Gothos grunted. ‘An affliction when the child is taken too soon from the mother’s tit. Spend the rest of your days sucking on something, anything, everything. There are Dog-Runners who slip in among the herds they hunt, to suckle animal teats in the season. They too have no teeth.’
‘And none of these Dog-Runners are trampled?’
‘Obsession incurs risk, Arathan.’
Arathan stood studying the Lord of Hate. ‘I imagine something like your Folly must incur many risks, lord. How is it you have avoided such dread pitfalls?’
‘In itself, a suicide note involves no particular obsession,’ Gothos replied, collecting up the cup. ‘My haunting is both singular and modest, in that I mean to get it right.’
‘And when you do, lord? When you finally get it right?’
‘Proof against the accusation of obsession,’ the lord answered, ‘since what drives me is simple curiosity. Indeed, what will happen when I finally get it right? Be sure I will find a means of letting you know the day that occurs.’
‘I hesitate to say that I look forward to it, lord, lest you mistake my meaning.’
‘Ah,’ said Gothos after sipping, ‘did I not warn you that old leaves hold a most subtle flavour? You have over-sweetened your offering, Arathan, as the young are wont to do.’
Arathan turned at a sound from the doorway, to see Hood standing in the threshold. The cowled Jaghut studied Arathan for a moment, and then stepped inside. ‘I smell that foul tea you so adore, Gothos.’
‘Properly aged as is appropriate,’ Gothos responded. ‘Arathan, fill him a cup, in which he may drown his sorrows, sweetly.’
‘I despaired,’ Hood said, collecting up a chair.
‘This is your story, yes.’
‘Not that, you gas-bloated goat. Day and night I am assailed. The questions alone invite my hunger for death. Imagine, the fools clamour for organization! Pragmatic necessities! Supply equipage, cooks and meals!’
‘Is it not said that an army travels on its stomach?’
‘An army travels on its griping, Gothos, which surely sustains it beyond all fodder.’
‘I too have been besieged, Hood,’ said the Lord of Hate, ‘for which you are to blame. This day, it was your officers who made a mess of my afternoon, as Arathan is my witness. So, as I feared, you are the cause of sorrows not just your own-’
‘That cause for sorrow not my own,’ Hood growled.
‘No,’ Gothos said. ‘But your answer to tragedy surely is. As for me’ – he paused to hold up his cup, as if he could somehow see through the pewter to admire the hue of the tea – ‘I would have set out hunting Azathanai, the ones with blood on their hands. Tragedy sits still as a frozen pond, upon which no firm footing is possible. Vengeance, on the other hand, can silence any army, in that grim, teeth-grinding way we both know all too well.’
Hood grunted. ‘The offence taken by innocent Azathanai will serve what need there may be for vengeance.’
‘Hardly. They’re almost as useless as we are, Hood. Expect nothing concerted, not even a proclamation of … oh, what would it be? Censure? Decided disapproval? Disagreeable frown?’
‘I am scoured of vengeance,’ Hood said. ‘Made hollow as a bronze urn.’
‘And so I shall think of you from now on, Hood. As a bronze urn.’
‘And when I think of you, Gothos, I shall imagine a book without resolution, a tale without end, an endeavour without purpose. I shall think of pointlessness, in a pointed fashion.’
‘Perhaps,’ Gothos said, leaning back. ‘Of course, that all depends on who outlives the other.’
‘Does it?’
‘Possibly. It was a thought, presumably relevant.’
Hood’s cold eyes fixed on Arathan – who sat once more beside the last surviving brazier – and the Jaghut said, ‘This one, Gothos, I will send back to you. Before we cross a threshold where no return is possible.’
‘I thought as much,’ Gothos said, sighing.
‘Unless you’d rather I didn’t.’
‘No. That is, I’d rather you did. Send him back, if not here, then somewhere else. Just not there.’
Arathan cleared his throat. ‘And I see that neither of you imagines that I might have a say in all this?’
Hood looked to Gothos. ‘Did the pup speak?’
‘Some semblance of speech, yes,’ Gothos said. ‘It does not mark his more admirable trait.’
Arathan said, ‘I will speak my piece, to you, Lord Hood, when the time comes – when we reach that threshold you describe. And you will hear me, sir, and make no argument against my continuing on, in your company.’
‘I will not?’
‘Not, sir, when you hear what I will say.’
‘He knows our minds, you see,’ said Gothos to Hood. ‘Being young and all.’
‘Ah, that. Yes, of course. Forgive me for forgetting.’ With that, Hood leaned back and stretched out his legs, his pose matching that of Gothos.
Arathan stared at them both.
A moment later, Gothos started tapping on the arm of his chair. Glancing over, Arathan saw Hood nodding off to sleep.
SEVEN
A man without daughters, Sharenas Ankhadu reflected as she studied her commander, knew little of subtlety. Vatha Urusander faced south, his back to the keep’s outer wall, the detritus from the chute leading from the kitchen heaped behind him, at the base of a wedge-shaped stain on the stone wall. He stood with his boots in scraps of rubbish. Knucklebones blushed pink, tubers black with rot, broken pottery, peels and lumps of fat too rancid to burn. Despite the late afternoon’s bitter cold, steam rose from that mound like the smoke from some hidden peat fire. There was, she decided, fecundity in what rotted, but hardly the appetizing kind.
In her absence, the list of the slain had grown. Curious, for a war as yet undeclared. She eyed her commander, wondering if she knew him at all. Aching from the long ride, she waited at a distance, her clothes spattered with mud, her hands quickly growing numb with cold beneath the soaked-through leather riding gloves.
Winter was the season of isolation. Worlds closed in, crowded up one against another. Trapped in such confines, surrounded by forbidding cold and frozen land, one could obsess on what was still to come, speaking heated words, making the season of spring into a promise of fire. She had ridden far in her exploration of the realm, through bleak wastelands, scorched forests, winding through hills silvered by snow and frost. And like anything coming in from the cold, she was rarely made a welcome guest. It did not take an ice-locked keep to forge solitude. Winter’s isolation belonged as much to the mind as to the world outside it.
A painter of portraits would grin at the image before her now, in that cruel, superior way of artists who saw all that they needed to see. Complexity was confusion more often than not, while clarity could gift one with simplicity. In any case, the backside of a fortress was sordid enough in its mundane truths. Gatehouses, formal lanes and a bold façade all served what was required of them, elevating the titled few and their claims of privilege and wealth, and of course such edifices fronted the building, like a tapestry hiding a crumbling wall.
No different from men and women, then: buildings shit out a hole in their backside.
The notion made her think of Hunn Raal and his smile, the one he saved for the people he despised. Knowledge assembled secret hoards, and the man now leading the Legion in all but name was greed’s own tyrant these days. Worse, there was now something else about him, an emanation of sorts, beyond the usual rank wine staining his breath and souring his sweat. Sharenas wondered if she was alone in sensing that change – perhaps, simply, she had been gone too long.
Too long, and ill timed this departure. We went our separate ways, Kagamandra Tulas. You and I, so long ago now, it seems. Have you found your betrothed yet? Did you flinch, or did you stand in the manner of the man you would be? Kagamandra, I have come back to Neret Sorr, and I miss you.