Steven Erikson - Forge of Darkness

Warlock Resh seemed to gag. Coughing, he said, ‘Guest, I beg you, constrain your power.’

‘You think this power is mine, warlock?’ Smiling, she rose. ‘I am weary. I see a monk in the doorway — will he suffice to guide me to my quarters?’

‘A moment, please,’ Caplo interposed, alarmed after a glance at his companion, who was gasping, half bent over. ‘If not your power, then whose?’

‘Your river god was dead. It is dead no longer.’

He stared in disbelief.

She met his eyes and this time held them. ‘Now you must contend with what you purport to worship, and give answer to the many things you have done in its name. Is it any wonder your friend quails?’

She set off across the compound.

Caplo stepped close to his friend. ‘Resh? Will you recover? Does she speak truth? What is it you feel?’

He looked up with savage eyes. ‘Rage.’

Thereafter, in the midst of panic and chaos tearing through the settlement, the Azathanai guest remained in her rooms, taking her meals in private. Upon the third morning she appeared in the compound. Summoning her grass horse, she mounted up and waited for the others.

Mother Sheccanto was confined to her bed. She had lost all control over her body and could not move, not even to lift a hand. Her lungs were filling with fluid, her breaths came in shallow rasps and her eyes, Caplo recalled, darted like trapped birds.

The hawk betrays the hare. The swift betrays the fly. God was bent to our will; and God now rages.

Riders had already gone out to Yedan Monastery, by Resh’s command, and word had come back the night before their departure for Kharkanas. Father Skelenal was on his way. Sisters had collapsed. The thirteen eldest among them had died. And in the Great Well of the Ancient God, the water boiled. The steam made a column that could be seen from the forest edge south of the convent.

When Warlock Resh announced that he would remain, awaiting the arrival of Skelenal, T’riss had turned to him and said, ‘You will not be needed here. Your Mother will recover most of her faculties. She will speak in private with her lifebound mate. You will accompany me, Warlock Resh.’

‘Why?’ he had demanded, and it had shocked Caplo to realize that his companion had not even questioned the Azathanai’s right to command him.

‘Who dwells in the forest north of Kharkanas?’ she asked him.

Resh shrugged. ‘Cast-offs, half-wild folk. Poachers, criminals-’

‘Deniers,’ Caplo said.

T’riss said, ‘Your Mother and Father need to prepare.’

‘For what?’ Caplo asked.

‘For what I must show Warlock Resh, lieutenant. It shall begin in the forest, but also upon the river itself, and in the streets of Kharkanas — until such time as Mother Dark awakens to the challenge.’

‘What will you say to her?’ Resh demanded in a harsh voice.

‘To Mother Dark?’ T’riss gathered up the makeshift reins. ‘I expect there will be no need for words, warlock. With my presence, she will understand.’

‘Do you threaten her?’ Caplo asked.

‘If I do, lieutenant, there will be nothing you can do about it. Not you, not her guardians. But no, I myself pose no threat to Mother Dark, and upon this you have my word, to weigh or discard as befits your nature. What I bring is change. Will she welcome it or resist it? Only she can answer that.’

In silence they had ridden out from the monastery, on to the south road that would take them on a route well to the east of Yedan Monastery, before entering the much diminished easternmost arm of Youth Forest.

The last words T’riss spoke, just outside the monastery gates, were, ‘I understand now the mystery of water. In peace it flows clear. When I stand before Mother Dark, turmoil will come to the water between us. But the promise remains — one day it shall run clear once again. Hold to this faith, all of you, even as chaos descends upon the world.’ She faced Resh and Caplo. ‘The river god tells me Dorssan Ryl’s water is dark, but it was not always so.’

It was not always so. The oldest of our scriptures say the same. This Azathanai has resurrected our god. This Azathanai has spoken with our god. But what does she promise the Tiste?

Chaos.

When they rode into the forest, however, Caplo had seen nothing unusual, nothing to give credence to the Azathanai’s portentous words. He had turned to the warlock riding beside him, a question on his lips, but Resh forestalled him with an upraised hand.

‘Not yet. It grows. Things stir. Dreams plague a thousand shadowed minds. Something is indeed awakening. We shall see its face upon our return.’

Caplo owned nothing of the sensitivity possessed by Warlock Resh and many of the others in the faith. Sheccanto once told him that even as a child he had knelt before pragmatism; and in so doing had surrendered his capacity for imagination. There existed a dichotomy between the two, and as forces of personality they often locked in combat. For some, however, there was an accord. Dreams defined the goal, pragmatism the path to it. Those who possessed that balance were said to be talented, but it did not make their lives any easier. The blunt of mind, who lived lives in which obstacles rose up before them with every step, were quick to raise similar obstacles before their ‘talented’ associates, and were often adamant in their belief that it was for the best, and justified their views with such words as ‘realistic’, ‘practical’ and, of course, ‘pragmatic’.

Caplo held much sympathy for those who would, by advice and by ridicule, rein in the unfettered dreamers of the world. He saw imagination as dangerous, at times deadly in its unpredictability. Among the many victims he had murdered, it had been the creative ones who caused him the most trouble. He could not track them upon the paths of their thinking.

That said, so many other things had been surrendered in the loss of his own imagination. It was difficult to feel anything for the lives of others. He had no interest, beyond the professional, in searching out empathy, and saw no reason to shift his own perspective on matters of opinion, since his opinions were soundly rooted in pragmatism and therefore proved ultimately unassailable.

For all of this, as they rode into the thinned fringe of the ancient forest, with the tight creaking of the Azathanai’s mount an incessant rhythm behind them, Caplo felt a chill that had nothing to do with the sudden falling off of sunlight. He glanced across at Resh to see the man’s craggy face sheathed in sweat.

‘Does she awaken her power again?’ he asked in a low tone.

Resh simply shook his head, a singular gesture of negation so uncharacteristic of the warlock that Caplo was startled and, indeed, somewhat frightened.

He looked about, eyes narrowed upon the shadows between the trees lining the road. He saw rubbish heaped in the ditches, and there, thirty or so paces deeper into the wood to his right, a squalid hovel wreathed in woodsmoke, with what might be a figure sitting hunched behind a smouldering fire — or perhaps it was nothing more than a boulder, or a stump. The air was cool on the cobbled road, redolent with decay, acidic enough to bite the back of his throat with each breath he took. There was little sound, barring that of a barking dog somewhere in the distance, and the nearer clump of horse hoofs upon the muddy stones.

The other times Caplo had ridden through, on his way to and from Kharkanas, he had barely noticed this stretch of woodland. There seemed to be as many stumps as growing trees, but now he realized that this was only true of the area immediately flanking the road. Things grew wilder deeper into the forest, where the gloom was a shroud no gaze could pierce, and to travel through would require a torch or lantern. It was astonishing to think people lived in this forest, hidden away, confined to an ever shrinking world.