The Crippled God
‘Where the Adjunct fell? But Aranict, what happened there saved Tavore’s life, and quite possibly the lives of the rest of the Bonehunters. The Nah’ruk reeled from that place.’
‘Yet still I fear it,’ she insisted, plucking out another rustleaf stick. ‘Allies should show themselves.’ She drew out the small silver box containing the resin sparker. The night wind defeated her efforts to scrape a flame to life, so she stepped close against Brys and tried again.
‘Allies,’ he said, ‘have their own enemies. Showing themselves imposes a risk, I imagine.’
A flicker of flame and then the stick was alight. She took a half-step back. ‘I think that’s a valid observation. Well, I suppose we always suspected that the Adjunct’s war wasn’t a private one.’
‘No matter how she might wish it so,’ he said, with something like grudging respect.
‘Tomorrow’s parley could prove most frustrating,’ Aranict observed, ‘if she refuses to relent. We need to know what she knows. We need to understand what she seeks. More than all that, we need to make sense of what happened the day of the Nah’ruk.’
He reached up, surprised her by brushing her cheek, and then leaning closer and kissing her. She laughed deep in her throat. ‘Danger is a most alluring drug, isn’t it, Brys?’
‘More or less.’
‘Good. Until later, then.’
She watched him walk away. Errant take me, he just climbed back out .
‘When it’s stretched it stays stretched,’ Hanavat said in a grumble. ‘What’s the point?’
‘Well, I’ll grant you that, though I imagine it’s as much the attention as anything else.’
Hanavat glanced away, eyes tightening. ‘My last child,’ she said. ‘My only child.’
To that Shelemasa was silent. The charge against the Nah’ruk had taken all of Hanavat’s children. All of them. But if that was cruel, it is nothing compared to sparing Gall. Where the mother bows, the father breaks. They are gone. He led them all to their deaths, yet he survived. Spirits, yours is the gift of madness .
The charge haunted Shelemasa as well. She had ridden through the lancing barrage of lightning, figures on either side erupting, bodies exploding, spraying her with sizzling gore. The screams of horses, the thunder of tumbling beasts, bones snapping – even now, that dread cauldron awakened again in her mind, a torrent of sounds pounding her ears from the inside out. She knelt in Hanavat’s tent, trembling with the memories.
The older woman must have sensed something, for she reached out and settled a weathered hand on her thigh. ‘It goes,’ she murmured. ‘I see it among all you survivors. The wave of remembrance, the horror in your eyes. But I tell you, it goes.’
‘For Gall, too?’
The hand seemed to flinch. ‘No. He is Warleader. It does not leave him. That charge is not in the past. He lives it again and again, every moment, day and night. I have lost him, Shelemasa. We have all lost him.’
A new Warleader was needed, but she suspected no acclamation was forthcoming. The will was dead. There were no pieces left to pick up.
‘I will attend the parley,’ said Hanavat, ‘and I want you with me, Shelemasa.’
‘Your husband—’
‘Is lying in his eldest son’s tent. He takes no food, no water. He intends to waste away. Before long, we will burn his body on a pyre, but that will be nothing but a formality. My mourning has already begun.’
‘I know …’ Shelemasa hesitated, ‘it was difficult between you. The rumours of his leanings—’