Some wandering people from the eastern wastelands, perhaps, yet when Brohl had suggested that, the Atri-Preda had simply shaken her head. She knows something. Another damned secret.
…
They rode out of the rain, into steaming hot sunlight, the rich smell of soaked lichen and moss.
The broad swath of churned ground was on their right. To draw any closer was to catch the stench of manure and human faeces, a smell he had come to associate with desperation. We fight our wars and leave in our wake the redolent reek of suffering and misery. These plains are vast, are they not? What terrible cost would we face if we just left each other alone? An end to this squabble over land-Father Shadow knows, no-one realty owns it. The game of possession belongs to us, not to the rocks and earth, the grasses and the creatures walking the surface in their fraught struggle to survive.
A bolt of lightning descends. A wild bhederin is struck and nearly explodes, as if life itself is too much to bear.
The world is harsh enough. It does not need our deliberate cruelties. Our celebration of viciousness.
His scout was returning at the gallop. Brohl Handar raised a hand to halt his troop.
The young warrior reined in with impressive grace. ‘Overseer, they are on Q’uson Tapi. They did not go round it, sir-we have them!’
Q’uson Tapi, a name that was found only on the oldest Letherii maps; the words themselves were so archaic that even their meaning was unknown. The bed of a dead inland sea or vast salt lake. Flat, not a single rise or feature spanning leagues-or so the maps indicated. ‘How far ahead is this Q’uson Tapi?’
The scout studied the sky, eyes narrowing on the sun to the west. ‘We can reach it before dusk,’ he said.
‘And the Awl?’
‘They were less than a league out from the old shoreline, Overseer. Where they go, there is no forage-the herds are doomed, as are the Awl themselves.’
‘Has the rain reached Q’uson Tapi?’
‘Not yet, but it will, and those clays will turn into slime-the great wagons will be useless against us.’
As will cavalry on both sides, I would wager.
‘Ride back to the column,’ Brohl Handar told the scout, ‘and report to the Atri-Preda. We will await her at the old shoreline.’
A Letherii salute-yes, the younger Edur had taken quickly to such things-and the scout nudged his horse into motion.
Redmask, what have you done now?
Atri-Preda Bivatt had tried, for most of the day, to convince herself that what she had seen had been conjured from an exhausted, overwrought mind, the proclivity of the eye to find shapes in nothing, all in gleeful service to a trembling imagination. With dawn’s light barely a hint in the air she had walked out, alone, to stand before a cairn-these strange constructions they now came across as they pushed ever further east. Demonic faces in white on the flatter sides of the huge boulders. Votive offerings on niches and between the roughly stacked stones.
They had pried apart one such cairn two days earlier, finding at its core… very little. A single flat stone on which rested a splintered fragment of weathered wood-seemingly accidental, but Bivatt knew differently. She could recall, long ago on the north shores, on a day of fierce seas crashing that coast, a row of war canoes, their prows dismantled-and the wood, the wood was as this, here in the centre of a cairn on the Awl’dan.
Standing before this new cairn, with dawn attempting to crawl skyward as grey sheets of rain hammered down, she had happened to glance up. And saw-a darker grey, man-shaped yet huge, twenty, thirty paces away. Solitary, motionless, watching her. The blood in her veins lost all heat and all at once the rain was as cold as those thrashing seas on the north coast years past.
A gust of wind, momentarily making the wall of water opaque, and when it had passed, the figure was gone.
Alas, the chill would not leave her, the sense of gauging, almost unhuman regard.
A ghost. A shape cast by her mind, a trick of the rain and wind and dawn’s uncertain birth. But no, he was there. Watching. The maker of the cairns.
Redmask. Myself. The Awl and the Letherii and Tiste Edur, here we duel on this plain. Assuming we are alone in this deadly game. Witnessed by naught but carrion birds, coyotes and the antelope gracing on the valley /loors that watch its pass by day after day.
But we are not alone.
The thought frightened her, in a deep, childlike way-the fear born in a mind too young to cast anything away, be it dreams, nightmares, terrors or dread of all that was for ever unknowable. She felt no different now.
There were thousands. There must have been. How, then, could they hide? How could they have hidden for so long, all this time, invisible to us, invisible to the Awl?
Unless Redmask knows. And now, working in league with the strangers from the sea, they prepare an ambush. Our annihilation.
She was right to be frightened.
There would be one more battle. Neither side had anything left for more than that. And, barring more appalling displays of murderous skill from the mage-killer, Letherii sorcery would achieve victory. Brohl Handar’s scout had returned with the stunning news that Redmask had led his people out onto Q’uson Tapi, and there would be no negation of magic on the flat floor of a dead sea. Redmask forces the issue. Once we clash on Q’uson Tapi, our fates will be decided. No more fleeing, no more ambushes-even those Kechra will have nowhere to hide.
Errant, heed me please. If you are indeed the god of the Letherii, deliver no surprises on that day. Please. Give us victory.
The column marched on, towards the ancient shore of a dead sea. Clouds were gathering on the horizon ahead. Rain was thrashing down on that salt-crusted bed of clay and silt. They would fight in a quagmire, where cavalry was useless, where no horse would be quick enough to outrun a wave of deadly magic. Where warriors and soldiers would lock weapons and die where they stood, until one side stood alone, triumphant.
Soon now, they would have done with it. Done with it all.
Since noon Redmask had driven his people hard, out onto the seabed, racing ahead of the rain-clouds. A league, then two, beneath searing sun and air growing febrile with the coming storm. He had then called a halt, but the activity did not cease, and Toc Anaster had watched, bemused at first and then in growing wonder and, finally, admiration, as the Awl warriors set down weapons, divested themselves of their armour, and joined with the elders and every other non-combatant in pulling free from the wagons the tents and every stretch of hide they could find.
And the wagons themselves were taken apart, broken down until virtually nothing remained but the huge wheels and theit axles, which were then used to transport the planks of wood. Hide and canvas were stretched out, pegged down, the stakes driven flush with the ground itself. Wooden walkways were constructed, each leading back to a single, centrally positioned wagon-bed that had been left intact and raised on legs of bundled spear-shafts to create a platform.
The canvas and hides stretched in rows, with squares behind each row, linked by flattened wicker walls that had been used for hut-frames. But no-one would sleep under cover this night. No, all that took shape here served but one purpose-the coming battle. The final battle.
Redmask intended a defence. He invited Bivatt and her army to close with him, and to do so the Letherii and the Piste Edur would need to march across open ground-Toc sat astride his horse, watching the frenzied preparations and occasionally glancing northwestward, to those closing stormclouds-open ground, then, that would be a sea of mud.
She might decide to wait. I would, if I were her. Wait until the rains had passed, until the ground hardened once again. But Toe suspected that she would not exercise such restraint. Redmask was trapped, true, but the Awl had their herds-thousands of beasts most of whom were now being slaughtered-so, Redmask could wait, his warriors well fed, whilst Bivatt and her army faced the threat of real starvation. She would need all that butchered meat, but to get to it she had to go through the Awl; she had to destroy her hated enemy.