Steven Erikson - Forge of Darkness

Back in the Citadel, there had been little time for contemplation. But now she began to see its manifold rewards. She rose from the chair and then turned to study it. Mother Dark sits upon the Throne of Night.

We shall need an answer to that.

Renarr stepped out on to the narrow balcony girdling this side of the Old Tower. She could look down on the courtyard with its scurrying figures, and beyond that to the settlement below ringed with rows of white tents.

Smoke and dust hung over Neret Sorr in thickening palls. Her home had been transformed, far beyond the details she could observe from this height. For all the crowds and canvas tents, it seemed small, paltry in its ambitions and frail in its presumptions. She remembered its streets and alleys, its crouched houses and cramped shops, and looked with a strange kind of envy upon those tiny shapes moving where she had once walked.

Modest lives marked only the succession of dreams set aside, or broken underfoot. The game of living was one of focus, an ever-narrowing horizon of what was possible and what could be achieved; but this made sharp and bright the lesser triumphs. A partner’s love, a child given to the world, an object well made by a crafter’s hands. Glories hid in the elegant fold of a new cloak, in the unscuffed and unworn display of new boots or moccasins; in a head of hair artfully arranged to complement clear features and vigorous health, or the paint that pretended to the same.

She remembered her own vanities as would someone who had grown past their toys of childhood, and just as the child who was no longer a child looked upon those toys with a sinking feeling that was new, that was ineffably sad, so too did she see what she had left behind, while before her was a future bereft of wonder.

These thoughts and notions settled in her now, too complicated for the world she had known, too fraught to encompass for the young woman she had once been. That woman had given her love to a man broad in his emotions, as quick to laughter as to tears — almost child-like in his rush from one extreme to the other, where wounds healed quickly and life could return to warm his eyes in an instant. He had fought against ridicule and had known blinding rage, and then had wept over one careless swing of his fist.

It would not have mattered. Bruises faded and cuts healed, and innocence could grow back like a scab and so seal past wounds, and if beauty was marred, then the disenchantment was temporary. But future lives had a way of vanishing before one’s eyes. Possibilities died down at the roots, and before long everything above ground, once so resplendent with promise, withered and lost colour, and then the wind came to strip it bare. The path ahead of her was a place of dead trees and dead grasses, a dead river beneath listless light, with a ghost at her side who had nothing to say.

Such were the gifts of her new place in this new world. Adopted by a guilt-ridden lord, she now found herself in a tower, lifted higher than anything she had ever known before: lifted past her dreams until they sat like forgotten toys at her feet. In her mind she saw herself walking down the stairs, along the corridors with their cold, stony breath, out through the doorway and into the dust-veiled courtyard, and then beyond the gate and continuing, step by step, into the town that she once knew. She saw the old women marking her passing and how their heads tilted close together as words were whispered. She saw the new speculation in the eyes of the men, and the curiosity of children who no longer felt able to call to her in greeting. She saw the expression of wives and mothers as they were dragged back into their own past and the girls they had once been, where everything was still possible, and come the night they might hold tighter their husbands but not for reasons of love. Instead, they would need those embraces to give comfort against the losses that now crowded their thoughts.

She saw herself walking down to the taverns, where the air was charged with laughter, and if some of it sounded strained, it was still forgivable and quickly swept past. Flushed faces would turn her way, painted eyes suddenly gauging, as she moved through the crowd, and before long a man smelling of ale would press against her, and she would cling to him, smiling at his awkward jests, seeing his desires behind his guarded expressions. Before long, he would, in her imagination, turn to the innkeeper and hire a room and old Greniz would nod with a sour gleam in his eye and hold out a greasy hand. Coins would flash in the gloom and in the moment her man moved to take her through the doorway to the back rooms a woman would brush close and say, ‘There’s a cut, jes so ya know.’ And Renarr would nod and for the briefest of moments the two women would lock gazes and pass between them the fullest understanding of this new shared world.

A world of pleasure and despair entwined, down among the dead roots. This was where her imagination took her, cold and rushing like a mountain stream, painting details she knew nothing about.

Witch Hale came out to stand beside her. ‘He is gone,’ she said.

Renarr nodded, if only to appease the old woman. But she had seen her father die some time before, when she had met his eyes and saw in them no feeling, and he had but studied her, detached, as if gathering details. And she had understood something then. This was how death came to the dying: from the inside out; and this was how the living took it: from the outside in.

She gathered about herself the new, rich clothing a guilt-ridden man had bestowed upon her, and then said, ‘I am going down to the village.’

Coming from the barracks, where she had been lounging with a half-dozen veteran sergeants before hearing the bell clang, Lieutenant Serap made her way across the compound towards the keep’s front entrance. She saw that Sergeant Yeld had returned. A crowd surrounded him, but he was holding up his hands, as if to defy their questions. Haradegar had rushed inside a few moments earlier, to sound the bell that would summon Urusander back up to the keep, and thence to the Campaign Room.

Two more riders appeared from the gate and Serap glanced over to see Sharenas Ankhadu and Kagamandra Tulas. They cantered across the courtyard, forcing a path through the milling soldiers, stablers and servants, and reined in close to Yeld, who pushed free, straightening against his weariness, and saluted Sharenas.

Serap reached them, but said nothing as she followed Yeld, Sharenas and Kagamandra into the keep. Their boots rang hollow as they marched down a corridor, the walls of which bore only the bleached impressions of the tapestries that had once lined it. The sergeant looked worn, as befitted someone who had ridden through the night.

Serap had been given to understand that Captain Sharenas had sent Yeld to Kharkanas. She had assumed that the sergeant carried orders to Hunn Raal, demanding his return. But my cousin is not in Kharkanas. What then the cause of this tension?

Castellan Haradegar, along with the High Priestess Syntara, was awaiting them in the Campaign Room. As she had done the few other times she had seen the High Priestess, Serap found herself staring at Syntara, half in fascination and half in revulsion. She forced herself to look away and concentrated instead on Sharenas. ‘Captain, did you by chance see Commander Urusander on the road up to the keep?’

‘He comes,’ she replied. ‘Sergeant Yeld, I trust your insistence that we make this a command meeting is justified by the news you bring.’

‘It is, sir.’

‘Were you able to speak with Hunn Raal?’

‘No,’ Yeld replied. ‘Sir, it is believed he has journeyed to the Hust Legion, bearing wagons burdened with gifts to the soldiers. Presumably, sir, he seeks entreaty with Commander Toras Redone, to ensure that no hostilities arise between our legions.’