The Bonehunters

Surmounting this plateau there had been a walled settlement, small and modest, a chaotic array of attached residences that would have housed perhaps twenty families at the height of its occupation. The defensive walls were solid, with no gates, and for the dwellers within, ingress and egress came via the rooftops and single-pole ladders.

Yadeth Garath, the first human city, was now little more than saltrotted rubble swallowed in silts, buried deep and unseen beneath the marsh. No history beyond the countless derivations from its ancient name remained, and of the lives and deaths and tales of all who had once lived there, not even bones survived.

Dejim Nebrahl recalled the fisher folk who had dwelt upon its ruins, living in their squalid huts on stilts, plying the waters in their round, hide boats, and walking the raised wooden platforms that crossed the natural canals wending through the swamp. They were not descendants of Yadeth Garath. They knew nothing of what swirled beneath the black silts, and this itself was an undeniable truth, that memory withered and died in the end. There was no single tree of life, no matter how unique and primary this Yadeth Garath – no, there was a forest, and time and again, a tree, its bole rotted through, toppled to swiftly vanish in the airless muck.

Dejim Nebrahl recalled those fisher folk, the way their blood tasted of fish and molluscs, dull and turgid and clouded with stupidity. If man and woman cannot – will not – remember, then they deserved all that was delivered upon them. Death, destruction and devastation. This was no god's judgement – it was the world's, nature's own. Exacted in that conspiracy of indifference that so terrified and baffled humankind.

Lands subside. Waters rush in. The rains come, then never come.

Forests die, rise again, then die once more. Men and women huddle with their broods in dark rooms in all their belated begging, and their eyes fill with dumb failure, and now they are crumbled specks of grey and white in black silt, motionless as the memory of stars in a longdead night sky.

Exacting nature's judgement, such was Dejim Nebrahl's purpose. For the forgetful, their very shadows stalk them. For the forgetful, death ever arrives unexpectedly.

The T'rolbarahl had returned to the site of Yadeth Garath, as if drawn by some desperate instinct. Dejim Nebrahl was starving. Since his clash with the mage near the caravan, his wanderings had taken him through lands foul with rotted death. Nothing but bloated, blackened corpses, redolent with disease. Such things could not feed him.

The intelligence within the D'ivers had succumbed to visceral urgency, a terrible geas that drove him onward on the path of old memories, of places where he had once fed, the blood hot and fresh pouring down his throats.

Kanarbar Belid, now nothing but dust. Vithan Ta'ur, the great city in the cliff-face – now even the cliff was gone. A swath of potsherds reduced to gravel was all that remained of Minikenar, once a thriving city on the banks of a river now extinct. The string of villages north of Minikenar revealed no signs that they had ever existed. Dejim Nebrahl had begun to doubt his own memories.

Driven on, across the gnawed hills and into the fetid marsh, seeking yet another village of fisher folk. But he had been too thorough the last time, all those centuries past, and none had come to take the place of the slaughtered. Perhaps some dark recollection held true, casting a haunted pall upon the swamp. Perhaps the bubbling gases still loosed ancient screams and shrieks and the boatmen from the isles, passing close, made warding gestures before swinging the tiller hard about.

Fevered, weakening, Dejim Nebrahl wandered the rotted landscape.

Until a faint scent reached the D'ivers.

Beast, and human. Vibrant, alive, and close.

The T'rolbarahl, five shadow-thewed creatures of nightmare, lifted heads and looked south, eyes narrowing. There, just beyond the hills, on the crumbling track that had once been a level road leading to Minikenar. The D'ivers set off, as dusk settled on the land.

****
Masan Gilani slowed her horse's canter when the shadows thickened with the promise of night. The track was treacherous with loose cobbles and narrow gullies formed by run-off. It had been years since she'd last ridden wearing so little – nothing more than a wrap about her hips – and her thoughts travelled far back to her life on the Dal Honese plains. She'd carried less weight back then. Tall, lithe, smoothskinned and bright with innocence. The heaviness of her full breasts and the swell of her belly and hips came much later, after the two children she'd left behind to be raised by her mother and her aunts and uncles. It was the right of all adults, man or woman, to take the path of wandering; before the empire conquered the Dal Honese, such a choice had been rare enough, and for the children, raised by kin on all sides, their health tended by shamans, midwives and shoulderwitches, the abandonment of a parent was rarely felt.