There was nothing right about any of this. She was married, after all. She was nobility – but no, that detail was without relevance, for what she had proposed had nothing to do with matters of propriety, was in no way intended to invite public scrutiny.
She is bored. She wants a lover. She wants what she could have had but didn’t take. A second chance, that’s what she wants.
Do second chances even exist?
This would be . . . sordid. Despicable. How could he even contemplate such a thing?
Maybe Apsalar saw all too well. Saw right into me, to the soul that was less than it should have been, to the will that was weak. I do not stand before a woman, do I? No, I fall into her arms. I change shape to fit each one, to make things snug, as if matching their dreams is the only path I know into their hearts.
Maybe she was right to walk away.
Was this all that Challice wanted? An amusing diversion to alleviate the drudgery of her comfortable life? He admitted to some suspicion that things were not that simple. There had been a darker current, as if to take him meant something more to Challice. Proof of her own descent, perhaps. Her own fall. Or something else, something even more pernicious.
The Rhivi server had brought him a pot of tea, a plate of fresh bread, a dipping jar of honey, and a bowl of diced fruit. He now stared at the array on the table in front of him, trying without success to recall the moment it had all arrived.
‘I need you,’ she had said, the words cutting through his exhaustion as the sky began to show its colour. ‘Crokus. Cutter. Whatever name you want. I knew it the moment I saw you. I had been walking, most of the night, just walking. I didn’t know it, but I was looking for someone. My life’s become a question that I thought no one could answer. Not my husband, not anyone. And then, there you were, standing in this cemetery, like a ghost.’
Oh, he knew about ghosts, the way they could haunt one day and night. The way they found places to hide in one’s own soul. Yes, he knew about ghosts. ‘Challice—’
‘You loved me once. But I was young. A fool. Now, I am neither young nor a fool. This time, I won’t turn away.’
‘Your husband—’
‘Doesn’t care what I do, or with whom I do it.’
‘Why did you marry him then?’
She had looked away, and it was some time before she replied. ‘When he saved my life, that night in the garden of Simtal’s estate, it was as if he then owned it. My life. He owned it because he saved it. He wasn’t alone in believing that, either. So did I. All at once, it was as if I no longer had any choice. He possessed my future, to do with as he pleased.’
‘Your father—’
‘Should have counselled me?’ She laughed, but it was a bitter laugh. ‘You didn’t see it, but I was spoiled. I was obnoxious, Crokus. Maybe he tried, I don’t really recall. But I think he was happy to see me go.’
No, this was not the Challice he had known.
‘House Vidikas owns an annexe, a small building down by the docks. It’s almost never used. There are two levels. On the main floor it’s just storage, filled with the shipwright’s leavings after the trader boat was finished. On the upper level is where the man lived while under contract. I’ve . . . seen it, and I have a key.’
Seen it? He wondered at her hesitation in that admission. But not for long. She’s used it before. She’s using it still. For trysts just like the one she’s talking about right now. Challice, why are you bothering with me?
At his hesitation she leaned closer, one hand on his arm. ‘We can just meet there, Crokus. To talk. A place where we can talk about anything, where there’s no chance of being seen. We can just talk.’
He knew, of course, that such a place was not for talking.
And, this evening, he would meet her there.
What was he— ‘Ow!’
The server had just cuffed him in the side of the head. Astonished, he stared up at her.
‘If I go to all that work to make you a damned breakfast, you’d better eat it!’
‘Sorry! I was just thinking—’
‘It’s easier when you’re chewing. Now, don’t make me have to come back here.’
He glared at her as she walked away. If I was nobleborn she’d never have done that. He caught the eye of a man sitting at a nearby table.
‘You have a way with women, I see.’
‘Hah hah.’
Events and moments can deliver unexpected mercy, and though she did not know it, such mercy was granted to Scillara at that instant, for she was not thinking of Cutter. Instead, she was sitting beside the Malazan historian, Duiker, fighting an instinct to close her arms round him and so in some small measure ease his silent grief. All that held her back, she knew, was the fear that he would not welcome her sympathy. That, and the distinct possibility that she was misreading him.
To live a hard life was to make solid and impregnable every way in, until no openings remained and the soul hid in darkness, and no one else could hear its screams, its railing at injustice, its long, agonizing stretches of sadness. Hardness without created hardness within.
Sadness was, she well knew, not something that could be cured. It was not, in fact, a failing, not a flaw, not an illness of spirit. Sadness was never without reason, and to assert that it marked some kind of dysfunction did little more than prove ignorance or, worse, cowardly evasiveness in the one making the assertion. As if happiness was the only legitimate way of being. As if those failing at it needed to be locked away, made soporific with medications; as if the causes of sadness were merely traps and pitfalls in the proper climb to blissful contentment, things to be edged round or bridged, or leapt across on wings of false elation.
Scillara knew better. She had faced her own sadness often enough. Even when she discovered her first means of escaping it, in durhang, she’d known that such an escape was simply a flight from feelings that existed legitimately. She’d just been unable to permit herself any sympathy for such feelings, because to do so was to surrender to their truth.
Sadness belonged. As rightful as joy, love, grief and fear. All conditions of being.
Too often people mistook the sadness in others for self-pity, and in so doing revealed their own hardness of spirit, and more than a little malice.
The taproom stank of blood, shit, piss and vomit. Blend was recovering in her bedroom upstairs, as close to death as she’d ever been, but the worst was past, now. Barathol and Chaur had gone down to the cellars below to help Picker and Antsy bury the bodies of their comrades. The blacksmith’s grief at the death of his new friend, Mallet, was too raw for Scillara to face – he was in no way a hard man and this jarred her frail assembly of beliefs, for he should have been. Yet had she not seen the same breathless vulnerability when he’d struggled to bring Chaur back to life after the huge simpleton had drowned?
‘He is . . .’ Duiker began, and then frowned, ‘a remarkable man, I think.’
Scillara blinked. ‘Who?’
The historian shook his head, unwilling to meet her eyes. ‘I should be getting drunk.’
‘Never works,’ she said.
‘I know.’
They were silent again, moments stretching on.
We just stumbled into these people. A crazy contest at a restaurant. We were just getting to know them, to treasure each and every one of them.
Mallet was a healer. A Bridgeburner. In his eyes there had burned some kind of self-recrimination, a welter of guilt. A healer tortured by something he could not heal. A list of failures transformed into failings. Yet he had been a gentle man. That soft, oddly high voice – which they would never hear again.
For him, Barathol had wept.
Bluepearl was a mage. Amusingly awkward, kind of wide-eyed, which hardly fit all that he’d been through, because he too had been a Bridgeburner. Antsy had railed over the man’s corpse, a sergeant dressing down a soldier so incompetent as to be dead. Antsy had been offended, indignant, even as anguish glittered in his bright blue eyes. ?
??You damned fool!’ he’d snarled. ‘You Hood-damned useless idiotic fool!’ When he’d made to kick the body Picker had roughly pulled him back, almost off his feet, and Antsy had lurched off to slam the toe of one boot into the planks of the counter.
They looked older now. Picker, Antsy. Wan and redeyed, shoulders slumped, not bothering to rinse the dried blood from their faces, hands and forearms.
Duiker alone seemed unchanged, as if these last deaths had been little more than someone pissing into a wide, deep river. His sadness was an absolute thing, and he never came up for air. She wanted to take him in her arms and shake the life back into him. Yet she would not do that, for she knew such a gesture would be a selfish one, serving only her own needs. As much, perhaps, as her initial impulse to embrace him in sympathy.
Because she too felt like weeping. For having dragged the historian out into the city – away from what had happened here the past night. For having saved his life.
When they’d first arrived back; when they’d seen the bodies on the street; when they’d stepped inside to look upon the carnage, Duiker had shot her a single glance, and in that she had read clearly the thought behind it. See what you took me away from? A thought so far away from the sentiment of gratitude that it might as well be in another realm.
The truth was obvious. He would rather have been here. He would rather have died last night. Instead, interfering bitch that she was, Scillara had refused him that release. Had instead left him in this sad life that would not end. That glance had been harder, more stinging, than a savage slap in the face.
She should have gone below. Should be standing there in that narrow, cramped cellar, holding Chaur’s hand, listening to them all grieve, each in their own way. Antsy’s curses. Picker at his side, so close as to be leaning on him, but otherwise expressionless beyond the bleakness of her glazed stare. Barathol and his glistening beard, his puffy eyes, the knotted muscles ravaging his brow.
The door opened suddenly, sending a shaft of daylight through suspended dust, and in stepped the grey-haired bard.
She and Duiker watched as the man shut the door behind him and replaced the solid iron bar in its slots – how he had ended up with that bar in his hands was a mystery, yet neither Scillara nor the historian commented.
The man approached, and she saw that he too had not bothered to change his clothes, wearing the old blood with the same indifference she had seen in the others.
There’d been a half-dozen bodies, maybe more, at the stage. A passing observation from Blend implicated the bard in that slaughter, but Scillara had trouble believing that. This man was gaunt, old. Yet her eyes narrowed on the blood spatter on his shirt.
He sat down opposite them, met Duiker’s eyes, and said, ‘Whatever they have decided to do, Historian, they can count me in.’
‘So they did try for you, too,’ said Scillara.
He met her gaze. ‘Scillara, they attacked everyone in the room. They killed innocents.’
‘I don’t think they’ll do anything,’ said Duiker, ‘except sell up and leave.’
‘Ah,’ the bard said, then sighed. ‘No matter. I will not be entirely on my own in any case.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I called in an old favour, Historian. Normally, I am not one to get involved in . . . things.’
‘But you’re angry,’ Scillara observed, recognizing at last the odd flatness in the old man’s eyes, the flatness that came before – before cold killing. This poet has claws indeed. And now I look at him, he’s not as old as I thought he was.
‘I am, yes.’
From below there came a splintering crack followed by shouts of surprise. All three at the table swiftly rose. Duiker leading the way, they ran to the kitchen, then down the narrow stairs to the cellar. Torchlight wavered at the far end of the elongated storage room, casting wild shadows on a bizarre scene. Pungent fluid sloshed on the earthen floor, seeming reluctant to drain, and in a half-circle stood the two Malazans, Barathol and Chaur, all facing one side wall where a large cask had shattered.
Antsy, Scillara surmised, had just kicked it.
Splitting it open, in a cascade of pickling juice, revealing to them all the object that that liquid had so perfectly preserved.
Folded up with knees beneath chin, arms wrapped round the shins.
Still wearing a mask on which four linear, vertical barbs marked a row across the forehead.
The bard grunted. ‘I’d often wondered,’ he said under his breath, ‘where the old ones ended up.’
The fluids were now seeping into the floor, along the edges of the freshly dug mounds.
*
A hundred stones, a cavort of ripples, the city in its life which is one life which is countless lives. To ignore is to deny brotherhood, sisterhood, the commonality that, could it be freed, would make the world a place less cruel, less vicious. But who has time for that? Rush this way, plunge that way, evade every set of eyes, permit no recognition in any of the faces flashing past. The dance of trepidation is so very tiresome.
Hold this gaze, if you dare, in the tracking of these tremulous ripples, the lives, the lives! See Stonny Menackis, wrought with recrimination, savaged by guilt. She sleeps badly or not at all (who would risk peering into her dark bedroom at night, for fear of seeing the gleam of staring eyes?). She trembles, her nerves like strings of fire, whilst poor Murillio stands apart, desperate to comfort her, to force open all that had now closed between them.
And in the courtyard a mob of unattended young savages wail about with wooden swords and it’s a miracle no one’s yet lost an eye or dropped to the pavestones with a crushed trachea.
While, in a workroom not too far away, Tiserra sits at the potter’s wheel and stares into space as the lump of clay spins round and round to the rhythm of her pumping foot – struck frozen, shocked by the stunning realization of the sheer depth of her love for her husband. A love so fierce that she is terrified, comprehending at last the extent of her vulnerability.
The sense is a wonder. It is delicious and terrifying. It is ecstatic.
Smile with her. Oh, do smile with her!
Whilst at this very moment, the object of Tiserra’s devotion strides into the courtyard of the Varada estate, his new place of employment. His mind, which had been calm in the course of his walk from home, now stirs with faint unease. He had sent Scorch and Leff home, and he had stood at the gate watching them stumble off like undead, and this had made him think of moments of greatest danger – just before dawn was the moment to strike, if one intended such violence – but who would bother? What was this mysterious Lady Varada up to anyway?
A seat on the Council, true, but was that sufficient cause for assassination? And why was he thinking of such things at all? There’d been rumours – picked up at the drunk baker’s stall – that the night just past should have belonged to the Assassins’ Guild but had turned sour for the hired killers and oh, wasn’t that regrettable? A moment of silence then pass the dumplings, if you please.
Now he paused in the courtyard, seeing the latest employees, his peculiar charges, with their dubious pasts and potentially alarming motivations. Reunited, yes, with the castellan, with the infamous Studious Lock. Madrun and Lazan Door were tossing knuckles against the compound wall to his right. Technically, their shift was over, although Torvald Nom suspected that this game of theirs had been going on for some time. Another word of warning to them? No, his spirits were already plunging, as they were wont to do when he awakened to a sense that something was being pulled over him, that he was being connived around – as his mother used to say when with one foot she pinned young Torvald to the floor and stared down at him as he squirmed and thrashed (mostly an act, of course; she weighed about as much as a guard dog, without the bite). Connived around, dear boy, and when I get to the bottom of things and all the trouble’s on the table, why, who will I find hiding in the closet? His sweet mother never quite mastered the extended metaphor, bless her.
Suddenl
y too despondent to so much as announce his arrival, Torvald Nom headed for his office, eager to climb over the desk and plant himself in the chair, where he could doze until the sounding of the lunch chime. At least the cooks she’d employed knew their business.
Leave him there, now, and ride one last ripple, out beyond the city, west along the lakeshore, out to a dusty, smoky pit where the less privileged laboured through their shortened lives to keep such creatures as Gorlas Vidikas and Humble Measure at the level of comfort and entitlement they held to be righteous. And, to be fair, they laboured as well to contribute to the general feeling of civilization, which is normally measured by technical wherewithal, a sense of progression and the notion of structural stability, little of which said labourers could themselves experience, save vicariously.
The child Harllo has been lashed ten times for being places he wasn’t supposed to be, and this punishment was fierce enough to leave him prostrate, lying on his stomach on his cot with thick unguents slowly melting into the wounds on his back.
Bainisk had received a whip to his left shoulder which would result in the third such scar for dereliction of his responsibilities as overseer in Chuffs, and he now came to sit beside Harllo, studying his young charge in a silence that stretched.
Until at last Harllo said, ‘I’m sorry, Bainisk—’
‘Never mind that. I just want to know what you were up to. I didn’t think you’d keep secrets from me, I really didn’t. Venaz is saying “I told you so”. He’s saying you’re no good, Mole, and that I should just push you on to the dredge crews.’
The young ones did not live long in the dredge crews. ‘Venaz wants to be your best mole again.’
‘I know that, only he’s grown too big.’
‘People like him never like people like me,’ Harllo said. This was not a whine, just an observation.
‘Because you’re smarter than he is and his being older means nothing, means it’s worse even, because in your head you’re already past him, past us all, maybe. Listen, Harllo, I seen ones like you before, coming in, going through. They get beaten down, beaten stupid. Or they end up getting killed. Maybe they try to run, maybe they stand up to the pit bosses over something. Your smartness is what’s going to ruin you, you understand?’