A Khundryl child came up to Saddic, pressing into his hands yet another toy – a bone top or whistle, she couldn’t quite see it before Saddic slipped it into his sack and smiled his thanks. A new sack, too big to carry now. The Khundryl children had been bringing him toys all day.
The times she’d watched that procession, she’d wanted to cry. She’d wanted Saddic to cry. But she didn’t understand why she wanted that – they were being kind, after all. And she didn’t know why she saw those Khundryl children as if they were but servants to something greater, something almost too big for words. Not at the instigation of adults, not even mothers and fathers. Not at the behest of pity, either. Didn’t they want their toys? She had seen such precious things settle into Saddic’s hand, had seen bright shining eyes lift shyly to Saddic in the moment of giving, and then fall away again – children running off, too light-footed, flinging themselves into their friends’ arms, and this went on and on and Badalle didn’t understand, but how her heart ached. How she wanted Saddic to weep, how she wanted to feel her own tears.
She spoke a poem under her breath.
‘Snakes do not know how to cry.
They know too much
and yearn for darkness.
They know too much
and fear the light.
No one gives gifts to snakes,
and no one makes of them a gift.
They are neither given
nor received.
Yet in all the world,
snakes do not know how to cry.’
Saddic studied her and she knew that he had heard. Of course it was for him, this poem, though she suspected that he did not know that.
But the man who will find him will. Maybe he’ll cry, when we cannot. Maybe he will tell this tale in such a way as to make his listeners cry, because we cannot
.
A Khundryl elder came up then and helped Saddic load his bag of toys on to a wagon. When the boy glanced over at Badalle, she nodded. He climbed up to settle himself beside his treasure. And there, he believed, he would die.
But it is not to be. How will he survive? I wish I knew the answer to that, because a secret hides inside it
.
The birth-tent’s flap was swept aside then, and the father emerged. His eyes were raw with weeping, yet there was a fire in them.
He is proud. He is defiant in his pride, and would challenge us all. I like this look. It is how a father should look
. Then behind him, out she came, unsteady on her feet, sagging with exhaustion, and in her arms a small bundled form.
Badalle gasped upon seeing Rutt walking towards them – where had he come from? Where had he been hiding?
With his crooked arms, with a terrible need in his ancient face, he walked to stand before the mother.
Anguish gripped Badalle’s heart and she staggered in sudden weakness.
Where is Held? Held is gone. Held was gone long ago. And what Rutt carried in his arms was us, all that way. He carried us
.
The mother looked across at this boy, and Badalle saw now that she was old – and so too was the father, old enough to be grandparents – she looked at Rutt, his empty arms, the ravaged face.
She does not understand. How can she? He cannot hurt anyone, not Rutt. He carried our hope, but our hope died. But it wasn’t his fault, it wasn’t his fault. Mother, if you had been there – if you had seen
—
And she stepped forward then, that old woman, that mother with her last ever child, this stranger, and gently laid her baby into Rutt’s waiting arms.
A gift beyond measure, and when she settled an arm about his shoulders, drawing him forward, so that he could walk with them – her and her husband – and they set out, slowly as it was all she could manage, in the wake of the nearest wagon, and all the Khundryl began to move … Badalle stood unmoving.
Saddic, I will tell you to remember this. These are the Khundryl, the givers of gifts. Remember them, won’t you?
And Rutt walked like a king.
From where he sat, Saddic watched as they made space on a Khundryl wagon for the mother, and for Rutt and her child that he held, and then set out to catch up with the rest of the army. The man who was the father took the lead yoke at the wagon’s head, and strained as if he alone could shoulder this burden.
Because it was no burden.
As Saddic well knew, gifts never are.
Ahead, the desert stretched on. Fiddler could see no end to it, and now believed he never would. He remembered that ancient shoreline of bones, the one they had left behind what seemed a century ago. No clearer warning could have been granted them, yet she had not hesitated.
He had to hand it to her. The world was her enemy, and she would face it unblinking. She had led them on to this road of suffering in the name of the Crippled God, and, to that god, what other path could there have been? She was making of them her greatest sacrifice – was it as brutal and as simple as that? He did not think her capable of such a thing. He wanted to refuse the very thought.
But here he walked, fifty or more paces ahead of them all. Even the Khundryl children were gone, leaving him alone. And behind him, a broken mass of humanity, somehow dragging itself forward, like a beast with a crushed spine. It had surrendered all formation, each soldier moving as his or her strength dictated. They carried their weapons because they had forgotten a time when they didn’t. And bodies fell, one by one.
Beneath the ghoulish light of the Jade Strangers, Fiddler set his eyes upon the distant flat line of the horizon, his legs scissoring under him, the muscles too dead to feel pain. He listened to his own breaths, wheezing as the air struggled up and down a swollen, parched windpipe. In so vast a landscape he felt his world contracting, step by step, and soon, he knew, all he would hear would be his own heart, the beats climbing down, losing all rhythm, and finally falling still.
That moment waited somewhere ahead. He was on his way to find it.
Whispering motion around him now, drifting out from a fevered mind. He saw a horseman at his side, close enough to reach out, if he so wanted, and set a hand upon the beast’s patched, salt-streaked shoulder. The man riding the beast he knew all too well.
Broke his leg. A toppling pillar, of all things. Mallet – I see you – you wanted to work on that leg. Got damned insubordinate about it, in
fact. But he didn’t listen. That’s his problem, he only listens when he feels like it
.
Trotts, you’re still the damned ugliest Barghast I ever saw. They bred ’em that way in your tribe, didn’t they? To better scare the enemy. Did they breed your women to be half blind, too? Keep the stones balanced, that’s the only way to make it through
.
So where’s Quick Ben? Kalam? I want to see you all here, friends
.
Hedge, well, he’s stepped out of this path. Can’t look him in the eye these days. It’s the one bad twist in this whole thing, isn’t it. Maybe you can talk to him, Sergeant. Talk him back to how it should be
.
‘Hedge is where we want him, Fid.’
What?
‘We sent him to you … to this, I mean. He’s walked a lonely path back, sapper.’
Mallet then spoke. ‘Bet he thought he’d made it all the way, too, when he stood before you, Fiddler. Only to have you back away.’
I … oh, gods. Hedge. I better find him, chew it all out, come the dawn – we’ll make it that far, won’t we, Sergeant?
‘Until it rises, aye, sapper. Until it rises.’
And then?
‘You’re so eager to join us?’
Whiskeyjack – please – where else would I go?
‘If we were just waiting for the dawn, soldier, you’d have to ask, what in Hood’s name for? You think we’d see you put through all of this for nothing? And then there’s Hedge. He’s here to die beside you and that’s it? We sent him to you so you could just kiss and make up? Gods below, Fiddler, you’re not that important in this wretched scheme.’
‘Well,’ said Mallet, ‘he might be, Sergeant. Made Captain now, didn’t he? Got himself his own company of marines and heavies. Bloody insufferable now, is old Fid.’
‘Sky’s paling,’ Whiskeyjack said.
Because you’re on damned horses. I can’t see it
.
‘False dawn,’ growled Trotts. ‘And Fid’s fading, Sergeant. We can’t hold on here much longer. Once he stops thinking past his feet …’
I was a mason’s apprentice. Had dreams of being a musician, getting fat and drunk in some royal court
.
‘Not this again,’ someone said among the crowd. ‘Someone find him a fiddle, and me a hanky.’
Glad you’re all here with me. Well, most of you, anyway. The Bridgeburners deserved a better way to die
—
The rider made a derisive sound. ‘Don’t be such an idiot, sapper. In your heads you’ve all built us up into something we never were. How quickly you’ve forgotten – we were mutinous at the best of times. The rest of the time – and that would be almost
all
the time – we were at
each other’s throats. Officers getting posted to us would desert first. It was that bad, Fiddler.’
Look, I ain’t done nothing to make this fucking legend, Sergeant. I ain’t said a damned thing
.
‘You don’t have to, and that’s just my point. People can talk up anything, can make a snivelling dollop of shit the god’s own mountain, given enough time and enough lies and enough
silences
.’
I’m a Bonehunter now. Got nothing to do with any of you any more – which is what I was trying to tell Hedge
.
‘Fine. Now go hunt down some bones.’
Sure, why not? Whose bones do you want us to hunt for?
Whiskeyjack rode slightly ahead and swung his mount round, blocking Fiddler’s path. But his old sergeant wasn’t looking good – he was a damned half-mummified corpse, and his mount wasn’t much better off. ‘Whose do you think, Fid?’ And yet that voice was his – no question.
Whiskeyjack
.
‘Where’d you come by that name, Fid?’ And that was Mallet, but he was badly chopped up, the wounds crusted with dried blood.
The name? Bonehunters? It was finger bones, I think
.
‘Whose hand?’
What? Nobody’s – lots of people. Nameless ones, long dead ones – just nameless bones!
They were all fading from his vision now. But he wanted them to stay. They were supposed to be here with him, to take up his soul when he died.
Whiskeyjack was backing his horse even as he grew translucent. ‘Bones of the fallen, Fiddler. Now,
who fell the furthest
?’
Before him now nothing but that distant, flat line. Nothing but the horizon. Fiddler rubbed at his face.
Fucking hallucinations. Least they could’ve done was give me a drink of water
.
He resumed walking. No reason to. No reason not to.
‘Who fell the furthest. Funny man, Whiskeyjack.’
But maybe it was so. Maybe she made us and named us to hunt down the bones of a damned god. Maybe she was telling us what she wanted all along, and we were too thick to know it
.
But look at that line. That perfect flat line. Just waiting for our bones to make us a shore, and once we’ve made it, why, we go no farther
.
Almost time
.
Hedge, I’ll find you if I can. A few words. A clasp of hands, or a clout upside the head, whichever best suits the moment
.
Bonehunters. Oh. Nice one
.
Lostara Yil wanted her god back. She wanted to feel that flow of strength, that appalling will. To take her out of here. To feel a sudden,
immortal power filling her body, and she would reach out to draw Henar Vygulf under her shadowy wing. Others too, if she could. This whole army of sufferers – they didn’t deserve this.
Henar walked close by her side, ready to steady her when she stumbled. He had seemed indomitable, but now he was bent like an old man. Thirst was crushing them all, like a vast hand pressing down. The Adjunct was ten paces ahead, Banaschar off to her right, and far ahead walked Fiddler, alone, and she imagined she could hear music from him, a siren call pulling them ever forward. But his fiddle was broken. There was no music, no matter what she thought she heard, just the sluggish dirge of her own blood, the rasps of their breaths and the crunch of their worn boots on the hard ground.
The Jade Strangers hung now over the northern sky, casting confused shadows – those terrible slashes would circle round over the course of the day, now visible even through the sun’s bright glare, making the light eerie, unearthly.
The Adjunct’s march was unsteady, drifting to the right for a time, and then back to the left. It seemed only Fiddler was capable of managing a straight line. She remembered back to the reading. Its wild violence – had it all been for nothing? A rush of possibilities, not one realized, not one borne out in the days to follow. It seemed the Adjunct – who alone warranted no card – had taken them all from their destinies, taken them into a place with no end but death, and a death bereft of glory or honour. If that was so, then Fiddler’s reading had been the cruellest of jokes.
Was he walking out there, ahead of the rest of them, out of some desperate desire? To drag them all into the truth of his visions? But the desert still stretched empty – not even the bones of the children of the Snake could be seen – they had lost them, but no one knew precisely when, and the path that might have led them to the mythical city of Icarias was now nowhere to be seen.