The Malazan Empire, page 818
‘Generous of you, I think.’
‘That’s me,’ Picker said.
Samar Dev set out in search of K’rul’s Bar. A breakfast sounded very fine indeed, as did the notion of decent wine. As for the bath, well, if it was indeed offered, why, she suspected she’d be too weary to resist.
Tens of thousands now followed the ox cart and its burden as it made its way down from Lakefront and into the Gadrobi District. Bells rang; the Great Ravens wheeled, adding their wretched cries. And already, from the hills beyond Two-Ox Gate, clouds of dust rose into the morning sky.
Caladan Brood did not need to hew each stone, or drive spade into stony soil. The warren of Tennes had been awakened, and the flesh of Burn was given new shape and new purpose. In this chosen place, a hill was being transformed. And by the time Brood led the ox up to the barrow’s passage entrance, and took the body of Anomander Rake into his arms, the chamber within was ready. And when he then emerged, pausing as if startled upon seeing the tens of thousands of silent mourners forming a ring round the hill’s base, an enormous capstone had risen into view, splitting the grassy ground.
And when with one hand Caladan Brood had guided it into place, he drew his hammer. To seal the barrow for ever.
Anomander Rake was interred in darkness. Weaponless, accompanied by no gifts, no wealth, no treasured possessions. His flesh was not treated against the ravages of decay. The blood and gore covering his face was not even washed away. None of these gestures belonged to the Tiste Andii, for whom the soul’s departure leaves the flesh blind, insensate and indifferent.
Dying delivers one into the river of darkness, that passes into and out of the ruined city of Kharkanas, the womb long dead, long abandoned. Into the river, and the river must travel on, ever on.
Caladan Brood sealed the barrow, and upon the capstone of bleached dolomite he set a symbol, carved deep into the stone’s face. An ancient Barghast glyph, its meaning precise and yet a thing of countless layers – although this is known only to those who in life come to face it directly.
A single Barghast glyph.
Which said Grief.
When Baruk had vanished inside his carriage and the conveyance had rumbled off on its way to the High Alchemist’s venerable estate; when the huge Toblakai warrior and Picker had concluded their conversation, and each had gone their own way, the former trailed by his daughters and the limping dog; when the place where two warriors had met in mortal combat bore nothing but a scattering of masonry, sun-darkened swaths of spilled blood and the motionless forms of dead Hounds of Light – when all this had come to pass, two figures emerged from the shadows.
One was barely visible despite the harsh sunlight: ghostly, leaning on a cane. And after a time of silence, this one spoke in a rasping voice. To begin with, a single word: ‘Well?’
And his companion replied in kind. ‘Well.’
The cane tapped a few times on the cobbles.
The companion then said, ‘It’s out of our hands now, until the end.’
‘Until the end,’ agreed Shadowthrone. ‘You know, Cotillion, I never much liked Caladan Brood.’
‘Really? I never knew.’
‘Do you think…’
‘I think,’ said Cotillion, ‘that we need not worry on that count.’
Shadowthrone sighed. ‘Are we pleased? It was…delicate…the timing. Are we pleased? We should be.’
‘The damned Hounds of Light,’ said Cotillion, ‘that was unexpected. Two, yes. But ten? Gods below.’
‘Hmph! I was more worried by my Magus’s temporary sanity.’
‘Is that what you call it?’
‘He had a chance – a slim one, but he had a chance. Imagine that one wielding Dragnipur.’
Cotillion regarded his companion. ‘Are you suggesting he would not have relinquished it? Ammanas, really. That was all your play. I’m not fooled by his seemingly going rogue on you. You vowed you’d not try to steal the sword. But of course you never mentioned anything about one of your High Priests doing it for you.’
‘And it would have been mine!’ Shadowthrone hissed in sudden rage. ‘If not for that confounded fat man with the greasy lips! Mine!’
‘Iskaral Pust’s, you mean.’
Shadowthrone settled down once more, tapped his cane. ‘We’d have seen eye to eye, eventually.’
‘I doubt it.’
‘Well, who cares what you think, anyway?’
‘So where is he now?’
‘Pust? Back in the temple, poring through the archives of the Book of Shadows.’
‘Looking for what?’
‘Some provision, any provision, for a High Priest of Shadow having two wives.’
‘Is there one?’
‘How should I know?’
‘Well,’ Cotillion said, ‘didn’t you write it?’
Shadowthrone shifted about. ‘I was busy.’
‘So who did?’
Shadowthrone would not answer.
Cotillion’s brows rose. ‘Not Pust! The Book of Shadows, where he’s proclaimed the Magus of the High House Shadow?’
‘It’s called delegation,’ Shadowthrone snapped.
‘It’s called idiocy.’
‘Well, hee hee. I dare say he’ll find what he’s looking for, won’t he?’
‘Aye, with the ink still wet.’
They said nothing then for a time, until Cotillion drew in a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh, and then said, ‘We should give him a few days, I think.’ And this time, he was not speaking of Iskaral Pust.
‘Unless you want to get cut to pieces, yes, a few days.’
‘I wasn’t sure he’d, well, accept. Right up until the moment he…’ Cotillion winced and looked up the street, as if straining to see some lone, wandering, lost figure dragging a sword in one hand. But no, he wouldn’t be coming back. ‘You know, I did offer to explain. It might have eased his conscience. But he wasn’t interested.’
‘Listen to these damned bells,’ said Shadowthrone. ‘My head’s hurting enough as it is. Let’s go, we’re done here.’
And so they were, and so they did.
Two streets from his home, Bellam Nom was grasped from behind and then pushed up against a wall. The motion ripped pain through his broken arm. Gasping, close to blacking out, he stared into the face of the man accosting him, and then slumped. ‘Uncle.’ And he saw, behind Rallick, another vaguely familiar face. ‘And…Uncle.’
Frowning, Rallick eased back. ‘You look a mess, Bellam.’
And Torvald said, ‘The whole damned Nom clan is out hunting for you.’
‘Oh.’
‘It won’t do having the heir to the House going missing for days,’ Torvald said. ‘You’ve got responsibilities, Bellam. Look at us, even we weren’t so wayward in our young days, and we’re heirs to nothing. So now we’ve got to escort you home. See how you’ve burdened us?’
And they set out.
‘I trust,’ Rallick said, ‘that whoever you tangled with fared worse, Bellam.’
‘Ah, I suppose he did.’
‘Well, that’s something at least.’
After they had ushered the young man through the gate, peering after him to make sure he actually went inside, Rallick and Torvald set off.
‘That was a good one,’ Rallick said, ‘all that rubbish about us in our youth.’
‘The challenge was in keeping a straight face.’
‘Well now, we weren’t so bad back then. At least until you stole my girlfriend.’
‘I knew you hadn’t forgotten!’
‘I suggest we go now to sweet Tiserra, where I intend to do my best to steal her back.’
‘You’re not actually expecting she’ll make us breakfast, are you?’
‘Why not?’
‘Tiserra is nobody’s servant, cousin.’
‘Oh, well. You can keep her, then.’
Torvald smiled to himself. It was so easy working Rallick. It had always been so easy, getting him to end up thinking precisely what Torvald wanted him to think.
Rallick walked beside him, also pleased as from the corner of his eye he noted Torvald’s badly concealed, faintly smug smile. Putting his cousin at ease had never taxed Rallick.
It was a comfort, at times, how some things never changed.
When Sister Spite stepped on to the deck, she saw Cutter near the stern, leaning on the rail and staring out over the placid lake. She hid her surprise and went to join him.
‘I am returning to Seven Cities,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘That’s close enough.’
‘Ah, well, I am pleased to have your company, Cutter.’
He glanced over at her. ‘Get what you wanted?’
‘Of course not, and…mostly.’
‘So, you’re not upset?’
‘Only in so far as I failed in sinking my teeth into my sister’s soft throat. But that can wait.’
If he was startled by her words, he did not show it. ‘I would have thought you’d want to finish it, since you came all this way.’
‘Oh, there are purposes and there are purposes to all that we do, my young friend. In any case, it is best that I leave immediately, for reasons I care not to explain. Have you said your goodbyes?’
He shrugged. ‘I think I did that years ago, Spite.’
‘Very well, shall we cast off?’
A short time later, the ship slipping easily just out from the shoreline, on a westward heading, they both stood at the port rail and observed the funeral procession’s end, there at a new long barrow rising modestly above the surrounding hills. Crowds upon crowds of citizens ringed the mound. The silence of the scene, with the bells faint and distant, made it seem ethereal, like a painted image, solemn through the smoke haze. They could see the cart, the ox.
Spite sighed. ‘My sister once loved him, you know.’
‘Anomander Rake? No, I didn’t know that.’
‘His death marks the beginning.’
‘Of what?’
‘The end, Cutter.’
He had no response to that. A few moments drifted past. ‘You said she loved him once. What happened?’
‘He acquired Dragnipur. At least, I imagine that was the cause. She is well named, is my sister.’
Envy.
Cutter shot her a glance, thinking of her own name, this beautiful woman at his side, and wisely he said nothing, nothing at all.
The bell that wasn’t there had finally stopped its manic ringing, and Scillara was able to climb back on to the temple roof, so that she could gaze out over the city. She could see the lake, where one lone ship had unfurled sails to ride the morning breeze. She knew those sails and she tracked them for a time.
Who was on board? Well, Spite for certain. And, if he’d any sense, Barathol. With smiling Chaur at his side, the giant child with his childish love that would never know betrayal, at least until the day, hopefully decades hence, when the blacksmith bowed to old age and took to bed for the last time. She could almost see him, his face, the deep wrinkles, the dimming of his dark eyes, and all the losses of his life falling away, veil by veil, until he ceased looking outward entirely.
Chaur would not understand. What he would feel would crash blind as a boar in a thicket, crash right through him. It would be a dreadful thing to witness, to see the poor child tangled in the clutches of pain he could not understand, and loss he could not fathom.
Who would care for him then?
And what of dear Scillara? Why was she not with them? She wished she had an answer to that. But she had come to certain truths about herself. Destined, she now believed, to provide gentle comfort to souls in passing. A comforting bridge, yes, to ease the loneliness of their journey.
She seemed doomed ever to open her arms to the wrong lover, to love fully yet never be so loved in return. It made her pathetic stock in this retinue of squandered opportunities that scrawled out the history of a clumsy life.
Could she live with that? Without plunging into self-pity? Time would tell, she supposed.
Scillara packed her pipe, struck sparks and drew deep.
A sound behind her made her turn—
As Barathol stepped close, one hand sliding up behind her head, leaned forward and kissed her. A long, deep, determined kiss. When he finally pulled away, she gasped. Eyes wide, staring up into his own.
He said, ‘I am a blacksmith. If I need to forge chains to keep you, I will.’
She blinked, and then gave him a throaty laugh. ‘Careful, Barathol. Chains bind both ways.’
His expression was grave. ‘Can you live with that?’
‘Give me no choice.’
Ride, my friends, the winds of love! There beside a belfry where a man and a woman find each other, and out in the taut billows of sails where another man stares westward and dreams of sweet moonlight, a garden, a woman who is the other half of his soul.
Gentle gust through a door, sweet sigh, as a guard comes home and is engulfed by his wife, who had suffered an eternal night of fears, but she holds him now and all is well, all is right, and children yell in excitement and dance in the kitchen.
The river of grief has swept through Darujhistan, and morning waxes in its wake. There are lives to rebuild, so many wounds to mend.
A bag of coins thumps on to the tabletop before a woman new to her blessed widowhood, and she feels as if she has awakened from a nightmare of decades, and this is, for her, a private kind of love, a moment for herself and no one else.
Picker strides into the bar and there waits Blend, tears in her eyes, and Samar Dev watches from a table and she smiles but that smile is wistful and she wonders what doors wait for her, and which ones will prove unlocked, and what might lie beyond.
And in a temple, Iskaral Pust blots dry the ink and crows over his literary genius. Mogora looks on with jaded eyes, but is already dreaming of alliances with Sordiko Qualm.
The bhokarala sit in a clump, exchanging wedding gifts.
Two estate guards, after a busy night, burst into a brothel, only to find nobody there. Love will have to wait, and is anyone really surprised at their ill luck?
At the threshold of a modest home and workshop, Tiserra stands facing the two loves of her life. And, for the briefest of moments, her imagination runs wild. She then recovers herself and, in a light tone, asks, ‘Breakfast?’
Torvald is momentarily startled.
Rallick just smiles.
There is a round man, circumference unending, stepping ever so daintily through rubble on his way back to the Phoenix Inn. It will not do to be a stranger to sorrow, if only to cast sharp the bright wonder of sweeter things. And so, even as he mourns in his own fashion (with cupcakes), so too he sighs wistfully. Love is a city, yes indeed, a precious city, where a thousand thousand paths wend through shadow and light, through air stale and air redolent with blossoms, nose-wrinkling perfume and nose-wrinkling dung, and there is gold dust in the sewage and rebirth in the shedding of tears.
And at last, we come to a small child, walking into a duelling school, passing through gilded streams of sunlight, and he halts ten paces from a woman sitting on a bench, and he says something then, something without sound.
A moment later two imps trundle into view and stop in their tracks, staring at Harllo, and then they squeal and rush towards him.
The woman looks up.
She is silent for a long time, watching Mew and Hinty clutching the boy. And then a sob escapes her and she makes as if to turn away—
But Harllo will have none of that. ‘No! I’ve come home. That’s what this is, it’s me coming home!’
She cannot meet his eyes, but she is weeping none the less. She waves a hand. ‘You don’t understand, Harllo. That time, that time – I have no good memories of that time. Nothing good came of it, nothing.’
‘That’s not true!’ he shouts, close to tears. ‘That’s not true. There was me.’
As Scillara now knew, some doors you cannot hold back. Bold as truth, some doors get kicked in.
Stonny did not know how she would manage this. But she would. She would. And so she met her son’s eyes, in a way that she had never before permitted herself to do. And that pretty much did it.
And what was said by Harllo, in silence, as he stood there, in the moments before he was discovered? Why, it was this: See, Bainisk, this is my mother.
Epilogue
Rage and tell me then
Not every tale is a gift
When anguish gives the knife
One more twist
And blood is thinned by tears
Cry out the injustice
Not every tale is a gift
In a world harsh with strife
Leaving us bereft
Deeds paling through the years
And I will meet your eye
Neither flinching nor shy
As I fold death inside life
And face you down
With a host of mortal fears
And I will say then
Every tale is a gift
And the scars borne by us both
Are easily missed
In the distance between us
Bard’s Curse
Fisher kel Tath
Nimander stood on the roof of the keep, leaning with his arms on the battlement’s cold stone, and watched the distant figure of Spinnock Durav as he crossed the old killing ground. A fateful, fretful meeting awaited that warrior, and Nimander was worried, for it was by Nimander’s own command that Spinnock now went to find the woman he loved.
Skintick arrived to stand at his side.
‘It’s madness,’ said Nimander. ‘It should be Durav on the throne. Or Korlat.’
‘It’s your lack of confidence we find so charming,’ Skintick replied.
‘Is that supposed to be amusing?’
‘Well, it amuses me, Nimander. I settle for that, most times. Listen, it’s simple and it’s complicated. His blood courses strong within you, stronger than you realize. And like it or not, people will follow you. Listen to you. Spinnock Durav was a good example, I’d venture. He took your command like a body blow, and then he set out to follow it. Not a word of complaint – your irritated impatience stung him.’
