Dust of Dreams

others?’
    ‘All outlying clans, those who travelled farthest in the dispersal—except forone. Gadra, which had found a decent bhederin herd in a pocket between the Akryn and the Awl’dan, enough to sustain them for a time—’
    ‘The Gadra warchief—Stolmen, yes? I sensed no disloyalty in him. Also, what chance of mutiny in that region? They would have nowhere to go—that makes no sense.’
    ‘You are right, it doesn’t. We should have heard from them. You must speak to the clan chiefs, Tool. They need to be reminded why we are here.’ She studied his soft brown eyes for a moment, and then looked away. The crisis, she knew, dwelt not just in the minds of the Barghast clan chiefs, but also in the man standing beside her. Her husband, her love.
    ‘I do not know,’ said Tool, slowly, as if searching for the right words, ‘if I can help them. The shoulder-seers were bold in their first prophecies, igniting the fires that have brought us here, but with each passing day it seems their tongues wither yet more, their words dry up, and all I can see in them is the fear in their eyes.’
    She took him by the arm and tugged until he followed her out from the edge of the vast encampment. They walked beyond the pickets and then the ring-trench dry-latrines, and still further, on to the hard uneven ground where the herds had tracked not so long ago, in the season of rains.
    ‘We were meant to wage war against the Tiste Edur,’ Tool said as they drew up atop a ridge and stared northward at distant dust-clouds. ‘The shoulder-seers rushed their rituals in finding pathways through the warrens. The entire White Face Barghast impoverished itself to purchase transports and grain. We hurried after the Grey Swords.’ He was silent for a moment longer, and then he said, ‘We sought the wrong enemy.’
    ‘No glory to be found in crushing a crushed people,’ Hetan observed, tasting the bitterness of her own words.
    ‘Nor a people terrorized by one of their own.’
    There had been fierce clashes over this. Despite his ascension to Warchief, a unanimous proclamation following the tragic death of her father, Onos Toolan had almost immediately found himself at odds with all the clan chiefs. War against the Lether Empire would be an unjust war, the Edur hegemony notwithstanding. Not only were the Letherii not their enemy, even these Tiste Edur, crouching in the terrible shadow of their emperor, likely bore no relationship whatsoever to those ancient Edur who had preyed upon the Barghast so many generations past. The entire notion of vengeance, or that of a war resumed, suddenly tasted sour, and for Tool, an Imass who felt nothing of the old festering wounds in the psyche of the Barghast—who was indeed deaf to the fury of the awakened Barghast gods . . . well, he’d shown no patience with those so eager to shed blood.
    The shoulder-seers had by this time lost all unity of vision. The prophecy, which had seemed so simple and clear, was all at once mired in ambiguity, seeding such discord among the seers that even their putative leader, Cafal, brother to Hetan, failed in his efforts to quell the schisms among the shamans. Thus, they had been no help in the battle of wills between Tool and the chiefs; and they were no help now.
    Cafal persisted in travelling from tribe to tribe—she had not seen her brotherin months. If he had succeeded in repairing any damage, she’d not heard of it; even among the shoulder-seers in this camp, she sensed a pervasive unease, and a sour reluctance to speak with anyone.
    Onos Toolan had been unwilling to unleash the White Faces upon the Lether Empire—and his will had prevailed, until that one fated day, when the last of the Awl fell—when Toc the Younger had died. Not only had Hetan’s own clan, the Senan, been unleashed, so too had the dark hunger of Tool’s own sister, Kilava.
    Hetan missed that woman, and knew that her husband’s grief was complicated by her departure—a departure that he might well see as her abandoning him in the moment of his greatest need. Hetan suspected, however, that in witnessing Toc’s death—and the effect it had had upon her brother, Kilava had been brutally reminded of the ephemeral nature of love and friendship—and so she had set out to rediscover her own life. A selfish impulse, perhaps, and an unfair wounding of a brother already reeling from loss.
    Yes, Kilava deserved a good hard slap to the side of that shapely head, and Hetan vowed that