the hard, frozen earth, chanting an ancient dirge of blood? Were mortal men and women destined to cower beneath the terrible clash of ascendants? Above them all, the sky was split in two, the brittle light of morning to the east, the unyielding darkness of night in the west. None—not Barghast, not Akrynnai, not Saphii nor D’ras—had ever before seen such a sky. It filled them with terror.
Frost sheathed the grasses and glistened on iron and bronze as icy cold air flowed out from beneath the storm front. Among the two armies, no fierce songs or chants rang out in challenge. An unnatural silence gripped the forces, even at the moment when the two masses of humanity came within sight of each other.
Not a single bird rode the febrile sky.
Yet the Akrynnai army marched closer to its hated enemy; and the enemy stood motionless awaiting them.
A thousand paces west of the Barghast position lay the body of a woman, curled in the frozen grasses with her back against a lichen-skinned boulder. A place to lie down, the last nest of her last night. Frost glittered like diamond scales upon her pale skin.
She had died alone, forty paces from the corpse of her brother. But this death belonged to the flesh. The woman that had been Hetan, wife to Onos Toolan, mother of Absi, Stavi and Storii, had died some time earlier. The body will totter past the dead husk of its soul, sometimes for days, sometimes for years.
She lay on frozen ground, complete in her scene of solitary surrender. Did the sky above blink in witness? Not even once? When a sky blinks, how long does it take between the sweep of darkness and the rebirth of light?
The ghosts, their wings burnt down to black stumps, waited to tell her the answers to those questions.
Saddic, are you still alive? I have dreamed a thing. This thing was a vision, the death of a lizard-wolf lying curled on its side, the danger of bones beneath the sun. Listen to my dream, Saddic, and remember.
Greed is the knife in the sheath of ambition. You see the wicked gleam when you’ve drawn too close. Too close to get away, and as I told you: greed invites death, and now death takes her twice. This thing was a vision. She died not forty paces from her brother, and above her two armies war in the heavens, and beasts that are brothers are about to lock jaws upon each other’s throat. Strange names, strange faces. Painted white like the Quitters. A man with sad eyes whose name is Sceptre Irkullas.
Such a sky, such a sky!
Greed and ambition, Saddic. Greed and treachery. Greed and justice. These are the reasons of fate, and every reason is a lie.
She was dead before dawn. I held her broken soul in my hands. I hold it still. As Rutt holds Held.
I knew a boy.
Absi, where are you?
Saddic listened, and then he said, ‘Badalle, I am cold. Tell me again about the fires. The wonderful fires.’
But these fires were burned down to cinders and ash. The cold was the cold of another world.
Saddic, listen. I have seen a door. Opening.
Chapter Eighteen
What feeds you is rent
With the claws of your need.
But needs dwell half in light
And half in darkness.
And virtue folds in the seam.
If the demand of need is life
Then suffering and death hold purpose.
But if we speak of want and petty desire
The seam folds into darkness
And no virtue holds the ground.
Needs and wants make for a grey world.
But nature yields no privilege.
And what is righteous will soon
Feed itself with the claws
Of your need, as life demands.
QUALITIES OF LIFE
SAEGEN
W
eak and exhausted, Yan Tovis had followed her brother through the gates and into the dead city of Kharkanas. The secret legends possessed by her bloodline had virtually carved into her soul the details before her. When she’d walked the bridge, the echo of the stones underfoot embraced her, as familiar and steeped in sorrow as a dead grandmother’s cloak. Passing beneath the storeyed arch, she felt as if she had returned home—but this home was a forgotten place, as if she had inherited someone else’s nostalgia. Her discomfort turned to distress as she emerged from the cool darkness and saw before her a silent, lifeless vista of tall, smoke-stained buildings, smeared towers and disfigured statues. Tiered gardens had grown past weeds and were now thick with twisted trees, the roots of which had burst the retaining walls, snaking down walls and buckling pavestones.