He saw Caladan Brood, hammer hanging down from his hands, motionless … and standing before the warlord, on an island of his own, was Kruppe. Brushing dust from his clothes. The crack that had been born where the hammer had struck the earth, parted neatly around the short, fat Daru, joining again just behind him.
Whiskeyjack struggled to hold back a laugh, knowing how desperate, how jarring it would sound. So, we have seen Brood's fury. And Kruppe, that preposterous little man, has stood it down. Well, if proof was ever needed that the Daru was not as he appeared to be … He then frowned. A demonstration indeed — directed towards whom, I wonder?
A cry of dismay cut through his thoughts.
Korlat. She faced north, her posture somehow contracted, drawn in on itself.
The fissure, Whiskeyjack now saw — all amusement gone — was filling with blood.
Fouled blood, rotten blood. Beru fend, the Sleeping Goddess. Burn sleeps the sleep of the dying, the poisoned. And this, he realized, was the day's final, most terrible revelation. Diseased. the hidden hand of the Crippled God.
The Mhybe's eyes snapped open. The wagon rocked and pitched. Thunder shook the ground. The shouts of Rhivi were on all sides, a wailing chorus of alarm and consternation. Her bones and muscles protested as she was thrown about in the cataclysm, but she would not cry out. She wanted only to hide.
The rumbling faded, replaced by the distant lowing of the bhederin and, closer by, the soft footpads of her kin as they rushed past the wagon. The herd was close to panic, and a stampede was imminent.
Bringing ruin to us all. Yet that would be a mercy. An end to the pain, to my nightmares.
In her dreams she was young once more, but those dreams held no joy. Strangers walked the tundra landscape where she invariably found herself. They approached. She fled. Darting like a snow hare. Running, always running.
Strangers. She did not know what they wanted, but they were seeking her — that much was clear. Tracking her, like hunters their quarry. To sleep was to awaken exhausted, limbs trembling, chest heaving with agonized breaths.
She had been saved from the Abyss, from those countless tattered souls lost in eternal, desperate hunger. Saved, by a dragon. To what end? Leaving me in a place where I am hunted, pursued without surcease?
Time passed, punctuated by the herders' calming words to the frightened bhederin. There would be no stampede after all. Rumbles still trembled through the earth, in diminishing ripples that grew ever farther apart.
The Mhybe moaned softly to herself as the wagon rocked once more, this time to the arrival of the two Daru, Coll and Murillio.