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The de

Trull walked to a nearby boulder and sat down on it He lowered his head into his hands and began to weep

After a time the demon moved to stand beside him Then a heavy hand settled on his shoulder

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Invisible in all his portions This thick-skinned thing has borders Indivisible to every sentinel Patrolling the geography of Arbitrary definitions, and yet the Mountains have ground down The fires died, and so streams Thisrated – all lost now In this unlit dust – we are not And have never been The runners green and fresh Of life risen fro extinctions (that one past this one new) all hallowed and self-sure But the dead strand moves unseen, The river of black crawls on To so Inconsequential in absence Of strings and shadows Charting fro this in that…

Excerpt from The Black Sands of Time (in the collection Suicidal Poets of Darujhistan) edited by Haroak

THE CORPSE BEYOND THE PIER WAS BARELY VISIBLE, A PALLID PATCH resisting the roll of the waves The shark that rose alongside it to est ones Udinaas had yet seen during the ti froe

Gulls and sharks, the feast lasting the entirelike a spectator before nature’s incessant display, the inevitability of the perfor him oddly satisfied Entertained, in fact Those ed Those ere owed They sat equally sweet in the bellies of the scavengers And this was a thing of wonder

The e itself into ates, inland An oversized garrison of Beneda Edur was re the restitution of peace, noriven the title of governor That the garrison under his control was not of his own tribe was no accident Suspicion had come in the wake of success, as it always did

Hannan Mosag’s work The e Too often, madness burned in his eyes

Mayen had beaten Feather Witch senseless, as close to killing the slave outright as was possible In the vast tent that now served as Edur headquarters – stolen froed to the Cold Clay Battalion – there had been rapes Slaves, prisoners Perhaps Mayen simply did to others what Rhulad did to her A coht believe so And as for the hundreds of noble women taken from the Letherii by Edur warriors, overnor’s coh it was likely that many now carried half-blood seeds within theovernor would soon accept the uilds and merchant interests And a new pattern would take shape

Unless, of course, the frontier cities were liberated by a victorious Letherii counter-attack Plenty of rumours, of course Clashes at sea between Edur and Letherii fleets Thousands sent to the deep The store-war The Ceda, Kuru Qan, had finally roused himself in all his terrible power While Letherii corpses crowded the harbour, it was Edur bodies out in the seas beyond

Strangest ru back a succession of Edur attacks, and was still holding out, and a the half-thousand convicted soldiers was a sorceror who had once rivalled the Ceda himself That hy the Edur army had remained camped here – they wanted no enemy still active behind theht well be continued resistance in their wake, but the es And the Letherii fleet had yet to make an appearance The Edur ships commanded Katter Sea as far south as the city of Awl

He drew his legs up and clith of the pier The streets were quiet Most signs of the fighting had been removed, the bodies and broken furniture and shattered pottery, and a light rain the night before had washed most of the bloodstains away But the air still stank of ss were saped and doorways that had been kicked in remained dark

He had never s and the dissolute remnants of the Nerek and Fent, the market stalls croith once-holy icons and relics, with cere sticks of chiefs, the s of shamans Fent ancestor chests, the bones still in them The harbour front streets and alleys had been croith Nerek children selling their bodies, and over it all hung a vague sense of sness, as if this was the proper order of the world, the roles settled out as they should be Letherii dominant, surrounded by lesser creatures inherently servile, their cultures little more than commodities