Fall of Light by Steven Erikson

Author:Steven Erikson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates
Published: 2016-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

‘I HAVE LIVED,’ SAID LORD HUST HENARALD, ‘IN A WORLD OF smoke.’ He sat on a stone bench in the chill garden, amidst leafless thickets and snow-capped boulders. Overhead the sky was thick with a grey blending of snowflakes and ash. Someone, perhaps a servant, had settled a thick robe on the lord, rough wool dyed burgundy, and it was draped unclasped across his shoulders like a mantle of old blood.

Galar Baras sat opposite. To his left was the low curving wall of the fountain. The mechanical pump had long ceased to function and the thick ice on the water was streaked and smeared with dead algae. Old layers of soot darkened the snow upon the ground.

‘It blinds the fools who dwell in its midst,’ Henarald continued, his vein-roped hands red with cold as he picked through a small heap of slag that rested in a pile upon the encircling stone wall. Occasionally, he brought one piece closer to his face for careful examination, eyes narrowing, before returning it to the heap. In the time that Galar had been in audience with the lord, a number of pieces of the ragged waste material had been examined more than once. ‘It stings, awakens tears, but leaves nothing seen to give comfort.’

‘Milord,’ Galar Baras ventured, not for the first time, ‘the armour you have sent us. The blades as well. Something now afflicts them—’

‘In smoke we dwell, shrouding us in the weariest of days. Do you see this ash? The last of the charcoal. Soon will come to us the stench of poor coal, and the iron will be brittle, red and short. It’s the sulphur, you see.’ He selected another piece of slag and peered at it. ‘We beat order into the world and make a song of smoke, but such music is too harsh, or not harsh enough, for the soul is never as strong as it believes itself, nor ever as weak as it fears. We are, in all, middling creatures, eager to bedeck our lives in trappings of grandeur. Self-importance. But still the smoke remains, blinding us, and what tears find our cheeks are but wet signifiers of irritation, damp whispers of discomfort. The air soon takes them away, to make each face a blank page.’ He set the rough piece of slag back down. ‘And now, this is all I see, here through the smoke. Faces like blank pages. I know none of them, yet imagine that I should. The confusion frightens me. I am stalked by what I once knew and haunted by the man I once was. You cannot know how that feels.’

‘Milord, what has happened to the Hust iron?’

Something flickered in Henarald’s blue eyes, like pale sunlight upon a blade. ‘Born of smoke – I never imagined how it would feel, this imprisonment. Is it any wonder we cry? Wrapped in flesh, drawn down, muscle to match the fuller’s peen, bent and swaged, the patina writ like poetry, yearning for a voice that might be music, only to yield nothing but cries of anguish.

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