Deadhouse Gates

by Steven Erikson

  'Ain't stopped us from following Fener, Mage,' Gesler said. 'Or even recruiting new followers to the warrior cult,' he added, nodding towards Truth. 'So just point the way—Otataral Coast, you said. Angle her due east, lad, and let's get this sail up and ready the spinnaker for the morning winds.'

  Slowly, Kulp sat back. 'Anyone else need to wash out their leggings?' he asked.

  Wrapped in his telaba, Duiker rode from the village. There were figures to either side of the coastal road, featureless in the faint moon's light. The cool desert air seemed to carry in it the residue of a sandstorm, a desiccating haze that parched the throat. Reaching the crossroads, the historian reined in. Southward the coastal road continued on, down to Hissar. A trader track led west, inland. A quarter-mile down this track was encamped an army.

  There was no order evident. Thousands of tents were haphazardly pitched around a huge central corral shrouded in fire-lit clouds of dust. Tribal chants drifted across the sands. Along the track, no more than fifty long paces from Duiker's position, a hapless squad of Malazan soldiers writhed on what were locally called Sliding Beds—four tall spears each set upright, the victim set atop the jagged points, at the shoulders and upper thighs. Depending on their weight and their strength of will in staying motionless, the impaling and the slow slide down to the ground could take hours. With Hood's blessing, the morrow's sun would hasten the tortured death. The historian felt his heart grow cold with rage.

  He could not help them, Duiker knew. It was challenge enough to simply stay alive in a countryside aflame with murderous lust. But there would come a time for retribution. If the gods will it.

  Mage fires blossomed vast and—at this distance—silent over Hissar. Was Coltaine still alive? Bult? The Seventh? Had Sormo divined what was coming in time?

  He tapped his heels against his mount's flanks, continued down the coastal road. The renegade army's appearance was a shock. It had emerged as if from nowhere, and for all the chaos of the encampment there were commanders there, filled with bloodthirsty intent and capable of achieving what they planned. This was no haphazard revolt. Kulp said a High Mage. Who else is out there? Sha'ik has had years in which to build her army of the Apocalypse, despatch her agents, plan this night—and all that will follow. We knew it was happening. Laseen should have stuck Pormqual's head on a spike long ago. A capable High Fist could have crushed this.

  'Dosü kim'aral!'

  Three cloaked shapes rose from the flood track on the inland side of the road. 'A night of glory!' Duiker responded, not slowing as he rode past.

  'Wait, Dosü! The Apocalypse waits to embrace you!' The figure gestured towards the encampment.

  'I have kin in Hissari Harbour,' the historian replied. 'I go to share in the riches of liberation!' Duiker reined in suddenly and pulled his horse around. 'Unless the Seventh has won back the city—is this the news you have for me?'

  The spokesman laughed. 'They are crushed. Destroyed in their beds, Dosü! Hissar has been freed of the Mezla curse!'

  'Then I ride!' Duiker kicked the horse forward again. He held his breath as he continued on, but the tribesmen did not call after him. The Seventh gone? Does Coltaine ride a sliding bed right now? It was hard to believe, yet it might well be true. Clearly the attack had been sudden, backed by high sorcery—with me dragging Kulp away, on this night of all nights, Hood curse my bones. For all the lives within him, Sormo E'nath was still a boy, his flesh hardly steeled to such a challenge. He might well have bloodied a few noses among the enemy's mages. To expect or hope for more than that was being unfair. They would have fought hard, every one of them. Hissar's price would have been high.

  Nonetheless, Duiker would have to see for himself. The Imperial Historian could do no less. More, he could ride among the enemy and that was an extraordinary opportunity. Never mind the risks. He would gather all the information he could, anticipating an eventual return to the ranks of a Malazan punitive force, where his knowledge could be put to lethal use. In other words, a spy. So much for objectivity, Duiker. The image of the Malazan soldiers lining the trader track, dying slowly on the sliding beds, was enough to sear away his detachment.

  Magic flared in the fishing village half a mile behind him. Duiker hesitated, then rode on. Kulp was a survivor, and by the look of that Coastal Guard, he had veterans at his side. The mage had faced powerful sorcery before—what he could not defeat, he could escape. Duiker's soldiering days were long past, his presence more of an impediment than an asset—they were better off without him.

  But what would Kulp do now? If there were any survivors among the Seventh, then the cadre mage's place was with them. What, then, of Heboric's fate? Well, I've done what I could for the old handless bastard. Fener guard you, old man.

  There were no refugees on the road. It seemed the fanatic call to arms was complete—all had proclaimed themselves soldiers of Dryjhna. Old women, fisherwives, children and pious grandfathers. Nonetheless, Duiker had been expecting to find Malazans, or at the very least signs of their passage, scenes where their efforts to escape came to a grisly end. Instead, the raised military road stretched bare, ghostly in the moon's silver light.

  Against the glare of distant Hissar appeared desert cape-moths, wheeling and fluttering like flakes of ash as broad across as a splayed hand as they crossed back and forth in front of the historian. They were carrion-eaters, and they were heading in the same direction as Duiker, in growing numbers.

  Within minutes the night was alive with the silent, spectral insects, whirling past the historian on all sides. Duiker struggled against the chill dread rising within him. 'The world's harbingers of death are many and varied.' He frowned, trying to recall where he'd heard those words. Probably from one of the countless dirges to Hood, sung by the priests during the Season of Rot in Unta.

  The first of the city's outlying slums appeared in the fading gloom ahead, a narrow cluster of shacks and huts clinging to the shelf above the beach. Smoke now rode the air, smelling of burning painted wood and scorched cloth. The smell of a city destroyed, the smell of anger and blind hatred. It was all too familiar to Duiker, and it made him feel old.

  Two children raced across the road, ducking between shacks. One voiced a laugh that pealed with madness, too knowing by far to come from one so young. The historian rode past the spot, his skin crawling. He was astonished to feel the fear within him—afraid of children? Old man, you don't belong here.

  The sky was lightening over the strait on his left. The cape-moths were plunging into the city ahead, vanishing inside the roiling clouds of smoke. Duiker reined in. The coastal road split here, the main track leading straight to become a main thoroughfare of the city. A second road, on the right, skirted the city and led to the Malazan barracks compound. The historian gazed down that road, squinting. Black columns of smoke rose half a mile away above the barracks, the columns bending high up where a desert wind caught hold and pushed them seaward.

  Butchered in their beds? The possibility suddenly seemed all too real. He rode towards the barracks. On his right, as shadows appeared with the rising sun, the city of Hissar burned. Support beams were giving way, mudbrick walls tumbling, cut stone shattering explosively in the blistering heat. Smoke covered the scene with its deathly, bitter shawl. Every now and then a distant scream sounded from the city's heart. It was clear that the mutiny's destructive ferocity had turned on itself. Freedom had been won, at the cost of everything.

  He reached the trampled earth where the trader encampment had once been—where he and the warlock Sormo had witnessed the divination. The camp had been hastily abandoned, possibly only hours earlier. A pack of dogs from the city now rooted through the rubbish left behind.

  Opposite the grounds, and on the other side of the Faladhan road, rose the fortified wall of the Malazan compound. Duiker slowed his mount to a walk, then a halt. Streaks of black scarred the few sections of bleached stone remaining upright. The sorcery that had assailed the wall had breached it in four places that he could se
e, each one a sundering of stone wide enough to rush a phalanx through. Bodies crowded the breaches, sprawled amidst the tumbled blocks. None wore much in the way of armour, and the weapons Duiker saw scattered about ranged from antique pikes to butcher's cleavers.

  The Seventh had fought hard, meeting their attackers at every breach; in the face of savage sorcery, they had cut down their attackers by the score. No-one had been caught asleep in his bed. The historian felt a trickle of hope seep into his thoughts.

  He glanced down the road, down to where the nut trees lined the cobbled street. There had been a cavalry sortie of some kind, close to the compound's inner city gate. Two horses lay among dozens of Hissari bodies, but no lancers that he could see. Either they'd been lucky enough to lose no-one in the attack, or they'd had the time to retrieve their slain and wounded comrades. There was a hand of organization here, a strong one. Coltaine? Bult?

  He saw no-one living down the length of the street. If battle continued, it had moved on. Duiker dismounted and approached one of the breaches in the compound wall. He clambered over the rubble, avoiding the stones slick with blood. Most of the attackers, he saw, had been killed by quarrels. Many bodies were virtually pincushioned with the stubby arrows. The range had been devastatingly short, the effect lethal. A frenzied, disorganized rush by a mob of ill-equipped Hissari stood no chance against such concentrated fire. Duiker saw no bodies beyond the ridge of tumbled stone.

  The compound's training field was empty. Bulwarks had been raised here and there to establish murderous crossfire should the defence at the breaches fail—but there was no sign that that had occurred.

  He stepped down from the ridge of shattered stone. The Malazan headquarters and the barracks had been torched. Duiker now wondered if the Seventh had not done it themselves. Announcing to all that Coltaine had no intention of hiding behind walls, the Seventh and the Wickans marched out, in formation. How did they fare?

  He returned to his waiting horse. Back in the saddle he could see more smoke, billowing heavily from the Malazan Estates district. Dawn had brought a strange calm to the air. To see the city so empty of life made it all seem unreal, as if the bodies sprawled in the streets were but scarecrows left over from a harvest festival. The capemoths had found them, however, covering the forms completely, their large wings slowly fanning as they fed.

  As he rode towards the Malazan Estates, he could hear the occasional shout and faint scream in the distance, barking dogs and braying mules. The roar of fires rose and fell like waves clawing a cliff face, carrying gusts of heat down the side streets hissing and rustling through the litter.

  Fifty paces from the Estates Duiker found the first scene of true slaughter. The Hissari mutineers had struck the Malazan quarter with sudden ferocity, probably at the same time as the other force had hemmed in the Seventh at the compound. The merchant and noble houses had thrown their own private guards forward in frantic defence, but they were too few and, lacking cohesion, had been quickly and savagely cut down. The mob had poured into the district, battering down estate posterns, dragging out into the wide street Malazan families.

  It was then, Duiker saw as his mount picked a careful path through the bodies, that madness had truly arrived. Men had been gutted, their entrails pulled out, wrapped around women—wives and mothers and aunts and sisters—who had been raped before being strangled with the intestinal ropes. The historian saw children with their skulls crushed, babies spitted on tapu skewers. However, many young daughters had been taken by the attackers as they plunged deeper into the district. If anything, their fates would be more horrific than those visited on their kin.

  Duiker viewed all he saw with a growing numbness. The terrible agony that had been unleashed here seemed to remain coiled in the air, poised, ready to snatch at his sanity. In self-defence, his soul withdrew, deeper, ever deeper. His power to observe remained, however, detached completely from his feelings—the release would come later, the historian well knew: the shaking limbs, the nightmares, the slow scarification of his faith.

  Expecting to see more of the same, Duiker rode towards the first square in the district. What he saw instead jarred him. The Hissari mutineers had been ambushed in the square and slaughtered by the score. Arrows had been used and then retrieved, but some shattered shafts remained. The historian dismounted to pick one up. Wickan. He believed he could now piece together what had occurred.

  The barracks compound had been besieged. Whoever commanded the Hissari had intended to prevent Coltaine and his forces from striking out into the city, and, if the sorcery's level was any indication, had sought the complete annihilation of the Malazan army. In this the commander had clearly failed. The Wickans had sortied, broken through the encirclement, and had ridden directly to the Estates—where they well knew the planned slaughter would have already begun. Too late to prevent the first attack at the District Gates, they had altered their route, riding around the mob, and set up an ambush in the square. The Hissari, in their thirst for more blood, had plunged forward, crossing the expanse without the foresight of scouts.

  The Wickans had then killed them all. There was no risk of reprisal to prevent them later retrieving their arrow shafts. The killing must have been absolute, every escape closed off, then the precise, calculated murder of every Hissari in the square.

  Duiker swung about at the sound of approaching footsteps. A band of mutineers approached from the gates behind him. They were well armed, with pikes in their hands and tulwars at their hips. Chain vests glinted from beneath the red telaban they wore. On their heads were the peaked bronze helmets of the City Guard.

  'Terrible slaughter!' Duiker wailed, drawing out the Dosü accent. 'It must be avenged!'

  The sergeant leading the squad eyed the historian warily. 'You have the dust of the desert upon you,' he said.

  'Aye, I have ridden down from the High Mage's forces to the north. A nephew, who dwelt in the harbour district. I seek to join him—'

  'If he yet lives, old man, you shall find him marching with Reloe.'

  'We have driven the Mezla from the city,' another soldier said. 'Outnumbered, already sorely wounded and burdened with ten thousand refugees—

  'Silence, Geburah!' the sergeant snapped. He narrowed his gaze on Duiker. 'We go to Reloe now. Come with us. All of Hissari shall be blessed in joining in the final slaughter of the Mezla.'

  Conscription. No wonder there's no-one about. They're in the holy army whether they like it or not. The historian nodded. 'I shall. I have vowed to protect the life of my nephew, you see—'

  'The vow to scourge Seven Cities of the Mezla is greater,' the sergeant growled. 'Dryjhna demands your soul, Dosü. The Apocalypse has come—armies gather all across the land and all must harken to the call.'

  'Last night I joined in spilling the blood of a Mezla Coastal Guard—my soul was given to her keeping then, Hissari.' Duiker's tone held a warning to the young sergeant. Respect your elders, child.

  The man answered the historian with an acknowledging nod.

  Leading his horse by the reins, Duiker accompanied the squad as they made their way through the Estates. Kamist Reloe's army, the sergeant explained, was marshalling on the plain to the southwest of the city. Three Odhan tribes were maintaining contact with the hated Mezla, harrying the train of refugees and the too few soldiers trying to protect them. The Mezla were seeking to reach Sialk, another coastal city twenty leagues south of Hissar. What the fools did not know, the man added with a dark grin, was that Sialk had fallen as well, and even now thousands of Mezla nobles and their families were being driven up the north road. The Mezla commander was about to see a doubling of citizens he was sworn to defend.

  Kamist Reloe would then encircle the enemy, his forces outnumbering them seven to one, and complete the slaughter. The battle was expected to take place in three days' time.

  Duiker made agreeable noises through all this, but his mind was racing. Kamist Reloe was a High Mage, one believed to have been killed in Raraku over t
en years ago, in a clash with Sha'ik over who was destined to lead the Apocalypse. Instead of killing her rival, it was now apparent that Sha'ik had won his loyalty. The hint of murderous rivalry, feuds and personality clashes had served Sha'ik well in conveying to the Malazans an impression of internal weaknesses plaguing her cause. All a lie. We were deceived, and now we are suffering the cost.

  'The Mezla army is as a great beast,' the sergeant said as they neared the city's edge, 'wounded by countless strikes, flanks streaming with blood. The beast staggers onward, blind with pain. In three days, Dosü, the beast shall fall.'

  The historian nodded thoughtfully, recalling the seasonal boar hunts in the forests of northern Quon Tali. A tracker had told him that among the hunters who were killed in such hunts, most met their fate after the boar had taken a fatal wound. An unexpected, final lashing out, a murderous lunge that seemed to defy Hood's grip on the beast. Seeing victory only moments away stripped caution from the hunters. Duiker heard something of that overconfidence in the mutineer's words. The beast streamed with blood, but it was not yet dead.

  The sun climbed the sky as they travelled south.

  The chamber's floor sagged like a bowl, carpeted in thick, felt-like drifts of dust. Almost a third of a league into the hill's stone heart, the rough-cut walls had cracked like glass, fissures reaching down from the vaulted roof. In the centre of the room lay a fishing boat resting on one flank, its lone mast's unreached sail hanging like rotted webbing. The dry, hot air had driven the dowels from the joins and the planks had contracted, splaying beneath the boat's own weight.

  'This is no surprise,' Mappo said from the portalway.

  Icarium's lips quirked slightly, then he stepped past the Trell and approached the craft. 'Five years? Not longer—I can still smell the brine. Do you recognize the design?'