‘That cannot be permitted,’ he replied.
‘You fool-you’ve left me no choice!’
He slowly straightened. ‘Then I shall accept the sea-’
She turned round, faced the dark waters. Her shoulders shook as she lowered her head. ‘No,’ she managed in a grating voice. ‘Get out of here, Yedan. Go north, into the old Edur lands. I will not accept one more death in my name-not one. No matter how deserved it is. You are my brother. Go.’
She was not one of the deceivers, he knew. Nor was she a fool. Given the endless opposition from the coven, she had possessed less power than her title proclaimed. And perhaps, intelligent as Yan Tovis was, she had been content to accept that limitation. Had the witches and warlocks been as wise and sober in their recognition of the deadly lure of ambition, he could well have left things as they were. But they had not been interested in a balance. They wanted what they had lost. They had not shown the intelligence demanded by the situation.
And so he had removed them, and now his sister’s power was absolute. Understandable, then, that she was so distraught. Eventually, he told himself, she would come to comprehend what was now necessary. Namely, his return, as the Watch, as the balance to her potentially unchecked power.
He would need to be patient.
‘I shall do as you say,’ he said to her.
She would not turn round, and so, with a nod, Yedan Derryg set out, northward along the shoreline. He’d left his horse and pack-mount tethered two hundred paces along, just above the high-water mark. One sure measure of intelligence, after all, was in the accurate anticipation of consequences. Emotions stung to life could drown one as easily as a riptide, and he had no desire to deepen her straits.
Soon the sun would rise, although with rain on the way its single glaring eye would likely not be visible for long, and that too was well. Leave the cloud’s tears to wash away all the blood, and before too long the absence of over a score of brazen, incipient tyrants would rush in among the Shake like a sudden fresh and bracing wind.
Strangers rode the night sky, and if the Shake had any hope of surviving what was coming, the politics of betrayal must be swept away. With finality.
It was his responsibility, after all. Perhaps his sister had forgotten the oldest vows that bound the Watch. But he had not. And so he had done what was necessary.
There was no pleasure in the act. Satisfaction, yes, as would be felt by any wise, intelligent person who succeeds in sweeping aside a multitude of shortsighted sharks, thus clearing the water. But no pleasure.
To his right, as he walked the shoreline, the land was growing light.
But the sea to his left remained dark.
Sometimes the verge between the two grew very narrow indeed.
Shifting weight from one foot to the other, Pully stared down into the pit. Snakes swarmed by the hundred in that hole, sluggish at first but now, as the day warmed, they writhed like worms in an open wound. She tugged at her nose, which had a tendency to tingle whenever she fell back into the habit of chewing her lips, but the tingling wouldn’t leave. Which meant, of course, that she was gnawing away at those wrinkled flaps covering what was left of her teeth.
Getting old was a misery. First the skin sagged. Then aches settled into every place and places that didn’t even exist. Pangs and twinges and spasms, and all the while the skin kept sagging, lines deepening, folds folding, and all beauty going away. The lilt of upright buttocks, the innocence of wide, shallow tits. The face still able to brave the weather, and lips still sweet and soft as pouches of rendered fat. All gone. What was left was a mind that still imagined itself young, its future stretching out, trapped inside a sack of loose meat and brittle bones. It wasn’t fair.
She yanked at her nose again, trying to get the feeling back. And that was another thing. The wrong parts kept on growing. Ears and nose, warts and moles, hairs sprouting everywhere. The body forgot its own rules, the flesh went senile and the bright mind within could wail all it wanted, but nothing that was real ever changed except for the worse.
She widened her stance and sent a stream of piss down into the stony earth. Even simple things got less predictable. Oh, what a misery ageing was.
Skwish’s head popped up amidst seething snakes, eyes blinking.
‘Yah,’ said Pully, ‘I’m still here.’
‘How long?’
‘Day and a night and now it’s morning. Y’amby get what yer needed? I got aches.’
‘An’ I got reck’lections I ain’t ever wanted.’ Skwish started working herself free of the heaps of serpents, none of which minded much or even noticed, busy as they were, breeding in a frenzy that seemed to last for ever.
‘T’which we might want, iyerplease?’
‘Mebee.’
Skwish reached up and, grunting, Pully helped her friend out of the pit. ‘Yee, y’smell ripe, woman. Snake piss and white smear, there’ll be onward eggs in yer ears.’
‘It’s a cold spirit t’travel on, Pully, an’ I ain’t ever doin it agin, so’s if I rank it’s the leese of our perbems. Gaf, I need a dunk in the sea.’
They set off for the village, a half day’s journey coastward.
‘An ya tervilled afar, Skwish, did yee?’
‘It’s bad an’ it’s bad, Pully. Cold blood t’the east no sun could warm. I seen solid black clouds rollin down, an’ iron rain an gashes in th’geround. I see the stars go away an’ nothing but green glows, an’ them green glows they is cold, too, cold as th’east blooding. All stems but one branch, y’see. One branch.’
‘So’s we guessed right, an’ next time Twilight goes an’ seal barks on ’bout a marchin’ the Shake away from the shore, you can talk up an’ cut er down and down. An’ then we vote and get er gone. Er and the Watch, too.’
Skwish nodded, trying to work globs of snake sperm out of her hair, without much success. ‘Comes to what’s d’served, Pully. The Shake did ever ’ave clear eyes. Y’ can’t freck on an’ on thinkin’ th’world won’t push back. It’ll push awright. Till the shore breaks an’ breaks it will an’ when it does, we ever do drown. I saw dust, Pully, but it wasn’t no puffy earth. T’was specks a bone an’ skin an’ dreams an’ motes a surprise, hah! We’s so freckered, sister, it’s all we can do is laughter an prance into the sea.’
‘Goo’ anough fra me,’ Pully grumbled. ‘I got so many aches I might be the def’nition a ache irrself.’
The two Shake witches-the last left alive, as they were soon to learn-set out for the village.
Take a scintillating, flaring arm of the sun’s fire, give it form, a life of its own, and upon the faint cooling of the apparition, a man such as Rud Elalle might emerge, blinking with innocence, unaware that all he touched could well explode into destructive flames-had he been of such mind. And to teach, to guide him into adulthood, the singular aversion remained: no matter what you do, do not awaken him to his anger.
Sometimes, Udinaas had come to realize, potential was a force best avoided, for the potential he sensed in his son was not a thing for celebration.
No doubt every father felt that flash of blinding, burning truth-the moment when he sensed his son’s imminent domination, be it physical or something less overtly violent in its promise. Or perhaps such a thing was in fact rare, conjured from the specific. After all, not every father’s son could veer into the shape of a dragon. Not every father’s son held the dawn’s golden immanence in his eyes.
Rud Elalle’s gentle innocence was a soft cloak hiding a monstrous nature, and that was an unavoidable fact, the burning script of his son’s blood. Silchas Ruin had spoken to that, with knowing, with the pained truth in his face. The ripening harvest of the Eleint, a fecund brutality that sought only to appease itself-that saw the world (any world, every world) as a feeding ground, and the promise of satisfaction waited in the bloated glut of power.
Rare the blood-fouled who managed to overcome that innate megalomania. ‘Ah, Udinaas,’ Silchas Ruin had said. ‘My brother, perhaps, Anomander. Osserc? Maybe, maybe not. There was a Bonecaster, once… and a Soletaken Jaghut. A handful of others-when the Eleint blood within them was thinner-and that is why I have hope for Rud Elalle, Udinaas. He is third-generation-did he not clash with his mother’s will?’