‘I think so, yes.’
‘Why?’
Seerdomin bared his teeth, ‘Don’t you start with me, Redeemer, The enemy never questions motivations-the enemy doesn’’t chew the ground out beneath its own feet.’ He jabbed a finger back at the woman kneeling in the basin. ‘Site has no questions. No doubts. What she has instead is strength. Power.’
‘That is true,’ said the Redeemer. ‘All of it. It is why those haunted by uncer-tainty must ever retreat. They cannot stand before the self-righteous. Instead, they must slink away, they must hide, they must slip behind the enemy’s lines-’
‘Where every damned one of them is hunted down and silenced-no, Redeemer, you forget, I lived in a tyranny. I kicked in doors. I dragged people away. Do you truly believe unbelievers will be tolerated? Scepticism is a criminal act. Wave the standard or someone else will, and they’ll be coming for you. Redeemer, I have looked in the eyes of my enemy, and they are hard, cold, emptied of everything but hate. I have, yes, seen my own reflection-it haunts me still.’
No further words were exchanged then. Seerdomin looked back down to that woman, the High Priestess who had once been Salind. She was naught but a tool, now, a weapon of some greater force’s will, its hunger. The same force, he now suspected, that drove nations to war, that drove husbands to kill wives and wives to kill husbands. That could take even the soul of a god and crush it into subservience.
When will you rise, Salind? When will you come for me?
This was not the afterlife he had imagined. My fighting should be over. My every need made meaningless, the pain of thoughts for ever silenced.
Is not death’s gift indifference? Blissful, perfect indifference?
She swayed back and forth, gathering strength as only the surrendered could do.
Monkrat walked through the pilgrim camp. Dishevelled as it had once been, now it looked as if a tornado had ripped through it. Tents had sagged; shacks leaned perilously close to collapse. There was rubbish everywhere. The few children still alive after being so long abandoned watched him walk past with haunted eyes peering out from filth-streaked faces. Sores ate into their drawn lips. Their bellies were swollen under the rags. There was nothing to be done for them, and even if there was, Monkrat was not the man to do it. In his mind he had left humanity behind long ago. There was no kinship to nip at his heart. Every fool the world over was on his or her own, or they were slaves. These were the only two states of being-every other one was a lie. And Monkrat had no desire to become a slave, as much as Gradithan or Saemenkelyk might want that.
No, he would remain his own world. It was easier that way. Ease was important. Ease was all that mattered.
Soon, he knew, he would have to escape this madness. Gradithan’s ambitions had lost all perspective-the curse of kelyk. He talked now incessantly of the coming of the Dying God, the imminent end of all things and the glorious rebirth to follow. People talking like that disgusted Monkrat. They repeated themselves so often it soon became grossly obvious that their words were wishes and the wish was that their words might prove true. Round and round, all that wasted breath. The mind so liked to go round and round, so liked that familiar track, the familiarity of it. Round and round, and each time round the mind was just that much stupider. Increment by increment, the range of thoughts narrower, the path underfoot more deeply trenched-he had even noted how the vocabulary diminished, as uneasy notions were cast-away and all the words associated with them, too. The circular track became a mantra, the mantra a proclamation of stupid wishes that things could be as they wanted them, that in fact they were as they wanted them.
Fanaticism was so popular. There had to be a reason for that, didn’t there? Some vast reward to the end of thinking, some great bliss to the blessing of idiocy. Well, Monkrat trusted none of that. He knew how to think for himself and that was all he knew so why give it up? He’d yet to hear an argument that could convince him-but of course, fanatics didn’t use arguments, did they? No, just that fixed gaze, the threat, the reason to fear.
Aye, he’d had enough. Gods below, he was actually longing for the city where he had been born. There in the shadow of Mock’s Hold, and that blackwater bay of the harbour where slept a demon, half buried in mud and tumbled ballast stones. And who knew, maybe there was no one left there to recognize him-and why would they in any case? His old name was on the toll of the fallen, after all, and beside it was Blackdog Wood, 1159 Burn’s Sleep. The Bridgeburners were gone, dead, destroyed in Pale with the remnants mopped up here at Black Coral. But he’d been a casualty long before then, and the years since then had been damned hard-no, it wasn’t likely that he’d be recognized.