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A figure joined him. Paran glanced over. 'Well?'

'The Barghast Elder Spirits have left Mallet,' Quick Ben said. 'The healer sleeps. Can you feel them, Captain? The spirits? All the barriers have been shattered, the Old Ones have joined with their younger spirit kin. The forgotten warren is forgotten no more.'Advertisement

'All very well,' Paran muttered, 'but we've still a city to liberate. What happens if Taur raises the standard of war and his rivals deny him?'

'They won't. They can't. Every shoulderman among the White Faces will awaken to the change, to the burgeoning. They'll feel that power, and know it for what it is. More, the spirits will make it known that their masters — the true gods of the Barghast — are trapped in Capustan. The Founding Spirits are awake. The time has come to free them.'

The captain studied the wizard at his side for a moment, then asked, 'Did you know the Moranth were kin to the Barghast?'

'More or less. Taur may not like it — and the tribes will howl — but if the spirits themselves have embraced Twist and his people. '

Paran sighed. I need to sleep. But I can't. 'I'd better gather the Bridgeburners.'

'Trotts's new tribe,' Quick Ben said, grinning.

'Then why can I hear his snores?'

'He's new to responsibility, Captain. You'll have to teach him.'

Teach him what? How to live beneath the burden of command? That's something I can't manage myself. I need only look into Whiskey jack's face to understand that no-one can — no-one who has a heart, anyway. We learn to achieve but one thing: the ability to hide our thoughts, to mask our feelings, to bury our humanity deep in our souls. And that can't be taught, only shown.

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'Go rouse the bastard,' Paran growled.

'Yes, sir.'

CHAPTER TWELVE

In the Mountain's Heart she waited,

dreaming of peace, so deeply curled

around her grief, when he found her,

the man's search was done,

and he took upon himself her every scar

for power's embrace is a love

that wounds.

Rise of the Domin

Scintalla of Bastion (1129–1164)

The mountain fastness of outlook, its back to the lake, was the colour of water-thinned blood in the sunset. Condors wheeled around it, twice the mass of Great Ravens, their collared necks crooked as they studied the humans seething around the base of the fortress amidst a grounded starscape of campfires.

The one-eyed Tenescowri who had once been a scout in Onearm's Host followed their curving flight with deep concentration, as if godly messages could be read in the condors' sweeping patterns against the deepening sky. He had been truly embraced, agreed those who knew him by sight. Felled mute by the Domin's vastness since that day in Bastion, three weeks past. There had been a savage hunger in his lone eye from the very beginning, an ancient fire that whispered ever louder of wolves padding the darkness. It was said that Anaster himself, First among the Children of the Dead Seed, had noted the man, had indeed drawn him closer during the long march, until the one-eyed Tenescowri had been given a horse, and rode with Anaster's lieutenants at the vanguard of the human tide.

Of course, Anaster's company of lieutenants changed faces with brutal regularity.

The shapeless, starving army now waited at the feet of the Pannion Seer. At dawn he would appear upon a balcony of Outlook's central tower, and raise his hands in holy benediction. The bestial howl that would rise to greet his blessing would shatter a lesser man, but the Seer, ancient as he was, was no ordinary man. He was the embodiment of Pannion, the god, the only god.

When Anaster led the Tenescowri army north, to the river, then beyond, to Capustan, he would carry within him the power that was the Seer. And the enemy that had gathered to oppose them would be raped, devoured, obliterated from the earth. There was no doubt in the minds of the hundred thousand. Only certainty, a razor-sharp sword of iron held in the grip of ceaseless, desperate hunger.

The one-eyed man continued staring at the condors as the light faded. Perhaps, some whispered, he was in communion with the Seer himself, and his gaze was not on the wheeling birds, but on the fortress of Outlook itself.

This was as close to the truth as the peasants would come. Indeed, Toc the Younger was studying that towering fastness, an antiquated monastery warped misshapen by military accretions: battlements and enfilading walls, vast gatehouses and sheer-walled trenches. The efforts continued, the masons and engineers clearly intent on working through the night beneath towering braziers of dancing flames. pqdm.com