Wareth laughed. It was a hard, bitter laugh. ‘And I stepped to the fore! Oh, you poor man.’
‘At least we can share the chagrin,’ Galar Baras said, smiling.
‘It’s impossible, sir. And not just with me. Rebble’s temper-’
‘Yes, I know all about that. And Listar strangled his wife.’
‘Even if he didn’t, sir, he is guilty of something, and whatever it is, he would walk into death at the first chance.’
‘Then help me.’
‘Sir?’
Galar Baras leaned forward. ‘We are in a civil war! Mother Dark’s most powerful army lies buried beneath mounds a league south of here! And now we’ve had word of a battle – the shattering of the Wardens. As of this moment, the only forces standing between Kharkanas and Urusander are the Houseblades of the Great Houses.’
‘Then surrender, sir.’
The captain shook his head. ‘Not my call, Wareth. I have been commanded to replenish the Hust. I need bodies.’
‘And you are desperate,’ Wareth said. ‘I see.’
‘I doubt you do.’
‘I see well enough, sir. Go back to the commander-’
‘This order comes from the Lord Silchas Ruin.’
‘Not his to make!’ Wareth snapped. ‘Toras Redone-’
‘Lies disarmed and in a drunken stupor in a locked room.’
After a moment, Wareth said, ‘She was drunk when she spared me.’
‘I know.’
‘You do? How? She was alone in the command tent.’
‘She told me.’
Wareth fell silent.
‘I need officers,’ Galar Baras said.
‘Promote every Hust soldier you have left, sir.’
‘I will, but they’re not enough.’
‘You will forge a nightmare. The Hust swords will twist in the hands of this pit’s murderers.’
Galar Baras’s eyes were level. ‘I would think it the other way round, Wareth.’
‘This is your faith in all of this? Abyss below! Captain, I know the limits of those weapons – perhaps more than any of you, and I tell you, it is not enough.’
‘Your sword failed in making you brave.’
‘It begged in my hand, damn you! And still I ran!’
‘I see only one way through this, Wareth. I am attaching you to my staff.’
‘You are indeed mad. Sir.’
‘Then I well suit the times, lieutenant.’
‘Lieutenant? You would promote a coward? Sir, the sergeants will turn their backs to you. As for my fellow lieutenants, and your fellow captains, they will-’
‘I am the last captain bar one,’ Galar Baras said. ‘And that one is in no condition to assume command. There were two others, after the Poisoning. Both took their own lives.’
‘You’ll need more.’
‘I’ll worry about that time when it comes. As for your fellow lieutenants, they will take their orders from me, as expected. Oh, I am not so foolish as to think you face anything but a lonely future, but, Wareth, you will be my bridge to these prisoners. From you, to Rebble and Listar, and to whatever women I can lift through the ranks – and as to that, can you give me a few names?’
‘Only by reputation,’ Wareth said, and in his mind he could well see the future the captain offered him. In his staff, hovering around the command tent. Away from the battle. The image rose like an island from the seas of his confusion and fear. I can weather the scorn. I’ve lived with my own long enough. ‘We were kept entirely separate, and hardly saw one another. They were the cats, the night-shift in the shafts.’
‘I know, Wareth. This isn’t the first pit I’ve emptied. I’ll take those names, lieutenant.’
‘When I said “reputation”, I did not mean it in a good way.’
‘Right now, that distinction is irrelevant.’
Wareth looked down at the man. ‘I think, sir, that we will lose this civil war.’
‘Keep that opinion to yourself.’
‘As you wish.’
‘Now, the names, lieutenant.’
* * *
The stench of a burned forest slipped in through every pore. Its stink soaked skin and the flesh beneath. It lurked in a man’s hair, his beard, like a promise of fire. It fouled clothes and the taste of food and water. Glyph walked through heaps of ash, around blackened stumps and the bones of tree-falls with their charred roots stark in the still air. His face was covered by a rag, leaving exposed only his red-rimmed eyes. He wore the hide of a deer, turned inside out in a feeble effort at disguise, as the deerskin’s underside was pale grey. He had rubbed handfuls of gritty ash into his black hair.
He could see too far in this forest, now. In past winters, there had been enough evergreen to offer up places to hide, blocking lines of sight, to allow a hunter to move unseen if care was taken.
Among the Deniers, it was the men who hunted. This tradition was older than the forest itself. And the great hunts, in the spring and again at summer’s end, when all the men set out, bearing bows and javelins, making their way through the forest to where the last herds still walked in their seasonal migration, far to the north now – these things too were old beyond memory.
Traditions died. And those who held fast to them, cursing and filled with hate as their precious ways of living were torn from their hands, they dwelt in a world of dreams where nothing changed. A predictable world that knew nothing of the fears that every mortal must face. He recalled the tale of the lake, and the families that lived on its shore. In all of their memories, reaching back to the very beginning, they fished that lake. They used spears in the shallows during the spawning season. They used nets and weirs at the streams that fed the lake. And for the creatures that crawled upon the lake bottom, they built traps. It was their tradition, this way of living, and they were known to all as the people who fished the lake.
There came a spring when no women walked out from that place, seeking husbands among the other peoples. And those women of the other peoples, who thought to travel to the homes of the people who fished the lake, they arrived to find empty camps and cold hearths, with huts fallen in under the weight of the past winter snows. They found nets, rotting on the scaffolds where they’d been hung to dry. They found unused fish spears amidst the high heaps of fishbone and broken mussel shells. They found all this, but nowhere could they find the people who fished the lake.
One young woman looked out to the lake’s lone island, a hump of moss and rock on which the last tree had been cut down long ago. Taking a canoe, she set out for that island.
There, she found the people who fished the lake. Crow-picked and withered by the winter. Their skin was sun-blackened in the manner of fish strips hung over a smoking fire. The children that she found had been eaten, every bone picked clean, and the bones then boiled so they were now light as twigs.
And in the lake, no fish remained. No mussels and no freshwater crabs or lobsters. The waters were clear and empty. When she paddled back across it, she could look down to a lifeless bottom of grey silts.
Tradition was not a thing to be worshipped. Tradition was the last bastion of fools. Did the fisherfolk see their final fate? Did they comprehend their doom? Glyph believed the answer to both questions, among those who still worked the waters, was yes. But the elders on the shore droned on about vast harvests in times past, when the gutted fish hung in their tens of thousands and the smoke of the fires drifted low and thick on the water, hiding the lake’s distant shores. Hiding this island, even. And oh, how they all grew fat and lazy in the weeks that followed, their bellies soft and bulging. There are fish in the lake, the elders said. There have always been fish in the lake. There always will be fish in the lake.
And the witch flung fish spines on to level beds of ash, reading in their patterns the secret hiding places of those fish. But she had done the same the last season, and the one before that, and now no hiding places remained.