All five T'lan Imass began to dissolve.
'Wait!' the mage shouted, rushing forward. 'How in Hood's name do we get out of here?'
It was too late. The creatures were gone.
Gesler rounded on Stormy. 'What did that bastard tell you?' he demanded.
The soldier's eyes were wet — shocking Felisin — as he turned to his corporal.
Gesler whispered, 'Stormy…'
'He said there was great pain,' the man muttered. 'I asked How long? He said For ever. The wound heals around him, you see. She couldn't command, you see. Not for something like that. He volunteered-' The man's throat closed up, then. He spun away, bolted through the gangway and out of sight.
'Clanless,' Heboric said from the forecastle. 'As good as useless. Existence without meaning …'
Gesler kicked one of the severed heads across the deck. Its uneven thumping was loud in the still air. 'Who still wants to live for ever?' he growled, then spat.
Truth spoke, his voice quavering. 'Didn't anybody else see?' he asked. 'The Bonecaster didn't — I'm sure of it, she didn't…'
'What're you going on about, lad?' Gesler demanded.
'That T'lan Imass. He tied it to his belt. By the hair. His bear cloak hid it.'
'What?'
'He took one of the heads. Didn't anybody else see?'
Heboric was the first to react. With a wild grin he leapt down to the main deck, making for the galley. Even as he plunged through the doorway Kulp was clambering down to the first oar deck. He disappeared from view.
Minutes passed.
Gesler, still frowning, went to join Stormy and the ex-priest.
Kulp returned. 'One of them's dead as a post,' he said.
Felisin thought to ask him what it all meant, but a sudden exhaustion swept the impulse away. She looked around until she saw Baudin. He was at the prow, his back to everything … to everyone. She wondered at his indifference. Lack of imagination, she concluded after a moment, the thought bringing a sneer to her lips. She made her way to him.
'All too much for you, eh, Baudin?' she asked, leaning beside him on the arching rail.
'T'lan Imass were never nothing but trouble,' he said. 'Always two sides to whatever they did, maybe more than two. Maybe hundreds.'
'A thug with opinions.'
'You set your every notion in stone, lass. No wonder people always surprise you.'
'Surprise? I'm way past surprise, thug. We're in something, every one of us. There's more to come, so you can forget about thinking of a way out. There isn't one.'
He grunted. 'Wise words for a change.'
'Don't soften up on me,' Felisin said. 'I'm just too tired to be cruel. Give me a few hours' sleep and I'll be back to my old self.'
'Planning ways to murder me, you mean.'
'Keeps me amused.'
He was silent a long moment, eyes on the meaningless horizon ahead, then he turned to her. 'You ever think that maybe what you are is what's trapping you inside whatever it is you're trapped inside?'
She blinked. There was a glint of sardonic judgement in his small, beastlike eyes. 'I'm not following you, Baudin.'
He smiled. 'Oh yes, you are, lass.'
CHAPTER TEN
It is one thing to lead by example with half a dozen soldiers at your back. It is wholly another with ten thousand.
Life of Dassem Ultor
Duiker
It had been a week since Duiker came upon the trail left by the refugees from Caron Tepasi. They had obviously been driven south to place further strain on Coltaine's stumbling city in motion, the historian thought. There was nothing else in this ceaseless wasted land. The dry season had taken hold, the sun in the barren sky scorching the grasses until they looked and felt like brittle wire.
Day after day had rolled by, yet Duiker still could not catch up with the Fist and his train. The few times he had come within sight of the massive dust cloud, Reloe's Tithansi outriders had prevented the historian from getting any closer.
Somehow, Coltaine kept his forces moving, endlessly moving, driving for the Sekala River. And from there? Does he make a stand, his back to the ancient ford?
So Duiker rode in the train's wake. The detritus from the refugees diminished, yet grew more poignant. Tiny graves humped the old encampments; the short-bones of horses and cattle lay scattered about; an oft-repaired but finally abandoned wagon axle marked one departure point, the rest of the wagon dismantled and taken for spares. The latrine trenches reeked beneath clouds of flies.
Places where skirmishing had occurred revealed another story. Amidst the naked, unrecovered bodies of Tithansi horsewarriors were shattered Wickan lances, the heads removed. Everything that could be reused had been stripped from the Tithansi bodies: leather thongs and straps, leggings and belts, weapons, even braids of hair. Dead horses were dragged away entire, leaving swathes of blood-matted grass in their wake.
Duiker was well past astonishment at anything he saw. Like the Tithansi tribesmen he'd occasionally exchanged words with, he'd begun to believe that Coltaine was something other than human, that he had carved his soldiers and every refugee into unyielding avatars of the impossible. Yet for all that, there was no hope for victory. Kamist Reloe's Apocalypse consisted of the armies of four cities and a dozen towns, countless tribes and a peasant horde as vast as an inland sea. And it was closing in, content for the moment simply to escort Coltaine to the Sekala River. Every current was drawing to that place. A battle was taking shape, an annihilation.
Duiker rode through the day, parched, hungry, wind-burned, his clothes reduced to rags. A straggler from the peasant army, an old man determined to join the last struggle. Tithansi riders knew him on sight and paid him little heed apart from a distant wave. Every two or three days a troop would join him, pass him bundles of food, water and feed for the horse. In some ways, he had become their icon, his journey symbolic, burdened with unasked-for significance. The historian felt pangs of guilt at that, yet accepted the gifts with genuine gratitude — they kept him and his horse alive.
Nonetheless, his faithful mount was wearing down. More and more each day Duiker led the animal by the reins.
Dusk approached. The distant dust cloud continued to march on, until the historian was certain that Coltaine's vanguard had reached the river. The Fist would insist that the entire train drive on through the night to the encampment that the vanguard was even now preparing. If Duiker was to have any chance of rejoining them, it would have to be this night.
He knew of the ford only from maps, and his recollection was frustratingly vague. The Sekala River averaged five hundred paces in width, flowing north to the Karas Sea. A small village squatted in the crook of two hills a few hundred paces south of the ford itself. He seemed to remember something about an old oxbow, as well.
The dying day spread shadows across the land. The brightest of the night's stars glittered in the sky's deepening blue. Wings of capemoths rose with the heat that fled the parched ground, like black flakes of ash.
Duiker climbed back into the saddle. A small band of Tithansi outriders rode a ridge half a mile to the north. Duiker judged that he was at least a league from the river. The patrols of horsewarriors would increase the closer he approached. He had no plan for dealing with them.
The historian had walked his mount for most of the day, preparing for a hard ride into the night. He would need all that the beast could give him, and was afraid that it would not be enough. He nudged the mare into a trot.
The distant Tithansi paid him no attention, and soon rode out of sight. Heart thumping, Duiker urged his horse into a canter.