The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (371 page)

‘Polish whatever you like,' the man replied disinterestedly, ‘just not in public. As for the Adjunct, if she can't handle a few scuffed up soldiers then she won't last long. It's a dusty world out there, and the sooner we blend in the better.'

Strings sighed. He was feeling more confident already. He faced his own soldiers. ‘Enough sitting on that straw. Start spreading it out to soak up this horse piss.' He faced Gesler again. ‘A word with you in private?'

The man nodded. ‘Let's head back outside.'

Moments later the two men stood on the cobbled courtyard of the estate that had once housed a well-off local merchant and was now the temporary bivouac for Ranal's squads. The lieutenant had taken the house proper for himself, leaving Strings wondering what the man did with all those empty rooms.

They said nothing for a moment, then Strings grinned. ‘I can picture Whiskeyjack's jaw dropping—the day I tell him you was my fellow sergeant in the new 8th Legion.'

Gesler scowled. ‘Whiskeyjack. He was busted down to sergeant before I was, the bastard. Mind you, I then made corporal, so I beat him after all.'

‘Except now you're a sergeant again. While Whiskeyjack's an outlaw. Try beating that.'

‘I just might,' Gesler muttered.

‘Got concerns about the Adjunct?' Strings quietly asked. The courtyard was empty, but even so…

‘Met her, you know. Oh, she's as cold as Hood's forked tongue. She impounded my ship.'

‘You had a ship?'

‘By rights of salvage, aye. I was the one who brought Coltaine's wounded to Aren. And that's the thanks I get.'

‘You could always punch her in the face. That's what you usually end up doing to your superiors, sooner or later.'

‘I could at that. I'd have to get past Gamet, of course. The point I was making is this: she's never commanded anything more than a damned noble household, and here she's been handed three legions and told to reconquer an entire subcontinent.' He glanced sidelong at Strings. ‘There wasn't many Falari made it into the Bridgeburners. Bad timing, I think, but there was one.'

‘Aye, and I'm him.'

After a moment, Gesler grinned and held out his hand. ‘Strings. Fiddler. Sure.'

They clasped wrists. To Strings, the other man's hand and arm felt like solid stone.

‘There's an inn down the street,' Gesler continued. ‘We need to swap stories, and I guarantee you, mine's got yours beat by far.'

‘Oh, Gesler,' Strings sighed, ‘I think you're in for a surprise.'

The journey home had been enough, if only to return one last time to the place of beginnings, to crumbled reminiscences amidst sea-thrust coral sands above the tide line, the handful of abandoned shacks battered by countless storms into withered skeletons of wood. Nets lay buried in glistening drifts blinding white in the harsh sunlight. And the track that had led down from the road, overgrown now with wind-twisted grasses…no place from the past survived unchanged, and here, in this small fisher village on the coast of Itko Kan, Hood had walked with thorough and absolute deliberation, leaving not a single soul in his wake.

Barring the one man who had now returned. And the daughter of that man, who had once been possessed by a god.

And in the leaning shack that had once housed them both—its frond-woven roof long since stripped away—with the broad, shallow-draught fisherboat close by now showing but a prow and a stern, the rest buried beneath the coral sand, the father had laid himself down and slept.

Crokus had awakened to soft weeping. Sitting up, he had seen Apsalar kneeling beside the still form of her father. There were plenty of footprints on the floor of the shack from the previous evening's random explorations, but Crokus noted one set in particular, prints large and far apart yet far too lightly pressed into the damp sand. A silent arrival in the night just past, crossing the single chamber to stand square-footed beside Rellock. Where it had gone after that left no markings in the sand.

A shiver rippled through the Daru. It was one thing for an old man to die in his sleep, but it was another for Hood himself—or one of his minions—to physically arrive to collect the man's soul.

Apsalar's grief was quiet, barely heard above the hiss of waves on the beach,
the faint whistle of the wind through the warped slats in the shack's walls. She knelt with bowed head, face hidden beneath her long black hair that hung so appropriately like a shawl. Her hands were closed around her father's right hand.

Crokus made no move towards her. In the months of their travelling together, he had come, perversely, to know her less and less. Her soul's depths had become unfathomable, and whatever lay at its heart was otherworldly and…not quite human.

The god that had possessed her—Cotillion, the Rope, Patron of Assassins within the House of Shadow—had been a mortal man, once, the one known as Dancer who had stood at the Emperor's side, who had purportedly shared Kellanved's fate at Laseen's hands. Of course, neither had died in truth. Instead, they had ascended. Crokus had no idea how such a thing could come to be. Ascendancy was but one of the countless mysteries of the world, a world where uncertainty ruled all—god and mortal alike—and its rules were impenetrable. But, it seemed to him, to ascend was also to
surrender
. Embracing what to all intents and purposes could be called immortality, was, he had begun to believe, presaged by a turning away. Was it not a mortal's fate—fate, he knew, was the wrong word, but he could think of no other—was it not a mortal's fate, then, to embrace life itself, as one would a lover? Life, with all its fraught, momentary fragility.

And could life not be called a mortal's first lover? A lover whose embrace was then rejected in that fiery crucible of ascendancy?

Crokus wondered how far she had gone down that path—for it was a path she was surely on, this beautiful woman no older than him, who moved in appalling silence, with a killer's terrible grace, this temptress of death.

The more remote she grew, the more Crokus felt himself drawn forward, to that edge within her. The lure to plunge into that darkness was at times overwhelming, could, at a moment's thought, turn frantic the beat of his heart and fierce the fire of the blood in his veins. What made the silent invitation so terrifying to him was the seeming indifference with which she offered it to him.

As if the attraction itself was…self-evident. Not worth even acknowledging
. Did Apsalar want him to walk at her side on this path to ascendancy—if that was what it was? Was it Crokus she wanted, or simply…somebody, anybody?

The truth was this: he had grown afraid to look into her eyes.

He rose from his bedroll and quietly made his way outside. There were fisherboats out on the shoals, white sails taut like enormous shark fins plying the sea beyond the breakers. The Hounds had once torn through this area of the coast, leaving naught but corpses, but people had returned—there if not here. Or perhaps they had
been
returned, forcibly. The land itself had no difficulty absorbing spilled blood; its thirst was indiscriminate, true to the nature of land everywhere.

Crokus crouched down and collected a handful of white sand. He studied the coral pebbles as they slipped down between his fingers.
The land does its own dying, after all. And yet, these are truths we would escape, should we proceed down this path. I wonder, does fear of dying lie at the root of ascendancy?

If so, then he would never make it, for, somewhere in all that had occurred, all that he had survived in coming to this place, Crokus had lost that fear.

He sat down, resting his back against the trunk of a massive cedar that had been thrown up onto this beach—roots and all—and drew out his knives. He practised a sequenced shift of grips, each hand reversing the pattern of the other, and stared down until the weapons—and his fingers—became little more than blurs of motion. Then he lifted his head and studied the sea, its rolling breakers in the distance, the triangular sails skidding along beyond the white line of foam. He made the sequence in his right hand random. Then did the same for his left.

Thirty paces down the beach waited their single-masted runner, its magenta sail reefed, its hull's blue, gold and red paint faint stains in the sunlight. A Korelri craft, paid in debt to a local bookmaker in Kan—for an alley in Kan had been the place where Shadowthrone had sent them, not to the road above the village as he had promised.

The bookmaker had paid the debt in turn to Apsalar and Crokus for a single night's work that had proved, for Crokus, brutally horrifying. It was one thing to practise passes with the blades, to master the deadly dance against ghosts of the imagination, but he had killed two men that night. Granted, they were murderers, in the employ of a man who was making a career out of extortion and terror. Apsalar had shown no compunction in cutting his throat, no qualms at the spray of blood that spotted her gloved hands and forearms.

There had been a local with them, to witness the veracity of the night's work. In the aftermath, as he stood in the doorway and stared down at the three corpses, he'd lifted his head and met Crokus's eyes. Whatever he saw in them had drained the blood from the man's face.

By morning Crokus had acquired a new name. Cutter.

At first he had rejected it. The local had misread all that had been revealed behind the Daru's eyes that night. Nothing fierce. The barrier of shock, fast crumbling to self-condemnation. Murdering killers was still murder, the act like the closing of shackles between them all, joining a line of infinite length, one killer to the next, a procession from which there was no escape. His mind had recoiled from the name, recoiled from all that it signified.

But that had proved a short-lived rectitude. The two murderers had died indeed—at the hands of the man named Cutter. Not Crokus, not the Daru youth, the cut-purse—who had vanished. Vanished, probably never to be seen again.

The delusion held a certain comfort, as cavernous at its core as Apsalar's embrace at night, but welcome all the same.

Cutter would walk her path.

Aye, the Emperor had Dancer, yes? A companion, for a companion was what was needed. Is needed. Now, she has Cutter. Cutter of the Knives, who dances in his chains as if they were weightless threads. Cutter, who, unlike poor Crokus, knows his place, knows his singular task—to guard her back, to match her cold precision in the deadly arts
.

And therein resided the final truth. Anyone could become a killer. Anyone at all.

She stepped out of the shack, wan but dry-eyed.

He sheathed his knives in a single, fluid motion, rose to his feet and faced her.

‘Yes,' she said. ‘What now?'

 

Broken pillars of mortared stone jutted from the undulating vista. Among the half-dozen or so within sight, only two rose as tall as a man, and none stood straight. The plain's strange, colourless grasses gathered in tufts around their bases, snarled and oily in the grey, grainy air.

As Kalam rode into their midst, the muted thunder of his horse's hoofs seemed to bounce back across his path, the echoes multiplying until he felt as if he was riding at the head of a mounted army. He slowed his charger's canter, finally reining in beside one of the battered columns.

These silent sentinels felt like an intrusion on the solitude he had been seeking. He leaned in his saddle to study the one nearest him. It looked old, old in the way of so many things within the Warren of Shadow, forlorn with an air of abandonment, defying any chance he might have of discerning its function. There were no intervening ruins, no foundation walls, no cellar pits or other angular pocks in the ground. Each pillar stood alone, unaligned.

His examination settled on a rusted ring set into the stone near the base, from which depended a chain of seized links vanishing into the tufts of grass. After a moment, Kalam dismounted. He crouched down, reaching out to close his hand on the chain. A slight upward tug. The desiccated hand and forearm of some hapless creature lifted from the grasses. Dagger-length talons, four fingers and two thumbs.

The rest of the prisoner had succumbed to the roots, was half buried beneath dun-coloured, sandy soil. Pallid yellow hair was entwined among the grass blades.

The hand suddenly twitched.

Disgusted, Kalam released the chain. The arm dropped back to the ground. A faint, subterranean keening sound rose from the base of the pillar.

Straightening, the assassin returned to his horse.

Pillars, columns, tree stumps, platforms, staircases leading nowhere, and for every dozen there was one among them holding a prisoner. None of whom seemed capable of dying. Not entirely. Oh, their minds had died—most of them—long ago. Raving in tongues, murmuring senseless incantations, begging forgiveness, offering bargains, though not one had yet—within Kalam's hearing—proclaimed its own innocence.

As if mercy could be an issue without it
. He nudged his horse forward once more. This was not a realm to his liking. Not that he'd in truth had much choice in the matter. Bargaining with gods was—for the mortal involved—an exercise in self-delusion. Kalam would rather leave Quick Ben to play games with the rulers of this warren—the wizard had the advantage of enjoying the challenge—no, it was more than that. Quick Ben had left so many knives in so many backs—none of them fatal but none the less sure to sting when tugged, and it was that tugging the wizard loved so much.

The assassin wondered where his old friend was right now. There'd been
trouble—
nothing new there
—and, since then, naught but silence. And then there was Fiddler. The fool had re-enlisted, for Hood's sake!

Well, at least they're doing something. Not Kalam, oh no, not Kalam
. Thirteen hundred children, resurrected on a whim. Shining eyes following his every move, mapping his every step, memorizing his every gesture—what could he teach them? The art of mayhem? As if children needed help in that.

A ridge lay ahead. He reached the base and brought his horse into a gentle canter up the slope.

Besides, Minala seemed to have it all under control. A natural born tyrant, she was, both in public and in private amidst the bedrolls in the half-ruined hovel they shared. And oddly enough, he'd found he was not averse to tyranny. In principle, that is. Things had a way of actually working when someone capable and implacable took charge. And he'd had enough experience taking orders to not chafe at her position of command. Between her and the aptorian demoness, a certain measure of control was being maintained, a host of life skills were being inculcated…
stealth, tracking, the laying of ambushes, the setting of traps for game both two-and four-legged, riding, scaling walls, freezing in place, knife throwing and countless other weapon skills, the weapons themselves donated by the warren's mad rulers—half of them cursed or haunted or fashioned for entirely unhuman hands
. The children took to such training with frightening zeal, and the gleam of pride in Minala's eyes left the assassin…chilled.

An army in the making for Shadowthrone. An alarming prospect, to say the least.

He reached the ridge. And suddenly reined in.

An enormous stone gate surmounted the hill opposite, twin pillars spanned by an arch. Within it, a swirling grey wall. On this side of the gate, the grassy summit flowed with countless, sourceless shadows, as if they were somehow tumbling out from the portal, only to swarm like lost wraiths around its threshold.

‘Careful,' a voice murmured beside Kalam.

He turned to see a tall, hooded and cloaked figure standing a few paces away, flanked by two Hounds. Cotillion, and his favoured two, Rood and Blind. The beasts sat on their scarred haunches, lurid eyes—seeing and unseeing—on the portal.

‘Why should I be careful?' the assassin asked.

‘Oh, the shadows at the gate. They've lost their masters…but anyone will do.'

‘So this gate is sealed?'

The hooded head slowly turned. ‘Dear Kalam, is this a flight from our realm? How…ignoble.'

‘I said nothing to suggest—'

‘Then why does your shadow stretch so yearningly forward?'

Kalam glanced down at it, then scowled. ‘How should I know? Perhaps it considers its chances better in yonder mob.'

‘Chances?'

‘For excitement.'

‘Ah. Chafing, are you? I would never have guessed.'