After a long moment, Degalla shook her head. ‘Of course not. You are right.’
‘Still,’ Jureg said in a low murmur, ‘I cannot but wonder …’
‘What now, husband?’
‘If Caplo could indeed hear Manalle and Hedeg, from so far away … perhaps we must assume he has heard us just now, as well.’
She glared at him.
* * *
‘Why did you speak so of Draconus?’ Finarra Stone demanded, once they were well beyond the two highborn.
Resh shrugged. ‘They irritated me.’
‘So you sent a viper into their snug bed. Does being petty please you?’
‘Sometimes,’ he admitted.
Caplo surprised her by speaking. ‘I was once a man with few doubts, Warden. Until the day I looked into Father Skelenal’s eyes, and saw in them a truth I could not countenance. Our god has been slain, but in the time before that death – in the decade upon decade of service and worship – that old man was a monster in our midst. We knew it, and yet we did nothing. In his eyes, Warden, I saw us all reflected, and liked it not.’
‘I am not aware of anything monstrous,’ Finarra said, ‘but then, why would I be? Yours is a secretive temple.’
‘Secretive, yes. Curious, isn’t it, how that habit so quickly devours propriety, decency, integrity, and indeed love. Beware any congress, Warden, that indulges in secrecy – you can be certain that it does not have your interests in mind, nor will it accord you the proper respect as befits the innocent, or, as they might label you, the ignorant. The secretive mind starts at every shadow, for it has peopled its world with suspicion.’
‘You describe a poisonous pit, Caplo, one in which I have no desire to dwell.’
‘Such a congress assembles a world in which assassins are necessary,’ Caplo said. ‘Such a congress may speak and act in the name of justice, but in justice it does not believe. Its only faith lies in efficacy, and the illusion of control it offers.’
‘In your world, then,’ said Finarra, ‘hope is fruitless.’
‘Not at all, Warden. That fruit is well fermented, and given freely to the uninitiated, until drunks stagger down every street, sleep in every alley. Hope is the wine, forgetfulness the reward. We will pour it down your throats from the moment of your birth, until the instant of your blessed death.’
‘You propose an end to secrecy, Caplo Dreem?’
‘I have the eyes to pierce every shadow. The ears to track every footfall. I have the claws to carve out the hidden-away, huddling in their hidden places. But imagine, Warden, my bitter gift, and its grisly promise. Exposure. Revelation. The insipid laid bare, the liars dragged out into day’s light, all the venal creatures who so thrive with their secrets.’
Warlock Resh sighed, loudly. ‘He goes on like this, Finarra Stone. Promises of … something cataclysmic.’
She grunted. ‘I’ve seen the same promise countless times, warlock, in the eyes of the fort’s mouser.’
There was a pause, and then Resh laughed.
Scowling, Caplo made much of drawing his hood back up, once more hiding his face.
* * *
There had been a child filled with laughter, and though she possessed her name, Lahanis recalled little of that strange – and strangely frail – creature who had dwelt so blissfully among the Borderswords. It was a memory that dwelt in summer meadows, or racing beneath the shadows of massive trees, with insects buzzing in and out of startling sunlight, and the sound of a warm wind through leaves. Boys had chased her, but she was quicker than any of them, cleverer besides. Though young, perhaps impossibly so, she had made a game of their desires, and found it easy to mock their confusion, their troubled urges for something more. The awakening of mysteries must have haunted her as well, she suspected, but she had no recollection of that. Every scene pulled from the past found that laughing child at the centre of a web, in command of everything, but understanding nothing.
The girl, with her piping laughter, belonged in a world of delusion, not yet spun dangerous, not yet tangled and treacherous. The seasons fought wars in her memory, but each time, echoed by the shrill peal of the girl’s voice, summer emerged triumphant, filling the world left behind with scented air on soft breezes and stubborn flowers disdainful of spring’s bright but brief glory.
Laughter was lost now, and Lahanis could think of it only as a child’s toy, dropped on to the ground, forgotten amidst the tufts of yellowed grasses that rose unevenly above the snow like broken baskets. Summer too was dead, its death-cry fading on cold winds, its funeral made into its own season of leaves falling like ashes. And the child who had known both laughter and summer, who had dwelt in that lively, colour-splashed world, well, somewhere her bones hid beneath the glittering skin and lifeless muscle of ice and snow.
This new child belonged to winter, finding her voice in the rasp of knife-blades against a whetstone, drawn to the momentary heat of spilled blood and cut-open bodies, last breaths slipping out in thin white streams, and all the stains that fear and pain made in scuffed snow.
She cared little for Glyph and his reasons for this new war. She was indifferent to the bitter grief of the hunters, and their anguish at discovering that no amount of murder could fill the emptiness inside them. For Lahanis, it was enough that killing was taking place; enough that summer’s green forest was transformed into winter’s hunting ground, and she was free of the webs of the past.
For all that, and her habit of avoiding the priest with the scarred face, she had felt the man’s attention drawn to her, like threads sent out to ensnare her, and this made Lahanis uneasy. There were many kinds of hunting, she now understood, and one of them was intent, born of focus or even obsession. It bore the face of a boy grown past his confusion, with the lure of mystery beckoning, where all games vanished and suddenly everything was in earnest. Even the laughing Lahanis, in those lying summers, had known enough to be wary of such boys among the pack pursuing her.