‘No. The spirit left.’
‘Just… left?’
‘Yes.’
‘Isn’t that, uh, unusual?’
‘The Throne of Ice was dying. Is dying still. There was-is-nothing left to rule, ghost. Would you have him sit there for ever?’ She did not seem inclined to await a reply, for she then said, ‘I have not been here before, Hedge of the Bridgeburners. For I would have known.’
‘Known what, Emroth?’
‘I have never before seen the true Throne of Ice, in the heart of the Hold. The very heart of the Jaghut realm.’
Hedge glanced back. The true Throne of Ice? ‘Who-who was he, Emroth?’
But she did not give answer.
After a time, however, he thought he knew. Had always known.
He kicked aside a broken pot, watched it skid, roll, then wobble to a halt. King on your melting throne, you drew a breath, then let it go. And… never again. Simple. Easy. When you are the last of your kind, and you release that last breath, then it is the breath of extinction.
And it rides the wind.
Every wind.
‘Emroth, there was a scholar in Malaz City-a miserable old bastard named Obo-who claimed he was witness to the death of a star. And when the charts were compared again, against the night sky, well, one light was gone.’
‘The stars have changed since my mortal life, ghost.’
‘Some have gone out?’
‘Yes.’
‘As in… died V
‘The Bonecasters could not agree on this,’ she said. Another observation offered a different possibility. The stars are moving away from us, Hedge of the Bridgeburners. Perhaps those we no longer see have gone too far for our eyes.’
‘Obo’s star was pretty bright-wouldn’t it have faded first, over a long time, before going out?’
‘Perhaps both answers are true. Stars die. Stars move away.’
‘So, did that Jaghut die, or did he move away?’
‘Your question makes no sense.’
Really? Hedge barked a laugh. You’re a damned bad liar, Emroth.’
‘This,’ she said, ‘is not a perfect world.’
The swaths of colours sweeping overhead hissed softly, while around them the wind plucked at tufts of cloth and fur, moaning through miniature gullies and caverns of ice, and closer still, a sound shared by ghost and T’lan Imass, the crackling destruction of their footsteps across the plateau.
Onrack knelt beside the stream, plunging his hands into the icy water, then lifting them clear again to watch the runnels trickling down. The wonder had not left his dark brown eyes since his transformation, since the miracle of a life regained.
A man could have no heart if he felt nothing watching this rebirth, this innocent joy in a savage warrior who had been dead a hundred thousand years. He picked up polished stones as if they were treasure, ran blunt, calloused fingertips across swaths of lichen and moss, brought to his heavy lips a discarded antler to taste with his tongue, to draw in its burnt-hair scent. Walking through the thorny brush of some arctic rose, Onrack had then halted, with a cry of astonishment, upon seeing red scratches on his bowed shins.
The Imass was, Trull Sengar reminded himself yet again, nothing-nothing-like what he would have imagined him to be. Virtually hairless everywhere barring the brown, almost black mane sweeping down past his broad shoulders. In the days since they had come to this strange realm, a beard had begun, thin along Onrack’s jawline and above his mouth, the bristles wide-spaced and black as a boar’s; but not growing at all on the cheeks, or the neck. The features of the face were broad and flat, dominated by a flaring nose with a pronounced bridge, like a knuckle bone between the wide-spaced, deeply inset eyes. The heavy ridge over those eyes was made all the more robust by the sparseness of the eyebrows.
Although not particularly tall, Onrack nevertheless seemed huge. Ropy muscles bound to thick bone, the arms elongated, the hands wide but the fingers stubby. The legs were disproportionately short, bowed so that the knees were almost as far out to the sides as his hips. Yet Onrack moved with lithe stealth, furtive as prey, eyes flicking in every direction, head tilting, nostrils flaring as he picked up scents on the wind. Prey, yet now he needed to satisfy a prodigious appetite, and when Onrack hunted, it was with discipline, a single-mindedness that was fierce to witness.
This world was his, in every way. A blend of tundra to the north and a treeline in the south that reached up every now and then to the very shadow of the huge glaciers stretching down the valleys. The forest was a confused mix of deciduous and coniferous trees, broken with ravines and tumbled rocks, springs of clean water and boggy sinkholes. The branches swarmed with birds, their incessant chatter at times overwhelming all else.
Along the edges there were trails. Caribou moved haphazardly between forest and tundra in their grazing. Closer to the ice, on higher ground where bedrock was exposed, there were goat-like creatures, scampering up ledges to look back down on the two-legged strangers passing through their domain.
Onrack had disappeared into the forest again and again in the first week of their wandering. Each time he reappeared his toolkit had expanded. A wooden shaft, the point of which he hardened in the fire of their camp; vines and reeds from which he fashioned snares, and nets that he then attached to the other end of the spear, displaying impressive skill at trapping birds on the wing.
From the small mammals caught in his nightly snares he assembled skins and gut. With the stomachs and intestines of hares he made floats for the weighted nets he strung across streams, and from the grayling and sturgeon harvested he gathered numerous spines which he then used to sew together the hides, fashioning a bag. He collected charcoal and tree sap, lichens, mosses, tubers, feathers and small pouches of animal fat, all of which went into the hide bag.
But all of these things were as nothing when compared with the burgeoning of the man himself. A face Trull had known only as dried skin taut over shattered bone was now animate with expression, and it was as if Trull had been blind to his friend in the time before, when even vocal inflection had been flat and lifeless.
Onrack now smiled. A sudden lighting of genuine pleasure that not only took Trull’s breath away-and, he admitted, often filled his eyes with tears-but could silence Quick Ben as well, the wizard’s dark face suddenly evincing ineffable wonder, an expression that a well-meaning adult might have upon seeing a child at play.
Everything about this Imass invited friendship, as if his smile alone cast some sorcery, a geas of charm, to which unquestioning loyalty was the only possible response. This glamour Trull Sengar had no interest in resisting. Onrack, after all, is the one brother I chose. But the Tiste Edur could see, on occasion, the gleam of suspicion in the Malazan wizard, as if Quick Ben was catching himself at the edge of some inner precipice, some slide into a place Ben could not, by his very nature, wholly trust.
Trull felt no worry; he could see that Onrack was not interested in manipulating his companions. His was a spirit contained within itself, a spirit that had emerged from a haunted place and was haunted no longer. Dead in a demonic nightmare. Reborn into a paradise. Onrack, my friend, you are redeemed, and you know it, with every sense-with your touch, your vision, with the scents of the land and the songs in the trees.
The previous evening he had returned from a trip into the forest with a sheath of bark in his hands. On it were nuggets of crumbly yellow ochre. Later, beside the fire, while Quick Ben cooked the remaining meat from a small deer Onrack had killed in the forest two days previously, the Imass ground the nuggets into powder. Then, using spit and grease, he made a yellow paste. As he worked these preparations, he hummed a song, a droning, vibrating cadence that was as much nasal as vocal. The range, like his speaking voice, was unearthly. It seemed capable of carrying two distinct tones, one high and the other deep. The song ended when the task was done. There was a long pause; then, as Onrack began applying the paint to his face, neck and arms, a different song emerged, this one with a rapid beat, fast as the heart of a fleeing beast.