Dust of Dreams

dead never come back all the way. ‘It’s like knowing the secret to a trick, the wonder goes away. They’ve lost all the delusions that once comforted them.’
    ‘Deadsmell!’
    He turned to see Bottle picking his way round the heaps and holes.
    ‘Heard you saying something—ghosts never got anything good to say, why bother talking with them?’
    ‘I wasn’t.’
    The young mage reached him and then stood, staring at the old Jaghut tower. ‘Did you see the baggage train forming up outside the city? Gods, we’ve got enough stuff to handle an army five times our size.’
    ‘Maybe, maybe not.’
    Bottle grunted. ‘That’s what Fiddler said.’
    ‘We’ll be marching into nowhere. Resupply will be hard to manage, maybe impossible.’
    ‘Into nowhere, that seems about right.’
    Deadsmell pointed at the Azath House. ‘They went in there, I think.’
    ‘Sinn and Grub?’
    ‘Aye.’
    ‘Something snatch them?’
    ‘I don’t think so. I think they went through, the way Kellanved and Dancer learned how to do.’
    ‘Where?’
    ‘No idea, and no, I have no plans to follow them. We have to consider them lost. Permanently.’
    Bottle glanced at him. ‘You throw that at the Adjunct yet?’
    ‘I did. She wasn’t happy.’
    ‘I bet she wasn’t.’ He scratched at the scraggy beard he seemed intent on growing. ‘So tell me why you think they went in there.’
    Deadsmell grimaced. ‘I remember the day I left my home. A damned ram had got on to the roof of my house—the house I inherited, I mean. A big white bastard, eager to hump anything with legs. The look it gave me was empty and full, if you know what I mean—’
    ‘No. All right, yes. When winter’s broken—the season, and those eyes.’
    ‘Empty and full, and from its perch up there it had a damned good view of the graveyard, all three tiers, from paupers to the local version of nobility. I’d just gone and buried the village priest—’
    ‘Hope he was dead when you did it.’
    ‘Some people die looking peaceful. Others die all too knowing. Empty and full. He didn’t know until he did his dying, and that kind of face is the worst kind to look down on.’ He scowled. ‘The worst kind, Bottle.’
    ‘Go on.’
    ‘What have you got to be impatient about, soldier?’
    Bottle flinched. ‘Sorry. Nothing.’
    ‘Most impatient people I meet are just like that, once you kick through all the attitude. They’re in a lather, in a hurry about nothing. The rush is in their heads, and they expect everyone else to up the pace and get the fuck on with it. I got no time for such shits.’
    ‘They make you impatient, do they?’
    ‘No time, I said. Meaning the more they push, the longer I take.’
    Bottle flashed a grin. ‘I hear you.’
    ‘Good.’ Deadsmell paused, working back round to his thoughts. ‘That ram,looming up there, well, it just hit me, those eyes. We all got them, I think, some worse than others. For the priest, they came late—but the promise was there, all his life. Same for everyone. You see that it’s empty, and that revelation fills you up.’
    ‘Wait—what’s empty?’
    ‘The whole Hood-forsaken mess, Bottle. All of it.’
    ‘Well now, aren’t you a miserable crudge, Deadsmell.’
    ‘I’ll grant you, this particular place eats on me, chews up memories I’d figured were long buried. Anyway, there I was, standing. Ram on one side, the priest’s tomb on the other—high ridge, highest I could find—and the highborn locals were going to howl when they saw that. But I didn’t care any longer.’
    ‘Because you left that day.’
    ‘Aye. Down to Li Heng, first in line at the recruiting office. A soldier leaves the dead behind and the ones a soldier does bury, well, most of the time they’re people that soldier knows.’
    ‘We don’t raise battlefield barrows for just our own dead.’
    ‘That’s not what I mean by “knowing”, Bottle. Ever look down on an enemy’s face, a dead one, I mean?’
    ‘A few times, aye.’
    ‘What did you see?’
    Bottle shifted uneasily, squinted at the tower again. ‘Point taken.’
    ‘No better place to piss on Hood’s face than in an army. When piss is all you got, and let’s face it, it’s all any of us has got.’
    ‘I’m waiting—patiently—to see how all this comes back to Sinn and Grub and the Azath.’
    ‘Last night, I went to the kennels and got out Bent and Roach—the lapdog’s the one of them with the real vicious streak, you know. Old Bent, he’s just a