The Crippled God

said in a voice like bared steel.
    ‘I resign—’
    ‘I forbid it.’
    He stared at her, mouth open in shock.
    ‘Fists Blistig, Kindly and Faradan Sort, our companies need to be readied for tomorrow’s march. I shall call upon you all at dusk to hear reports of our status. Until then, you are dismissed.’
    Kindly grasped Blistig by one arm and marched him out, Sort following with a wry smile.
    ‘Omtose Phellack,’ muttered Banaschar once they’d left. ‘Adjunct, I was chilled enough the last time. Will you excuse me?’
    Tavore nodded. ‘Captain Yil, please escort our priest to his tent, lest he get lost.’ She then shot Aranict a glance, as if to ask Are you ready for this? To which Aranict nodded.
    Abrastal sighed. ‘Very well, shall we begin?’
    Aranict saw that the dung had burned down to dull ashes. She flicked away the gutted butt of her last stick, and then stood, lifting her gaze to the Spears of Jade.
    We’ll do what we can. Today, we promised as much. What we can .
    One battle. Oh, Tavore …
    Sick and shaken as she had been, her hardest journey this day had been back through the Bonehunter camp. The soldiers, their faces, the low conversations and the occasional laugh – each and every scene, each and every sound, struck her heart like a dagger’s point. I am looking upon dead men, dead women. They don’t know it yet. They don’t know what’s awaiting them, what she means to do with them .
    Or maybe they do .
    Unwitnessed. I’ve heard about this, about what she told them. Unwitnessed … is what happens when nobody survives .
    He’d intended to call them all together during the Adjunct’s parley, but re-forming the squads had taken longer than he’d thought it would – a notion which, he decided, had been foolishly optimistic. Even with spaces in each campfire’s circle yawning like silent howls, marines and heavies might as well have been rooted to the ground. They’d needed pulling, kicking, dragging out of their old places.
    To fit into a new thing you had to leave the old thing behind, and that wasn’t as easy as it sounded, since it meant accepting that the old thing was dead, for ever gone, no matter where you tried standing or how stubbornly you held fast.
    Fiddler knew he’d been no different. As bad as Hedge in that regard, in fact. The heavies and the marines were a chewed-up mess. Standing over them, like some cutter above a mauled patient, trying to work out exactly what he was looking at – desperate for something even remotely recognizable – he’d watched them trickle slowly into the basin he’d chosen for this meeting. As the sun waned in the sky, as pairs of squad-mates set out to find some missing comrade, eventually returning with a scowling companion in tow – aye, this was a rough scene, resentment thickening in the dusty air.
    He’d waited, weathering their impatience, until at last, with dusk fast rushing in, the final recalcitrant soldier walked into the crowd – Koryk.
    Well. You can try all the browbeating you want, when the skull’s turned into a solid stone wall there’s no getting in .
    ‘So,’ Fiddler said, ‘I’m captain to you lot now.’ He stared at the faces – only half of which seemed to be paying him any attention. ‘If Whiskeyjack could see me right now, he’d probably choke – I was never cut out for anything more than what I was in the beginning. A sapper—’
    ‘So what is it,’ a voice called out, ‘you want us to feel sorry for you?’
    ‘No, Gaunt-Eye. With you all feeling so sorry for yourselves I wouldn’t stand a chance, would I? I look out at you now and you know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking: you ain’t Bridgeburners. You ain’t even close.’
    Even the gloom wasn’t enough to hide the hard hostility fixed on him now. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘You see, it was back in Blackdog that it finally clunked home that we were the walking dead. Someone wanted us in the ground, and damn if we didn’t mostly end up there. In the tunnels of Pale, the tombs of the Bridgeburners. Tombs they dug for themselves. Heard a few stragglers hung on until Black Coral, and those bodies ended up in Moon’s Spawn the day it was abandoned by the Tiste Andii. An end to the tale, but like I said, we saw that end coming from a long way off.’
    He fell silent then, momentarily lost in his own memories, the million losses that added up to what he felt now. Then he shook himself and looked up once more. ‘But you lot.’ He shook