Wandering onward, leaving, at last, those dread monuments in his wake. He might have wept for a time, although of course he could not feel his own tears-they were one with the sea around him-but he voiced muted cries, enough to make his throat raw. And at times he staggered, fell, hands plunging deep into the muck, and struggled to regain his feet, buffeted by the currents.
All of this seemed to go on for a long time.
Until something loomed out of the darkness ahead. Blockish, heaped on one side with what seemed to be detritus-drifts of wreckage, tree branches and the like. Bruthen Trana stumbled closer, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
A house. Enclosed by a low wall of the same black stone. Dead trees in the yard, their trunks thick, stubby, each rising from a root-heaved mound. A snaking path leading to three sagging, saddled steps and a recessed, narrow door. To either side of this entrance there were square windows, shuttered in strips of slate. To the right, forming a rounded corner, rose a squat, flat-topped tower. A small corniced window at the upper level was lit from within with a dull yellow glow, fitful, wavering.
A house. On the floor of the ocean.
And someone is home.
Bruthen Trana found himself standing before the gate, his eyes on the snaking path of pavestones leading to the steps. He could see blooms of silts rising from the mounds to either side, as if the mud was seething with worms. Closer now to the house, he noted the thick green slime bearding the walls, and the prevailing current-which had heaped up rubbish against one side-had done its work on the ground there as well, uprooting one of the dead trees and sculpting out the mound until it was no more than a scatter of barnacled boulders. The tree leaned against the house with unyielding branches from which algae streamed and swirled against the backwash of the current.
This is not what I seek. He knew that with sudden certainty. And yet… he glanced up once more at the tower, in time to see the light dim, as if withdrawing, then vanish.
Bruthen Trana walked onto the path.
The current seemed fiercer here, as if eager to push him off the trail, and some instinct told the Tiste Edur that losing his footing in this yard would be a bad thing. Hunching down, he pushed on.
Upon reaching the steps, Bruthen Trana was buffeted by a sudden roil of the current and he looked up to see that the door had opened. And in the threshold stood a most extraordinary figure. As tall as the Tiste Edur, yet so thin as to seem emaciated. Bone-white flesh, thin and loose, a long, narrow face, seamed with a mass of wrinkles. The eyes were pale grey, surrounding vertical pupils.
The man wore rotted, colourless silks that hid little, including the extra joints on his arms and legs, and what seemed to be a sternum horizontally hinged in the middle. The ripple of too many ribs, a set of lesser collarbones beneath the others. His hair-little more than wisps on a mottled pate-stirred like cobwebs. In one lifted hand the man held a lantern in which sat a stone that burned with golden fire.
The voice that spoke in Bruthen Trana’s mind was strangely childlike. ‘Is this the night for spirits?’
‘Is it night then?’ Bruthen Trana asked.
‘Isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well,’ the figure replied with a smile, ‘neither do I. Will you join us? The house has not had a guest for a long time.’
‘I am not for this place,’ Bruthen Trana said, uncertain. ‘I think…’
‘You are correct, but the repast is timely. Besides, some current must have brought you here. It is not as if just any old spirit can find the house. You have been led here, friend.’.
‘Why? By whom?’
‘The house, of course. As to why,’ the man shrugged, then stepped back and gestured. ‘Join us, please. There is wine, suitably… dry.’
Bruthen Trana ascended the steps, and crossed the threshold.
The door closed of its own accord behind him. They were in a narrow hallway, directly ahead a T-intersection.
‘I am Bruthen Trana, a Tiste Edur of-’
‘Yes, yes, indeed. The Empire of the Crippled God. Well, one of them, anyway. An Emperor in chains, a people in thrall’-a quick glance over the shoulder as the man led him into the corridor to the right-‘that would be you, Edur, not the Letherii, who are in thrall to a far crueller master.’
‘Coin.’
‘Well done. Yes.’
They halted before a door set in a curved wall.
‘This leads to the tower,’ Bruthen Trana said. ‘Where I first saw your light.’
‘Indeed. It is, alas, the only room large enough to accommodate my guest. Oh,’ he stepped closer, ‘before we go in, I must warn you of some things. My guest possesses a weakness-but then, don’t we all? In any case, it has fallen to me to, uh, celebrate that weakness-now, yes, soon it will end, as all things do-but not quite yet. Thus, you must not distract my dear guest from the distraction I already provide. Do you understand me?’