Lady Elaina clutched her wrinkled neck. ‘Here! He is here?’
Tarel worked hard to keep his annoyance from his face – he wanted to bark at the old aristocrat: Not now, you stupid hag! Instead, he said through tight lips, ‘When the time comes.’
‘And that time?’ the admiral asked.
Tarel nodded his gratitude for the question. The one to bring him to the issue of the night. He cleared his throat. ‘When my sister invades.’
All four co-conspirators displayed their disbelief.
‘All the admirals agree the Malazans are far from ready,’ said Admiral Karesh. ‘And wouldn’t invade in any case. Everyone agrees they are much more likely to raid the mainland for funds and materiel.’
‘My agents on the island report those pirates are busy doing just that,’ supplied Lord Kobay.
Tarel waited for them to quieten then shook his head. ‘You do not know my sister. She is utterly pitiless. She will come for me – I know this. And …’ he pointed to all four, ‘she will come for those who conspired against her as well.’
Lady Elaina regarded him and sighed. ‘It is time to let her go, my king. She is nothing now. She has sold herself to these evil allies – imagine, an assassin and a dark mage! She is their creature now. A slave, no doubt.’
But Tarel knew he could not ‘let her go’. Nor could he possibly convince these four of what he knew of her. None of them grew up in the royal household. None of them knew that the old king, his father, would lean to Sureth and murmur a name and later that man or woman would disappear, or suffer an accident, or be waylaid and murdered by brigands.
She had been his assassin from the start. The dagger in his right hand.
Yet no one ever saw it. Only he. Only watchful Tarel. He’d seen through her all along.
Which was why he struck first to take the throne. He had to. It was a question of self-preservation. So long as she lived, his life was worth a basket of rotting fish.
None of these gaping fools could possibly understand any of this.
He swept a hand before him. ‘She is coming, and that is that. We must prepare. Therefore … with your permission …’ He clapped his hands lightly, twice, and faced a corner of the murky room. ‘A visitor.’
The darkness thickened to the blackness of wet ink. Lady Elaina gasped her dread of sorcery. Lord Kobay rumbled his unease. A burst of air came then, like a gust through a window. Dust blew about the room and the glasses on the table rattled.
Out of the murk stepped an aged woman in long loose robes. Her hair was a dramatic mane of greyish silver, her lined features sun-darkened to the hue of ancient wood. Her most striking feature, however, was her eyes. They flashed a silver light as if dusted in that precious metal.
Tarel held out a hand in invitation. ‘Lords and ladies, may I introduce the Witch Jadeen, terror of south Itko Kan.’
The smile the witch gave in answer to that introduction could only be described as hungry.
* * *
Dancer did not mind the actual physical walk across the central plains; the gentle hills, small copses and tall grasses were pretty, as was the enormous sky with its horizon-to-horizon fronts of massed clouds passing overhead like the fabled sky-castles of the ancients.
Fabled no more, he reflected, as they’d found the shattered remains of one such in Shadow.
No, it was the uncertainty surrounding the errand that bothered him. Were they wasting their time? Could they simply wander for ever, pursuing a will-o’-the-wisp? Had Kellanved finally slipped over the edge into obsession and madness?
How could he discover the answers to any of these questions? Whom could he ask? Certainly not Kellanved.
So for three days they walked in relative silence on a roughly northward path, tracing the ever diminishing escarpment until it lay across the landscape as nothing more than a particularly steep hill. At nights he lay back to study the starred night sky – so much brighter here, far from the lights of any city. There was a delicacy and an intricacy in their arrangements he never would have guessed at before. Perhaps there was some credence after all to the astrologers’ assertion that secrets lie hidden there among such complexity.
That third night he could restrain his unease no longer, and he cleared his throat, turning his head to regard his partner who sat now, hands atop his walking stick, studying the flames of their meagre fire. ‘Do you even know what you are looking for?’ he asked.
Kellanved did not stir – he might have been asleep for all Dancer knew – yet he answered readily enough, ‘I’ll know it when I see it.’
Such unhelpful answers were the main reason for Dancer’s unwillingness to ask the maddening fellow any questions.
‘We really should be heading back. We have no idea how far—’
‘It is close,’ the hunched mock-elder snapped. ‘Close. I feel it.’
Dancer raised a brow; the man was rarely so touchy. Clearly he must be sharing something of his own disquiet. So Dancer relented; he would push no further – for now.
As winter was coming on, morning revealed a thick misty ground fog. The blanket Dancer slept wrapped up in carried a silvery lacing of frost. He rose to see Kellanved still sitting hunched, hands atop the short walking stick. ‘Kellanved?’ he asked.
The lad’s head jerked as he came awake, blinking. ‘What?’ Then his gaze slid aside, probing the rolling fog, and he faced the east, standing. Now Dancer felt it too; though no mage, his training had raised his senses to a point where active Warren magics played upon his nerves.
The fog was not entirely natural.
As if now aware of their regard, whoever lay behind the deception let it slip away and the roiling banks parted, fading, to reveal a band of Seti horsemen and women, some twenty or so.
Their leathers and regalia were impressive. Wolf-tails swung from the tops of raised spears; necklaces of wolf and cat teeth hung at their necks. The foremost, the oldest, rode a dappled grey mount. A thick cloak of white fur draped his shoulders, and the tails of grey-white animals adorned a stone-headed mace cradled in his arms.
‘Shadow mage,’ this Seti elder called to them, ‘did you think your crossing of our lands would go unnoticed?’
Kellanved thoughtfully scratched his chin. ‘Actually, no – I didn’t.’
‘Then you are even more the fool than you appear. You know you are not welcome here.’
Kellanved opened his arms wide. ‘We are merely passing through. That is all.’
‘Passing through?’ the elder repeated, doubtingly. ‘Passing through to what? There is nothing here for you outlanders. No town or settlement. Only our plains, which only we seem to value.’ He pointed the mace to the north. ‘But perhaps you mean to travel to the mountains yonder and the fields of ice beyond. In which case, you are welcome to continue onward and good riddance to you.’
Kellanved tapped his walking stick to the ground, tilting his head. ‘In truth, we are searching for something …’
Now the lean elder frowned suspiciously beneath his long grey moustaches. ‘Searching for something? For what? A quick death?’ He motioned with the mace and the war band spread out to either side, beginning to encircle them, spears lowered. ‘You are not intending to meddle here with the resting place of the Great Goddess, are you? In which case you have earned your deaths.’
Dancer set his back to Kellanved and rested his hands on his heaviest parrying blades.
‘And who will have given us our deaths?’ Kellanved asked.
The elder nodded at the justice of the question. He pointed the mace to his chest. ‘It is I, Imotan, shaman of the White Jackal, who judges. You outlanders push in upon us with impunity. And though we do all that we can to drive you from our lands, game becomes scarce. Hunger stalks our encampments. It is not how things used to be in my forefathers’ time.’ He extended the mace, pointing to Kellanved. ‘Push us no longer, outlander. You may not like where we go.’