Ulag, please – are we not done with weapons? Is peace nothing but a lie?
First Sword – you vow to shatter us all, but what will it win us? Is this the only legacy we can offer to all who follow? We die, tokens of useless defiance. The kings will still stride the earth, the slaves will still bow in chains, the hunters will hunt and the hunted will die. Mothers will weep for lost children – First Sword, can you offer us nothing but this?
But there was no room in the thoughts of Onos T’oolan to heed the fears of his followers. He was not even listening, chewing on the pathetic game of implacability – this mad diffidence and the absurdity of the unaffected. No, none of them could reach him.
But we follow. We can do nothing else .
She stumbled against Ulag. He reached out, steadied her.
‘Ulag?’
‘Hold on, Rystalle Ev. Find something. A memory you can hold on to. A time of joy, of love even. When the moment comes …’ he paused, as if struggling with his words, ‘when the time comes, and you are driven to your knees, when the world turns its face from you on all sides, when you fall inside yourself, and fall, and fall , find your moment, your dream of peace.’
‘There is none,’ she whispered. ‘I remember only grief.’
‘Find it,’ he hissed. ‘You must!’
‘He will see us all destroyed – that is the only peace I now dream of, Ulag.’
She saw him turn away then, and sorrow filled her. See us? We are the T’lan Imass. We are the glory of immortality. When oblivion comes, I shall kiss it. And in my mind, I shall ride into the void on a river of tears. On a river of tears .
Gruntle followed a trail old beyond imagination, skirting sheer cliffs, the tumbled wreckage of sharp rocks and shattered boulders. In this place of dreams the air was hot, smelling of salt marshes and vast tidal flats. It was a trail of the dead and the dying, a trail of clenched jaws and neck muscles taut as bands of iron. Limbs scraped, knocked against stone, and that deep, warm miasma that so bound the minds of the hunted, the victims, filled the air like the breath of ghosts trapped for ever in this travail.
He reached the cave, paused just outside it, head lifted, testing the air.
But all this was long past, generation folded upon generation, a procession that promised to repeat again and again, for all time.
An illusion, he well knew. The last giant cat that had dragged its prey into this cave was bones and dust, so scattered by the centuries that he could not identify its scent. A leopard, a tiger, a cave lion – what did it matter, the damned thing was dead. The cycle of hunting, breeding and rearing had long ago snapped clean.
He edged into the cave, knowing what he would find.
Bones. Gnawed skulls. Eres’al skulls, and those of other apes, and here and there a human child, a woman. This was proof of a time when the world’s future tyrants were nothing but victims, cowering, eyes wide at the flash of feline eyes in the darkness. They fell to savage fangs, to talons. They hung slack by the neck from the jaws of the great tawny beasts haunting their world.
Tyranny was but a gleam in the eye back then, and each day the sun lifted to light a world of ignorance. How sweet must that have been.
Gruntle snorted. Where was the mind that dreamed of unimagined possibilities – like hands groping in the dark? Groping – was that a flare of distant light? Was that a promise of something, something … wonderful? In the moment before the low growl – hackles snapping – and the sudden lunge. Better to die reaching for dreams than reaching for … for what? That tick under the armpit of the smelly creature huddled against you?
I have heard that rock apes gather on the cliff edges to watch the sun set and rise. What are they thinking? What are they dreaming? Is that a moment of prayer? A time to give thanks for the glory of life?
A prayer? Aye: ‘May all these two-legged hunters chew straight up their own arses. Give us spears of fire and lightning to turn this battle – just once, we beg you. Just once! ’
He reached out a massive barbed paw and slapped at a small skull, watched it skid and then slowly spin in place. Got you, I see. Fangs went crunch, dreams went away. Done . With a low growl, he slipped past the heaps of bones until he found the place where the ancient cats had slept, bellies full, running through the wild grasses of their dream worlds – which were no different from this one. Imagine dreaming of a paradise no different from the one in which you happen to live. What moral might hide in that?
All these worlds, all these fraught warrens, mocked him with their perfect banality. Patterns without revelation, repetitions without meaning. It was not enough to imagine worlds without humans or other sentient fools; the simple act of imagining placed his all-too-human sensibility upon the scene, his very own eyes to witness the idyllic perfection of his absolute absence. For all that, it was easy to harbour such contradictions – when I hold on to this humanity within me. When I refuse the sweet bliss of the tiger’s world .
