Patience — it would not do, he realized, to seek to steal the Fallen One’s wor shy;shippers. There was no real need. The gods were already assembling to crush the Crippled fool once and for all. Kallor did not think they would fail this time.’ Though no doubt the Fallen One had a few more tricks up his rotted sleeve, not least the inherent power of the cult itself, feeding as it did on misery and suffering — two conditions of humanity that would persist for as long as humans existed.
Kallor grunted. ‘Ah, fuck patience. The High King will take this throne. Then we can begin the. . negotiations.’
He was no diplomat and had no interest in acquiring a diplomat’s skills, not even when facing a god. There would be conditions, some of them unpalatable, enough to make the hoary bastard choke on his smoke. Well, too bad.
One more throne. The last he’d ever need.
He resumed walking. Boots worn through. Dust wind-driven into every crease of his face, the pores of his nose and brow, his eyes thinned to slits. The world clawed at him, but he pushed through. Always did. Always would.
One more throne. Darujhistan.
Long ago, in some long-lost epoch, people had gathered on this blasted ridge over shy;looking the flattened valley floor, and had raised the enormous standing stones that now leaned in an uneven line spanning a thousand paces or more. A few had toppled here and there, but among the others Samar Dev sensed a belligerent vitality. As if the stones were determined to stand sentinel for ever, even as the bones of those who’d raised them now speckled the dust that periodically scoured their faces.
She paused to wipe sweat from her forehead, watching as Traveller reached the crest, and then moved off into the shade of the nearest stone, a massive phallic menhir looming tall, where he leaned against it with crossed arms. To await her, of course — she was clearly slowing them down, and this detail irritated her. What she lacked, she understood, was manic obsession, while her companions were driven and this lent them the vigour common to madmen. Which, she had long since decided, was precisely what they were.
She missed her horse, the one creature on this journey that she had come to feel an affinity with. An average beast, a simple beast, normal, mortal, sweetly dull-eyed and pleased by gestures of care and affection.
Resuming her climb, she struggled against the crumbled slope, forcing her legs between the sage brushes — too weary to worry about slumbering snakes and scor shy;pions, or hairy spiders among the gnarled, twisted branches.
The thump of Havok’s hoofs drummed through the ground, halting directly above her at the top of the slope. Scowling, she looked up.
Karsa’s regard was as unreadable as ever, the shattered tattoo like a web stretching to the thrust of the face behind it. He leaned forward on his mount’s neck and said, ‘Do we not feed you enough?’
‘Hood take you.’
‘Why will you not accept sharing Havok’s back, witch?’
Since he showed no inclination to move, she was forced to work to one side as she reached the crest, using the sage branches to pull herself on to the summit. Where she paused, breathing hard, and then she held up her hands to her face, drawing in the sweet scent of the sage. After a moment she glanced up at the To shy;blakai. A number of responses occurred to her, in a succession of escalating vi shy;ciousness. Instead of voicing any of them, she sighed and turned away, finding her own standing stone to lean against — noting, with little interest, that Traveller had lowered his head and seemed to be muttering quietly to himself.
This close to the grey schist, she saw that patterns had been carved into its surface, wending round milky nodules of quartz. With every dawn, she realized, this side of the stone would seem to writhe as the sun climbed higher, the nodes glistening. And the purpose of all that effort? Not even the gods knew, she sus shy;pected.
History, she realized, was mostly lost. No matter how diligent the recorders, the witnesses, the researchers, most of the past simply no longer existed. Would never be known. The notion seemed to empty her out somewhere deep inside, as if the very knowledge of loss somehow released a torrent of extinction within her own memories — moments swirling away, never to be retrieved. She set a finger in one groove etched into the stone, followed its serpentine track downward as far as she could reach, then back up again. The first to do so in how long?
