The field of battle was almost motionless now. Thousands of warriors frozen in the clinches of murder, as if a mad artist had sought to paint rage, in all its frayed shrouds of senseless destruction. He thought back on that towering host of conceits he had constructed, every one of which had led to this battle. Cracked, grinding, descending in chaotic collapse-he so wanted to laugh, but the breaths weren’t coming easy, the air was like a striking serpent in his throat.
He bumped up against another dead horse, and sought to pull himself atop the blistered, brittle beast. One last look, one final sweep of this wretched panorama. The valley locked in its preternatural darkness, the falling sky with its dread weight crushing everything in sight.
Grimacing, he forced himself into a sitting position, one leg held out stiff and dead.
And beheld the scene.
Tens of thousands of bodies, a rotting forest of shapeless stumps, all sheathed in deathly frost. Nothing moved, nothing at all. Flakes of ash were raining down from the starless, impenetrable heavens.
‘End it, then,’ he croaked. ‘They’re all gone… but me. End it, please, I beg you…’
He slid down, no longer able to hold himself up. Closed his eyes.
Was someone coming? The cold collector of souls? Did he hear the crunch of boots, lone steps, drawing closer-a figure, emerging from the darkness in his mind? My eyes are closed. That must mean something.
Was something coming? He dared not look.
He had once been a farmer. He was certain of that much, but trouble had befallen him. Debt? Perhaps, but the word was stingless, as far as Last was concerned, suggesting that it was not a haunting presence in his mind, and when memories were as few and as sketchy as were his, that must count for something.
Instead, he had this: the stench of bonfires, that ashy smear of cleared land, everything raw and torn and nothing in its proper place. High branches stacked in chaotic heaps, moss knotted on every twig. Roots dripping in inverted postures. Enormous boles lying flat and stripped down, great swaths of bark prised loose. Red-stained wood and black gritty rocks pulled from the flecked soil.
The earth could heave and make such a mess, but it had not. It had but trembled, and not from any deep stirring or restlessness, but from the toppling of trees, the bellowing of oxen straining at stumps, the footfalls of mindful men.
Shatter all you see. It’s what makes you feel. Feel… anything.
He remembered his hands deep in the rich warm earth. He remembered closing his eyes-for just a moment-and feeling that pulse of life, of promise and purpose. They would plant crops, nurture a bounty for their future lives. This was just. This was righteous. The hand that shapes is the hand that reaps. This, he told himself, was pure. Sighing, a sure smile curving his lips, he opened his eyes once more. Smoke, mists here and there amidst the ruination. Still smiling, he then withdrew his hands from the warm earth.
To find them covered in blood.
He never counted himself a clever man. He knew enough to know that and not much else. But the world had its layers. To the simple it offered simplicity. To the wise it offered profundity. And the only measure of courage worth acknowledging was found in accepting where one stood in that scheme-in hard, unwavering honesty, no matter how humbling.
He stared down at his hands and knew it for a memory not his own. It was, in fact, an invention, the blunt, almost clumsy imposition of something profound. Devoid of subtlety and deliberately so, which then made it more complicated than it at first seemed.
Even these thoughts were alien. Last was not a thoughtful man.
The heart knows need, and the mind finds reason to justify. It says: destruction leads to creation, so the world has shown us. But the world shows us more than that. Sometimes, destruction leads to oblivion. Extinction. But then, what’s so bad about that? If stupidity does not deserve extinction, what does? The mind is never so clever as to deceive anyone and anything but itself and its own kind.
Last decided that he was not afraid of justice, and so he stood unmoving, unflinching, as the slayer appeared at the far end of the corridor. Asane’s shrieks had run down to silence. He knew she was dead. All her fears come home at last, and in oblivion there was, for her, relief. Peace.
Murder could wear such pleasant masks.
The slayer met his eyes and at that final moment they shared their understanding. The necessity of things. And Last fell to the sword without a sound.
There had been blood on his hands. Reason enough. Justice delivered.
Forgive me?
Sheb couldn’t remember who he had been. Indebted, a prisoner, a man contemptuous of the law, these things, yes, but where were the details? Everything had flitted away in his growing panic. He’d heard Asane’s death echoing down the corridor. He knew that a murderer now stalked him. There was no reason for it. He’d done nothing to deserve this.