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‘I know you,’ she said. ‘You are Hood.’

The Jaghut stepped forward, the gate swirling closed behind him. Hood paused, regarding each witness in turn, and then walked towards Equity.Advertisement

‘ They made you their king ,’ she whispered. ‘They who followed no one chose to follow you . They who refused every war fought your war. And what you did then – what you did—’

As he reached her, his desiccated hands caught her. He lifted her from her feet, and then, mouth stretching, he bit into the side of her face. The tusks drove up beneath her cheek bone, burst the eye on that side. In a welter of blood, he tore away half of her face, and then bit a second time, up under the orbitals, the tusks driving into her brain.

Equity hung in his grip, feeling her life drain away. Her head felt strangely unbalanced. She seemed to be weeping from only one eye, and from her throat no words were possible. I once dreamed of peace. As a child, I dreamed of —

Shurq Elalle stared in horror as the Jaghut flung the corpse away. From his gore-drenched mouth fell fragments of scalp and skull.

Then Hood faced them, and in a dry, toneless voice he said, ‘I have never much liked Forkrul Assail.’

No one spoke. Felash stood trembling, her face pale as death itself. Beside her, the handmaid had set her hands upon the axes at her belt, but seemed unable to move beyond that futile, diffident gesture.

Shurq Elalle gathered herself, and said, ‘You have a singular way of ending a discussion, Jaghut.’

The empty pits seemed to find her, somehow, and Hood said, ‘We have no need of allies. Besides, I recently learned a lesson in brevity, Shurq Elalle, which I have taken to heart.’

‘A lesson? Really? Who taught you that? ’

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The Jaghut looked away, across the water. ‘Ah, my Death Ship. I admit, it was a quaint affectation. Nonetheless, one cannot help but admire its lines.’

Princess Felash, Fourteenth Daughter of Bolkando, fell to her knees and was sick in the sand.

CHAPTER TEN

What is it about this world

That so causes you trouble?

Why avow in your tone

This victim role?

And the plaintive hurt

Painting your eyes

Bemoans a life’s struggle

Ever paying a grievous toll

We gathered in one place

Under the selfsame sun

And the bronze woman

Holding the basin,

Her breasts settled in the bowl,

Looked down with pity

Or was it contempt?

She is a queen of dreams

And her gift is yours to take

Pity if you choose it

Or contempt behind the veil

I would have polished those eyes

For a better look

I would have caressed those roses

For a sweeter taste

When we drink from the same cup

And you make bitter recoil

I wonder at the tongue in waiting

And your deadening flavours

So eager to now despoil

What is it about this world

That so causes you trouble?

What could I say to change

Your wounded regard?

If my cold kiss must fail

And my milk run sour

Beneath the temple bell

That so blights your reward?

Ten thousand hang from trees

Their limbs bared roots

Starved of hope in the sun

And the wood-cutters are long gone

Up to where the road gives way

To trails in the dust

That spiral and curl

Like the smoke of fires

They are blazing beacons

In the desert night.

It was said by the lepers

Huddled against the hill

That a man with no hands

Who could stare only

As could the blind

Upon the horrors of argument

Did with one hand gone

Reach into the dark sky

And with the other too gone

He led me home

Wood-Cutters Tablets II & III Hethra of Aren

THE EDGE OF THE GLASS DESERT WAS A BROKEN LINE OF CRYSTALS AND boulders, for all the world like an ancient shoreline. Aranict could not pull her gaze from it. She sat slumped in the saddle of her wearily plodding horse, a hood drawn over against the blistering sun, off to one side of the main column. Prince Brys rode somewhere ahead, near the vanguard, leaving her alone.

The desert’s vast, flat stretch was blinding, the glare painful and strangely discordant, as if she was witnessing an ongoing crime, the raw lacerations of a curse upon the land itself. Stones melted to glass, shards of crystal jutting like spears, others that grew like bushes, every branch and twig glittering as if made of ice.

Rolled up against the verge there were bones, heaped like driftwood. Most were shattered, reduced to splinters, as if whatever had befallen the land had taken in a massive fist each creature and crushed the life from it – it felt like a deliberate act, an exercise in unbelievable malice. She thought she could still taste the evil, could still feel its rotted breath on the wind. pqdm.com