‘Take two with the strongest mounts, sergeant, and waste no time,’ Cryl commanded. ‘We will continue on and you ride to catch us up — or you send one rider and take yourself and the other to Lord Jaen, if — well, if it’s necessary. No, wait, take four, not two.’
‘Yes sir. We shouldn’t be long.’
‘If he’s an innocent, I feel for him,’ Cryl said.
‘If he’s an innocent,’ Agalas replied, ‘his run of bad luck ain’t ending soon.’
They rode back. Cryl watched the sergeant select four Houseblades and set off at a gallop. He eyed the eight who remained. She’d left him Corporal Rees, a round-faced veteran with a caustic sense of humour, but there was little amusement in the man’s visage today. ‘Corporal Rees, I’ll have you ride at my side.’
‘Send scouts ahead, sir?’
‘Yes. But we will now ride without rest.’
‘Understood, sir,’ Rees replied. ‘Don’t worry about the sergeant, sir — she’ll get the bastard to talk.’
‘I hope so.’
‘Agalas’s been on the other end of torture, sir.’
‘She has?’
Rees nodded severely. ‘I got drunk one night and cornered her. Told her my whole life story, sir. But she survived. Most of her sanity intact, too.’
Cryl shot the corporal a look. ‘It’s already a day of blood, corporal. I really don’t think you’ll win much laughter with comments like that one.’
‘Wasn’t thinking about laughter, sir.’
Cryl let it pass.
They cantered on, horse hoofs thundering under them.
Ever since the huts and their dead, and the soldiers he’d found camped further along the trail, everything had gone wrong for Kadaspala. His mule had plunged a hoof down a burrow hole and snapped its foreleg in half. The artist had toppled from the animal’s back, landing awkwardly on his paint box, and then received a solid kick from the braying, thrashing beast, leaving his left thigh so bruised he could barely walk.
He had considered making his way back to the soldiers, but by then they had been a half-day behind him — assuming they’d not moved on. His agitation deepened when he realized that he had lost track of the date — that he was, perhaps, at risk of arriving too late to accompany the procession from Enes House. Once his father and sister arrived at the site of Andarist’s new estate, there would be two days of preparations before the ceremony. Even half lame and loaded down with equipment as he was, he expected to reach them before the ceremony. It was, he decided, the best he could hope for.
Cutting the mule’s throat had proved messy and brutal, leaving him sprayed in blood and sickened by the deed.
When he looked down at his stained hands and clothes, he felt as if he had caught a curse from the Deniers’ camp, and blood was now following him everywhere, a trail of culpability steeped in death and dying. The child’s dead face returned to him, no longer ghostly, no longer sketched in the air by the fingers of one hand, but hard with accusation now. That child had made him a consort with the ending of lives, Tiste and beast, the wild into the tamed and the tamed into the decrepit, and all was sullied, all was ruined.
He limped on through the afternoon, the straps rubbing his shoulders raw, the insects biting through his sweat — but with all that he carried he could not brush or wave them away, forcing him to suffer their frenzy.
Art failed reality. Each and every time, it failed in the essence of experience. A work could but achieve the merest hints of what was real and immediate: the tactile discomforts, the pangs of disequilibrium, the smells of endeavour and the shaky unease of a rattled mind. It pawed bluntly at immediate truths and fumbled blindly through all the lies one told oneself in every passing instant, every eternal moment.
He saw now that there was no beginning to anything, and no end, either. Moments fell forward in seamless progression and then fell behind in gathering haze. Colours washed away the moment the observing eyes lost appreciation; or they grew stark and hard when the senselessness of things struck home. He saw now, at the ends of his scraped and stung arms, one hand that etched out creation, and the other that erased it: and by these twin measures he existed, and his entire purpose in living was to insist that he was here, and that this was now, and once those hands fell still, eternally still, all that he proclaimed of himself would vanish.
In his irretrievable absence, they could walk the halls between his paintings; they could walk as things of flesh and heat, blood and bone, thought and unthought, while to either side ran windows on to flattened worlds and reduced lives that were in total all Kadaspala had ever achieved, and with sharpened nail they could poke through those false worlds, and behind them find naught but mortar and stone.