‘I know you,’ she said. ‘You are Hood.’
The Jaghut stepped forward, the gate swirling closed behind him. Hood paused, regarding each witness in turn, and then walked towards Equity.
‘ They made you their king ,’ she whispered. ‘They who followed no one chose to follow you . They who refused every war fought your war. And what you did then – what you did—’
As he reached her, his desiccated hands caught her. He lifted her from her feet, and then, mouth stretching, he bit into the side of her face. The tusks drove up beneath her cheek bone, burst the eye on that side. In a welter of blood, he tore away half of her face, and then bit a second time, up under the orbitals, the tusks driving into her brain.
Equity hung in his grip, feeling her life drain away. Her head felt strangely unbalanced. She seemed to be weeping from only one eye, and from her throat no words were possible. I once dreamed of peace. As a child, I dreamed of —
Shurq Elalle stared in horror as the Jaghut flung the corpse away. From his gore-drenched mouth fell fragments of scalp and skull.
Then Hood faced them, and in a dry, toneless voice he said, ‘I have never much liked Forkrul Assail.’
No one spoke. Felash stood trembling, her face pale as death itself. Beside her, the handmaid had set her hands upon the axes at her belt, but seemed unable to move beyond that futile, diffident gesture.
Shurq Elalle gathered herself, and said, ‘You have a singular way of ending a discussion, Jaghut.’
The empty pits seemed to find her, somehow, and Hood said, ‘We have no need of allies. Besides, I recently learned a lesson in brevity, Shurq Elalle, which I have taken to heart.’
‘A lesson? Really? Who taught you that? ’
The Jaghut looked away, across the water. ‘Ah, my Death Ship. I admit, it was a quaint affectation. Nonetheless, one cannot help but admire its lines.’
Princess Felash, Fourteenth Daughter of Bolkando, fell to her knees and was sick in the sand.
CHAPTER TEN
What is it about this world
That so causes you trouble?
Why avow in your tone
This victim role?
And the plaintive hurt
Painting your eyes
Bemoans a life’s struggle
Ever paying a grievous toll
We gathered in one place
Under the selfsame sun
And the bronze woman
Holding the basin,
Her breasts settled in the bowl,
Looked down with pity
Or was it contempt?
She is a queen of dreams
And her gift is yours to take
Pity if you choose it
Or contempt behind the veil
I would have polished those eyes
For a better look
I would have caressed those roses
For a sweeter taste
When we drink from the same cup
And you make bitter recoil
I wonder at the tongue in waiting
And your deadening flavours
So eager to now despoil
What is it about this world
That so causes you trouble?
What could I say to change
Your wounded regard?
If my cold kiss must fail
And my milk run sour
Beneath the temple bell
That so blights your reward?
Ten thousand hang from trees
Their limbs bared roots
Starved of hope in the sun
And the wood-cutters are long gone
Up to where the road gives way
To trails in the dust
That spiral and curl
Like the smoke of fires
They are blazing beacons
In the desert night.
It was said by the lepers
Huddled against the hill
That a man with no hands
Who could stare only
As could the blind
Upon the horrors of argument
Did with one hand gone
Reach into the dark sky
And with the other too gone
He led me home
Wood-Cutters Tablets II & III Hethra of Aren
THE EDGE OF THE GLASS DESERT WAS A BROKEN LINE OF CRYSTALS AND boulders, for all the world like an ancient shoreline. Aranict could not pull her gaze from it. She sat slumped in the saddle of her wearily plodding horse, a hood drawn over against the blistering sun, off to one side of the main column. Prince Brys rode somewhere ahead, near the vanguard, leaving her alone.
The desert’s vast, flat stretch was blinding, the glare painful and strangely discordant, as if she was witnessing an ongoing crime, the raw lacerations of a curse upon the land itself. Stones melted to glass, shards of crystal jutting like spears, others that grew like bushes, every branch and twig glittering as if made of ice.
Rolled up against the verge there were bones, heaped like driftwood. Most were shattered, reduced to splinters, as if whatever had befallen the land had taken in a massive fist each creature and crushed the life from it – it felt like a deliberate act, an exercise in unbelievable malice. She thought she could still taste the evil, could still feel its rotted breath on the wind.
