blunt, so that even the thickest of subjects will comprehend. Failing that, they die. For the smart ones, of course, incomprehension is inexcusable.
______
A night of heat in Letheras. Stone dripped sweat. The canals looked viscid, motionless, the surface strangely flattened and opaque with swirls of dust and rubbish. Insects danced over the water as if seeking their reflections, but this smooth patina yielded nothing, swallowing up the span of stars, devouring the lurid torchlight of the s
treet patrols, and so the winged insects spun without surcease, as though crazed with fever.
Beneath a bridge, on stepped banks buried in darkness, crickets crawled like droplets of oozing oil, glistening, turgid, haplessly crunched underfoot as two figures drew together and huddled in the gloom.
‘He never would’ve went in,’ one of them said in a hoarse whisper. ‘The water reeks, and look, no ripples, no nothing. He’s scarpered to the other side, somewhere in the night market where he can get lost fast.’
‘Lost,’ grunted the other, a woman, lifting up the dagger in one gloved hand and examining the edge, ‘that’s a good one. Like he could get lost. Like any of us could.’
‘You think he can’t wrap himself up like we done?’
‘No time for that. He bolted. He’s on the run. Panicked.’
‘Looked like panic, didn’t it,’ agreed her companion, and then he shook his head. ‘Never seen anything so . . . disappointing.’
The woman sheathed her dagger. ‘They’ll flush him out. He’ll come back across, and we jump him then.’
‘Stupid, thinking he could get away.’
After a few moments, Smiles unsheathed her dagger again, peered at the edge.
Beside her, Throatslitter rolled his eyes but said nothing.
Bottle straightened, gestured for Koryk to join him, then watched, amused, as the broad-shouldered half-blood Seti shoved and elbowed his way through the crowd, leaving a wake of dark glares and bitten-off curses—there was little risk of trouble, of course, since clearly the damned foreigner was looking for just that, and instincts being what they were the world over, no one was of a mind to take on Koryk.
Too bad. It’d be a thing worth seeing, Bottle smiled to himself, if a mob of irate Letherii shoppers descended on the glowering barbarian, pummelling him into the ground with loaves of crusty bread and bulbous root-crops.
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