The Malazan Empire, page 52
“I have,” Fiddler said, then ducked at the sergeant’s glower. “Well, you asked, didn’t you?”
“Out with it, then.”
Fiddler straightened in his chair and cleared his throat. Hedge poked him in the ribs as he was about to begin. After a menacing scowl, he tried again. “It’s like this, Sergeant. We’ve seen a lot of our friends die, right? And maybe we didn’t have to give the orders, so maybe you think it’s easier for us. But I don’t think so. You see, to us those people were living, breathing. They were friends. When they die, it hurts. But you go around telling yourself that the only way to keep from going mad is to take all that away from them, so you don’t have to think about it, so you don’t have to feel anything when they die. But, damn, when you take away everybody else’s humanity, you take away your own. And that’ll drive you mad as sure as anything. It’s that hurt we feel that makes us keep going, Sergeant. And maybe we’re not getting anywhere, but at least we’re not running away from anything.”
There was silence in the room. Then Hedge punched Fiddler in the arm. “I’ll be damned! You got a brain in there, after all. I guess I been wrong about you all these years.”
“Yeah, right,” Fiddler said, rolling his eyes at Mallet, “and who is it who’s burned his hair off so many times he’s gotta wear some ugly leather cap all the time, hey?”
Mallet laughed, but the tension remained and everyone’s gaze swung back to fix on their sergeant. Slowly, Whiskeyjack studied each man in his squad. He saw the caring in their eyes, the open offer to the friendship he’d spent years suppressing. All that time pushing them away, pushing everyone away, and the stubborn bastards just kept on coming back.
So Sorry hadn’t been human. His conviction that all she’d done was within the possibilities of humanity now seemed to rest on uncertain ground. But it did not collapse. He’d seen too much in his life. There’d be no sudden faith in his view of human history, no burgeoning optimism to chase away all the demonic memories of the horrors he’d lived through.
Still, there came a time when some denials lost their function, when the world’s relentless battering at him made his foolishness obvious even to himself. He was, finally, and after all these years, among friends. That was a hard admission and he realized he was already impatient with it. “All right,” he growled, “enough with the flapping lips. We’ve got work to do. Corporal?”
“Sergeant?” Kalam replied.
“Get yourself ready. You’ve got the daylight hours to re-establish contact with the Assassins’ Guild. Meanwhile, I want everyone else to lay out their weapons and give them a good cleaning. Repairs to armor. There’ll be an inspection, and if I find a single damn thing I don’t like, there’ll be Hood’s heel coming down. Understood?”
“We hear ya,” Mallet said, grinning.
Despite their slow pace, Coll’s wound had opened half a dozen times since they’d begun the journey. He’d found a way of sitting in his saddle, leaning to one side and taking most of the weight on his uninjured leg, and since this morning the wound had yet to reopen. The awkward position brought pains and cramps to the rest of him, however.
Paran knew a foul mood when he saw one. Though it was clear to both of them that a bond had formed between them, comfortable and unfettered by pretenses, they’d exchanged but scant words as the ravages of Coll’s wound continued to take its toll.
Coll’s entire left leg, from the hip where the sword had done its damage down to the foot, was a uniform sun-darkened brown color. Clots of drying blood gathered in the joints of his upper leg plates and knee guard. As the thigh swelled, they were forced to slice the leather padding beneath the plate.
Succour had been denied them at the Catlin Bridge garrison, since the lone surgeon stationed there had been sleeping off one of his “bad nights.” Clean bandages had been donated, though, and it was these—already soaked through—that now covered the wound.
There was little traffic on Jammit’s Worry despite the city’s walls being within sight. The flood of refugees from the north had since ended, and those who would gather for the Gedderone Festival had already done so.
As they approached the edge of Worrytown, Coll raised himself from the semi-conscious state he’d been in for the last few hours. His face was deathly white. “Is this Worry Gate?” he asked dully.
“I believe so,” Paran said, since they were on the road sharing that strange name. “Will we be permitted to pass within?” he asked. “Will the guards call for a surgeon?”
Coll shook his head. “Take me on through. Phoenix Inn. Take me to the Phoenix Inn.” His head sagged again.
“Very well, Coll.” He’d be surprised if the guards permitted it, and he’d need a story to tell them, though Coll had said nothing of how he’d been wounded. “I hope,” he muttered, “there’s someone in this Phoenix Inn with a healer’s touch.” The man looked bad. Paran fixed his gaze on the city’s gates. He’d already seen enough to understand why the Empress wanted it so avidly. “Darujhistan.” He sighed. “My, but you are a wonder, aren’t you?”
Rallick nudged himself another inch upward. His limbs trembled with exhaustion. If not for the morning shadows on this side of the belfry, he’d have been spotted long ago. As it was, he would not remain hidden much longer.
Taking the stairs would have been suicide in the darkness. Ocelot would have set alarms all along the way—the man was no fool at covering the approaches to his position.
If he was up there, Rallick reminded himself. If not, Coll was in trouble. There was no telling if his friend had arrived at the gates yet, and the silence from the top of the belfry could mean anything. He paused to rest and glanced up. Ten feet to go, the most critical ones yet. He was so tired it was all he could do simply to retain the handholds. The silent approach was now beyond him. His only advantage lay in that Ocelot’s concentration would be eastward, while he now climbed the west side of the tower.
He drew some deep breaths, then reached for another handhold.
Passersby stopped to watch Paran and Coll move slowly through Worrytown toward the gate. Ignoring them, and the questions they asked, the captain focused his attention on the two guards at the gate itself. They’d spotted him and Coll, and now stood waiting.
Reaching the gate, Paran motioned that they would pass through. One guard nodded while the other walked alongside the captain’s horse. “Your friend needs a surgeon,” he said. “If you wait just inside we can have one here in five minutes.”
Paran refused the offer. “We need to find the Phoenix Inn. I’m from the north, never been here before. The man said the Phoenix Inn, so that’s where I’m going to take him.”
The guard was dubious. “Be surprised if he’d make it that far. But if that’s what you want, the least we can do is give you an escort.”
As they emerged from the gate’s shadow the other guard cried out in surprise.
Paran held his breath as the man stepped close to Coll. “I know him,” he said. “He’s Coll Jhamin, of House Jhamin. I served under him. What happened?”
“I thought Coll died a few years back,” the other guard said.
“Screw the writs,” his companion snapped. “I know what I know, Vildron. This is Coll, all right.”
“He wants to go to the Phoenix Inn,” Paran told the man. “That’s the last thing he said to me.”
The man nodded. “Let’s do it right, though.” He turned to the other guard. “I’ll take the grief if there’s any, Vildron. Get me the wagon—it’s still hitched up from this morning, right?” The guard smiled up at Paran. “Thanks for getting him here. Some of us in the city still got eyes, and damn what the highbrows whisper. We’ll put him in the back of the wagon—less jarring that way.”
Paran relaxed. “Thanks, soldier.” He looked past the man, eager to see what he could of the city now that the wall was behind him. Immediately before them rose a humped hill, its sides overgrown with weeds and gnarled trees. On its summit squatted a temple of some kind, abandoned long ago, from which a square-sided tower rose, capped by a bronze-tiled roof. As his eyes reached the belfry’s open-sided platform, he saw a flash of movement. He squinted.
Rallick raised his head cautiously over the platform’s edge. He almost gasped aloud. The belfry was empty. Then he remembered Ocelot’s sorcery. Holding his breath, he strained one last time with leaden arms, drawing himself flat onto the platform. As soon as he moved to gather in his feet, the barren stone of the platform shimmered and he saw Ocelot lying before him, crossbow cocked, taking aim at something below.
Rallick unsheathed his knives and moved all at once. But his exhaustion gave him away, his boots scuffing the stone.
Ocelot spun onto his back, weapon swinging to fix on Rallick. The Clan Leader’s face twisted into a mask of rage and fear. He wasted no time with words and immediately released the quarrel set in his crossbow.
Rallick tensed for the impact that he was certain would throw him across the platform and possibly over the edge. A flash of red before his chest blinded him momentarily, but no impact came. Blinking, Rallick looked down. The quarrel had vanished. The truth came to him in an instant. The quarrel had been magic, created by sorcery to fly unimpeded, but Baruk’s rusty powder had worked. Even as this thought burst into his head, he propeled himself forward.
Ocelot swore and dropped the crossbow. As he reached for his knife, Rallick landed on him. A loud grunt sounded from the Clan Leader, his eyes squeezing shut in pain.
Rallick drove the dagger in his right hand against Ocelot’s chest. The weapon scraped across mail beneath the cloth shirt. Damn, the man had learned something from that other night—and this was Rallick’s own precaution, come to defy him now. The blade in his left hand he angled upward, under Ocelot’s right arm. The weapon’s point cut into flesh, then continued on into the man’s armpit.
Rallick saw, inches from his face, the dagger’s tip emerge from the cloth covering Ocelot’s right shoulder, followed by a bloom of blood. He heard a knife skitter across the flagstones.
Teeth bared, Ocelot snapped his left hand up to the back of Rallick’s neck, finding his braid. He gave it a savage yank, twisting Rallick’s head around. Then he tried to sink his teeth into Rallick’s neck.
Ocelot gasped as Rallick jammed a knee into his crotch. He tightened his hold on the braid again, this time near its knotted end.
Rallick heard the snick of metal and attempted desperately to roll to his right. Wounded as Ocelot’s right arm was, it struck his body with enough force to drive the wedged wrist-blade through the chain links and into his chest. A dull fire blossomed from the wound. Ocelot jerked the blade free and, still holding Rallick’s braid, drew back for another stab.
Rallick brought up his right arm and, in a single sweeping motion, sliced through his braid. Freed, he pushed himself onto that side, withdrawing the knife in his left hand as he did so. Ocelot slashed wildly at his face, missing by inches.
With all the remaining strength in his left arm, Rallick slammed his knife into Ocelot’s stomach. Links snapped and the blade sank to its hilt. The Clan Leader’s body doubled up, curling around the embedded weapon. Gasping, Rallick lurched forward and hammered the other dagger into Ocelot’s forehead.
Rallick lay unmoving for a time, wondering at the absence of pain. The plan would fall to Murillio now. Coll would be avenged. Murillio could handle it—he had no choice.
Ocelot’s body seemed to grow heavier on him despite the blood leaking from it. “I’d always believed I was this man’s match,” he muttered. He pushed himself from the still-twitching body and rolled onto his back in the center of the platform. He’d hoped to see sky, to look one last time on its bright, depthless blue. Instead, he found himself looking at the underside of the belfry’s roof, its ancient stone arch crowded with nesting bats. This detail fixed itself in his head as he felt the blood stream from his chest. He thought he could see beady eyes glittering down at him.
After seeing no other sign of movement on the belfry, Paran’s gaze swung to the avenue on his left. Vildron approached, seated on a wagon drawn by two horses. The guard waiting beside Coll’s horse said, “Give me a hand here, will you? Let’s get the old man down.”
Paran dismounted and hurried to help him. He glanced at Coll’s face. Though still hunched on the saddle, he was unconscious. How much longer could he last? If that was me, Paran realized, I’d be dead by now. “After all this,” he growled as they dragged Coll from the saddle, “you’d damn well better live.”
Groaning, Serrat rolled onto her back. The sun beat down hot against her eyelids as the scattered fragments of her memory gathered. The Tiste Andii had been about to make her move on the woman in the alley below. With that one dead, the Coin Bearer’s protectors would number but one. And when they left the tenement block under cover of darkness, they’d walk right into the trap she’d set.
The assassin-mage opened her eyes to a mid-morning sun overhead. Her daggers, which she’d held in her hands as she crouched at the rooftop’s edge, now lay on the pebbled surface beside her, neatly placed side by side. A thick, dull ache throbbed in the back of her skull. She probed the wound, wincing, then sat up.
The world spun, then settled. Serrat was bewildered and angry. She’d been blindsided, and whoever had done it was good, good enough to sneak up on a Tiste Andii assassin-mage. And that was worrying, since they’d yet to meet such a match in Darujhistan, with the exception of those two Claw on the night of the ambush. But if it had been the Claw, she’d be dead now.
Instead, the arrangements looked to have been designed more with embarrassment in mind than anything else. Leaving her here in broad daylight, weapons beside her, hinted of a subtle and cunning sense of humor. Oponn? Possibly, though gods rarely acted so directly, preferring unwitting agents culled from among the mortal masses.
One certainty rose from the mystery, however, and that was that she’d lost her opportunity to kill the Coin Bearer—at least, for another day. Next time, she vowed, as she climbed to her feet and accessed her Kurald Galain Warren, her secret foes would find her ready for them.
The air around her shimmered with sorcery. When it settled, Serrat was gone.
Motes of dust drifted through the dead, hot air of the Phoenix Inn’s attic. The slanting ceiling rose from five feet along the east wall to seven feet along the west wall. Sunlight streamed in from windows at each end of the long and narrow room.
Both Crokus and Apsalar slept, though at opposite ends of the room. Sitting on a crate beside the trapdoor, Meese cleaned her nails with a sliver of wood. Leaving Mallet’s tenement and making their way across the rooftops to this hiding place had proved an easy task. Too easy, in fact. Irilta reported that no one on the streets had followed them. And the rooftops themselves had been empty of life. It was as if a path free of obstruction had been made for them.
More of the Eel’s brilliance at work? Meese grunted softly. Maybe. More likely Meese was putting too much weight on the instinctive unease that traveled like an elusive itch along her spine. Even now she felt hidden eyes upon them, and that, she told herself, glaring around the musty attic, was impossible.
There came a soft knock at the trapdoor. The door swung up and Irilta appeared. “Meese?” she whispered loudly.
“Breathing down your neck,” Meese rumbled, tossing the wood sliver onto the oily floor. “Tell Scurve this place is a fire waiting to happen.”
Irilta grunted as she pulled herself into the room. She shut the trapdoor and wiped the dust from her hands. “Getting strange downstairs,” she said. “City wagon rolls up and off comes a guard and some other fellow carrying Coll between them. The old fool’s near-dead from a sword cut. They put him in Kruppe’s room a floor down. Sulty’s run off to find a cutter, but it don’t look good. Not good at all.”
Meese squinted in the dusty air, her gaze fixing on Crokus where he still slept. “What’s the other one look like?” she asked.
Irilta grinned. “Good enough for a roll on the mat, I’d say. Said he found Coll on Jammit’s Worry, bleeding all over the place. Coll woke up long enough to tell him to ride here. The guy’s downstairs in the bar right now, eating enough for three men.”
Meese grunted. “Foreigner?”
Irilta strode to the window facing the street. “Speaks Daru like he was born to it. But he said he’d come down from the north. Pale, Genabaris before that. He’s got the soldier about him, I’d say.”
“Any word from the Eel yet?”
“We keep the lad here for now.”
“And the girl?”
“The same.”
Meese sighed loudly. “Crokus ain’t gonna like being cooped up here.”
Irilta glared over at Crokus’s sleeping form. Was the lad truly asleep? “No choice. Got word that there’s a couple of guardsmen waiting at Mammot’s place—too late, of course, but they’ve got damn close.” Irilta rubbed dust from the window and leaned forward. “Sometimes I swear I see someone, or maybe something. Then I blink and it’s gone.”
“Know what you mean.” Bones creaking, Meese pushed herself to her feet. “I think even the Eel’s beginning to sweat.” She chuckled. “Life’s heating up, friend. Rolling times ahead.”
Irilta nodded grimly. “Roll on, roll on.”
Captain Paran refilled his tankard for the third time. Was this what that Tiste Andii had meant about his luck turning? Since coming to this land he’d found three friends—something wholly unexpected and new to him, precious, in fact. But the Tattersail he knew was dead, and in her place . . . a child. Toc was dead. And now it looked like Coll would join that list.
He ran a finger through a pool of spilled beer on the table, creating a river leading to a crack between two planks, then watched as the beer drained down and out of sight. He felt a spreading wetness on his right shin but ignored it as his eyes focused on the crack. The wood had been bolted down, joining the thick planks to an equally robust frame of legs.
