She came closer. And the closer she drew to where he was standing, the more his eyes failed him, and when he heard her halt before him, Corabb Bhilan Thenu'alas was blind.
Yet not deaf, as she whispered, 'Help me.'
'Open your eyes, friend.'
But he didn't want to. Everybody demanded decisions. From him, all the time, and he didn't want to make any more. Never again. The way it was now was perfect. This slow sinking away, the whisperings that meant nothing, that weren't even words. He desired nothing more, nothing else.
'Wake up, Fiddler. One last time, so we can talk. We need to talk, friend.'
All right. He opened his eyes, blinked to clear the mists – but they didn't clear – in fact, the face looking down at him seemed to be made of those mists. 'Hedge. What do you want?'
The sapper grinned. 'I bet you think you're dead, don't you? That you' re back with all your old buddies. A Bridgeburner, where the Bridgeburners never die. The deathless army – oh, we cheated Hood, didn't we just. Hah! That's what you're thinking, yeah? Okay, then, so where's Trotts? Where are all the others?'
'You tell me.'
'I will. You ain't dead. Not yet, maybe not for a while either. And that's my point. That's why I'm here. You need a kicking awake, Fid, else Hood'll find you and you won't see none of us ever again. The world's been burned through, where you are right now. Burned through, realm after realm, warren after warren. It ain't a place anybody can claim. Not for a long time. Dead, burned down straight to the Abyss.'
'You're a ghost, Hedge. What do you want with me? From me?'
'You got to keep going, Fid. You got to take us with you right to the end-'
'What end?'
'The end and that's all I can say-'
'Why?'
''Cause it ain't happened yet, you idiot! How am I supposed to know?
It's the future and I can't see no future. Gods, you're so thick, Fid.
You always were.'
'Me? I didn't blow myself up, Hedge.'
'So? You're lying on a bunch of urns and bleeding out – that's better?
Messing up all that sweet honey with your blood-'
'What honey? What are you talking about?'
'You better get going, you're running outa time.'
'Where are we?'
'No place, and that's the problem. Maybe Hood'll find you, maybe noone will. The ghosts of Y'Ghatan – they all burned. Into nothing.
Destroyed, all those locked memories, thousands and thousands.
Thousands of years… gone, now. You've no idea the loss…'
'Be quiet. You're sounding like a ghost.'
'Time to wake up, Fid. Wake up, now. Go on…'
Wildfires had torn across the grasslands, and Bottle found himself lying on blackened stubble. Nearby lay a charred carcass. Some kind of four-legged grass-eater – and around it had gathered a half-dozen human-like figures, fine-furred and naked. They held sharp-edged stones and were cutting into the burnt flesh.
Two stood as sentinels, scanning the horizons. One of them was… her.
My female. Heavy with child, so heavy now. She saw him and came over.
He could not look away from her eyes, from that regal serenity in her gaze.
There had been wild apes on Malaz Island once. He remembered, in Jakatakan, when he was maybe seven years old, seeing a cage in the market, the last island ape left, captured in the hardwood forests on the north coast. It had wandered down into a village, a young male seeking a mate – but there were no mates left. Half-starved and terrified, it had been cornered in a stable, clubbed unconscious, and now it crouched in a filthy bamboo cage at the dockside market in Jakatakan.
The seven-year-old boy had stood before it, his eyes level with that black-furred, heavy-browed beast's own eyes, and there had been a moment, a single moment, when their gazes locked. A single moment that broke Bottle's heart. He'd seen misery, he'd seen awareness – the glint that knew itself, yet did not comprehend what it had done wrong, what had earned it the loss of its freedom. It could not have known, of course, that it was now alone in the world. The last of its kind.
And that somehow, in some exclusively human way, that was its crime.
Just as the child could not have known that the ape, too, was aged seven.
Yet both saw, both knew in their souls – those darkly flickering shapings, not yet solidly formed – that, for this one time, they were each looking upon a brother.