Kedeviss, you were a gift. And now your soul waits, as it must. For this is the fate of the Tiste Andii. Our fata. 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.
Xx
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