Kedeviss, you were a gift. And now your soul waits, as it must. For this is the fate of the Tiste Andii. Our fata. We will wait.
Until the wait is over.
Endest Silann stood with his back to the rising sun. And to the city of Black Coral. The air was chill, damp with night’s breath, and the road wending out from the gates that followed the coastline of the Cut was a bleak, colourless ribbon that snaked into stands of dark conifers half a league to the west. Empty of traffic.
The cloak of eternal darkness shrouding the city blocked the sun’s stretching rays, although the western flanks of the jumbled slope to their right was showing gilt edges; and far off to the left, the gloom of the Cut steamed white from the smooth, black surface.
‘There will be,’ said Anomander Rake, ‘unpleasantness.’
‘I know, Lord.’
‘It was an unanticipated complication.’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘I will walk,’ said Rake, ‘until I reach the tree line. Out of sight, at least until then.’
‘Have you waited too long, Lord?’
‘No.’
‘That is well, then.’
Anomander Rake rested a hand on Endest’s shoulder. ‘You have ever been, my friend, more than I deserve.’
Endest Silann could only shake his head, refuting that.
‘If we are to live,’ Rake went on, ‘we must take risks. Else our lives become deaths in all but name. There is no struggle too vast, no odds too overwhelming, for even should we fail-should we fall-we will know that we have lived.’
Endest nodded, unable to speak. There should be tears streaming down his face, but he was dry inside-his skull, behind his eyes, all… dry. Despair was a furnace where everything had burned up, where everything was ashes, but the heat remained, scalding, brittle and fractious.
‘The day has begun.’ Rake withdrew his hand and pulled on his gauntlets. ‘This walk, along this path… I will take pleasure in it, my friend. Knowing that you stand here to see me off.’
And the Son of Darkness set out.
Endest Silann watched. The warrior with his long silver hair flowing, his leather cloak flaring out. Dragnipur a scabbarded slash.
Blue seeped into the sky, shadows in retreat along the slope. Gold painted the tops of the tree line where the road slipped in. At the very edge, Anomander Rake paused, turned about and raised one hand high.
Endest Silann did the same, but the gesture was so weak it made him gasp, and his arm faltered.
And then the distant figure swung round. And vanished beneath the trees.
Xx
Like broken slate
We take our hatred
And pile it high
Rolling with the hills
A ragged line to map
Our rise and fall
And I saw suffused
With the dawn
Crows aligned in rows
Along the crooked wall
Come to feed
Bones lie scattered
At the stone’s foot
The heaped ruin
Of past assaults
The crows face each way
To eye the pickings
On both sides
For all its weakness
The world cannot break
What we make
Of our hatred
I watched the workers
Carry each grey rock
They laboured
Blind and stepped
Unerringly modest paths
Piece by sheared piece
They built a slaughter
Of innocent others
While muttering as they might
Of waves of weather
And goodly deeds
– We The Builders , Hanasp Tular
Pray you never hear an imprecise breath
Caught in its rough web
Every god turns away at the end
And not a whisper sounds
Do not waste a lifetime awaiting death
Caught in its rough web
It hovers in the next moment you must attend
As your last whisper sounds
Pray you never hear an imprecise breath
– Rough Web , Fisher Kel That
The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a breath that begins in love and ends with grief. Time unravels now. Event clashes upon event. So much to ecount, pray this sad-eyed round man does not falter, does not grow too reathless. History has its moments. To dwell within one is to understand nothing. We are rocked in the tumult, and the awareness of one’s own ignorance is a smothering cloak that proves poor armour. You will flinch with the wounds. We shall all flinch.
As might a crow or an owl, or indeed a winged eel, hover now a moment above this fair city, its smoke haze, the scurrying figures in the streets and lanes, the im-penetrable dark cracks of narrow alleyways. Thieves’ Road spreads a tangled web between buildings. Animals bawl and wives berate husbands and husbands bellow back, night buckets gush from windows down into the guttered alleys and-in some poorer areas of the Gadrobi District-into streets where pedestrians duck and dodge in the morning ritual of their treacherous journeys to work, or home. Clouds of flies are stirred awake with the dawn’s light. Pigeons revive their hopeless struggle to walk straight lines. Rats creep back into their closed-in refuges after yet another night of seeing far too much. The night’s damp smells are burned off and new stinks arise in pungent vapours.
