There had been a woman, once, and yes, he might have loved her. Like the hand plunged into the cool water, he might have been brushed by this heady emo shy;tion, this blood-whispered obsession that poets died for and over which people murdered their dearest. And he recalled that the last time he set eyes upon her, down beside Dorssan Ryl, driven mad by Mother’s abandonment (many were), there was nothing he recognized in her eyes. To see, there in a face he had known, had adored, that appalling absence — she was gone, never to return.
Oh, this was a nightmare. He had done nothing, he had been too much the coward. And he had watched her leave, with all the others so struck by loss, as they set out on a hopeless pilgrimage, a fatal search to find Her once again. What a journey that must have been! Before the last crazed one fell for the final time, punctuating a trail of corpses leagues long. A crusade of the insane, wandering into the nowhere.
Kharkanas was virtually an empty city after they’d gone. Anomander Rake’s first lordship over echoing chambers, empty houses. There would be many more.
A calm, then, drifting on like flotsam in the stream, not yet caught by the rushes, not yet so waterlogged that it vanished, tumbled like a severed moon into the muddy bed. Of course it couldn’t last. One more betrayal was needed, to shat shy;ter the world once and for all.
The night just past Endest Silann, making his way to a back storeroom on the upper level, came upon the Son of Darkness in a corridor. Some human, thinking the deed one of honour, had hung a series of ancient Andii tapestries down both walls of the passage. Scenes of Kharkanas, and one indeed showing Dorssan Ryl — although none would know if not familiar with that particular vantage point, for the river was but a dark slash, a talon curled round the city’s heart. There was no particular order, arrayed so in ignorance, and to walk this corridor was to be struck by a collage of images, distinct as memories not one tethered to the next.
Anomander Rake had been standing before one, his eyes a deep shade of amber. Predatory, fixed as a lion’s before a killing charge. On the faded tapestry a figure stood tall amidst carnage. The bodies tumbled before him all bled from wounds to the back. Nothing subtle here, the weaver’s outrage dripped from every thread. White-skinned, onyx-eyed, sweat-blackened hair braided like hanging ropes. Slick swords in his hands, he looked out upon the viewer, defiant and cold. In the wracked sky behind him wheeled Locqui Wyval with women’s heads, their mouths open in screams almost audible.
‘He did not mean it,’ said Anomander Rake.
‘The body follows the head, but sometimes it’s the other way round. There was a cabal. Ambitious, hungry. They used him, Endest, they used him badly.’
‘They paid for it, didn’t they?’
‘We all did, old friend.’
Endest Silann looked away. ‘I so dislike this hallway, Lord. When I must walk it, I look neither left nor right.’
Rake grunted, ‘It is indeed a gauntlet of recrimination,’
‘Reminders, Lord, of the fact that some things never change.’
‘You must wrest yourself loose, Endest. This despondency can. . ravage the soul.’
‘I have heard there is a river that empties into Coral Bay. Eryn or Maurik. Which seems depthless.’
Anomander Rake, still studying the tapestry, nodded.
‘Spinnock Durav has seen it, walked its shores. He says it reminds him of Dorssan Ryl. . his childhood.’
‘Yes, there are some similarities.’
‘I was thinking, if I could be spared. .’
His Lord glanced over and smiled. ‘A pilgrimage? Of course, Endest. If, that is, you can return before a month passes.’
The glance had become something more focused, and the amber glare had dimmed to something like. .
‘And so it shall.’
