Hot.’
Seren Pedac felt that serpent recoil, felt the ripples sweep back into her in waves of scalding heat.
Fever dreams, the fire of Udinaas’s soul. The man stirred in his blankets.
She would need to be more subtle, would need the essence of the serpent she had chosen. Edging forward once more, finding that raging forge, then burrowing down, through hot sand, beneath it. Oh, there was pain, yes, but it was not, she now realized, some integral furnace of his soul. It was the realm his dream had taken him into, a realm of blistering light-
Her eyes opened onto a torn landscape. Boulders baked red and brittle. Thick, turgid air, the breath of a potter’s kiln. Blasted white sky overhead.
Udinaas wandered, staggering, ten paces away.
She sent her serpent slithering after him.
An enormous shadow slid over them-Udinaas spun and twisted to glare upward as that shadow flowed past, then on, and the silver and gold scaled dragon, gliding on stretched wings, flew over the ridge directly ahead, then, a moment later, vanished from sight.
Seren saw Udinaas waiting for it to reappear. And then he saw it again, now tiny as a speck, a glittering mote in the sky, fast dwindling. The Letherii slave cried out, but Seren could not tell if the sound had been one of rage or abandonment.
No-one likes being ignored.
Stones skittered near the serpent and in sudden terror she turned its gaze, head lifting, to see a woman. Not Menandore. No, a Letherii. Small, lithe, hair so blonde as to be almost white. Approaching Udinaas, tremulous, every motion revealing taut, frayed nerves.
Another intruder.
Udinaas had yet to turn from that distant sky, and Seren watched as the Letherii woman drew still closer. Then, five paces away, she straightened, ran her hands through her wild, burnished hair. In a sultry voice, the strange woman spoke. ‘I have been looking for you, my love.’
He did not whirl round. He did not even move, but Seren saw something new in the lines of his back and shoulders, the way he now held his head. In his voice, when he replied, there was amusement. ‘“My love”?’ And then he faced her, with ravaged eyes, a bleakness like defiant ice in this world of fire. ‘No longer the startled hare, Feather Witch-yes, I see the provocative way you now look at me, the brazen confidence, the invitation. And in all that, the truth that is your contempt still burns through. Besides,’ he added, ‘I heard you scrabbling closer, could smell, even, your fear. What do you want, Feather Witch?’
‘I am not frightened, Udinaas,’ the woman replied.
That name, yes. Feather Witch. The fellow slave, the Caster of the Tiles. Oh, there is history between them beyond what any of us might have imagined.
‘But you are,’ Udinaas insisted. ‘Because you expected to find me alone.’
She stiffened, then attempted a shrug. ‘Menandore feels nothing for you, my love. You must realize that. You are naught but a weapon in her hands.’
‘Hardly. Too blunted, too pitted, too fragile by far.’
Feather Witch’s laugh was high and sharp. ‘Fragile? Errant take me, Udinaas, you have never been that.’
Seren Pedac certainly agreed with her assessment. What reason this false modesty?
‘I asked what you wanted. Why are you here?’
‘I have changed since you last saw me,’ Feather Witch replied. ‘I am now Destra Irant to the Errant, to the last Elder God of the Letherii. Who stands behind the Empty Throne-’
‘It’s not empty.’
‘It will be.’
‘Now there’s your new-found faith getting in the way again. All that hopeful insistence that you are once more at the centre of things. Where is your flesh hiding right now, Feather Witch? In Letheras, no doubt. Some airless, stinking hovel that you have proclaimed a temple-yes, that stings you, telling me I am not in error. About you. Changed, Feather Witch? Well, fool yourself if you like. But don’t think I’m deceived. Don’t think I will now fall into your arms gasping with lust and devotion.’
‘You once loved me.’
‘I once pressed red-hot coins into Rhulad’s dead eyes, too. But they weren’t dead, alas. The past is a sea of regrets, but I have crawled a way up the shore now, Feather Witch. Quite a way, in fact.’
‘We belong together, Udinaas. Destra Irant and T’orrud Segul, and we will have, at our disposal, a Mortal Sword. Letherii, all of us. As it should be, and through us the Errant rises once more. Into power, into domination-it is what our people need, what we have needed for a long time.’
‘The Tiste Edur-’
‘Are on their way out. Rhulad’s Grey Empire-it was doomed from the start. Even you saw that. It’s tottering, crumbling, falling to pieces. But we Letherii will survive. We always do, and now, with the rebirth of the faith in the Errant, our empire will make the world tremble. Destra Irant, T’orrud Segul and Mortal Sword, we shall be the three behind the Empty Throne. Rich, free to do as we please. We shall have Edur for slaves. Broken, pathetic Edur. Chained, beaten, we shall use them up, as they once did to us. Love me or not, Udinaas. Taste my kiss or turn away, it does not matter. You are T’orrud Segul. The Errant has chosen you-’
