Reaper's Gate & Toll the Hounds - By Steven Erikson Page 0,842

rather imposing woman whose dignity was marred by the self-satisfied smirk on her face.

As Scillara passed behind the woman, she took hold of her braid and gave it a sharp downward tug.

'Ow!' The woman whirled, her expression savage.

'Sorry,' Scillara said. 'Must have caught on my bracelet.'

And as Scillara continued on down the street, she heard, from the squad officer: 'She's not wearing any bracelet.'

The Guild woman hissed and said, 'I want her—' And then Scillara turned the corner. She did not expect the officer to send anyone in pursuit. The man was doing his job and had no interest in complicating things.

'And there I was,' she muttered under her breath, 'about to trap a very fine man in my messed-up web. Hoping – praying – that he'd be the one to untangle my life.' She snorted. 'Just my luck.'

From rank superstitions to scholarly treatises, countless generations had sought understanding of those among them whose minds stayed undeveloped, childlike or, indeed, seemingly trapped in some other world. God and demon possession, stolen souls, countless chemical imbalances and unpleasant humours, injuries sustained at birth or even before; blows to the head as a child; fevers and so on. What could never be achieved, of course (barring elaborate, dangerous rituals of spirit-walking), was to venture into the mind of one thus afflicted.

It would be easy to assume an inner world of simple feelings, frightening unknowns and the endless miasma of confusion. Or some incorporeal demon crouched down on every thought, crushing the life from it, choking off every possible passage to awareness. Such assumptions, naturally, are but suppositions, founded only on external observation: the careful regard of seemingly blank eyes and stupid smiles, repetitive behaviour and unfounded fears.

Hold tight, then, this hand, on this momentary journey into Chaur's mind.

The world he was witness to was a place of objects, some moving, some never moving, and some that were still but could be moved if one so willed it. These three types were not necessarily fixed, and he well knew that things that seemed destined to immobility could suddenly come awake, alive, in explosive motion. Within himself, Chaur possessed apprehensions of all three, in ever shifting forms. There was love, a deeply rooted object, from which came warmth, and joy, and a sense of perfect well-being. It could, on occasion, reach out to take in another – someone or something on the outside – but, ultimately, that was not necessary. The love was within him, its very own world, and he could go there any time he liked. This was expressed in a rather dreamy smile, an expression disengaged with everything on the outside.

Powerful as it was, love was vulnerable. It could be wounded, jabbed into recoiling pain. When this happened, another object was stirred awake. It could be called hate, but its surface was mottled with fear and anger. This object was fixed as deeply in his soul as was love, and the two needed each other even if their relationship was strained, fraught. Prodded into life by love's pain, hate opened eyes that could only look outward – never to oneself, never even to the identity known as Chaur. Hate blazed in one direction and one only – to the outer world with its objects, some moving, some not, some that might do either, shifting from one to the next and back again.

Hate could, if it must, make use of Chaur's body. In lashing out, in a frenzied reordering of the world. To bring it back into the right shape, to force an end to whatever caused love its pain.

All of this depended upon observation, but such observation did not rely overmuch on what he saw, or heard, smelled, touched or tasted. Hate's secret vision was much sharper – it saw colours that did not exist for others, and those colours were, on an instinctive level, encyclopedic. Seeing them, hate knew everything. Knew, indeed, far beyond what a normal mind might achieve.

Was this little more than a peculiar sensitivity to nonverbal communication? Don't ask Chaur. He is, after all, in his own world.

His object called hate had a thing about blood. Its hue, the way it flowed, the way it smelled and tasted, and this was a bizarre truth: his hate loved blood. To see it, to immerse oneself in it, was to feel joy and warmth and contentment.

The guards flanking Chaur, walking at ease and with modest thoughts of their own, had no inkling of all that swirled in the seemingly