The Malazan Empire, page 900
‘Bakal?’ she whispered.
Nothing. From the trench itself, a heavy silence. She crouched at the body, pulled it on to its back. She stared down at Bakal’s face: the frothy streaks of blood smearing his chin, the expression as of one lost, and finally, his staring, sightless eyes.
Another shout from the camp, closer this time. That’s Faranda—and that one, that’s Sekara. Spirits shit on them both!
Terror rushed through her. She crouched, like a hare with no cover in sight.
Hetan made to sink to her knees. ‘No!’ she hissed. ‘Stay up, damn you!’ She grasped the woman’s shirt again, tugged her stumbling round one end of the trench, out on to the plain.
Jade licked the grasses—a hundred paces ahead the ground rose, showing pieces of a ridge. The column had skirted round that, she recalled. ‘Hetan! Listen to me! Walk to that ridge—do you see it? Walk there. Just walk, do you understand? A man waits for you there—he’s impatient. He’s angry. Hurry to him or you’ll regret it. Hurry!’ She shoved her forward.
Hetan staggered, righted herself. For one terrible moment she simply stood where she was, and then the hobbled lurched into motion.
Estaral watched her for a dozen heartbeats—to be certain—and then she spun and ran back towards the camp. She could slip in unseen. Yes, she’d cleaned up Hetan’s face, and then had simply left her, close to the wagons—the bitch was dead behind the eyes, anyone could see that. She fled out on to the plain? Ridiculous, but if you want to go look, out where the Akrynnai are waiting, go right ahead.
She found shadows between two wagons, squeezed in. Figures were moving in and out of firelight. The shouts had stopped. If she avoided the hearths, she could thread her way back to where Strahl and the others were camped. She would have to tell him of Bakal’s death. Who would lead the Senan tomorrow? It would have to be Strahl. He would need to know, so he could ready his mind to command, to the weight of his clan’s destiny.
She edged forward.
Thirty paces on, they found her. Six women led by Sekara, with Faranda hovering in the background. Estaral saw them rushing to close and she drew her knife. She knew what they would do to her; she knew they weren’t interested in asking questions, weren’t interested in explanations. No, they will do to me what they did to Hetan. Bakal was gone, her protector was gone. There were, she realized, so many ways to be alone.
They saw her weapon. Avid desire lit their eyes—yes, they wanted blood. ‘I killed her!’ Estaral shrieked. ‘Bakal was using her—I killed them both!’
She lunged into their midst.
Blades flickered. Estaral staggered, spun even as she sank to her knees. Gleeful faces on all sides. Such bright hunger—oh, how alive they feel! She was bleeding out, four, maybe five wounds, heat leaking out from her body.
So stupid. All of it . . . so stupid. And with that thought she laughed out her last breath.
The massive bank of clouds on the western horizon now filled half the night sky, impenetrable and solid as a wall, building block by block to shut out the stars and the slashes of jade. Wind rustled the grasses, pulled from the east as if the storm was drawing breath. Yet no flashes lit the clouds, and not once had Cafal heard thunder. Despite this, his trepidation grew with every glance at the towering blackness.
Where was Bakal? Where was Hetan?
The bound grip of the hook-blade was slick in his hand. He had begun to shiver as the temperature plummeted.
He could save her. He was certain of it. He would demand the power from the Barghast gods. If they refused him, he vowed he would destroy them. No games, no bargains. I know it was your lust for blood that led to this. And I will make you pay.
Cafal dreaded the moment he first saw his sister, this mocking, twisted semblance of the woman he had known all his life. Would she even recognize him? Of course she would. She would lunge into his arms—an end to the torment, the rebirth of hope. Dread, yes, and then he would make it good again, all of it. They would flee west—all the way to Lether—
A faint sound behind him. Cafal whirled round.
The mace clipped him on his left temple. He reeled to the right, attempted to pivot and slash his weapon into the path of his attacker. A punch in the chest lifted him from his feet. He was twisted in the air, hook-blade flying from his hand, and it seemed the fist on his chest followed him down, driving deeper when he landed on his back. Bones grated, splintered.
He saw, uncomprehending, the shaft of the spear, upright as a standard, its head buried in his chest.
Shadowy shapes above him. The gauntleted hands gripping the spear now twisted and pushed down hard.
The point thrust through into the earth beneath him.
He struggled to make sense of things, but everything slipped through his nerveless fingers. Three, now four shapes looming over him, but not a word was spoken.
They watch me die. I’ve done the same. Why do we do that? Why are we so fascinated by this failure?
Because, I think, we see how easy it is.
The Akrynnai warrior holding the man down with his spear now relaxed. ‘He’s done,’ he said, tugging his weapon loose.
‘If he was scouting our camp,’ the mace-wielder said, ‘why was he facing the wrong way?’
‘Barghast,’ muttered a third man, and the others nodded. There was no sense to these damned savages.
‘Tomorrow,’ said the warrior now cleaning his spear, ‘we kill the rest of them.’
She stumbled onward, eyes on the black wall facing her, which seemed to lurch close only to recoil again, as if the world pulsed. The wind pushed her along now, solid as a hand at her back, and the thud of the staff’s heel thumped on and on.
When four Akrynnai warriors cut across her field of vision, she slowed and then halted, waiting for them to take her. But they didn’t. Instead, they made warding gestures and quickly vanished into the gloom. After a time, she set out once more, tottering, her breath coming in thick gasps now. The blisters on her hands broke and made the staff slick.
She walked until the world lost its strength, and then she sat down on the damp grasses beside a lichen-skinned boulder. The wind whipped at her shredded shirt. She stared unseeing, the staff sliding out from her hands. After a time she sank down on to her side, drawing her legs up.
And waited for the blackness to swallow the world.
It was as if night in all its natural order had been stolen away. Strahl watched as the White Faces fed their fires with anything that would burn, crying out to their gods. See us! Find us! We are your children! Goats were dragged to makeshift altars and their throats slashed open. Blood splashed and hoofed legs kicked and then fell to feeble trembling. Dogs fled the sudden, inexplicable slash of cutlass blades. Terror and madness whipped like the smoke and sparks and ashes from the bonfires. By dawn, he knew, not a single animal would be left alive.
If dawn ever comes.
He had heard about Estaral’s death. He had heard about what she had claimed to have done. None of that made sense. Bakal would not have used Hetan—clearly, Estaral had believed she would be with Bakal, that she would be his wife, and when she saw him with Hetan her insanity had painted the scene with the drenched colours of lust. She had murdered them both in a jealous rage.
Strahl cursed himself. He should have driven the widow away days ago. He should have made it plain that Bakal had no interest in her. Spirits below, if he’d seen even a hint of the mad light in her eyes, he would have killed her outright.
Now command of the Senan in the battle this dawn fell to him. He had been handed his most hidden ambition—when he had in fact already willingly surrendered it to stand in Bakal’s shadow. But desire, once it reached the mouth, never tasted as sweet as it did in anticipation. In fact, he was already choking on it.
Bakal had discussed the engagement with him. Had told him what he intended. Strahl had that much at least. And when the Senan gathered at dawn, he would summon the chiefs of the clan, and he would give him Bakal’s words as if they were his own. Would they listen?
He would know soon enough.
The sun opened its eye in the east and seemed to flinch in the face of the massive wall of dark clouds devouring half the sky. On the vast plain at the very edge of what had once been the lands of the Awl, two armies stirred. Bestial standards of the Barghast clans lifted like uneasy masts above the wind-flattened grasses, as ash from the enormous bonfires spun and swirled in the air thick as snow. Approaching from the southwest was a vast crescent, warriors mounted and on foot. Pennons snapped above legions of Saphii soldiers marching in phalanx, shields tilted to cut the wind, long spears blazing with the dawn’s fires. Companies of D’ras skirmishers and archers filled the gaps and ranged ahead of the main force in loose formations. Mounted archers advanced on the tips of the bhederin’s horns, backed by the heavier lancers. The horses were skittish beneath the Akrynnai warriors, and every now and then one reared or bolted and fellow riders would close to help calm the animal.
Along the summit of the ridge, Warleader Maral Eb had positioned the Senan in the centre, framed by the lesser clans. His own Barahn he had divided between his brothers, anchoring the outer flanks.
As the day awakened, the crescent approached the Barghast position, swinging south as scouts rode back to report on the field of battle.
All at once the wind fell off, and in its place frigid cold gripped the air. It was the heart of summer, yet breaths plumed and steam rose from the backs of thousands of horses. Warriors shivered, half with chill and half with sudden dread.
Was this a battle between gods? Were the Akrynnai spirits about to manifest like fangs in snapping jaws? Were the undead ancestor gods of the White Faces only moments from clambering up from the hard, frozen earth, chanting an ancient dirge of blood? Were mortal men and women destined to cower beneath the terrible clash of ascendants? Above them all, the sky was split in two, the brittle light of morning to the east, the unyielding darkness of night in the west. None—not Barghast, not Akrynnai, not Saphii nor D’ras—had ever before seen such a sky. It filled them with terror.
Frost sheathed the grasses and glistened on iron and bronze as icy cold air flowed out from beneath the storm front. Among the two armies, no fierce songs or chants rang out in challenge. An unnatural silence gripped the forces, even at the moment when the two masses of humanity came within sight of each other.
Not a single bird rode the febrile sky.
Yet the Akrynnai army marched closer to its hated enemy; and the enemy stood motionless awaiting them.
A thousand paces west of the Barghast position lay the body of a woman, curled in the frozen grasses with her back against a lichen-skinned boulder. A place to lie down, the last nest of her last night. Frost glittered like diamond scales upon her pale skin.
She had died alone, forty paces from the corpse of her brother. But this death belonged to the flesh. The woman that had been Hetan, wife to Onos Toolan, mother of Absi, Stavi and Storii, had died some time earlier. The body will totter past the dead husk of its soul, sometimes for days, sometimes for years.
She lay on frozen ground, complete in her scene of solitary surrender. Did the sky above blink in witness? Not even once? When a sky blinks, how long does it take between the sweep of darkness and the rebirth of light?
The ghosts, their wings burnt down to black stumps, waited to tell her the answers to those questions.
Saddic, are you still alive? I have dreamed a thing. This thing was a vision, the death of a lizard-wolf lying curled on its side, the danger of bones beneath the sun. Listen to my dream, Saddic, and remember.
Greed is the knife in the sheath of ambition. You see the wicked gleam when you’ve drawn too close. Too close to get away, and as I told you: greed invites death, and now death takes her twice. This thing was a vision. She died not forty paces from her brother, and above her two armies war in the heavens, and beasts that are brothers are about to lock jaws upon each other’s throat. Strange names, strange faces. Painted white like the Quitters. A man with sad eyes whose name is Sceptre Irkullas.
Such a sky, such a sky!
Greed and ambition, Saddic. Greed and treachery. Greed and justice. These are the reasons of fate, and every reason is a lie.
She was dead before dawn. I held her broken soul in my hands. I hold it still. As Rutt holds Held.
I knew a boy.
Absi, where are you?
Saddic listened, and then he said, ‘Badalle, I am cold. Tell me again about the fires. The wonderful fires.’
But these fires were burned down to cinders and ash. The cold was the cold of another world.
Saddic, listen. I have seen a door. Opening.
Chapter Eighteen
What feeds you is rent
With the claws of your need.
But needs dwell half in light
And half in darkness.
And virtue folds in the seam.
If the demand of need is life
Then suffering and death hold purpose.
But if we speak of want and petty desire
The seam folds into darkness
And no virtue holds the ground.
Needs and wants make for a grey world.
But nature yields no privilege.
And what is righteous will soon
Feed itself with the claws
Of your need, as life demands.
QUALITIES OF LIFE
SAEGEN
Weak and exhausted, Yan Tovis had followed her brother through the gates and into the dead city of Kharkanas. The secret legends possessed by her bloodline had virtually carved into her soul the details before her. When she’d walked the bridge, the echo of the stones underfoot embraced her, as familiar and steeped in sorrow as a dead grandmother’s cloak. Passing beneath the storeyed arch, she felt as if she had returned home—but this home was a forgotten place, as if she had inherited someone else’s nostalgia. Her discomfort turned to distress as she emerged from the cool darkness and saw before her a silent, lifeless vista of tall, smoke-stained buildings, smeared towers and disfigured statues. Tiered gardens had grown past weeds and were now thick with twisted trees, the roots of which had burst the retaining walls, snaking down walls and buckling pavestones. Birds nested on ledges above walls painted white in guano. Heaps of wind-blown leaves mouldered in corners, and plants had pushed up between flagstones.
She could feel the ancient magic, like something fluttering at the edge of her vision. The city had survived the eons far better than it rightly should have. And the sorcery still resisted the relentless siege of time. She looked upon a scene that might have been abandoned little more than a generation ago, when in truth it was ancient beyond imagining.
Mothers will hold children close
Until the world itself crumbles
So wrote some poet from this very city, and Yan Tovis understood it well enough. The child and the home shall never change, if that child’s mother has any say over the matter. But explanations make truths mundane. The poet seeks to awaken in the listener all that is known yet unspoken. Words to conjure an absence of words. But children will grow up, and time will drive spears through the thickest walls. And sometimes the walls are breached from within.
It had always been her habit—and she knew it well enough—to sow uncertainty. In her mind, indecision was a way of life. Her brother, of course, was the very opposite. They stood facing one another in extremity, across a gulf that could not be bridged. When Yedan Derryg stepped beyond challenge, his will was a brutal thing, a terrible force that destroyed lives. When she did not have him facing her—his hands dripping blood and his eyes hard as stone—she came to believe that indecisiveness was the natural order of the world, a state of mind that waited until acted upon, doomed to react and never initiate, a mind that simply held itself in place, passive, resigned to whatever the fates delivered.
They were meant to stand together, meant to fix pressure each upon the other like the counterweights at either end of the bridge, and in that tense balance they might find the wisdom to rule, they might make solid and sure the stones beneath the feet of their people.
He had murdered her witches and warlocks, and it had not been a matter of stepping round her to get to them, for she had proved no obstacle to him. No, she had been frozen in place. Awaiting the knife of fate. Yedan’s knife.
I forgot. And so I failed. I need him back. I need my Witchslayer.
Behind her trooped the vanguard of her people. Pully and Skwish, plump and rosy as maidens, their faces growing slack as the residual magic bled through their meagre defences. The two officers commanding the Watch’s company, Brevity and Pithy, had already begun sending squads on to the side streets, to scout out places to accommodate the refugees. Their calm, drawling instructions were like a farrier’s file over the uneven edge of fear and panic.
She could not see Yedan, nor his horse, but ahead, close to the centre of the city, rose a massive edifice, part temple, part palace and keep, from which five towers rose to spear the heavy gloom of the sky. The Citadel. It occupied an island encircled by a gorge that could be crossed by but one bridge, and that bridge was reached by this main avenue.
Yan Tovis glanced back, found Pithy. ‘Settle the people as best you can—but don’t spread them out too much. Oh, and tell the witches they won’t be able to think straight until they’ve worked a protective circle around themselves.’
At the woman’s nod, Yan faced the heart of the city again, and then set out.
He rode to the Citadel. Of course he did. He was Yedan Derryg. And he wants to see for himself where all the blood was spilled.
Some enormous concussion had cracked the marble pillars flanking the Great Hall. Fissures gaped, many of the columns bowed or tilted precariously, and a fine scattering of white dust coated the mosaic floor. In places that dust had congealed into muddy stains.
Indifferent to the rubbish, Yedan crossed the vast chamber. He could feel a warmth coursing through him, as if he was about to wade into a battle. Currents of power still drifted in this place, thick with discordant emotions. Horror, grief, black rage and terrible agony. Madness had descended upon this citadel, and blood had drenched the world.
