Forge of Darkness (The Kharkanas Trilogy 1)

The water was deep, the bank dropping off sharply. He pulled off his boots and leggings and, naked from the waist down, held on to a branch and settled into the bitter cold water. The currents would cleanse him — they would have to as he was not about to let go or risk trying to hold on with one hand. He did not know how to swim.

Bursa edged down the bank. ‘We had someone keeping an eye on you.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Narad replied in grunts, still gripping the branch and feeling his feet and legs growing numb.

‘Standard doctrine,’ Bursa replied. ‘No one is left on their own, even if it looks like they are. You’re a soldier of the Legion now, Narad. Initiated on a stream of shit and piss.’ He laughed again.

Shaking his head, Narad clambered free of the river. He looked down at his pale, thin legs. They seemed clean enough. He went to the soiled clothing.

‘Throw the trousers away,’ Bursa said. ‘I’ve got a spare pair that you can have, with a rope belt which I think you’ll need.’

‘Thank you, sir. I’ll pay you back.’

‘Don’t insult me, Narad. This kind of debt means nothing in the Legion. Who knows, maybe one day you’ll make the same offer to someone else, and so it goes.’

‘Yes sir. Thanks.’

‘Come back up with me. We have a wedding to attend.’

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The water was deep, the bank dropping off sharply. He pulled off his boots and leggings and, naked from the waist down, held on to a branch and settled into the bitter cold water. The currents would cleanse him — they would have to as he was not about to let go or risk trying to hold on with one hand. He did not know how to swim.

Bursa edged down the bank. ‘We had someone keeping an eye on you.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ Narad replied in grunts, still gripping the branch and feeling his feet and legs growing numb.

‘Standard doctrine,’ Bursa replied. ‘No one is left on their own, even if it looks like they are. You’re a soldier of the Legion now, Narad. Initiated on a stream of shit and piss.’ He laughed again.

Shaking his head, Narad clambered free of the river. He looked down at his pale, thin legs. They seemed clean enough. He went to the soiled clothing.

‘Throw the trousers away,’ Bursa said. ‘I’ve got a spare pair that you can have, with a rope belt which I think you’ll need.’

‘Thank you, sir. I’ll pay you back.’

‘Don’t insult me, Narad. This kind of debt means nothing in the Legion. Who knows, maybe one day you’ll make the same offer to someone else, and so it goes.’

‘Yes sir. Thanks.’

‘Come back up with me. We have a wedding to attend.’

Narad followed Bursa back on to the road. Seeing his nakedness, the men laughed and the women crowed.

‘That water was cold,’ Narad explained.

The afternoon light was fading. Hobbling on blistered feet, the swelling on his thigh now reaching to the knee, Kadaspala made his way down the slope of the road’s bank. He was spent, too weary to go on. He could see a battered lean-to among the young trees at the forest’s edge. It would have to do for this night.

Arriving, he paused to study the old camp. The ancient necessity for shelter was simple in its beginnings, he reflected, before it strived for such elaborations as to achieve absurdity. But there was nothing elaborate or absurd about this humble construction. It would need work to keep the rain from him, but he knew that there would be no rain, not this night. Beyond that, this shelter’s only surviving function was to comfort the mind.

With a small fire flickering before it, smoke wafting in along with the heat, to keep the insects at bay, he would sleep like a king, albeit a hungry, battered one. When he arrived at Andarist’s house, he would appear like a pauper, a destitute wastrel. Would anyone even recognize him? He imagined a familiar Houseblade grasping him by the scruff of the neck and marching him behind an outbuilding, for a lesson in propriety.

He saw his father’s disgust, his sister’s shock. Hostage Cryl would laugh and drape an arm across his shoulders. All this on the morrow, then. A return to civilization for the wandering artist, the mad painter of portraits, the fool and his brushes.

But even this scene, conceived so tenderly in his mind, was but an illusion. Tiste were killing Tiste. Today’s righteous cause is religion. The gods are paying attention, after all. Wanting you to die in their name. Why? To prove your loyalty, of course. And what of their loyalty, you might wonder? Has your god blessed you and your life? Answered your every prayer? Given proof of its omnipotence?

Where is this god’s loyalty to you? Not loyal enough to spare your life which you give in its name. Not loyal enough to steer you past tragedy and grief, loss and misery. Not loyal enough to save your loved ones. Or the children who had to die as proof of that selfsame loyalty.

No, today the sack is filled with religion. Tomorrow it will be something else. The joy lies in beating it.

‘Poor Enesdia,’ he muttered as he sat down beneath the flimsy shelter. ‘The wrong wedding. At the wrong time.’ Bruised petals on the black currents.

He had asked, once, to paint a portrait of Lord Anomander. This in itself was almost unprecedented. Kadaspala was asked: he did not ask. But, that one time, he had, because he had seen something in that young highborn. Something different. He knew that he would find no answer to this mystery without day upon day devoted to piercing the mien of Anomander of House Purake, to slicing it away sliver by sliver with each stroke of his brush, down to the bone and then through that bone. No one, not even a highborn, should possess what Anomander possessed — that almost ancient assurance, and eyes that saw across a thousand years in an instant.

In other flesh, he would see it as madness. As tyranny, or an historian’s jaded, cynical regard, or both, since surely every historian was a tyrant at heart, so fiercely armed were they with the weapons of fact and truth; and if tyranny did not thrive in delusion and self-delusion, then it thrived nowhere at all. He would know the first honest historian he saw — the one broken and weeping and well beyond words or even a meeting of gazes. Instead, those he knew were mostly smug with their presumed knowledge, and on board or canvas their visages were as flat as anyone else’s.