‘Precisely as I was saying, dear.’
‘Really? So if I was to pour boiling oil all over you, you’d be telling me—in between screams—to get my head out from between your—’ She shut her mouth with an audible snap.
Wisely, Pearl made no comment.
Flat of the sword? No, the edge. ‘I want to kill you, Pearl.’
‘I know.’
‘But for the moment, I’ll settle with having you in my shadow.’
‘Thank you. Now, just walk on ahead, a nice even pace. Straight into that wall of sand. And mind you squint your eyes right down—wouldn’t want those glorious windows of fire damaged . . .’
She’d expected to meet resistance, but the journey proved effortless. Six steps within a dull, ochre world, then out onto the blasted plain of Raraku, blinking in the dusk’s hazy light. Four more steps, out onto scoured bedrock, then she spun round.
Smiling, Pearl raised both hands, palms upward. Standing a pace behind her.
She closed the distance, one gloved hand reaching up to the back of his head, the other reaching much lower as she closed her mouth on his. Moments later they were tearing at each other’s clothes. No resistance at all.
Less than four leagues to the southwest, as darkness descended, Kalam Mekhar woke suddenly, sheathed in sweat. The torment of his dreams still echoed, even as their substance eluded him. That song again . . . I think. Rising to a roar that seemed to grip the throat of the world . . . He slowly sat up, wincing at the various aches from his muscles and joints. Being jammed into a narrow, shadowed fissure was not conducive to restorative sleep.
And the voices within the song . . . strange, yet familiar. Like friends . . . who never sang a word in their lives. Nothing to quell the spirit—no, these voices give music to war . . .
He collected his waterskin and drank deep to wash the taste of dust from his mouth, then spent a few moments checking his weapons and gear. By the time he was done his heart had slowed and the trembling was gone from his hands.
He did not think it likely that the Whirlwind Goddess would detect his presence, so long as he travelled through shadows at every opportunity. And, in a sense, he well knew, night itself was naught but a shadow. Provided he hid well during the day, he expected to be able to reach Sha’ik’s encampment undiscovered.
Shouldering his pack, he set off. The stars overhead were barely visible through the suspended dust. Raraku, for all its wild, blasted appearance, was crisscrossed with countless trails. Many led to false or poisoned springs; others to an equally certain death in the wastes of sand. And beneath the skein of footpaths and old tribal cairns, the remnants of coastal roads wound atop the ridges, linking what would have been islands in a vast, shallow bay long ago.
Kalam made his way in a steady jog across a stone-littered depression where a half-dozen ships—the wood petrified and looking like grey bones in the gloom—had scattered their remnants in the hard-packed clay. The Whirlwind had lifted the mantle of sands to reveal Raraku’s prehistory, the long-lost civilizations that had known only darkness for millennia. The scene was vaguely disturbing, as if whispering back to the nightmares that had plagued his sleep.
And that damned song.
The bones of sea-creatures crunched underfoot as the assassin continued on. There was no wind, the air almost preternatural in its stillness. Two hundred paces ahead, the land rose once more, climbing to an ancient, crumbled causeway. A glance up to the ridge froze Kalam in his tracks. He dropped low, hands closing on the grips of his long-knives.
A column of soldiers was walking along the causeway. Helmed heads lowered, burdened with wounded comrades, pikes wavering and glinting in the grainy darkness.
Kalam judged their numbers as close to six hundred. A third of the way along the column rose a standard. Affixed to the top of the pole was a human ribcage, the ribs bound together by leather strips, in which two skulls had been placed. Antlers rode the shaft all the way down to the bearer’s pallid hands.
The soldiers marched in silence.
Hood’s breath. They’re ghosts.
The assassin slowly straightened. Strode forward. He ascended the slope until he stood, like someone driven to the roadside by the army’s passage, whilst the soldiers shambled past—those on his side close enough to reach out and touch, were they flesh and blood.
‘He walks up from the sea.’
Kalam started. An unknown language, yet he understood it. A glance back—and the depression he had just crossed was filled with shimmering water. Five ships rode low in the waters a hundred sweeps of the oar offshore, three of them in flames, shedding ashes and wreckage as they drifted. Of the remaining two, one was fast sinking, whilst the last seemed lifeless, bodies visible on its deck and in the rigging.
‘A soldier.’
‘A killer.’
‘Too many spectres on this road, friends. Are we not haunted enough?’
‘Aye, Dessimbelackis throws endless legions at us, and no matter how many we slaughter, the First Emperor finds more.’
‘Not true, Kullsan. Five of the Seven Protectors are no more. Does that mean nothing? And the sixth will not recover, now that we have banished the black beast itself.’
‘I wonder, did we indeed drive it from this realm?’
‘If the Nameless Ones speak true, then yes—’
‘Your question, Kullsan, confuses me. Are we not marching from the city? Were we not just victorious?’
The conversation had begun to fade as the soldiers who had been speaking marched onward, but Kalam heard the doubting Kullsan’s reply: ‘Then why is our road lined with ghosts, Erethal?’
More importantly, Kalam added to himself, why is mine?
He waited as the last of the soldiers marched past, then stepped forward to cross the ancient road.
And saw, on the opposite side, a tall, gaunt figure in faded orange robes. Black pits for eyes. One fleshless hand gripping an ivory staff carved spirally, on which the apparition leaned as if it was the only thing holding it up.
‘Listen to them now, spirit from the future,’ it rasped, cocking its head.
And now Kalam heard it. The ghost soldiers had begun singing.
Sweat sprang out on the assassin’s midnight skin. I’ve heard that song before . . . or no, something just like it. A variation . . . ‘What in the Abyss . . . You, Tanno Spiritwalker, explain this—’
‘Spiritwalker? Is that the name I will acquire? Is it an honorific? Or the acknowledgement of a curse?’
‘What do you mean, priest?’
‘I am no priest. I am Tanno, the Eleventh and last Seneschal of Yaraghatan, banished by the First Emperor for my treasonous alliance with the Nameless Ones. Did you know what he would do? Would any of us have guessed? Seven Protectors indeed, but far more than that, oh yes, far more . . .’ Steps halting, the spectre walked onto the road and began dragging itself along in the wake of the column. ‘I gave them a song, to mark their last battle,’ it rasped. ‘I gave them that at least . . .’
Kalam watched as the figures disappeared into the darkness. He swung about. The sea was gone, the basin’s bones revealed once more. He shivered. Why am I witness to these things? I’m reasonably certain I’m not dead . . . although I soon might be, I suppose. Are these death-visions? He had heard of such things, but held little stock in them. Hood’s embrace was far too random to be knotted into the skein of fate . . . until it had already occurred—or so the assassin’s experience told him.
He shook his head and crossed the road, slipping down the crumbling verge to the boulder-strewn flat beyond. This stretch had once been naught but dunes, before the Whirlwind’s rise. Its elevation was higher—perhaps twice the height of a man—than the ancient seabed he had just traversed, and here, beyond the tumbled stones, lay the gridwork foundations of a city. Deep canals cut through it, and he could make out where bridges had once spanned them here and there. Few of the wall foundations rose higher than the assassin’s shins, but some of the buildings
looked to have been large—a match to anything found in Unta, or Malaz City. Deep pits marked where cisterns had been built, where the seawater from the other side of the causeway could, stripped of salt by the intervening sands, collect. The remnants of terraces indicated a proliferation of public gardens.
He set out, and soon found himself walking down what had once been a main thoroughfare, aligned north-south. The ground underfoot was a thick, solid carpet of potsherds, scoured and bleached by sand and salt. And now I am like a ghost, the last to walk these thoroughfares, with every wall transparent, every secret revealed.
It was then that he heard horses.
Kalam sprinted to the nearest cover, a set of sunken stairs that once led to the subterranean level of a large building. The thump of horse hoofs drew closer, approaching from one of the side avenues on the opposite side of the main street. The assassin ducked lower as the first rider appeared.
Pardu.
Drawing rein, cautious, weapons out. Then a gesture. Four more desert warriors appeared, followed by a fifth Pardu, this last one a shaman, Kalam concluded, given the man’s wild hair, fetishes and ratty goat-hide cape. Glaring about, eyes glinting as if raging with some internal fire, the shaman drew out a long bone and began waving it in circles overhead. Then he lifted his head and loudly sniffed the air.
Kalam slowly eased his long-knives from their scabbards.
The shaman growled a few words, then pivoted on the high Pardu saddle and slipped to the ground. He landed badly, twisting an ankle, and spent the next few moments hobbling about, cursing and spitting. His warriors swung down from their horses in a more graceful fashion, and Kalam caught the flash of a quickly hidden grin from one of them.
The shaman began stamping around, muttering under his breath, reaching up with his free hand to tug at his tangled hair every now and then. And in his movements Kalam saw the beginnings of a ritual.
Something told the assassin that these Pardu did not belong to Sha’ik’s Army of the Apocalypse. They were too furtive by far. He slowly sheathed his otataral long-knife and settled back in the deep shadow of the recess, to wait, and watch.
The shaman’s muttering had fallen into a rhythmic cadence, and he reached into a bag of sewn hides at his belt, collecting a handful of small objects which he began scattering about as he walked his endless circle. Black and glittering, the objects crackled and popped on the ground as if they had been just plucked from a hearth. An acrid stench wafted out from the ritual circle.
Kalam never discovered if what occurred next had been intended; without doubt its conclusion was not. The darkness lying heavy on the street seemed to convulsively explode—and then screams tore the air.
Two massive beasts had arrived, immediately attacking the Pardu warriors. As if darkness itself had taken form, only the shimmer of their sleek hides betrayed their presence, and they moved with blurring speed, amidst spraying blood and snapping bones. The shaman shrieked as one of the enormous beasts closed. Huge black head swung to one side, jaws opening wide, and the shaman’s head vanished within the maw. A wet crunch as the jaws ground shut.
The hound—for that, Kalam realized, was what it was—then stepped away, as the shaman’s headless body staggered back, then sat down with a thump.
The other hound had begun feeding on the corpses of the Pardu warriors, and the sickening sound of breaking bones continued.
These, Kalam could well see, were not Hounds of Shadow. If anything, they were larger, bulkier, massing more like a bear than a dog. Yet, as they now filled their bellies with raw human flesh, they moved with savage grace, primal and deadly. Devoid of fear and supremely confident, as if this strange place they had come to was as familiar to them as their own hunting grounds.
The sight of them made the assassin’s skin crawl. Motionless, he had slowed his own breathing, then the pace of his heart. There were no other alternatives available to him, at least until the hounds left.
But they seemed to be in no hurry, both settling down to split the last long bones and gnaw at joints.
Hungry, these bastards. Wonder where they came from . . . and what they’re going to do now.
Then one lifted its head, and stiffened. With a deep grunt it rose. The other continued crunching through a human knee, seemingly indifferent to its companion’s sudden tension.
Even when the beast turned to stare at the place where Kalam crouched.
It came at him fast.
Kalam leapt up the worn stairs, one hand reaching into the folds of his telaba. He pivoted hard and sprinted, even as he flung his last handful of smoky diamonds—his own cache, not Iskaral Pust’s—into his wake.
A skittering of claws immediately behind him, and he flung himself to one side, rolling over a shoulder as the hound flashed through the place where he had been a moment earlier. The assassin continued rolling until he was on his feet once more, tugging desperately at the whistle looped around his neck.
The hound skidded across dusty flagstones, legs cycling wildly beneath it as it twisted around.
A glance showed the other hound entirely unmindful, still gnawing away in the street beyond.
Then Kalam clamped the whistle between his teeth. He scrambled in a half-circle to bring the scatter of diamonds between himself and the attacking hound.
And blew through the bone tube as hard as he could.
Five azalan demons rose from the ancient stone floor. There seemed to be no moment of disorientation among them, for three of the five closed instantly on the nearer hound, whilst the remaining two flanked Kalam as they clambered, in a blur of limbs, towards the hound in the street. Which finally looked up.
Curious as he might have been to witness the clash of behemoths, Kalam wasted no time in lingering. He ran, angling southward as he leapt over wall foundations, skirted around black-bottomed pits, and set his gaze fixedly on the higher ground fifteen hundred paces distant.
Snaps and snarls and the crash and grind of tumbling stones evinced an ongoing battle in the main street behind him. My apologies, Shadowthrone . . . but at least one of your demons should survive long enough to escape. In which case, you will be informed of a new menace unleashed on this world. And consider this—if there’s two of them, there’s probably more.
He ran onward through the night, until all sounds behind him vanished.
An evening of surprises. In a jewelmonger’s kiosk in G’danisban. At a sumptuous, indolent dinner shared by a Kaleffa merchant and one of his prized client’s equally prized wives. And in Ehrlitan, among a fell gathering of flesh-traders and murderers plotting the betrayal of a Malazan collaborator who had issued a secret invitation to Admiral Nok’s avenging fleet—which even now was rounding the Otataral Sea on its way to an ominous rendezvous with eleven transports approaching from Genabackis—a collaborator who, it would turn out, would awaken the next morning not only hale, but no longer facing imminent assassination. And on the coastal caravan trail twenty leagues west of Ehrlitan, the quietude of the night would be broken by horrified screams—loud and lingering, sufficient to awaken a maul-fisted old man living alone in a tower overlooking the Otataral Sea, if only momentarily, before he rolled over and fell once more into dreamless, restful sleep.
At the distant, virtually inaudible whistle, countless smoky diamonds that had originated from a trader in G’danisban’s market round crumbled into dust—whether placed for safe-keeping in locked chests, worn as rings or pendants, or residing in a merchant’s hoard. And from the dust rose azalan demons, awakened long before their intended moment. But that suited them just fine.
They had, one and all, appointed tasks that demanded a certain solitude, at least initially. Making it necessary to quickly silence every witness, which the azalan were pleased to do. Proficiently and succinctly.
For those that had appeared in the ruins of a city in Raraku, however, to find two creatures whose existence was very nearly lost to the demons’ racial memory, the moments immediately following their arrival proved s
omewhat more problematic. For it became quickly apparent that the hounds were not inclined to relinquish their territory, such as it was.
The fight was fierce and protracted, concluding unsatisfactorily for the five azalan, who were eventually driven off, battered and bleeding and eager to seek deep shadows in which to hide from the coming day. To hide, and lick their wounds.
And in the realm known as Shadow, a certain god sat motionless on his insubstantial throne. Already recovered from his shock, his mind was racing.
Racing.
Grinding, splintering wood, mast snapping overhead to drag cordage down, a heavy concussion that shivered through the entire craft, then only the sound of water dripping onto a stone floor.
With a muted groan, Cutter dragged himself upright. ‘Apsalar?’
‘I’m here.’
Their voices echoed. Walls and ceiling were close—the runner had landed in a chamber.
‘So much for subtle,’ the Daru muttered, searching for his pack amidst the wreckage. ‘I’ve a lantern. Give me a moment.’
‘I am not going anywhere,’ she replied from somewhere near the stern.
Her words chilled him, so forlorn did they sound. His groping hands closed on his pack and he dragged it close. He rummaged inside until his hand closed on and retrieved first the small lantern and then the tinder box.
The fire-making kit was from Darujhistan, and consisted of flint and iron bar, wick-sticks, igniting powder, the fibrous inner lining from tree bark, and a long-burning gel the city’s alchemists rendered from the gas-filled caverns beneath the city. Sparks flashed three times before the powder caught with a hiss and flare of flame. The bark lining followed, then, dipping a wick-stick into the gel, Cutter set it alight. He then transferred the flame to the lantern.
A sphere of light burgeoned in the chamber, revealing the crushed wreckage of the runner, rough-hewn stone walls and vaulted ceiling. Apsalar was still seated near the splintered shaft of the tiller, barely illumined by the lantern’s light. More like an apparition than a flesh and blood person.