Steven Erikson - Dust of Dreams

After all, you may at this moment face two bridling, angry armies, my friends, and find yourselves shaking with terror.

Wait until you meet the Bonehunters.

He watched as, following hasty reiterations of a desire to work things through peacefully, the Chancellor and the Conquestor retreated back down the slope-not even bothering with the ridiculous chairs. The slaves stumbled after them in a fan-waving mob.

Beside him, Krughava sighed, and then said, ‘It occurs to me, sir, that the Bolkando expected the Khundryl to prove little more than a minor irritant, confined to the region surrounding their settlement. Easily contained, or, indeed, quickly driven over the border into the Wastelands. That notion led, inevitably, to the conceit that we here could be isolated and dealt with at their leisure.’

‘Then an ambush was intended all along?’

‘Or the threat thereof, to win further concessions.’

‘Well,’ said Tanakalian, ‘if the Khundryl will neither remain close to their settlement nor retreat over the border, then it follows that but one course remains.’

She nodded. ‘As a barbed spear,’ she said, ‘Gall will lead his people into the very heart of the kingdom.’ She rolled her shoulders in a rustle of chain and buckles. ‘Shield Anvil, inform the legion commands that we are to march two bells before dawn-’

‘Even if that means we are pursued by the Bolkando escort?’

She bared her teeth. ‘Have you gauged those troops, sir? They could be naked and not keep up with us. Their baggage train alone is thrice the size of their combatants in column. That,’ she pronounced, ‘is an army used to going nowhere.’

She set off, then, to beat down the two Bolkando delegates, from flickering daggers to misshapen lumps of lead.

Tanakalian, on the other hand, made his way to the Perish camp.

The insects were maddening, and from the rushes lining the river birds screamed.

The rain thrashed down, making the world grey and turning the stony track into a foaming stream. The tall black boles of the trees to either side loomed into view and then receded in rippling waves as Yan Tovis guided her horse down the now treacherous trail. Her waxed cloak was drawn tight about her, the hood pulled over her helm. Two days and three nights of this and she was chilled and soaked through. Ever since she had departed the Cities Road, five leagues from Dresh, cutting northward to where she had left her people, league after league of this forest had begun to weigh upon her. Her descent to the coast was also a journey into the past, civilization fading into ghostly hopes in her wake. Patches of clear-cut meadow, bordered by snarled bomas of cut branches, hacked brush and root stumps, the triple ruts of log-tracks wending in and out; the rubbish of old camps and the ash heaps and trenches of charcoal makers: these marked the brutal imposition of Dresh’s hunger and need.

As with the islands of Katter Bight, desolation was the promise. As she had ridden through the old timber camps, she had seen the soil erosion, the deep rocky channels cutting through every clearing. And when in Dresh, resigning her commission, she had noted the nervousness among the garrison troops. Following a royal decree halting logging operations, there had been riots-much of the city’s wealth came from the forest, after all, and while the prohibition was a temporary one, during which the King’s agents set about devising a new system-one centred on sustainability-the stink of panic clogged the city streets.

Yan Tovis was not surprised that King Tehol had begun challenging the fundamental principles and practices of Lether, but she suspected that he would soon find himself a solitary, beleaguered voice of reason. Even common sense was an enemy to the harvesters of the future. The beast that was civilization ever faced forward, and in making its present world it devoured the world to come. It was an appalling truth that one’s own children could be so callously sacrificed to immediate comforts, yet this was so and it had always been so.

Dreamers were among the first to turn their backs on historical truths. King Tehol would be swept aside, drowned in the inexorable tide of unmitigated growth. No one, after all, can stand between the glutton and the feast.

She wished him well, even as she knew he would fail.

In the midst of pelting rain she had left the camps behind, taking one of the old wood-bison migration routes through virgin forest. The mud of the ancient track swarmed with leeches and she was forced to dismount every bell or so to tug the mottled black and brown creatures from her horse’s legs, until the path led down on to a sinkhole basin that proved to be a salt-trap-the plague of leeches ended abruptly and, as she continued down-slope, did not return.

Signs of the old dwellers began to appear-perhaps they were Shake remnants, perhaps they belonged to a people now forgotten. She saw the slumping humps of round huts covered in wax-leaved vines. She saw on the massive trunks of the most ancient trees crumbled visages, carved by hands long since rotted to nothing. The wooden faces were smeared in black-slime, moss and lumps of sickly fungi. She halted her mount beside one such creation and stared at it through the rain for a long time. She could think of no finer symbol of impermanence. The blunted expression, its pits of sorrow that passed for eyes: these things haunted her long after she had left the ruined settlement.

The track eventually merged with a Shake road that had once joined two coastal villages, and this was the path she now took.

The rain had become a deluge, and its hissing rose to a roar on her hood, a curtain of water sheeting down in front of her eyes.

Her horse halted suddenly and she lifted her head to see a lone rider blocking her path.

He seemed a figure sculpted in flowing water. ‘Listen to me,’ she said, loud, unexpectedly harsh. ‘Do you truly imagine that you can follow us, brother?’

Yedan Derryg made no reply-his typical statement of obstinacy.

She wanted to curse him, but knew that even that would be useless. ‘You killed the witches and warlocks. Pully and Skwish are not enough. Do you understand what you have forced upon me, Yedan?’

He straightened in his saddle at that. Even in the gloom she saw his jaws bunching as he chewed for a time on his reply, before saying, ‘You cannot. You must not. Make the journey, sister, upon the mortal path.’

‘Because it is the only one you can follow, banished as you are.’

But he shook his head. ‘The road you seek is but a promise. Never attempted. A promise, Yan Tovis. Will you risk the lives of our people upon such a thing?’

‘You have left me no choice.’

‘Take the mortal path, as you said you would. Eastward to Bluerose and thence across the sea-’

She wanted to scream at him. Instead, she bared her teeth. ‘You damned fool, Yedan. Have you seen the camp of our-my-people? The population of the whole island-old prisoners and their families, merchants and hawkers, cut-throats and pirates- everyone joined us! Not even including the Shake, there are close to ten thousand Letherii refugees in my camp! What am I to do with them all? How do I feed them?’

‘They are not your responsibility, Twilight. Disperse them-the islands are very nearly under water now-this crisis belongs to King Tehol-to Lether.’

‘You forget,’ she snapped, ‘Second Maiden proclaimed its independence. And made me Queen. The moment we arrived on the mainland, we became invaders. ’

He cocked his head. ‘It is said the King is a compassionate man-’

‘He may well be, but how will everyone else think-all those people whose lands we must cross? When we beg for food and shelter? When our hunger grasps tight our souls, so that begging becomes demands? The northern territories have not yet recovered from the Edur War-fields lie fallow; the places where sorcery was unleashed now seethe with nightmare creatures and poisonous plants. I will not descend upon King Tehol’s most fragile subjects with fifteen thousand desperate trespassers!’