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’Captain will do, Twist I don’t need re of my precious blood Aware, are they? How, and just as important, how do you know they know?’
’We stand on their land, Captain The soul beneath us is the blood of their ancestors Blood whispers The Moranth hear’
’Surprised you can hear anything inside that helm of yours,’ Paran muttered, tired and irritated ’Never mind I want you over us anyway’
The commander slowly nodded
The captain turned and surveyed his company Veteran soldiers -- virtually every one of thely professional He wondered what it would be like to see out through the eyes of any one of theh the layers of the soul’s exhaustion that Paran had barely begun to find within himself Soldiers now and soldiers to the end of their days -- none would dare leave to find peace Solicitude and calm would unlock that safe prison of cold control -- the only thing keeping them sane
Whiskeyjack had said to Paran that, once this as done, the Bridgeburners would be retired Forcibly if necessary
Armies possessed traditions, and these had less to do with discipline than with the fraught truths of the hu each and every recruit And rituals at the end, a fornition in every way iift was a kind of sanity, a uidance, cannot be abandoned and left lost in sonizable and indifferent to their lives Re the ineffable Yet, when it’s done, what is the once-soldier? What does he or she beco backward, eyes on the past -- its horrors, its losses, its grief, its sheer heart-bursting living? The ritual is a turning round, a facing forward, a gentle and respectful hand like a guide on the shoulder
Sorroas a steady, faint susurration within Paran, a tide that neither ebbed nor flowed, yet threatened to drown him none the less
And when the White Faces find us each and every man and woman here could end up with slit throats, and Queen help in to wonder if it would be a s and the quorl was airborne, the Black Moranth commander perched on the moulded saddle
Paran watched the, then turned to his coeburners Time to march’
The dark, close air was filled with sickly gling like a swie current After a few , slipped sideways into yet another warren
It fared little better Some kind of infection had seeped in fro every sorcerous path he atte nausea, he pushed himself forward
This has the stench of the Crippled God … yet the enemy whose lands we approach is the Pannion Seer Granted, an obvious means of self-defence, sufficient to explain the coincidence Then again, since when do I believe in coincidences? No, this co of scents hinted at a deeper truth That bastard ascendant may well be chained, his body broken, but I can feel his hand -- even here -- twitching at invisible threads
The faintest of se
He shifted warrens once again, and found hi A presence was ahead, leaving a cooled, strangely lifeless wake Well, perhaps no surprise -- I’e of Hood’s own realm now, after all None the less … Unease pattered within him like sleet He pushed his nervousness down Hood’s warren was resisting the poison better than round beneath hih the wizard’s ht bled down fro The haze filling the air felt oily, thick enough on either side to make the path seem like a tunnel
Quick Ben’s steps slowed The clay ground was no longer slyphs in colu, the wizard suspected, yet… He crouched and reached down ’Freshly cut … or tile fros’
Stepping carefully to avoid the glyphs, Quick Ben padded forward
He skirted a broad sinkhole filled with painted pebbles -- offerings to Hood from some holy teuages fronored or forgotten Even clerks die, Hood -- why not put the all this up? Of all our traits to survive the passage of death, surely obsessivenessthem