The shorter one grunted, then said, ‘We don’t want any company. So pick somewhere else to do your fighting.’
‘I am tempted to crush your skull between my hands,’ Menandore said.
‘Doesn’t work,’ the wizard muttered. ‘Everything just pops back out.’
The one with the crossbow gave her a wide smile.
Menandore said, ‘I assure you, I have no intention of being anywhere near you, although it is my hope I will be within range to see your grisly deaths.’
‘What makes you so sure they’ll be grisly?’ the wizard asked, now studying one pebble in particular, holding it up to the light as if it was a gem of some sort, but Menandore could see that it was not a gem. Simply a stone, and an opaque one at that.
‘What are you doing?’ she demanded.
He glanced across at her, then closed his hand round the stone and brought it down behind his back. ‘Nothing. Why? Anyway, I asked you a question.’
‘And I am obliged to answer it?’ She snorted.
Rud Elalle and Ulshun Pral arrived, halting a few paces behind the wizard and his companion.
Menandore saw the hard expression in her son’s face. Could I have seen anything else? No. Not for this. ‘Beloved son-’
‘I care nothing for the Finnest,’ Rud Elalle said. ‘I will not join you in your fight, Mother.’
She stared, eyes widening even as they filled with burning rage. ‘You must! I cannot face them both!’
‘You have new allies,’ Rud Elalle said. ‘These two, who even now guard the approach-’
‘These brainless dolts? My son, you send me to my death!’
Rud Elalle straightened. ‘I am taking my Imass away from here, Mother. They are all that matters to me-’
‘More than the life of your mother?’
‘More than the fight she chooses for herself!’ he snapped.
‘This clash-this feud-it is not mine. It is yours. It was ever yours! I want nothing to do with it!’
Menandore flinched back at her son’s fury. Sought to hold his eyes, then failed and looked away. ‘So be it,’ she whispered. ‘Go then, my son, and take your chosen kin. Go!’
As Rud Elalle nodded and turned away, however, she spoke again, in a tone harder than anything that had come before. ‘But not him.’
Her son swung round, saw his mother pointing towards the Imass at his side.
Ulshun Pral.
Rud Elalle frowned. ‘What? I do not-’
‘No, my son, you do not. Ulshun Pral must remain. Here.’
‘I will not permit-’
And then the Bentract leader reached out a hand to stay Rud Elalle-who was moments from veering into his dragon form, to lock in battle with his own mother.
Menandore waited, outwardly calm, reposed, even as her heart thudded fierce in her chest.
‘She speaks true,’ Ulshun Pral said. ‘I must stay.’
‘But why?’
‘For the secret I possess, Rud Elalle. The secret they all seek. If I go with you, all will pursue. Do you understand? Now, I beg you, lead my people away from here, to a safe place. Lead them away, Rud Elalle, and quickly!’
‘Will you now fight at my side, my son?’ Menandore demanded. ‘To ensure the life of Ulshun Pral?’
But Ulshun Pral was already pushing Rud Elalle away. ‘Do as I ask,’ he said to Menandore’s son. ‘I cannot die fearing for my people-please, lead them away.’
The wizard then spoke up, ‘We’ll do our best to safeguard him, Rud Elalle.’
Menandore snorted her contempt. ‘You risk such a thing?’ she demanded of her son.
Rud Elalle stared across at the wizard, then at the smiling one with the crossbow, and she saw a strange calm slip over her son’s expression-and that sliver of disquiet returned to her, stinging.
‘I shall,’ Rud Elalle then said, and he reached out to Ulshun Pral. A gentle gesture, a hand resting lightly against one side of the Imass’s face. Rud Elalle then stepped back, swung round, and set off back for the camp.
Menandore spun on the two remaining men. ‘You damned fools!’
‘Just for that,’ the wizard said, ‘I’m not giving you my favourite stone.’
Hedge and Quick Ben watched her march back down the slope.
‘That was odd,’ the sapper muttered.
‘Wasn’t it.’
They were silent for another hundred heartbeats, then Hedge turned to Quick Ben. ‘So what do you think?’
‘You know exactly what I’m thinking, Hedge.’
‘Same as me, then.’
‘The same.’
‘Tell me something, Quick.’
‘What?’
‘Was that really your favourite stone?’
‘Do you mean the one I had in my hand? Or the one I slipped into her fancy white cloak?’
With skin wrinkled and stained by millennia buried in peat, Sheltatha Lore did indeed present an iconic figure of dusk. In keeping now with her reddish hair and the murky hue of her eyes, she wore a cloak of deep burgundy, black leather leggings and boots. Bronze-studded vest drawn tight across her chest.
At her side-like Sheltatha facing the hills-stood Sukul Ankhadu, Dapple, the mottling of her skin visible on her bared hands and forearms. On her slim shoulders a Letherii night-cloak, as was worn now by the noble born and the women of the Tiste Edur in the empire, although this one was somewhat worse for wear.
‘Soon,’ said Sheltatha Lore, ‘this realm shall be dust.’
‘This pleases you, sister?’
‘Perhaps not as much as it pleases you, Sukul. Why is this place an abomination in your eyes?’
‘I have no love for Imass. Imagine, a people grubbing in the dirt of caves for hundreds of thousands of years. Building nothing. All history trapped as memory, twisted as tales sung in rhyme every night. They are flawed. In their souls, there must be a flaw, a failing. And these ones here, they have deluded themselves into believing that they actually exist.’
‘Not all of them, Sukul.’
Dapple waved dismissively. ‘The greatest failing here, Sheltatha, lies with the Lord of Death. If not for Hood’s indifference, this realm could never have lasted as long as it has. It irritates me, such carelessness.’
‘So,’ Sheltatha Lore said with a smile, ‘you will hasten the demise of these Imass, even though, with the realm dying anyway, they are already doomed.’
‘You do not understand. The situation has… changed.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Their conceit,’ said Sukul, ‘has made them real. Mortal, now. Blood, flesh and bone. Capable of bleeding, of dying. Yet they remain ignorant of their world’s imminent extinction. My slaughtering them, sister, will be an act of mercy.’
Sheltatha Lore grunted. ‘I cannot wait to hear them thank you.’
At that moment a gold and white dragon rose into view before them, sailing low over the crests of the hills.
Sukul Ankhadu sighed. ‘It begins.’
The Soletaken glided down the slope directly towards them. Looming huge, yet still fifty paces away, the dragon tilted its wings back, crooked them as its hind limbs reached downwards, then settled onto the ground.
A blurring swirl enveloped the beast, and a moment later Menandore walked out from that spice-laden disturbance.
Sheltatha Lore and Sukul Ankhadu waited, saying nothing, their faces expressionless, while Menandore approached, finally halting five paces from them, her blazing eyes moving from one sister to the other, then back again. She said, ‘Are we still agreed, then?’
‘Such glorious precedent, this moment,’ Sheltatha Lore observed.
Menandore frowned. ‘Necessity. At least we should be understood on that matter. I cannot stand alone, cannot guard the soul of Scabandari. The Finnest must not fall in his hands.’
A slight catch of breath from Sukul. ‘Is he near, then?’
‘Oh yes. I have stolen the eyes of one travelling with him. Again and again. They even now draw to the last gate, and look upon its wound, and stand before the torn corpse of that foolish Imass Bonecaster who thought she could seal it with her own soul.’ Menandore sneered. ‘Imagine such effrontery. Starvald Demelain! The very chambers of K’rul’s heart! Did she not know how that weakened him? Weakened everything7.’