The Crippled God

him was a ragged wall, Letherii and Shake on their knees, or bent over, or trying to drag themselves out from a forest of legs, shielding wounds – he thought he would see weeping faces, bawling despair, but the pain-twisted faces were dry, and every cry that clawed past his own roaring self was one of raw pain. Just that. Nothing more. A sound without complications, can you hear it?
    If there could be one god, with one voice, this is the sound it would make – to stop us in our endless madness .
    But look on, Withal. See the truth. We do not listen .
    He made his way past these exhausted and wounded comrades, pushed his way into the heaving mass. The stench rocked him. Abattoir, sewer, cutter’s floor. Thick enough to choke him. He struggled against vomiting – here inside this helm – no, he would not do that. Could not.
    Faces now, on all sides. None speaking, and the look in their eyes was flat, flatter than anything he’d ever seen. And they were all straining towards the front line, moving up to take their places, to fill the gaps, the unending gaps, as if to say If you will kill us all, kill me next. But do not think it will be easy .
    Suddenly, he felt ready for this. Walk until something bars your path. Then stand, until you fall. Whoever said life was complicated?
    The channels and currents had carried him to the left flank, well away from that immovable knot at the centre, where a sword’s laughter had taken for itself all the Shore’s madness, every last scrap of it.
    He saw Brevity, though at first he did not recognize her – that solid, handsome face, the wry look in her eyes, all gone. In their place a mask of wet blood over dried blood, over blood that had turned into black tar. A slash had opened one cheek, revealing two rows of red molars. There was nothing sardonic left, but she commanded that front line, her will clenched like a fist.
    Off her shield side, two Shake fell and three Liosan pushed in to widen the gap.
    Eyes widening at the perfect, breathtaking simplicity of what was needed of him, Withal surged to meet them.
    This was something new. Yan Tovis could feel it. Yedan Derryg had advanced the line to the very edge of the breach, and there they hadheld against the Liosan. This time there was to be no foothold. He would refuse them a single step upon the strand.
    He had explained nothing, and as she fought, crowded hard against that wound – from which Liosan poured like blood – she began to realize that, this time, there would be no respite, not until one side or the other fell, to the very last soldier. What had begun would not end until the last sword swung down, or sank deep in writhing flesh.
    How had he known? What had he done on the other side of the gate? What had he seen?
    She caught glimpses of her brother, there, where the terrifying pealing laughter went on and on, where blood fountained, where Liosan bodies piled ever higher and they stood on them, fighting for balance, face to face, weapons flashing. Glimpses. A face she barely knew, so twisted was it, the Hust sword dragging him past exhaustion, past all reason of what the human body could withstand. Of his face, she could see the white bones beneath translucent flesh, could see all the veins and arteries and the root-mat of vessels, could see the bloody tears that streamed down from his eyes.
    Night had come to the Shake. The sand had measured the time, in a kind of stillness, a kind of silence that was beneath all this, and the grains slipped down, and now had come the eternity just before dawn, the time of the Watch. He stood. He fought, his stance wide to find purchase on a hill of bodies.
    See him. In the eternity before dawn. When among mortals courage is at its weakest, when fear sinks talons on the threshold and will not let go. When one awakens to such loneliness as to twist a moan from the chest. But then … you feel it, breath catching. You feel it. You are not alone .
    The Watch stands guard .
    They would not break, would not yield – all those who stood now with him. Instead, at his sides they died, and died.
    She was a thing of ash and blood, moulded into something vaguely human-shaped, tempered by the crushed bone of her ancestors, and she fought on, because her brother would not yield, because the very border that was Lightfall, and the wound, had now become the place where it would be decided.
    And still the Liosan came, lunging wild-eyed from the swirling chaos – most did not even have time