He crouched, pulled loose the knife then quickly sliced open the belly and tugged and tore out the hare’s warm intestines. He held the glistening ropes up in one hand, studied them and whispered, ‘
An eye of the hare stared up sightlessly, everything behind it closed up, gone away.
But he’d seen all that before. More times than he could count. Hares, people, all the same. In that last moment, yes, there was nothing to see, so what else to do but go away?
He flung the guts to one side, picked up the carcass by its elongated hind limbs and resumed his journey. The hare was coming with him. Not that it cared. Later, they’d sit down for dinner.
High in the sky overhead, the black specks began a descent. Their equally empty eyes had spied the entrails, spread in lumpy grey ropes on the yellow grasses, now in the lone man’s wake. Empty eyes, but a different kind of emptiness. Not that of death’s banality, no, but that of life’s banality.
The same kind of eyes as Kallor’s own.
And this was the mercy in the hare’s swift death, for unlike countless hundreds of thousands of humans, the creature’s last glimpse was not of Kallor’s profoundly empty eyes — a sight that brought terror into the faces of every victim.
The world, someone once said, gives back what is given. In abundance. But then, as Kallor would point out, someone was always saying something. Until he got fed up and had them executed.
Pray, do not speak to me of weather
Not sun, not cloud, not of the places
Where storms are born
I would not know of wind shivering the heather
Nor sleet, nor rain, nor of ancient traces
On stone grey and worn
Pray, do not regale the troubles of ill health
Not self, not kin, not of the old woman
At the road’s end
I will spare no time nor in mercy yield wealth
Nor thought, nor feeling, nor shrouds woven
To tempt luck’s end
Pray, tell me of deep chasms crossed
Not left, not turned, not of the betrayals
Breeding like worms
I would you cry out your rage ’gainst what is lost
Now strong, now to weep, now to make fist and rail
On earth so firm
Pray, sing loud the wretched glories of love
Now pain, now drunken, now torn from all reason
In laughter and tears
I would you bargain with the fey gods above
Nor care, nor cost, nor turn of season
To wintry fears
Sing to me this and I will face you unflinching
Now knowing, now seeing, now in the face
Of the howling storm
Sing your life as if a life without ending
And your love, sun’s bright fire, on its celestial pace
To where truth is born
Darujhistan. Glories unending! Who could call a single deed inconsequential? This scurrying youth with his arms full of vegetables, the shouts from the stall in his wake, the gauging eye of a guard thirty paces away, assessing the poor likelihood of catching the urchin. Insignificant? Nonsense! Hungry mouths fed, glowing pride, some fewer coins for the hawker, perhaps, but it seemed all profit did was fill a drunken husband’s tankard anyway so the bastard could die of thirst for all she cared! A guard’s congenitally flawed heart beat on, not yet pushed to bursting by hard pursuit through the crowded market, and so he lives a few weeks longer, enough to complete his full twenty years’ service and so guarantee his wife and children a pension. And of course the one last kiss was yet to come, the kiss that whispered volumes of devotion and all the rest.
