‘Lead them now,’ she said to the boy beside her. ‘Follow Rutt. And keep an eye on Brayderal. Danger comes. The time of the Quitters has arrived. Go, lead them after Rutt. Begin!’
He looked upon her with alarm, but she waved him away, and set out for the snake’s tattered tail.
The Quitters were coming.
To begin the last slaughter.
Inquisitor Sever stood looking down on the body of Brother Beleague, seeing as if for the first time the emaciated travesty of the young man she had once known and loved. On her left was Brother Adroit, breathing fast and shallow, hunched and wracked with tremors. The bones of his spine and shoulders were bowed like an old man’s, legacy of this journey’s terrible deficiencies. His nose was rotting, a raw wound glistening and crawling with flies.
To her right was Sister Rail, her gaunt face thin as a hatchet, her eyes rimmed in dull, dry red. She had little hair left—that lustrous mane was long gone, and with it the last vestiges of the beauty she had once possessed.
Sister Scorn had collected Beleague’s staff and now leant upon it as would a cripple. The joints of her elbows, high-wrists and wrists were inflamed and swollen with fluids, but Sever knew that strength remained within her. Scorn was the last Adjudicator among them.
When they had set out to deliver peace upon the last of the south-dwellers—these children—they had numbered twelve. Among them, three of the original five women still lived, and but one of the seven men. Inquisitor Sever accepted responsibility for this tragic error in judgement. Of course, who could have imagined that thousands of helpless children could march league upon league through this tortured land, bereft of shelter, their hands empty? Outlasting the wild dogs, the cannibal raiders among the last of the surviving adults, and the wretched parasites swarming the ground and the skies above—no, not one Inquisitor could have anticipated this terrible will to survive.
Surrender was the easy choice, the simplest decision of all. They should have given up long ago.
And we would now be home. And my mate could stand before his daughter and feel such pride at her courage and purity—that she chose to walk with the human children, that she chose to guide her kin to the delivery of peace.
And I would not now be standing above the body of my dead son.
It was understood—it had always been understood—that no human was an equal to the Forkrul Assail. Proof was delivered a thousand times a day—and towards the end, ten thousand, as the pacification of the south kingdoms reached its blessed conclusion. Not once had the Shriven refused their submission; not once had a single pathetic human straightened in challenge. The hierarchy was unassailable.
But these children did not accept that righteous truth. In ignorance they found strength. In foolishness they found defiance.
‘The city,’ said Scorn, her voice a broken thing. ‘We cannot permit it.’
Sever nodded. ‘The investment is absolute, yes. We cannot hope to storm it.’
Adroit said, ‘Its own beauty, yes. To challenge would be suicide.’
The women turned at that and he flinched back a step. ‘Deny me? The clarity of my vision?’
Sever sighed, gaze dropping once more to her dead son. ‘We cannot. It is absolute. It shines.’
‘And now the boy with the baby leads them to it,’ said Sister Rail. ‘Unacceptable.’
‘Agreed,’ said Sever. ‘We may fail to return, but we shall not fail in what we set out to do. Adjudicator, will you lead us into peace?’
‘I am ready,’ Scorn replied, straightening and holding out the staff. ‘Wield this, Inquisitor, my need for it has ended.’
She longed to turn away, to reject Scorn’s offer. My son’s weapon. Fashioned by my own hands and then surrendered to him. I should never have touched it again.
‘Honour him,’ Scorn said.
‘I shall.’ She took the iron-shod staff, and then faced the others. ‘Gather up the last of your strength. I judge four thousand remain—a long day of slaughter awaits us.’
‘They are unarmed,’ said Rail. ‘Weak.’
‘Yes. In the delivering of peace, we will remind them of that truth.’
Scorn set out. Sever and the others fell in behind the Adjudicator. When they drew closer, they would fan out, to make room for the violence they would unleash.
Not one Shriven would ever reach the city. And the boy with the baby would die last. By my husband’s daughter’s hand. Because she lives, she still lives.
Something like panic gripped the children, dragging Brayderal along in a rushing tide. Swearing, she tried to pull loose, but hands reached out, clutched tight, pushed her onwards. She should have been able to defy them all, but she had overestimated her reserves of strength—she was more damaged than she had believed.
She saw Saddic, leading this charge. Plunging after Rutt, who was now almost at the city’s threshold. But of Badalle there was no sign. This detail frightened her. There is something about her. She is transformed, but I do not know how. She is somehow . . . quickened.
Her kin had finally comprehended the danger. They waited no longer.
Scuffed, tugged and pushed, she waited for the first screams behind her.
Words. I have nothing but words. I cast away many of them, only to have others find me. What can words achieve? Here in this hard, real place? But doubts themselves are nothing but words, a troubled song in my head. When I speak, the snakes listen. Their eyes are wide. But what happens to all I say, once the words slip into them? Alchemies. Sometimes the mixture froths and bubbles. Sometimes it boils. Sometimes, nothing stirs and the potion lies dead, cold and grey as mud. Who can know? Who can predict?
I speak softly when all that I say is a howl. I pound upon bone with my fists, and they hear naught but whispers. Savage words will thud against dead flesh. But the slow drip of blood, ah, then they are content as cats at a stream.
Badalle hurried along, and it seemed the snake parted, as if her passage was ripping it in two. She saw skeletal faces, shining eyes, limbs wrapped in skin dry as leather. She saw thigh bones from ribbers picked up on the trail—held like weapons—but what good would they do against the Quitters?
I have words and nothing else. And, in these words, I have no faith. They cannot topple walls. They cannot crush mountains down to dust. The faces swam past her. She knew them all, and they were nothing but blurs, each one smeared inside tears.
But what else is there? What else can I use against them? They are Quitters. They claim power in their voice. The islands in her mind were drowning.
I too seek power in my words.
Have I learned from them? This is how it seems. Is this how it is?
Stragglers. The sickened, the weakened, and then she was past them all, standing alone on the glass plain. The sun made the world white, bitter with purity. This was the perfection so cherished by the Quitters. But it was not the Quitters who cut down our world. They only came in answer to the death of our gods—our faith—when the rains stopped, when the last green withered and died. They came in answer to our prayers. Save us! Save us from ourselves!
Emerging from the heat shimmer, four figures, fast closing. Like wind-rocked puppets, every limb snapped back until broken, wheeling loose, and death surrounded them in whirlwinds. Monstrous, clambering out of her memories. Swirls of power—she saw mouths open—
‘YIELD!’
The command rushed through Badalle, hammered children to the ground behind her. Voices crying out, helpless with dread. She felt it rage against her will, weakening her knees. She felt a snap, as if a tether had broken, and all at once she lifted free—she saw the ribby snake, the sinuous length stretched out as if in yearning. But, segment by segment, it writhed in pain.
As that command thundered from bone to bone, Badalle found her voice. Power in the word, but I can answer it.
‘—to the assault of wonder
Humility takes you in hand—’
She spun back down to lock herself behind her own eye
s. She saw energies whirl away, ignite in flashes.
‘HALT!’
Cracking like a fist. Lips split, blood threading down. Badalle spat, pushed forward. One step, only one.
‘—in softest silence
Enfold the creeping doubt—’
She saw her words strike them. Stagger them. Almost close enough, at last, to see their ravaged faces, the disbelief, the bafflement and growing distress. The indignation. And yes, that she understood. Games of meaning in evasion. Deceit of intent in sleight of hand.
Badalle took another step.
‘Yield all these destinations
Unbidden jostle to your bones
Halt in the shadow thrown
Beneath the yoke of dismay—’
She felt fire in her limbs, saw blinding incandescence erupt from her hands. Truth was such a rare weapon, and all the more deadly for it.
‘Do not give me your words!
They are dead with the squalor
Of your empty virtues
YIELD to your own lies!
HALT in the breathless moment
Your lungs scream
And silence answers
Your heart drums
Brittle surfaces
BLEED!’
They staggered back as if blinded. Blue fluids spurted from ruptured joints, gushed down from gaping mouths. Agony twisted their angled faces. One fell, thrashing, kicking on the ground. Another, a woman closer to Badalle than the others, dropped down on to her knees, and their impact with the crystalline ground was marked by two bursts of bluish blood—the Quitter shrieked. The remaining two, a man and a woman, reeling as if buffeted by invisible fists, had begun retreating—stumbling, half-running.
The fires within Badalle flared, and then died.
The Quitters deserved worse—but she did not have it in her to deliver such hard punishment. They had given her but two words. Not enough. Two words. Obedience to the privilege of dying. Accept your fate. But . . . we will not. We refuse. We have been refusing things for a long time, now. We are believers in refusal.
They will not come close now. Not for a long time. Maybe, for these ones, never again. I have hurt them. I took their words and made them my own. I made the power turn in their hands and cut them. It will have to do.
She turned round. The ribby snake had begun moving again, strangely mindless, as if beaten by drovers, senseless as a herd of cattle crossing a . . . a river? But, when have I seen a river?
She blinked. Licked salty blood from her lips. Flies danced.
The city awaited them.
‘It is what we can bear,’ she whispered. ‘But there is more to life than suffering.’
Now we must find it.
Darkness passed, and yet it remained. A splinter pure, promising annihilation. Onos T’oolan could sense it, somewhere ahead, a flickering, wavering presence. His stride, unbroken for so long, now faltered. The bitter rage within him seemed to stagger, sapped of all strength. Depression rose like flood waters, engulfing all sense of purpose. The tip of his sword bit the ground.
Vengeance meant nothing, even when the impulse was all-consuming. It was a path that, once started upon, could conceivably stretch on for ever. The culpable could stand in a line reaching past the horizon. An avenger’s march was endless. So it had been with the vengeance sought against the Jaghut, and Onos T’oolan had never been blind to the futility of that. Was he nothing but an automaton, stung into motion that would never slow in step?
He felt a sudden pressure wash over him from behind.
Baffled, all at once frightened, his weapon’s stone tip carving a furrow in the dry soil, the First Sword slowly swung round.
He could deny. He could refuse. But these choices would not lead him to the knowledge he sought. He had been forced back from the realms of death. The blood ties he had chosen had been severed. No longer a husband, a father, a brother. He had been given vengeance, but what vengeance could he find sifting through a valley heaped with corpses? There were other purposes, other reasons for walking this pathetic world once again. Onos T’oolan had been denied his rightful end—he intended to find out why.
Not one among the thousand or so T’lan Imass approaching him had yet touched his thoughts. They walked enshrouded in silence, ghosts, kin reduced to strangers.
He waited.
Children of the Ritual, yes, but his sense of many of them told him otherwise. There was mystery here. T’lan Imass, and yet . . .
When all the others halted their steps, six bonecasters emerged, continuing their approach.
He knew three. Brolos Haran, Ulag Togtil, Ilm Absinos. Bonecasters of the Orshayn T’lan Imass. The Orshayn had failed to appear at Silverfox’s Gathering. Such failure invited presumptions of loss. Extinction. Fates to match those of the Ifayle, the Bentract, the Kerluhm. The presumption had been erroneous.
The remaining three were wrong in other ways. They were clothed in the furs of the white bear—a beast that had come late in the age of the Imass—and their faces were flatter, the underlying structure more delicate than that of true Imass. Their weapons were mostly bone, ivory, tusk or antler, with finely chipped chert and flint insets. Weapons defying the notion of finesse: intricate in their construction and yet the violence they would deliver promised an almost primitive brutality.
Bonecaster Ulag Togtil spoke. ‘First Sword. Who knew dust could be so interesting?’
There was a frustrated hiss from Brolos Haran. ‘He insists on speaking for us, and yet he never says what we wish him to say. Why we ever acquiesce is a mystery.’
‘I have my own paths,’ Ulag said easily, ‘and I do not imagine the First Sword lacks patience.’
‘Not patience,’ snapped Brolos, ‘but what about tolerance?’
‘Bone bends before it breaks, Brolos Haran. Now, I would say more to the First Sword, before we all await the profundity of his words. May I?’
Brolos Haran half-turned to Ilm Absinos, one hand lifting in an odd gesture that baffled Onos T’oolan—for a moment—before he understood.
Helplessness.
‘First Sword,’ Ulag resumed, ‘we do not reach to you in the manner of Tellann, because we make no claim upon you. We are summoned, yes, but it was—we have come to believe—not by your hand. You may refuse us. It is not in our hearts to force ourselves upon the will of another.’
Onos T’oolan said, ‘Who are these strangers?’
‘Profound indeed,’ Ulag said. ‘First Sword, they are T’lan Imass of a second Ritual. The descendants of those who sought to follow Kilava Onass when she rejected the first Ritual. It was their failure not to determine beforehand Kilava’s attitude to being accompanied. But when there is but one hole in the ice, then all must use it to breathe.’
‘My sister invited no one.’
‘Alas. And so it comes to this. These three are bonecasters of the Brold T’lan Imass. Lid Ger, Lera Epar and Nom Kala. The Brold number two thousand seven hundred and twelve. The majority of these remain in the dust of our wake. Our own Orshayn number six hundred and twelve—you see them here. If you need us, we shall serve.’
Nom Kala studied the First Sword, this warrior she had once believed was nothing but an invention, a myth. Better, she concluded, had he remained so. His bones were latticed, as if he had been pounded into fragments—and some of those bones were not even his own.
The First Sword was not the giant of the legends. He did not wear a cloak of ice. Caribou antlers did not sprout from his head. He did not possess breath that gave the gift of fire. Nor did he seem the kind of warrior to recount his exploits for three days and four nights to belittle an overly proud hero. She began to suspect few of those ancient tales belonged to this figure at all. Dancing across the sea on the backs of whales? Crossing swords with demon walruses in their underwater towers? The secret seducer of wives left alone at night?
How many children among her clan, generation upon generation, bore some variation of the name Onos, to account for impossibl
e pregnancies?
The sudden shocked gulp that erupted from her drew everyone’s attention.
Brolos Haran had been speaking—about what Nom Kala had no idea—and he was not pleased with the interruption. ‘Nom Kala, what is it about the Fall at the Red Spires that so amuses you?’
‘Nothing,’ she replied, ‘unless it was meant to. I apologize, Brolos Haran. A stray thought. Well, a few stray thoughts.’
The others waited.
She elected to refrain from elaborating.
The wind moaned, whispered through remnants of fur.
Onos T’oolan spoke. ‘Orshayn. Brold. I have forsworn the Jaghut Wars. I seek no battle. I do not invite you to join me, for what I seek is an accounting. Like you, I am summoned from the dust, and it is to dust that I wish to return. But first, I will find the one who has so punished me with resurrection. The bonecaster of the Logros T’lan Imass, Olar Ethil.’
Ulag said, ‘Can you be certain it is her, First Sword?’
Onos T’oolan cocked his head. ‘Ulag Togtil, after all this time, do you still hold to the virtue of certainty?’
‘We fought no war against the Jaghut,’ Nom Kala said.
The bonecasters of the Orshayn reacted with a chill wave of disapproval. She ignored it.
Onos T’oolan said, ‘Ulag. I see the Orshayn Warleader standing with your kin. Why does Inistral Ovan not come forward?’
‘He is shamed, First Sword. The losses at the Red Spire . . .’
‘Nom Kala,’ Onos then said, ‘have you no ruler of the Brold Clan?’
‘Only us,’ she replied. ‘Even the war we fought against the humans was not a war that demanded a warleader. It was clear that we could not defeat them on a field of battle. There were too many.’
‘Then how did you fight?’
‘By keeping alive our stories, our ways of living. And by hiding, for in hiding, we survived. We persisted. This is itself a victory.’
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