Authors: Steven Erikson
‘Toc’ll be back soon,’ she told them. ‘Listen, can you make him stop that babbling? Please? It’s making my skin crawl. I mean, has he lost his mind, the little one? Or are they all like that? Barghast children aren’t, at least not that I remember. They stay quiet, just like you two are doing right now.’
Neither girl replied. They simply watched her.
The boy suddenly shouted.
At the cry the ground erupted twenty paces beyond the cairn. Stones spat through a cloud of dust.
And something clambered forth.
The twins shrieked. But the boy was laughing. Setoc stared. A huge wolf,
long-limbed, with a long, flat head and heavy jaws bristling with fangs, stepped out from the dust, and then paused to shake its matted, tangled coat. The gesture cut away the last threads of fear in Setoc.
From the boy, a new song. ‘
Ay ay ay ayayayayayayay!
’
At its hunched shoulders, the creature was taller than Setoc. And it had died long, long ago.
Her eyes snapped to the boy.
He summoned it. With that nonsense song, he summoned it.
Can—can I do the same? What is the boy to me? What is being made here?
One of the twins spoke: ‘He needs Toc. At his side. At our brother’s side. He needs Tool’s only friend. They have to be together.’
And the other girl, her gaze levelled on Setoc, said, ‘And
they
need
you
. But we have nothing. Nothing.’
‘I don’t understand you,’ Setoc said, irritated by the stab of irrational guilt she’d felt at the girl’s words.
‘What will happen,’ the girl asked, ‘when you raise one of your perfect eyebrows?’
‘
What?
’
‘ “Wherever you walk, someone’s stepped before you.” Our father used to say that.’
The enormous wolf stood close to the boy. Dust still streamed down its flanks. She had a sudden vision of this beast tearing out the throat of a horse.
I saw these ones, but as ghosts. Ghosts of living things, not all rotted skin and bones. They kept their distance. They were never sure of me. Yet . . . I wept for them.
I can’t level cities.
Can I?
The apparitions rose suddenly, forming a circle around Toc. He slowly straightened from gutting the antelope he’d killed with an arrow to the heart. ‘If only Hood’s realm was smaller,’ he said, ‘I might know you all. But it isn’t and I don’t. What do you want?’
One of the undead Jaghut answered: ‘Nothing.’
The thirteen others laughed.
‘Nothing from you,’ the speaker amended. She had been female, once—when such distinctions meant something.
‘Then why have you surrounded me?’ Toc asked. ‘It can’t be that you’re hungry—’
More laughter, and weapons rattled back into sheaths and belt-loops. The woman approached. ‘A fine shot with that arrow, Herald. All the more remarkable for the lone eye you have left.’
Toc glared at the others. ‘Will you stop laughing, for Hood’s sake!’
The guffaws redoubled.
‘The wrong invocation, Herald,’ said the woman. ‘I am named Varandas. We
do not serve Hood. We did Iskar Jarak a favour, and now we are free to do as we please.’
‘And what pleases you?’
Laughter from all sides.
Toc crouched back down, resumed gutting the antelope. Flies spun and buzzed. In the corner of his vision he could see one of the animal’s eyes, still liquid, still full, staring out at nothing.
Iskar Jarak, when will you summon me? Soon, I think. It all draws in—but none of that belongs to the Wolves. Their interests lie elsewhere. What will happen? Will I simply tear in half?
He paused, looked up to see the Jaghut still encircling him. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Wandering,’ Varandas replied.
Another added in a deep voice, ‘Looking for something to kill.’
Toc glanced again at the antelope’s sightless eye. ‘You picked the wrong continent. The T’lan Imass have awakened.’
All at once, the amusement surrounding him seemed to vanish, and a sudden chill gripped the air.
Toc set down his knife and dragged loose the antelope’s guts.
‘We never faced them,’ said Varandas. ‘We were dead long before their ritual of eternal un-life.’
A different Jaghut spoke. ‘K’Chain Nah’ruk, and now T’lan Imass. Doesn’t anyone ever go away?’
After a moment, all began laughing again.
Through the merriment Varandas stepped close to Toc and said, ‘Why have you killed this thing? You cannot eat it. And since that is true, I conclude that you must therefore hunt for others. Where are they?’
‘Not far,’ he replied, ‘and none are any threat to you.’
‘Too bad.’
‘Nah’ruk—were they Iskar Jarak’s favour?’
‘They were.’
‘What were they after?’
‘Not “what”. Who. But ask nothing more of that—we have discussed the matter and can make no sense of it. The world has lost its simplicity.’
‘The world was never simple, Jaghut, and if you believe it was, you’re deluding yourself.’
‘What would you know of the ancient times?’
He shrugged. ‘I only know recent times, but why should the ancient ones be any different? Our memories lie. We call it nostalgia and smile. But every lie has a purpose. And that includes falsifying our sense of the past—’
‘And what purpose would that serve, Herald?’
He wiped clean his knife in the grasses. ‘You shouldn’t need to ask.’
‘But I do ask.’
‘We lie about our past to make peace with the present. If we accepted the truth of our history, we would find no peace—our consciences would not permit it. Nor would our rage.’
Varandas was clearly amused. ‘Are you consumed with anger, Herald? Do you see too clearly with that lonely eye? Strong emotions are ever a barrier to perception, and this must be true of you.’
‘Meaning?’
‘You failed to detect my mocking tone when I spoke of the world’s loss of simplicity.’
‘I must have lost its distinction in the midst of the irony suffusing everything else you said. How stupid of me. Now, I am done with this beast.’ He sheathed his knife and lifted the carcass to settle it across his shoulders. ‘I could wish you all luck in finding something to kill,’ he said, ‘but you don’t need it.’
‘Do you think the T’lan Imass will be eager to challenge us, Herald?’
He levered the antelope on to the rump of his horse. The eyes, he saw, now swarmed with flies. Toc set a boot in the stirrup and, lifting wide with his leg to clear the carcass, lowered himself into the saddle. He gathered the reins. ‘I knew a T’lan Imass once,’ he said. ‘I taught him how to make jokes.’
‘He needed teaching?’
‘More like reminding, I think. Being un-alive for as long as he was will do that to the best of us, I suspect. In any case, I’m sure the T’lan Imass will find you very comforting, in all that dark armour and whatnot, even as they chop you to pieces. Unfortunately, and at the risk of deflating your bloated egos, they’re not here for you.’
‘Neither were the Nah’ruk. But,’ and Varandas cocked her helmed head, ‘what do you mean they will find us “comforting”?’
Toc studied her, and then scanned the others. Lifeless faces, so eager to laugh.
Damned Jaghut.
He shrugged, and then said, ‘Nostalgia.’
After the Herald and the lifeless antelope had ridden away on the lifeless horse, Varandas turned to her companions. ‘What think you, Haut?’
The thick-limbed warrior with the heavy voice shifted, armour clanking and shedding red dust, and then said, ‘I think, Captain, we need to make ourselves scarce.’
Suvalas snorted. ‘The Imass were pitiful—I doubt even un-living ones could cause us much trouble. Captain, let us find some of them and destroy them. I’d forgotten how much fun killing is.’
Varandas turned to one of her lieutenants. ‘Burrugast?’
‘A thought has occurred to me, Captain.’
She smiled. ‘Go on.’
‘If the T’lan Imass who waged war against the Jaghut were as pitiful as Suvalas suggests, why are there no Jaghut left?’
No one arrived at an answer. Moments passed.
‘We need to make ourselves scarce,’ Haut repeated. And then he laughed.
The others joined in. Even Suvalas.
Captain Varandas nodded. So many things were a delight, weren’t they? All these awkward emotions, such as humility, confusion and unease. To feel them
again, to laugh at their inherent absurdity, mocking every survival instinct—as if she and her companions still lived. As if they still had something to lose. As if the past was worth recreating here in the present. ‘As if,’ she added mostly to herself, ‘old grudges were worth holding on to.’ She grunted, and then said, ‘We shall march east.’
‘Why east?’ Gedoran demanded.
‘Because I feel like it, lieutenant. Into the birth of the sun, the shadows on our trail, a new day ever ahead.’ She tilted back her head. ‘Hah hah hah hah hah!’
Toc the Younger saw the gaunt ay from some distance away. Standing with the boy clinging to one foreleg. If Toc had possessed a living heart, it would have beaten faster. If he could draw breath, it would have quickened. If his eye were swimming in a pool of tears, as living eyes did, he would weep.
Of course, it was not Baaljagg. The giant wolf was not—he realized as he rode closer—even alive. It had been summoned. Not from Hood’s Realm, for the souls of such beasts did not reside there.
The Beast Hold, gift of the Wolves. An ay, to walk the mortal world once again, to guard the boy. And their chosen daughter.
Setoc, was this by your hand?
One-eyed he might be, but he was not blind to the patterns taking shape. Nor, in the dry dust of his mind, was he insensitive to the twisted nuances within those patterns, as if the distant forces of fate took ghastly pleasure in mocking all that he treasured—the memories he held on to as would a drowning man hold on to the last breath in his lungs.
I see you in his face, Tool. As if I could travel back to the times before the Ritual of Tellann, as if I could whisper in like a ghost to that small camp where you were born, and see you at but a few years of age, bundled against the cold, your breath pluming and your cheeks bright red—I had not thought such a journey possible.
But it is. I need only look upon your son, and I see you.
We are broken, you and me. I had to turn you away. I had to deny you what you wanted most. But, what I could not do for you, I will do for your son.
He knew he was a fool to make such vows. He was the Herald of Death. And soon Hood would summon him. He would be torn from the boy’s side.
Unless the Wolves want me to stay. But no one can know what they want. They do not think anything like us. I have no control . . . over anything.
He reached the camp. Setoc had built a small fire. The twins had not moved from where they’d been earlier, but their eyes were fixed on Toc now, as if he could hold all their hopes in his arms.
But I cannot. My life is gone, and what remains does not belong to me.
I dream I can hold to my vows. I dream I can be Toc the Younger, who knew how to smile, and love. Who knew what it was to desire a woman forever beyond his reach—gods, such delicious anguish! When the self would curl up, when longing overwhelmed with the sweetest flood.
Remember! You once wrote poems! You once crawled into your every
thought, your every feeling, to see and touch and dismantle and, in the midst of putting it all back together, feel wonder. Awed, humbled by complexity, assailed by compassion. Uncomprehending in the face of cruelty, of indifference.
Remember how you thought: How can people think this way? How can they be so thoughtless, so vicious, so worshipful of death, so dismissive of suffering and misery?
He stared at the wolf. Baaljagg, not Baaljagg. A mocking reflection, a crafted simulacrum.
A Hairlock.
He met Setoc’s slightly wide eyes and saw that she had had nothing to do with this summoning.
The boy. Of course. Tool made me arrows. His son finds me a companion as dead as I am.
‘It is named Baaljagg—’
‘Balalalalalalalalala!’
Sceptre Irkullas sat, shoulders hunched, barricaded from the world by his grief. His officers beseeched him, battering at the high walls. The enemy was within reach, the enemy was on the move—an entire people, suddenly on the march. Their outriders had discovered the Akrynnai forces. The giant many-headed beasts were jockeying for position, hackles raised, and soon would snap the jaws, soon the fangs would sink deep, and fate would fill the mouth bitter as iron.
A conviction had burrowed deep into his soul. He was about to tear out the throat of the wrong enemy. But there were no thorns to prick his conscience, nothing to stir to life the trembling dance of reason. Before too long, loved ones would weep. Children would voice cries unanswered. And ripples would spread outward, agitated, in a tumult, and nothing would be the same as it once was.