Dust of Dreams

same fate. She’s been cut down inside, and the stem lies bruised and lifeless. She was once a great warrior. She was once proud, her wit sharp as a thorn, ever quick to laugh but never with cruelty.
She was indeed a host of virtues, but they had availed her nothing.
No strength of will survives hobbling. Not a single virtue. This is the secret of humiliation: the deadliest weapon the Barghast have.
    She could see Hetan up ahead, her matted hair, her stumbles brought up by the crooked staff the hobbled were permitted when on the march. The daughter of Humbrall Taur was barely recognizable. Did her father’s spirit stand witness, there in the Reaper’s shadow? Or had he turned away?
    No, he rides his last son’s soul. That must be what has so maddened Cafal.
    Well, to honour Hetan’s father, she would do this. When the Barghast came to rest at this day’s end. She was tired. She was thirsty. She hoped it would be soon.
    ______
    Kashat pointed. ‘See there, brother. The ridge forms half a circle.’
    ‘Not much of a slope,’ Sagal muttered.
    ‘Look around,’ Kashat said, snorting. ‘It’s about the best we can manage. This land is pocked, but those pocks are old and worn down. Anyway, that ridge marks the biggest of those pocks—you can see that for yourself. And the slope is rocky—they would lose horses charging up that.’
    ‘So they flank us instead.’
    ‘We make strongpoints at both ends, with crescents of archers positioned behind them to take any riders attempting an encirclement.’
    ‘With the rear barricaded by the wagons.’
    ‘Held by mixed archers and pike-wielders, yes, exactly. Listen, Sagal, by this time tomorrow we’ll be picking loot from heaps of corpses. The Akrynnai army will be shattered, their villages undefended—we can march into the heart of their territory and claim it for ourselves.’
    ‘An end to the Warleader, the rise of the first Barghast King.’
    Kashat nodded. ‘And we shall be princes, and the King shall grant us provinces to rule. Our very own herds. Horses, bhederin, rodara. We shall have Akrynnai slaves, as many of their young women as we want, and we shall live in keeps—do you remember, Sagal? When we were young, our first war, marching down to Capustan—we saw the great stone keeps all in ruin along the river. We shall build ourselves those, one each.’
    Sagal grinned at his brother. ‘Let us return to the host, and see if our great King is in any better mood than when we left him.’
    They turned back, slinging their spears over their shoulders and jogging to rejoin the vanguard of the column. The sun glared through the dust above the glittering forest of barbed iron, transforming the cloud into a penumbra of gold. Vultures rode the deepening sky to either side. Barely two turns of the beaker before dusk arrived—the night ahead promised to be busy.
     
    The half-dozen Akryn scouts rode between the narrow, twisting gullies and out on to the flats where the dust still drifted above the rubbish left behind by the Barghast. They cut across that churned-up trail and cantered southward. The sun had just left the sky, dropping behind a bank of clouds dark as a shadowed cliff-face on the western horizon, and dusk bled into the air.
    When the drum of horse hoofs finally faded, Cafal edged out from the deeper of the two gullies. The bastards had held him back too long—the great cauldrons would be steaming in the Barghast camp, the foul reek of six parts animal blood to two parts water and sour wine, and all the uncured meat still rank with the taste of slaughter. Squads would be shaking out, amidst curses that they would have to eat salted strips of smoked bhederin, sharing a skin of warm water on their patrols between the pickets. The Barghast encampment would be seething with activity.
    One of Bakal’s warriors had found him a short time earlier, delivering the details of the plan. It would probably fail, but Cafal did not care. If he died attemptingto steal her back, then this torment would end. For one of them, at least. It was a selfish desire, but selfish desires were all he had left.
    I am the last of Father’s children, the last not dead or broken. Father, you so struggled to become the great leader of the White Faces. And now I wonder, if you had turned away from the attempt, if you had quenched your ambition, where would you and your children be right now? Spirits reborn, would we even be here, on this cursed continent?
    I know for a fact