Then Hood faced them, and in a dry, toneless voice he said, ‘I have never much liked Forkrul Assail.’
No one spoke. Felash stood trembling, her face pale as death itself. Beside her, the handmaid had set her hands upon the axes at her belt, but seemed unable to move beyond that futile, diffident gesture.
Shurq Elalle gathered herself, and said, ‘You have a singular way of ending a discussion, Jaghut.’
The empty pits seemed to find her, somehow, and Hood said, ‘We have no need of allies. Besides, I recently learned a lesson in brevity, Shurq Elalle, which I have taken to heart.’
‘A lesson? Really? Who taught you that?’
The Jaghut looked away, across the water. ‘Ah, my Death Ship. I admit, it was a quaint affectation. Nonetheless, one cannot help but admire its lines.’
Princess Felash, Fourteenth Daughter of Bolkando, fell to her knees and was sick in the sand.
CHAPTER TEN
What is it about this world
That so causes you trouble?
Why avow in your tone
This victim role?
And the plaintive hurt
Painting your eyes
Bemoans a life’s struggle
Ever paying a grievous toll
We gathered in one place
Under the selfsame sun
And the bronze woman
Holding the basin,
Her breasts settled in the bowl,
Looked down with pity
Or was it contempt?
She is a queen of dreams
And her gift is yours to take
Pity if you choose it
Or contempt behind the veil
I would have polished those eyes
For a better look
I would have caressed those roses
For a sweeter taste
When we drink from the same cup
And you make bitter recoil
I wonder at the tongue in waiting
And your deadening flavours
So eager to now despoil
What is it about this world
That so causes you trouble?
What could I say to change
Your wounded regard?
If my cold kiss must fail
And my milk run sour
Beneath the temple bell
That so blights your reward?
Ten thousand hang from trees
Their limbs bared roots
Starved of hope in the sun
And the wood-cutters are long gone
Up to where the road gives way
To trails in the dust
That spiral and curl
Like the smoke of fires
They are blazing beacons
In the desert night.
It was said by the lepers
Huddled against the hill
That a man with no hands
Who could stare only
As could the blind
Upon the horrors of argument
Did with one hand gone
Reach into the dark sky
And with the other too gone
He led me home
THE EDGE OF THE GLASS DESERT WAS A BROKEN LINE OF CRYSTALS AND boulders, for all the world like an ancient shoreline. Aranict could not pull her gaze from it. She sat slumped in the saddle of her wearily plodding horse, a hood drawn over against the blistering sun, off to one side of the main column. Prince Brys rode somewhere ahead, near the vanguard, leaving her alone.
The desert’s vast, flat stretch was blinding, the glare painful and strangely discordant, as if she was witnessing an ongoing crime, the raw lacerations of a curse upon the land itself. Stones melted to glass, shards of crystal jutting like spears, others that grew like bushes, every branch and twig glittering as if made of ice.
Rolled up against the verge there were bones, heaped like driftwood. Most were shattered, reduced to splinters, as if whatever had befallen the land had taken in a massive fist each creature and crushed the life from it – it felt like a deliberate act, an exercise in unbelievable malice. She thought she could still taste the evil, could still feel its rotted breath on the wind.
Waves of nausea spread out from her stomach again and again, slow as a creeping tide, and when it washed its way back, when it retreated, it left a residue in her own bones. This place, it wants to kill me. I can feel it. Her skin was clammy and cool beneath her cloak. It wants inside. Eager as an infection. Who could have done this? Why? What terrible conflict led to this?
She imagined that if she listened carefully enough, if all the sounds of thousands of soldiers marching and hundreds of wagons rolling were to suddenly fall away, if even the wind moaned into silence, she might hear still the droning words of the ritual that had ignited the fires, creating the desecrating cruelty that would become the Glass Desert.
This is what despair leads to, the kind of despair that steals light from the world, that mocks life’s own struggle to exist, to persist. Denying our desire to heal, to mend all that we break. Refusing hope itself.
If despair has a ritual, it was spoken here.
Riding this close to the glistening edge, to the banks of bones and cracked boulders, she felt as if she was taking it inside herself, as if deadly crystals had begun growing within her, whispering awake in the echoes of ancient words. When all you are is made wrong. This is how it feels.
Brys Beddict’s army was many days behind the other two, for the prince had made certain he was the last to leave the Bonehunters. They had marched with them to the desert’s very edge. Eight days through an increasingly parched and forbidding land. She wondered if he’d been hoping to change the Adjunct’s mind, to convince her of the madness of her determination to cross the Glass Desert. Or perhaps he had been considering accompanying that doomed force. For the first time since they had become lovers, Brys had closed himself to her. And not just me. To everyone.
And on the day we parted from them, he stood near Tavore, but he said nothing. Nor as we all watched the Bonehunters form up and set out, crossing that ghastly midden of crystals and bones, into the harsh glare beyond; we all watched, and not one of us – not one in the entire mass of soldiers – had a thing to say.
When the last burdened wagon rocked over the berm, and the last of the dust swirled away in the Malazans’ wake; when the column wavered and smeared in the fierce glare and rising heat, Brys had turned to face her.
The look in his face shocked her, cut through her every defence. Whatever he had thought to do to dissuade the Adjunct, the moment had passed. No, a thousand moments. Eight days’ worth, and not one grasped, not one taken in hand like a weapon. The brittle wall of silence had defeated him, defeated them all. That look …
Helpless. Filled with … Abyss below, filled with despair.
She was a singular woman, was Tavore Paran. They could all see that. They had all witnessed the terrible majesty of her will.
And her soldiers followed – that had been for Aranict the hardest thing to witness. The squads fell in, the companies formed up, and as they marched past Prince Brys they offered him a sharp, perfect salute. As if on a parade ground. Eyes hidden in the shadow of their helms, that closed fist on the chest, expressions chiselled from stone – gods, I will never forget that, any of it. Those faces. Horrifying in their emptiness. Those soldiers: veterans of something far beyond battles, far beyond shields locked and swords bared, beyond even the screams of dying comrades and the desolation of loss.
Veterans of a lifetime of impossible decisions, of all that is unbearable and all that is without reconciliation.