She shrugged. ‘Water, then.’ As he headed off she closed her eyes. It was me they all listened to. I saw the standards. We could all read the trail. But it was me. You didn’t kill us, captain. I did.
They had disarmed her — even her eating knife was missing from its thin leather sheath. If she had such a weapon within reach, she would take her own life.
But no. I will deliver the captain’s message. Then, before my kin, I will open my throat. I will give them my name to curse. She saw the corporal returning with a waterskin. Hungry? Thirsty? Scratch behind the ear? As soon as he arrived, she reached out and took the skin from him. ‘Now get me that horse.’
Seven heavily burdened wagons, each one drawn by a brace of oxen, had begun their journey at the Hust Forge, travelling southward to the borderlands where awaited the Hust Legion encampment. Their pace was slow, stalled at times when an axle split or a wheel stripped its rim on the rough cobbles of the road.
Bearing his lord’s command calling the Hust to war, Galar Baras caught up with the train half a day out from the camp. He had ridden hard and his mount was weary, and after the haunting solitude of his journey thus far he welcomed the company of drovers, wagon masters, carpenters, smiths, cooks and guards, many of whom he knew from the Forge settlement where he had been born and then raised. For all that, it was a muted welcome. News of the slaughter at the wedding hung like a pall over everyone. For many, he knew, it was not so much the sudden deaths of Lord Jaen and his daughter that sobered the crew and made conversations infrequent and hushed; rather, it was what the killings portended.
War had returned to Kurald Galain. This time, however, the enemy came not from beyond the realm’s borders. Galar could not imagine the mind of a Tiste in the moments that led up to the slaying of a fellow Tiste. For himself, it was difficult to think of any other Tiste as being anything but kin. Yet now it seemed that every face, with its familiar array of traits, was but a mask, and behind some of those masks lurked an enemy, a stranger with strange thoughts.
There was nothing obvious to make simple this designation of friend or foe; not the chalky white skin and angular body of the Forulkan, nor the savage bestiality of the Jheleck. Of course, there had always been bandits and other criminals, who made a profession from preying upon their own kind, but then Galar did not understand them either. Such fools dispensed with trust, and so suffered lives of loneliness and fear. Even among their own kind, such fraternity as existed was rife with betrayal and treachery. The existence of a lifelong criminal was a pitiful one, for all the wealth they might gather, and for all the power they might come to possess.
In a world emptied of virtues, all things became vices, including wealth and even family, and each day arrived with bleaker aspect than the last.
This war will unleash the criminal in all of us, I fear.
As he rode in the company of this train of wagons, he could feel the future settling on everyone, thick and suffocating, under heavy skies that might never break.
This last day of the journey seemed to mock all of that, with its cerulean sky and the warm wind that came up from the south. The low hills flanking the road showed the pocks of old mines, from which rough tracks wended down; and here and there could be seen old basins excavated out centuries past, where foul water had settled and, upon drying up, left discoloured, toxic sands. Galar could see the remains of wooden structures: buildings and trestles, scaffolding and ramps, but the forests that had once cloaked these hills and the broad shallow valleys around them were long gone.
There were legacies to be found in every scene of ruination, and as much as Galar sought to grasp only those that led to triumph, even to hold these too tightly could cut him to the bone.
He rode at the head of the column, avoiding the dust. Henarald’s delivery of the sword to Lord Anomander, and the blessing that had — or had not — occurred in the Chamber of Night still left Galar rattled, and he need only catch a glimpse of his hand gripping the reins, seeing the ebon hue of his skin, to be reminded of that time. In revisiting that fated day in the Citadel, he found himself shaking his head again and again: at times in wonder, but more often in disbelief. Every uttered word had seemed to blaze with fire — even those words that Galar had himself spoken had felt like incantations, or fragments plucked from some disordered, ethereal poem that all who were present somehow shared.
If this was among the gifts of standing in a god’s presence, then Galar Baras at last understood the rewards of faith. In those heady words so laden with meanings; in the confessions and frustrations, the mysteries and the furies, there had been frightening power. In such moments, he realized, worlds could be changed, broken down, reshaped and twisted anew.
He could not imagine the state of Lord Anomander now, the proclaimed protector and First Son of Mother Dark, who for all his status and power had been unable to prevent the massacre. And now, it was rumoured, he had broken with his brother Andarist, and this was a breach beyond imagining only a month ago.
When Galar arrived at the encampment, he would stand before Commander Toras Redone, and voice Lord Henarald’s call to war. The Hust Legion would march northward, to Kharkanas. Once there, Toras Redone would kneel before Lord Anomander and pledge the legion to his service, in the name of Mother Dark. And then, perhaps at winter’s end, the weapons would unleash their voice of horror against Urusander’s Legion.
Galar Baras knew the outcome of such a clash, but he wondered at how the victory would taste. This future I see is too bitter to bear. Mother Dark, your First Son asks of you but one thing. By your word, you can command Urusander to kneel before you, and so end this war before it truly begins. Together, Urusander and Anomander can hunt down the murderers and see justice done. We can name them criminals and so keep the world we know.
Yet a part of him wondered, in a voice venal in its clarity, if the world they all knew was in fact worth it.
She will meet my eyes, and again I will see the truth in them. Sober or drunken, her desire overwhelms me. I yield, weakened into deceit, into betrayal. I make of vows a mockery, even as I long to utter them for myself, and find their honest answer returned to me, in this uneven woman with her uneven love. There are many fools in the world and I must count myself among them.
Who could be righteous in this midst of failings, these seething flaws hiding behind every familiar mask? And what of this delusion, that the mind of the nefarious, the criminal, was a stranger’s mind, with sensibilities alien and malign? We are cheaters one and all. I see the proof of that in myself. Even as I long for and, indeed, demand virtues among others — in the name of reason and propriety — I am hunted by my own vices, and would elude the bite of reason and make of propriety nothing more than a public front.
And now I fear that I am not unusual, not cursed into some special maze of my own making. I fear that we are all the same, eager to make strangers of the worst that is in each of us, and by this stance lift up the banners of good against some foreign evil.
But see how they rest against one another, and by opposition alone are left to stand. This is flimsy construction indeed. And so I make masks of the worst in me and fling them upon the faces of my enemies, and would commit slaughter on all that I despise in myself. Yet, with this blood soaking the ground before me, see my flaws thrive in this fertile soil.
Ahead, where the way sloped upward to cut through the crest line of a ridge, Galar Baras saw the picket towers flanking the road. But no guards stood on those elevated platforms. Have they decamped? Did someone else bring the news to them? Toras Redone, will we slip past one another yet again, to ever stretch the torment of our love? He would welcome that bitter denial, and if by surfeit alone could drown every desire, would have them never meet again.