We live in waiting
For this most precious thing:
Our god with clear eyes
Who walks into the waste
Of our lives
With the bound straw
Of a broom
And with a bright smile
This god brushes into a corner
Our mess of crimes
The ragged expostulations
We spit out on the morn
With each sun’s rise
We live in waiting, yes
In precious abeyance
Cold-eyed our virtues
Sowing the seeds of waste
In life’s hot earth
In hand the gelid iron
Of weapons
And with bright recompense
We soak this ground
Under the clear sky
With the blood of our god
Spat out and heaved
In rigour’d disgust
– Our Waiting God
Cormor Fural
Towers and bridges, skeletally thin and nowhere the sign of guiding hands, of intelligence or focused will. These constructs, reaching high towards the so-faint bloom of light, were entirely natural, rough of line and raw in their bony elegance. To wander their spindly feet was to overwhelm every sense of proportion, of the ways the world was supposed to look. There was no air, only water. No light, only the glow of some unnatural gift of spiritual vision. Revealing these towers and arching bridges, so tall, so thin, that they seemed but moments from toppling into the fierce, swirling currents.
Bruthen Trana, tugged loose from the flesh and bone that had been home to his entire existence, now wandered lost at the bottom of an ocean. He had not expected this. Visions and prophecies had failed them; failed Hannan Mosag especially. Bruthen had suspected that his journey would find him in a strange, unanticipated place, a realm, perhaps, of myth. A realm peopled by gods and demons, by sentinels defending long-dead demesnes with immortal stolidity.
‘Where the sun’s light will not reach.’ Perhaps his memory was not perfect, but that had been the gist of that fell prophecy. And he was but a warrior of the Tiste Edur-now a warrior bereft of flesh beyond what his spirit insisted out of some wilful stubbornness, as obstinate in its conceits as any sentinel.
And so now he walked, and he could look down upon his limbs, his body; he could reach up and touch his face, feel his hair-now unbound-sweeping out on the current like strands of seaweed. He could feel the cold of the water, could feel even the immense pressure besieging him in this dark world. But there were no paths, no road, no obvious trail wending around these stone edifices.
The rotted wood of ship timbers burst into clouds beneath his feet. Clotted rivets turned underfoot. Fragments that might be bone skittered and danced along the muddy bottom, carried every which way by the currents. Dissolution seemed to be the curse of the world, of all the worlds. All that broke, all that failed, wandered down to some final resting place, lost to darkness, and this went beyond ships on the sea and the lives on those ships. Whales, dhenrabi, the tiniest crustacean. Plans, schemes and grandiose visions. Love, faith and honour. Ambition, lust and malice. He could reach down and scoop it all into his hands, watching the water tug it away, fling it out into a swirling, momentary path of glittering glory, then gone once more.
Perhaps this was the truth he had been meant to see, assuming the presumption of his worthiness, of course-which was proving a struggle to maintain indeed. Instead, waves of despair swept over him, swept through him, spun wild out of his own soul.
He was lost.
What am I looking for? Who am 1 looking for? I have forgotten. Is this a curse? Am I dead and now wandering doomed? Will these towers topple and crush me, leave me yet one more broken, mangled thing in the muck and silt?
I am Tiste Edur. This much I know. My true body is gone, perhaps for ever.
And something, some force of instinct, was driving him on, step by step. There was a goal, a thing to be achieved. He would find it. He had to find it. It had to do with Hannan Mosag, who had sent him here-he did recall that, along with the faint echoes of prophecy.
Yet he felt like a child, trapped in a dream that was an endless search for a familiar face, for his mother, who was out there, unmindful of his plight, and indifferent to it had she known-for that was the heart of such fearful dreams-a heart where love is revealed to be necrotic, a lie, the deepest betrayal possible. Bruthen Trana understood these fears for what they were, for the weakness they revealed, even as he felt helpless against them.
Wandering onward, leaving, at last, those dread monuments in his wake. He might have wept for a time, although of course he could not feel his own tears-they were one with the sea around him-but he voiced muted cries, enough to make his throat raw. And at times he staggered, fell, hands plunging deep into the muck, and struggled to regain his feet, buffeted by the currents.
All of this seemed to go on for a long time.
Until something loomed out of the darkness ahead. Blockish, heaped on one side with what seemed to be detritus-drifts of wreckage, tree branches and the like. Bruthen Trana stumbled closer, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
A house. Enclosed by a low wall of the same black stone. Dead trees in the yard, their trunks thick, stubby, each rising from a root-heaved mound. A snaking path leading to three sagging, saddled steps and a recessed, narrow door. To either side of this entrance there were square windows, shuttered in strips of slate. To the right, forming a rounded corner, rose a squat, flat-topped tower. A small corniced window at the upper level was lit from within with a dull yellow glow, fitful, wavering.
A house. On the floor of the ocean.
And someone is home.
Bruthen Trana found himself standing before the gate, his eyes on the snaking path of pavestones leading to the steps. He could see blooms of silts rising from the mounds to either side, as if the mud was seething with worms. Closer now to the house, he noted the thick green slime bearding the walls, and the prevailing current-which had heaped up rubbish against one side-had done its work on the ground there as well, uprooting one of the dead trees and sculpting out the mound until it was no more than a scatter of barnacled boulders. The tree leaned against the house with unyielding branches from which algae streamed and swirled against the backwash of the current.
This is not what I seek. He knew that with sudden certainty. And yet… he glanced up once more at the tower, in time to see the light dim, as if withdrawing, then vanish.
Bruthen Trana walked onto the path.
The current seemed fiercer here, as if eager to push him off the trail, and some instinct told the Tiste Edur that losing his footing in this yard would be a bad thing. Hunching down, he pushed on.
Upon reaching the steps, Bruthen Trana was buffeted by a sudden roil of the current and he looked up to see that the door had opened. And in the threshold stood a most extraordinary figure. As tall as the Tiste Edur, yet so thin as to seem emaciated. Bone-white flesh, thin and loose, a long, narrow face, seamed with a mass of wrinkles. The eyes were pale grey, surrounding vertical pupils.
The man wore rotted, colourless silks that hid little, including the extra joints on his arms and legs, and what seemed to be a sternum horizontally hinged in the middle. The ripple of too many ribs, a set of lesser collarbones beneath the others. His hair-little more than wisps on a mottled pate-stirred like cobwebs. In one lifted hand the man held a lantern in which sat a stone that burned with golden fire.
The voice that spoke in Bruthen Trana’s mind was strangely childlike. ‘Is this the night for spirits?’
‘Is it night then?’ Bruthen Trana asked.
‘Isn’t it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well,’ the figure replied with a smile, ‘neither do I. Will you join us? The house has not had a guest for a long time.’
‘I am not for this place,’ Bruthen Trana said, uncertain. ‘I think…’
‘You are correct, but the repast is timely. Besides, some current must have brought you here. It is not as if just any old spirit can find the house. You have been led here, friend.’.
‘Why? By whom?’
‘The house, of course. As to why,’ the man shrugged, then stepped back and gestured. ‘Join us, please. There is wine, suitably… dry.’
Bruthen Trana ascended the steps, and crossed the threshold.
The door closed of its own accord behind him. They were in a narrow hallway, directly ahead a T-intersection.
‘I am Bruthen Trana, a Tiste Edur of-’
‘Yes, yes, indeed. The Empire of the Crippled God. Well, one of them, anyway. An Emperor in chains, a people in thrall’-a quick glance over the shoulder as the man led him into the corridor to the right-‘that would be you, Edur, not the Letherii, who are in thrall to a far crueller master.’
‘Coin.’
‘Well done. Yes.’
They halted before a door set in a curved wall.
‘This leads to the tower,’ Bruthen Trana said. ‘Where I first saw your light.’
‘Indeed. It is, alas, the only room large enough to accommodate my guest. Oh,’ he stepped closer, ‘before we go in, I must warn you of some things. My guest possesses a weakness-but then, don’t we all? In any case, it has fallen to me to, uh, celebrate that weakness-now, yes, soon it will end, as all things do-but not quite yet. Thus, you must not distract my dear guest from the distraction I already provide. Do you understand me?’
‘Perhaps I should not enter at all, then.’
‘Nonsense. It is this, Bruthen Trana. You must not speak of dragons. No dragons, do you understand?’
The Tiste Edur shrugged. ‘That topic had not even occurred to me-’
‘Oh, but in a way it has, and continues to do so. The spirit of Emurlahnis. Scabandari. Father Shadow. This haunts you, as it does all the Tiste Edur. The matter is delicate, you see. Very delicate, for both you and my guest. I must needs rely upon your restraint, or there will be trouble. Calamity, in fact.’
‘I shall do my best, sir. A moment-what is your name?’
The man reached for the latch. ‘My name is for no-one, Bruthen Trana. Best know me by one of my many titles. The Letherii one will do. You may call me Knuckles.’
He lifted the latch and pushed open the door.
Within was a vast circular chamber-far too large for the modest tower’s wall that Bruthen Trana had seen from outside. Whatever ceiling existed was lost in the gloom. The stone-tiled floor was fifty or more paces across. As Knuckles stepped inside, the glow from his lantern burgeoned, driving back the shadows. Opposite them, abutting the curved wall, was a raised dais on which heaps of silks, pillows and furs were scattered; and seated at the edge of that dais, leaning forward with forearms resting on thighs, was a giant. An ogre or some such demon, bearing the same hue of skin as Knuckles yet stretched over huge muscles and a robust frame of squat bones. The hands dangling down over the knees were disproportionately oversized even for that enormous body. Long, unkempt hair hung down to frame a heavy-featured face with deep-set eyes-so deep that even the lantern’s light could spark but a glimmer in those ridge-shelved pits.
‘My guest,’ Knuckles murmured. ‘Kilmandaros. Most gentle, I assure you, Bruthen Trana. When… distracted. Come, she is eager to meet you.’
They approached, footfalls echoing in this waterless chamber. Knuckles shifted his route slightly towards a low marble table on which sat a dusty bottle of wine. ‘Beloved,’ he called to Kilmandaros, ‘see who the house has brought to us!’
‘Stuff it with food and drink and send it on its way,’ the huge woman said in a growl. ‘I am on the trail of a solution, scrawny whelp of mine.’
Bruthen Trana could now see, scattered on the tiles before Kilmandaros, a profusion of small bones, each incised in patterns on every available surface. They seemed arrayed without order, nothing more than rubbish spilled out from some bag, yet Kilmandaros was frowning down at them with savage concentration.
‘The solution,’ she repeated.
‘How exciting,’ Knuckles said, procuring from somewhere a third goblet into which he poured amber wine. ‘Double or nothing, then?’
‘Oh yes, why not? But you owe me the treasuries of a hundred thousand empires already, dear Setch-’
‘Knuckles, my love.’
‘Dear Knuckles.’
‘I am certain it is you who owes me, Mother.’
‘For but a moment longer,’ she replied, now rubbing those huge hands together. ‘I am so close. You were a fool to offer double or nothing.’
‘Ah, my weakness,’ Knuckles sighed as he walked over to Bruthen Trana with the goblet. Meeting the Tiste Edur’s eyes, Knuckles winked. ‘The grains run the river, Mother,’ he said. ‘Best hurry with your solution.’
A fist thundered on the dais. ‘Do not make me nervous!’
The echoes of that impact were long in fading.
Kilmandaros leaned still further, glowering down at the array of bones. ‘The pattern,’ she whispered, ‘yes, almost there. Almost…’
‘1 feel magnanimous,’ Knuckles said, ‘and offer to still those grains… for a time. So that we may be true hosts to our new guest.’
The giant woman looked up, a sudden cunning in her expression. ‘Excellent idea, Knuckles. Make it so!’
A gesture, and the wavering light of the lantern ceased Its waver. All was still in a way Bruthen Trana could not define-after all, nothing had changed. And yet his soul knew, somehow, that the grains Knuckles had spoken of were time, its passage, its unending journey. He had just, with a single gesture of one hand, stopped time.
At least in this chamber. Surely not everywhere else. And yet…
Kilmandaros leaned back with a satisfied smirk and fixed her small eyes on Bruthen Trana. ‘I see,’ she said. ‘The house anticipates.’
‘We are as flitting dreams to the Azath,’ Knuckles said. ‘Yet, even though we are but momentary conceits, as our sorry existence might well be defined, we have our uses.’
‘Some of us,’ Kilmandaros said, suddenly dismissive, ‘prove more useful than others. This Tiste Edur’-a wave of one huge, scarred hand-‘is of modest value by any measure.’
‘The Azath see what we do not, in each of us. Perhaps, Mother, in all of us.’
A sour grunt. ‘You think this house let me go of its own will-proof of your gullibility, Knuckles. Not even the Azath could hold me for ever.’
‘Extraordinary,’ Knuckles said, ‘that it held you at all.’
This exchange, Bruthen Trana realized, was an old one, following well-worn ruts between the two.
‘Would never have happened,’ Kilmandaros said under her breath, ‘if he’d not betrayed me-’
‘Ah, Mother. I have no particular love for Anomander Purake, but let us be fair here. He did not betray you. In fact, it was you who jumped him from behind-’
Anticipating his betrayal!’
‘Anomander does not break his word, Mother. Never has, never will.’
‘Tell that to Osserc-’
‘Also in the habit of “anticipating” Anomander’s imminent betrayal.’
‘What of Draconus?’
‘What of him, Mother?’
Kilmandaros rumbled something then, too low for Bruthen Trana to catch.
Knuckles said, ‘Our Tiste Edur guest seeks the place of Names.’
Bruthen Trana started. Yes! It was true-a truth he had not even known before just this moment, before Knuckle’s quiet words. The place of Names. The Names of the Gods.
‘There will be trouble, then,’ Kilmandaros said, shifting in agitation, her gaze drawn again and again to the scatter of bones. ‘He must remember this house, then. The path-every step-he must remember, or he will wander lost for all time. And with him, just as lost as they have ever been, the names of every forgotten god.’
‘His spirit is strong,’ Knuckles said, then faced Bruthen Trana and smiled. ‘Your spirit is strong. Forgive me-we often forget entirely the outside world, even when, on rare occasions such as this one, that world intrudes.’
The Tiste Edur shrugged. His head was spinning. The place of Names. ‘What will I find there?’ he asked.
‘He forgets already,’ Kilmandaros muttered.
‘The path,’ Knuckles answered. ‘More than that, actually. But when all is done-for you, in that place-you must recall the path, Bruthen Trana, and you must walk it without a sliver of doubt.’
‘But, Knuckles, all my life, I have walked no path without a sliver of doubt-more than a sliver, in fact-’
‘Surprising,’ Kilmandaros cut in, ‘for a child of Scabandari-’
‘I must begin the grains again,’ Knuckles suddenly announced. ‘Into the river-the pattern, Mother, it calls to you once more.’
She swore in some unknown language, bent to scowl down at the bones. ‘I was there,’ she muttered. ‘Almost (here-so close, so-’
A faint chime echoed in the chamber.
Her fist thundered again on the dais, and this time the echoes seemed unending.
At a modest signal from Knuckles, Bruthen Trana drained the fine wine and set the goblet down on the marble tabletop.
It was time to leave.
Knuckles led Bruthen Trana back into the corridor. A final glance back into that airy chamber and the Tiste Edur saw Kilmandaros, hands on knees, staring directly at him with those faintly glittering eyes, like two lone, dying stars in the firmament. Chilled to the depths of his heart, Bruthen Trana pulled his gaze away and followed the son of Kilmandaros back to the front door.
At the threshold, he paused for a moment to search Knuckles’s face. ‘The game you play with her-tell me, does such a pattern exist?’
Brows arched. ‘In the casting of bones? Damned if I know.’ A sudden smile, then. ‘Our kind, ah, but we love patterns.’
‘Even if they don’t exist?’
‘Don’t they?’ The smile grew mischievous. ‘Go, Bruthen Trana, and mind the path. Always mind the path.’
The Tiste Edur walked down onto the pavestones. ‘I would,’ he muttered, ‘could I find it.’
Forty paces from the house, he turned to look upon it, and saw nothing but swirling currents, spinning silts in funnels.
Gone. As if I had imagined the entire thing.
But I was warned, wasn’t I? Something about a path.
‘Remember…’
Lost. Again. Memories tugged free, snatched away by the ferocious winds of water.
He swung round again and set off, staggering, step by step, towards something he could not dredge up from his mind, could not even imagine. Was this where life ended? In some hopeless quest, some eternal search for a lost dream?
Remember the path. Oh, Father Shadow, remember… something. Anything.
Where the huge chunks of ice had been, there were now stands of young trees. Alder, aspen, dogwood, forming a tangled fringe surrounding the dead Meckros City. Beyond the trees were the grasses of the plains, among them deep-rooted bluestems and red-lipped poppies that cloaked the burial mounds where resided the bones of thousands of people.
The wreckage of buildings still stood here and there on their massive pylons of wood, while others had tilted, then toppled, spilling out their contents onto canted streets. Weeds and shrubs now grew everywhere, dotting the enormous, sprawling ruin, and among the broken bones of buildings lay a scatter of flowers, a profusion of colours on all sides.
He stood, balanced on a fallen pillar of dusty marble allowing him a view of the vista, the city stretching to his left, the ragged edge and green-leafed trees with the mounds beyond on his right. His eyes, a fiery amber, were fixed on something on the far horizon directly ahead. His broad mouth held its habitual downturn at the corners, an expression that seemed ever at war with the blazing joy within his eyes. His mother’s eyes, it was said. But somehow less fierce and this, perhaps, was born of his father’s uneasy gift-a mouth that did not expect to smile, ever.
His second father, his true father. The thread of blood. The one who had visited in his seventh week of life. Yes, while it had been a man named Araq Elalle who had raised him, whilst he lived in the Meckros City, it had been the other-the stranger in the company of a yellow-haired bonecaster-who had given his seed to Menandore, Rud Halle’s mother. His Imass minders had not been blind to such truths, and oh how Menandore had railed at them afterwards.
I took all that I needed from Udinaas! And left him a husk and nothing more. He can never sire another child-a husk! A useless mortal-forget him, my son. He is nothing.’ And from the terrible demand in her blazing eyes, her son had recoiled.
Rud Elalle was tall now, half a hand taller than even his mother. His hair, long and wild in the fashion of the Bentract Imass warriors, was a sun-bleached brown. He wore a cloak of ranag hide, deep brown and amber-tipped the fur. Beneath that was a supple leather shirt of deerskin. His leggings were of thicker, tougher allish hide. On his feet were ranag leather moccasins that reached to just below his knees.
A scar ran down the right side of his neck, gift of a boar’s dying lunge. The bones of his left wrist had been broken and were now misaligned, the places of the breaks knotted protrusions bound in thick sinews, but the arm had not been weakened by this; indeed, it was now stronger than its opposite. Menandore’s gift, that strange response to; any injury, as if his body sought to armour itself against any chance of the same injury’s recurring. There had been other breaks, other wounds-life among the Imass was hard, and though they would have protected him from its rigour, he would not permit that. He was among the Bentract, he was of the Bentract. Here, with these wondrous people, he had found love and fellowship. He would live as they lived, for as long as he could.
Yet, alas, he felt now… that time was coming to an end. His eyes remained fixed on that distant horizon, even as he sensed her arrival, now at his side. ‘Mother,’ he said.
‘Imass,’ she said. ‘Speak our own language, my son. Speak the language of dragons.’
Faint distaste soured Rud Elalle. ‘We are not Eleint, Mother. That blood is stolen. Impure-’
‘We are no less children of Starvald Demelain. I do not know who has filled your mind with these doubts. But they are weaknesses, and now is not the time.’
‘Now is not the time,’ he repeated.
She snorted. ‘My sisters.’
‘Yes.’
‘They want me. They want him. Yet, in both schemes, they have not counted you a threat, my son. Oh, they know you are grown now. They know the power within you. But they know nothing of your will.’
‘Nor, Mother, do you.’
He heard her catch her breath, was inwardly amused at the suddenly crowded silence that followed.
He nodded to the far horizon. ‘Do you see them, Mother?’
‘Unimportant. Mayhap they will survive, but I would not wager upon it. Understand me, Rud, with what is to come, not one of us is safe. Not one. You, me, your precious Bentract-’
He turned at that, and his eyes were all at once a mirror of his mother’s-bright with rage and menace.
She very nearly flinched, and he saw that and was pleased. ‘1 will permit no harm to come to them, Mother. You wish to understand my will. Now you do.’
‘Foolish. No, insanity. They are not even alive-’
‘In their minds, they are. In my mind, Mother, they are.’
She sneered. ‘Do the new ones now among the Bentract hold to such noble faith, Rud? Have you not seen their disdain? Their contempt for their own deluded kin? It is only a matter of time before one of them speaks true-shattering the illusion for all time-’
‘They will not,’ Rud said, once more eyeing the distant party of wanderers who were now, without question, approaching the ruined city. ‘You do not visit often enough,’ he said. ‘Disdain and contempt, yes, but now, too, you will see fear.’
‘Of you? Oh, my son, you fool! And do your adopted kin know to guard your back against them? Of course not, for that would reveal too much, would invite awkward questions-and the Imass are not ones to be easily turned away when seeking truth.’
‘My back will be guarded,’ Rud said.
‘By whom?’
‘Not you, Mother?’
She hissed in a most reptilian manner. ‘When? While my sisters are busy trying to kill me? When he has the Finnest in his hand and casts eyes upon all of us?’
‘If not you,’ he said easily, ‘then someone else.’
‘Wiser to kill the newcomers now, Rud.’
‘And my kin would have no questions then?’
‘None but you alive to answer, and you of course may tell them anything you care to. Kill those new Imass, those strangers with their sly regard, and be quick about it.’
‘I think not.’
‘Kill them, or I will.’
‘No, Mother. The Imass are mine. Shed blood among my people-any of them-and you will stand alone the day Sukul and Sheltatha arrive, the day of Silchas Ruin who comes to claim the Finnest.’ He glanced across at her. Could white skin grow still paler? ‘Yes, all in a single day. I have been to the Twelve Gates-maintaining my vigil as you have asked.’
‘And?’ The query was almost breathless.
‘Kurald Galain is most perturbed.’
‘They draw close?’
‘You know that as well as I do-my father is with them, is he not? You steal his eyes when it suits you-’
‘Not as easy as you think.’ Her tone was genuine in its bitterness. ‘He… baffles me.’
Frightens you, you mean. ‘Silchas Ruin will demand the Finnest.’-
‘Yes, he will! And we both know what he will do with it-and that must not be permitted!’
Are you sure of that, Mother? Because, you see, I am not. Not any more. ‘Silchas Ruin may well demand. He may well make dire threats, Mother. You have said so often enough.’
‘And if we stand side by side, my son, he cannot hope to get past us.’
‘Yes.’
‘But who will be guarding your back?’
‘Enough, Mother. I warned them to silence and I do not think they will attempt anything. Call it faith-not in the measure of their fear. Instead, my faith rests in the measure of… wonder.’
She stared at him, clearly confused.
He felt no inclination to elaborate. She would see, in time. ‘I would go to welcome these new ones,’ he said, eyes returning to the approaching strangers. ‘Will you join me, Menandore?’
‘You must be mad.’ Words filled with affection-yes, she could never rail at him for very long. Something of his father’s ethereal ease, perhaps-an ease even Rud himself could remember from that single, short visit. An ease that would slip over the Letherii’s regular, unimpressive features, whenever the wave of pain, dismay-or indeed any harsh emotion-was past and gone, leaving not a ripple in its wake.
That ease, Rud now understood, was the true face of Udinaas. The face of his soul.
Father, I do so look forward to seeing you again.
His mother was gone-at least from his side. At a sudden gust of wind Rud Elalle glanced up and saw the white and gold mass of her dragon form, lurching skyward with every heave of the huge wings.
The strangers had all halted, still three hundred paces away, and were staring up, now, as Menandore lunged yet higher, slid across currents of air for a moment, until she faced them, and then swept down, straight for the small party. Oh, how she loved to intimidate lesser beings.
What happened then without doubt surprised Menandore more than even Rud-who gave an involuntary shout of surprise as two feline shapes launched into the air from the midst of the party. Dog-sized, forelegs lashing upward as Rud’s mother sailed overhead-and she snapped her hind legs up tight against her belly in instinctive alarm, even as a thundering beat of her wings lifted her out of harm’s way. At sight of her neck twisting round, eyes flashing in an outraged glare-indignant indeed-Rud Elalle laughed, and was satisfied to see that the sound reached his mother, enough to draw her glare and hold it, until the dragon’s momentum carried her well past the strangers and their defiant pets, out of the moment when she might have banked hard, jaws hingeing open to unleash deadly magic down on the obstreperous emlava and their masters.
The threat’s balance tilted away-as Rud had sought with that barking laugh-and on she flew, dismissing all in her wake, including her son.
And, were it in his nature, he would then have smiled. For he knew his mother was smiling, now. Delighted to have so amused her only son, her child who, like any Imass, saved his laughter for the wounds his body received in the ferocious games of living. And even her doubts, etched in by this conversation just past, would smooth themselves over for a time.
A little time. When they returned, Rud also knew, they would sting like fire. But by then, it would be too late. More or less.
He climbed down from the toppled column. It was time to meet the strangers.
‘That,’ Hedge announced, ‘is no Imass. Unless they breed ‘em big round here.’
‘Not kin,’ Onrack observed with narrowed eyes.
Hedge’s ghostly heart was still pounding hard in his ghostly chest in the wake of that damned dragon. If it hadn’t been for the emlava cubs and their brainless lack of fear, things might well have got messy. A cusser in Hedge’s left hand. Quick Ben with a dozen snarly warrens he might well have let loose all at once. Trull Sengar and his damned spears-aye, dragon steaks raining down from the sky.
Unless she got us first.
No matter, the moment had passed, and he was thankful for that. ‘Maybe he’s no kin, Onrack, but he dresses like an Imass, and those are stone chips at the business end of that bone club he’s carrying.’ Hedge glanced across at Quick Ben-feeling once again the surge of delight upon seeing a familiar face, the face of a friend-and said, ‘I wish Fid was here, because just looking at that man has the hairs standing on the back of my neck.’
‘If you’ve already got a bad feeling about this,’ the wizard replied, ‘why do you need Fid?’
‘Confirmation, is why. The bastard was talking to a woman, who then veered into a dragon and thought to give us a scare. Anybody keeping scaly company makes me nervous.’
‘Onrack,’ said Trull Sengar as the man drew closer, walking with a casual, almost loose stride, ‘I think we approach the place where Cotillion wanted us to be.’
At that, Hedge scowled. ‘Speaking of scaly-dealing with Shadowthr one’s lackey makes all this stink even worse-’
‘Leaving once more unspoken the explanation for what you’re doing here, Hedge,’ the Tiste Edur replied with a faint smile at the sapper-that damned smile, so bloody disarming that Hedge almost spilled out every secret in his head, just to see that smile grow into something more welcoming. Trull Sengar was like that, inviting friendship and camaraderie like the sweet scent of a flower-probably a poisonous one-but that might be just me. My usual paranoia. Well earned, mind. Still, there doesn’t seem to be anything poisonous about Trull Sengar.
It’s just that 1 don’t trust nice people. There, it’s said-.at least here in my head. And no, 1 don’t need any Hood-kissed reason either. He stepped too close to one of the emlava cubs and had to dance away to avoid lashing talons. He glared at the hissing creature. ‘Your hide’s mine, you know that? Mine, kitty. Take good care of it in the meantime.’
The eyes burned up at him, and the emlava cub opened wide its jaws to loose yet another whispering hiss.
Damn, those fangs are getting long.
Onrack had moved out ahead, and now the Imass stopped. Moments later they had all drawn up to stand a few paces behind him.
The tall, wild-haired warrior walked closer. Five paces from Onrack he halted, smiled and said something in some guttural language.
Onrack cocked his head. ‘He speaks Imass.’
‘Not Malazan?’ Hedge asked with mock incredulity. ‘What’s wrong with the damned fool?’
The man’s-smile broadened, those amber nugget eyes fixing on Hedge, and in Malazan he said, ‘All the children of the Imass tongue are as poetry to this damned fool. As are the languages of the Tiste,’ he added, gaze shifting to Trull Sengar. Then he spread his hands out to the sides, palms exposed. ‘I am Rud Elalle, raised among the Bentract Imass as a child of their own.’
Onrack said, ‘They have yet to show themselves, Rud Elalle. This is not the welcome I expected from kin.’
‘You have been watched, yes, for some time. Many clans. Ulshun Pral sent out word that none were to block your path.’ Rud Elalle looked down at the tethered cubs to either side of Trull Sengar. ‘The ay flee your scent, and now 1 see why.’ He then lowered his hands and stepped back. ‘I have given you my name.’
‘I am Onrack, of Logros T’lan Imass. The one who restrains the emlava is Trull Sengar, Tiste Edur of the Hiroth tribe. The dark-skinned man is Ben Adaephon Delat, born in a land called Seven Cities; and his companion is Hedge, once a soldier of the Malazan Empire.’
Rud’s eyes found Hedge again. ‘Tell me, soldier, do you bleed?’
‘What?’
‘You were dead, yes? A spirit willing itself the body it once possessed. But now you are here. Do you bleed?’
Bemused, Hedge looked to Quick Ben. ‘What’s he mean? Like a woman bleeds? I’m too ugly to be a woman, Quick.’
‘Forgive me,’ Rud Elalle said. ‘Onrack proclaims himself a T’lan Imass-yet here he stands, clothed in flesh and bearing the scars of your journey in this realm. And there have been other such guests. T’lan Imass-lone wanderers who have found this place-and they too are clothed in flesh.’
‘Other guests?’ Hedge asked. ‘You almost had one more of those, and she would have been a viper in your midst, Rud Elalle. For what it’s worth, I wouldn’t be trusting those other T’lan Imass, were I you.’
‘Ulshun Pral is a wise leader,’ Rud answered with another smile.
‘I’m still a ghost,’ Hedge said.
‘Are you?’
The sapper frowned. ‘Well, I ain’t gonna cut myself to find out one way or the other.’
‘Because you intend to leave this place, eventually. Of course, I understand.’
‘Sounds like you do at that,’ Hedge snapped. ‘So, maybe you live with these Bentract Imass, Rud Elalle, but that’s about as far as this kinship thing goes. So, who are you?’
‘A friend,’ the man replied with yet another smile.
Aye, and if you knew how 1 felt about friendly people.
‘You have given me your names, and so now I welcome you among the Bentract Imass. Come, Ulshun Pral is eager to meet you.’
He set off.
They followed. With hand signals, Hedge drew Quick Ben closer to his side and they dropped back a bit from the others. The sapper spoke in very low tones. ‘That furry tree’s standing on the ruins of a dead city, Quick, like he was its Hood-damned prince.’
A Meckros City,’ the wizard murmured.
Aye, I guessed as much. So where’s the ocean? Glad I never saw the wave that carried it here.’
Quick Ben snorted. ‘Gods and Elder Gods, Hedge. Been here kicking pieces around, I’d wager. And, just maybe, a Jaghut or two. There’s a real mess of residual magic in this place-not just Imass. More Jaghut than Imass, in fact. And… other stuff.’
‘Quick Ben Delat, lucid as a piss-hole.’
‘You really want to know why Cotillion sent us here?’
‘No. Just knowing snares me in his web and I ain’t gonna dance for any god.’
‘And I do, Hedge?’
The sapper grinned. ‘Aye, but you dance, and then you dance.’
‘Rud has a point, by the way.’
‘No, he has a club.’
‘About you bleeding.’
‘Hood above, Quick-’
‘Oh, now that’s a giveaway, Hedge. What’s Hood doing “above”? Just how deep was that hole you crawled out of? And more important, why?’
‘My company soured already? I liked you least, you know. Even Trotts-’
‘Now who’s dancing?’
‘Better we know nothing about why we’re here, is what I’m trying to say.’
‘Relax. I have already figured you out, Hedge, and here’s something that might surprise you. Not only do I have no problem with you being here-neither does Cotillion.’
‘Bastard! What-you and Cotillion sending pigeons back and forth on all this?’
‘I’m not saying Cotillion knows anything about you, Hedge. I’m just saying that if he did, he’d be fine. So would Shadowthrone-’
‘Gods below!’
‘Calm down!’
‘Around you, Quick, that’s impossible. Always was, always will be! Hood, I’m a ghost and I’m still nervous!’
‘You never were good at being calm, were you? One would think dying might have changed you, some, but I guess not.’
‘Funny. Ha ha.’
They were now skirting the ruined city, and came within sight of the burial mounds. Quick Ben grunted. ‘Looks like the Meckros didn’t survive the kick.’
‘Dead or no,’ Hedge said, ‘you’d be nervous too if you was carrying a sack of cussers on your back.’
‘Damn you, Hedge-that was a cusser in your hand back there! When the dragon-’
‘Aye, Quick, so you just keep them kitties away from me, lest I jump back and turn an ankle or something. And stop talking about Shadowthrone and Cotillion, too.’
‘A sack full of cussers. Now I am nervous-you may be dead, but I’m not!’
‘Just so.’
‘I wish Fid was here, too. Instead of you.’
‘That’s not a very nice thing to say! You’re hurting my feelings. Anyway. What I was wanting to tell you was about that T’lan Imass I was travelling with, for a time.’
‘What happened to it? Let me guess, you tossed it a cusser.’
‘Damned right I did, Quick. She was trailing chains, big ones.’
‘Crippled God?’
‘Aye. Everyone wants in on this game here.’
‘That’d be a mistake,’ the wizard asserted as they walked towards a series of rock outcroppings behind which rose thin tendrils of hearth smoke. ‘The Crippled God would find himself seriously outclassed.’
‘Think highly of yourself, don’t you? Some things never change.’
‘Not me, idiot. I meant the dragon. Menandore. Rud Halle’s mother.’
Hedge dragged the leather cap from his head and pulled at what was left of his hair. ‘This is what drives me mad! You! Things like that, just dropped out like a big stinking lump of-ow!’ He let go of his hair. ‘Hey, that actually hurt!’
‘Tug hard enough to bleed, Hedge?’
Hedge glared across at the wizard, who was now smirking. ‘Look, Quick, this would all be fine if I was planning on building a homestead here, planting a few tubers and raising emlava for their cuddly fur or something. But damn it, I’m just passing through, right? And when I come out the other side, well, I’m back being a ghost, and that’s something I need to get used to, and stay used to.’
Quick Ben shrugged. ‘Just stop pulling your hair and you’ll be fine, then.’
The emlava cubs had grown and were now strong enough to pull Trull Sengar off balance as they strained on their leather leashes, their attention fixed yet again on the Malazan soldier named Hedge, for whom they had acquired a mindless hate. Trull leaned forward to drag the beasts along-it always worked better when the sapper walked ahead, rather than lagging back as he was doing now.
Onrack, noting his struggles, turned and quickly clouted both cubs on their flat foreheads. Suitably cowed, the two emlava ceased their efforts and padded along, heads lowered.
‘Their mother would do the same,’ Onrack said.
‘The paw of discipline,’ Trull said, smiling. ‘I wonder if we might believe the same for our guide here.’
Rud Elalle was ten paces ahead of them-perhaps he could hear, perhaps not.
‘Yes, they share blood,’ Onrack said, nodding. ‘That much was clear when they were standing side by side. And if there is Eleint blood in the mother, then so too in the son.’
‘Soletaken?’
‘Yes.’
‘I wonder if he anticipated this complication?’ Trull meant Cotillion when saying he.
‘Unknown,’ Onrack replied, understanding well enough. ‘The task awaiting us grows ever less certain.
Friend Trull, I fear for these Imass. For this entire realm.’
‘Leave the wizard and his sapper to address our benefactor’s needs, then, and we will concern ourselves with protecting this place, and your kin who call it home.’
The Imass glanced across with narrowed eyes. ‘You say this, with such ease?’
‘The wizard, Onrack, is the one who needs to be here. His power-he will be our benefactor’s hand in what is to come. You and me, we were but his escort, his bodyguards, if you will.’
‘You misunderstand me, Trull Sengar. My wonder is in your willingness to risk your life, again. This time for a people who are nothing to you. For a realm not your own.’
‘They are your kin, Onrack.’
‘Distant. Bentract.’
‘If it had been, say, the Den-Ratha tribe of the Edur to gain supremacy among our tribes, Onrack, instead of my own Hiroth, would I not give my life to defend them? They are still my people. For you it is the same, yes? Logros, Bentract-just tribes-but the same people.’
‘There is too much within you, Trull Sengar. You humble me.’
‘Perhaps there lies your own misunderstanding, friend. Perhaps all you see here is my search for a cause, for something to fight for, to die for.’
‘You will not die here.’
‘Oh, Onrack-’
‘I may well fight to protect the Bentract and this realm, hut they are not why I am here. You are.’
Trull could not meet his friend’s eyes, and in his heart there was pain. Deep, old, awakened.
The son,’ Onrack said after a moment, ‘seems… very young.’
‘Well, so am I.’
‘Not when I look into your eyes. It is not the same with this Soletaken,’ he continued, seemingly unmindful of the wound he had just delivered. ‘No, those yellow eyes are young.’
‘Innocent?’
A nod. ‘Trusting, as a child is trusting.’
‘A gentle mother, then.’
‘She did not raise him,’ Onrack said.
Ah, the Imass, then. And now I begin to see, to understand. ‘We will be vigilant, Onrack.’
‘Yes.’
Rud Elalle led them into a split between two upthrust knobs of layered rock, a trail that then wound between huge boulders before opening out into the Imass village.
Rock shelters along a cliff. Tusk-framed huts, the spindly frames of drying racks on which were stretched hides. Children running like squat imps in the midst of a gathering of perhaps thirty Imass. Men, women, elders. One warrior stood before all the others, while off to one side stood three more Imass, their garb rotted and subtly different in cut and style from that of the Bentract-the strangers, Trull realized-guests yet remaining apart.
Upon seeing them, Onrack’s benign expression hardened. ‘Friend,’ he murmured to Trull, “ware those three.’
‘I decided the same myself,’ Trull replied under his breath.
Rud Elalle moved to stand at the Bentract leader’s side. ‘This is Ulshun Pral,’ he said, setting a hand on the man’s thick shoulder-a gesture of open affection that seemed blissfully unmindful of the growing tension at the edge of this village.
Onrack moved forward. ‘I am Onrack the Broken, once of the Logros T’lan Imass, child of the Ritual. I ask that we be made guests among your tribe, Ulshun Pral.’
The honey-skinned warrior frowned over at Rud Elalle, then said something in his own language.
Rud nodded and faced Onrack. ‘Ulshun Pral asks that you speak in the First Language.’
‘He asked,’ Onrack said, ‘why 1 chose not to.’
‘Yes.’
‘My friends do not share the knowing of that language. I cannot ask for guesting on their behalf without their understanding, for to be guest is to be bound to the rules of the tribe, and this they must know, before I would venture a promise of peace on their behalf
‘Can you not simply translate?’ Rud Elalle asked.
‘Of course, yet I choose to leave that to you, Rud Elalle, for Ulshun Pral knows and trusts you, while he does not know me.’
‘Very well, I shall do so.’
‘Enough with all this,’ Hedge called out, gingerly setting down his pack. ‘We’ll all be good boys, so long as no-one tries to kill us or worse, like making us eat some horrible vegetable rightly extinct on every other realm in the universe.’
Rud Elalle was displaying impressive skill and translating Hedge’s words almost as fast as the sapper spoke them.
Ulshun Pral’s brows lifted in seeming astonishment, then he turned and with a savage gesture yelled at a small crowd of elderly women at one side of the crowd.
Hedge scowled at Onrack, ‘Now what did I say?’ he demanded.
But Trull saw his friend smiling. Ulshun Pral has just directed the cooks to fish the baektar from the stew they have prepared for us.’
‘The baek-what?’
‘A vegetable, Hedge, that will be found nowhere but here.’
All at once the tension was gone. There were smiles, shouts of apparent welcome from other Imass, and many came forward to close, first on Onrack, and then-with expressions of delight and wonder, on Trull Sengar-no, he realized, not on him-on the emlava cubs. Who began purring deep in their throats, as thick, short-fingered hands reached out to stroke fur and scratch behind the small, tufted ears.
‘Look at that, Quick!’ Hedge was staring in disbelief. ‘Now is that fair?’
The wizard slapped the sapper on the back. ‘It’s true, Hedge, the dead stink.’
‘You’re hurting my feelings again!’
Sighing, Trull released the leather leashes and stepped back. He smiled across at Hedge. ‘I smell nothing un-toward,’ he said.
But the soldier’s scowl only deepened. ‘Maybe I like you now, Trull Sengar, but you keep being nice and that’ll change, I swear it.’
‘Have I offended you-’
‘Ignore Hedge,’ Quick Ben cut in, ‘at least when he’s talking. Trust me, it was the only way the rest of us in the squad stayed sane. Ignore him… until he reaches into that damned sack of his.’
‘And then?’ Trull asked in complete bewilderment.
‘Then run like Hood himself was on your heels.’
Onrack had separated himself from his welcomers and was now walking towards the strangers.
‘Yes,’ Quick Ben said in a low voice. ‘They’re trouble indeed.’
‘Because they were like Onrack? T’lan Imass?’
‘Of the Ritual, aye. The question is, why are they here?’
‘I would imagine that whatever mission brought them to this place, Quick Ben, the transformation they experienced has shaken them-perhaps, as with Onrack, their spirits have reawakened.’
‘Well, they look unbalanced enough.’
Their conversation with Onrack was short, and Trull watched as his old friend approached.
‘Well?’ the wizard demanded.
Onrack was frowning. ‘They are Bentract, after all. But from those who joined the Ritual. Ulshun Pral’s clan were among the very few who did not, who were swayed by the arguments set forth by Kilava Onass-this is why,’ Onrack added, ‘they greet the emlava as if they were Kilava’s very own children. Thus, there are ancient wounds between the two groups. Ulshun Pral was not a clan chief back then-indeed, the T’lan Bentract do not even know him.’
‘And that is a problem?’
‘It is, because one of the strangers is a chosen chief-chosen by Bentract himself. Hostille Rator.’
‘And the other two?’ Quick Ben asked.
‘Yes, even more difficult. Ulshun Pral’s Bonecaster is gone. Til’aras Benok and Gr’istanas Ish’ilm, who stand to either side of Hostille Rator, are Bonecasters.’
Trull Sengar drew a deep breath. ‘They contemplate usurpation, then.’
Onrack the Broken nodded.
‘Then what had stopped them?’ Quick Ben asked.
‘Rud Elalle, wizard. The son of Menandore terrifies them.’
The rain thundered down, every moment another hundred thousand iron-tipped lances crashing down out of the dark onto slate rooftops, exploding on the cobbled streets where streams now rushed down, racing for the harbour.
The ice north of the island had not died quietly. Sundered by the magic of a wilful child, the white and blue mountains had lifted skyward in pillars of steam that roiled into massive stormclouds, which had then marched south freed from the strictures of refusal, and those clouds now erupted over the beleaguered city with rage and vengeance. Late afternoon had become midnight and now, as the half-drowned chimes of midnight’s bells sounded, it seemed as if this night would never end.
On the morrow-if it ever came-the Adjunct would set sail with her motley fleet. Thrones of War, a score of well-armed fast escorts, the last of the-transports holding the rest of the Fourteenth Army, and one sleek black dromon propelled by the tireless oars manned by headless Tiste Andii. Oh, and of course, in the lead would be a local pirate’s ship, captained by a dead woman-but never mind her. Return, yes, to that black-hulled nightmare.
Their hosts had worked hard to keep the dread truth of that Quon dromon from Nimander Golit and his kin. The severed heads on the deck, mounded around the mainmast, well, they had kept them covered. No point in encouraging hysteria, should their living Tiste Andii guests see the faces of their kin, their true kin, for were they not of Drift Avalii? Oh yes, they were indeed. Uncles, fathers, mothers, oh, a play on words now would well serve the notion-they were, yes, heads of families, cut away before their time, before their children had grown old enough, wise enough, hard enough to survive in this world. Cut away, ha ha. Now, death would have been one thing. Dying was one thing. Just one and there were other things, always, and you didn’t need any special wisdom to know that. But those heads had not died, not stiffened then softened with rot. The faces had not fallen away to leave just bone, just the recognition that came with a sharing of what-is, what-was and what’ would-be. No, the eyes stared on, the eyes blinked because some memory told them that blinking was necessary. The mouths moved, resuming interrupted conversations, the sharing of jests, the gossip of parents, yet not a single word could claw free.
But hysteria was a complicated place in which a young mind might find itself. It could be deafening with screams, shrieks, the endless bursts of horror again and again and again-a tide surging without end. Or it could be quiet-silent in that awful way of some silences-like that of gaping mouths, desperate but unable to draw breath, the eyes above bulging, the veins standing prominent in their need, but no breath would come, nothing to slide life into the lungs. This was the hysteria of drowning. Drowning inside oneself, inside horror. The hysteria of a child, blank-eyed, drool smearing the chin.
Some secrets were impossible to keep. The truth of that ship, for one. The Silanda’s lines were known, were profoundly familiar. The ship that had taken their parents o-
a pathetic journey in search of the one whom every Tiste Andii of Drift Avalii called Father. Anomander Rake. Anomander of the silver hair, the dragon’s eyes. Didn’t find him, alas. Never the chance to plead for help, to ask all the questions that needed asking, to stab fingers in accusation, condemnation, damnation. All that, yes yes.
Take to your oars, brave parents, there is more sea to cross. Can you see the shore? Of course not. You see the sunlight when there is sunlight through canvas weave, and in your heads you feel the ache of your bodies, the strain in your shoulders, the bunch and loose, bunch and loose of every draw on the sweeps. You feel the blood welling up to pool in the neck as if it was a gilded cup, only to sink back down again. Row, damn you! Row for the shore!
Aye, the shore. Other side of this ocean, and this ocean, dear parents, is endless.
So row! Row!
He might have giggled, but that would be a dangerous thing, to break the silence of his hysteria, which he had held on to for so long now it had become warm as a mother’s embrace.
Best to carry on, working to push away, shut away, all thought of the Silanda. Easier on land, in this inn, in this room.
But, on the morrow, they would sail. Again. Onto the ships, oh the spray and wind enlivens so!
And this was why, on this horrid night of vengeful rain, Nimander was awake. For he knew Phaed. He knew Phaed’s own stain of hysteria, and what it might lead her to do. Tonight, in the sodden ashes of midnight’s bell.
She could make her footfalls very quiet, as she crept out of her bed and padded barefoot to the door. Blessed sister blessed daughter blessed mother blessed aunt, niece, grandmother-blessed kin, blood of my blood, spit of my spit, gall of my gall. 1 hear you.
For I know your mind, Phaed. The ever-surging bursts in your soul-yes, 1 see your bared teeth, the smear of intent. You imagine yourself unseen, yes, unwitnessed, and so you reveal your raw self. There in that blessed slash of grey-white, so poetically echoed by the gleam of the knife in your hand.
To the door, darling Phaed. Lift the latch, and out you go, to slide down the corridor all slithering limbs as the rain lashes the roof above and water trickles down the walls in dirty tears. Cold enough to see your breath, Phaed, remind-ing you not just that you are alive, but that you are sexually awakened; that this journey is the sweetest indulgence of under’the-cover secrets, fingers ever playful on the knife, and on the rocking ship in the harbour eyes stare at blackness beneath drenched canvas, water trickling down…
She worries, yes, about Withal. Who might awaken. Before or after. Who might smell the blood, the iron stench, the death riding out on Sandalath Drukorlat’s last breath. Who might witness when all that Phaed was, truly was, could never be witnessed-because such things were not allowed, never allowed, and so she might have to kill him, too.
Vipers strike more than once.
Now at the door, the last barrier-row you fools-the shore lies just beyond!-and of course there is no lock binding the latch. No reason for it. Save one murderous child whose mother’s head stares at canvas on a pitching deck. The one child who went to see that for herself. And we are drawn to pilgrimage. Because to live is to hunt for echoes. Echoes of what? No-one knows. But the pilgrimage is taken, yes, ever taken, and every now and then those echoes are caught-just a whisper-creaking oars, the slap and chop of waves like fists against the hull, clamouring to get in, and the burbling blood, the spitting suck as it sinks back down. And we hear, in those echoes, some master’s voice: Row! Row for the shore! Row for your lives!
He remembered a story, the story he always remembered, would ever remember. An old man alone in a small fisher boat. Rowing into the face of a mountain of ice. Oh, he did love that story. The pointless glory of it, the mindless magic-he would grow chilled at the thought, at the vision he conjured of that wondrous, profound and profoundly useless scene. Old man, what do you think you are doing? Old man-the ice!
Inside, a shadow among shadows, gloom in the gloom, teeth hidden now, but the knife is a lurid gleam, catching reflections of rain from the window’s pitted rainbow glass. And a shudder takes her then, pulling her down into a crouch as sensations flood up through her belly, lancing upward into her brain and her breath catches-oh, Phaed, don’t scream now. Don’t even moan.
They have drawn their cots together-on this night, then, the man and the bitch have shared the spit of their loins, isn’t that sweet. She edges closer, eyes searching. Finding Sandalath’s form on the left, closest to her. Convenient.
Phaed raises the knife.
In her mind, flashes, scene after scene, the sordid list of this old woman’s constant slights, each one belittling Phaed, each one revealing to all nearby too many of Phaed’s secret terrors-no-one has the right to do that, no-one has the right to then laugh-laugh in the eyes if not out loud. All those insults, well, the time has come to pay them back. Here, with one hard thrust of the knife.
She lifts the knife still higher, draws in her breath and holds it.
And stabs down.
Nimander’s hand snaps out, catches her wrist, hard, tightening as she twists round, lips peeled back, eyes blazing with rage and fear. Her wrist is a tiny thing, like a bony snake, caught, frenzied, seeking to turn the knife, to set the edge against Nimander’s hand. He twists again and bones break, an awful crunching, grinding sound.
The knife clunks on the wooden floor.
Nimander bears down on her, using his weight to crumple Phaed onto the floor beside the bed. She tries to scratch at his eyes and he releases the broken limb to grasp the other one. He breaks that one too.
She has not screamed. Amazing, that. Not a sound but her panting breath.
Nimander pins her down and takes her neck in his hands. He begins to squeeze.
No more, Phaed. I now do as would Anomander Rake. As would Silchas Ruin. As would Sandalath herself were she awake. I do this, because I know you-yes, even now, there, in your bulging eyes where all your awareness now gathers in a flood, I can see the truth of you.
The emptiness inside.
Your mother stares in horror. At what she has spawned. She stares, disbelieving, clinging desperately to the possibility that she has got it wrong, that we all have, that you are not as you are. But that is no help. Not to her. Not to you.
Yes, stare up into my eyes, Phaed, and know that I see you.
I see you-
He was being dragged away. Off Phaed. His hands were being pried loose, twisted painfully to break his grip-and he falls back, muscled arms wrapped about him now, and is dragged from Phaed, from her bloated face and the dreadful gasping-poor Phaed’s throat hurts, maybe is torn, even. To breathe is to know agony.
But she lives. He has lost his chance, and now they will kill him.
Sandalath screams at him-she has been screaming at him for some time, he realizes. She first screamed when he broke Phaed’s second wrist-awakened by Phaed’s own screams-oh, of course she had not stayed quiet. Snapping bones would never permit that, not even from a soulless creature as was Phaed. She had screamed, and he’d heard nothing, not even echoes-hands on the oar and squeeze!
Now what would happen? Now what would they do?
‘Nimander!’
He started, stared across at Sandalath, studied her face as if it were a stranger’s.
Withal held him, arms trapped against his sides, but Nimander was not interested in struggling. It was too late for that.
Phaed had thrown up and the stink of her vomit was thick in the air.
Someone was pounding on the door-which in his wisdom Nimander had locked behind him after following Phaed into the room.
Sandalath yelled that it was all right, everything was fine-an accident, but everything is fine now.
But poor Phaed’s wrists are broken. That will need seeing to.
Not now, Withal.
He stands limp in my arms, wife. Can I release him now?
Yes, but be wary-
I shall, no doubt of that.
And now Sandalath, positioned between Nimander and the still-coughing, gagging Phaed, took Nimander’s face in her hands and leaned closer to study his eyes.
What do you see, Sandalath Drukorlat? Gems bright with truths and wonders? Pits whispering at you that no bottom will ever be found, that the plunge into a soul never ends? Row, you fools! We’re sinking! Oh, don’t giggle, Nimander, don’t do that. Remain as you are, outwardly numb. Blank. What do you see? Why, nothing, of course.
‘Nimander.’
‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You can kill me now.’
A strange look on her face. Something like horror. ‘Nimander, no. Listen to me. I need to know. What has happened here? Why were you in our room?’
‘Phaed.’
‘Why were you both in our room, Nimander?’
Why, I followed her. I stayed awake-I’ve been doing that a lot. I’ve been watching her for days and days, nights and nights. Watching her sleep, waiting for her to wake up, to take out her knife and smile a greeting to the dark. The dark that is our heritage, the dark of betrayal.
I don’t remember when last I slept, Sandalath Drukorlat.
I needed to stay awake, always awake. Because of Phaed.
Did he answer her then? Out loud, all those tumbling statements, those reasonable explanations. He wasn’t sure. ‘Kill me now, so I can sleep, I so want to sleep.’
‘No’One is going to kill you,’ Sandalath said. Her hands, pressed to the sides of his face, were slick with sweat. Or rain, perhaps. Not tears-leave that to the sky, to the night.
‘I am sorry,’ Nimander said.
‘I think that apology should be saved for Phaed, don’t you?’
‘I am sorry,’ he repeated to her, then added, ‘that she’s not dead.’
Her hands pulled away, leaving his cheeks suddenly cold.
‘Hold a moment,’ Withal said, stepping to the foot of the bed and bending down to pick up something. Gleaming, edged. Her knife. ‘Now,’ he said in a murmur, ‘which one does this toy belong to, I wonder?’
‘Nimander’s still wearing his,’ Sandalath said, and then she turned to stare down at Phaed.
A moment later, Withal grunted. ‘She’s been a hateful little snake around you, Sand. But this?’ He faced Nimander. ‘You just saved my wife’s life? I think you did.’ And then he moved closer, but there was nothing of the horror of Sandalath’s face in his own. No, this was a hard expression, that slowly softened. ‘Gods below, Nimander, you knew this was coming, didn’t you? How long? When did you last sleep?’ He stared a moment longer, then spun. ‘Move aside, Sand, I think I need to finish what Nimander started-’
‘No!’ his wife snapped.
‘She’ll try again.’
‘I understand that, you stupid oaf! Do you think I’ve not seen into that fanged maw that is Phaed’s soul? Listen, there is a solution-’
‘Aye, wringing her scrawny neck-’
‘We leave them here. On the island-we sail tomorrow without them. Withal-husband-’
‘And when she recovers-creatures like this one always do-she’ll take this damned knife and do to Nimander what she’s tried to do to you. He saved your life, and I will not abandon him-’
‘She won’t kill him,’ Sandalath said. ‘You don’t understand. She cannot-without him, she would be truly alone, and that she cannot abide-it would drive her mad-’
‘Mad, aye, mad enough to take a knife to Nimander, the one who betrayed her!’
‘No.’
‘Wife, are you so certain? Is your faith in understanding the mind of a sociopath so strong? That you would leave Nimander with her?’
‘Husband, her arms are broken.’
‘And broken bones can be healed. A knife in the eye cannot.’
‘She will not touch him.’
‘Sand-’
Nimander spoke. ‘She will not touch me.’
Withal’s eyes searched his. ‘You as well?’
You must leave us here,’ Nimander said, then winced at the sound of his own voice. So weak, so useless. He was no Anomander Rake. No Silchas Ruin. Andarist’s faith in choosing him to lead the others had been a mistake. ‘We cannot go with you. With Silanda. We cannot bear to see that ship any longer. Take it away, please, take them away!’
Oh, too many screams this night, in this room. More demands from outside, in growing alarm.
Sandalath turned and, drawing a robe about her-she had been, Nimander suddenly realized, naked-a woman of matronly gifts, the body of a woman who had birthed children, a body such as young men dream of. And might there be wives who might be mothers who might be lovers’…for one such as me? Stop, she is’dead-robe drawn, Sandalath walked to the door, quickly unlocked it and slipped outside, closing the door behind her. More voices in the corridor.
Withal was staring down at Phaed, who had ceased her coughing, her whimpers of pain, her fitful weeping. ‘This is not your crime, Nimander.’
What?
Withal reached down and grabbed Phaed by her upper arms. She shrieked.
‘Don’t,’ Nimander said.
‘Not your crime.’
‘She will leave you, Withal. If you do that. She will leave you.’
He stared across at Nimander, then pushed Phaed back down onto the floor. ‘You don’t know me, Nimander. Maybe she doesn’t, either-not when it comes to what I will do for her sake-and, I suppose,’ he added with a snarl, ‘for yours.’
Nimander had thought his words had drawn Withal back, had kept him from doing what he had intended to do, and so he was unprepared, and so he stood, watching, as Withal snatched Phaed up, surged across the room-carrying her as if she was no more than a sack of tubers-and threw her through the window.
A punching shatter of the thick, bubbled glass, and body, flopping arms and bared lower limbs-with dainty feet at the end-were gone, out into the night that howled, spraying the room with icy rain.
Withal stumbled back in the face of that wind, then he spun to face Nimander. ‘I am going to lie,’ he said in 9 growl. ‘The mad creature ran, flung herself through-do you hear me?’
The door opened and Sandalath charged into the room, behind her the Adjunct’s aide, Lostara Yil, and the priest, Banaschar-and, pushing close behind them, the other Tiste Andii-eyes wide with fear, confusion-and Nimander lurched towards them, one step, then another-
And was pulled round to face Sandalath.
Withal was speaking. A voice filled with disbelief. Expostulations.
But she was staring into his eyes. ‘Did she? Nimander! Did she?’
Did she what! Oh, yes, go through the window.
Shouts from the street below, muted by the wailing winds and lashing rain. Lostara Yil moved to stand at the sill, leaned out. A moment later she stepped back and turned, her expression grave. ‘Broken neck. I’m sorry, Sandalath. But I have questions…’
Mother, wife, Withal’s lover, was still staring into Nimander’s eyes-a look that said loss was rearing from the dark, frightened places in her mind, rearing, yes, to devour the love she held for her husband-for the man with the innocent face; that told him, with the answer he might give to her question, two more lives might be destroyed. Did she? Through the window? Did she… die?
Nimander nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.
Another dead woman screamed in his skull and he almost reeled. Dead eyes, devouring all love. ‘You have lied, Nimander!’
Yes. To save Withal. To save Sandalath Drukorlat-
‘To save yourself!’
Yes.
‘My love, what has happened to you?’
I heard a spinning sound. A whispering promise-we must stay here, you see. We must. Andarist chose me. He knew he was going to die. He knew that there would be no Anomander Rake, no Silchas Ruin, no great kin of our age of glory-no-one to come to save us, take care of us. There was only me.
My love, to lead is to carry burdens. As did the heroes of old, with clear eyes.
So look at my eyes, my love. See my burden? Just like a hero of old-
Sandalath reached up again, those two long-fingered hands. Not to take his face, but to wipe away the rain streaming down his cheeks.
My clear eyes.
We will stay here, on this island-we will look to the Shake, and see in them the faint threads of Tiste Andii blood, and we will turn them away from the barbarity that has taken them and so twisted their memories.
We will show them the shore. The true shore.
Burdens, my love. This is what it is to live, while your loved ones die.
Sandalath, still ignoring Lostara Yil’s questioning, now stepped back and turned to settle into her husband’s arms.
And Withal looked across at Nimander.
Outside, the wind screamed.
Yes, my love, see it in his-eyes. Look what I have done to Withal. All because I failed.
Last night’s storm had washed the town clean, giving it a scoured appearance that made it very nearly palatable. Yan Tovis, Twilight, stood on the pier watching the foreign ships pull out of the harbour. At her side was her half-brother, Yedan Derryg, the Watch.
‘Glad to see them go,’ he said.
‘You are not alone in that,’ she replied.
‘Brullyg’s still dead to the world-but was that celebration or self-pity?’
Yan Tovis shrugged.
‘At dawn,’ Yedan Derryg said after a long moment of silence between them, ‘our black-skinned cousins set out to build the tomb.’ His bearded jaw bunched, molars grinding, then he said, ‘Only met the girl once. Sour-faced, shy eyes.’
‘Those broken arms did not come from the fall,’ Yan Tovis said. ‘Too bruised-the tracks of fingers. Besides, she landed on her head, bit through her tongue clean as a knife cut.’
‘Something happened in that room. Something sordid.’
‘I am pleased we did not inherit such traits.’
He grunted, said nothing.
Yan Tovis sighed. ‘Pully and Skwish seem to have decided their sole purpose in living these days is to harry me at every turn.’
‘The rest of the witches have elected them as their representatives. You begin your rule as Queen in a storm of ill-feeling.’
‘It’s worse than that,’ she said. ‘This town is crowded with ex-prisoners. Debt-runners and murderers. Brullyg managed to control them because he could back his claim to being the nastiest adder in the pit. They look at me and see an Atri-Preda of the Imperial Army-just another warden-and you, Derryg, well, you’re my strong-arm Finadd. They don’t care a whit about the Shake and their damned queen.’
‘Which is precisely why you need the witches, Twilight.’
‘I know. And if that’s not misery enough, they know it, too.’
‘You need clout,’ he said.
‘Clever man.’
‘Even as a child, you were prone to sarcasm.’
‘Sorry.’
‘The answer, I think, will be found with these Tiste Andii.’
She looked across at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Who knows more of our past than even the witches? Who knows it as a clean thing? A thing not all twisted by generations of corruption, of half-remembrances and convenient lies?’
‘Your tongue runs away with you, Yedan.’
‘More sarcasm.’
‘No, I find myself somewhat impressed.’
The jaw bunched as he studied her.
She laughed. Could not help it. ‘Oh, brother, come-the foreigners are gone and probably won’t be back-ever.’
‘They sail to their annihilation?’
‘What do you think?’
‘I’m not sure, Twilight. That child mage, Sinn…’
‘You may be right. News of her imminent departure had Pully and Skwish dancing.’
‘She destroyed a solid wall of ice half as long as Fent Reach. I would not discount these Malazans.’
‘The Adjunct did not impress me,’ Yan Tovis said.
‘Maybe because she didn’t need to.’
Twilight thought about that, then thought about it some more.
Neither spoke as they turned away from the glittering bay and the now-distant foreign ships.
The morning sun was actually beginning to feel warm-the final, most poignant proof that the ice was dead, the threat past. The Isle would live on.
On the street ahead the first bucket of night-soil slopped down onto the clean cobbles from a second-storey window, forcing passers-by to dance aside.
‘The people greet you, Queen.’
‘Oh, be quiet, Yedan.’
Captain Kindly stood by the port rail, staring across the choppy waves to the Silanda. Soldiers from both of the squads on that haunted ship were visible on the deck, a handful gathered about a game of bones or some such nefarious activity, whilst the sweeps churned the water in steady rhythm. Masan Gilani was up near the steering oar, keeping Sergeant Cord company.
Lucky bastard, that Cord. Lieutenant Pores, positioned on Kindly’s right, leaned his forearms on the rail, eyes fixed on Masan Gilani-as were, in all likelihood, the eyes of most of the sailors on this escort, those not busy readying the sails at any rate.
‘Lieutenant.’
‘Sir?’
‘What do you think you are doing?’
‘Uh, nothing, sir.’
‘You’re leaning on the gunnel. At ease. Did I at any time say “at ease”, Lieutenant?’
Pores straightened. ‘Sorry, sir.’
‘That woman should be put up on report.’
Aye, she’s not wearing much, is she?’
‘Out of uniform.’
‘Damned distracting, isn’t it, sir?’
‘Disappointing, you mean, surely, Lieutenant.’
‘Ah, that’s the word I was looking for, all right. Thank you, sir.’
‘The Shake make the most extraordinary combs,’ Kindly said. ‘Turtleshell.’
‘Impressive, sir.’
‘Expensive purchases, but well worth it, I should judge.’
‘Yes sir. Tried them yet?’
‘Lieutenant, do you imagine that to be amusing?’
‘Sir? No, of course not!’
‘Because, as is readily apparent, Lieutenant, your commanding officer has very little hair.’
‘If by that you mean on your head, then yes sir, that is, uh, apparent indeed.’
‘Am I infested with lice, then, that I might need to use a comb elsewhere on my body, Lieutenant?’
‘I wouldn’t know, sir. I mean, of course not.’
‘Lieutenant, I want you to go to my cabin and prepare the disciplinary report on that soldier over there.’
‘But sir, she’s a marine.’
‘Said report to be forwarded to Fist Keneb when such communication is practicable. Well, why are you still standing here? Get out of my sight, and no limping!’
‘Limp’s long gone, sir!’
Pores saluted then hurried away, trying not to limp. The problem was, it had become something of a habit when he was around Captain Kindly. Granted, a most pathetic attempt at eliciting some sympathy. Kindly had no sympathy. He had no friends, either. Except for his combs. And they’re all teeth and no bite,’ he murmured as he descended to Kindly’s cabin. ‘Turtleshell, ooh!’
Behind him, Kindly spoke, ‘I have decided to accompany you, Lieutenant. To oversee your penmanship.’
Pores cringed, hitched a sudden limp then rubbed at his hip before opening the cabin hatch. ‘Yes sir,’ he said weakly.
And when you are done, Lieutenant, my new turtleshell combs will need a thorough cleansing. Shake are not the most fastidious of peoples.’
‘Nor are turtles.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘I will be most diligent, sir.’
‘And careful.’
‘Absolutely, sir.’
‘In fact, I think I had better oversee that activity as well.’
‘Yes sir.’
‘That wasn’t a limp I saw, was it?’
‘No sir, I’m much better now.’
‘Otherwise we would have to find a good reason for your limping, Lieutenant. For example, my finding a billy club and shattering your legs into pieces. Would that do, do you think? No need to answer, I see. Now, best find the ink box, yes?’
‘I’m telling you, Masan, that was Kindly himself over there. Drooling over you.’
‘You damned fool,’ she said, then added, ‘Sergeant.’
Cord just grinned. ‘Even at that distance, your charms are, uh, unmistakable.’
‘Sergeant, Kindly has probably not lain with a woman since the night of his coming of age, and that time was probably with a whore his father or uncle bought for the occasion. Women can tell these things. The man’s repressed, in all the worst ways.’
‘Oh, and what are the good ways of being repressed?’
‘For a man? Well, decorum for one, as in not taking advantage of your rank. Listen closely now, if you dare. All real acts of chivalry are forms of repressed behaviour.’
‘Where in Hood’s name did you get that? Hardly back on the savannas of Dal Hon!’
‘You’d be surprised what the women in the huts talk about, Sergeant.’
‘Well, soldier, I happen to be steering this damned ship, so it was you who walked up here to stand with me, not the other way round!’
¦
‘I was just getting away from Balm’s squad-not to mention that sapper of yours, Crump, who’s decided I’m worthy of worship. Says I’ve got the tail of some salamander god.’
‘You’ve what?’
‘Aye. And if he grabs it it’s liable to come off. I think he means he thinks I’m too perfect for the likes of him. Which is something of a relief. Doesn’t stop him ogling me, though.’
‘You get the ogles because you want the ogles, Masan Gilani. Keep your armour on and we’ll all forget about you quick enough.’
‘Armour on a ship? No thanks. That’s a guarantee of a fast plunge to the mucky bottom, Sergeant.’
‘We won’t be seeing any battle on the waves,’ Cord pronounced.
‘Why not? The Letherii got a fleet or three, don’t they?’
‘Mostly chewed up by years at sea, Masan Gilani. Besides, they’re not very good at the ship-to-ship kind of fighting-without their magic, that is.’
‘Well, without our marines, neither are we.’
‘They don’t know that, do they?’
‘We haven’t got Quick Ben any more either.’
Cord leaned on the steering oar and looked across at her. You spent most of your time in the town, didn’t you? Just a few trips back and forth to us up the north side of the island. Masan Gilani, Quick Ben had all the moves, aye, and even the look of an Imperial High Mage. Shifty, mysterious and scary as Hood’s arse-crack. But I’ll tell you this-Sinn, well, she’s the real thing.’
‘If you say so.’ All Masan Gilani could think of, when it came to Sinn, was the little mute child curling up in the arms of every woman in sight, suckling on tits like a newborn. Of course, that was outside Y’Ghatan. Long ago, now.
‘I do say so,’ Cord insisted. ‘Now, if you ain’t interested in getting unofficial with this sergeant here, best take your swaying hips elsewhere,’
‘You men really are all the same.’
‘And so are you women. Might interest you,’ he added as she turned to leave, ‘Crump’s no whiskered shrew under those breeches.’
‘That’s disgusting.’ But she paused at the steps leading down to the main deck and glanced back at the sergeant. ‘Really?’
‘Think I’d lie about something like that?’
He watched Masan Gilani sashay her way up the main deck to where Balm and the rest were gambling, Crump with all the winnings, thus far. They’d reel him in later, of course. Although idiots had a way of being damnably lucky.
In any case, the thought of Masan Gilani ending up with Crump, of all people, was simply too hilarious to let pass. If she wasn’t interested in decent men like Sergeant Cord, well, she could have the sapper and so deserve everything that came with him. Aye, he’ll worship you all right. Even what you cough up every morning and that sweet way you clear your nose before going into battle. Oh, wait till I tell Shard about this. And Ebron. And Limp. We’ll set up a book, aye. How long before she runs screaming. With Crump loping desperate after her, knees at his ears.
Ebron climbed onto the aft deck. ‘What’s got you looking so cheerful, Sergeant?’
‘I’ll tell you later. Dropped out of the game?’
‘Crump’s still winning.’
‘Ain’t turned it yet?’
‘We tried, half a bell ago, Sergeant. But the damned fool’s luck’s gone all uncanny.’
‘Really? He’s not a mage or something, is he?’
‘Gods no, the very opposite. All my magics go awry-the ones I tried on him and on the bones and skull. Those Mott Irregulars, they were mage-hunters, you know. High Marshal this and High Marshal that-if Crump really is a Bole, one of the brothers, well, they were legendary.’
‘You saying we’re underestimating the bastard, Ebron?’
The squad mage looked morose. ‘By about three hundred imperial jakatas and counting, Sergeant.’
Hood’s balls, maybe Masan Gilani will like being Queen of the Universe.
‘What was that you were going to tell me about, Sergeant?’
‘Never mind.’
Shurq Elalle stood on the foredeck of the Froth Wolf and held a steady, gauging eye on the Undying Gratitude five reaches ahead. All sails out, riding high. Skorgen Kaban was captaining her ship and would continue to do so until they reached the mouth of the Lether River. Thus far, he’d not embarrassed himself-or, more important, her.
She wasn’t very happy about all of this, but these Malazans were paying her well indeed. Good-quality gold, and a chestful of that would come in handy in the days, months and probably years to come.
Yet another invasion of the Letherii Empire, and in its own way possibly just as nasty as the last one. Were these omens, then, signalling the decline of a once great civilization? Conquered by barbaric Tiste Edur, and now in the midst of a protracted war that might well bleed them out, right down to a lifeless corpse.
Unless, of course, those hapless abandoned marines-whatever ‘marines’ were; soldiers, anyway-were already jellied and dissolving into the humus. A very real possi-bility, and Shurq was not privy to any details of the campaign so she had no way of knowing either way.
So, here she was, returning at last to Letheras… maybe just in time to witness its conquest. Witness-now really, darling Shurq, you’ve a bigger role than that. Like leading ihe damned enemy right up to the docks’. And how famous will that make you then? How many more curses on your name?
There is a ritual,’ said a voice behind her.
She turned. That odd man, the one in the ratty robes, whose face was so easily forgotten. The priest. ‘Banaschar, is it?’
He nodded. ‘May I join you, Captain?’
‘As you please, but at the moment I am not a captain. I’m a passenger, a guest.’
‘As am I,’ he replied. ‘As I mentioned a moment ago, there is a ritual.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘To find and bind your soul to your body once more-to remove your curse and make you alive again.’
‘A little late for that, even if I desired such a thing, Banaschar.’
His brows rose. ‘You do not dream of living again?’
‘Should I?’
‘I am probably the last living High Priest of D’rek, the Worm of Autumn. The face of the aged, the dying and the diseased. And of the all-devouring earth that takes flesh and bone, and the fires that transform into ashes-’
‘Yes, fine, I grasp the allusions.’
‘I, more perhaps than most, do understand the tension between the living and the dead, the bitterness of the season that finds each and every one of us-’
‘Do you always go on like this?’
He looked away. ‘No. I am trying to resurrect my faith-’
‘By the Tiles, Banaschar, don’t make me laugh. Please.’
‘Laugh? Ah, yes, the play on words. Accidental-’
‘Rubbish.’
That elicited a mocking smile-which was better than the grave misery that had been there a moment earlier. ‘Very well, Shurq Elalle, why do you not wish to live once again?’
‘I don’t get old, do I? I stay as I am, suitably attractive-’
‘Outwardly, yes.’
‘And have you taken the time to look inward, Banaschar?’
‘I would not do such a thing without your permission.’
‘I give it. Delve deep, High Priest.’
His gaze fixed on her, but slowly surrendered its focus. A moment passed, then he paled, blinked and stepped back. ‘Gods below, what is that V
‘I don’t know what you mean, good sir.’
‘There are… roots… filling your entire being. Every vein and artery, the thinnest capillaries… alive…’
‘My ootooloo-they said it would take over, eventually. Its appetites are’-she smiled-‘boundless. But I have learned to control them, more or less. It possesses its own rigour, yes?’
‘You are dead and yet not dead, not any more-but what lives within you, what has claimed your entire body, Shurq Elalle, it is alien. A parasite!’
‘Beats fleas.’
He gaped.
She grew impatient with his burgeoning alarm. ‘Errant take your rituals. I am content enough as I am, or will be once I get scoured out and some new spices stuffed-’
‘Stop, please.’
‘As you like. Is there something else you wanted to discuss? Truth is, I have little time for high priests. As if piety comes from gaudy robes and self-righteous arrogance. Show me a priest who knows how to dance and I might bask in his measure, for a time. Otherwise…’
He bowed. ‘Forgive me, then.’
‘Forget trying to resurrect your faith, Banaschar, and try finding for yourself a more worthy ritual of living.’
He backed away, and very nearly collided with the Adjunct and Tavore’s ever-present bodyguard, Lostara Yil. Another hasty bow, then flight down the steps.
The Adjunct frowned at Shurq Elalle. ‘It seems you are upsetting my other passengers, Captain.’
‘Not my concern, Adjunct. I would be of better service if I was on my own ship.’
‘You lack confidence in your first mate?’
‘My incomplete specimen of a human? Why would you imagine that?’
Lostara Yil snorted, then pointedly ignored the Adjunct’s quick warning glance.
‘I will have many questions to ask you, Captain,’ Tavore said. ‘Especially the closer we get to Letheras. And I will of course value your answers.’
‘You are being too bold,’ Shurq Elalle said, ‘heading straight for the capital.’
‘Answers, not advice.’
Shurq Elalle shrugged. ‘I had an uncle who chose to leave Letheras and live with the Meckros. He wasn’t much for listening to advice either. So off he went, and then, not so long ago, there was a ship, a Meckros ship from one of their floating cities south of Pilott-and they told tales of a sister city being destroyed by ice, then vanishing-almost no wreckage left behind at all-and no survivors. Probably straight down to the deep. That hapless city was the one my uncle lived on.’
‘Then you should have learned a most wise lesson,’ Lostara Yil said in a rather dry tone that hinted of self-mockery.
‘CM*
‘Yes. People who make up their minds about something never listen to advice-especially when it’s to the contrary.’
‘Well said.’ Shurq Elalle smiled at the tattooed woman. ‘Frustrating, isn’t it?’
‘If you two are done with your not very subtle complaints,’ the Adjunct said, ‘I wish to ask the captain here about the Letherii secret police, the Patriotists.’
‘Ah well,’ Shurq Elalle said, ‘that is not a fun subject. Not fun at all.’
‘I am not interested in fun,’ Tavore said.
And one look at her, Shurq Elalle reflected, was proof enough of that.
With twelve of his most loyal guards from the Eternal Domicile, Sirryn marched up Kravos Hill, the west wall of Letheras two thousand paces behind him. The tents of the
¦
Imperial Brigade dominated in the midst of ancillary companies and lesser brigades, although the Tiste Edur encampment, situated slightly apart from the rest, to the north, looked substantial-at least two or three thousand of the damned savages, Sirryn judged.
Atop Kravos Hill stood half a dozen Letherii officers and a contingent of Tiste Edur, among them Hanradi Khalag. Sirryn withdrew a scroll and said to the once-king, ‘I am here to deliver the Chancellor’s orders.’
Expressionless, Hanradi reached out for the scroll, then passed it on to one of his aides without looking at it.
Sirryn scowled. ‘Such orders-’
‘I do not read Letherii,’ Hanradi said.
‘If you’d like, I can translate-’
‘I have my own people for that, Finadd.’ Hanradi Khalag looked across at the officers of the Imperial Brigade. ‘In the future,’ he said, ‘we Edur will patrol the boundaries of our own camp. The parade of Letherii whores is now at an end, so your pimp soldiers will have to make their extra coin elsewhere.’
The Edur commander led his troop away, down off the summit of the hill. Sirryn stared after them for a moment, until he was certain they would not return. He then withdrew a second scroll and approached the Preda of the Imperial Brigade. ‘These, too,’ he said, ‘are the Chancellor’s orders.’
The Preda was a veteran, not just of battle, but of the ways of the palace. He simply nodded as he accepted the scroll. ‘Finadd,’ he asked, ‘will the Chancellor be commanding us in person when the time comes?’
‘I imagine not, sir.’
That could make things awkward.’
‘In some matters, I will speak for him, sir. As for the rest, you will find, once you have examined that scroll, that you are given considerable freedom for the battle itself.’
And if I find myself at odds with Hanradi?’
‘I doubt that will be a problem,’ Sirryn said.
He watched the Preda mull that over, and thought he saw a slight widening of the man’s eyes.
‘Finadd,’ the Preda said.
‘Sir?’
‘How fares the Chancellor, at the moment?’
‘Well indeed, sir.’
‘And… in the future?’
‘He is most optimistic, sir.’
‘Very good. Thank you, Finadd.’
Sirryn saluted. ‘Begging your leave, sir, I wish to oversee the establishment of my camp.’
‘Make it close to this hill, Finadd-this is where we will command the battle-and I will want you close.’
‘Sir, there is scant room left-’
‘You have my leave to move people out at your discretion, Finadd.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Oh, he would enjoy that. Grubby soldiers with dust on their boots-they always imagined themselves superior to their counterparts in the palace. Well, a few cracked skulls would change that quick enough. By leave of their very own Preda. He saluted again and led his troops back down the hill.
The man looked familiar. Had he been a student of hers? Son of a neighbour, son of another scholar? These were the questions in Janath’s mind as the troop dragged them from Tehol’s home. Of the journey to the compound of the Patriotists, she now recalled very little. But that man, with the familiar face-a face that stirred oddly intimate feelings within her-would not leave her.
Chained in her cell, chained in the darkness that crawled with vermin, she had been left alone for some time now. Days, perhaps even a week. A single plate of watery stew slid through the trap at the foot of the door at what seemed irregular intervals-it would not be pushed into her cell if she did not leave the empty plate from the last meal within easy reach of the guard. The ritual had not been explained to her, but she had come to admire its precision, its eloquence. Disobedience meant hunger; or, rather, starvation-hunger was always there, something that she had not experienced in the household of Bugg and Tehol. There had been a time, back then, when she had come to loathe the taste of chicken. Now she dreamed of those damned hens.
The man, Tanal Yathvanar, had visited but once, apparently to gloat. She’d no idea she had been wanted for sedition, although in truth that did not surprise her much. When thugs were in power, educated people were the first to feel their fists. It was so pathetic, really, how so much violence came from someone feeling small. Small of mind, and it did not matter how big the sword in hand, that essential smallness remained, gnawing with very sharp teeth.
Both Bugg and Tehol had hinted, occasionally, that things would not go well if the Patriotists found her. Well, them, as it turned out. Tehol Beddict, her most frustrating student, who had only attended her lectures out of adolescent lust, now revealed as the empire’s greatest traitor-so Tanal Yathvanar had said to her, the glee in his voice matched by the lurid reflections in his eyes as he stood with his lantern in one hand and the other touching his private parts whenever he thought she wasn’t looking. She had been sitting with her back to the stone wall, head tilted down chin to chest, with her filthy hair hanging ragged over her face.
Tehol Beddict, masterminding the empire’s economic ruin-well, that was still a little hard to believe. Oh, he had the talent, yes. And maybe even the inclination. But for such universal collapse as was now occurring, there was a legion of co-conspirators. Unwitting for the most part, of course, barring that niggling in their guts that what they were doing was, ultimately, destructive beyond measure. But greed won out, as it always did. So, Tehol Beddict had paved the road, but hundreds-thousands?-had freely chosen to walk it. And now they cried out, indignant and appalled, even as they scurried for cover lest blame spread its crimson pool.
As things stood at the moment, the entire crime now rested at Tehol’s feet-and Bugg’s, the still elusive manservant.
‘But we will find him, janath,’ Tanal Yathvanar had said. ‘We find everyone, eventually.’
Everyone but yourselves, she had thought to reply, for that search leads you onto a far too frightening path. Instead, she had said nothing, given him nothing at all. And watched as the sword got ever smaller in his hand-yes, that sword, too.
‘Just as we found you. Just as I found you. Oh, it’s well known now. I was the one to arrest Tehol Beddict and Scholar Janath. Me. Not Karos Invictad, who sits day and night drooling over his box and that blessed two-headed insect. It has driven him mad, you know. He does nothing else.’ He then laughed. ‘Did you know he is now the richest man in the empire? At least, he thinks he is. But I did the work for him. I made the transactions. I have copies of everything. But the real glory is this-1 am his beneficiary, and he doesn’t even know it!’
Yes, the two-headed insect. One drooling, the other nattering.
Tanal Yathvanar. She knew him-that was now a certainty. She knew him, because he had done all this to her before. There had been no dissembling when he had talked about that-it was the source for his gloating over her, after all, so it could not be a lie.
And now her memories-of the time between the end of the semester at the academy, and her awakening in the care of Tehol and Bugg-memories that had been so fragmented, images blurred beyond all understanding, began to coalesce, began to draw into focus.
She was wanted, because she had escaped. Which meant that she had been arrested-her first arrest-and her tormentor had been none other than Tanal Yathvanar.
Logical. Reasonable intuitions from the available facts and her list of observations. Cogent argument and standing before her-some time ago now-the one man who offered the most poignant proof as he babbled on, driven by her lack of reaction. ‘Dear]anath, we must resume where we left off. 1 don’t know how you got away. 1 don’t even know how you ended up with Tehol Beddict. But once more you are mine, to do with as I please. And what I will do with you will not, alas, please you, but your pleasure is not what interests me. This time, you will beg me, you will promise anything, you will come to worship me. And that is what I will leave you with, today. To give you things to think about, until my return.’
Her silence, it had turned out, had been a weak defence.
She was beginning to remember-past those ordered details arranged with clinical detachment-and with those memories there was… pain.
Pain beyond comprehension.
I was driven mad. That is why I could not remember anything. Entirely mad-I don’t know how Bugg and Tehol healed me, but they must have. And Tehol’s consideration, his very uncharacteristic gentleness with me-not once did he seek to take advantage of me, although he must have known that he could have, that I would have welcomed it. That should have awakened suspicion in me, it should have, but I was too happy, too strangely content, even as 1 waited and waited for Tehol to find himself in my arms.
Ah, now isn’t that an odd way of putting it?
She wondered where he was. In another cell? There were plenty of moaners and criers for neighbours, most beyond all hope of communication. Was one of them Tehol Beddict? Broken into a bleeding, gibbering thing?
She did not believe it. Would not. No, for the Great Traitor of the Empire, there would have to be spectacle. A Drowning of such extravagance as to burn like a brand into the collective memory of the Letherii people. He would need to be broken publicly. Made the singular focus for this overwhelming tide of rage and fear. Karos Invictad’s crucial act to regain control, to quell the anarchy, the panic, to restore order.
What irony, that even as Emperor Rhulad prepared to slaughter champions-among them some reputed to be the most dangerous Rhulad would ever face-Karos Invictad could so easily usurp the attention of everyone-well, among the Letherii, that is-with this one arrest, this one trial, this one act of bloodletting.
Doesn’t he realize? That to kill Tehol Beddict this way will be to make of him a martyr? One such as has never been seen before? Tehol Beddict sought to destroy the Letherii system of Indebtedness. Sought to destroy the unholy union of coin and power. He will be the new Errant, but a new kind of Errant. One bound to justice, to freedom, to the commonality of humans. Regardless of whether he was right, regardless even if these were his aims-none of that will matter. He will be written of, a thousand accounts, and in time but a handful will survive, drawn together to forge the heart of a new cult.
And you, Karos Invictad, oh, how your name will ride the breath of curses, for ever more.
Make someone a martyr and surrender all control, of what that someone was in life, of what that someone becomes in death. Do this, Karos Invictad, and you will have lost, even as you lick the man’s blood from your hands.
Yet, perhaps the Invigilator understood all of that. Enough to have already murdered Tehol Beddict, murdered him and dumped the body into the river, weighted down with stones. Unannounced, all in the darkness of night.
But no-the people wanted, needed, demanded that public, ritualized execution of Tehol Beddict.
And so she went round and round, in the swirling drain of her mind, the bottomless well that was her spirit’s defensive collapse sucking her down, ever down.
Away from the memories.
From Tanal Yathvanar.
And what he had done to her before.
And what he would do to her now.
The proud, boisterous warrior who had been Gadalanak returned to the compound barely recognizable as human. The kind of failure, Samar Dev was led to understand, that infuriated this terrible, terrifying Emperor. Accordingly, Gadalanak had been cut to pieces. Long after he was dead, Rhulad’s dread sword had swung down, chopping, slashing, stabbing and twisting. Most of the man’s blood had probably drained into the sand of the arena floor, since the corpse carried by the burial retinue of Indebted did not even drip.
Puddy and other warriors, still waiting their turn-the masked woman included-stood nearby, watching the bearers and their reed stretcher with its grisly heap of raw meat and jutting bone cross the compound on their way to what was known as the Urn Room, where Gadalanak’s remains would be interred. Another Indebted trailed the bearers, carrying the warrior’s weapon and shield, virtually clean of any blood, spattered or otherwise. Word had already come of the contest’s details. The Emperor had cut off Gadalanak’s weapon-arm with the first blow, midway between hand and elbow, sending the weapon flying off to one side. Shield-arm followed, severed at the shoulder. It was said the attending Tiste Edur-and the few Letherii dignitaries whose bloodlust overwhelmed panic at sudden financial straits-had then voiced an ecstatic roar, as if answering Gadalanak’s own screams.
Silent, sober of expression and pale as bleached sand, Puddy and the others watched this grim train, as did Samar 1)ev herself. Then she turned away. Into the side corridor, down its dusty, gloomy length.
Karsa Orlong was lying on the oversized cot that had been built for some previous champion-a full-blood Tarthenal, although still not as tall as the Teblor now sprawled down its length, bared feet jutting over the end with the toes pressed against the wall-a wall stamped with the grime of those toes and feet, since Karsa Orlong had taken to doing very little, ever since the announcement of the contests.
‘He’s dead,’ she said.
‘Who?’
‘Gadalanak. Within two or three heartbeats-I think it was a mistake, all of you deciding not to attend-you need to see the one you will fight. You need to know his style. There might be weaknesses-’
Karsa snorted. ‘Revealed in two heartbeats?’
‘The others, I suspect, will now change their minds. They will go, see for themselves-’
‘Fools.’
‘Because they won’t follow your lead in this?’
‘I wasn’t even aware they had, witch. What do you want? Can’t you see I’m busy?’
She stepped into the room. ‘Doing what?’
‘You are dragging your ghosts with you.’
‘More like they’re clinging to my heels, gibbering-something is building within you, Karsa Orlong-’
‘Climb onto me and we can relieve that, Samar Dev.’
‘Amazing,’ she breathed.
‘Yes.’
‘No, you idiot. I was just commenting on how you can still manage to shock me on occasion.’
‘You only pretend to innocence, woman. Take your clothes off.’
‘If I did, it would only be because you have worn me down. But I won’t, because I am tougher than you think. One look at the odious stains your feet have left on that wall is enough to quench any ardour I might-in sudden madness-experience.’
‘I did not ask you to make love to my feet.’
‘Shouldn’t you be exercising-no, not that kind. I mean, staying limber, stretching and the like.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Reassurance, I think.’
He turned to look at her, then slowly sat up, the cot groaning beneath him. ‘Samar Dev, what is it you fear the most?’
‘Well, you dying, I think. Infuriating as you are, you are a friend. To me, at least. That, and the fact that, uh, after you, they will call upon Icarium. As you can see, the two fears are closely bound together.’
‘Is this what the spirits crowding you fear as well?’
‘An interesting question. I’m not sure, Karsa.’ And, a moment later, she added, ‘Yes, I see now how that might be important-worth knowing, I mean.’
‘I have my own ghosts,’ he said.
‘I know. And what are they feeling? Can you tell?’
‘Eager.’
She frowned. ‘Truly, Karsa Orlong? Truly?’
He laughed. ‘Not for what you think. No, they delight in the end that is coming to them, to the sacrifice they will make.’
‘What kind of sacrifice?’
‘When the time comes, witch, you must draw your iron knife. Give it your blood. Free the spirits you have bound.’
‘What time, damn you?’
‘You will know. Now, take off your clothes. I will see you naked.’
‘No. Gadalanak is dead. Never again will we hear his laughter-’
‘Yes, so it is for us to laugh, now, Samar Dev. We must remind ourselves what it is to live. For him. For Gadalanak.’
She stared at him, then hissed in anger. ‘You almost had me, Karsa Orlong. It’s when you get too convincing, you know, that you become the most dangerous.’
‘Perhaps you’d rather I just took you, then. Tore your clothes away with my own hands. Flung you down on the bed.’
‘I’m leaving now.’
Taralack Veed had once dreamt of the time now imminent, when Icarium Lifestealer would step onto the sand of the arena, amidst the eager roar of unwitting onlookers-and those derisive cries would change very quickly, oh yes, to ones of astonishment, then terror. As the rage was awakened, unleashed.
As the world began its gory end. An emperor, a palace, a city, the heart of an empire.
But this Rhulad would not die. Not with finality. No, each time he would rise again, and two forces would lock together in battle that might never end. Unless… could Icarium be killed? Could he die? He was not immortal, after all-although it could be argued that his rage was, the rage of the victim, generation after generation, a rage against injustice and inequity, and such a thing was without end.
No, if Taralack Veed pushed his thoughts far enough, he ever came to the same place. Rhulad would kill Icarium. A hundred clashes, a thousand-at some point, on a continent of ashes, the burgeoning chaos would strike through, into the heart of Icarium’s rage. And Lifestealer would fall.
There was logic to this. The victim might awaken to fury, but the victim was doomed to be just that: a victim. This was the true cycle, the one to which every culture, every civilization, was witness, century upon century. A natural force, the core of the struggle to exist is the desire to not just survive, but thrive. And to thrive is to feed on victims, ever more victims.
‘It is the language itself,’ Senior Assessor said, kneeling over a basin of still water to study his reflection as he applied gaudy paint. ‘Life pushes forward, when it succeeds. Life halts or falls to the wayside, when it fails. Progression, Taralack Veed, implies a journey, but not necessarily one through a fixed interval of time. That is, the growth and ageing of an individual person, although that too is quickly sewn into the cloth. No, the true journey is one of procreation, one’s seed moving from host to host in a succession of generations, each of which must be successful to some degree, lest the seed… halt, fall to the wayside. Of course, it is not in a single man’s mind to think in terms of generation upon generation, although the need to sow his seed is ever paramount. Other concerns, all of which support that which is paramount, generally occupy the mind on a moment to moment basis. The acquisition of food, the security of one’s shelter, the support of one’s family, relatives and allies, the striving to fashion a predictable world, peopled with predictable people-the quest, if you will, for comfort.’
Taralack Veed looked away, back to the window, where stood Finadd Varat Taun, watching something in the compound below. ‘Monk,’ Taralack said in a growl, ‘among my tribe, each of the things you describe was but part of a war, 11 feud that could never end. Each was desperate and vicious. No love, no loyalty could be wholly trusted, because the ground churned beneath our feet. Nothing is certain. Nothing.’
‘One thing is,’ Varat Taun said, facing them. ‘The warrior named Gadalanak is dead. And now so too is the one named Puddy, the quick one who loved to boast.’
Taralack Veed nodded. ‘You come to believe as I now do, Finadd. Yes, you and I, we have seen Icarium in his anger. But this Emperor, this Rhulad…’
The monk made a strange grunting noise, then pivoted on the stool-away from them both-and hugged himself.
Varat Taun frowned and took a step forward. ‘Senior Assessor? Priest? Is something wrong?’
A vigorous shake of the head, then: ‘No, please. Let us change the subject. Blessed God, I almost failed-the mirth, you see, it very nearly burst from me. Ah, it is all I cun do to restrain myself.’
Your faith in your god is unshaken.’
Yes, Taralack Veed. Oh yes. Is it not said Rhulad is mad? Driven insane by countless deaths and rebirths? Well, my friends, I tell you, Lifestealer, my most beloved god-the one god-well, he too is mad. And remember this, please, it is Icarium who has come here. Not Rhulad-my god has made this journey. To delight in his own madness.’
‘Rhulad is-’
‘No, Varat Taun, Rhulad is not. A god. The god. He is a cursed creature, as mortal as you or me. The power lies in the sword he wields. The distinction, my friends, is essential. Now, enough, lest my vow is sundered. You are both too grave, too poisoned by fear and dread. My heart is near to bursting.’
Taralack Veed stared at the monk’s back, saw the trembling that would not still. No, Senior Assessor, it is you who is mad. To worship Icarium? Does a Gral worship the viper? The scorpion?
Spirits of the rock and sand, I cannot wait much longer. Let us be done with this.
‘The end,’ Senior Assessor said, ‘is never what you imagine. Be comforted by that, my friends.’
Varat Taun asked the monk, ‘When do you intend to witness your first contest?’
‘If any-and I am not yet decided-if any, then the Toblakai, of course,’ Senior Assessor murmured, finally in control of his amusement-so much so that he twisted round to look up at the Finadd with calm, knowing eyes. ‘The Toblakai.’
Rhulad Sengar, Emperor of a Thousand Deaths, stood above the corpse of his third victim. Splashed in blood not his own, sword trembling in his hand, he stared down at the still face with its lifeless eyes as the crowd dutifully roared its pleasure, gave voice to his bitter triumph.
That onrushing wall of noise parted around him, left him untouched. It was, he well knew, a lie. Everything was a lie. The challenge, which had proved anything but. The triumph, which was in truth a failure. The words uttered by his Chancellor, by his bent and twisted Ceda-and every face turned his way was as this one below. A mask, a thing of death, an expression of hidden laughter, hidden mockery. For if it was not death that mocked him, then what?
When last did he see something genuine in a subject’s face? When you did not think of them as subjects. When they were not. When they were friends, brothers, fathers and mothers. I have my throne, 1 have my sword, I have an empire. But I have… no’one.
He so wanted to die. A true death. To fall and not find his spirit flesh cast up on the strand of that dread god’s island.
But it will be different this time. I can feel it. Something… will be different.
Ignoring the crowd and its roar now creeping towards hysteria, Rhulad walked from the arena, through the shimmering ripples rising from the sun-baked sand. His own sweat had thinned the blood splashed upon him, sweat seeping out from between tarnished coins, glistening from the ringed ridges of pocked scars. Sweat and blood merged into these streams of sour victory that could but temporarily stain the surfaces of the coins.
Chancellor Triban Gnol could not understand that, Rhulad knew. How gold and silver outlived the conceits of mortal lives. Nor could Invigilator Karos Invictad.
In many ways Rhulad found himself admiring this Great Traitor, Tehol Beddict. Beddict, yes, the brother of the one honourable Letherii warrior 1 was privileged to meet. One, only one. Brys Beddict, who defeated me truly-and in that too he was like no other. Karos Invictad had wanted to drag Tehol Beddict out here into the arena, to stand before the Emperor, to be shamed and made to hear the frenzied hunger of the crowd. Karos Invictad had thought that such a thing would humiliate Tehol Beddict. But if Tehol is like Brys, he would but stand, he’would but smile, and that smile would be his challenge. To me. His invitation to execute him, cut him down as I never did to Brys. And yes, I would see that knowing, there in his eyes. Rhulad had forbidden that. Leave Tehol to the Drownings. To that circus of savagery transformed into a game of wagers.
In the meantime, the empire’s foundations wobbled, spat dust in grinding protest; the once-firm cornerstones shook as if revealed to be nothing more than clay, still wet from the river. Men who had been wealthy had taken their own lives. Warehouses had been besieged by an ever-growing mob-this thousand-headed beast of need rising in every city and town of the empire. Blood had spilled over a handful of docks, a crust of stale bread, and in the poorest slums mothers smothered their babies rather than see them bloat then wither with starvation.
Rhulad left the harsh sunlight and stood in the tunnel entrance, swallowed by shadows.
My grand empire.
The Chancellor stood before him each day, and lied. All was well, all would be well with the execution of Tehol Beddict. The mines were working overtime, forging more currency, but this needed careful control, because Karos Invictad believed that all that Tehol had stolen would be retrieved. Even so, better a period of inflation than the chaos now plaguing Lether.
But Hannan Mosag told him otherwise, had indeed fashioned rituals permitting Rhulad to see for himself-the riots, the madness, scenes blurred, at times maddeningly faded, yet still they stank of the truth. Where the Ceda lied was in what he would not reveal.
‘What of the invasion, Ceda? Show me these Malazans.’
‘I cannot, alas, Emperor. They protect themselves with strange magics. See, the water in the bowl grows cloudy when I quest their way. As if they could cast in handfuls of flour. Blinding all the water might reveal.’
Lies. Triban Gnol had been more blunt in his assessment-a directness that unveiled the Chancellor’s growing concern, perhaps even his fear. The Malazans who had landed on the west coast, who had begun their march inland-towards Letheras itself-were proving themselves both cunning and deadly. To clash with them was to reel back bloodied and battered, a retreat strewn with dead soldiers and dead Tiste Edur. Yes, they were coming for Rhulad. Could the Chancellor stop them?
‘Yes, Emperor. We can. We shall. Hanradi has divided his Edur forces. One waits with our main army just west of the city. The other has travelled fast and light northward and is even now swinging westward, like a sweeping arm, to appear behind these Malazans-but not as has been attempted before. No, your Edur do not ride in column, do not travel the roads now. They fight as they once did, during the unification wars. War’parties, moving silent in the shadows, matching the Malazans and perhaps going one better in their stealth-’
Yes.’ We adapt, not into something new, but into something old-the very heart of our prowess. Whose idea was this? Tell me!’
A bow from Triban Gnol. ‘Sire, did you not place me in charge of this defence?’
‘Then, you.’
Another bow. ‘As I said, Emperor, the guiding hand was yours.’
To be so unctuous was to reveal contempt. Rhulad understood that much. The Ceda lacked such civilized nuances in his reply: ‘The idea was mine and Hanradi’s, Emperor. After all, I was the Warlock King and he was my deadliest rival. This can be remade into a war we Edur under’ stand and know well. It is clear enough that attempting to fight these Malazans in the manner of the Letherii has failed-’
‘But there will be a clash, a great battle.’
‘It seems so.’
‘Good.’
‘Perhaps not. Hanradi believes…’
And there the dissembling had begun, the half-truths, the poorly veiled attacks upon the Chancellor and his new role as military commander.
To fashion knowledge to match the reality was difficult, to sift through the lies, to shake free the truths-Rhulad was exhausted by it, yet what else could he do? He was learning, damn them all. He was learning.
‘Tell me, Ceda, of the Bolkando invasion.’
‘Our border forts have been overrun. There have been two battles and in both the Letherii divisions were forced to withdraw, badly wounded. That alliance among the eastern kingdoms is now real, and it appears that they have hired mercenary armies…’
The Bolkando Conspiracy… now real. Meaning it had begun as a lie. He recalled Triban Gnol’s shocked expression when Rhulad had repeated Hannan Mosag’s words-as if they were his own. ‘That alliance among the eastern kingdoms is now real, Chancellor…’.
Triban Gnol’s mask had cracked then-no illusion there, no game brought to a yet deeper level. The man had looked… guilty.
We must win these wars. To the west and to the east. We must, as well, refashion this empire. The days of the Indebted will be gone. The days of the coins ruling this body are oyer. 1, Rhulad, Emperor, shall set my hands upon this clay, and make of it something new.
So, let the plague of suicides among the once-rich continue. Let the great merchant houses crash down into ruin. Let the poor rend the nobles limb from limb. Let estates bum. When the ashes have settled, have cooled, then shall Rhulad find fertile ground for his new empire.
Yes, that is what is different, this time. 1 sense a rebirth. Close. Imminent. I sense it, and maybe it will be enough, maybe it will give me reason again to cherish this life. My life.
Oh, Father Shadow, guide me now.
Mael had been careless. It had been that carelessness that the Errant had relied upon. The Elder God so fixed on saving his foolish mortal companion, blundering forward into such a simple trap. A relief to have the meddling bastard out of the way, serving as a kind of counter-balance to the lurid acquisitiveness of Feather Witch, whose disgusting company the Errant had just left.
And now he stood in the dark corridor. Alone.
‘We will have our Mortal Sword,’ she had announced from her perch on the altar that squatted like an island amidst black floodwater. ‘The idiot remains blind and stupid.’
Which idiot would that be, Feather Witch? Our imminent Mortal Sword?
‘I do not understand your sarcasm, Errant. Nothing has gone astray. Our cult grows day by day, among the Letherii slaves, and now the Indebted-’
The disaffected, you mean. And what is it you are promising them, Feather Witch? In my name?
‘The golden age of the past. When you stood ascendant among all other gods. When yours was the worship of all the Letherii. Our glory was long ago, and to that we must return.’
There was never a golden age. Worship of me to the exclusion of all other gods has never existed among the Letherii. The time you speak of was an age of plurality, of tolerance, a culture flowering-
‘Never mind the truth. The past is what I say it is. That is the freedom of teaching the ignorant.’
He had laughed then. The High Priestess stumbles upon a vast wisdom. Yes, gather your disaffected, ignorant fools, then. Fill their heads with the noble glory of a non-existent past, then send them out with their eyes blazing in stupid-but comforting-fervour. And this will begin our new golden age, an exultation in the pleasures of repression and tyrannical control over the lives of everyone. Hail the mighty Errant, the god who brooks no dissent.
‘What you do with your power is up to you. I know what I plan to do with mine.’
Udinaas has rejected you, Feather Witch. You have lost the one you wanted the most.
She had smiled. ‘He will change his mind. You will see. Together, we shall forge a dynasty. He was an Indebted. I need only awaken the greed within him.’
Feather Witch, listen well to your god. To this modest sliver of wisdom. The lives of others are not yours to use. Offer them bliss, yes, but do not be disappointed when they choose misery-
because the misery is theirs, and in deciding to choose someone else’s path or their own, they will choose their own. The Shake have a saying: ‘Open to mem your hand to the shore, watch them walk into the sea.’
‘No wonder they were wiped out.’
Feather Witch-
‘Listen to my wisdom now, Errant. Wisdom the Shake should have heeded. When it comes to using the lives of others, the first thing to take from them is the privilege of choice. Once you have done that, the rest is easy.’
He had found his High Priestess. Indeed. Bless us all.