You run
The memory remains.’
Mappo spun, fled the square.
Echoes pursued him. Carrying her voice. ‘In Icarias, memory remains. In Icarias waits the tomb of all that is forgotten. Where memory remains. Where he would have found his truth. Do you choose to save him now, Ogre? Do you choose to bring him to his city? When he opens his own tomb, what will he find?
What do any of us find?
Will you dare map your life, Ogre, by each dead child left in your wake? You see, I dreamed a dream I cannot tell Rutt, because I love him. I dreamed of a tomb, Ogre, filled with every dead child.
It seems, then, that we are all builders of monuments.
Shrieking, Mappo ran. And ran, leaving a trail of bloody footprints, and on all sides, his reflection. Forever trapped.
Because the memory remains.
‘Will you ever tire, Setch, of gloom and doom?’
Sechul Lath glanced across at Errastas. ‘I will, the moment you tire of all that blood on your hands.’
Errastas snarled. ‘And is it your task to ever remind me of it?’
‘To be honest, I don’t know. I suppose I could carve out my own eyes, and then bless my newfound blindness—’
‘Do you now mock my wound?’
‘No, forgive me. I was thinking of the poet who one day decided he’d seen too much.’
Behind them, Kilmandaros asked, ‘And did his self-mutilation change the world?’
‘Irrevocably, Mother.’
‘How so?’ she asked.
‘Eyes can be hard as armour. They can be hardened to see yet feel nothing, if the will is strong enough. You’ve seen such eyes, Mother – you as well, Errastas. They lie flat in the sockets, like stone walls. They are capable of witnessing any and every atrocity. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. Now, that poet, he removed those stones. Tore away the veil, permanently. So what was inside, well, it all poured out.’
‘But, being blinded, nothing that was outside could find a way in.’
‘Indeed, Mother, but by then it was too late. It had to be, if you think about it.’
‘So it poured out,’ grumbled Errastas. ‘Then what?’
‘I’d hazard it changed the world.’
‘Not for the better,’ Kilmandaros muttered.
‘I have no burning need, Errastas,’ said Sechul Lath, ‘to cure the ills of the world. This one or any other.’
‘Yet you observe critically—’
‘If all honest observation ends up sounding critical, is it the honesty you then reject, or the act of observation?’
‘Why not both?’
‘Indeed, why not both? Abyss knows, it’s easier that way.’
‘Why do you bother, then?’
‘Errastas, I am left with two choices. I could weep for a reason, or weep for no reason. In the latter we find madness.’
‘And is the former any different?’ Kilmandaros asked.
‘Yes. A part of me chooses to believe that if I weep long enough, I’ll weep myself out. And then, in the ashes – in the aftermath – will be born something else.’
‘Like what?’ Errastas demanded.
Sechul Lath shrugged. ‘Hope.’
‘See this hole in my face, Knuckles? I too weep, but my tears are blood.’
‘My friend, at last you have become the true god of all the living worlds. When you finally stand at the very pinnacle of all creation, we shall raise statues marking your holy wounding, symbol of life’s ceaseless suffering.’
‘This I will accept, so long as the blood leaking down my face isn’t my own.’
Kilmandaros grunted. ‘No doubt your worshippers will be happy to bleed for you, Errastas, until the Abyss swallows us all.’
‘And I shall possess a thirst to match their generosity.’
‘When we—’
But Kilmandaros’s hand suddenly gripped Sechul’s shoulder and spun him round. ‘Friends,’ she said in a rumble, ‘it is time.’
They faced the way they had come.
From the ridge where they stood, the basin to the west stretched out flat, studded with rocks and tufts of wiry grass, for as far as they could see. But now, under the mid-morning light, the vista had begun to change. Spreading in a vast, curved shadow, the ground was bleaching, all colour draining away. From grey to white, until it seemed that the entire basin was a thing of bone and ash, and in the distance – at the very centre of this blight – the earth had begun to rise.
‘She awakens,’ said Kilmandaros.
‘And now,’ whispered Errastas, his lone eyes glittering bright, ‘we shall speak of dragons.’
A hill where no hill had been before, lifting to command the horizon, bulging, swelling – a mountain—
They saw it explode, a billowing eruption of earth and stone.
Huge cracks ripped across the basin floor. The entire ridge rippled under them and all three Elder Gods staggered.
As the column of dust and ashes rose skyward, as the cloud opened like a mushroom to fill half the sky, the sound finally reached them, solid as a rushing wall, igniting stunning agony inside their skulls. Sechul and Errastas were battered to the ground, sent tumbling. Even Kilmandaros was thrown from her feet – Sechul stared across at her, saw her mouth opened wide in a terrible scream that he could not hear amidst the howling wind, the crushing thunder of that eruption.
Twisting round, he stared at the vast, roiling cloud. Korabas. You are returned to the world.
Within the maelstrom spinning vortices of dirt, dust and smoke had begun to form. He watched them coil, pushed out to the sides as if buffeted by some unseen column of rising air at the very centre. Sechul frowned.
Her wings? Are those made by her wings? Elder blood!
As the roar died away, Sechul Lath heard Errastas. Laughing.
‘Mother?’
Kilmandaros was climbing to her feet. She glanced across at her son. ‘Korabas Otataral iras’Eleint. Otataral, Sechul, is not a thing – it is a title.’ She turned to Errastas. ‘Errant! Do you know its meaning?’
The one-eyed Elder God’s laughter slowly died. He looked away. ‘What do I care for ancient titles?’ he muttered.
‘Mother?’
She faced the terrible blight of earth and sky to the west. ‘Otas’taral. In every storm there is an eye, a place of … stillness. Otas’taral means the Eye of Abnegation. And now, upon the world, we have birthed a storm.’
Sechul Lath sank back down, covered his face with dust-stained hands. Will I ever tire? Yes. I have. See what we have unleashed. See what we have begun.
Errastas staggered close, falling to his knees beside Sechul, who looked up into that ravaged face and saw both manic glee and brittle terror. The Errant smiled a ghastly smile. ‘Do you see, Setch? They have to stop her! They have no choice!’
Yes, please. Stop her.
‘She has begun to move,’ Kilmandaros announced.
Sechul pushed Errastas to one side and sat up. But the sky revealed nothing: too much dust, too much smoke and ash – the pall had devoured two-thirds of the heavens, and the last third looked sickly, as if in retreat. The unnatural gloom was settling fast. ‘Where?’ he demanded.
His mother pointed. ‘Track her by the ground. For now, it is all we can do.’
Sechul Lath stood.
‘There,’ she said.
A broad swathe of bleached death, stretching in a line. ‘Northeast,’ he whispered, watching the slow, devastating blight cutting its slash across the landscape. ‘All that lies beneath her …’
‘Where she passes,’ said Kilmandaros, ‘no life shall ever return. The stillness of matter becomes absolute. She is the Eye of Abnegation, the storm’s centre, where all must die.’
‘Mother, we have gone too far. This time—’
‘It’s too late!’ shrieked Errastas. ‘She is the heart of sorcery! Without the Eye of Abnegation, there can be no magic!’