Midnight Tides by Steven Erikson
‘Then there will be war,’ Trull whispered.
‘There is always war, brother,’ Fear replied. ‘Faiths, words and swords: history resounds with their interminable clash.’
‘That, and the breaking of bones,’ Rhulad said, with the smile of a man with a secret.
Foolish conceit, for Tomad could not miss it and he leaned forward. ‘Rhulad Sengar, you speak like a blind elder with a sack full of wraiths. I am tempted to drag you across this table and choke the gloat from your face.’
Trull felt sweat prickle beneath his clothes. He saw the blood leave his brother’s face. Oh, Father, you deliver a wound deeper than you could ever have imagined. He glanced over at Mayen and was startled to see something avid in her eyes, a malice, a barely constrained delight.
‘I am not so young, Father,’ Rhulad said in a rasp, ‘nor you so old, to let such words pass—’
Tomad’s fist thumped the tabletop, sending cups and plates clattering. ‘Then speak like a man, Rhulad! Tell us all this dread knowledge that coils your every strut and has for the past week! Or do you seek to part tender thighs with your womanish ways? Do you imagine you are the first young warrior who seeks to walk in step with women? Sympathy, son, is a poor path to lust—’
Rhulad was on his feet, his face twisting with rage. ‘And which bitch would you have me bed, Father? To whom am I promised? And in whose name? You have leashed me here in this village and then you mock when I strain.’ He glared at the others, fixing at last on Trull. ‘When the war begins, Hannan Mosag will announce a sacrifice. He must. A throat will be opened to spill down the bow of the lead ship. He will choose me, won’t he?’
‘Rhulad,’ Trull said, ‘I have heard no such thing—’
‘He will! I am to bed three daughters! Sheltatha Lore, Sukul Ankhadu and Menandore!’
A plate skittered out from the hands of a slave and cracked onto the tabletop, spilling the shellfish it held. As the slave reached forward to contain the accident, Uruth’s hands snapped out and grasped the Letherii by the wrists. A savage twist to reveal the palms.
The skin had been torn from them, raw, red, glittering wet and cracked.
‘What is this, Udinaas?’ Uruth demanded. She rose and yanked him close.
‘I fell—’ the Letherii gasped.
‘To weep your wounds onto our food? Have you lost your mind?’
‘Mistress!’ another slave ventured, edging forward. ‘I saw him come in earlier – he bore no such wounds then, I swear it!’
‘He is the one who fought the Wyval!’ another cried, backing away in sudden terror.
‘Udinaas is possessed!’ the other slave shrieked.
‘Quiet!’ Uruth set a hand against Udinaas’s forehead and pushed back hard. He grunted in pain.
Sorcery swirled out to surround the slave. He spasmed, then went limp, collapsing at Uruth’s feet.
‘There is nothing within him,’ she said, withdrawing a trembling hand.
Mayen spoke. ‘Feather Witch, attend to Uruth’s slave.’
The young Letherii woman darted forward. Another slave appeared to help her drag the unconscious man away.
‘I saw no insult in the slave’s actions,’ Mayen continued. ‘The wounds were indeed raw, but he held cloth against them.’ She reached out and lifted the plate to reveal the bleached linen that Udinaas had used to cover his hands.
Uruth grunted and slowly sat. ‘None the less, he should have informed me. And for that oversight he must be punished.’
‘You just raped his mind,’ Mayen replied. ‘Is that not sufficient?’
Silence.
Daughters take us, the coming year should prove interesting. One year, as demanded by tradition, and then Fear and Mayen would take up residence in a house of their own.
Uruth simply glared at the younger woman, then, to Trull’s surprise, she nodded. ‘Very well, Mayen. You are guest this night, and so I will abide by your wishes.’
Through all of this Rhulad had remained standing, but now he slowly sat once more.
Tomad said, ‘Rhulad, I know of no plans to resurrect the ancient blood sacrifice to announce a war. Hannan Mosag is not careless with the lives of his warriors, even those as yet unblooded. I cannot fathom how you came to believe such a fate awaited you. Perhaps,’ he added, ‘this journey you are about to undertake will provide you with the opportunity to become a blooded warrior, and so stand with pride alongside your brothers. So I shall pray.’
It was a clear overture, this wish for glory, and Rhulad displayed uncharacteristic wisdom in accepting it with a simple nod.
Neither Feather Witch nor Udinaas returned, but the remaining slaves proved sufficient in serving the rest of the meal.
And for all this, Trull still could not claim any understanding of Mayen, Fear’s betrothed.
****
A stinging slap and he opened his eyes.
To see Feather Witch’s face hovering above his own, a face filled with rage. ‘You damned fool!’ she hissed.
Blinking, Udinaas looked around. They were huddled in his sleeping niche. Beyond the cloth hanging, the low sounds of eating and soft conversation.
Udinaas smiled.
Feather Witch scowled. ‘She—’
‘I know,’ he cut in. ‘And she found nothing.’
He watched her beautiful eyes widen. ‘It is true, then?’
‘It must be.’
‘You are lying, Udinaas. The Wyval hid. Somehow, somewhere, it hid itself from Uruth.’
‘Why are you so certain of that, Feather Witch?’
She sat back suddenly. ‘It doesn’t matter—’
‘You have had dreams, haven’t you?’
She started, then looked away. ‘You are a Debtor’s son. You are nothing to me.’
‘And you are everything to me, Feather Witch.’
‘Don’t be an idiot, Udinaas! I might as well wed a hold rat! Now, be quiet, I need to think.’
He slowly sat up, drawing their faces close once again. ‘There is no need,’ he said. ‘I trust you, and so I will explain. She looked deep indeed, but the Wyval was gone. It would have been different, had Uruth sought out my shadow.’
She blinked in sudden comprehension, then: ‘That cannot be,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘You are Letherii. The wraiths serve only the Edur—’
‘The wraiths bend a knee because they must. They are as much slaves to the Edur as we are, Feather Witch. I have found an ally…’
‘To what end, Udinaas?’
He smiled again, and this time it was a much darker smile. ‘Something I well understand. The repaying of debts, Feather Witch. In full.’
Book Two
Prows Of The Day
We are seized in the age of our youth dragged over this road’s stones spent and burdened by your desires. And unshod hoofs clatter beneath bones to remind us of every fateful charge upon the hills you have sown with frozen seeds in this dead earth. Swallowing ground and grinding bit we climb into the sky so alone in our fretted ways a heaving of limbs and the iron stars burst from your heels baffling urgency warning us of your savage bite.
Destriers (Sons to Fathers)
Fisher kel Tath
Chapter Six
The Errant bends fate,
As unseen armour
Lifting to blunt the blade
On a field sudden
With battle, and the crowd
Jostles blind their eyes gouged out
By the strait of these affairs
Where dark fools dance on tiles
And chance rides a spear
With red bronze
To spit worlds like skulls
One upon the other
Until the seas pour down
To thicken metal-clad hands
So this then is the Errant
Who guides every fate
Unerring
Upon the breast of men.
The Casting of Tiles
Ceda Ankaran Qan
(1059 Burn?
The Tarancede Tower rose from the south side of Trate’s Harbour. Hewn from raw basalt it was devoid of elegance or beauty, reaching like a gnarled arm seven storeys from an artificial island of jagged rocks. Waves hammered it from all sides, flinging spume into the air. There were no windows, no doors, yet a series of glossy obsidian plates ringed the uppermost level, each orie as tall as a man and almost as wide.
Nine similar towers rose above the borderlands, but the Tarancede was the only one to stand above the harsh seas of the north.
The sun’s light was a lurid glare against the obsidian plates, high above a harbour already swallowed by the day’s end. A dozen fisher-boats rode the choppy waters beyond the bay, plying the shelf of shallows to the south. They were well out of the sea-lanes and probably heedless of the three ships that appeared to the north, their full-bellied sails as they drove on down towards the harbour, the air around them crowded with squalling gulls.
They drew closer, and a ship’s pilot scow set out from the main pier to meet them.
The three harvest ships were reflected in the tower’s obsidian plates, sliding in strange ripples from one to the next, the gulls smudged white streaks around them.
The scow’s oars suddenly backed wildly, twisting the craft away.
Shapes swarmed across the rigging of the lead ship. The steady wind that had borne the sails fell, sudden as a drawn breath, and canvas billowed down. The figures flitting above the deck, only vaguely human-shaped, seemed to drift away, like black banners, across the deepening gloom. The gulls spun from their paths with shrill cries.
From the scow an alarm bell began clanging. Not steady. Discordant, a cacophony of panic.
****
No sailor who had lived or would ever live discounted the sea’s hungry depths. Ancient spirits rode the currents of darkness far from the sun’s light, stirring silts that swallowed history beneath endless layers of indifferent silence. Their powers were immense, their appetites insatiable. All that came down from the lit world above settled into their embrace.
The surface of the seas, every sailor knew, was ephemeral. Quaint sketchings across an ever-changing slate, and lives were but sparks, so easily quenched by the demon forces that could rise from far below to shake their beast hides and so up-end the world.
Propitiation was aversion, a prayer to pass unnoticed, to escape untaken. Blood before the bow, dolphins dancing to starboard and a gob of spit to ride blessed winds. The left hand scrubs, the right hand dries. Wind widdershins on the cleats, sun-bleached rags tied to the sea-anchor’s chain. A score of gestures, unquestioned and bound in tradition, all to slide the seas in peace.
None sought to call up the ravelled spirits from those water-crushed valleys that saw no light. They were not things to be bound, after all. Nor bargained with. Their hearts beat in the cycles of the moon, their voice was the heaving storm and their wings could spread from horizon to horizon, in towering white-veined sheets of water that swept all before them.
Beneath the waves of Trate Harbour, with three dead ships like fins on its back, the bound spirit clambered in a surge of cold currents towards shore. The last spears of sunlight slanted through its swirling flesh, and the easing of massive pressures made the creature grow in size, pushing onto the rocky coastlines ahead and to the sides the bay’s own warmer waters, so that the fish and crustaceans of the shallows tumbled up from the waves in mangled shreds of flesh and shattered shell, granting the gulls and land crabs a sudden feast of slaughter.
The spirit lifted the ships, careering wild now, on a single wave that rose high as it swelled shoreward. The docks, which had a few moments earlier been crowded with silent onlookers, became a swarm of fleeing figures, the streets leading inland filling with stampedes that slowed to choking, crushing masses of humanity.
The wave tumbled closer, then suddenly fell away. Hulls thundered at the swift plunge, spars snapped and, on the third ship, the main mast exploded in a cloud of splintered wood. Rocking, trailing wreckage, the harvesters coasted between the piers.
Pressures drawing inward, building once more, the spirit withdrew from the bay. In its wake, devastation.
Glimmering in its obsidian world, the first ship crunched and slid against a pier, and came to a gentle rest. The white flecks of the gulls plunged down to the deck, to begin at long last their feeding. The Tarancede Tower had witnessed all, the smooth tiles near its pinnacle absorbing every flickering detail of the event, despite the failing light.
And, in a chamber beneath the old palace in the city of Letheras, far to the southeast, Ceda Kuru Qan watched. Before him lay a tile that matched those of the distant tower above Trate’s harbour, and, as he stared at the enormous black shadow that had filled the bay and most of the inlet, and was now beginning its slow withdrawal, the sorceror blinked sweat from his eyes and forced his gaze back to those three harvest ships now lolling against the piers.
The gulls and the gathering darkness made it difficult to see much, barring the twisted corpses huddled on the deck, and the last few flickering wraiths.
But Kuru Qan had seen enough.
****
Five wings to the Eternal Domicile, of which only three were complete. Each of the latter consisted of wide hallways with arched ceilings sheathed in gold-leaf. Between elaborate flying buttresses to either side and running the entire length were doorways leading to chambers that would serve as offices and domiciles of the Royal Household’s administrative and maintenance staff. Towards the centre the adjoining rooms would house guards, armouries and trapdoors leading to private passages – beneath ground level – that encircled the entire palace that was the heart of the Eternal Domicile.
At the moment, however, those passages were chest-deep in muddy water, through which rats moved with no particular purpose barring that of, possibly, pleasure. Brys Beddict stood on a landing three steps from the silt-laden flood and watched the up-thrust heads swimming back and forth in the gloom. Beside him stood a palace engineer covered in drying mud.
‘The pumps are next to useless,’ the man was saying. ‘We went with big hoses, we went with small ones, made no difference. Once the pull got strong enough in went a rat, or ten, plugging things up. Besides, the seep’s as steady as ever. Though the Plumbs still swear we’re above the table here.’
‘I’m sure the Ceda will consent to attaching a mage to your crew.’
‘I’d appreciate it, Finadd. All we need is to hold the flow back for a time, so’s we can bucket the water out and the catchers can go down and collect the rats. We lost Ormly last night, the palace’s best catcher. Likely drowned – the fool couldn’t swim. If the Errant’s looking away, we might be spared finding much more than bones. Rats know when it’s a catcher they’ve found, you know.’
‘These tunnels are essential to maintaining the security of the king—’
‘Well, ain’t nobody likely to try using them if they’re flooded—’
‘Not as a means of ingress for assassins,’ Brys cut in. ‘They are to permit the swift passage of guards to any area above that is breached.’
‘Yes, yes. I was only making a joke, Finadd. Of course, you could choose fast swimmers among your guards… all right, never mind. Get us a mage to sniff round and tell us what’s going on and then to stop the water coming in and we’ll take care of the rest.’
‘Presumably,’ Brys said, ‘this is not indicative of subsidence—’
‘Like the other wings? No, nothing’s slumped – we’d be able to tell. Anyway, there’s rumours that those ones are going to get a fresh look at. A new construction company has been working down there, nearby. Some fool bought up the surrounding land. There’s whispers they’ve figured out how to shore up buildings.’
‘Really? I’ve heard nothing about it.’
‘The guilds aren’t happy about it, that’s for sure, since these upstarts are hiring the Unwelcomes – those malcontents who made the List. Paying ’em less than the usual rate, though, which i
Brys slowly turned from his study of the rats and eyed the engineer. ‘Bugg?’
‘Damn, I need a bath. Look at my nails. Yeah, Bugg’s Construction. There must be a Bugg, then, right? Else why name it Bugg’s Construction?’
A shout from a crewman down on the lowest step, then a scream. Wild scrambling up to the landing, where the worker spun round and pointed.
A mass of rats, almost as wide as the passageway itself, had edged into view. Moving like a raft, it crept into the pool of lantern light towards the stairs. In its centre – the revelation eliciting yet another scream from the worker and a curse from the engineer – floated a human head. Yellow-tinted silver hair, a pallid, deeply lined face with a forehead high and broad above staring, narrow-set eyes.
Other rats raced away as the raft slipped to nudge against the lowest step.
The worker gasped, ‘Errant take us, it’s Ormly!’
The eyes flickered, then the head was rising, lifting the nearest rats in the raft with it, humped over shoulders, streaming glimmering water. ‘Who in the Hold else would it be?’ the apparition snapped, pausing to hawk up a mouthful of phlegm and spitting it into the swirling water. ‘Like my trophies?’ he asked, raising his arms beneath the vast cape of rats. ‘Strings and tails. Damned heavy when wet, though.’
‘We thought you were dead,’ the engineer muttered, in a tone suggesting that he would rather it were true.