The Crippled God

Would it ever release him?
    He turned his head to the rider travelling beside him, to see if the Ve’Gath’s thick hide was growing up in the same way, but no – there it remained an ornate saddle, that and nothing more. And Mortal Sword Krughava rode it with all the ease and familiarity of a veteran. He envied such people, for whom everything came so easily.
    My father was not like that. He was never a natural fighter. He had nothing of the talent of, say, Kalam Mekhar. Or Stormy or Gesler. He was just an average man, forced to be more than he was .
    I am glad I did not see him die. I am glad my memories see him as only alive, for ever alive .
    I think I can live with that .
    I have no choice .
    They had left the K’Chain Che’Malle army halfway through last night, and now they were swiftly closing on the Letherii and Bolkando armies. If he stretched up – as far as the sheathing armour round his thighs would permit – he could see directly ahead the dark, seething stain of the troops ascending to the ridge. Grub glanced again across at Krughava. She was wearing her helm, the visor dropped down andthe hinges locked. The wolfskin cape was too heavy to skirl out behind her, despite the swift pace the Ve’Gath were setting, but still it flowed down with impressive grace along the horizontal back of the K’Chain Che’Malle, sweeping down to cover its hips and the projecting mass of its upper leg muscles, so that the fur rippled and glistened as the muscles bunched and stretched.
    She would have made a frightening mother, he decided, this Krughava. Frightening, and yet, if she gave a child her love, he suspected it would be unassailable. Fierce as a she-wolf, yes .
    But I have no mother. Maybe I never had one – I don’t remember. Not a single face, swimming blurry in my dreams – nothing. And now I have no father. I have no one and when I look ahead, into my future, I see myself riding, for ever alone . The notion, which he trucked out again and again, as if to taste it on his tongue, stirred nothing in him. He wondered if there was something wrong with him; he wondered if, years from now, on that long journey, he might find it – that wrongness, like a corpse lying on the ground on the path ahead. He wondered what he would feel then.
    Thinking back on their parting from the K’Chain army, Grub tried to recall the reasons behind his decision to leave Sinn’s side. Something had pulled him to Brys Beddict and all the Letherii and Bolkando, a vague belief that he would be more useful there, though he had no idea what he might do, or if he had anything to give. It was easier thinking of this like that, instead of the suspicion that he was fleeing Sinn – fleeing what she might do.
    ‘ No one can stop me, Grub. No one but you .’ So she’d told him, more than once, but not in a reassuring way, not in a way that told him that he mattered to her. No, it was more like a challenge, as if to ask: What have you got hidden inside you, Grub? Let’s see, shall we? But he didn’t want to know what he had inside him. That day they’d come to do battle with the Moons, that day when there had been fire and stone and earth and something cold at the centre of it all, he had felt himself falling away, and the boy who had walked at Sinn’s side was somebody else, wearing his skin, wearing his face. It had been … terrifying.
    All that power, how it poured through us. I didn’t like it. I don’t like it .
    I’m not running away. Sinn can do what she likes. I can’t really stop her, and I don’t want her to prove it, to spite her own words. I don’t want to hear her laughing. I don’t want to look into her eyes and see the fires of Telas .
    They had been seen, and now the warrior-beasts under them were shifting their approach, angling towards a small party that had ridden out to one side. Prince Beddict. Aranict. Queen Abrastal and Spax, andthree people he’d not seen before – two women and a tall, ungainly-looking man with a long face. Just behind this group, standing alone and impossibly tall, was a woman shrouded in a cloak of rabbit-skins, down to her ankles, her hair a wild, tangled mane of brown, her face looking like it had been carved from sandstone.
    The thumping gait of the Ve’Gath fell off as they drew nearer. Glancing down, Grub saw that the armour formed a high collar up past his hips, flaring out just beneath his ribs. And behind his back, an upthrust of overlapping scales formed a kind of