Midnight Tides & The Bonehunters - By Steven Erikson Page 0,568

and folded, forming high-walled basins, sinkholes and ravines filled with exfoliated slabs sheathed in slick, emerald-green moss. Tree-falls crowded these depressions, the black spruce's bark rough as sharkskin and the needleless, web-thick branches harsh as claws and unyielding.

Spears of sunlight reached down here and there, throwing motes of intense colour into an otherwise gloomy, cavernous world.

Towards dusk, Boatfinder led them to a treacherous scree, up which he scrambled. Karsa and Samar Dev, leading their horses, found the climb perilous, every foothold less certain than the last – moss giving way like rotted skin to expose sharp-edged angular rock and deep holes, any one of which could have snapped a horse-leg.

Sodden with grimy sweat, scratched and scraped, Samar Dev finally reached the summit, turning to guide her horse the last few steps. Before them wound more or less flat bedrock, grey with the skin of lichen. From modest depressions here and there rose white and jack pines, the occasional straggly oak, fringed in juniper and swaths of blueberry and wintergreen bushes. Sparrow-sized dragonflies darted through spinning clouds of smaller insects in the fading sunlight.

Boatfinder gestured northward. 'This path leads to a lake. We camp there.'

They set off.

No higher ground was visible in any direction, and as the elongated basolith twisted and turned, flanked every now and then by slightly lower platforms and snags, Samar Dev quickly realized how easy it would be to get lost in this wild land. The path bifurcated ahead and, approaching the junction, Boatfinder strode along the east edge, looking down for a time, then chose the ridge on the right.

Matching his route, Samar Dev glanced over the edge and saw what he had been searching for, a sinuous line of smallish boulders lying on a shelf of stone slightly below them, the pattern creating something like a snake, the head consisting of a wedge-shaped, flattened rock, while at the other end the last stone of the tail was no bigger than her thumbnail. Lichen covered the stones, bunching round each one to suggest that the trail-marker was very old. There was nothing obvious in the petroform that would make the choice of routes clear, although the snake's head was aligned in the direction they were walking.

'Boatfinder,' she called out, 'how is it that you read this serpent of boulders?'

He glanced back at her. 'A snake is away from the heart. A turtle is the heart's path.'

'All right, then why aren't they on this higher ground, so you don't have to look for them?'

'When the black grain is carried south, we are burdened – neither turtle nor snake must lose shape or pattern. We run these stone roads. Burdened.'

'Where do you take the harvest?'

'To our gather camps on the plains. Each band. We gather the harvest. Into one. And divide it, so that each band has sufficient grain. Lakes and rivers and their shores cannot be trusted. Some harvest yields true. Other harvest yields weak. As water rises and as water falls. It is not the same. The flat-rock seeks to be level, across all the world, but it cannot, and so water rises and water falls. We do not kneel before inequity, else we ourselves discard fairness and knife finds knife.'

'Old rules to deal with famine,' Samar said, nodding.

'Rules in the frozen time.'

Karsa Orlong looked at Samar Dev. 'What is this frozen time, witch?'

'The past, Teblor.'

She watched his eyes narrow thoughtfully, then he grunted and said, 'And the unfound time is the future, meaning that now is the flowing time—'

'Yes!' Boatfinder cried. 'You speak life's very secret!'

Samar Dev pulled herself into the saddle – on this ridge they could ride their horses – carefully. She watched Karsa Orlong follow suit, as a strange stillness filled her being. Born, she realized, of Boatfinder's words. 'Life's very secret.' This flowing time not yet frozen and only now found out of the unfound. 'Boatfinder, the Iron Prophet came to you long ago – in the frozen time – yet he spoke to you of the unfound time.'

'Yes, you understand, witch. Iskar Jarak speaks but one language, yet within it is each and all. He is the Iron Prophet. The King.'

'Your king, Boatfinder?'

'No. We are his shadows.'

'Because you exist only in the flowing time.'

The man turned and made a reverent bow that stirred something within Samar Dev. 'Your wisdom honours us, witch,' he said.

'Where,' she asked, 'is Iskar Jarak's kingdom?'

Sudden tears in the man's eyes. 'An answer we yearn to find. It is lost—'

'In the unfound time.'

'Yes.'

'Iskar Jarak was a