He began walking, hide-wrapped feet scuffing as he dragged them forward, the point of the sword inscribing a desultory furrow in the dried clay as it trailed from his left hand. Clumps of mud clung to his ragged hide shirt and the leather straps of his weapon harness. Silty, soupy water had seeped into the various gashes and punctures on his body and now leaked in trickling runnels with every heavy step he took. He had possessed a helm once, an impressive trophy from his youth, but it had been shattered at the final battle against the Jaghut family in the Jhag Odhan. A single crossways blow that had also shorn away a fifth of his skull, parietal and temporal, on the right side. Jaghut women had deceptive strength and admirable ferocity, especially when cornered.
The sky above him had a sickly cast, but one he had already grown used to. This fragment of the long-fractured Tiste Edur warren was by far the largest he had come across, larger even than the one that surrounded Tremorlor, the Azath Odhanhouse. And this one had known a period of stability, sufficient for civilizations to arise, for savants of sorcery to begin unravelling the powers of Kurald Emurlahn, although those inhabitants had not been Tiste Edur.
Idly, Onrack wondered if the renegade T’lan Imass he and his kin pursued had somehow triggered the wound that had resulted in the flooding of this world. It seemed likely, given its obvious efficacy in obscuring their trail. Either that, or the Tiste Edur had returned, to reclaim what had once been theirs.
Indeed, he could smell the grey-skinned Edur-they had passed this way, and recently, arriving from another warren. Of course, the word ‘smell’ had acquired new meaning for the T’lan Imass in the wake of the Ritual. Mundane senses had for the most part withered along with flesh. Through the shadowed orbits of his eyes, for example, the world was a complex collage of dull colours, heat and cold and often measured by an unerring sensitivity to motion. Spoken words swirled in mercurial clouds of breath-if the speaker lived, that is. If not, then it was the sound itself that was detectable, shivering its way through the air. Onrack sensed sound as much by sight as by hearing.
And so it was that he became aware of a warm-blooded shape lying a short distance ahead. The wall here was slowly failing. Water spouted in streams from fissures between the bulging stones. Before long, it would give way entirely.
The shape did not move. It had been chained in place.
Another fifty paces and Onrack reached it.
The stench of Kurald Emurlahn was overpowering, faintly visible like a pool enclosing the supine figure, its surface rippling as if beneath a steady but thin rain. A deep ragged scar marred the prisoner’s broad brow beneath a hairless pate, the wound glowing with sorcery. There had been a metal tongue to hold down the man’s tongue, but that had dislodged, as had the straps wound round the figure’s head.
Slate-grey eyes stared up, unblinking, at the T’lan Imass.
Onrack studied the Tiste Edur for a moment longer, then he stepped over the man and continued on.
A ragged, withered voice rose in his wake. ‘Wait.’
The undead warrior paused and glanced back.
‘I-I would bargain. For my freedom.’
‘I am not interested in bargains,’ Onrack replied in the Edur language.
‘Is there nothing you desire, warrior?’
‘Nothing you can give me.’
‘Do you challenge me, then?’
Tendons creaking, Onrack tilted his head. ‘This section of the wall is about to collapse. I have no wish to be here when it does.’
‘And you imagine that I do?’
‘Considering your sentiments on the matter is a pointless effort on my part, Edur. I have no interest in imagining myself in your place. Why would I? You are about to drown.’
‘Break my chains, and we can continue this discussion in a safer place.’
‘The quality of this discussion has not earned such an exercise,’ Onrack replied.
‘I would improve it, given the time.’
‘This seems unlikely.’ Onrack turned away.
‘Wait! I can tell you of your enemies!’
Slowly, the T’lan Imass swung round once more. ‘My enemies? I do not recall saying that I had any, Edur.’
‘Oh, but you do. I should know. I was once one of them, and indeed that is why you find me here, for I am your enemy no longer.’
‘You are now a renegade among your own kind, then,’ Onrack observed. ‘I have no faith in traitors.’
‘To my own kind, T’lan Imass, I am not the traitor. That epithet belongs to the one who chained me here. In any case, the question of faith cannot be answered through negotiation.’
‘Should you have made that admission, Edur?’
The man grimaced. ‘Why not? I would not deceive you.’
Now, Onrack was truly curious. ‘Why would you not deceive me?’
‘For the very cause that has seen me Shorn,’ the Edur replied. ‘I am plagued by the need to be truthful.’
‘That is a dreadful curse,’ the T’lan Imass said.
‘Yes.’
Onrack lifted his sword. ‘In this case, I admit to possessing a curse of my own. Curiosity.’
‘I weep for you.’
‘I see no tears.’
‘In my heart, T’lan Imass.’
A single blow shattered the chains. With his free right hand, Onrack reached down and clutched one of the Edur’s ankles. He dragged the man after him along the top of the wall.
‘I would rail at the indignity of this,’ the Tiste Edur said as he was pulled onward, step by scuffing step, ‘had I the strength to do so.’
Onrack made no reply. Dragging the man with one hand, his sword with the other, he trudged forward, his progress eventually taking them past the area of weakness on the wall.
‘You can release me now,’ the Tiste Edur gasped.
‘Can you walk?’
‘No, but-’
‘Then we shall continue like this.’
‘Where are you going, then, that you cannot afford to wait for me to regain my strength?’
‘Along this wall,’ the T’lan Imass replied.
There was silence between them for a time, apart from the creaks from Onrack’s bones, the rasp of his hide-wrapped feet, and the hiss and thump of the Tiste Edur’s body and limbs across the mud-layered stones. The detritus-filled sea remained unbroken on their left, a festering marshland on their right. They passed between and around another dozen catfish, these ones not quite as large yet fully as limbed as the previous group. Beyond them, the wall stretched on unbroken to the horizon.
In a voice filled with pain, the Tiste Edur finally spoke again. ‘Much more… T’lan Imass… and you’ll be dragging a corpse.’
Onrack considered that for a moment, then he halted his steps and released the man’s ankle. He slowly swung about.
Groaning, the Tiste Edur rolled himself onto his side. ‘I assume,’ he gasped, ‘you have no food, or fresh water.’
Onrack lifted his gaze, back to the distant humps of the catfish. ‘I suppose I could acquire some. Of the former, that is.’
‘Can you open a portal, T’lan Imass? Can you get us out of this realm?’
‘No.’
The Tiste Edur lowered his head to the clay and closed his eyes. ‘Then I am as good as dead in any case. None the less, I appreciate your breaking my chains. You need not remain here, though I would know the name of the warrior who showed me what mercy he could.’
‘Onrack. Clanless, of the Logros.’
‘I am Trull Sengar. Also clanless.’
Onraek stared down at the Tiste Edur for a while. Then the T’lan Imass stepped over the man and set off, retracing their path. He arrived among the catfish. A single chop downward severed the head of the nearest one.
The slaying triggered a frenzy among the others. Skin split, sleek four-limbed bodies tore their way free. Broad, needle-fanged heads swung towards the undead warrior in their midst, tiny eyes glistening. Loud hisses from all sides. The beasts moved on squat, muscular legs, three-toed feet thickly padded and clawed. Their tails were short, extending in a vertical fin back up their spines.