Picker fell through darkness. Maybe she was flesh and bone. Maybe she was nothing but a soul, torn loose and now plummeting with naught but the weight of its own regrets. But her arms scythed through bitter cold air, her legs kicked out to find purchase where none existed. And each breath was getting harder to snatch from that rushing blast.
In the dream-world every law could be twisted round, bent, folded. And so, as she sensed the unseen ground fast approaching, she spun herself upright and slowed, sudden and yet smooth, and moments later she landed lightly on uneven bedrock. Snail shells crunched underfoot; she heard the faint snap of small rodent bones.
Blinking, gasping one breath after another deep into her lungs, she simply stood for a time, knees slightly flexed, hands out to her sides.
She could smell an animal stench, thick, as if she found herself in a den in some hillside.
The darkness slowly faded. She saw rock walls on which scenes had been pecked, others painted in earthy hues. She saw the half-shells of gourds crowding the rough floor on both sides — she had landed upon a sort of path, reaching ahead and behind, perhaps three paces wide. Before her, six or seven paces away, it ended in a stone wall. Behind her, the trail blended into darkness. She looked once more at the objects cluttering the flanks. In each gourd there was thick, dark liquid. She knew instinctively that it was blood.
The image etched into the wall in front, where the path ended, now snared her attention, and slowly its details began to resolve. A carriage or wagon, a swarm of vague shapes all reaching up for it on both sides, with others hinted at in its wake. A scene of frenzy and panic, the figure sitting on the bench holding reins that seemed to whip about — but no, her mind was playing tricks in this faint light, and that sound, as of wheels slamming and rocking and spinning over broken ground, was only her lunging heart, the rush of blood in her ears.
But Picker stared, transfixed.
A soldier with nothing left to believe in is a terrible thing to behold. When the blood on the hands is unjust blood, the soul withers.
Death becomes a lover, and that love leads to but one place. Every time, but one place.
Friends and family watch on, helpless. And in this tragic scene, the liars, the cynical bearers of poison, they are nowhere to be found.
Endest Silann had once been a priest, a believer in forces beyond the mortal realm; a believer in the benign regard of ancestors, spirits, each one a moral lodestone that cut through the dissembling, the evasions of responsibility, the denials of culpability — a man of faith, yes, in the traditional sense of the word. But these things no longer found harbour in his soul. Ancestors dissolved into the ground, leaving nothing but crumbling flecks of bone in dark earth. Spirits offered no gifts and those still clinging to life were bitter and savage, too often betrayed, too often spat upon, to hold any love for anyone.
He now believed that mortals were cursed. Some innate proclivity led them again and again on the same path. Mortals betrayed every gift granted them. They betrayed the giver. They betrayed their own promises. Their gods, their ancestors, their children — everywhere, betrayal.
The great forests of Kharkanas had been cut down; the squalid dying islands of growth left behind had each one fallen to fire or blight. The rich soils washed down into the rivers. The flesh of the land was stripped back to reveal bedrock bones. And hunger stalked the children. Mothers wailed, fathers tried on hardened masks of resolve, but before any of this both had looked out upon the ravaged world with affronted disbelief — someone’s to blame, someone always is, but by the Abyss, do not look at
But there was nowhere else to look. Mother Dark had turned away. She had left them to fates of their own devising, and in so doing, she had taken away their privilege of blaming someone else. Such was a godless world.
One might think, then, that a people might rise to fullest height, stand proud, and accept the notion of potential culpability for each decision made or not made. Yes, that would be nice. That would be something to behold, to feed riotous optimism. But such a moment, such stature, never came. Enlightened ages belonged to the past or waited for the future. Such ages acquired the gloss of iconic myth, reduced to abstractions. The present world was real, filled with the grit of reality and compromise. People did not stand tall. They ducked.
There was no one about with whom Endest Silann could discuss all this. No one who might — just might — understand the significance of what he was thinking.
