Toll the Hounds Part 99

'Something has happened to you,' she continued. 'When you awoke in Bastion, you were . . . changed. I thought it was some sort of residue from the possession. Now, I am not so sure.'

He put away the chain and rings and then slid down from the boulder, landing lightly and taking a moment to straighten his cloak. 'Of them all,' he said in a low voice, 'you, Kedeviss, are the sharpest. You see what the others do not.'

'I make a point of paying attention. You've hidden yourself well, Clip or whoever you now are.'

'Not well enough, it seems.'

'What do you plan to do?' she asked him. 'Anomander Rake will see clearly, the moment he sets his eyes upon you.

And no doubt there will be others.'

'I was Herald of Dark,' he said.

'I doubt it,' she said.

'I was Mortal Sword to the Black-Winged Lord, to Rake himself.'

'He didn't choose you, though, did he? You worshipped a G.o.d who never answered, not a single prayer. A G.o.d who, in all likelihood, never even knew you existed.'

'And for that,' whispered Clip, 'he will answer.'

Her brows rose. 'Is this a quest for vengeance? If we had known-'

'What you knew or didn't know is irrelevant.'

'A Mortal Sword serves.'

'I said, Kedeviss, I was was a Mortal Sword a Mortal Sword.'

'No longer, then. Very well, Clip, what are you now?'

In the grainy half-light she saw him smile, and something dark veiled his eyes. 'One day, in the sky over Bastion, a warren opened. A machine tumbled out, and down-'

She nodded. 'Yes, we saw that machine.'

'The one within brought with him a child G.o.d oh, not deliberately. No, the mechanism of his sky carriage, in creating gates, in travelling from realm to realm, by its very nature cast a net, a net that captured this child G.o.d. And dragged it here.'

'And this traveller what happened to him?'

Clip shrugged.

She studied him, head c.o.c.ked to one side. 'We failed, didn't we?'

He eyed her, as if faintly amused.

'We thought we'd driven the Dying G.o.d from you instead, we drove him deeper. By destroying the cavern realm where he dwelt.'

'You ended his pain, Kedeviss,' said Clip. 'Leaving only his . . . hunger.'

'Rake will destroy you. Nor,' she added, 'will we accompany you to Black Coral. Go your own way, G.o.dling. We shall find our own way there-'

He was smiling. 'Before me? Shall we race, Kedeviss me with my hunger and you with your warning? Rake does not frighten me the Tiste Andii do not frighten me. When they see me, they will see naught but kin until it is too late.'

'G.o.dling, if in poring through Clip's mind you now feel you understand the Tiste Andii, I must tell you, you are wrong. Clip was a barbarian. Ignorant. A fool. He knew nothing.'

'I am not interested in the Tiste Andii oh, I will kill Rake, because that is what he deserves. I will feed upon him and take his power into me. No, the one I seek is not in Black Coral, but within a barrow outside the city. Another young G.o.d so young, so helpless, so naive.' His smile returned. 'And he knows I am coming for him.'

'Must we then stop you ourselves?'

'You? Nimander, Nenanda, all you pups pups? Now really, Kedeviss.'

'If you-'

His attack was a blur one hand closing about her throat, the other covering her mouth. She felt her throat being crushed and scrabbled for the knife at her belt.

He spun her round and flung her down to the ground, so hard that the back of her head crunched on the rocks. Dazed, her struggles weakened, flailed, fell away.

Something was pouring out from his hand where it covered her mouth, something that numbed her lips, her jaws, then forced its way into her mouth and down her throat. Thick as tree sap. She stared up at him, saw the muddy gleam of the Dying G.o.d's eyes dying no longer, now freed and thought: what have we done? what have we done?

He was whispering. 'I could stop now, and you'd be mine. It's tempting.'

Instead, whatever oozed from his hand seemed to burgeon, sliding like a fat, sleek serpent down her throat, coiling in her gut.

'But you might break loose just a moment's worth, but enough to warn the others, and I can't have that.'

Where the poison touched, there was a moment of ecstatic need, sweeping through her, but that was followed almost instantly by numbness, and then something . . . darker. She could smell her own rot, pooling like vapours in her brain.

He is killing me. Even that knowledge could not awaken any strength within her. Even that knowledge could not awaken any strength within her.

'I need the rest of them, you see,' he was saying. 'So we can walk in, right in, without anyone suspecting anything. I need my way in, that's all. Look at Nimander.' He snorted. 'There is no guile in him, none at all. He will be my shield. My shield.' My shield.'

He was no longer gripping her neck. It was no longer necessary.

Kedeviss stared up at him as she died, and her final, fading thought was: Nimander . . . guileless? Oh, but you don't . . . Nimander . . . guileless? Oh, but you don't . . . And then there was nothing. And then there was nothing.

The nothing that no priest dared speak of, that no holy scripture described, that no seer or prophet set forth in ringing proclamation. The nothing, this nothing, it is the soul in waiting.

Comes death, and now the soul waits.

Aranatha opened her eyes, sat up, then reached out to touch Nimander's shoulder. He awoke, looked at her with a question in his eyes.

'He has killed Kedeviss,' she said, the words soft as a breath.

Nimander paled.

'She was right,' Aranatha went on, 'and now we must be careful. Say nothing to anyone else, not yet, or you will see us all die.'

'Kedeviss.'

'He has carried her body to a creva.s.se, and thrown her into it, and now he makes signs on the ground to show her careless steps, the way the edge gave way. He will come to us in shock and grief. Nimander, you must display no suspicion, do you understand?'

And she saw that his own grief would sweep all else aside at least for now which was good. Necessary. And that the anger within him, the rage destined to come, would be slow to build, and as it did she would speak to him again, and give him the strength he would need.

Kedeviss had been the first to see the truth or so it might have seemed. But Aranatha knew that Nimander's innocence was not some innate flaw, not some fatal weakness. No, his innocence was a choice he had made. The very path of his life. And he had his reasons for that.

Easy to see such a thing and misunderstand it. Easy to see it as a failing, and then to believe him irresolute.

Clip had made this error from the very beginning. And so too this Dying G.o.d, who knew only what Clip believed, and thought it truth.

She looked down and saw tears held back, waiting for Clip's sudden arrival with his tragic news, and Aranatha nodded and turned away, to feign sleep.

Somewhere beyond the camp waited a soul, motionless as a startled hare. This was sad. Aranatha had loved Kedeviss dearly, had admired her cleverness, her percipience. Had cherished her loyalty to Nimander even though Kedeviss had perhaps suspected the strange circ.u.mstances surrounding Phaed's death, and had seen how Phaed and her secrets haunted Nimander still.

When one can possess loyalty even in the straits of full, brutal understanding, then that one understands all there is to understand about compa.s.sion.

Kedeviss, you were a gift. And now your soul waits, as it must. For this is the fate of the Tiste Andii. Our fate. We will wait.

Until the wait is over.

Endest Silann stood with his back to the rising sun. And to the city of Black Coral. The air was chill, damp with night's breath, and the road wending out from the gates that followed the coastline of the Cut was a bleak, colourless ribbon that snaked into stands of dark conifers half a league to the west. Empty of traffic.

The cloak of eternal darkness shrouding the city blocked the sun's stretching rays, although the western flanks of the jumbled slope to their right was showing gilt edges; and far off to the left, the gloom of the Cut steamed white from the smooth, black surface.

'There will be,' said Anomander Rake, 'unpleasantness.'

'I know, Lord.'

'It was an unantic.i.p.ated complication.'

'Yes, it is.'

'I will walk,' said Rake, 'until I reach the tree line. Out of sight, at least until then.'

'Have you waited too long, Lord?'

'No.'

'That is well, then.'

Anomander Rake rested a hand on Endest's shoulder. 'You have ever been, my friend, more than I deserve.'

Endest Silann could only shake his head, refuting that.

'If we are to live,' Rake went on, 'we must take risks. Else our lives become deaths in all but name. There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail should we fall we will know that we have lived.'

Endest nodded, unable to speak. There should be tears streaming down his face, but he was dry inside his skull, behind his eyes, all . . . dry. Despair was a furnace where everything had burned up, where everything was ashes, but the heat remained, scalding, brittle and fractious.

'The day has begun.' Rake withdrew his hand and pulled on his gauntlets. 'This walk, along this path . . . I will take pleasure in it, my friend. Knowing that you stand here to see me off.'

And the Son of Darkness set out.

Endest Silann watched. The warrior with his long silver hair flowing, his leather cloak flaring out. Dragnipur a scabbarded slash.

Blue seeped into the sky, shadows in retreat along the slope. Gold painted the tops of the tree line where the road slipped in. At the very edge, Anomander Rake paused, turned about and raised one hand high.

Endest Silann did the same, but the gesture was so weak it made him gasp, and his arm faltered.

And then the distant figure swung round.

And vanished beneath the trees.

BOOK FOUR - TOLL THE HOUNDS.

Like broken slate We take our hatred And pile it high Rolling with the hills A ragged line to map Our rise and fall And I saw suffused With the dawn Crows aligned in rows Along the crooked wall Come to feed

Bones lie scattered At the stone's foot The heaped ruin Of past a.s.saults The crows face each way To eye the pickings On both sides For all its weakness The world cannot break What we make Of our hatred

I watched the workers Carry each grey rock They laboured Blind and stepped Unerringly modest paths Piece by sheared piece They built a slaughter Of innocent others While muttering as they might Of waves of weather And goodly deeds We the Builders Hanasp Tular

CHAPTER NINETEEN.

Pray you never hear an imprecise breath Caught in its rough web Every G.o.d turns away at the end And not a whisper sounds Do not waste a lifetime awaiting death Caught in its rough web It hovers in the next moment you must attend As your last whisper sounds Pray you never hear an imprecise breath Rough Web Fisher

The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins in love and ends with grief.