The Malazan Empire, page 855
‘Setoc! Stop! The power—it is too great—it overwhelms!’
But she had lost all control. She had not expected anything like this. The pressure, crushing in from all sides now, threatened to destroy her. She wept like the last child on earth, the last living thing, sole witness to the legacy of all that her kind had achieved. This desolation. This suicidal victory over nature itself.
‘Setoc!’
All at once she saw something glowing before her: a portal, pathetically small, nothing more than a bolt-hole. She raised a trembling hand and pointed towards it. ‘My loved ones,’ she whispered, ‘the way through. Make it bigger.’
They had wandered far beyond the chamber of slaughter, where scores of K’Chain Che’Malle had seemingly been sacrificed. Lanterns cast fitful light against metal entrails embedded in niches along the walls of the corridors, and from the ceiling thick cables sagged, dripping some kind of viscous oil. The air was rank with acidic vapours, making their eyes water. Side passages opened to rooms crowded with strange, incomprehensible machinery, the floor slick with spilled oils.
Taxilian led the others in their exploration, wending ever deeper into the maze of wide, low-ceilinged corridors. Moving a step behind him, Rautos could hear the man muttering, but he could not make out the words—he feared Taxilian might be going mad. This was an alien world, shaped by alien minds. Sense and understanding eluded them all, and from this was born fear.
Behind Rautos, almost on his heels, was Breath, coughing, gasping, as if her endless talk of drowning had thickened the air around her.
‘Tunnels!’ she hissed. ‘I hate tunnels. Pits, caves. Dark—always dark—rooms. Where is he leading us? We’ve passed countless ramps leading to higher levels—what is the fool looking for?’
Rautos had no answers, so he said nothing.
Behind Breath, Sheb and Nappet were bickering. Those two would come to blows soon; they were too much alike. Both vicious, both fundamentally amoral, both born betrayers. Rautos wished they would kill each other—they would not be missed.
‘Ah!’ cried Taxilian. ‘Found it!’
Rautos moved up to the man’s side. They stood at the threshold of a vast eight-walled chamber. A narrow ledge encircled it level with the passage they had just traversed. The actual floor was lost in darkness below. Taxilian edged out to the right, lifting his lantern.
The monstrous mechanism filling the centre of the expanse towered past level after level—only a few with balconies to match the one they were on—until it vanished high overhead. It seemed to be constructed entirely of metal, gleaming like brass and the purest iron, eight cylinders each the size of a city tower. Spigots jutted out from bolted collars that fastened the segments every second level, and attached to these were black, pliant ropes of some sort that reached out like the strands of an abandoned spider’s web, converging on huge boxes of metal affixed to the walls. Peering downward, Rautos could just make out a change in the configuration of the towers, as if each one sat upon a beehive dome.
His gaze caught and held upon one piece of metal, bent so perfectly between two fittings, and he frowned as if silts had been brushed from some deeply submerged memory. He groped towards it, fighting back a whimper, and then the blinding clouds returned, and he was swept away once more. He reeled and would have fallen from the ledge had not Breath roughly pulled him back.
‘Idiot! Do you want to kill yourself?’
He shook his head. ‘Sorry. Thank you.’
‘Don’t bother. I acted on instinct. If I’d thought about it, I probably would have let you go. You’re nothing to me, fat old man. Nothing. No one is, not here, not one of you.’
She had raised her voice to make certain everyone else heard her last words.
Sheb snorted. ‘Bitch needs a lesson or two, I think.’
Breath spun to face him. ‘Hungry for a curse, are you? What part of your body do you want to rot off first? Maybe I’ll do the choosing—’
‘Set your magic on me, woman, and I will throttle you.’
She laughed, turned away. ‘Play with Asane if you have the need.’
Rautos, after a few deep, calming breaths, set out after Taxilian, who had begun walking round the ledge, eyes fixed on the edifice.
‘It’s an engine,’ he said when Rautos drew close.
‘A what? As in a mill? But I see nothing like gears or—’
‘Like that, yes. You can hide gears and levers inside, in housings to keep them clean of grit and whatnot. Even more relevantly, you can seal things and make use of alternating pressures, and so move things from one place to another. It’s a common practice in alchemy, especially if one conjures such pressures using heat and cold. I once saw a sorcerous invention that could draw the ether out of a glass jar, thus quenching the lit candle within it. A pump bound in wards was used to draw out the life force that exists in the air.’ He waved one hand at the towers. ‘Heat, cold—I think these are vast pressure chambers of some sort.’
‘For what purpose?’
Taxilian looked at him with glittering eyes. ‘That’s what I mean to find out.’
There were no ladders or bridges across to the towers. Taxilian led him back to the entranceway. ‘We’re going up now,’ he said.
‘We need food,’ said Last, his expression worried, frightened. ‘We could get lost in here—’
‘Stop whimpering,’ growled Nappet. ‘I could walk us out of here in no time.’
‘None of you,’ cut in Asane, startling everyone, ‘wants to talk about what we found in the first room. That’s what you’re all running from. Those—those monsters—they were all slaughtered.’ She glared at them, diffident, and rushed on. ‘What killed them could still be here! We don’t know anything about any of this—’
‘Those monsters didn’t die in battle,’ said Sheb. ‘That was a ritual killing we saw. Sacrifices, that’s what they were.’
‘Maybe they had no choice.’
Sheb snorted. ‘I can’t think of many beasts choosing to be sacrificed. Of course they had no choice. This place is abandoned—you can feel it. Smell it in the stale air.’
‘When we climb higher,’ said Last, ‘we’ll get out of the wet, and we can see if there’s tracks in the dust.’
‘Gods below, the farmer’s good for something after all,’ said Nappet with a hard grin.
‘Let’s go, then,’ said Taxilian, and he set off. Once more the others fell in behind him.
Drifting between all of them, voiceless, half-blinded with sorrow that swept down like curtains of rain, the ghost yearned to reach through. To Taxilian, Rautos, even stolid, slow-thinking Last. In their journey through the bowels of the Dragon Keep, knowledge had erupted, thunderous, pounding concussions that sent him reeling.
He knew this place. He knew its name. Kalse Rooted. A demesne of the K’Chain Che’Malle, a border keep. A vast body now drained of all life, a corpse standing empty-eyed on the plain. And he knew that a Shi’gal Assassin had slain those K’ell Hunters. To seal the failure of this fortress.
Defeat was approaching. The whispering chant, the song of scales. The great army sent out from here had been annihilated. Naught but a pathetic rearguard left behind. The J’an Sentinels would have taken the Matron away, to the field of the fallen, there to entomb her for evermore.
Taxilian! Hear me. What is lifeless is not necessarily dead. That which falls can rise again. Take care—take great care—in this place . . .
But his cries were not heard. He was trapped outside, made helpless with all that he understood, with this cascade of secrets that could do little more than tumble into an abyss of ignorance.
He knew how Asane railed in her own mind, how she longed to escape her own flesh. She wanted out from all that had failed her. Her damned flesh, her dying organs, her very mind. She had been awakened to the comprehension that the body was a prison, but one prone to terrible, inexorable decay. Oh, there was always that final flight, when the corroded bars ceased to pose a barrier; when the soul was free to fly, to wing out in search of unseen shores. But with that release—for all she knew—all that she called herself would be lost. Asane would end. Cease, and that which was born from the ashes held no regard for the living left behind, no regard for that world of aches, pain, and suffering. It was transformed into indifference, and all that was past—all that belonged to the mortal life now done—meant nothing to it; she could not comprehend such a cruel rebirth.
She longed for death none the less. Longed to escape her withered husk with all its advancing decrepitude, its sundering into the pathos of the broken. Fear alone held her back—back from that ledge in the eight-sided chamber, back from that fatal drop to some unseen floor far below. And that same fear clawed at her now. Demons stalked this keep. She dreaded what was coming.
Walking a step behind her was Last, aptly choosing a rearguard position. His shoulders were hunched, head ducked as if the corridor’s ceiling were much lower than it was. He was a man born to open spaces, boundless skies overhead, the sweep of vistas. Within this haunted maze, he felt diminished, almost crippled. Vertigo lunged at him with each turn and twist. He saw how the walls closed in. He felt the mass looming over them all, the unbearable weight of countless storeys overhead.
He had a sudden memory of his childhood. He had been helping his father—before the debts arrived, before everything was taken away that meant anything at all—he had been helping his father, he recalled, dismantle a shed behind the stables. They had prised loose the warped planks and were stacking them in a disordered heap this side of the pen’s fence. Finishing a task begun months earlier, before the planting. By late afternoon the shed was down, and his father had told him to rearrange the boards, sorting them by length and condition.
He had set to the task. Recollection grew hazy then, up until the moment he lifted a grey, weathered plank—one from last season’s work—and saw how its recent shifting from the day’s work just done had crushed a nest of mice, the woven bundle of grasses flattened, smeared in a tangle of blood and tiny entrails. Hairless, pink pups scattered about, crushed, each one yielding up their single drop of lifeblood. Both parents suffocated beneath the weight of the overburden.
Kneeling before this tableau, his presence looming like a god come too late, he stared down at this destroyed family. Silly to weep, of course. There were plenty of other mice—Errant knew the yard’s cats stayed fat. So, foolish, these tears.
Yes, he’d been just a child. A sensitive age, no doubt. And later that night his father took him by the hand and led him out to the modest barrow on the old plot, continuing what had been their the post-supper ritual ever since his mother was put into the ground, and they burned knotted hoops of wrinkle grass with their dried blossoms that flared bright the instant flames touched them. Bursts of fire that blotted the eyes with pulsing afterglows. And when his father saw the tears on his son’s cheeks he drew him close and said, ‘I’ve been waiting for that.’
Yes, the levels above seemed well built, the walls solid and sturdy. No reason to think it would all come down at the careless toss of some child god. These kinds of thoughts, well, they could only make a man angry. In ways every child would understand.
He walked with his huge hands balled into fists.
Sheb was fairly certain that he had died in prison, or come close enough to dead that the cell cutter simply ordered the bearers to carry him out to the lime pits, and they spilled him down on to a bed of dusted corpses. Searing pain from the lime had roused him from his fevered oblivion, and he must have climbed his way out, pushed through the bodies that had been dumped on top of him.
He recalled struggling. Vast, unshifting weights. He recalled even thinking that he had failed. That he was too weak, that he would never get free. He even remembered seeing swaths of red, blistered skin on his arms, sloughing away in his frenzied thrashing. And a nightmare instant where he gouged out his own burning eyes to bring an end to their agony.
Mad delusions, of course. He had won free. Had he not, would he be alive now? Walking at Nappet’s side? No, he had cheated them all. Those Hivanar agents who brought the embezzlement charges against him, the advocates who bribed him out of the Drownings (where, he knew, he would have survived), seeing him instead sent to the work camps. Ten years’ hard labour—no one survived that.
Except me. Sheb the unkillable. And one day, Xaranthos Hivanar, I will come back to steal the rest of your wealth. I still know what I know, don’t I? And you will pay to keep me quiet. And this time round I won’t get careless. I’ll see your corpse lying in a pauper’s pit. I swear it before the Errant himself. I swear it!
Walking at Sheb’s side, Nappet held on to his cold, hard grin. He knew Sheb wanted to be the bully in this crowd. The man had a viper’s heart, a stony knuckle of a thing, beating out venom in turgid spurts. One of these nights, he vowed, he’d throw the fool on his back and give him the old snake-head where it counted.
Sheb had been in a Letherii prison—Nappet was certain of it. His habits, his manners, his skittish way of moving—they told him all he needed to know about ratty little Sheb. He’d been used and used well in those cells. Calluses on the knees. Fish Breath. Slick cheeks. There were plenty of names for men like him.
Sheb had got it enough to start liking it, and all this bitching back and forth between Nappet and Sheb, well, that was just seeing who’d be the first one doing the old cat stretch.
Four years’ back-breaking quarrying up near Bluerose. That had been Nappet’s sentence for that little gory mess back in Letheras, the sister’s husband who’d liked throwing the frail thing around—well, no brother was going to let that just sidle past. No brother worth anything.
The only damned shame was that he hadn’t managed to kill the bastard. Close, though. Enough broken bones so that the man had trouble sitting up, never mind stalking the house breaking things and hitting defenceless women.
Not that she’d been grateful. Family loyalty only went one way, it turned out. He forgave her quick enough for ratting on him. She’d walked in on a messy scene, after all. Screams aplenty. Her poor mind was confused—she’d never been very sharp to begin with. If she had been, why, she’d never have married that nub-nosed swaggering turd in the first place.
Anyway, Nappet knew he’d get Sheb sooner or later. So long as Sheb understood that between them he was the man in charge. And he knew that Sheb would want it rough, at least to start with, so he could look outraged, wounded and all that. The two of them, they’d played in the same yard, after all.
Breath stumbled and Nappet shoved her forward. ‘Stupid woman. Frail and stupid, that’s what you are, like every other woman. Almost as bad as the hag back there. You got a swamp drying out in that blonde hair, did you know that? You stink of the swamp—not that we been through one.’
She shot him a glare, before hurrying on.
Breath could smell mud. Its stench seemed to ooze from her pores. Nappet was right in that, but that didn’t stop her thinking about ways to kill him. If not for Taxilian, and maybe Last, he and Sheb would have raped her by now. Once or twice, to convince her about who was in charge. After that, she knew, they’d be happy enough with each other.
She’d been told a story, once, although she could not recall who had told it to her, or where they had been. It was a tale about a girl who was a witch, though she didn’t know it yet. She was a seer of the Tiles long before she saw her first Tile. A gift no one thought to even look for in this small, wheat-haired child.
Even before her first bloodflow, men had been after her. Not the tall grey-skinned ones, though the girl feared them the most—for reasons never explained—but men living in the same place as her. Letherii. Slaves, yes, slaves, just like she’d been. That girl. That witch.
And there was one man, maybe the only one among them all, who did not look on her with hunger. No, in his eyes there had been love. That real thing, that genuine thing that girls dreamed of finding. But he was lowborn. He was nothing. A mender of nets, a man whose red hands shed fish scales when he returned from his day’s work.
The tragedy was this, then. The girl had not yet found her Tiles. Had she done so early enough, she would have taken that man to her bed. She would have made him her first man. So that what was born between her legs was not born in pain. So that it would not become so dark in its delicious desires.
Before the Tiles, then, she had given herself to other men, unloving men. She’d given herself over to be used.
The same men who then in turn gave her a new name, one born of the legend of the White Crow, who once offered the gift of flight to humans, in the form of a single feather. And, urged on by promises, men would grasp hold of that feather and seek to fly. Only to fall to their deaths. With the crow laughing as they fell. Crows needed to eat just like everything else, after all.
‘I am the White Crow, and I will feed on your dreams. And feed well.’
They called her Feather, for the promise she offered, and never delivered. Had she found the Tiles, Breath was certain, she would have been given a different name. That little blonde girl. Whoever she was.
Rautos, who had yet to discover his family name, was thinking of his wife. Trying to recall something of their lives together, something other than the disgusting misery of their last years.
A man does not marry a girl, nor a woman. He marries a promise, and it shines with a bright purity that is ageless. It shines, in other words, with the glory of lies. The deception is self-inflicted. The promise was simple in its form, as befitted the thick-headedness of young men, and in its essence it offered the delusion that the present moment was eternal; that nothing would change; not the fires of desire, not the flesh itself, not the intense look in the eye.
Now here he was, at the far end of a marriage—where she was at this moment he had no idea. Perhaps he’d murdered her. Perhaps, as was more likely given the cowardice in his soul, he had simply fled her. No matter. He could look back with appalling clarity now, and see how her dissolution had matched his own. They had each settled like a lump of wax, melting season by season, descending into something shapeless, something not even hinting at the forms they had once possessed. Smeared, sagging, two heaps of sour smells, chafed skin, groans born of fitful motion. Fools that they both were, they had not moved through the years hand in hand—no, they’d not possessed that wisdom, that ironic recognition of the inevitable.
