Midnight tides

a lecture given by Royal Geographer Thula Redsand

at the Cutter Academy 19th Annual Commencement

(moments before the Great Collapse of the Academy Ceiling)

Comments recounted by sole survivor, Ibal the Dart

THERE WAS NOTHING NATURAL IN THE DUST THAT LOOMED LIKE A behemoth above the Edur armies as they came down from the north and began moving into positions opposite Brans Keep. The ochre cloud hovered like a standing wave in a cataract, fierce winds whipping southward to either side, carrying ashes and topsoil in a dark, ominous onslaught against the waiting Letherii armies and the barren hills behind them.

The emperor of the Tiste Edur had found the glory of rebirth yet again. Every death was a tier in his climb to unassailable domination. Resurrection, Udinaas now understood, was neither serene nor painless. It came in screams, in shrieks that rent the air. It came in a storm of raw trauma that tore at Rhulad’s sanity as much as it would anyone’s suffering the same curse. And there was no doubt at all in the slave’s mind, the sword and its gift were cursed, and the god behind it – if it was a god in truth – was a creature of madness.

This time, Rhulad’s brothers had been there to witness his awakening. Udinaas had not been surprised at the horror writ on their faces with the emperor’s first ragged scream, the convulsions racking Rhulad’s body of smudged gold and dried blood, the cold unearthly light blazing anew in his terrible eyes. He had seen them frozen, unable to draw closer, unable to flee, standing witness to the dreadful truth.

Perhaps, afterwards, when they had thawed – when their hearts started beating once more – there was sympathy. Rhulad wept openly, with only the slave’s arm across his shoulders for comfort. And Fear and Trull had looked on, the K’risnan sitting hunched and mute on the ground behind them, until such time as the emperor found himself once more, the child and brother and newly blooded warrior he’d once been – before the sword found his hands – discovered, still cowering but alive within him.

Little had been said on the return journey, but they had ridden their horses into the ground in their haste, and for all but Udinaas the ride had been a flight. Not from the Forkrul Assail and its immutable fascination for the peace of cold corpses, but from the death, and the rebirth, of the emperor of the Tiste Edur.

They re-joined the army five leagues from Brans Keep, and received Hannan Mosag’s report that contact had been established with the K’risnan in the other two armies, and all were approaching the fated battlefield, where, shadow wraiths witnessed, the Letherii forces awaited them.

Details, the trembling skein of preparation, Udinaas was indifferent to them, the whisper of order in seeming chaos. An army marched, like some headless migration, each beast bound by instinct, the imperatives of violence. Armies marched from complexity into simplicity. It was this detail that drove them onward. A field waited, on which all matters could be reduced, on which dust and screams and blood brought cold clarity. This was the secret hunger of warriors and soldiers, of governments, kings and emperors. The simple mechanics of victory and defeat, the perfect feint to draw every eye, every mind lured into the indulgent game. Focus on the scales. Count the measures and mull over balances, observe the stacked bodies like stacked coins and time is devoured, the mind exercised in the fruitless repetition of the millstone, and all the world beyond was still and blurred for the moment… so long as no-one jarred the table.

Udinaas envied the warriors and soldiers their simple lives. For them, there was no coming back from death. They spoke simply, in the language of negation. They fought for the warrior, the soldier, at their side, and even dying had purpose – which was, he now believed, the rarest gift of all.

Or so it should have been, but the slave knew it would be otherwise. Sorcery was the weapon for the battle to come. Perhaps it was, in truth, the face of future wars the world over. Senseless annihilation, the obliteration of lives in numbers beyond counting. A logical extension of governments, kings and emperors. War as a clash of wills, a contest indifferent to its cost, seeking to discover who will blink first – and not caring either way. War, no different an exercise from the coin-reaping of the Merchants’ Tolls, and thus infinitely understandable.

The Tiste Edur and their allies were arraying themselves opposite the Letherii armies, the day’s light growing duller, muted by the hovering wave of suspended dust. In places sorcery crackled, shimmered the air, tentative escapes of the power held ready by both sides. Udinaas wondered if anyone, anyone at all, would survive this day. And, among those who did, what lessons would they take from this battle?

Sometimes the game goes too far.

She was standing beside him, silent and small and wrapped in a supple, undyed deerhide. She had said nothing, offered no reason for seeking him out. He did not know her mind, he could not guess her thoughts. Unknown and profoundly unknowable.

Yet now he heard her draw a shuddering breath.

Udinaas glanced over. ‘The bruises are almost gone,’ he said.

Feather Witch nodded. ‘I should thank you.’

‘No need.’

‘Good.’ She seemed to falter at her own vehemence. ‘I should not have said that. I don’t know what to think.’

‘About what?’

She shook her head. ‘About what, he asks. For Errant’s sake, Udinaas, Lether is about to fall.’

‘Probably. I have looked long and hard at the Letherii forces. I see what must be mages, standing apart here and there. But not the Ceda.’

‘He must be here. How could he not be?’

Udinaas said nothing.

‘You are no longer an Indebted.’

‘And that matters?’

‘I don’t know.’

They fell silent. Their position was on a rise to the northwest of the battlefield. They could make out the facing wall of Brans Keep itself, a squat, formidable citadel leaning up against a cliff carved sheer into a hillside. Corner towers flanked the wall, and on each stood large fixed mangonels with their waiting crews. There was also a mage present on each tower, arms raised, and it was evident that a ritual was under way binding the two on their respective perches. Probably something defensive, since the bulk of the King’s Battalion was positioned at the foot of the keep.

To the west of that battalion a ridge reached out from the hills a short distance, and on its other side were positioned elements of the king’s heavy infantry, along with the Riven Brigade. West of that waited companies of the Snakebelt Battalion with the far flanking side protected by the Crimson Rampant Brigade, who were backed to the westernmost edge of the Brans Hills and to the course of the Dissent River to the south.

It was more difficult to make out the array of Letherii forces east of the King’s Battalion. There was an artificial lake on the east side of the keep, and north of it, alongside the battalion, was the Merchants’ Battalion. Another seasonal river or drainage channel wound northeast on their right flank, and it seemed the Letherii forces on the other side of that intended to use the dry ditch as a line of defence.

In any case, Rhulad’s own army would present the western body of the Edur advance. Central was Fear’s army, and further to the east, beyond an arm of lesser hills and old lake beds, approached the army of Tomad and Binadas Sengar, on their way down from the town of Five Points.

The rise Udinaas and Feather Witch stood on was ringed in shadow wraiths, and it was clear to Udinaas that protective sorcery surrounded them. Beyond the rise, out of sight of the facing armies, waited the Edur women, elders and children. Mayen was somewhere among them, still cloistered, still under Uruth Sengar’s direct care.