The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (45 page)

The fire had returned, a beacon before them, and Kruppe saw the two figures awaiting them. The vestiges of the spell he had cast upon himself made the Tlan and the Rhivi blinding to his eyes, such was their power. Kruppe and the woman arrived.

Pran Chole stepped forward. “Thank you, Kruppe.” He studied the woman and nodded slowly. “Yes, I see the effects of the Imass upon her. But there is more.” He looked to the Rhivi. “She was a mage once?”

The Rhivi moved close to the woman. “Hear me, lost one. Your name is Tattersail, your sorcery is Thyr. The Warren flows within you now, it animates you, protects you.” She opened her robe once more. “It is time to bring you back into the world.”

Tattersail stepped back in alarm.

“Within you is the past,” Pran said. “My world. You know the present, and the Rhivi offers you to the future. In this place all is merged. The flesh you wear has upon it a spell of preservation, and in your dying act you opened your Warren within the influence of Tellann. And now you wander within a mortal’s dream. Kruppe is the vessel of change. Permit us to aid you.”

With a wordless cry Tattersail staggered into Pran’s arms. The Rhivi quickly joined them.

“My,” Kruppe breathed, “but Kruppe’s dreams have taken a strange turn. While his own concerns are ever present, a haunting voice, once again he must set them aside.”

Suddenly K’rul stood beside him. “Not so. It is not my way to use you without just recompense.”

Kruppe looked up at the Elder God. “Kruppe asks for nothing. There is a gift in this, and I am glad to be part of its making.”

K’rul nodded. “Nevertheless. Speak to me of your efforts.”

“Rallick and Murillio seek to right an old wrong,” Kruppe said, with a sigh. “They think me ignorant of their schemes, but I shall turn such schemes to my purposes. Guilt rides this decision, but they are needed.”

“Understood. And the Coin Bearer?”

“Protection has been set in motion, though its final shaping is yet to come. I know that the Malazan Empire is present in Darujhistan, covertly for the moment. What they seek—”

“Is anything but clear, Kruppe. Even to them. Use this to your advantage when you find them. Allies might come from surprising quarters. I will tell you this: two now approach the city, one is a T’lan Imass, the other a bane to magic. Their purposes are destructive, but already forces are in play attending to them. Seek knowledge of them, but do not openly oppose them. They are dangerous. Power attracts power, Kruppe. Leave them to the consequences of their actions.”

Kruppe nodded. “Kruppe is no fool, K’rul. He openly opposes no one, and he finds power a thing to be avoided at all costs.”

As they spoke the Rhivi woman had taken Tattersail in her arms. Pran Chole squatted nearby, his eyes closed and his lips forming silent words. The Rhivi woman rocked the desiccated body in rhythmic motion, chanting softly. Water stained the Rhivi’s thighs.

“Aye,” Kruppe whispered. “She prepares to give birth in truth.”

Abruptly the Rhivi tossed away the body. It crumpled in a lifeless heap.

The Moon now hung immediately overhead, so bright that Kruppe found he could not look at it directly.

The Rhivi had assumed a squatting position, moving with the rhythm of labor, her face sheathed in sweat. Pran Chole remained immobile, though his body was racked in shivering bouts that twisted his face with pain. His eyes opened wide, glowing bright amber, and fixed on the Moon.

“Elder God,” Kruppe said quietly, “how much will this Tattersail remember of her former life?”

“Unknown,” K’rul replied. “Soul-shifting is a delicate thing. The woman was consumed in a conflagration. Her soul’s first flight was carried on wings of pain and violence. More, she entered another ravaged body, bearing its own traumas. The child that is born will be like no other ever seen. Its life is a mystery, Kruppe.”

Kruppe grunted. “Considering her parents, she will indeed be exceptional.” A thought came to him and he frowned. “K’rul, what of the first child within the Rhivi?”

“There was none, Kruppe. The Rhivi woman was prepared in a manner unknown to any man.” He chuckled. “Including myself.” He raised his head. “This sorcery belongs to the Moon, Kruppe.”

They continued watching the labors of birth. To Kruppe it seemed they waited more hours in the darkness than any normal night could hold. The Moon remained overhead, as if it found its position to its liking—or, he reconsidered, as if it stood guard over them.

Then a small cry rose into the still air, and the Rhivi lifted in her arms a child furred in silver.

Even as Kruppe watched, the fur sloughed away. The Rhivi turned the child and placed her mouth against its belly. Her jaws bunched and the remaining length of umbilical cord fell away.

Pran Chole strode to stand beside Kruppe and the Elder God. The T’lan looked exhausted. “The child drew from me power beyond my control,” he said softly.

As the Rhivi squatted again in afterbirth, holding the child against her chest, Kruppe’s eyes widened. The mother’s belly was smooth, the white fox tattoo was gone.

“I am saddened,” Pran said, “that I may not return in twenty years to see the woman this child shall become.”

“You shall,” K’rul said in a low tone, “but not as a T’lan. As a T’lan Imass Bonecaster.”

The breath hissed between Pran’s teeth. “How long?” he asked.

“Three hundred thousand years, Pran Chole of Cannig Tol’s Clan.”

Kruppe laid a hand on Pran’s arm. “You’ve something to look forward to,” he said.

The T’lan stared at Kruppe a moment, then he threw back his head and roared with laughter.

The hours before Kruppe’s dream had proved eventful, beginning with his meeting with Baruk that permitted the revelation of the Coin Bearer punctuated with the clever if slightly dramatic suspension of the coin’s wax impression—a cantrip that had gone strangely awry.

But soon after the meeting, droplets of now-hardened wax pebbling the breast and arms of his coat, Kruppe paused just outside the alchemist’s door. Roald was nowhere to be seen. “Oh, my,” Kruppe breathed as he wiped sweat from his
forehead. “Why should Master Baruk find Crokus’s name familiar? Ah, stupid Kruppe! Uncle Mammot, of course. Oh dear, that was close—all could well have been lost!” He continued on down the hall to the stairs.

For a time there, Oponn’s power had waxed considerably. Kruppe smiled at his pun, but it was a distracted smile. He would do well to avoid such contacts. Power had a habit of triggering his own talents; already he felt the urgings of the Deck of Dragons within his head.

He hurried down the stairs and crossed the main hall to the doors. Roald was just entering, burdened beneath mundane supplies. Kruppe noted the dust covering the old man’s clothing. “Dear Roald, you look as if you’ve just weathered a sandstorm! Do you require Kruppe’s assistance?”

“No,” Roald grunted. “Thank you, Kruppe. I can manage. Will you be so kind as to close the doors on your way out?”

“Of course, kind Roald!” Kruppe patted the man’s arm and strode out into the courtyard. The gates leading to the street had been left open, and beyond was a swirling cloud of dust. “Ah, yes, the road repairs,” Kruppe muttered.

A headache had burgeoned behind his eyes, and the bright sun overhead wasn’t helping matters any. He was halfway to the gates when he stopped. “The doors! Kruppe has forgotten to close the doors!” He spun round and returned to the estate entrance, sighing as the doors closed with a satisfying click. As he turned away a second time someone shouted in the street beyond. There followed a loud crash, but this latter sound was lost on Kruppe.

With that bellowed curse a sorcerous storm roared into his head. He fell to his knees, then his head snapped up, eyes widening. “That,” he whispered, “was indeed a Malazan curse. Then why does House Shadow’s image burn like fire in Kruppe’s skull? Who now walks the streets of Darujhistan?”
A count of knots unending
. . . “Mysteries solved, more mysteries created.”

The pain had passed. Kruppe climbed to his feet and brushed the dust from his clothing. “Good that said affliction occurred beyond the eyes of suspicious beings, Kruppe notes with relief. All upon a promise made to friend Roald. Wise old friend Roald. Oponn’s breath is this time welcome, though begrudgingly so.”

He strode to the gates and peered into the street. A cart filled with shattered cobbles had toppled. Two men argued incessantly as to whose fault it was while they righted the cart and proceeded to refill it. Kruppe studied them. They spoke well the Daru tongue, but to one who listened carefully there was the hint of an accent—an accent that did not belong. “Oh, my,” Kruppe said, stepping back. He adjusted his coat, took a deep breath, then opened the gate and walked into the street.

The fat little man with the flopping sleeves walked from the house’s gate and turned left. He seemed in a hurry.

Sergeant Whiskeyjack wiped the sweat from his brow with a scarred forearm, his eyes slits against the bright sunlight.

“That is the one, Sergeant,” Sorry said, beside him.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

Whiskeyjack watched the man winding through the crowd. “What’s so important about him?” he asked.

“I admit,” Sorry replied, “to some uncertainty as to his significance. But he is vital, Sergeant.”

Whiskeyjack chewed his lip, then turned to the wagon bed where a city map had been laid flat, its corners anchored down by chunks of rock. “Who lives in that estate?”

“A man named Baruk,” Sorry answered. “An alchemist.”

He scowled. How did she know that? “Are you saying that fat little man is this Baruk?”

“No. He works for the alchemist. Not a servant. A spy, perhaps. His skills involve thievery, and he possesses . . . talent.”

Whiskeyjack looked up. “A Seer?”

For some reason Sorry winced. The sergeant watched, bemused, as Sorry’s face paled. Damn, he wondered, what on earth is going on with this girl?

“I believe so,” she said, her voice trembling.

Whiskeyjack straightened. “All right. Follow him.”

She nodded shakily, then slipped into the crowd.

The sergeant rested his back against the wagon’s sidewall. His expression soured as he studied his squad. Trotts was swinging his pick as if on a battlefield. Stones flew everywhere. Passersby ducked, and cursed when ducking failed. Hedge and Fiddler crouched behind a wheelbarrow, flinching each time the Barghast’s pick struck the street. Mallet stood a short distance away, directing pedestrians to the other pavement. He no longer bellowed at the people, having lost his voice arguing with an old man with a donkey wobbling under an enormous basket of firewood. The bundles now lay scattered across the street—the old man and the donkey nowhere to be seen—providing an effective barrier to wheeled vehicles.

All in all, Whiskeyjack concluded, everyone with him had assumed the role of heat-crazed street worker with a facility he found oddly disturbing.

Hedge and Fiddler had acquired the wagon, loaded down with cobbles, less than an hour after their midnight landing at a public dock on the Lakefront. Exactly how this had been accomplished, Whiskeyjack was afraid to ask. But it suited their plans perfectly. Something nagged at the back of Whiskeyjack’s mind but he dismissed it. He was a soldier and a soldier followed orders. When the time came, there would be chaos at every major intersection of streets in the city.

“Planting mines ain’t gonna be easy,” Fiddler had pointed out, “so we do it right in front of everyone’s nose. Road repair.”

Whiskeyjack shook his head. True to Fiddler’s prediction, no one had yet questioned them. They continued ripping up streets and replacing the old cobbles with Moranth munitions encased in fire-hardened clay. Was everything going to be so easy?

His thoughts returned to Sorry.
Not likely
. Quick Ben and Kalam had at last convinced him that their half of the mission was better off without her. She’d tagged along with his crew, eyes never still, but otherwise offering little in the way of assistance. He admitted to feeling some relief that he’d sent her off on that fat man’s trail.

But what had pulled a seventeen-year-old girl into the world of war? He couldn’t understand it—he couldn’t get past her youthfulness, couldn’t see beyond to the cold, murderous killer behind those dead eyes. As much as he told his squad that she was as human as any of them, the doubts grew with every question about her that he could not answer. He knew almost nothing about her. The revelation that she could manage a fishing boat had come from seemingly nowhere. And here in Darujhistan she’d hardly acted like a girl raised in a fishing village. There was a natural poise about her, a measure of assurance more common to the higher, educated classes. No matter where she was, she carried herself as if she belonged there.

Did that sound like a seventeen-year-old girl? No, but it seemed to match Quick Ben’s assertions, and that galled him. How else to match her with that icy-cold woman torturing prisoners outside Nathilog? He could look at her and part of him would say: “Young, not displeasing to the eye, a confidence that makes her magnetic.” While another part of his mind snapped shut. Young? He’d hear his own harsh, pained laugh. Oh, no, not this lass. She’s
old
. She walked under a blood-red moon in the dawn of time, did this one.
Her face is the face of all that cannot be fathomed, and she’s looking you in the eye, Whiskeyjack, and you’ll never know what she’s thinking
.

He could feel sweat drain down his face and neck. Nonsense. That part of his mind lost itself to its own terror. It took the unknown and fashioned, in blind desperation, a visage it could recognize. Despair, he told himself, always demands a direction, a focus. Find the direction and the despair goes away.

Of course, it wasn’t that easy. The despair he felt had no shape. It was not just Sorry, not just this endless war, not even the treachery from within the Empire. He had nowhere to look for answers, and he was tired of asking questions.

When he had looked upon Sorry at Graydog, the source of his horror lay in the unveiling of what he was becoming: a killer stripped of remorse, armored in the cold iron of inhumanity, freed from the necessity to ask questions, to seek answers, to fashion a reasonable life like an island in a sea of slaughter.