The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (936 page)

‘So,' Karsa murmured, ‘these are the Hounds of Shadow. You would play games with me, then? Try for me, and when we're done few of you will leave this place, and none will be free of wounds, this I promise you. Havok, see the black one in the high grasses? Thinks to hide from us.' He grunted a laugh. ‘The others will feint, but that black one will lead the true charge. My sword shall tap
her
nose first.'

The two white beasts parted, one trotting a dozen or so paces along the ridge, the other turning round and doing the same in the opposite direction. In the gap now between them, shadows swirled like a dust-devil.

Karsa could feel a surge of battle lust within him, his skin prickling beneath the fixed attention of seven savage beasts, yet he held his gaze on that smudge of gloom, where two figures were now visible. Men, one bare-headed and the other hooded and leaning crooked over a knobby cane.

The Hounds to either side maintained their distance, close enough for a swift charge but not so close as to drive Havok into a rage. Karsa reined in six paces from the strangers and eyed them speculatively.

The bare-headed one was plainly featured, pale as if unfamiliar with sunlight, his dark hair straight and loose, almost ragged. His eyes shifted colour in the sunlight, blue to grey, to green and perhaps even brown, a cascade of indecision that matched his expression as he in turn studied the Toblakai.

The first gesture came from the hooded one with the hidden face, a lifting of the cane in a half-hearted waver. ‘Nice horse,' he said.

‘Easier to ride than a dog,' Karsa replied.

A snort from the dark-haired man.

‘This one,' said the hooded man, ‘resists sorcery, Cotillion. Though his blood is old, I wonder, will all mortals one day be like him? An end to miracles. Nothing but dull, banal existence, nothing but mundane absence of wonder.' The cane jabbed. ‘A world of bureaucrats. Mealy-minded, sour-faced and miserable as a reunion of clerks. In such a world, Cotillion, not even the gods will visit. Except in pilgrimage to depression.'

‘Quaintly philosophical of you, Shadowthrone,' replied the one named Cotillion. ‘But is this one really the right audience? I can almost smell the bear grease from here.'

‘That's Lock,' said Shadowthrone. ‘He was rolling in something a while ago.'

Karsa leaned forward on the strange saddle that Samar Dev had had fitted for Havok back in Letheras. ‘If I am a clerk, then one prophecy will prove true.'

‘Oh, and which one would that be?' Cotillion asked, seemingly amused that Karsa was capable of speech.

‘The tyranny of the number counters will be a bloody one.'

Shadowthrone wheezed laughter, then coughed into the silence of the others and said, ‘Hmmm.'

Cotillion's eyes had narrowed. ‘In Darujhistan, a temple awaits you, Toblakai. A crown and a throne for the taking.'

Karsa scowled. ‘Not more of that shit. I told the Crippled God I wasn't interested. I'm still not. My destiny belongs to me and none other.'

‘Oh,' said Shadowthrone, cane wavering about once again, like a headless snake, ‘we're not encouraging you to take it. Far from it. You on that throne would be…distressing. But he will drive you, Toblakai, the way hunters drive a man-eating lion. Straight into the spike-filled pit.'

‘A smart lion knows when to turn,' Karsa said. ‘Watch as the hunters scatter.'

‘It is because we understand you, Toblakai, that we do not set the Hounds upon you. You bear your destiny like a standard, a grisly one, true, but then, its only distinction is in being obvious. Did you know that we too left civilization behind? The scribblers were closing in on all sides, you see. The clerks with their purple tongues and darting eyes, their shuffling feet and sloped shoulders, their bloodless lists. Oh, measure it all out! Acceptable levels of misery and suffering!' The cane swung down, thumped hard on the ground. ‘
Acceptable?
Who the fuck says
any
level is acceptable? What sort of mind thinks that?'

Karsa grinned. ‘Why, a civilized one.'

‘Indeed!' Shadowthrone turned to Cotillion. ‘And you doubted this one!'

Cotillion grimaced. ‘I stand corrected, Shadowthrone. If the Crippled God has not yet learned his lesson with this warrior, more lessons are bound to follow. We can leave him to them. And leave this Toblakai, too.'

‘Barring one detail,' Shadowthrone said in a rasp. ‘Toblakai, heed this warning, if you value that destiny you would seek for yourself. Do not stand in Traveller's path.
Ever
.'

Karsa's grin broadened. ‘We are agreed, he and I.'

‘You are?'

‘I will not stand in his path, and he will not stand in mine.'

Shadowthrone and Cotillion were silent then, considering.

Leaning back, Karsa collected the lone rein. Havok lifted his head, nostrils flaring. ‘I killed two Deragoth,' Karsa said.

‘We know,' said Cotillion.

‘Their arrogance was their soft underbelly. Easy to reach. Easy to plunge in my hands. I killed them because they thought me weak.'

Cotillion's expression grew mocking. ‘Speaking of arrogance…'

‘I was speaking,' said Karsa as he swung Havok round, ‘of lessons.' Then he twisted in the saddle. ‘You laugh at those coming to the Crippled God. Perhaps one day I will laugh at those coming to you.'

 

Cotillion and Shadowthrone, with the Hounds gathering close, watched the Toblakai ride away on his Jhag horse.

A thump of the cane. ‘Did you sense the ones in his sword?'

Cotillion nodded.

‘They were…' Shadowthrone seemed to struggle with the next word, ‘…
proud
.'

And again, Cotillion could do little more than nod.

Abruptly, Shadowthrone giggled, the sound making the two new Hounds flinch – a detail he seemed not to notice. ‘Oh,' he crooned, ‘all those poor clerks!'

 

‘Is that a cloud on the horizon?'

At Reccanto Ilk's query, Mappo glanced up and followed the man's squinting gaze. He rose suddenly. ‘That's more than a cloud,' he said.

Sweetest Sufferance, sitting nearby, grunted and wheezed herself upright, brushing sand from her ample behind. ‘Master Qu – ellll!' she sang.

Mappo watched as the crew started scrabbling, checking the leather straps and fastening rings and clasps dangling from the carriage. The horses shifted about, suddenly restless, eyes rolling and ears flattening. Gruntle came up to stand beside the Trell. ‘That's one ugly storm,' he said, ‘and it looks to be bearing down right on us.'

‘These people baffle me,' Mappo admitted. ‘We are about to get obliterated, and they look…excited.'

‘They are mad, Mappo.' He eyed the Trell for a long moment, then said, ‘You must be desperate to have hired this mob.'

‘Why is it,' Mappo asked, ‘that Master Quell seemed indifferent to unleashing an undead dragon into this world?'

‘Well, hardly indifferent. He said
oops!
At least, I think that's what I heard, but perhaps that was but my imagination. This Trygalle Guild…these carriages, they must be dragging things across realms all the time. Look at yon walking corpse.'

They did so, observing in silence as the desiccated figure, holding a collection of cast-off straps and rope, stood speculatively eyeing one of the carriage's spoked wheels.

The wind freshened suddenly, cooler, strangely charged.

One of the horses shrilled and began stamping the sand. After a moment the others caught the same feverish anxiety. The carriage rocked, edged forward. Master Quell was helping Precious Thimble through the door, hastening things at the end with a hard shove to her backside. He then looked round, eyes slightly wild, until he spied Mappo.

‘Inside you go, good sir! We're about to leave!'

‘Not a moment too soon,' Gruntle said.

Mappo set out for the carriage, then paused and turned to Gruntle. ‘Please, be careful.'

‘I will, as soon as I figure out what's about to happen. Quell! What warren are we using now? And hadn't you better get the way through opened?'

Quell stared at him. ‘Get on the damned carriage!'

‘Fine, but tell me—'

‘You idiot!' shouted Faint from where she sat on the roof. ‘Don't you get it?' And she jabbed a finger at the churning black cloud now almost towering over them. ‘
That's
our ride!'

‘But – wait – how—'

‘Climb aboard, you oaf, or drown!'

‘Climb aboard,' shrieked Sweetest Sufferance, ‘and maybe drown anyway!'

Gruntle saw that the corpse had tied itself to the wheel.

Gods below, what am I doing here?

A roar exploded on the reef and Gruntle whirled round to see the gust front's devastating arrival, a wall of thrashing, spume-crested water, rising, charging, lifting high to devour the entire island.

He lunged for the carriage. As he scrambled up the side and fumbled for the lashing, Reccanto Ilk, squinting, asked, ‘Is it here yet?'

The horses began screaming in earnest.

And all at once, the short-sighted idiot had his answer.

Many children, early on, acquire a love of places they have never been. Often, such wonder is summarily crushed on the crawl through the sludge of murky, confused adolescence on to the flat, cracked pan of adulthood with its airless vistas ever lurking beyond the horizon. Oh, well, sometimes such gifts of curiosity, delight and adventure do indeed survive the stationary trek, said victims ending up as artists, scholars, inventors and other criminals bent on confounding the commonplace and the platitudes of peaceful living. But never mind them for now, since, for all their flailing subversions, nothing really ever changes unless in service to convenience.

Bainisk was still, in the sheltered core of his being, a child. Ungainly with growth, yes, awkward in a body with which he had not yet caught up, but he had yet to surrender his love of the unknown. And so it should be wholly understandable that he and young Harllo should have shared a spark of delight and wonder, the kind that wove tight between them so that not even the occasional snarl could truly sever the binding.

In the week following that fateful tear in the trust between them, Harllo had come to believe that he was once more truly alone in the world. Wounds scabbed over and scabs fell away to reveal faint scars that soon faded almost out of existence, and the boy worked on, crawling into fissures, scratching his way along fetid, gritty cracks in the deep rock. Choking at times on bad air, stung by blind centipedes and nipped by translucent spiders. Bruised by shifting stones, his eyes wide in the darkness as he searched out the glitter of ore on canted, close walls.

At week's end, however, Bainisk was with him once more, passing him a jug of silty lakewater as he backed out of a fissure and sat down on the warm, dry stone of the tunnel floor, and in this brief shared moment the tear slowly began to heal, re-knitted in the evasiveness of their eyes that would not yet lock on to the reality of their sitting side by side – far beneath the world's surface, two beating hearts that echoed naught but each other – and this was how young boys made amends. Without words, with spare gestures that, in their rarity, acquired all the necessary significance. When Harllo was done drinking he passed back the jug.

‘Venaz is on me all the time now,' Bainisk said. ‘I tried it, with him again, I mean. But it's not the same. We're both too old for what we had, once. All he ever talks about is stuff that bores me.'

‘He just likes hurting people.'

Bainisk nodded. ‘I think he wants to take over my job. He argued over every order I gave him.'

‘People like him always want to take over,' Harllo said. ‘And most times when other people see it they back off and let them. That's what I don't get, Bainisk. It's the scariest thing of all.'

That last admission was uncommon between boys. The notion of being frightened. But theirs was not a normal world, and to pretend that there was nothing to fear was not among the few privileges they entertained. Out here, people didn't need reasons to hurt someone. They didn't need reasons for doing anything.

‘Tell me about the city again, Mole.'

‘There's a haunted tower. My uncle took me to see it once. He has big hands, so big that when he holds yours it's like your hand disappears and there's nothing in the world could pull you apart. Anyway, there's a ghost in that tower. Named Hinter.'

Bainisk set on him wide eyes. ‘Did you see it? Did you see that ghost?'

‘No, it was daytime. They're hard to see in daytime.'

‘It's dark enough down here,' Bainisk said, looking round. ‘But I ain't never seen a ghost.'

Harllo thought to tell him, then. It had been his reason for bringing up the story in the first place, but he found himself holding back yet again. He wasn't sure why. Maybe it was because the skeleton wasn't a true ghost. ‘Sometimes,' he said, ‘the dead don't go away. I mean, sometimes, they die but the soul doesn't, er, leave the body. It stays where it is, where it always was.'

‘Was this Hinter like that?'

‘No, he was a real ghost. A spirit with no body.'

‘So what makes ghosts of some people but not others?'

Harllo shrugged. ‘Don't know, Bainisk. Maybe spirits with a reason to stay are the ones that become ghosts. Maybe the Lord of Death doesn't want them, or lets them be so they can maybe finish doing what they need to do. Maybe they don't realize they're dead.' He shrugged again. ‘That's what my uncle said. He didn't know either, and not knowing made him mad – I could tell by the way he held my hand tighter.'

‘He got mad at a ghost?'

‘Could be. That's what I figure, anyway. I didn't say nothing to make him mad, so it must have been the ghost. His not knowing what it wanted or something.'

Harllo could well recall that moment. Like Bainisk, he'd asked lots of questions, amazed that such a thing as a ghost could exist, could be hiding, watching them, thinking all its ghost thoughts. And Gruntle had tried to answer him, though it was obviously a struggle. And when Harllo asked him if maybe his father – who was dead – might be a ghost out there somewhere far away, his uncle had said nothing. And when he asked if maybe his ghost father was still around because he was looking for his son, then Gruntle's big hand squeezed tight and then tighter for a breath or two, not enough to actually hurt Harllo, but close. And then the grip softened once more, and Gruntle took him off to buy sweets.

He'd probably seen Hinter, looking out through one of the gloomy windows of the tower. He'd probably wanted to tell Hinter to go away and never come back. Like bad fathers did. Because maybe Harllo's father wasn't dead at all, since one time his real mother had said something about ‘
putting the bastard away
', and though Harllo didn't know the precise meaning of ‘bastard' he'd heard it often enough to guess it was a word used for people no one liked having around.

But thinking about Gruntle made him sad, so instead he reached for the jug of water again and drank deep.

Bainisk watched him, and then rose. ‘There's a new chute that's been cleared. I was thinking maybe you could climb it, if you was rested up enough.'

‘Sure, Bainisk. I'm ready.'

They set out in silence. But this time the silence wasn't uncomfortable, and Harllo felt such a wave of relief when he realized this that his eyes welled up for a moment. Silly, really, and dangerous besides. When he had a moment when Bainisk wasn't looking, he quickly wiped his grimy cheeks and then dried the backs of his hands on his tunic.

Even had he been turned towards Harllo, Bainisk probably would not have noticed. His mind was stepping stealthily on to the worn stones of the path leading to Hinter's Tower, so that he could see the ghost for himself. What a thing that would be! To see with his own eyes something that he had never seen before!

There in that amazing city so far away. Where all manner of wonders jostled with the crowds on all the bright streets. Where ghosts argued with landlords over rent. Where people had so much food they got fat and had to be carried around. And people didn't hurt other people for no good reason, and people like Venaz got exactly what they deserved.

Oh yes, he did love that city, that place where he had never been.

 

Don't be absurd. The modestly pudgy man in the red waistcoat is not so crass as to fish for weeping multitudes in the rendition of this moment, nor so awkward with purple intent. Give Kruppe some credit, you who are so quick to cast aspersions like hooks into a crowded pool (caught something, did you? No, dear friend, do not crow your prowess, 'twas only this carp desperate to get out).

The water's reflection is not so smooth; oh, no, not so smooth.

Is Bainisk's city quaint, possibly even cute and heart-warming, in a softly tragic way? Not the point!

Some of us, you see (or don't), still dream of that city. Where none of us has ever been.

That, dear ones, is the point.

 

Second guessing is murder. Or, depending on one's point of view, suicide. Blend had found plenty of opportunity to consider such matters while lying bleeding on the floor of K'rul's Bar. It had been close, and without Mallet around the prospects of a thorough healing of her wounds was something she would just have to live without. The Councilman, Coll, had sent over a local cutter with passing skills in common Denul, and he had managed to half knit the ruptured flesh and stem the flow of blood, and then had taken needle and gut to suture the wounds. All of which left Blend propped up on her bed, barely able to move.

K'rul's Bar remained closed. What had once been a temple was now a crypt. From what Picker had told her, there wasn't a patch of raw earth in the cellars below that wasn't soft and queasy underfoot. The Elder God never had it so good.

Bluepearl and Mallet, both dead. The very idea of that left gaping holes that opened out beneath every thought, every feeling that leaked through her grim control. The bastards had survived decades of war, battle after battle, only to get cut down in their retirement by a mob of assassins.

The shock lingered, there in the echoes of empty rooms, the silences from all the wrong places, the bitter arguments that erupted between Antsy and Picker in the office or in the corridors. If Duiker remained resident – if he hadn't fled – he was silent, witnessing, as any historian would, every opinion strapped down into immobility. And, it seemed, thoroughly uninterested in whether she – or any of them – lived or died.

The sunlight creeping through the shutters told her it was day, possibly late afternoon, and she was hungry and maybe, just maybe, they'd all forgotten her. She'd heard the occasional thump from the main floor below, a few murmured conversations, and was contemplating finding something to pound on the floor when she heard steps approaching along the corridor. A moment later her door opened and in strode Scillara, bearing a tray.

Something sweet and avid curled up deep in Blend's gut, then squirmed at a succession of delicious thoughts. ‘Gods, you're a sight. I was moments from slipping away, straight into Hood's hoary arms, but now, all at once—'

‘You have reason to live, yes, all that. It's tapu – I hope you don't mind, but the only cuisine I know at all is Seven Cities, and little enough of that.'

‘They've got you cooking now?'

‘Pays my room and board. At least,' she added as she set the tray down on Blend's lap, ‘no one's demanded I clear my tab.'

Blend looked down at the skewers of meat and vegetables and fruit. The pungent aroma of greenspice made her eyes water. ‘Money can go piss itself,' she said.

Scillara's eyes widened.

Blend shrugged, reaching for the first skewer. ‘We were never in this to get rich, love. It was just…something to do, a place to be. Besides, we're not going to hold our hands out when it comes to you and Barathol, and Chaur. Gods below, you dragging Duiker off on a date kept the old fool alive. And Barathol and Chaur arrived like a mailed fist – from what I hear, just in time, too. We may be idiots, Scillara, but we're loyal idiots.'

‘I imagine,' Scillara said, pulling a chair close, ‘the Assassins' Guild is not thinking of you as idiots at the moment. More like a hornet's nest they regret kicking. Regret?' She snorted. ‘That's too mild a word. If you think you're reeling, consider the Guild Master right now.'

‘He'll recover,' Blend said. ‘Us? I'm not so sure. Not this time.'

Scillara's heavy-lidded eyes settled on Blend for a long moment, and then she said, ‘Picker was badly shaken. Still is, in fact. Time and again I see the colour drain from her face, I see her knees go weak, and she reaches out to grab hold of something. Middle of the night, she's up and pacing the hallways – she acts like Hood's at her shoulder these days—'

‘That's just it, though, isn't it? A few years ago and she'd be strapping on the armour and counting quarrels – we'd have to chain her down to keep her from charging off—'

‘You don't get it, do you, Blend?'

‘What?'

‘Years ago, as you say, she was a soldier – so were you. A soldier lives with certain possibilities. Needs to keep in mind what might happen at any time. But you're all retired now. Time to put all that away. Time to finally relax.'

‘Fine. It takes a while to get it all back—'

‘Blend, Picker's the way she is right now because she almost lost
you
.'