T'lan Imass. No room for doubt – their undead faces stare out at us, from all sides, skulls and withered faces peering out from wreaths of crystallized bark, the dark pits of their eyes tracking our passage. This is a burial ground, not of the flesh-and-blood forebears of the T'lan Imass, but of the deathless creatures themselves.
List's visions of ancient war – we see here its aftermath. Crumpled platforms were visible as well, stone latticework perched amidst branches that had once grown around them, closing up the assembled bones like the fingers of stone hands.
At the war's end, the survivors came here, carrying those comrades too shattered to continue, and made of this forest their eternal home. The souls of the T'lan Imass cannot join Hood, cannot even flee their prisons of bone and withered flesh. One does not bury such things – that sentence of earthen darkness offers no peace. Instead, let those remnants look out from their perches upon one another, upon the rare mortal passages on this trail. . .
Corporal List saw far too clearly, his visions delivering him deep into a history better left lost. Knowledge had beaten him down –as it does us all, when delivered in too great a measure. Yet I hunger still.
Cairns had begun appearing, heaps of boulders surmounted with totemic skulls. Not barrows, List had said. Sites of engagement, the various clans, wherever the Jaghut turned from flight and lashed out.
The day was drawing to a close when they reached the final height, a broad, jumbled basolith that seemed to have shed its limestone coat, the exposed bedrock deeply hued the colour of wine. Flat, treeless stretches were crowded with boulders set out in spirals, ellipses and corridors. Cedars were replaced by pines, and the number of petrified trees diminished.
Duiker and List had been travelling in the last third of the column, the wounded shielded by a battered rearguard of infantry. Once the last of the wagons and the few livestock that remained cleared the slope and made level ground, the footmen quickly gained the ridge, squads scattering to various vantage points and potential strongholds commanding the approach.
List halted his wagon and set the brake, then rose from the buckboard, stretched and looked down at Duiker with haunted eyes.
'Better lines of sight up here, anyway,' the historian offered.
'Always has been,' the corporal said. 'If we make for the head of the column, we'll come to the first of them.'
'The first of what?'
The blood leaving the lad's face bespoke another vision flooding his mind, a world and a time seen through unhuman eyes. After a moment he shuddered, wiping sweat from his face. 'I'll show you.'
They moved through the quiet press in silence. The efforts at making camp they saw on all sides looked wooden, refugees and soldiers alike moving as automatons. No-one bothered attempting to erect tents; they simply laid out their bedrolls on the flat rock. Children sat unmoving, watching with the eyes of old men and women.
The Wickan camps were no better. There was no escape from what had been, from the images and remembered scenes that rose again and again, remorselessly, before the mind's eye. Every frail, mundane gesture of normal life had shattered beneath the weight of knowledge.
Yet there was anger, white hot and buried deep, out of sight, as if mantled in peat. It had become the last fuel with any potency. And so we move on, day after day, fighting every battle – those inside and those without – with an unyielding ferocity and determination. We are all in that place where Lull now lives, a place stripped of rational thought, trapped in a world without cohesion.
Arriving at the vanguard, they came upon a scene. Coltaine, Bult and Captain Lull were present, and facing them in a ragged line ten paces away were the last of the Engineers.
The Fist turned as Duiker and List approached. 'Ah, this is well. I would have you witness this, Historian.'
'What have I missed?'
Bult grinned. 'Nothing; we've just managed the prodigious task of assembling the sappers – you'd think battles with Kamist Reloe were tactical nightmares. Anyway, here they are, looking like they're waiting to be ambushed, or worse.'
'And are they, Uncle?'
The commander's grin broadened. 'Maybe.'
Coltaine now stepped towards the assembled soldiers. 'Symbols of bravery and gestures of recognition can only ring hollow – this I know, yet what else is left to me? Three clan leaders have come to me, each begging to approach you men and women with an offer of formal adoption to their clan. Perhaps you are unaware of what such unprecedented requests reveal ... or perhaps, judging by your expressions, you know. I felt need to answer on your behalf, for I know more of you soldiers than do most Wickans, including those clan leaders, and they have each humbly withdrawn their requests.'
