And these things were never so precious
Listen to the bird in its cage as it speaks
In a dying man’s voice; when he is gone
The voice lives to greet and give empty
Assurances with random poignancy
I do not know if I could live with that
If I could armour myself as the inhuman beak
Opens to a dead man’s reminder, head cocked
As if channelling the ghost of the one
Who imagines an absence of sense, a vacuum awaiting
The cage is barred and nightly falls the shroud
To silence the commentary of impossible apostles
Spirit godlings and spanning abyss, impenetrable cloud
Between the living and the dead, the here and the gone
Where no bridge can smooth the passage of pain
And these things were never so precious
Listening to the bird as it speaks and it speaks
And it speaks, the one who has faded away
The father departed knowing the unknown
And it speaks and it speaks and it speaks
In my father’s voice
– Caged Bird, Fisher kel That
There was no breath to speak of. Rather, what awoke him was the smell of death, dry, an echo of pungent decay that might belong to the carcass of a beast left in the high grasses, desiccated yet holding its reek about itself, close and suffocating as a cloak. Opening his eyes, Kallor found him-self staring up at the enormous, rotted head of a dragon, its massive fangs and shredded gums almost within reach.
The morning light was blotted out and it seemed the shade cast by the dragon roiled with all its centuries of forgotten breath. As the savage thunder of Kallor’s heartbeat eased, he slowly edged to one side i-the dragon’s viper head tilting to track his movement-and carefully stood, keeping his hands well away from the scabharded sword lying on the ground beside his bedroll. ‘I did not,’ he said, scowling, ‘ask for company.’
The dragon withdrew its head in a crackling of dried scales along the length of its serpent neck; settled back between the twin cowls of its folded wings.
He could see runnels of dirt trickling down from creases and joins on the creature’s body. One gaunt forelimb bore the tracery of fine roots in a colourless mockery of blood vessels. From the shadowed pits beneath the gnarled brow ridges there was the hint of withered eyes, a mottling of grey and black that could hold no display of desire or intent; and yet Kallor felt that regard raw as sharkskin against his own eyes as he stared up at the undead dragon.
‘You have come,’ he said, ‘a long way, I suspect. But I am not for you. I can give you nothing, assuming I wanted to, which I do not. And do not imagine,’ he added, ‘that I will bargain with you, whatever hungers you may still possess.’
He looked about his makeshift camp, saw that the modest hearth with its fistful of coals still smouldered from the previous night’s fire. ‘I am hungry, and thirsty,’ he said. ‘You can leave whenever it pleases you.’
The dragon’s sibilant voice spoke in Kallor’s skull. ‘You cannot know my pain.’
He grunted. ‘You cannot feel pain. You’re dead, and you have the look of having been buried. For a long time.’
‘The soul writhes. There is anguish. I am broken.’
He fed a few clumps of dried bhederin dung on to the coals, and then glanced over. ‘I can do nothing about that.’
‘I have dreamt of a throne.’
Kallor’s attention sharpened with speculation. ‘You would choose a master? That is unlike your kind.’ He shook his head. ‘I scarcely believe it.’
‘Because you do not understand. None of you understand. So much is beyond you. You think to make yourself the King in Chains. Do not mock my seeking a master, High King Kallor.’
‘The Crippled God’s days are numbered, Eleint,’ said Kallor. ‘Yet the throne shall remain, long after the chains have rusted to dust.’
There was silence between them then, for a time. The morning sky was clear, tinted faintly red with the pollen and dust that seemed to seethe up from this land. Kallor watched the hearth finally lick into flames, arid he reached for the small, battered, blackened pot. Poured the last of his water into it and set the pot on the tripod perched above the fire. Swarms of suicidal insects darted into the flames, igniting in sparks, and Kallor wondered at this penchant for seeking death, as if the lure for an end was irresistible. Not a trait he shared, however.
I remember my death,’ the dragon said.
‘And that’s worth remembering?’
‘The Jaghut were a stubborn people. So many saw naught but the coldness in their hearts-’
‘Misunderstood, were they?’”They mocked your empire, High King. They answered you with scorn. It seems the wounds have not healed.’
‘A recent reminder, that’s all,’ Kallor replied, watching the water slowly awaken. He tossed in a handful of herbs. ‘Very well, tell me your tale. I welcome the amusement.’
The dragon lifted its head and seemed to study the eastern horizon.
‘Never wise to stare into the sun,’ Kallor observed. ‘You might burn your eyes.’
‘It was brighter then-do you recall!’
‘Perturbations of orbit, or so believed the K’Chain Che’Malle.’
‘So too the Jaghut, who were most diligent in their observations of the world. Tell me, High King, did you know they broke peace only once! In all their existence-no, not the T’lan Imass-that war belonged to those savages and the Jaghut were a most reluctant foe.’
‘They should have turned on the Imass,’ Kallor said. ‘They should have annihilated the vermin.’
‘Perhaps, but I was speaking of an earlier war-the war that destroyed the Jaghut long before the coming of the T’lan Imass. The war that shattered their unity, that made of their lives a moribund flight from an implacable enemy-yes, long before and long after the T’lan Imass.’
Kallor considered that for a moment, and then he grunted and said, ‘I am not well versed in Jaghut history. What war was this? The K’Chain Che’Malle? The Forkrul Assail?’ He squinted at the dragon. ‘Or, perhaps, you Eleint?’
There was sorrow in its tone as the dragon replied, ‘No. There were some among us who chose to join in this war, to fight alongside the Jaghut armies-’
‘Armies? Jaghut armies?’
‘Yes, an entire people gathered, a host of singular will. Legions uncountable. Their standard was rage, their clarion call injustice. When they marched, swords beating on shields, time itself found measure, a hundred million hearts of edged iron. Not even you, High King, could imagine such a sight-your empire was less than a squall to that terrible storm.’
For once, Kallor had nothing to say. No snide comment to voice, no scoffing refutation. In his mind he saw the scene the dragon had described, and was struck mute. To have witnessed such a thing!
The dragon seemed to comprehend his awe. ‘Yes again, High King. When you forged your empire, it was on the dust of that time, that grand contest, that most bold assault. We fought. We refused to retreat. We failed. We fell. So many of us fell-should we have believed otherwise! Should we have held to our faith in the righteousness of our cause, even as we came to believe that we were doomed?’
Kallor stared across at the dragon, the tea in the pot steaming away. He could almost hear the echoes of tens of millions, hundreds of millions, dying on a plain so vast even the horizons could not close it in. He saw flames, rivers of blood, a sky solid with ash. In creating this image, he had only to draw upon his own fury of destruction, then multiply it a thousand fold. The notion took his breath, snatched it from his lungs, and his chest filled with pain. ‘What,’ he managed, ‘who? What enemy could vanquish such a force?’Grieve for the Jaghut, High King, when at last you sit on that throne, Grieve for the, chains that hind all life, that yon can never break, Weep, for me and my fallen kin-who did not hesitate to join a war that could not be won. Know, for ever in your soul, Kallor Eidorann, that the Jaghut fought the war no other has dared to fight.’
‘Eleint
‘Think of these people. Think of them, High King. The sacrifice they made for us all. Think of the Jaghut, and an impossible victory won in the heart of defeat. Think, and then you will come to understand all that is to come. Perhaps, then, you alone will know enough to honour their memory, the sacrifice they made for us all.
‘High King, the Jaghut’s only war, their greatest war, was against Death itself.’
The dragon turned away then, spreading its tattered wings. Sorcery blossomed round the huge creature, and it lifted into the air.
Kallor stood, watching the Eleint rise into the cinnamon sky. A nameless dead dragon, that had fallen in the realm of Death, that had fallen and in dying had simply… switched sides. No, there could be no winning such a war. ‘You damned fool,’ he whispered at the fast receding Eleint. ‘All of you, damned fools.’ Bless you, bless you all.
Gothos, when next we meet, this High King owes you an apology.
On withered cheeks that seemed cursed to eternal dryness, tears now trickled down. He would think long and think hard, now, and he would come to feelings that he’d not felt in a long time, so long that they seemed foreign, dangerous to harbour in his soul.
And he would wonder, with growing unease, at the dead Eleint who, upon escaping the realm of Death, would now choose the Crippled God as its new master.
A throne, Emperor Kellanved once said, is made of many parts. And then he had added, any one of which can break, to the king’s eternal discomfort. No, it did no good to simply sit on a throne, deluding oneself of its eternal solidity. He had known that long before Kellanved ever cast an acquisitive eye on empire. But he was not one for resonant quotations.
Well, everyone has a few flaws.
In a dark pool a score of boulders rise clear of the lightless, seemingly lifeless surface. They appear as islands, no two connected in any obvious way, no chain of uplifted progression to hint at some mostly submerged range of mountains, no half-curl to mark a flooded caldera. Each stands alone, a bold proclamation.
Is this how it was at the very beginning? Countless scholars struggled to make sense of it, the distinct existences, the imposition of order in myriad comprehensions. Lines were drawn, flags splashed with colours, faces blended into singular philosophies and attitudes and aspects. Here there is Darkness, and here there is Life. Light, Earth, Fire, Shadow, Air, Water. And Death. As if such aspects began as pure entities, unstained by contact with any of the others. And as if time was the enemy, forcing the inevitable infections from one to another. Whenever Endest Silann thought about these things, he found himself trapped in a prickly, uneasy suspicion. In his experience, purity was an unpleasant concept, and to imagine worlds defined by purity filled him with fear. An existence held to be pure was but the physical corollary of a point of view bound in cer-tainty. Cruelty could thrive unfettered by compassion. The pure could see no value among the impure, after all. Justifying annihilation wasn’t even necessary, since the inferiority was ever self-evident.
Howsoever all creation had begun, he now believed, those pure forms existed as nothing more than the raw materials for more worthy elaborations. As any alchemist knew, transformation was only possible as a result of admixture. For creation to thrive, there must be an endless succession of catalysts.
His Lord had understood that. Indeed, he had been driven to do all that he had done by that very comprehension. And change was, for so many, terrifying. For so much of existence, Anomander Rake had fought virtually alone. Even his brothers had but fallen, bound by the ties of blood, into the chaos that followed.
Was Kharkanas truly the first city? The first, proudest salutation to order in the cosmos? Was it in fact even true that Darkness preceded all else? What of the other worlds, the rival realms? And, if one thought carefully about that nascent age of creation, had not the admixture already begun? Was there not Death in the realms of Darkness, Light, Fire and all the rest? Indeed, how could Life and Death exist in any form of distinction without the other?
No, he now believed that the Age of Purity was but a mythical invention, a convenient separation of all the forces necessary for all existence. Yet was he not witness to the Coming of Light? To Mother Dark’s wilful rejection of eternal stasis? Did he not with his own eyes see the birth of a sun over his blessed, precious city? How could he not have understood, at that moment, how all else would follow, inevitably, inexorably? That fire would awaken, that raging winds would howl, that waters would rise and the earth crack open? That death would flood into their world in a brutal torrent of violence? That Shadow would slide between things, whispering sly subversions of all those pristine absolutes?
He sat alone in his room, in the manner of all old men when the last witness has wandered off, when nothing but stone walls and insensate furniture gathered close to mock his last few aspirations, his last dwindling reasons for living. In his mind he witnessed yet again, in a vision still sharp, still devastating, Andarist staggering into view. Blood on his hands. Blood painted in the image of a shattered tree upon his grief-wracked face-oh, the horror in his eyes could still make Endest Silann reel back, wanting none of this, this curse of witnessing-
No, better stone walls and insensate furniture. All the errors in Andarist’s life, now crowding with jabbering madness in those wide, staring eyes.
Yes, he had reeled back once that stare fixed his own. Some things should never be communicated, should never be cast across, to slash through the heavy curtains one raised to keep whatever was without from all that was within, slashing through and lodging deep in the soul of a defenceless witness. Keep your pain to yourself, Andarist! He left you to this-he left you thinking you wiser than you were. Do not look so betrayed, damn you! He is not to blame!
I am not to blame.
To break Shadow is to release it into every other world. Even in its birth, it had been necessarily ephemeral, an illusion, a spiral of endless, self-referential tautologies. Shadow was an argument and the argument alone was sufficient to assert its existence. To stand within was a solipsist’s dream, seeing all else as ghostly, fanciful delusion, at best the raw matter to give Shadow shape, at worst nothing more than Shadow’s implicit need to define itself-Gods, what is the point of trying to make sense of such a thing? Shadow is, and Shadow is not, and to dwell within it is to be neither of one thing nor of any other.
And your children, dear Shadow, took upon themselves the strength of Andi-ian courage and Liosan piety, and made of that blend something savage, brutal beyond belief. So much for promises of glory.
He found he was sitting with his head in his hands. History charged, assailing his weary defences. From the image of Andarist he next saw the knowing half-smile of Silchas Ruin, on the dawn when he walked to stand beside Scabandari, as if he knew what was to come, as if he was content with accepting all that followed, and doing so to spare his followers from a more immediate death-as Liosan legions ringed the horizon, soldiers singing that horrifying, haunting song, creating a music of heartbreaking beauty to announce their march to slaughter-sparing his people a more immediate death, granting them a few more days, perhaps weeks, of existence, before the Edur turned on their wounded allies on some other world.
Shadow torn, rent into pieces, drifting in a thousand directions. Like blowing upon a flower’s seed-head, off they wing into the air!
Andarist, broken. Silchas Ruin, gone.
Anomander Rake, standing alone.
This long. This long…
The alchemist knows: the wrong catalyst, the wrong admixture, ill-conceived proportions, and all pretence of control vanishes-the transformation runs away, unchained, burgeons to cataclysm. Confusion and fear, suspicion and then war, and war shall breed chaos. And so it shall and so it does and so it ever will.
See us flee, dreaming of lost peace, the age of purity and stasis, when we embraced decay like a lover and our love kept us blind and we were content. So long as we stayed entertained, we were content.
Look at me.
This is what it is to be content.
Endest Silann drew a deep breath, lifted his head and blinked to clear his eyes. His master believed he could do this, and so he would believe his master. There, as simple as that.
Somewhere in the keep, priestesses were singing.
A hand reached up and grasped hard. A sudden, powerful pull tore loose Apsal’ara’s grip and, snarling curses, she tumbled from the axle frame and thumped heavily on the sodden ground. The face staring down at her was one she knew, and would rather she did not. ‘Are you mad, Draconus?’
His only response was to grasp her chain and begin dragging her out from under the wagon.
Furious, indignant, she writhed across the mud, seeking purchase-anything to permit her to right herself, to even, possibly, resist. Stones rolled beneath the bite of her fingernails, mud grated and smeared like grease beneath her elbows, her knees, her feet. And still he pulled, treating her with scant, bitter ceremony, as if she was nothing more than a squalling cut-purse-the outrage!
Out from the wagon’s blessed gloom, tumbling across rock-studded dirt-chains whipping on all sides, lifting clear and then falling back to track twisting furrows, lifting again as whoever or whatever was at the other end heaved forward another single, desperate step. The sound was maddening, pointless, infuriating.
Apsal’ara rolled upright, gathering a length of chain and glaring across at Dra-conus. ‘Come closer,’ she hissed, ‘so I can smash your pretty face.’
His smile was humourless. ‘Why would I do that, Thief?’
‘To please me, of course, and I at least deserve that much from you-for dragging me out here.’
‘Oh/ he said, ‘I deserve many things, Apsal’ara. But for the moment, I will be content with your attention.’
‘What do you want? We can do nothing to stop this. If I choose to greet my end lounging on the axle, why not?’
They were forced to begin walking, another step every few moments-much slower now, so slow the pathos stung through to her heart.
‘You have given up on your chain?’ Draconus asked, as if the manner in which he had brought her out here was of no import, easily dismissed now.
She decided, after a moment, that he was right. At the very least, there’d been some… drama. ‘Another few centuries,’ she said, shrugging, ‘which I do not have. Damn you, Draconus, there is nothing to see out here-let me go back-’
‘I need to know,’ he cut in, ‘when the time comes to fight, Apsal’ara-will you come to my side?’
She studied him. A well-featured man, beneath that thick, black beard. Eyes that had known malice long since stretched to snapping, leaving behind a Strange bemusement, something almost regretful, almost… wise. Oh, this sword’s realm delivered humility indeed. ‘Why?’ she demanded.
His heavy brows lifted, as if the question surprised him. ‘I have seen many,’ he said, haltingly, ‘in my time. So many, appearing suddenly, screaming in horror, in anguish and despair. Others… already numbed, hopeless. Madness arrives to so many, Apsal’ara…’
She bared her teeth. Yes, she had heard them. Above the places where she hid. Out to the sides, beyond the incessant rains, where the chains rolled and roped, fell slack then lifted once more, where they crossed over, one wending ever farther to one side, cutting across chain after chain-as the creature at the end staggered blind, unknowing, and before too long would fall and not rise again. The rest would simply step over that motionless chain, until it stretched into the wagon’s wake and began dragging its charge.
‘Apsal’ara, you arrived spitting like a cat. But it wasn’t long before you set out to find a means of escape. And you would not rest.’ He paused, and wiped a hand across his face. ‘There are so few here I have come to… admire.’ The smile Dra-conus then offered her was defenceless, shocking. ‘If we must fall, then I would choose the ones at my side-yes, I am selfish to the last. And I am sorry for dragging you out here so unceremoniously.’
She walked alongside him, saying nothing. Thinking. At last, she sighed. ‘It is said that only one’s will can fight against chaos, that no other weapons are possible.’
‘So it is said.’
She shot him a look. ‘You know me, Draconus. You know… I have strength. Of will.’
‘You will fight long,’ he agreed, nodding. ‘So very long.’
‘The chaos will want my soul. Will seek to tear it apart, strip away my awareness. It will rage all around me.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Some of us are stronger than others.’
‘Yes, Apsal’ara. Some of us are stronger than others.’
‘And these you would gather close about you, that we might form a core. Of resistance, of stubborn will.’
‘So I have thought.’
‘To win through to the other side? Is there an other side, Draconus?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You don’t know,’ she repeated, making the words a snarl. ‘All my life,’ she said, ‘I have chosen to be alone. In my struggles, in my victories and my failings. Draconus, I will face oblivion in the same way. I must-we all must. It does nothing to stand together, for we each fall alone.’
‘I understand. I am sorry, then, Apsal’ara, for all this.’
‘There is no other side, Draconus.’
‘No, probably not.’
She drew up more of her chain, settled its crushing weight on to her shoulders, and then pulled away from the man, back towards the wagon. No, she could not give him anything, not when hope itself was impossible. He was wrong to admire her. To struggle was her own madness, resisting something that could not be resisted, fighting what could not be defeated.
This foe would take her mind, her self, tearing it away piece by piece-and she might sense something of those losses, at least to begin with, like vast blanks in her memory, perhaps, or an array of simple questions she could no longer answer. But before long, such knowledge would itself vanish, and each floating fragment would swirl about, untethered, alone, unaware that it had once been part of something greater, something whole. Her life, all her awareness, scattered into frightened orphans, whimpering at every strange sound, every unseen tug from the surrounding darkness. From woman to child, to helpless babe.
She knew what was coming. She knew, too, that in the end there was a kind ofmercy to that blind ignorance, to the innocence of pieces. Unknowing, the or-pans would dissolve away, leaving nothing.
Whatt mind could not fear such a fate?
‘Draconus,’ she whispered, although she was far from his side now, closing in on the wagon once more, ‘there is no other side of chaos. Look at us. Each chained. Together, and yet alone. See us pass the time as we will, until the end. You made this sword, but the sword is only a shape given to something far beyond you, far beyond any single creature, any single mind. You just made it momentarily manageable.’
She slipped into the gloom behind the lead wheel. Into the thick, slimy rain.
‘Anomander Rake understands,’ she hissed. ‘He understands, Draconus. More than you ever did. Than you ever will. The world within Dragnipur must die. That is the greatest act of mercy imaginable. The greatest sacrifice. Tell me, Draconus, would you relinquish your power? Would you crush down your selfishness, to choose this… this emasculation? This sword, your cold, iron grin of vengeance-would you see it become lifeless in your hands? As dead as any other hammered bar of iron?’
She ducked beneath the lead axle and heaved the chain on her shoulders up and on to the wooden beam. Then climbed up after it. ‘No, Draconus, you could not do that, could you?’
There had been pity in Rake’s eyes when he killed her. There had been sorrow. But she had seen, even then, in that last moment of locked gazes, how such sentiments were tempered.
By a future fast closing in. Only now, here, did she comprehend that.
You give us chaos. You give us an end to this.
And she knew, were she in Anomander Rake’s place, were she the one possessing Dragnipur, she would fail in this sacrifice. The power of the weapon would seduce her utterly, irrevocably.
None other. None other but you, Anomander Rake.
Thank the gods.
He awoke to the sting of a needle at the corner of one eye. Flinching back, gasping, scrabbling away over the warm bodies. In his wake, that blind artist, the mad Tiste Andii, Kadaspala, face twisted in dismay, the bone stylus drawing back.
‘Wait! Come back! Wait and wait, stay and stay, I am almost done! I am almost done and I must be done before it’s too late, before it’s too late!’
Ditch saw that half his mangled body now bore tattoos, all down one side-wherever skin had been exposed whilst he was lying unconscious atop the heap of the fallen. How long had he been lying there, insensate, whilst the insane creature stitched him full of holes? ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘not me. Not me!’
‘Necessary. The apex and the crux and the fulcrum and the heart. He chose you. I chose you. Necessary! Else we are all lost, we are all lost, we are all lost. Come back. Where you were and where you were, lying just so, your arm over, the wrist-the very twitch of your eye-’’I said no! Come at me again, Kadaspala, and I will choke the life from you, I swear it. I will crush your neck to pulp. Or snap your fingers, every damned one of them!’
Lying on his stomach, gaping sockets seeming to glare, Kadaspala snatched his hands back, hiding them beneath his chest. ‘You must not do that and you must not do that. I was almost finished with you. I saw your mind went away, leaving me your flesh-to do what was needed and what was needed is still needed, can’t you understand that?’
Ditch crawled further away, well beyond the Tiste Andii’s reach, rolling and then sinking down between two demonic forms, both of which shifted sicken-ingly beneath his weight. ‘Don’t come any closer,’ he hissed.
‘I must convince you. I have summoned Draconus. He is summoned. There will be threats, they come with Draconus, they always come with Draconus. I have summoned him.’
Ditch slowly lowered himself down on to his back. There would be no end to this, he knew. Each time his mind fell away, fled to whatever oblivion it found, this mad artist would crawl to his side, and, blind or not, he would resume bis work. What of it! Why should I really care? This body is mostly destroyed now, anyway. If Kadaspala wants it-no, damn him, it is all I have left.
‘So many are pleased,’ the Tiste Andii murmured, ‘to think that they have become something greater than they once were. It is a question of sacrifices, of which I know all there is to know, yes, I know all there is to know. And,’ he added, somewhat breathlessly, ‘there is of course more to it, more to it. Salvation-’
‘You cannot be serious.’
‘It is not quite a lie, not quite a lie, my friend. Not quite a lie: And truth, well, truth is never as true as you think it is, or if it is, then not for long not for long not long for long.’
Ditch stared up at the sickly sky overhead, the flashes of reflected argent spilling through what seemed to be roiling clouds of grey dust. Everything felt imminent, something hovering at the edge of his vision. There was a strangeness in his mind, as if he was but moments from hearing some devastating news, a fatal illness no healer could solve; he knew it was coming, knew it to be inevitable, but the details were unknown and all he could do was wait. Live on in endless anticipation of that cruel, senseless pronouncement.
If there were so many sides to existing, why did grief and pain overwhelm all else? Why were such grim forces so much more powerful than joy, or love, or even compassion? And, in the face of that, did dignity really provide a worthy response? It was but a lifted shield, a display to others, whilst the soul cowered be-hind it, in no way ready to stand unmoved by catastrophe, especially the personal kind.
He felt a sudden hatred for the futility of things.
Kadaspala was crawling closer, his slithering stalking betrayed in minute gasps of effort, the attempts at stealth pathetic, almost comical. Blood and ink, ink and blood, right, Kadaspala? The physical and the spiritual, each painting the truth of the other.
I will wring your neck, I swear it.
He felt motion, heard soft groans, and all at once a figure was crouching down beside him. Ditch opened his eyes. ‘Yes,’ he said, sneering, ‘you were summoned.’
‘Just how many battles, wizard, are you prepared to lose?’
The question irritated him, but then it was meant to. ‘Either way, I have few left, don’t I?’
Draconus reached down and dragged Ditch from between the two demons, roughly throwing him on to his stomach-no easy thing, since Ditch was not a small man, yet the muscles behind that effort made the wizard feel like a child.
‘What are you doing?’ Ditch demanded, as Draconus placed his hands to either side of the wizard’s head, fingers lacing below his jaw.
Ditch sought to pull his head back, away from that tightening grip, but the effort failed.
A sudden wrench to one side. Something in his neck broke clean, a crunch and snap that reverberated up into his skull, a brief flare of what might have been pain, then… nothing.
‘What have you done?
‘Not the solution I would have preferred,’ Draconus said from above him, ‘but it was obvious that argument alone would not convince you to cooperate.’
Ditch could not feel his body. Nothing, nothing at all beneath his neck. He broke it-my neck, severed the spinal cord. He-gods! Gods! ‘Torment take you, Elder God. Torment take your soul. An eternity of agony. Death of all your dreams, sorrow unending among your kin-may they too know misery, despair-all your-’ •
‘Oh, be quiet, Ditch. I haven’t the time for this.’
The scene before Ditch’s eyes rocked then, swung wild and spun, as Draconus dragged him back to where he had been lying before, to where Kadaspala needed him to be. The apex, the crux, the heart, the whatever. You have me now, Tiste Andii.
And yes, I did not heed your threat, and look at me now. True and true, you might say, Ditch never learns. Not about threats. Not about risks. And no, nothing-nothing-about creatures such as Draconus. Or Anomander Rake. Or any of them, who do what they have to do, when it needs doing.
‘Hold your face still,’ Kadaspala whispered close to one ear. ‘I do not want to blind you, I do not want to blind you. You do not want to be blind, trust me, you do not want to be blind. No twitching, this is too important, too too too important and important, too.’
The stab of the stylus, a faint sting, and now, as it was the only sensation he had left, the pain shivered like a blessing, a god’s merciful touch to remind him of his flesh-that it still existed, that blood still flowed beneath the skin.
The healer, Ditch, has devastating news.
But you still have your dignity. You still have that. Oh yes, he still has his dignity. See the calm resignation in these steady eyes, the steeled expression, the courage of no choice. Be impressed, won’t you!
The south-facing slopes of God’s Walk Mountains were crowded with ruins. Shattered domes, most of them elliptical in shape, lined the stepped tiers like broken teeth. Low walls linked them, although these too had collapsed in places, where run-off from the snow-clad peaks had cut trenches and gullies like gouges down the faces, as if the mountains themselves were eager to wash away the last remnants of the long-dead civilization.
Water and earth will heal what needs healing. Water and earth, sun and wind, these will take away every sign of wilful assertion, of cogent imposition. Brick crumbles to rubble, mortar drifts away as grit on the breeze. These mountains, Kedeviss knew, will wash it all away.
The notion pleased her, and in these sentiments she was little different from most Tiste Andii-at least those she knew and had known. There was a secret delight in impermanence, in seeing arrogance taken down, whether in a single person or in a bold, proud civilization. Darkness was ever the last thing to remain, in the final closing of eyelids, in the unlit depths of empty buildings, godless tempels. When a people vanished, their every home, from the dishevelled hovel of the destitute to the palaces of kings and queens, became nothing but a sepulchre, a tomb host to nothing but memories, and even these quickly faded.
She suspected that the dwellers of the village, there at the foot of the nearest mountain, on the edge of a lake in headlong retreat, knew nothing about the sprawling city whose ruins loomed above them. A convenient source of cut stone and oddly glazed bricks and nothing more. And of course, whatever little knowledge they had possessed, they had surrendered it all to Saemenkelyk, for it was clear as the troupe drew closer that the village was lifeless, abandoned.
Against the backdrop of the mountains, the figure of Clip-striding well ahead of the rest of them-looked appropriately diminished, like an ant about to tackle a hillside. Despite this, Kedeviss found her gaze drawn to him again and again. I’m not sure. Not sure about him. Distrust came easy, and even had Clip been all smiles and eager generosity, still she would have her suspicions. They’d not done well with strangers, after all.
‘I have never,’ said Nimander as he walked at her side, ‘seen a city like that.’
‘They certainly had a thing about domes,’ observed Skintick behind them. ‘But let’s hope that some of those channels still run with fresh water. I feel salted as a lump of bacon.’
Crossing the dead lake had been an education in human failure. Long lost nets tangled on deadheads, harpoons, anchors, gaffs and more shipwrecks than seemed reasonable. The lake’s death had revealed its treachery in spiny ridges and shoals, in scores of mineralized tree trunks, still standing from the day some dam high in the mountains broke to send a deluge sweeping down into a forested valley. Fisher boats and merchant scows, towed barges and a few sleek galleys attesting to past militarydisputes, the rusted hulks of armour and other things less identifiable-the lake bed seemed a kind of concentrated lesson on bodies of water and the fools who dared to navigate them. Kedeviss imagined that, should a sea or an ocean suddenly drain away to nothing, she would see the same writ large, a clutter of loss so vast as to take one’s breath away. What meaning could one pluck free from broken ambition? Avoid the sea. Avoid risks. Take no chances. Dream of nothing, want less. An Andi-ian response, assuredly. Humans, no doubt, would draw down into thoughtful silence, thinking of ways to improve the odds, of turning the battle and so winning the war. For them, after all, failure was temporary, as befitted a short-lived species that didn’t know any better.
‘I guess we won’t be camping in the village,’ Skintick said, and they could see that Clip had simply marched through the scatter of squatting huts, and was now attacking the slope.
‘He can walk all night if he likes,’ Nimander said. ‘We’re stopping. We need the rest. Water, a damned bath. We need to redistribute our supplies, since there’s no way we can take the cart up and over the mountains. Let’s hope the locals just dropped everything like all the others did.’
A bath. Yes. But it won’t help. We cannot clean our hands, not this time.
They passed between sagging jetties, on to the old shore by way of a boat-launch ramp of reused quarry stones, many of which had been carved with strange symbols. The huts rested on solid, oversized foundations, the contrast between ancient skill and modern squalor so pathetic it verged on the comical, and Kedeviss heard Skintick’s amused snort as they wended their way between the first structures.
A rectangular well dominated the central round, with more perfectly cut stone set incompetently in the earth to form a rough plaza of sorts. Discarded clothing and bedding was scattered about, bleached by salt and sun, like the shrunken remnants of people.
‘I seem to recall,’ Skintick said, ‘a child’s story about flesh-stealers. Whenever you find clothes lying on the roadside and in glades, it’s because the stealers came and took the person wearing them. I never trusted that story, though, since who would be walking round wearing only a shirt? Or one shoe? No, my alternative theory is far more likely.’
Nimander, ever generous of heart, bit on the hook. ‘Which is?’
‘Why, the evil wind, of course, ever desperate to get dressed in something warm, but nothing ever fits so the wind throws the garments away in a fit of fury.’
‘You were a child,’ Kedeviss said, ‘determined to explain everything, weren’t you? I don’t really recall, since I stopped listening to you long ago.’
‘She stabs deeps, Nimander, this woman.’
Nenanda had drawn up the cart and now climbed down, stretching out the kinks in his back. ‘I’m glad I’m done with that,’ he said.
Moments later Aranatha and Desra joined them.
Yes, here we are again. With luck, Clip will fall into a crevasse and never return. Nimander looked older, like a man whose youth has been beaten out of him, ‘Well,’ he said with a sigh, ‘we should search these huts and find whatever there is to find.’
At his command the others set out to explore. Kedeviss remained behindl, her eyes still on Nimander, until he turned about and regarded her quizzically.
‘He’s hiding something,’ she said.
He did not ask whom she meant, but simply nodded.
‘I’m not sure why he feels the need for us, ‘Mander. Did he want worshippers? Servants? Are we to be his cadre in some political struggle to come?’
A faint smile from Nimander. ‘You don’t think, then, he collected us out of fellowship, a sense of responsibility-to take us back… to our “Black-Winged Lord”?’
‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘he alone among us has never met Anomander Rake. In a sense, he’s not taking us to Anomander Rake. We’re taking him.’
‘Careful, Kedeviss. If he hears you you will have offended his self-importance.’
‘I may end up offending more than that,’ she said.
Nimander’s gaze sharpened on her.
‘1 mean to confront him,’ she said. ‘I mean to demand some answers.’
‘Perhaps we should all-’
‘No. Not unless I fail.’ She hoped he wouldn’t ask for her reasons on this, and suspected, as she saw his smile turn wry, that he understood. A challenge by all of them, with Nimander at the forefront, could force into the open the power struggle that had been brewing between Clip and Nimander, one that was now played out in gestures of indifference and even contempt-on Clip’s part, at any rate, since Nimander more or less maintained his pleasant, if slightly morbid, passivity, fending off Clip’s none too subtle attacks as would a man used to being under siege. Salvos could come from any direction, after all. So carry a big shield, and keep smiling.
She wondered if Nimander even knew the strength within him. He could have become a man such as Andarist had been-after all, Andarist had been more of a father to him than Anomander Rake had ever been-and yet Nimander had grown into a true heir to Rake, his only failing being that he didn’t know it. And perhaps that was for the best, at least for the time being.
‘When?’ he asked now.
She shrugged. ‘Soon, I think.’
A thousand paces above the village, Clip settled on one of the low bridging walls and looked down at the quaintly sordid village below. He could see his miserable little army wandering about at the edges of the round, into and out of huts.
They were, he decided, next to useless. If not for concern over them, he would never have challenged the Dying God. Naturally, they were too ignorant to comprehend that detail. They’d even got it into their heads that they’d saved his life. Well, such delusions had their uses, although the endless glances his way-so rank with hopeful expectation-were starting to grate. He spun the rings. Clack-clack…, clack-clack…
Oh. I sense your power, O Black-Winged Lord. Holding me at bay. Tell me, what do you fear? Why force me into this interminable walk?
The Liosan of old had it right. Justice was unequivocal. Explanations revealed the cowardice at the core of every criminal, the whining expostulations, the succession of masks each one tried on and discarded in desperate succession. The not-my-fault mask. The it-was-a-mistake mask. You-don’t-understand and see-me-so-helpless and have-pity-I’m-weak-he could see each expression, perfectly arranged round eyes equally perfect in their depthless pit of self-pity [come in there’s room for everyone). Mercy was a flaw, a sudden moment of doubt to undermine the vast, implacable structure that was true justice. The masks were meant to stir awake that doubt, the last chance of the guilty to squirm free of proper retribution.
Clip had no interest in pity. Acknowledged no flaws within his own sense of justice. The criminal depends upon the compassion of the righteous and would use that compassion to evade precisely everything that criminal deserved. Why would any sane, righteous person fall into such a trap? It permitted criminals to thrive (since they played by different rules and would hold no pity or compassion for those who might wrong them). No, justice must be pure. Punishment left sacrosanct, immune to compromise.
He would make it so. For his modest army, for the much larger army to come. His people. The Tiste Andii of Black Coral. We shall rot no longer. No more dwindling fires, drifting ashes, lives wasted century on century-do you hear me, O Lord? I will take your people, and I will deliver justice.
Upon this world.
Upon every god and ascendant who ever wronged us, betrayed us, scorned us.
Watch them reel, faces bloodied, masks awry, the self-pity in their eyes dissolving-and in its place the horror of recognition. That there is no escape this time. That the end has arrived, for every damned one of them.
Yes, Clip had read his histories. He knew the Liosan, the Edur, he knew all the mistakes that had been made, the errors in judgement, the flaws of compassion. He knew, too, the true extent of the Black-Winged Lord’s betrayal. Of Mother Dark, of all the Tiste Andii. Of those you left in the Andara. Of Nimander and his kin.
Your betrayal, Anomander Rake, of me.
The sun was going down. The rings clacked and clacked, and clacked. Below, the salt pan was cast in golden light, the hovels crouched on the near shoreline blessed picturesque by distance and lack of detail. Smoke from a cookfire now rose from their midst. Signs of life. Flames to beat back the coming darkness. But it would not last. It never lasted.
The High Priestess pushed the plate away. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘Any more and I will burst.’ A first level acolyte ducked in to take the plate, scurrying off with such haste that she almost spilled the towering heap of cracked crayfish shells. Leaning hack, the High Priestess wiped the melted butter from her fingers, ‘It’i typical,’ she said to the hall-dozen sisters seated at the table, ‘the nets drag up a sudden, unexpected bounty, and what do we do? Devour it entire.’
‘Kurald Galain continues to yield surprises,’ said the Third Sister; ‘why not ex-pect more to come?’
‘Because, dearest, nothing lasts for ever. Surrounding Kharkanas, there once stood forests. Until we chopped them down.’
‘We were young-’
‘And that would be a worthy defence,’ the High Priestess cut in, ‘if we have not, here in our old age, just repeated the stupidity. Look at us. Come the morrow all bur clothes will cease to fit. We will discover, to our horror, bulges where none existed before. We see pleasure as an excuse for all manner of excess, but it is a most undisciplined trait. Now, sermon ended. Someone pour the tea.’
More first level acolytes slithered in.
A rustling of small bells at the corridor door preceded the arrival of a temple guardian. The woman, clad in scale armour and ringed leather, marched up to halt beside the High Priestess. She lowered the grille face-piece on her helm and leaned close to-whisper-lips unseen and so unreadable to any-a brief message.
The High Priestess nodded, and then gestured the guardian away. ‘Second and Third Sister, remain in your seats. You others, take your tea to the Unfit Garden. Sixth Sister, once there you can stop hiding that flask and top up everyone else, yes?’
Moments later, only three women remained in the chamber, as even the acolytes had been sent away.
The door opened again and the guardian reappeared, this time escorting an old woman, human, who tottered on two canes to support her massive weight. Sweat darkened the cloth of her loose clothing round her armpits and cleavage and on the bulging islands of her hips. Her expression was one of anxiety and discomfort.
Unbidden, Third Sister rose and pulled a bench away from one wall, positioning it in the woman’s path.
‘Please do sit,’ said the High Priestess, thinking, alas, of the two dozen blind crayfish she’d just eaten, each almost half the size of a lobster, served up drenched in melted butter. Pleasure until pain, and we then rail at our misfortune.
With muttered thanks, the woman lowered herself on to the bench. ‘Please to introduce myself,’ she said in a wheeze. ‘I am the Witch-’
‘I know,’ the High Priestess interrupted, ‘and that title will suffice here, as must my own. Yours has been a trying journey, and so I can only assume you come with word of a crisis.’
A quick nod. ‘The cult of the Redeemer, High Priestess, has become… corrupted.’
‘And what is the agency of that corruption?’
‘Well, but that is complicated, you see. There was a High Priestess-oh, she was a reluctant owner of that title, and all the duties that came with it. Yet none could deny her natural authority-’
‘“Natural authority,’” said the High Priestess. ‘I like that phrase. Sorry, do go on.’’Outlaws have usurped the pilgrim camp. There is some concentrated form of the drink called kelyk-I do not know if you are familiar with it?’
‘We are, yes.’
Another quick nod. ‘Saemankelyk. The word comes from a dialect common south of God’s Walk Mountains. “Saeman” means “Dying God” and.”kelyk” means-’
‘Blood.’
A sigh. ‘Yes.’
Second Sister cleared her throat, and then said, ‘Surely you do not mean to suggest that the meaning is literal?’
The witch licked her lips-an instinctive gesture rather than anything ironic-and said, ‘I have applied some… arts, er, to examining this Saemankelyk. There are unnatural properties, that much is certain. In any case, the outlaws have made addicts of the pilgrims. Including Salind, the Redeemer’s High Priestess.’
Third Sister spoke. ‘If this foul drink is in any way blessed, then one might well see its poisonous influence as a corruption of the Redeemer’s worshippers. If one kneels before Saemenkelyk… well, one cannot kneel before two masters, can one?’
Not without physically splitting in half, no. ‘Witch, what is it you wish of us?’
‘This corruption, High Priestess. It could… spread.’
Silence round the table.
It was clear now to the High Priestess that the witch had given this meeting considerable thought, until arriving at the one suggestion she considered most likely to trigger alarm. As if we Tiste Andii are but taller, black-skinned versions of humans. As if we could so easily be… stolen away.
Emboldened, the witch resumed. ‘High Priestess, Salind-she needs help. We need help. There was a warrior, one among you, but he has disappeared. Now that Seerdomin is dead, I sought to find him. Spinnock Durav.’
The High Priestess rose. ‘Come with me, Witch,’ she said. ‘Just you and me. Come, it’s not far.’
The old woman levered herself upright, confusion in her small eyes.
To a side passage, a narrow corridor of twenty paces, and then down a short flight of stairs, the air still smelling of fresh-chiselled basalt, into a large but low-vaulted octagonal chamber devoid of any furniture, the floor of which was inlaid with onyx tesserae, irregular in shape and size. A journey of but a few moments for most people; yet for the witch it was an ordeal, striking the High Priestess with the poignancy of the old woman’s desperation-that she should so subject herself to such a struggle. The trek from her home through the city to the keep must have been an epic undertaking.
These thoughts battered at the High Priestess’s impatience, and so she weathered the delay saying nothing and without expression on her smooth, round face.
As soon as the witch tottered into the chamber, she gasped.
‘Yes, you are clearly an adept,’ observed the High Priestess. ‘There are nodes of power in this temple. Kurald Galain, the cleansing darkness.’ She could see that the witch was breathing hard and fast, and there was a look of wonder on that sweat-sheathed face, ‘Do not be alarmed at what you feel inside,’ she said, ‘By en-tering here, you have drawn Kurald Galain into your body, in your breaths, through the very pores of your skin. The sorcery is now within you.’
‘B-but… why? Why have you done this to me?’
‘[could sense the labouring of your heart, Witch. Your trek to my temple would have been your last-’
‘Oh, I knew that!’ snapped the witch.
The sudden irritation shocked the High Priestess for a moment. She reassessed this woman tottering before her. ‘I see. Then…’
‘Then yes, I prayed my sacrifice would be worth it. Salind is so precious-what has been done to her is despicable. Is… evil.’
‘Then you have not come in the name of the Redeemer, have you?’
‘No. I came for a friend.’
A friend. ‘Witch, Spinnock Durav is no longer in Black Coral. It grieves me to hear of Seerdomin’s death. And it grieves me more to learn of Salind’s fate. Tell me, what else are you feeling?’
The witch was hunched over, as if in visceral pain. ‘Fine,’ she hissed reluctantly. ‘I can see that there is no risk of the poison spreading. I never thought there was.’
‘I know that,’ said the High Priestess, her voice soft.
‘But I needed to bargain for your help.’
‘That is ever the assumption among you humans. Do you know, when the delegates from the Free Cities came to treat with us, when the Rhivi and the man who pretended to be Prince K’azz D’Avore of the Crimson Guard came to us-they all thought to bargain. To buy our swords, our power. To purchase our alliance. Lord Anomander Rake but lifted one hand-before any of them could even so much as say one beseeching word. And he said this: “We are the Tiste Andii. Do not seek to bargain with us. If you wish our help, you will ask for it. We will say yes or we will say no. There will be no negotiations.”‘
The witch was staring across at her.
The High Priestess sighed. ‘It is not an easy thing for a proud man or woman, to simply ask.’
‘No,’ whispered the witch. ‘It’s not.’
Neither spoke then for a dozen heartbeats, and then the witch slowly straight-ened. ‘What have you done to me?’
‘I expect Kurald Galain has done its assessment. Your aches are gone, yes? Your breathing has eased. Various ailments will disappear in the next few days. You may find your appetite… diminished. Kurald Galain prefers forces in balance.’
The witch’s eyes were wide.
The High Priestess waited.
‘I did not ask for such things.’
‘No. But it did not please me to realize that your journey to my temple would prove fatal.’
‘Oh. Then, thank you.’
The High Priestess frowned. ‘Am I not yet understood?’
‘You arc,’ replied the witch, with another flash of irritation, ‘but I have my own rules, and I will voice my gratitude, whether it pleases you or not.’
That statement earned a faint smile and the High Priestess dipped her head in acknowledgement.
‘Now, then,’ said the witch after yet another brief stretch of silence, ‘I ask that you help Salind.’
‘No.’
The witch’s face darkened.
‘You have come here,’ said the High Priestess, ‘because of a loss of your own faith. Yes, you would have the Temple act on behalf of Salind. It is our assessment that Salind does not yet need our help. Nor, indeed, does the Redeemer.’
‘Your… assessment?’
‘We are,’ said the High Priestess, ‘rather more aware of the situation than you might have believed. If we must act, then we will, if only to preempt Silanah-although, I admit, it is no easy thing attempting to measure out the increments of an Eleint’s forbearance. She could stir at any time, at which point it will be too late.’
‘Too late?’
‘Yes, for Salind, for the usurpers, for the pilgrim camp and all its inhabitants.’
‘High Priestess, who is Silanah? And what is an Eleint?’
‘Oh, I am sorry. That was careless of me. Silanah commands the spire of this keep-she is rather difficult to miss, even in the eternal gloom. On your return to your home, you need but turn and glance back, and up, of course, and you will see her.’ She paused, and then added, ‘Eleint means dragon.’
‘Oh.’
‘Come, let us return to the others. I am sure more tea has been brewed, and we can take some rest there.’
The witch seemed to have run out of commentary, and now followed meekly as the High Priestess strode from the chamber.
The return journey did not take nearly as long.
It should have come as no surprise to Samar Dev when Karsa Orlong rode back into the camp at dusk at the end of the third day since leaving them. Riding in, saying nothing, looking oddly thoughtful.
Unscathed. As if challenging the Hounds of Shadow was no greater risk than, say, herding sheep, or staring down a goat (which, of course, couldn’t be done-but such a detail would hardly stop the Toblakai, would it? And he’d win the wager, too). No, it was clear that the encounter had been a peaceful one-perhaps predicated on the Hounds’ fleeing at high speed, tails between their legs.
Slipping down from Havok’s back, Karsa walked over to where sat Samar Dev beside the dung fire. Traveller had moved off thirty or so paces, as it was his habit to attend to the arrival of dusk in relative solitude.
The Toblakai crouched down. ‘Where is the tea?’ he asked. ‘There isn’t any,’ she said. ‘We’ve run out.’
Karsa nodded towards Traveller. ‘This city he seeks. How far away?’
Samar Dev shrugged. ‘Maybe a week, since we’re going rather slowly.’
‘Yes. I was forced to backtrack to find you.’ He was silent for a moment, looking into the flames, and then he said, ‘He does not seem the reluctant type.’
‘No, you’re right. He doesn’t.’
‘I’m hungry.’
‘Cook something.’
‘I will.’
She rubbed at her face, feeling the scrape of calluses from her hands, and then tugged at the knots in her hair. ‘Since meeting you,’ she said, ‘I have almost forgotten what it is to be clean-oh, Letheras was all right, but we were pretty much in a prison, so it doesn’t really count. No, with you it’s just empty wastelands, blood-soaked sands, the occasional scene of slaughter,’
‘You sought me out, Witch,’ he reminded her.
‘I delivered your horse.’ She snorted. ‘Since you two are so clearly perfect for each other, it was a matter of righting the cosmic balance. I had no choice.’
‘You just want me,’ he said, ‘yet whenever we are together, you do nothing but second-guess everything. Surrender, woman, and you can stop arguing with yourself. It has been a long time since I spilled my seed into a woman, almost as long as since you last felt the heat of a man.’
She could have shot back, unleashed a flurry of verbal quarrels that would, inevitably, all bounce off his impervious barbarity. ‘You’d be gentle as a desert bear, of course. I’d probably never recover.’
‘There are sides of me, Witch, that you have not seen, yet.’
She grunted.
‘You are ever suspicious of being surprised, aren’t you?’
A curious question. In fact, a damned tangle of a question. She didn’t like it. She didn’t want to go near it. ‘I was civilized, once. Content in a proper city, a city with an underground sewer system, with Malazan aqueducts and hot water from pipes. Hallways between enclosed gardens and the front windows to channel cool air through the house. Proper soap to keep clothes clean. Songbirds in cages. Chilled wine and candied pastries.’
‘The birds sing of imprisonment, Samar Dev. The soap is churned by indentured workers with bleached, blistered hands and hacking coughs. Outside your cool house with its pretty garden there are children left to wander in the streets. Lepers are dragged to the edge of the city and every step is cheered on by a hail of stones. People steal to eat and when they are caught their hands are cut off. Your city takes water from farms and plants wither and animals die.’
She glared across at him. ‘Nice way to turn the mood, Karsa Orlong.’
‘There was a mood?’
‘Too subtle, was it?’
He waved a dismissive hand. ‘Speak your desires plain.’
‘I was doing just that, you brainless bhederin. fust a little… comfort. That’s all. Even the illusion would have served.’Traveler returned to the fire. ‘We are about to have a guest,’ he said.
Samar Dev rose and searched round, but darkness was fast swallowing the plain. She turned with a query on her lips, and saw that Karsa had straightened and was looking skyward, to the northeast. And there, in the deepening blue, a dragon was gliding towards them.
‘Worse than moths,’ Traveller muttered.
‘Are we about to be attacked?’
He glanced at her, and shrugged.
‘Shouldn’t we at least scatter or something?’
Neither warrior replied to that, and after a moment Samar Dev threw up her hands and sat down once more beside the fire. No, she would not panic. Not for these two abominations in her company, and not for a damned dragon, either. Fine, let it be a single pass rather than three-what was she, an ant? She picked up another piece of dung and tossed it into the fire. Moths? Ah, I see. We are a bea-con, are we, a wilful abrogation of this wild, empty land. Whatever. Flap flap on over, beastie, just don’t expect scintillating discourse.
The enormous creature’s wings thundered as the dragon checked its speed a hundred paces away, and then it settled almost noiselessly on to the ground. Watching it, Samar Dev’s eyes narrowed. ‘That thing’s not even alive.’
‘No,’ Karsa and Traveller said in unison.
‘Meaning,’ she continued, ’it shouldn’t be here.’
‘That is true,’ Traveller said.
In the gloom the dragon seemed to regard them for a moment, and then, in a blurring dissolution, the creature sembled, until they saw a tall, gaunt figure of indeterminate gender. Grey as cobwebs and dust, pallid hair long and ropy with filth, wearing the remnants of a long chain hauberk, unbelted. An empty, splintered scabbard hung from a baldric beneath the right arm. Leggings of some kind of thick hide, scaled and the hue of forest loam, reached down to grey leather boots that rose to just below the knees.
No light was reflected from the pits of its eyes. It approached with peculiar caution, like a wild animal, and halted at the very edge of the firelight. Whereupon it lifted both hands, brought them together into a peak before its face, and bowed.
In the native tongue of Ugari, it said, ‘Witch, I greet you.’
Samar Dev rose, shocked, baffled. Was it some strange kind of courtesy, to address her first? Was this thing in the habit of ignoring ascendants as if they were nothing more than bodyguards? And from her two formidable companions, not a sound.
‘And I greet you in return,’ she managed after a moment.
‘I am Tulas Shorn,’ it said. ‘I scarce recall when I last walked this realm, if I ever have. The very nature of my demise is lost to me, which, as you might imagine, is proving disconcerting.’
‘So it would, Tulas Shorn. I am Samar Dev-’
‘Yes, the one who negotiates with spirits, with the sleeping selves of stream and rock, crossroads and sacred paths. Priestess of Burn-’’That title is in error, Tulas Shorn-’
‘In it? You are a witch, are you not?’
‘Yes, but-’
‘You do not reach into warrens, and so force alien power into this world. Your congress is with the earth, the sky, water and stone. You are a priestess of Hum, chosen among those of whom she dreams, as are others, but you, Samar Dev, she dreams of often.’
‘How would you know that?’
Tulas Shorn hesitated, and then said, ‘There is death in dreaming.’
‘You are Tiste Edur,’ said Karsa Orlong, and, baring his teeth, he reached for his sword.
‘More than that,’ said Traveller, ‘one of Hood’s own.’
Samar Dev spun to her two companions. ‘Oh, really! Look at you two! Not killed anything in weeks-how can you bear it? Planning on chopping it into tiny pieces, are you? Well, why not fight for the privilege first?’
Traveller’s eyes widened slightly at her outburst.
Karsa’s humourless smile broadened. ‘Ask it what it wants, then, Witch.’
‘The day I start taking orders from you, Karsa Orlong, I will do just that.’
Tulas Shorn had taken a step back. ‘It seems I am not welcome here, and so I shall leave.’
But Samar Dev’s back was up, and she said, ‘I welcome you, Tulas Shorn, even if these ones do not. If they decide to attack you, I will stand in their way. I offer you all the rights of a guest-it’s my damned fire, after all, and if these two idiots don’t like it they can make their own, preferably a league or two away.’
‘You are right,’ Traveller said. ‘I apologize. Be welcome, then, Tulas Shorn.’
Karsa shrugged. ‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘I’ve killed enough Edur. Besides, this one’s already dead. I still want to know what it wants.’
Tulas Shorn edged in warily-a caution that seemed peculiarly out of place in a corpse, especially one that could veer into a dragon at any moment. ‘I have no urgent motivations, Tartheno Toblakai. I have known solitude for too long and would ease the burden of being my only company.’
‘Then join us,’ Karsa said, returning to crouch at the fire. ‘After all,’ he added, ‘perhaps one day I too will tire of my own company.’
‘Not any time soon, I would wager,’ said the Tiste Edur.
Traveller snorted a laugh, and then looked shocked with himself.
Samar Dev settled down once more, thinking of Shorn’s words. ‘There is death in dreaming.’ Well, she supposed, there would be at that. Then why did she feel so… rattled? What were you telling me, Tulas Shorn!
‘Hood has released you?’ Traveller asked. ‘Or was he careless?’
‘Careless?’ The Tiste Edur seemed to consider the word. ‘No, I do not think that. Rather, an opportunity presented itself to me. I chose not to waste it.’
‘So now,’ said Traveller, eyes fixed on the withered face enlivened only by reflected firelight, ‘you wing here and there, seeking what?’
‘Instinct can set one on a path,’ Tulas Shorn said, ‘with no destination in mind.’ It raised both hands and seemed to study them. ‘I have thought to see lifeonce more, awakened within me. I do not know if such a thing is even possible. Samar Dev, is such a thing possible? Can she dream me alive once more?’
‘Clan she-what? I don’t know. Call me a priestess if you like, but I don’t worship Burn, which doesn’t make me a very good priestess, does it? But if she dreams death, then she dreams life, too.’
‘From one to the other is generally in one direction only,’ Traveller observed. ‘Hood will come for you, Tulas Shorn; sooner or later, he will come to reclaim you.’
For the first time, she sensed evasiveness in the Tiste Edur as it said, ‘I have time yet, I believe. Samar Dev, there is sickness in the Sleeping Goddess.’
She flinched. ‘I know.’
‘It must be expunged, lest she die.’
‘I imagine so.’
‘Will you fight for her?’
‘I’m not a damned priestess!’ She saw the surprise on the faces of Karsa and Traveller, forced herself back from the ragged edge of anger. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start, Tulas Shorn.’
‘I believe the poison comes from a stranger’s pain.’
‘The Crippled God.’
‘Yes, Samar Dev.’
‘Do you actually think it can be healed?’
‘I do not know. There is physical damage and then there is spiritual damage. The former is more easily mended than the latter. He is sustained by rage, I suspect. His last source of power, perhaps his only source of power whilst chained in this realm.’
‘I doubt he’s in the negotiating mood,’ Samar Dev said. ‘And even if he was, he’s anathema to the likes of me.’
‘It is an extraordinary act of courage,’ said Tulas Shorn, ‘to come to know a stranger’s pain. To even consider such a thing demands a profound dispensation, a willingness to wear someone else’s chains, to taste their suffering, to see with one’s own eyes the hue cast on all things-the terrible stain that is despair.’ The Tiste Edur slowly shook its head. ‘I have no such courage. It is, without doubt, the rarest of abilities.’
None spoke then for a time. The fire ate itself, indifferent to witnesses, and in its hunger devoured all that was offered it, again and again, until night and the disinterest of its guests left it to starve, until the wind stirred naught but ashes.
If Tulas Shorn sought amiable company, it should have talked about the weather.
In the morning, the undead Soletaken was gone. And so too were Traveller’s and Samar Dev’s horses.
‘That was careless of us,’ Traveller said.
‘He was a guest,’ Samar Dev said, baffled and more than a little hurt by the betrayal. They could see Havok, standing nervously some distance off, as if reluctant to return from his nightlong hunting, as if he had been witness to something unpleasant. There was, however, no sign of violence the picket stakes remained where they had been pounded into the hard ground.
‘It wanted to slow us down,’ Traveller said. ‘One of Hood’s own, alter all.’
‘All right,’ Samar Dev glared across at a silent Karsa Orlong, ‘the fault was all mine. I should have left you two to chop the thing to bits. I’m sorry.’
But Karsa shook his head. ‘Witch, goodwill is not something that needs an apology. You were betrayed. Your trust was abused. If there are strangers who thrive on such things, they will ever remain strangers-because they have no other choice. Pity Tulas Shorn and those like it. Even death taught it nothing.’
Traveller was regarding the Toblakai with interest, although he ventured no comment.
Havok was trotting towards them. Karsa said, ‘I will ride out, seeking new mounts-or perhaps the Edur simply drove your beasts off.’
‘I doubt that,’ Traveller said.
And Karsa nodded, leaving Samar Dev to realize that he had offered the possibility for her sake, as if in some clumsy manner seeking to ease her self-recrimination. Moments later, she understood that it had been anything but clumsy. It was not her inward chastisement that he spoke to; rather, for her, he was giving Tulas Shorn the benefit of the doubt, although Karsa possessed no doubt at all-nor, it was clear, did Traveller.
Well then, I am ever the fool here. So be it. ‘We’d best get walking, then.’
In setting out, they left behind a cold hearth ringed in stones, and two saddles.
Almost two leagues away, high in the bright blue sky, Tulas Shorn rode the freshening breeze, the tatters of its wings rapping in the rush of air.
As it had suspected, the trio had made no effort to hunt down the lost horses. Assuming, as they would, that the dragon had simply obliterated the animals.
Tulas Shorn had known far too much death, however, to so casually kill innocent creatures. No, instead, the dragon had taken them, one in each massive clawed foot, ten leagues to the south, almost within sight of a small, wild herd of the same breed-one of the last such wild herds on the plain.
Too many animals were made to bow in servitude to a succession of smarter, crueller masters (and yes, those two traits went together). Poets ever wailed upon witnessing fields of slaughter, armies of soldiers and warriors frozen in death, but Tulas Shorn-who had walked through countless such scenes-reserved his sorrow, his sense of tragedy, for the thousands of dead and dying horses, war dogs, the oxen trapped in yokes of siege wagons mired in mud or shattered, the beasts that bled and suffered through no choice of their own, that died in a fog of ignorance, all trust in their masters destroyed.
The horse knows faith in the continuation of care from its master; that food and water will be provided, that injuries will be mended, that the stiff brush will stroke its hide at day’s end. And in return it serves as best it can, or at least as best it chooses. The dog understands that the two-legged members of its pack cannot be challenged, and believes that every hunt will end in success. These were truths. A master of beasts must be as a parent to a host of unruly but trusting children. Stolid, consistent, never wanton in cruelty, never unmindful of the faith in which he or she is held. Oh, Tulas Shorn was not unaware of the peculiarity of such convictions, and had been the subject of mockery even among fellow Tiste Edur.
Although such mockery had invariably faded when they had seen what had been achieved by this strange, quiet warrior with the Eleint-tainted eyes.
Gliding high above the Lamatath Plain, now scores of leagues south of the witch and her companions, Tulas Shorn could taste something in the air, so ancient, so familiar, that if the dragon had still possessed functioning hearts, why, they would have thundered. Pleasure, perhaps even anticipation.
How long had it been?
Long.
What paths did they now wander down?
Alien ones, to be sure.
Would they remember Tulas Shorn? The first master, the one who had taken them raw and half-wild and taught them the vast power of a faith that would never know betrayal?
They are close, yes.
My Hounds of Shadow.
If he’d had a single moment, a lone instant of unharried terror, Gruntle might have conjured in his mind a scene such as might be witnessed from someone in a passing ship-some craft beyond the raging storm, at the very edge of this absurd insanity. Hands gripping the ratlines, deck pitching wild in the midst of a dishevelled sea, and there, yes… something impossible.
An enormous carriage thrashing through a heaving road of foam, frenzied horses ploughing through swollen, whipped waves. And figures, clinging here and there like half-drowned ticks, and another, perched high on the driver’s bench behind the maddened animals, from whom endless screams pealed forth, piercing the gale and thunder and surge. Whilst on all sides the storm raged on, as if in indignant fury; the winds howled, rain slashing the air beneath bulging, bruised clouds; and the sea rose up in a tumult, spray erupting in tattered sheets.
Yes, the witness might well stare, agape. Aghast.
But Gruntle had no opportunity for such musing, no sweet luxury of time to disconnect his mind’s eye from this drenched, exhausted and battered body strapped tight to the roof of the carriage, this careering six-wheeled island that seemed ever tottering on the edge of obliteration. To draw one more breath was the only goal, the singular purpose of existence. Nothing else was remotely relevant.
He did not know if he was the last one left-he had not opened his eyes in an eternity-and even if he was, why, he knew he would not hold out much longer. He convulsed yet again, but there was nothing left in his stomach-gods, he had never felt so sick in all his life. The wind tore at his hair-he’d long since lost his helm-savage as clawed fin-gers, and he ducked lower. Those unseen fingers then grabbed a handful and pulled his head up.
Gruntle opened his eyes and found himself staring into a crazed face, the features so twisted that he could not for a moment recognize who was accosting him some lost sailor from a drowned ship? Flung aboard the carriage as gods rolled in helpless laughter?-but no, it was Faint, and that expression was not abject terror. It was wild, gut-wrenching hilarity.
She tugged on the rings attached to the iron rails and managed to pull herself yet closer, enough to dip her head down beside his, and in the half-sheltered cave their arms created her voice seemed to come from his own skull. ‘I thought you were dead! So pale, like a damned cadaver!’
And this left her convulsed with laughter? ‘I damn well wish I was!’ he shouted back.
‘We’ve known worse!’
Now, he’d heard that a dozen times since this venture began, and he had begun to suspect it was one of those perfect lies that people voiced to stay sane no matter what madness they found themselves in. ‘Has Quell ever done anything like (his before?’
‘Like what? This is the Trygalle Trade Guild, shareholder! This is what we do, man
And when she began laughing again, he planted a hand on her head and pushed her away. Faint retreated, back along the rail, and Gruntle was alone once more.
How long had it been? Days. Weeks. Decades. He desperately needed fresh water-whatever rain reached his face was as salty as the sea. He could feel himself weakening-even could he find something to eat, he would never hold it down. Outrageous, to think that he could die here, body flopping about on its straps, slowly torn apart by the storm. Not with a weapon in hand, not with a defiant bellow tearing loose from his throat. Not drenched in hot blood, not staring his killer in the eye.
This was worse than any demise he might imagine. As bad as some unseen disease-the sheer helplessness of discovering that one’s own body could fail all on its own. He could not even roar to the heavens with his last breath-the gesture would flood his mouth, leave him choking, defiance flung straight back at him, right back down his own throat.
More screaming-laughter? No, this was screaming.
What now?
Gruntle snatched a breath and then looked up.
Walls of water on all sides-he flinched-and then a swell heaved them skyward, the carriage twisting, pitching. Rings squealed as he was tossed up, until sharp, savage tugs from the straps snatched him back down.
But he had seen-yes-all his companions-their wide eyes, their gaping mouths-and he had seen, too, the object of their terror.
They were racing, faster than any wave, straight for a towering cliff face.
‘Land ho!’ shrieked Glanno Tarp from his perch. Explosions of foam at the cliff’s base appeared with every lift of the waves. fagged spires of black rock, reefs, shoals and all those other names for killers of people and ships. And carriages. All looming directly ahead, a third of a league away and closing fast.
Can those horses climb straight up a cliff face? Sounds ridiculous-but 1 won’t put it past them. Not any more.
Even so, why is everyone screaming?
A moment later Gruntle had his answer. Another upward pitch, and this time he twisted round and glanced back, into their wake-no reason, at least, he didn’t think there was, but the view, surely, could not be as horrifying as what lay ahead.
And he saw another wall of water, this one high as a damned mountain.
Its sickly green flank picked up the carriage and then the horses, and began carrying them into the sky. So fast that the water streamed from the roof, from every flattened shareholder, and even the rain vanished as higher they went, into the gut of the clouds.
He thought, if he dared open his eyes, he would see stars, the ferment above, to the sides, and indeed below-but Gruntle’s nerve had failed him. He clung, eyes squeezed shut, flesh dry and shivering in the bitter cold of the wind.
More sound than a mortal brain could comprehend-thunder from beneath, animal squeals and human shrieks, the swollen thrash of blood in every vein, every artery, the hollow howl of wind in his gaping mouth.
Higher, and higher still-
And wasn’t there a cliff dead ahead?
He could not look.
Everyone thought that Reccanto Ilk was the one with the bad eyes, and that was a most pleasing misindirection as far as Glanno Tarp was concerned. Besides, he was fine enough with things within, oh, thirty or so paces. Beyond that, objects acquired a soft-edged dissolidity, became blocks of vague shape, and the challenge was in gauging the speed at which they approached, and, from this, their distance and relative size. The carriage driver had taken this to a fine art indeed, with no one the wiser.
Which, in this instance at least, was of no help at all.
He could hear everyone screaming behind him, and he was adding plenty all on his own, even as the thought flashed in his mind that Reccanto Ilk was probably shrieking in ignorance-simply because everyone else was-but the looming mass of the rotted cliff-face was a most undenimissable presence, and my how big it was getting!
The horses could do naught but run, in what must have seemed downhill for the hapless beasts, even as the wave’s surge reared ever higher-all sorts of mas-somentum going on here, Glanno knew, and no quibblering about it, either.
What with pitch and angle and cant and all that, Glanno could now see the top of the cliff, a guano-streaked lip all wavy and grimacing. Odd vertical streaks depended down from the edge-what were those? Could be? Ladders? How strange.
Higher still, view expandering, the sweep of the summit, flat land, and globs of glimmering light like melted dollops of murky wax. Something towering, a spire, a tower yes, a towering tower, with jagged-teeth windows high up, blinking in and out-all directly opposite now, almost level-
Something pounded the air, pounded right into his bones, rattling the roots of his insipid or was it inspired grin-something that tore the wave apart, an upward charging of spume, a world splashed white, engulfing the horses, the carriage, and Glanno himself.
His mouth was suddenly full of seawater. His eyes stared through stinging salt. His ears popped like berries between finger and thumb, ploop ploop. And oh, that hurt!
The water rushed past, wiping clean the world-and there, before him-were those buildings?
Horses were clever. Horses weren’t half blind. They could find something, a street, a way through, and why not? Clever horses.
‘ Yeaagh!’ Glanno thrashed the reins.
Equine shrills.
The wheels slammed down on to something hard for the first time in four days.
And, with every last remnant of axle grease scrubbed away, why, those wheels locked up, a moment of binding, and then the carriage leapt back into the air, and Glanno’s head snapped right and left at the flanking blur of wheels spinning past at high speed.
Oh.
When the carriage came back down again, the landing was far from smooth.
Things exploded. Glanno and the bench he was strapped to followed the horses down a broad cobbled street. Although he was unaware of it at the time, the carriage behind them elected to take a sharp left turn on to a side street, just behind the formidable tower, and, skidding on its belly, barrelled another sixty paces down the avenue before coming to a rocking rest opposite a squat gabled building with a wooden sign swinging wildly just above the front door.
Glanno rode the bench this way and that, the reins sawing at his fingers and wrists, as the horses reached the end of the rather short high street, and boldly leapt, in smooth succession, a low stone wall that, alas, Glanno could not quite manage to clear on his skidding bench. The impact shattered all manner of things, and the driver found himself flying through the air, pulled back down as the horses, hoofs hammering soft ground, drew taut the leather harness, and then whipped him round as they swung left rather than leaping the next low stone wall-and why would they? They had found themselves in a corral.
Glanno landed in deep mud consisting mostly of horse shit and piss, which was probably what saved his two legs, already broken, from being torn right off. The horses came to a halt beneath thrashing rain, in early evening gloom, easing by a fraction the agony of his two dislocated shoulders, and he was able to roll mostly on to his back, to lie unmoving, the rain streaming down his face, his eyes closed, with only a little blood dripping from his ears.
Outside the tavern, frightened patrons who had rushed out at the cacophony inthe street now stood getting wet beneath the eaves, staring in silence at the wheel less carriage, from the roof of which people on all sides seemed to be falling, whereupon they dragged themselves upright, bleary eyes fixing on the tavern door, and staggered whenceforth inside. Only a few moments afterwards, the nearest carriage door opened with a squeal, to unleash of gush of foamy seawater, and then out stumbled the occupants, beginning with a gigantic tattooed ogre. The tavern’s patrons, one and all, really had nothing to say.
Standing in the highest room of the tower, an exceedingly tall, bluish-skinned man with massive, protruding tusks, curved like the horns of a ram to frame his bony face, slowly turned away from the window, and, taking no notice of the dozen servants staring fixedly at him-not one of whom was remotely human-he sighed and said, ‘Not again.’
The servants, reptilian eyes widening with comprehension, then began a wailing chorus, and this quavering dirge reached down through the tower, past chamber after chamber, spiralling down the spiral staircase and into the crypt that was the tower’s hollowed-out root. Wherein three women, lying motionless on stone slabs, each opened their eyes. And in doing so, a crypt that had been in darkness was dark no longer.
From the women’s broad, painted mouths there came a chittering sound, as of chelae clashing behind the full lips. A conversation, perhaps, about hunger. And need. And dreadful impatience.
Then the women began shrieking.
High above, in the topmost chamber of the tower, the man winced upon hearing those shrieks, which grew ever louder, until even the fading fury of the storm was pushed down, down under the sea’s waves, there to drown in shame.
In the tavern in the town on the coast called the Reach of Woe, Gruntle sat with the others, silent at their table, as miserable as death yet consumed with shaky relief. Solid ground beneath them, dry roof overhead. A pitcher of mulled wine midway between.
At the table beside them, Jula and Amby Bole sat with Precious Thimble-although she was there in flesh only, since everything else had been battered senseless-and the two Bole brothers were talking.
‘The storm’s got a new voice. You hear that, Jula?’
‘I hear that and I hear you, Amby. I hear that in this ear and I hear you in that ear, and they come together in the middle and make my head ache, so if you shut up then one ear’s open so the sound from the other can go right through and sink into that wall over there and that wall can have it, ’cause I don’t.’
‘You don’t-hey, where’d everyone go?’
‘Down into that cellar-you ever see such a solid cellar door, Amby? Why, it’s as thick as the ones we use on the pits we put wizards in, you know, the ones nobody can open.’’It was you that scared ’em, Jula, but look, now we can drink even more and pay nothing,’
‘Until they all come back out. And then you’ll be looking at paying a whole lot,’
‘I’m not paying. This is a business expense.’
‘Is it?’
‘1 bet. We have to ask Master Quell when he wakes up.’
‘He’s awake, I think.’
‘He don’t look awake.’
‘Nobody does, exceptin’ us.’
‘Wonder what everyone’s doing in the cellar. Maybe there’s a party or something.’
‘That storm sounds like angry women.’
‘Like Mother, only more than one.’
‘That would be bad.’
‘Ten times bad. You break something?’
‘Never did. You did.’
‘Someone broke something, and those mothers are on the way. Sounds like.’
‘Sounds like, yes.’
‘Coming fast.’
‘Whatever you broke, you better fix it.’
‘No way. I’ll just say you did it.’
‘I’ll say I did it first-no, you did it. I’ll say you did it first.’
‘I didn’t do-’
But now the shrieking storm was too loud for any further conversation, and to Gruntle’s half-deadened ears it did indeed sound like voices. Terrible, inhuman voices, filled with rage and hunger. He’d thought the storm was waning; in fact, he’d been certain of it. But then everyone had fled into the cellar-
Gruntle lifted his head.
At precisely the same time that Mappo did.
Their eyes met. And yes, both understood. That’s not a storm.
My finest student? A young man, physically perfect. To look upon him was to see a duellist by any known measure. His discipline was a source of awe; his form was elegance personified. He could snuff a dozen candles in successive lunges, each lunge identical to the one preceding it. He could spear a buzzing fly. Within two years I could do nothing more for him for he had passed my own skill.
I was, alas, not there to witness his first duel, but it was described to me in detail. For all his talent, his perfection of form, for all his precision, his muscle memory, he revealed one and only one flaw.
He was incapable of fighting a real person. A foe of middling skill can be profoundly dangerous, in that clumsiness can surprise, ill-preparation can confound brilliant skills of defence. The very unpredictability of a real opponent in a life and death struggle served my finest student with a final lesson.
It is said the duel lasted a dozen heartbeats. From that day forward, my philosophy of instruction changed. Form is all very well, repetition ever essential, but actual blood-touch practice must begin within the first week of instruction. To be a duellist, one must duel. The hardest thing to teach is how to survive.
Trevan Ault 2nd century, darujhistan
Gather close, and let us speak of nasty little shits. Oh, come now, we are no strangers to the vicious demons in placid disguises, innocent ? eyes so wide, hidden minds so dark. Does evil exist? Is it a force, some deadly possession that slips into the unwary? Is it a thing separate and thus subject to accusation and blame, distinct from the one it has used? Does it flit from soul to soul, weaving its diabolical scheme in all the unseen places, snarling into knots tremulous fears and appalling opportunity, stark terrors and brutal self-interest? Or is the dread word nothing more than a quaint and oh so convenient encap-nidation of all those traits distinctly lacking moral context, a sweeping generalization embracing all things depraved and breath takingly cruel, a word to define that peculiar glint in the eye-the voyeur to one’s own delivery of horror, of pain and anguish and impossible grief?
Give the demon crimson scales, slashing talons. Tentacles and dripping poison. Three eyes and six slithering tongues. As it crouches there in the soul, its latest abode in an eternal succession of abodes, may every god kneel in prayer.
But really. Evil is nothing but a word, an objectification where no objectifica-tion is necessary. Cast aside this notion of some external agency as the source of inconceivable inhumanity-the sad truth is our possession of an innate proclivity towards indifference, towards deliberate denial of mercy, towards disengaging all that is moral within us.
Hut if that is too dire, let’s call it evil. And paint it with fire and venom.
There are extremities of behaviour that seem, at the time, perfectly natural, indeed reasonable. They are arrived at suddenly, or so it might seem, but if one looks the progression reveals itself, step by step, and that is a most sad truth.
Murillio walked from the duelling school, rapier at his hip, gloves tucked into his belt. Had he passed anyone who knew him they might be forgiven for not at first recognizing him, given his expression. The lines of his face were drawn deep, his frown a clench, as if the mind behind it was in torment, sick of itself. He looked older, harder. He looked to be a man in dread of his own thoughts, a man haunted by an unexpected reflection in a lead window, a silvered mirror, flinching back from his own face, the eyes that met themselves with defiance.
Only a fool would have stepped directly into this man’s path.
In his wake, a young student hesitated. He had been about to call out a greeting to his instructor,’ but he had seen Murillio’s expression, and, though young, the student was no fool. Instead, he set out after the man.
Bellam Nom would not sit in any god’s lap. Mark him, mark him well.
There had been fervent, breathless discussion. Crippled Da was like a man reborn, finding unexpected reserves of strength to lift himself into the rickety cart, with Myrla, her eyes bright, fussing over him until even he slapped her hands away.
Mew and Hinty stared wide-eyed, brainless as toddlers were, faces like sponges sucking in everything and understanding none of it. As for Snell, oh, it was ridiculous, all this excitement. His ma and da were, he well knew, complete idiots. Too stupid to succeed in life, too thick to realize it.
They had tortured themselves and each other over the loss of Harllo, their mutual failure, their hand-in-hand incompetence that made them hated even as they wallowed in endless self-pity. Ridiculous. Pathetic. The sooner Snell was rid of them the better, and at that thought he eyed his siblings once again. If Ma and Da just vanished, why, he could sell them both and make good coin. They weren’t fitfor much else. Let someone else wipe their stinking backsides and shove food into their mouths-damned things choked half the time and spat it out the other half, and burst into tears at the, lightest poke.
But his disgust was proving a thin crust, cracking as terror seethed beneath, the terror born of remote possibilities. Da and Ma were going to a temple, a new temple, one devoted to a god as broken and useless as Bedek himself. The High Priest, who called himself a prophet, was even more crippled. Nothing worked below his arms, and half his face sagged and the eye on that side had just dried up since the lids couldn’t close and now it looked like a rotten crab apple-Snell had seen it for himself, when he’d stood at the side of the street watching as the Prophet was being carried by his diseased followers to the next square, where he’d croak out yet another sermon predicting the end of the world and how only the sick and the stupid would survive.
No wonder Da was so eager. He’d found his god at last, one in his own image, and that was usually the way, wasn’t it? People don’t change to suit their god; they change their god to suit them.
Da and Ma were on their way to the Temple of the Crippled God, where they hoped to speak to the Prophet himself. Where they hoped to ask the god’s blessing. Where they hoped to discover what had happened to Harllo.
Snell didn’t believe anything would come of that. But then, he couldn’t be sure, could he? And that was what was scaring him. What if the Crippled God knew about what Snell had done? What if the Prophet prayed to it and was told the truth, and then told Da and Ma?
Snell might have to run away. But he’d take Hinty and Mew with him, selling them off to get some coin, which he’d need and need bad. Let someone else wipe their stinking…
Yes, Ma, I’ll take care of them. You two go, see what you can find out.
Just look at them, so filled with hope, so stupid with the idea that something else will solve all their problems, swipe away their miseries. The Crippled God: how good can a god be if it’s crippled? If it can’t even heal itself? That Prophet was getting big crowds. Plenty of useless people in the world, so that was no surprise. And they all wanted sympathy. Well, Snell’s family deserved sympathy, and maybe some coin, too. And a new house, all the food they could eat and all the beer they could drink. In fact, they deserved maids and servants, and people who would think for them, and do everything that needed doing.
Snell stepped outside to watch Ma wheeling Da off down the alley, clickety-click.
Behind him Hinty was snuffling, probably getting ready to start bawling since Ma was out of sight and that didn’t happen often. Well, he’d just have to shut the brat up. A good squeeze to the chest and she’d just pass out and things would get quiet again. Maybe do that to both of them. Make it easier wrapping them up in some kind of sling, easier to carry in case he decided to run.
Hinty started crying.
Snell spun round and the runt looked at him and her crying turned into shrieks… ‘Yes, Hinty,’ Snell mild, grinning, ‘I’m coming for ya. I’m coming for ya.’ And so he did,
Bellam Nom had known that something was wrong, terribly so. The atmosphere in the school was sour, almost toxic. Hardly conducive to learning about duelling, about everything one needed to know about staying alive in a contest of blades.
On a personal, purely selfish level, all this was frustrating, but one would have to be an insensitive bastard to get caught up in that kind of thinking. The problem was, something had broken Stonny Menackis. Broken her utterly. And that in turn had left Murillio shattered, because he loved her-no doubt about that, since he wouldn’t have hung around if he didn’t, not with the way she was treating him and everyone else, but especially him.
It hadn’t been easy working out what was wrong, since nobody was talking much, but he’d made a point of lingering, standing in shadows as if doing little more than cooling himself off after a bell’s worth of footwork in the sunlight. And Bellam Nom had sharp ears. He also had a natural talent, one it seemed he had always possessed: he could read lips. This had proved useful, of course. People had a hard time keeping secrets from Bellam.
Master Murillio had reached some sort of decision, and walked as one driven now, and Bellam quickly realized that he did not need to employ any stealth while trailing him-an entire legion of Crimson Guard could be marching on the man’s heels and he wouldn’t know it.
Bellam was not certain what role he might be able to play in whatever was coming. The only thing that mattered to him was that he be there when the time came.
Mark him well. These are the thoughts of courage, unquestioning and uncompromising, and this is how heroes come to be. Small ones. Big ones. All kinds. When drama arrives, they are there. Look about. See for yourself.
He seemed such an innocuous man, so aptly named, and there was nothing in this modest office that might betray Humble Measure’s ambitions, nor his blood-thirsty eagerness in making use of Seba Krafar and his Guild of Assassins.
Harmless, then, and yet Seba found himself sweating beneath his nondescript clothes. True, he disliked appearing in public, particularly in the light of day, but that unease barely registered when in the presence of the Master Ironmonger.
It’s simple. I don’t like the man. And is that surprising? Despite the fact that he’s provided the biggest contract I’ve seen, at least as head of the Guild. Probably the Malazan offer Vorcan took on was bigger, but only because achieving it was impossible, even for that uncanny bitch.
Seba’s dislike was perhaps suspect, even to his own mind, since it was caught up in the grisly disaster of Humble Measure’s contract. Hard to separate this man from the scores of assassins butchered in the effort (still unsuccessful) to killthose damned Malazans. And this particular subject was one that would not quite depart, despite Humble Measure’s casual, dismissive wave of one soft hand.
‘The failing is of course temporary,’ Seba Krafar said. ‘Hadn’t we best complete it, to our mutual satisfaction, before taking on this new contract of yours?’
‘I have reconsidered the K’rul Temple issue, at least for the moment,’ said Humble Measure. ‘Do not fear, I am happy to add to the original deposit commensurate with the removal of two of the subjects, and should the others each fall in turn, you will of course be immediately rewarded. As the central focus, however, I would be pleased if you concentrated on the new one.’
Seba Krafar was never able to meet anyone’s gaze for very long. He knew that most would see that as a weakness, or as proof that Seba could not be trusted, but he always made a point of ensuring that what he had to say was never evasive. This blunt honesty, combined with the shying eyes, clearly unbalanced people, and that was fine with Seba. Now, if only it worked on this man. ‘This new one,’ he ventured, ’is political.’
‘Your specialty, I gather,’ said Humble Measure.
‘Yes, but one that grows increasingly problematic. The noble class has learned to protect itself. Assassinations are not as easy as they once were.’
The Ironmonger’s brows lifted. ‘Are you asking for more money?’
‘Actually, no. It’s this: the Guild is wounded. I’ve had to promote a dozen snipes months ahead of their time. They’re not ready-oh, they can kill as efficiently as anyone, but most of them are little more than ambitious thugs. Normally, I would cull them, ruthlessly, but at the moment I can’t afford to.’
‘This requires, I assume, certain modifications to your normal tactics.’
‘It already has. Fifteen of my dead from K’rul Bar were my latest promotions. That’s left the rest of them rattled. An assassin without confidence is next to useless.’
Humble Measure nodded. ‘Plan well and execute with precision, Master Krafar, and that confidence will return.’
‘Even that won’t be enough, unless we succeed.’
‘Agreed.’
Seba was silent for a moment, still sweating, still uneasy. ‘Before I accept this latest contract,’ he said, ‘I should offer you a way out. There are other, less bloody ways of getting elected to the Council. It seems money is not a problem, and given that-’ He stopped when the man lifted a hand.
Suddenly, there was something new in Humble Measure’s eyes, something Seba had not seen before, and it left him chilled. ‘If it was my desire to buy my way on to the Council, Master Krafar, I would not have summoned you here. That should be obvious.’
‘Yes, I suppose-’
‘But I have summoned you, yes? Therefore, it is reasonable to assume my desires are rather more complicated than simply gaining a seat on the Council.’
‘You want this particular councillor dead.’
Humble Measure acknowledged this with a brief closing of his eyes that somehow conveyed a nod without his having to move his head. ‘We are notnegotiating my reasons, since they are none of your business and have no rele-vnncc to the task itself. Now, you will assault this particular estate, and you will kill the councillor and everyone else, down to the scullery maid and the terrier employed to kill rats.’
Seba Krafar looked away (but then, he’d been doing that on and off ever since he’d sat down). ‘As you say. Should be simple, but then, these things never are.’
‘Are you saying that you are not up to this?’
‘No, I’m saying that I have learned to accept that nothing is simple, and the simpler it looks the more complicated it probably is. Therefore, this will need careful planning. I trust you are not under any pressure to get on to the Council in a hurry? There’re all kinds of steps needed in any case, sponsorships or bloodline claims, assessment of finances and so on…’ He fell silent after, in a brief glance, he noted the man’s level look. Seba cleared his throat, and then said, ‘Ten days at the minimum. Acceptable?’
‘Acceptable.’
‘Then we’re done here.’
‘We are.’
‘The disposition provided us by the Malazan embassy is unacceptable.’
Councillor Coll fixed a steady regard on Hanut Orr’s smooth-shaven face, and saw nothing in it but what he had always seen, pear, contempt, misdirection and outright deceit, the gathered forces of hatred and spite. ‘So you stated,’ he replied. ‘But as you can see, the meeting has finished. I do my best to leave matters of the Council in the chamber. Politicking is a habit that can fast run away with you, Councillor.’
‘I do not recall seeking your advice.’
‘No, just my allegiance. Of the two, you elected the wrong one, Councillor.’
‘I think not, since it is the only relevant one.’
‘Yes,’ Coll smiled, ‘I understood you well enough. Now, if you will excuse me-’
‘Their explanation for why they needed to expand the embassy is flimsy-are you so easily duped, Councillor Coll? Or is it just a matter of filling your purse to buy your vote?’
‘Either you are offering to bribe me, Councillor Orr, or you are suggesting that I have been bribed. The former seems most unlikely. Thus, it must be the latter, and since we happen to be standing in the corridor, with others nearby-close enough to hear you-you leave me no choice but to seek censure.’
Hanut Orr sneered. ‘Censure? Is that the coward’s way of avoiding an actual duel?’
‘I accept that it is such a rare occurrence that you probably know little about it. Very well, for the benefit of your defence, allow me to explain.’
A dozen or more councillors had now gathered and were listening, expressions appropriately grave.
Coll continued, ‘I hereby accept your accusation as a formal charge. Theprocedure now is the engagement of an independent committee that will begin investigating. Of course, said investigation is most thorough, and will involve the detailed auditing of both of our financial affairs-yes, accuser and accused. Such examination inevitably… propagates, so that all manner of personal information comes to light. Once all pertinent information is assembled, my own advocates will review your file, to determine whether a countercharge is appropriate. At this point, the Council Judiciary takes over proceedings.’
Hanut Orr had gone somewhat pale.
Coll observed him with raised brows. ‘Shall I now seek censure, Councillor?’
‘I was not suggesting you were taking bribes, Councillor Coll. And I apologize if my carelessness led to such an interpretation.’
‘I see. Were you then offering me one?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Then, is our politicking done here?’
Hanut Orr managed a stiff bow, and then whirled off, trailed after a moment by Shardan Lim and then, with studied casualness, young Gorlas Vidikas.
Coll watched them depart.
Estraysian D’Arle moved to his side and, taking him by the arm, led him towards a private alcove-the ones designed precisely for extra-chamber politicking. Two servants delivered chilled white wine and then quickly departed.
‘That was close,’ Estraysian murmured.
‘He’s young. And stupid. A family trait? Possibly.’
‘There was no bribe, was there?’
Coll frowned. ‘Not as such. The official reasons given are just as Orr claimed. Flimsy.’
‘Yes. And he was not privy to the unofficial ones.’
‘No. Wrong committee.’
‘Hardly an accident. That ambitious trio’s been given places on every meaningless committee we can think of-but that’s not keeping them busy enough, it seems. They still find time to get in our way.’
‘One day,’ said Coll, ‘they will indeed be as dangerous as they think they are.’
Outside the building, standing in the bright sun, the three ambitious young counsellors formed a sort of island in a sea of milling pigeons. None took note of the cooing on all sides.
‘I’ll have that bastard’s head one day,’ said Hanut Orr. ‘On a spike outside my gate.’
‘You were careless,’ said Shardan Lim, doing little to disguise his contempt.
Stung, Orr’s gloved hand crept to the grip of his rapier. ‘I’ve had about enough of you, old friend. It’s clear you inherited every mewling weakness of your predecessor. I admit I’d hoped for something better.’
‘Listen to you two,’ said Gorlas Vidikas. ‘Bitten by a big dog so here you are snapping at each other, and why? Because the big dog’s too big. If he could see you now.’
Hanut Orr snorted, ‘So speaks the man who can’t keep his wife on a fight enough leash.’
Was the perfectt extension of the metaphor deliberate? Who can say? In any case, to the astonishment of both Orr and Lim, Gorlas Vidikas simply smiled, us if appreciative of the riposte. He made a show of brushing dust from his cuffs. ‘Well then, I will leave you to… whatever, as I have business that will take me out of the city for the rest of the day.’
‘That Ironmonger will never get on the Council, Vidikas,’ Shardan Lim said. ‘There’s no available seat and that situation’s not likely to change any time soon. This partnership of yours will take you nowhere and earn you nothing.’
‘On the contrary, Shardan. I am getting wealthy. Do you have any idea how essential iron is to this city? Ah, I see that such matters are beneath you both. So be it. As a bonus, I am about to acquire a new property in the city as well. It has been and will continue to be a most rewarding partnership. Good day to you, sirs.’
There was no denying Seba Krafar’s natural air of brutality. He was a large, bearish man, and though virtually none of the people he pushed past while crossing the market’s round knew him for the Master of the Assassin’s Guild, they none the less quickly retreated from any confrontation; and if any might, in their own natural belligerence, consider a bold challenge to this rude oaf, why, a second, more searching glance disavowed them of any such notions.
He passed through the press like a heated knife through pig fat, a simile most suited to his opinion of humanity and his place within it. One of the consequences of this attitude, however, was that his derisive regard led to a kind of arrogant carelessness. He took no notice whatsoever of the nondescript figure who fell into his wake.
The nearest cellar leading down into the tunnels was at the end of a narrow, straight alley that led to a dead end. The steps to the cellar ran along the back of the last building on the left. The cellar had once served as a storage repository for coal, in the days before the harnessing of gas-back when the notion of poisoning one’s own air in the name of brainless convenience seemed reasonable (at least to people displaying their lazy stupidity with smug pride). Now, the low-ceilinged chamber squatted empty and sagging beneath three levels of half-rotted tenement rooms in symbolic celebration of modernity.
From the shutterless windows babies cried to the accompaniment of clanking cookware and slurred arguments, sounds as familiar to Seba Krafar as the rank air of the alley itself. His thoughts were busy enough to justify his abstracted state. Fear warred with greed in a mutual, ongoing exchange of masks which were in fact virtually identical, but never mind that; the game was ubiquitous enough, after all. Before too long, in any case, the two combatants would end up supine with exhaustion. Greed usually won, but carried fear on its back.
So much for Seba Krafar’s preoccupations. Even without them, it was unlikely he would have heard the one on his trail, since that one possessed unusual talents, of such measure that he was able to move up directly behind the Master Assassin, and reach out with ill intent.
A hand closed on Seba’s neck, fingers like contracting claws of iron pressing nerves that obliterated all motor control, yet before the assassin could collapse (as as his body wanted to do) he was flung halfway round and thrown up against a grimy stone wall. And held there, moccasined feet dangling.
He felt a breath along one cheek, and then heard whispered words.
‘Pull your watchers off K’rul’s Bar. When I leave here, you will find a small sack at your feet. Five councils. The contract is now concluded-I am buying it out.’ The tip of a knife settled beneath Seba’s right eye. ‘I trust five councils are sufficient. Unless you object.’
‘No, not at all,’ gasped Seba. ‘The Malazans are safe-at least from the Guild. Of course, that just means the client will seek, er, other means.’
‘Yes, about your client.’
‘I cannot-’
‘No need to, Seba Krafar. I am well aware of the Master Ironmonger’s particular obsession.’
‘Lucky you,’ Seba said in a growl-gods, whoever this was still held him off the ground, and that grip did not waver. ‘Because,’ he added-for he was still a brave man-‘I’m not.’
‘If you were,’ said the man, ‘you would not be so eager to take his coin, no matter how much he offered.’
‘Since you put it that way, perhaps those five councils down there could buy him an accident.’
‘Generous offer, but suicidal on your part. No, I do not hire people to do my dirty work.’
Through gritted teeth-feeling was returning to his limbs, like sizzling fire-Seba said, ‘So I’ve gathered.’
‘We’re done here,’ the man said.
‘Unless you’ve other pressing business,’ Seba managed, and felt a slackening of that grip, and, vague beneath his feet, the greasy cobblestones.
‘Very well,’ said the voice, ‘you’ve actually managed to impress me, Seba Krafar. Reach up to that old lantern hook, there on your left-you can hold yourself up until the strength returns to your legs. It wouldn’t do’anything to your already damaged dignity to have you fall now. Stay facing the wall for ten steady breaths, eyes closed. I don’t want to have to change my mind about you.’
‘First impressions are never easy to live up to,’ said Seba, ‘but I’ll do my best.’
The hand pulled away, then returned to give his shoulder a gentle pat.
He stood, forehead pressed against the wall, eyes closed, and counted ten slow breaths. Somewhere round the third one, he caught the stench-oh, more than just muscles let loose below his neck, and now he understood the man’s comments on dignity. Yes, plopping down on my arse would’ve been most unpleasant.
Sweat ran down both sides of his face. Glancing straight down, he saw thesmall bag with its measly five coins. ‘Shit,’ he muttered, ‘I forgot to write him a receipt.’
Fisher waited at the mouth of the alley, until he saw the Master Assassin delicately bend down to retrieve the bag.
Agreement consummated.
The Master Assassin, he was certain, would bother them no more. As for Humble Measure, well, that man’s downfall would require something considerably more complicated. But there was time.
And this is the lesson here, dear friends. Even a man such as Fisher kel Tath, for all his formidable, mysterious qualities, was quite capable of grievous errors in judgement.
Time then to return to K’rul’s Bar. Perhaps Picker had found her way back, into that cool flesh that scarcely drew breath. If not, why, Fisher might have to do something about that. Lost souls had a way of getting into trouble.
Was this sufficient cause for his own carelessness? Perhaps. Leaving the round and its crowds, he walked into the narrow, shady Avenue of the Bullocks, threading between the few hurrying passers-by-at night, this street was notorious for muggings, and indeed, was it not but two days ago that the City Guard found yet another battered corpse? There, before those very steps leading to a shop selling square nails, rivets and wooden frames on which to hang skinned things and other works worthy of display. Even during the day this track was risky. It was the shadows, you see-
And out from one stepped a small, toad-visaged apparition wearing a broad grin that split the very dark, somewhat pocked face, reminding one of a boldly slashed overripe melon. Seemingly balanced on this creature’s head was a bundle of bow-gut-no, it was hair-in which at least three spiders nested.
‘You,’ hissed the man, his eyes bright and then shifty, and then bright once more.
‘None other,’ said Fisher, with the faintest of sighs.
‘Of course not.’ The head tilted but the hair did not slide off. ‘Another idiot-this city’s full of them! “None other.” What kind of thing to say is that? If some other, why, I’d not have leapt into his path, would I? Best keep this simple.’ The head righted itself, spiders adjusting their perches to match. ‘I bring word from my brilliant not-all-there master.’ A sudden whisper: ‘Brilliant, yes, a word used most advisedly; still, use it once and we’re done with it for ever.’ He then raised his voice once more. ‘When all this is done-’
‘Excuse me,’ cut in Fisher. ‘When all what is done?’
‘This, of course! Foolish Iskaral-keep it simple! Simpler, even! Listen, dear middling bard, when all this is done, eke out the eel-no, wait-er, seek out the eel. Seal? Damn, I had the message memorized and everything! Peek at-eat an eel-seek and peek the bleak earl-perk the veal, deal the prick-oh, Hood’s breath! What was it again? And I had the gall to call him brilliant! He should’ve sent Sor-diko Qualm, yes, so I could’ve followed the glorious rocking ship of her sweethips-’ and he wagged his head side to side, side to side, eyes glazing, ‘slib-slab, slib-slul), oh!’
‘Thank you,’ Fisher said as the man began muttering under his breath and pausing every now and then to lick his lips, ‘for, er, the message. I assure you, I understand.’
‘Of course you do-you’re a man, aren’t you? Gods, that a simple casual stride could so reduce one to gibbering worship-why, who needs gods and goddesses when we have arses like that?’
‘Indeed, who? Now, since you have successfully delivered your message from your master, may I proceed on my way?’
‘What? Naturally. Go away. You’re a damned distraction, is what you are.’
A tilt of the head, and the bard was indeed on his way once more.
The mob outside the newly consecrated Temple of the Fallen One, or the Crippled God, or indeed the name by which most knew it-the Temple of Chains-was thick and strangely rank. More than natural sweat as might be squeezed out by the mid-morning sun, this was the human rendering of desperation, made even sicklier with obsequious anticipation.
Yet the door to the narrow-fronted temple remained shut, evidently barred from within. Offerings were heaped up against it-copper and tin coins as well as links of chain and the odd clasp and cheap jewellery.
Bedek on his cart and Myrla standing before him, gripping the handles, found themselves in the midst of trembling alcoholics, the pock-scarred, the lame and the deformed. Milky eyes stared, as if cataracts were punishment for having seen too much-all other eyes were filled with beseeching need, the hunger for blessing, for even the passing brush of a twisted hand if it belonged to the Prophet. Misshapen faces lifted up, held fixedly upon that door. Once within the press, and unable to get any closer, the stink became unbearable. The breath of rotting teeth and consumptive dissolution. From his low perch, Bedek could see nothing but shoulders and the backs of heads. Whimpering, he plucked at his wife’s tunic.
‘Myrla. Myrla!’
The look she turned on him was both savage and… small, and with a shock Bedek suddenly saw her-and himself-as meaningless, insignificant, worthless. They were, he realized, no better than anyone else here. Each of them seeking to be singled out, to be guided out, to be raised up from all the others. Each dreaming of coming into glorious focus in the eyes of a god-eyes brimming with pity and knowledge, eyes that understood injustice and the unfairness of existence. A god, yes, to make them right. To make us all-each and every one of us-right. Whole.
But Bedek had held no such notions. They were not why he was here. He and Myrla were different. From all of these people. They, you see, had lost a child.
The door would remain locked, they learned, until at least midday. Sometimes even later. And even then, the Prophet might not emerge. If he was communing with his own pain, they were told, he might not be seen for days. Yes, but did he bless people? Did he help people?
Oh, yes. Why, I saw a man in terrible pain, and the Prophet took it all away.
He healed the man?
No, he smothered him. Delivered his spirit-now at peace-into the hands of the Fallen One. If you are in pain, this is where you can end your life-only here, do you understand, can you be sure your soul will find a home. There, in the loving heart of the Fallen One. Don’t you want to find your legs again? Other side of life, that’s where you’ll find them.
And so Bedek came to understand that, perhaps, this Crippled God could not help them. Not with finding Harllo. And all at once he wanted to go home.
But Myrla would have none of that. The yearning was unabated in her eyes, but it had been transformed, and what she sought now had nothing to do with Harllo. Bedek did not know what that new thing might be, but he was frightened down to the core of his soul.
Snell struggled to form a sling to take the runts, both of whom were lying senseless on the floor. He had checked to see they were both breathing, since he’d heard that making them black out could sometimes kill them-if he’d held them tight for too long-though he’d been careful. He was always careful when doing that, though if one of them did die, why, he would say it went to sleep and just never woke up and that happened, didn’t it, with the little ones? And then he’d cry because that was expected.
Poor thing, but it’d always been weak, hadn’t it? So many children were weak. Only the strong ones, the smart ones, survived. It’s what the world was like, after all, and the world can’t be changed, not one bit.
There was a man in the Daru High Market who always dressed well and had plenty of coin, and it was well known he’d take little ones. Ten, twenty silver councils, boy or girl, it didn’t matter which. He knew people, rich people-he was just the middleman, but you dealt with him if you didn’t want no one to find out anything, and if there were any small bodies left over, well, they never ever showed up to start people asking questions.
It would be a bit of a walk, especially with both Mew and Hinty, and that’s why he needed to work out a sling of some sort, like the ones the Rhivi mothers used. Only, how did they do that?
The door opened behind him and Snell whirled in sudden terror.
The man standing in the threshold was familiar-he’d been with Stonny Men-ackis the last time she’d visited-and Snell could see at once that dear Snell was in trouble. Ice cold fear, a mouth impossibly dry, a pounding heart.
‘They’re just sleeping!’
The man stared. ‘What have you done with them, Snell?’
‘Nothing! Go away. Da and Ma aren’t here. They went to the Chains Temple. Come back later.’
Instead, the man stepped inside. One gloved hand casually flung Snell back, away from the motionless girls on the floor. The blow rocked Snell, and as if a stopper had been jarred loose fear poured through him. As the man knelt and drew off a glove to set a palm against Mew’s forehead, Snell scrabbled to the back wall.
‘I’m gonna call the guards-I’m gonna scream-’
‘Shut your damned face or I’ll do it for you.’ A quick, heavy look. ‘I’ve not yet started with you, Snell. Everything comes back to you. On the day Harllo went missing, on that day, Snell…’ He lifted his hand and straightened. ‘Are they drugged? Tell me how you did this.’
He meant to keep lying, but all at once he thought that maybe if he told the truth about this, the man might believe the lies he used afterwards, on the other stuff. ‘I just squeeze ’em, when they cry too much, that’s all. It don’t hurt them none, honest.’
The man had glanced at the stretch of burlap lying beside Mew. Maybe he was putting things together, but nothing could be proved, could it? It would be all right. It would be-
Two quick strides and those hands-one gloved and the other bare and scarred-snagged the front of Snell’s tunic. He was lifted into the air until his eyes were level with the man’s. And Snell saw in those deadly eyes something dark, a lifeless whisper that could flatten out at any moment, and all thoughts of lying whimpered away.
‘On that day,’ the man said, ‘you came back with a load of sun-dried dung. Something you’d never done before, and have never done since. No, your mother said it was Harllo who did such things. Harllo, who at five fucking years old did more to help this family than you ever have. Who collected that dung, Snell?’
Snell had widened his eyes as wide as they could go. He made his chin tremble. ‘Harllo,’ he whispered, ‘but I never hurt him-I swear it!’
Oh, he hadn’t wanted to lie. It just came out.
‘Past Worrytown or Two-Ox Gate?’
‘The gate. Two-Ox.’
‘Did you go with him or did you follow him? What happened out there, Snell?’
And Snell’s eyes betrayed him then, a flicker too instinctive to stop in time-down to where Mew and Hinty were lying.
The man’s eyes flattened just as Snell had feared they might.
‘I never killed him! He was breathing when I left him! If you kill me they’ll find out-they’ll arrest you-you’ll go the gallows-you can’t kill me-don’t!’
‘You knocked him out and left him there, after stealing the dung he’d collected. The hills beyond Two-Ox Gate.’
‘And I went back, a couple of days-the day after-and he was gone! He’s just run off, that’s all-’
‘A five-year-old boy doing everything he could to help his family just ran off, did he? Or did you drive him off, Snell?’
‘I never did-he was just gone-and that’s not my fault, is it? Someone maybe found him, maybe even adopted him.’
‘You are going to tell your parents everything, Snell,’ the man said. ‘I will be back tonight, probably late, but I will be back. Don’t even think of running-’’He won’t,’ said a voice from the door,
The man turned. ‘Bellam-what-’
‘Master Murillio, I’ll stay here and keep an eye on the fucker. And when his parents show up, well, he’ll spill it all out. Go on, Master, you don’t need to worry about anything happening back here.’
The man-Murillio-was silent for a time, seeming to study the rangy boy who stood, arms folded, leaning against the doorway’s frame.
And then he set Snell down and stepped back. ‘I won’t forget this, Bellam.’
‘It’ll be fine, Master. I won’t beat the bones out of him, much as I’d like to, and much as he obviously deserves it. No, he’s going to sit and play with his little sisters-soon as they come round-’
‘A splash of water should do it.’
‘After a splash, then. And not only is Snell going to play with them, but he’s going to make a point of losing every game, every argument. If they want him to stand on his head while picking his arsehole, why, that’s what Snell will do. Right, Snell?’
Snell had met older boys just like this one. They had calm eyes but that was just to fix you good when you weren’t expecting.nothing. He was more frightened of this Bellam than he’d been of Murillio. ‘You hurt me and I’ll get my friends after you,’ he hissed. ‘My street friends-’
‘And when they hear the name Bellam Nom they’ll cut you loose faster than you can blink.’
Murillio had found a clay bowl into which he now poured some water.
‘Master,’ said Bellam, ‘I can do that. You got what you needed from him-at least a trail, a place to start.’
‘Very well. Until tonight then, Bellam, and thank you.’
After he’d left, Bellam shut the door and advanced on Snell, who once more cringed against the back wall.
‘You said-’
‘We do that, don’t we, when it comes to grown-ups.’
‘Don’t touch me!’
‘No grown-ups anywhere close, Snell-what do you like to do when they’re not around? Oh, yes, that’s right. You like to torment everyone smaller than you. That sounds a fun game. I think I’ll play, and look, you’re smaller than me. Now, what torment shall we do first?’
In leaving them for the time being, all grim concern regarding anything unduly cruel can be thankfully dispensed with. Bellam Nom, being cleverer than most, knew that true terror belonged not to what did occur, but to what might occur. He was content to encourage Snell’s own imagination into the myriad possibilities, which was a delicate and precise form of torture. Especially useful in that it left no bruises.
Bullies learn nothing when bullied in turn; there are no lessons, no about-face in their squalid natures. The principle of righteous justice is a peculiar domainwhere propriety and vengeance become confused, almost indistinguishable. The bullied bully is shown but the other side of the same fear he or she has lived with all his or her life. The about-face happens there, on the outside, not the inside. Inside, the bully and everything that haunts the bully’s soul remains unchanged.
It is an abject truth, but conscience cannot be shoved down the throat.
If only it could.
Moths were flattened against the walls of the narrow passageway, waiting for something, probably night. As it was a little used route to and from the Vidikas estate, frequented twice a day at specific times by deliveries to the kitchen, Chal-lice had taken to using it with all the furtive grace of the insouciant adulteress that she had become. The last thing she expected was to almost run into her husband there in the shadows midway through.
Even more disconcerting, it was clear that he had been awaiting her. One hand holding his duelling gloves as if about to slap them across her cheek, yet there was an odd smile on his face. ‘Darling,’ he said.
She halted before him, momentarily struck dumb. It was one thing to play out the game at breakfast, a table between them cluttered with all the false icons of a perfect and perfectly normal marriage. Their language then was such a smooth navigation round all those deadly shoals that it seemed the present was but a template of the future, of years and years of this; not a single wound stung to life, no tragic floundering on the jagged shallows, sailors drowning in the foam.
He stood before her now, tall with a thousand sharp edges, entirely blocking her path, his eyes glittering like wrecker fires on a promontory. ‘So pleased I found you,’ he said. ‘I must head out to the mining camp-no doubt you can hear the carriage being readied behind you.’
Casual words, yet she was startled, like a bird; flash of fluttering, panicked wings in the gloom as she half turned to register the snort of horses and the rustle of traces from the forecourt behind her. ‘Oh,’ she managed, then faced him once more. Her heart’s rapid beat began slowing down.
‘Even here,’ Gorlas said, ‘there is a sweet flush to your cheeks, dear. Most becoming.’
She could almost feel the brush of fingertips to grant benediction to the compliment. A moth, startled awake by the clash of currents in the dusty air, wings dry as talc as it fluttered against her face. She flinched back. ‘Thank you,’ she said.
This was just another game, of course. She realized that now. He did not want things to get messy, not here, not any time soon. She told herself this with certainty, and hoped it was true. But then, why not an explosive shattering? Freeing him, freeing her-wouldn’t that be healthier in the end? Unless his idea of freeing himself is to kill me. Such things happen, don’t they?
‘I do not expect to be back for at least three days. Two nights.’
‘I see. Be well on your journey, Gorlas.’
‘Thank you, darling.’ And then, without warning, he stepped close, his freehand grasping her right breast… ‘I don’t like the thought of strangers doing this,’ he said, his voice low, that odd smile still their, ‘I need to picture the face, one I know well. I need a sense of the bastard behind it.’
She stared into his eyes and saw only a stranger, calculating, as clinical and cold as a dresser of the dead-like the one who’d come to do what was needed with the corpse of her mother, once the thin veil of sympathy was tossed aside like a soiled cloth and the man set to work.
‘When I get back,’ he continued, ‘we’ll have a talk. One with details. I want to know all about him, Challice.’
She knew that what she said at this precise moment would echo in her husband’s mind for virtually every spare moment in the course of the next three days and two nights, and by the time he returned her words would have done their work in transforming him-into a broken thing, or into a monster. She could say All right, as if she was being forced, cornered, and whatever immediate satisfaction he felt would soon twist into something dark, unpleasant, and she would find herself across from a vengeful creature in three days’ time. She might say If you like, and he would hear that as defiance and cruel indifference-as if for her his needs were irrelevant, as if she would oblige out of pity and not much else. No, in truth she had few choices in what she might utter at this moment. In an instant, as he awaited her response, she decided on what she would say and when it came out it was calm and assured (but not too much so). ‘Until then, husband.’
He nodded, and she saw the pupils of his eyes dilate. She caught his quickened breathing, and knew her choice had been the right one. Now, the next three days and two nights, Gorlas would be as one on fire. With anticipation, with his imagination unleashed and playing out scenarios, each one a variation on a single theme.
Yes, Gorlas, we are not done with each other yet, after all.
His hand withdrew from her breast and, with a courtly bow, he stepped to one side to permit her to pass.
She did so.
Murillio hired a horse for the day; with tack included, the rental amounted to three silver councils along with a twenty-council deposit. Of that, the animal was worth perhaps five, certainly not much more. Slope-backed, at least ten years old, worn out, beaten down, the misery in the beast’s eyes stung Murillio to sympathy and he was of half a mind to forgo the deposit and leave the animal in the hands of a kindly farmer with plenty of spare pasture.
He rode at a slow, plodding walk through the crowded streets, until he reached Two-Ox Gate. Passing through the archway’s shadow, he collected the horse into a steady trot on the cobbled road, passing laden wagons and carts and the occa-sional Gadrobi peasant struggling beneath baskets filled with salted fish, flasks of oil, candles and whatever else they needed to make bearable living in a squalid hut along the roadside.
Once beyond the leper colony, he began scanning the lands to either side, seekingthe nearest active pasture. A short distance on he spied sheep and goats wandering the slope of a hillside to his right. A lone shepherd hobbled along the ridge, waving a switch to keep the flies off.’ Murillio pulled his mount off the road and rode towards him.
The old man noticed his approach and halted.
He was dressed in rags, but the crook he carried looked new, freshly oiled and polished. His eyes were smeared with cataracts from too many years in the bright sunlight, and he squinted, wary and nervous, as Murillio drew up and settled back in the saddle.
‘Hello, good shepherd.’
A terse nod answered him.
‘I am looking for someone-’
‘Nobody but me here,’ the old man replied, flicking the switch before his face.
‘This was a few weeks back. A young boy, up here collecting dung, perhaps.’
‘We get’em, out from the city.’
The furtiveness was ill-disguised. The old man licked his lips, switched at flies that weren’t there. There were secrets here, Murillio realized. He dismounted. ‘You know of this one,’ he said. ‘Five years old. He was hurt, possibly unconscious.’
The shepherd stepped back as he approached, half raised the crook. ‘What was I supposed to do?’ he demanded. ‘The ones that come out here, they got nothing. They live in the streets. They sell the dung for a few coppers. I got no help here, we just working for somebody else. We go hungry every winter-what was I supposed to do?’
‘Just tell me what happened,’ said Murillio. ‘You do that and maybe I’ll just walk away, leave you be. But you’re a bad liar, old man, and if you try again I might get angry.’
‘We wasn’t sure he was gonna live-he was beat up near dead, sir. Woulda died if we hadn’t found him, took care of him.’
‘And then?’
‘Sold him off. It’s hard enough, feedin’ ourselves-’
‘To who? Where is he?’
‘Iron mines. The Eldra Holdings, west of here.’
Murillio felt a chill grip his heart. ‘A five-year-old boy-’
‘Moles, they call ’em. Or-so I heard.’
He returned to the horse. Lifted himself into the saddle and roughly pulled the beast round. Rode hard back to the road.
A thousand paces along, the horse threw a shoe.
The ox lumbered along at the pace of a beast for which time was meaningless, and perhaps in this it was wise indeed. Walking beside it, the man with the crop twitched its flank every now and then, but this was habit, not urgency. The load of braided leather was not a particularly onerous burden, and if the carter timed things right, why, he might wangle himself a meal at the camp before the long return journey buck to the city. At least by then the day would be mostly done and the air would’ve cooled. In this heat, neither man nor beast was in any hurry.
Hardly surprising, then, that the lone traveller on foot caught up with them before too long, and after a brief conversation-a few words to either side of the jangle of coins-the load on the cart grew heavier, yet still not enough to force a groan from the ox. This was, after all, the task of its life, the very definition of its existence. In truth, it had little memory of ever being free, of ever trundling along without something to drag behind it, or the endless reverberation in its bones as wheels clunked across cobbles, slipping into and out of worn ruts in the stone.
Languid blinks, the storm of flies that danced in the heat, twitching tail and spots of blood on the fetlocks, and pulling something from one place to another. And at its side, squinting red-shot eyes, a storm of flies dancing, spots of blood here and there from midges and whatnot, and taking something from one place to another. Ox and driver, parallel lives through meaningless years. A singular variation, now, the man sitting with legs dangling off the cart, his boots worn and blisters oozing, and the dark maelstrom in his eyes that was for neither of them, and no business of theirs besides.
The ornate, lacquered, leaf-sprung carriage that rumbled past them a league from the camp had its windows shuttered against the heat and dust.
The man in the back had watched its approach. The carter watched it pass. The ox saw it moving away in front of it at a steady pace that it could never match, even had it wanted to, which it didn’t.
Snell was nobody’s fool, and when the ball of bound multicoloured twine rolled close to the door and Hinty stared at it, expecting its miraculous return to her pudgy, grimy hands, why, Snell obliged-and as soon as he was at the door, he darted outside and was gone.
He heard Bellam’s shout, but Snell had a good head start and besides, the stupid idiot wouldn’t just leave the runts behind, would he? No, Snell had made good his escape, easy as that, because he was clever and jerks could threaten him all the time but he won in the end, he always won-proof of his cleverness.
Up the street, into an alley, under the broken fence, across the narrow yard-chickens scattering from his path-and on to the stacked rabbit pens, over the next fence, into Twisty Alley, twenty strides up and then left, into the muddy track where a sewage pipe leaked. Nobody’d go down this pinched passageway, what with the stench and all, but he did, piss soaking through his worn moccasins, and then he was out on to Purse Street, and freedom.
Better if he’d stolen the runts to sell. Better still if he’d still had his stash of coins. Now, he had nothing. But nobody would catch him now. There were some older boys with connections to the gang that worked Worrytown, lifting what they could from the trader wagons that crowded through. If Snell could get out there, he’d be outside the city, wouldn’t he? They could hunt for ever and not find him. And he could make himself rich. He could rise in the ranks and become a pack leader. People would be scared of him, terrified even. Merchants would pay him just to not rob them. And he’d buy an estate, and hire assassins to kill Bellam Nom and Stormy Menackis and Murillio. He’d buy up his parents’ debts and make them pay him every month-wouldn’t that be something? It’d be perfect. And his sisters he could pimp out and eventually he’d have enough money to buy a title of some sort, get on the Council, and proclaim himself King of Darujhistan, and he’d order new gallows built and execute everyone who’d done him wrong.
He rushed through the crowds, his thoughts a world away, a future far off but almost in reach.
His feet were clipped out from under him and he fell hard: numbing shock from one shoulder and his hip. Bellam Nom stood over him, breathing hard but grinning. ‘Nice try,’ he said.
‘Mew and Hinty! You left them-’
‘Locked up, yes. That’s what slowed me down.’ And he reached down, grasped Snell’s arm and yanked him to his feet, twisting hard enough to make him yelp in pain.
Bellam dragged Snell back the way he’d come.
‘I’m going to kill you one day,’ Snell said, then winced as Bellam’s grip tightened on his arm.
‘It’s what people like you rely on, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘That none of us are as nasty as you. That we’ll have qualms about, say, skinning you alive. Or shattering your kneecaps. Gouging out your eyes. You want to kill me? Fine, just don’t be surprised if I get to you first, Snell.’
‘You can’t murder-’
‘Can’t I? Why not? You seem to think you can, whenever you like, whenever the chance arises. Well, I’m not Stonny Menackis. I’m not Murillio, either. They’re… civilized folk. No, Snell, I’m more like you, only I’m older and better at it.’
‘If you did anything to me, Murillio would have to go after you. Like you say, he’s not like us. Or Stonny. She’d cut you to pieces. Yes, it’d be Stonny, once Da asked her to, and he would.’
‘You’re making a big assumption, Snell.’
‘What?’
‘That they’d ever figure out it was me.’
‘I’ll warn them-as soon as they come back-I’ll warn them about you-’
‘Before or after you make your confession? About what you did to poor Harllo?’
‘That was different! I didn’t do nothing on purpose-’
‘You hurt him, probably killed him, and left his body for the birds. You kept it all a secret, Snell. Hood knows, if I asked nicely enough, your da might just hand you over to me and good riddance to you.’
Snell said nothing. There was true terror inside him now. So much terror itfilled him up, spilled out through his pores, and out from between his legs. This Bellam was a monster. He didn’t feel anything for nobody. He just wanted to hurt Snell. A monster. A vicious demon, yes, a demon. Bellam was everything that was wrong with… with… everything.
‘I’ll,be good,’ Snell whimpered. ‘You’ll see. I’ll make it right, all of it.’
But these were lies, and both of them knew it. Snell was what he was, and no amount of cuddling and coddling would change that. He stood, there in the mind, as if to say: we are in your world. More of us than you imagine. If you knew how many of us there are, you’d be very, very frightened. We are here. Now, what are you going to do with us? Snell was what he was, yes, and so, too, was Bellam Nom.
When he was dragged in through the narrow door of a nondescript shop at the near end of Twisty Alley, Snell suddenly recoiled-he knew this place. He knew-
‘What you got yourself there, Bellam?’
‘A fresh one, Goruss, and I’ll let him go cheap.’
‘Wait!’ Snell shrieked, and then a heavy hand clamped over his mouth and he was pulled into the gloom, smelling rank sweat, feeling a breath on his cheek as the ogre named Goruss leaned in close.
‘A screamer, iz he?’
‘A nasty little shit, in fact.’
‘We’ll work that outer ’im.’
‘Not this one. He’d stab his mother just to watch the blood flow. ‘Sprobably left a trail of tortured small animals ten leagues long, buried in little holes in every back yard of the neighbourhood. This is one of those, Goruss.’
‘Eighteen silver?’
‘Slivers?’
‘Yah.’
‘All right.’
Snell thrashed about as he was carried off into a back room, then down steps and into an unlit cellar that smelled of piss-soaked mud. He was gagged and bound and thrown into a low iron cage. Goruss then went back up the stairs, leaving Snell alone.
In the front room, Goruss sat down across from Bellam. ‘Ale, nephew?’
‘Too early for me, Uncle.’
‘How long you want me to hold him?’
‘Long enough to shit everything out of him. I want him so scared he breaks inside.’
‘Give him a night, then. Enough to run through all his terrors, but not so much he gets numb. Shit, nephew, I don’t deal in anybody under, oh, fifteen years old, and we do careful interviewing and observing, and only the completely hopeless ones get shipped to the rowing benches. And even then, they get paid and fed and signed out after five years-and most of them do good after that.’
‘I doubt Snell knows any of that, Uncle. Just that children are dragged into this shop and they don’t come back out.’’Must look that way.’
Bellam smiled. ‘Oh, it does, Uncle, it does.’
‘Not seen him in days.’
Barathol just nodded, then walked over to the cask of water to wash the grime off his forearms and hands. Chaur sat on a crate nearby, eating some local fruit with a yellow skin and pink, fleshy insides. Juice dribbled down his stubbled chin.
Scillara gave him a bright smile as she wandered into the front room. The air smelled brittle and acrid, the way it does in smithies, and she thought now that, from this moment on, the scent would accompany her every recollection of Barathol, this large man with the gentle eyes. ‘Had any more trouble with the Guilds?’ she asked.
He dried himself off and flung the cloth to one side. ‘They’re making it hard, but I expected that. We’re surviving.’
‘So I see.’ She kicked at a heap of iron rods. ‘New order?’
‘Swords. The arrival of the Malazan embassy’s garrison has triggered a new fad among the nobles. Imperial longswords. Gave trouble to most of the local sword-smiths.’ He shrugged. ‘Not me, of course.’
Scillara settled down in the lone chair and began scraping out her pipe. ‘What’s so special about Malazan longswords?’
‘The very opposite, actually. The local makers haven’t quite worked out that they have to reverse engineer to get them right.’
‘Reverse engineer?’
‘The Malazan longsword’s basic design and manufacture is originally Untan, from the imperial mainland. Three centuries old, at least, maybe older. The empire still uses the Untan foundries and they’re a conservative bunch.’
‘Well, if the damned things do what they’re supposed to do, why make changes?’
‘That seems to be the thinking, yes. The locals have gone mad folding and refolding, trying to capture that rough solidity, but the Untan smiths are in the habit of working iron not hot enough. It’s also red iron that they’re using-the Untan Hills are rotten with it even though it’s rare everywhere else.’ He paused, watching as she lit her pipe. ‘This can’t be of any real interest to you, Scillara.’
‘Not really, but I do like the sound of your voice.’ And she looked up at him through the smoke, her eyes half veiled.
‘Anyway, I can make decent copies and the word’s gone out. Eventually, some swordsmith will work things out, but by then I’ll have plenty of satisfied customers and even undercutting me won’t be too damaging.’
‘Good,’ she said.
He studied her for a moment, and then said, ‘So, Cutter’s gone missing, has he?’
‘I don’t know about that. Only that I’ve not seen him in a few days.’
‘Are you worried?’She thought about it, and then thought some more, ‘ Barathol, that wasn’t my reason for visiting you. I wasn’t looking for someone to charge in as if Cut-ter’s been kidnapped or something. I’m here because I wanted to see you. I’m lonely-oh, I don’t mean anybody’ll do, either, when I say that. I just wanted to see you, that’s all.’
After a moment, he shrugged and held out his hands. ‘Here I am.’
‘You won’t make it easy, will you?’
‘Scillara, look at me. Please, look. Carefully. You’re too fast for me. Cutter, that historian, even that Bridgeburner, you leave them all spinning in your wake. Given my choice, I’d rather go through the rest of my life beneath the notice of everyone. I’m not interested in drama, or even excitement.’
She stretched out her legs. ‘And you think I am?’
‘It’s life that you’re full of.’ Barathol frowned and then shook his head. ‘I’m not very good at saying what I mean, am I?’
‘Keep trying.’
‘You can be… overwhelming.’
‘Typical, put on a little fat and suddenly I’m too much for him.’
‘You’re not.fat and you know it. You have,’ he hesitated, ‘shape.’
She thought to laugh, decided that it might come out too obviously hurt, Which would make him feel even worse. Besides, her comment had been little more than desperate misdirection-she’d lost most of the weight she’d put on during her pregnancy. ‘Barathol, has it not occurred to you that maybe I am as I am because behind it all there’s not much else?’
His frown deepened.
Chaur dropped down from the crate and came over. He patted her on the head with a sticky hand and then hurried off into the yard.
‘But you’ve lived through so much.’
‘And you haven’t? Gods below, you were an officer in the Red Blades. What you did in Aren-’
‘Was just me avoiding a mess, Scillara. As usual.’
‘What are we talking about here?’
His eyes shied away. ‘I’m not sure. I suppose, now that Cutter’s left you…’
‘And Duiker’s too old and Picker’s a woman and that’s fun but not serious-for me, at least-I’ve found myself in need of another man. Chaur’s a child, in his head, that is. Leaving… you.’
The harsh sarcasm of her voice stung him and he almost stepped back. ‘From where I’m standing,’ he said.
‘Well,’ she said, sighing, ‘it’s probably what I deserve, actually. I have been a bit… loose. Wayward. Looking, trying, not finding, trying again. And again. From where you’re standing, yes, I can see that.’
‘None of that would matter to me,’ Barathol then said. ‘Except, well, I don’t want to be just another man left in your wake.’
‘No wonder you’ve devoted your life to making weapons and armour. Problem is, you’re doing that for everyone else.’
He said nothing. He simply watched her, as, she realized, he had been doing for some time now. All at once, Scillara felt uncomfortable. She drew hard on her pipe. ‘Barathol, you need some armour of your own.’
And he nodded. ‘I see.’
‘I’m not going to make promises I can’t keep. Still, it may be that my waywardness is coming to an end. People like us, who spend all our time looking, well, even when we find it we usually don’t realize it-until it’s too late.’
‘Cutter.’
She squinted up at him. ‘He had no room left in his heart, Barathol. Not for me, not for anyone.’
‘So he’s just hiding right now?’
‘In more ways than one, I suspect.’
‘But he’s broken your heart, Scillara.’
‘Has he?’ She considered. ‘Maybe he has. Maybe I’m the one needing armour.’ She snorted. ‘Puts me in my place, doesn’t it.’ And she rose.
Barathol started. ‘Where are you going?’
‘What? I don’t know. Somewhere. Nowhere. Does it matter?’
‘Wait.’ He stepped closer. ‘Listen to me, Scillara.’ And then he was silent, on his face a war of feelings trying to find words. After a moment, his scowl deepened. ‘Yesterday, if Cutter had just walked in here to say hello, I’d have taken him by the throat. Hood, I’d have probably beaten him unconscious and tied him up in that chair. Where he’d stay-until you dropped by.’
‘Yesterday.’
‘When I thought I had no chance.’
She was having her own trouble finding words. ‘And now?’
‘I think… I’ve just thrown on some armour.’
‘The soldier… unretires.’
‘Well, I’m a man, and a man never learns.’
She grinned. ‘That’s true enough.’
And then she leaned close, and as he slowly raised his arms to take her into an embrace she almost shut her eyes-all that relief, all that anticipation of pleasure, even joy-and the hands instead grasped her upper arms and she was pushed suddenly to one side. Startled, she turned to see a squad of City Guard crowding the doorway.
The officer in the lead had the decency to look embarrassed.
‘Barathol Mekhar? By city order, this smithy is now under temporary closure, and I am afraid I have to take you into custody.’
‘The charge?’
‘Brought forward by the Guild of Smiths. Contravention of proper waste disposal. It is a serious charge, I’m afraid. You could lose your business.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Barathol said. ‘I am making use of the sewage drains-I spill nothing-’
‘The common drain, yes, but you should be using the industrial drain, which runs alongside the common drain.’’This is the first I have heard of such a ihing ‘
‘Well,’ said a voice behind the guards, ‘if you were a member of the Guild, you’d know all about it, wouldn’t you?’
It was a woman who spoke, but Scillara could not see past the men in the door way.
Barathol threw up his hands. ‘Very well, I am happy to comply. I will install the proper pipes-’
‘You may do so,’ said the officer, ‘once the charges are properly adjudicated, fines paid, and so forth. In the meantime, this establishment must be shut down. The gas valves must be sealed. Materials and tools impounded.’
‘I see. Then let me make some arrangement for my helper-somewhere to stay and-’
‘I am sorry,’ cut in the officer, ‘but the charge is against both you and your apprentice.’,,
‘Not precisely,’ said the unseen woman. ‘The blacksmith cannot have an apprentice unless he is a member of the Guild. The two are colluding to undermine the Guild.’
The officer’s expression tightened. ‘As she said, yes. I’m not here to prattle on in the language of an advocate. I do the arrest and leave one of my guards to over-see the decommissioning of the establishment by a qualified crew.’
‘A moment,’ said Barathol. ‘You are arresting Chaur?’
‘Is that your apprentice’s name?’
‘He’s not my apprentice. He’s a simpleton-’
‘Little more than a slave, then,’ snapped the unseen official of the Guild. ‘That would be breaking a much more serious law, I should think.’
Scillara watched as two men went to the yard and returned with a wide-eyed, whimpering Chaur. Barathol attempted to console him, but guards stepped in between them and the officer warned that, while he didn’t want to make use of shackles, he would if necessary. So, if everyone could stay calm and collected, they could march out of here like civilized folk. Barathol enquired as to his right to hire an advocate and the officer replied that, while it wasn’t a right as such, it was indeed a privilege Barathol could exercise, assuming he could afford one.
At that point Scillara spoke up and said, ‘I’ll find one for you, Barathol.’
A flicker of relief and gratitude in his eyes, replaced almost immediately by his distress over the fate of Chaur, who was now bawling and tugging his arms free every time a guard sought to take hold of him.
‘Let him alone,’ said Barathol. ‘He’ll follow peacefully enough-just don’t grab him.’
And then the squad, save one, all marched out with their prisoners. Scillara fell in behind them, and finally saw the Guild official, a rather imposing woman whose dignity was marred by the self-satisfied smirk on her face.
As Scillara passed behind the woman, she took hold of her braid and gave it a sharp downward tug.
’Ow!’ The woman whirled, her expression savage.
‘Sorry,’ Scillara said. ‘Must have caught on my bracelet.’And as Scillara continued on down the street, she heard, from the squad offi-iri: ‘She’s not wearing any bracelet.’
The Guild woman hissed and said, ‘I want her-’
And then Scillara turned the corner. She did not expect the officer to send anyone in pursuit. The man was doing his job and had no interest in complicating things.
‘And there I was,’ she muttered under her breath, ‘about to trap a very fine man in my messed-up web. Hoping-praying-that he’d be the one to untangle my life.’ She snorted. ‘Just my luck.’
From rank superstitions to scholarly treatises, countless generations had sought understanding of those among them whose minds stayed undeveloped, childlike or, indeed, seemingly trapped in some other world. God and demon possession, stolen souls, countless chemical imbalances and unpleasant humours, injuries sustained at birth or even before; blows to the head as a child; fevers and so on. What could never be achieved, of course (barring elaborate, dangerous rituals of spirit-walking); was to venture into the mind of one thus afflicted.
It would be easy to assume an inner world of simple feelings, frightening unknowns and the endless miasma of confusion. Or some incorporeal demon crouched down on every thought, crushing the life from it, choking off every possible passage to awareness. Such assumptions, naturally, are but suppositions, founded only on external observation: the careful regard of seemingly blank eyes and stupid smiles, repetitive behaviour and unfounded fears.
Hold tight, then, this hand, on this momentary journey into Chaur’s mind.
The world he was witness to was a place of objects, some moving, some never moving, and some that were still but could be moved if one so willed it. These three types were not necessarily fixed, and he well knew that things that seemed destined to immobility could suddenly come awake, alive, in explosive motion. Within himself, Chaur possessed apprehensions of all three, in ever shifting forms. There was love, a deeply rooted object, from which came warmth, and joy, and a sense of perfect well-being. It could, on occasion, reach out to take in another-someone or something on the outside-but, ultimately, that was not necessary. The love was within him, its very own world, and he could go there any time he liked. This was expressed in a rather dreamy smile, an expression disengaged with everything on the outside.
Powerful as it was, love was vulnerable. It could be wounded, jabbed into recoiling pain. When this happened, another object was stirred awake. It could be called hate, but its surface was mottled with fear and anger. This object was fixed as deeply in his soul as was love, and the two needed each other even if their relationship was strained, fraught. Prodded into life by love’s pain, hate opened eyes that could only look outward-never to oneself, never even to the identity known as Chaur. Hate blazed in one direction and one only-to the outer world with its objects, some moving, some not, some that might do either, shifting from one to the next and back again. Hate could, if it must, make use of Chaur’s body. In lashing out, in a frenzied reordering of the world. To bring it buck into the right shape, to force an end to whatever caused love its pain.
All of this depended upon observation, but such observation did not rely overmuch on what he saw, or heard, smelled, touched or tasted. Hate’s secret vision was much sharper-it saw colours that did not exist for others, and those colours were, on an instinctive level, encyclopedic. Seeing them, hate knew everything. Knew, indeed, far beyond what a normal mind might achieve.
Was this little more than a peculiar sensitivity to nonverbal communication? Don’t ask Chaur. He is, after all, in his own world.
His object called hate had a thing about blood. Its hue, the way it flowed, the way it smelled and tasted, and this was a bizarre truth: his hate loved blood. To see it, to immerse oneself in it, was to feel joy and warmth and contentment.
The guards flanking Chaur, walking at ease and with modest thoughts of their own, had no inkling of all that swirled in the seemingly simple mind of their prisoner. Who walked, limbs loose and swinging now that the natural tension that had behind up the huge man’s neck and shoulders had eased away-clearly, the oaf had forgotten all the trouble he was in, had forgotten that they were all walking to a gaol, that soon Chaur would find himself inside a cage of stolid black iron bars. All those thick walls enclosing the simpleton’s brain were clearly back in place.
Not worth a second glance.
And so there were none to see the hate-filled eyes peering out through every crack, every murder hole, every arrow slit-a thousand, ten thousand glittering eyes, seeing everything, the frenzied flicking as immobile objects were observed, gauged and then discarded; as others were adjudged potentially useful as things that, while unmoving, could be made to move. Seeing all, yes, absorbing and processing at speeds that would stun one of normal intelligence-because this was something different, something alien, something almost perfect in its own way, by its own rules, by all the forces it could assemble, harbour, and then, when the time was appropriate, unleash upon a most unsuspecting world.
The simple ones aren’t simple. The broken ones aren’t broken. They are rearranged. For better, for worse? Such judgements are without relevance. After all, imagine a world where virtually every mind is simpler than it imagines itself to be, or is so utterly broken that it is itself unaware of its own massive, stunning dysfunction. In such a world, life goes on, and madness thrives. Stupidity repeats. Behaviours destroy and destroy again, and again, yet remain impervious to enlightenment. Crimes against humanity abound, and not one victimizer can even comprehend one day becoming victim; not a single cruel soul understands that cruelty delivered yields cruelty repaid tenfold. It is enough to eat today and let tomorrow’s children starve. Wealth ever promises protection against the strictures of an unkind, avaricious world, and yet fails to deliver on that promise every single time, be the slayer disease, betrayal or the ravaging mobs of revolution. Wealth cannot comprehend that the very avarice it fears is its own creation, the toxic waste product of its own glorious exaltation. Imagine such a world, then-oh, don’t bother. Better to pity poor, dumb Chaur. Who, without warning, exploded into motion. Placid thoughts in guardian skulls shattered into oblivion as fists smashed, sending each man flying out to the side. As dulled senses of something awry shot the first spurt of chemical alarm through the nearest of the remaining guards, Chaur reached him, picked him up by belt and neck, and threw him against a happily immobile stone wall on the right. The officer and the last guard both began their whirl to confront the still mostly unknown threat, and Chaur, smiling, was there to meet them. He had in his left hand-gripped by one ear-a heavy amphora, which he had collected from a stall to his left, and he brought this object round to crash into the officer. Clay shards, a shower of pellet grain, and in their midst a crumpling body. The last guard, one hand tugging at his sword, mouth open to begin a shout of alarm, saw in his last conscious moment Chaur and his broad smile, as the simpleton, with a roundhouse swing, drove his fist into the side of the man’s head, collapsing the helm on that side and sending the headpiece flying. In a welter of blood from ear and temple, the guard fell to the ground, alive but temporarily unwilling to acknowledge the fact.
And Chaur stood now facing Barathol, with such pleased, excited eyes that the blacksmith could only stare back, speechless, aghast.
Gorlas Vidikas stepped out from the carriage and paused to adjust his leggings, noting with faint displeasure the discordant creases sitting in that sweaty carriage had left him with, and then glanced up as the sickly foreman wheezed his way over.
‘Noble sir,’ he gasped, ‘about the interest payments-I’ve been ill, as you know-’
‘You’re dying, you fool,’ Gorlas snapped. ‘I am not here to discuss your problems. We both know what will happen should you default on the loan, and we both know-I should trust-that you are not long for this world, which makes the whole issue irrelevant. The only question is whether you will die in your bed or end up getting tossed out on your backside.’ After a moment, he stepped closer and slapped the man on his back, triggering a cloud of dust. ‘You’ve always got your shack here at camp, yes? Come now, it’s time to discuss other matters.’
The foreman blinked up at him, with all that pathetic piteousness perfected by every loser the world over. Better, of course, than the dark gleam of malice-the stupid ones were quick to hate, once they’d got a sense of how they’d been duped-no, best keep this one making all those mewling help-me faces.
Gorlas smiled. ‘You can stay in your lovely new home, friend. I will withhold the interest payments so you can leave this world in peace and comfort.’ And oh, wasn’t this such extraordinary favour? This concession, this grave sacrifice, why, it would not be remiss if this idiot fell to his knees in abject gratitude, but never mind that. A second thump on the back, this one triggering a coughing fit from the old man.
Gorlas walked to the edge of the vast pit and surveyed the bustling hive of activity below. ‘All is well?’
The foreman, after hacking out a palmful of yellow phlegm, hobbled up to stand hunched beside him, wiping a hand on a caked trouser leg. ‘ Well enough, sir, yes, well enough indeed.’
See how his mood has improved? No doubt eaten up with worry all morning, the poor useless bastard. Well, the world needed such creatures, didn’t it? To do all the dirty, hard work, and then thank people like Gorlas for the privilege. You’re so very welcome, you stupid fool, and see this? It’s my smile of indulgence. Bask and bask well-it’s the only thing I give away that’s truly free.
‘How many losses this week?’
‘Three. Average, sir, that’s average as can be. One mole in a cave-in, the others died of the greyface sickness. We got the new vein producing now. Would you believe, it’s red iron!’
Gorlas’s brows lifted, ‘Red iron?’
A quick, eager nod. ’Twice the price at half-weight, that stuff. Seems there’s growing demand-’
‘Yes, the Malazan longswords everyone’s lusting after. Well, this will make it easier to order one, since up to now only one smith had the skill to make the damned weapons.’ He shook his head. ‘Ugly things, if you ask me. Curious thing is, we don’t get red iron round here-not till now, that is-so how was the fool making such perfect copies?’
‘Well, noble sir, there’s an old legend ‘bout how one can actually turn regular iron into the red stuff, and do it cheap besides. Maybe it ain’t just a legend.’
Gorlas grunted. Interesting. Imagine finding out that secret, being able to take regular iron, toss in something virtually worthless, and out comes red iron, worth four times the price. ‘You’ve just given me an idea,’ he murmured. ‘Though I doubt the smith would give up the secret-no, I’d have to pay. A lot.’
‘Maybe a partnership,’ the foreman ventured.
Gorlas scowled. He wasn’t asking for advice. Still, yes, a partnership might work. Something he’d heard about that smith… some Guild trouble. Well, could be Gorlas could smooth all that over, for a consideration. ‘Never mind,’ he said, a tad overloud, ’it was just a notion-I’ve already discarded it as too compli-cated, too messy. Let’s forget we ever discussed it.’
‘Yes, sir.’
But was the foreman looking oddly thoughtful? Might be necessary, Gorlas reflected, to hasten this fool’s demise.
From up the road behind them, a trader’s cart was approaching.
Stupid, really. He’d elected his riding boots, but the things were ancient, worn, and it seemed his feet had flattened out some since he’d last used them, and now he had enormous blisters, damned painful ones. And so, for all his plans of a stentorian, impressive arrival at the camp, full of dour intent and an edge of bluster, to then be ameliorated by a handful of silver councils, a relieved foreman sending a runner off to retrieve the wayward child, Murillio found himself on the back of a rickety cart, covered in dust and sweating in the midst of a cloud of flies.
Well, he would just have to make the best of it, wouldn’t he? As the ox haltedat the top of the ridgeline, the old man walking slow as a snail over to where stood the eponymous foreman beside some fancy noble-now both looking their way-Murillio eased himself down, wincing at the lancing pain shooting up his legs, thinking with dread of the long walk back to the city, his hand holding Harllo’s tiny one, with darkness crawling up from the ditches to either side-a long, long walk indeed, and how he’d manage it was, truth be told, beyond him.
Soldiers knew about blisters, didn’t they? And men and women who worked hard for a living. To others, the affliction seemed trivial, a minor irritation-and when there were years between this time and the last time one had suffered from them, it was easy to forget, to casually dismiss just how debilitating they truly were.
Raw leather rubbed at each one like ground glass as he settled his weight back down. Still, it would not do to hobble over, and so, mustering all his will, Murillio walked, one careful step at a time, to where the foreman and the nobleman stood discussing things with the carter. As he drew closer, his gaze narrowed on the highborn one, a hint of recognition… but where? When?
The carter had been told by the foreman where to take the supplies, and off he went, with a passing nod at Murillio.
The foreman was squinting curiously, and as Murillio drew up before them he spat to one side and said, ‘You look lost, sir. If you’ve the coin you can buy a place at the workers’ table-it’s plain fare but fillin’ enough, though we don’t serve noth-ing but weak ale.’ He barked a laugh. ‘We ain’t no roadside inn, are we?’
Murillio had thought long on how he would approach this. But he had not expected a damned nobleman in this particular scene, and something whispered to him that what should have been a simple negotiation, concluded by paying twice the going rate for a five-year-old boy, might now turn perilously complicated, ‘Are you the foreman of the camp, sir?’ he asked, after a deferential half-bow to the nobleman. At the answering nod, Murillio continued, ‘Very good. I am here in search of a young boy, name of Harllo, who was sold to your camp a few weeks back.’ He quickly raised a gloved hand. ‘No, I have no desire to challenge the propriety of that arrangement. Rather, I wish to purchase the boy’s freedom, and so deliver him back to his, er, terribly distressed parents.’
‘Do ye now?’ The foreman looked over at the nobleman.
Yes, Murillio thought he might know this young man.
‘You are the one named Murillio,’ the nobleman said, with an odd glitter in his gaze.
‘You have the better of me-’
‘That goes without saying. I am the principal investor of this operation. I am also a councillor. Gorlas Vidikas of House Vidikas.’
Murillio bowed a second time, as much to hide his dismay as in proper deference. ‘Councilman Vidikas, it is a pleasure meeting you.’
‘Is it? I very much doubt that. It took me a few moments to place you. You were pointed out, you see, a couple years back, at some estate fete.’
‘Oh? Well, there was a time when I was-’
‘You were on a list,’ Gorlas cut in.
‘A what?’’A hobby of a friend of mine, although I doubt he would have seen it as a hobby. In fact, if I was so careless as to use that word, when it came to his list, he’d probably call me out.’
‘I am sorry,’ Murillio said, ‘but I’m afraid I do not know what you are talking about. Some sort of list, you said?’
‘Likely conspirators,’ Gorlas said with a faint smile, ‘in the murder of Turban Orr, not to mention Ravyd Lim-or was it some other Lim? I don’t recall now, but then, that hardly matters. No, Turban Orr, and of course the suspicious suicide of Lady Simtal-all on the same night, in her estate. I was there, did you know that? I saw Turban Orr assassinated with my own eyes.’ And he was in truth smiling now, as if recalling something yielding waves of nostalgia. But his eyes were hard, fixed like sword points. ‘My friend, of course, is Hanut Orr, and the list is his.’
‘1 do recall attending the Simtal fete,’ Murillio said, and in his mind he was re-living those moments after leaving the Lady’s bedchamber-leaving her with the means by which she could take her own life-and his thoughts, then, of everything he had surrendered, and what it might mean for his future. Appropriate, then, that it should now return to crouch at his feet, like a rabid dog with fangs bared. ‘Alas, I missed the duel-’
‘It was no duel, Murillio. Turban Orr was provoked. He was set up. He was assassinated, in plain view. Murder, not a duel-do you even comprehend the difference?’
The foreman was staring back and forth between them with all the dumb bewilderment of an ox.
‘I do, sir, but as I said, I was not there to witness the event-’
‘You call me a liar, then?’
‘Excuse me?’ Gods below, ten years past and he would have handled this with perfect grace and mocking equanimity, and all that was ruffled would be smoothed over, certain debts accepted, promises of honouring those debts not even needing explicit enunciation. Ten years past and-
‘You are calling me a liar.’
‘No, I do not recall doing so, Councillor. If you say Turban Orr was assassinated, then so be it. As for my somehow conspiring to bring it about, well, that is itself a very dangerous accusation.’ Oh, he knew where this was leading. He had known for some time, in fact. It was all there in Gorlas Vidikas’s eyes-and Murillio now recalled where he had last seen this man, and heard of him. Gorlas enjoyed duelling. He enjoyed killing his opponents. Yes, he had attended one of this bastard’s duels, and he had seen-
‘It seems,’ said Gorlas, ‘we have ourselves a challenge to honour here.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘When you retracted your accusation, well, I admit I thought you were about to tuck your tail between your legs and scuttle off down the road. And perhaps I would’ve let you go at that-it’s Hanut’s obsession, after all. Not mine.’
Murillio said nothing, understanding how he had trapped himself, with the foreman to witness the fact that the demand for a duel had come from him, not Gorlas Vidikas. He also understood that there had been no chance, none at all, that Gorlas would have let him go. Naturally,’ continued the councillor, ‘I have no intention of withdrawing my accusation-so either accept it or call me out, Murillio. I have vague recollections that yon were one judged a decent duellist.’ He scanned the track to either side. ‘This place seems well suited. Now, a miserable enough audience, granted, but-’
‘Excuse me,’ cut in the foreman, ‘but the day’s shift bell is about to sound. The crews can get a perfect view, what with you two on the ridgeline-if you’d like.’
Gorlas winked over at Murillio as he said, ‘By all means we shall wait, then.’
The foreman trundled down the path into the pit, to ensure that the crew captains were told what was going on. They’d enjoy the treat after a long day’s work in the tunnels.
As soon as the foreman was out of earshot, Gorlas grinned at Murillio. ‘Now, anything more we should talk about, now that we’ve got no witness?’
‘Thank you for the invitation,’ Murillio said, tightening the straps of his glove. ‘Turban Orr didn’t deserve an honourable death. Hanut is your friend? Tell me, do you enjoy sleeping with vipers, or are you just stupid?’
‘If that was an attempt to bring me to a boil, it was pathetic. You truly think I don’t know all the tricks leading up to a duel? Gods below, old man. Still, I am pleased by your admission-Hanut will be delighted to hear that his suspicions were accurate. More important, he will find himself in my debt.’ And then he cocked his head. ‘Of course, the debt will be all the greater if I let you live. A duel unto wounding-leaving your fate in Hanut’s hands. Yes, that would be perfect. Well, Murillio, shall it be wounding?’
‘If you like,’ Murillio said.
‘Are your boots pinching?’
‘No.’
‘You seem in discomfort, Murillio, or is that just nerves?’
Bells clanged in the pit below. Distant shouts, and out from the tunnel mouths spewed filthy figures looking barely human at this distance. Runners raced down the lines. Word was getting out.
‘What’s this Harllo boy to you, anyway?’
Murillio glanced back to Gorlas. ‘You married Estraysian D’Arle’s daughter, didn’t you? She’s made herself very… popular, of late, hasn’t she? Alas, I am starting to understand why-you’re not much of a man, are you, Gorlas?’
For all the councillor’s previous bravado, he paled in the late afternoon light.
‘It’s terrible, isn’t it,’ Murillio went on, ‘how every sordid detail, no matter how private and personal, so easily leaves the barricaded world of the wellborn and races like windblown seeds among all us common folk, us lowborn. Why, whatever happened to decency?’
The rapier rasped its way out of the sheath and the point lifted towards Murillio. ‘Draw your weapon, old man.’
Krute of Talient stepped inside. He saw Rallick Nom standing by the window, but it was shuttered closed. The man might as well be standing facing a wall. Oh, he was a strange one indeed, stranger now than he’d ever been before. All that si-lence, all that sense of something being very much… wrong. In his head? Maybe, And that was a worrying thought-that Rallick Nom might not be right any more,
‘It’s confirmed,’ said Krute, setting down the burlap sack filled with the makings for supper. ‘One contract dissolved, a new one accepted. Stinks of desperation, doesn’t it? Gods, Seba’s even called me back and that’s an invitation no sane man would refuse.’ He paused, eyeing his friend, and then said, ‘So you may not be seeing much of me from now on. From what I’ve gathered, this new one’s pretty straightforward, but it’s the kind that’ll shake up the precious bloods.’
‘Is it now?’ Rallick asked, expressionless.
‘Listen,’ said Krute, knowing he was betraying his nerves, ‘I couldn’t say no, could I? It’s fine enough living off your coin, but that’s hard on a man’s pride. I’ve got a chance to get back into the middle of things again. I’ve got a chance to walk with the Guild again. Rallick, I got to take it, you understand?’
‘Is it that important to you, Krute?’
Krute nodded.
‘Then,’ said Rallick, ‘I had best leave your company.’
‘I’m sorry about that-it’s my being… what’s that word again?’
‘Compromised.’
‘Exactly. Now, if you’d made your move on Seba, well, we wouldn’t be in this situation, would we? It’s the waiting that’s been so hard.’
‘There are no plans to replace Seba Krafar,’ said Rallick. ‘I am sorry if I have unintentionally misled you on that count. This is not to say we’re uninterested in the Guild.’ He hesitated. ‘Krute, listen carefully. I can leave you some coin-enough for a while, a half-year’s worth, in fact. Just decline Seba’s invitation-you don’t know what you’re getting into-’
‘And you do? No, Rallick, the point is, if I don’t know it’s because I’ve been pushed out of things.’
‘You should be thankful for that.’
‘I don’t need any patronizing shit from you, Rallick Nom. You’re all secrets now, nothing but secrets. But you’ll live here, with me, and eat what I cook, and what about me? Oh, right, on the outside again, this time with you. Well, I can’t live like that, so you’d better go. Don’t think ill of me-I won’t tell Seba about you.’
‘Can I not buy your retirement, Krute?’
‘No.’
Rallick nodded and then walked to the door. ‘Guard yourself well, Krute.’
‘You too, Rallick.’
Emerging from the tenement building’s narrow back door, Rallick Nom stepped out into the rank, rubbish-filled alley. His last venture into the world had seen him very nearly killed by Crokus Younghand, and of his time spent recovering at the Phoenix Inn, it was clear that no one who’d known of his presence had said a thing-not Kruppe, nor Coll, nor Murillio, nor Meese or Irilta; the Guild had notsniffed out his ignominious return. Even that wayward cousin of his, Torvald, had said nothing-although why that man had so vigorously avoided him was both baffling and somewhat hurtful.
Anyway, in a sense, Rallick remained invisible.
He paused in the alley. Still light, a ribbon of brightness directly above. It felt odd, to be outside in the day, and he knew it would not be long before someone caught sight of him, recognizing his face-eyes widening with astonishment-and word would race back to Seba Krafar. And then?
Well, the Master would probably send one of his lieutenants to sound Rallick out-what did he want? What did he expect from the Guild? There might be an invitation as well, the kind that was deadly either way. Accept it and walk into an ambush. Reject it and the hunt would begin. There were few who could take down Rallick one on one, but that wouldn’t be the preferred tactic in any case. No, it would be a quarrel to the back.
There were other places he could hide-he could probably walk right back into the Firmest House. But then, Krute was not the only one getting impatient. Besides, Rallick had never much liked subterfuge. He’d not used it when he’d been active in the Guild, after all-except when he was working, of course.
No, the time had come to stir things awake. And if Seba Krafar’s confidence had been rattled by a handful of rancorous Malazans, well, he was about to be sent reeling.
The notion brought a faint smile to Rallick’s lips. Yes, I am back.
He set out for the Phoenix Inn.
/ am back, so let’s get this started, shall we?
Echoing alarms at the blurred border between the Daru and Lakefront districts, a half-dozen streets behind them now as Barathol-holding Chaur’s hand as he would a child’s-dragged the giant man through the late afternoon crowds. They had passed a few patrols, but word had yet to outdistance the two fugitives, although it was likely that this flight would, ultimately, prove anything but surreptitious-guards and bystanders both could not help but recall the two huge foreigners, one onyx-skinned, the other the hue of stained rawhide, rushing past.
Barathol had no choice but to dispense with efforts at stealth and subterfuge. Chaur was bawling with all the indignant outrage of a toddler justly punished, astonished to discover that not all things were cute and to be indulged by adoring caregivers-that, say, shoving a sibling off a cliff was not quite acceptable behaviour.
He had tried calming Chaur down, but simple as Chaur was, he was quick to sense disapproval, and Barathol had been unthinking and careless in expressing that disapproval-well, rather, he had been shocked into carelessness-and now the huge child would wail unto eventual exhaustion, and that exhaustion was still a long way off.
Two streets away from the harbour, three guards thirty paces behind them suddenly raised shouts, and now the chase was on for real. To Barathol’s surprise, C haur fell silent, and the smith pulled him up along-side him us they hurried along. ‘Chaur, listen to me. Get back to the ship-do you understand? Back to the ship, to the lady,.yes? Back to Spite-she’ll hide you. To The ship, Chaur, understand?’
A tear-streaked face, cheeks blotchy, eyes red, Chaur nodded.
Barathol pushed him ahead. ‘Go. On your own-I’ll catch up with you. Go!’
And Chaur went, lumbering, knocking people off their feet until a path mirac-ulously opened before him.
Barathol turned about to give the three guards some trouble. Enough to pur-chase Chaur the time he needed, at least.
He managed that well enough, with fists and feet, with knees and elbows, and if not for the arrival of reinforcements, he might even have won clear. Six more guards, however, proved about five too many, and he was wrestled to the ground and beaten half senseless.
The occasional thought filtered weakly through the miasma of pain and confusion as he was roughly carried to the nearest gaol. He’d known a cell before. It wasn’t so bad, so long as the jailers weren’t into torture. Yes, he could make a tour of gaol cells, country to country, continent to continent. All he needed to do was start up a smithy without the local Guild’s approval.
Simple enough.
Then these fragmented notions went away, and the bliss of unconsciousness was unbroken, for a time.