Reaper's Gale

  They continued trudging across this plateau, beneath deep blue skies where stars glittered high in the vault directly overhead, a world of ice seemingly without end.

  The scree of garbage accompanied them on all sides.

  Fragments of cloth or clothing or perhaps tapestry, potsherds, eating utensils, arcane tools of wood or ground stone, the piece of a musical instrument that involved strings and raised finger-drums, the splintered leg of a wooden chair or stool. No weapons, not in days, and the one they had discovered early on – a spear shaft – had been Imass.

  Jaghut had died on this ice. Slaughtered. Emroth had said as much. But there were no bodies, and there had been no explanation forthcoming from the T’lan Imass. Collected then, Hedge surmised, perhaps by a survivor. Did the Jaghut practise ritual interment? He had no idea. In all his travels, he could not once recall talk of a Jaghut tomb or burial ground. If they did such things, they kept them to themselves.

  But when they died here, they had been on the run. Some of those swaths of material were from tents. Flesh and blood Imass did not pursue them – not across this lifeless ice. No, they must have been T’lan. Of the Ritual. Like Emroth here.

  ‘So,’ Hedge said, his own voice startlingly loud in his ears, ‘were you involved in this hunt, Emroth?’

  ‘I cannot be certain,’ she replied after a long moment. ‘It is possible.’

  ‘One scene of slaughter looks pretty much the same as the next, right?’

  ‘Yes. That is true.’

  Her agreement left him feeling even more depressed.

  ‘There is something ahead,’ the T’lan Imass said. ‘We are, I believe, about to discover the answer to the mystery.’

  ‘What mystery?’

  ‘The absence of bodies.’

  ‘Oh, that mystery.’

  Night came abruptly to this place, like the snuffing out of a candle. The sun, which circled just above the horizon through the day, would suddenly tumble, like a rolling ball, beneath the gleaming, blood-hued skyline. And the black sky would fill with stars that only faded with the coming of strangely coloured brushstrokes of light, spanning the vault, that hissed like sprinkled fragments of fine glass.

  Hedge sensed that night was close, as the wind’s pockets of warmth grew more infrequent, the ember cast to what he assumed was west deepening into a shade both lurid and baleful.

  He could now see what had caught Emroth’s attention. A hump on the plateau, ringed in dark objects. The shape rising from the centre of that hillock at first looked like a spar of ice, but as they neared, Hedge saw that its core was dark, and that darkness reached down to the ground.

  The objects surrounding the rise were cloth-swaddled bodies, many of them pitifully small.

  As the day’s light suddenly dropped away, night announced on a gust of chill wind, Hedge and Emroth halted just before the hump.

  The upthrust spar was in fact a throne of ice, and on it sat the frozen corpse of a male Jaghut. Mummified by cold and desiccating winds, it nevertheless presented an imposing if ghastly figure, a figure of domination, the head tilted slightly downward, as if surveying a ring of permanently supine subjects.

  ‘Death observing death,’ Hedge muttered. ‘How damned appropriate. He collected the bodies, then sat down and just died with them. Gave up. No thoughts of vengeance, no dreams of resurrection. Here’s your dread enemy, Emroth.’

  ‘More than you realize,’ the T’lan Imass replied.

  She moved on, edging round the edifice, her hide-wrapped feet plunging through the crust of brittle ice in small sparkling puffs of powdery snow.

  Hedge stared up at the Jaghut on his half-melted throne. All thrones should be made of ice, I think.

  Sit on that numb arse, sinking down and down, with the puddle of dissolution getting ever wider around you. Sit, dear ruler, and tell me all your grand designs.

  Of course, the throne wasn’t the only thing falling apart up there. The Jaghut’s green, leathery skin had sloughed away on the forehead, revealing sickly bone, almost luminescent in the gloom; and on the points of the shoulders the skin was frayed, with the polished knobs of the shoulder bones showing through. Similar gleams from the knuckles of both hands where they rested on the now-tilted arms of the chair.

  Hedge’s gaze returned to the face. Black, sunken pits for eyes, a nose broad and smashed flat, tusks of black silver. I thought these things never quite died. Needed big rocks on them to keep them from getting back up. Or chopped to pieces and every piece planted under a boulder.

  I didn’t think they died this way at all.

  He shook himself and set off after Emroth.

  They would walk through the night. Camps, meals and sleeping were for still-breathing folk, after all.

  ‘Emroth!’

  The head creaked round.

  ‘That damned thing back there’s not still alive, is it?’

  ‘No. The spirit left.’

  ‘Just . . . left?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Isn’t that, uh, unusual?’

  ‘The Throne of Ice was dying. Is dying still. There was – is – nothing left to rule, ghost. Would you have him sit there for ever?’ She did not seem inclined to await a reply, for she then said, ‘I have not been here before, Hedge of the Bridgeburners. For I would have known.’

  ‘Known what, Emroth?’

  ‘I have never before seen the true Throne of Ice, in the heart of the Hold. The very heart of the Jaghut realm.’

  Hedge glanced back. The true Throne of Ice? ‘Who – who was he, Emroth?’

  But she did not give answer.

  After a time, however, he thought he knew. Had always known.

  He kicked aside a broken pot, watched it skid, roll, then wobble to a halt. King on your melting throne, you drew a breath, then let it go. And . . . never again. Simple. Easy. When you are the last of your kind, and you release that last breath, then it is the breath of extinction. And it rides the wind.

  Every wind.

  ‘Emroth, there was a scholar in Malaz City – a miserable old bastard named Obo – who claimed he was witness to the death of a star. And when the charts were compared again, against the night sky, well, one light was gone.’

  ‘The stars have changed since my mortal life, ghost.’

  ‘Some have gone out?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘As in . . . died?’

  ‘The Bonecasters could not agree on this,’ she said. ‘Another observation offered a different possibility. The stars are moving away from us, Hedge of the Bridgeburners. Perhaps those we no longer see have gone too far for our eyes.’

  ‘Obo’s star was pretty bright – wouldn’t it have faded first, over a long time, before going out?’

  ‘Perhaps both answers are true. Stars die. Stars move away.’

  ‘So, did that Jaghut die, or did he move away?’

  ‘Your question makes no sense.’

  Really? Hedge barked a laugh. ‘You’re a damned bad liar, Emroth.’

  ‘This,’ she said, ‘is not a perfect world.’

  The swaths of colours sweeping overhead hissed softly, while around them the wind plucked at tufts of cloth and fur, moaning through miniature gullies and caverns of ice, and closer still, a sound shared by ghost and T’lan Imass, the crackling destruction of their footsteps across the plateau.

  * * *

  Onrack knelt beside the stream, plunging his hands into the icy water, then lifting them clear again to watch the runnels trickling down. The wonder had not left his dark brown eyes since his transformation, since the miracle of a life regained.

  A man could have no heart if he felt nothing watching this rebirth, this innocent joy in a savage warrior who had been dead a hundred thousand years. He picked up polished stones as if they were treasure, ran blunt, calloused fingertips across swaths of lichen and moss, brought to his heavy lips a discarded antler to taste with his tongue, to draw in its burnt-hair scent. Walking through the thorny brush of some arctic rose
, Onrack had then halted, with a cry of astonishment, upon seeing red scratches on his bowed shins.

  The Imass was, Trull Sengar reminded himself yet again, nothing – nothing – like what he would have imagined him to be. Virtually hairless everywhere barring the brown, almost black mane sweeping down past his broad shoulders. In the days since they had come to this strange realm, a beard had begun, thin along Onrack’s jawline and above his mouth, the bristles wide-spaced and black as a boar’s; but not growing at all on the cheeks, or the neck. The features of the face were broad and flat, dominated by a flaring nose with a pronounced bridge, like a knuckle bone between the wide-spaced, deeply inset eyes. The heavy ridge over those eyes was made all the more robust by the sparseness of the eyebrows.

  Although not particularly tall, Onrack nevertheless seemed huge. Ropy muscles bound to thick bone, the arms elongated, the hands wide but the fingers stubby. The legs were disproportionately short, bowed so that the knees were almost as far out to the sides as his hips. Yet Onrack moved with lithe stealth, furtive as prey, eyes flicking in every direction, head tilting, nostrils flaring as he picked up scents on the wind. Prey, yet now he needed to satisfy a prodigious appetite, and when Onrack hunted, it was with discipline, a single-mindedness that was fierce to witness.

  This world was his, in every way. A blend of tundra to the north and a treeline in the south that reached up every now and then to the very shadow of the huge glaciers stretching down the valleys. The forest was a confused mix of deciduous and coniferous trees, broken with ravines and tumbled rocks, springs of clean water and boggy sinkholes. The branches swarmed with birds, their incessant chatter at times overwhelming all else.

  Along the edges there were trails. Caribou moved haphazardly between forest and tundra in their grazing. Closer to the ice, on higher ground where bedrock was exposed, there were goat-like creatures, scampering up ledges to look back down on the two-legged strangers passing through their domain.

  Onrack had disappeared into the forest again and again in the first week of their wandering. Each time he reappeared his toolkit had expanded. A wooden shaft, the point of which he hardened in the fire of their camp; vines and reeds from which he fashioned snares, and nets that he then attached to the other end of the spear, displaying impressive skill at trapping birds on the wing.

  From the small mammals caught in his nightly snares he assembled skins and gut. With the stomachs and intestines of hares he made floats for the weighted nets he strung across streams, and from the grayling and sturgeon harvested he gathered numerous spines which he then used to sew together the hides, fashioning a bag. He collected charcoal and tree sap, lichens, mosses, tubers, feathers and small pouches of animal fat, all of which went into the hide bag.

  But all of these things were as nothing when compared with the burgeoning of the man himself. A face Trull had known only as dried skin taut over shattered bone was now animate with expression, and it was as if Trull had been blind to his friend in the time before, when even vocal inflection had been flat and lifeless.

  Onrack now smiled. A sudden lighting of genuine pleasure that not only took Trull’s breath away – and, he admitted, often filled his eyes with tears – but could silence Quick Ben as well, the wizard’s dark face suddenly evincing ineffable wonder, an expression that a well-meaning adult might have upon seeing a child at play.

  Everything about this Imass invited friendship, as if his smile alone cast some sorcery, a geas of charm, to which unquestioning loyalty was the only possible response. This glamour Trull Sengar had no interest in resisting. Onrack, after all, is the one brother I chose. But the Tiste Edur could see, on occasion, the gleam of suspicion in the Malazan wizard, as if Quick Ben was catching himself at the edge of some inner precipice, some slide into a place Ben could not, by his very nature, wholly trust.

  Trull felt no worry; he could see that Onrack was not interested in manipulating his companions. His was a spirit contained within itself, a spirit that had emerged from a haunted place and was haunted no longer. Dead in a demonic nightmare. Reborn into a paradise. Onrack, my friend, you are redeemed, and you know it, with every sense – with your touch, your vision, with the scents of the land and the songs in the trees.

  The previous evening he had returned from a trip into the forest with a sheath of bark in his hands. On it were nuggets of crumbly yellow ochre. Later, beside the fire, while Quick Ben cooked the remaining meat from a small deer Onrack had killed in the forest two days previously, the Imass ground the nuggets into powder. Then, using spit and grease, he made a yellow paste. As he worked these preparations, he hummed a song, a droning, vibrating cadence that was as much nasal as vocal. The range, like his speaking voice, was unearthly. It seemed capable of carrying two distinct tones, one high and the other deep. The song ended when the task was done. There was a long pause; then, as Onrack began applying the paint to his face, neck and arms, a different song emerged, this one with a rapid beat, fast as the heart of a fleeing beast.

  When the last daub of paint marked his amber skin, the song stopped.

  ‘Gods below!’ Quick Ben had gasped, one hand on his chest. ‘My heart’s about to pound right through my cage of bones, Onrack!’

  The Imass, settling back in his cross-legged position, regarded the wizard with calm, dark eyes. ‘You have been pursued often. In your life.’

  A grimace from Quick Ben, then he nodded. ‘Feels like years and years of that.’

  ‘There are two names to the song. Agkor Raella and Allish Raella. The wolf song, and the caribou song.’

  ‘Ah, so my cud-chewing ways are exposed at last.’

  Onrack smiled. ‘One day, you must become the wolf.’

  ‘Might be I already am,’ Quick Ben said after a long moment. ‘I’ve seen wolves – plenty of them around here, after all. Those long-legged ones with the smallish heads—’

  ‘Ay.’

  ‘Ay, right. And they’re damned shy. I’d wager they don’t go for the kill until the odds are well in their favour. The worst kind of gamblers, in fact. But very good at survival.’

  ‘Shy,’ Onrack said, nodding. ‘Yet curious. The same pack follows us now for three days.’

  ‘They enjoy scavenging your kills – let you take all the risks. Makes for a sweet deal.’

  ‘Thus far,’ Onrack said, ‘there have been few risks.’

  Quick Ben glanced over at Trull, then shook his head and said, ‘That mountain sheep or whatever you call it not only charged you, Onrack, but it sent you flying. We thought it’d broken every bone in your body, and you just two days into your new one at that.’

  ‘The bigger the prey, the more you must pay,’ Onrack said, smiling again. ‘In the way of gambling, yes?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ the wizard said, prodding at the meat on the spit. ‘My point was, the wolf is the caribou until necessity forces otherwise. If the odds are too bad, the wolf runs. It’s a matter of timing, of choosing the right moment to turn round and hold your ground. As for those wolves tracking us, well, I’d guess they’ve never seen our kind before—’

  ‘No, Quick Ben,’ Onrack said. ‘The very opposite is true.’

  Trull studied his friend for a moment, then asked, ‘We’re not alone here?’

  ‘The ay knew to follow us. Yes, they are curious, but they are also clever, and they remember. They have followed Imass before.’ He lifted his head and sniffed loudly. ‘They are close tonight, those ay. Drawn to my song, which they have heard before. The ay know, you see, that tomorrow I will hunt dangerous prey. And when the moment of the kill comes, well, we shall see.’

  ‘Just how dangerous?’ Trull asked, suddenly uneasy.

  ‘There is a hunting cat, an emlava – we entered its territory today, for I found the scrapes of its claim, on stone and on wood. A male by the flavour of its piss. Today, the ay were more nervous than usual, for the cat will kill them at every opportunity, and it is a creature of ambush. But I have assured them with my song. I found Tog’tol – ye
llow ochre – after all.’

  ‘So,’ Quick Ben said, his eyes on the dripping meat above the flames, ‘if your wolves know we are here, how about the cat?’

  ‘He knows.’

  ‘Well, that’s just terrific, Onrack. I’m going to need some warrens close to hand all damned day, then. That happens to be exhausting, you know.’

  ‘You need not worry with the sun overhead, wizard,’ Onrack said. ‘The cat hunts at night.’

  ‘Hood’s breath! Let’s hope those wolves smell it before we do!’

  ‘They won’t,’ the Imass replied with infuriating calm. ‘In scenting its territory, the emlava saturates the air with its sign. Its own body scent is much weaker, freeing the beast to move wherever it will when inside its territory.’

  ‘Why are dumb brutes so damned smart, anyway?’

  ‘Why are us smart folk so often stupidly brutal, Quick Ben?’ Trull asked.

  ‘Stop trying to confuse me in my state of animal terror, Edur.’

  An uneventful night passed and now, the following day, they walked yet further into the territory of the emlava. Halting at a stream in mid-morning, Onrack had knelt beside it to begin his ritual washing of hands. At least, Trull assumed it was a ritual, although it might well have been another of those moments of breathless wonder that seemed to afflict Onrack – and no surprise there; Trull suspected he’d be staggering about for months after such a rebirth. Of course, he does not think like us. I am much closer in my ways of thought to this human, Quick Ben, than I am to any Imass, dead or otherwise. How can that be?

  Onrack then rose and faced them, his spear in one hand, sword in the other. ‘We are near the emlava’s lair. Although he sleeps, he senses us. Tonight, he means to kill one of us. I shall now challenge his claim to this territory. If I fail, he may well leave you be, for he will feed on my flesh.’

  But Quick Ben was shaking his head. ‘You’re not doing this alone, Onrack. Granted, I’m not entirely sure of how my sorcery will work in this place, but dammit, it’s just a dumb cat, after all. A blinding flash of light, a loud sound—’