Forge of Darkness (The Kharkanas Trilogy 1)

Gurren nodded.

‘Gurren,’ said Urusander, louder, more formal, ‘how is the water between us?’

Gurren met the man’s eyes and was surprised to see the anguish gone, the eyes now filling with warmth. He nodded again. ‘The water is clear, Lord.’

Serap held back. She saw Lord Urusander transformed; she saw the commander she had always known. All indecisiveness had vanished. There were things to be done and, at last, orders to be issued. Her only regret was Osserc’s absence. She imagined that he had fled after murdering Millick; fled thinking he was now an outlaw and almost certainly disowned by his father for the crime. The boy did not understand his father at all. But then, that baffled regard was mutual.

How could it be otherwise, with so much mud in the water between them? Mud and swirling currents, the endless, helpless stirring of silts so that nothing could ever come to rest.

But on this day, she had seen a dying old man and a heartbroken, guilt-ridden commander stand face to face, and make peace with each other.

They walked now, as would old friends, up to the house, and then disappeared inside.

Mother Dark, you have found a worthy husband here. A most worthy husband.

When she swung round to return to her horse, she looked up and saw, whipping hard in the breeze, the Legion’s banner, high above the gatehouse.

It was done.

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Gurren nodded.

‘Gurren,’ said Urusander, louder, more formal, ‘how is the water between us?’

Gurren met the man’s eyes and was surprised to see the anguish gone, the eyes now filling with warmth. He nodded again. ‘The water is clear, Lord.’

Serap held back. She saw Lord Urusander transformed; she saw the commander she had always known. All indecisiveness had vanished. There were things to be done and, at last, orders to be issued. Her only regret was Osserc’s absence. She imagined that he had fled after murdering Millick; fled thinking he was now an outlaw and almost certainly disowned by his father for the crime. The boy did not understand his father at all. But then, that baffled regard was mutual.

How could it be otherwise, with so much mud in the water between them? Mud and swirling currents, the endless, helpless stirring of silts so that nothing could ever come to rest.

But on this day, she had seen a dying old man and a heartbroken, guilt-ridden commander stand face to face, and make peace with each other.

They walked now, as would old friends, up to the house, and then disappeared inside.

Mother Dark, you have found a worthy husband here. A most worthy husband.

When she swung round to return to her horse, she looked up and saw, whipping hard in the breeze, the Legion’s banner, high above the gatehouse.

It was done.

Urusander’s Legion had returned to Kurald Galain.

Against the bright blue, cloudless sky, the banner was like a golden blade, torn from the sun itself. She squinted at it. Painters called that colour liossan.

In the wake of terrible fever, in a strange, warm stillness that filled her being, Renarr opened her eyes. She saw her father, and with him strangers. The twisted, damaged vision that had claimed her left eye was gone now, and everything seemed impossibly clear. Even the pain of her swollen face was fast fading.

Her father leaned closer. ‘Little girl,’ he said, his eyes wet. ‘Do you see who’s here? It’s Lord Urusander himself.’

Her gaze slipped past her father, to the man standing near, and in the Lord’s face she saw the son. Renarr looked away.

‘Changes, little girl,’ said Gurren, in a tone she’d never before heard from him. ‘In your whole world, Renarr. Changes, blessed changes.’

There was no denying that. Millick was dead. The man she loved was dead, murdered by the Lord’s son. And now here stood the Lord, and her father babbling about how they were going to live in the Great House, and how she would be taken care of from now on, and the Lord was smiling and nodding, and all she could think about was Millick, to whom she had told everything because he saw that she wasn’t the same any more — Millick, weeping and drunk and feebly trying to put her face back together, on his knees beside her telling her how his cousins had got the story of her confession out of him after a cask of ale, and how they laughed at him and called her a whore to his face, until he was driven to madness. Blind rage, he kept saying, trying to explain himself, how his fists just lashed out unseeing when she came upon him beating Eldin and Orult behind the house, how he punched not knowing whom he punched.

And how Witch Hale got her story all wrong, because Millick had gone in hiding from his cousins and their friends, and Renarr got fevered and had to crawl home in the middle of the night, and Renarr’s jaw was too swollen and she couldn’t get the right words past her broken mouth.

Changes. It was a day of changes all right.

THIRTEEN

Kadaspala was not a believer in gods, but he knew that belief could create them. And once made, they bred in kind. He had seen places where discord thrived, where violence spun roots through soil and flesh both, and the only propitiation left to those who dwelt there was the spilling of yet more blood. These were venal gods, the vicious spawn of a stew of wretched emotions and desires. There was no master and no slave: god and mortal fed on each other, like lovers sharing a vile fetish.

He knew that there was power in emotion, and that it could spill out to soak the ground, to stain stone and twist wood; that it could poison children and so renew the malign cycle, generation upon generation. Such people made of their home a god’s lap, and they curled tight within its comforting, familiar confines.

Kadaspala wanted none of it, and yet he was never as immune as he would have liked: even the pronouncement that he stood outside such things was itself an illusion. He was not a believer in gods, but he had his own. They came to him in the simplest of all forms, eschewing even shape and, at times, substance itself. They came to him in a flood, with every moment — indeed, even in his sleep and the dream worlds that haunted it. They howled. They whispered. They caressed. Sometimes, they lied.