Then she looked skyward, where enormous dark clouds were building almost directly overhead, forming huge, towering columns bruised blue and green. She saw flashes of lightning flaring from their depths – and the blinding light was slow to fade. Two remained, burning luridly, and instead of diminishing, it seemed that those actinic glares were growing stronger, deepening in hue.
All at once, she realized what she was seeing.
There is a god among us. A god has been summoned!
The eyes blazed with demonic fire, and the clouds, ever massing, found form, a shape so vast, so overwhelming, that Sister Reverence cried out.
The argent gleam of tusks, the clouds curling into swirls of dark fur. Towering, seething, building into a thing of muscle and terrible rage, the eyes baleful as twin desert suns. Dominating the entire sky above the Spire, Fener, the Boar of Summer, manifested.
This is no sending. He is here. The god Fener is here!
With dawn paling the grey sky overhead and water running in streams along the gutters, Karsa Orlong looked down at the peaceful face of the old man cradled in his lap. He slipped a hand under that head and lifted it slightly, and then moved away, settling it once more on the hard cobbles of the street .
It was time .
He rose, taking hold of his sword. Fixing his eyes on the temple opposite, he walked towards the barred door .
The city was awakening. Early risers out on the street paused upon seeing him crossing their path. And those who could see his face backed away .
He reached for the heavy brass latch, grasped hold of it, and tore it away from the wooden door. Then he kicked, shattering the door’s planks like kindling, the sound of the impact like thunder, its echoes tumbling down the passageway within. Voices shouted .
Karsa entered the temple of Fener .
Down a once-opulent corridor, past the flanking braziers – two priests appearing with the intent of blocking his passage, but when they saw him they shrank from his path .
Into the altar chamber. Thick smoke sweetly redolent with incense, a heat rising from the very stones underfoot, and to either side the paint of the murals was crackling, bubbling, and then it began to blacken, curling away from the walls, devouring the images .
Priests were wailing in terror and grief, but the Toblakai ignored them all. His eyes were on the altar, a block of rough-hewn stone on which rested a jewel-studded boar tusk .
Closing on the altar, Karsa raised his stone sword .
‘ Upon his heart .’
When the blade descended, it smashed through the tusk and then continued on, cracking the altar stone with the sound of thunder, shattering the block in half .
* * *
Onos T’oolan could hear weeping, but this was the sound of something unseen, something long hidden in the souls of the T’lan Imass. He had never expected it to awaken, had never expected to feel it again. In his mind he saw a child, clothed in mortal flesh, lifting a face to the heavens, and that face was his own – so long ago now. There had been dreams, but even as they faded the child boy wept with shuddering convulsions.
Things die. Dreams fall to dust. Innocence bleeds out to soak the ground. Love settles in cold ashes. We had so much. But we surrendered it all. It was … unforgivable .
He rose again, on a broad, level stretch of land where a village had once stood. It had been made mostly of wood and that wood had been taken away to build engines of war. Now only the foundation stones remained. The raised road that ran into it sloped until it was level with the cobbled street at the village’s edge.
His kin rose around him and they moved out to present a broad front facing on to that road, there to await the army they could now see to the west. The sound of thousands of marching boots on cobbles was a solid roar underfoot.
We shall fight here. Because the fighting and the killing goes on for ever. And the child will shed his tears until the end of time. I remember so many loves, so many things lost. I remember being broken. Again and again. There need be no end to it – there is no law to say that one cannot break one more time .
When he raised his weapon, his kin followed suit. Seven thousand four hundred and fifty-nine T’lan Imass. Another battle, the same war. The war we never lost, yet never knew how to win .
The concussion that clove through the heaving clouds behind them staggered the T’lan Imass, a thunder so loud it shivered through their bones. Wheeling round, Onos T’oolan stared up to see a stone sword – an Imass sword – descending as if held in the hand of the Jade Strangers, impossibly huge, slicing down through a vague bestial shape – that then staggered .
Twin embers of crimson – eyes – suddenly blossomed as if filling with blood.
