‘Mother, please .’
Kilmandaros sighed. ‘You will not stay with me, my son?’
‘To witness your meeting with Draconus? I think not.’
She nodded.
‘Draconus will kill you!’
She faced him with burning eyes. ‘It was only a plan, my beloved son.’
BOOK SIX
TO ONE IN CHAINS
If you knew where this path led
Would you have walked it?
If you knew the pain at love’s solemn end
Would you have awakened it?
In darkness the wheel turns
In darkness the dust dims
In red fire the wheel burns
In darkness the sun spins
If you knew the thought in your head
Would you have spoken it?
If by this one word you betrayed a friend
Would you have uttered it?
In darkness the wheel turns
In darkness the dust dims
In red fire the wheel burns
In darkness the sun spins
If you knew the face of the dead
Would you have touched it?
If by this coin a soul’s journey to send
Would you have stolen it?
In darkness the wheel turns
In darkness the dust dims
In red fire the wheel burns
In darkness the sun spins
Sparak Chant Psalm VII ‘The Vulture’s Laugh ’ The Sparak Nethem
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The faces all in rows will wait
As I take each in my hands
Remembering what it is
To be who I am not.
Will all these struggles
Fade into white?
Or melt like snow on stone
In the heat of dawn?
Do you feel my hands?
These weathered wings
Of dreams of flight
– stripped –
Are gifts worn down.
Still I hold fast and climb sure
Through your eyes –
Who waits for me
Away from the ravaged nests
The scenes of violence
Any searching will easily find
The broken twigs
The tufts of feather and hair
The spilled now drying –
Did you spring alight
Swift away unharmed?
So many lies we leave be
The sweet feeding to make us strong
But the rows are unmoving
And we journey without a step
What I dare you to lose
I surrendered long ago
But what I beg you to find
Must I then lose?
In these rows there are tales
For every line, every broken smile
Draw close then
And dry these tears
For I have a story to tell
The Unwitnessed Fisher kel Tath
THESE SOLDIERS . THE TWO WORDS HUNG IN HER MIND LIKE MEAT from butcher hooks. They twisted slowly, aimlessly. They dripped, but the drips had begun to slow. Lying on her side atop the packs of wrapped food, Badalle could let her head sink down on one side and see the rough trail stretching away behind them. Not much was being left behind now – barring the bodies – and beneath the light of the Jade Strangers those pale shapes looked like toppled statues of marble lining a long-abandoned road. Things with their stories gone, their histories for ever lost. When she tired of that view, she could set her gaze the opposite way, looking ahead, and from her vantage point the column was like a swollen worm, with thousands of heads upon its elongated back, each one of them slave to the same crawling body.
Every now and then the worm cast off a part of it that had died, and these pieces were pushed out to the sides. Hands would reach down from those walking past, collecting up fragments of clothing which would be used during the day, stitched together to make flies – gifts of shade from the dead – and by the time those discarded pieces came close to her, why, they’d be mostly naked, and they’d have become marble statues. Because, when things fail, you topple the statues .
Directly before her, the bared backs of the haulers glistened with precious sweat as they strained in their yokes. And the thick ropes twisted as they went taut and gusted out breaths of glittering dust all down their length. They call these soldiers heavies. Some of them anyway. The ones who don’t stop, who don’t fall down, who don’t die. The ones who scare the others and make them keep going. Until they fall over dead. Heavies. These soldiers .
She thought back. The sun had been spilling out along the horizon. The day was going away, and it had been a day when no one had spoken, when the Snake had been silent. She had been walking three paces behind Rutt, and Rutt walked hunched over around Held, who was huddled in his arms, and Held’s eyes were closed against the glare – but then, they were always closed, because so much in the world was too hard to look at.
