Free Fall of Light by Steven Erikson Page A

will bend to the weight of failure. My bones will creak to the crumbling of Kurald Galain. Do not look to my memories, my brothers and sisters. Already they twist with doubt. Already they take on the shape of my flaws.
    No. Do not follow me. I but walk to the grave.
    A short time earlier, while he sat on the bench of the inner garden, huddled against the bitter cold, beneath a thick cloak of bear fur, he had seen the young hostage, Orfantal, run alongside the fountain with its black frozen pool. The boy held a practice sword in one hand, and the dog, Ribs, ran beside him as if it had rediscovered its youth. Now free of worms, it had gained weight, that beast, and showed the sleek muscles of its hunting origins. Together, they played out imaginary battles, and more than once Endest had come upon Orfantal in his death-throes, with Ribs drawing close beside the boy as he lay on the ground, spoiling the gravitas of the scene with a cold wet nose snuffling against Orfantal’s face. He’d yelp and then curse the dog, but it was difficult to find malice in the love the animal displayed, and before long they would be wrestling on the thin carpet of snow.
    Endest Silann was no indulgent witness to all of this. In the dull, half-formed shadows cast by child and dog, he saw only nightmares in waiting.
    Lord Anomander had left the wretched house of his brother – scene of recent slaughter – in the company of the Azathanai High Mason, Caladan Brood. They had struck north, into the burned forest. Endest had watched them from the bloodstained threshold.
    ‘I will hold you to your promise of peace,’ Anomander had said to Brood, just before they left, when they all still stood in the house.
    Caladan had regarded him. ‘Understand this, Son of Darkness, I build with my hands. I am a maker of monuments to lost causes. If you travel west of here, you will find my works. They adorn ruins and other forgotten places. They stand, as eternal as I could make them, to reveal the virtues to which every age aspires. They are lost now but will be rediscovered. In the days of a wounded, dying people, these monuments are raised again. And again. Not to worship, not to idolize – only the cynics find pleasure in that, to justify the suicide of their own faith. No, they raise them in hope. They raise them to plead for sanity. They raise them to fight against futility.’
    Anomander had gestured back to the hearthstone. ‘Is that now another one of your monuments?’
    ‘Intentions precede our deeds, and then are left lying in the wake of those deeds. I am not the voice of posterity, Anomander Rake. Nor are you.’
    ‘Rake?’
    ‘Purake is an Azathanai word,’ Brood said. ‘You did not know? It was an honorific granted to your family, to your father in his youth.’
    ‘Why? How did he earn it?’
    The Azathanai shrugged. ‘K’rul gave it. He did not share his reasons. Or, rather, “she”, as K’rul is wont to change his mind’s way of thinking, and so assumes a woman’s guise every few centuries. He is now a man, but back then he was a woman.’
    ‘Do you know its meaning, Caladan?’
    ‘Pur Rakess Calas ne A’nom. Roughly, Strength in Standing Still.’
    ‘A’nom,’ said the Son of Darkness, frowning.
    ‘Perhaps,’ the Azathanai said, ‘as a babe, you were quick to stand.’
    ‘And Rakess? Or Rake, as you would call me?’
    ‘Only what I see in you, and what all others see in you. Strength.’
    ‘I feel no such thing.’
    ‘No one who is strong does.’
    They had conversed as if Endest was not there, as if he was deaf to their words. The two men, Tiste and Azathanai, had begun forging something between them, and whatever it was, it was unafraid of truths.
    ‘My father died because he would not retreat from battle.’
    ‘Your father was bound in the chains of his family name.’
    ‘As I will be, Caladan? You give me hope.’
    ‘Forgive me, Rake, but strength is not always a virtue. I will raise no monument to you.’
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