The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen, page 411
Since they were all fleeing, he was not unduly concerned.
He came within sight of the square tower. The Azath. Apart from its primitive style of architecture, there seemed to be little else to set it apart. Brys was baffled by the Ceda’s assertion that a structure of stone and wood could be sentient, could breathe with a life of its own. A building presupposed a builder, yet Kuru Qan claimed that the Azath simply rose into being, drawn together of its own accord. Inviting suspicion on every law of causality generations of scholars had posited as irrefutable truth.
The surrounding grounds were less mysterious, if profoundly more dangerous. The humped barrows in the overgrown yard were unmistakable. Gnarled and stunted, dead trees rose here and there, sometimes from the highest point of the mound, but more often from the flanks. A winding flagstone pathway began opposite the front door, the gate marked by rough pillars of unmortared stone wrapped in vines and runners. The remnants of a low wall enclosed the grounds.
Brys reached the edge of the yard along one side, the gate to his right, the tower to the left. And saw immediately that many of the barrows within sight had slumped on at least one of their sides, as if gutted from within. The weeds covering the mounds were dead, blackened as if by rot.
He studied the scene for a moment longer, then made his way round the perimeter towards the gateway. Striding between the pillars, onto the first flagstone—which pitched down to one side with a grinding clunk. Brys tottered, flinging his arms out for balance, and managed to recover without falling.
High-pitched laughter from near the tower’s entrance.
He looked up.
The girl emerged from the shadow cast by the tower. ‘I know you. I followed the ones following you. And killed them.’
‘What has happened here?’
‘Bad things.’ She came closer, mould-patched and dishevelled. ‘Are you my friend? I was supposed to help it stay alive. But it died anyway, and things are busy killing each other. Except for the one the tower chose. He wants to talk to you.’
‘To me?’
‘To one of my grown-up friends.’
‘Who,’ Brys asked, ‘are your other grown-up friends?’
‘Mother Shurq, Father Tehol, Uncle Ublala, Uncle Bugg.’
Brys was silent. Then, ‘What is your name?’
‘Kettle.’
‘Kettle, how many people have you killed in the past year?’
She cocked her head. ‘I can’t count past eight and two.’
‘Ah.’
‘Lots of eight and twos.’
‘And where do the bodies go?’
‘I bring them back here and push them into the ground.’
‘All of them?’
She nodded.
‘Where is this friend of yours? The one who wants to talk to me?’
‘I don’t know if he’s a friend. Follow me. Step where I step.’
She took him by the hand and Brys fought to repress a shiver at that clammy grip. Off the flagstoned path, between barrows, the ground shifting uncertainly beneath each cautious step. There were more insects, but of fewer varieties, as if some kind of attrition had occurred on the grounds of the Azath. ‘I have never seen insects like these before,’ Brys said. ‘They’re…big.’
‘Old, from the times when the tower was born,’ Kettle said. ‘Eggs in the broken ground. Those stick-like brown ones with the heads at both ends are the meanest. They eat at my toes when I sit still too long. And they’re hard to crush.’
‘What about those yellow, spiky ones?’
‘They don’t bother me. They eat only birds and mice. Here.’
She had stopped before a crumpled mound on which sat one of the larger trees in the yard, the wood strangely streaked grey and black, the twigs and branches projecting in curves rather than sharp angles. Roots spread out across the entire barrow, the remaining bark oddly scaled, like snake skin.
Brys frowned. ‘And how are we to converse, with him in there and me up here?’
‘He’s trapped. He says you have to close your eyes and think about nothing. Like you do when you fight, he says.’
Brys was startled. ‘He’s speaking to you now?’
‘Yes, but he says that isn’t good enough, because I don’t know enough…words. Words and things. He has to show you. He says you’ve done this before.’
‘It seems I am to possess no secrets,’ Brys said.
‘Not many, no, so he says he’ll do the same in return. So you can trust each other. Somewhat.’
‘Somewhat. His word?’
She nodded.
Brys smiled. ‘Well, I appreciate his honesty. All right, I will give this a try.’ He closed his eyes. Kettle’s cold hand remained in his, small, the flesh strangely loose on the bones. He pulled his thoughts from that detail. A fighter’s mind was not in truth emptied during a fight. It was, instead, both coolly detached and mindful. Concentration defined by a structure which was in turn assembled under strict laws of pragmatic necessity. Thus, observational, calculating, and entirely devoid of emotion, even as every sense was awakened.
He felt himself lock into that familiar, reassuring structure.
And was stunned by the strength of the will that tugged him away. He fought against a rising panic, knowing he was helpless before such power. Then relented.
Above him, a sky transformed. Sickly, swirling green light surrounding a ragged black wound large enough to swallow a moon. Clouds twisted, tortured and shorn through by the descent of innumerable objects, each object seeming to fight the air as it fell, as if this world was actively resisting the intrusion. Objects pouring from that wound, tunnelling through layers of the sky.
On the landscape before him was a vast city, rising up from a level plain with tiered gardens and raised walkways. A cluster of towers rose from the far side, reaching to extraordinary heights. Farmland reached out from the city’s outskirts in every direction for as far as Brys could see, strange shadows flowing over it as he watched.
He pulled his gaze from the scene and looked down, to find that he stood on a platform of red-stained limestone. Before him steep steps ran downward, row upon row, hundreds, to a paved expanse flanked by blue-painted columns. A glance to his right revealed a sharply angled descent. He was on a flat-topped pyramid-shaped structure, and, he realized with a start, someone was standing beside him, on his left. A figure barely visible, ghostly, defying detail. It was tall, and seemed to be staring up at the sky, focused on the terrible dark wound.
Objects were striking the ground now, landing hard but with nowhere near the velocity they should have possessed. A loud crack reverberated from the concourse between the columns below, and Brys saw that a massive stone carving had come to rest there. A bizarre beast-like human, squatting with thickly muscled arms reaching down the front, converging with a two-handed grip on the penis. Shoulders and head were fashioned in the likeness of a bull. A second set of legs, feminine, were wrapped round the beast-man’s hips, the platform on which he crouched cut, Brys now saw, into a woman’s form, lying on her back beneath him. From nearby rose the clatter of scores of clay tablets—too distant for Brys to see if there was writing on them, though he suspected there might be—skidding as if on cushions of air before coming to a rest in a scattered swath.
Fragments of buildings—cut limestone blocks, cornerstones, walls of adobe, wattle and daub. Then severed limbs, blood-drained sections of cattle and horses, a herd of something that might have been goats, each one turned inside out, intestines flopping. Dark-skinned humans—or at least their arms, legs and torsos.
Above, the sky was filling with large pallid fragments, floating down like snow.
And something huge was coming through the wound. Wreathed in lightning that seemed to scream with pain, shrieks unending, deafening.
Soft words spoke in Brys’s mind. ‘My ghost, let loose to wander, perhaps, to witness. They warred against Kallor; it was a worthy cause. But…what they have done here….’
Brys could not pull his eyes from that howling sphere of lightning. He could see limbs within it, the burning arcs entwined about them like chains. ‘What—what is it?’
‘A god, Brys Beddict. In its own realm, it was locked in a war. For there were rival gods. Temptations…’
‘Is this a vision of the past?’ Brys asked.
‘The past lives on,’ the figure replied. ‘There is no way of knowing…standing here. How do we measure the beginning, the end—for all of us, yesterday was as today, and as it will be tomorrow. We are not aware. Or perhaps we are, yet choose—for convenience, for peace of mind—not to see. Not to think.’ A vague gesture with one hand. ‘Some say twelve mages, some say seven. It does not matter, for they are about to become dust.’
The massive sphere was roaring now, burgeoning with frightening speed as it plunged earthward. It would, Brys realized, strike the city.
‘Thus, in their effort to enforce a change upon the scheme, they annihilate themselves, and their own civilization.’
‘So they failed.’
The figure said nothing for a time.
And the descending god struck; a blinding flash, a detonation that shook the pyramid beneath them and sent fissures through the concourse below. Smoke, rising in a column that then billowed outward, swallowing the world in shadow. Wind rushed outward in a shock, flattening trees in the farmland, toppling the columns lining the concourse. The trees then burst into flame.
‘In answer to a perceived desperation, fuelled by seething rage, they called down a god. And died with the effort. Does that mean that they failed in their gambit? No, I do not speak of Kallor. I speak of their helplessness which gave rise to their desire for change. Brys Beddict, were their ghosts standing with us now, here in the future world where our flesh resides, thus able to see what their deed has wrought, they would recognize that all that they sought has come to pass.
‘That which was chained to the earth has twisted the walls of its prison. Beyond recognition. Its poison has spread out and infected the world and all who dwell upon it.’
‘You leave me without hope,’ Brys said.
‘I am sorry for that. Do not seek to find hope among your leaders. They are the repositories of poison. Their interest in you extends only so far as their ability to control you. From you, they seek duty and obedience, and they will ply you with the language of stirring faith. They seek followers, and woe to those who question, or voice challenge.
‘Civilization after civilization, it is the same. The world falls to tyranny with a whisper. The frightened are ever keen to bow to a perceived necessity, in the belief that necessity forces conformity, and conformity a certain stability. In a world shaped into conformity, dissidents stand out, are easily branded and dealt with. There is no multitude of perspectives, no dialogue. The victim assumes the face of the tyrant, self-righteous and intransigent, and wars breed like vermin. And people die.’
Brys studied the firestorm engulfing what was once a city of great beauty. He did not know its name, nor the civilization that had birthed it, and, it now struck him, it did not matter.
‘In your world,’ the figure said, ‘the prophecy approaches its azimuth. An emperor shall arise. You are from a civilization that sees war as an extension of economics. Stacked bones become the foundation for your roads of commerce, and you see nothing untoward in that—’
‘Some of us do.’
‘Irrelevant. Your legacy of crushed cultures speaks its own truth. You intend to conquer the Tiste Edur. You claim that each circumstance is different, unique, but it is neither different nor unique. It is all the same. Your military might proves the virtue of your cause. But I tell you this, Brys Beddict, there is no such thing as destiny. Victory is not inevitable. Your enemy lies in waiting, in your midst. Your enemy hides without need for disguise, when belligerence and implied threat are sufficient to cause your gaze to shy away. It speaks your language, takes your words and uses them against you. It mocks your belief in truths, for it has made itself the arbiter of those truths.’
‘Lether is not a tyranny—’
‘You assume the spirit of your civilization is personified in your benign king. It is not. Your king exists because it is deemed permissible that he exist. You are ruled by greed, a monstrous tyrant lit gold with glory. It cannot be defeated, only annihilated.’ Another gesture towards the fiery chaos below. ‘That is your only hope of salvation, Brys Beddict. For greed kills itself, when there is nothing left to hoard, when the countless legions of labourers are naught but bones, when the grisly face of starvation is revealed in the mirror.
‘The god is fallen. He crouches now, seeding devastation. Rise and fall, rise and fall, and with each renewal the guiding spirit is less, weaker, more tightly chained to a vision bereft of hope.’
‘Why does this god do this to us?’
‘Because he knows naught but pain, and yearns only to share it, to visit it upon all that lives, all that exists.’
‘Why have you shown me this?’
‘I make you witness, Brys Beddict, to the symbol of your demise.’
‘Why?’
The figure was silent for a moment, then said, ‘I advised you to not look for hope from your leaders, for they shall feed you naught but lies. Yet hope exists. Seek for it, Brys Beddict, in the one who stands at your side, from the stranger upon the other side of the street. Be brave enough to endeavour to cross that street. Look neither skyward nor upon the ground. Hope persists, and its voice is compassion, and honest doubt.’
The scene began to fade.
The figure at his side spoke one last time. ‘That is all I would tell you. All I can tell you.’
He opened his eyes, and found himself once more standing before the barrow, the day dying around him. Kettle still held his hand in her cold clasp.
‘You will help me now?’ she asked.
‘The dweller within the tomb spoke nothing of that.’
‘He never does.’
‘He showed me virtually nothing of himself. I don’t even know who, or what, he is.’
‘Yes.’
‘He made no effort to convince me…of anything. Yet I saw…’ Brys shook his head.
‘He needs help escaping his tomb. Other things are trying to get out. And they will. Not long now, I think. They want to hurt me, and everyone else.’
‘And the one we’re to help will stop them?’
‘Yes.’
‘What can I do?’
‘He needs two swords. The best iron there is. Straight blades, two-edged, pointed. Thin but strong. Narrow hilts, heavy pommels.’
Brys considered. ‘I should be able to find something in the armoury. He wants me to bring them here?’
Kettle nodded.
He needed help. But he did not ask for it. ‘Very well. I will do this. But I will speak to the Ceda regarding this.’
‘Do you trust him? He wants to know, do you trust this Ceda?’
Brys opened his mouth to reply, to say yes, then he stopped. The dweller within the barrow was a powerful creature, probably too powerful to be controlled. There was nothing here that would please Kuru Qan. Yet did Brys have a choice? The Ceda had sent him here to discover what had befallen the Azath…He looked over at the tower. ‘The Azath, it is dead?’
‘Yes. It was too old, too weak. It fought for so long.’
‘Kettle, are you still killing people in the city?’
‘Not many. Only bad people. One or two a night. Some of the trees are still alive, but they can’t feed on the tower’s blood any more. So I give them other blood, so they can fight to hold the bad monsters down. But the trees are dying too.’
Brys sighed. ‘All right. I will visit again, Kettle. With the swords.’
‘I knew I could like you. I knew you would be nice. Because of your brother.’
That comment elicited a frown, then another sigh. He gently disengaged his hand from the dead child’s grip. ‘Be careful, Kettle.’
‘It was a perfectly good sleep,’ Tehol said as he walked alongside Bugg.
‘I am sure it was, master. But you did ask for this meeting.’
‘I didn’t expect such a quick response. Did you do or say something to make them unduly interested?’
‘Of course I did, else we would not have achieved this audience.’
‘Oh, that’s bad, Bugg. You gave them my name?’
‘No.’
‘You revealed something of my grand scheme?’
‘No.’
‘Well, what did you, say, then?’
‘I said money was not a consideration.’
‘Not a consideration?’ Tehol slowed his pace, drawing Bugg round. ‘What do you think I’m willing to pay them?’
‘I don’t know,’ the manservant replied. ‘I have no idea of the nature of this contract you want to enter into with the Rat Catchers’ Guild.’
‘That’s because I hadn’t decided yet!’
‘Well, have you decided now, master?’
‘I’m thinking on it. I hope to come up with something by the time we arrive.’
‘So, it could be expensive…’
Tehol’s expression brightened. ‘You’re right, it could be indeed. Therefore, money is not a consideration.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I’m glad we’re in agreement. You are a wonderful manservant, Bugg.’
‘Thank you, master.’
They resumed walking.
Before long they halted in front of Scale House. Tehol stared up at the riotous rodent façade for a time. ‘They’re all looking at me,’ he said.
‘They do convey that impression, don’t they?’
‘I don’t like being the singular focus of the attention of thousands of rats. What do they know that I don’t?’
‘Given the size of their brains, not much.’
Tehol stared for a moment longer, then he slowly blinked and regarded Bugg. Five heartbeats. Ten.
The manservant remained expressionless, then he coughed, cleared his throat, and said, ‘Well, we should head inside, shouldn’t we?’
