The Malazan Empire, page 986
From the breach the roar was unceasing, savage as a storm against cliffs.
Dear ocean, then, call my soul. I would swim the waters again. Let me swim the waters again.
Chapter Thirteen
There was a love once
I shaped it with my hands
Until in its forms
I saw sunlight and streams
And earthy verges sweet with grass
It fit easily into my pack
And made peaceful
The years of wandering
Through forests in retreat
And down the river’s tragic flow
On the day we broke
Upon the shore of a distant land
I fled cold and bereft
Fighting curtains of ash
Up through the snows of the pass
In the heaps of spoil
Among an enemy victorious
My love floundered
In the cracked company of kin
Broken down blow upon blow
And now as my days lower
Into the sleep of regret
I dream of fresh clay
Finding these old hands
Where the wind sings of love
Forests in Retreat
Fisher kel Tath
THE PASSAGE OF THOUSANDS OF HOBNAILED BOOTS HAD WORN through the thin grasses, lifting into the air vast clouds of dust.
The breeze had fallen off and, coming down from the north, tracked the columns at virtually the same turgid pace, blinding them to the world.
The horses were growing gaunt, their heads hanging, their eyes dull. When Aranict turned her mount to follow Brys, the beast felt sluggish beneath her, slow to canter. They rode out to the west side of the marching troops and made their way back down the line’s ragged length. Dusty faces lifted here and there to watch them pass, but mostly the soldiers kept their gazes on the ground before them, too weary to answer any stir of curiosity.
She knew how they felt. She had done her share of plodding on foot, although without the added burden of a pack heavy with armour and weapons. They had marched hard to draw up close to the Bolkando Evertine Legion, who in turn had already fallen a third of a day behind the Perish. Shield Anvil Tanakalian was if anything proving harsher than Krughava in driving the Grey Helms. Their pace was punishing, sparing no thought for their putative allies.
Brys was worried, and so was Queen Abrastal. Was this nothing more than the lust for glory, the fierce zeal of fanatics? Or was something more unpleasant at work here? Aranict had her suspicions, but she was not yet willing to voice them, not even to Brys. Tanakalian had not been pleased with the Adjunct’s insistence that Gesler take overall command. Perhaps he intended to make the position irrelevant, at least in so far as regards the Perish. But if so, why would he do that?
They pulled free of the last block of wagons and through the drifting dust they saw the rearguard, a dozen Bluerose lancers, drawn up around three figures on foot. Aranict rose in her saddle and looked westward – the K’Chain Che’Malle were out there, she knew. Out of sight yet still moving in parallel with the Letherii. She wondered when next Gesler, Stormy and Kalyth would visit them. More arguments, more confusion thicker than these clouds of dust.
She shook her head. Never mind all that. Since the morning strangers had been tracking them. And they’ve just bitten our tail. Aranict returned her attention to the three dishevelled newcomers. Two women and one man. They’d arrived with little evident gear or supplies, and as Aranict drew closer she could see their sorry state.
But they were not wearing uniforms. Not Malazan deserters, then. Or worse: survivors.
Brys slowed his horse, glanced back at her, and, seeing his relief, she nodded. He’d feared the same. But in some ways, she realized, this was even more disturbing, as if the Bonehunters had truly vanished, their fate unknown and possibly unknowable. Like ghosts.
She had to struggle against thinking of them as being already dead. In her mind rose visions of hollowed eye sockets, withered skin splitting over bones – the image was horrifying, yet it haunted her. She could see the edge of the Glass Desert off to the east, heat shimmering in a wall, rising like a barrier beyond which the soil lost all life.
They reined in. Brys studied the three strangers for a moment, and then said, ‘Welcome.’
The woman in the front turned her head and spoke to her comrades. ‘Gesros Latherii stigan thal. Ur leszt.’
The other woman, short and plump but with the blotchy, sagging cheeks that denoted dehydration, frowned and said, ‘Hegoran stig Daru?’
‘Ur hedon ap,’ replied the first woman. She was taller than the other one, with shoulder-length dark brown hair. She had the eyes of someone used to pain. Facing Brys again, she said, ‘Latherii Ehrlii? Are you Ehrlii speak? Are you speak Latherii?’
‘Letherii,’ Brys corrected. ‘The language of the First Empire.’
‘First Empire,’ the woman repeated, matching perfectly Brys’s intonation. ‘Slums – er, lowborn stig—dialect. Ehrlitan.’
The plump woman snapped, ‘Turul berys? Turul berys?’
The first woman sighed. ‘Please. Water?’
Brys gestured to the preda commanding the lancers. ‘Give them something to drink. They’re in a bad way.’
‘Commander, our own supplies—’
‘Do it, Preda. Three more in our army won’t make much difference either way. And find a cutter – the sun has roasted them.’ He nodded to the first woman. ‘I am Commander Brys Beddict. We march to war, I’m afraid. You are welcome to travel with us for as long as you desire, but once we enter enemy territory, unless you remain with us, I cannot guarantee your safety.’
Of course he didn’t call himself a prince. Just a commander. Noble titles still sat uneasily with him.
The woman was slowly nodding. ‘You march south.’
‘For now,’ he replied.
‘And then?’
‘East.’
She turned to the other woman. ‘Gesra ilit.’
‘Ilit? Korl mestr al’ahamd.’
The woman faced Brys. ‘I named Faint. We go with you, tu—please. Ilit. East.’
Aranict cleared her throat. The inside of her mouth was stinging, had been for days. She was itchy beneath her soiled garments. She spent a moment lighting a stick of rustleaf, knowing that Brys had twisted in his saddle and was now observing her. Through a brief veil of smoke she met his eyes and said, ‘The younger one’s a mage. The man – there’s something odd about him, as if he’s only in the guise of a human, but it’s a guise that is partly torn away. Behind it…’ She shrugged, drew on her stick. ‘Like a wolf pretending to sleep. He has iron in his hands.’
Brys glanced over, frowned.
‘In the bones,’ she amended. ‘He could probably punch his way through a keep wall.’
‘Iron, Atri-Ceda? Are you sure? How can that be?’
‘I don’t know. I might even be wrong. But you can see, he carries no weapons, and those knuckles are badly scarred. There’s a taint of the demonic about him—’ She cut herself off, as Faint was now speaking quickly to the young mage.
‘Hed henap vil nen? Ul stig “Atri-Ceda”. Ceda ges kerallu. Ust kellan varad harada unan y? Thekel edu.’
Eyes fixed on Aranict and everyone was silent for a moment.
With narrowed gaze the young sorceress addressed Faint. ‘Kellan varad. V’ap gerule y mest.’
Whatever she’d said did not seem to warrant a reply from Faint, who now spoke to Aranict. ‘We are lost. Seek Holds. Way home. Darujhistan. Do you kerall— er, are you, ah, caster magic? Kellan Varad? High Mage?’
Aranict glanced at Brys, who now answered her earlier shrug with one of his own. She was silent for a moment, thinking, and then she said, ‘Yes, Faint. Atri-Ceda. High Mage. I am named Aranict.’ She cocked her head and asked, ‘The Letherii you speak, it is high diction, is it not? Where did you learn it?’
Faint shook her head. ‘City. Seven Cities. Ehrlitan. Lowborn tongue, in slums. You speak like whore.’
Aranict pulled hard on her rustleaf, and then smiled. ‘This should be fun.’
The ghost of Sweetest Sufferance held up her clay pipe, squinted at the curls of smoke rising from it. ‘See that, Faint? That’s the perfect breath of every life-giving god there ever was. Holier than incense. Why, if priests filled their braziers with rustleaf, the temples would be packed, worshippers like salted fish in a barrel—’
‘Worshippers?’ Faint snorted. ‘Addicts, you mean.’
‘Variations on a theme, darling. You’ve stopped wincing with every breath, I see.’
Faint leaned back on the heap of blankets. ‘You heard Precious. That Aranict is tapping Elder magic—’
‘And something else, too, she said. Newborn, she called it – what in Hood’s name is that supposed to mean?’
‘I don’t care. All I know is I’ve stopped aching everywhere.’
‘Me too.’
Sweetest puffed contentedly for a time, and then said, ‘They were nervous round Amby though, weren’t they?’ She glanced over at the silent man where he sat close to the tent’s entrance. ‘Like they never seen a Bole before, right, Amby?’
The man gave no sign of having heard her, which Faint found something of a relief. He must think I’ve gone mad, having a one-way conversation like this. Then again, he might be right. Something snapped in me, I suppose.
Sweetest Sufferance rolled her eyes at Faint.
‘Did you see the tack on that commander’s horse,’ Faint asked in a low voice. ‘A different rig from what the lancers had. The set-up was different, I mean. That over-tug inside the horn. The stirrup angle—’
‘What’re you going on about, Faint?’
‘The prince’s horse, idiot. He had his tack worked in the Malazan style.’
Sweetest Sufferance frowned at Faint. ‘Coincidence?’ She waved a hand. ‘Sorry, pretend I didn’t say that. So, that is strange, isn’t it? Can’t think the Malazans ever got this far. But maybe they did. Oh, well, they must have, since you saw what you saw—’
‘Your head’s spinning, isn’t it?’
‘I might crawl out and throw up soon,’ she replied. ‘Amby, don’t be blocking that flap, right? Now, Malazan tack. What do you think that means?’
‘If Precious and Aranict can work out a way of talking to each other, we might find out.’
‘We ever use the Holds, Faint?’
‘Not on purpose. No. Master Quell had some stories, though. The early days, when things were a lot wilder than what we go through – when they didn’t know how to control or even pick their gates. Every now and then, one of the carriages would plunge into some world nobody even knew existed. Got into lots of trouble, too. Quell once told me about one realm where there was virtually no magic at all. The shareholders who ended up there had a Hood’s hole of a time getting back.’
‘Yeah, we had it easy, didn’t we?’
‘Until our master got eviscerated, yes, Sweetie.’
‘You know, I doubt Precious is going to get much that’s useful from that High Mage.’
‘Why do you say that?’
Sweetest shrugged. ‘It’s not like we got anything to offer them, is it? Not like we can bargain or make a deal.’
‘Sure we can. Get us back home and the Trygalle will offer ’em a free delivery. Anything, anywhere.’
‘You think so? Why? I can’t think we’re that important, Faint.’
‘You ain’t read all the articles, have you? If we’re in trouble, we can bargain with the full backing of the Guild, and they will honour those bargains to the letter.’
‘Really? Well now, they know how to take care of their shareholders. I’m impressed.’
‘You have to hand it to them,’ Faint agreed. ‘I mean, excepting when we’re torn off the carriage on a run and left behind to get ripped apart and eaten. Or cut down in a deal that goes sour. Or we run up a whopping tab in the local pit. Or some alien disease takes us down. Or we lose a limb or three, get head-bash addled, or—’
‘Giant lizards drop outa the sky and kill us, yes. Be quiet, Faint. You’re not helping things at all.’
‘What I’m doing,’ Faint said, closing her eyes, ‘is trying not to think about those runts, and the hag that took them.’
‘It’s not like they were shareholders, dearie.’
Ah, now that’s my Sweetest. ‘True enough. Still. We got stretched out plain to see that day, Sweetest, and the rack’s tightening still, at least in my mind. I just don’t feel good about it.’
‘Think I’ll head out and throw up now,’ Sweetest said.
Slipping past Amby was easy, Faint saw, for a ghost.
Precious Thimble rubbed at her face, which had gone slightly numb. ‘How are you doing this?’ she asked. ‘You’re pushing words into my head.’
‘The Empty Hold is awake once more,’ Aranict replied. ‘It is the Hold of the Unseen, the realms of the mind. Perception, knowledge, illusion, delusion. Faith, despair, curiosity, fear. Its weapon is the false belief in chance, in random fate.’
Precious was shaking her head. ‘Listen. Chance is real. You can’t say it isn’t. And mischance, too. You said your army got caught in a fight nobody was looking for – what was that?’
‘I dread to think,’ Aranict replied. ‘But I assure you it was not blind chance. In any case, your vocabulary has improved dramatically. Your comprehension is sound—’
‘So you can stop shoving stuff in, right?’
Aranict nodded. ‘Drink. Rest now.’
‘I have too many questions for that, Atri-Ceda. Why is the Hold empty?’
‘Because it is home to all which cannot be possessed, cannot be owned. And so too is the throne within the Hold empty, left eternally vacant. Because the very nature of rule is itself an illusion, a conceit and the product of a grand conspiracy. To have a ruler one must choose to be ruled over, and that forces notions of inequity to the fore, until they become, well, formalized. Made central to education, made essential as a binding force in society, until everything exists to prop up those in power. The Empty Throne reminds us of all that. Well, some of us, anyway.’
Precious Thimble frowned. ‘What did you mean when you said the Hold was awake once more?’
‘The Wastelands are so called because they are damaged—’
‘I know that – I can’t do a damned thing here.’
‘Nor could I, until recently.’ The Atri-Ceda plucked out a stick of rolled rustleaf and quickly lit it. Smoke thickened the air in the tent. ‘Imagine a house burning down,’ she said, ‘leaving nothing but heaps of ash. That’s what happened to magic in the Wastelands. Will it ever come back? Ever heal? Maybe that’s what we’re seeing here, but the power doesn’t just show up. It grows, and I think now it has to start in a certain way. Beginning with…wandering. And then come the Holds, like plants taking root.’ Aranict gestured. ‘Much wandering in these Wastelands of late, yes? Powerful forces, so much violence, so much will.’
‘And from Holds to warrens,’ muttered Precious, nodding to herself.
‘Ah, the Malazans speak of this, too. These warrens. If they are destined to appear here, they have yet to do so, Precious Thimble. And is there not concern that they are ill?’
‘Malazans,’ Precious hissed. ‘You’d think they invented warrens, the way they go on. Things got sickly for a time, sure, but then that went away.’
‘The Holds have always been the source of magical power on this continent,’ Aranict said, shrugging. ‘In many ways, we Letherii are very conservative, but I am beginning to think there are other reasons for why there has been no change here. The K’Chain Che’Malle remain. And the Forkrul Assail dominate the lands to the east. Even the creatures known as the T’lan Imass are among us now, and without question the Hold of Ice is in the ascendant, meaning the Jaghut have returned.’ She shook her head. ‘The Malazans speak of war among the gods. I fear that what is coming will prove more terrible than any of us can imagine.’
Precious licked her lips, glanced away. The tent seemed to have closed round her, like a death-shroud being drawn tight. She shivered. ‘We just want to go home.’
‘I do not know how I can help you,’ Aranict said. ‘The Holds are not realms one willingly travels through. Even drawing upon their power invites chaos and madness. They are places of treachery, of deadly traps and pits leading down into unknown realms. Worse, the more powerful rituals demand blood.’
Precious gathered herself, met the Atri-Ceda’s gaze. ‘In the east,’ she said. ‘Something’s there – I can feel it. A thing of vast power.’
‘Yes,’ Aranict said, nodding.
‘It is where you are going, isn’t it? This army and the war to come. You are going to fight for that power, to take it for yourself.’
‘Not quite, Precious Thimble. That power – we mean to set it free.’
‘And if you do? What happens then?’
‘We don’t know.’
‘You keep speaking of the Malazans. Are they here? Are they one of the armies marching to this war?’
Aranict seemed about to say one thing, then changed her mind and said, ‘Yes.’
Precious sat back on her haunches. ‘I am from One-Eye Cat, a city of Genabackis. We were conquered by the Malazans. Winning is all that matters to them, Atri-Ceda. They will lie. They will backstab. Whatever you see on the surface, don’t believe it. Don’t. With them, nothing is as it seems, not ever.’
‘They are a complicated people—’
Precious snorted. ‘Their first emperor was where it all started. The sleight of hand, the deadly misdirection – everything the Malazan Empire became infamous for started with him. And though he’s now dead and gone, nothing has changed. Tell your commander, Aranict. Tell him. The Malazans – they’ll betray you. They’ll betray you.’
Brys glanced up as she entered the tent. ‘You were able to speak to her?’
‘I was, after some curious work – it’s as I said, the power of the Holds ever grows. I was never before able to manipulate the Empty Hold the way I did this night. In fact –’ she settled down on the bed mat, started pulling off her boots – ‘I don’t feel very good about what I had to do. By the time I was done not even her innermost thoughts were hidden from me. I feel…sullied.’
