Steven Erikson - Forge of Darkness

Orfantal’s head was swimming, but in challenge to her words he heard a faint voice of protest, rising from deep inside. He disliked liars. To lie was to break loyalty. To lie, as the ghost of every dead hero knew, was to betray.

The night was sinking into confusion, and he felt very alone.

‘I am a great believer in invention,’ said Rise Herat to the small girl beside him. Glancing down at her he added, ‘But do be careful. It’s a long fall from here and I would not survive the displeasure of the entire Hust clan should harm befall you.’

Seeming intent on ignoring his warning, Legyl Behust pulled herself up and on to the merlon. Feet dangling behind her, she leaned out, her face flushed with excitement, her eyes wide with wonder.

Rise took hold of the nearest ankle and held tight. ‘I indulge you too much,’ he said. ‘But look well upon all that you see. The city holds its back to the river behind us, and indeed to the Citadel itself. We need not concern ourselves with those settlements upon the south shore, where you will find the factories, infernal with the stinks of industry. Hides into leather, the butchering of pigs, cattle and whatnot. The crushing of bones into meal for the fields. The throwing of clay and the deliveries each day from the charcoal burners. All the necessities of maintaining a large population.’

‘I don’t want to look there!’

‘Of course you don’t. Better these finer structures, this sad attempt at order-’

‘But where are the spirits of the forest? Where is the forest? You talked about forests!’

He pointed. ‘There, that dark line to the north. Once, it was much closer.’

‘It ran away?’

‘Think of Kharkanas as a beast crawled up from the river. Perhaps to sun itself, or perhaps only to glower at the world. Think of the long-tailed, beaked turtles — the ones the river folk bring to the markets. Gnarled and jagged shells, a savage bite and thick muscles upon the long neck. Claws at the ends of strong limbs. Skin tough as armour. An ugly beast, Legyl, foul of temper and voracious. Hear its hiss as you draw close!’

She was squirming about on the narrow stone projection. ‘Where’s its eyes? I don’t see its eyes!’

‘But dear, we are its eyes. Here atop the Old Tower. We are the city’s eyes just as we are the world’s eyes, and that is a great responsibility, for it is only through us that the world is able to see itself, and from sight is born mystery — the releasing of imagination — and in this moment of recognition, why, everything changes.’

She sagged back. ‘But I don’t want to be its eyes, Master Rise.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I don’t know what I’m seeing.’

He helped her regain her feet. ‘That’s fine, because none of us do. Brush the grit from your clothes. You venture into a difficult area, this idea of “knowing”.’

‘I wasn’t going to ever fall,’ she said, slapping at the stains on her tunic. ‘Of course not. I had your foot.’

‘Ever.’

‘And you can be sure you may rely upon me, Legyl,’ said Rise Herat. ‘So, as you say, there are some things that can well be known. But tell me — did not the city seem alive to you?’

‘I could see everyone. In the streets. They were tiny!’

Taking her hand, he led her back to the trap door and the steep steps leading down to the level below. ‘Fleas from the mud, mites and ticks burrowing into the hide.’

‘It was buildings and stuff. Not a river turtle at all.’

‘I have shown you the city and to look upon the city is to look upon your own body, Legyl. And this Citadel… why, the eyes are set in the head and the head upon the body. This morning, you became the Citadel’s eyes. Is your body not flesh and bone? Is it not a place of heat and labour, the beat of your heart, the breath you draw? Such is wise Kharkanas.’

At the bottom of the steps she pulled free her hand. ‘Cedorpul’s a better teacher than you. He makes sense. You don’t.’

He shrugged. ‘I forget the narrow perch of the child’s mind. In pragmatism there is comfort, yes?’

‘I’m going to play in my room now.’

‘Go on,’ he said, gesturing her along.

The temple’s lone hostage scampered off, down the inner stairs to the next floor below. Rise Herat hesitated, and then turned about and made his way back up to the tower’s platform. His morning ritual, this private contemplation of Kharkanas, might still be salvaged. Cedorpul had ambushed him in the corridor outside his chambers, thrusting this young student into his care. Hasty words regarding lessons and then the young priest was gone.

More rumours, more agitation to rush up and down the hallways of the Citadel. The sanctuary of the Old Tower was Rise Herat’s place of strength amidst all this nonsense. Instead, he found himself left in charge of a girl he saw as almost feral and possibly simple-minded, so vast the temple’s neglect. Ever passed on to the next, scores of teachers and no lessons ever returned to, Legyl’s was an education of fragments, delivered in haste and out from airs of distraction. When he had looked down at her, however, he had seen sure intelligence in the large eyes staring back up at him.

As the court historian, he decided that history would be the lesson he delivered. Such ambitions proved short-lived, as her breathless scatter of comments and observations left him confused. She listened to his words as one might listen to a songbird in the garden, a pleasant drone in the background. Whatever she took in seemed randomly selected; but perhaps it was that way with all children. He rarely had any contact with them, and generally preferred it that way.

Rise looked out over Kharkanas. Thin smoke drifted above the cityscape, not yet lifting to the height of the tower. It softened all that lay beneath it, and he wondered at the loss he always felt when venturing into a vista, the way the vastness narrowed down to the immediate; the sudden insistence of details near to hand. There had been a time, a generation or so back, when the city’s artists had taken to the countryside, to paint landscapes, and to Rise Herat’s mind these paintings achieved what reality could not. A promise of depth and distance, yet one in which the promise remained sacred, for neither depth nor distance could be explored. To draw closer was to see only the brush strokes and dried paint upon the board; and with them the surrendering of the illusion.

Details cluttered the mortal mind, blinded it to the broader sweeps of history. He’d thought to reach this observation in his lesson with Legyl. It might have been, he now considered, that she was still rather too young for such concepts. But then, it was equally likely that age had little to do with comprehension. He need only descend the tower and plunge into the frantic world of the court to witness the same obsessions with detail and immediacy that sent Legyl Behust scurrying this way and that. If anything, he was, in making the comparison, being unkind to the child.

No matter. Thoughts unspoken left no scars upon others. The fate of the inner landscape of the one doing the thinking was, of course, entirely different. This was the procession, he knew, of the failing mind, and in that failure was found a place where many unspoken thoughts came to rest; and it was a place of prejudice, hatred and ignorance.

That said, he knew that he was a poor teacher. He wove his histories as if they were inventions, disconnected and not relevant. Worse, he preferred the sweeping wash of colour to obsessive detail, ineffable feeling over intense analysis, possibility over probability; he was, by any measure, a dreadful historian.

He could see a shadow upon the city below, not thrown down by the smoke; nor did it come from a cloud as the sky was clear. This was Mother Dark’s indrawn breath, stealing the light from the world. What, he wondered, did she do with it? Was it as the priestesses said? Did she devour it, feed upon it? When light goes, where does it go?