‘Can I talk you out of this?’
He shook his head.
‘Very well. Errant’s blessing on you, Varat Taun.’
‘He is right,’ said the Mocker behind them. ‘I too must return.’
A heavy sigh gusted from Yan Tovis. ‘So be it – I should have known better than to try to save anyone but myself – no, I’m not as bitter as that sounded. My apologies. You both have my blessing. Be sure to walk those horses on occasion, however.’
‘Yes sir. Atri-Preda? Thank you.’
‘What word do I send to your wife?’
‘None, sir. Please.’
Yan Tovis nodded.
Varat Taun guided his mount off the road, reining in. The monk followed suited, somewhat more awkwardly. The lieutenant watched in some amusement. ‘You have no horses in your lands?’
‘Few. Cabal is an archipelago for the most part. The mainland holdings are on the sides of rather sheer cliffs, a stretch of coast that is severely mountainous. And what horses we do have are bred for labour and food.’
To that, Varat Taun said nothing.
They waited on the side of the track, watching the column of mounted soldiers ride past.
Errant take me, what have I done?
* * *
The lake stretched on with no end in sight. The three figures had rowed their well-provisioned boat for what passed for a day and most of a night in the Shadow Realm, before the craft ran aground in shallows. Unable to find a way past, they had shouldered the packs and disembarked, wading in silty, knee-deep water. Now, midway through the next day, they dragged exhausted, numbed legs through a calm lake that had been no deeper than their hips since dawn – until they reached a sudden drop-off.
Trull Sengar had been in the lead, using his spear to probe the waters ahead, and now he moved to one side, step by step, the butt of the weapon stirring the grey, milky silts along the edge. He continued on for a time, watched by his companions. ‘Doesn’t feel natural,’ he finally said, making his way back to the others. ‘The drop-away is smooth, even.’ Moving past Onrack and Quick Ben, he resumed probing the ledge in the opposite direction. ‘No change here.’
The wizard voiced a long, elaborate string of curses in his Malazan tongue, then said, ‘I could take to the air, drawing on Serc – although how long I could manage that is anyone’s guess.’ He glared across at Onrack. ‘You can just melt into silts, you damned T’lan Imass.’
‘Leaving me,’ said Trull, who then shrugged. ‘I will swim, then – there may well be a resumption of the shallows ahead – you know, we’ve been walking on an unnaturally level bottom for some time. Imagine for the moment that we are on a submerged concourse of some sort – enormous, granted, but still. This drop-off could simply mark a canal. In which case I should soon find the opposite side.’
‘A concourse?’ Quick Ben grimaced. ‘Trull, if this is a concourse beneath us it’s the size of a city-state.’
Onrack said, ‘You will find one such construct, Wizard, covering the southeast peninsula of Stratem. K’Chain Che’Malle. A place where ritual wars were fought – before all ritual was abandoned.’
‘You mean when the Short-Tails rebelled.’
Trull swore under his breath. ‘I hate it when everyone knows more than me.’ Then he snorted. ‘Mind you, my company consists of a mage and an undead, so I suppose it’s no surprise I falter in comparison.’
‘Falter?’ Onrack’s neck creaked loud as the warrior turned to regard the Tiste Edur. ‘Trull Sengar, you are the Knight of Shadow.’
Quick Ben seemed to choke.
Above the wizard’s sudden fit of coughing, Trull shouted: ‘I am what? Was this Cotillion’s idea? That damned upstart—’
‘Cotillion did not choose you, friend,’ Onrack said. ‘I cannot tell you who made you what you now are. Perhaps the Eres’al, although I do not comprehend the nature of her claim within the realm of Shadow. One thing, however, is very clear – she has taken an interest in you, Trull Sengar.
Even so, I do not believe the Eres’al was responsible. I believe you yourself were.’
‘How? What did I do?’
The T’lan Imass slowly tilted its head to one side. ‘Warrior, you stood before Icarium. You held the Lifestealer. You did what no warrior has ever done.’
‘Absurd,’ snapped Trull. ‘I was finished. If not for Quick Ben here – and the Eres’al – I’d be dead, my chopped-up bones mouldering outside the throne room.’
‘It is your way, my friend, to disarm your own achievements.’
‘Onrack—’
Quick Ben laughed. ‘He’s calling you modest, Edur. And don’t bother denying the truth of that – you still manage to startle me on that count. I’ve lived most of my life among mages or in the ranks of an army, and in neither company did I ever find much in the way of self-deprecation. We were all too busy pissing on each other’s trees. One needs a certain level of, uh, bravado when it’s your job to kill people.’
‘Trull Sengar fought as a soldier,’ Onrack said to the wizard. ‘The difference between you two is that he is unable to hide his grief at the frailty of life.’
‘Nothing frail about us,’ Quick Ben muttered. ‘Life stays stubborn until it has no choice but to give up, and even then it’s likely to spit one last time in the eye of whatever’s killed it. We’re cruel in victory and cruel in defeat, my friends. Now, if you two will be quiet for a moment, I can go in search of a way out of here.’
‘Not flying?’ Trull asked, leaning on his spear.
‘No, a damned gate. I’m beginning to suspect this lake doesn’t end.’
‘It must end,’ the Edur said.
‘The Abyss is not always twisted with wild storms. Sometimes it’s like this – placid, colourless, a tide rising so slowly that it’s impossible to notice, but rise it does, swallowing this tilted, dying realm.’
‘The Shadow Realm is dying, Quick Ben?’
The wizard licked his lips – a nervous gesture Trull had seen before from the tall, thin man – then shrugged. ‘I think so. With every border an open wound, it’s not that surprising. Now, quiet everyone. I need to concentrate.’
Trull watched as Quick Ben closed his eyes.
A moment later his body grew indistinct, grainy at its edges, then began wavering, into and out of solidity.
The Tiste Edur, still leaning on his spear, grinned over at Onrack. ‘Well, old friend, it seems we wander the unknown yet again.’
‘I regret nothing, Trull Sengar.’
‘It’s virtually the opposite for me – with the exception of talking you into freeing me when I was about to drown in the Nascent – which, I’ve just realized, doesn’t look much different from this place. Flooding worlds. Is this more pervasive than we realize?’
A clattering of bones as the T’lan Imass shrugged. ‘I would know something, Trull Sengar. When peace comes to a warrior . . .’
The Edur’s eyes narrowed on the battered undead. ‘How do you just cast off all the rest? The surge of pleasure at the height of battle? The rush of emotions, each one threatening to overwhelm you, drown you? That sizzling sense of being alive? Onrack, I thought your kind felt . . . nothing.’
‘With awakening memories,’ Onrack replied, ‘so too other . . . forces of the soul.’ The T’lan Imass lifted one withered hand. ‘This calm on all sides – it mocks me.’
‘Better a wild storm?’
‘I think, yes. A foe to fight. Trull Sengar, should I join this water as dust, I do not think I would return. Oblivion would take me with the promise of a struggle ended. Not what I desire, friend, for that would mean abandoning you. And surrendering my memories. Yet what does a warrior do when peace is won?’
‘Take up fishing,’ Quick Ben muttered, eyes still closed, body still wavering. ‘Now enough words from you two. This isn’t easy.’
Wavering once more in and out of existence, then, suddenly – gone.
Ever since Shadowthrone had stolen him away – when Kalam ne
eded him the most – Quick Ben had quietly seethed. Repaying a debt in one direction had meant betraying a friend in another. Unacceptable.
Diabolical.
And if Shadowthrone thinks he has my loyalty just because he pushed Kal into the Deadhouse, then he is truly as mad as we all think he is. Oh, I’m sure the Azath and whatever horrid guardian resides in there would welcome Kalam readily enough. Mount his head on the wall above the mantel, maybe – all right, that’s not very likely. But the Azath collects. That’s what it does, and now it has my oldest friend. So, how in Hood’s name do I get him out?
Damn you, Shadowthrone.
But such anger left him feeling unbalanced, making concentration difficult. And the skin rotting from my legs isn’t helping either. Still, they needed a way out. Cotillion hadn’t explained much. No, he’d just expected us to figure things out for ourselves. What that means is that there’s only one real direction. Wouldn’t do to have us get lost now, would it?
Slightly emboldened – a momentary triumph over diffidence – Quick Ben concentrated, his senses reaching out to the surrounding ether. Solid, clammy, a smooth surface yielding like sponge under the push of imagined hands. The fabric of this realm, the pocked skin of a ravaged world. He began applying more pressure, seeking . . . soft spots, weaknesses – I know you exist.
Ah, you are now aware of me – I can feel that. Curious, you feel almost . . . feminine. Well, a first time for everything. What had been clammy beneath his touch was now simply cool. Hood’s breath, I’m not sure I like the images accompanying this thought of pushing through.
Beyond his sense of touch, there was nothing. Nothing for his eyes to find; no scent in the tepid air; no sound beyond the faint swish of blood in the body – there one moment, gone the next as he struggled to separate his soul, free it to wander.
This isn’t that bad—
A grisly tearing sound, then a vast, inexorable inhalation, tearing his spirit loose – yanking him forward and through, stumbling, into acrid swirling heat, thick clouds closing on all sides, soft sodden ground underfoot. He groped forward, his lungs filling with a pungent vapour that made his head reel. Gods, what sickness is this? I can’t breathe—
The wind spun, drove him staggering forward – sudden chill, stones turning beneath his feet, blessed clean air that he sucked in with desperate gasps.
Down onto his hands and knees. On the rocky ground, lichen and mosses. On either side, a thinly spread forest in miniature – he saw oaks, spruce, alder, old and twisted and none higher than his hip. Dun-hued birds flitted among small green leaves. Midges closed in, sought to alight – but he was a ghost here, an apparition – thus far. But this is where we must go.
The wizard slowly lifted his head, then climbed to his feet.
He stood in a shallow, broad valley, the dwarf forest covering the basin behind him and climbing the slopes on all sides, strangely park-like in the generous spacing of the trees. And they swarmed with birds. From somewhere nearby came the sound of trickling water. Overhead, dragonflies with wingspans to match that of crows darted in their uncanny precision, feeding on midges. Beyond this feeding frenzy the sky was cerulean, almost purple near the horizons. Tatters of elongated clouds ran in high ribbons, like the froth of frozen waves on some celestial shore.
Primordial beauty – tundra’s edge. Gods, I hate tundra. But so be it, as kings and queens say when it’s all swirled down the piss-hole. Nothing to be done for it. Here we must come.
Trull Sengar started at the sudden coughing – Quick Ben had reappeared, half bent over, tears streaming from his eyes and something like smoke drifting from his entire body. He hacked, then spat and slowly straightened.
Grinning.
The proprietor of the Harridict Tavern was a man under siege. An affliction that had reached beyond months and into years. His establishment, once devoted to serving the island prison’s guards, had since been usurped along with the rest of the port town following the prisoners’ rebellion. Chaos now ruled, ageing honest folk beyond their years. But the money was good.
He had taken to joining Captain Shurq Elalle and Skorgen Kaban the Pretty at their preferred table in the corner during lulls in the mayhem, when the serving wenches and scull-boys rushed about with more purpose than panic, dull exhaustion replacing abject terror in their glazed eyes – and all seemed, for the moment, right and proper.
There was a certain calm with this here captain – a pirate if the Errant pisses straight and he ain’t missed yet – and a marked elegance and civility to her manner that told the proprietor that she had stolen not just coins from the highborn but culture as well, which marked her as a smart, sharp woman.
He believed he was falling in love, hopeless as that was. Stress of the profession and too much sampling of inland ales had left him – in his honest, not unreasonably harsh judgement – a physical wreck to match his moral lassitude which on good days he called his business acumen. Protruding belly round as a stew pot and damned near as greasy. Bulbous nose – one up on Skorgen there – with burst veins, hair-sprouting blackheads and swirling bristles that reached down from the nostrils to entwine with his moustache – once a fashion among hirsute men but no more, alas. Watery close-set eyes, the whites so long yellow he was no longer sure they hadn’t always been that colour. A few front teeth were left, four in all, one up top, three below. Better than his wife, then, who’d lost her last two stumbling into a wall while draining an ale casket – the brass spigot knocking the twin tombstones clean out of their sockets, and if she hadn’t then choked on the damned things she’d still be with him, bless her. Times she was sober she’d work like a horse and bite just as hard and both talents did her well working the tables.
But life was lonely these days, wasn’t it just, then in saunters this glorious, sultry pirate captain. A whole sight better than those foreigners, walking in and out of the Brullyg Shake’s Palace as if it was their ancestral home, then spending their nights here, hunched down at the games table – the biggest table in the whole damned tavern, if you mind, with a single jug of ale to last the entire night no matter how many of them crowded round their strange, foreign, seemingly endless game.
Oh, he’d demanded a cut as was his right and they paid over peaceably enough – even though he could make no sense of the rules of play. And how those peculiar rectangular coins went back and forth! But the tavern’s take wasn’t worth it. A regular game of Bale’s Scoop on any given night would yield twice as much for the house. And the ale quaffed – a player didn’t need a sharp brain to play Bale’s, Errant be praised. So these foreigners were worse than lumps of moss renting a rock, as his dear wife used to say whenever he sat down for a rest.
Contemplating life, my love. Contemplate this fist, dear husband. Wasn’t she something, wasn’t she just something. Been so quiet since that spigot punched her teeth down her throat.
‘All right, Ballant,’ Skorgen Kaban said in a sudden gust of beery breath, leaning over the table. ‘You come and sit wi’ us every damned night. And just sit. Saying nothing. You’re the most tight-lipped tavernkeep I’ve ever known.’
‘Leave the man alone,’ the captain said. ‘He’s mourning. Grief don’t need words for company. In fact, words is the last thing grief needs, so wipe your dripping nose, Pretty, and shut the toothy hole under it.’
The first mate ducked. ‘Hey, I never knew nothing about grief, Captain.’ He used the back of one cuff to blot at the weeping holes where his nose used to be, then said to Ballant, ‘You just sit here, Keeper, and go on saying nothing to no-one for as long as you like.’
Ballant struggled to pull his adoring gaze from the captain, long enough to nod and smile at Skorgen Kaban, then looked back again to Shurq Elalle.
The diamond set in her forehead glittered in the yellowy lantern light like a knuckle sun, the jewel in her frown – oh, he’d have to remember that one – but she was frowning, and that was never good. Not for a woman.
‘Pretty,’ she now said in a
low voice, ‘you remember a couple of them Crimson Guard – in the squad? There was that dark-skinned one – sort of a more earthy colour than an Edur. And the other one, with that faint blue skin, some island mix, he said.’
‘What about them, Captain?’
‘Well.’ She nodded towards the foreigners at the games table on the other side of the room. ‘Them. Something reminds me of those two in Iron Bars’s squad. Not just skin, but their gestures, the way they move – even some of the words I’ve overheard in that language they’re speaking. Just . . . odd echoes.’ She then fixed her dark but luminous gaze on Ballant. ‘What do you know about them, Keeper?’
‘Captain,’ Skorgen objected, ‘he’s in mourning—’
‘Be quiet, Pretty. Me and Ballant are having an inconsequential conversation.’
Yes, most inconsequential, even if that diamond blinded him, and that wonderful spicy aroma that was her breath made his head swim as if it was the finest liqueur. Blinking, he licked his lips – tasting sweat – then said, ‘They have lots of private meetings with Brullyg Shake. Then they come down here and waste time.’
Even her answering grunt was lovely.
Skorgen snorted – wetly – then reached out with his one good hand and wiped clean the tabletop. ‘Can you believe that, Captain? Brullyg an old friend of yours and you can’t e’en get in to see him while a bunch of cheap foreigners can natter in his ear all day an’ every day!’ He half rose. ‘I’m thinking a word with these here—’
‘Sit down, Pretty. Something tells me you don’t want to mess with that crowd. Unless you’re of a mind to lose another part of your body.’ Her frown deepened, almost swallowing that diamond. ‘Ballant, you said they waste time, right? Now, that’s the real curious part about all this. People like them don’t waste time. No. They’re waiting. For something or someone. And those meetings with the Shake – that sounds like negotiating, the kind of negotiating that Brullyg can’t walk away from.’
‘That don’t sound good, Captain,’ Skorgen muttered. ‘In fact, it makes me nervous. Never mind avalanches of ice – Brullyg didn’t run when that was coming down—’