‘ I doubt we are the first victims of misapprehension regarding that young warrior, brother. ’
‘Granted. Nor, I suspect, will we be the last to suffer such shock.’
‘ Did you sense the six T’lan Imass spirits, Cynnigig? Hovering there, beyond the hidden walls of the yard? ’
‘Oh yes. Servants of the Crippled God, now, the poor things. They would tell him something, I think-’
‘ Tell who? The Crippled God? ’
‘No. Karsa Orlong. They possess knowledge, with which they seek to guide the Thelomen Toblakai-but they dared not approach. The presence of the House, I suspect, had them fearful.’
‘ No, it is dead-all that survived of its lifespirit moved into the spear. Not the House, brother, but Karsa Orlong himself-that was who they feared .’
‘Ah.’ Cynnigig smiled as he slipped another sliver of meat into Phyrlis’s wooden mouth, where it slid from view, falling down into the hollow cavity within. There to rot, to gift the tree with its nutrients. ‘Then those Imass are not so foolish after all.’
BOOK FOUR
HOUSE OF CHAINS
You have barred the doors
caged the windows
every portal sealed
to the outside world,
and now you find what you feared most-
there are killers,
and they are in the House.
House
Talanbal
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The rage of the Whirlwind Goddess was an inferno, beaten on the forge of Holy Raraku.
The legions that marched in the dust of blood burned by the eye of the sun were cold iron.
There, on the dry harbour of the dead city where the armies joined to battle Hood walked the fated ground where he walked many times before.
The Divided Heart
Fisher
She had wormed her way alongside the carefully stacked cut stones, to the edge of the trench-knowing her mother would be furious at seeing how she had ruined her new clothes-and finally came within sight of her sister.
Tavore had claimed her brother’s bone and antler toy soldiers, and in the rubble of the torn-up estate wall, where repairs had been undertaken by the grounds workers, she had arranged a miniature battle.
Only later would Felisin learn that her nine-year-old sister had been, in fact, recreating a set battle, culled from historical accounts of a century-old clash between a Royal Untan army and the rebelling House of K’azz D’Avore. A battle that had seen the annihilation of the renegade noble family’s forces and the subjugation of the D’Avore household. And that, taking on the role of Duke Kenussen D’Avore, she was working through every possible sequence of tactics towards achieving a victory. Trapped by a series of unfortunate circumstances in a steep-sided valley, and hopelessly outnumbered, the unanimous consensus among military scholars was that such victory was impossible.
Felisin never learned if her sister had succeeded where Kenussen D’Avore-reputedly a military genius-had failed. Her spying had become a habit, her fascination with the hard, remote Tavore an obsession. It seemed, to Felisin, that her sister had never been a child, had never known a playful moment. She had stepped into their brother’s shadow and sought only to remain there, and when Ganoes had been sent off for schooling, Tavore underwent a subtle transformation. No longer in Ganoes’s shadow, it was as if she had become his shadow, severed and haunting .
None of these thoughts were present in Felisin’s mind all those years ago. The obsession with Tavore existed, but its sources were formless, as only a child’s could be.
The stigma of meaning ever comes later, like a brushing away of dust to reveal shapes in stone.
At the very edge of the ruined city on its south side, the land fell away quickly in what had once been elastic slumps of silty clay, fanning out onto the old bed of the harbour. Centuries of blistering sun had hardened these sweeps, transforming them into broad, solid ramps.
Sha’ik stood at the head of the largest of these ancient fans born of a dying sea millennia past, trying to see the flat basin before her as a place of battle. Four thousand paces away, opposite, rose the saw-toothed remnants of coral islands, over which roared the Whirlwind. That sorcerous storm had stripped from those islands the formidable mantle of sand that had once covered them. What remained offered little in the way of a secure ridge on which to assemble and prepare legions. Footing would be treacherous, formations impossible. The islands swept in a vast arc across the south approach. To the east was an escarpment, a fault-line that saw the land falling sharply away eighty or more arm-lengths onto a salt flat-what had once been the inland sea’s deepest bed. The fault was a slash that widened in its southwestward reach, just the other side of the reef islands, forming the seemingly endless basin that was Raraku’s southlands. To the west lay dunes, the sand deep and soft, wind-sculpted and rife with sink-pits.