The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen, page 300
‘As you said, the Hounds are troubled.’
‘They are indeed.’
‘You wish to know more of your potential enemy.’
‘We would.’
Kalam studied the gate, the swirling shadows at its threshold. ‘Where would you have me begin?’
‘A confluence to your own desires, I suspect.’
The assassin glanced at the god, then slowly nodded.
In the half-light of dusk, the seas grew calm, gulls wheeling in from the shoals to settle on the beach. Cutter had built a fire from driftwood, more from the need to be doing something than seeking warmth, for the Kanese coast was subtropical, the breeze sighing down off the verge faint and sultry. The Daru had collected water from the spring near the trail head and was now brewing tea. Overhead, the first stars of night flickered into life.
Apsalar’s question earlier that afternoon had gone unanswered. Cutter was not yet ready to return to Darujhistan, and he felt nothing of the calm he’d expected to follow the completion of their task. Rellock and Apsalar had, finally, returned to their home, only to find it a place haunted by death, a haunting that had slipped its fatal flavour into the old man’s soul, adding yet one more ghost to this forlorn strand. There was, now, nothing for them here.
Cutter’s own experience here in the Malazan Empire was, he well knew, twisted and incomplete. A single vicious night in Malaz City, followed by three tense days in Kan that closed with yet more assassinations. The empire was a foreign place, of course, and one could expect a certain degree of discord between it and what he was used to in Darujhistan, but if anything what he had seen of daily life in the cities suggested a stronger sense of lawfulness, of order and calm. Even so, it was the smaller details that jarred his sensibilities the most, that reinforced the fact that he was a stranger.
Feeling vulnerable was not a weakness he shared with Apsalar. She seemed possessed of absolute calm, an ease, no matter where she was—the confidence of the god who once possessed her had left something of a permanent imprint on her soul. Not just confidence. He thought once more of the night she had killed the man in Kan. Deadly skills, and the icy precision necessary when using them. And, he recalled with a shiver, many of the god’s own memories remained with her, reaching back to when the god had been a mortal man, had been Dancer. Among those, the night of the assassinations—when the woman who would become Empress had struck down the Emperor…and Dancer.
She had revealed that much, at least, a revelation devoid of feeling, of sentiment, delivered as casually as a comment about the weather. Memories of biting knives, of dust-covered blood rolling like pellets across a floor…
He removed the pot from the coals, threw a handful of herbs into the steaming water.
She had gone for a walk, westward along the white beach. Even as dusk settled, he had lost sight of her, and he had begun to wonder if she was ever coming back.
A log settled suddenly, flinging sparks. The sea had grown entirely dark, invisible; he could not even hear the lap of the waves beyond the crackling fire. A cooler breath rode the breeze.
Cutter slowly rose, then spun round to face inland as something moved in the gloom beyond the fire’s light. ‘Apsalar?’
There was no reply. A faint thumping underfoot, as if the sands trembled to the passage of something huge…huge and four-legged.
The Daru drew out his knives, stepping away from the flickering light.
Ten paces away, at a height to match his own, he saw two glowing eyes, set wide, gold and seemingly depthless. The head and the body beneath it were darker stains in the night, hinting at a mass that left Cutter cold.
‘Ah,’ a voice said from the shadows to his left, ‘the Daru lad. Blind has found you, good. Now, where is your companion?’
Cutter slowly sheathed his weapons. ‘That damned Hound gave me a start,’ he muttered. ‘And if it’s blind, why is it looking straight at me?’
‘Well, her name is something of a misnomer. She sees, but not as we see.’ A cloaked figure stepped into the firelight. ‘Do you know me?’
‘Cotillion,’ Cutter replied. ‘Shadowthrone is much shorter.’
‘Not that much, though perhaps in his affectations he exaggerates certain traits.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I would speak with Apsalar, of course. There is the smell of death here…recent, that is—’
‘Rellock. Her father. In his sleep.’
‘Unfortunate.’ The god’s hooded head turned, as if scanning the vicinity, then swung back to face Cutter. ‘Am I your patron now?’ he asked.
He wanted to answer no. He wanted to back away, to flee the question and all his answer would signify. He wanted to unleash vitriol at the suggestion. ‘I believe you might be at that, Cotillion.’
‘I am…pleased, Crokus.’
‘I am now named Cutter.’
‘Far less subtle, but apt enough, I suppose. Even so, there was the hint of deadly charm in your old Daru name. Are you sure you will not reconsider?’
Cutter shrugged, then said, ‘Crokus had no…patron god.’
‘Of course. And one day, a man will arrive in Darujhistan. With a Malazan name, and no-one will know him, except perhaps by reputation. And he will eventually hear tales of the young Crokus, a lad so instrumental in saving the city on the night of the Fete, all those years ago. Innocent, unsullied Crokus. So be it…Cutter. I see you have a boat.’
The change of subject startled him slightly, then he nodded. ‘We have.’
‘Sufficiently provisioned?’
‘More or less. Not for a long voyage, though.’
‘No, of course not. Why should it be? May I see your knives?’
Cutter unsheathed them and passed them across to the god, pommels forward.
‘Decent blades,’ Cotillion murmured. ‘Well balanced. Within them are the echoes of your skill, the taste of blood. Shall I bless them for you, Cutter?’
‘If the blessing is without magic,’ the Daru replied.
‘You desire no sorcerous investment?’
‘No.’
‘Ah. You would follow Rallick Nom’s path.’
Cutter’s eyes narrowed. Oh, yes, he would recall him. When he saw through Sorry’s eyes, at the Phoenix Inn, perhaps. Or maybe Rallick acknowledged his patron…though I find that difficult to believe. ‘I think I would have trouble following that path, Cotillion. Rallick’s abilities are…were—’
‘Formidable, yes. I do not think you need use the past tense when speaking of Rallick Nom, or Vorcan for that matter. No, I’ve no news…simply a suspicion.’ He handed the knives back. ‘You underestimate your own skills, Cutter, but perhaps that is for the best.’
‘I don’t know where Apsalar’s gone,’ Cutter said. ‘I don’t know if she’s coming back.’
‘As it has turned out, her presence has proved less vital than expected. I have a task for you, Cutter. Are you amenable to providing a service to your patron?’
‘Isn’t that expected?’
Cotillion was silent for a moment, then he laughed softly. ‘No, I shall not take advantage of your…inexperience, though I admit to some temptation. Shall we begin things on a proper footing? Reciprocity, Cutter. A relationship of mutual exchanges, yes?’
‘Would that you had offered the same to Apsalar.’ Then he clamped his jaw shut.
But Cotillion simply sighed. ‘Would that I had. Consider this new tact the consequence of difficult lessons.’
‘You said reciprocity. What will I receive in return for providing this service?’
‘Well, since you’ll not accept my blessing or any other investment, I admit to being at something of a loss. Any suggestions?’
‘I’d like some questions answered.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Yes. Such as, why did you and Shadowthrone scheme to destroy Laseen and the empire? Was it just a desire for revenge?’
The god seemed to flinch within his robes, and Cutter felt unseen eyes harden. ‘Oh my,’ Cotillion drawled, ‘you force me to reconsider my offer.’
‘I would know,’ the Daru pressed on, ‘so I can understand what you did…did to Apsalar.’
‘You demand that your patron god justify his actions?’
‘It wasn’t a demand. Just a question.’
Cotillion said nothing for a long moment.
The fire was slowly dying, embers pulsing with the breeze. Cutter sensed the presence of a second Hound somewhere in the darkness beyond, moving restlessly.
‘Necessities,’ the god said quietly. ‘Games are played, and what may appear precipitous might well be little more than a feint. Or perhaps it was the city itself, Darujhistan, that would serve our purposes better if it remained free, independent. There are layers of meaning behind every gesture, every gambit. I will not explain myself any further than that, Cutter.’
‘Do—do you regret what you did?’
‘You are indeed fearless, aren’t you? Regret? Yes. Many, many regrets. One day, perhaps, you will see for yourself that regrets are as nothing. The value lies in how they are answered.’
Cutter slowly turned and stared out into the darkness of the sea. ‘I threw Oponn’s coin into the lake,’ he said.
‘And do you now regret the act?’
‘I’m not sure. I didn’t like their…attention.’
‘I am not surprised,’ Cotillion muttered.
‘I have one more request,’ Cutter said, facing the god again. ‘This task you shall set me on—if I am assailed during it, can I call upon Blind?’
‘The Hound?’ The astonishment was clear in Cotillion’s voice.
‘Aye,’ Cutter replied, his gaze now on the huge beast. ‘Her attention…comforts me.’
‘That makes you rarer than you could imagine, mortal. Very well. If the need is dire, call upon her and she will come.’
Cutter nodded. ‘Now, what would you have me do on your behalf?’
The sun had cleared the horizon when Apsalar returned. After a few hours’ sleep, Cutter had risen to bury Rellock above the tide line. He was checking the boat’s hull one last time when a shadow appeared alongside his own.
‘You had visitors,’ she said.
He squinted up at her, studied her dark, depthless eyes. ‘Aye.’
‘And do you now have an answer to my question?’
Cutter frowned, then he sighed and nodded. ‘I do. We’re to explore an island.’
‘An island? Is it far?’
‘Middling, but getting farther by the moment.’
‘Ah. Of course.’
Of course.
Overhead, gulls cried in the morning air on their way out to sea. Beyond the shoals, their white specks followed the wind, angling southwestward.
Cutter set his shoulder to the prow and pushed the craft back out onto the water. Then he clambered aboard. Apsalar joined him, making her way to the tiller.
What now? A god had given him his answer.
There had been no sunset in the realm the Tiste Edur called the Nascent for five months. The sky was grey, the light strangely hued and diffuse. There had been a flood, and then rains, and a world had been destroyed.
Even in the wreckage, however, there was life.
A score of broad-limbed catfish had clambered onto the mud-caked wall, none less than two man-lengths from blunt head to limp tail. They were well-fed creatures, their silvery-white bellies protruding out to the sides. Their skins had dried and fissures were visible in a latticed web across their dark backs. The glitter of their small black eyes was muted beneath the skin’s crinkled layer.
And it seemed those eyes were unaware of the solitary T’lan Imass standing over them.
Echoes of curiosity still clung to Onrack’s tattered, desiccated soul. Joints creaking beneath the knotted ropes of ligaments, he crouched beside the nearest catfish. He did not think the creatures were dead. Only a short time ago, these fish had possessed no true limbs. He was witness, he suspected, to a metamorphosis.
After a moment, he slowly straightened. The sorcery that had sustained the wall against the vast weight of the new sea still held along this section. It had crumbled in others, forming wide breaches and foaming torrents of silt-laden water rushing through to the other side. A shallow sea was spreading out across the land on that side. There might come a time, Onrack suspected, when fragments of this wall were this realm’s only islands.
The sea’s torrential arrival had caught them unawares, scattering them in its tumbling maelstrom. Other kin had survived, the T’lan Imass knew, and indeed some had found purchase on this wall, or on floating detritus, sufficient to regain their forms, to link once more so that the hunt could resume.
But Kurald Emurlahn, fragmented or otherwise, was not amenable to the T’lan Imass. Without a Bonecaster beside him, Onrack could not extend his Tellann powers, could not reach out to his kin, could not inform them that he had survived. For most of his kind, that alone would have been sufficient cause for…surrender. The roiling waters he had but recently crawled from offered true oblivion. Dissolution was the only escape possible from this eternal ritual, and even among the Logros—Guardians of the First Throne itself—Onrack knew of kin who had chosen that path. Or worse…
The warrior’s contemplation of choosing an end to his existence was momentary. In truth, he was far less haunted by his immortality than most T’lan Imass.
There was always something else to see, after all.
He detected movement beneath the skin of the nearest catfish, vague hints of contraction, of emerging awareness. Onrack drew forth his two-handed, curved obsidian sword. Most things he stumbled upon usually had to be killed. Occasionally in self-defence, but often simply due to an immediate and probably mutual loathing. He had long since ceased questioning why this should be so.
From his massive shoulders hung the rotted skin of an enkar’al, pebbled and colourless. It was a relatively recent acquisition, less than a thousand years old. Another example of a creature that had hated him on first sight. Though perhaps the black rippled blade swinging at its head had tainted its response.
It would be some time, Onrack judged, before the beast crawled out from its skin. He lowered his weapon and stepped past it. The Nascent’s extraordinary, continent-spanning wall was a curiosity in itself. After a moment, the warrior decided to walk its length. Or at least, until his passage was blocked by a breach.
He began walking, hide-wrapped feet scuffing as he dragged them forward, the point of the sword inscribing a desultory furrow in the dried clay as it trailed from his left hand. Clumps of mud clung to his ragged hide shirt and the leather straps of his weapon harness. Silty, soupy water had seeped into the various gashes and punctures on his body and now leaked in trickling runnels with every heavy step he took. He had possessed a helm once, an impressive trophy from his youth, but it had been shattered at the final battle against the Jaghut family in the Jhag Odhan. A single crossways blow that had also shorn away a fifth of his skull, parietal and temporal, on the right side. Jaghut women had deceptive strength and admirable ferocity, especially when cornered.
The sky above him had a sickly cast, but one he had already grown used to. This fragment of the long-fractured Tiste Edur warren was by far the largest he had come across, larger even than the one that surrounded Tremorlor, the Azath Odhanhouse. And this one had known a period of stability, sufficient for civilizations to arise, for savants of sorcery to begin unravelling the powers of Kurald Emurlahn, although those inhabitants had not been Tiste Edur.
Idly, Onrack wondered if the renegade T’lan Imass he and his kin pursued had somehow triggered the wound that had resulted in the flooding of this world. It seemed likely, given its obvious efficacy in obscuring their trail. Either that, or the Tiste Edur had returned, to reclaim what had once been theirs.
Indeed, he could smell the grey-skinned Edur—they had passed this way, and recently, arriving from another warren. Of course, the word ‘smell’ had acquired new meaning for the T’lan Imass in the wake of the Ritual. Mundane senses had for the most part withered along with flesh. Through the shadowed orbits of his eyes, for example, the world was a complex collage of dull colours, heat and cold and often measured by an unerring sensitivity to motion. Spoken words swirled in mercurial clouds of breath—if the speaker lived, that is. If not, then it was the sound itself that was detectable, shivering its way through the air. Onrack sensed sound as much by sight as by hearing.
And so it was that he became aware of a warm-blooded shape lying a short distance ahead. The wall here was slowly failing. Water spouted in streams from fissures between the bulging stones. Before long, it would give way entirely.
The shape did not move. It had been chained in place.
Another fifty paces and Onrack reached it.
The stench of Kurald Emurlahn was overpowering, faintly visible like a pool enclosing the supine figure, its surface rippling as if beneath a steady but thin rain. A deep ragged scar marred the prisoner’s broad brow beneath a hairless pate, the wound glowing with sorcery. There had been a metal tongue to hold down the man’s tongue, but that had dislodged, as had the straps wound round the figure’s head.
Slate-grey eyes stared up, unblinking, at the T’lan Imass.
Onrack studied the Tiste Edur for a moment longer, then he stepped over the man and continued on.
A ragged, withered voice rose in his wake. ‘Wait.’
The undead warrior paused and glanced back.
‘I—I would bargain. For my freedom.’
‘I am not interested in bargains,’ Onrack replied in the Edur language.
‘Is there nothing you desire, warrior?’
‘Nothing you can give me.’
‘Do you challenge me, then?’
Tendons creaking, Onrack tilted his head. ‘This section of the wall is about to collapse. I have no wish to be here when it does.’
‘And you imagine that I do?’
‘Considering your sentiments on the matter is a pointless effort on my part, Edur. I have no interest in imagining myself in your place. Why would I? You are about to drown.’
