Did those Imass know that strangers had come among them? To this even Onrack had no answer. His kind were shy, he explained, and cunning. They might watch from hiding places for days, nights, and only when they so chose would they reveal enough to touch Onrack’s senses, his animal awareness with its instinctive whispering. Eyes are upon us, friends. It is time.
Trull waited for those words.
The emlava kits yowled, announcing their hunger.
Trull, who had taken point whilst Onrack and the wizard carried the beasts in their sack, halted and turned about.
Time for feeding. Else not a single moment of peace.
Groaning, Quick Ben set down his end of the sling-pole, watched bemusedly as the two kits spat and clawed their way free of the skin, hissing at each other then at Onrack, who began withdrawing leaf-wrapped hunks of raw antelope. The meat was foul, but clearly this was no deterrent for the emlava cubs as they lunged towards him.
The Imass flung the meat onto the ground to spare his own hands, and then stepped away with an odd smile on his face.
Too many odd smiles these days, the wizard thought. As if the blinding wonder and joy had begun to dim-not much, only a fraction, yet Quick Ben believed it was there, a hint of dismay. He was not surprised. No-one could sus-tain such pure pleasure indefinitely. And, for all this seeming paradise-at least a paradise by Imass standards-there remained something vaguely unreal about it. As if it was no more than an illusion, already begun to fray at the edges.
No real evidence of that, however. The wizard could feel the health of this place. It was strong, and, he now suspected, it was growing. As Omtose Phellack waned on all sides. The end of an age, then. An age that had ended everywhere else long, long ago. But isn’t Tellann itself dead everywhere else? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s just changed, grown into itself. Maybe, everywhere else, what we’re seeing-what we’re living in-is Tellann ascendant, victor in the war of millennia past, dominant and secure in its maturity. Is that possible?
Yet that did not mesh with Onrack, with how he had been and how he was now. Unless… gods below, unlike everywhere else, this is one fragment of Tellann that lies, somehow, beyond the Ritual. That is why he is flesh and blood here. In this place, there was no Ritual of Tellann, no severing of Imass souls. Suggesting that the Imass living here know nothing about it.
So what would happen if Logros led his thousands here? If Kron-But no, Silverfox wouldn’t permit that. She needed them for something else. For another war.
It’d be nice to know how this fragment related to the one created for the Wolves at the end of the Pannion War. From what Quick Ben had understood, that Beast Hold, or whatever it had been called, had been seeded with the souls of T’lan Imass. Or at least the memories of those souls-could be that’s all a soul really is: the bound, snarled mass of memories from one life. Huh. Might explain why mine is such a mess. Too many lives, too many disparate strands all now tangled together…
Trull Sengar had set off in search of water-springs bubbled up from bedrock almost everywhere, as if even the stone itself was saturated with glacial melt.
Onrack eyed the cats for another moment then turned to Quick Ben. ‘There is a sweep of ice beyond these hills,’ he said. ‘I can smell its rot-an ancient road, once travelled by Jaghut. Fleeing slaughter. This intrusion, wizard, troubles me.’
‘Why? Presumably that battle occurred thousands of years ago and the Jaghut are all dead.’
‘Yes. Still, that road reminds me of… things. Awakens memories…’
Quick Ben slowly nodded. ‘Like shadows, aye.’
‘Just so.’
‘You had to know it couldn’t last.’
The Imass frowned, the expression accentuating his strangely unhuman, robust features. ‘Yes, perhaps I did, deep within me. I had… forgotten.’
‘You’re too damned hard on yourself, Onrack. You don’t need to keep yourself shining so bright all the time.’
Onrack’s smile held sadness. ‘I gift my friend,’ he said quietly, ‘for all the gifts he has given me.’
Quick Ben studied the warrior’s face. ‘The gift loses its value, Onrack, if it goes on too long. It begins to exhaust us, all of us.’
‘Yes, I see that now.’
‘Besides,’ the wizard added, watching the two emlava, their bellies full, now mock-fighting on the blood-smeared grass, ‘showing your fallible side is another kind of gift. The kind that invites empathy instead of just awe. If that makes any sense.’
‘It does.’
‘You’ve been making lots of paints, haven’t you?’
A sudden smile. ‘You are clever. When I find a wall of stone that speaks… yes, a different kind of gift. My forbidden talents.’
‘Forbidden? Why?’
‘It is taboo among my people to render our own forms in likeness to truth. Too much is captured, too much is trapped in time. Hearts can break, and betrayals breed like vermin.’
Quick Ben glanced up at Onrack, then away. Hearts can break. Aye, the soul can haunt, can’t it just.
Trull Sengar returned, waterskins sloshing. ‘By the Sisters,’ he said to Onrack, ‘is that a frown you’re wearing?’
‘It is, friend. Do you wish to know why?’
‘Not at all. It’s just, uh, well, a damned relief, to be honest.’
Onrack reached down and snagged one of the cubs, lifting it by the scruff of its neck. The beast hissed in outrage, writhing as he held it up. ‘Trull Sengar, you may explain to our friend why Imass are forbidden to paint likenesses of themselves. You may also tell him my story, so that he understands, and need not ask again why I am awakened to pain within me, recalling now, as I do, that mortal flesh is only made real when fed by the breath of love.’
Quick Ben studied Onrack with narrowed eyes. I don’t recall asking anything like that. Well, not out hud, anyway.
Trull Sengar’s relieved expression fell away and he sighed, but it was a loose sigh, the kind that marked the unbinding of long-held tensions. ‘I shall. Thank you, Onrack. Some secrets prove a heavy burden. And when I am done revealing to Quick Ben one of the details of your life that has served to forge our friendship, I will then tell you both of my own secret. I will tell you of the Eres’al and what she did to me, long before she appeared to us all in the cavern.’
A moment of long silence.
Then Quick Ben snorted. ‘Fine. And I’ll tell a tale of twelve souls. And a promise I made to a man named Whiskeyjack-a promise that has brought me all this way, with farther still to go. And then, I suppose, we shall all truly know each other.’
‘It is,’ Onrack said, collecting the second cub so he could hold both beasts up side by side, ‘a day for gifts.’
From beyond the hills there came the sound of thunder. That faded, and did not repeat.
The emlava were suddenly quiet.
‘What was that?’ Trull Sengar asked.
Quick Ben could feel his heart pound in his chest. ‘That, friends, was a cusser.’
Fiddler made his way across the dirt floor of the barn to where Bottle slept. He stared down at the young soldier curled up beneath a dark grey blanket. Poor bastard. He nudged with his foot and Bottle groaned. ‘Sun’s set,’ Fiddler said.
‘I know, Sergeant. I watched it going down.’
‘We’ve rigged a stretcher. Just get up and eat something and then you’ve got a mobile bed for the rest of the night.’
‘Unless you need me.’
‘Unless we need you, aye.’
Bottle sat up, rubbed at his face. ‘Thanks, Sergeant. I don’t need the whole night-half will do.’
‘You take what I give you, soldier. Cut it short and we could all end up regretting it.’