Chapter Nineteen
The Day of Pure Blood was a gift of the Seven from their tombs of sand. Fortune was a river the glory a gift of the Seven that flowed yellow and crimson across the day.
Dog Chain
Thes'soran
In the local Can'eld dialect, it would come to be called Mesh'am tho'ledann: the Day of Pure Blood. The River Vathar's mouth gushed blood and corpses into Dojal Hading Sea for close to a week after the slaughter, a tide that deepened from red to black amidst pallid, bloated bodies. To the fisher-folk plying those waters, that time was called the Season of Sharks, and more than one net was cut away before a ghastly harvest was pulled aboard.
Horror knew no sides, played no favourites. It spread like a stain outward, from tribe to tribe, from one city to the next. And from that revulsion was born fear among the natives of Seven Cities. A Malazan fleet was on its way, commanded by a woman hard as iron. What happened at Vathar Crossing was a whetstone to hone her deadly edge.
Yet, Korbolo Dom was anything but finished.
The cedar forest south of the river rose on tiered steps of limestone, the trader track crazed with switchbacks and steep, difficult slopes. And the deeper into the wood the depleted train went, the more ancient, the more uncanny it became.
Duiker led his mare by the reins, stumbling as rocks turned underfoot. Alongside him clattered a wagon, sagging with wounded soldiers. Corporal List sat on the buckboard, his switch snapping the dusty, sweat-runnelled backs of the pair of oxen labouring at their yokes.
The losses at Vathar Crossing were a numb litany in the historian's mind. Over twenty thousand refugees, a disproportionate number of children among them. Less than five hundred able fighters remained in the Foolish Dog Clan, and the other two clans were almost as badly mauled. Seven hundred soldiers of the Seventh were dead, wounded or lost. A scant dozen engineers remained on their feet, and but a score of marines. Three noble families had been lost—an unacceptable attrition, this latter count, as far as the Council was concerned.
And Sormo E'nath. Within the one man, eight elder warlocks, a loss of not just power, but knowledge, experience and wisdom. A blow that had driven the Wickans to their knees.
Earlier that day, at a time when the train had ground to a temporary halt, Captain Lull had joined the historian to share some rations. Few words passed between them to start, as if the events at Vathar Crossing were something not to be talked about, even as they spread like a plague through every thought and echoed ghostlike behind every scene around them, every sound that rose from the camp.
Lull slowly put away the remnants of their meal. Then he paused, and Duiker saw the man studying his own hands, which had begun trembling. The historian looked away, surprised at the sudden shame that swept through him. He saw List, wrapped in sleep on the buckboard, trapped within his prison of dreams. I could in mercy awaken the lad, yet the power for knowledge has mastered me. Cruelty comes easy these days.
The captain sighed after a moment, hastily completing the task. 'Do you find the need to answer all this, Historian?' he asked. 'All those tomes you've read, those other thoughts from other men, other women. Other times. How does a mortal make answer to what his or her kind are capable of? Does each of us, soldier or no, reach a point when all that we've seen, survived, changes us inside? Irrevocably changes us. What do we become, then? Less human, or more human? Human enough, or too human?'
Duiker was silent for a long minute, his eyes on the rock-studded dirt that surrounded the boulder upon which he sat. Then he cleared his throat. 'Each of us has his own threshold, friend. Soldier or no, we can only take so much before we cross over… into something else. As if the world has shifted around us, though it's only our way of looking at it. A change of perspective, but there's no intelligence to it—you see but do not feel, or you weep yet look upon your own anguish as if from somewhere else, somewhere outside. It's not a place for answers, Lull, for every question has burned away. More human or less human—that's for you to decide.'
'Surely it has been written of, by scholars, priests… philosophers?'
Duiker smiled down at the dirt. 'Efforts have been made. But those who themselves have crossed that threshold… well, they have few words to describe the place they've found, and little inclination to attempt to explain it. As I said, it's a place without intelligence, a place where thoughts wander, formless, unlinked. Lost.'
'Lost,' the captain repeated. 'I am surely that.'
'Yet you and I, Lull, we are lost late in our lives. Look upon the children, and despair.'
'How to answer this? I must know, Duiker, else I go mad.'
'Sleight of hand,' the historian said.
'What?'
'Think of the sorcery we've seen in our lives, the vast, unbridled, deadly power we've witnessed unleashed. Driven to awe and horror. Then think of a trickster—those you saw as a child—the games of illusion and artifice they could play out with their hands, and so bring wonder to your eyes.'
The captain was silent, motionless. Then he rose. 'And there's my answer?'
'It's the only one I can think of, friend. Sorry if it's not enough.'
'No, old man, it's enough. It has to be, doesn't it?'
'Aye, that it does.'
'Sleight of hand.'
The historian nodded. 'Ask for nothing more, for the world—this world—won't give it.'
'But where will we find such a thing?'
'Unexpected places,' Duiker replied, also rising. Somewhere ahead, shouts rose and the convoy resumed its climb once more. 'If you fight both tears and a smile, you'll have found one.'
'Later, Historian.'
'Aye.'
He watched the captain set off back towards his company of soldiers, and wondered if all he'd said, all he'd offered to the man, was nothing but lies.
The possibility returned to him now, hours later as he trudged along on the trail. One of those random, unattached thoughts that were coming to characterize the blasted scape of his mind. Returned, lingered a moment, then drifted away and was gone.
The journey continued, beneath clouds of dust and a few remaining butterflies.
Korbolo Dom pursued, sniping at the train's mangled tail, content to await better ground before another major engagement. Perhaps even he quailed at what Vathar Forest had begun to reveal.
Among the tall cedars there were trees of some other species that had turned to stone. Gnarled and twisted, the petrified wood embraced objects that were themselves fossilized—the trees held offerings and had, long ago, grown around them.
Duiker well recalled the last time he had seen such things, in what had been a holy place in the heart of an oasis, just north of Hissar. That site had revealed ram's horns locked in the wrapped crooks of branches, and there were plenty of those here as well, although they were the least disquieting of Vathar's offerings.
T'lan Imass. No room for doubt—their undead faces stare out at us, from all sides, skulls and withered faces peering out from wreaths of crystallized bark, the dark pits of their eyes tracking our passage. This is a burial ground, not of the flesh-and-blood forebears of the T'lan Imass, but of the deathless creatures themselves.
List's visions of ancient war—we see here its aftermath. Crumpled platforms were visible as well, stone latticework perched amidst branches that had once grown around them, closing up the assembled bones like the fingers of stone hands. At the war's end, the survivors came here, carrying those comrades too shattered to continue, and made of this forest their eternal home. The souls of the T'lan Imass cannot join Hood, cannot even flee their prisons of bone and withered flesh. One does not bury such things—that sentence of earthen darkness offers no peace. Instead, let those remnants look out from their perches upon one another, upon the rare mortal passages on this trail…
Corporal List saw far too clearly, his visions delivering him deep into a history better left lost. Knowledge had beaten him down—as it does us all, when delivered in too great a measure. Yet I hun
ger still.
Cairns had begun appearing, heaps of boulders surmounted with totemic skulls. Not barrows, List had said. Sites of engagement, the various clans, wherever the Jaghut turned from flight and lashed out.
The day was drawing to a close when they reached the final height, a broad, jumbled basolith that seemed to have shed its limestone coat, the exposed bedrock deeply hued the colour of wine. Flat, treeless stretches were crowded with boulders set out in spirals, ellipses and corridors. Cedars were replaced by pines, and the number of petrified trees diminished.
Duiker and List had been travelling in the last third of the column, the wounded shielded by a battered rearguard of infantry. Once the last of the wagons and the few livestock that remained cleared the slope and made level ground, the footmen quickly gained the ridge, squads scattering to various vantage points and potential strongholds commanding the approach.
List halted his wagon and set the brake, then rose from the buckboard, stretched and looked down at Duiker with haunted eyes.
'Better lines of sight up here, anyway,' the historian offered.
'Always has been,' the corporal said. 'If we make for the head of the column, we'll come to the first of them.'
'The first of what?'
The blood leaving the lad's face bespoke another vision flooding his mind, a world and a time seen through unhuman eyes. After a moment he shuddered, wiping sweat from his face. 'I'll show you.'
They moved through the quiet press in silence. The efforts at making camp they saw on all sides looked wooden, refugees and soldiers alike moving as automatons. No-one bothered attempting to erect tents; they simply laid out their bedrolls on the flat rock. Children sat unmoving, watching with the eyes of old men and women.
The Wickan camps were no better. There was no escape from what had been, from the images and remembered scenes, that rose again and again, remorselessly, before the mind's eye. Every frail, mundane gesture of normal life had shattered beneath the weight of knowledge.
Yet there was anger, white hot and buried deep, out of sight, as if mantled in peat. It had become the last fuel with any potency. And so we move on, day after day, fighting every battle—those inside and those without—with an unyielding ferocity and determination. We are all in that place where Lull now lives, a place stripped of rational thought, trapped in a world without cohesion.
Arriving at the vanguard, they came upon a scene. Coltaine, Bult and Captain Lull were present, and facing them in a ragged line ten paces away were the last of the Engineers.
The Fist turned as Duiker and List approached. 'Ah, this is well. I would have you witness this, Historian.'
'What have I missed?'
Bult grinned. 'Nothing; we've just managed the prodigious task of assembling the sappers—you'd think battles with Kamist Reloe were tactical nightmares. Anyway, here they are, looking like they're waiting to be ambushed, or worse.'
'And are they, Uncle?'
The commander's grin broadened. 'Maybe.'
Coltaine now stepped towards the assembled soldiers. 'Symbols of bravery and gestures of recognition can only ring hollow—this I know, yet what else is left to me? Three clan leaders have come to me, each begging to approach you men and women with an offer of formal adoption to their clan. Perhaps you are unaware of what such unprecedented requests reveal… or perhaps, judging by your expressions, you know. I felt need to answer on your behalf, for I know more of you soldiers than do most Wickans, including those clan leaders, and they have each humbly withdrawn their requests.
He was silent for a long moment.
'Nonetheless,' Coltaine finally continued, 'I would have you know, they meant to honour you.'
Ah, Coltaine, even you do not understand these soldiers well enough. Those scowls you see arrayed before you certainly look like disapproval, disgust even, but then, when have you ever seen them smile?
'So, I am left with the traditions of the Malazan Empire. There were enough witnesses at the Crossing to weave in detail the tapestry of your deeds, and among all of you, in eluding your fallen comrades, the natural leadership of one was noted again and again. Without it, the day would have been truly lost.'
The sappers did not move, their scowls if anything deeper, more fierce.
Coltaine moved to stand before one man. Duiker recalled him well—a squat, hairless, immeasurably ugly sapper, his eye thin slashes, his nose a flattened spread of angles and crooks. Audaciously, he wore fragments of armour that Duiker recognized as taken from a commander of the Apocalypse, though the helm tied to his belt was something that could have adorned an antique shop in Darujhistan. Another object that hung from his belt was difficult to identify, and it was a moment before the historian realized he was looking at the battered remnant of a shield: two reinforced grips behind a mangled plate-sized flap of bronze. A large, blackened cross bow hung from one shoulder, so covered and entwined with twigs, branches and other camouflage as to make it seem the man carried a bush.
'I believe the time has come,' Coltaine said, 'for a promotion. You are now a sergeant, soldier.'
The man said nothing, his eyes narrowing to the thinnest of slits.
'I think a salute would be appropriate,' Bult growled. One of the other sappers cleared his throat and nervously yanked at his moustache.
Captain Lull rounded on the man. 'Got something to say about this, soldier?'
'Not much,' the man muttered. 'Out with it.'
The soldier shrugged. 'Well, only… he was a captain not two minutes ago, sir. The Fist's just demoted him. That's Captain Mincer, sir. Commands the Engineers. Or did.'
Mincer finally spoke. 'And since I'm now a sergeant, I suggest the captaincy go to this soldier.' He reached out and grabbed the woman beside him by the ear to drag her close. 'What used to be my sergeant. Name's Bungle."
Coltaine stared a moment longer, then swung around and met Duiker's eyes with such comic pleasure that the historian's exhaustion was simply swept away, flash-burned into oblivion. The Fist struggled to keep a straight face, and Duiker bit his lip in his own effort. His gaze caught on Lull, whose face showed the same struggle, even as the captain winked and mouthed three silent words. Sleight of hand.
The question remained how Coltaine would now play it. Composing his face into stern regard, the Fist turned about again. He eyed Mincer, then the woman named Bungle. 'That will be fine, Sergeant,' he said. 'Captain Bungle, I would advise you to listen to your sergeant in all matters. Understood?'
The woman shook her head.
Mincer grimaced and said, 'She's no experience with that, Fist. I never asked her advice, I'm afraid.'
'From what I have gathered, you never asked anyone's advice when you were captain.'
'Aye, that's a fact.'
'Nor did you attend any staff briefings.'
'No, sir.'
'And why was that?'
Mincer shrugged.
Captain Bungle spoke. 'Beauty sleep, sir. That's what he always said.'
'Hood knows the man needs it,' Bult muttered.
Coltaine raised an eyebrow. 'And did he sleep, Captain? During those times?'
'Oh yes, sir. He sleeps when we march, too, sir. Sleeps while walking—I've never seen the like. Snoring away, sir, one foot in front of the other, a bag full of rocks on his back—
'Rocks?'
'For when he breaks his sword, sir. He throws them, and there ain't a damned thing he can't hit.'
'Wrong,' Mincer growled. 'That lapdog…'
Bult seemed to choke, then spat in sympathy.
Coltaine had drawn his hands behind him, and Duiker saw them clench in a white-knuckled grip. As if sensing that attention, the Fist called out without turning, 'Historian!'
'I am here, Fist.'
'You will record this?'
'Oh, aye, sir. Every blessed word.'
'Excellent. Engineers, you are dismissed.'
The group wandered off, muttering. One man clapped Mincer on the shoulder and received a blistering gla
re in return.
Coltaine watched them leave, then strode to Duiker, Bult and Lull following.
'Spirits below!' Bult hissed.
Duiker smiled. 'Your soldiers, Commander.'
'Aye,' he said, suddenly beaming with pride. 'Aye.'
'I did not know what to do,' Coltaine confessed.
Lull grunted. 'You played it perfectly, Fist. That was exquisite, no doubt already making the rounds as a Hood-damned full-blown legend. If they liked you before, they love you now, sir.'
The Wickan remained baffled. 'But why? I just demoted a man for unsurpassed bravery!'
'Returned him to the ranks, you mean. And that lifted every one of 'em up, don't you see that?'
'But Mincer—'
'Never had so much fun in his life, I'd bet. You can tell, when they get even uglier. Hood knows, I can't explain it—only sappers know a sapper's way of thinking and behaving, and sometimes not even them.'
'You've a captain named Bungle, now, nephew,' Bult said. 'Think she'll be there in polish and shine next briefing?'
'Not a chance,' Lull opined. 'She's probably packing her gear right now."
Coltaine shook his head. 'They win,' he said, in evident wonder. 'I am defeated.'
Duiker watched the three men walk away, still discussing what had just happened. Not lies after all. Tears and smiles, something so small, so absurd… the only possible answer… The historian shook himself, and looked around until he found List. 'Corporal, I recall you had something to show me…"
'Yes, sir. Up ahead, not far, I think.'
They came to the ruined tower before reaching the forward outlying pickets. A squad of Wickans had commandeered the position, filling the ringed bedrock floor with supplies and leaving in attendance a lone, one-armed youth.
List laid a hand on one of the massive foundation stones. 'Jaghut,' he said. 'They lived apart, you know. No villages, no cities, just single, remote dwellings. Like this one.'
'Enjoyed their privacy, I take it.'
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