Up from the darkness, a clawing, gasping struggle. Explosive blooms of pain, like a wall of fire rising behind his eyes, the shivering echoes of wounds, a tearing and puncturing of flesh — his own flesh.
A low groan escaped him, startled him into an awareness — he lay propped at an angle, taut skins stretched beneath him. There had been motion, a rocking and bumping and scraping, but that had ceased. He opened his eyes, found himself in shadow. A stone wall reared to his left, within reach. The air smelled of horses and dust and, much closer, blood and sweat.
Morning sunlight bathed the compound to his right, glimmered off the blurred figures moving about there. Soldiers, horses, impossibly huge, lean wolves.
Boots crunched on gravel and the shadow over him deepened. Blinking, Gruntle looked up.
Stonny's face was drawn, spattered with dried blood, her hair hanging in thick, snarled ropes. She laid a hand on his chest. 'We've reached Capustan,' she said in a ragged voice.
He managed a nod.
'Gruntle-'
Pain filled her eyes, and he felt a chill sweep over him.
'Gruntle … Harllo's dead. They — they left him, buried under rocks. They left him. And Netok — Netok, that dear boy. so wide-eyed, so innocent. I gave him his manhood, Gruntle, I did that, at least. Dead — we lost them both.' She reeled away then, out of the range of his vision, though he heard her rushed footsteps, dwindling.
Another face appeared, a stranger's, a young woman, helmed, her expression gentle. 'We are safe now, sir,' she said, her accent Capan. 'You have been force-healed. I grieve for your losses. We all do — the Grey Swords, that is. Rest assured, sir, you were avenged against the demons …'
Gruntle stopped listening, his eyes pulling away, fixing on the clear blue sky directly overhead. I saw you, Harllo. You bastard. Throwing yourself in that creature's path, between us. I saw, damn you.
A corpse beneath rocks, a face in the darkness, smeared in dust, that would never again smile.
A new voice. 'Captain.'
Gruntle turned his head, forced words through the clench of his throat. 'It's done, Keruli,' he said. 'You've been delivered. It's done. Damn you to Hood, get out of my sight.'
The priest bowed his head, withdrew through the haze of Gruntle's anger; withdrew, then was gone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The harder the world, the fiercer the honour.
Dancer
The bones formed hills, stretching out on all sides. Clattering, shifting beneath Gethol as the Jaghut struggled for purchase against the slope. The blood had slowed its flow down his ruined face, though the vision of one eye was still obscured — blocked by an upthrust shard that glimmered pink-white — and the pain had dulled to a pulsing throb.
'Vanity,' he mumbled through scabbed lips, 'is not my curse.' He gained his balance, straightened, tottering, on the hillside. 'No predicting mortal humans — no, not even Hood could have imagined such … insolence. But ah! The Herald's visage is now broken, and that which is broken must be discarded. Discarded …'
Gethol looked around. The endless hills, the formless sky, the cool, dead air. The bones. The Jaghut's undamaged eyebrow lifted. 'None the less, I appreciate the joke, Hood. Ha ha. Here you have tossed me. Ha ha. And now, I have leave to crawl free. Free from your service. So be it.'
The Jaghut opened his warren, stared into the portal that formed before him, his path into the cold, almost airless realm of Omtose Phellack. 'I know you, now, Hood. I know who — what — you are. Delicious irony, the mirror of your face. Do you in turn, I now wonder, know me?'
He strode into the warren. The familiar gelid embrace eased his pain, the fire of his nerves. The steep, jagged walls of ice to either side bathed him in blue-green light. He paused, tested the air. No stench of Imass, no signs of intrusion, yet the power he sensed around him was weakened, damaged by millennia of breaches, the effrontery of T'lan. Like the Jaghut themselves, Omtose Phellack was dying. A slow, wasting death.
'Ah, my friend,' he whispered, 'we are almost done. You and I, spiralling down into … oblivion. A simple truth. Shall I unleash my rage? No. After all, my rage is not enough. It never was.'
He walked on, through the frozen memories that had begun to rot, there, within his reach, ever narrowing, ever closing in on the Jaghut.
The fissure was unexpected, a deep cleft slashing diagonally across his path. A soft, warm breath flowed from it, sweet with decay and disease. The ice lining its edges was bruised and pocked, riven with dark veins. Halting before it, Gethol quested with his senses. He hissed in recognition. 'You have not been idle, have you? What is this invitation you set before me? I am of this world, whilst you, stranger, are not.'