Once on the road, he fixed his gaze on the towering gate ahead, but something in its strange, alien architecture made his head spin, so he studied the horizon to the right-where massive towers rose from sprawling, low buildings. He was not certain, but he thought he could detect thin, ragged streamers of smoke from the tops of those towers. After a time, he decided that what he was seeing was the effect of the wind and updraughts from those chimneys pulling loose ashes from deep pits at the base of the smokestacks.
On the road before him, here and there, he saw faint heaps of corroded metal, and the wink of jewellery-corpses had once crowded this approach, but the bones had long since crumbled to dust.
The mottled light cast sickly sheens on the outer walls of the city-and those stones, he could now see, were blackened with soot, a thick crust that glittered like obsidian.
Yedan Derryg halted before the gate. The way was open-no sign of barriers remained beyond torn hinges reduced to corroded lumps. He could see a broad street beyond the arch, and dust on the cobbles black as crushed coal.
‘Walk on, horse.’
And Prince Yedan Derryg rode into Kharkanas.
Book Three. Only the Dust Will Dance
The dead have found me in my dreams
Fishing beside lakes and in strange houses
That could be homes for lost families
In all the pleasures of completeness
And I wander through their natural company
In the soft comforts of contentment.
The dead greet me with knowing ease
And regard nothing the forsaken awakening
That abandons me in this new solitude
Of eyes flickering open and curtains drawing.
When the dead find me in my dreams
I see them living in the hidden places
Unanchored in time and ageless as wishes.
The woman lying at my side hears my sigh
Following the morning chime and asks
After me as I lie in the wake of sorrow’s concert,
But I will not speak of life’s loneliness
Or the empty shorelines where fishermen belong
And the houses never lived in never again
That stand in necessary configurations
To build us familiar places for the dead.
One day I will journey into her dreams
But I say nothing of this behind my smile
And she will see me hunting the dark waters
For the flit of trout and we will travel
Strange landscapes in the forever instant
Until she leaves me for the living day
But as the dead well know the art of fishing
Finds its reward in brilliant joyous hope
And eternal loving patience, and it is my
Thought now that such gods that exist
Are the makers of dreams and this is their gift
This blessed river of sleep and dreams
Where in wonder we may greet our dead
And sages and priests are wise when they say
Death is but sleep and we are forever alive
In the dreams of the living, for I have seen
My dead on nightly journeys and I tell you this:
They are well.
SONG OF DREAMING
FISHER
Chapter Thirteen
They came late to the empty land and looked with bitterness upon the six wolves watching them from the horizon’s rim. With them was a herd of goats and a dozen black sheep. They took no account of the wolves’ possession of this place, for in their minds ownership was the human crown that none other had the right to wear. The beasts were content to share in survival’s struggle, in hunt and quarry, and the braying goats and bawling sheep had soft throats and carelessness was a common enough flaw among herds; and they had not yet learned the manner of these two-legged intruders. Herds were fed upon by many creatures. Often the wolves shared their meals with crows and coyotes, and had occasion to argue with lumbering bears over a delectable prize.
When I came upon the herders and their long house on a flat above the valley, I found six wolf skulls spiked above the main door. In my travels as a minstrel I knew enough that I had no need to ask-this was a tale woven into our kind, after all. No words, either, for the bear skins on the walls, the antelope hides and elk racks. Not a brow lifted for the mound of bhederin bones in the refuse pit, or the vultures killed by the poison-baited meat left for the coyotes.
That night I sang and spun tales for my keep. Songs of heroes and great deeds and they were pleased enough and the beer was passing and the shank stew palatable.
Poets are sembling creatures, capable of shrugging into the skin of man, woman, child and beast. There are some among them secretly marked, sworn to the cults of the wilderness. And that night I shared out my poison and in the morning I left a lifeless house where not a dog remained to cry, and I sat upon a hill with my pipe, summoning once more the wild beasts. I defend their ownership when they cannot, and make no defence against the charge of murder; but temper your horror, friends: there is no universal law that places a greater value upon human life over that of a wild beast. Why would you ever imagine otherwise?
CONFESSIONS OF T WO H UNDRED
TWENTY-THREE COUNTS OF JUSTICE
WELTHAN THE MINSTREL (AKA SINGER MAD)
He came to us in the guise of a duke from an outlying border fastness-a place remote enough that none of us even thought to suspect him. And in his manner, his hard countenance and few words, he matched well our lazy preconceptions of such a man. None of us could argue that there was something about him, a kind of self-assurance rarely seen at court. In his eyes, like wolves straining at chains, there was a hint of the feral-the priestesses positively dripped.
‘But, they would find, his was a most potent seed. And it was not Tiste Andii.’
Silchas Ruin poked at the fire with a stick, reawakening flames. Sparks fled up into the dark. Rud watched the warrior’s cadaverous face, the mottled play of orange light that seemed to paint brief moments of life in it.
After a time, Silchas Ruin settled back and resumed. ‘Power was drawn to him like slivers of iron to a lodestone… it all seemed so… natural. His distant origins invited the notion of neutrality, and one might argue, in hindsight, that Draconus was indeed neutral. He would use any and every Tiste Andii to further his ambitions, and how were we to imagine that, at the very core of his desire, there was love?’
Rud’s gaze slid away from Silchas Ruin, up and over the Tiste Andii’s right shoulder, to the terrible slashes of jade in the night sky. He tried to think of something to say, a comment of any sort: something wry, perhaps, or knowing, or cynical. But what did he know of the love such as Silchas Ruin was describing? What, indeed, did he know of anything in this or any other world?
