Icarium stared at him, then, slowly, his long fingers relaxed their grip on the Gral's hide shirt.
'My friend,' Taralack said, 'you must eat. You must keep your strength. This empire of the Tiste Edur, it is an abomination, ruled by a madman whose only talent is with a sword, and to that the weak and strong must bow, for such is the cast of the world. To defy the powerful is to invite subjugation and annihilation – you know this, Icarium. Yet you and you alone, friend, possess what is necessary to destroy that abomination. This is what you were born to do. You are the final weapon of justice – do not waver before this flood of inequity. Feed upon what you have witnessed – what we have witnessed – and all that we shall see on the voyage ahead. Feed on it, to fuel the justice within you – until it is blinding with power. Icarium, do not let these terrible Edur defeat you – as they are doing now.'
A voice spoke behind him. Twilight. 'The Preda considers a test. For this warrior.'
Taralack Veed turned, looked up at the woman. 'What do you mean? What sort of test?'
'We fight many wars. We walk paths of Chaos and Shadow.'
The Gral's eyes narrowed. 'We?'
She grimaced. 'The Edur now rule Lether. Where they lead, Letherii must follow. Edur swords make river of blood, and from river of blood, there is river of gold. The loyal have grown rich, so very rich.'
'And the disloyal?'
'They tend the oars. Indebted. It is so.'
'And you, Atri-Preda? Are you loyal?'
She studied him, silent for a half-dozen heartbeats, then she said, '
Each champion believes. By their sword the Emperor shall die. What is believed and what is true is not same,' she said, strangely twisting Taralack's own words. 'To what is true, I am loyal. The Preda considers a test.'
'Very well,' the Gral said, then held his breath, dreading a refusal from Icarium. But none came. Ah, that is good.
The woman walked away, armour rustling like coins spilling onto gravel.
Taralack Veed stared after her.
'She hides herself,' Icarium said in a low, sad voice. 'Yet her soul dies from within.'
'Do you believe, my friend,' the Gral said, turning back to the Jhag once more, 'that she alone suffers in silence? That she alone cowers, her honour besieged by what she must do?'
Icarium shook his head.
'Then think of her when your resolve falters, friend. Think of Twilight. And all the others like her.'
A wan smile. 'Yet you say there is no innocence.'
'An observation that does not obviate the demand for justice, Icarium.'
The Jhag's gaze shifted, down and away, and seemed to focus on the slime-laden planks of the hull to his right. 'No,' he whispered in a hollow tone, 'I suppose it doesn't.'
****
Sweat glistened on the rock walls, as if the pressure of the world had grown unbearable. The man who had just appeared, as if from nowhere, stood motionless for a time, the dark grey of his cloak and hood making him indistinct in the gloom, but the only witnesses to this peculiarity were both indifferent and blind – the maggots writhing in torn, rotting flesh among the sprawl of bodies that stretched before him down the chasm's elongated, rough floor.
The stench was overpowering, and Cotillion could feel himself engulfed in grief-laden familiarity, as if this was the true scent of existence. There had been times – he was almost certain – when he'd known unmitigated joy, but so faded were they to his recollection that he had begun to suspect the fictional conjuring of nostalgia. As with civilizations and their golden ages, so too with people: each individual ever longing for that golden past moment of true peace and wellness.
So often it was rooted in childhood, in a time before the strictures of enlightenment had afflicted the soul, when what had seemed simple unfolded its complexity like the petals of a poison flower, to waft its miasma of decay.
The bodies were of young men and women – too young in truth to be soldiers, although soldiers they had been. Their memories of solace would likely have been scoured from their minds back when, in a place and a world they had once called home, they hung nailed by iron spikes to wooden crosses, uncomprehending of their crimes. Of course there had been no such crimes. And the blood, which they had shed so profusely, had yielded no evidence of its taint, for neither the name of a people nor the hue of their skin, nor indeed the cast of their features, could make life's blood any less pure, or precious.
Wilful fools with murder in their rotted hearts believed otherwise.
They divided the dead into innocent victim and the rightfully punished, and knew with unassailable conviction upon which side they themselves stood. With such conviction, the plunging of knives proved so very easy.
