'To me,' the mother growled, 'it matters naught which of you kills us, only that you kill us.'
The woman's broad mouth quirked. 'I can see your point.'
Weariness threatened to overwhelm the Jaghut mother, but she managed to pull herself into a sitting position. 'What,' she asked between gasps, 'do you want?'
'To offer you a bargain.'
Breath catching, the Jaghut mother stared into the Bonecaster's dark eyes, and saw nothing of mockery. Her gaze then dropped, for the briefest of moments, on her son and daughter, then back up to hold steady on the woman's own.
The Imass slowly nodded.
The earth had cracked some time in the past, a wound of such depth as to birth a molten river wide enough to stretch from horizon to horizon. Vast and black, the river of stone and ash reached southwestward, down to the distant sea. Only the smallest of plants had managed to find purchase, and the Bonecaster's passage — a Jaghut child in the crook of each arm — raised sultry clouds of dust that hung motionless in her wake.
She judged the boy at perhaps five years of age; his sister perhaps four. Neither seemed entirely aware, and clearly neither had understood their mother when she'd hugged them goodbye. The long flight down the L'amath and across the Jagra Til had driven them both into shock. No doubt witnessing the ghastly death of their father had not helped matters.
They clung to her with their small, grubby hands, grim reminders of the child she had but recently lost. Before long, both began suckling at her breasts, evincing desperate hunger. Some time later, the children slept.
The lava flow thinned as she approached the coast. A range of hills rose into distant mountains on her right. A level plain stretched directly before her, ending at a ridge half a league distant. Though she could not see it, she knew that just the other side of the ridge, the land slumped down to the sea. The plain itself was marked by regular humps, and the Bonecaster paused to study them. The mounds were arrayed in concentric circles, and at the centre was a larger dome — all covered in a mantle of lava and ash. The rotted tooth of a ruined tower rose from the plain's edge, at the base of the first line of hills. Those hills, as she had noted the first time she had visited this place, were themselves far too evenly spaced to be natural.
The Bonecaster lifted her head. The mingled scents were unmistakable, one ancient and dead, the other … less so. The boy stirred in her clasp, but remained asleep.
'Ah,' she murmured, 'you sense it as well.'
Skirting the plain, she walked towards the blackened tower.
The warren's gate was just beyond the ragged edifice, suspended in the air at about six times her height. She saw it as a red welt, a thing damaged, but no longer bleeding. She could not recognize the warren — the old damage obscured the portal's characteristics. Unease rippled faintly through her.
The Bonecaster set the children down by the tower, then sat on a block of tumbled masonry. Her gaze fell to the two young Jaghut, still curled in sleep, lying on their beds of ash. 'What choice?' she whispered. 'It must be Omtose Phellack. It certainly isn't Tellann. Starvald Demelain? Unlikely.' Her eyes were pulled to the plain, narrowing on the mound rings. 'Who dwelt here? Who else was in the habit of building in stone?' She fell silent for a long moment, then swung her attention back to the ruin. 'This tower is the final proof, for it is naught else but Jaghut, and such a structure would not be raised this close to an inimical warren. No, the gate is Omtose Phellack. It must be so.'
Still, there were additional risks. An adult Jaghut in the warren beyond, coming upon two children not of its own blood, might as easily kill them as adopt them. 'Then their deaths stain another's hands, a Jaghut's.' Scant comfort, that distinction. It matters naught which of you kills us, only that you kill us. The breath hissed between the woman's teeth. 'What choice?' she asked again.
She would let them sleep a little longer. Then, she would send them through the gate. A word to the boy — take care of your sister. The journey will not be long. And to them both — your mother waits beyond. A lie, but they would need courage. If she cannot find you, then one of her kin will. Go then, to safety, to salvation.
After all, what could be worse than death?
She rose as they approached. Pran Chole tested the air, frowned. The Jaghut had not unveiled her warren. Even more disconcerting, where were her children?
'She greets us with calm,' Cannig Tol muttered.
'She does,' the Bonecaster agreed.
'I've no trust in that — we should kill her immediately.'
'She would speak with us,' Pran Chole said.
'A deadly risk, to appease her desire.'
'I cannot disagree, Clan Leader. Yet … what has she done with her children?'
'Can you not sense them?'
Pran Chole shook his head. 'Prepare your spearmen,' he said, stepping forward.
There was peace in her eyes, so clear an acceptance of her own imminent death that the Bonecaster was shaken. Pran Chole walked through shin-deep water, then stepped onto the island's sandy bank to stand face to face with the Jaghut. 'What have you done with them?' he demanded.
The mother smiled, lips peeling back to reveal her tusks. 'Gone.'
'Where?'
'Beyond your reach, Bonecaster.'
Pran Chole's frown deepened. 'These are our lands. There is no place here that is beyond our reach. Have you slain them with your own hands, then?'
The Jaghut cocked her head, studied the Imass. 'I had always believed you were united in your hatred for our kind. I had always believed that such concepts as compassion and mercy were alien to your natures.'
The Bonecaster stared at the woman for a long moment, then his gaze dropped away, past her, and scanned the soft clay ground. 'An Imass has been here,' he said. 'A woman. The Bonecaster-' the one I could not find in my spiritwalk. The one who chose not to be found. 'What has she done?'
'She has explored this land,' the Jaghut replied. 'She has found a gate far to the south. It is Omtose Phellack.'
'I am glad,' Pran Chole said, '1 am not a mother.' And you, woman, should be glad I am not cruel. He gestured. Heavy spears flashed past the Bonecaster. Six long, fluted heads of flint punched through the skin covering the Jaghut's chest. She staggered, then folded to the ground in a clatter of shafts.
Thus ended the thirty-third Jaghut War.
Pran Chole whirled. 'We've no time for a pyre. We must strike southward. Quickly.'
Cannig Tol stepped forward as his warriors went to retrieve their weapons. The Clan Leader's eyes narrowed on the Bonecaster. 'What distresses you?'
'A renegade Bonecaster has taken the children.'
'South?'
'To Morn.'
The Clan Leader's brows knitted.
'The renegade would save this woman's children. The renegade believes the Rent to be Omtose Phellack.'
Pran Chole watched the blood leave Cannig Tol's face. 'Go to Morn, Bonecaster,' the Clan Leader whispered. 'We are not cruel. Go now.'
Pran Chole bowed. The Tellann warren engulfed him.
The faintest release of her power sent the two Jaghut children upward, into the gate's maw. The girl cried out a moment before reaching it, a longing wail for her mother, who she imagined waited beyond. Then the two small figures vanished within.
The Bonecaster sighed and continued to stare upward, seeking any evidence that the passage had gone awry. It seemed, however, that no wounds had reopened, no gush of wild power bled from the portal. Did it look different? She could not be sure. This was new land for her; she had nothing of the bone-bred sensitivity that she had known all her life among the lands of the Tarad clan, in the heart of the First Empire.