The Malazan Empire, page 379
Trull stood beside the corpse. The Blackwood bole was still being prepared in an unlit building to one side of the citadel. Living wood resisted the hands that would alter its shape. But it loved death and so could be cajoled.
Distant cries in the village as voices lifted in a final prayer to Daughter Dusk. Night was moments from arriving. The empty hours, when even faith itself must be held quiescent, lay ahead. Night belonged to the Betrayer. Who sought to murder Father Shadow at their very moment of triumph, and who very nearly succeeded.
There were prohibitions against serious discourse during this passage of time. In darkness prowled deceit, an unseen breath that any could draw in, and so become infected.
No swords were buried beneath the threshold of homes wherein maidens dwelt. To seal marriage now would be to doom its fate. A child delivered was put to death. Lovers did not touch one another. The day was dead.
Soon, however, the moon would rise and shadows would return once more. Just as Scabandari Bloodeye emerged from the darkness, so too did the world. Failure awaits the Betrayer. It could not be otherwise, lest the realms descend into chaos.
He stared down at the mound of leaves beneath which lay the body of the warrior. He had volunteered to stand guard this first night. No Edur corpse was ever left unattended when darkness prowled, for it cared naught whether its breath flowed into warm flesh or cold. A corpse could unleash dire events as easily as the acts of someone alive. It had no need for a voice or gestures of its own. Others were ever eager to speak for it, to draw blade or dagger.
Hannan Mosag had proclaimed this the greatest flaw among the Edur. Old men and the dead were the first whisperers of the word vengeance. Old men and the dead stood at the same wall, and while the dead faced it, old men held their backs to it. Beyond that wall was oblivion. They spoke from the end times, and both knew a need to lead the young onto identical paths, if only to give meaning to all they had known and all they had done.
Feuds were now forbidden. Crimes of vengeance sentenced an entire bloodline to disgraced execution.
Trull Sengar had watched, from where he stood in the gloom beneath a tree—the body before him—had watched his brother Rhulad walk out into the forest. In these, the dark hours, he had been furtive in his movement, stealing like a wraith from the village edge.
Into the forest, onto the north trail.
That led to the cemetery that had been chosen for the Beneda warrior’s interment.
Where a lone woman stood vigil against the night.
It may be an attempt…that will fail. Or it is a repetition of meetings that have occurred before, many times. She is unknowable. As all women are unknowable. But he isn’t. He was too late to the war and so his belt is bare. He would draw blood another way.
Because Rhulad must win. In everything, he must win. That is the cliff-edge of his life, the narrow strand he himself fashions, with every slight observed—whether it be real or imagined matters not—every silent moment that, to him, screams scorn upon the vast emptiness of his achievements.
Rhulad. Everything worth fighting for is gained without fighting. Every struggle is a struggle against doubt. Honour is not a thing to be chased, for it, as with all other forces of life, is in fact impelled, streaking straight for you. The moment of collision is where the truth of you is revealed.
An attempt. Which she will refuse, with outrage in her eyes.
Or their arms are now entwined, and in the darkness there is heat and sweat. And betrayal.
And he could not move, could not abandon his own vigil above this anonymous Beneda warrior.
His brother Fear had made a sword, as was the custom. He had stood before Mayen with the blade resting on the backs of his hands. And she had stepped forward, witnessed by all, to take the weapon from him. Carrying it back to her home.
Betrothal.
A year from that day—less than five weeks from now—she would emerge from the doorway with that sword. Then, using it to excavate a trench before the threshold, she would set it down in the earth and bury it. Iron and soil, weapon and home. Man and woman.
Marriage.
Before that day when Fear presented the sword, Rhulad had not once looked at Mayen. Was it the uninterest of youth? No, the Edur were not like Letherii. A year among the Letherii was as a day among the Edur. There were a handful of prettier women among the maidens of noble-born households. But he had set his eyes upon her thereafter.
And that made it what it was.
He could abandon this vigil. A Beneda warrior was not a Hiroth warrior, after all. A sea-gnawed corpse clothed in copper, not gold. He could set out on that trail, padding through the darkness.
To find what? Certainty, the sharp teeth behind all that gnawed at his thoughts.
And the worth of that?
It is these dark hours—
Trull Sengar’s eyes slowly widened. A figure had emerged from the forest edge opposite him. Heart thudding, he stared.
It stepped forward. Black blood in its mouth. Skin a pallid, dulled reflection of moonlight, smeared in dirt, smudged by something like mould. Twin, empty scabbards of polished wood at its hips. Fragments of armour hanging from it. Tall, yet stoop-shouldered, as if height had become its own imposition.
Eyes like dying coals.
‘Ah,’ it murmured, looking down on the heap of leaves, ‘what have we here?’ It spoke the language of night, close kin to that of the Edur.
Trembling, Trull forced himself to step forward, shifting his spear into a two-handed grip, the iron blade hovering above the corpse. ‘He is not for you,’ he said, his throat suddenly parched and strangely tight.
The eyes glowed brighter for a moment as the white-skinned apparition glanced up at Trull. ‘Tiste Edur, do you know me?’
Trull nodded. ‘The ghost of darkness. The Betrayer.’
A yellow and black grin.
Trull flinched as it drew a step closer and then settled to a crouch on the other side of the leaves. ‘Begone from here, ghost,’ the Edur said.
‘Or you will do what?’
‘Sound the alarm.’
‘How? Your voice is but a whisper now. Your throat is clenched. You struggle to breathe. Is it betrayal that strangles you, Edur? Never mind. I have wandered far, and have no desire to wear this man’s armour.’ It straightened. ‘Move back, warrior, if you wish to draw breath.’
Trull held himself where he was. The air hissed its way down his constricted throat, and he could feel his limbs weakening.
‘Well, cowardice was never a flaw among the Edur. Have it your way, then.’ The figure turned and walked towards the forest edge.
Blessed lungful of air, then another. Head spinning, Trull planted his spear and leaned on it. ‘Wait!’
The Betrayer halted, faced him once more.
‘This—this has never happened before. The vigil—’
‘Contested only by hungry earth spirits.’ The Betrayer nodded. ‘Or, even more pathetic, by the spirits of uprooted Blackwoods, sinking into the flesh to do…what? Nothing, just as they did in life. There are myriad forces in this world, Tiste Edur, and the majority of them are weak.’
‘Father Shadow imprisoned you—’
‘So he did, and there I remain.’ Once again, that ghastly smile. ‘Except when I dream. Mother Dark’s reluctant gift, a reminder to me that She does not forget. A reminder to me that I, too, must never forget.’
‘This is not a dream,’ Trull said.
‘They were shattered,’ the Betrayer said. ‘Long ago. Fragments scattered across a battlefield. Why would anyone want them? Those broken shards can never be reunited. They are, each and every one, now folded in on themselves. So, I wonder, what did he do with them?’
The figure walked into the forest and was gone.
‘This,’ Trull whispered, ‘is not a dream.’
Udinaas opened his eyes. The stench of the seared corpse remained in his nose and mouth, thick in his throat. Above him, the longhouse’s close slanted ceiling, rough black bark and yellowed chinking. He remained motionless beneath the blankets.
Was it near dawn?
He could hear nothing, no voices from the chambers beyond. But that told him little. The hours before the moon rose were silent ones. As were, of course, the hours when everyone slept. He had nets to repair the coming day. And rope strands to weave.
Perhaps that is the truth of madness, when a mind can do nothing but make endless lists of the mundane tasks awaiting it, as proof of its sanity. Mend those nets. Wind those strands. See? I have not lost the meaning of my life.
The blood of the Wyval was neither hot nor cold. It did not rage. Udinaas felt no different in his body. But the clear blood of my thoughts, oh, they are stained indeed. He pushed the blankets away and sat up. This is the path, then, and I am to stay on it. Until the moment comes.
Mend the nets. Weave the strands.
Dig the hole for that Beneda warrior, who would have just opened his eyes, had he any. And seen not the blackness of the imprisoning coins. Seen not the blue wax, nor the morok leaves reacting to that wax and turning wet and black. Seen, instead, the face of…something else.
Wyval circled dragons in flight. He had seen that. Like hounds surrounding their master as the hunt is about to be unleashed. I know, then, why I am where I have arrived. And when is an answer the night is yet to whisper—no, not whisper, but howl. The call to the chase by Darkness itself.
Udinaas realized he was among the enemy. Not as a Letherii sentenced to a life of slavery. That was as nothing to the peril his new blood felt, here in this heart of Edur and Kurald Emurlahn.
Feather Witch would have been better, I suppose, but Mother Dark moves unseen even in things such as these.
He made his way into the main chamber.
And came face to face with Uruth.
‘These are not the hours to wander, slave,’ she said.
He saw that she was trembling.
Udinaas sank to the floor and set his forehead against the worn planks.
‘Prepare the cloaks of Fear, Rhulad and Trull, for travel this night. Be ready before the moon’s rise. Food and drink for a morning’s repast.’
He quickly climbed to his feet to do as she bid, but was stopped by an outstretched hand.
‘Udinaas,’ Uruth said. ‘You do this alone, telling no-one.’
He nodded.
Shadows crept out from the forest. The moon had risen, prison world to Menandore’s true father, who was trapped within it. Father Shadow’s ancient battles had made this world, shaped it in so many ways. Scabandari Bloodeye, stalwart defender against the fanatic servants of implacable certitude, whether that certitude blazed blinding white, or was the all-swallowing black. The defeats he had delivered—the burying of Brother Dark and the imprisonment of Brother Light there in that distant, latticed world in the sky—were both gifts, and not just to the Edur but to all who were born and lived only to one day die.
The gifts of freedom, a will unchained unless one affixed upon oneself such chains—the crowding host’s uncountable, ever-rattling offers, each whispering promises of salvation against confusion—and wore them like armour.
Trull Sengar saw chains upon the Letherii. He saw the impenetrable net which bound them, the links of reasoning woven together into a chaotic mass where no beginning and no end could be found. He understood why they worshipped an empty throne. And he knew the manner in which they would justify all that they did. Progress was necessity, growth was gain. Reciprocity belonged to fools and debt was the binding force of all nature, of every people and every civilization. Debt was its own language, within which were used words like negotiation, compensation and justification, and legality was a skein of duplicity that blinded the eyes of justice.
An empty throne. Atop a mountain of gold coins.
Father Shadow had sought a world wherein uncertainty could work its insidious poison against those who chose intransigence as their weapon—with which they held wisdom at bay. Where every fortress eventually crumbled from within, from the very weight of those chains that exerted so inflexible an embrace.
In his mind he argued with that ghost—the Betrayer. The one who sought to murder Scabandari Bloodeye all those thousands of years ago. He argued that every certainty is an empty throne. That those who knew but one path would come to worship it, even as it led to a cliff’s edge. He argued, and in the silence of that ghost’s indifference to his words he came to realize that he himself spoke—fierce with heat—from the foot of an empty throne.
Scabandari Bloodeye had never made that world. He had vanished in this one, lost on a path no-one else could follow.
Trull Sengar stood before the corpse and its mound of rotting leaves, and felt desolation in his soul. A multitude of paths waited before him, and they were all sordid, sodden with despair.
The sound of boots on the trail. He turned.
Fear and Rhulad approached. Wearing their cloaks. Fear carried Trull’s own in his arms, and from the man’s shoulders hung a small pack.
Rhulad’s face was flushed, and Trull could not tell if it was born of anxiety or excitement.
‘I greet you, Trull,’ Fear said, handing him the cloak.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Our father passes this night in the temple. Praying for guidance.’
‘The Stone Bowl,’ Rhulad said, his eyes glittering. ‘Mother sends us to the Stone Bowl.’
‘Why?’
Rhulad shrugged.
Trull faced Fear. ‘What is this Stone Bowl? I have never heard of it.’
‘An old place. In the Kaschan Trench.’
‘You knew of this place, Rhulad?’
His younger brother shook his head. ‘Not until tonight, when Mother described it. We have all walked the edge of the Trench. Of course the darkness of its heart is impenetrable—how could we have guessed that a holy site hid within it?’
‘A holy site? In absolute darkness?’
‘The significance of that,’ Fear said, ‘will be made evident soon enough, Trull.’
They began walking, eldest brother in the lead. Into the forest, onto a trail leading northwest. ‘Fear,’ Trull said, ‘has Uruth spoken to you of the Stone Bowl before?’
‘I am Weapons Master,’ Fear replied. ‘There were rites to observe…’
Among them, Trull knew, the memorization of every battle the Edur ever fought. He then wondered why that thought had come to him, in answer to Fear’s words. What hidden linkages was his own mind seeking to reveal, and why was he unable to discern them?
They continued on, avoiding pools of moonlight unbroken by shadows. ‘Tomad forbade us this journey,’ Trull said after a time.
‘In matters of sorcery,’ Fear said, ‘Uruth is superior to Tomad.’
‘And this is a matter of sorcery?’
Rhulad snorted behind Trull. ‘You stood with us in the Warlock King’s longboat.’
‘I did,’ agreed Trull. ‘Fear, would Hannan Mosag approve of what we do, of what Uruth commands of us?’
Fear said nothing.
‘You,’ Rhulad said, ‘are too filled with doubt, brother. It binds you in place—’
‘I watched you walk the path to the chosen cemetery, Rhulad. After Dusk’s departure and before the moon’s rise.’
If Fear reacted to this, his back did not reveal it, nor did his steps falter on the trail.
‘What of it?’ Rhulad asked, his tone too loose, too casual.
‘My words, brother, are not to be answered with flippancy.’
‘I knew that Fear was busy overseeing the return of weapons to the armoury,’ Rhulad said. ‘And I sensed a malevolence prowling the darkness. And so I stood in hidden vigil over his betrothed, who was alone in the cemetery. I may be unblooded, brother, but I am not without courage. I know you believe that inexperience is the soil in which thrive the roots of false courage. But I am not false, no matter what you think. For me, inexperience is unbroken soil, not yet ready for roots. I stood in my brother’s place.’
‘Malevolence in the night, Rhulad? Whose?’
‘I could not be certain. But I felt it.’
‘Fear,’ Trull said, ‘have you no questions for Rhulad on this matter?’
‘No,’ Fear replied drily. ‘There is no need for that…when you are around.’
Trull clamped his mouth shut, thankful that the night obscured the flush on his face.
There was silence for some time after that.
The trail began climbing, winding among outcrops of lichen-skinned granite. They climbed over fallen trees here and there, scrambled up steep slides. The moon’s light grew diffuse, and Trull sensed it was near dawn by the time they reached the highest point of the trail.
The path now took them inland—eastward—along a ridge of toppled trees and broken boulders. Water trapped in depressions in the bedrock formed impenetrable black pools that spread across the trail. The sky began to lighten overhead.
Fear then led them off the path, north, across tumbled scree and among the twisted trees. A short while later Kaschan Trench was before them.
A vast gorge, like a knife’s puncturing wound in the bedrock, its sides sheer and streaming with water, it ran in a jagged line, beginning beneath Hasana Inlet half a day to the west, and finally vanishing into the bedrock more than a day’s travel to the east: They were at its widest point, two hundred or so paces across, the landscape opposite slightly higher but otherwise identical—scattered boulders looking as if they had been pushed up from the gorge and mangled trees that seemed sickened by some unseen breath from the depths.
Fear unclasped his cloak, dropped his pack and walked over to a misshapen mound of stones. He cleared away dead branches and Trull saw that the stones were a cairn of some sort. Fear removed the capstone, and reached down into the hollow beneath. He lifted clear a coil of knotted rope.
‘Remove your cloak and your weapons,’ he said as he carried the coil to the edge.
He found one end and tied his pack, cloak, sword and spear to it. Trull and Rhulad came close with their own gear and all was bound to the rope. Fear then began lowering it over the side.
