The Crippled God

by Steven Erikson

He grimaced, and then nodded.

  The queen of the Bolkando abruptly rose, taking a deep breath, and Spax’s eyes could not help but fall to her swelling chest. ‘I will meet this Adjunct,’ Abrastal said with sudden vigour. Her eyes found the Barghast and pinned him in place. ‘If indeed we are to face more of the giant two-legged lizards with their terrible magic … Spax, what will you now claim of the courage of your people?’

  ‘Courage, Highness? You will have that. But can we hope to do what those Khundryl said the Malazans did?’ He hesitated, and then shook his head. ‘Firehair, I too will look hard upon those soldiers, and I fear I already know what I will see. They have known the crucible.’

  ‘And you do not wish to see that truth, do you?’

  He grunted. ‘Let’s just say it’s both a good and a bad thing your stores of rum are nearly done.’

  ‘Was this our betrayal?’

  Tanakalian faced the question, and the eyes of the hard, iron woman who had just voiced it, for as long as he could before shying away. ‘Mortal Sword, you well know we simply could not reach them in time. As such, our failure was one of circumstance, not loyalty.’

  ‘For once,’ she replied, ‘you speak wisely, sir. Tomorrow we ride out to the Bonehunter camp. Prepare an escort of fifty of our brothers and sisters – I want healers and our most senior veterans.’

  ‘I understand, Mortal Sword.’

  She glanced at him, studied his face for a moment, and then returned her gaze to the jade-lit southeastern sky. ‘If you do not, sir, they will.’

  You hound me into a corner, Mortal Sword. You seem bent on forcing my hand. Is there only room for one on that pedestal of yours? What will you do when you stand face to face with the Adjunct? With Brys Beddict?

  But, more to the point, what do you know of this betrayal? I see a sword in our future. I see blood on its blade. I see the Perish standing alone, against impossible odds.

  ‘At the parley,’ Krughava said, ‘you will keep our own counsel, sir.’

  He bowed. ‘As you wish.’

  ‘She has been wounded,’ Krughava went on. ‘We will close about her with our utmost diligence to her protection.’

  ‘Protection, sir?’

  ‘In the manner of hunter whales, Shield Anvil, when one of their clan is unwell.’

  ‘Mortal Sword, this shall be a parley of comrades, more or less. Our clan, as you might call it, is unassailed. No sharks. No dhenrabi or gahrelit. Against whom do we protect her?’

  ‘The darkness of her own doubts if nothing else. Though I cannot be certain, I fear she is one who would gnaw upon her own scars, eager to watch them bleed, thirsty for the taste of blood in her mouth.’

  ‘Mortal Sword, how can we defend her against herself?’

  Krughava was silent for a time, and then she sighed. ‘Make stern your regard, banish all shadows from your mind, anneal in brightest silver your certainty. We return to the path, with all resolve. Can I make it any clearer, Shield Anvil?’

  He bowed again.

  ‘Leave me now,’ she said.

  Tanakalian swung round and walked down from the rise. The even rows of cookfires flickered in the basin before him, painting the canvas tents with light and shadow. Five thousand paces to the west rose another glow – the Bolkando encampment. A parley of comrades, a clan. Or perhaps not. The Bolkando have no place in this scheme.

  They said she was concussed, but now recovers. They said something impossible happened above her unconscious form, there on the field of battle. They said – with something burning fierce in their eyes – that the Bonehunters awakened that day, and its heart was there, before the Adjunct’s senseless body.

  Already a legend is taking birth, and yet we saw none of its making. We played no role. The name of the Perish Grey Helms is a gaping absence in this roll call of heroes.

  The injustice of that haunted him. He was Shield Anvil, but his embrace remained empty, a gaping abyss between his arms. This will change. I will make it change. And all will see. Our time is coming.

  Blood, blood on the sword. Gods, I can almost taste it.

  She pulled hard on the leaf-wrapped stick, feeling every muscle in her jaw and neck bunch taut. Smoke streaming from her mouth and nose, she faced the darkness of the north plain. Others, when they walked out to the edge of the legion’s camp, would find themselves on the side that gave them a clear view of the Malazan encampment. They walked out and they stared, no different from pilgrims facing a holy shrine, an unexpected edifice on their path. She imagined that in their silence they struggled to fit into their world that dismal sprawl of dung-fires, the vague shapes moving about, the glint of banners like a small forest of storm-battered saplings. Finding a place for all that should have been easy. But it wasn’t.

  They would wince at their own wounds, reminded of the gaps in their own lines, and they would feel like shadows cast by something greater than anything they had known before. There was a name for this, she knew. Atri-Ceda Aranict pulled again on the stick, mindful of the bright swimming glow hovering before her face.

  Some scholar once likened this to the mastery fire and all it symbolized. Huh. Some scholar was working hard to justify her habit. Stupid woman. It’s yours, so just revel in it and when it comes to justifying what you do, keep your mouth shut. Philosophy, really.

  Ask a soldier. A soldier knows all about smoke. And what’s in and what’s out, and what’s the fucking difference in the end.

  The Letherii had comported themselves with honour on that horrid field of battle. They had distracted the enemy. They had with blood and pain successfully effected the Malazan withdrawal – no, let’s call it what it was, a rout. Once the signals sounded, the impossible iron wall became a thing of reeds, torn loose and whipped back on the savage wind.

  Even so. Letherii soldiers walked out at dusk, or in the moments before dawn, right out to the camp’s edge, and they looked across the empty expanse of scrub to the Malazans. They weren’t thinking of routs, or withdrawals. They were thinking of all that had gone before that.

  And there was a word for what they felt.

  Humility.

  ‘My dear.’ He had come up behind her, soft-footed, as uncertain as a child.

  Aranict sighed. ‘I am forgetting how to sleep.’

  Brys Beddict came up to stand at her side. ‘Yes. I awoke and felt your absence, and it made me think.’

  Once, she had been nervous before this man. Once, she had imagined illicit scenes, the way a person might conjure up wishes they knew could never be filled. Now, her vanishing from his bed wakened him to unease. A few days, and the world changes. ‘Think of what?’

  ‘I don’t know if I should say.’

  The tone was rueful. She filled her lungs with smoke, eased it back out slowly. ‘I’d wager it’s too late for that, Brys.’

  ‘I have never been in love before. Not like this. I have never before felt so … helpless. As if, without my even noticing, I gave you all my power.’

  ‘All the children’s stories never talked about that,’ Aranict said after a moment. ‘The prince and the princess, each heroic and strong, equals in the grand love they win. The tale ends in mutual admiration.’

  ‘That tastes a tad sour.’

  ‘That taste is of self-congratulation,’ she said. ‘Those tales are all about narcissism. The sleight of hand lies in the hero’s mirror image – a princess for a prince, a prince for a princess – but in truth it’s all one. It’s nobility’s love for itself. Heroes win the most beautiful lovers, it’s the reward for their bravery and virtue.’

  ‘And those lovers are naught but mirrors?’

  ‘Shiny silver ones.’

  She felt him watching her.

  ‘But,’ he said after a few moments, ‘it’s not that even a thing, is it? You are not my mirror, Aranict. You are something other. I am not reflected in you, just as you are not reflected in me. So what is this that we have found here, and why do I find myself on my knees before it?’

>   The stick’s end glowed like a newborn sun, only to ebb in its instant of life. ‘How should I know, Brys? It is as if I stand facing you from an angle no one else can find, and when I’m there nothing rises between us – a trick of the light and your fortifications vanish. So you feel vulnerable.’

  He grunted. ‘But it is not that way with Tehol and Janath.’

  ‘Yes, I have heard about them, and it seems to me that no matter which way each faces, he or she faces the other. He is her king and she is his queen, and everything else just follows on from there. It is the rarest of loves, I should think.’

  ‘But it is not ours, is it, Aranict?’

  She said nothing. How can I? I feel swollen, as if I have swallowed you alive, Brys. I walk with the weight of you inside me, and I have never before felt anything like this. She flicked the stick-end away. ‘You worry too much, Brys. I am your lover. Leave it at that.’

  ‘You are also my Atri-Ceda.’

  She smiled in the darkness. ‘And that, Brys, is what brought me out here.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Something hides. It’s all around us, subtle as smoke. It has manifested only once thus far, and that was at the battle, among the Malazans – at the place where the Adjunct fell unconscious. There is a hidden hand in all of this, Brys, and I don’t trust it.’

  ‘Where the Adjunct fell? But Aranict, what happened there saved Tavore’s life, and quite possibly the lives of the rest of the Bonehunters. The Nah’ruk reeled from that place.’

  ‘Yet still I fear it,’ she insisted, plucking out another rustleaf stick. ‘Allies should show themselves.’ She drew out the small silver box containing the resin sparker. The night wind defeated her efforts to scrape a flame to life, so she stepped close against Brys and tried again.

  ‘Allies,’ he said, ‘have their own enemies. Showing themselves imposes a risk, I imagine.’

  A flicker of flame and then the stick was alight. She took a half-step back. ‘I think that’s a valid observation. Well, I suppose we always suspected that the Adjunct’s war wasn’t a private one.’

  ‘No matter how she might wish it so,’ he said, with something like grudging respect.

  ‘Tomorrow’s parley could prove most frustrating,’ Aranict observed, ‘if she refuses to relent. We need to know what she knows. We need to understand what she seeks. More than all that, we need to make sense of what happened the day of the Nah’ruk.’

  He reached up, surprised her by brushing her cheek, and then leaning closer and kissing her. She laughed deep in her throat. ‘Danger is a most alluring drug, isn’t it, Brys?’

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered, but then stepped back. ‘I will walk the perimeter now, Atri-Ceda, to witness the dawn with my soldiers. Will you be rested enough for the parley?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Good. Until later, then.’

  She watched him walk away. Errant take me, he just climbed back out.

  ‘When it’s stretched it stays stretched,’ Hanavat said in a grumble. ‘What’s the point?’

  Shelemasa continued rubbing the oil into the woman’s distended belly. ‘The point is, it feels good.’

  ‘Well, I’ll grant you that, though I imagine it’s as much the attention as anything else.’

  ‘Exactly what men never understand,’ the younger woman said, finally settling back and rubbing her hands together. ‘We have iron in our souls. How could we not?’

  Hanavat glanced away, eyes tightening. ‘My last child,’ she said. ‘My only child.’

  To that Shelemasa was silent. The charge against the Nah’ruk had taken all of Hanavat’s children. All of them. But if that was cruel, it is nothing compared to sparing Gall. Where the mother bows, the father breaks. They are gone. He led them all to their deaths, yet he survived. Spirits, yours is the gift of madness.

  The charge haunted Shelemasa as well. She had ridden through the lancing barrage of lightning, figures on either side erupting, bodies exploding, spraying her with sizzling gore. The screams of horses, the thunder of tumbling beasts, bones snapping – even now, that dread cauldron awakened again in her mind, a torrent of sounds pounding her ears from the inside out. She knelt in Hanavat’s tent, trembling with the memories.

  The older woman must have sensed something, for she reached out and settled a weathered hand on her thigh. ‘It goes,’ she murmured. ‘I see it among all you survivors. The wave of remembrance, the horror in your eyes. But I tell you, it goes.’

  ‘For Gall, too?’

  The hand seemed to flinch. ‘No. He is Warleader. It does not leave him. That charge is not in the past. He lives it again and again, every moment, day and night. I have lost him, Shelemasa. We have all lost him.’

  Eight hundred and eighty warriors remained. She had stood among them, had wandered with them the wreckage of the retreat, and she had seen what she had seen. Never again will we fight, not with the glory and joy of old. Our military effectiveness, as the Malazan scribes would say, has come to an end. The Khundryl Burned Tears had been destroyed. Not a failure of courage. Something far worse. We were made, in an instant, obsolete. Nothing could break the spirit as utterly as that realization had done.

  A new Warleader was needed, but she suspected no acclamation was forthcoming. The will was dead. There were no pieces left to pick up.

  ‘I will attend the parley,’ said Hanavat, ‘and I want you with me, Shelemasa.’

  ‘Your husband—’

  ‘Is lying in his eldest son’s tent. He takes no food, no water. He intends to waste away. Before long, we will burn his body on a pyre, but that will be nothing but a formality. My mourning has already begun.’

  ‘I know …’ Shelemasa hesitated, ‘it was difficult between you. The rumours of his leanings—’

  ‘And that is the bitterest thing of all,’ Hanavat cut in. ‘Gall, well, he leaned every which way. I long ago learned to accept that. What bites deepest now is we had found each other again. Before the charge. We were awakened to our love for one another. There was … there was happiness again. For a few moments.’ She stopped then, for she was crying.

  Shelemasa drew closer. ‘Tell me of the child within you, Hanavat. I have never been pregnant. Tell me how it feels. Are you filled up, is that how it is? Does it stir – I am told it will stir on occasion.’

  Smiling through her grief, Hanavat said, ‘Ah, very well. How does it feel? Like I’ve just eaten a whole pig. Shall I go on?’

  Shelemasa laughed, a short, unexpected laugh, and then nodded. Tell me something good. To drown out the screams.

  ‘The children are asleep,’ Jastara said, moving to settle down on her knees beside him. She studied his face. ‘I see how much of him came from you. Your eyes, your mouth—’

  ‘Be quiet, woman,’ said Gall. ‘I will not lie with my son’s widow.’

  She pulled away. ‘Then lie with someone, for Hood’s sake.’

  He turned his head, stared at the tent wall.

  ‘Why are you here?’ she demanded. ‘You come to my tent like the ghost of everything I have lost. Am I not haunted enough? What do you want with me? Look at me. I offer you my body – let us share our grief—’

  ‘Stop.’

  She hissed under her breath.

  ‘I would you take a knife to me,’ Gall said. ‘Do that, woman, and I will bless you with my last breath. A knife. Give me pain, be pleased to see how you hurt me. Do that, Jastara, in the name of my son.’

  ‘You selfish piece of dung, why should I indulge you? Get out. Find some other hole to hide in. Do you think your grandchildren are comforted seeing you this way?’

  ‘You are not Khundryl born,’ he said. ‘You are Gilk. You understand nothing of our ways—’

  ‘The Khundryl were feared warriors. They still are. You need to stand again, Gall. You need to gather your ghosts – all of them – and save your people.’

  ‘We are not Wickans,’ he whispered, reaching up to claw once more at his face.

  She spat out a
curse. ‘Gods below, do you really think Coltaine and his damned Wickans could have done better?’

  ‘He would have found a way.’

  ‘Fool. No wonder your wife sneers at you. No wonder all your lovers have turned away from you—’

  ‘Turned away? They’re all dead.’

  ‘So find some more.’

  ‘Who would love a corpse?’

  ‘Now finally you have a point worth making, Warleader. Who would? The answer lies before me, a stupid old man. It’s been five days. You are Warleader. Shake yourself awake, damn you—’

  ‘No. Tomorrow I will give my people into the Adjunct’s care. The Khundryl Burned Tears are no more. It is done. I am done.’

  The blade of a knife hovered before his eyes. ‘Is this what you want?’

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered.

  ‘What should I cut first?’

  ‘You decide.’

  The knife vanished. ‘I am Gilk, as you say. What do I know of mercy? Find your own way to Hood, Gall. The Wickans would have died, just as your warriors died. No different. Battles are lost. It is the world’s way. But you still breathe. Gather up your people – they look to you.’

  ‘No longer. Never again will I lead warriors into battle.’

  She snarled something incomprehensible, and moved off, leaving him alone.

  He stared at the tent wall, listened to his own pointless breaths. I know what this is. It is fear. For all my life it has waited for me, out in the cold night. I have done terrible things, and my punishment draws near. Please, hurry.

  For this night, it is very cold, and it draws ever nearer.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Once we knew nothing.

  Now we know everything.

  Stay away from our eyes.

  Our eyes are empty.

  Look into our faces

  and see us if you dare.

  We are the skin of war.

  We are the skin of war.

  Once we knew nothing.

  Now we know everything.

  Skin

  Sejaras

  SWEAT ENOUGH A MAN COULD DROWN IN. HE SHIVERED BENEATH HIS furs, something he did every night since the battle. Jolting awake, drenched, heart pounding. After-images behind his eyes. Keneb, in the instant before he was torn apart, twisting round in his saddle, fixing Blistig with a cold, knowing stare. Not ten paces away, their eyes locking. But that was impossible. I know it’s impossible. I was never even close. He didn’t turn, didn’t look back. Didn’t see me. Couldn’t.