The Crippled God

sagging with exhaustion, and in her arms a small bundled form.
    Badalle gasped upon seeing Rutt walking towards them – where had he come from? Where had he been hiding?
    With his crooked arms, with a terrible need in his ancient face, he walked to stand before the mother.
    Anguish gripped Badalle’s heart and she staggered in sudden weakness. Where is Held? Held is gone. Held was gone long ago. And what Rutt carried in his arms was us, all that way. He carried us .
    The mother looked across at this boy, and Badalle saw now that she was old – and so too was the father, old enough to be grandparents – she looked at Rutt, his empty arms, the ravaged face.
    She does not understand. How can she? He cannot hurt anyone, not Rutt. He carried our hope, but our hope died. But it wasn’t his fault, it wasn’t his fault. Mother, if you had been there – if you had seen —
    And she stepped forward then, that old woman, that mother with her last ever child, this stranger, and gently laid her baby into Rutt’s waiting arms.
    A gift beyond measure, and when she settled an arm about his shoulders, drawing him forward, so that he could walk with them – her and her husband – and they set out, slowly as it was all she could manage, in the wake of the nearest wagon, and all the Khundryl began to move … Badalle stood unmoving.
    Saddic, I will tell you to remember this. These are the Khundryl, the givers of gifts. Remember them, won’t you?
    And Rutt walked like a king.
    From where he sat, Saddic watched as they made space on a Khundryl wagon for the mother, and for Rutt and her child that he held, and then set out to catch up with the rest of the army. The man who was the father took the lead yoke at the wagon’s head, and strained as if he alone could shoulder this burden.
    Because it was no burden.
    As Saddic well knew, gifts never are.
    Ahead, the desert stretched on. Fiddler could see no end to it, and now believed he never would. He remembered that ancient shoreline of bones, the one they had left behind what seemed a century ago. No clearer warning could have been granted them, yet she had not hesitated.
    He had to hand it to her. The world was her enemy, and she would face it unblinking. She had led them on to this road of suffering in the name of the Crippled God, and, to that god, what other path could there have been? She was making of them her greatest sacrifice – was it as brutal and as simple as that? He did not think her capable of such a thing. He wanted to refuse the very thought.
    But here he walked, fifty or more paces ahead of them all. Even the Khundryl children were gone, leaving him alone. And behind him, a broken mass of humanity, somehow dragging itself forward, like a beast with a crushed spine. It had surrendered all formation, each soldier moving as his or her strength dictated. They carried their weapons because they had forgotten a time when they didn’t. And bodies fell, one by one.
    Beneath the ghoulish light of the Jade Strangers, Fiddler set his eyes upon the distant flat line of the horizon, his legs scissoring under him, the muscles too dead to feel pain. He listened to his own breaths, wheezing as the air struggled up and down a swollen, parched windpipe. In so vast a landscape he felt his world contracting, step by step, and soon, he knew, all he would hear would be his own heart, the beats climbing down, losing all rhythm, and finally falling still.
    That moment waited somewhere ahead. He was on his way to find it.
    Whispering motion around him now, drifting out from a fevered mind. He saw a horseman at his side, close enough to reach out, if he so wanted, and set a hand upon the beast’s patched, salt-streaked shoulder. The man riding the beast he knew all too well.
    Broke his leg. A toppling pillar, of all things. Mallet – I see you – you wanted to work on that leg. Got damned insubordinate about it, infact. But he didn’t listen. That’s his problem, he only listens when he feels like it .
    Trotts, you’re still the damned ugliest Barghast I ever saw. They bred ’em that way in your tribe, didn’t they? To better scare the enemy. Did they breed your women to be half blind, too? Keep the stones balanced, that’s the only way to make it through .
    So where’s Quick Ben? Kalam? I want to see you all here, friends .
    Hedge, well, he’s stepped out of this path. Can’t look him in the eye these days. It’s the one bad twist in this whole thing, isn’t it. Maybe you