‘A few more things. Ryllandaras gauged you, and concluded that he had no wish to add his skins to your collection. He is ever wise, is Ryllandaras. A score of wolves, you said? His power has grown, then, a mystery both ominous and curious, given the chaos in his heart. What else? Well, the rest I choose not to reveal.’
Karsa grunted. He untied the bear cloak and let it fall to the ground, then unslung his sword and turned to face the rockslide.
A boulder sailed out from the cavity, of a size and weight that would strain even Bairoth Gild. The ground shook when it struck and bounced and rolled to a dusty halt.
‘Will he now make me wait?’ Karsa growled.
As if in answer Icarium emerged from the cave, slapping the dust from his long-fingered hands. ‘You are not Fenn,’ he said. ‘Indeed, I believe you are Teblor, a son of the fallen tribes in Laederon. You have travelled far, warrior, to meet your end.’
‘If you are so eager,’ Karsa growled, ‘cease your words.’
The Jhag’s expression grew troubled. ‘Eager? No. I am never eager. This is a moment of pathos, I believe. The first time I have felt such a thing, which is strange.’ He turned to his companion. ‘Have we known such moments as this one before, Mappo Runt?’
‘Aye, my friend. We have.’
‘Ah, well, then the burden of recollection is yours alone.’
‘As it ever was, Icarium.’
‘I grieve for you, friend.’
Mappo nodded. ‘I know you do. Now, best unsheathe your sword, Icarium. This Teblor evinces frustration and impatience.’
The Jhag went to his weapon. ‘What will come of this, Mappo?’
The Trell shook his head. ‘I do not know, but I am filled with dread.’
‘I shall endeavour to be efficient, then, so as to diminish the duration of your discomfort.’
‘Clearly impossible,’ Karsa muttered, ‘given your love of words.’ He readied his sword. ‘Be on with it, then, I have a horse to find.’
Icarium’s brows rose fractionally, then he drew out his sword. An unusual weapon, single-edged and looking ancient. He approached.
The Jhag’s attack was a flicker of motion, faster than anything Karsa had seen before, yet his sword flashed to meet it. Blades collided.
There was a peculiar snick and Karsa found himself holding nothing more than a handle.
Outrage exploded within him and he stepped forward, his huge fist hammering into Icarium’s face. The Jhag was thrown backward, leaving his feet, his sword cartwheeling away to clatter on the slope of the rockfall. Icarium landed with a heavy thump, and did not move.
‘Bastard broke my sword—’ Karsa began, turning towards Mappo.
White light detonated in his skull.
And he knew no more.
Mappo stared down at the motionless Thelomen Toblakai, noting the slow rise and fall of the giant’s chest. Hefting his mace, he glanced over to where Icarium lay, saw a hand slowly lift from the ground, twitch, then settle once more.
The Trell sighed. ‘Better than I could have hoped for, I think.’
He walked back and returned his weapon to the large leather sack, then set out to strike the camp.
Pounding pain behind his eyes, a sound of roaring, as of a river raging through a narrow channel. Karsa groaned.
Some time passed before he finally pushed himself onto his hands and knees.
It was dawn . . . again.
‘Say nothing, Bairoth Gild,’ he muttered. ‘Nor you, Delum Thord. I can well guess what happened. That bastard Trell struck me from behind. Aye, he didn’t kill me, but one day he will wish he had.’
A slow, cautious look around confirmed that he was alone. His broken sword had been positioned beside him, handle and blade side by side, with a small bound bundle of desert flowers lying atop them.
The blow to his head left him nauseous, and he found he was shaking once he’d managed to climb to his feet. He unstrapped his dented helm and tossed it aside. Dried blood matted his hair and covered the back of his neck.
‘At least you are now well rested, Karsa Orlong.’
‘You are less amused than you would have me think, Bairoth Gild. The one named Icarium. He is the one from our legends, isn’t he?’
‘And you alone among the living Teblor have crossed blades with him.’
‘He broke my sword.’
There was no reply to that. Karsa set about preparing to resume his journey, once more donning the bear cloak, then shouldering the pack. He left the wooden sword pieces and their bouquet, and made to set off down the descending road. Then he paused, turning his attention instead to the cavity that Icarium had excavated into the rockslide.
The Jhag’s efforts had partially uncovered a statue, broken here and there, with what remained fissured with cracks, but recognizable none the less. A grotesque construct, as tall as Karsa, made of a black, grainy stone.
A seven-headed hound.
It had been completely buried by the fall, and so would have revealed no sign that it existed beneath the rubble. Yet Icarium had found it, though his reasons for uncovering the monstrosity were still unfathomable. ‘He has lived too long, I think,’ Karsa murmured.
He strode back out from the cavity, then swung onto the road.
Six days later, the city of Lato Revae far behind him, the Teblor lay prone in the shadows of a guldindha tree at the edge of a grove, watching a pair of drovers switching their herd of goats towards a dusty corral. A small village lay beyond, its low buildings roofed in palm fronds, the air above it hazy with dung smoke and dust.
The sun would be down soon, and he could resume his journey. He had waited out the day, unseen. These lands between Lato Revae and the Mersin River were relatively crowded, compared to all that he had seen thus far, reminding him that his travels, since his landing at Ehrlitan, had been mostly through unbroken wilderness. The Pan’potsun Odhan—the Holy Desert itself—was a world virtually abandoned by civilization.
But here, irrigation ditches ribboned the plain. Wells and groves and villages abounded, and there were more roads than he had ever seen before, even in the lands of the Nathii. Most were dusty, winding tracks at ground level, usually situated between ditches. Thus far, the only exceptions were the imperial tracks, raised and straight and substantial enough to permit two wagons to pass each other with room to spare. These Malazan roads had suffered in the last year—despite their obvious value, foundation boulders had been dug out, league-markers uprooted. But the ditches alongside them were deep and wide, and Karsa had used those ditches to remain hidden from sight as he made his way southwestward.
The village ahead crouched on a crossroads of Malazan tracks, and a squat, square tower rose above the low roofs near the centre. Its limestone walls were stained black, streaks flaring up from arrow-slits and windows. When the sun finally settled beyond the horizon, no lights showed from the tower.
Though it was likely that there were rebel soldiers of the Apocalypse stationed in the village, given its strategic placement on the crossroads, Karsa had no interest in initiating contact. His was a private journey, if for no reason but that he chose to have it so. In any case, it seemed the rebellion was not quite as fierce here; either that or the unbridled blood-thirst had long since abated. There had been no widespread destruction of farms and fields, no slaughter in the village and town streets. Karsa wondered if there had been as many Malazan traders and landowners this far west, or if the garrisons had all been recalled into the major cities, such as Kayhum, Sarpachiya and Ugarat—their fellow non-combatants accompanying them. If so, then it had not helped them.
He disliked being weaponless, barring the Malazan short-sword he used as a knife, sheathed at his hip. But there was no suitable wood in this region. There were said to be ironwood trees in the Jhag Odhan and he would wait until then.
The swift descent into night was done. The Teblor warrior stirred collecting his pack, then set out along the edge of the guldindha grove. One of the imperial roads led
off in the direction he sought, likely the main artery connecting Lato Revae with the Holy City Ugarat. If any bridges across the Mersin River had survived the uprising, it would be the Malazan-built one on that road.
He skirted the village on its north side, through knee-high grains, the soil soft from the previous night’s irrigating. Karsa assumed the water came from the river somewhere ahead, though he could not imagine how the flow was regulated. The notion of a life spent tilling fields was repellent to the Teblor warrior. The rewards seemed to be exclusive to the highborn landowners, whilst the labourers themselves had only a minimal existence, prematurely aged and worn down by the ceaseless toil. And the distinction between high and low status was born from farming itself—or so it appeared to Karsa. Wealth was measured in control over other people, and the grip of that control could never be permitted to loosen. Odd, then, that this rebellion had had nothing to do with such inequities, that in truth it had been little more than a struggle between those who would be in charge.
Yet the majority of the suffering had descended upon the lowborn, upon the common folk. What matter the colour of the collar around a man’s neck, if the chains linked to them were identical?
Better to struggle against helplessness, as far as he was concerned. This blood-soaked Apocalypse was pointless, a misdirected explosion of fury that, when it passed, left the world unchanged.
He bounded across a ditch, crossed through a narrow fringe of overgrown brush, and found himself at the edge of a shallow pit. Twenty paces across and at least thirty paces wide. The town’s refuse was piled here, not entirely successful at covering the mass of lowlander bones.
Here, then, were the Malazans. As tamed and broken as the earth itself. The wealth of flesh, flung back into the ground. Karsa had no doubt that it was their rivals in status who were loudest in exhorting their deaths.
‘And so, once again, Karsa Orlong, we are given the truths of the lowlanders.’ Bairoth Gild’s ghostly voice was palpably bitter. ‘For every virtue they espouse, a thousand self-serving evils belie their piety. Know them, Warleader, for one day they will be your enemy.’
‘I am no fool, Bairoth Gild. Nor am I blind.’
Delum Thord spoke. ‘A place of haunting lies ahead, Karsa Orlong. As ancient as our own blood. Those who live here avoid it, and have always avoided it.’
‘Not entirely,’ Bairoth interjected. ‘Fear has inspired them on occasion. The place is damaged. None the less, the Elder power lingers. The path beckons—will you walk it, Warleader?’
Karsa made his way around the pit. He could see something ahead, earthworks rising to break the flatness of the surrounding plain. Elongated barrows, the slabs of stone that formed them visible in places although they were mostly covered in thorny brush and tufts of yellow grasses. The mounds formed an irregular ring around a larger, circular hill that was flat-topped, though slightly canted as if one side had settled over time. Rising at angles from the summit were standing stones, a score or more.
Rocks from clearing the nearby fields had been discarded in this once-holy site, around the barrows, heaped against the slope of the central hill, along with other detritus: the withered wooden skeletons of ox ploughs, palm fronds from roofs, piles of potsherds and the bones of butchered livestock.
Karsa slipped between two barrows and made his way up the central slope. The nearest standing stone reached barely to his waist. Black symbols crowded it, the spit and charcoal paint relatively recent. The Teblor recognized various signs, such as had been employed as a secret, native language during the Malazan occupation. ‘Hardly a place of fear,’ he muttered. Fully half of the stones were either shattered or toppled, and from the latter Karsa noted that they were, in fact, taller than he was, so deeply had they been anchored in the artificial hill. The summit itself was pitted and uneven.
‘Oh, these are the signs of fear, Karsa Orlong, do not doubt that. This desecration. Were this a place without power, the answer would have been indifference.’
Karsa grunted, stepping carefully on the treacherous ground as he approached the nominal centre of the stone ring. Four smaller slabs had been tilted together there, the wiry grasses stopping a pace away on all sides, leaving only bare earth flecked with bits of charcoal.
And fragments, Karsa noted as he crouched, of bone. He picked one up and studied it in the starlight. From a skull, lowlander in scale though somewhat more robust, the outer edge of an eye socket. Thick . . . like that of my gods . . . ‘Bairoth Gild. Delum Thord. Do either of you sense the presence of a spirit or a god here?’
‘No,’ Delum Thord replied.
Bairoth spoke. ‘A shaman was buried here, Warleader. His head was severed and left fixed in the apex of the four cardinal stones. Whoever shattered it did so long afterwards. Centuries. Perhaps millennia. So that it would no longer see. No longer watch.’
‘Then why is this place of value to me?’
‘For the way through it offers, Warleader.’
‘The way through what, Bairoth Gild?’
‘Passage westward, into the Jhag Odhan. A trail in the dreamworld. A journey of months will become one of mere days, should you choose to walk it. It lives still, for it was used not long ago. By an army.’
‘And how can I walk this trail?’
Delum Thord replied, ‘We can lead you, Karsa Orlong. For, like the one once buried here, we are neither dead nor alive. The lord Hood cannot find our spirits, for they are here with you. Our presence adds to the god of death’s hatred of you, Warleader.’
‘Hatred?’
‘For what you have taken and would not give to him. Will not. Would you become your own Keeper of Souls? So he must now fear. When last did Hood know a rival?’
Karsa scowled and spat onto the ground. ‘I have no interest in being his rival. I would break these chains. I would free even you and Bairoth Gild.’
‘We would rather you did not, Warleader.’
‘You and Bairoth Gild are perhaps alone in that sentiment, Delum Thord.’
‘What of it?’ Bairoth snapped.
Karsa said nothing, for he had begun to understand the choice that lay ahead, sometime in the future. To cast off my enemies . . . I must also cast off my friends. And so Hood follows, and waits. For the day that must come.
‘You hide your thoughts now, Karsa Orlong. This new talent does not please us.’
‘I am warleader,’ Karsa growled. ‘It is not my task to please you. Do you now regret that you follow?’
‘No, Karsa Orlong. Not yet.’
‘Take me into this trail in the dreamworld, Delum Thord.’
The air grew suddenly colder, the smell reminding Karsa of the sloped clearings on high mountain sides when spring arrived, the smell of enlivened, softened lichen and moss. And before him, where there had been night-softened farmland a moment ago, there was now tundra, beneath a heavily overcast sky.
A broad path lay before him, stretching across the rolling land, where the lichen had been crushed, the mosses kicked aside and trampled. As Bairoth Gild had said, an army had passed this way, although by the signs it seemed their journey had been but a moment ago—he half expected to see the tail end of that solemn column on the distant horizon, but there was nothing. Simply an empty, treeless expanse, stretching out on all sides. He moved forward, in the army’s wake.
This world seemed timeless, the sky unchanging. On occasion, herds appeared, too distant to make out the kind of beasts, rolling across hillsides then slipping from view as they streamed down into valleys. Birds flew in arrowhead formation, a strange long-necked breed high overhead, all of them consistently flying back the way Karsa had come. Apart from the whine of the insects swarming about the Teblor, a strange, unreal silence emanated from the landscape.
A dream world, then, such as the elders of his tribe were wont to visit, seeking portents and omens. The scene not unlike what Karsa had glimpsed when, in delirium, he had found himself before his god, Urugal.
He continued on.
Bairoth Gild spoke. ‘We are now at the border of a new warren, Warleader. A warren inimical to the army that arrived here. And so, a war was waged.’
‘How far have I travelled, Bairoth Gild? In my world, am I approaching Ugarat? Sarpachiya?’
The ghost’s laughter was like a boulder rolled over gravel. ‘They are behind you now, Karsa Orlong. You approach the land known as the Jhag Odhan.’
It had seemed no more than a half-day’s worth of travel in this dream world.
Signs of the army’s passage grew less distinct, the ground underfoot frozen rock hard and now consisting mostly of rounded stones. Ahead, a plain studded with huge flat slabs of black rock.
Moments later, Karsa was moving among them.
There were bodies beneath the stones. Pinned down.
‘Will you free these, Karsa Orlong?’
‘No, Delum Thord, I shall not. I shall pass through this place, disturbing nothing.’
‘Yet these are not Forkrul Assail. Many are dead, for they had not the power their kind once possessed. While others remain alive, and will not die for a long time. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Karsa Orlong, do you no longer believe in mercy?’
‘My beliefs are my own, Delum Thord. I shall not undo what I do not understand, and that is all.’
He travelled on, and soon left the terrible plain behind.
Before him now stretched a field of ice, crack-riven, with pools of water reflecting the silver sky. Bones were scattered on it, from hundreds, perhaps thousands of figures. Bones of a type he had seen before. Some still sheathed in withered skin and muscle. Shards of stone weapons lay among them, along with fragments of fur, antlered helms and torn, rotting hides.
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