Titus Consent observed, “It doesn’t matter in the end. We’ll go where we have to go. Whoever gets in the way will get trampled.”
There were no more human intercessions. The road was busy now that no monster lurked in the high Jagos. And the season was late. Travelers were trying to get through before weather got in the way. The Night took no more than a normally malicious interest. After a few small punishments it pretended indifference.
“Bayard va Still-Patter offered the use of his house, gave me letters to prove it, and I don’t intend to be shy about taking advantage,” Hecht declared as he neared Alten Weinberg. To va Still-Patter retainers sent by the Ambassador’s father to discourage the hiresword interloper from taking advantage of the son’s generosity. “I won’t let my men steal whatever they overlooked last time.”
He faked a light, playful mood. He did not look forward to the incessant politics plaguing every center of power. He was exhausted. Though the threats had been minimal the mountains left him wanting nothing more than to disappear and recuperate.
The pass had been colder than ever for the time of year. And, though the Night itself had shown little interest, someone had sent numerous noxious minor Instrumentalities to make him miserable, presumably in hopes he would turn back.
Heris had been no help.
He had not yet had time to pull off his boots, once inside Bayard va Still-Patter’s, when the invitations and petitions started. He told Rivademar Vircondelet, “You’ve been here a week. You’re rested up and familiar with the local situation. This crap is on you. Anybody wants an audience, tell them to go through the Empress. I work for her. If it’s the Empress, though, say I’m too sick.” Hecht did not strictly lie about being sick.
“Won’t be the Empress, boss. She’s out in the sticks doing what they call a progress. Which sounds like just showing herself off so people know she really exists. At their expense, of course. I hear Johannes started it so he could save on what it cost to run the court. Anyway, we’ll actually have a few weeks where the load stays kind of light.”
“That’s good. That’s real good. It’ll give me a chance to recover.”
He did not like being sick. He could not recall the last time he was really sick.
Titus told him exactly, when he arose, recovered but weak, three days later. Titus had consulted his personal journals. But it did not matter, other than to illuminate the fact that people pushed old seasons of pain out of mind.
“What’s on the schedule?” Hecht asked.
“It’s really piled up while you were loafing, boss. Everyone wants a piece, now that you’re here. Both of them.”
“What?”
“Almost everybody who is anybody is out making progress with the Empress. The elder va Still-Patter is not here to aggravate us only because his gout is so bad he can’t get out of bed.”
“Again, then. That’s real good. I want you all to learn everything about this city while you have the chance. Now. Let’s put me to bed.”
18. Cape Tondur: Andoray
A supernatural wind blew south southwest along the coast of Andoray. Little of the power from beneath the sea made it inshore, where scores of ravenous Instrumentalities prowled the brink of the forever ice, eager for any taste of power, dodging or preying on one another.
For all but the greatest a moment of inattention meant certain destruction.
The most terrible doom was the vast white toad squatting atop a promontory of ice that thrust miles out into the sea. That ice creaked forward a yard or two every day. And lifted vertically several feet. Or more, if the Windwalker caught a lucky gust of power. Or if some desperately hungry lesser Instrumentality strayed within range of the Windwalker’s lightning tongue.
There were human worshippers attendant upon the Windwalker, initially. Cold and starvation took most. Their frozen remains lay scattered around the great toad. Most resembled the Seatt peoples of the northernmost north of ancient times.
Not all the Windwalker’s Chosen elected to perish beside their god. One family took advantage of a distraction on the god’s part to flee into the Ormo Strait aboard a boat found caught in a crust of newly formed surface ice. These fugitives were the first Chosen to shake the mad god’s control. His strength was limited and his attention rigidly fixed elsewhere.
Kharoulke the Windwalker had no room in his divine consciousness for anything but hunger: for the power out there, and for revenge on those filthy come-lately divines who had driven his generation into a terrible captivity.
Middle-world time rolled past swiftly. Those who had known the Windwalker elsewhere did not mourn his absence.
Kharoulke sat at the end of the ice, five hundred feet above the frigid indigo waters of the Andorayan Sea. Only a few miles now separated him from the gateway to the Realm of the Gods. He could see through that. The waters beyond were subtly different. He saw but could not reach. A mighty and dark god he was but he had almost no power left. He could not collect enough more. He might not get there in time to sabotage the restoration of his most hated enemies.
Can a god know despair? Particularly a god who knew what it meant to be imprisoned for millennia?
Maybe not. But certainly something very like despair, which had built in the understanding that Instrumentalities of the Night were not armed with a sense of time like the one so critical to those ephemeral mortals who shaped the gods.
There was no longer any guard on Kharoulke’s back but the dread of him. Among the scattered, frozen Chosen, now miles behind, there were, as well, several Krepnights, the Elect. They had not had the strength to survive the frozen dreams of the god who had imagined them, either.
Something flickered into existence behind the great white toad, was gone in an instant. The same shimmering disturbance came and went a dozen times before the cold and hungry god realized that something not of the Night was very active back where he was not watching.
Kharoulke the Windwalker began to turn. He began to change his form.
Thunder spoke, sharp and businesslike.
A thousand invisibly fast iron and silver needles pierced the god, driving deep into his being. The agony was like nothing he had ever known. It raped away all reason.
Kharoulke continued to change, growing taller and more manlike. The pain worsened. Those needles were barbed. Movement made them cut their ways forward, deeper into the divine flesh. Till they were expelled or absorbed they would continue the hurt and would sap Kharoulke’s little remaining power.
In ragged-ass volley a dozen kegs of firepowder spent their chemical energy, not against the Windwalker but against the ice on which he had begun to shift his bulk.
The Instrumentality made one move too many. A crack zigged and zagged from one explosion site to the next, dashing east to west across the promontory. The ice groaned, grumbled, roared.
The Windwalker boomed in rage, so loud his fury could be heard a thousand miles away. He saw. He knew. He began to shift to another shape, angelic, sprouting a vast spread of white wings. But he was a thing of the most intense cold. He could not change quickly. He did not make this change in time.
The tip of the ice headland descended into the sea. The Windwalker followed, plunging deep into the painful, poisonous indigo water. The agony inside the dark god gained accompaniment over all his surface.
The Windwalker’s thrashing only caused the needles within to do more damage. The storm surge waves he generated were powerful enough to wreck small boats when they reached Santerin’s shores.