The Bonehunters

He looked round, trying to get his bearings. In this place, one direction was good as another. Barring the damned sea, of course. So, it's done. Time to explore…

The ghost left the wreckage of the destroyed statues behind, a lone, mostly insubstantial figure walking the denuded, muddy land. As bowlegged as he had been in life.

Dying left no details behind, after all. And most certainly, nothing like absolution awaited the fallen.

Absolution comes from the living, not the dead, and, as Hedge well knew, it has to be earned.

****
She was remembering things. Finally, after all this time. Her mother, camp follower, spreading her legs for the Ashok Regiment before it was sent to Genabackis. After it had left, she just went and died, as if without those soldiers she could only breathe out, never again in – and it was what you drew in that gave you life. So, just like that.

Dead. Her offspring was left to fare for itself, alone, uncared for, unloved.

Mad priests and sick cults and, for the girl born of the mother, a new camp to follow. Every path of independence was but a dead-end sidetrack off that more deeply rutted road, the one that ran from parent to child – this much was clear to her now.

Then Heboric, Destriant of Treach, had dragged her away – before she found herself breathing ever out – but no, before him, there had been Bidithal and his numbing gifts, his whispered assurances of mortal suffering being naught more than a layered chrysalis, and upon death the glory would break loose, unfolding its iridescent wings. Paradise.

Oh, that had been a seductive promise, and her drowning soul had clung to the solace of its plunging weight as she sank deathward. She had once dreamed of wounding young, wide-eyed acolytes, of taking the knife in her own hands and cutting away all pleasure. Misery loves – needs – company; there is nothing altruistic in sharing. Self-interest feeds on malice and all else falls to the wayside.

She had seen too much in her short life to believe anyone professing otherwise. Bidithal's love of pain had fed his need to deliver numbness. The numbness within him made him capable of delivering pain.

And the broken god he claimed to worship – well, the Crippled One knew he would never have to account for his lies, his false promises. He sought out lives in abeyance, and with their death he was free to discard those whose lives he had used up. This was, she realized, exquisite enslavement: a faith whose central tenet was unprovable.

There would be no killing this faith. The Crippled God would find a multitude of mortal voices to proclaim his empty promises, and within the arbitrary strictures of his cult, evil and desecration could burgeon unchecked.

A faith predicated on pain and guilt could proclaim no moral purity. A faith rooted in blood and suffering'We are the fallen,' Heboric said suddenly.

Sneering, Scillara pushed more rustleaf into the bowl of her pipe and drew hard. 'A priest of war would say that, wouldn't he? But what of the great glory found in brutal slaughter, old man? Or have you no belief in the necessity of balance?'

'Balance? An illusion. Like trying to focus on a single mote of light and seeing naught of the stream and the world that stream reveals. All is in motion, all is in flux.'

'Like these damned flies,' Scillara muttered.

Cutter, riding directly ahead, glanced back at her. 'I was wondering about that,' he said. 'Carrion flies – are we heading towards a site of battle, do you think? Heboric?'

He shook his head, amber eyes seeming to flare in the afternoon light.

'I sense nothing of that. The land ahead is as you see it.'

They were approaching a broad basin, dotted with a few tufts of dead, yellow reeds. The ground itself was almost white, cracked like a broken mosaic. Some larger mounds were visible here and there, constructed, it seemed, of sticks and reeds. Reaching the edge, they drew to a halt.

Fish bones lay in a heaped carpet along the fringe of the dead marsh's shoreline, blown there by the winds. On one of the closer mounds they could see bird bones and the remnants of eggshells. These wetlands had died suddenly, in the season of nesting.

Flies swarmed the basin, swirling about in droning clouds.

'Gods below,' Felisin said, 'do we have to cross this?'

'Shouldn't be too bad,' Heboric said. 'It's not far across. It'd be dark long before we finish if we try to go round this. Besides,' he waved at the buzzing flies, 'we haven't even started to cross yet they've found us, and skirting the basin won't escape them. At least they're not the biting kind.'

'Let's just get this over with,' Scillara said.