He did not think it likely that the Whirlwind Goddess would detect his presence, so long as he travelled through shadows at every opportunity. And, in a sense, he well knew, night itself was naught but a shadow. Provided he hid well during the day, he expected to be able to reach Sha’ik’s encampment undiscovered.
Shouldering his pack, he set off. The stars overhead were barely visible through the suspended dust. Raraku, for all its wild, blasted appearance, was crisscrossed with countless trails. Many led to false or poisoned springs; others to an equally certain death in the wastes of sand. And beneath the skein of footpaths and old tribal cairns, the remnants of coastal roads wound atop the ridges, linking what would have been islands in a vast, shallow bay long ago.
Kalam made his way in a steady jog across a stone-littered depression where a half-dozen ships-the wood petrified and looking like grey bones in the gloom-had scattered their remnants in the hard-packed clay. The Whirlwind had lifted the mantle of sands to reveal Raraku’s prehistory, the long-lost civilizations that had known only darkness for millennia. The scene was vaguely disturbing, as if whispering back to the nightmares that had plagued his sleep.
And that damned song.
The bones of sea-creatures crunched underfoot as the assassin continued on. There was no wind, the air almost preternatural in its stillness. Two hundred paces ahead, the land rose once more, climbing to an ancient, crumbled causeway. A glance up to the ridge froze Kalam in his tracks. He dropped low, hands closing on the grips of his long-knives.
A column of soldiers was walking along the causeway. Helmed heads lowered, burdened with wounded comrades, pikes wavering and glinting in the grainy darkness.
Kalam judged their numbers as close to six hundred. A third of the way along the column rose a standard. Affixed to the top of the pole was a human ribcage, the ribs bound together by leather strips, in which two skulls had been placed. Antlers rode the shaft all the way down to the bearer’s pallid hands.
The soldiers marched in silence.
Hood’s breath. They’re ghosts.
The assassin slowly straightened. Strode forward. He ascended the slope until he stood, like someone driven to the roadside by the army’s passage, whilst the soldiers shambled past-those on his side close enough to reach out and touch, were they flesh and blood.
‘He walks up from the sea.’
Kalam started. An unknown language, yet he understood it. A glance back-and the depression he had just crossed was filled with shimmering water. Five ships rode low in the waters a hundred sweeps of the oar offshore, three of them in flames, shedding ashes and wreckage as they drifted. Of the remaining two, one was fast sinking, whilst the last seemed lifeless, bodies visible on its deck and in the rigging.
‘A soldier.’
‘A killer.’
‘Too many spectres on this road, friends. Are we not haunted enough?’
‘Aye, Dessimbelackis throws endless legions at us, and no matter how many we slaughter, the First Emperor finds more.’
‘Not true, Kullsan. Five of the Seven Protectors are no more. Does that mean nothing? And the sixth will not recover, now that we have banished the black beast itself.’
‘I wonder, did we indeed drive it from this realm?’
‘If the Nameless Ones speak true, then yes-’
‘Your question, Kullsan, confuses me. Are we not marching from the city? Were we not just victorious?’
The conversation had begun to fade as the soldiers who had been speaking marched onward, but Kalam heard the doubting Kullsan’s reply: ‘Then why is our road lined with ghosts, Erethal?’
More importantly, Kalam added to himself, why is mine?
He waited as the last of the soldiers marched past, then stepped forward to cross the ancient road.
And saw, on the opposite side, a tall, gaunt figure in faded orange robes. Black pits for eyes. One fleshless hand gripping an ivory staff carved spirally, on which the apparition leaned as if it was the only thing holding it up.
‘Listen to them now, spirit from the future,’ it rasped, cocking its head.
And now Kalam heard it. The ghost soldiers had begun singing.
Sweat sprang out on the assassin’s midnight skin. I’ve heard that song before… or no, something just like it. A variation… ‘What in the Abyss… You, Tanno Spiritwalker, explain this-’
‘Spiritwalker? Is that the name I will acquire? Is it an honorific? Or the acknowledgement of a curse?’
‘What do you mean, priest?’
‘I am no priest. I am Tanno, the Eleventh and last Seneschal of Yaraghatan, banished by the First Emperor for my treasonous alliance with the Nameless Ones. Did you know what he would do? Would any of us have guessed? Seven Protectors indeed, but far more than that, oh yes, far more…’ Steps halting, the spectre walked onto the road and began dragging itself along in the wake of the column. ‘I gave them a song, to mark their last battle,’ it rasped. ‘I gave them that at least…’
Kalam watched as the figures disappeared into the darkness. He swung about. The sea was gone, the basin’s bones revealed once more. He shivered. Why am I witness to these things? I’m reasonably certain I’m not dead… although I soon might be, I suppose. Are these death-visions? He had heard of such things, but held little stock in them. Hood’s embrace was far too random to be knotted into the skein of fate… until it had already occurred-or so the assassin’s experience told him.
He shook his head and crossed the road, slipping down the crumbling verge to the boulder-strewn flat beyond. This stretch had once been naught but dunes, before the Whirlwind’s rise. Its elevation was higher-perhaps twice the height of a man-than the ancient seabed he had just traversed, and here, beyond the tumbled stones, lay the gridwork foundations of a city. Deep canals cut through it, and he could make out where bridges had once spanned them here and there. Few of the wall foundations rose higher than the assassin’s shins, but some of the buildings looked to have been large-a match to anything found in Unta, or Malaz City. Deep pits marked where cisterns had been built, where the seawater from the other side of the causeway could, stripped of salt by the intervening sands, collect. The remnants of terraces indicated a proliferation of public gardens.
He set out, and soon found himself walking down what had once been a main thoroughfare, aligned north-south. The ground underfoot was a thick, solid carpet of potsherds, scoured and bleached by sand and salt. And now I am like a ghost, the last to walk these thoroughfares, with every wall transparent, every secret revealed.
It was then that he heard horses.
Kalam sprinted to the nearest cover, a set of sunken stairs that once led to the subterranean level of a large building. The thump of horse hoofs drew closer, approaching from one of the side avenues on the opposite side of the main street. The assassin ducked lower as the first rider appeared.
Pardu.
Drawing rein, cautious, weapons out. Then a gesture. Four more desert warriors appeared, followed by a fifth Pardu, this last one a shaman, Kalam concluded, given the man’s wild hair, fetishes and ratty goat-hide cape. Glaring about, eyes glinting as if raging with some internal fire, the shaman drew out a long bone and began waving it in circles overhead. Then he lifted his head and loudly sniffed the air.
Kalam slowly eased his long-knives from their scabbards.
The shaman growled a few words, then pivoted on the high Pardu saddle and slipped to the ground. He landed badly, twisting an ankle, and spent the next few moments hobbling about, cursing and spitting. His warriors swung down from their horses in a more graceful fashion, and Kalam caught the flash of a quickly hidden grin from one of them.