Jaghut had died on this ice. Slaughtered. Emroth had said as much. But there were no bodies, and there had been no explanation forthcoming from the T’lan Imass. Collected then, Hedge surmised, perhaps by a survivor. Did the Jaghut practise ritual interment? He had no idea. In all his travels, he could not once recall talk of a Jaghut tomb or burial ground. If they did such things, they kept them to themselves.
But when they died here, they had been on the run. Some of those swaths of material were from tents. Flesh and blood Imass did not pursue them-not across this lifeless ice. No, they must have been T’lan. Of the Ritual. Like Emroth here.
‘So,’ Hedge said, his own voice startlingly loud in his ears, ‘were you involved in this hunt, Emroth?’
‘I cannot be certain,’ she replied after a long moment. ‘It is possible.’
‘One scene of slaughter looks pretty much the same as the next, right?’
‘Yes. That is true.’
Her agreement left him feeling even more depressed.
‘There is something ahead,’ the T’lan Imass said. ‘We are, I believe, about to discover the answer to the mystery’
‘What mystery?’
‘The absence of bodies.’
‘Oh, that mystery’
Night came abruptly to this place, like the snuffing out of a candle. The sun, which circled just above the horizon through the day, would suddenly tumble, like a rolling ball, beneath the gleaming, blood-hued skyline. And the black sky would fill with stars that only faded with the coming of strangely coloured brushstrokes of light, spanning the vault, that hissed like sprinkled fragments of fine glass.
Hedge sensed that night was close, as the wind’s pockets of warmth grew more infrequent, the ember cast to what he assumed was west deepening into a shade both lurid and baleful.
He could now see what had caught Emroth’s attention. A hump on the plateau, ringed in dark objects. The shape rising from the centre of that hillock at first looked like a spar of ice, but as they neared, Hedge saw that its core was dark, and that darkness reached down to the ground.
The objects surrounding the rise were cloth-swaddled bodies, many of them pitifully small.
As the day’s light suddenly dropped away, night announced on a gust of chill wind, Hedge and Emroth halted just before the hump.
The upthrust spar was in fact a throne of ice, and on it sat the frozen corpse of a male Jaghut. Mummified by cold and desiccating winds, it nevertheless presented an imposing if ghastly figure, a figure of domination, the head tilted slightly downward, as if surveying a ring of permanently supine subjects.
‘Death observing death,’ Hedge muttered. ‘How damned appropriate. He collected the bodies, then sat down and just died with them. Gave up. No thoughts of vengeance, no dreams of resurrection. Here’s your dread enemy, Emroth.’
‘More than you realize,’ the T’lan Imass replied.
She moved on, edging round the edifice, her hide-wrapped feet plunging through the crust of brittle ice in small sparkling puffs of powdery snow.
Hedge stared up at the Jaghut on his half-melted throne. All thrones should be made of ice, 1 think.
Sit on that numb arse, sinking down and down, with the puddle of dissolution getting ever wider around you. Sit, dear ruler, and tell me all your grand designs.
Of course, the throne wasn’t the only thing falling apart up there. The Jaghut’s green, leathery skin had sloughed away on the forehead, revealing sickly bone, almost luminescent in the gloom; and on the points of the shoulders the skin was frayed, with the polished knobs of the shoulder bones showing through. Similar gleams from the knuckles of both hands where they rested on the now-tilted arms of the chair.
Hedge’s gaze returned to the face. Black, sunken pits for eyes, a nose broad and smashed flat, tusks of black silver. I thought these things never quite died. Needed big rocks on them to keep them from getting back up. Or chopped to pieces and every piece planted under a boulder.
I didn’t think they died this way at all.
He shook himself and set off after Emroth.
They would walk through the night. Camps, meals and sleeping were for still-breathing folk, after all.
‘Emroth!’
The head creaked round.
‘That damned thing back there’s not still alive, is it?’
‘No. The spirit left.’
‘Just… left?’
‘Yes.’
‘Isn’t that, uh, unusual?’
‘The Throne of Ice was dying. Is dying still. There was-is-nothing left to rule, ghost. Would you have him sit there for ever?’ She did not seem inclined to await a reply, for she then said, ‘I have not been here before, Hedge of the Bridgeburners. For I would have known.’
‘Known what, Emroth?’
‘I have never before seen the true Throne of Ice, in the heart of the Hold. The very heart of the Jaghut realm.’
Hedge glanced back. The true Throne of Ice? ‘Who-who was he, Emroth?’
But she did not give answer.
After a time, however, he thought he knew. Had always known.
He kicked aside a broken pot, watched it skid, roll, then wobble to a halt. King on your melting throne, you drew a breath, then let it go. And… never again. Simple. Easy. When you are the last of your kind, and you release that last breath, then it is the breath of extinction.
And it rides the wind.
Every wind.
‘Emroth, there was a scholar in Malaz City-a miserable old bastard named Obo-who claimed he was witness to the death of a star. And when the charts were compared again, against the night sky, well, one light was gone.’
‘The stars have changed since my mortal life, ghost.’
‘Some have gone out?’
‘Yes.’
‘As in… died V
‘The Bonecasters could not agree on this,’ she said. Another observation offered a different possibility. The stars are moving away from us, Hedge of the Bridgeburners. Perhaps those we no longer see have gone too far for our eyes.’
‘Obo’s star was pretty bright-wouldn’t it have faded first, over a long time, before going out?’
‘Perhaps both answers are true. Stars die. Stars move away.’
‘So, did that Jaghut die, or did he move away?’
‘Your question makes no sense.’
Really? Hedge barked a laugh. You’re a damned bad liar, Emroth.’
‘This,’ she said, ‘is not a perfect world.’
The swaths of colours sweeping overhead hissed softly, while around them the wind plucked at tufts of cloth and fur, moaning through miniature gullies and caverns of ice, and closer still, a sound shared by ghost and T’lan Imass, the crackling destruction of their footsteps across the plateau.
Onrack knelt beside the stream, plunging his hands into the icy water, then lifting them clear again to watch the runnels trickling down. The wonder had not left his dark brown eyes since his transformation, since the miracle of a life regained.
A man could have no heart if he felt nothing watching this rebirth, this innocent joy in a savage warrior who had been dead a hundred thousand years. He picked up polished stones as if they were treasure, ran blunt, calloused fingertips across swaths of lichen and moss, brought to his heavy lips a discarded antler to taste with his tongue, to draw in its burnt-hair scent. Walking through the thorny brush of some arctic rose, Onrack had then halted, with a cry of astonishment, upon seeing red scratches on his bowed shins.
The Imass was, Trull Sengar reminded himself yet again, nothing-nothing-like what he would have imagined him to be. Virtually hairless everywhere barring the brown, almost black mane sweeping down past his broad shoulders. In the days since they had come to this strange realm, a beard had begun, thin along Onrack’s jawline and above his mouth, the bristles wide-spaced and black as a boar’s; but not growing at all on the cheeks, or the neck. The features of the face were broad and flat, dominated by a flaring nose with a pronounced bridge, like a knuckle bone between the wide-spaced, deeply inset eyes. The heavy ridge over those eyes was made all the more robust by the sparseness of the eyebrows.