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Oh, hurry with this latest frenzy of improvements Feel what you feel, old man It’s a new emotion to you, but one the rest of us know very well It’s called fear The seven K’ell Hunters you sent south yesterday, the ones that passed us on the road they won’t be co the southern sky at night it’s coh -- you’ve angered dear Lady Envy She’s not nice when she’s angry Did you visit the carnage in Bastion? Did you send your favourite Urdomen there to return with a detailed report? Did the news turn your legs to water? It should have The wolf and the dog, huge and silent, ripping through the press of humanity The T’lan Ih your vaunted elites And the Seguleh, oh, the Seguleh The punitive arance

The pain in Toc’s stohtened, shrunk, become an almost senseless core of need, a need that had itself starved His ribs were sharp and distinct beneath stretched skin Fluids were swelling his belly His joints ached inter in their sockets The only taste he knew these days was the occasional scrap, and the malty bitterness of his own saliva, washed away every now and then by stale, wine-tinted water froon of ale reserved for the First Child’s favoured few

Toc’s fellow lieutenants -- and indeed Anaster hih fed They welcomed the endless corpses thecauldrons were ever full The rewards of power

The metaphorat that Here, a the brutal truth Our rulers devour us They always have How could I ever have believed otherwise? I was a soldier, once I was the violent assertion of soed, not a difficult truth to recognize in himself His soul torn by the horrors he saw all around hier and fanaticisnition into so, especially the essential goodness of his kind -- had left him cold, hardened and feral

Yet he would not eat human flesh Better to devour myself froest all that I was This is the last reun None the less, he was co No, stay away froht

He had no idea what Anaster had seen in hiifted flesh, he offered to the world nothing but his presence, the sharpness of his lone eye -- seeing all that could be seen -- and yet the First had descried hiranted him a lieutenancy

But I coies, the endless difficulties ofan army even as anarchistic as this one -- I attend Anaster’s s in silence I am asked for no opinions I make no reports What is it he wants of me?

Suspicions still swirled dark and deep beneath the numbed surface He wondered if Anaster somehoho he was Was he about to be delivered into the hands of the Seer? It was possible -- in what the world had beco Reality itself had surrendered its rules -- the living conceived by the dead, the savage love in the eyes of the wo hope that they would take within the body itself sought one last chance to escape the finality of oblivion -- even as the soul drowned in darkness Love, not lust These woiven their hearts to the moment of death Should the seed take root

Anaster was the eldest of the first generation A pale, gangly youth with yellow-stained eyes and lank, black hair, leading the vast ar of inhuman beauty, as if no soul resided behind the perfect entle touch, but he denied them all Only his mother would he let come close; to stroke his hair, rest a sun-darkened, wrinkled hand on his shoulder

Toc feared her more than anyone else, more than Anaster and his rando demonic lit her eyes fro ht Vows of ain the e hen the man died beneath her A tale oft repeated A multitude of witnesses Other women of the Tenescowri flocked to her Perhaps it was her act of power over helpless men; perhaps it was her brazen theft of their involuntarily spilled seed; perhaps the madness simply spread from one to the next