She barked a laugh, but did not turn round. ‘Fire,’ she said. ‘Yes. Fire. Tell me, Grub, what do you believe in?’
‘What?’
‘Some things are more real than others. For everyone. Each one, different, always different. What’s the most real to you?’
‘We can’t survive this place, that’s what’s most real, Sinn. We need water. Food. Shelter.’
He saw her nod. ‘That’s what this warren is telling us, Grub. Just that. What you believe has to do with surviving. It doesn’t go any further, does it? What if I told you that it used to be that for almost everybody? Before the cities, before people invented being rich.’
‘Being rich? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Before some people found other things to believe in. Before they made those things more real than anything else. Before they decided it was all right even to kill for them. Or enslave people. Or keep them stupid and poor.’ She shot him a look. ‘Did you know I had a Tanno tutor? A Spiritwalker.’
‘I don’t know anything about them. Seven Cities priests, right?’
‘He once told me that an untethered soul can drown in wisdom.’
‘What?’
‘Wisdom grows by stripping away beliefs, until the last tether is cut, and suddenly you float free. Only, because your eyes are wide open, you see right away that you can’t float in what you’re in. You can only sink. That’s why the meanest religions work so hard at keeping their followers ignorant. Knowledge is poison. Wisdom is depthless. Staying ignorant keeps you in the shallows. Every Tanno one day takes a final spiritwalk. They cut the last tether, and the soul can’t go back. When that happens, the other Tannos mourn, because they know that the spiritwalker has drowned.’
His mouth was too dry, his throat too sore, but even if that had been otherwise, he knew he would have nothing to say to any of that. He knew, after all, about his own ignorance.
‘Look around, Grub. See? There are no gifts here. Look at these stupid bodies and their stupid wagonloads of furniture. The last thing that was real for them, the only thing, was fire.’
His attention was drawn to a dust-cloud, rising in a slanted shroud of gold. Something was on a track that would converge with this road. A herd? An army?
‘Fire is not the gift you think it is, Grub.’
‘We’ll die tonight without it.’
‘We need to stay on this road.’
‘Why?’
‘To find out where it leads.’
‘We’ll die here, then.’
‘This land, Grub,’ she said, ‘has generous memories.’
The sun was low by the time the army arrived. Horse-drawn chariots and massive wagons burdened with plunder. The warriors were dark-skinned, tall and thin, bedecked in bronze armour. Grub thought there might be a thousand of them, maybe more. He saw spearmen, archers, and what must be the equivalent of heavy infantry, armed with sickle-bladed axes and short curved swords.
They cut across the track of the road as if blind to it, and as Grub stared he was startled to realize that the figures and their horses and chariots were vaguely transparent. They are ghosts. ‘These,’ he said to Sinn who stood beside him, ‘are this land’s memories?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can they see us?’
She pointed at one chariot that had thundered past only to turn round at the urging of the man behind the driver, and was now drawing up opposite them. ‘See him-he’s a priest. He can’t see us, but he senses us. Holiness isn’t always in a place, Grub. Sometimes it’s what’s passing through.’
He shivered, hugged himself. ‘Stop this, Sinn. We’re not gods.’
‘No, we’re not. We’re’-and she laughed-‘more like divine messengers.’
The priest had leapt down from the chariot-Grub could now see the old blood splashed across the spokes of the high wheels, and saw where blades were fitted in times of battle, projecting out from the hubs. A mass charge by such instruments of war would deliver terrible slaughter.
The hawk-faced man was edging closer, groping like a blind man.
Grub made to step back but Sinn caught him by the arm and held him fast.
‘Don’t,’ she murmured. ‘Let him touch the divine, Grub. Let him receive his gift of wisdom.’
The priest had raised his hands. Beyond, the entire army had halted, and Grub saw what must be a king or commander-perched on a huge, ornate chariot-drawing up to observe the strange antics of his priest.
‘We can give him no wisdom,’ Grub said. ‘Sinn-’
‘Don’t be a fool. Just stand here. Wait. We don’t have to do anything.’
Those two outstretched hands came closer. The palms were speckled with dried blood. There were, however, no calluses upon them. Grub hissed, ‘He is no warrior.’
‘No,’ Sinn agreed, ‘but he so likes the blood.’
The palms hovered, slipped forward, and unerringly settled upon their brows.
Grub saw the priest’s eyes widen, and he knew at once that the man was seeing through-through to this road and its litter of destruction-to an age either long before or yet to come: the age in which Grub and Sinn existed, solid and real.
The priest lurched back and howled.
Sinn’s laughter was harsh. ‘He saw what was real! He saw!’ She spun to face Grub, her eyes bright. ‘The future is a desert! And a road! And no end to the stupid wars, the insane slaughter-’ She whirled back and jabbed a finger at the wailing priest who was staggering back to his chariot. ‘He believed in the sun god! He believed in immortality-of glory, of wealth-golden fields, lush gardens, sweet rains and sweet rivers flowing without cease! He believed his people are-hah!-chosen! They all do, don’t you see? They do, we do, everyone does! See our gift, Grub? See what knowledge yields him? The sanctuary of ignorance-is shattered! Garden into wilderness, cast out into the seas of wisdom! Is not our message divine?’
Grub did not think he had any tears left in him. He was wrong.
The army and its priest and its king all fled, wild as the wind. But, before they did, slaves appeared and raised a cairn of stones. Which they then surrounded with offerings: jars of beer and wine and honey, dates, figs, loaves of bread and two throat-cut goats spilling blood into the sand.
The feast was ghostly, but Sinn assured Grub that it would sustain them. Divine gifts, she said, were not gifts at all. The receiver must pay for them.
‘And he has done that, has he not, Grub? Oh, he has done that.’
The Errant stepped into the vast, impossible chamber. Gone now the leisure of reminiscences, the satisfied stirring of brighter days long since withered colourless, almost dead. Knuckles trailed a step behind him, as befitted his role of old and his role to come.
She was awake, hunched over a scattering of bones. Trapped in games of chance and mischance, the brilliant, confounding offerings of Sechul Lath, Lord of the Hold of Chance-the Toppler, the Conniver, the Wastrel of Ruin. Too foolish to realize that she was challenging, in the Lord’s cast, the very laws of the universe which were, in truth, far less predictable than any mortal might believe.
The Errant walked up and with one boot kicked the ineffable pattern aside.
Her face stretched into a mask of rage. She reared, hands lifting-and then froze as she fixed her eyes upon the Errant.
‘Kilmandaros.’
He saw the flicker of fear in her gaze.
‘I have come,’ he said to her, ‘to speak of dragons.’
Chapter Eight
In my lifelong study of the scores of species of ants to be found in the tropical forests of Dal Hon, I am led to the conviction that all forms of life are engaged in a struggle to survive, and that within each species there exists a range of natural but variable proclivities, of physical condition and of behaviour, which in turn weighs for or against in the battle to survive and procreate. Further, it is my suspicion that in the act of procreation, such traits are passed on. By extension, one can see that ill traits reduce the likelihood of both survival and procreation. On the basis of these notions, I wish to propose to my fellow scholars at this noble gathering a law of survival that pertains to all forms of life. But before I do so, I must add one more caveat, drawn from the undeniable behavioural characteristics of, in my instance of speciality, ants. To whit, success of one form of life more often than not initiates devastating population collapse among competitors, and indeed, sometimes outright extinction. And that such annihilation of rivals may in fact be a defining feature of success.