‘What are you doing?’ Sharl asked. She was lying down on the ground again, with no memory of how she’d got there.
‘Pluggin’ the hole in your gut,’ Brevity said.
‘Am I going to die?’
‘Not a chance. You’re my new best friend, remember? Speaking of which, what’s your name?’
Sharl tried to lift herself up, but there was no strength left in her. She had never felt so weak. All she wanted to do was close her eyes. And sleep.
Someone was shaking her. ‘Don’t! Don’t you leave me alone!’
Her body felt chained down, and she wanted free of it. I never knew how to fight.
‘No! I can’t bear this, don’t you understand? I can’t bear to see you die!’
I’m sorry. I wasn’t brave enough for any of this. My brothers, they died years ago, you see. It was only my stubbornness, my guilt – I couldn’t let them go. I brought them with me. And those two boys I found, they didn’t mind the new names I gave them. Oruth. Casel.
I couldn’t stop them dying. It was hunger, that’s all. When you have no land, no way through, when they just step over you in the street. I did my best. We were not good enough – they said so, that look in their eyes, stepping over us – we just weren’t good enough. Not clever enough, not brave enough.
Casel was four when he died. We left him in the alley behind Skadan’s. I found a bit of sacking. I put it over his eyes. Oruth asked why and I said it was what they did at funerals. They did things to the body. But why? he asked. I said I didn’t know. When Oruth died a month later, I found another piece of cloth. I put it over his eyes. Another alley, another funeral.
They were so little.
Someone was crying. A sound of terrible, soul-crushing anguish. But she herself was done with that. Let the chains fall away. And for my eyes, a cloth.
It’s what they do.
With the Sister of Cold Nights standing close, Yan Tovis sat once more beside the body of her brother. She looked down on his face, wondering what seemed so different about it now, wondering what details had now arrived, here in death, that made it seem so peaceful.
And then she saw. The muscles of his jaw were no longer taut, bunched by that incessant clench. And suddenly he seemed young, younger than she’d ever seen him before.
Yedan Derryg, you are beautiful.
From all sides, she now heard, there rose a keening sound. Her Shake and her Letherii were now mourning for their fallen prince. She let the sound close round her like a shroud.
Welcome home then, brother.
CHAPTER TWENTY
‘We stood watching the bodies tumbling and rolling down the broad steps. Half the city was on fire and out in the farm-holdings terrified slaves were dragging the diseased carcasses into enormous heaps while lamplighters wearing scarves poured oil and set alight the mountains of putrid flesh, until the black columns marched like demons across the land.
‘In the canals the corpses were so thick we saw a filthy boy eschew the bridge for a wild scramble, but he only made it halfway before falling in, and the last we saw of him was a small hand waving desperately at the sky, before it went down.
‘Most of the malformed and wizened babies had already been put to death, as much an act of mercy as any kind of misplaced shame, though there was plenty about which we rightly should be ashamed, and who would dare argue that? The animals were gone, the skies were empty of life, the waters were poisoned, and where paradise had once beckoned now desolation ruled, and it was all by our own righteous will.
‘The last pair of politicians fell with hands around each other’s throat, trailed by frantic toadies and professional apologists looking for a way out, though none existed, and soon they too choked on their own shit.
‘As for us, well, we leaned our bloodied pikes against the plinth of the toppled monument facing those broad steps, sat down in the wreckage, and discussed the weather.’
Sadakar’s Account
The Fall of Inderas
THE SUN HAD SET. THE BOY, AWAKE AT LAST, TOTTERED INTO THE Khundryl camp. He held his arms as if cradling something. He heard the woman’s cries – it was impossible not to – and all the Khundryl had gathered outside a tent, even as the rest of the army pushed itself upright like a beast more dead than alive, to begin another night of marching. He stood, listening. There was the smell of blood in the air.
Warleader Gall could hear his wife’s labour pains. The sound filled him with horror. Could there be anything crueller than this? To deliver a child into this world. By the Fall of Coltaine, have we not shed enough tears? Do we not bear their scars as proof?
He sought to roll over in his furs, wanting none of this, but he could not move. As if his body had died this day. And he but crouched inside it. Born to a dying mother. Who gathers round her now? Shelemasa. The last of the surviving shoulder-women. But there are no daughters. No sons with their wives. And there is not me, and with this child, this last child, for the first time I will not witness my wife giving birth.
A knife pressed against his cheek. Jastara’s voice hissed in his ear. ‘If you do not go to her now, Gall, I will kill you myself.’
I cannot.
‘For the coward you are, I will kill you. Do you hear me, Gall? I will make your screams drown out the world – even your wife’s cries – or do you forget? I am Semk. This whole night – I will make it your eternal torment. You will beg for release, and I shall deny it!’
‘Then do it, woman.’
‘Does not the father kneel before the mother? In the time of birth? Does he not bow to the strength he himself does not possess? Does he not look into the eyes of the woman he loves, only to see a power strange and terrible – how it does not even see him, how it looks past – or no, how it looks within? Does not a man need to be humbled? Tell me, Gall, that you refuse to see that again – one final time in your life! Witness it!’
He blinked up at her. The knife point had dug deep, now grazing the bone of his cheek. He felt the blood running down to drip from the line of his jaw, the rim of his ear. ‘The child is not mine,’ he whispered.
‘But it is. You fool, can’t you see that? It will be the last Khundryl child! The last of the Burned Tears! You are Warleader Gall. It shall be born, and it shall look up into your face! How dare you deny it that?’
His breath was coming in gasps. Do I have this left in me? Can I find the strength she demands of me? I … I have lost so much. So much.
‘This is our final night, Gall. Be our Warleader one last time. Be a husband. Be a father.’
A feeble, trembling hand fumbled with the furs covering him – he caught its movement, wondered at it. My own? Yes. Groaning, he struggled to sit up. The knife slipped away from his bloody cheek. He stared across at Jastara.
‘My son … did well by you.’
Her eyes went wide. The colour left her face. She shrank back.
Gall pushed the furs away, reached for his weapon belt.
Summoned by a mother’s cries, Badalle walked with her children. Saddic stumbled at her side. They were all closing in, like an indrawn breath.
The army was on the move. She had not believed these soldiers capable of rising yet again, to face the wastes ahead. She did not understand the source of strength they had found, the hard will in their eyes. Nor did she understand the way they looked at her and Saddic, and at the other children of the Snake. As if we have been made holy. As if we have blessed them. When the truth is, it is they who have blessed us, because now we children will not have to die alone. We can die in the arms of men and women, men and women who for that moment become our fathers, our mothers.
But, here in the Khundryl camp, a new child was about to come into the world.
When she arrived, the clawed warriors surrounded the birth-tent. She saw the corpse of a horse nearby and walked over to stand upon it.
Her children saw and they faced her, for they knew what was coming. Looking down, she met Saddic’s shining eyes, and nodded.
Badalle awakened her voice. ‘There is a mother this night.’
Warriors turned to her – they had no choice. She would make them listen, if only to give them the one thing that she had left. Where it all began, so it ends. This is what I have, the only thing I ever had. Words.
‘There is a mother this night
In the desert of dreams
Beneath stars burned blind
And soldiers must march where
She leads them on the dead trail
By this truth we are all bound
Past the bodies left in the ditch
She looks up where we fail
And the sky is without end
Follow her for the time of our birth
Is a birth still to come
There is a mother this night
Who leads an army of children
What will you ask of her
When dawn awakens?
What will you demand of her
That she would give
If only she could?
There is a mother in the night
For a child lost in the dark’
Faces stared up at her, but she could make no sense of what she saw in them. And she could barely remember the words she had just spoken, but when she looked down at Saddic he nodded, to tell her that he had them, gathered like the toys in the sack dangling from one hand. And when he is a man, he will write this down, all of this, and one night a stranger will find him, a poet, a singer of tales and a whisperer of songs.
He will come in search of the fallen.
Like a newborn child, he will come in search of the fallen.
Saddic, you will not die here. Not for many, many years. How do I know this? And the woman who sleeps in the other room – who has loved you all her life – who is she? I would see that, if I could.
The mother’s cries were softer now.
A man appeared. Walked through the silent crowd that parted from his path. Strode into the tent. Moments later, the mother inside was weeping, a sound that filled the world, that made Badalle’s heart pound. And then, a small, pitiful wail.
Badalle sensed someone standing near her. She turned to see the Adjunct.
‘Mother,’ Badalle said, ‘you should be leading your children.’
‘Did you truly think I would miss this?’
Sighing, Badalle stepped down from the carcass of the horse. Reached out and took the Adjunct’s hand.
She flinched as if stung, stared down at Badalle as if in shock. ‘Don’t do that,’ she said.
‘Mother, when will you let yourself feel?’
The Adjunct backed away, and moments later she was gone, lost in the crowd. If it made a path for her, Badalle couldn’t see it.
‘There is a mother this night,’ she whispered, ‘but to her the stars are blind.’
Koryk reached up and with one finger probed the line of his gums. When he withdrew the finger and looked down, he saw that it was smeared with blood. And that was a good joke. He was dying of thirst, just like all the others, but he’d been drinking his own blood for two days now. Wiping his finger clean on his thigh, he glanced over at the others.
Smiles was going to outlast them all. Women were stronger in ways no man dared admit. But then they had to be.
There was more blood running down the back of his nose. He could never quite manage to get his throat clear of it, no matter how many times he swallowed. They had to be. A house of whores. I saw all I ever needed to see. Better than any tutor’s endless droning on about history. Better than all the sages and prophets and agitators and rebels. Aye, those ones made fists and shook them, punching walls at the injustice of it all – but those walls, they were just the boxes they’d built for themselves, the boxes they lived in. They could never see past. And for most of them, that box was their whole world. They had no idea there was anything outside it.
But the whores knew. Laughter for the moment, but take the stretch of years and it’s all heartbreak. A woman gives up her body when she has nothing else left to give. She gives it up like a man his last copper. In a whore’s eyes, you’ll find everything that we do to each other. Everything.
He’d killed a fellow Bonehunter last night. A man trying to steal an empty cask. But he wasn’t thinking about that. That damned face so twisted with need, or the sigh that left the man on that last breath. No, he was thinking about whores.
They could have schooled me in shame. But they didn’t. And now, gods help me, I wish they had. Because then, he would understand what it was that forced his comrades back to their feet, that gave them the strength to pick up their gear one more time, knees bending under that weight. ‘The Malazan soldier carries on his back all that’s needed for war.’ Dassem’s credo for campaigns. But what if there’s no war? What if the enemy is inside you? And what if this burden doesn’t belong to just you? What if it belongs to a whole damned world? What then?
He’d listened to that captain, Ruthan Gudd. Lying dry-skinned in the unbearable heat, shivering beneath the last blanket he still owned, he heard about the boy and the girl and the toys spilled out on the ground between them. They’d forgotten the word. Toys. But even finding it again hadn’t helped much, because they’d also forgotten how to play.
There’s a secret few would guess. In a house of whores, the love for children is as close to sacred as a mortal can get. Too precious to mock, because every whore remembers the child she once was. Maybe they were sad memories, maybe they were bittersweet, but it was all before the last thing was given away. So they know. It’s innocence that is sacred.
Nothing else.
On holy days, priests used to incite mobs to stone whores. No one would go out – he remembered all the women hiding in their rooms, speaking only in whispers lest some sound escape past the shutters, or out under the door. And he used to cower with them, terrified, and on those days he came to learn a hatred for priests, for temples, for all those hunters of the unworthy.
So, Crippled God. Fallen One. If I could kill you with my bare hands, I would. If I could kill every priest, and every god, and all those others stalking the streets with stones in their hands, I would. For the whores and all you took from them. And for the children.
He rose, shouldering his pack, his useless weapons, his useless armour, and faced the others, seeing that they too were ready, and when Tarr gestured they fell in one by one.
One more night. In the name of innocence.
Bottle’s joints were on fire. Swollen and red, they made every step agony. Since when was a story enough to keep someone alive? No matter how heartbreaking, no matter how tragic. No matter how incensed the listener might become. The world lacked such simplicity. He’d never believed in speeches, was ever suspicious of that power to incite. Dreams could be voiced, desires could be uttered and then whispered back with fervour, but in the end most people eventually turned away and the crowd dispersed, and it was back home and getting on with living.
For all the boldness of believers on the front line, when the fires ebbed and no one was looking, it was time again to hide away. But maybe we need that. Our little hole to climb down into. For some respite, where all the clamouring voices in your head can just die away. For blessed silence.
And the ones who never get to that, who are so consumed they can find nowhere to hide, no place to rest, see what happens to them – see the fever in their eyes. They have made their lives torture, they have made the voice of their spirit one long, unbroken howl.
Fevered, aye. He was that, and more. ‘We’re the walking dead.’ Fiddler’s words, or someone’s, anyway. Maybe Cuttle. No matter. The walking dead didn’t feel pain like this. The walking dead didn’t carry on their backs a thousand questions – questions with no answers.
His grandmother was now hobbling beside him. She didn’t belong on this trail, in this desert, but there she was. And maybe she wasn’t his grandmother at all, just some other wax witch twisting reeds in her arthritic hands, making dolls for the children in
the village ahead. Gifts.
Charms. I remember you giving them away. Toys, you said, head bobbing. Free toys! And they all ran up to you, laughing.
But you wove protections into those dolls. Blessings, wards against illness. Nothing powerful, nothing to stop, say, a flash flood or an avalanche. But the father that lashed out with his fists. The uncle who slipped under the blankets in the dead of night. Those ones paid for what they did.
And the cuts that healed. The fevers that went away.
So, Grandmother, I’ll walk this last walk. In your memory. Make me a doll, for this pain.
And take this child by the hand. And tell him again, how they will pay for what they did.
For years, before her nails were worn down to bloody shreds by all that she clawed at, Smiles had carried a dream, carried it around like a pearl inside a battered shell. Of a day in the future when she was a mother, and she’d given birth to twins. Two girls, squalling and hissing the way girls do. Playing on the beach under her watchful eye.
And then, in a dark, desolate season – with the skies grey and the seas swollen – the older ones would come to her. ‘The fish are gone,’ they’d say. ‘The spirits must be appeased. Choose one, Mother, and make of her the gift of our people, our gift to the thirsty waters.’ And she would walk away, calling her daughters back to the hut.
They were lowborn. The whole family. Her husband and the father of the twins was gone, maybe dead. It was all down to her. One child to be blessed, the other cursed. Yet arguments could be made as to who was which. She knew all about that.
A night of bitter winds, of fires doused by spray. And Smiles would set out, knives in hand. And she would kill every one of those elders – in all their hunger, in all their needs now that they were too old to fish, now that the only authority they still possessed came with their threats and warnings about angry, vengeful spirits. Aye, she would show them a vengeful, angry spirit, and the gifts it would make to the hungry sea would appease a thousand spirits of the deep.