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Step and step, now, step and step-
Chapter Ten
Will you come and tell me when the music ends When the musicians are swallowed in flames Every instrument blackening and crumbling to ash When the dancers stumble and sprawl their diseased limbs rotting off and twitching the skin sloughing away
Will you come and tell me when the music ends
When the stars we pushed into the sky loose their roars
And the clouds we built into visible rage do now explode
When the bright princes of privilege march past with dead smiles falling from their faces a host of deceiving masks
Will you come and tell me when the music ends When reason sinks into the morass of superstition Waging a war of ten thousand armies stung to the lash When we stop looking up even as we begin our mad ru
Will you come and tell me when the music ends When the musicians are no more than black gri
Will you come and tell me when the music ends The fire is eating my breath and agony fills this song When my fingers crack on the strings and fall from my hands And this dance twists every muscle like burning rope while your laughter follows down my crumpling corpse
Won’t you come and tell me when the music ends
When I can leap away and face one god or a thousand
Or nothing at all into this blessed bliss of oblivion
When I can prise open this box and release cruel and bitter fury at all the mad fools crowding the door in panicked flight
Watch me and watch me with eyes wide and shocked
With disbelief with horror with indignant umbrage to upbraidAnd the shouted Nays are like drumbeats a
The music ends my friends, my vile, despicable friends, and see me-
see me slam the door slam it hard-in all your faces!
The Music Ends Fisher Kel Tath
His boots crunched on waterworn stones slick with mist as he made his way to the water’s edge. The steep slopes of the surrounding mountainsides were verdant, thick rainforest, crimson-barked trees towering high, beards of moss hanging from toppled trunks.
Endest Sila
Black water rushed by and he felt its cold-no need to squat down, no need to slide a hand into the tugging current. This dark river was, he could see now, nothing like Dorssan Ryl. How could he have expected otherwise? The new is ever but a mangled echo of the old and whatever whispers of similarity one imagined do naught but sting with pain, leaving one blistered with loss. Oh, he had been a fool, to have journeyed all this way. Seeking what? Even that he could not answer.
No, perhaps he could. Escape. Brief, yes, but escape none the less. The coward flees, knowing he must return, wishing that the return journey might kill him, take his life as it did the old everywhere. But listen! You can shape your soul-make it a bucket, a leaking one that you carry about. Or your soul can be a rope, thick and twisted, refusing to break even as it buckles to one knot after another. Choose your image, Endest Sila
Startled, alarmed, he turned away from the rush of the river. Faced upstream whence came the late afternoon breeze. There, in distant gloom, the muted glow of a campfire.
Ah, no escape after all. He’d wanted solitude, face to face with intractable, in-different nature. He’d wanted to feel… irrelevant. He’d wanted the wildness to punch him senseless, leave him humiliated, reduced to a wretch. Oh, he had wanted plenty, hadn’t he?
With a sour grunt, Endest Sila
Thirty paces away, he could see the lone figure facing the smoky flames. Huge, round-shouldered, seated on a fallen log. And Endest Sila
Two trout speared on skewers cooked above the fire. A pot of simmering tea sat with one blackened shoulder banked in coals. Two tin cups warmed on the flat rock making up one side of the hearth. Another log waited opposite the one on which sat the warlord, Caladan Brood, who slowly twisted round to watch Endest Sila
‘Complaints are far away and will remain so, Caladan. You have awakened my appetite-for food, drink and, most of all, company.’
‘Then sit, make yourself comfortable.’
‘So you did indeed disband your army after the siege,’ said Endest Sila
‘See me now,’ said the warlord, ‘commanding an army of wet stones, and yes, it proves far less troublesome than the last one. Finally, I can sleep soundly at night. Although, matching wits with these trout has challenged me mightily. There, take one of those plates, and here-beware the bones, though,’ he added as he set a fish on the plate.
‘Alone here, Caladan Brood-it makes me wonder if you are hiding.’
‘It may be that I am, Endest Sila
‘No, it never does.’
Neither spoke for a time as they ate their supper. The trout was indeed over-done but Endest Sila
If Anomander Rake was a mystery shrouded in darkness, then Caladan Brood was one clothed in geniality. Spare with words, he nevertheless could make virtually anyone feel welcome and, indeed, appreciated. Or rather, he could when the pressures of command weren’t crouched on his shoulders like a damned mountain. This night, then, Endest Sila
When the meal was done, night’s arrival closed out the world beyond the fire’s light. The rush of the river was a voice, a presence: Water flowed indifferent to the heave and plunge of the sun, the shrouded moon and the slow spin of the stars. The sound reached them in a song without words, and all effort to grasp its meaning was hopeless, for, like the water itself, one could not grasp hold of sound. The flow was ceaseless and immeasurable and just as stillness did not in fact exist, so too true, absolute silence.
‘Why are you here?’ Endest Sila
‘I wish I could answer you, old friend, and Burn knows the desire to ease the burden is almost overwhelming.’
‘You are assuming, Caladan, that I am ignorant of what awaits us.’
‘No, I do not do that-after all, you have sought a pilgrimage, out to this river-and among the Tiste Andii, this place has proved a mysterious lure. Yet you ask why I am here, and so your knowledge must be… incomplete. Endest Sila
The old Tiste Andii looked away, off into the dark where the river sang to the night. So, others had come here, then. Some instinctive need drawing them, yes, to the ghost of Dorssan Ryl. He wondered if they had felt the same disappointment as he had upon seeing these black (but not black enough) waters. It is not the stum. Nothing ever is, begi