he did, he’d done for a reason. As simple as that.
But so many were hurt, Sheb.
‘Not my fault they couldn’t get out of the way. If they’d any brains they’d have seen me coming.’
The way you lived forced others into lives of misery, Sheb.
‘I can’t help it if they couldn’t do no better!’
They couldn’t. They weren’t even people.
‘What?’ He looked up, into the killer’s eyes. ‘No, it’s not fair.’
‘That’s right, Sheb. It isn’t, and it never was.’
The blade lashed out.
The ghost shrieked. Suddenly trapped in the Matron’s chamber. Mists roiled. Rautos was on his knees, weeping uncontrollably. Breath was casting her tiles, which were no longer tiles, but coins, glittering and bright—yet every pattern she scanned elicited a snarl from her, and she swept them up yet again—the manic snap and bounce of coins filled the air.
‘No answers,’ she hissed. ‘No answers! No answers!’
Taxilian stood before the enormous throne, muttering under his breath. ‘Sulkit transformed it—and now it waits—everything waits. I don’t understand.’
Sulkit stood nearby. Its entire body had changed shape, elongating, shoulders hunched, its snout foreshortened and broader, fangs gleaming wet with oils. Grey reptilian eyes held fixed, unblinking—the drone was a drone no longer. Now a J’an Sentinel, he stood facing the ghost.
The unhuman regard was unbearable.
Veed strode into the chamber and halted. Sword blade dripping gore, the front of his studded vest spattered and streaked. His face was lifeless. His eyes were the eyes of a blind man. ‘Hello, old friend,’ he said. ‘Where should I start?’
The ghost recoiled.
Rautos stood facing his wife. Another evening spent in silence, but now there was something raw in the air. She was searching his face and her expression was strange and bleak. ‘Have you no pity, husband?’
‘Pity,’ he’d replied, ‘is all I have.’
She’d looked away. ‘I see.’
‘You surrendered long ago,’ he said. ‘I never understood that.’
‘Not everyone surrenders willingly, Rautos.’
He studied her. ‘But where did you find your joy, Eskil? Day after day, night after night, where was your pleasure in living?’
‘You stopped looking for that long ago.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You found your hobbies. The only time your eyes came alive. My joy, husband, was in you. Until you went away.’
Yes, he remembered this now. One night, one single night. ‘That was wrong,’ he’d said, his voice hoarse. ‘To put all that . . . in someone else.’
Her shrug horrified him. ‘Overwhelmed, were you? But Rautos, that’s just not so, is it? After all, you can’t be overwhelmed by something you don’t even bother to notice.’
‘I noticed.’
‘And so you turned away from me. Until, as you say, here you stand with nothing in your heart but pity. You once said you loved me.’
‘I once did.’
‘Rautos Hivanar, what are these things you are digging up from the river bank?’
‘Mechanisms. I think.’
‘What so fascinates you about them?’
‘I don’t know. I cannot glean their purpose, their function—why are we talking about this?’
‘Rautos, listen. They’re just pieces. The machine, whatever it was, whatever it did, it’s broken.’
‘Eskil, go to bed.’
And so she did, ending the last real conversation between them. He remembered sitting down, his hands to his face, outwardly silent and motionless yet inside he was wracked with sobs. Yes, it was broken. He knew that. And not a single piece left made any sense. And all his pity, well, turned out it was all he had for himself, too.
Rautos felt the bite of the blade and in the moment before the pain rushed in, he managed a smile.
Veed stood over the corpse, and then swung his gaze to Taxilian. Held there for a moment, before his attention drifted to Breath. She was on her knees, scraping coins into her hands.
‘No solutions. No answers. They should be here, in these! These fix everything—everyone knows that! Where is the magic?’
‘Illusions, you mean,’ Veed said, grinning.
‘The best kind! And now the water’s rising—I can’t breathe!’
‘He should never have accepted you, Feather Witch. You understand that, don’t you? Yes, they were all mistakes, all fragments of lives he took inside like so much smoke and dust, but you were the worst of them. The Errant drowned you—and then walked away from your soul. He should not have done that, for you were too potent, too dangerous. You ate his damned eye.’
Her head snapped up, a crazed grin smeared across her face. ‘Elder blood! I hold his debt!’
Veed glanced at the ghost. ‘He sought to do what K’rul did so long ago,’ he said, ‘but Icarium is not an Elder God.’ He regarded Feather Witch again. ‘He