He was taken from you, like a bauble stolen from your purse. The theft stung, it stings still. You feel outraged. Violated. This is pride and indignation, isn’t it? These are the sigils on your banner of war, your lust for vengeance. Look upon yourself, Mappo, you mouth the arguments of tyrants now, and all shrink from your path .
But I want him back. At my side. I swore my life to protecting him, sheltering him. How can that be taken away from me? Can you not hear the empty howl in my heart? This is a pit without light, and upon all the close walls surrounding me I can feel nothing but the gouges my claws have made .
The green sheen upon the broken land was sickly to his eyes, unnatural, an ominous imposition that made the shattering of the moon seem almost incidental. But worlds heal, when we do not . Mustiness clung to the night air, as of distant corpses left to rot.
There have been so many deaths in this wasteland. I don’t understand it. Was this by Icarium’s sword? His rage? I should have felt that, but the very ground barely breathes; like an old woman in her death-cot she can but tremble to faraway sounds. Thunder and a darkness upon the sky .
‘There is war.’
Mappo grunted. They’d been silent for so long he’d almost forgotten Gruntle’s presence, standing here at his side. ‘What do you know of it?’ he asked, pulling his gaze away from the eastern horizon.
The barb-tattooed caravan guard shrugged. ‘What is there to know? Deaths beyond counting. Slaughter to make my mouth water. Hackles rise – even in this gloom I can see the dismay in your face, Trell, and I share it. War, it is what it was and always will be. What else is there to say?’
‘You yearn to join the fray?’
‘My dreams tell me different.’
Mappo glanced back at the camp. The humped forms of their sleeping companions, the more regular mound of the fresh burial cairn. The desiccated shape of Cartographer seated upon the stones, a tattered wolf lying at his feet. Two horses, the scatter of packs and supplies. An air of death and sorrow. ‘If there is war,’ he said, facing Gruntle again, ‘who profits?’
The man rolled his shoulders, a habit of his, Mappo now knew, as if Trake’s Mortal Sword sought to shift a burden no one else could see. ‘Ever the question, as if answers meant anything, which they don’t. Soldiers are herded into the iron maw and the ground turns to red mud, and someone on a nearby hill raises a fist in triumph, while another flees the field on a white horse.’