‘Must we then stop you ourselves?’
‘You? Nimander, Nenanda, all you pups? Now really, Kedeviss.’
‘If you-’
His attack was a blur — one hand closing about her throat, the other covering her mouth. She felt her throat being crushed and scrabbled for the knife at her belt.
He spun her round and flung her down to the ground, so hard that the back of her head crunched on the rocks. Dazed, her struggles weakened, flailed, fell away.
Something was pouring out from his hand where it covered her mouth, some shy;thing that numbed her lips, her jaws, then forced its way into her mouth and down her throat. Thick as tree sap. She stared up at him, saw the muddy gleam of the Dying God’s eyes — dying no longer, now freed — and thought: what have we done?
He was whispering. ‘I could stop now, and you’d be mine. It’s tempting.’
Instead, whatever oozed from his hand seemed to burgeon, sliding like a fat, sleek serpent down her throat, coiling in her gut.
‘But you might break loose — just a moment’s worth, but enough to warn the others, and I can’t have that.’
Where the poison touched, there was a moment of ecstatic need, sweeping through her, but that was followed almost instantly by numbness, and then something. . darker. She could smell her own rot, pooling like vapours in her brain.
He is killing me. Even that knowledge could not awaken any strength within her.
‘I need the rest of them, you see,’ he was saying. ‘So we can walk in, right in, without anyone suspecting anything. I need my way in, that’s all. Look at Nimander.’ He snorted. ‘There is no guile in him, none at all. He will be my shield. My shield.’
He was no longer gripping her neck. It was no longer necessary.
Kedeviss stared up at him as she died, and her final, fading thought was: Nimander. . guileless? Oh, but you don’t. . And then there were nothing.
The nothing that no priest dared speak of, that no holy scripture described, that no seer or prophet set forth in ringing proclamation. The nothing, this nothing, it is the soul in waiting.
Comes death, and now the soul waits.
Aranatha opened her eyes, sat up, then reached out to touch Nimander’s shoulder. He awoke, looked at her with a question in his eyes.
‘He has killed Kedeviss,’ she said, the words soft as a breath.
Nimander paled.
‘She was right,’ Aranatha went on, ‘and now we must be careful. Say nothing to anyone else, not yet, or you will see us all die.’
‘Kedeviss.’
‘He has carried her body to a crevasse, and thrown her into it, and now he makes signs on the ground to show her careless steps, the way the edge gave way. He will come to us in shock and grief. Nimander, you must display no suspicion, do you understand?’
And she saw that his own grief would sweep all else aside — at least for now — which was good. Necessary. And that the anger within him, the rage destined to come, would be slow to build, and as it did she would speak to him again, and give him the strength he would need.
Kedeviss had been the first to see the truth — or so it might have seemed. But Aranatha knew that Nimander’s innocence was not some innate flaw, not some fatal weakness. No, his innocence was a choice he had made. The very path of his life. And he had his reasons for that.
Easy to see such a thing and misunderstand it. Easy to see it as a failing, and to then believe him irresolute.
Clip had made this error from the very beginning. And so too this Dying God, who knew only what Clip believed, and thought it truth.
She looked down and saw tears held back, waiting for Clip’s sudden arrival with his tragic news, and Aranatha nodded and turned away, to feign sleep.
Somewhere beyond the camp waited a soul, motionless as a startled hare. This was sad. Aranatha had loved Kedeviss dearly, had admired her cleverness, her percipience. Had cherished her loyalty to Nimander — even though Kedeviss had perhaps suspected the strange circumstances surrounding Phaed’s death, and had seen how Phaed and her secrets haunted Nimander still.
When one can possess loyalty even in the straits of full, brutal understanding, then that one understands all there is to understand about compassion.
Kedeviss, you were a gift. And now your soul waits, as it must. For this is the fate of the Tiste Andii. Our fate. We will wait.
Until the wait is over.
Endest Silann stood with his back to the rising sun. And to the city of Black Coral. The air was chill, damp with night’s breath, and the road wending out from the gates that followed the coastline of the Cut was a bleak, colourless ribbon that snaked into stands of dark conifers half a league to the west. Empty of traffic.
The cloak of eternal darkness shrouding the city blocked the sun’s stretching rays, although the western flanks of the jumbled slope to their right was showing gilt edges; and far off to the left, the gloom of the Cut steamed white from the smooth, black surface.
‘There will be,’ said Anomander Rake, ‘unpleasantness.’
‘I know, Lord.’
‘It was an unanticipated complication.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘I will walk,’ said Rake, ‘until I reach the tree line. Out of sight, at least until then.’
‘Have you waited too long, Lord?’
‘No.’
‘That is well, then.’
Anomander Rake rested a hand on Endest’s shoulder. ‘You have ever been, my friend, more than I deserve.’
Endest Silann could only shake his head, refuting that.
‘If we are to live,’ Rake went on, ‘we must take risks. Else our lives become deaths in all but name. There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail — should we fall — we will know that we have lived.’
Endest nodded, unable to speak. There should be tears streaming down his face, but he was dry inside — his skull, behind his eyes, all. . dry. Despair was a furnace where everything had burned up, where everything was ashes, but the heat remained, scalding, brittle and fractious.
‘The day has begun.’ Rake withdrew his hand and pulled on his gauntlets. ‘This walk, along this path. . I will take pleasure in it, my friend. Knowing that you stand here to see me off.’
And the Son of Darkness set out.
Endest Silann watched. The warrior with his long silver hair flowing, his leather cloak flaring out. Dragnipur a scabbarded slash.
Blue seeped into the sky, shadows in retreat along the slope. Gold painted the tops of the tree line where the road slipped in. At the very edge, Anomander Rake paused, turned about and raised one hand high.
Endest Silann did the same, but the gesture was so weak it made him gasp, and his arm faltered.
And then the distant figure swung round.
And vanished beneath the trees.
BOOK FOUR
Like broken slate
We take our hatred
And pile it high
Rolling with the hills
A ragged line to map
Our rise and fall
And I saw suffused
With the dawn
Crows aligned in rows
Along the crooked wall
Come to feed
Bones lie scattered
At the stone’s foot
The heaped ruin
Of past assaults
The crows face each way
To eye the pickings
On both sides
For all its weakness
The world cannot break
What we make
Of our hatred
I watched the workers
Carry each grey rock
They laboured