And then Udinaas saw, scattered on the floor around the figure, corpses twisted in death. Dark, greenish skin, tusked. A man, a woman, two children. Their bodies had been broken, the ends of shattered bone jutting out from flesh. The way they lay suggested that the white-skinned man had been their killer.
Udinaas was shivering uncontrollably. His hands and feet we numb. ‘Wither? Shadow wraith? Are you with me?’
Silence.
His heart began hammering hard in his chest. This did not feel like dream. It was too real. He felt no dislocation, no whispering assurance of a body lying on its sleeping pallet in an Edur longhouse.
He was here, and he was freezing to death.
Here. In the depths of ice, this world of secrets where time has ceased.
He turned and studied the doorway.
And only then noticed the footprints impressed upon the frost-laden flagstones. Leading out. Bared feet, human, a child’s.
There was no ice visible beyond the portal. Naught but opaque silver as if a curtain had fallen across the entrance.
Feeling ebbing from his limbs, Udinaas backtracked the footprints. To behind the standing figure. Where he saw, after a numbed moment, that the back of the man’s head had been stove in. Hair and skin still attached to the shattered plates of the skull that hung down on the neck. Something like a fist had reached into the figure’s head, tearing through the grey flesh of the brain.
The break looked unaccountably recent.
Tiny tracks indicated that the child had stood behind the figure – no, had appeared behind it, for there were no others to be found. Had appeared … to do what? Reach into a dead man’s skull ? Yet the figure was as tall as an Edur. The child would have had to climb.
His thoughts were slowing. There was a pleasurable languor to his contemplation of this horrid mystery. And he was growing sleepy. Which amused him. A dream that made him sleepy. A dream that will kill me . Would they find a frozen corpse on the sleeping pallet? Would it be taken as an omen?
Oh well, follow the prints… into that silver world . What else could he do?
With a final glance back at the immobile scene of past murder and recent desecration, Udinaas staggered slowly towards the doorway.
The silver enveloped him, and sounds rushed in from all sides. Battle. Screams, the ringing hammering of weapons. But he could see nothing. Heat rolled over him from the left, carrying with it a cacophony of inhuman shrieks.
Contact with the ground beneath vanished, and the sounds dropped, swiftly dwindled to far below. Winds howled, and Udinaas realized he was flying, held aloft on leathery wings. Others of his kind sailed the tortured currents – he could see them now, emerging from the cloud. Grey-scaled bodies the size of oxen, muscle-bunched necks, taloned hands and feet. Long, sloping heads, the jaws revealing rows of dagger-like teeth and the pale gums that held them. Eyes the colour of clay, the pupils vertical slits.
Locqui Wyval. That is our name. Spawn of Starvald Demelain, the squalid children whom none would claim as their own. We are as flies spreading across a rotting feast, one realm after another. D’isthal Wyvalla, Enkar’al, Trol, we are a plague of demons in a thousand pantheons.
Savage exultation. There were things other than love upon which to thrive.
A tide of air pushed – drove him and his kind to one side. Bestial screams from his kin as something loomed into view.
Eleint! Soletaken but oh so much draconic blood. Tiam’s own.
Bone-white scales, the red of wounds smeared like misty paint, monstrously huge, the dragon the Wyval had chosen to follow loomed alongside them.
And Udinaas knew its name.
Silchas Ruin. Tiste Andii, who fed in the wake of his brother – fed on Tiam’s blood, and drank deep. Deeper than Anomander Rake by far. Darkness and chaos. He would have accepted the burden of godhood… had he been given the chance.
Udinaas knew now what he was about to witness. The sembling on the hilltop far below. The betrayal. Shadow’s murder of honour in the breaking of vows. A knife in the back and the screams of the Wyval here in the roiling skies above the battlefield. The shadow wraith had not lied. The legacy of the deed remained in the Edur’s brutal enslavement of Tiste Andii spirits. Faith was proved a lie, and in ignorance was found weakness. The righteousness of the Edur stood on shifting sands.
Silchas Ruin. The weapons of those days possessed terrifying power, but his had been shattered. By a K’Chain Che’Malle matron’s death-cry.
The silver light flickered. A physical wrenching, and he found himself lying on his sleeping pallet in the Sengar longhouse.
The skin had been torn from his palms, his knees. His clothes were sodden with melted frost.