The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (11 page)

“Has Caladan Brood backed away?” Hairlock snapped.

“He is not Tiste Andii, Hairlock. He’s human—some say with Barghast blood, but nonetheless he shares nothing of Elder blood, or its ways.”

Tattersail said, “You’re counting on Rake betraying Pale’s wizards—betraying the pact made between them.”

“The risk is not as overreaching as it may seem,” the High Mage said. “Bellurdan has done the research in Genabaris, Sorceress. Some new scrolls of
Gothos’ Folly
were discovered in a mountain fastness beyond Blackdog Forest. Among the writings are discussions of the Tiste Andii, and other peoples from the Elder Age. And remember, Moon’s Spawn has retreated from a direct confrontation with the Empire before.”

The waves of fear sweeping through Tattersail made her knees weak. She sat down again, heavily enough to make the camp chair creak. “You’ve condemned us to death,” she said, “if your gamble proves wrong. Not just us, High Mage, all of Onearm’s Host.”

Tayschrenn swung round slowly, putting his back to Hairlock and the others. “Empress Laseen’s orders,” he said, without turning. “Our colleagues come by Warren. When they arrive, I will detail the positioning. That is all.” He strode into the map room, resumed his original stance.

Dujek seemed to have aged in front of Tattersail’s eyes. Swiftly she slid her glance from him, too anguished to meet the abandonment in his eyes, and the suspicion curdling beneath its surface.
Coward—that’s what you are, woman. A coward
.

Finally the High Fist cleared his throat. “Prepare your Warrens, cadre. As usual, always an even trade.”

Give the High Mage credit, Tattersail thought. There was Tayschrenn, standing on the first hill, almost inside the Moon’s shadow. They had arrayed themselves into three groups, each taking a hilltop on the plain outside Pale’s walls. The cadre’s was most distant, Tayschrenn’s the closest. On the center hill stood the three other High Mages. Tattersail knew them all. Nightchill, raven-haired, tall, imperious and with a cruel streak the old Emperor used to drool over. At her side her lifelong companion, Bellurdan, skull-crusher, a Thelomen giant who would test his prodigious strength against the Moon’s portal, should it come to that. And A’Karonys, fire-wielder, short and round, his burning staff taller than a spear.

The 2nd and 6th Armies had formed ranks on the plain, weapons bared and awaiting the call to march on the city when the time came. Seven thousand veterans and four thousand recruits. The Black Moranth legions lined the ridge to the west a quarter-mile distant.

No wind stirred the midday air. Biting midges roved in visible clouds through the soldiers waiting below. The sky was overcast, the cloud cover thin but absolute.

Tattersail stood on the hill’s crest, sweat running down under her clothing, and watched the soldiers on the plain before facing her meager cadre. At full strength, six mages should have been arrayed behind her, but there were only
two. Off to one side Hairlock waited, wrapped in the dark gray raincloak that was his battle attire—looking smug.

Calot nudged Tattersail and jerked his head toward Hairlock. “What’s he so happy about?”

“Hairlock,” Tattersail called. The man swung his head. “Were you right about the three High Mages?”

He smiled, then turned away again.

“I hate it when he’s hiding something,” Calot said.

The sorceress grunted. “He’s added something up, all right. What’s so particular about Nightchill, Bellurdan, and A’Karonys? Why did Tayschrenn pick them and how did Hairlock know he’d pick them?”

“Questions, questions.” Calot sighed. “All three are old hands at this kind of stuff. Back in the days of the Emperor they each commanded a company of Adepts—when the Empire had enough mages in the ranks to form actual companies. A’Karonys climbed through the ranks in the Falari Campaign, and Bellurdan and Nightchill were from before even then—came down from Fenn on the Quon mainland during the unification wars.”

“All old hands,” Tattersail mused, “as you said. None have been active lately, have they? Their last campaign was Seven Cities—”

“Where A’Karonys took a beating in the Panpot’sun Wastes—”

“He was left hanging—the Emperor had just been assassinated. Everything was chaotic. The T’lan Imass refused to acknowledge the new Empress, marched themselves off into the Jhag Odhan.”

“Rumor has it they’re back, at half-strength—whatever they ran into out there wasn’t pleasant.”

Tattersail nodded. “Nightchill and Bellurdan were told to report to Nathilog, left sitting on their hands for the past six, seven years—”

“Until Tayschrenn sent the Thelomen off to Genabaris, to study a pile of ancient scrolls, of all things.”

“I’m frightened,” Tattersail admitted. “Very frightened. Did you see Dujek’s face? He
knew
something—a realization, and it hit him like a dagger in the back.”

“Time to work,” Hairlock called.

Calot and Tattersail swung around.

A shiver ran through her. Moon’s Spawn had been revolving steadily for the last three years. It had just stopped. Near its very top, on the side facing them, was a small ledge, and a shadowed recess had appeared. A portal. No movement showed yet. “He knows,” she whispered.

“And he isn’t running,” Calot added.

Down on the first hill, High Mage Tayschrenn rose and lifted his arms out to the sides. A wave of golden flame spanned his hands, then rolled upward, growing as it raced toward Moon’s Spawn. The spell crashed against the black rock, sending chunks hurtling out, then down. A rain of death descended into the city of Pale, and among the Malazan legions waiting in the plain.

“It’s begun,” Calot breathed.

Silence answered Tayschrenn’s first attack, save for the faint scatter of rubble on the city’s tiled rooftops and the distant cries of wounded soldiers on the plain. Everyone’s eyes were trained upward.

The reply was not what anyone expected.

A black cloud enshrouded Moon’s Spawn, followed by faint shrieking. A moment later the cloud spread out, fragmenting, and Tattersail realized what she was seeing.

Ravens
.

Thousands upon thousands of Great Ravens. They must have nested among the crags and pocks in the Moon’s surface. Their shrieks grew more defined, a caterwaul of outrage. They wheeled out from the Moon, their fifteen-foot wingspans catching the wind and lifting them high above the city and plain.

Fear lurched into terror in Tattersail’s heart.

Hairlock barked a laugh and whirled to them. “These are the Moon’s messengers, colleagues!” Madness glittered in his eyes. “These carrion birds!” He flung back his cloak and raised his arms. “Imagine a lord who’s kept thirty thousand Great Ravens well fed!”

A figure had appeared on the ledge before the portal, its arms upraised, long silver hair blowing from its head.

Mane of Chaos. Anomander Rake. Lord of the black-skinned Tiste Andii, who has looked down on a hundred thousand winters, who has tasted the blood of dragons, who leads the last of his kind, seated in the Throne of Sorrow and a kingdom tragic and fey—a kingdom with no land to call its own
.

Anomander Rake looked tiny against the backdrop of his edifice, almost insubstantial at this distance. The illusion was about to be shattered. She gasped as the aura of his power bloomed outward—
to see it at such a distance
. . . “Channel your Warrens,” Tattersail commanded, her voice cracking. “Now!”

Even as Rake gathered his power, twin balls of blue fire raced upward from the center hill. They struck the Moon near its base and rocked it. Tayschrenn launched another wave of gilden flames, crashing with amber spume and red-tongued smoke.

The Moon’s lord responded. A black, writhing wave rolled down to the first hill. The High Mage was buffeted to his knees deflecting it, the hilltop around him blighted as the necrous power rolled down the slopes, engulfing nearby ranks of soldiers. Tattersail watched as a midnight flash swallowed the hapless men, followed by a thump that thundered through the earth. When the flash dissipated, the soldiers lay in rotting heaps, mown down like stalks of grain.

Kurald Galain sorcery. Elder magic, the Breath of Chaos
.

Her breaths coming fast and tight in her chest, Tattersail felt her Thyr Warren flow into her. She shaped it, muttering chain-words under her breath, then unleashed the power. Calot followed, drawing from his Mockra Warren. Hairlock surrounded himself in his own mysterious source, and the cadre entered the fray.

Everything narrowed down for Tattersail from then on, yet a part of her mind remained distant, held on a leash of terror, observing with a kind of muffled vision all that happened around her.

The world became a living nightmare, as sorcery flew upward to batter Moon’s Spawn, and sorcery rained downward, indiscriminate and devastating. Earth rose skyward in thundering columns. Rocks ripped through men like hot stones through snow. A downpour of ash descended to cover the living and dead alike. The sky dimmed to pallid rose, the sun a coppery disc behind the haze.

She saw a wave sweep past Hairlock’s defenses, cutting him in half. His howl was more rage than pain, instantly muted as virulent power washed over Tattersail and she found her own defenses assailed by the sorcery’s cold, screaming will as it sought to destroy her. She reeled back, brought up short by Calot as he added his Mockra power to bolster her faltering parries. Then the assault passed, sweeping on and down the hill to their left.

Tattersail had fallen to her knees. Calot stood over her, chaining words of power around her, his face turned away from Moon’s Spawn, fixed on something or someone down below on the plain. His eyes were wide with terror.

Too late Tattersail understood what was happening. Calot was defending her at his own expense. A final act, even as he watched his own death erupt around him. A blast of bright fire engulfed him. Abruptly the net of protection over Tattersail vanished. A wash of crackling heat from where Calot had stood sent her tumbling to one side. She felt more than heard her own shriek, and her sense of distance closed in then, a layer of mental defense obliterated.

Spitting dirt and ashes, Tattersail climbed to her feet and fought on, no longer launching attacks, just struggling to remain alive. Somewhere in the back of her head a voice was screaming, urgent, panicked.
Calot had faced the plain not Moon’s Spawn—he’d faced right! Hairlock had been struck from the plain!

She watched as a Kenryll’ah demon arose beneath Nightchill. Laughing shrilly, the towering, gaunt creature tore Nightchill limb from limb. It had begun feeding by the time Bellurdan arrived. The Thelomen bellowed as the demon raked its knife-like talons against his chest. Ignoring the wounds and the blood that sprayed from them, he closed his hands around the demon’s head and crushed it.

A’Karonys unleashed gouts of flame from the staff in his hands until Moon’s Spawn almost disappeared inside a ball of fire. Then ethereal wings of ice closed around the short, fat wizard, freezing him where he stood. An instant later he was crushed to dust.

Magic rained in an endless storm around Tayschrenn, where he still knelt on the withered, blackened hilltop. But every wave directed his way he shunted aside, wreaking devastation among the soldiers cowering on the plain. Through the carnage filling the air, through the ash and shrill-tongued ravens, through the raining rocks and the screams of the wounded and dying, through the blood-chilling shrieks of demons flinging themselves into ranks of soldiery—through it all sounded the steady thunder of the High Mage’s onslaught. Enormous cliffs, sheared from the Moon’s face and raging with flame and trailing columns of
black smoke, fell down into the city of Pale, transforming the city into its own cauldron of death and chaos.

Her ears numbed and body throbbing as if her flesh itself gasped for breath, Tattersail was slow to grasp that the sorcery had ceased. Even the voice shrieking in the back of her mind had fallen silent. She raised bleary eyes to see Moon’s Spawn, billowing smoke and ablaze in a dozen places on its ravaged mien, moving away, pulling back. Then it was past the city, unsteady in its revolutions and leaning to one side. Moon’s Spawn headed south, toward the distant Tahlyn Mountains.

She looked around, vaguely recalling that a company of soldiers had sought refuge on the blasted summit. Then something had hit her, taking all she had left to resist it. Now, nothing was left of the company but their armor.
Always an even trade, Sorceress
. She fought against a sob, then swung her attention to the first hill.

Tayschrenn was down, but alive. A half-dozen marines scampered up the hillside to gather around the High Mage. A minute later they carried him away.

Bellurdan, most of his clothing burned away and his flesh scorched red, remained on the center hill, collecting Nightchill’s scattered limbs and raising his voice in a mournful wail. The sight, in all its horror and pathos, struck Tattersail’s heart like a hammer on an anvil. Quickly she turned away. “Damn you, Tayschrenn.”

Pale had fallen. The price was Onearm’s Host and four mages. Only now were the Black Moranth legions moving in. Tattersail’s jaw clenched, her lips drawing from their fullness into a thin white line. Something tugged at her memory, and she felt a growing certainty that this scene was not yet played out.

The sorceress waited.

The Warrens of Magic dwelt in the beyond. Find the gate and nudge it open a crack. What leaks out is yours to shape
. With these words a young woman set out on the path to sorcery.
Open yourself to the Warren that comes to you—that finds you. Draw forth its power—as much as your body and soul are capable of containing—but remember, when the body fails, the gate closes
.

Tattersail’s limbs ached. She felt as though someone had been beating her with clubs for the past two hours. The last thing she had expected was that bitter taste on her tongue that said something nasty and ugly had come to the hilltop. Such warnings seldom came to a practitioner unless the gate was open, a Warren unveiled and bristling with power. She’d heard tales from other sorcerers, and she’d read moldy scrolls that touched on moments like these, when the power arrived groaning and deadly, and each time, it was said, a
god
had stepped onto the mortal ground.