Steven Erikson - Fall of Light

Hearing a sound he glanced up. Two women sat astride horses made of knotted grasses and twigs. They sat in silence, watching him from a dozen paces away.

He didn’t know either of them. They didn’t match the faces he was looking for. Wreneck returned his attention to the dead man. He leaned on the spear, but the leather armour would not give. It needs a thrust. He drew the weapon back, and then poked it against the body.

‘He’s not bothered,’ said one of the women. ‘Go ahead, if you must. But abusing a corpse is unseemly, don’t you think?’

Unseemly? Wreneck looked around at all the dead bodies. Shaking his head, he poked a second time. The leather armour was tough. He leaned closer then, to find what had killed the man. He saw a nick in the corpse’s throat, where blood had sprayed and then poured out on to the ground. It didn’t seem like much, but no other wounds were visible.

He prodded a third time, hard against the chest, and then stepped back. He turned to the two women. ‘It’s all right now,’ he said. ‘I’m done avenging what they did to her. I’m going home now.’

The woman who had spoken earlier now leaned forward on her saddle. ‘And I, sir, am your witness. She is avenged.’

‘What’s your name?’ Wreneck asked. ‘I need to know, since you’ve witnessed and everything.’

‘Threadbare.’

The golden-haired woman beside Threadbare said, ‘And I am T’riss.’ She smiled. ‘Your witnesses.’

Satisfied, Wreneck nodded. Home was a long way away and he had a lot of walking to do. He would salvage a cloak from one of these bodies, with maybe a second one for a blanket.

Jinia, it’s done. I feel better. I hope you will, too.

Sometimes it takes being a child to do what’s right.

* * *

‘What was all that about?’ T’riss asked. ‘You send children into war now, Tiste?’

‘His blade was clean,’ Threadbare replied. She raised her gaze skyward. ‘They’re gone, right? Not still winging around up there in the gloom and clouds?’

‘Gone, for now.’

Threadbare sighed, gathering up the braided reins. ‘I think I prefer it this way,’ she said.

‘Prefer what?’

‘Coming too late to fight. Missing the whole fucking mess. I’ve seen enough of it, T’riss. Look around here. All these sad corpses. It’s a stupid argument that ends up with someone dead and the others looking guilty behind all that satisfaction.’ She looked over at T’riss. ‘I am riding to Kharkanas, to find my people. What about you?’

‘There is a forest,’ T’riss replied, ‘where waits another Azathanai. I think I need to see him.’

‘What for?’

‘He will know of me. Who I once was.’

‘That makes a difference?’

‘What do you mean?’

Threadbare shrugged. ‘Whoever you were isn’t who you are now. Sounds to me you’re heading for confusion and probably misery. Maybe some secrets should stay secrets. That ever occurred to you?’

T’riss smiled. ‘All the time. The thing is, we almost clashed. Here, in the Valley of Tarns. Had I come in time. Had he awakened his power. The dragons would have … enjoyed that.’ She paused, and then shrugged. ‘But something happened. Someone, I think, held him back. Someone pretty much saved the world. I’m curious, aren’t you? About this Tiste who refused my Azathanai brother?’

Threadbare studied T’riss for a time, and then sighed. ‘Where is this forest, then?’

‘Just outside the city.’

‘So, it seems we ride together for a little while longer.’

‘Yes. Is that not delightful?’

Threadbare saw the boy nearing the northern ridge of the valley. ‘That vengeance of his,’ she said. ‘He did it right, I think.’

‘The dead weep for him.’

‘They do? In pity?’

‘No,’ T’riss replied. ‘In envy.’

Threadbare kicked her mount forward. ‘Fucking ghosts,’ she muttered. I’m of a mind to join them.

* * *

Renarr followed Lord Vatha Urusander into the old throne room. Within the spacious chamber, lightness and darkness waged a belaboured contest, too sombre to be a battle, too desultory to be a war. This was a sullen acceptance, as of two powers recognizing the other’s necessity. Definition, Urusander might say, by opposition.

Candles and a brazier illuminated one of the two thrones that had been set up side by side on the dais. Its wood was white, polished pearlescent, and over the arms gold-threaded silks had been draped. The other throne seemed to emanate negation, making it difficult to discern, as if some lifeless mote stained the eye.

Mother Dark had been seated on that throne, though upon Urusander’s entrance into the chamber she now stood. At the foot of the dais and flanking the approach waited the two High Priestesses, both turning to face Father Light. Syntara was resplendent in her sunburst vestments, her brocade glittering and her braided hair looking like ropes of gold wire. Heavy white makeup disguised the fresh cuts on her face.

High Priestess Emral Lanear – whom Renarr had never seen before – wore a black robe, untouched by ornamentation. Her onyx face looked distraught, with deep lines bracketing her mouth. She was older than Syntara, her features almost too plain in the absence of paint and colour. A woman, concluded Renarr with a mental smile, inviting darkness.

This moment, Renarr understood, belonged to the surface. Nothing here announced depth or solidity. The ceremony would be in the manner of all ceremonies: momentary and ephemeral. A sudden focus, filled with intent, which would ring hollow for ever afterwards.

She thought it fitting.

As Urusander paused a few paces in front of her, Renarr moved off to the right, towards the flanking row of braziers suspended from three-legged iron stands. The warmth was welcome but would soon become oppressive. She found herself drawing closer to where Hunn Raal stood.

The man’s faint smirk was just as welcoming as the heat from the glowing embers: a thing of familiarity, a wry reminder of the occasion’s falsity. Mockery attended the moment, and in this respect Hunn Raal belonged to this scene. He had recovered from the sorcerous battle, if one chose to ignore the ruptured pads of the palms of his hands, the gaping, bloodless fissures streaking his fingers. That, and the incessant low tremble that the destriant fought with sips from his flask. Still, he stood in the manner of a man wholly satisfied.

She considered this scene, caught as it was on the cusp of dawn, when night and day fell into their eternal, exhausted battle, against the backdrop of a bleeding sky, and wondered how it would be seen in posterity. Necessity’s bared teeth, transformed into smiles of joy in the centuries to come. That vast span of wilful forgetfulness we call history. Looking round the chamber, she saw but one other witness who might be asking the same questions. Rise Herat. The historian. I once attended one of his lectures. A night of self-hatred, I recall, uttered in the lifeless tones of an anatomist lecturing surgeons. Only, the body on the slab was his own. He was past even enjoying the pain he inflicted on himself.

When the historian’s love of history dies … alas, there is nowhere to go, no place to which one might flee and then hide.

Unless one chooses to live a life insensate. She glanced again at Hunn Raal, and saw how the man and the historian more or less faced one another, and as she noted this Vatha Urusander stepped forward, moving in between the two men as he approached the dais, and the woman who would become his wife.

He halted at the halfway point when Mother Dark suddenly spoke. ‘A moment, if you will, Lord Urusander.’