‘Gesture for gesture? Very well. Errastas has summoned the Elders. Sechul Lath, Kilmandaros, Mael-and now Draconus-yes! When you hide yourselves so well you yield your touch on this trembling world-you become blind. Your brother is dead, Silchas Ruin. Dragnipur is shattered. Draconus is loose upon the realm, Darkness in his hands-and what does his old lover see now that she sets eyes upon us all once more? Have you greeted your mother yet, Silchas? Have you felt her touch upon your brow? I thought not. She grieves for the son she cherished the most, I think. In whom the black flames of her love burned brightest. She reserves true spite and contempt for-’
Torrent’s backhanded swing caught her full in the face, hard enough to knock her from her feet, falling in a clatter of bones. As he loomed over her, he found he’d drawn his sword. ‘Spite, witch? Well, you’d know of it better than anyone. Now shut that bony jaw and keep it shut.’
Her black pitted eyes seemed to fix upon his own as if bearing claws, but he did not flinch. Destruction? You scrawny bitch, I fear only its escape. He stepped back and shot Silchas a glance.
The man looked so wounded it was a wonder he was still standing. He had wrapped his arms about his own torso, curled in and shrunken. The liquid that leaked down from his eyes traced crimson glints down his hollowed cheeks. Torrent saw Ryadd, his face ravaged with distress, take a step towards his companion, and then he wheeled to advance on Olar Ethil.
Torrent stepped into his path. ‘Go back,’ he said. ‘Now is not the time. Console your friend, Ryadd. I will lead her away from here.’
The young warrior trembled, his eyes incandescent with fury. ‘She will not-’
‘Heed me? She will. Ryadd, the attacks are over-’
He started, eyes widening. ‘Attacks.’ Then he nodded. ‘Yes, I see. Yes.’ He nodded again, and then turned round, ready to give his youthful strength to an old man suddenly broken.
And so he surpasses, and leadership now belongs to him. Simple as that. Torrent sheathed his sword and swung up on to his horse. He gathered the reins, shot one last withering look upon Olar Ethil-who’d yet to move-and then kicked his mount into motion.
On to the trail of the wagon, east and south. He did not look back, but after a time he saw a spinning cloud of dust lift from a nearby rise. She was with him. I see you, sweet as crotch rot, but will you even admit I probably just saved your sorry sack?
Didn’t think so.
As the sun painted gold the brutal facing of the stone tower, a figure of gold and bronze stood above another who knelt, bowed forward over his thighs with his face in his hands.
Neither moved until long after the sun set and darkness claimed the sky.
There had been an old man among the Barghast, brain-addled and prone to drag on to his shoulders a tattered, mangy wolf hide, and then fall to his hands and knees, as if at last he had found his true self. A beast incapable of speech beyond yips and howls, he would rush in amongst the camp dogs, growling, until he had subdued every bewildered, cowering animal. He had sought to do other things as well, but Setoc found even the memory of those to be too pitiful and painfully pathetic to revisit.
The giant plains wolf, Baaljagg, reminded her of that old man. Hide patched and rotted, in places hanging in mangled strips. Its muzzle was perpetually peeled back, revealing the massive oak-hued teeth and fangs, as if the entire world deserved an eternal challenge. The creature’s black pitted eyeholes haunted her, speaking to her in eloquent silence: I am death, they said. I am your fate and the fate of all living things. I am what is left behind. Departed from the world, I leave you only this.
She wondered what had happened to that old man, to make him want to be a wolf. What wound stuck in his mind made him lose all sense of his true self? And why was there no going back, no finding that lost self? The mind held too many secrets. The brain was a sack of truths and their power, hiding there inside, was absolute. Twist one truth into a lie, and a man became a wolf. His flesh and bones could only follow, straining to reshape themselves. Two legs to four, teeth to fangs: new forms and new purposes to give proof to the falsehood.
But such lies need not be so obvious as that old man with his broken brain, need they? The self could become lost in more subtle ways, could it not? Today I am this person. Tomorrow I am another. See the truths of me? Not one is tethered. I am bound to no single self, but unleashed into a multitude of selves. Does this make me ill? Broken?
Is this why I can find no peace?
The twins walked five paces in front of her. They were one split in two. Sharp-eyed round faces peering into the mirror, where nothing could hide. Truths could bend but not twist.