Without it, he might crumble, collapse inward like a deflated bladder. Or lash out, yes, at every one of his kin. At Desra, who had been his lover. At Kedeviss and Aranatha who were useless. At Skintick who mocked to hide his cowardice. And at Nimander, who was to blame for – well, no need to go into that, was there?
‘Do not fret, beloved. I wait for you. For ever. Be strong and know this: you are stronger than you know. Think—’
And all at once another voice sounded in his mind, harder, sour with venom, ‘She knows nothing. She lies to you.’
Phaed.
‘Yes, you cannot be rid of me, brother. Not when your hands still burn. Still feel the heat of my throat. Not when my bulging eyes stay fixed on you, like nails, yes? The iron tips slowly pushing into your own eyes, so cold, such pain, and you cannot pull loose, can never escape.’
Do I deny my guilt? Do I even flinch from such truths?
‘That is not courage, brother. That is despair. Pathetic surrender. Remember Withal? How he took upon himself what needed doing? He picked me up like a rag doll – impressive strength, yes! The memory heats me, Nimander! Would you lick my lips?’ and she laughed. ‘Withal, yes, he knew what to do, because you left him no choice. Because you failed. So weak you could not murder your sister. I saw as much in your eyes; at that last moment, I saw it!’
Some sound must have risen from Nimander, for Skintick turned with brows raised.
‘What is wrong?’
Nimander shook his head.
They walked round pale-barked trees, on soft loam between splayed roots. Dappled sunlight and the chattering alarm of a flying squirrel on a bony branch overhead. Leaves making voices – yes, that was all it was, whispering leaves and his overwrought imagination—
Phaed snorted. ‘“Sometimes being bad feels good. Sometimes dark lust burns like parched wood. Sometimes, my love, you awaken desire in someone else’s pain.” Recall that poet, Nimander? That woman of Kharkanas? Andarist was reluctant to speak of her, but I found in the Old Scrolls all her writings. “And with the tips of your fingers, all this you can train.” Hah! She knew! And they all feared her, and now they will not speak her name, a name forbidden, but I know it – shall I—’
No!
And Nimander’s hands clutched, as if once more crushing Phaed’s throat. And he saw her eyes, yes, round and swollen huge and ready to burst. In his mind, yes, once more he choked the life from her.
And from the leaves came the whisper of dark pleasure.
Suddenly cold, suddenly terrified, he heard Phaed’s knowing laugh.
‘You look ill,’ Skintick said. ‘Should we halt for a rest?’
Nimander shook his head. ‘No, let Clip’s impatience drag us ever onward, Skintick. The sooner we are done . . .’ But he could not go on, would not finish that thought.
‘See ahead,’ Desra said. ‘Clip has reached the forest edge, and not a moment too soon.’
There was no cause for her impatience, merely a distorted, murky reflection of Clip’s own. This was how she seduced men, by giving back to them versions of themselves, promising her protean self like a precious gift to feed their narcissistic pleasures. She seemed able to steal hearts almost without effort, but Nimander suspected that Clip’s self-obsession would prove too powerful, too well armoured against any incursions. He would not let her into his places of weakness. No, he would simply use her, as she had so often used men, and from this would be born a most deadly venom.
Nimander had no thought to warn Clip. Leave them their games, and all the wounds to come.
‘Yes, leave them to it, brother. We have our own, after all.’
Must I choke you silent once more, Phaed?
‘If it pleases you.’
The clearing ahead stretched out, rolling downward towards a distant river or stream. The fields on the opposite bank had been planted with rows of some strange, purplish, broad-leafed crop. Scarecrows hung from crosses in such profusion that it seemed they stood like a cohort of soldiers in ranks. Motionless, rag-bound figures in each row, only a few paces apart. The effect was chilling.
Clip’s eyes thinned as he studied the distant field and its tattered sentinels. Chain snapped out, rings spun in a gleaming blur.
‘There’s a track, I think,’ Skintick said, ‘up and over the far side.’
‘What plants are those?’ Aranatha asked.
No one had an answer.
‘Why are there so many scarecrows?’
Again, no suggestions were forthcoming.
Clip once more in the lead, they set out.
The water of the stream was dark green, almost black, so sickly in appearance that none stopped for a drink, and each found stones to step on rather than simply splash across the shallow span. They ascended towards the field where clouds of insects hovered round the centre stalk of each plant, swarming the pale green flowers before rising in a gust to plunge down on to the next.
As they drew closer, their steps slowed. Even Clip finally halted.
The scarecrows had once been living people. The rags were bound tightly, covering the entire bodies; arms, legs, necks, faces, all swathed in rough cloth that seemed to drip black fluids, soaking the earth. As the wrapped heads were forward slung, threads of the thick dark substance stretched down from the gauze covering the victims’ noses.
‘Feeding the plants, I think,’ Skintick said quietly.
‘Blood?’ Nimander asked.
‘Doesn’t look like blood, although there may be blood in it.’
‘Then they’re still alive.’
Yet that seemed unlikely. None of the forms moved, none lifted a bound head at the sound of their voices. The air itself stank of death.
‘They are not still alive,’ Clip said. He had stopped spinning the chain.
‘Then what leaks from them?’
Clip moved on to the narrow track running up through the field. Nimander forced himself to follow, and heard the others fall in behind him. Once they were in the field, surrounded by the corpses and the man-high plants, the pungent air was suddenly thick with the tiny, wrinkle-winged insects, slithering wet and cool against their faces.
They hurried forward, gagging, coughing.
The furrows were sodden underfoot, black mud clinging to their moccasins, a growing weight that made them stumble and slip as they scrambled upslope. Reaching the ridge at last, out from the rows, down into a ditch and then on to a road. Beyond it, more fields to either side of a track, and, rising from them like an army, more corpses. A thousand hung heads, a ceaseless flow of black tears.
‘Mother bless us,’ Kedeviss whispered, ‘who could do such a thing?’
‘“All possible cruelties are inevitable”,’ Nimander said. ‘“Every conceivable crime has been committed”.’ Quoting Andarist yet again.
‘Try thinking your own thoughts on occasion,’ Desra said drily.
‘He saw truly—’
‘Andarist surrendered his soul and thought it earned him wisdom,’ Clip cut in, punctuating his statement with a snap of rings. ‘In this case, though, he probably struck true. Even so, this has the flavour of . . . necessity.’
Skintick snorted. ‘Necessity, now there’s a word to feed every outrage on decency.’
Beyond the ghastly army and the ghoulish purple-leaved plants squatted a town, quaint and idyllic against a backdrop of low, forested hills. Smoke rose above thatched roofs. A few figures were visible on the high street.
‘I think we should avoid meeting anyone,’ Nimander said. ‘I do not relish the notion of ending up staked above a plant.’
‘That will not occur,’ said Clip. ‘We need supplies and we can pay for them. In any case, we have already been seen. Come, with luck there will be a hostel or inn.’
A man in a burgundy robe was approaching, up the track that met the raised road. Below the tattered hem of the robe his legs were bare and pale, but his feet were stained black. Long grey hair floated out from his head, unkempt and tangled. His hands
were almost comically oversized, and these too were dyed black.
The face was lined, the pale blue eyes wide as they took in the Tiste Andii on the road. Hands waving, he began shouting, in a language Nimander had never heard before. After a moment, he clearly cursed, then said in broken Andii, ‘Traders of Black Coral ever welcome! Morsko town happy of guests and kin of Son of Darkness! Come!’ Clip gestured for his troupe to follow.
The robed man, still smiling like a crazed fool, whirled and hurried back down the track.
Townsfolk were gathering on the high street, watching in silence as they drew nearer. The score or so parted when they reached the edge of the town. Nimander saw in their faces a bleak lifelessness, in their eyes the wastelands of scorched souls, so exposed, so unguarded, that he had to look away.
Hands and feet were stained, and on more than a few the blackness rimmed their gaping mouths, making the hole in their faces too large, too seemingly empty and far too depthless.
The robed man was talking. ‘A new age, traders. Wealth! Bastion. Heath. Even Outlook rises from ash and bones. Saemankelyk, glory of the Dying God. Many the sacrifices. Of the willing, oh yes, the willing. And such thirst!’
They came to a broad square with a bricked well on a centre platform of water-worn limestone slabs. On all sides stood racks from which harvested plants hung drying upside down, their skull-sized rootballs lined like rows of children’s heads, faces deformed by the sun. Old women were at the well, drawing water in a chain that wended between racks to a low, squat temple, empty buckets returning.
The robed man pointed at the temple – probably the only stone building in the town – and said, ‘Once sanctified in name of Pannion. No more! The Dying God now, whose body, yes, lies in Bastion. I have looked upon it. Into its eyes. Will you taste the Dying God’s tears, my friends? Such demand!’
‘What horrid nightmare rules here?’ Skintick asked in a whisper.
Nimander shook his head.
‘Tell me, do we look like traders?’
‘How should I know?’
‘Black Coral, Nimander. Son of Darkness – our kinfolk have become merchants!’
‘Yes, but merchants of what?’
The robed man – a priest of some sort – now led them to an inn to the left of the temple that looked half dilapidated. ‘Few traders this far east, you see. But roof is sound. I will send for maids, cook. There is tavern. Opens of midnight.’
The ground floor of the inn was layered in dust, the planks underfoot creaking and strewn with pellets of mouse droppings. The priest stood beside the front door, large hands entwined, head bobbing as he held his smile.
Clip faced the man. ‘This will do,’ he said. ‘No need for maids, but find a cook.’
‘Yes, a cook. Come midnight to tavern!’
‘Very well.’
The priest left.
Nenanda began pacing, kicking detritus away from his path. ‘I do not like this, Herald. There aren’t enough people for this town – you must have seen that.’
‘Enough,’ muttered Skintick as he set his pack down on a dusty tabletop, ‘for planting and harvesting.’
‘Saemankelyk,’ said Nimander. ‘Is that the name of this dying god?’
‘I would like to see it,’ Clip said, chain spinning once more as he looked out through the smeared lead-paned window. ‘This dying god.’
‘Is this place called Bastion on the way to Black Coral?’
Clip glanced across at Nimander, disdain heavy in his eyes. ‘I said I wish to see this dying god. That is enough.’
‘I thought—’ began Nenanda, but Clip turned on him sharply.
‘That is your mistake, warrior. Thinking. There is time. There is always time.’
Nimander glanced across at Skintick. His cousin shrugged; then, eyes narrowing, he suddenly smiled.
‘Your god, Nimander?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not likely to die any time soon, then.’
‘No, never that.’
‘What are you two talking about?’ Clip demanded, then, dismissing any possible reply, he faced the window once more. ‘A dying god needs to die sometime.’
‘Notions of mercy, Great One?’ Skintick asked.
‘Not where you are concerned.’
‘Just as well, since I could never suffer the gratitude.’
Nimander watched as Desra glided up to stand beside Clip. They stood looking out through the pane, like husband and wife, like allies against the world. Her left arm almost touching him, up near her elbow, but she would not draw any closer. The spinning rings prevented that, whirling a metal barrier.
‘Tonight,’ Clip said loudly, ‘no one drinks.’
Nimander thought back to those black-stained mouths and the ravaged eyes above them, and he shivered.
Mist drifted down from the park-like forest north of the Great Barrow, merging with the smoke of cookfires from the pilgrims encamped like an army around the enormous, circular mound. Dawn was paling the sky, seeming to push against the unnatural darkness to the south, but this was a war the sun could not win.
From the city gate the cobbled road ran between lesser barrows where hundreds of corpses had been interred following the conquest. Malazans, Grey Swords, Rhivi, Tiste Andii and K’Chain Che’Malle. Farther to the west rose longer barrows, final home to the fallen citizens and soldiers of the city.
Seerdomin walked the road through the gloom. A path through ghosts – too many to even comprehend – but he thought he could hear the echoes of their death-cries, their voices of pain, their desperate pleas for mothers and loved ones. Once he was past this place, who was there to hear those echoes? No one, and it was this truth that struck him the hardest. They would entwine with naught but themselves, falling unheeded to the dew-flattened grass.
He emerged into morning light, like passing through a curtain, suddenly brushed with warmth, and made his way up the slope towards the sprawled encampment. For this, he wore his old uniform, a kind of penance, a kind of self-flagellation. There was need, in his mind, to bear his guilt openly, brazenly, to leave himself undefended and indefensible. This was how he saw his daily pilgrimage to the Great Barrow, although he well knew that some things could never be purged, and that redemption was a dream of the deluded.
Eyes fixed on him from the camps to either side as he continued on towards that massive heap of treasure – wealth of such measure that it could only belong to a dead man, who could not cast covetous eyes upon his hoard, who would not feel its immense weight night and day, who would not suffer beneath its terrible curse. He was tracked, then, by no doubt hardening eyes, the fixation of hatred, contempt, perhaps even the desire of murder. No matter. He understood such sentiments, the purity of such desires.
Armour clanking, chain rustling across the fronts of his thighs as he drew ever closer.
The greater vastness of wealth now lay buried beneath more mundane trinkets, yet it was these meagre offerings that seemed most potent in their significance to Seerdomin. Their comparative value was so much greater, after all. Sacrifice must be weighed by the pain of what is surrendered, and this alone was the true measure of a virtue’s worth.
He saw now the glitter of sunlight in the dew clinging to copper coins, the slick glimmer on sea-polished stones in an array of muted colours and patterns. The fragments of glazed ceramics from some past golden age of high culture.
Feathers now bedraggled, knotted strips of leather from which dangled fetishes, gourd rattles to bless newborn babes and sick children. And now, here and there, the picked-clean skulls of the recent dead – a sub-cult, he had learned, centred on the T’lan Imass, who knelt before the Redeemer and so made themselves his immortal servants.
Seerdomin knew that the truth was more profound than that, more breathtaking, and that servitude was not a vow T’lan Imass could make, not to anyone but the woman known as Silverfox. No, they had knelt in gratitude.
That notion could still leave him chilled, wonder awakened in hi
s heart like a gust of surprised breath.
Still, these staring skulls seemed almost profane.
He stepped into the slightly rutted avenue and drew closer. Other pilgrims were placing their offerings ahead, then turning about and making their way back, edging round him with furtive glances. Seerdomin heard more in his wake, a susurration of whispered prayers and low chanting that seemed like a gentle wave carrying him forward.
Reaching the barrow’s ragged, cluttered edge, he moved to one side, off the main approach, then settled down into a kneeling position before the shrine, lowering his head and closing his eyes.
He heard someone move up alongside him, heard the soft breathing but nothing else.
Seerdomin prayed in silence. The same prayer, every day, every time, always the same.
Redeemer. I do not seek your blessing. Redemption will never be mine, nor should it, not by your touch, nor that of anyone else. Redeemer, I bring no gift to set upon your barrow. I bring to you naught but myself. Worshippers and pilgrims will hear nothing of your loneliness. They armour you against all that is human, for that is how they make you into a god. But you were once a mortal soul. And so I come, my only gift my company. It is paltry, I know, but it is all I have and all I would offer.
Redeemer, bless these pilgrims around me.
Bless them with peace in their need.
He opened his eyes, then slowly climbed to his feet.
Beside him spoke a woman. ‘Benighted.’
He started, but did not face her. ‘I have no such title,’ he said.
There was faint amusement in her reply, ‘Seerdomin, then. We speak of you often, at night, from fire to fire.’
‘I do not flee your venom, and should it one day take my life, so it will be.’
All humour vanished from her voice as she seemed to draw a gasp, then said, ‘We speak of you, yes, but not with venom. Redeemer bless us, not that.’