Dust of Dreams (89 page)

Gall was nodding. Such things happened, yes. Unexpected, impossible to plan around. That hoof, those shadows on the uneven ground, the eyes of the horse, that hole, all converging into a single fatal moment. To think too much of such things could drive one mad, could tip one into an all-consuming rage. At the games of chance, the cruel, bitter games.

‘Warleader,’ the scout continued after a moment, ‘Vedith’s command of the ambush was absolute. Every raid set about its task though we all knew he had fallen—we did this for him, to honour him as we must. The enemy was broken. Fourteen hundred dead Bolkando, the rest weaponless and in flight across the countryside. We have nineteen dead and fifty-one wounded.’

His gaze returned to her. ‘Thank you, Rafala. The wing is now yours.’

‘It shall be named Vedith.’

He nodded. ‘See to your wounded.’

Gall stepped back inside the tent. He stood, not sure what to do next, where to go. Not sure why he was here at all.

‘I heard,’ said his wife in a low tone. ‘Vedith must have been a good warrior, a good commander.’

‘He was young,’ said Gall, as though that made a difference—as though saying it made a difference—but it didn’t.

‘Malak’s cousin Tharat has a son named Vedith.’

‘Not any more.’

‘He used to play with our Kyth Anar.’

‘Yes,’ Gall said suddenly, eyes bright as he looked upon her. ‘That is right. How could I have forgotten?’

‘Because that was fifteen years ago, husband. Because Kyth did not live past his seventh birthday. Because we agreed to bury our memories of him, our wondrous first son.’

‘I said no such thing and neither did you!’

‘No. We didn’t need to. An agreement? More like a blood vow.’ She sighed. ‘Warriors die. Children die—’

‘Stop it!’

She sat up, groaning with the effort. Seeing the tears he could not wipe away she reached out one hand. ‘Come here, husband.’

But he could not move. His legs were rooted tree-trunks beneath him.

She said, ‘Something new comes squalling into the world every moment of every day. Opening eyes that can barely see. And as they come, other things leave.’

‘I gave him that command. I did it myself.’

‘Such is a Warleader’s burden, husband.’

He fought back a sob. ‘I feel so alone.’

She was at his side, taking one of his hands. ‘That is the truth we all face,’ she said. ‘I have had seven children since then, and yes, most of them are yours. Do you ever wonder why I cannot give up? What it is that drives women to suffer this time and again? Listen well to this secret, Gall, it is because to carry a child is to be not alone. And to lose a child is to be so wretchedly alone that no man can know the same . . . except perhaps the heart of a ruler, a leader of warriors, a Warleader.’

He found he could meet her eyes once again. ‘You remind me,’ he said, voice rough.

She understood. ‘And you me, Gall. We forget too easily and too often these days.’

Yes.
He felt her callused hand in his, and something of that loneliness crumbled away. Then he guided their hands down on to her rounded belly. ‘What awaits this one?’ he wondered aloud.

‘That we cannot say, husband.’

‘Tonight,’ he said, ‘we shall call all our children together. We shall eat as a family—what do you think?’

She laughed. ‘I can almost see their faces, all around us—the looks so dumbfounded, so confused. What will they make of such a thing?’

Gall shrugged, a sudden looseness to his limbs, the tightness of his chest vanishing in a single breath. ‘We call them not for them but for us, for you and me, Hanavat.’

‘Tonight,’ she said, nodding. ‘Vedith plays with our son once more. I can hear them shouting and laughing, and the sky is before them and it does not end.’

With genuine feeling—the first time in years—Gall took his wife into his arms.

H
e saw a different past. One that rolled out after choices not made. He saw the familiar trapped inside strangeness. Huddling round fires as winds howled and new things moved in the darkness beyond. The failure of opportunities haunted him and his kind. A dogged rival slipped serpent-like into the mossy cathedrals of needled forests, sliding along shadow streams, and life became a time of picking through long-dead kills, frowning at broken tools of stone different from anything ever seen before. This—all of this—he realized, was the slow failure that, in his own past, had been evaded.

By the Ritual of Tellann. The sealing of living souls inside lifeless bone and flesh, the trapping of sparks inside withered eyes.

Here, in this other past, in that other place, there had been no ritual. And the ice that was in his own realm the plaything of the Jaghut here lifted barriers unbidden. Everywhere the world shrank. Of course, such challenges had been faced before. People suffered, many died, but they struggled through and they survived. This time, however, it was different.

This time, there were strangers.

He did not know why he was being shown this. Some absurdly detailed false history to torment him? Too elaborate, too strained in its conceptualization. He had real wounds that could be torn open. Yes, the vision mocked him, but on a scale broader than that of his own personal failures. He was being shown the inherent weakness of his own kind—he was feeling the feelings of those last survivors in that other, bitter world, the muddy knowledge of things coming to an end. The end of families, the end of friends, the end of children. Nothing to follow.

The end, in fact, of the one thing never before questioned.
Continuation. We tell ourselves that each of us must pass, but that our kind will live on. This is the deeply buried taproot feeding our very will to live. Cut that root, and living fades. Bleeding dry and colourless, it fades.

He was invited to weep one last time. To weep not for himself, but for his species.

When fell the last salty tear of the Imass? Did the soil that received it taste its difference from all those that came before? Was it bitterer? Was it sweeter? Did it sting the ground like acid?

He could see that tear, its deathly drop dragged into infinity, a journey too slow
to measure. But he knew that what he was seeing was a conceit. The last to die had been dry-eyed—Onos Toolan had witnessed the moment here in this false past—the wretched brave lying bound and bleeding and awaiting the flint-toothed ivory blade in a stranger’s hand. They too were hungry, desperate, those strangers. And they would kill the Imass, the last of his kind, and they would eat him. Leave his cracked and cut bones scattered on the floor of this cave, with all the others, and then, in sudden superstitious terror, the strangers would flee this place, leaving nothing behind of themselves, lest wronged ghosts find them on the paths of haunting.

In that other world, the end of Tool’s kind came at the cut of a knife.

Someone was howling, flesh stretched to bursting by a surge of rage.

The children of the Imass, who were not children at all, but inheritors nevertheless, had flooded the world with the taste of Imass blood on their tongues. Just one more quarry hunted into oblivion, with nothing more than a vague unease lodged deep inside, the mark of sin, the horror of a first crime.

The son devours the father, heart of a thousand myths, a thousand half-forgotten tales.

Empathy was excoriated from him. The howl he heard was rising from his own throat. The rage battered like fists inside his body, a demonic thing eager to get out.

They will pay—

But
no
. Onos Toolan staggered onward, hide-bound feet crunching on frozen moss and lichen. He would walk out of this damning, vicious fate. Back to his own world’s paradise beyond death, where rituals delivered curse and salvation both. He would not turn. He was blind as a beast driven to the cliff’s edge, but it did not matter; what awaited him was a death better than this death—

He saw a rider ahead, a figure hunched and cowled as it waited astride a gaunt, grey horse from which no breath plumed. He saw a recurved Rhivi bow gripped in one bony hand, and Onos Toolan realized that he knew this rider.

This inheritor.

Tool halted twenty paces away. ‘You cannot be here.’

The head tilted slightly and the glitter of a single eye broke the blackness beneath the cowl. ‘Nor you, old friend, yet here we are.’

‘Move aside, Toc the Younger. Let me pass. What waits beyond is what I have earned. What I will return to—it is mine. I will see the herds again, the great ay and the ranag, the okral and agkor. I will see my kin and run in the shadow of the tusked tenag. I will throw a laughing child upon my knee. I will show the children their future, and tell them how all that we are shall continue, unending, for here I will find an eternity of wishes, for ever fulfilled.

‘Toc, my friend, do not take this from me. Do not take this, too, when you and your kind have taken everything else.’

‘I cannot let you pass, Tool.’

Tool’s scarred, battered hands closed into fists. ‘For the love between us, Toc the Younger, do not do this.’

An arrow appeared in Toc’s other hand, biting the bowstring and, faster than
Tool could register, the barbed missile flashed out and stabbed the ground at his feet.

‘I am dead,’ said Tool. ‘You cannot hurt me.’

‘We’re both dead,’ Toc replied, his voice cold as a stranger’s. ‘I will take your legs out from under you and the wounds will be real—I will leave you bleeding, crippled, in terrible pain. You will not pass.’

Tool took a step forward. ‘
Why?
’

‘The rage burns bright within you, doesn’t it?’

‘Abyss take it—I am done with fighting! I am done with all of it!’

‘On my tongue, Onos Toolan, is the taste of Imass blood.’

‘You want me to fight you? I will—do you imagine your puny arrows can take down an Imass? I have snapped the neck of a bull ranag. I have been gored. Mauled by an okral. When my kind hunt, we bring down our quarry with our own hands, and that triumph is purchased in broken bones and pain.’

A second arrow thudded into the ground.

‘Toc—why are you doing this?’

‘You must not pass.’

‘I—I gifted you with an Imass name. Did you not realize the measure of that honour? Did you not know that no other of your kind has ever been given such a thing? I called you
friend.
When you died, I
wept
.’

‘I see you now, in flesh, all that once rode the bone.’

‘You have seen this before, Toc the Younger.’

‘I do not—’

‘You did not recognize me. Outside the walls of Black Coral. I found you, but even your face was not your own. We were changed, the both of us. Could I go back . . .’ He faltered, and then continued, ‘Could I go back, I would not have let you pass me by. I would have made you realize.’

‘It does not matter.’

Something broke inside Onos Toolan. He looked away. ‘No, perhaps it doesn’t.’

‘On the Awl’dan plain, you saw me fall.’

Tool staggered back as if struck a blow. ‘I did not know—’

‘Nor me, Tool. And so truths come round, full circle, with all the elegance of a curse. I did not know you outside Black Coral. You did not know me on the plain. Fates have a way of . . . of
fitting together
.’ Toc paused, and then hissed a bitter laugh. ‘And do you recall when we met at the foot of Morn? Look upon us now. I am the withered corpse, and you—’ He seemed to tremble, as if struck an invisible blow, and then recovered. ‘On the plain, Onos Toolan. What did I give my life for? Do you recall?’