The Malazan Empire, page 222
The chains led into the Warren of Darkness, the knot beneath the groaning wagon. Thus, Darkness held those souls, one and all, held them fast.
I need to go back. Into the sword. I need to ask—
‘Jen’isand Rul. Aye, Draconus, the one you spoke with within Dragnipur – my other brother – made use of you, Ganoes Paran. Does that truth seem brutal to you? Is it beyond understanding? Like the others within the sword, my brother faces … eternity. He sought to outwit a curse, yet he never imagined that doing so would take so long. He is changed, mortal. His legendary cruelty has been … blunted. Wisdom earned a thousand times over. More, we need him.’
You want me to free Draconus from Rake’s sword.
‘Yes.’
To then have him go after Rake himself in an effort to reclaim the weapon he forged. Nightchill, I would rather Rake than Draconus—
‘There will be no such battle, Ganoes Paran.’
Why not?
‘To free Draconus, the sword must be shattered.’
The cold steel between his ribs now twisted. And that would free … everyone else. Everything else. Sorry, woman, I won’t do it—
‘If there is a way to prevent that woeful release of mad, malign spirits – whose numbers are indeed beyond legion and too horrifying to contemplate – then only one man will know it.’
Draconus himself.
‘Yes. Think on this, Ganoes Paran. Do not rush – there is still time.’
Glad to hear it.
‘We are not as cruel as you think.’
Vengeance hasn’t blackened your heart, Nightchill? Excuse my scepticism.
‘Oh, I seek vengeance, mortal, but not against the minor players who acted out my betrayal, for that betrayal was foretold. An ancient curse. The one who voiced that curse is the sole focus of my desire for vengeance.’
I’m surprised he or she’s still around.
There was a cold smile in her words. ‘Such was our curse against him.’
I’m beginning to think you all deserve each other.
There was a pause, then she said, ‘Perhaps we do, Ganoes Paran.’
What have you done with Tattersail?
‘Nothing. Her attentions are presently elsewhere.’
So I was flattering myself, thinking otherwise. Dammit, Paran, you’re still a fool.
‘We shall not harm her, mortal. Even were we able, which we are not. There is honour within her. And integrity. Rare qualities, for one so powerful. Thus, we have faith—’
A gloved hand on his shoulder startled Paran awake. He blinked, looked around. The roof. I’m back.
‘Captain?’
He met Mallet’s concerned gaze. ‘What?’
‘Sorry, sir, it seemed we’d lost you there … for a moment.’
He grimaced, wanting to deny it to the man’s face, but unable to do so. ‘How long?’
‘A dozen heartbeats, sir.’
‘Is that all? Good. We have to get moving. To the Thrall.’
‘Sir?’
I’m between them and us, now, Mallet. But there’s more of ‘us’ than you realize. Damn, I wish I could explain this. Without sounding like a pompous bastard. Not replying to the healer’s question, he swung round and found Trotts. ‘Warchief. The Thrall beckons.’
‘Aye, Captain.’
The Bridgeburners were one and all avoiding his gaze. Paran wondered why. Wondered what he’d missed. Mentally shrugging, he strode over to Gruntle. ‘You’re coming with us,’ he said.
‘I know.’
Yes, you would at that. Fine, let’s get this done.
* * *
The palace tower rose like a spear, wreathed in banners of ghostly smoke. The dark, colourless stone dulled the bright sunlight bathing it. Three hundred and thirty-nine winding steps led up the tower’s interior, to emerge onto an open platform with a peaked roof of copper tiles that showed no sign of verdigris. The wind howled between the columns holding the roof and the smooth stone platform, yet the tower did not sway.
Itkovian stood looking east, the wind whipping against his face. His body felt bloodless, strangely hot beneath the tattered armour. He knew that exhaustion was finally taking its toll. Flesh and bone had its limits. The defence of the dead prince in his Great Hall had been brutal and artless. Hallways and entrances had become abattoirs. The stench of slaughter remained like a new layer beneath his skin – even the wind could not strip it away.
The battles at the coast and the landings were drawing to a grim close, a lone surviving scout had reported. The Betrullid had been broken, fleeing north along the coast, where the Shield Anvil well knew their horses would become mired in the salt marsh. The pursuing Barghast would make short work of them.
The besiegers’ camps had been shattered, as if a tornado had ripped through them. A few hundred Barghast – old women and men and children – wandered through the carnage, gathering the spoils amidst squalling seagulls.
The East Watch redoubt, now a pile of rubble, barely rose above the carpet of bodies. Smoke drifted from it as if from a dying pyre.
Itkovian had watched the Barghast clans push into the city, had seen the Pannion retreat become a rout in the streets below. The fighting had swiftly swept past the palace. A Seerdomin officer had managed to rally a rearguard in Jelarkan’s Concourse, and that battle still raged on. But for the Pannions it was a withdrawing engagement. They were buying time for the exodus through what was left of the south and west gates.
A few White Face scouts had ventured into the palace grounds, close enough to discern that defenders remained, but no official contact had been established.
The recruit, Velbara, stood at Itkovian’s side, a recruit no longer. Her training in weapons had been one of desperation. She’d not missed the foremost lesson – that of staying alive – that was the guiding force behind every skill she thereafter acquired in the heat of battle. As with all the other Capan newcomers to the company – who now made up most of the survivors under the Shield Anvil’s command – she had earned her place as a soldier of the Grey Swords.
Itkovian broke a long silence. ‘We yield the Great Hall, now.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The honour of the prince has been reasserted. We must needs depart – there is unfinished business at the Thrall.’
‘Can we even yet reach it, sir? We shall need to find a Barghast warchief.’
‘We shall not be mistaken for the enemy, sir. Enough of our brothers and sisters lie dead in the city to make our colours well known. Also, given the pursuit has, apart from the concourse, driven the Pannions west onto the plain, we shall likely find our path unopposed.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Itkovian fixed his attention one last time on the destroyed redoubt in the killing field to the east. Two Gidrath soldiers in the Great Hall below were from that foolhardy but noble defence, and one of them bore recent wounds that would most likely prove fatal. The other, a bull of a man who had knelt before Rath’Hood, seemed no longer able to sleep. In the four days and nights since retaking the Great Hall, he had but paced during his rest periods, oblivious of his surroundings. Pacing, muttering under his breath, his eyes darkly feverish in their intensity. He and his dying companion were, Itkovian suspected, the last Gidrath still alive outside the Thrall itself.
A Gidrath sworn to Hood, yet he follows my command without hesitation. Simple expedience, one might reasonably conclude. Notions of rivalry dispensed with in the face of the present extremity. Yet … I find myself mistrusting my own explanations.
Despite his exhaustion, the Shield Anvil had sensed a growing perturbation. Something had happened. Somewhere. And as if in response he’d felt his blood seem to drain from him, emptying his veins, hollowing his heart, vanishing through a wound he’d yet to find. Leaving him to feel … incomplete.
As if I had surrendered my faith. But I have not. ‘The void of lost faith is filled with your swollen self.’ Words from a long-dead Destriant. One does not yield, one replaces. Faith with doubt, scepticism, denial. I have yielded nothing. I have no horde of words crowding my inner defences. Indeed, I am diminished into silence. Emptied … as if awaiting renewal …
He shook himself. ‘This wind screams too loud in my ears,’ he said, eyes still on the East Watch redoubt. ‘Come, sir, we go below.’
* * *
One hundred and twelve soldiers remained in fighting condition, though not one was free of wounds. Seventeen Grey Swords lay dead or slowly dying along one wall. The air reeked of sweat, urine and rotting meat. The Great Hall’s entranceways were framed in blackening blood, scraped clean on the tiles for firm footing. The long-gone architect who had given shape to the chamber would have been appalled at what it had become. Its noble beauty now housed a nightmare scene.
On the throne, his skin roughly sewn back onto his half-devoured form, sat Prince Jelarkan, eyeless, teeth exposed in a grin that grew wider as the lips lost their moisture and shrank away on all sides. Death’s broadening smile, a precise, poetic horror. Worthy to hold court in what the Great Hall had become. A young prince who had loved his people, now joined to their fate.
It was time to leave. Itkovian stood near the main entrance, studying what was left of his Grey Swords. They in turn faced him, motionless, stone-eyed. To the left, two Capan recruits held the reins of the two remaining warhorses. The lone Gidrath – his companion had died moments earlier – paced with head sunk low, shoulders hunched, back and forth along the wall behind the ranked mercenaries. A battered longsword was held in each hand, the one on the left bent by a wild swing that had struck a marble column two nights past.
The Shield Anvil thought to address his soldiers, if only to honour decorum, but now, as he stood scanning their faces, he realized that he had no words left within him: none to dress what mutually bound them together; none capable of matching the strangely cold pride he felt at that moment. Finally, he drew his sword, tested the straps holding his shield-arm in place, then turned to the main entranceway.
The hallway beyond had been cleared of corpses, creating an avenue between the stacked bodies to the outer doors.
Itkovian strode down the ghastly aisle, stepped between the leaning, battered doors, and out into sunlight.
Following their many assaults, the Pannions had pulled their fallen comrades away from the broad, shallow steps of the approach, had used the courtyard to haphazardly pile the bodies – including those still living, who then either expired from wounds or from suffocation.
Itkovian paused at the top of the steps. The sounds of fighting persisted from the direction of Jelarkan’s Concourse, but that was all he heard. Silence shrouded the scene before him, a silence so discordant in what had been a lively palace forecourt, in what had been a thriving city, that Itkovian was deeply shaken for the first time since the siege began.
Dear Fener, find for me the victory in this.
He descended the steps, the stone soft and gummy under his boots. His company followed, not a word spoken.
They strode through the shattered gate, began picking their way through the corpses on the ramp, then in the street beyond. Uncontested by the living, this would nevertheless prove a long journey. Nor would it be a journey without battle. Assailing them now were what their eyes saw, what their noses smelled, and what they could feel underfoot.
A battle that made shields and armour useless, that made flailing swords futile. A soul hardened beyond humanity was the only defence, and for Itkovian that price was too high. I am the Shield Anvil. I surrender to what lies before me. Thicker than smoke, the grief unleashed and now lost, churning this lifeless air. A city has been killed. Even the survivors huddling in the tunnels below – Fener take me, better they never emerge … to see this.
Their route took them between the cemeteries. Itkovian studied the place where he and his soldiers had made a stand. It looked no different from anywhere else his eye scanned. The dead lay in heaps. As Brukhalian had promised, not one pavestone had gone uncontested. This small city had done all it could. Pannion victory might well have been inevitable, but thresholds nevertheless existed, transforming inexorable momentum into a curse.
And now the White Face clans of the Barghast had announced their own inevitability. What the Pannions had delivered had been in turn delivered upon them. We are all pushed into a world of madness, yet it must now fall to each of us to pull back from this Abyss, to drag ourselves free of the descending spiral. From horror, grief must be fashioned, and from grief, compassion.
As the company entered a choked avenue at the edge of the Daru district, a score of Barghast emerged from an alley mouth directly ahead. Bloodied hook-swords in hands, white-painted faces spattered red. The foremost among them grinned at the Shield Anvil.
‘Defenders!’ he barked in harshly-accented Capan. ‘How sits this gift of liberation?’
Itkovian ignored the question, ‘You have kin at the Thrall, sir. Even now I see the protective glow fading.’
‘We shall see the bones of our gods, aye,’ the warrior said, nodding. His small, dark eyes scanned the Grey Swords. ‘You lead a tribe of women.’
‘Capan women,’ Itkovian said. ‘This city’s most resilient resource, though it fell to us to discover that. They are Grey Swords, now, sir, and for that we are strengthened.’
‘We’ve seen your brothers and sisters everywhere,’ the Barghast warrior growled. ‘Had they been our enemies, we would be glad they are dead.’
‘And as allies?’ the Shield Anvil asked.
The Barghast fighters one and all made a gesture, back of sword-hand to brow, the briefest brush of leather to skin, then the spokesman said, ‘The loss fills the shadows we cast. Know this, soldier, the enemy you left to us was brittle.’
Itkovian shrugged. ‘The Pannions’ faith knows not worship, only necessity. Their strength is a shallow thing, sir. Will you accompany us to the Thrall?’
‘At your sides, soldiers. In your shadow lies honour.’
Most of the structures in the Daru district had burned, collapsing in places to fill the streets with blackened rubble. As the Grey Swords and Barghast wound their way through the least cluttered paths, Itkovian’s eyes were drawn to one building still standing, off to their right. A tenement, its walls were strangely bowed. Banked fires had been built against the side facing him, scorching the stones, but the assault of flame had failed for some reason. Every arched window Itkovian could see looked to have been barricaded.
At his side, the Barghast spokesman growled, ‘Your kind crowd your barrows.’
The Shield Anvil glanced at the man. ‘Sir?’
The warrior nodded towards the smoke-hazed tenement and went on with his commentary, ‘Easier, aye, than digging and lining a pit outside the city, then the lines passing buckets of earth. You like a clear view from the walls, it seems. But we do not live among our dead in the manner of your people…’
Itkovian turned back to study the tenement, now slightly to the rear on the right. His eyes narrowed. The barricades blocking the windows. Once more, flesh and bone. Twin Tusks, who would build such a necropolis? Surely, it cannot be the consequence of defence?
‘We wandered close,’ the warrior at his side said. ‘The walls give off their own heat. Jellied liquid bleeds between the cracks.’ He made another gesture, this one shuddering, hilt of his hook-sword clattering against the coin-wrought armour covering his torso. ‘By the bones, soldier, we fled.’
‘Is that tenement the only one so … filled?’
‘We’ve seen no other, though we did pass one estate that still held – enlivened corpses stood guard at the gate and on the walls. The air stank of sorcery, an emanation foul with necromancy. I tell you this, soldier, we shall be glad to quit this city.’
Itkovian was silent. He felt rent inside. The Reve of Fener voiced the truth of war. It spoke true of the cruelty that humanity was capable of unleashing upon its own kind. War was played like a game by those who led others; played in an illusory arena of calm reason, but such lies could not survive reality, and reality seemed to have no limits. The Reve held a plea for restraint, and insisted the glory to be found was not to be a blind one, rather a glory born of solemn, clear-eyed regard. Within limitless reality resided the promise of redemption.
That regard was failing Itkovian now. He was recoiling like a caged animal cruelly prodded on all sides. Escape was denied to him, yet that denial was self-imposed, a thing born of his conscious will, given shape by the words of his vow. He must assume this burden, no matter the cost. The fires of vengeance had undergone a transformation within him. He would be, at the last, the redemption – for the souls of the fallen in this city.
Redemption. For everyone else, but not for himself. For that, he could only look to his god. But, dear Fener, what has happened? Where are you? I kneel in place, awaiting your touch, yet you are nowhere to be found. Your realm … it feels … empty.
Where, now, can I go?
Aye, I am not yet done. I accept this. And when I am? Who awaits me? Who shall embrace me? A shiver ran through him.
Who shall embrace me?
The Shield Anvil pushed the question away, struggled to renew his resolve. He had, after all, no choice. He would be Fener’s grief. And his Lord’s hand of justice. Not welcome responsibilities, and he sensed the toll they were about to exact.
They neared the plaza before the Thrall. Other Barghast were visible, joining in the convergence. The distant sounds of battle in Jelarkan Concourse, which had accompanied them through most of the afternoon, now fell silent. The enemy had been driven from the city.
Itkovian did not think the Barghast would pursue. They had achieved what they had come here to do. The Pannion threat to the bones of their gods had been removed.
Probably, if Septarch Kulpath still lived, he would reform his tattered forces, reassert discipline and prepare for his next move. Either a counterattack, or a westward withdrawal. There were risks to both. He might have insufficient force to retake the city. And his army, having lost possession of their camps and supply routes, would soon suffer from lack of supplies. It was not an enviable position. Capustan, a small, inconsequential city on the east coast of Central Genabackis, had become a many-sided curse. And the lives lost here signified but the beginning of the war to come.
