Trull’s sense of wonder was reawakened every time he glanced across at Onrack. A friend in the flesh was truly a revelation. He had imagined himself long past such profound, prolonged astonishment. The day he had been Shorn by his brother, it had seemed to him that his heart had died. Chained to stone, awaiting the cold water and the rot that it promised, the muscle that forged the tides of his blood seemed to beat on in some kind of waning inertia.
The desiccated corpse that was Onrack, walking up to where he had been bound, had even then seemed an unlikely salvation.
Trull recalled he’d had to argue with the T’lan Imass to win his own release. The thought amused him still.
Creaking sinew and cabled muscle and torque-twisted bone, Onrack had been the personification of indifference. As unmindful of life and its struggle to persist as only a lifeless thing could be.
And so Trull had simply tagged along, unwilling to admit to himself the burgeoning truth of his salvation-his reluctant return to life in the company of an undead warrior who had begun to discover his own life, the memories once thought surrendered, to time and cruel ritual, to wilful denial spanning tens of thousands of years.
What had bound them together? What improbable menagerie of terse conversations, unanticipated emotions and the shared extremity of combat had so thoroughly entwined them together, now as brothers yet more a brother than any of those with whom Trull Sengar shared blood? We stood side by side, together facing certain defeat. Only to find blessing in the timid hand of a creature not even half human. Oh, 1 know her well, that one.
Yet she is a secret 1 find 1 cannot share with Onrack, with my friend. Now, if only he was as coy, as guarded. Not this… this open regard, this casting away of every natural, reasonable defence. This childness-by the Sisters, Trull, at least find yourself a word that exists. But he seems so young! Not of age, but of cast. A species of unmitigated innocence-is such a thing even possible?
Well, he might know the answer to that soon enough. They had found signs as they trekked this youthful world. Camps, hearthstones lining firepits. Places where stone tools had been made, a flat boulder where an Imass had sat, striking flakes from flint, leaving behind a half-circle scatter of splinters. Refuse pits, filled with bones charred white or boiled to extract the fat, leaving them crumbly and light as pumice; scorched shell fragments from the gourds used to heat the bones in water; and the shattered rocks that had been plunged hot into that water to bring it to a boil. Signs of passing this way, some only a few weeks old, by Onrack’s estimations.
Did those Imass know that strangers had come among them? To this even Onrack had no answer. His kind were shy, he explained, and cunning. They might watch from hiding places for days, nights, and only when they so chose would they reveal enough to touch Onrack’s senses, his animal awareness with its instinctive whispering. Eyes are upon us, friends. It is time.
Trull waited for those words.
The emlava kits yowled, announcing their hunger.
Trull, who had taken point whilst Onrack and the wizard carried the beasts in their sack, halted and turned about.
Time for feeding. Else not a single moment of peace.
Groaning, Quick Ben set down his end of the sling-pole, watched bemusedly as the two kits spat and clawed their way free of the skin, hissing at each other then at Onrack, who began withdrawing leaf-wrapped hunks of raw antelope. The meat was foul, but clearly this was no deterrent for the emlava cubs as they lunged towards him.
The Imass flung the meat onto the ground to spare his own hands, and then stepped away with an odd smile on his face.
Too many odd smiles these days, the wizard thought. As if the blinding wonder and joy had begun to dim-not much, only a fraction, yet Quick Ben believed it was there, a hint of dismay. He was not surprised. No-one could sus-tain such pure pleasure indefinitely. And, for all this seeming paradise-at least a paradise by Imass standards-there remained something vaguely unreal about it. As if it was no more than an illusion, already begun to fray at the edges.
No real evidence of that, however. The wizard could feel the health of this place. It was strong, and, he now suspected, it was growing. As Omtose Phellack waned on all sides. The end of an age, then. An age that had ended everywhere else long, long ago. But isn’t Tellann itself dead everywhere else? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe it’s just changed, grown into itself. Maybe, everywhere else, what we’re seeing-what we’re living in-is Tellann ascendant, victor in the war of millennia past, dominant and secure in its maturity. Is that possible?
Yet that did not mesh with Onrack, with how he had been and how he was now. Unless… gods below, unlike everywhere else, this is one fragment of Tellann that lies, somehow, beyond the Ritual. That is why he is flesh and blood here. In this place, there was no Ritual of Tellann, no severing of Imass souls. Suggesting that the Imass living here know nothing about it.
