Remember the path. Oh, Father Shadow, remember… something. Anything.
Where the huge chunks of ice had been, there were now stands of young trees. Alder, aspen, dogwood, forming a tangled fringe surrounding the dead Meckros City. Beyond the trees were the grasses of the plains, among them deep-rooted bluestems and red-lipped poppies that cloaked the burial mounds where resided the bones of thousands of people.
The wreckage of buildings still stood here and there on their massive pylons of wood, while others had tilted, then toppled, spilling out their contents onto canted streets. Weeds and shrubs now grew everywhere, dotting the enormous, sprawling ruin, and among the broken bones of buildings lay a scatter of flowers, a profusion of colours on all sides.
He stood, balanced on a fallen pillar of dusty marble allowing him a view of the vista, the city stretching to his left, the ragged edge and green-leafed trees with the mounds beyond on his right. His eyes, a fiery amber, were fixed on something on the far horizon directly ahead. His broad mouth held its habitual downturn at the corners, an expression that seemed ever at war with the blazing joy within his eyes. His mother’s eyes, it was said. But somehow less fierce and this, perhaps, was born of his father’s uneasy gift-a mouth that did not expect to smile, ever.
His second father, his true father. The thread of blood. The one who had visited in his seventh week of life. Yes, while it had been a man named Araq Elalle who had raised him, whilst he lived in the Meckros City, it had been the other-the stranger in the company of a yellow-haired bonecaster-who had given his seed to Menandore, Rud Halle’s mother. His Imass minders had not been blind to such truths, and oh how Menandore had railed at them afterwards.
I took all that I needed from Udinaas! And left him a husk and nothing more. He can never sire another child-a husk! A useless mortal-forget him, my son. He is nothing.’ And from the terrible demand in her blazing eyes, her son had recoiled.
Rud Elalle was tall now, half a hand taller than even his mother. His hair, long and wild in the fashion of the Bentract Imass warriors, was a sun-bleached brown. He wore a cloak of ranag hide, deep brown and amber-tipped the fur. Beneath that was a supple leather shirt of deerskin. His leggings were of thicker, tougher allish hide. On his feet were ranag leather moccasins that reached to just below his knees.
A scar ran down the right side of his neck, gift of a boar’s dying lunge. The bones of his left wrist had been broken and were now misaligned, the places of the breaks knotted protrusions bound in thick sinews, but the arm had not been weakened by this; indeed, it was now stronger than its opposite. Menandore’s gift, that strange response to; any injury, as if his body sought to armour itself against any chance of the same injury’s recurring. There had been other breaks, other wounds-life among the Imass was hard, and though they would have protected him from its rigour, he would not permit that. He was among the Bentract, he was of the Bentract. Here, with these wondrous people, he had found love and fellowship. He would live as they lived, for as long as he could.
Yet, alas, he felt now… that time was coming to an end. His eyes remained fixed on that distant horizon, even as he sensed her arrival, now at his side. ‘Mother,’ he said.
‘Imass,’ she said. ‘Speak our own language, my son. Speak the language of dragons.’
Faint distaste soured Rud Elalle. ‘We are not Eleint, Mother. That blood is stolen. Impure-’
‘We are no less children of Starvald Demelain. I do not know who has filled your mind with these doubts. But they are weaknesses, and now is not the time.’
‘Now is not the time,’ he repeated.
She snorted. ‘My sisters.’
‘Yes.’
‘They want me. They want him. Yet, in both schemes, they have not counted you a threat, my son. Oh, they know you are grown now. They know the power within you. But they know nothing of your will.’
‘Nor, Mother, do you.’
He heard her catch her breath, was inwardly amused at the suddenly crowded silence that followed.
He nodded to the far horizon. ‘Do you see them, Mother?’
‘Unimportant. Mayhap they will survive, but I would not wager upon it. Understand me, Rud, with what is to come, not one of us is safe. Not one. You, me, your precious Bentract-’
He turned at that, and his eyes were all at once a mirror of his mother’s-bright with rage and menace.
She very nearly flinched, and he saw that and was pleased. ‘1 will permit no harm to come to them, Mother. You wish to understand my will. Now you do.’
‘Foolish. No, insanity. They are not even alive-’
