The guard had halted, had turned to regard the Trell as he spoke. Just beyond the alley’s mouth was a wall and, to the left, the unlit cave of a tunnel or a gate. After a moment the man grunted, then led Mappo on, into the reeking passageway through the wall, where the Trell warrior was forced to duck.
‘You must be a formidable tribe back in your homeland,’ the guard observed, ‘if your kin are as big and broad as you are.’
‘Alas, we are, generally, not killers, sir. If we had been, perhaps we would have fared better. As it is, the glory of my people has waned.’ Mappo then halted and looked back at the gate they had just passed through. He could see that the wall was but a fragment, a stretch no more than fifty paces in length. At both ends leaning buildings thrust into the spaces where it should have continued on.
The guard laughed. ‘Aye, not much left of the Gadrobi Wall. Just this one gate, and it’s used mostly by thieves and the like. Come, not much further.’
The Temple of Burn had seen better days. Graffiti covered the plain limestone walls, some the blockish list of prayers, others elliptical sigils and obscure local symbols. A few raw curses, or so Mappo suspected from the efforts made to deface the messages. Rubbish clogged the gutter surrounding the foundations, through which rats ambled.
The guard led him along the wall and to the right, where they came out on to a slightly wider thoroughfare. The temple’s formal entrance was a descending set of stairs, down to a landing that looked ankle deep in rainwater. Mappo regarded it in some dismay.
The guard seemed to notice. ‘Yes, the cult is fading. She had slept too long, I suppose. I know I have no business asking, but what do you seek here?’
‘I am not sure,’ Mappo admitted.
‘Ah. Well, Burn’s blessings on you, then.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
The guard set out to retrace his route, no doubt returning to the alley with the corpses. The memory of them remained with Mappo, leaving him with a gnawing disquiet. He had glimpsed something of the mysterious wounds on the second body. Brutal indeed. Would there could be an end to such things, yes. A true bless-, ing of peace.
He made his way down the steps. Splashed through the pool to the doors.
They opened before he could knock.
A gaunt, sad-faced man stood before him. ‘You had to know, Mappo Runt of the Trell, that it could not last. You stand before me like a severed limb, and all that you bleed stains the ether, a flow seeming without end.’
‘There will be an end,’ Mappo replied. ‘When I have found him once more.’
‘He is not here.’
‘I know,’
‘Would you walk the veins of the earth, Mappo Runt? to that why you have come to this temple?’
‘Yes.’
‘You choose a most perilous path. There is poison. There is bitter cold. Ice, stained with foreign blood. There to are that blinds those who wield it. There is wind that cries out an eternal death cry. There is darkness and it is crowded. There is grief, more than even you can withstand. There is yielding and that which will not yield. Pressures too vast even for one such as you. Will you still walk Hum’s Path, Mappo Runt?’
‘I must.’
The sad face looked even sadder. ‘I thought as much. I could have made my list of warnings even longer, you know. We could have stood in our places for the rest of the night, you in that sodden pool, me standing here uttering dire details. And still, at long last, you would say “I must” and we would have wasted all that time. Me hoarse and you asleep on your feet.’
‘You sound almost regretful, Priest.’
‘Perhaps I am at that. It was a most poetic list.’
‘Then by all means record it in full when you write your log of this fell night.’
‘I like that notion. Thank you. Now, come inside, and wipe your feet. But hurry-we have been preparing the ritual since your ship docked.’
‘The breadth of your knowledge is impressive,’ Mappo said as, ducking, he stepped inside.
‘Yes, it is. Now, follow me.’
A short corridor, ceiling dripping, into a broader transept, across a dingy mosaic floor, down a second corridor, this one lined with niches, each home to a holy object-misshapen chunks of raw ore, crystals of white, rose and purple quartz and amethyst, starstones, amber, copper, flint and petrified wood and bones. At the end of this passage the corridor opened out into a wider colonnaded main chamber, and here, arrayed in two rows, waited acolytes, each wearing brown robes and holding aloft a torch.
The acolytes chanted in some arcane tongue as the High Priest led Mappo down between the rows.
Where an altar should have been, at the far end, there was instead a crevasse in the floor, as if the very earth had opened up beneath the altar, swallowing it and the dais it stood on. From the fissure rose bitter, hot smoke.
The sad-faced High Priest walked up to its very, edge then turned to face Mappo. ‘Burn’s Gate awaits you, Trell.’
Mappo approached and looked down.
To see molten rock twenty spans below, a seething river sweeping past.
‘Of course,’ the High Priest said, ‘what you see is not in this realm. Were it so, Darujhistan would now be a ball of fire bright as a newborn sun. The caverns of gas and all that.’
if I jump down there,’ Mappo said, ‘I will be roasted to a crisp.’
‘Yes. I know what you must be thinking.’
‘Oh?’
‘Some gate.’
‘Ah, yes. Accurate enough.’
‘You must be armoured against such forces. This is the ritual I mentioned ear¬lier. Are you ready, Mappo Runt?’
‘You wish to cast some sort of protective spell on me?’
‘No,’ he replied, with an expression near to weeping, ‘we wish to bathe you in blood.’
Barathol Mekhar could see the pain in Scillara’s eyes, when they turned inward in a private moment, and he saw how Chaur held himself close to her, protective in some instinctive fashion as might be a dog with a wounded master. When she caught Barathol studying her, she was quick with a broad smile, and each time he felt as if something struck his heart, like a fist against a closed door. She was indeed a most beautiful woman, the kind of beauty that emerged after a second look, or even a third, unfolding like a dark flower in jungle shadows. The pain in those eyes only deepened his anguish.
Cutter was a damned fool. Yes, there had been another woman-his first love, most likely-but she was gone. Time had come to cut the anchor chain. No one could drown for ever. This was what came of being so young, and deftness with knives was a poor replacement for the skill of surviving everything the world could throw in the way. Longing for what could never be found was pointless, a waste of time.
Barathol had left his longing behind, somewhere in the sands of Seven Cities. A sprawl of motionless bodies, mocking laughter disguised as unceasing wind, a lizard perched like a gift on a senseless black-crusted hand. Moments of madness-oh, long before the madness of the T’lan Imass in Aren-when he had railed at remorseless time, at how too late was something that could not be changed-not with blood spilled at the foot of a god, not with a knife poised to carve out his own heart. Too late simply grinned at him, lifeless, too poignant for sanity.
Those two words had begun a chant, then stride by stride a gleeful echo, and they had lifted to a roar in the raiders’ camp, amidst screams and the clash of iron; lifted, yes, into a deafening maelstrom that crashed inside Barathol’s skull, a surging tide with nowhere to go. Too late cannot be escaped. It crooned with every failed parry, every failed dodge from a scything weapon. It exploded in eyes as death hammered home, exploded along with blood and fluids. It lunged in the wake of toppling bodies. It scrawled messages (ever the same message) in the sands dying men crawled across.
He could have chanted for ever, but he had left no one alive. Oh, a dozen horses that he gave away to a caravan some days later, a gift for taking in the half-dead warrior, for treating his raging fever, for cleaning his wounds and burning out infection. They would accept no payment for their efforts-they could do nothing for the bleak anguish in his soul, they explained, and so to ask for anything would be dishonourable. Now a gift, well, that was different.