Oh, hurry with this latest frenzy of improvements. Feel what you feel, old man. It's a new emotion to you, but one the rest of us know very well. It's called fear. The seven K'ell Hunters you sent south yesterday, the ones that passed us on the road. they won't be coming back. And that magefire you see lighting the southern sky at night. it's coming closer. Inexorable. The reason's simple enough — you've angered dear Lady Envy. She's not nice when she's angry. Did you visit the carnage in Bastion? Did you send your favourite Urdomen there to return with a detailed report? Did the news turn your legs to water? It should have. The wolf and the dog, huge and silent, ripping through the press of humanity. The T'lan Imass, his sword a rust-hued blur as it sliced through your vaunted elites. And the Seguleh, oh, the Seguleh. The punitive army of three, come to answer your arrogance.
The pain in Toc's stomach had dulled; the knot of hunger had tightened, shrunk, become an almost senseless core of need, a need that had itself starved. His ribs were sharp and distinct beneath stretched skin. Fluids were swelling his belly. His joints ached interminably, and he'd felt his teeth loosening in their sockets. The only taste he knew these days was the occasional scrap, and the malty bitterness of his own saliva, washed away every now and then by stale, wine-tinted water from the casks on the wagons or a rare flagon of ale reserved for the First Child's favoured few.
Toc's fellow lieutenants — and indeed Anaster himself — were well enough fed. They welcomed the endless corpses the march had claimed and continued to claim. Their boiling cauldrons were ever full. The rewards of power.
The metaphor made real — I can see my old cynical teachers nodding at that. Here, among the Tenescowri, there is no obfuscating the brutal truth. Our rulers devour us. They always have. How could I ever have believed otherwise? I was a soldier, once. I was the violent assertion of someone else's will.
He had changed, not a difficult truth to recognize in himself. His soul torn by the horrors he saw all around him, the sheer amorality born of hunger and fanaticism, he had been reshaped, twisted almost beyond recognition into something new. The eradication of faith — faith in anything, especially the essential goodness of his kind — had left him cold, hardened and feral.
Yet he would not eat human flesh. Better to devour myself from within, to take my own muscles away, layer by layer, and digest all that I was. This is the last remaining task before me, and it has begun. None the less, he was coming to realize a deeper truth: his resolve was crumbling. No, stay away from that thought.
He had no idea what Anaster had seen in him. Toc played the mute, he was the defier of gifted flesh, he offered to the world nothing but his presence, the sharpness of his lone eye — seeing all that could be seen — and yet the First had descried him, somehow, from the multitudes, had dragged him forth and granted him a lieutenancy.
But I command no-one. Tactics, strategies, the endless difficulties of managing an army even as anarchistic as this one — I attend Anaster's meetings in silence. I am asked for no opinions. I make no reports. What is it he wants of me?
Suspicions still swirled dark and deep beneath the numbed surface. He wondered if Anaster somehow knew who he was. Was he about to be delivered into the hands of the Seer? It was possible — in what the world had become, anything was possible. Anything and everything. Reality itself had surrendered its rules — the living conceived by the dead, the savage love in the eyes of the women as they mounted a dying prisoner, the flaring hope that they would take within them the corpse's last seed as it fled — as if the dying body itself sought one last chance to escape the finality of oblivion — even as the soul drowned in darkness. Love, not lust. These women have given their hearts to the moment of death. Should the seed take root.
Anaster was the eldest of the first generation. A pale, gangly youth with yellow-stained eyes and lank, black hair, leading the vast army from atop his draught horse. His face was a thing of inhuman beauty, as if no soul resided behind the perfect mask. Women and men of all ages came to him, begging his gentle touch, but he denied them all. Only his mother would he let come close; to stroke his hair, rest a sun-darkened, wrinkled hand on his shoulder.
Toc feared her more than anyone else, more than Anaster and his random cruelty, more than the Seer. Something demonic lit her eyes from within. She had been the first to mount a dying man, screaming the Night Vows of a married couple's first night, then wailing in the manner of a village widow when the man died beneath her. A tale oft repeated. A multitude of witnesses. Other women of the Tenescowri flocked to her. Perhaps it was her act of power over helpless men; perhaps it was her brazen theft of their involuntarily spilled seed; perhaps the madness simply spread from one to the next.