The Malazan Empire, page 636
‘That’s good, because they’re about to discover that most of their unadvertised holdings have been so thoroughly undermined that they’re not only worthless, but fatal liabilities.’
‘We transferred ours beyond the empire, Bugg. Months ago. Once we fully understood what you and Tehol were doing.’
‘Where?’ Bugg asked.
‘Should I tell you?’
‘We’re not going after it,’ Tehol said. ‘Right, Bugg?’
‘Of course not. I just want to be sure it’s, uh, far enough removed.’
Rucket’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you that close?’
Neither man replied.
She looked down at the plate for a moment, then settled back like a human canal lock, her belly re-emerging from the shadows in silky waves. ‘Very well, gentlemen. South Pilott. Far enough away, Bugg?’
‘Just.’
‘That answer makes me nervous.’
‘I am about to default on everything I owe,’ Bugg said. ‘This will cause a massive financial cascade that will not spare a single sector of industry, and not just here in Letheras, but across the entire empire and beyond. Once I do it, there will be chaos. Anarchy. People may actually die.’
‘Bugg’s Construction is that big?’
‘Not at all. If it was, we’d have been rounded up long ago. No, there are about two thousand seemingly independent small-and middling-sized holdings, each one perfectly positioned according to Tehol’s diabolical planning to ensure that dread cascade. Bugg’s Construction is but the first gravestone to tip – and it’s a very crowded cemetery.’
‘Your analogy makes me even more nervous.’
‘Your glamour fades a touch when you’re nervous,’ Tehol observed. ‘Please, regain your confidence, Rucket.’
‘Shut your mouth, Tehol.’
‘In any case,’ Bugg resumed, ‘this meeting was to deliver to you and the Guild the final warning before the collapse. Needless to say, I will be hard to track down once it happens.’
Her eyes settled on Tehol. ‘And you, Tehol? Planning on crawling into a hole as well?’
‘I thought we weren’t talking about that any more.’
‘By the Abyss, Master,’ Bugg muttered.
Tehol blinked, first at Bugg, then at Rucket. Then, ‘Oh. Sorry. You meant, um, was I planning on going into hiding, right? Well, I’m undecided. Part of the satisfaction, you see, is in witnessing the mess. Because, regardless of how we’ve insinuated ourselves in the machinery of Lether’s vast commerce, the most bitter truth is that the causes behind this impending chaos are in fact systemic. Granted, we’re hastening things somewhat, but dissolution – in its truest sense – is an integral flaw in the system itself. It may well view itself as immortal, eminently adaptable and all that, but that’s all both illusional and delusional. Resources are never infinite, though they might seem that way. And those resources include more than just the raw product of earth and sea. They also include labour, and the manifest conceit of a monetary system with its arbitrary notions of value – the two forces we set our sights on, by the way. Shipping out the lowest classes – the dispossessed – to pressure the infrastructure, and then stripping away hard currency to escalate a recession – why are you two staring at me like that?’
Rucket smiled. ‘Defaulting to the comfort of your scholarly analysis to deflect us from your more pathetic fixations. That, Tehol Beddict, is perhaps the lowest you have gone yet.’
‘But we’ve just begun.’
‘You may wish to believe that to be the case. For myself, my own curiosity is fast diminishing.’
‘But think of all the challenges in store for us, Rucket!’
She surged to her feet. ‘I’m going out the back way.’
‘You won’t fit.’
‘Alas, Tehol, the same will never be said of you. Good day, gentlemen.’
‘Wait!’
‘Yes, Tehol?’
‘Well, uh, I trust this conversation will resume at a later date?’
‘I’m not hanging around for that,’ Bugg said, crossing his brawny arms in a show of…something. Disgust, maybe. Or, Tehol reconsidered, more likely abject envy.
‘Nothing is certain,’ Rucket told him. ‘Barring the truth that men are wont to get lost in their illusions of grandeur.’
‘Oh,’ murmured Bugg, ‘very nice, Rucket.’
‘If that hadn’t left me speechless,’ Tehol said as she rolled away, ‘I’d have said something.’
‘I have no doubt of that, Master.’
‘Your faith is a relief, Bugg.’
‘Small comfort in comparison, I’d wager.’
‘In comparison,’ Tehol agreed, nodding. ‘Now, shall we go for a walk, old friend?’
‘Assuming your drape is now unmarred by unsightly bulges.’
‘In a moment.’
‘Master?’
Tehol smiled at the alarm on Bugg’s face. ‘I was just imaging her stuck there, wedged in Huldo’s alleyway. Unable to turn. Helpless, in fact.’
‘There it is,’ he said with a sigh, ‘you did indeed manage to sink lower.’
There was an old Gral legend that had begun to haunt Taralack Veed, although he could not quite grasp its relevance to this moment, here in Letheras, with the Lifestealer walking at his side as they pushed through the crowds milling outside a row of market stalls opposite the Quillas Canal.
The Gral were an ancient people; their tribes had dwelt in the wild hills of the First Empire, and there had been Gral companies serving in Dessimbelackis’s vaunted armies, as trackers, as skirmishers and as shock troops, although this manner of combat ill suited them. Even then, the Gral preferred their feuds, the spilling of blood in the name of personal honour. The pursuit of vengeance was a worthy cause. Slaughtering strangers made no sense and stained the soul, demanding tortured cleansing rituals. Further, there was no satisfaction in such murder.
Two months before the Great Fall, a commander named Vorlock Duven, leading the Karasch Legion deep into the untamed wastes of the southwest, had sent her seventy-four Gral warriors into the Tasse Hills to begin a campaign of subjugation against the tribe believed to rule that forbidding range. The Gral were to incite the Tasse to battle, then withdraw, with the savages hard on their heels, to a place of ambush at the very edge of the highlands.
Leading the Gral was a wise veteran of the Bhok’ar clan named Sidilack, called by many Snaketongue after a sword-thrust into his mouth had sliced down the length of his tongue. His warriors, well blooded after a three-year campaign of conquest among the desert and plains peoples south of Ugari, were skilled at finding the hidden trails leading into the rough heights, and before long they were coming upon rude dwellings and rock shelters in the midst of ancient ruins that hinted that some terrible descent from civilization had afflicted the Tasse long ago.
At dusk on the third day seven woad-painted savages ambushed the lead scouts, killing one before being driven off. Of the four Tasse who had fallen in the clash, only one was not already dead of his wounds. The language of his pain-stricken ravings was like nothing Sidilack and his warriors had ever heard before. Beneath the dusty blue paint the Tasse were physically unlike any other nearby tribes. Tall, lithe, with strangely small hands and feet, they had elongated faces, weak chins and oversized teeth. Their eyes were close-set, the irises tawny like dried grass, the whites blistered with so many blood vessels it seemed they might well weep red tears.
Among all four of the Tasse the signs of dehydration and malnutrition were obvious, and as fighters they had been singularly ineffective with their stone-tipped spears and knotted clubs.
The wounded savage soon died.
Resuming their hunt, the Gral pushed ever deeper, ever higher into the hills. They found ancient terraces that had once held crops, the soil now lifeless, barely able to sustain dry desert scrub. They found stone-lined channels to collect rainwater that no longer came. They found stone tombs with large capstones carved into phallic shapes. On the trail potsherds and white bleached bone fragments crunched underfoot.
At noon on the fourth day the Gral came upon the settlement of the Tasse. Twelve scraggy huts, from which rushed three warriors with spears, shrieking as they lined up in a pathetic defensive line in front of five starving females and a lone two-or three-year-old female child.
Sidilack, the wise veteran who had fought twenty battles, who had stained his soul with the slaughter of countless strangers, sent his Gral forward. The battle lasted a half-dozen heartbeats. When the Tasse men fell their women attacked with their hands and teeth. When they were all dead, the lone child crouched down and hissed at them like a cat.
A sword was raised to strike her down.
It never descended. The clearing was suddenly swallowed in shadows. Seven terrible hounds emerged to surround the child, and a man appeared. His shoulders so broad as to make him seem hunched, he was wearing an ankle-length coat of blued chain, his black hair long and unbound. Cold blue eyes fixed upon Sidilack and he spoke in the language of the First Empire: ‘They were the last. I do not decry your slaughter. They lived in fear. This land – not their home – could not feed them. Abandoned by the Deragoth and their kind, they had failed in life’s struggle.’ He turned then to regard the child. ‘But this one I will take.’
Sidilack, it was said, could feel then the deepest stain settling upon his soul. One that no cleansing ritual could eradicate. He saw, in that moment, the grim fate of his destiny, a descent into the madness of inconsolable grief. The god would take the last child, but it was most certainly the last. The blood of the others was on Sidilack’s hands, a curse, a haunting that only death could relieve.
Yet he was Gral. Forbidden from taking his own life.
Another legend followed, that one recounting the long journey to Snaketongue’s final end, his pursuit of questions that could not be answered, the pathos of his staggering walk into the Dead Man’s Desert – realm of the fallen Gral – where even the noble spirits refused him, his soul, the hollow defence of his own crime.
Taralack Veed did not want to think of these things. Echoes of the child, that hissing, less-than-human creature who had been drawn into the shadows by a god – to what end? A mystery within the legend that would never be solved. But he did not believe there had been mercy in that god’s heart. He did not want to think of young females with small hands and feet, with sloped chins and large canines, with luminous eyes the hue of savanna grasses.
He did not want to think of Sidilack and the endless night of his doom. The warrior with slaughter’s blood staining his hands and his soul. That tragic fool was nothing like Taralack Veed, he told himself again and again. Truths did not hide in vague similarities, after all; only in the specific details, and he shared none of those with old Snaketongue.
‘You speak rarely these days, Taralack Veed.’
The Gral glanced up at Icarium. ‘I am frightened for you,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘I see nothing of the hardness in your eyes, friend, the hardness that perhaps none but a longtime companion would be able to detect. The hardness that bespeaks your rage. It seems to sleep, and I do not know if even Rhulad can awaken it. If he cannot, then you will die. Quickly.’
‘If all you say of me is true,’ the Jhag replied, ‘then my death would be welcome. And justified in every sense of the word.’
‘No other can defeat the Emperor—’
‘Why are you so certain I can? I do not wield a magical sword. I do not return to life should I fall. These are the rumours regarding the Tiste Edur named Rhulad, yes?’
‘When your anger is unleashed, Icarium, you cannot be stopped.’
‘Ah, but it seems I can.’
Taralack Veed’s eyes narrowed. ‘Is this the change that has come to you, Icarium? Have your memories returned to you?’
‘I believe if they had, I would not now be here,’ the Jhag replied, pausing before one stall offering cord-wrapped pottery. ‘Look upon these items here, Taralack Veed, and tell me what you see. Empty vessels? Or endless possibilities?’
‘They are naught but pots.’
Icarium smiled.
It was, the Gral decided, a far too easy smile. ‘Do you mock me, Icarium?’
‘Something awaits me. I do not mean this mad Emperor. Something else. Answer me this. How does one measure time?’
‘By the course of the sun, the phases of the moon, the wheel of the stars. And, of course, in cities such as this one, the sounding of a bell at fixed intervals – a wholly absurd conceit and, indeed, one that is spiritually debilitating.’
‘The Gral speaks.’
‘Now you truly mock me. This is unlike you, Icarium.’
‘The sounding of bells, their increments established by the passing of sand or water through a narrowed vessel. As you say, a conceit. An arbitrary assertion of constancy. Can we truly say, however, that time is constant?’
‘As any Gral would tell you, it is not. Else our senses lie.’
‘Perhaps they do.’
‘Then we are lost.’
‘I appreciate your intellectual belligerence today, Taralack Veed.’
They moved on, wandering slowly alongside the canal.
‘I understand your obsession with time,’ the Gral said. ‘You, who have passed through age after age, unchanging, unknowing.’
‘Unknowing, yes. That is the problem, isn’t it?’
‘I do not agree. It is our salvation.’
They were silent for a few more strides. Many were the curious – at times pitying – glances cast their way. The champions were also the condemned, after all. Yet was there hope, buried deep behind those shying eyes? There must be. For an end to the nightmare that was Rhulad Sengar, the Edur Emperor of Lether.
‘Without an understanding of time, history means nothing. Do you follow, Taralack Veed?’
‘Yet you do not understand time, do you?’
‘No, that is true. Yet I believe I have…pursued this…again and again. From age to age. In the faith that a revelation on the meaning of time will unlock my own hidden history. I would find its true measure, Taralack Veed. And not just its measure, but its very nature. Consider this canal, and those linked to it. The water is pushed by current and tide from the river, then traverses the city, only to rejoin the river not far from where it first entered. We may seek to step out from the river and so choose our own path, but no matter how straight it seems, we will, in the end, return to that river.’
‘As with the bells, then,’ the Gral said, ‘water tracks the passage of time.’
‘You misunderstand,’ Icarium replied, but did not elaborate.
Taralack Veed scowled, paused to spit thick phlegm onto his palms, then swept it back through his hair. Somewhere in the crowd a woman screamed, but the sound was not repeated. ‘The canal’s current cannot change the law that binds its direction. The canal is but a detour.’
‘Yes, one that slows the passage of its water. And in turn that water changes, gathering the refuse of the city it passes through, and so, upon returning to the river, it is a different colour. Muddier, more befouled.’
‘The slower your path, the muddier your boots?’
‘Even so,’ Icarium said, nodding.
‘Time is nothing like that.’
‘Are you so certain? When we must wait, our minds fill with sludge, random thoughts like so much refuse. When we are driven to action, our current is swift, the water seemingly clear, cold and sharp.’
‘I’d rather, Icarium, we wait a long time. Here, in the face of what is to come.’
‘The path to Rhulad? As you like. But I tell you, Taralack Veed, that is not the path I am walking.’
Another half-dozen strides.
Then the Gral spoke. ‘They wrap the cord around them, Icarium, to keep them from breaking.’
Senior Assessor’s eyes glittered as he stood amidst a crowd twenty paces from where Icarium and Taralack Veed had paused in front of a potter’s stall. His hands were folded together, the fingers twitching. His breathing was rapid and shallow.
Beside him, Samar Dev rolled her eyes, then asked, ‘Are you about to fall dead on me? If I’d known this walk involved skulking in that Jhag’s shadow, I think I would have stayed in the compound.’
‘The choices you make,’ he replied, ‘must needs be entirely of your own accord, Samar Dev. Reasonably distinct from mine or anyone else’s. It is said that the history of human conflict resides exclusively in the clash of expectations.’
‘Is it now?’
‘Furthermore—’
‘Never mind your “furthermore”, Senior Assessor. Compromise is the negotiation of expectation. With your wayward notions we do not negotiate, and so all the compromising is mine.’
‘As you choose.’
She thought about hitting him, decided she didn’t want to make a scene. What was it with men and their obsessions? ‘He is in all likelihood going to die, and soon.’
‘I think not. No, most certainly I think not.’
Icarium and the Gral resumed their meander through the crowds, and after a moment Senior Assessor followed, maintaining his distance. Sighing, Samar Dev set off after him. She didn’t like this mob. It felt wrong. Tense, overwrought. Strain was visible on faces, and the cries of the hawkers sounded strident and half desperate. Few passers-by, she noted, were buying.
‘Something’s wrong,’ she said.
‘There is nothing here that cannot be explained by impending financial panic, Samar Dev. Although you may believe I am unaware of anything but him, I assure you that I have assessed the condition of Letheras and, by extension, this entire empire. A crisis looms. Wealth, alas, is not an infinite commodity. Systems such as this are dependent upon the assumption of unlimited resources, however. These resources range from cheap labour and materials to an insatiable demand. Such demand, in turn, depends on rather more ethereal virtues, such as confidence, will, perceived need and the bliss of short-term thinking, any one of which is vulnerable to mysterious and often inexplicable influences. We are witness, here, to the effects of a complex collusion of factors which are serving to undermine said virtues. Furthermore, it is my belief that the situation has been orchestrated.’
