Let’s play a game.
There is no gate-oh, you’ve seen it, I well know.
But it is a lie. It is what your mind builds, stone by stone.
For your kind love borders. Thresholds, divisions, delineations. To enter a place you believe you must leave another. But look around and you can see. There is no gate, my jriend.
I show you this. Again and again. The day you comprehend, the day wisdom comes to you, you will join me. The flesh that encompasses you is your final conceit. Abandon it, my love. You once scattered yourself and you will do so again. When wisdom arrives. Has wisdom arrived yet?
The wind’s efforts at seduction, its invitations to his accepting some kind of wilful dissolution, were getting irritating. Grunting, he pushed himself upright.
On the slope to his left, a hundred or more paces away, sprawled the skeleton of a dragon. Something had shattered its ribcage, puncturing blows driving shards and fragments inward-fatally so, he could see even from this distance. The bones looked strange, sheathed one and all in something like black, smoky glass. Glass that webbed down to the ground, then ran in frozen streams through furrows on the slope. As if the beast’s melting flesh had somehow vitrified.
He had seen the same on the two other dragon remains he had come across.
He stood, luxuriating in his conceit-in the dull pain in his lower back, the vague earache from the insistent wind, and the dryness at the back of his throat that forced him to repeatedly clear it. Which he did, before saying, ‘All the wonders and miseries of a body, wind, that is what you have forgotten. What you long for. You want me to join you? Ha, it’s the other way round.’
You will never win this game, my love-
‘Then why play it?’
He set off at an angle up the hillside. On the summit, he could see more stone rubble, the remnants of a temple that had dropped through a hole in the earth, plucked from mortal eyes in a conflagration of dust and thunder. Like cutting the feet out from under a god. Like obliterating a faith with a single slash of the knife. A hole in the earth, then, the temple’s pieces tumbling through the Abyss, the ethered layers of realm after realm, until they ran out of worlds to plunge through.
Knock knock, right on Hood’s head.
Your irreverence will deliver unto you profoundest regret, beloved.
‘My profoundest regret, wind, is that it never rains here. No crashing descent of water-to drown your every word.’
Your mood is foul today. This is not like you. We have played so many games together, you and I.
‘Your breath is getting cold.’
Because you are walking the wrong way!
‘Ah. Thank you, wind.’
A sudden bitter gust buffeted him, evincing its displeasure. Grit stung his eyes, and he laughed. ‘Hood’s secret revealed, at last. Scurry on back to him, wind, you have lost (his game.’
You fool. Ponder this question: among the fallen, among the dead, will you find more soldiers-more fighters than non-fighters? Will you find more men than women? More gods than mortals? More fools than the wise? Among the Fallen, my friend, does the echo of marching armies drown all else? Or the moans of the diseased, the cries of the starving?
‘I expect, in the end,’ he said after a moment, ‘it all evens out.’
You are wrong. I must answer you, even though it will break your heart. I must.
‘There is no need,’ he replied. ‘I already know.’
Do you? whispered the wind.
‘You want me to falter. In despair. I know your tricks, wind. And I know, too, that you are probably all that remains of some ancient, long-forgotten god. Hood knows, maybe you are all of them, their every voice a tangled mess, pushing dust and sand and little else. You want me to fall to my knees before you. In abject worship, because maybe then some trickle of power will come to you. Enough to make your escape.’ He grunted a laugh. ‘But this is for you to ponder, wind. Among all the fallen, why do you haunt me?’
Why not? You boldly assert bone and flesh. You would spit in I lood’s face-you would spit in mine if you could think of a way to dodge my spitting it right back.
Aye, I would at that. Which is my point. You chose wrongly, wind. Because I am a soldier.’
Let’s play a game.
‘Let’s not.’
Among the Fallen, who-
‘The answer is children, wind. More children than anyone else.’
Then where is your despair?
‘You understand nothing,’ he said, pausing to spit. ‘For a man or a woman to reach adulthood, they must first kill the child within them.’
You are a most vicious man, soldier.
‘You still understand nothing. I have just confessed my despair, wind. You win the game. You win every game. But I will march on, into your icy breath, because that’s what soldiers do.’
Odd, it does not feel as if I have won.
On a flat stretch of cold but not yet frozen mud, he came upon tracks. Broad, flattened and bony feet, one set, heading in the same direction. Someone… seeking perhaps what he sought. Water pooled in the deep prints, motionless and reflecting the pewter sky.
He crouched down, studying the deep impressions. ‘Be useful, wind. Tell me who walks ahead of me.’
Silent. One who does not play.
‘Is that the best you can do?’
Vndead.
He squinted down at the tracks, noting the wide, slightly misaligned gait, the faint streaks left by dangling tufts of hide, skins, whatever. T’lan Imass?’
Broken.
‘Two, maybe three leagues ahead of me.’
More. Water crawls slowly here.
‘I smell snow and ice.’
My breath betrays all that I devour. Turn back to a sweeter kiss, beloved.
‘You mean the reek of fly-swarmed swamp I’ve endured for the past two months?’ He straightened, adjusted his heavy pack.
You are cruel. At least the one ahead says nothing. Thinks nothing. Feels nothing.
‘T’lan Imass for certain, then.’
Broken.
‘Yes, I understood you the first time.’
What will you do?
‘If need be, I will give you a gift, wind.’
A gift? Oh, what is it?
‘A new game-you have to guess.’
I will think and think and-
‘Hood’s breath-oh-oh! Forget I just said that!’
– and think and think…
They rode hard, westward at first, paralleling the great river for most of two days, before reaching the feeder track that angled northerly towards Almas, a modest town distinguished only by its garrison and stables, where Atri-Preda Yan Tovis, Varat Taun and their Letherii company could rest, resupply and requisition fresh mounts.
Varat Taun knew flight when he saw it, when he found himself part of it. Away from Letheras, where, a day before their departure, the palace and barracks seemed caught in a rising storm of tension, the smell of blood heady in the air, a thousand rumours cavorting in all directions but none of them possessing much substance, beyond news relating the casting out of two families, the widows and children of two men who had been the Chancellor’s bodyguards, and who were clearly no longer among the living.
Had someone tried to assassinate Triban Gnol? He’d wondered that out loud early in this journey and his commander had simply grunted, as if nothing in the notion surprised or even alarmed her. Of course she knew more than she was letting on, but Twilight had never been free with her words.
Nor am I, it turns out. The horrors of what I witnessed in that cavern-no, nothing 1 can say could possibly convey the… the sheer extremity of the truth. So best leave it. The ones who will witness will not live long past the experience. What then will remain of the empire?
And is this not why we are running away?
A foreigner rode with them. A Mocker, Yan Tovis had said, whatever that meant. A monk of some sort. With the painted face of a cavorting mummer-what mad religion is that? Varat Taun could not recall the strange little man saying a word-perhaps he was mute, perhaps his tongue had been cut out. Cultists did terrible things to themselves. The journey across the seas and oceans of the world had provided a seemingly endless pageantry of bizarre cultures and customs. No amount of self-mutilation in misguided service to some god would surprise Varat Taun. The Mocker had been among the challengers, but the absurdity of this was now obvious-after the first day of riding he had been exhausted, reeling in the saddle. He was, evidently, a healer.