Cutter was a damned fool. Yes, there had been another woman-his first love, most likely-but she was gone. Time had come to cut the anchor chain. No one could drown for ever. This was what came of being so young, and deftness with knives was a poor replacement for the skill of surviving everything the world could throw in the way. Longing for what could never be found was pointless, a waste of time.
Barathol had left his longing behind, somewhere in the sands of Seven Cities. A sprawl of motionless bodies, mocking laughter disguised as unceasing wind, a lizard perched like a gift on a senseless black-crusted hand. Moments of madness-oh, long before the madness of the T’lan Imass in Aren-when he had railed at remorseless time, at how too late was something that could not be changed-not with blood spilled at the foot of a god, not with a knife poised to carve out his own heart. Too late simply grinned at him, lifeless, too poignant for sanity.
Those two words had begun a chant, then stride by stride a gleeful echo, and they had lifted to a roar in the raiders’ camp, amidst screams and the clash of iron; lifted, yes, into a deafening maelstrom that crashed inside Barathol’s skull, a surging tide with nowhere to go. Too late cannot be escaped. It crooned with every failed parry, every failed dodge from a scything weapon. It exploded in eyes as death hammered home, exploded along with blood and fluids. It lunged in the wake of toppling bodies. It scrawled messages (ever the same message) in the sands dying men crawled across.
He could have chanted for ever, but he had left no one alive. Oh, a dozen horses that he gave away to a caravan some days later, a gift for taking in the half-dead warrior, for treating his raging fever, for cleaning his wounds and burning out infection. They would accept no payment for their efforts-they could do nothing for the bleak anguish in his soul, they explained, and so to ask for anything would be dishonourable. Now a gift, well, that was different.
In the desert nothing disguised time’s cruel face. Its skin was stretched to the bone, its lone eye burned the sky and its gaping mouth was cold and airless as a mountain peak. The traders understood this. They were as much a tribe of the desert as anyone, after all. They gave htm bladders of water-enough to take him to the nearest garrison outpost ‘Ave. give the Mezla that-they know how to build waystations and equip them well. They turn no one away, friend.’
They gave him the strongest of the raiders’ horses, a fine saddle, jerked meat and dried fruit. They gave him feed for the mount to last four days and, finally, they showed him the track he would take, the path that cheated death and yes, it was the only one.
Death stalked him, they said. Waited, for now, out beyond the glare of the dung-fires, but when Barathol finally rode out the reaper with the long legs would set out after him, singing of time, singing of the hunger that never ended, never slowed, never did anything but devour all in its path.
‘When longing comes to you, friend, step not into its snare, for longing is the fatal bait-find yourself in its snare and you will be dragged, dragged through all the time allotted you, Barathol Mekhar, and nothing you grasp will remain, all torn from your fingers. All that you see will race past in a blur. All that you taste will be less than a droplet, quickly stripped away. Longing will drag you into the stalker’s bony arms, and you will have but a single, last look back, on to your life-a moment of clarity that can only be some unknown god’s most bitter gift-and you will understand, all at once, all that you have wasted, all that you let escape, all that you might have had.
‘Now ride, friend. And ‘ware the traps of your mind.’
Too late. Those two words haunted him, would perhaps for ever haunt him.
The cruel chant had filled his head when he’d looked down upon Chaur’s drowned face. Too late!
But he’d spat into that gleeful cry. That time, yes, he had. He had said no and he had won.
Such victories were without measure.
Enough to hold a man up for a while longer. Enough to give him the courage to meet a woman’s eyes, to meet unflinching what he saw there…
In cavorting, clashing light, faces smeared past as they walked through the crowd. Rollicking songs in the local tongue, jars and flasks thrust at them in drunken generosity. Shouted greetings, strangers in clutches by walls, hands groping beneath disordered clothing. The smell of sex everywhere-Barathol slowed and half turned
Scillara was laughing. ‘You lead us into most unusual places, Barathol. This street called out to you, did it?’
Chaur was staring at the nearest pair, mouth hanging open as his head unconsciously began bobbing in time with their rhythmic thrusts.
‘Gods below,’ Barathol muttered. ‘I wasn’t paying much attention.’