Night came abruptly to this place, like the snuffing out of a candle. The sun, which circled just above the horizon through the day, would suddenly tumble, like a rolling ball, beneath the gleaming, blood-hued skyline. And the black sky would fill with stars that only faded with the coming of strangely coloured brushstrokes of light, spanning the vault, that hissed like sprinkled fragments of fine glass.
Hedge sensed that night was close, as the wind’s pockets of warmth grew more infrequent, the ember cast to what he assumed was west deepening into a shade both lurid and baleful.
He could now see what had caught Emroth’s attention. A hump on the plateau, ringed in dark objects. The shape rising from the centre of that hillock at first looked like a spar of ice, but as they neared, Hedge saw that its core was dark, and that darkness reached down to the ground.
The objects surrounding the rise were cloth-swaddled bodies, many of them pitifully small.
As the day’s light suddenly dropped away, night announced on a gust of chill wind, Hedge and Emroth halted just before the hump.
The upthrust spar was in fact a throne of ice, and on it sat the frozen corpse of a male Jaghut. Mummified by cold and desiccating winds, it nevertheless presented an imposing if ghastly figure, a figure of domination, the head tilted slightly downward, as if surveying a ring of permanently supine subjects.
‘Death observing death,’ Hedge muttered. ‘How damned appropriate. He collected the bodies, then sat down and just died with them. Gave up. No thoughts of vengeance, no dreams of resurrection. Here’s your dread enemy, Emroth.’
‘More than you realize,’ the T’lan Imass replied.
She moved on, edging round the edifice, her hide-wrapped feet plunging through the crust of brittle ice in small sparkling puffs of powdery snow.
Hedge stared up at the Jaghut on his half-melted throne. All thrones should be made of ice, 1 think.
Sit on that numb arse, sinking down and down, with the puddle of dissolution getting ever wider around you. Sit, dear ruler, and tell me all your grand designs.
Of course, the throne wasn’t the only thing falling apart up there. The Jaghut’s green, leathery skin had sloughed away on the forehead, revealing sickly bone, almost luminescent in the gloom; and on the points of the shoulders the skin was frayed, with the polished knobs of the shoulder bones showing through. Similar gleams from the knuckles of both hands where they rested on the now-tilted arms of the chair.
Hedge’s gaze returned to the face. Black, sunken pits for eyes, a nose broad and smashed flat, tusks of black silver. I thought these things never quite died. Needed big rocks on them to keep them from getting back up. Or chopped to pieces and every piece planted under a boulder.
I didn’t think they died this way at all.
He shook himself and set off after Emroth.
They would walk through the night. Camps, meals and sleeping were for still-breathing folk, after all.
‘Emroth!’
The head creaked round.
‘That damned thing back there’s not still alive, is it?’
‘No. The spirit left.’
‘Just… left?’
‘Yes.’
‘Isn’t that, uh, unusual?’
‘The Throne of Ice was dying. Is dying still. There was-is-nothing left to rule, ghost. Would you have him sit there for ever?’ She did not seem inclined to await a reply, for she then said, ‘I have not been here before, Hedge of the Bridgeburners. For I would have known.’
‘Known what, Emroth?’
‘I have never before seen the true Throne of Ice, in the heart of the Hold. The very heart of the Jaghut realm.’
Hedge glanced back. The true Throne of Ice? ‘Who-who was he, Emroth?’
But she did not give answer.
After a time, however, he thought he knew. Had always known.
He kicked aside a broken pot, watched it skid, roll, then wobble to a halt. King on your melting throne, you drew a breath, then let it go. And… never again. Simple. Easy. When you are the last of your kind, and you release that last breath, then it is the breath of extinction.
And it rides the wind.
Every wind.
‘Emroth, there was a scholar in Malaz City-a miserable old bastard named Obo-who claimed he was witness to the death of a star. And when the charts were compared again, against the night sky, well, one light was gone.’
‘The stars have changed since my mortal life, ghost.’
‘Some have gone out?’
‘Yes.’
‘As in… died V
‘The Bonecasters could not agree on this,’ she said. Another observation offered a different possibility. The stars are moving away from us, Hedge of the Bridgeburners. Perhaps those we no longer see have gone too far for our eyes.’
‘Obo’s star was pretty bright-wouldn’t it have faded first, over a long time, before going out?’
‘Perhaps both answers are true. Stars die. Stars move away.’
‘So, did that Jaghut die, or did he move away?’
‘Your question makes no sense.’
Really? Hedge barked a laugh. You’re a damned bad liar, Emroth.’
‘This,’ she said, ‘is not a perfect world.’
