Deadhouse Gates

'The youngest son,' List said, staring down at the primitive tomb. His face was frightening to look at, for it wore a father's grief, as raw as if the child's death was but yesterday – a grief that had, if anything, grown with the tortured, unfathomable passage of two hundred thousand years.



He stands guard still, that Jaghut ghost. The statement, a silent utterance that was both simple and obvious, nevertheless took the historian's breath away. How to comprehend this . . .



'How old?' Duiker's voice was as parched as the Odhan that awaited them.



'Five. The T'lan Imass chose this place for him. The effort of killing him would have proved too costly, given that the rest of the family still awaited them. So they dragged the child here – shattered his bones, every one, as many times as they could on so small a frame – then pinned him beneath this rock.'



Duiker had thought himself beyond shock, beyond even despair, yet his throat closed up at List's toneless words. The historian's imagination was too sharp for this, raising images in his mind that seared him with overwhelming sorrow. He forced himself to look away, watched the activities among the soldiers and Wickans thirty paces distant. He realized that they worked mostly in silence, speaking only as their tasks required, and then in low, strangely subdued tones.



'Yes,' List said. 'The father's emotions are a pall unrelieved by time – so powerful, so rending, those emotions, that even the earth spirits had to flee. It was that or madness. Coltaine should be informed – we must move quickly across this land.'



'And ahead? On the Nenoth plain?'



'It gets worse. It was not just the children that the T'lan Imass pinned – still breathing, still aware – beneath rocks.'



'But why?' The question ripped from Duiker's throat.



'Pogroms need no reason, sir, none that can weather challenge, in any case. Difference in kind is the first recognition, the only one needed, in fact. Land, domination, pre-emptive attacks – all just excuses, mundane justifications that do nothing but disguise the simple distinction. They are not us. We are not them.'



'Did the Jaghut seek to reason with them, Corporal?'



'Many times, among those not thoroughly corrupted by power – the Tyrants – but you see, there was always an arrogance in the Jaghut, and it was a kind that could claw its way up your back when face to face. Each Jaghut's interest was with him or herself. Almost exclusively. They viewed the T'lan Imass no differently from the way they viewed ants underfoot, herds on the grasslands, or indeed the grass itself. Ubiquitous, a feature of the landscape. A powerful, emergent people, such as the T'lan Imass were, could not but be stung—'



'To the point of swearing a deathless vow?'



'I don't believe that, at first, the T'lan Imass realized how difficult the task of eradication would be. Jaghut were very different in another way – they did not flaunt their power. And many of their efforts in self-defence were ... passive. Barriers of ice – glaciers – they swallowed the lands around them, even the seas, swallowed whole continents, making them impassable, unable to support the food the mortal Imass required.'



'So they created a ritual that would make them immortal—'



'Free to blow like the dust – and in the age of ice, there was plenty of dust.'



Duiker's gaze caught Coltaine standing near the edge of the trail. 'How far,' he asked the man beside him, 'until we leave this area of... of sorrow?'



'Two leagues, no more than that. Beyond are Nenoth's true grasslands, hills . . . tribes, each one very protective of what little water they possess.'



'I think I had better speak with Coltaine.'



'Aye, sir.'



The Dry March, as it came to be called, was its own testament to sorrow. Three vast, powerful tribes awaited them, two of them, the Tregyn and the Bhilard, striking at the beleaguered column like vipers. With the third, situated at the very western edge of the plains – the Khundryl – there was no immediate contact, though it was felt that that would not last.



The pathetic herd accompanying the Chain of Dogs died on that march, animals simply collapsing, even as the Wickan cattle-dogs converged with fierce insistence that they rise – dead or no – and resume the journey. When butchered, these carcasses were little more than ropes of leathery flesh.



Starvation joined the terrible ravaging thirst, for the Wickans refused to slaughter their horses and attended them with eloquent fanaticism that no-one dared challenge. The warriors sacrificed of themselves to keep their mounts alive. One petition from Nethpara's Council, offering to purchase a hundred horses, was returned to the noble-born leader smeared in human excrement.