Steven Erikson - Dust of Dreams

She had raised her voice to make certain everyone else heard her last words.

Sheb snorted. ‘Bitch needs a lesson or two, I think.’

Breath spun to face him. ‘Hungry for a curse, are you? What part of your body do you want to rot off first? Maybe I’ll do the choosing-’

‘Set your magic on me, woman, and I will throttle you.’

She laughed, turned away. ‘Play with Asane if you have the need.’

Rautos, after a few deep, calming breaths, set out after Taxilian, who had begun walking round the ledge, eyes fixed on the edifice.

‘It’s an engine,’ he said when Rautos drew close.

‘A what? As in a mill? But I see nothing like gears or-’

‘Like that, yes. You can hide gears and levers inside, in housings to keep them clean of grit and whatnot. Even more relevantly, you can seal things and make use of alternating pressures, and so move things from one place to another. It’s a common practice in alchemy, especially if one conjures such pressures using heat and cold. I once saw a sorcerous invention that could draw the ether out of a glass jar, thus quenching the lit candle within it. A pump bound in wards was used to draw out the life force that exists in the air.’ He waved one hand at the towers. ‘Heat, cold-I think these are vast pressure chambers of some sort.’

‘For what purpose?’

Taxilian looked at him with glittering eyes. ‘That’s what I mean to find out.’

There were no ladders or bridges across to the towers. Taxilian led him back to the entranceway. ‘We’re going up now,’ he said.

‘We need food,’ said Last, his expression worried, frightened. ‘We could get lost in here-’

‘Stop whimpering,’ growled Nappet. ‘I could walk us out of here in no time.’

‘None of you,’ cut in Asane, startling everyone, ‘wants to talk about what we found in the first room. That’s what you’re all running from. Those-those monsters-they were all slaughtered.’ She glared at them, diffident, and rushed on. ‘What killed them could still be here! We don’t know anything about any of this-’

‘Those monsters didn’t die in battle,’ said Sheb. ‘That was a ritual killing we saw. Sacrifices, that’s what they were.’

‘Maybe they had no choice.’

Sheb snorted. ‘I can’t think of many beasts choosing to be sacrificed. Of course they had no choice. This place is abandoned-you can feel it. Smell it in the stale air.’

‘When we climb higher,’ said Last, ‘we’ll get out of the wet, and we can see if there’s tracks in the dust.’

‘Gods below, the farmer’s good for something after all,’ said Nappet with a hard grin.

‘Let’s go, then,’ said Taxilian, and he set off. Once more the others fell in behind him.

Drifting between all of them, voiceless, half-blinded with sorrow that swept down like curtains of rain, the ghost yearned to reach through. To Taxilian, Rautos, even stolid, slow-thinking Last. In their journey through the bowels of the Dragon Keep, knowledge had erupted, thunderous, pounding concussions that sent him reeling.

He knew this place. He knew its name. Kalse Rooted. A demesne of the K’Chain Che’Malle, a border keep. A vast body now drained of all life, a corpse standing empty-eyed on the plain. And he knew that a Shi’gal Assassin had slain those K’ell Hunters. To seal the failure of this fortress.

Defeat was approaching. The whispering chant, the song of scales. The great army sent out from here had been annihilated. Naught but a pathetic rearguard left behind. The J’an Sentinels would have taken the Matron away, to the field of the fallen, there to entomb her for evermore.

Taxilian! Hear me. What is lifeless is not necessarily dead. That which falls can rise again. Take care-take great care-in this place…

But his cries were not heard. He was trapped outside, made helpless with all that he understood, with this cascade of secrets that could do little more than tumble into an abyss of ignorance.

He knew how Asane railed in her own mind, how she longed to escape her own flesh. She wanted out from all that had failed her. Her damned flesh, her dying organs, her very mind. She had been awakened to the comprehension that the body was a prison, but one prone to terrible, inexorable decay. Oh, there was always that final flight, when the corroded bars ceased to pose a barrier; when the soul was free to fly, to wing out in search of unseen shores. But with that release-for all she knew-all that she called herself would be lost. Asane would end. Cease, and that which was born from the ashes held no regard for the living left behind, no regard for that world of aches, pain, and suffering. It was transformed into indifference, and all that was past-all that belonged to the mortal life now done-meant nothing to it; she could not comprehend such a cruel rebirth.

She longed for death none the less. Longed to escape her withered husk with all its advancing decrepitude, its sundering into the pathos of the broken. Fear alone held her back-back from that ledge in the eight-sided chamber, back from that fatal drop to some unseen floor far below. And that same fear clawed at her now. Demons stalked this keep. She dreaded what was coming.

Walking a step behind her was Last, aptly choosing a rearguard position. His shoulders were hunched, head ducked as if the corridor’s ceiling were much lower than it was. He was a man born to open spaces, boundless skies overhead, the sweep of vistas. Within this haunted maze, he felt diminished, almost crippled. Vertigo lunged at him with each turn and twist. He saw how the walls closed in. He felt the mass looming over them all, the unbearable weight of countless storeys overhead.

He had a sudden memory of his childhood. He had been helping his father-before the debts arrived, before everything was taken away that meant anything at all-he had been helping his father, he recalled, dismantle a shed behind the stables. They had prised loose the warped planks and were stacking them in a disordered heap this side of the pen’s fence. Finishing a task begun months earlier, before the planting. By late afternoon the shed was down, and his father had told him to rearrange the boards, sorting them by length and condition.

He had set to the task. Recollection grew hazy then, up until the moment he lifted a grey, weathered plank-one from last season’s work-and saw how its recent shifting from the day’s work just done had crushed a nest of mice, the woven bundle of grasses flattened, smeared in a tangle of blood and tiny entrails. Hairless, pink pups scattered about, crushed, each one yielding up their single drop of lifeblood. Both parents suffocated beneath the weight of the overburden.

Kneeling before this tableau, his presence looming like a god come too late, he stared down at this destroyed family. Silly to weep, of course. There were plenty of other mice-Errant knew the yard’s cats stayed fat. So, foolish, these tears.

Yes, he’d been just a child. A sensitive age, no doubt. And later that night his father took him by the hand and led him out to the modest barrow on the old plot, continuing what had been their the post-supper ritual ever since his mother was put into the ground, and they burned knotted hoops of wrinkle grass with their dried blossoms that flared bright the instant flames touched them. Bursts of fire that blotted the eyes with pulsing afterglows. And when his father saw the tears on his son’s cheeks he drew him close and said, ‘I’ve been waiting for that.’

Yes, the levels above seemed well built, the walls solid and sturdy. No reason to think it would all come down at the careless toss of some child god. These kinds of thoughts, well, they could only make a man angry. In ways every child would understand.