‘Is that you, Wither? Leave me be.’
Are any warrens alive? Most would say no. Impossible. They are forces. Aspects. Proclivities manifest as the predictable-oh, the Great Thinkers who are long since dust worried this in fevered need, as befits the obsessed. But they did not under’ stand. One warren lies like a web over all the others, and its voice is the will necessary to shape magic. They did not see it. Not for what it was. They thought… chaos, a web where each strand was undifferentiated energy, not yet articulated, not yet given shape by an Elder God’s intent.’
She listened, as yet uncomprehending, even as her heart thundered in her chest and her each breath came in a harsh rasp. This, she knew, was not Wither’s voice. Not the wraith’s language. Not its cadence.
‘But K’rul understood. Spilled blood is lost blood, powerless blood in the end. It dies when abandoned. Witness violent death for proof of that. For the warrens to thrive, coursing in their appointed rivers and streams, there must be a living body, a grander form that exists in itself. Not chaos. Not Dark, nor Light. Not heat, not cold. No, a conscious aversion to disorder. Negation to and of all else, when all else is dead. For the true face of Death is dissolution, and in dissolution there is chaos until the last mote of energy ceases its wilful glow, its persistent abnegation. Do you understand?’
‘No. Who are you?’
‘There is another way, then, of seeing this. K’rul realized he could not do this alone. The sacrifice, the opening of his veins and arteries, would mean nothing, would indeed fail. Without living flesh, without organized functionality.
‘Ah, the warrens, Seren Pedac, they are a dialogue. Do you see now?’
‘No!’
Her frustrated cry echoed through the ruins. She saw Silchas and Clip halt and turn about.
Behind her, Fear Sengar called out, ‘Acquitor? What is it you deny?’
Knowing laughter from Udinaas.
‘Disregard the vicious crowd now, the torrent of sound overwhelming the warrens, the users, the guardians, the parasites and the hunters, the complicit gods elder and young. Shut them away, as Corlos taught you. To remember rape is to fold details into sensation, and so relive each time its terrible truth. He told you this could become habit, an addiction, until even despair became a welcome taste on your tongue. Understand, then-as only you can here-that to take one’s own life is the final expression of despair. You saw that. Buruk the Pale. You felt that, at the sea’s edge. Seren Pedac, K’rul could not act alone in this sacrifice, lest he fill every warren with despair.
‘Dialogue. Presupposition, yes, of the plural. One with another. Or succession of others, for this dialogue must be ongoing, indeed, eternal.
‘Do I speak of the Master of the Holds? The Master of the Deck? Perhaps-the face of the other is ever turned away-to all but K’rul himself. This is how it must be. The dialogue, then, is the feeding of power. Power unimaginable, power virtually omnipotent, unassailable… so long as that other’s face remains… turned away.
‘From you. From me. From all of us.’
She stared wildly about then, at these tilted ruins, this endless scree of destruction.
‘The dialogue, however, can be sensed if not heard-such is its power. The construction of language, the agreement in principle of meaning and intent, the rules of grammar-Seren
Pedac, what did you think Mockra was? If not a game of grammar? Twisting semantics, turning inference, inviting suggestion, reshaping a mind’s internal language to deceive its own senses?
‘Who am I?
‘Why, Seren Pedac, 1 am Mockra.’
The others were gathered round her now. She found herself on her knees, driven there by revelation-there would be bruises, an appalling softness in the tissue where it pressed against hard pavestone. She registered this, as she stared up at the others. Reproachful communication, between damaged flesh and her mind, between her senses and her brain.
She shunted those words aside, then settled into a sweet, painless calm.
As easy as that.
‘Beware, there is a deadly risk in deceiving oneself. You can blind youself to your own damage. You can die quickly in that particular game, Seren Pedac. No, if you must… experiment… then choose another.
‘Corlos would have showed you that, had he the time with you.’
‘So-so he knows you?’’
‘Not as intimately as you. There are few so… blessed.’
‘But you are not a god, are you?’
‘You need not ask that, Seren Pedac.’
‘You are right. But still, you are alive.’