Quell stared at him. ‘Get on the damned carriage!’
‘Fine, but tell me-’
‘You idiot!’ shouted Faint from where she sat on the roof. ‘Don’t you get it?’ And she jabbed a finger at the churning black cloud now almost towering over them. ‘
‘But — wait — how-’
‘Climb aboard, you oaf, or drown!’
‘Climb aboard,’ shrieked Sweetest Sufferance, ‘and maybe drown anyway!’
Gruntle saw that the corpse had tied itself to the wheel.
A roar exploded on the reef and Gruntle whirled round to see the gust front’s devastating arrival, a wall of thrashing, spume-crested water, rising, charging, lift shy;ing high to devour the entire island.
He lunged for the carriage. As he scrambled up the side of the carriage and fumbled for the lashing, Reccanto Ilk, squinting, asked, ‘Is it here yet?’
The horses began screaming in earnest.
And all at once, the shortsighted idiot had his answer.
You would call us weak?
Fear talks out of the side of the mouth
Each item in your list is an attack
That turns its stab upon yourself
Displaying the bright terrors
That flaw the potential for wonder
You drone out your argument
As if stating naught but what is obvious
And so it is but not in the way you think
The pathos revealed is your paucity
Of wisdom disguised as plain speak
From your tower of reason
As if muscle alone bespoke strength
As if height measures the girth of will
As if the begotten snips thorns from the rose
As if the hearthfire cannot devour a forest
As if courage flows out lost monthly
In wasted streams of dead blood
Who is this to utter such doubt?
Priest of a cult false in its division
I was there on the day the mob awoke
Storming the temple of quailing half-men
You stood gape-jawed behind them
As your teachings were proved wrong
Shrink back from true anger
Flee if you can this burgeoning strength
The shape of the rage against your postulated
Justifications is my soldier’s discipline
Sure in execution and singular in purpose
Setting your head atop the spike
Many children, early on, acquire a love of places they have never been. Often, such wonder is summarily crushed on the crawl through the sludge of murky, confused adolescence on to the flat, cracked pan of adulthood with its airless vistas ever lurking beyond the horizon. Oh, well, sometimes such gifts of curiosity, delight and adventure do indeed survive the stationary trek, said victims ending up as artists, scholars, inventors and other criminals bent on confounding the commonplace and the platitudes of peaceful living. But never mind them for now, since, for all their flailing subversions, nothing really ever changes unless in service to convenience.
Bainisk was still, in the sheltered core of his being, a child. Ungainly with growth, yes, awkward in a body in which he had not yet caught up, but he had yet to surrender his love of the unknown. And so it should be wholly understandable that he and young Harllo should have shared a spark of delight and wonder, the kind that wove tight between them so that not even the occasional snarl could truly sever the binding.
