Her eyes settled on Tehol. ‘And you, Tehol? Planning on crawling into a hole as well?’
‘I thought we weren’t talking about that any more.’
‘By the Abyss, Master,’ Bugg muttered.
Tehol blinked, first at Bugg, then at Rucket. Then, ‘Oh, Sorry. You meant, um, was I planning on going into hiding, right? Well, I’m undecided. Part of the satisfaction, you see, is in witnessing the mess. Because, regardless of how we’ve insinuated ourselves in the machinery of Lether’s vast commerce, the most bitter truth is that the causes behind this impending chaos are in fact systemic. Granted, we’re hastening things somewhat, but dissolution-in its truest sense-is an integral flaw in the system itself. It may well view itself as immortal, eminently adaptable and all that, but that’s all both illusional and delusional. Resources are never infinite, though they might seem that way. And those resources include more than just the raw product of earth and sea. They also include labour, and the manifest conceit of a monetary system with its arbitrary notions of value-the two forces we set our sights on, by the way. Shipping out the lowest classes-the dispossessed-to pressure the infrastructure, and then stripping away hard currency to escalate a recession-why are you two staring at me like that?’
Rucket smiled. ‘Defaulting to the comfort of your scholarly analysis to deflect us from your more pathetic fixations. That, Tehol Beddict, is perhaps the lowest you have gone yet.’
‘But we’ve just begun.’
‘You may wish to believe that to be the case. For myself, my own curiosity is fast diminishing.’
‘But think of all the challenges in store for us, Rucket!’
She surged to her feet. ‘I’m going out the back way.’
‘You won’t fit.’
‘Alas, Tehol, the same will never be said of you. Good day, gentlemen.’
‘Wait!’
‘Yes, Tehol?’
‘Well, uh, I trust this conversation will resume at a later date?’
‘I’m not hanging around for that,’ Bugg said, crossing his brawny arms in a show of… something. Disgust, maybe. Or, Tehol reconsidered, more likely abject envy.
‘Nothing is certain,’ Rucket told him. ‘Barring the truth that men are wont to get lost in their illusions of grandeur.’
‘Oh,’ murmured Bugg, ‘very nice, Rucket.’
‘If that hadn’t left me speechless,’ Tehol said as she rolled away, ‘I’d have said something.’
‘I have no doubt of that, Master.’
‘Your faith is a relief, Bugg.’
‘Small comfort in comparison, I’d wager.’
‘In comparison,’ Tehol agreed, nodding. ‘Now, shall we go for a walk, old friend?’
‘Assuming your drape is now unmarred by unsightly bulges.’
‘In a moment.’
‘Master?’
Tehol smiled at the alarm on Bugg’s face. ‘I was just imaging her stuck there, wedged in Huldo’s alleyway. Unable to turn. Helpless, in fact.’
‘There it is,’ he said with a sigh, ‘you did indeed manage to sink lower.’
There was an old Gral legend that had begun to haunt Taralack Veed, although he could not quite grasp its relevance to this moment, here in Letheras, with the Lifestealer walking at his side as they pushed through the crowds milling outside a row of market stalls opposite the Quillas Canal.
The Gral were an ancient people; their tribes had dwelt in the wild hills of the First Empire, and there had been Gral companies serving in Dessimbelackis’s vaunted armies, as trackers, as skirmishers and as shock troops, although this manner of combat ill suited them. Even then, the Gral preferred their feuds, the spilling of blood in the name of personal honour. The pursuit of vengeance was a worthy cause. Slaughtering strangers made no sense and stained the soul, demanding tortured cleansing rituals. Further, there was no satisfaction in such murder.
Two months before the Great Fall, a commander named Vorlock Duven, leading the Karasch Legion deep into the untamed wastes of the southwest, had sent her seventy-four Gral warriors into the Tasse Hills to begin a campaign of subjugation against the tribe believed to rule that forbidding range. The Gral were to incite the Tasse to battle, then withdraw, with the savages hard on their heels, to a place of ambush at the very edge of the highlands.
Leading the Gral was a wise veteran of the Bhok’ar clan named Sidilack, called by many Snaketongue after a sword-thrust into his mouth had sliced down the length of his tongue. His warriors, well blooded after a three-year campaign of conquest among the desert and plains peoples south of Ugari, were skilled at finding the hidden trails leading into the rough heights, and before long they were coming upon rude dwellings and rock shelters in the midst of ancient ruins that hinted that some terrible descent from civilization had afflicted the Tasse long ago.
