The Crippled God (30 page)

They had flown so high above all of this, to a human eye they would have been virtually invisible. When they drew nearer to the rearing range north of the valley, close to its westernmost end, they had seen an encamped army, laying siege to a fastness carved into the first of the
mountains. Rud had wondered at that. Civil war? But Silchas Ruin had shown no curiosity. ‘
Humans can do whatever they please, and they will. Count on it, Ryadd
.’

Still, he imagined it was warm inside that keep right now.

Assuming it still held against the enemy. For some reason, he was sure that it did.
Aye, humans will do whatever they please, Silchas Ruin, and they’ll be damned stubborn about it, too
.

He settled down against the cold night.

His thoughts were earth, and the blood moved slowly through it, seeping like a summer’s rain. He saw how the others looked at him, when they’d thought his attention elsewhere. So much larger than any of them was he, bedecked in the armour of Dalk’s hide, his Ethilian mace showing a face to each of the cardinal directions, as befitted the Witch’s gift from the sky.

Listening to them readying their weapons, adjusting the straps of their armour, locking the grilled cheek-guards in place on their blackened helms, he knew that, in the past weeks, he had become the mountain they huddled against, the stone at their backs, on their flanks, at the point of the spear – wherever he was needed most, there he would be.

How many of the foe had he killed? He had no idea. Scores. Hundreds. They were the Fangs of Death, their numbers were endless and that, he well knew, was no exaggeration.

His fellow invaders, who once numbered in their tens of thousands, had dwindled now. It might be that other fragments still pushed on, somewhere to the south or north, but then they did not have a Thel Akai warrior in their company. They did not have a dragon-killer.
They do not have me
.

Earth was slow in dying. The soil was a black realm of countless mouths, ceaseless hungers. In a single handful raged a million wars. Death was ever the enemy, yet death was also the source of sustenance. It took a ferocious will to murder earth.

One by one, his companions – barely a score left now – announced themselves ready, in rising to their feet, in testing their gauntleted grips on their notched, battered weapons. And such weapons! Each one worth a dozen epic songs of glory and pain, triumph and loss. If he looked up from the ground at this moment, he would see faces swallowed in the barred shadows of their cheek-guards; he would see these proud warriors standing, eyes fixed eastward, and, slowly, those grimly set mouths and the thin, tattered lips would twist with wry amusement.

A war they could not win.

An epic march from which not one great hero would ever return.

The earth within him surged with sudden fire, and he rose, the mace
lifting in his huge hands.
We shall have lived as none other has lived. We shall die as no other has died. Can you taste this moment? By the Witch but I can!

He faced his companions, and gave them his own grin.

Tusked mouths opened like split flesh, and cold laughter filled the air.

Groaning, Ublala Pung opened his eyes. More dreams! More terrible visions! He rolled on to his side and blinked across the makeshift camp at the huddled form of the Barghast woman. His love. His adored one. It wasn’t fair that she hated him. He reached out and drew close the strange mace with its four blue-iron heads. It looked as if it should be heavy, and perhaps to some people it was. And it had a name, its very own name. But he’d forgotten it.
A dozen and four epic songs. Songs of glore and painty, turnips and lust
.

Perhaps she was just pretending to sleep. And she’d try to kill him again. The last time Draconus had stopped her, appearing as if out of nowhere to grasp her wrist, staying the dagger’s point a finger’s breadth from Ublala’s right eye. He’d then slapped the woman, hard enough to send her sprawling.

‘
Best we kill her now, Ublala
.’

Rubbing the sleep from his face. ‘
No, please, don’t do that. I love her. It’s just a spat of some sort, Draconus, and as soon as I figure out what we’re arguing about I’ll fix it, I swear
.’

‘
Ublala
—’

‘
Please! We’re just disagreeing about something
.’

‘
She means to kill and then rob us
.’

‘
She had cruel parents, and was bullied as a child, Draconus. Other girls pulled her braids and spat in her ears. It’s all a misunderstanding!
’

‘
One more chance, then. My advice is to beat her senseless, Ublala. It’s likely that’s how Barghast men treat murderous women, as necessity demands
.’

‘
I can’t do that, Draconus. But I’ll comb her hair
.’

Which was what he had been doing when she’d finally come round. Lacking a comb, he’d been using a thorny twig, which probably wasn’t ideal, especially on her fine eyebrows, but they’d since taken care of the infections and she was looking almost normal again.

So maybe she really was asleep, and now that she had no weapons left, why, she was as harmless as a twill-mouse, except for the big rocks she kept close at hand every night.

At least she had stopped complaining.

Ublala twisted to see if he could find Draconus – the man never seemed to sleep at all, though he’d lie down on occasion, which is what
he’d been doing when Ralata had tried knifing Ublala. Wasn’t she surprised!

The man was standing facing north, something he had been doing a lot of, lately.

People like him had too many thoughts, Ublala decided. So many he couldn’t even rest from himself, and that had to be a hard thing to live with. No, it was better to have hardly any thoughts at all.
Like earth. Yes, that’s it all right. Dirt
.

But those tusks were scary, and that laughing was even worse!

A new scent on the cool breath drifting in from the west. Perhaps some ancient memories were stirred by it, something that left the pack agitated. She watched the lord stretching and then padding up to the rise. He possessed such power, as did all lords – he could stand on a high place, exposed to all four winds, and feel no fear.

The others remained in the high grasses of the slope, the young males pacing, the females in the shadow of the trees, where pups crawled and tumbled.

Bellies were full, but the herds wending up from the plains to the south were smaller this season, and there was a harried air to their long flight from thirst and heat, as if pursued by fire or worse. Hunting the beasts had been easy – the animal they’d brought down had already been exhausted, and the taste of old terror was in its blood.

The lord stood on the ridge. His ears sharpened and the others quickly rose – even the games of the pups ceased.

The lord staggered. Three sticks were jutting from it now, and from the slope beyond came strange excited barks. Blood threaded down from the sticks as the lord sank down, head twisting in a vain effort to reach the shafts. Then it fell on its side and stopped moving.

There was motion on all sides now, and more sticks whipped through foliage and grasses, sinking into flesh. The pack erupted in snarls of pain.

The figures that rushed in moved on their hind legs. Their skins gleamed with oil and their smell was that of crushed plants over something else. They flung more sticks. There was white around their eyes and they had small mouths from which came their wild barking.

She gasped as fire tore into her flank. Blood filled her throat, sprayed out from her nostrils and then poured from her jaws. She saw an attacker reach down and grasp a pup by its tail. He swung it and then slammed the little one against the bole of a tree.

An old scent.
They are among us again. There is nowhere to hide. Now we die
.

Vision blurred, Setoc withdrew her hand from the bleached wolf’s skull they’d found in the crotch of the gnarled tree growing from the
edge of the dried-up spring. The rough, tortured bark had almost devoured the bleached bone.

The first tree they’d found in weeks. She wiped at her eyes.
And this
.

It wasn’t enough to grieve. She saw that now. Not enough to wallow in the anguish of blood on the hands. It wasn’t enough to fight for mercy, to plead for a new way of walking the world. It wasn’t enough to feel guilt.

She turned to study the camp. Faint, Precious Thimble, Sweetest Sufferance and Amby Bole, all looking for a way home. A place of comfort, all threats diminished, all dangers locked away. Where patrols kept the streets safe, where the fields ran in rows and so did trees. Or so she imagined – strange scenes that couldn’t be memory, because she had no memory beyond the plains and the wild lands. But in those cities the only animals nearby were slaves or food, and those that weren’t lived in cages, or their skins adorned the shoulders of fine ladies and bold nobles, or their bones waited in heaps for the grinders, to be fed into the planted fields.

That was their world, the one they wanted back.

You can have it. There is no place for me in it, is there? Very well
. The sorrow within her now seemed infinite. She walked from the camp, out into the darkness. The Bonecaster had taken the children, and Torrent with them. Destinies had taken the Trell and Gruntle. Death had taken the others.
But I owe you nothing. In your company, my ghost wolves stay away. They drift like distant desires. I am forgetting what it is to run free
.

I am forgetting why I am here
.

They would not miss her. They had their own haunts, after all.
I do not belong with you. I think – I think … I am what you left behind. Long ago
. She wondered if she too was in search of a destiny, the same as Mappo and Gruntle, but it seemed they were so much more than her, and that even the idea of a destiny for Setoc was ridiculous.
But the ghost wolves – and all the other fallen beasts – they look to me. For something. I just don’t know what it is. And I need to find out
.

Is that what destiny is? Is that all it is?

It was surprisingly easy to leave them behind, the ones she’d walked with for so long now. She could have turned back right then, to face the city – all the cities and all the broken lands that fed them. She could have chosen to accept her humanness. Instead …
look at me. Here I walk
.

Let the Wolves cleanse this world. Let the beasts return. Above all, let the senseless killing end: we are tired of running, tired of dying. You must see that. You must feel something for that. Just how cold is your soul?

You empty the land. You break the earth and use it until it dies, and then your children starve. Do not blame me. Do not blame any of us for that
.

Her breath caught and she hesitated. A sudden dark thought had flared in her mind. A knife in her hand. Throats opening to the night. Four more of the murderers dead. In a war that she knew might never end.
But what difference does that make – we’ve been losing for so long, I doubt we’d know the taste of victory even as it filled our mouths. Even as it drowned us in its glory
.

Could she kill them? Could she turn around, here and now, and creep back into the camp?
No pup skulls to crack open, but still. The dead-inside have to work hard at their pleasures. That burst of shock. Disbelief. The sudden laugh. So hard, to feel anything at all, isn’t it?

The thoughts were delicious, but she resumed her journey. It was not, she decided, her destiny to kill one here, another there. No, if she could, she would kill them all.
This is the war the Wolves have sought. The Hold shall be reborn. Am I to be their leader? Am I to stand alone at the head of some vast army of retribution?

All at once, the ghost wolves were surrounding her, brushing close, and she began a loping run, effortlessly, her heart surging with strength. Freedom – she understood now – was something so long lost among humans that they had forgotten what it felt like.
Bend to your labours! Grasp those coins! Keep the doors locked and fires raging to empty the shadows behind you! Make your brothers and sisters kneel before you, to serve your pleasures. Are you free? You don’t remember the truth of what once was – of what you all so willingly surrendered
.

I will show you freedom. So I vow: I will show you what it is to be free
.

On all sides, the ghost wolves howled.

‘She’s gone.’

Faint opened her eyes, blinked at the bright morning sun. ‘What? Who?’

‘The girl. Setoc, with the wolf eyes. Gone.’

She stared up at Amby, frowning. And then said, ‘Oh.’

‘I don’t think she’s coming back.’

‘No, Amby, I don’t either.’

He moved back as she sat up. Her chest ached, her ragged scars itched. She was filthy and the taste in her mouth was thick with the rancid meat they’d eaten the night before. Amby stood like a man lost in the company of anyone but his brother – just a glance nearly broke her heart.

She looked past him. Sweetest Sufferance was still asleep, her rounded
form swathed in blankets. Precious Thimble sat near the ashes of the night’s fire, eyes fixed dully on Amby.