Reaper's Gate & Toll the Hounds - By Steven Erikson Page 0,686

musicians are swallowed in flames

Every instrument blackening and crumbling to ash

When the dancers stumble and sprawl their diseased limbs

rotting off and twitching the skin sloughing away

Will you come and tell me when the music ends

When the stars we pushed into the sky loose their roars

And the clouds we built into visible rage do now explode

When the bright princes of privilege march past with

dead smiles

falling from their faces a host of deceiving masks

Will you come and tell me when the music ends

When reason sinks into the morass of superstition

Waging a war of ten thousand armies stung to the lash

When we stop looking up even as we begin our mad running

into stupidity's nothingness with heavenly choirs screaming

Will you come and tell me when the music ends

When the musicians are no more than black grinning sticks

Every instrument wailing its frantic death cry down the road

When the ones left standing have had their mouths cut off

leaving holes from which a charnel wind eternally blows

Will you come and tell me when the music ends

The fire is eating my breath and agony fills this song

When my fingers crack on the strings and fall from my hands

And this dance twists every muscle like burning rope

while your laughter follows down my crumpling corpse

Won't you come and tell me when the music ends

When I can leap away and face one god or a thousand

Or nothing at all into this blessed bliss of oblivion

When I can prise open this box and release cruel and

bitter fury

at all the mad fools crowding the door in panicked flight

Watch me and watch me with eyes wide and shocked

With disbelief with horror with indignant umbrage to upbraid

And the shouted Nays are like drumbeats announcing a truth

The music ends my friends, my vile, despicable friends, and see me –

see me slam the door slam it hard – in all your faces!

The Music Ends

Fisher kel Tath

His boots crunched on water-worn stones slick with mist as he made his way to the water's edge. The steep slopes of the surrounding mountainsides were verdant, thick rainforest, crimson-barked trees towering high, beards of moss hanging from toppled trunks.

Endest Silann leaned on his stolid walking stick, the muscles of his legs trembling. He looked round as he slowly regained his breath. It was chilly, the sun's arc just slipping past the western peaks, and shadow swallowed the river valley.

Black water rushed by and he felt its cold – no need to squat down, no need to slide a hand into the tugging current. This dark river was, he could see now, nothing like Dorssan Ryl. How could he have expected otherwise? The new is ever but a mangled echo of the old and whatever whispers of similarity one imagined do naught but sting with pain, leaving one blistered with loss. Oh, he had been a fool, to have journeyed all this way. Seeking what? Even that he could not answer.

No, perhaps he could. Escape. Brief, yes, but escape none the less. The coward flees, knowing he must return, wishing that the return journey might kill him, take his life as it did the old everywhere. But listen! You can shape your soul – make it a bucket, a leaking one that you carry about. Or your soul can be a rope, thick and twisted, refusing to break even as it buckles to one knot after another. Choose your image, Endest Silann. You are here, you've made it this far, haven't you? And as he told you . . . not much farther to go. Not much farther at all.

He smelled woodsmoke.

Startled, alarmed, he turned away from the rush of the river. Faced upstream whence came the late afternoon breeze. There, in distant gloom, the muted glow of a campfire.

Ah, no escape after all. He'd wanted solitude, face to face with intractable, indifferent nature. He'd wanted to feel . . .

irrelevant. He'd wanted the wildness to punch him senseless, leave him humiliated, reduced to a wretch. Oh, he had wanted plenty, hadn't he?

With a sour grunt, Endest Silann began walking upstream. At the very least, the fire would warm his hands.

Thirty paces away, he could see the lone figure facing the smoky flames. Huge, round-shouldered, seated on a fallen log. And Endest Silann smiled in recognition.

Two trout speared on skewers cooked above the fire. A pot of simmering tea sat with one blackened shoulder banked in coals. Two tin cups warmed on the flat rock making up one side of the hearth.

Another log waited opposite the one on which sat the warlord,