But when they died here, they had been on the run. Some of those swaths of material were from tents. Flesh and blood Imass did not pursue them-not across this lifeless ice. No, they must have been T’lan. Of the Ritual. Like Emroth here.
‘So,’ Hedge said, his own voice startlingly loud in his ears, ‘were you involved in this hunt, Emroth?’
‘I cannot be certain,’ she replied after a long moment. ‘It is possible.’
‘One scene of slaughter looks pretty much the same as the next, right?’
‘Yes. That is true.’
Her agreement left him feeling even more depressed.
‘There is something ahead,’ the T’lan Imass said. ‘We are, I believe, about to discover the answer to the mystery’
‘What mystery?’
‘The absence of bodies.’
‘Oh, that mystery’
Night came abruptly to this place, like the snuffing out of a candle. The sun, which circled just above the horizon through the day, would suddenly tumble, like a rolling ball, beneath the gleaming, blood-hued skyline. And the black sky would fill with stars that only faded with the coming of strangely coloured brushstrokes of light, spanning the vault, that hissed like sprinkled fragments of fine glass.
Hedge sensed that night was close, as the wind’s pockets of warmth grew more infrequent, the ember cast to what he assumed was west deepening into a shade both lurid and baleful.
He could now see what had caught Emroth’s attention. A hump on the plateau, ringed in dark objects. The shape rising from the centre of that hillock at first looked like a spar of ice, but as they neared, Hedge saw that its core was dark, and that darkness reached down to the ground.
The objects surrounding the rise were cloth-swaddled bodies, many of them pitifully small.
As the day’s light suddenly dropped away, night announced on a gust of chill wind, Hedge and Emroth halted just before the hump.
The upthrust spar was in fact a throne of ice, and on it sat the frozen corpse of a male Jaghut. Mummified by cold and desiccating winds, it nevertheless presented an imposing if ghastly figure, a figure of domination, the head tilted slightly downward, as if surveying a ring of permanently supine subjects.
‘Death observing death,’ Hedge muttered. ‘How damned appropriate. He collected the bodies, then sat down and just died with them. Gave up. No thoughts of vengeance, no dreams of resurrection. Here’s your dread enemy, Emroth.’