‘Old friend.’ This Consort bears unseemly gifts, and reveals powers uncanny. How thin, I now wonder, does the Tiste blood run in you, Draconus?

Your ‘old friend’ gives nothing away. I should have expected as much.

So, the Azathanai gather to witness the end of us, and this leads me to a truth. Forgive me, Lord Anomander, for what is to come. Nothing here is your fault, and if we crowd round to take strength from your honour, it is because we lack it in ourselves. We will feed and may well grow mighty, even as we cut you down. She met the depthless eyes of Lord Draconus. ‘Please, then,’ she said. ‘Take us home.’

And Grizzin Farl, you have my thanks. For revealing what you could not reveal.

The highborn are right, though they understand it not. Still, they are right.

She studied Lord Draconus, as if seeing him for the first time. The enemy among us now guides us here in this Eternal Night.

If I can, Consort, I will see Lord Anomander turn against you, by every measure. If it lies within my power, I will see the First Son kill you, Draconus.

For what you have done.

The end of things. In this realm, the notion felt all too real.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HUNCHED AND GAUNT, THE OLD MAN WITH ONE LEG WORKED his crutches with jarring intensity, as if, at any moment, what held him up could pull loose from his grip, twisting to make a cruciform upon which the fates would nail him. The lines of his face made for hard angles, matching the harsh resentment in his eyes. His thin, pale lips moved to a voiceless litany of curses as his eyes tracked the floor ahead of him. And yet, for all of that, he trailed High Priestess Syntara as if he was her shadow, bound to her by laws that could not be sundered by any mortal hand.

Renarr watched their approach with detached amusement. For her, religion was a wasteland, a place only the broken would choose to stumble on to, their hands outstretched to grasp whatever came within reach. She recalled her own thoughts from some weeks past: the conflation in her mind of whore’s tent and temple, and the squalid surrender that fused into one these seemingly disparate settings. The need was the same, and for many the satiation achieved by both proved shortlived and ephemeral.

The High Priestess was bedecked in flavours of white and gold. An ethereal illumination clung to her like smoke. Her heart-shaped face glistened as if brushed with pearl-dust, and the colour of her eyes seemed to shift hues in a soft stream of blues, magenta and lilac. She was indeed a creature of stunning beauty.

‘Blessings upon you,’ said Syntara when at last she halted a few paces away from Lord Urusander, who had turned to face the new arrivals from his position by the tall, narrow window overlooking the courtyard.