The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (106 page)

Regaining control of the gelding, Fiddler drove his heels into its flanks. They bolted forward, savagely riding down the group's generous leader. From under the horse's stamping hooves came the sound of snapping bones and the sickening crushing of his skull. Fiddler twisted in the saddle to find the remaining three men.

Two of them writhed in keening pain near Apsalar, who sat calm in the saddle, a thick-bladed kethra knife in each gloved hand.

Crokus had dismounted and was now crouching over the last body, removing a throwing knife from a blood-drenched throat.

They all turned at a grinding of potsherds to see the girl claw her way clear of the cart, scramble to her feet, then race into the shadows of an alley, disappearing from view.

The sound of horsemen coming from the north gate reached them.

“Ride on!” Fiddler snapped.

Crokus leaped onto his mount's back. Apsalar sheathed her blades and gave the sapper a nod as she gathered up the reins.

“Ride through—to the south gate!”

Fiddler watched the two of them gallop on, then he slipped from the gelding's back and approached the two men Apsalar had wounded. “Ah,” he breathed when he came close and saw their slashed-open crotches, “that's the lass I know.”

The troop of horsemen arrived. They all wore ochre sashes diagonally across their chain-covered chests. Their commander opened his mouth to speak but Fiddler was first.

“Is no man's daughter safe in this seven-cursed city? She was no Mezla, by my ancestors! Is this your Apocalypse? Then I pray the pit of snakes awaits you in the Seven Hells!”

The commander was frowning. “Gral, you say these men were rapists?”

“A Mezla slut gets what she deserves, but the girl was no Mezla.”

“So you killed these men. All six of them.”

“Aye.”

“Who were the other two riders with you?”

“The pilgrims I am sworn to protect.”

“And yet they ride into the city's heart…without you at their side.”

Fiddler scowled.

The commander scanned the victims. “Two yet live.”

“May they be cursed with a hundred thousand more breaths before Hood takes them.”

The commander leaned on his saddlehorn and was silent a moment. “Rejoin your pilgrims, Gral. They have need of your services.”

Growling, Fiddler remounted. “Who rules G'danisban now?”

“None. The army of the Apocalypse holds but two districts. We shall have the others by the morrow.”

Fiddler pulled the horse around and kicked it into a canter. The troop did not follow. The sapper swore under his breath—the commander was right, he should not have sent Crokus and Apsalar on. He knew himself lucky in that his remaining with the rapists could so easily be construed as typically Gral—the opportunity to brag to the red-swathed riders, the chance to voice curses and display a tribesman's unassailable arrogance—but it risked offering up to contempt his vow to protect his charges. He'd seen the mild disgust in the commander's eyes. In all, he'd been
too
much of a Gral horsewarrior. If not for Apsalar's frightening talents, those two would now be in serious trouble.

He rode hard in pursuit, noting belatedly that the gelding was responding to his every touch. The horse knew he was no Gral, but it'd evidently decided he was behaving in an approved manner, well enough to accord him some respect. It was, he reflected, this day's lone victory.

 

G'danisban's central square was the site of past slaughter. Fiddler caught up with his companions when they had just begun walking their horses through the horrific scene. They both turned upon hearing his approach, and Fiddler could only nod at the relief in their faces when they recognized him.

Even the Gral gelding hesitated at the square's edge. The bodies covering the cobbles numbered several hundred. Old men and old women, and children, for the most part. They had all been savagely cut to pieces or, in some cases, burned alive. The stench of sun-warmed blood, bile and seared flesh hung thick in the square.

Fiddler swallowed back his revulsion, cleared his throat. “Beyond this square,” he said, “all pretenses of control cease.”

Crokus gestured shakily. “These are Malazan?”

“Aye, lad.”

“During the conquest, did the Malazan armies do the same to the locals here?”

“You mean, is this just reprisal?”

Apsalar spoke with an almost personal vehemence. “The Emperor warred against armies, not civilians—”

“Except at Aren,” Fiddler sardonically interjected, recalling his words with the Tano Spiritwalker. “When the T'lan Imass rose in the city—”

“Not by Kellanved's command!” she retorted. “Who ordered the T'lan Imass into Aren? I shall tell you. Surly, the commander of the Claw, the woman who took upon herself a new name—”

“Laseen.” Fiddler eyed the young woman quizzically. “I have never before heard that assertion, Apsalar. There were no written orders—none found, in any case—”

“I should have killed her there and then,” Apsalar muttered.

Astonished, Fiddler glanced at Crokus. The Daru shook his head.

“Apsalar,” the sapper said slowly, “you were but a child when Aren rebelled then fell to the T'lan Imass.”

“I know that,” she replied. “Yet these memories…they are so clear. I was…sent to Aren…to see the slaughter. To find out what happened. I…I
argued
with Surly. No one else was in the room. Just Surly and…and me.”

They reached the other end of the square. Fiddler reined in and regarded Apsalar for a long moment.

Crokus said, “It was the Rope, the patron god of assassins, who possessed you. Yet your memories are—”

“Dancer's.” As soon as he said it, Fiddler knew it was true. “The Rope has another name. Cotillion. Hood's breath, so obvious! No one doubted that the assassinations occurred. Both Dancer and the Emperor…murdered by Laseen and her chosen Clawmasters. What did Laseen do with the bodies? No one knows.”

“So Dancer lived,” Crokus said with a frown. “And ascended. Became a patron god in the Warren of Shadow.”

Apsalar said nothing, watching and listening with a carefully controlled absence of expression on her face.

Fiddler was cursing himself for a blind idiot. “What House appeared in the Deck of Dragons shortly afterward? Shadow. Two new Ascendants. Cotillion…and Shadowthrone…”

Crokus's eyes widened. “Shadowthrone is Kellanved,” he said. “They weren't assassinated—either of them. They escaped by ascending.”

“Into the Shadow Realm.” Fiddler smiled wryly. “To nurse their thoughts of vengeance, leading eventually to Cotillion possessing a young fishergirl in Itko Kan, to begin what would be a long, devious path to Laseen. Which failed. Apsalar?”

“Your words are true,” she said without inflection.

“Then why,” the sapper demanded, “didn't Cotillion reveal himself to us? To Whiskeyjack, to Kalam? To Dujek? Dammit, Dancer knew us all—and if that bastard understood the notion of friendship at all, then those I've just mentioned were his friends—”

Apsalar's sudden laugh rattled both men. “I could lie and say he sought to protect you all. Do you really wish the truth, Bridgeburner?”

Fiddler felt himself flushing. “I do,” he growled.

“Dancer trusted but two men. One was Kellanved. The other was Dassem Ultor, the First Sword. Dassem is dead. I am sorry if this offends you, Fiddler. Thinking on it, I would suggest that
Cotillion
trusts no one. Not even Shadowthrone. Emperor Kellanved…well enough.
Ascendant
Kellanved—Shadowthrone—ah, that is something wholly different.”

“He was a fool,” Fiddler pronounced, gathering up his reins.

Apsalar's smile was strangely wistful.

“Enough words,” Crokus said. “Let's get out of this damned city.”

“Aye.”

 

The short journey from the square to the south gate was surprisingly uneventful, for all the commander's warnings. Dusk shrouded the streets and smoke from a burning tenement block spread an acrid haze that made breathing tortured. They rode through the silent aftermath of slaughter, when the rage has passed and awareness returns with shock and shame.

The moment was a single indrawn breath in what Fiddler knew would be an ever-burgeoning wildfire. If the Malazan legions had not been withdrawn from nearby Pan'potsun, there would have been the chance of crushing the life from this first spark, with a brutality to match the renegades'. When slaughter is flung back on the perpetrators, the thirst for blood is quickly quenched.

The Emperor would have acted swiftly, decisively.
Hood's breath, he would never have let it slide this far
.

Less than a tenth of a bell after leaving the square they passed beneath the smoke-blackened arch of an unguarded south gate. Beyond stretched the Pan'potsun Odhan, flanked to the west by the ridge that divided the Odhan from the Holy Desert Raraku. The night's first stars flickered alight overhead.

Fiddler broke the long silence. “There is a village a little over two leagues to the south. With luck it won't be a carrion feast. Not yet, anyway.”

Crokus cleared his throat. “Fiddler, if Kalam had known…about Dancer, I mean, Cotillion…”

The sapper grimaced, glanced at Apsalar. “She'd be with him right now.”

Whatever response Crokus intended was interrupted by a squealing, flapping shape that dropped down out of the darkness to collide with the lad's back. Crokus let out a shout of alarm as the creature gripped his hair and clambered onto his head.

“It's just Moby,” Fiddler said, trying to shake off the jitters the familiar's arrival had elicited. He squinted. “Looks like he's been in a scrap,” he observed.

Crokus pulled Moby down into his arms. “He's bleeding everywhere!”

“Nothing serious, I'd guess,” Fiddler said.

“What makes you so sure?”

The sapper grinned. “Ever seen bhok'arala mate?”

“Fiddler,” Apsalar's tone was tight. “We are pursued.”

Reining in, Fiddler rose in the stirrups and twisted around. In the distant gloom was a cloud of dust. He hissed a curse. “The Gral clan.”

“We ride weary mounts,” Apsalar said.

“Aye. Queen grant us there's fresh horses to be had in New Velar.”

 

At the base of three converging gorges, Kalam left the false path and carefully guided his horse through a narrow drainage channel. The old memories of the ways into Raraku felt heavy in his bones.
Everything's changed, yet nothing has changed
.

Of the countless trails that passed through the hills, all but a few led only to death. The false routes were cleverly directed away from the few waterholes and springs. Without water, Raraku's sun was a fatal companion. Kalam knew the Holy Desert, the map within his head—decades old—was seared anew with every landmark he recognized. Pinnacles, tilted rocks, the wend of a flood channel—he felt as if he had never left, for all his new loyalties, his conflicting allegiances.
Once more, a child of this desert. Once more, servant to its sacred need
.

As the wind and sun did to the sand and stone, Raraku shaped all who had known it. Crossing it had etched the souls of the three companies that would come to be called the Bridgeburners.
We could imagine no other name. Raraku burned our pasts away, making all that came before a trail of ashes
.

He swung the stallion onto a scree, rocks and sand skittering and tumbling as the beast scrambled up the slope, regaining the true path along the ridge line that would run in a slow descent westward to Raraku's floor.

Stars glittered like knife-points overhead. The bleached limestone crags shone silver in the faint moonlight, as if reflecting back memories of the day just past.

The assassin led his horse between the crumbled foundations of two watchtowers. Potsherds and fractured brick crunched under the stallion's hooves. Rhizan darted from his path with a soft flit of wings. Kalam felt he had returned home.

“No farther,” a rasping voice warned.

Smiling, Kalam reined in.

“A bold announcement,” the voice continued. “A stallion the color of sand, red telaba…”

“I announce what I am,” Kalam replied casually. He had pin-pointed the source of the voice, in the deep shadows of a sinkhole just beyond the left-hand watchtower. There was a crossbow trained on the assassin, but Kalam knew he could dodge the quarrel, rolling from the saddle with the stallion between him and the stranger. Two well-thrown knives into the darker shape amidst the shadows would punctuate the exchange. He felt at ease.

“Disarm him,” the voice drawled.

Two massive hands closed on his wrists from behind and savagely pulled both his arms back, until he was dragged, cursing with rage, over the stallion's rump. As soon as he cleared the beast, the hands twisted his body around and drove him hard, face first, into the stony ground. The air knocked from his lungs, Kalam was helpless.

He heard the one who'd spoken rise up from the sinkhole and approach. The stallion snapped his teeth but was swiftly calmed at a soft word from the stranger. The assassin listened as the saddlebags were lifted away and set on the ground. Flaps opened. “Ah, he's the one, then.”

The hands released Kalam. Groaning, the assassin managed to roll over. A giant of a man stood over him, his face tattooed like shattered glass. A long single braid hung down the left side of his chest. The man wore a cloak of bhederin hide over a vest of armor that seemed made of clam shells. The wooden handle and stone pommel of a bladed weapon of some kind jutted from just under his left arm. The broad belt over the man's loincloth was oddly decorated with what looked to Kalam like dried mushroom caps of various sizes. He was over seven foot tall, yet muscled enough to seem wide, and his flat, broad face gazed down without expression.