Galar Baras felt his gaze slide away from Dathenar’s bright, challenging regard. He looked upon the mob now gathering to receive weapons and armour. ‘Lieutenants, I leave the two of you in command. I must ride to Hust Forge. If it is at all possible, I will reawaken Toras Redone to our need for her. At the very least, I wonder if she has even heard of the fall of the Wardens. If not, best I be the one to bring her the news.’
‘You delight in heavy burdens, sir.’
Dathenar’s observation had come in a casual tone, but the truth of it cut Galar Baras, so that he stood for a moment, bereft of words, with something roaring in his skull. Shaking himself free of the paralysis, he turned away from the two lieutenants, and then paused and glanced back. ‘Welcome to the Hust Legion. Look to Wareth to inform you of any details with respect to the prisoners. Oh, and there is a killer in our midst, revisiting, perhaps, old hurts. Wareth will give you the details.’
‘Intrigue and mystery, sir, keep us young.’
Galar Baras eyed Dathenar, with his now placid expression, and then Prazek, who stood smiling like a man about to dance. ‘Again, you are both most welcome.’
An empty niche in a corridor, from which echoes still seemed to drift out, rebounding from some other place, but with weariness and overtones of loss. As the recollection of that day slowly faded from his mind, Galar Baras turned away from the niche and resumed his walk. Earlier in the day, before his eventual audience with Lord Henarald, he had walked the work yard, shocked by the fading energy of cooling blast furnaces, tall chimneys all but one yielding no column of smoke, an air of exhaustion heavy in the bitter winter air.
Behind the dozen bricked furnaces with their flanking bellows, there had been a row of wagons, sagging with coal left unattended. He had seen in all this the truth of what Henarald would soon tell him: the forges were dying. The charcoal was gone, the new seams of coal rotten. The age of weapons was itself coming to an end, in the manner that would surprise only a fool. War, this artless collapse that sees every forged blade worked to its sole purpose. How is it, then, that in the perfection of the form, and in its equally perfect application, we bring upon ourselves nothing but chaos and destruction? Am I alone in seeing the irony of this? Industry, you unfold in the machinations of our minds, so sweetly reasoned that we believe you both inevitable and righteous. But see what you build. No, step around the monuments, around every glorious edifice. Walk here, to this place of tailings and slag.
Henarald was right. The only freedom left the world belongs to what we discard, the pointless wastage we so quickly sweep away. See the birds dance on the heaps, thinking every glistening twinkle the betrayal of an insect’s wings. But to feed there is to die, and the hunt’s lure rewards with nothing but starvation.
He had walked the yards, and now, as he drew closer to the inner wing of the keep, where Toras Redone
had either retreated or been locked away from the sight of others, he listened for the distant roar of the forges, but heard nothing.
Industry, your artistry was an illusion. Your offer of permanence was a lie. You are nothing more than the maw we built, and then fed until both we and the world sank down in exhaustion, and in the failing of your fires, your never-satisfied hunger, we turn not upon you, but upon each other.
The Jaghut alone dared face you and name you the demon in their midst. Us? Why, we will die at your feet as if you were an altar, and hold with our last breath to the belief in your sanctity, even as the rust seizes your soul, and the last drop of blood falls from ours.
As with so many other things, Galar Baras realized, the seeds of civilization’s death were sown in its birth. But the Jaghut had proved that progress was not inevitable, that the fates could be defied, broken, utterly discarded.
He reached the door, studied its black bronze, its rivets and stained wood. Beyond it, alas, was his love. No matter her condition, he knew that he would fall to his knees upon seeing her, if not in body then in his soul. We do well to curse love. That makes us so abject, so eager to surrender. She need only meet my eye to know that I am hers, to do with as she pleases. Where then is my courage?
He hesitated.
Toras Redone, I bring sad news. The Wardens have been destroyed in battle. But Calat Hustain survives, and is blameless in the fate of his people. Or can that be said? Did he not give his command to Ilgast Rend? Was he not precipitous in setting out to the Vitr in such a time as this? The news is sad indeed, and you will choose which – the end of the Wardens, or that your husband still lives.
He could imagine himself, standing before her, unbowed by her sordid presence. Speaking his mind, flensing all decorum from the raw hungers and needs that plagued both him and her. But no, I can hardly be certain of her, can I? She was drunk the night she made me her plaything. It left embers between us, fanned by flattery and chance gazes locked a moment too long. For all her games, her memory of that night might be blurred, stripped of all detail.
In her appetites she was ever blind, taking all within her reach.
I may walk in to find her recalling neither me nor herself. Grief and horror and recrimination, and jugs of wine. There may be nothing left of Toras Redone. Denied her chance to die with her soldiers, denied again upon the morning that followed, by my own hand—
Oh, she should recall that, I would think. In a flare of hate, she will recall my staying hand.
Courage retreated before love. A brave man would have let her drink deep the poison.
Sad tidings, my love. He lives. You live. And so do I.
The Hust Legion? Well, the iron lives, too. You’ll know its voice by the laughter, the black chatter of crows feasting upon the dead. Listen, then, to war’s cold welcome.
He reached out, closed his hand upon the door’s heavy iron ring. It was time to look upon what was left of his love.
* * *
‘In times of war, privileges of rank are won in blood. Or so,’ Prazek added, ‘we make it known.’ He reached out to add another chip of dung to the fire. A small hearth, set well away from the others of the camp. Faror Hend had seen it from a distance while walking the perimeter, ensuring that the pickets were in place, and that two of every three soldiers on guard were, in fact, facing inward, upon the camp. For all that, there had been no desertions since the distribution of the Hust weapons and armour. None, indeed, since lieutenants – now captains – Prazek and Dathenar assumed temporary command of the Hust Legion.
Curious, Faror Hend had made her way to the flickering flames out upon the plain, fifty paces beyond the pickets, to find the two officers from Lord Anomander’s Houseblades attending a private fire ringed by stones that had been collected from a nearby cairn. Upon seeing her hesitant approach, and even as she had begun turning away, Dathenar had spoken an invitation to join them. And now she sat opposite the two men, feeling out of place.
Gallan had once called them his soldier poets, and after half a week in their company, official and otherwise, she well understood the honorific. But theirs was a wit too sharp for her, and even to witness it was to feel one’s own mind as something too blunt, likely to stumble should it seek to keep pace with the two men. Still, it proved a modest wound, given how entertaining they often were.
But this was a night for sober reflection, at least thus far, and what eloquence was loosed sounded wry, almost bitter at times. More to the point, it was heavy with exhaustion, and Faror had come to comprehend the sheer effort of aplomb. In the watery light of the fire, the faces before her were drawn, haggard, revealing all that they were wont to hide from others. This particular window’s view humbled her.
‘Private fires,’ said Dathenar, nodding in answer to Prazek’s earlier assertion. ‘We tend them as would any common soldier or peasant, and by any starry measure above we are just as unnoticed in the eyes of the firmament. Rank, my friend, is an impostor.’