‘A god devoid of wisdom deserves what it gets.’
‘That’s not what I meant.’
Karsa stooped momentarily to retrieve the dead rat, then he headed for the hatch.
She followed.
When she reached the main deck, the Toblakai was walking towards the captain. She watched as he placed the sodden rat in the Letherii’s hands, then turned away, saying, ‘Get the hoists-I want my horse on deck and off this damned hulk.’ Behind him, the captain stared down at the creature in his hands, then, with a snarl, he flung it over the rail.
Samar Dev contemplated a few quick words with the captain, to stave off the coming storm-a storm that Karsa had nonchalantly triggered innumerable times before on this voyage-then decided it was not worth the effort. It seemed that the captain concluded much the same, as a sailor hurried up with a bucket of seawater, into which the Letherii thrust his hands.
The main hatch to the cargo hold was being removed, while other hands set to assembling the winches.
Karsa strode to the gangway. He halted, then said in a loud voice, ‘This city reeks. When I am done with its Emperor, I may well burn it to the ground.’
The planks sagged and bounced as the Toblakai descended to the landing.
Samar Dev hurried after him.
One of two fully armoured guards had already begun addressing Karsa in contemptuous tones. ‘-to be unarmed whenever you are permitted to leave the compound, said permission to be granted only by the ranking officer of the Watch. Our immediate task is to escort you to your quarters, where the filth will be scrubbed from your body and hair-’
He got no further, as Karsa reached out, closed his hand on the guard’s leather weapons harness, and with a single heave flung the Letherii into the air. Six or more paces to the left he sailed, colliding with three stevedores who had been watching the proceedings. All four went down.
Voicing an oath, the second guard tugged at his shortsword.
Karsa’s punch rocked his head back and the n collapsed.
Hoarse shouts of alarm, more Letherii soldiers converging.
Samar Dev rushed forward. ‘Hood take you, Toblakai do you intend to war with the whole empire?’
Glaring at the half-circle of guards closing round him, Karsa grunted then crossed his arms. ‘If you are to be my escort,’ he said to them, ‘then be civil, or I will break you all into pieces.’ Then he swung about, pushing past Samar. ‘Where is my horse?’ he bellowed to the crew still on deck. ‘Where is Havok! I grow tired of waiting!’
Samar Dev considered returning to the ship, demanding that they sail out, back down the river, back into the Draconean Sea, then beyond. Leaving this unpredictable Toblakai to Letheras and all its hapless denizens.
Alas, even gods don’t deserve that.
Bugg stood thirty paces from the grand entrance to the Hivanar Estate, one hand out as he leaned against a wall to steady himself. In some alley garden a short distance away, chickens screeched in wild clamour and flung themselves into the grille hatches in frenzied panic. Overhead, starlings still raced back and forth en masse.
He wiped beads of sweat from his brow, struggled to draw a deep breath.
A worthy reminder, he told himself. Everything was only a matter of time. What stretched would then contract. Events tumbled, forces closed to collision, and for all that, the measured pace seemed to remain unchanged, a current beneath all else. Yet, he knew, even that slowed, incrementally, from one age to the next. Death is written in birth-the words of a great, sage. What was her name? When did she live? Ah, so much has whispered away from my mind, these memories, like sand between the fingers. Yet she could see what most cannot-not even the gods. Death and birth. Even in opposition the two forces are bound, and to define one is to define the other.
And now he had come. With his first step, delivering the weight of history. This land’s. His own. Two forces in opposition, yet inextricably bound. Do you now feel as if you have come home, Icarium? 1 remember you, striding from the sea, a refugee from a realm you had laid to waste. Yet your father did not await you-he had gone, he had walked down the throat of an Azath. Icarium, he was Jaghut, and among the faghut no father reaches across to take his child’s hand.
Are you sick, ojd man?’
Blinking, Bugg looked across to see a servant from one of the nearby estates, returning from market with a basket of foodstuffs balanced on his head. Only with grief, dear mortal. He shook his head.
‘It was the floods,’ the servant went on. ‘Shifting the clay.’
Aye.’
‘Scale House fell down-did you hear? Right into the street. Good thing it was empty, hey? Though I heard there was a fatality-in the street.’ The man suddenly grinned. A cat!’ Laughing, he resumed his journey.
Bugg stared after him; then, with a grunt, he set off for the gate.
He waited on the terrace, frowning down at the surprisingly deep trench the crew had managed to excavate into the bank, then outward, through the bedded silts of the river itself. The shoring was robust, and Bugg could see few leaks from between the sealed slats. Even so, two workers were on the pump, their bared backs slick with sweat.
Rautos Hivanar came to his side. ‘Bugg, welcome. I imagine you wish to retrieve your crew.’
‘No rush, sir,’ Bugg replied. ‘It is clear to me now that this project of yours is… ambitious. How much water is coming up from the floor of that pit?’
‘Without constant pumping, the trench would overflow in a little under two bells.’
‘I bring you a message from your servant, Venitt Sathad, who visited on his way out of the city. He came to observe our progress on the refurbishment of the inn you recently acquired, and was struck with something of a revelation upon seeing the mysterious mechanism we found inside an outbuilding. He further suggested it was imperative that you see it for yourself. Also, he mentioned a collection of artifacts… recovered from this trench, yes?’
The large man was silent for a moment, then he seemed to reach a decision, for he gestured Bugg to follow.
They entered the estate, passing through an elongated, shuttered room in which hung drying herbs, down a corridor and into a workroom dominated by a large table and prism lanterns attached to hinged arms so that, if desired, they could be drawn close or lifted clear when someone was working at the table. Resting on the polished wood surface were a dozen or so objects, both metal and fired clay, not one of which revealed any obvious function.
Rautos Hivanar still silent and standing now at his side, Bugg scanned the objects for a long moment, then reached out and picked up one in particular. Heavy, unmarked by pitting or rust, seamlessly bent almost to right angles.
‘Your engineers,’ Rautos Hivanar said, ‘could determine no purpose to these mechanisms.’
Bugg’s brows rose at the man’s use of the word ‘mechanism’. He hefted the object in his hands.
‘I have attempted to assemble these,’ the merchant continued, ‘to no avail. There are no obvious attachment points, yet, somehow, they seem to me to be of a piece. Perhaps some essential item is still buried beneath the river, but we have found nothing for three days now, barring a wheelbarrow’s worth of stone chips and shards-and these were recovered in a level of sediment far below these artifacts, leading me to believe that they pre-date them by centuries, if not millennia.’
‘Yes,’ Bugg muttered. ‘Eres’al, a mated pair, preparing flint for tools, here on the bank of the vast marsh. He worked the cores, she did the more detailed knapping. They came here for three seasons, then she died in childbirth, and he wandered with a starving babe in his arms until it too died. He found no others of his kind, for they had been scattered after the conflagration of the great forests, the wildfires sweeping out over the plains. The air was thick with ash. He wandered, until he died, and so was the last of his line.’ He stared unseeing at the artifact, even as its weight seemed to burgeon, threatening to tug at his arms, to drag him down to his knees. ‘But Icarium said there would be no end, that the cut thread was but an illusion-in his voice, then, I could hear his father.’