The Malazan Empire, page 491
‘All right, take Widdershins. Deadsmell, go to the stairs—’
‘Leading up? It’s a ladder.’
‘Fine, the Hood-damned fucking ladder, then. You’re backup and mouthpiece, got it? Hear any scrapping upstairs and you join it, but not before letting us know about it. Understood?’
‘Clear as piss, Sergeant.’
‘Good, the three of you go. Galt, stay at the window and keep looking at what’s opposite you. Lobe, do the same at that window. There’s more crap waiting for us and we’re gonna carve right through all of it.’
A short while later, the sound of footfalls padding back and forth from above ceased and Deadsmell called out from the hallway that Throatslitter and Widdershins were coming down the ladder. A dozen heartbeats later and all three entered the silk room. Throatslitter came close to Balm’s side and crouched. ‘Sergeant,’ he said, his voice near a whisper.
‘What?’
‘We found something. Don’t much like the looks of it. We think you should take a look.’
Balm sighed, then straightened. ‘Galt?’
‘They’re there, all right, all three floors.’
‘Lobe?’
‘Same here, including on the roof, some guy with a hooded lantern.’
‘Okay, keep watching. Lead on, Throatslitter. Deadsmell, back into the hallway. Widdershins, do some magic or something.’
He followed Throatslitter back to the ladder. The floor above was low-ceilinged, more of an attic than anything else. Plenty of rooms, the walls thick, hardened clay.
Throatslitter led him up to one such wall. At his feet stood huge urns and casks. ‘Found these,’ he said, reaching down behind one cask and lifting into view a funnel, made from a gourd of some sort.
‘All right,’ Balm said, ‘what about it?’
His soldier kicked one of the casks. ‘These ones are full. But the urns are empty. All of ’em.’
‘Okay…’
‘Olive oil.’
‘Right, this city’s famous for it. Go on.’
Throatslitter tossed the funnel aside, then drew a knife. ‘See these damp spots on these walls? Here.’ He pointed with the knife-tip, then dug into the patch. ‘The clay’s soft, recently plugged. These walls, they’re hollow.’
‘For Fener’s sake, man, what are you going on about?’
‘Just this. I think these walls – the whole building, it’s filled with oil.’
‘Filled? With…with oil?’
Throatslitter nodded.
Filled with oil? What, some kind of piping system to supply it downstairs? No, for Hood’s sake, Balm, don’t be an idiot. ‘Throatslitter, you think other buildings are rigged like this? Is that what you’re thinking?’
‘I think, Sergeant, that Leoman’s turned Y’Ghatan into one big trap. He wants us in here, fighting in the streets, pushing in and in—’
‘But what about his followers?’
‘What about them?’
But…that would mean… He thought back – the faces of the enemy, the fanaticism, the gleam of drugged madness. ‘Abyss take us!’
‘We got to find Fist Keneb, Sergeant. Or the captains. We got—’
‘I know, I know. Let’s get out of here, before that bastard with the lantern throws it!’
It had begun messy, only to get messier still. Yet, from that initial reeling back, as ambushes were unveiled one after another, mauling the advance squads of marines, Fist Keneb’s and Fist Tene Baralta’s companies had rallied, regrouped, then pushed inward, building by building, street by street. Somewhere ahead, Keneb knew, what was left of the marines was penetrating still further, cutting through the fanatic but poorly armed and thoroughly undisciplined warriors of Leoman’s renegade army.
He had heard that those warriors were in a drug-fuelled frenzy, that they fought without regard to injury, and that none retreated, dying where they stood. What he had expected, truth be told. A last stand, a heroic, martyred defence. For that was what Y’Ghatan had been, what it was, and what it would always be.
They would take this city. The Adjunct would have her first true victory. Bloody, brutal, but a victory nonetheless.
He stood one street in from the breach, smouldering rubble behind him, watching the line of wounded and unconscious soldiers being helped back to the healers in camp, watching fresh infantry filing forward, through the secured areas, and ahead to the battle that was the closing of the Malazan fist around Leoman and his followers, around the last living vestiges of the rebellion itself.
He saw that Red Blade officer of Tene Baralta’s, Lostara Yil, leading three squads towards the distant sounds of fighting. And Tene himself stood nearby, speaking with Captain Kindly.
Keneb had sent Faradan Sort ahead, to make contact with the advance squads. There was to be a second rendezvous, near the palace itself, and hopefully everyone was still following the battle plan.
Shouts, then cries of alarm – from behind him. From outside the breach! Fist Keneb spun round, and saw a wall of flame rising in the killing field beyond – where the narrow, deep trench had been dug by Leoman’s warriors. Buried urns filled with olive oil began exploding from the trench, spraying burning liquid everywhere. Keneb saw the line of retreating wounded scatter apart near the trench, figures aflame. Shrieks, the roar of fire—
His horrified gaze caught motion to his right, up on the nearest building’s rooftop, where it faced onto the rubble of the breach. A figure, lantern in one hand, flaring torch in the other – bedecked in web-slung flasks, surrounded by amphorae, at the very edge of the roof, arms outstretched, kicking over the tall clay jars – ropes affixed between them and his ankles, the weight then plunging the figure over the side.
Down into the rubble of the breach.
He struck, vanished from view, then a sudden flaring of flames, rushing out in sheets—
And Keneb saw, upon other rooftops, lining the city’s walls, more figures – flinging themselves down. Down, then the glow of raging fire, rising up, encircling – from the bastions, more flames, billowing out, spreading wild like a flood unleashed.
Heat rushed upon Keneb, driving him back a step. Oil from shattered casks, beneath the wreckage of fallen wall and collapsed buildings, suddenly caught flame. The breach was closing, demonic fire lunging into sight.
Keneb looked about, horror rising within him, and saw the half-dozen signallers of his staff huddled near a fragment of rubble. Bellowing, he ran to them. ‘Sound the recall! Damn you, soldiers, sound the recall!’
Northwest of Y’Ghatan, Temul and a company of Wickans rode up the slope to the Lothal road. They had seen no-one. Not a single soul fleeing the city. The Fourteenth’s horse-warriors had fully encircled it. Wickans, Seti, Burned Tears. There would be no escape.
Temul had been pleased, hearing that the Adjunct’s thinking had followed identical tracks with his own. A sudden strike, hard as a knife pushed into a chest, straight into the heart of this cursed rebellion. They had heard the munitions go off – loud, louder than expected, and had seen the flame-shot black clouds billowing upward, along with most of Y’Ghatan’s south wall.
Reining in on the road, seeing beneath them the signs of the massive exodus that had clogged this route only days earlier.
A flaring of firelight, distant rumbling, as of thunder, and the horse-warriors turned as one to face the city. Where walls of flame rose behind the stone walls, from the bastions, and the sealed gates, then, building after building within, more flames, and more.
Temul stared, his mind battered by what he was seeing, what he now understood.
A third of the Fourteenth Army was in that city by now. A third.
And they were already as good as dead.
Fist Blistig stood beside the Adjunct on the road. He felt sick inside, the feeling rising up from a place and a time he had believed left behind him. Standing on the walls of Aren, watching the slaughter of Coltaine’s army. Hopeless, helpless—
‘Fist,’ the Adjunct snapped, ‘get more soldiers filling in that trench.’
He started, then half-turned and gestured towards one of his aides – the woman had heard the command, for she nodded and hurried off. Douse the trench, aye. But…what’s the point? The breach had found a new wall, this one of flames. And more had risen all round the city, beginning just within the tiered walls, buildings bursting, voicing terrible roars as fiery oil exploded out, flinging mud-bricks that were themselves deadly, burning missiles. And now, further in, at junctures and along the wider streets, more buildings were igniting. One, just beyond the palace, had moments earlier erupted, with geysers of burning oil shooting skyward, obliterating the darkness, revealing the sky filling with tumbling black clouds.
‘Nil, Nether,’ the Adjunct said in a brittle voice, ‘gather our mages – all of them – I want the flames smothered in the breach. I want—’
‘Adjunct,’ Nether cut in, ‘we have not the power.’
‘The old earth spirits,’ Nil added in a dull tone, ‘are dying, fleeing the flames, the baking agony, all dying or fleeing. Something is about to be born…’
Before them, the city of Y’Ghatan was brightening into day, yet a lurid, terrible day.
Coughing, staggering, wounded soldiers half-carried, half-dragged through the press – but there was nowhere to go. Keneb stared – the air burning his eyes – at the mass of his soldiers. Seven, eight hundred. Where were the others? But he knew.
Gone. Dead.
In the streets beyond, he could see naught but fire, leaping from building to building, filling the fierce, hot air, with a voice of glee, demonic, hungry and eager.
He needed to do something. Think of something, but this heat, this terrible heat – his lungs were heaving, desperate despite the searing pain that blossomed with each strained breath. Lungful after lungful, yet it was as if the air itself had died, all life sucked from it, and so could offer him nothing.
His own armour was cooking him alive. He was on his knees, now, with all the others. ‘Armour!’ he rasped, not knowing if anyone could hear him. ‘Get it off! Armour! Weapons!’ Gods below, my chest – the pain—
A blade-on-blade parry, holding contact, two edges rasping against each other, then, as the warrior pushed harder with his scimitar, Lostara Yil ducked low, disengaged her sword downward, slashing up and under, taking him in the throat. Blood poured out. Stepping past, she batted aside another weapon thrusting at her – a spear – hearing splinters from the shaft as she pushed it to one side. In her left hand was her kethra knife, which she punched into her foe’s belly, twisting as she yanked it back out again.
Lostara staggered free of the crumpling warrior, a flood of sorrow shooting through her as she heard him call out a woman’s name before he struck the cobbles.
The fight raged on all sides, her three squads now down to fewer than a dozen soldiers, whilst yet more of the berserk fanatics closed in from the flanking buildings – market shops, shuttered doors kicked down and now billowing smoke, carrying out into the street the reek of overheated oil, spitting, crackling sounds – something went thump and all at once there was fire—
Everywhere.
Lostara Yil cried out a warning, even as another warrior rushed her. Parrying with the knife, stop-thrusting with her sword, then kicking the impaled body from her blade, his sagging weight nearly tugging the weapon from her hand.
Terrible shrieks behind her. She whirled.
A flood of burning oil, roaring out from buildings to either side, sweeping among the fighters – their legs, then clothes – telaba, leathers, linens, the flames appearing all over them. Warrior and soldier, the fire held to no allegiance – it was devouring everyone.
She staggered away from that onrushing river of death, stumbled and fell, sprawling, onto a corpse, clambered onto it a moment before fiery oil poured around her, swept past her already burning island of torn flesh—
A building exploded, the fireball expanding outward, plunging towards her. She cried out, throwing up both arms, as the searing incandescence reached out to take her—
A hand from behind, snagging her harness—
Pain – the breath torn from her lungs – then…nothing.
‘Stay low!’ Balm shouted as he led his squad down the twisting alley. After his bellowed advice, the sergeant resumed his litany of curses. They were lost. Pushed back in their efforts to return to Keneb and the breach, they were now being herded. By flames. They had seen the palace a short while earlier, through a momentary break in the smoke, and as far as Balm could determine they were still heading in that direction – but the world beyond had vanished, in fire and smoke, and pursuing in their wake was the growing conflagration. Alive, and hunting them.
‘It’s building, Sergeant! We got to get out of this city!’
‘You think I don’t know that, Widdershins? What in Hood’s name do you think we’re trying to do here? Now be quiet—’
‘We’re gonna run out of air.’
‘We are already, you idiot! Now shut that mouth of yours!’
They reached an intersection and Balm halted his soldiers. Six alley-mouths beckoned, each leading into tracks as twisted and dark as the next. Smoke was tumbling from two of them, on their left. Head spinning, every breath growing more pained, less invigorating, the Dal Honese wiped hot sweat from his eyes and turned to study his soldiers. Deadsmell, Throatslitter, Widdershins, Galt and Lobe. Tough bastards one and all. This wasn’t the right way to die – there were right ones, and this wasn’t one of them. ‘Gods,’ he muttered, ‘I’ll never look at a hearth the same again.’
‘You got that right, Sergeant,’ said Throatslitter, punctuating his agreement with a hacking cough.
Balm pulled off his helm. ‘Strip down, you damned fools, before we bake ourselves. Hold on to your weapons, if you can. We ain’t dying here tonight. You understand me? All of you listen – do you understand me?’
‘Aye, Sergeant,’ Throatslitter said. ‘We hear you.’
‘Good. Now, Widdershins, got any magic to make us a path? Anything at all?’
The mage shook his head. ‘Wish I did. Maybe soon, though.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean a fire elemental’s being born here, I think. A fire spirit, a godling. We got a firestorm on the way, and that will announce its arrival – and that’s when we die if we ain’t dead already. But an elemental is alive. It’s got a will, a mind, damned hungry and eager to kill. But it knows fear, fear because it knows it won’t last long – too fierce, too hot – days at best. And it knows other kinds of fear, too, and that’s where maybe I can do something – illusions. Of water, but not just water. A water elemental.’ He stared round at the others, who were all staring back, then shrugged. ‘Maybe, maybe not. How smart is an elemental? Got to be smart to be fooled, you see. Dog-smart, at least, better if it was smarter. Problem is, not everybody agrees that elementals even exist. I mean, I’m convinced it’s a good theory—’
Balm cracked him across the head. ‘All this on a theory? You wasted all that air on that? Gods below, Widdershins, I’m minded to kill you right now.’ He rose. ‘Let’s get going, while we can. To Hood with the damned palace – let’s take the alley opposite and when the theoretical elemental arrives we can shake its hand and curse it to the nonexistent Abyss. Come on – and you, Widdershins, not another word, got it?’
The soldier returned, wreathed in flames. Running, running from the pain, but there was nowhere to go. Captain Faradan Sort aimed the crossbow and loosed a quarrel. Watched the poor man fall, grow still as the flames leapt all over him, blackening the skin, cracking open the flesh. She turned away. ‘Last quarrel,’ she said, tossing the weapon to one side.
Her new lieutenant, with the mouthful name of Madan’Tul Rada, said nothing – a characteristic Faradan was already used to, and of which she was, most of the time, appreciative.
Except now, when they were about to roast. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘scratch that route – and I’m out of scouts. No back, no forward, and, from the looks of it, no left and no right. Any suggestions?’
Madan’Tul Rada’s expression soured, jaw edging down as tongue probed a likely rotted molar, then he spat, squinted in the smoke, and unslung his round shield to study its charred face. Looked up again, slowly tracking, then: ‘No.’
They could hear a wind above them, shrieking, whirling round and round over the city, drawing the flames up, spinning tails of fire that slashed like giant swords through the convulsing smoke. It was getting harder and harder to breathe.
The lieutenant’s head lifted suddenly, and he faced the wall of flame up the street, then rose.
Faradan Sort followed suit, for she could now see what he had seen – a strange black stain spreading out within the flames, the tongues of fire flickering back, dying, the stain deepening, circular, and out from its heart staggered a figure shedding charred leathers, clasps and buckles falling away to bounce on the street.
Stumbling towards them, flames dancing in the full head of hair – dancing, yet not burning. Closer, and Faradan Sort saw it was a girl, a face she then recognized. ‘She’s from Cord’s Ashok squad. That’s Sinn.’
‘How did she do that?’ Madan’Tul Rada asked.
‘I don’t know, but let’s hope she can do it again. Soldier! Over here!’
An upper level had simply sheared away, down, crashing in an explosion of dust and smoke onto the street. Where Bowl had been crouching. He had not even seen it coming, Hellian suspected. Lucky bastard. She looked back at her squad. Blistered, red as boiled lobsters. Armour shed, weapons flung away – too hot to hold. Marines and heavies. Herself the only sergeant. Two corporals – Urb and Reem – their expressions dulled. Red-eyed all of them, gasping in the dying air, damn near hairless. Not much longer, I think. Gods, what I would do for a drink right now. Something nice. Chilled, delicate, the drunk coming on slow and sly, peaceful sleep beckoning as sweet as the last trickle down my ravaged throat. Gods, I’m a poet when it comes to drink, oh yes. ‘Okay, that way’s blocked now. Let’s take this damned alley—’
