The torment of this existence should not include pain. That was unfair. Of course, most of that pain was fading now-he was too far gone to curl and flinch, to gasp and sob-but the memories remained, like fire in his skull.
Pulled onward over loose stones, their sharp edges rolling up his back, gouging new furrows through the pulped meat, knuckling against the base of his skull to tear away the last’ few snarls of hair and scalp. And as the chain snagged, only to give and twist him round, he stared again and again upon that storm in their wake.
Songs of suffering from the groaning wagon somewhere ahead, an unending ehorus of misery ever drifting back.
Too bad, he reflected, that the huge demon had not found him in the moments following his collapse, had not lifted him to its shoulder-not that it could carry any more than it already had been carrying. But even if it had done little more than drag him to one side, then the edge of the wagon’s massive wheel would not have crushed his right arm and shoulder, grinding both into pulp until only threads of gristle were all that held it to his body. After that, all hopes-faint as they had been-of rising again to add his strength to the procession had vanished. Me had become yet one more dead weight, dragged in the wake, adding to the suf-fering of those who trudged on.
Nearby, almost parallel to him, a huge chain sheathed in moss ended in the remnants of a dragon. Wings like tattered sails, spars snapped and dangling, the mostly skinless head dragged behind a shredded neck. When he had first seen it he had been shocked, horrified. Now, each time it came into view, he felt a wave of dread. That such a creature should have failed was proof of the desperate ex-tremity now plaguing them.
Anomander Rake had stopped killing. The legion was failing. Annihilation edged ever closer.
Life fears chaos. It was ever thus. We fear it more than anything else, because it is anathema. Order battles against dissolution. Order negotiates cooperation as a mechanism of survival, on every scale, from a patch of skin to an entire menagerie, of interdependent creatures. That cooperation, of course, may not of essence be necessarily peaceful-a minute exchange of failures to ensure greater successes.
Yes, as I am dragged along here, at the very end of my existence, I begin to understand…
See me, see this gift of contemplation.
Rake, what have you done?
A calloused hand closed about his remaining arm, lifted him clear of the ground, and he was being carried forward, closer to that crawling wagon.
‘There is no point.’
‘That,’ replied a deep, measured voice, ’is without relevance.’
‘I am not worth-’