House of Chains

by Steven Erikson

  Even in the wreckage, however, there was life.

  A score of broad-limbed catfish had clambered onto the mud-caked wall, none less than two man-lengths from blunt head to limp tail. They were well-fed creatures, their silvery-white bellies protruding out to the sides. Their skins had dried and fissures were visible in a latticed web across their dark backs. The glitter of their small black eyes was muted beneath the skin’s crinkled layer.

  And it seemed those eyes were unaware of the solitary T’lan Imass standing over them.

  Echoes of curiosity still clung to Onrack’s tattered, desiccated soul. Joints creaking beneath the knotted ropes of ligaments, he crouched beside the nearest catfish. He did not think the creatures were dead. Only a short time ago, these fish had possessed no true limbs. He was witness, he suspected, to a metamorphosis.

  After a moment, he slowly straightened. The sorcery that had sustained the wall against the vast weight of the new sea still held along this section. It had crumbled in others, forming wide breaches and foaming torrents of silt-laden water rushing through to the other side. A shallow sea was spreading out across the land on that side. There might come a time, Onrack suspected, when fragments of this wall were this realm’s only islands.

  The sea’s torrential arrival had caught them unawares, scattering them in its tumbling maelstrom. Other kin had survived, the T’lan Imass knew, and indeed some had found purchase on this wall, or on floating detritus, sufficient to regain their forms, to link once more so that the hunt could resume.

  But Kurald Emurlahn, fragmented or otherwise, was not amenable to the T’lan Imass. Without a Bonecaster beside him, Onrack could not extend his Tellann powers, could not reach out to his kin, could not inform them that he had survived. For most of his kind, that alone would have been sufficient cause for . . . surrender. The roiling waters he had but recently crawled from offered true oblivion. Dissolution was the only escape possible from this eternal ritual, and even among the Logros—Guardians of the First Throne itself—Onrack knew of kin who had chosen that path. Or worse . . .

  The warrior’s contemplation of choosing an end to his existence was momentary. In truth, he was far less haunted by his immortality than most T’lan Imass.

  There was always something else to see, after all.

  He detected movement beneath the skin of the nearest catfish, vague hints of contraction, of emerging awareness. Onrack drew forth his two-handed, curved obsidian sword. Most things he stumbled upon usually had to be killed. Occasionally in self-defence, but often simply due to an immediate and probably mutual loathing. He had long since ceased questioning why this should be so.

  From his massive shoulders hung the rotted skin of an enkar’al, pebbled and colourless. It was a relatively recent acquisition, less than a thousand years old. Another example of a creature that had hated him on first sight. Though perhaps the black rippled blade swinging at its head had tainted its response.

  It would be some time, Onrack judged, before the beast crawled out from its skin. He lowered his weapon and stepped past it. The Nascent’s extraordinary, continent-spanning wall was a curiosity in itself. After a moment, the warrior decided to walk its length. Or at least, until his passage was blocked by a breach.

  He began walking, hide-wrapped feet scuffing as he dragged them forward, the point of the sword inscribing a desultory furrow in the dried clay as it trailed from his left hand. Clumps of mud clung to his ragged hide shirt and the leather straps of his weapon harness. Silty, soupy water had seeped into the various gashes and punctures on his body and now leaked in trickling runnels with every heavy step he took. He had possessed a helm once, an impressive trophy from his youth, but it had been shattered at the final battle against the Jaghut family in the Jhag Odhan. A single crossways blow that had also shorn away a fifth of his skull, parietal and temporal, on the right side. Jaghut women had deceptive strength and admirable ferocity, especially when cornered.

  The sky above him had a sickly cast, but one he had already grown used to. This fragment of the long-fractured Tiste Edur warren was by far the largest he had come across, larger even than the one that surrounded Tremorlor, the Azath Odhanhouse. And this one had known a period of stability, sufficient for civilizations to arise, for savants of sorcery to begin unravelling the powers of Kurald Emurlahn, although those inhabitants had not been Tiste Edur.

  Idly, Onrack wondered if the renegade T’lan Imass he and his kin pursued had somehow triggered the wound that had resulted in the flooding of this world. It seemed likely, given its obvious efficacy in obscuring their trail. Either that, or the Tiste Edur had returned, to reclaim what had once been theirs.

  Indeed, he could smell the grey-skinned Edur—they had passed this way, and recently, arriving from another warren. Of course, the word ‘smell’ had acquired new meaning for the T’lan Imass in the wake of the Ritual. Mundane senses had for the most part withered along with flesh. Through the shadowed orbits of his eyes, for example, the world was a complex collage of dull colours, heat and cold and often measured by an unerring sensitivity to motion. Spoken words swirled in mercurial clouds of breath—if the speaker lived, that is. If not, then it was the sound itself that was detectable, shivering its way through the air. Onrack sensed sound as much by sight as by hearing.

  And so it was that he became aware of a warm-blooded shape lying a short distance ahead. The wall here was slowly failing. Water spouted in streams from fissures between the bulging stones. Before long, it would give way entirely.

  The shape did not move. It had been chained in place.

  Another fifty paces and Onrack reached it.

  The stench of Kurald Emurlahn was overpowering, faintly visible like a pool enclosing the supine figure, its surface rippling as if beneath a steady but thin rain. A deep ragged scar marred the prisoner’s broad brow beneath a hairless pate, the wound glowing with sorcery. There had been a metal tongue to hold down the man’s tongue, but that had dislodged, as had the straps wound round the figure’s head.

  Slate-grey eyes stared up, unblinking, at the T’lan Imass.

  Onrack studied the Tiste Edur for a moment longer, then he stepped over the man and continued on.

  A ragged, withered voice rose in his wake. ‘Wait.’

  The undead warrior paused and glanced back.

  ‘I—I would bargain. For my freedom.’

  ‘I am not interested in bargains,’ Onrack replied in the Edur language.

  ‘Is there nothing you desire, warrior?’

  ‘Nothing you can give me.’

  ‘Do you challenge me, then?’

  Tendons creaking, Onrack tilted his head. ‘This section of the wall is about to collapse. I have no wish to be here when it does.’

  ‘And you imagine that I do?’

  ‘Considering your sentiments on the matter is a pointless effort on my part, Edur. I have no interest in imagining myself in your place. Why would I? You are about to drown.’

  ‘Break my chains, and we can continue this discussion in a safer place.’

  ‘The quality of this discussion has not earned such an exercise,’ Onrack replied.

  ‘I would improve it, given the time.’

  ‘This seems unlikely.’ Onrack turned away.

  ‘Wait! I can tell you of your enemies!’

  Slowly, the T’lan Imass swung round once more. ‘My enemies? I do not recall saying that I had any, Edur.’

  ‘Oh, but you do. I should know. I was once one of them, and indeed that is why you find me here, for I am your enemy no longer.’

  ‘You are now a renegade among your own kind, then,’ Onrack observed. ‘I have no faith in traitors.’

  ‘To my own kind, T’lan Imass, I am not the traitor. That epithet belongs to the one who chained me here. In any case, the question of faith cannot be answered through negotiation.’

  ‘Should you have made that admission, Edur?’

  The man grimaced. ‘Why not? I would not deceive you.’

&nbs
p; Now, Onrack was truly curious. ‘Why would you not deceive me?’

  ‘For the very cause that has seen me Shorn,’ the Edur replied. ‘I am plagued by the need to be truthful.’

  ‘That is a dreadful curse,’ the T’lan Imass said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Onrack lifted his sword. ‘In this case, I admit to possessing a curse of my own. Curiosity.’

  ‘I weep for you.’

  ‘I see no tears.’

  ‘In my heart, T’lan Imass.’

  A single blow shattered the chains. With his free right hand, Onrack reached down and clutched one of the Edur’s ankles. He dragged the man after him along the top of the wall.

  ‘I would rail at the indignity of this,’ the Tiste Edur said as he was pulled onward, step by scuffing step, ‘had I the strength to do so.’

  Onrack made no reply. Dragging the man with one hand, his sword with the other, he trudged forward, his progress eventually taking them past the area of weakness on the wall.

  ‘You can release me now,’ the Tiste Edur gasped.

  ‘Can you walk?’

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘Then we shall continue like this.’

  ‘Where are you going, then, that you cannot afford to wait for me to regain my strength?’

  ‘Along this wall,’ the T’lan Imass replied.

  There was silence between them for a time, apart from the creaks from Onrack’s bones, the rasp of his hide-wrapped feet, and the hiss and thump of the Tiste Edur’s body and limbs across the mud-layered stones. The detritus-filled sea remained unbroken on their left, a festering marshland on their right. They passed between and around another dozen catfish, these ones not quite as large yet fully as limbed as the previous group. Beyond them, the wall stretched on unbroken to the horizon.

  In a voice filled with pain, the Tiste Edur finally spoke again. ‘Much more . . . T’lan Imass . . . and you’ll be dragging a corpse.’

  Onrack considered that for a moment, then he halted his steps and released the man’s ankle. He slowly swung about.

  Groaning, the Tiste Edur rolled himself onto his side. ‘I assume,’ he gasped, ‘you have no food, or fresh water.’

  Onrack lifted his gaze, back to the distant humps of the catfish. ‘I suppose I could acquire some. Of the former, that is.’

  ‘Can you open a portal, T’lan Imass? Can you get us out of this realm?’

  ‘No.’

  The Tiste Edur lowered his head to the clay and closed his eyes. ‘Then I am as good as dead in any case. None the less, I appreciate your breaking my chains. You need not remain here, though I would know the name of the warrior who showed me what mercy he could.’

  ‘Onrack. Clanless, of the Logros.’

  ‘I am Trull Sengar. Also clanless.’

  Onraek stared down at the Tiste Edur for a while. Then the T’lan Imass stepped over the man and set off, retracing their path. He arrived among the catfish. A single chop downward severed the head of the nearest one.

  The slaying triggered a frenzy among the others. Skin split, sleek four-limbed bodies tore their way free. Broad, needle-fanged heads swung towards the undead warrior in their midst, tiny eyes glistening. Loud hisses from all sides. The beasts moved on squat, muscular legs, three-toed feet thickly padded and clawed. Their tails were short, extending in a vertical fin back up their spines.

  They attacked as would wolves closing on wounded prey.

  Obsidian blade flashed. Thin blood sprayed. Heads and limbs flopped about.

  One of the creatures launched itself into the air, huge mouth closing over Onrack’s skull. As its full weight descended, the T’lan Imass felt his neck vertebrae creak and grind. He fell backward, letting the animal drag him down.

  Then he dissolved into dust.

  And rose five paces away to resume his killing, wading among the hissing survivors. A few moments later they were all dead.

  Onrack collected one of the corpses by its hind foot and, dragging it, made his way back to Trull Sengar.

  The Tiste Edur was propped up on one elbow, his flat eyes fixed on the T’lan Imass. ‘For a moment,’ he said, ‘I thought I was having the strangest dream. I saw you, there in the distance, wearing a huge, writhing hat. That then ate you whole.’

  Onrack pulled the body up alongside Trull Sengar. ‘You were not dreaming. Here. Eat.’

  ‘Might we not cook it?’

  The T’lan Imass strode to the seaside edge of the wall. Among the flotsam were the remnants of countless trees, from which jutted denuded branches. He climbed down onto the knotted detritus, felt it shift and roll unsteadily beneath him. It required but a few moments to snap off an armful of fairly dry wood, which he threw back up onto the wall. Then he followed.

  He felt the Tiste Edur’s eyes on him as he prepared a hearth.

  ‘Our encounters with your kind,’ Trull said after a moment, ‘were few and far between. And then, only after your . . . ritual. Prior to that, your people fled from us at first sight. Apart from those who travelled the oceans with the Thelomen Toblakai, that is. Those ones fought us. For centuries, before we drove them from the seas.’

  ‘The Tiste Edur were in my world,’ Onrack said as he drew out his spark stones, ‘just after the coming of the Tiste Andü. Once numerous, leaving signs of passage in the snow, on the beaches, in deep forests.’

  ‘There are far fewer of us now,’ Trull Sengar said. ‘We came here—to this place—from Mother Dark, whose children had banished us. We did not think they would pursue, but they did. And upon the shattering of this warren, we fled yet again—to your world, Onrack. Where we thrived . . .’

  ‘Until your enemies found you once more.’

  ‘Yes. The first of those were . . . fanatical in their hatred. There were great wars—unwitnessed by anyone, fought as they were within darkness, in hidden places of shadow. In the end, we slew the last of those first Andü, but were broken ourselves in the effort. And so we retreated into remote places, into fastnesses. Then, more Andü came, only these seemed less . . . interested. And we in turn had grown inward, no longer consumed with the hunger of expansion—’

  ‘Had you sought to assuage that hunger,’ Onrack said as the first wisps of smoke rose from the shredded bark and twigs, ‘we would have found in you a new cause, Edur.’

  Trull was silent, his gaze veiled. ‘We had forgotten it all,’ he finally said, settling back to rest his head once more on the clay. ‘All that I have just told you. Until a short while ago, my people—the last bastion, it seems, of the Tiste Edur—knew almost nothing of our past. Our long, tortured history. And what we knew was in fact false. If only,’ he added, ‘we had remained ignorant.’

  Onrack slowly turned to gaze at the Edur. ‘Your people no longer look inward.’

  ‘I said I would tell you of your enemies, T’lan Imass.’

  ‘You did.’

  ‘There are your kind, Onrack, among the Tiste Edur. In league with our new purpose.’

  ‘And what is this purpose, Trull Sengar?’

  The man looked away, closed his eyes. ‘Terrible, Onrack. A terrible purpose.’

  The T’lan Imass warrior swung to the corpse of the creature he had slain, drew forth an obsidian knife. ‘I am familiar with terrible purposes,’ he said as he began cutting meat.

  ‘I shall tell you my tale now, as I said I would. So you understand what you now face.’

  ‘No, Trull Sengar. Tell me nothing more.’

  ‘But why?’

  Because your truth would burden me. Force me to find my kin once more. Your truth would chain me to this world—to my world, once more. And I am not ready for that. ‘I am weary of your voice, Edur,’ he replied.

  The beast’s sizzling flesh smelled like seal meat. A short time later, while Trull Sengar ate, Onrack moved to the edge of the wall facing onto the marsh. The flood waters had found old basins in the landscape, from which gases now leaked upward to drift in pale smears over the thick, percolating surface. Thicker fog
obscured the horizon, but the T’lan Imass thought he could sense a rising of elevation, a range of low, humped hills.

  ‘It’s getting lighter,’ Trull Sengar said from where he lay beside the hearth. ‘The sky is glowing in places. There . . . and there.’

  Onrack lifted his head. The sky had been an unrelieved sea of pewter, darkening every now and then to loose a deluge of rain, though that had grown more infrequent of late. But now rents had appeared, ragged-edged. A swollen orb of yellow light commanded one entire horizon, the wall ahead seeming to drive towards its very heart; whilst directly overhead hung a smaller circle of blurred fire, this one rimmed in blue. ‘The suns return,’ the Tiste Edur murmured. ‘Here, in the Nascent, the ancient twin hearts of Kurald Emurlahn live on. There was no way of telling, for we did not rediscover this warren until after the Breach. The flood waters must have brought chaos to the climate. And destroyed the civilization that existed here.’

  Onrack looked down. ‘Were they Tiste Edur?’

  The man shook his head. ‘No, more like your descendants, Onrack. Although the corpses we saw here along the wall were badly decayed.’ Trull grimaced. ‘They are as vermin, these humans of yours.’

  ‘Not mine,’ Onrack replied.

  ‘You feel no pride, then, at their insipid success?’

  The T’lan Imass cocked his head. ‘They are prone to mistakes, Trull Sengar. The Logros have killed them in their thousands when the need to reassert order made doing so necessary. With ever greater frequency they annihilate themselves, for success breeds contempt for those very qualities that purchased it.’

  ‘It seems you’ve given this some thought.’

  Onrack shrugged in a clatter of bones. ‘More than my kin, perhaps, the edge of my irritation with humankind remains jagged.’

  The Tiste Edur was attempting to stand, his motions slow and deliberate. ‘The Nascent required . . . cleansing,’ he said, his tone bitter, ‘or so it was judged.’

  ‘Your methods,’ Onrack said, ‘are more extreme than what the Logros would choose.’