‘Oh, very well. Lead on, Pearl.’
Whatever signs he followed, they were not visible to Lostara. Even stranger, it seemed to be a weaving, wandering one, a detail that had the Claw frowning, his steps hesitant, cautious. Before too long, he was barely moving at all, edging forward by the smallest increments. And she saw that his face was beaded with sweat.
She bit back on her questions, but slowly drew her sword once more.
Then, finally, they came to another corpse.
The breath whooshed from Pearl, and he sank down to his knees in front of the large, burned body.
She waited until his breathing slowed, then cleared her throat and said, ‘What just happened, Pearl?’
‘Hood was here,’ he whispered.
‘Aye, I can well see that—’
‘No, you don’t understand.’ He reached out to the corpse, his hand closing into a fist above its broad chest, then punched down.
The body was simply a shell. It collapsed with a dusty crunch beneath the blow.
He glared back at her. ‘Hood was here. The god himself, Lostara. Came to take this man—not just his soul, but also the flesh—all that had been infected by the warren of fire—the warren of light, to be more precise. Gods, what I would do for a Deck of Dragons right now. There’s been a change in Hood’s . . . household.’
‘And what is the significance of all this?’ she asked. ‘I thought we were looking for Felisin.’
‘You’re not thinking, lass. Remember Stormy’s tale. And Truth’s. Felisin, Heboric, Kulp and Baudin. We found what was left of Kulp back at Gryllen’s wagon. And this’—his gesture was fierce—‘is Baudin. The damned Talon—though the proof’s not around his neck, alas. Remember their strange skin? Gesler, Stormy, Truth? The same thing happened to Baudin, here.’
‘You called it an infection.’
‘Well, I don’t know what it is. That warren changed them. There’s no telling in what way.’
‘So, we’re left with Felisin and Heboric Light Touch.’
He nodded.
‘Then I feel I should tell you something,’ Lostara continued. ‘It may not be relevant . . .’
‘Go on, lass.’
She turned to face the hills to the southwest. ‘When we trailed that agent of Sha’ik’s . . . into those hills—’
‘Kalam Mekhar.’
‘Aye. And we ambushed Sha’ik up at the old temple at the summit—on the trail leading into Raraku—’
‘As you have described.’
She ignored his impatience. ‘We would have seen all this. Thus, the events we’ve just stumbled upon here occurred after our ambush.’
‘Well, yes.’
She sighed and crossed her arms. ‘Felisin and Heboric are with the army of the Apocalpyse, Pearl. In Raraku.’
‘What makes you so certain?’
She shrugged. ‘Where else would they be? Think, man. Felisin’s hatred of the Malazan Empire must be all-consuming. Nor would Heboric hold much love for the empire that imprisoned and condemned him. They were desperate, after Gryllen’s attack. After Baudin and Kulp died. Desperate, and probably hurting.’
He slowly nodded, straightened from his crouch beside the corpse. ‘One thing you’ve never explained to me, Lostara. Why did your ambush fail?’
‘It didn’t. We killed Sha’ik—I would swear to it. A quarrel in the forehead. We could not recover the body because of her guards, who proved too much for our company. We killed her, Pearl.’
‘Then who in Hood’s name is commanding the Apocalypse?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Can you show me this place of ambush?’
‘In the morning, aye. I can take you right there.’ He simply stared at her, even as the sphere of light above them began to waver, then finally vanished with a faint sigh.
His memories had awakened. What had lain within the T’lan Imass, layered, indurated by the countless centuries, was a landscape Onrack could read once more. And so, what he saw before him now . . . gone were the mesas on the horizon, the wind-sculpted towers of sandstone, the sweeps of windblown sand and white ribbons of ground coral. Gone the gorges, arroyos and dead riverbeds, the planted fields and irrigation ditches. Even the city to the north, on the horizon’s very edge, clinging like a tumour to the vast winding river, became insubstantial, ephemeral to his mind’s eye.
And all that he now saw was as it had been . . . so very long ago.
The inland sea’s cloudy waves, rolling like the promise of eternity, along a shoreline of gravel that stretched north, unbroken all the way to the mountains that would one day be called the Thalas, and south, down to encompass the remnant now known as the Clatar Sea. Coral reefs revealed their sharkskin spines a sixth of a league beyond the beach, over which wheeled seagulls and long-beaked birds long since extinct.
There were figures walking along the strand. Renig Obar’s clan, come to trade whale ivory and dhenrabi oil from their tundra homelands, and it seemed they had brought the chill winds with them . . . or perhaps the unseemly weather that had come to these warm climes hinted of something darker. A Jaghut, hidden in some fasthold, stirring the cauldron of Omtose Phellack. Much more of this and the reefs would die, and with them all the creatures that depended on them.
A breath of unease fluttered through the Onrack who was flesh and blood. But he had stepped aside. No longer a bonecaster for his clan—Absin Tholai was far superior in the hidden arts, after all, and more inclined to the hungry ambition necessary among those who followed the Path of Tellann. All too often, Onrack had found his mind drawn to other things.
To raw beauty, such as he saw before him now. He was not one for fighting, for rituals of destruction. He was always reluctant to dance in the deeper recesses of the caves, where the drums pounded and the echoes rolled through flesh and bone as if one was lying in the path of a stampeding herd of ranag—a herd such as the one Onrack had blown onto the cave walls around them. His mouth bitter with spit, charcoal and ochre, the backs of his hands stained where they had blocked the spray from his lips, defining the shapes on the stone. Art was done in solitude, images fashioned without light, on unseen walls, when the rest of the clan slept in the outer caverns. And it was a simple truth, that Onrack had grown skilled in the sorcery of paint out of that desire to be apart, to be alone.
Among a people where solitude was as close to a crime as possible. Where to separate was to weaken. Where the very breaking of vision into its components—from seeing to observing, from resurrecting memory and reshaping it beyond the eye’s reach, onto walls of stone—demanded a fine-edged, potentially deadly propensity.
A poor bonecaster. Onrack, you were never what you were meant to be. And when you broke the unwritten covenant and painted a truthful image of a mortal Imass, when you trapped that lovely, dark woman in time, there in the cavern no-one was meant to find . . . ah, then you fell to the wrath of kin. Of Logros himself, and the First Sword.
But he remembered the expression on the young face of Onos T’oolan, when he had first looked upon the painting of his sister. Wonder and awe, and a resurgence of an abiding love—Onrack was certain that he had seen such in the First Sword’s face, was certain that others had, as well, though of course none spoke of it. The law had been broken, and would be answered with severity.
He never knew if Kilava had herself gone to see the painting; had never known if she had been angered, or had seen sufficient to understand the blood of his own heart that had gone into that image.
But that is the last memory I now come to.
‘Your silences,’ Trull Sengar muttered, ‘always send shivers through me, T’lan Imass.’
‘The night before the Ritual,’ Onrack replied. ‘Not far from this place where we now stand. I was to have been banished from my tribe. I had committed a crime to which there was no other answer. Instead, events eclipsed the clans. Four Jaghut tyrants had risen and had formed a compact. They sought to destroy this land—as indeed they have.’
r /> The Tiste Edur said nothing, perhaps wondering what, precisely, had been destroyed. Along the river there were irrigation ditches, and strips of rich green crops awaiting the season’s turn. Roads and farmsteads, the occasional temple, and only to the southwest, along that horizon, did the broken ridge of treeless bluffs mar the scene.
‘I was in the cavern—in the place of my crime,’ Onrack continued after a moment. ‘In darkness, of course. My last night, I’d thought, among my own kind. Though in truth I was already alone, driven from the camp to this final place of solitude. And then someone came. A touch. A body, warm. Soft beyond belief—no, not my wife, she had been among the first to shun me, for what I had done, for the betrayal it had meant. No, a woman unknown to me in the darkness . . .’
Was it her? I will never know. She was gone in the morning, gone from all of us, even as the Ritual was proclaimed and the clans gathered. She defied the call—no, more horrible yet, she had killed her own kin, all but Onos himself. He had managed to drive her off—the truest measure of his extraordinary martial prowess.
Was it her? Was there blood unseen on her hands? That dried, crumbled powder I found on my own skin—which I’d thought had come from the overturned bowl of paint. Fled from Onos . . . to me, in my shameful cave.
And who did I hear in the passage beyond? In the midst of our love-making, did someone come upon us and see what I myself could not?
‘You need say no more, Onrack,’ Trull said softly.
True. And were I mortal flesh, you would see me weep, and thus say what you have just said. Thus, my grief is not lost to your eyes, Trull Sengar. And yet still you ask why I proclaimed my vow . . .
‘The trail of the renegades is . . . fresh,’ Onrack said after a moment.
Trull half smiled. ‘And you enjoy killing.’
‘Artistry finds new forms, Edur. It defies being silenced.’ The T’lan Imass slowly turned to face him. ‘Of course, changes have come to us. I am no longer free to pursue this hunt . . . unless you wish the same.’
Trull grimaced, scanned the lands to the southwest. ‘Well, it’s not as inviting a prospect as it once was, I’ll grant you. But, Onrack, these renegades are agents in the betrayal of my people, and I mean to discover as much as I can of their role. Thus, we must find them.’
‘And speak with them.’
‘Speak with them first, aye, and then you can kill them.’
‘I no longer believe I am capable of that, Trull Sengar. I am too badly damaged. Even so, Monok Ochem and Ibra Gholan are pursuing us. They will suffice.’
The Tiste Edur’s head had turned at this. ‘Just the two of them? You are certain?’
‘My powers are diminished, but yes, I believe so.’
‘How close?’
‘It does not matter. They withhold their desire for vengeance against me . . . so that I might lead them to those they have hunted from the very beginning.’
‘They suspect you will join the renegades, don’t they?’
‘Broken kin. Aye, they do.’
‘And will you?’
Onrack studied the Tiste Edur for a moment. ‘Only if you do, Trull Sengar.’
They were at the very edge of cultivated land, and so it was relatively easy to avoid contact with any of the local residents. The lone road they crossed was empty of life in both directions for as far as they could see. Beyond the irrigated fields, the rugged natural landscape reasserted itself. Tufts of grasses, sprawls of water-smoothed gravel tracking down dry gulches and ravines, the occasional guldindha tree.
The hills ahead were saw-toothed, the facing side clawed into near cliffs.
Those hills were where the T’lan Imass had broken the ice sheets, the first place of defiance. To protect the holy sites, the hidden caves, the flint quarries. Where, now, the weapons of the fallen were placed.
Weapons these renegades would reclaim. There was no provenance to the sorcery investing those stone blades, at least with respect to Tellann. They would feed the ones who held them, provided they were kin to the makers—or indeed made by those very hands long ago. Imass, then, since the art among the mortal peoples was long lost. Also, finding those weapons would give the renegades their final freedom, severing the power of Tellann from their bodies.
‘You spoke of betraying your clan,’ Trull Sengar said as they approached the hills. ‘These seem to be old memories, Onrack.’
‘Perhaps we are destined to repeat our crimes, Trull Sengar. Memories have returned to me—all that I had thought lost. I do not know why.’
‘The severing of the Ritual?’
‘Possibly.’
‘What was your crime?’
‘I trapped a woman in time. Or so it seemed. I painted her likeness in a sacred cave. It is now my belief that, in so doing, I was responsible for the terrible murders that followed, for her leaving the clan. She could not join in the Ritual that made us immortal, for by my hand she had already become so. Did she know this? Was this the reason for her defying Logros and the First Sword? There are no answers to that. What madness stole her mind, so that she would kill her closest kin, so that, indeed, she would seek to kill the First Sword himself, her own brother?’
‘A woman not your mate, then.’
‘No. She was a bonecaster. A Soletaken.’
‘Yet you loved her.’
A lopsided shrug. ‘Obsession is its own poison, Trull Sengar.’
A narrow goat trail led up into the range, steep and winding in its ascent. They began climbing.
‘I would object,’ the Tiste Edur said, ‘to this notion of being doomed to repeat our mistakes, Onrack. Are no lessons learned? Does not experience lead to wisdom?’
‘Trull Sengar. I have just betrayed Monok Ochem and Ibra Gholan. I have betrayed the T’lan Imass, for I chose not to accept my fate. Thus, the same crime as the one I committed long ago. I have always hungered for solitude from my kind. In the realm of the Nascent, I was content. As I was in the sacred caves that lie ahead.’
‘Content? And now, at this moment?’
Onrack was silent for a time. ‘When memories have returned, Trull Sengar, solitude is an illusion, for every silence is filled by a clamorous search for meaning.’
‘You’re sounding more . . . mortal with every day that passes, friend.’
‘Flawed, you mean.’
The Tiste Edur grunted. ‘Even so. Yet look at what you are doing right now, Onrack.’
‘What do you mean?’
Trull Sengar paused on the trail and looked at the T’lan Imass. His smile was sad. ‘You’re returning home.’
A short distance away were camped the Tiste Liosan. Battered, but alive. Which was, Malachar reflected, at least something.
Strange stars gleamed overhead, their light wavering, as if brimming with tears. The landscape stretching out beneath them seemed a lifeless wasteland of weathered rock and sand.
The fire they had built in the lee of a humped mesa had drawn strange moths the size of small birds, as well as a host of other flying creatures, including winged lizards. A swarm of flies had descended on them earlier, biting viciously before vanishing as quickly as they had come. And now, those bites seemed to crawl, as if the insects had left something behind.
There was, to Malachar’s mind, an air of . . . unwelcome to this realm. He scratched at one of the lumps on his arm, hissed as he felt something squirm beneath the hot skin. Turning back to the fire, he studied his seneschal.
Jorrude knelt beside the hearth, head lowered—a position that had not changed in some time—and Malachar’s disquiet deepened. Enias squatted close by the seneschal, ready to move if yet another fit of anguish overwhelmed his master, but those disturbing sessions were arriving ever less frequently. Orenas remained guarding the horses, and Malachar knew he stood with sword drawn in the darkness beyond the fire’s light.
There would be an accounting one day, he knew, with the T’lan Imass. The Tiste Liosan had proceeded with the ritual in good faith. They had been
too open. Never trust a corpse. Malachar did not know if such a warning was found in the sacred text of Osric’s Visions. If not, he would see that it was added to the collected wisdom of the Tiste Liosan. When we return. If we return.
Jorrude slowly straightened. His face was ravaged with grief. ‘The Guardian is dead,’ he announced. ‘Our realm is assailed, but our brothers and sisters have been warned and even now ride out to the gates. The Tiste Liosan will hold. Until Osric’s return, we shall hold.’ He slowly swung to face each of them in turn, including Orenas who silently appeared out of the gloom. ‘For us, another task. The one we were assigned to complete. On this realm, somewhere, we will find the trespassers. The thieves of the Fire. I have quested, and they have never been closer to my senses. They are in this world, and we shall find them.’
Malachar waited, for he knew there was more.
Jorrude then smiled. ‘My brothers. We know nothing of this place. But that is a disadvantage that will prove temporary, for I have also sensed the presence of an old friend to the Tiste Liosan. Not far away. We shall seek him out—our first task—and ask him to acquaint us with the rigours of this land.’
‘Who is this old friend, Seneschal?’ Enias asked.
‘The Maker of Time, Brother Enias.’
Malachar slowly nodded. A friend of the Tiste Liosan indeed. Slayer of the Ten Thousand. Icarium.
‘Orenas,’ Jorrude said, ‘prepare our horses.’
Chapter Seventeen
Seven faces in the rock. Six faces turned to the Teblor. One remains Unfound. Mother to the tribe of ghosts. The Teblor children we were told to turn away
Mother’s Prayer of Giving Among the Teblor
KARSA ORLONG WAS NO STRANGER TO STONE. RAW COPPER GOUGED from outcroppings, tin and their mating that was bronze, such materials had their place. But wood and stone were the words of the hands, the sacred shaping of will.
Parallel flakes, long and thin, translucent slivers punched away from the blade, leaving ripples reaching across, from edge to wavy spine. Smaller flakes removed from the twin edges, first one side, then flipping the blade over between blows, back and forth, all the way up the length.