Reaper's Gale
Anomander Rake, who walked away. Andarist, his brother, who did not. Silchas Ruin-ah, such a family! Clearly unique among the brood of the Mother. They lived larger, then, in great drama. Lives tense and humming like bowstrings, the ferocity of truth in their every word, the hard, cruel exchanges that drove them apart when nothing else would. Not even Mother Dark’s turning away. Their early lives were poems of epic grandeur. And we? We are nothing. Softened, blunted, confused into obscurity. We have lost our simplicity, lost its purity. We are the Dark without mystery.
Sandalath Drukorlat-who had lived in those ancient times and must grieve in her soul for the fallen Tiste Andii-now turned about and with a gesture beckoned the motley survivors of Drift Avalii to follow. Onto the deck-‘you have hair, Nimander, the colour of starlight’-to look upon this squalid harbour town that would be their home for the next little eternity, to use Phaed’s hissing words.
‘It used to be a prison, this island. Full of rapists and murderers.’ A sudden look into his eyes, as if seeking something, then she gave him a fleeting smile that was little more than a showing of teeth and said, A good place for murder.’
Words that, millennia past, could have triggered a civil war or worse, the fury of Mother Dark herself. Words, then, that barely stirred the calm repose of Nimander’s indifference.
And the terrible price of following.
Where we learned that love does not belong in this world.
Chapter Fourteen
Seeing in the vessel’s cup a thousand cracks I looked back the way I came and saw a trail green with memories lost whoever made this bowl was a fool but the greater he who carried it.
– Stone Bowl , Fisher kel Tath
The pitched sweep of ice had gone through successive thaws and freezes until its surface was pocked and sculpted like the colourless bark of some vast toppled tree. The wind, alternating between warm and cold, moaned a chorus of forlorn voices through this muricated surface, and it seemed to Hedge that with each crunching stamp of his boot, a lone cry was silenced for ever. The thought left him feeling morose, and this motley scatter of refuse dotting the plain of ice and granulated snow only made things worse.
He had willed himself this shape, this body in which he now dwelt, walking heavily alongside the withered, animate carcass that was Emroth. And it seemed he could conjure a kind of physical continuity with everything around him-like the crunching of his feet-but he now wondered if that continuity was a delusion, as if in picking up this curved shell of some ancient broken pot just ahead of him he was not in truth picking up its ghost. But for that revelation his eyes were blind, the senses of touch and sound were deceits, and he was as lost as an echo.
They continued trudging across this plateau, beneath deep blue skies where stars glittered high in the vault directly overhead, a world of ice seemingly without end. The scree of garbage accompanied them on all sides. Fragments of cloth or clothing or perhaps tapestry, potsherds, eating utensils, arcane tools of wood or ground stone, the piece of a musical instrument that involved strings and raised finger-drums, the splintered leg of a wooden chair or stool. No weapons, not in days, and the one they had discovered early on-a spear shaft-had been Imass.
Jaghut had died on this ice. Slaughtered. Emroth had said as much. But there were no bodies, and there had been no explanation forthcoming from the T’lan Imass. Collected then, Hedge surmised, perhaps by a survivor. Did the Jaghut practise ritual interment? He had no idea. In all his travels, he could not once recall talk of a Jaghut tomb or burial ground. If they did such things, they kept them to themselves.