She would take him into a suffocating embrace, desperate sparks igniting within her, forcing her into animation.
Strings on the ends of those pudgy fingers, plucking her to life.
And she howled and she howled.
Heavy footsteps rushed past the entrance to the tent. Voices, a few shouts. A runner had entered the camp. The word was delivered, and the word was dead .
How could imagination hope to achieve the wonders of reality? The broken, deathly landscape stretched out on all sides, but the vista was shrinking as the day’s light faded. Yet more than darkness embraced the transformation. Domes of cracked bedrock appeared, skinned in lichen and moss. Shin-high trees with thick, twisted boles, branches fluttering with the last of the autumn leaves, like blackened layers of peeled skin. Bitter arctic wind rushing down from the northwest to herald winter’s eager arrival.
Cafal and Setoc ran through this new world. The frigid air bit in their lungs, yet it was richer and sweeter than anything they had breathed in their own realm, their own time.
How to describe the noise of a hundred thousand wolves running across the land? It filled Cafal’s skull with the immensity of an ocean. Padded footfalls delivered a pitch and rhythm unlike that of spaded hoofs. The brush of fur as shoulders rubbed was a seething whisper. The heat rising from bodies was thick as mist, the animal smell overwhelming-the smell of a world without cities, forges, charcoal burners, without battlefields, trenches filled with waste, without human sweat and perfumes, the smoke of rustleaf and durhang, the dust of frantic destruction.
Wolves. Before humans waged war upon them, before the millennia-long campaign of slaughter. Before the lands emptied.
He could almost see them. Every sense but sight was alive with the creatures. And he and Setoc were carried along on the ghostly tide.
All that was gone had returned. All this history, seeking a home.
They would not find it among his people. He did not understand why Setoc was leading them to the Barghast. He could hear her singing, but the words she used belonged to some other language. The tone was strangely fraught, as if warring forces were bound together. Curiosity and wariness, congress and terror-he could almost see the glint of bestial eyes as they watched the first band of humans from a distance. Did these two-legged strangers promise friendship? Cooperation? A recognition of brother-and sisterhood? Yes, to all of that. But this was no family at peace; this was a thing writhing with deceit, betrayal, black malice and cruelty.
The wolves were innocents. They stood no chance.
Flee the Barghast. Please, I beg you-
But his pleading rang hollow even to Cafal. He needed them-he needed this swift passage. Night had fallen. A wind was rising to tear at the torches and hearth-fires in the Senan camp. Rain spat with stinging fury and lightning ignited the horizon.
Eyes gleamed, iron licked the darkness-
The gods were showing him was what coming.
And he would not get there in time. Because, as has ever been known, the Barghast gods were bastards.
Heart thudding with anticipation, Sathand Gril slipped out from the light of the wind-whipped fires. He had watched the children and their furtive flight into the shattered hills northeast of the camp when the sun was still a hand’s breadth above the horizon. This had been his singular responsibility for weeks now-spying on the horrid little creatures-all leading to this moment, this reward.
He had killed the boy’s dog and now he would kill the boy. Plunging his knife into his belly with a hand over his mouth to stifle the shrieks. A large rock to crush the skull and destroy the face, because no one welcomed the face of a dead child, especially one frozen in twisted pain. He had no desire to look upon the half-lidded eyes that saw nothing, that had gone flat with the soul’s absence. No, he would destroy the thing utterly, and then fling it into a defile.
The twins were destined for something far more elaborate. He’d break their legs. Then tie their hands. He’d blood them both, but not cruelly, for Sathand was not one of those who hungered to rape, not women, not children. But he would give them his seed to carry to the gods.
This night of murder, it was for the Barghast. The righting of wrongs. The end of the usurper’s line and the eradication of Hetan’s shame. Onos Toolan was not of the clans of the White Face. He was not even Barghast.
No matter. Word had come. Onos Toolan was dead-murdered by Bakal, who had broken his own arm with the force of the knife-thrust he had driven into the Warleader’s heart. A power struggle was coming-Sathand Gril well knew that Sekara had decided on the Barahn warchief, Maral Eb. But to Sathand’s eyes-and to those of many others among the Senan-Bakal could make a surer claim, and that was one Sathand would back. More blood to be spilled before things settled out. Most were agreed on that.
