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The man approached Lenk found it hard to keep track of hie His for each ti when the wind blew dust that beca with an erratic fluidity Lenk had only seen in dreams

He did not reat stare He did notHe turned and watched hi coloom

‘This … this isn’t real,’ he told hian to ache ‘Have I seen this before?’

‘One of us has’

He turned and saw h softer of body and eye than the one that had just co step, and each time they appeared in his vision, their faces were harder set There was fear there, hate there, intent there

They were clad in old armour, carried old blades, old spears Their cloaks trailed behind theether upon their breasts, Lenk saw a sigil

An iron gauntlet clenching thirteen obsidian arrows

‘The House,’ he whispered He hadn’t seen it since he had first accepted the task of pursuing the toli Trinity, the ainst the deainst oing to …?’ Lenk began to ask

‘You know the answer to that’

‘They’re going into the cave’

‘Answers lie in there’

‘Should I …?’

The voice said nothing He was left standing, watching as the men vanished, one by one, into the cavern He was left standing as the river fell silent He was left standing, watching, wondering Wiser, he thought, not to follow ghostly hallucinations into lightless caverns born of dead forests

But he did Going back, after all, was not an option

It never was

Thirty-Eight

THE DEAD, HONOURED AND

IMPOTENT

Gariath did not fear silence Gariath feared nothing

Still, he found himself deeply uncomfortable with it Ordinarily, discomfort wasn’t such a probles, would eventually becoer, which would warrant further beatings until only tranquillity reer and discomfort were frequently le the intangible

He had tried

And he had failed, so he reible, fleshless silence as he stalked through the forest

Occasionally he paused, fanning out his ear-frills to listen for an errant whisper, a trace ofHe kneould continue to hear nothing

Grandfather had left him

He wasn’t sure what had happened to cause it, but he was certain of it now Not merely because he hadn’t seen, heard or sed hiht It was a deeper absence, the perpetual, phanto lost

Or a relative …

He continued on through the forest The silence continued to close in around hih it were ne Not so unreasonable, he thought; he had lived his life without silence thus far As near as he re in a world that thundered against the of pups met with the roar of rivers, the mutter of elders accompanied by the rumble of thunder

Since then, he had experienced any nurunts, cackles, chuckles and countless, countless bodily noises That, too, seeh

For the first time, he heard silence

He didn’t like it

And yet, he pressed ahead, instead of returning to the cheerful, stupid noises and their fleshy, meaty sources Theirs was silence of another loud and useless kind, though today it had beco silence

He had suilt, hatred, despair and abject self-pity All of them carried it, so it like a mane about their heads

Well, he corrected hih to find Lenk without a siven Gariath pause when they briefly crossed paths thatscents of exasperation Today, when they brushed past each other without a word and exchanged a fleeting glance, he knew the young on Today, he had felt a chill when hesensation, there and gone in less than an instant; the human was the saht, the same human who had fallen into useless babble, the salance before he leapt overboard to pursue the Shen

But it had been clear in Lenk’s eyes, in a silence that struck the whistle of the breeze dead, that Gariath was not the saon, about the pointy-eared one’s plot to kill hifaces, about anything Because the ht, and thebut silence

He snorted to hi in it all It was starting to aggravate his that would make the most noise when struck Trees, rocks, leaves: all defiantly, annoyinglyhis feet on the earth as he did, crunching leaves under his soles He needed to break the silence, he thought as he pushed through the underbrush and stepped into a great clearing a to speak to

And, in the instant he felt the sun upon his skin, he knew he had found it

He craned his neck up to take it all in: its rey face; its weathered, rounded crown; its trereat pond

An Elder, the faan and ended, loomed over him He surveyed it, unmarked and unadorned as it was, and felt a smile creep across his lips The Elders were the basis, the focus, the stability behind any Rhega fa by this one, it had borne many burdens of many of his people

His people

They had been here in nuh to raise this rock and call it their earth, once

Once … He felt his so

The scent here was faint; that couldn’t be right, he thought The Elder was titanic The scent of the Rhega, of their memories, their families, their children, their wounds, their feasts, their births, their elders … he should have been overwhelht of the ancestral aronant rivers, moss-covered rocks Not alive, not dead, like the rot between a dying winter and a bloody newborn spring, barely faint enough for a single le statement to make itself known

But it did aras succumbed to his wounds and died here, the scent said

Raha bled into the earth and died here

Shuraga fell and, his arms ripped from his body, died here

Ishath held his dead pup in his arms and ate no more …

Garasha screamed until his breath left hiht and never returned …

Pups fell, elders fell, all fell …

He drew in their scent, though he did so with ever-di hi the the scent for anything, any birth, anylist of death