‘It occurs to me,’ Emroth said with rasping dryness, ‘that manifestation of the will can go both ways.’
‘Their disbelief annihilated their own souls? Then why create an underworld?’
‘Verdith’anath is an ancient creation. It may be that the first Jaghut souls found it not to their liking. To create a realm of death is the truest manifestation of will, after all. And yet, what is created is not always solely what was willed. Every realm finds… resident beings. Every realm, once formed, is rife with bridges, gates, portals. If the Jaghut did not find it to their liking, other creatures did.’
‘Like your T’lan Imass.’
‘In the ages of ice that beset our kind,’ Emroth said, ‘there existed pockets of rich land, often surrounded in ice, yet resisting its fierce power. In these pockets, Ghost, the old ways of the Imass persisted. Places of forests, sometimes tundra, and, always, the beasts we knew so well. Our name for such a place was Farl ved ten ara. A refugium.’
Hedge studied the forested hills. ‘There are Imass in there.’
‘I believe that is so.’
‘Do you intend to seek them out, Emroth?’
‘Yes. I must.’
‘And what of your new god?’
‘If you would destroy me, do it now, Ghost.’ With that she turned and began walking towards the Refugium.
Hedge stood, shifted the cusser to his right hand, and gauged distance. The Crippled God would welcome more allies, wouldn’t he just? You go, Emroth, to meet this timeless kin. With your words marshalled to sway them, to offer them a new faith. Your kin. Could be thousands of them. Tens of thousands.
But they’re not what you came for.
Like me, Emroth, you’re heading for the gate. Starvald Demelain. Where anything is possible.
Including the destruction of the warrens.
It’s the blood, you see. The blood of dragons. Outside and inside. Dead and living. Aye, amazing the things you figure out. once you’re dead. But not dead. Aye, it’s all about the will.
The cusser returned to his left hand.
Arm angled back. Then swung forward. He watched the cusser’s arc for the briefest of moments, then, as habit demanded, he pitched sideways, onto the ground-
Even as it lurched up to meet him, a stone cracking hard against his chin. The concussion had of course deafened him, and he stared about, spitting blood from his tooth-sliced tongue. His left arm was gone, as was most of his left hip and thigh. Snow and dust drifting down, sparkling in the sunlight. Pebbles and clods of frozen earth now landing all around him, bouncing, skittering. The snow in the air, sparkling like magic.
He spat more blood, felt his chin with his one remaining hand and found a deep gash there, studded with gravel. He scowled, dismissed these absurd details. No more blood, a tongue whole and ever eager to wag. Smooth chin, unmarred by any gash-well, more or less smooth, under all that stubble. New left leg, hip, arm. Aye, that’s better.
The sapper climbed to his feet.
The crater was appropriately large, suitably deep, reaching down past the skin of ice and snow to the ground underneath, that now steamed sodden and glistening. Pieces of Emroth here and there. Not many. Cussers were like that, after all.
‘Aye,’ Hedge muttered, ‘Fid’s the sentimental one.’
Thirty, then thirty-five paces on, reaching the first sward of riotous grass, the sapper came upon one more fragment of Emroth’s body. And he halted. Stared down for some time. Then slowly turned and studied the way he had come, the borderline between ice and earth.
Farl ved ten ara. Refugium indeed. ‘Shit,’ he muttered. Worse yet, she’d told him. A place without the Ritual itself.
After a long moment, Hedge turned back to the forest ahead. He stepped over the torn, severed left leg lying bleeding in the grass. Flesh and blood, aye. A woman’s leg. Damned shapely at that.
‘Shit,’ he said again, hurrying on. ‘Fid’s the soft-hearted one, that he is. Fiddler. Not me. Not me.’ Wiping at his cheeks, cursing the ghost tears on his ghost face, and alone once more in this insipid, uninspiring realm of the dead, the Bridgeburner went on. Undead for a few hundred thousand years. Broken, Fallen, then resurrected, enough to walk once more. And, finally, thirty or so paces from a return to life…
A grim lesson about keeping the wrong company.
Seeking the forest. Beneath the thick branches at last, the heavy fluttering of a new season’s painfully green leaves. Spin and whirl of insects, the chitter of birds. Into the forest, aye, beyond the sight of that severed limb, the borderland, the steaming crater.
Shit!
‘Damned soft of you, Fid. But we’re at war, like I keep telling you. We’re at war. And I don’t care if it’s a damned Jaghut Bridge of Death, it’s still a bridge, and you know what we do to bridges, don’t you?’
Refugium.
But no refuge for me.
The emlava kittens were heavy as cattle dogs but shorter of leg and nowhere near as energetic. All they wanted to do was sleep. And feed. For the first few days, carrying them invited deadly fits of lashing talons and terrifying lunges with jaws opened wide. Unmindful of macabre irony, Onrack used their mother’s skinned hide to fashion a sack. Ends affixed to a cut sapling, the Imass and either Quick Ben or Trull would then carry between them the two hissing, thrashing creatures in their ghastly bag.
The ay never came close again.
A male and a female, their grey fur not yet banded and the pale hue of ashes rather than the dark iron of their mother. In the cave there had been a third one, dead a week or more. From the condition of its body, its siblings had decided on eliminating it. So fared the weak in this and every other world.
Trull’s sense of wonder was reawakened every time he glanced across at Onrack. A friend in the flesh was truly a revelation. He had imagined himself long past such profound, prolonged astonishment. The day he had been Shorn by his brother, it had seemed to him that his heart had died. Chained to stone, awaiting the cold water and the rot that it promised, the muscle that forged the tides of his blood seemed to beat on in some kind of waning inertia.
The desiccated corpse that was Onrack, walking up to where he had been bound, had even then seemed an unlikely salvation.
Trull recalled he’d had to argue with the T’lan Imass to win his own release. The thought amused him still.
Creaking sinew and cabled muscle and torque-twisted bone, Onrack had been the personification of indifference. As unmindful of life and its struggle to persist as only a lifeless thing could be.
And so Trull had simply tagged along, unwilling to admit to himself the burgeoning truth of his salvation-his reluctant return to life in the company of an undead warrior who had begun to discover his own life, the memories once thought surrendered, to time and cruel ritual, to wilful denial spanning tens of thousands of years.
What had bound them together? What improbable menagerie of terse conversations, unanticipated emotions and the shared extremity of combat had so thoroughly entwined them together, now as brothers yet more a brother than any of those with whom Trull Sengar shared blood? We stood side by side, together facing certain defeat. Only to find blessing in the timid hand of a creature not even half human. Oh, 1 know her well, that one.
Yet she is a secret 1 find 1 cannot share with Onrack, with my friend. Now, if only he was as coy, as guarded. Not this… this open regard, this casting away of every natural, reasonable defence. This childness-by the Sisters, Trull, at least find yourself a word that exists. But he seems so young! Not of age, but of cast. A species of unmitigated innocence-is such a thing even possible?
Well, he might know the answer to that soon enough. They had found signs as they trekked this youthful world. Camps, hearthstones lining firepits. Places where stone tools had been made, a flat boulder where an Imass had sat, striking flakes from flint, leaving behind a half-circle scatter of splinters. Refuse pits, filled with bones charred white or boiled to extract the fat, leaving them crumbly and light as pumice; scorched shell fragments from the gourds used to heat the bones in water; and the shattered rocks that had been plunged hot into that water to bring it to a boil. Signs of passing this way, some only a few weeks old, by Onrack’s estimations.