‘Climb aboard, you oaf, or drown!’

‘Climb aboard,’ shrieked Sweetest Sufferance, ‘and maybe drown anyway!’

Gruntle saw that the corpse had tied itself to the wheel.

Gods below, what am I doing here?

A roar exploded on the reef and Gruntle whirled round to see the gust front’s devastating arrival, a wall of thrashing, spume-crested water, rising, charging, lift-ing high to devour the entire island.

He lunged for the carriage. As he scrambled up the side of the carriage and fumbled for the lashing, Reccanto Ilk, squinting, asked, ‘Is it here yet?’

The horses began screaming in earnest.

And all at once, the shortsighted idiot had his answer.

xx

You would call us weak?

Fear talks out of the side of the mouth

Each item in your list is an attack

That turns its stab upon yourself

Displaying the bright terrors ‹

That flaw the potential for wonder

You drone out your argument

As if stating naught but what is obvious

And so it is but not in the way you think

The pathos revealed is your paucity

Of wisdom disguised as plain speak

From your tower of reason

As if muscle alone bespoke strength

As if height measures the girth of will

As if the begotten snips thorns from the rose

As if the hearthfire cannot devour a forest

As if courage flows out lost monthly

In wasted streams of dead blood

Who is this to utter such doubt?

Priest of a cult false in its division

I was there on the day the mob awoke

Storming the temple of quailing half-men

You stood gape-jawed behind them

As your teachings were proved wrong

Shrink back from true anger

Flee if you can this burgeoning strength

The shape of the rage against your postulated

Justifications is my soldier’s discipline

Sure in execution and singular in purpose

Setting your head atop the spike

– Last Day Of The Man Sect, Sevelenatha Of Genabaris (Cited In ‘Treatise On Untenable Philosophies Among Cults’, Genorthu Stulk)

Many children, early on, acquire a love of places they have never been. Often, such wonder is summarily crushed on the crawl through the sludge of murky, confused adolescence on to the flat, cracked pan of adulthood with its airless vistas ever lurking beyond the horizon. Oh, well, sometimes such gifts of curiosity, delight and adventure do indeed survive the stationary trek, said victims ending up as artists, scholars, inventors and other criminals bent on confounding the commonplace and the platitudes of peaceful living. But never mind them for now, since, for all their flailing subversions, nothing really ever changes unless in service to convenience.

Bainisk was still, in the sheltered core of his being, a child. Ungainly with growth, yes, awkward in a body in which he had not yet caught up, but he had yet to surrender his love of the unknown. And so it should be wholly understandable that he and young Harllo should have shared a spark of delight and wonder, the kind that wove tight between them so that not even the occasional snarl could truly sever the binding.

In the week following that fateful tear in the trust between them, Harllo had come to believe that he was once more truly alone in the world. Wounds scabbed over and scabs fell away to reveal faint scars that soon faded almost out of exis-tence, and the boy worked on, crawling into fissures, scratching his way along fetid, gritty cracks in the deep rock. Choking at times on bad air, stung by blind centipedes and nipped by translucent spiders. Bruised by shifting stones, his eyes wide in the darkness as he searched out the glitter of ore on canted, close walls.

At week’s end, however, Bainisk was with him once more, passing him a jug of silty lakewater as he backed out of a fissure and sat down on the warm, dry stone of the tunnel floor, and in this brief shared moment the tear slowly began to heal, reknitted in the evasiveness of their eyes that would not yet lock on to the reality of their sitting side by side-far beneath the world’s surface, two beating hearts that echoed naught but each other-and this was how young boys made amends. Without words, with spare gestures that, in their rarity, acquired all the necessary significance. When Harllo was done drinking he passed back the jug.

‘Venaz is on me all the time now,’ Bainisk said. ‘I tried it, with him again, I mean. But it’s not the same. We’re both too old for what we had, once. All he ever talks about is stuff that bores me.’

‘He just likes hurting people.’

Bainisk nodded. ‘I think he wants to take over my job. He argued over every or-der I gave him.’