'So, Barathol Mekhar, what awaits you on the coast?'
'Probably plague,' he said.
'Oh now that's a pleasant thought. And if you survive that?'
He shrugged. 'A ship, going somewhere else. I've never been to Genabackis. Nor Falar.'
'If you go to Falar,' Scillara said, 'or empire-held Genabackis, your old crimes might catch up with you.'
'They've caught up with me before.'
'So, either you're indifferent to your own death, Barathol, or your confidence is supreme and unassailable. Which is it?'
'Take your pick.'
A sharp one. I won't get any rise from him, no point in trying. 'What do you think it will be like, crossing an ocean?'
'Like a desert,' Cutter said, 'only wetter.'
She probably should have glared at him for that, but she had to admit, it was a good answer. All right, so maybe they're both sharp, in their own ways. I think I'm going to enjoy this journey.
They rode the track, the heat and sunlight burgeoning into a conflagration, and in their wake clumped Chaur, still smiling.
The Jaghut Ganath stood looking into the chasm. The sorcerous weaving she had set upon this… intrusion had shattered. She did not need to descend that vast fissure, nor enter the buried sky keep itself, to know the cause of that shattering. Draconean blood had been spilled, although that in itself was not enough. The chaos between the warrens had also been unleashed, and it had devoured Omtose Phellack as boiling water does ice.
Yet her sense of the sequence of events necessary for such a thing to happen remained clouded, as if time itself had been twisted within that once-floating fortress. There was outrage locked in the very bedrock, and now, a most peculiar imposition of… order.
She wished for companions here, at her side. Cynnigig, especially. And Phyrlis. As it was, in this place, alone as she was, she felt oddly vulnerable.
Perhaps most of all, would that Ganoes Paran, Master of the Deck, was with me. A surprisingly formidable human. A little too prone to take risks, however, and there was something here that invited a certain caution. She would need to heal this – there could be no doubt of that. Still…
Ganath pulled her unhuman gaze from the dark fissure – in time to see, flowing across the flat rock to either side, and behind her, a swarm of shadows – and now figures, huge, reptilian, all closing in on where she stood.
She cried out, her warren of Omtose Phellack rising within her, an instinctive response to panic, as the creatures closed.
There was no escape – no timeHeavy mattocks slashed down, chopping through flesh, then bone. The blows drove her to the ground amidst gushes of her own blood. She saw before her the edge of the chasm, sought to reach out towards it. To drag herself over it, and fall – a better deathMassive clawed feet, scaled, wrapped in strips of thick hide, kicking up dust close to her face. Unable to move, feeling her life drain away, she watched as that dust settled in a dull patina over the pool of her blood, coating it like the thinnest skin. Too much dirt, the blood wouldn't like that, it would sicken with all that dirt.
She needed to clean it. She needed to gather it up, somehow pour it back into her body, back in through these gaping wounds, and hope that her heart would burn clean every drop.
But now even her heart was failing, and blood was sputtering, filled with froth, from her nose and mouth.
She understood, suddenly, that strange sense of order. K'Chain Che'
Malle, a recollection stirred to life once more, after all this time.
They had returned, then. But not the truly chaotic ones. No, not the Long-Tails. These were the others, servants of machines, of order in all its brutality. Nah'Ruk.
They had returned. Why?
The pool of blood was sinking down into the white, chalky dust where furrows had been carved by talons, and into these furrows the rest of the blood drained in turgid rivulets. The inexorable laws of erosion, writ small, and yet… yes, I suppose, most poignant.
She was cold, and that felt good. Comforting. She was, after all, a Jaghut.
And now I leave.
The woman stood facing landwards, strangely alert. Mappo Runt rubbed at his face, driven to exhaustion by Iskaral Pust's manic tirade at the crew of the broad-beamed caravel as they scurried about with what seemed a complete absence of reason: through the rigging, bounding wild over the deck and clinging – with frantic screams – to various precarious perches here and there. Yet somehow the small but seaworthy trader craft was full before the wind, cutting clean on a northeasterly course.
A crew – an entire crew – of bhok'arala. It should have been impossible. It most certainly was absurd. Yet these creatures had been awaiting them in their no-doubt purloined craft, anchored offshore, when Mappo, Iskaral, his mule, and the woman named Spite pushed through the last of the brush and reached the broken rocks of the coast.
