‘Grieving what?’ Wither demanded.
‘Innocence, wraith. When we kill her.’
Wither was, uncharacteristically, silent.
Udinaas glanced down at the crouching shade, then sneered. ‘All your coveted knowledge…’
Seventeen legends described the war against the scaled demons the Awl called the Kechra; of those, sixteen were of battles, terrible clashes that left the corpses of warriors scattered across the plains and hills of the Awl’dan. Less a true war than headlong flight, at least in the first years. The Kechra had come from the west, from lands that would one day belong to the empire of Lether but were then, all those countless centuries ago, little more than blasted wastes-fly-swarmed marshlands of peat and rotten ice. A ragged, battered horde, the Kechra had seen battle before, and it was held in some versions of those legends that the Kechra were themselves fleeing, fleeing a vast, devastating war that gave cause to their own desperation.
In the face of annihilation, the Awl had learned how to fight such creatures. The tide was met, held, then turned.
Or so the tales proclaimed, in ringing, stirring tones of triumph.
Redmask knew better, although at times he wished he didn’t. The war ended because the Kechra’s migration reached the easternmost side of the Awl’dan, and then continued onward. Granted, they had been badly mauled by the belligerent ancestors of the Awl, yet, in truth, they had been almost indifferent to them-an obstacle in their path-and the death of so many of their own kind was but one more ordeal in a history of fraught, tragic ordeals since coming to this world.
Kechra. K’Chain Che’Malle, the Firstborn of Dragons.
There was, to Redmask’s mind, nothing palatable or sus-taining about knowledge. As a young warrior, his world had been a single knot on the rope of the Awl people, his own deliberate binding to the long, worn history of bloodlines, He had never imagined that there were so many other ropes, so many intertwined threads; he had never before comprehended how vast the net of existence, nor how tangled it had become since the Night of Life-when all that was living came into being, born of deceit and betrayal and doomed to an eternity of struggle.
And Redmask had come to understand struggle-there in the startled eyes of the rodara, the timid fear of the myrid; in the disbelief of a young warrior dying on stone and wind-blown sand; in the staring comprehension of a woman surrendering her life to the child she pushed out from between her legs. He had seen elders, human and beast, curl up to die; he had seen others fight for their last breath with all the will they could muster. Yet in his heart, he could find no reason, no reward waiting beyond that eternal struggle.
Even the spirit gods of his people battled, flailed, warred with the weapons of faith, with intolerance and the sweet, deadly waters of hate. No less confused and sordid than any mortal.
The Letherii wanted, and want invariably transformed into a moral right to possess. Only fools believed such things to be bloodless, either in intent or execution.
Well, by the same argument-by its very fang and talon-there existed a moral right to defy them. And in such a battle, there would be no end until one side or the other was obliterated. More likely, both sides were doomed to suffer that fate. This final awareness is what came from too much knowledge.
Yet he would fight on.
These plains he and his three young followers moved through had once belonged to the Awl. Until the Letherii expanded their notion of self-interest to include stealing land and driving away its original inhabitants. Cairn markers and totem stones had all been removed, the boulders left in heaps; even the ring-stones that had once anchored huts were gone. The grasses were overgrazed, and here and there long rectangular sections had seen the earth broken in anticipation of planting crops, fence posts stacked nearby. But Redmask knew that this soil was poor, quickly exhausted except in the old river valleys. The Letherii might manage a generation or two before the top-soil blew away. He had seen the results east of the wastelands, in far Kolanse-an entire civilization totterin on the edge of starvation as desert spread like plague.
The blurred moon had lifted high in the star-spattered night sky as they drew closer to the mass of rodara. There was little point in going after the myrid-the beasts were not swift runners over any reasonable distance-but as they edged closer, Redmask could see the full extent of this rodara herd. Twenty thousand head, perhaps even more.
A large drover camp, lit by campfires, commanded a hill’ top to the north. Two permanent buildings of cut-log walls and sod-capped roofs overlooked the shallow valley and the herds-these would, Redmask knew, belong to the Factor’s foreman, forming the focus for the beginning of a true settlement.
