House of Chains

And fragments, Karsa noted as he crouched, of bone. He picked one up and studied it in the starlight. From a skull, lowlander in scale though somewhat more robust, the outer edge of an eye socket. Thick… like that of my gods … ‘Bairoth Gild. Delum Thord. Do either of you sense the presence of a spirit or a god here?’

‘ No ,’ Delum Thord replied.

Bairoth spoke. ‘ A shaman was buried here, Warleader. His head was severed and left fixed in the apex of the four cardinal stones. Whoever shattered it did so long afterwards. Centuries. Perhaps millennia. So that it would no longer see. No longer watch .’

‘Then why is this place of value to me?’

‘ For the way through it offers, Warleader. ’

‘The way through what, Bairoth Gild?’

‘ Passage westward, into the Jhag Odhan. A trail in the dreamworld. A journey of months will become one of mere days, should you choose to walk it. It lives still, for it was used not long ago. By an army. ’

‘And how can I walk this trail?’

Delum Thord replied, ‘ We can lead you, Karsa Orlong. For, like the one once buried here, we are neither dead nor alive. The lord Hood cannot find our spirits, for they are here with you. Our presence adds to the god of death’s hatred of you, Warleader .’

‘Hatred?’

‘ For what you have taken and would not give to him. Will not. Would you become your own Keeper of Souls? So he must now fear. When last did Hood know a rival? ’

Karsa scowled and spat onto the ground. ‘I have no interest in being his rival. I would break these chains. I would free even you and Bairoth Gild.’

‘ We would rather you did not, Warleader. ’

‘You and Bairoth Gild are perhaps alone in that sentiment, Delum Thord.’

‘ What of it ?’ Bairoth snapped.

Karsa said nothing, for he had begun to understand the choice that lay ahead, sometime in the future. To cast off my enemies… I must also cast off my friends. And so Hood follows, and waits. For the day that must come .

‘ You hide your thoughts now, Karsa Orlong. This new talent does not please us. ’

‘I am warleader,’ Karsa growled. ‘It is not my task to please you. Do you now regret that you follow?’

‘ No, Karsa Orlong. Not yet .’

‘Take me into this trail in the dreamworld, Delum Thord.’

The air grew suddenly colder, the smell reminding Karsa of the sloped clearings on high mountain sides when spring arrived, the smell of enlivened, softened lichen and moss. And before him, where there had been night-softened farmland a moment ago, there was now tundra, beneath a heavily overcast sky.

A broad path lay before him, stretching across the rolling land, where the lichen had been crushed, the mosses kicked aside and trampled. As Bairoth Gild had said, an army had passed this way, although by the signs it seemed their journey had been but a moment ago-he half expected to see the tail end of that solemn column on the distant horizon, but there was nothing. Simply an empty, treeless expanse, stretching out on all sides. He moved forward, in the army’s wake.

This world seemed timeless, the sky unchanging. On occasion, herds appeared, too distant to make out the kind of beasts, rolling across hillsides then slipping from view as they streamed down into valleys. Birds flew in arrowhead formation, a strange long-necked breed high overhead, all of them consistently flying back the way Karsa had come. Apart from the whine of the insects swarming about the Teblor, a strange, unreal silence emanated from the landscape.

A dream world, then, such as the elders of his tribe were wont to visit, seeking portents and omens. The scene not unlike what Karsa had glimpsed when, in delirium, he had found himself before his god, Urugal.

He continued on.

Eventually, the air grew colder, and frost glittered amidst the lichen and moss to either side of the wide trail. The smell of rotting ice filled Karsa’s nose. Another thousand paces brought him to the first dirt-studded sweep of snow, filling a shallow valley on his right. Then shattered chunks of ice, half buried in the ground as if they had fallen from the sky, many of them larger than a lowlander wagon. The land itself was more broken here, the gentle roll giving way to sharp-walled drainage gullies and channels, to upthrust hillsides revealing banded sandstone beneath the frozen, thick skin of peat. Fissures in the stone gleamed with greenish ice.

Bairoth Gild spoke. ‘ We are now at the border of a new warren, Warleader. A warren inimical to the army that arrived here. And so, a war was waged .’

‘How far have I travelled, Bairoth Gild? In my world, am I approaching Ugarat? Sarpachiya?’