Night of Knives (38 page)

Edgewalker said nothing.

The old man leant both his hands on the silver hound’s head of his walking stick. He and his companion Cotillion faded from view, like proverbial shadows under gathering moonlight, until they disappeared, eventually, from sight.

Edgewalker turned and limped from the House. Out upon the open plain he struck a direction towards the featureless horizon. Dust-devils dogged his heels. How many times, he wondered, had he heard that very same conceit from a claimant to the Throne? Would they never learn? How long, he wondered, would this one last? Why was it none of the long chain of hopefuls ever bothered to ask why the Throne should be empty in the first place? After all, perhaps there was a reason.

Still, this one’s residence should bode new and interesting times for Shadow. He should be thankful to these men, for in the end the one thing their presence might bring to the enduring eternity of the Realm was the potential for change and thus, the continuing possibility of . . .
progression.

The strange thing looked like nothing the boy or his sister had ever seen or heard of before. Out crabbing during the evening low tide they came across it wedged between limpet-encrusted rocks, half buried in sand. Against his sister’s silent urgings to move away, the boy used a stick to prod the pale shape.

‘It’s a man drowned,’ whispered the girl, hushed.

‘No,’ the boy answered, scornful of his sister’s knowledge of fishing, or anything else for that matter. ‘It’s scaled. It’s a fish.’

The girl peered down to where her brother knelt, and the pale shadowed length at his feet. Its glimmer in the fading light reminded her of the glow she sometimes saw at night along the edge of waves. To tease her brother, she asked, ‘Oh? What kind of a fish is it then?’

The boy’s face puckered with vexation at the silliness of girls’ questions. ‘I don’t know. A big one. It sure stinks like a fish.’

The smell was undeniable. Yet the girl remained uneasy. She thought she saw the glint of an eye, watching them from behind a tangle of seaweed at one end of the body. Hoping to scare her younger brother away from the thing, she whispered, ‘It’s a corpse. A drowned man. Come away or his ghost will haunt you.’

The boy glared back. ‘I’m not afraid.’

The girl did not answer, for behind her brother the pale shape moved. An arm, lustrous in the dark, slipped from under it. The seaweed fell back from a face of angular, knife-like lines holding molten golden eyes.

The girl screamed. The boy shrieked as a cold hand clasped his ankle. Both screamed into the empty twilight while the thing’s mouth moved, its message obliterated beneath their combined cries. Then the thing released the boy’s ankle.

Sobbing, the boy scrambled away on all fours, his sister tugging upon his tunic, urging him on, as if he were yet held back. Behind them the shape collapsed among the shadows of the rocks.

After sunset a single torch approached the rocks. The incoming tide slapped and splashed among their black, glistening teeth. Torch held high, an old man eased his way through the pools and gaps. His long hair and beard shone white, whipped in the contrary winds. At the shore, a glowing lantern revealed brother and sister, hands clasped together.

Methodically, the old man advanced. He swept the torch before him, down into crevasses between boulders and low over the rising water. He turned back to the children and called, ‘Here?’

‘Farther out,’ the girl answered in a near gasp.

The old man drew a knife from his belt. Its blade was thin,
honed down to a sickle moon. He exchanged torch and knife from hand to hand, then edged farther into the tide. Standing waist-deep in the frigid water he decided that he had gone out quite far enough. He would step up onto the last remaining tall rocks standing like a bastion before the waves, then return to tell his grandchildren that the ghost had fled back to its salty rest.

Sister and brother watched their grandfather pull himself awkwardly up the very tall rocks amid the spray of the gathering tide, then disappear down into their recesses. They waited, silent, neither daring to speak. It seemed to the girl that her grandfather had been gone a very long time when her brother cleared his throat and whispered haltingly, ‘Do you think it got him?’

‘Shush! Of course not,’ the girl soothed. But she wondered,
had it
? And if it had, what would they do? Where could they go? The town? Pyre was a day’s walk away. And besides, what help would come from there?

The girl was brought back to herself by her brother’s hissed intake of breath, his chill damp hand tightening on her own. She looked up to see the ghost lowering itself down from the boulders. But it was not a haunt because it carried a torch and no ghost would carry one of those, no matter how potent a shade it might be. Watching her grandfather gingerly feel his way from rock to rock, a new, disturbing thought occurred to her: even though their grandfather was safely returned, how could she ever be sure the ghost hadn’t got him? For haunts, she had heard from many, were notoriously slippery things, and who could say what had happened out there in the darkness, hidden among the rocks and foam and sea?

When her grandfather stepped up out of the surf, smiling, he teased her brother. The spirit, he said, was long gone back to his home in the sea. The girl knew he was lying. The ghost
had
got him. She saw it in his eyes – something new that had not
been there when he left them. Her brother was too young to see. It was there and did not go away even as he told them that sea-spirits might visit the shore from time to time, but that they all must return to the deeps, just as this one had. She nodded but was not fooled. She would keep a close eye on him.

Walking home the old man took no notice of his grandson’s tight grasp of his hand, or of his granddaughter’s thoughtful face as she trailed behind with the lantern. He saw instead the churning amber eyes of the man from the sea with hair like weeds – the Stormrider. The Rider had spoken to him and to his amazement he had understood. It had spoken a halting Korelan, the language of the isles south of the Cut where the Riders and Korel inhabitants continually warred over the Stormwall – the human-raised barricade that stands between land and sea. His own grandfather had claimed the family had come out of Korel ages ago, and had taught him bits and pieces of the tongue when he’d been a lad, enough to understand the Rider’s own crude mouthing of it. It made sense to him that the Riders should simply assume that Korelan was the human tongue.

Lying half-dead in the foam the Rider had asked a question – a single simple question that triggered an avalanche of inquiry in the old man’s thoughts.

‘Why are you killing us?’ the Rider asked, and he had stared, thinking the alien must not understand what he was asking. Us killing
them
?
They
were the demons that cracked ships open and sent men to their doom. But three more times the Rider asked before he’d managed to steel himself sufficiently to reach down close enough to draw his blade across its throat. He would never forget his surprise as the Rider’s blood gushed warm and red over his hand.

Titles and Groups

First Sword of the Empire:
Malazan and T’lan Imass, a title denoting an Imperial Champion

The Sword:
self-named bodyguard to Dassem Ultor, First Sword of the Empire

Fist:
a military governor of the Malazan Empire

High Fist:
a commader of armies within the Malazan Empire

T’lan Imass:
ancient, undead army commanded by the Emperor

The Bridgeburners:
a legendary elite division of the Malazan 2nd Army

The Crimson Guard:
a famous mercenary company opposed to the Malazan Empire

The Claw:
the covert organization of the Malazan Empire

The Talon:
rumoured Imperial covert organization predating the Claw.

Shadow Cult:
worshippers of the Shadow Realm

Peoples and Places

Stormriders, ‘Riders’:
nonhuman inhabitants of Seas of Storms

Sea of Storms:
an ocean strait between Malaz Island and the
Korel subcontinent, inhabited by the Stormriders

Y’Ghatan:
an ancient city of the Seven City region

Korel:
one name for an archipelago and subcontinent south of Quon Tali. Also known as ‘Fist’.

Mock’s Hold:
an old fort overlooking Malaz city

Shadow Hounds:
guardians of the Shadow Realm

Sorcery

The Warrens: (Other realms/worlds from which mages draw their power)

Denul:
The Path of Healing

D’riss:
The Path of the Earth

Hood’s Path:
The Path of Death

Meanas:
The Path of Shadow and illusion

Ruse:
The Path of the Sea

Rashan:
The Path of Darkness

Sere:
The Path of the Sky

Shadow:
The Path of Shadow

Thyr:
The Path of Light

Telas:
The Path of Fire

The Elder Warrens

Kurald Galain:
The Elder Warren of Darkness

Kurald Emurlahn:
The Elder Warren of Shadow

Omtose Phellack:
The Elder Jaghut Warren of Ice

IAN CAMERON ESSLEMONT grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He has studied archaeology and creative writing, has traveled extensively in Southeast Asia, and lived in Thailand and Japan for several years. He now lives in Alaska with his wife and children and is currently working on another novel set in the world of Malaz, a world he cocreated with his friend Steven Erikson.