In the silence following that question, they heard, coming from the cave, the first pitiful cry.
‘Did you ever wish, Udinaas, that you could sink inside stone? Shake loose its vast memories-’
The ex-slave glanced at Wither-a deeper smear in the gloom-then sneered. ‘And see what they have seen? You damned wraith, stones can’t see.’
‘True enough. Yet they swallow sound and bind it trapped inside. They hold conversations with heat and cold. Their skins wear away to the words of the wind and the lick of water. Darkness and light live in their flesh-and they carry within them the echoes of wounding, of breaking, of being cruelly shaped-’
‘Oh, enough!’ Udinaas snapped, pushing a stick further into the fire. ‘Go melt away into these ruins, then.’
‘You are the last one awake, my friend. And yes, I have been in these ruins.’
‘Games like those are bound to drive you mad.’
A long pause. ‘You know things you have no right to know.’
‘How about this, then? Sinking into stone is easy. It’s getting out again that’s hard. You can get lost, trapped in the maze. And on all sides, all those memories pressing in, pressing down.’
‘It is your dreams, isn’t it? Where you learn such things. Who speaks to you? Tell me the name of this fell mentor!’
Udinaas laughed. ‘You fool, Wither. My mentor? Why, none other than imagination.’
‘I do not believe you.’
There seemed little point in responding to that declaration. Staring into the flames, Udinaas allowed its flickering dance to lull him. He was tired. He should be sleeping. The fever was gone, the nightmarish hallucinations, the strange nectars that fed the tumbling delusions all seeped away, like piss in moss. The strength 1 felt in those other worlds was a lie. The clarity, a deceit. All those offered ways forward, through what will come, every one a dead end. 1 should have known better.
‘K’Chain Nah’ruk, these ruins.’
‘You still here, Wither? Why?’
‘This was once a plateau on which the Short-Tails built a city. But now, as you can see, it is shattered. Now there is nothing but these dread slabs all pitched and angled-yet we have been working our way downward. Did you sense this? We will soon reach the centre, the heart of this crater, and we will see what destroyed this place.’
‘The ruins,’ said Udinaas, ‘remember cool shadow. Then concussion. Shadow, Wither, in a flood to announce the end of the world. The concussion, well, that belonged to the shadow, right?’
‘You know things-’
‘You damned fool, listen to me! We came to the edge of this place, this high plateau, expecting to see it stretch out nice and flat before us. Instead, it looks like a frozen puddle onto which someone dropped a heavy rock. Splat. All the sides caved inward. Wraith, I don’t need any secret knowledge to work this out. Something big came down from the sky-a meteorite, a sky keep, whatever. We trudged through its ash for days. Covering the ancient snow. Ash and dust, eating into that snow like acid. And the ruins, they’re all toppled, blasted outward, then tilted inward. Out first, in second. Heave out and down, then slide back. Wither, all it takes is for someone to just look. Really look. That’s it. So enough with all this mystical sealshit, all right?’
His tirade had wakened the others. Too bad. Nearly dawn anyway. Udinaas listened to them moving around, heard a cough, then someone hawking spit. Which? Seren? Kettle?
The ex-slave smiled to himself. ‘Your problem, Wither, is your damned expectations. You hounded me for months and months, and now you feel the need to have made it-me-worth all that attention. So here you are, pushing some kind of sage wisdom on this broken slave, but I told you then what I’ll tell you now. I’m nothing, no-one. Understand? Just a man with a brain that, every now and then, actually works. Yes, I work it, because I find no comfort in being stupid. Unlike, I think, most people. Us Letherii, anyway. Stupid and proud of it. Belongs on the Imperial Seal, that happy proclamation. No wonder I failed so miserably.’
Seren Pedac moved into the firelight, crouching down to warm her hands. ‘Failed at what, Udinaas?’
‘Why, everything, Acquitor. No need for specifics here.’
Fear Sengar spoke from behind him. ‘You were skilled, I recall, at mending nets.’
Udinaas did not turn round, but he smiled. ‘Yes, I probably deserved that. My well-meaning tormentor speaks. Well-meaning? Oh, perhaps not. Indifferent? Possibly. Until, at least, I did something wrong. A badly mended net-aaii! Flay the fool’s skin from his back! I know, it was all for my own good. Someone’s, anyway.’
Another sleepless night, Udinaas?’
He looked across the fire at Seren, but she was intent on the flames licking beneath her outstretched hands, as if the question had been rhetorical.
‘I can see my bones,’ she then said.
‘They’re not real bones,’ Kettle replied, settling down with her legs drawn up. ‘They look more like twigs.’
‘Thank you, dear.’
‘Bones are hard, like rock.’ She set her hands on her knees and rubbed them. ‘Cold rock.’
‘Udinaas,’ Seren said, ‘I see puddles of gold in the ashes.’
‘I found pieces of a picture frame.’ He shrugged. ‘Odd to think of K’Chain Nah’ruk hanging pictures, isn’t it?’
Seren looked up, met his eyes. ‘K’Chain-’
Silchas Ruin spoke as he stepped round a heap of cut stone. ‘Not pictures. The frame was used to stretch skin. K’Chain moult until they reach adulthood. The skins were employed as parchment, for writing. The Nah’ruk were obsessive recorders.’
‘You know a lot about creatures you killed on sight,’ Fear Sengar said.
Clip’s soft laughter sounded from somewhere beyond the circle of light, followed by the snap of rings on a chain.
Fear’s head lifted sharply. ‘That amuses you, pup?’
The Tiste Andii’s voice drifted in, eerily disembodied. ‘Silchas Ruin’s dread secret. He parleyed with the Nah’ruk. There was this civil war going on, you see…’
‘It will be light soon,’ Silchas said, turning away.
Before too long, the group separated as it usually did. Striding well ahead were Silchas Ruin and Clip. Next on the path was Seren Pedac herself, while twenty or more paces behind her straggled Udinaas-still using the Imass spear as a walking stick-and Kettle and Fear Sengar.
Seren was not sure if she was deliberately inviting solitude upon herself. More likely some remnant of her old profession was exerting on her a disgruntled pressure to take the lead, deftly dismissing the presence ahead of the two Tiste warriors. As if they don’t count. As if they’re intrinsically unreliable as guides… to wherever it is we’re going.
She thought back, often, on their interminable flight from Letheras, the sheer chaos of that trek, its contradictions of direction and purpose; the times when they were motionless-setting down tentative roots in some backwater hamlet or abandoned homestead-but their exhaustion did not ease then, for it was not of blood and flesh. Scabandari Bloodeye’s soul awaited them, like some enervating parasite, in a place long forgotten. Such was the stated purpose, but Seren had begun, at last, to wonder.
Silchas had endeavoured to lead them west, ever west, and was turned aside each time-as if whatever threat the servants of Rhulad and Hannan Mosag presented was too vast to challenge. And that made no sense. The bastard can change into a damned dragon. And is Silchas a pacifist at heart! Hardly. He kills with all the compunction of a man swatting mosquitoes. Did he turn us away to spare our lives? Again, unlikely. A dragon doesn’t leave behind anything alive, does it? Driven north, again and again, away from the more populated areas.
To the very edge of Bluerose, a region once ruled by Tiste Andii-hiding still under the noses of Letherii and Edur-no, I do not trust any of this. 1 cannot. Silchas Ruin sensed his kin. He must have.