The Crippled God

ground .
    Wherever you’re going, it can’t be worth it. Nothing in this world is worth it, and you’d be hard pressed to convince me otherwise .
    She heard a grunt and glanced back.
    Amby was carrying Precious Thimble in his arms, the smile on his face stretched into a rictus travesty of satisfaction, as if in finding his heart’s desire he was forcing himself to take its fullest pleasure. Precious Thimble’s head lolled against his upper arm, her eyes closed, her mouth half open.
    ‘What’s wrong with her?’
    Amby said, ‘Fainted … Faint.’
    ‘Oh, sod off, you lump of lard.’
    Ten thousand furred backs, black, silver and grey, the bodies lean and long. Like iron swords, ten thousand iron swords. They seethed before Setoc’s eyes, they blurred like the honed edges of waves on an angry sea. She was carried along, driven to rearing cliffs, to up-thrust fangs of rotted rock.
    The wind roared in her ears, roared in and through her, trembling like thunder through every bone of her being. She felt the beasts crashing ashore, felt their fury assailing insensate stone and all the brutal laws that held it in place. They bared teeth at the sky, they bit and chewed shafts of sunlight as if speared through. They howled against the coming of night and in the hunt they stalked their own senseless savagery.
    We are what we are, and facing this enemy what we are is helpless .
    Who will fight for us? Who will peel lips back to reveal swords of sharp iron?
    The cliffs ahead reverberated to the onslaught – she drew ever closer. Wolves of Winter, do you see me? Blessed Lord, Proud Lady, is this your summons? Does there await a cave in that ravaged wall? And inside, a Hold of Thrones?
    There is a smell to the wild, a smell that makes the hairs stand on end, that rushes like ice through human veins. There are trails crossing the path, secret passages beneath the canopy. Mice dance on the beaten floor in the instant before we arrive, and we are blind to it all .
    And all the spaces carved out by our fires and our weapons and our axes and our ploughs, we must then fill with that sweating, bitter flood that is pride. In the wastelands of our making we will ourselves to stand as would one exalted and triumphant .
    Thrones of the Wild, thrones of bones and hides and lifeless eyes. Tall as mountains, these Beast Thrones .
    Who assails us? Who hunts us? Who slays us?
    Everyone .
    She raced for the jagged rocks. Annihilation, if it came, would arrive as a blessing. The heat of the beasts carrying her was sweet as a loving kiss, a safe embrace, a promise of salvation. I am the Destriant of the Wolves. I hold in my chest the souls of the all the slain beasts, of this and every other world .
    But I cannot hold them for ever .
    I need a sword. I need absolution .
    Absolution, yes, and a sword. Ten thousand iron swords. In the name of the Wolves of Winter, in the name of the Wild .
    Sister Equity walked across lifeless sand, far to the south of the Spire, far away from the eyes of everyone. She had once dreamed of peace. She had lived in a world where questions were rare, and there had been comfort in that. If there was a cause worthy enough to which she could devote her life, it was to journey from birth to death without confrontation. Nothing to stir her unease, nothing to deliver pain or to receive it. Although the Forkrul Assail had long ago lost their god, had long ago suffered the terrible grief of that god’s violent end – the murder for which no penance was possible – she had come to harbour in her own soul a childish hope that a new god could be made. Assembled like the setting of bones, the moulded clay of muscles, the smooth caress of a face given form, given life by her own loving hands. And this god she would call Harmony.
    In the world of this god life would not demand a death. There would be no need to kill in order to eat. There would be no cruel fate or random tragedy to take one before her time, and the forests and plainswould seethe with animals, the skies with birds, the seas, lakes and rivers with fish.
    The wishes of a child were fragile things, and she now knew that none ever survived the hard, jostling indifference that came with the bitter imperatives of adulthood: the stone-eyed rush to find elusive proofs of worth, or to reach at last the swollen satiation that was satisfaction. Virtues changed; the clays found new forms and hardened to stone, and adults took weapons in hand and killed each other over