Midnight Tides & The Bonehunters - By Steven Erikson Page 0,712

... reaching ...

What is this sound? Where am I?

A million voices – screaming, plunging into terrible death – oh, they had travelled the dark span for so long, weightless, seeing before them that vast ... emptiness. Unmindful of their arguing, their discussions, their fierce debates, it swallowed them. Utterly. Then, out, through to the other side ... a net of power spreading out, something eager for mass, something that grew ever stronger, and the journey was suddenly in crazed, violent motion – a world beneath – so many lost then – and beyond it, another, this one larger—

'Oh, hear us, so many ... annihilated. Mountains struck to dust, rock spinning away into dark, blinding clouds that scintillated in harsh sunlight – and now, this beast world that fills our vision – is this home?

'Have we come home?'

Reaching ... hands of jade, dusty, raw, not yet polished into lurid brightness. I remember ... you had to die, Treach, didn't you? Before ascendancy, before true godhood. You had to die first.

Was I ever your Destriant?

Did that title ever belong to me?

Did I need to be killed?

Reaching – these hands, these unknown, unknowable hands – how can I answer these screams? These millions in their shattered prisons – I touched, once, fingertip to fingertip, I touched, oh ... the voices—

'This is not salvation. We simply die. Destruction—'

'No, no, you fool. Home. We have come home—'

'Annihilation is not salvation. Where is he? Where is our god?'

'I tell you, the search ends'.'

'No argument there.'

Listen to me.

'Who is that?'

'He returns! The one outside – the brother!'

Listen to me, please. I – I'm not your brother. I'm no-one. I thought ... Destriant ... did I know it for certain? Have I been lied to? Destriant ... well, maybe, maybe not. Maybe we all got it wrong, every one of us. Maybe even Treach got it wrong.

'He has lost his mind.'

'Forget him – look, death, terrible death, it comes—'

'Mad? So what. I'd rather listen to him than any of you. He said listen, he said that, and so I shall.'

'We will all listen, idiot – we have no choice, have we?'

Destriant. We got it all wrong. Don't you see? All I have done ... cannot be forgiven. Can never be forgiven – he's sent me back. Even Hood – he's rejected me, flung me back. But ... it's slipping away, so tenuous, I am failing—

'Failing, falling, what's the difference?'

Reaching.

'What?'

My hands – do you see them? Cut loose, that's what happened. The hands ... cut loose. Freed. I can't do this ... but I think they can. Don't you see?

'Senseless words.'

'No, wait—'

Not Destriant.

Shield Anvil.

Reaching ... look upon me – all of you! Reach! See my hands! See them! They're reaching – reaching out for you!

They ... are ... reaching ...

Barathol swam down into darkness. He could see nothing. No-one. Chaur, oh gods, what have J done? He continued clawing his way downward. Better he drowned as well – he could not live with this, not with that poor manchild's death on his hands – he could not—

His own breath was failing, the pressure closing in, pounding in his skull. He was blind—

A flash of emerald green below, blooming, incandescent, billowing out – and at its core – Oh gods, wait – wait for me—

Limp, snagged in unravelled folds of canvas, Chaur was sinking, arms out to the sides, his eyes closed, his mouth ... open.

No! No, no!

From the pulsing glow, heat – such heat – Barathol fought closer, his chest ready to explode – and reached down, down—

A section of the aft deck floated free from what was now little more than pummelled wreckage. The firestones tore down on all sides as Cutter struggled to help Scillara clamber onto the pitching fragment. Those firestones – they were smaller than pebbles, despite the fist-sized holes they had punched through the Grief. Smaller than pebbles – more like grains of sand, glowing bright green, like spatters of glass, their colour changing, almost instantly, into rust red as they plummeted into the depths.

Scillara cried out.

'Are you hit? Oh, gods – no—'

She twisted round. 'Look! Hood take us – look!' And she lifted an arm, pointed as a swelling wave lifted them – pointed eastward—

Towards Otataral Island.

It had ... ignited. Jade green, a glowing dome that might have spanned the entire island, writhing, lifting skyward, and, rising up through it ... hands. Of jade. like ... like Heboric's. Rising, like trees. Arms – huge – dozens of them – rising, fingers spreading, green