The Malazan Empire, page 235
Coll hesitated, then said, ‘Murillio, if we find someone – someone who can do something for the Mhybe – well, it’s likely to be expensive.’
The man shrugged. ‘I’ve been in debt before.’
‘As have I. So long as it’s understood that this will likely mean our financial ruin, and all that might be achieved is a kinder end to her life.’
‘A worthwhile exchange, then.’
Coll did not ask for another affirmation of his friend’s resolve. He knew Murillio too well for that. Aye, it’s naught but coin, isn’t it? No matter the amount, a fair exchange to ease an old woman’s suffering. One way or the other. For at least we will have cared – even if she never again awakens and thus knows nothing of what we do. Indeed, it is perhaps better that way. Cleaner. Simpler …
* * *
The howl echoed as if from a vast cavern. Echoed, folded in on itself until the mourning call became a chorus. Bestial voices in countless numbers, voices that stripped away the sense of time itself, that made eternity into a single now.
The voices of winter.
Yet they came from the south, from the place where the tundra could go no further; where the trees were no longer ankle-high, but rose, still ragged, wind-torn and spindly, over her head, so that she could pass unseen – no longer towering above the landscape.
Kin answered that howl. The pursuing beasts, still on her trail, yet losing her now, as she slipped among the black spruce, the boggy ground sucking hungrily at her bare feet, the black-stained water swirling thick and turgid as she waded chill pools. Huge mosquitoes swarmed her, each easily twice the size of those she knew on the Rhivi Plain. Blackflies crawled in her hair, bit her scalp. Round leeches like black spots covered her limbs.
In her half-blind flight she had stumbled into a spatulate antler, jammed in the crotch of two trees at eye-level. The gouge a tine had made under her right cheek still trickled blood.
It is my death that approaches. That gives me strength. I draw from that final moment, and now they cannot catch me.
They cannot catch me.
The cavern lay directly ahead. She could not yet see it, and there was nothing in the landscape to suggest a geology natural to caves, but the echoing howl was closer.
The beast calls to me. A promise of death, I think, for it gives me this strength. It is my siren call—
Darkness drew down around her, and she knew she had arrived. The cavern was a shaping of a soul, a soul lost within itself.
The air was damp and cool. No insects buzzed or lit on her skin. The stone under the soles of her feet was dry.
She could see nothing, and the howl had fallen silent.
When she stepped forward she knew it was her mind that moved, her mind alone, leaving her body, questing out, seeking that chained beast.
‘Who?’
The voice startled her. A man’s voice, muffled, taut with pain.
‘Who comes?’
She did not know how to answer, and simply spoke the first words that came into her head. ‘It is I.’
‘I?’
‘A – a mother…’
The man’s laugh grated harshly. ‘Another game, then? You’ve no words, Mother. You’ve never had them. You’ve whimpers and cries, you’ve warning growls, you’ve a hundred thousand wordless sounds to describe your need – that is your voice and I know it well.’
‘A mother.’
‘Leave me. I am beyond taunting. I circle my own chain, here in my mind. This place is not for you. Perhaps, in finding it, you think you’ve defeated my last line of defence. You think you now know all of me. But you’ve no power here. Do you know, I imagine seeing my own face, as if in a mirror.
‘But it’s the wrong eye – the wrong eye staring back at me. And worse, it’s not even human. It took me a long time to understand, but now I do.
‘You and your kind played with winter. Omtose Phellack. But you never understood it. Not true winter, not the winter that is not sorcery, but born of the cooling earth, the dwindling sun, the shorter days and longer nights. The face I see before me, Seer, it is winter’s face. A wolf’s. A god’s.’
‘My child knows wolves,’ the Mhybe said.
‘He does indeed.’
‘Not he. She. I have a daughter—’
‘Confusing the rules defeats the game, Seer. Sloppy—’
‘I am not who you think I am. I am – I am an old woman. Of the Rhivi. And my daughter wishes to see me dead. But not a simple passage, not for me. No. She’s sent wolves after me. To rend my soul. They hunt my dreams – but here, I have escaped them. I’ve come here to escape.’
The man laughed again. ‘The Seer has made this my prison. And I know it to be so. You are the lure of madness, of strangers’ voices in my head. I defy you. Had you known of my real mother, you might have succeeded, but your rape of my mind was ever incomplete. There is a god here, Seer, crouched before my secrets. Fangs bared. Not even your dear mother, who holds me so tight, dares challenge him. As for your Omtose Phellack – he would have confronted you at that warren’s gate long ago. He would have denied it to you, Jaghut. To all of you. But he was lost. Lost. And know this, I am helping him. I am helping him to find himself. He’s growing aware, Seer.’
‘I do not understand you,’ the Mhybe replied, faltering as despair slowly stole through her. This was not the place she had believed it to be. She had indeed fled to another person’s prison, a place of personal madness. I came here for death—’
‘You’ll not find it, not in these leathery arms.’
‘I am fleeing my daughter—’
‘Flight is an illusion. Even Mother here comprehends that. She knows I am not her child, yet she cannot help herself. She even possesses memories, of a time when she was a true Matron, a mother to a real brood. Children who loved her, and other children – who betrayed her. And left her to suffer for eternity.
‘She never anticipated an escape from that. Yet when she found herself free at last, it was to discover that her world had turned to dust. Her children were long dead, entombed in their barrows – for without a mother, they withered and died. She looked to you, then, Seer. Her adopted son. And showed you your power, so that she could use it. To re-create her world. She raised her dead children. She set them to rebuilding the city. But it was all false, the delusion could not deceive her, could only drive her mad.
‘And that,’ he continued, ‘is when you usurped her. Thus, her child has made her a prisoner once more. There is no escaping the paths of our lives, it seems. A truth you’re not prepared to face, Seer. Not yet.’
‘My child has made me a prisoner as well,’ the Mhybe whispered. ‘Is this the curse of all mothers?’
‘It is the curse of love.’
A faint howl rang through the dark air.
‘Hear that?’ the man asked. ‘That is my mate. She’s coming. I looked for so long. For so long. And now, she’s coming.’
The voice had acquired a deeper timbre with these words. It seemed to be no longer the man’s voice.
‘And now,’ the words continued, ‘now, I answer.’
His howl tore through her, flung her mind back. Out of the cavern, out beyond the straggly forests, back onto the tundra’s barren plain.
The Mhybe screamed.
Her wolves answered. Triumphantly.
They had found her once again.
A hand touched her cheek. ‘Gods, that was bloodcurdling.’
A familiar voice, but she could not yet place it.
Another man spoke, ‘There is more to this than we comprehend, Murillio. Look at her cheek.’
‘She has clawed herself—’
‘She cannot lift her arms, friend. And look, the nails are clean. She did not inflict this wound on herself.’
‘Then who did? I’ve been here all this time. Not even the old Rhivi woman has visited since I last looked upon her – and there was no wound then.’
‘As I said, there is a mystery here…’
‘Coll, I don’t like this. Those nightmares – could they be real? Whatever pursues her in her dreams – are they able to physically damage her?’
‘We see the evidence—’
‘Aye, though I scarce believe my own eyes. Coll, this cannot go on.’
‘Agreed, Murillio. First chance in Capustan…’
‘The very first. Let’s move the wagon to the very front of the line – the sooner we reach the streets the better.’
‘As you say.’
Chapter Twenty
It is a most ancient tale. Two gods from before the time of men and women. Longing and love and loss, the beasts doomed to wander through the centuries.
A tale of mores, told with the purpose of no resolution. Its meaning, gentle readers, lies not in a soul-warming conclusion, but in all that is unattainable in this world.
Who then could have imagined such closure?
WINTER’S LOVE
SILBARATHA
The heart of the vast palace lay buried in the cliff. Seas born to the east of the bay battered the cliff’s jagged hooves, lifting spray to darken the rockface. Immediately beyond the broken shore’s rough spars, the waters of Coral Bay pitched into inky blackness, fathoms deep. The city’s harbour was little more than a narrow, crooked cut on the lee side of the cliff, a depthless fissure that opened a split nearly bisecting the city. It was a harbour without docks. The sheer faces of the sides had been carved into long piers, surmounted by causeways. At high tide level, mooring rings had been driven into the living stone. Broad sweeps of thick netting, twice the height of an ocean trader’s masts, spanned the entire breadth of water from the harbour’s mouth all the way to its apex. Where no tethered anchor could touch the fjord’s bottom, and where the shores themselves offered no strand, no shallows whatsoever, a ship’s anchors were drawn upward. The cat-men, as they were called – that strange, almost tribal collection of workers who lived with their wives and children in shacks on the netting and whose sole profession was the winching of anchors and the tethering of sway-lines – had made of the task artistry in motion.
From the wide, sea-facing battlement of the palace, the sealskin-roofed huts and driftwood sheds of the cat-men were like a scattering of brown pebbles and beach detritus, snagged on netting that was thread-like with distance. No figures scampered between the structures. No smoke rose from the angled hood-chimneys. Had he an eagle’s eye, Toc the Younger would have had no trouble seeing the salt-dried bodies tangled here and there in the netting; as it was, he could only take the Seerdomin’s word for it that those small, bedraggled smudges were indeed corpses.
The trader ships no longer came to Coral. The cat-men had starved. Every man, every woman, every child. A legendary and unique people within the city had become extinct.
The observation had been delivered in a detached tone, but Toc sensed an undercurrent in the nameless warrior-priest’s words. The huge man stood close, one hand gripping Toc’s left arm above the elbow. To keep him from flinging himself from the cliff. To keep him standing upright. What had begun as one task had quickly become the other. This reprieve from the clutches of the Matron was but temporary. The Malazan’s broken body had no strength left within it. Muscles had atrophied. Warped bones and seized joints gave him the flexibility of dry wood. His lungs were filled with fluid, making his drawn breath a wheeze, his exhalation a milky gurgle.
The Seer had wanted him to see. Coral. The palace fortress – often assailed, by Elingarth warships and pirate fleets, never taken. His vast cordon of mages, the thousand or more K’Chain Che’Malle K’ell Hunters, the elite legions of his main army. The defeats to the north meant little to him; indeed, he would yield Setta, Lest and Maurik; he would leave the invaders to their long, exhausting march – through scorched lands that offered no sustenance; where even the wells had been fouled. As for the enemies to the south, there was now a vast stretch of rough sea to impede their progress – a sea the Seer had filled with shattered mountains of ice. There were no boats to be found on the far shore in any case. A journey to the western end of Ortnal Cut would take months. True, the T’lan Imass could cross the water, as wave-borne dust. But it would have to fight the fierce currents the entire way, currents that plunged into the depths on cold streams, that swept in submerged rivers eastward, out into the ocean.
The Seer was well satisfied, said the nameless Seerdomin. Pleased enough to yield Toc this momentary mercy. Out from his Mother’s arms.
The chill, salty wind whipped at his face, tugged at his ragged, long, dirty hair. His clothes were little more than crusted strips – the Seerdomin had given him his cloak, which Toc had wrapped about himself like a blanket. It had been this gesture that had hinted to the Malazan that the man at his side still possessed a shred of humanity.
The discovery had brought water to his eyes.
Clarity had been reborn within him, aided by the Seerdomin’s detailed account of the battles to the south. Perhaps it was insanity’s final, most convincing delusion, but Toc clung to it none the less. He stared southward across the wind-whipped seas. The mountainous shoreline on the far side was barely visible.
They had surely reached it by now. They might well be standing on the beach, staring bleakly towards him, and all that lay in between. Baaljagg would not be discouraged. A goddess hid within her, driving ever onward, ever onward, to find her mate.
The mate who hides within me. We’d travelled, side by side, all unknowing of the secrets within each other. Ah, such brutal irony …
And perhaps Tool would not be daunted. Time and distance meant nothing to the T’lan Imass. The same, no doubt, was true for the three Seguleh – they still had their singular message to deliver, after all. Their people’s invitation to war.
But Lady Envy …
Mistress of adventure, seduced by serendipity – true, she was angry, now. That much was clear from the Seerdomin’s reportage. Affronted was a better description, Toc corrected. Sufficient to see her temper flare, but that temper was not a driven thing. She was not one to smoulder, not one to kindle deep-bedded fires of vengeance. She existed for distraction, for wayward whims.
Lady Envy, and likely her wounded, hurting dog, Garath, would turn away now, at last. Tired of the hunt, they would not set to themselves the task of pursuit, not across this violent sea with its glowing, awash leviathans of jagged ice.
He told himself not to be disappointed, but a pang of sadness twisted within him at the thought. He missed her, not as a woman – not precisely, in any case. No, the immortal face she presents, I think. Unburdened, a trickster’s glint to her millennial regard. I teased her, once … danced around that nature … made her stamp her foot and frown. As only an immortal could do when the unlikely brunt of such mocking. I turned the knife. Gods, did I truly possess such audacity?
Well, dear Lady, I humbly apologize, now. I am not the brave man I once was, if it was indeed bravery and not simple stupidity. Mocking’s been taken from my nature. Never to return, and perhaps that’s a good thing. Ah, I can see you nod most wholeheartedly at that. Mortals should not mock, for all the obvious reasons. Detachment belongs to gods, because only they can afford its price. So be it.
Thank you, Lady Envy. No recriminations will pursue you. It was well run.
‘You should have seen Coral in its day, Malazan.’
‘It was your home, wasn’t it?’
‘Aye. Though my home now is in the heart of my Seer.’
‘Where the winds are even colder,’ Toc muttered.
The Seerdomin was silent for a moment.
Toc was expecting a blow from a gauntleted fist, or a painful wrench from the hand gripping his frail arm. Either one would have been an appropriate response; either one would have elicited an approving nod from the Seer. Instead, the man said, ‘This is a summer day, but not like the summer days I remember in my youth. Coral’s wind was warm. Soft, caressing as a lover’s breath. My father, he fished out beyond the cut. Up along the coast north of here. Vast, rich shoals. He’d be gone for a week or more with every season’s run. We’d all go down to the causeway to watch the fleets return, to see our father’s orange sail among the barques.’
Toc glanced up at the man, saw the smile, the glimmering echo of a child’s joy in his eyes.
Saw them die once more.
‘He came back the last time … to find that his family had embraced the Faith. His wife, to the Tenescowri. His sons, to the ranks, eldest begun schooling as Seerdomin. He did not throw his lines to me on that day – seeing my uniform. Seeing my mother – hearing her mindless shrieks. Seeing my brothers with spears in hand, my sisters naked and clinging to men thrice their age. No, he swung the boom, tacked onto the offshore breeze.
‘I watched his sail until I could see it no more. It was my way, Malazan—’
‘Of saying goodbye,’ Toc whispered.
‘Of saying good luck. Of saying … well done.’
Destroyer of lives. Seer, how could you have done this to your people?
A distant bell rang in the palace behind them.
The Seerdomin’s grip tightened. ‘The allotted time is done.’
‘Back to my own embrace,’ Toc said, his gaze straining to catch, one last time, the world before him. Remember this, for you will not see it again, Toc the Younger.
‘Thank you for the use of your cloak,’ he said.
‘You are welcome, Malazan. These winds were once warm. Come, lean on me while we walk – your weight is as nothing.’
They slowly made their way towards the building. ‘Easily borne, you mean.’
‘I did not say that, Malazan. I did not say that.’
* * *
The gutted tenement seemed to shiver a moment before collapsing in a cloud of dust. The cobbles of the street trembled beneath Shield Anvil Itkovian’s boots and thunder shook the air.
Hedge turned to him, grinning through the smears of soot. ‘See? Easy.’
Itkovian answered the Bridgeburner with a nod, watched as Hedge rejoined his fellow sappers and they set off for the next unrecoverable building.
