House of Chains

by Steven Erikson

  ‘I’d been given to understand you were agitated, discomfited.’

  ‘Ah, L’oric. Another stupid man. He mistook excitement for agitation, but I will say no more of that. Not to you.’

  ‘Allow me to be equally succinct, Bidithal.’ Heboric stepped closer. ‘If you even so much as look in Felisin’s direction, these hands of mine will twist your head from your neck.’

  ‘Felisin? Sha’ik’s dearest? Do you truly believe she is a virgin? Before Sha’ik returned, the child was a waif, an orphan in the camp. None cared a whit about her—’

  ‘None of which matters,’ Heboric said.

  The High Mage turned away. ‘Whatever you say, Ghost Hands. Hood knows, there are plenty of others—’

  ‘All now under Sha’ik’s protection. Do you imagine she will permit such abuses from you?’

  ‘You shall have to ask her that yourself,’ Bidithal replied. ‘Now leave me. You are guest no longer.’

  Heboric hesitated, barely resisting an urge to kill the man now, this instant. Would it even be pre-emptive? Has he not as much as admitted to his crimes? But this was not a place of Malazan justice, was it? The only law that existed here was Sha’ik’s. Nor will I be alone in this. Even Toblakai has vowed protection over Felisin. But what of the other children? Why does Sha’ik tolerate this, unless it is as Leoman has said. She needs Bidithal. Needs him to betray Febryl’s plotting.

  Yet what do I care for all of that? This . . . creature does not deserve to live.

  ‘Contemplating murder?’ Bidithal murmured, his back turned once more, his own shadow dancing on its own on the tent wall. ‘You would not be the first, nor, I suspect, the last. I should warn you, however, this temple is newly resanctified. Take another step towards me, Ghost Hands, and you will see the power of that.’

  ‘And you believe Sha’ik will permit you to kneel before Shadowthrone?’

  The man whirled, his face black with rage. ‘Shadowthrone? That . . . foreigner! The roots of Meanas are found in an elder warren! Once ruled by—’ he snapped his mouth shut, then smiled, revealing dark teeth. ‘Not for you. Oh no, not for you, ex-priest. There are purposes within the Whirlwind—your existence is tolerated but little more than that. Challenge me, Ghost Hands, and you will know holy wrath.’

  Heboric’s answering grin was hard. ‘I’ve known it before, Bidithal. Yet I remain. Purposes? Perhaps mine is to block your path. I’d advise you to think on that.’

  Stepping outside once more, he paused briefly, blinking in the harsh sunlight. Silgar was nowhere to be seen, yet he had completed an elaborate pattern in the dust around Heboric’s moccasins. Chains, surrounding a figure with stumps instead of hands . . . yet footed. The ex-priest scowled, kicking through the image as he set forth.

  Silgar was no artist. Heboric’s own eyes were bad. Perhaps he’d seen only what his fears urged—it had been Silgar himself within the circle of chains the first time, after all. In any case, it was not important enough to make him turn back for a second look. Besides, his own steps had no doubt left it ruined.

  None of which explained the chill that clung to him as he walked beneath the searing sun.

  The vipers were writhing in their pit, and he was in their midst.

  The old scars of ligature damage made his ankles and wrists resemble segmented tree trunks, each pinched width encircling his limbs to remind him of those times, of every shackle that had snapped shut, every chain that had held him down. In his dreams, the pain reared like a thing alive once more, weaving mesmerizing through a tumult of confused, distraught scenes.

  The old Malazan with no hands and the shimmering, near solid tattoo had, despite his blindness, seen clearly enough, seen those trailing ghosts, the wind-moaning train of deaths that stalked him day and night now, loud enough in Toblakai’s mind to drown out the voice of Urugal, close enough to obscure his god’s stone visage behind veil after veil of mortal faces—each and every one twisted with the agony and fear that carved out the moment of dying. Yet the old man had not understood, not entirely. The children among those victims—children in terms of recently birthed, as the lowlanders used the word—had not all fallen to the bloodwood sword of Karsa Orlong. They were, one and all, the progeny that would never be, the bloodlines severed in the trophy-cluttered cavern of the Teblor’s history.

  Toblakai. A name of past glories, of a race of warriors who had stood alongside mortal Imass, alongside cold-miened Jaghut and demonic Forkrul Assail. A name by which Karsa Orlong was now known, as if he alone was the inheritor of elder dominators in a young, harsh world. Years ago, such a thought would have filled his chest with fierce, bloodthirsty pride. Now it racked him like a desert cough, weakened him deep in his bones. He saw what no-one else saw, that his new name was a title of polished, blinding irony.

  The Teblor were long fallen from Thelomen Toblakai. Mirrored reflections in flesh only. Kneeling like fools before seven blunt-featured faces carved into a cliffside. Valley dwellers, where every horizon was almost within reach. Victims of brutal ignorance—for which no-one else could be blamed—entwined with deceit, for which Karsa Orlong would seek a final accounting.

  He and his people had been wronged, and the warrior who now strode between the dusty white boles of a long-dead orchard would, one day, give answer to that.

  But the enemy had so many faces . . .

  Even alone, as he was now, he longed for solitude. But it was denied him. The rattle of chains was unceasing, the echoing cries of the slain endless. Even the mysterious but palpable power of Raraku offered no surcease—Raraku itself, not the Whirlwind, for Toblakai knew that the Whirlwind was like a child to the Holy Desert’s ancient presence, and it touched him naught. Raraku had known many such storms, yet it weathered them as it did all things, with untethered skin of sand and the solid truth of stone. Raraku was its own secret, the hidden bedrock that held the warrior in this place. From Raraku, Karsa believed, he would find his own truth.

  He had knelt before Sha’ik Reborn, all those months ago. The young woman with the Malazan accent who’d stumbled into view half carrying her tattooed, handless pet. Knelt, not in servitude, not from resurrected faith, but in relief. Relief, that the waiting had ended, that he would be able to drag Leoman away from that place of failure and death. They had seen Sha’ik Elder murdered while under their protection. A defeat that had gnawed at Karsa. Yet he could not deceive himself into believing that the new Chosen One was anything but a hapless victim that the insane Whirlwind Goddess had simply plucked from the wilderness, a mortal tool that would be used with merciless brutality. That she had proved a willing participant in her own impending destruction was equally pathetic in Karsa’s eyes. Clearly, the scarred young woman had her own reasons, and seemed eager for the power.

  Lead us, Warleader.

  The words laughed bitterly through his thoughts as he wandered through the grove—the city almost a league to the east, the place where he now found himself a remnant outskirt of some other town. Warleaders needed such forces gathered around them, arrayed in desperate defence of self-delusion, of headlong singlemindedness. The Chosen One was more like Toblakai than she imagined, or, rather, a younger Toblakai, a Teblor commanding slayers—an army of two with which to deliver mayhem.

  Sha’ik Elder had been something else entirely. She had lived long through her haunting, her visions of Apocalypse that had tugged and jerked her bones ever onward as if they were string-tied sticks. And she had seen truths in Karsa’s soul, had warned him of the horrors to come—not in specific terms, for like all seers she had been cursed with ambiguity—but sufficient to awaken within Karsa a certain . . . watchfulness.

  And, it seemed, he did little else these days but watch. As the madness that was the soul of the Whirlwind Goddess seeped out like poison in the blood to infect every leader among the rebellion. Rebellion . . . oh, there was truth enough in that. But the enemy was not the Malazan Empire. It is sanity itself that they are rebelling against. Order. Honourable conduct. ‘
Rules of the common’, as Leoman called them, even as his consciousness sank beneath the opaque fumes of durhang. Yes, I would well understand his flight, were I to believe what he would present to us all—the drifting layers of smoke in his pit, the sleepy look his eyes, the slurred words . . . ah, but Leoman, I have never witnessed you actually partake of the drug. Only its apparent aftermath, the evidence scattered all about, and the descent into sleep that seems perfectly timed whenever you wish to close a conversation, end a certain discourse . . .

  Like him, Karsa suspected, Leoman was biding his time. Raraku waited with them. Perhaps, for them. The Holy Desert possessed a gift, yet it was one that few had ever recognized, much less accepted. A gift that would arrive unseen, unnoticed at first, a gift too old to find shape in words, too formless to grasp in the hands as one would a sword.

  Toblakai, once a warrior of forest-cloaked mountains, had grown to love this desert. The endless tones of fire painted on stone and sand, the bitter-needled plants and the countless creatures that crawled, slithered or scampered, or slipped through night-air on silent wings. He loved the hungry ferocity of these creatures, their dancing as prey and predator a perpetual cycle inscribed on the sand and beneath the rocks. And the desert in turn had reshaped Karsa, weathered his skin dark, stretched taut and lean his muscles, thinned his eyes to slits.

  Leoman had told him much of this place, secrets that only a true inhabitant would know. The ring of ruined cities, harbours one and all, the old beach ridges with their natural barrows running for league upon league. Shells that had turned hard as stone and would sing low and mournful in the wind—Leoman had presented him with a gift of these, a vest of hide on which such shells had been affixed, armour that moaned in the endless, ever-dry winds. There were hidden springs in the wasteland, cairns and caves where an ancient sea-god had been worshipped. Remote basins that would, every few years, be stripped of sand to reveal long, high-prowed ships of petrified wood that was crowded with carvings—a long-dead fleet revealed beneath starlight only to be buried once more the following day. In other places, often behind the beach ridges, the forgotten mariners had placed cemeteries, using hollowed-out cedar trunks to hold their dead kin—all turned to stone, now, claimed by the implacable power of Raraku.

  Layer upon countless layer, the secrets were unveiled by the winds. Sheer cliffs rising like ramps, in which the fossil skeletons of enormous creatures could be seen. The stumps of cleared forests, hinting of trees as large as any Karsa had known from his homeland. The columnar pilings of docks and piers, anchor-stones and the open cavities of tin mines, flint quarries and arrow-straight raised roads, trees that grew entirely underground, a mass of roots stretching out for leagues, from which the ironwood of Karsa’s new sword had been carved—his blood-sword having cracked long ago.

  Raraku had known Apocalypse first-hand, millennia past, and Toblakai wondered if it truly welcomed its return. Sha’ik’s goddess stalked the desert, her mindless rage the shriek of unceasing wind along its borders, but Karsa wondered at the Whirlwind’s manifestation—just whose was it? Cold, disconnected rage, or a savage, unbridled argument?

  Did the goddess war with the desert?

  Whilst, far to the south in this treacherous land, the Malazan army prepared to march.

  As he approached the heart of the grove—where a low altar of flat-stones occupied a small clearing—he saw a slight, long-haired figure, seated on the altar as if it was no more than a bench in an abandoned garden. A book was in her lap, its cracked skin cover familiar to Toblakai’s eyes.

  She spoke without turning round. ‘I have seen your tracks in this place, Toblakai.’

  ‘And I yours, Chosen One.’

  ‘I come here to wonder,’ she said as he walked into view around the altar to stand facing her.

  As do I.

  ‘Can you guess what it is I wonder about?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  The almost-faded pocks of bloodfly scars only showed themselves when she smiled. ‘The gift of the goddess . . .’ the smile grew strained, ‘offers only destruction.’

  He glanced away, studied the nearby trees. ‘This grove will resist in the way of Raraku,’ he rumbled. ‘It is stone. And stone holds fast.’

  ‘For a while,’ she muttered, her smile falling away. ‘But there remains that within me that urges . . . creation.’

  ‘Have a baby.’

  Her laugh was almost a yelp. ‘Oh, you hulking fool, Toblakai. I should welcome your company more often.’

  Then why do you choose not to?

  She waved a small hand at the book in her lap. ‘Dryjhna was an author who, to be gracious, lived with malnourished talent. There are naught but bones in this tome, I am afraid. Obsessed with the taking of life, the annihilation of order. Yet not once does he offer anything in its stead. There is no rebirth among the ashes of his vision, and that saddens me. Does it sadden you, Toblakai?’

  He stared down at her for a long moment, then said, ‘Come.’

  Shrugging, she set the book down on the altar and rose, straightening the plain, worn, colourless telaba that hung loose over her curved body.

  He led her into the rows of bone-white trees. She followed in silence.

  Thirty paces, then another small clearing, this one ringed tight in thick, petrified boles. A squat, rectangular mason’s chest sat in the skeletal shade cast down by the branches—which had remained intact down to the very twigs. Toblakai stepped to one side, studied her face as she stared in silence at his works-in-progress.

  Before them, the trunks of two of the trees ringing the clearing had been reshaped beneath chisel and pick. Two warriors stared out with sightless eyes, one slightly shorter than Toblakai but far more robust, the other taller and thinner.

  He saw that her breath had quickened, a slight flush on her cheeks. ‘You have talent . . . rough, but driven,’ she murmured without pulling her eyes from their study. ‘Do you intend to ring the entire clearing with such formidable warriors?’

  ‘No. The others will be . . . different.’

  Her head turned at a sound. She stepped quickly closer to Karsa. ‘A snake.’

  He nodded. ‘There will be more, coming from all sides. The clearing will be filled with snakes, should we choose to remain here.’

  ‘Flare-necks.’

  ‘And others. They won’t bite or spit, however. They never do. They come . . . to watch.’

  She shot him a searching glance, then shivered slightly. ‘What power manifests here? It is not the Whirlwind’s—’

  ‘No. Nor do I have a name for it. Perhaps the Holy Desert itself.’

  She slowly shook her head to that. ‘I think you are wrong. The power, I believe, is yours.’

  He shrugged. ‘We shall see, when I have done them all.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Besides Bairoth and Delum Thord? Seven.’

  She frowned. ‘One for each of the Holy Protectors?’

  No. ‘Perhaps. I have not decided. These two you see, they were my friends. Now dead.’ He paused, then added, ‘I had but two friends.’

  She seemed to flinch slightly at that. ‘What of Leoman? What of Mathok? What of . . . me?’

  ‘I have no plans on carving your likenesses here.’

  ‘That is not what I meant.’

  I know. He gestured at the two Teblor warriors. ‘Creation, Chosen One.’

  ‘When I was young, I wrote poetry, in the path that my mother already walked. Did you know that?’

  He smiled at the word ‘young’ but replied in all seriousness, ‘No, I did not.’

  ‘I . . . I have resurrected the habit.’

  ‘May it serve you well.’

  She must have sensed something of the blood-slick edge underlying his statement, for her expression tightened. ‘But that is never its purpose, is it. To serve. Or to yield satisfaction—self-satisfaction, I mean, since the other kind but follows as a returning ripple in a well—’

  ‘Confusing the pattern.
’

  ‘As you say. It is far too easy to see you as a knot-browed barbarian, Toblakai. No, the drive to create is something other, isn’t it? Have you an answer?’

  He shrugged. ‘If one exists, it will only be found in the search—and searching is at creation’s heart, Chosen One.’

  She stared at the statues once more. ‘And what are you searching for? With these . . . old friends?’

  ‘I do not know. Yet.’

  ‘Perhaps they will tell you, one day.’

  The snakes surrounded them by the hundreds now, slithering unremarked by either over their feet, around their ankles, heads lifting again and again to flick tongues towards the carved trunks.

  ‘Thank you, Toblakai,’ Sha’ik murmured. ‘I am humbled . . . and revived.’

  ‘There is trouble in your city, Chosen One.’

  She nodded. ‘I know.’

  ‘Are you the calm at its heart?’

  A bitter smile twisted her lips as she turned away. ‘Will these serpents permit us to leave?’

  ‘Of course. But do not step. Instead, shuffle. Slowly. They will open for you a path.’

  ‘I should be alarmed by all this,’ she said as she edged back on their path.

  But it is the least of your worries, Chosen One. ‘I will keep you apprised of developments, if you wish.’

  ‘Thank you, yes.’

  He watched her make her way out of the clearing. There were vows wrapped tight around Toblakai’s soul. Slowly constricting. Some time soon, something would break. He knew not which, but if Leoman had taught him one thing, it was patience.

  When she was gone, the warrior swung about and approached the mason’s chest.

  Dust on the hands, a ghostly patina, tinted faintly pink by the raging red storm encircling the world.

  The heat of the day was but an illusion in Raraku. With the descent of darkness, the desert’s dead bones quickly cast off the sun’s shimmering, fevered breath. The wind grew chill and the sands erupted with crawling, buzzing life, like vermin emerging from a corpse. Rhizan flitted in a frenzied wild hunt through the clouds of capemoths and chigger fleas above the tent city sprawled in the ruins. In the distance desert wolves howled as if hunted by ghosts.