She climbed to her feet and strode to check her horses. “You're getting stranger every day, Tool,” she said quietly, more to herself than to the Imass. Into her mind returned the first thing she had seen when she opened her eyes-that damned creature and his sword. How long had he stood like that? All night?
The Adjunct paused to test her shoulder tentatively. It was healing quickly. Perhaps the injury had not been as severe as she'd first thought As she saddled her horse she chanced to glance at Tool. The warrior stood staring at her. What kind of thoughts would occupy someone who'd lived through three hundred thousand years? Or did the Imas live? Before meeting Tool she had generally thought of them as undead, hence without a soul, the flesh alone animated by some external force.
But now she wasn't so sure.
“Tell me, Tool, what dominates your thoughts?”
The Imass shrugged before replying. “I think of futility, Adjunct.”
“Do all Imass think about futility?”
“No. Few think at all.”
“Why is that?”
The Imass leaned his head to one side and regarded her. “Because Adjunct, it is futile.”
“Let's get going, Tool. We're wasting time.”
“Yes, Adjunct.”
She climbed into the saddle, wondering how the Imass had meant that.
BOOK FOUR ASSASSINS
I dreamed a coin with shifting face-so many youthful visages so many costly dreams, and it rolled and rang “round the gilded rim of a chalice made for gems
Life of Dreams Mares the Hag
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The night held close as I wandered my spirit unfooted to either earth or stone unravelled from tree undriven by iron nail but like the night itself a thing of air stripped of light so I came upon them, those masons who cut and carved stone in the night sighting by stars and battered hand.
“What of the sun?” asked I of them “Is not its cloak of revelation the warmth of reason in your shaping?”
And one among them answered “No soul can withstand the sun's bones of light and reason dims when darkness falls-so we shape barrows in the night for you and your kin.”
“Forgive my interruption, then,” said I.
“The dead never interrupt,” said the mason, “they but arrive.”
Pauper's Stone Darujhistan of
“Yet another night, yet another dream,” KRUPPE MOANED, “With naught but a scant fire to keep this wanderer company.” He held his hands over the flickering, undying hearth that had been stoked by an Elder God. It seemed an odd gift, but he sensed a significance to it. “Kruppe would understand this meaning, for rare and unwelcome is this frustration.”
The landscape around him was barren; even the ploughed earth was gone, with no sign of habitation in sight. He squatted by the lone fire in a tundra wasteland, and the air had the breath of rotting ice. To the north and to the east the horizon gleamed green, almost luminescent though no moon had risen to challenge the stars. Kruppe had never before seen such a thing, yet it was an image fashioned within his mind.
“Disturbing, indeed, proclaims Kruppe. Are these visions of instinct, then, unfurled in this dream for a purpose? Kruppe knows not, and would return to his warm bed this instant, were the choice his.”
He stared about at the lichen- and moss-covered ground, frowning at the strange bright colours born there. He'd heard tales of Redspire Plain, that land far to the north, beyond the Laederon Plateau. Is this what tundra looked like? He'd always pictured a bleak, colourless world. “Yet peruse these stars overhead. They glisten with a youthful energy, nay, sparkle as if amused by the one who contemplates them. While the earth itself hints of vast blushes of red, orange and lavender.”
Kruppe rose as low thunder reached him from the west. In the distance moved a massive herd of brown-furred beasts. The steam of their breath gusted silver in the air above and behind them as they ran, turning as one this way and that but ever at a distance. He watched them for some time.
When they came closest to him he saw the reddish streaks in their fur, and their horns, sweeping down then up and out. The land shook with their passage.
“Such is the life in this world, Kruppe wonders. Has he travelled back, then, to the very beginning of things?”
“You have,” said a deep voice behind him.
Kruppe turned. “Ah, come to share my fire, of course.” He saw before him a squat figure, covered in the tanned hides of deer or some such similar animal. Antlers stretched out from a flat skull-cap on the man's head, grey and covered in fuzzy skin. Kruppe bowed. “You see before you Kruppe, of Darujhistan.”
