Onrack pulled the body up alongside Trull Sengar. ‘You were not dreaming. Here. Eat.’
‘Might we not cook it?’
The T’lan Imass strode to the seaside edge of the wall. Among the flotsam were the remnants of countless trees, from which jutted denuded branches. He climbed down onto the knotted detritus, felt it shift and roll unsteadily beneath him. It required but a few moments to snap off an armful of fairly dry wood, which he threw back up onto the wall. Then he followed.
He felt the Tiste Edur’s eyes on him as he prepared a hearth.
‘Our encounters with your kind,’ Trull said after a moment, ‘were few and far between. And then, only after your… ritual. Prior to that, your people fled from us at first sight. Apart from those who travelled the oceans with the Thelomen Toblakai, that is. Those ones fought us. For centuries, before we drove them from the seas.’
‘The Tiste Edur were in my world,’ Onrack said as he drew out his spark stones, ‘just after the coming of the Tiste Andu. Once numerous, leaving signs of passage in the snow, on the beaches, in deep forests.’
‘There are far fewer of us now,’ Trull Sengar said. ‘We came here-to this place-from Mother Dark, whose children had banished us. We did not think they would pursue, but they did. And upon the shattering of this warren, we fled yet again-to your world, Onrack. Where we thrived…’
‘Until your enemies found you once more.’
‘Yes. The first of those were… fanatical in their hatred. There were great wars-unwitnessed by anyone, fought as they were within darkness, in hidden places of shadow. In the end, we slew the last of those first Andu, but were broken ourselves in the effort. And so we retreated into remote places, into fastnesses. Then, more Andu came, only these seemed less… interested. And we in turn had grown inward, no longer consumed with the hunger of expansion-’
‘Had you sought to assuage that hunger,’ Onrack said as the first wisps of smoke rose from the shredded bark and twigs, ‘we would have found in you a new cause, Edur.’
Trull was silent, his gaze veiled. ‘We had forgotten it all,’ he finally said, settling back to rest his head once more on the clay. ‘All that I have just told you. Until a short while ago, my people-the last bastion, it seems, of the Tiste Edur-knew almost nothing of our past. Our long, tortured history. And what we knew was in fact false. If only,’ he added, ‘we had remained ignorant.’