Reaper's Gale

  Oh no, she will not escape me a second time. ‘If said pardon exists,’ Tanal said to Tehol Beddict, ‘then of course you will both be released, with apologies. For the moment, however, you are now in my custody.’ He gestured to one of his guards. ‘Shackle them.’

  ‘Yes sir.’

  Bugg turned the corner leading into the narrow lane only to find it blocked by a freshly killed steer, legs akimbo, white tongue lolling as Ublala Pung – an arm wrapped about the beast’s broken neck – grunted and pulled, his face red and the veins on his temples purple and bulging. The odd multiple pulsing of his hearts visibly throbbed on both sides of the Tarthenal’s thick neck as he endeavoured to drag the steer to Tehol’s door.

  His small eyes lit up on seeing Bugg. ‘Oh good. Help.’

  ‘Where did you get this? Never mind. It will never fit in through the door, Ublala. You’ll have to dismember it out here.’

  ‘Oh.’ The giant waved one hand. ‘I’m always forgetting things.’

  ‘Ublala, is Tehol home?’

  ‘No. Nobody is.’

  ‘Not even Janath?’

  The Tarthenal shook his head, eyeing the steer, which was now thoroughly jammed in the lane. ‘I’ll have to rip its legs off,’ he said. ‘Oh, the hens are home, Bugg.’

  Bugg had been growing ever more nervous with each step that had brought him closer to their house, and now he understood why. But he should have been more than just nervous. He should have known. My mind – I have been distracted. Distant worshippers, something closer to hand . . . Bugg clambered over the carcass, pushing past Ublala Pung, which, given the sweat lathering the huge man, proved virtually effortless, then hurried to the doorway.

  The shutter was broken, torn from its flimsy hinges. Inside, four hens marched about on the floor like aimless soldiers. Ublala Pung’s pillow was trying to do the same.

  Shit. They’ve got them.

  There would be a scene at the headquarters of the Patriotists. Couldn’t be helped. Wholesale destruction, an Elder God’s rage unleashed – oh, this was too soon. Too many heads would look up, eyes narrowing, hunger bursting like juices under the tongue. Just stay where you are. Stay where you are, Icarium. Lifestealer. Do not reach for your sword, do not let your brow knit. No furrows of anger to mar your unhuman face. Stay, Icarium!

  He entered the room, found a large sack.

  Ublala Pung filled the doorway. ‘What is happening?’

  Bugg began throwing their few possessions into the sack.

  ‘Bugg?’

  He snatched up a hen and stuffed it in, then another.

  ‘Bugg?’

  The mobile pillow went last. Knotting the sack, Bugg turned about and gave it to Ublala Pung. ‘Find somewhere else to hide out,’ Bugg said. ‘Here, it’s all yours—’

  ‘But what about the cow?’

  ‘It’s a steer.’

  ‘I tried but it’s jammed.’

  ‘Ublala – all right, stay here, then, but you’re on your own. Understand?’

  ‘Where are you going? Where is everyone?’

  Had Bugg told him then, in clear terms that Ublala Pung would comprehend, all might well have turned out differently. The Elder God would look back on this one moment, over all others, during his extended time of retrospection that followed. Had he spoken true – ‘They’re just gone, friend, and none of us will be back. Not for a long time. Maybe never. Take care of yourself, Ublala Pung, and ‘ware your new god – he is much more than he seems.’

  With that, Bugg was outside, climbing over the carcass once more and to the mouth of the alley. Where he halted.

  They would be looking for him. On the streets. Did he want a running battle? No, just one single strike, one scene of unveiled power to send Patriotist body parts flying. Fast, then done. Before I awaken the whole damned menagerie.

  No, I need to move unseen now.

  And quickly.

  The Elder God stirred power to life, power enough to pluck at his material being, disassembling it. No longer corporeal, he slipped down through the grimy cobbles of the street, into the veins of seepwater threading the entire city.

  Yes, much swifter here, movement as fast as thought—

  He tripped the snare before he was even aware that he had been pulled off course, drawn like an iron filing to a lodestone. Pulled, hard and then as if in a whirlpool, down to a block of stone buried in darkness. A stone of power – of Mael’s very own power – a damned altar!

  Eagerly claiming him, chaining him as all altars sought to do to their chosen gods. Nothing of sentience or malice, of course, but a certain proclivity of structure. The flavour of ancient blood fused particle by particle into the stone’s crystalline latticework.

  Mael resisted, loosing a roar that shivered through the foundations of Letheras, even as he sought to reassert his physical form, to focus his strength—

  And the trap was so sprung – by that very act of regaining his body. The altar, buried beneath rubble, the rubble grinding and shifting, a thousand minute adjustments ensnaring Mael – he could not move, could no longer even so much as cry out.

  Errant! You bastard!

  Why?

  Why have you done this to me?

  But the Errant had never shown much interest in lingering over his triumphs. He was nowhere close, and even if he had been, he would not have answered.

  A player had been removed from the game.

  But the game played on.

  In the throne room of the Eternal Domicile, Rhulad Sengar, Emperor of a Thousand Deaths, sat alone, sword in one hand. In wavering torchlight he stared at nothing.

  Inside his mind was another throne room, and in that place he was not alone. His brothers stood before him; and behind them, his father, Tomad, and his mother, Uruth. In the shadows along the walls stood Udinaas, Nisall, and the woman Rhulad would not name who had once been Fear’s wife. And, close to the locked doors, one more figure, too lost in the dimness to make out. Too lost by far.

  Binadas bowed his head. ‘I have failed, Emperor,’ he said. ‘I have failed, my brother.’ He gestured downward and Rhulad saw the spear transfixing Binadas’s chest. ‘A Toblakai, ghost of our ancient wars after the fall of the Kechra. Our wars on the seas. He returned to slay me. He is Karsa Orlong, a Teblor, a Tartheno Toblakai, Tarthenal, Fenn – oh, they have many names now, yes. I am slain, brother, yet I did not die for you.’ Binadas looked up then and smiled a dead man’s smile. ‘Karsa waits for you. He waits.’

  Fear took a single step forward and bowed. Straightening, he fixed his heavy gaze on Rhulad – who whimpered and shrank back into his throne. ‘Emperor. Brother. You are not the child I nurtured. You are no child I have nurtured. You betrayed us at the Spar of Ice. You betrayed me when you stole my betrothed, my love, when you made her with child, when you delivered unto her such despair that she took her own life.’ As he spoke his dead wife walked forward to join him, their hands clasping. Fear said, ‘I stand with Father Shadow now, brother, and I wait for you.’

  Rhulad cried out, a piteous sound that echoed in the empty chamber.

  Trull, his pate pale where his hair had once been, his eyes the eyes of the Shorn – empty, unseen by any, eyes that could not be met by those of any other Tiste Edur. Eyes of alone. He raised the spear in his hands, and Rhulad saw the crimson gleam on that shaft, on the broad iron blade. ‘I led warriors in your name, brother, and they are now all dead. All dead.

  ‘I returned to you, brother, when Fear and Binadas could not. To beg for your soul, your soul of old, Rhulad, for the child, the brother you had once been.’ He lowered the spear, leaned on it. ‘You drowned me, chained to stone, while the Rhulad I sought hid in the darkness of your mind. But he will hide no longer.’

  From the gloom of the doors, the vague figure moved forward, and Rhulad on his throne saw himself. A youth, weaponless, unblooded, his skin free of coins, his skin smooth and clear.

  ‘We stand in the river of Sengar blood,’ Trull said. ‘And we wait for y
ou.’

  ‘Stop! ‘ Rhulad shrieked. ‘Stop! ‘

  ‘Truth,’ said Udinaas, striding closer, ‘is remorseless, Master. Friend?’ The slave laughed. ‘You were never my friend, Rhulad. You held my life in your hand – either hand, the empty one or the one with the sword, makes no difference. My life was yours, and you thought I had opened my heart to you. Errant take me, why would I do that? Look at my face, Rhulad. This is a slave’s face. No more memorable than a clay mask. This flesh on my bones? It works limbs that are naught but tools. I held my hands in the sea, Rhulad, until all feeling went away. All life, gone. From my once-defiant grasp.’ Udinaas smiled. ‘And now, Rhulad Sengar, who is the slave?

  ‘I stand at the end of the chains. The end but one. One set of shackles. Here, do you see? I stand, and I wait for you.’

  Nisall spoke, gliding forward naked, motion like a serpent’s in candle-light. ‘I spied on you, Rhulad. Found out your every secret and I have them with me now, like seeds in my womb, and soon my belly will swell, and the monsters will emerge, one after another. Spawn of your seed, Rhulad Sengar. Abominations one and all. And you imagined this to be love? I was your whore. The coin you dropped in my hand paid for my life, but it wasn’t enough.

  ‘I stand where you will never find me. I, Rhulad, do not wait for you.’

  Remaining silent, then, at the last, his father, his mother.

  He could remember when last he saw them, the day he had sent them to dwell chained in the belly of this city. Oh, that had been so clever, hadn’t it?

  But moments earlier one of the Chancellor’s guards had begged audience. A terrible event to relate. The Letherii’s voice had quavered like a badly strung lyre. Tragedy. An error in rotation among the jailers, a week passing without anyone descending to their cells. No food, but, alas, plenty of water.

  A rising flood, in fact.

  ‘My Emperor. They were drowned. The cells, chest-deep, sire. Their chains . . . not long enough. Not long enough. The palace weeps. The palace cries out. The entire empire, sire, hangs its head.

  ‘Chancellor Triban Gnol is stricken, sire. Taken to bed, unable to give voice to his grief.’

  Rhulad could stare down at the trembling man, stare down, yes, with the blank regard of a man who has known death again and again, known past all feeling. And listen to these empty words, these proper expressions of horror and sorrow.

  And in the Emperor’s mind there could be these words: I sent them down to be drowned. With not a single wager laid down.

  The rising waters, this melting, this sinking palace. This Eternal Domicile. I have drowned my father. My mother. He could see those cells, the black flood, the gouges in the walls where they had clawed at the very ends of those chains. He could see it all.

  And so they stood. Silent. Flesh rotted and bloated with gases, puddles of slime spreading round their white, wrinkled feet. A father on whose shoulders Rhulad had ridden, shrieking with laughter, a child atop his god as it ran down the strand with limitless power and strength, with the promise of surety like a gentle kiss on the child’s brow.

  A mother – no, enough. I die and die. More deaths, yes, than anyone can imagine. I die and I die, and I die.

  But where is my peace?

  See what awaits me? See them!

  Rhulad Sengar, Emperor of a Thousand Deaths, sat alone on his throne, dreaming peace. But even death could not offer that.

  At that moment his brother, Trull Sengar, stood near Onrack, the emlava cubs squalling in the dirt behind them, and watched with wonder as Ben Adaephon Delat, a High Mage of the Malazan Empire, walked out across the shallow river. Unmindful of the glacial cold of that stream that threatened to leave numb his flesh, his bones, the very sentiments of his mind – nothing could deter him from this.

  Upon seeing the lone figure appear from the brush on the other side, Quick Ben had halted. And, after a long moment, he had smiled, and under his breath he had said something like: ‘Where else but here? Who else but him?’ Then, with a laugh, the High Mage had set out.

  To meet an old friend who himself strode without pause into that broad river.

  Another Malazan.

  Beside Trull, Onrack settled a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘You, my friend, weep too easily.’

  ‘I know,’ Trull sighed. ‘It’s because, well, it’s because I dream of such things. For myself. My brothers, my family. My people. The gifts of peace, Onrack – this is what breaks me, again and again.’

  ‘I think,’ said Onrack, ‘you evade a deeper truth.’

  ‘I do?’

  ‘Yes. There is one other, is there not? Not a brother, not kin, not even Tiste Edur. One who offers another kind of peace, for you, a new kind. And this is what you yearn for, and see the echo of, even in the meeting of two friends such as we witness here.

  ‘You weep when I speak of my ancient love.

  ‘You weep for this, Trull Sengar, because your love has not been answered, and there is no greater anguish than that.’

  ‘Please, friend. Enough. Look. I wonder what they are saying to each other?’

  ‘The river’s flow takes their words away, as it does us all.’ Onrack’s hand tightened on Trull’s shoulder. ‘Now, my friend, tell me of her.’

  Trull Sengar wiped at his eyes, then he smiled. ‘There was, yes, a most beautiful woman . . .’

  BOOK FOUR - REAPER’S GALE

  I went in search of death

  In the cast down wreckage

  Of someone’s temple nave

  I went in search among flowers

  Nodding to the wind’s words

  Of woeful tales of war

  I went among the blood troughs

  Behind the women’s tents

  All the children that never were

  And in the storm of ice and waves

  I went in search of the drowned

  Among bony shells and blunt worms

  Where the grains swirled

  Each and every one crying out

  its name its life its loss

  I went on the current roads

  That led me nowhere known

  And in the still mists afield

  Where light itself crept uncertain

  I went in search of wise spirits

  Moaning their truths in dark loam

  But the moss was silent, too damp to remember my search

  Finding at last where the reapers sow

  Cutting stalks to take the season

  I failed in my proud quest

  To a scything flint blade

  And lying asward lost to summer

  Bared as its warm carapace

  of youthful promise was sent away

  into autumn’s reliquary sky

  Until the bones of night

  Were nails glittering in the cold

  oblivion, and down the darkness

  death came to find me

  Before Q’uson Tapi

  Toc Anaster

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The great conspiracy among the kingdoms of Saphinand, Bolkando, Ak’ryn, and D’rhasilhani that culminated in the terrible Eastlands War was in numerous respects profoundly ironic. To begin with, there had been no conspiracy. This fraught political threat was in fact a falsehood, created and fomented by powerful economic interests in Lether; and more, it must be said, than just economic. Threat of a dread enemy permitted the imposition of strictures on the population of the empire that well served the brokers among the elite; and would no doubt have made them rich indeed if not for the coincidental financial collapse occurring at this most inopportune of moments in Letherii history. In any case, the border kingdoms and nations of the east could not but perceive the imminent threat, especially with the ongoing campaign against the Awl on the north plains. Thus a grand alliance was indeed created, and with the aforementioned foreign incentives, the war exploded across the entire eastern frontier.

  Combined, not entirely accidentally, with the punitive invasion begun on the northwest coast, it is
without doubt that Emperor Rhulad Sengar felt beleaguered indeed . . .

  The Ashes of Ascension,

  History of Lether, Vol. IV

  Calasp Hivanar

  She had been no different from any other child with her childish dreams of love. Proud and tall, a hero to stride into her life, taking her in his arms and sweeping away all her fears like silts rushing down a stream to vanish in some distant ocean. The benediction of clarity and simplicity, oh my, yes, that had been a most cherished dream.

  Although Seren Pedac could remember that child, could remember the twisting anguish in her stomach as she yearned for salvation, an anguish delicious in all its possible obliterations, she would not indulge in nostalgia. False visions of the world were a child’s right, not something to be resented, but neither were they worthy of any adult sense of longing.

  In Hull Beddict, after all, the young Seren Pedac had believed, for a time – a long time, in fact, before her foolish dream finally withered away – that she had found her wondrous hero, her majestic conjuration whose every glance was a blessing on her heart. So she had learned how purity was poison, the purity of her faith, that is, that such heroes existed. For her. For anyone.

  Hull Beddict had died in Letheras. Or, rather, his body had died there. The rest had died in her arms years before then. In a way, she had used him and perhaps not just used him, but raped him. Devouring his belief, stealing away his vision – of himself, of his place in the world, of all the meaning that he, like any other man, sought for his own life. She had found her hero and had then, in ways subtle and cruel, destroyed him under the siege of reality. Reality as she had seen it, as she still saw it. That had been the poison within her, the battle between the child’s dream and the venal cynicism that had seeped into adulthood. And Hull had been both her weapon and her victim.