And now, Nimander knew, heart-faced Phaed was planning matricide.

He admitted to his own doldrums-long periods of flat indifference-as if none of this was in fact worth thinking about. He had his private host of demons, after all, none of which seemed inclined to simply fade away. Unperturbed by the occasional neglect, they played on in their dark games, and the modest hoard of wealth that made up Nimander’s life went back and forth, until the scales spun without surcease. Clashing discord and chaos to mark the triumphant cries, the hissed curses, the careless scattering of coin. He often felt numbed, deafened.

It may have been that these were the traits of the Tiste Andii. Introverts devoid of introspection. Darkness in the blood. Chimerae, even unto ourselves. He’d wanted to care about the throne they had been defending, the one that Andarist died for, and he had led his charges into that savage battle without hesitation. Perhaps, even, with true eagerness.

Rush to death. The longer one lives, the less valued is that life. Why is that?

But that would be introspection, wouldn’t it? Too trying a task, pursuing such questions. Easier to simply follow the commands of others. Another trait of his kind, this comfort in following? Yet who stood among the Tiste Andii as symbols of respect and awe? Not young warriors like Nimander Golit. Not wicked Phaed and her vile ambitions.

Anomander Rake, who walked away. Andarist, his brother, who did not. Silchas Ruin-ah, such a family! Clearly unique among the brood of the Mother. They lived larger, then, in great drama. Lives tense and humming like bowstrings, the ferocity of truth in their every word, the hard, cruel exchanges that drove them apart when nothing else would. Not even Mother Dark’s turning away. Their early lives were poems of epic grandeur. And we? We are nothing. Softened, blunted, confused into obscurity. We have lost our simplicity, lost its purity. We are the Dark without mystery.

Sandalath Drukorlat-who had lived in those ancient times and must grieve in her soul for the fallen Tiste Andii-now turned about and with a gesture beckoned the motley survivors of Drift Avalii to follow. Onto the deck-‘you have hair, Nimander, the colour of starlight’-to look upon this squalid harbour town that would be their home for the next little eternity, to use Phaed’s hissing words.

‘It used to be a prison, this island. Full of rapists and murderers.’ A sudden look into his eyes, as if seeking something, then she gave him a fleeting smile that was little more than a showing of teeth and said, A good place for murder.’

Words that, millennia past, could have triggered a civil war or worse, the fury of Mother Dark herself. Words, then, that barely stirred the calm repose of Nimander’s indifference.

‘You have hair, Nimander, the colour of-’ But the past was dead. Drift Avalii. Our very own prison isle, where we learned about dying.

And the terrible price of following.

Where we learned that love does not belong in this world.

Chapter Fourteen

The pitched sweep of ice had gone through successive thaws and freezes until its surface was pocked and sculpted like the colourless bark of some vast toppled tree. The wind, alternating between warm and cold, moaned a chorus of forlorn voices through this muricated surface, and it seemed to Hedge that with each crunching stamp of his boot, a lone cry was silenced for ever. The thought left him feeling morose, and this motley scatter of refuse dotting the plain of ice and granulated snow only made things worse.

Detritus of Jaghut lives, slowly rising like stones in a farmer’s field. Mundane objects to bear witness to an entire people-if only he could make sense of them, could somehow assemble together all these disparate pieces. Ghosts, he now believed, existed in a perpetually confused state, the way before them an endless vista strewn with meaningless dross-the truths of living were secrets, the physicality of facts for ever withheld. A ghost could reach but could not touch, could move this and that, but never be moved by them. Some essence of empathy had vanished-but no, empathy wasn’t the right word. He could feel, after all. The way he used to, when he had been alive. Emotions swam waters both shallow and deep. Tactile empathy perhaps was closer to the sense he sought. The comfort of mutual resistance.

He had willed himself this shape, this body in which he now dwelt, walking heavily alongside the withered, animate carcass that was Emroth. And it seemed he could conjure a kind of physical continuity with everything around him-like the crunching of his feet-but he now wondered if that continuity was a delusion, as if in picking up this curved shell of some ancient broken pot just ahead of him he was not in truth picking up its ghost. But for that revelation his eyes were blind, the senses of touch and sound were deceits, and he was as lost as an echo.

They continued trudging across this plateau, beneath deep blue skies where stars glittered high in the vault directly overhead, a world of ice seemingly without end. The scree of garbage accompanied them on all sides. Fragments of cloth or clothing or perhaps tapestry, potsherds, eating utensils, arcane tools of wood or ground stone, the piece of a musical instrument that involved strings and raised finger-drums, the splintered leg of a wooden chair or stool. No weapons, not in days, and the one they had discovered early on-a spear shaft-had been Imass.

Jaghut had died on this ice. Slaughtered. Emroth had said as much. But there were no bodies, and there had been no explanation forthcoming from the T’lan Imass. Collected then, Hedge surmised, perhaps by a survivor. Did the Jaghut practise ritual interment? He had no idea. In all his travels, he could not once recall talk of a Jaghut tomb or burial ground. If they did such things, they kept them to themselves.

But when they died here, they had been on the run. Some of those swaths of material were from tents. Flesh and blood Imass did not pursue them-not across this lifeless ice. No, they must have been T’lan. Of the Ritual. Like Emroth here.

‘So,’ Hedge said, his own voice startlingly loud in his ears, ‘were you involved in this hunt, Emroth?’

‘I cannot be certain,’ she replied after a long moment. ‘It is possible.’

‘One scene of slaughter looks pretty much the same as the next, right?’

‘Yes. That is true.’

Her agreement left him feeling even more depressed.

‘There is something ahead,’ the T’lan Imass said. ‘We are, I believe, about to discover the answer to the mystery’

‘What mystery?’

‘The absence of bodies.’

‘Oh, that mystery’

Night came abruptly to this place, like the snuffing out of a candle. The sun, which circled just above the horizon through the day, would suddenly tumble, like a rolling ball, beneath the gleaming, blood-hued skyline. And the black sky would fill with stars that only faded with the coming of strangely coloured brushstrokes of light, spanning the vault, that hissed like sprinkled fragments of fine glass.

Hedge sensed that night was close, as the wind’s pockets of warmth grew more infrequent, the ember cast to what he assumed was west deepening into a shade both lurid and baleful.

He could now see what had caught Emroth’s attention. A hump on the plateau, ringed in dark objects. The shape rising from the centre of that hillock at first looked like a spar of ice, but as they neared, Hedge saw that its core was dark, and that darkness reached down to the ground.