Dust of Dreams (26 page)

Oh, they could be lovable enough, when it suited them, and, in sly gift from their true father, both possessed a natural talent for conveying innocence, so pure and so absolute it verged on the autistic, guaranteed to produce nausea in their mother, and other mothers besides. Why, Hetan had seen great-aunts—normally indulgent as befitted their remote roles—narrow their gazes when witnessing the display.

Of course, it was no easy thing to measure evil, or even to be certain that the assignation was appropriate. Was it not a woman’s gift to excel in the entirely essential guidance of every aspect of her chosen man’s life? It most certainly was. Accordingly, Hetan pitied the future husbands of Storii and Stavi. At the same time, however, she was not about to see her own man savaged by the two creatures.
The issue was down to simple possession. And the older the twins grew, the more brazen their efforts at stealing him away from her.

Yes, she understood all of this. It was not anything direct, or even conscious on the part of the girls. They were simply trying out their skills at capturing, rending and devouring. And it was also natural that they would decide upon their own mother as competition. There were times, Hetan reflected, when she wished she could track down their distant, wayward and diabolical father, and thrust both rotters on to his plump lap—yes, Kruppe of Darujhistan was indeed welcome to his inadvertent get.

Alas, she could well see that the man who now stood in Kruppe’s stead would not have accepted such a gesture, no matter how just Hetan might deem it. Such were the myriad miseries of parenthood. And her bad luck in choosing an honourable mate.

He was vulnerable, apt to descend into indulgence, and the twins knew it and like piranhas they had closed in. It wasn’t that Stavi and Storii were uniquely insensitive—like all girls of their age, they just didn’t care. They wanted whatever they wanted and would do whatever was necessary to get it.

Long before their coming of age, of course, tribal life among the White Face Barghast would beat that out of them, or at least repress its more vicious impulses, all of which were necessary to a proper life.

Storii was the first to note Hetan’s approach, and the dark intent in her mother’s eyes was reflected in a sudden flash of terror and malice in the girl’s sweet, rounded face. She flicked her fingertips against her sister’s shoulder and Stavi flinched at the stinging snap and then caught sight of Hetan. In a heartbeat the twins were in full flight, bounding away like a pair of stoats, and their adopted father stared after them in surprise.

Hetan arrived. ‘Beloved, you have all the wit of a bhederin when it comes to those two.’

Onos Toolan blinked at her, and then he sighed. ‘I am afraid I was frustrating them nonetheless. It is difficult to concentrate—they speak too fast, so breathless—I lose all sense of what they mean, or want.’

‘You can be certain that whatever it was, its function was to spoil them yet further. But I have broken their siege, Tool, to tell you that the clan chiefs are assembling—well, those who managed to heed the summons.’ She hesitated. ‘They are troubled, husband.’

Even this did little to penetrate the sorrow that he had folded round him since the brutal death of Toc the Younger. ‘How many clans sent no one?’ he asked.

‘Almost a third.’

He frowned at that, but said nothing.

‘Mostly from the southern extremes,’ Hetan said. ‘That is why those here are now saying that they must have mutinied—lost their way, their will. That they have broken up and wandered into the kingdoms, the warriors hiring on as bodyguards and such to the Saphin and the Bolkando.’

‘You said “mostly”, Hetan. What of the others?’

‘All outlying clans, those who travelled farthest in the dispersal—except for
one. Gadra, which had found a decent bhederin herd in a pocket between the Akryn and the Awl’dan, enough to sustain them for a time—’

‘The Gadra warchief—Stolmen, yes? I sensed no disloyalty in him. Also, what chance of mutiny in that region? They would have nowhere to go—that makes no sense.’

‘You are right, it doesn’t. We should have heard from them. You must speak to the clan chiefs, Tool. They need to be reminded why we are here.’ She studied his soft brown eyes for a moment, and then looked away. The crisis, she knew, dwelt not just in the minds of the Barghast clan chiefs, but also in the man standing beside her. Her husband, her love.

‘I do not know,’ said Tool, slowly, as if searching for the right words, ‘if I can help them. The shoulder-seers were bold in their first prophecies, igniting the fires that have brought us here, but with each passing day it seems their tongues wither yet more, their words dry up, and all I can see in them is the fear in their eyes.’

She took him by the arm and tugged until he followed her out from the edge of the vast encampment. They walked beyond the pickets and then the ring-trench dry-latrines, and still further, on to the hard uneven ground where the herds had tracked not so long ago, in the season of rains.

‘We were meant to wage war against the Tiste Edur,’ Tool said as they drew up atop a ridge and stared northward at distant dust-clouds. ‘The shoulder-seers rushed their rituals in finding pathways through the warrens. The entire White Face Barghast impoverished itself to purchase transports and grain. We hurried after the Grey Swords.’ He was silent for a moment longer, and then he said, ‘We sought the wrong enemy.’

‘No glory to be found in crushing a crushed people,’ Hetan observed, tasting the bitterness of her own words.

‘Nor a people terrorized by one of their own.’

There had been fierce clashes over this. Despite his ascension to Warchief, a unanimous proclamation following the tragic death of her father, Onos Toolan had almost immediately found himself at odds with all the clan chiefs. War against the Lether Empire would be an unjust war, the Edur hegemony notwithstanding. Not only were the Letherii not their enemy, even these Tiste Edur, crouching in the terrible shadow of their emperor, likely bore no relationship whatsoever to those ancient Edur who had preyed upon the Barghast so many generations past. The entire notion of vengeance, or that of a war resumed, suddenly tasted sour, and for Tool, an Imass who felt nothing of the old festering wounds in the psyche of the Barghast—who was indeed deaf to the fury of the awakened Barghast gods . . . well, he’d shown no patience with those so eager to shed blood.

The shoulder-seers had by this time lost all unity of vision. The prophecy, which had seemed so simple and clear, was all at once mired in ambiguity, seeding such discord among the seers that even their putative leader, Cafal, brother to Hetan, failed in his efforts to quell the schisms among the shamans. Thus, they had been no help in the battle of wills between Tool and the chiefs; and they were no help now.

Cafal persisted in travelling from tribe to tribe—she had not seen her brother
in months. If he had succeeded in repairing any damage, she’d not heard of it; even among the shoulder-seers in this camp, she sensed a pervasive unease, and a sour reluctance to speak with anyone.

Onos Toolan had been unwilling to unleash the White Faces upon the Lether Empire—and his will had prevailed, until that one fated day, when the last of the Awl fell—when Toc the Younger had died. Not only had Hetan’s own clan, the Senan, been unleashed, so too had the dark hunger of Tool’s own sister, Kilava.

Hetan missed that woman, and knew that her husband’s grief was complicated by her departure—a departure that he might well see as her abandoning him in the moment of his greatest need. Hetan suspected, however, that in witnessing Toc’s death—and the effect it had had upon her brother, Kilava had been brutally reminded of the ephemeral nature of love and friendship—and so she had set out to rediscover her own life. A selfish impulse, perhaps, and an unfair wounding of a brother already reeling from loss.

Yes, Kilava deserved a good hard slap to the side of that shapely head, and Hetan vowed that she would be the one to deliver it, when next they met.

‘I see no enemy,’ her husband said now.

She nodded. Yes, this was the crisis afflicting her people, and so they looked to their Warchief. In need of a direction, a purpose. Yet he gave them nothing. ‘We have too many young warriors,’ she said. ‘Trained in the ancient ways of fighting, eager to see their swords drink blood—slaughtering a half-broken, exhausted Letherii army did little to whet the appetites of those in our own clan—yet it was enough to ignite envy and feuding with virtually everyone else.’

‘Things were simpler among the Imass,’ said Tool.

‘Oh, rubbish!’

He shot her a glare, and then looked away once more, shoulders slumping. ‘Well, we had purpose.’

‘You had a ridiculous war against a foe that had no real desire to fight you. And so, instead of facing the injustice you were committing, you went and invoked the Ritual of Tellann. Clever evasion, I suppose, if rather
insane.
What’s so frightening about facing your own mistakes?’

‘Dear wife, you should not ask that question.’

‘Why not?’

He met her eyes again, not with anger this time, but bleak despair. ‘You may find that mistakes are all you have.’

She grew very still, chilled despite the burgeoning heat of the morning. ‘Oh, and for you, does that include me?’

‘No, I speak to help you understand an Imass who was once a T’lan.’ He hesitated, and then said, ‘With you, with our children, I had grown to believe that such things were at last behind me—those dread errors and the burden of all they yielded. And then, in an instant . . . I am reminded of my own stupidity. It does no good to ignore one’s own flaws, Hetan. The delusion comforts, but it can prove fatal.’

‘You’re not dead.’

‘Am I not?’

She snorted and turned away. ‘You’re just as bad as your sister!’ Then wheeled back to him. ‘Wake up! Your twenty-seven clans are down to nineteen—how many more will you lose because you can’t be bothered to make a decision?’

His eyes narrowed on her. ‘What would you have me decide?’ he asked quietly.

‘We are White Face Barghast!
Find us an enemy!
’

The privilege of being so close to home was proving too painful, even as Torrent—the last warrior of the Awl—sought to exult in the anguish. Punishment for surviving, for persisting, like one last drop of blood refusing to soak into the red mud; he did not know what held him upright, breathing, heart pounding on and on, thoughts clawing through endless curtains of dust. Somewhere, deep inside, he prayed he would find his single, pure truth, squeezed down into a knucklebone, polished by all the senseless winds, the pointless rains, the spiralling collapse of season upon season. A little knot of something like bone, to stumble over, to roll across, to send him sprawling.

He might find it, but he suspected not. He did not possess the wit. He was not sharp in the way of Toc Anaster, the Mezla who haunted his dreams. Thundering hoofs, a storm-wracked night sky, winds howling like wolves, and the dead warrior’s single eye fixed like an opal in its shadowed socket. A face horrifying in its red, glistening ruin—the skin cut away, smeared teeth exposed in a feral grin—oh, perhaps indeed the Mezla rode into Torrent’s dreams, a harbinger of nightmares, a mocker of his precious, fragile truth. One thing seemed clear—the dead archer was
hunting
Torrent, fired by hatred for the last Awl warrior, and the pursuit was relentless, Torrent’s steps dragging even as he ran for his life, gasping, shrieking—until with a start he would awaken, sheathed in sweat and shivering.

It seemed that Toc Anaster was in no hurry to bring the hunt to its grisly conclusion. The ghost’s pleasure was in the chase. Night after night after night.

The Awl warrior no longer wore a copper mask. The irritating rash that had mottled his face was now gone. He had elected to deliver himself and the children into the care of the Gadra clan, camped as they were at the very edge of the Awl’dan. He had not wished to witness the devastating grief of the strange warrior named Tool, over Toc Anaster’s death.

Shortly after joining the clan, and with the fading of his rash, Gadra women had taken an interest in him, and they were not coy, displaying a boldness that almost frightened Torrent—he had fled a woman’s advance more than once—but of late the dozen or so intent on stalking and trapping him had begun cooperating with one another.

And so he took to his horse, riding hard out from the camp, spending the entire span of the sun’s arc well away from their predations. Red-eyed with exhaustion, miserable in his solitude, and at war with himself. He had never lain with a woman, after all. He had no idea what it involved, beyond those shocking childhood memories of seeing, through the open doorways of huts, adults clamped round one another grunting and moaning and sighing. But they had been Awl—
not these savage, terrifying Barghast who coupled with shouts and barks of laughter, the men bellowing like bears and the women clawing and scratching and biting.

No, none of it made any sense. For, even as he endeavoured to escape these mad women with their painted faces and bright eyes, he wanted what they offered. He fled his own desire, and each time he did so the torture he inflicted upon himself stung all the worse.

Such misery as no man deserves!

He should have rejoiced in his freedom, here on the vast plains so close to the Awl’dan. To see the herds of bhederin—which his own people had never thought to tame—and the scattering of rodara, too, that the surviving children of the Awl now cared for—and to know that the cursed Letherii were not hunting them, not slaughtering them . . . he should be exulting in the moment.