The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen

by Steven Erikson

  “Aye.”

  “They’ve drawn so much on their warrens that it’s begun to damage their own bodies—I saw one healer’s arm snap like a twig when he lifted a pot from a hearth. That frightened me more than anything else I’ve yet to witness, Captain.”

  The man tugged at the patch covering his ruined eye. “You’re not alone in that, old man.”

  Duiker fell silent. Lull had nearly succumbed to a septic infection. He had become gaunt beneath his armor, and the scars on his face had set his features into a tortured expression that made strangers flinch. Hood’s breath, not just strangers. If the Chain of Dogs has a face, it is Lull’s.

  They rode between columns of soldiers, smiled at the shouts and grim jests thrown their way, though for Duiker the smile was strained. It was well that spirits were high, the strange melancholy that came with victory drifting away, but the specter of what lay ahead nevertheless loomed with monstrous certainty. The historian had felt his own spirits deepening to sorrow, for he’d long since lost the ability to will himself into blind faith.

  The captain spoke again. “This forest beyond the river, what do you know of it?”

  “Cedar,” Duiker replied. “Source of Ubaryd’s fame in ship-building. It once covered both sides of the River Vathar, but now only the south side remains, and even that has dwindled close to the bay.”

  “The fools never bothered replanting?”

  “A few efforts, when the threat was finally recognized, but herders had already claimed the land. Goats, Captain. Goats can turn a paradise into a desert in no time at all. They eat shoots, they strip bark entirely around the boles of trees, killing them as surely as a wildfire. However, there’s plenty of forest left upriver—we’ll be a week or more traveling through it.”

  “So I’d heard. Well, I’ll welcome the shade…”

  A week or more, indeed. More like eternity—how does Coltaine defend his vast winding train amidst a forest, where ambushes will come from every direction, where troops cannot wheel and respond with anything like swiftness and order? Sulmar’s concerns about the dry lands beyond the forest are moot, as far as I’m concerned. And I wonder if I’m alone in thinking that?

  They rode between wagons loaded with wounded soldiers. The air was foul here with flesh rotting where forced healing had failed to stem the advance of infection. Soldiers in fever raved and rambled, delirium prying open the doors of their minds to countless other realms—from this nightmare world into countless others. Only Hood’s gift offers surcease…

  Off to their left on the flat grassland, the train’s dwindling herds of cattle and goats moved amidst turgid clouds of dust. Wickan cattle-dogs patrolled the edges, accompanied by Weasel Clan riders. The entire herd would be slaughtered at the River Vathar, for the lands beyond the forest would not sustain them. For there are no spirits of the land there.

  The historian found himself musing as he eyed the herd. The animals had matched them step for step on this soul-destroying journey. Month after month of suffering. That is one curse we all share—the will to live. Their fates had been decided, though thankfully they knew nothing of that. Yet even that will change in the last moments. The dumbest of beasts seems capable of sensing its own impending death. Hood grants every living thing awareness at the very end. What mercy is that?

  “The horse’s blood had burned black in its veins,” Lull said suddenly.

  Duiker nodded, not needing to ask which horse the captain meant. She carried them all, such a raging claim on her life force, it seared her from within. Such thoughts took him past words, into a place of raw pain.

  “It’s said,” Lull went on, “that their hands are stained black now. They are marked forever more.”

  As am I. He thought of Nil and Nether, two children curled fetally beneath the hood of the wagon, there in the midst of their silent kin. The Wickans know that the gift of power is never free. They know enough not to envy the chosen among them, for power is never a game, nor a glittering standards raised to glory and wealth. They disguise nothing in trappings, and so we all see what we’d rather not, that power is cruel, hard as iron and bone, and it thrives on destruction.

  “I am falling into your silences, old man,” Lull said softly.

  Duiker could only nod again.

  “I find myself impatient for Korbolo Dom. For an end to this. I can no longer see what Coltaine sees, Historian.”

  “Can you not?” Duiker asked, meeting the man’s eye. “Are you certain that what he sees is different from what you see, Lull?”

  Dismay slowly settled on his twisted features.

  “I fear,” Duiker continued, “that the Fist’s silences no longer speak of victory.”

  “A match to your own growing silence, then.”

  The historian shrugged. An entire continent pursues us. We should not have lived this long. And I can take my thoughts no further than that, and am diminished by that truth. All those histories I’ve read…each an intellectual obsession with war, the endless redrawing of maps. Heroic charges and crushing defeats. We are all naught but twists of suffering in a river of pain. Hood’s breath, old man, your words weary even yourself—why inflict them on others?

  “We need to stop thinking,” Lull said. “We’re well past that point. Now we simply exist. Look at those beasts over there. We’re the same, you and I, the same as them. Struggling beneath the sun, pushed and ever pushed to our place of slaughter.”

  Duiker shook his head. “It is our curse that we cannot know the bliss of being mindless, Captain. You’ll find no salvation where you’re looking, I’m afraid.”

  “Not interested in salvation,” Lull growled. “Just a way to keep going.”

  They approached the captain’s company. In the midst of the Seventh’s infantry stood a knot of haphazardly armed and armored men and women, perhaps fifty in all. Faces were turned expectantly toward Lull and Duiker.

  “Time to be a captain,” Lull muttered under his breath, his tone so dispirited that it stung the historian’s heart.

  A waiting sergeant barked out a command to stand at attention and the motley gathering made a ragged but determined effort to comply. Lull eyed them for a moment longer, then dismounted and approached.

  “Six months ago you knelt before purebloods,” the captain addressed them. “You shied away your eyes and had the taste of dusty floors on your tongues. You exposed your backs to the whips and your world was high walls and foul hovels where you slept, where you loved, and gave birth to children who would face no better future. Six months ago I wouldn’t have wasted a tin jakata on the lot of you.” He paused, nodding to his sergeant.

  Soldiers of the Seventh came forward, each carrying folded uniforms. Those uniforms were faded, stained and restitched where weapons had pierced the cloth. Resting atop each pressed bundle was an iron sigil. Duiker leaned forward on his saddle to examine one more closely. The medallion was perhaps four inches in diameter, a circlet of chain affixed to a replica Wickan dog-collar, and in the center was a cattle-dog’s head—not snarling, simply staring outward with hooded eyes.

  Something twisted inside the historian so that he barely managed to contain it.

  “Last night,” Captain Lull said, “a representative of the Council of Nobles came to Coltaine. They were burdened with a chest of gold and silver jakatas. It seems the nobles have grown weary of cooking their own food, mending their own clothes…wiping their own asses—”

  At another time such a comment would have triggered dark looks and low grumbling—just one more spit in the face to join a lifetime of others. Instead, the former servants laughed. The antics of when they were children. Children no more.

  Lull waited for the laughter to fall away. “The Fist said nothing. The Fist turned his back on them. The Fist knows how to gauge value…” The captain paused, a slow frown descending on his scarred features. “There comes a time when a life can’t be bought by coin, and once that line’s crossed, there’s no going back. You are soldiers now. Soldiers
of the Seventh. Each of you will join regular squads in my infantry, to stand alongside your fellow soldiers—and not one of them gives a damn what you were before.” He swung to the sergeant. “Assign these soldiers, Sergeant.”

  Duiker watched the ritual in silence, each issuing of uniform as a man or woman’s name was called out, the squads coming forward to collect their new member. Nothing was overplayed, nothing was forced. The perfunctory professionalism of the act carried its own weight, and a deep silence enveloped the scene. The historian saw inductees in their forties, but none was unfit. Decades of hard labor and the culling of two battles had ensured a collection of stubborn survivors.

  They will stand, and stand well.

  The captain appeared at his side. “As servants,” Lull softly tumbled, “they might have survived, been sold on to other noble families. Now, with swords in their hands, they will die. Can you hear this silence, Duiker? Do you know what it signifies? I imagine you do, all too well.”

  With all that we do, Hood smiles.

  “Write of this, old man.”

  Duiker glanced at the captain and saw a broken man.

  At Gelor Ridge, Corporal List had leaped down into the ditch beside the earthen ramp to avoid a swarm of arrows. His right foot had landed on a javelin head thrust up through the dirt. The iron point had driven through the sole of his boot, then the flesh between his big toe and the next one along.

  A small wound, naught but mischance, yet punctures were the most feared of all battle wounds. They carried a fever that seized joints, including those of the jaw, that could make the mouth impossible to open, closing the throat to all sustenance and bringing agonizing death.

  The Wickan horsewives had experience of treating such injuries, yet their supply of powers and herbs had long since dwindled, leaving them with but one treatment—burning the wound, and the burning had to be thorough. The hours after the battle of Gelor Ridge, the air was foul with the stench of burned hair and the macabre, sweetly enticing smell of cooked meat.

  Duiker found List hobbling in a circle with a determined expression on his thin, sweat-beaded face. The corporal glanced up as the historian approached. “I can ride as well, sir, though for only an hour at a time. The foot goes numb and it’s then that infection could return—or so I’m told.”

  Four days ago the historian had walked alongside the travois that carried List, looking down on a young man that he was certain was dying. A harried Wickan horsewife had quickly checked on the corporal during the march. Duiker had seen a grim expression settle into her lined features as she probed with her fingers the swollen glands beneath List’s sparsely bearded chin. Then she had glanced up at the historian.

  Duiker recognized her then, and she him. The woman who once offered me food.

  “It’s not good,” he’d said.

  She hesitated, then reached under the folds of her hide cloak to withdraw a knuckle-sized, misshapen object that looked to Duiker like nothing more than a knob of mouldy bread. “A jest of the spirits, no doubt,” she said in Malazan. Then she bent down, grasped List’s injured foot—which had been left unbandaged and open to the hot, dry air—and pressed the knob against the puncture wound, binding it in place with a strip of hide.

  A jest to make Hood frown.

  “You should be ready to rejoin the ranks soon, then,” Duiker now said.

  List nodded, approached. “I must tell you something, sir,” he said quietly. “My fever showed me visions of what’s ahead—”

  “That happens sometimes.”

  “A god’s hand reached out from the darkness, grasped my soul and dragged it forward, through days, weeks. Historian—”List paused to wipe the sweat from his brow—“the land south of Vathar…we’re going to a place of old truths.”

  Duiker’s gaze narrowed. “Old truths? What does that mean, List?”

  “Something terrible happened there, sir. Long ago. The earth—it’s lifeless—”

  That is something only Sormo and the High Command know. “This god’s hand, Corporal, did you see it?”

  “No, but I felt it. The fingers were long, too long, with more joints than there should be. Sometimes that grip comes back, like a ghost’s, and I start shivering in its icy clutch.”

  “Do you recall that ancient slaughter at Sekala Crossing? Did your visions echo those, Corporal?”

  List frowned, then shook his head. “No, what lies ahead of us now is much older, Historian.”

  Shouts arose as the train readied to lurch into motion again, down off the Imperial Road and onto the trader track.

  Duiker looked out over the studded plain to the south. “I will walk alongside your travois, Corporal,” he said, “while you describe for me in detail these visions of yours.”

  “They might be naught but fevered delusions, Historian—”

  “But you don’t believe so…and neither do I.” His eyes remained on the plain. A many-jointed hand. Not a god’s hand, Corporal, though one of such power that you might well have thought so. You’ve been chosen, lad, for whatever reason, to witness an Elder vision. Out from the darkness comes the cold hand of a Jaghut.

  Felisin sat on a block of masonry that had fallen from the ancient gate, her arms wrapped around herself, her eyes on the ground before her, steadily rocking in a slow cadence. The motion brought peace to her mind, as if she was nothing more than a vessel filled with water.

  Heboric and the giant warrior were arguing. About her, about prophecies and ill chance, about the desperation of fanatics. Mutual contempt swirled and bubbled between the two men, seemingly born in the instant they met, and growing darker with every moment that passed.

  The other warrior, Leoman, crouched nearby, matching her silence. He had before him the Holy Book of Dryjhna, guarding the tome in her stead, awaiting what he seemed to see as her inevitable acceptance that she was indeed Sha’ik reborn.

  Reborn. Renewed. Heart of the Apocalypse. Delivered by the unhanded in the suspended breath of the goddess. Who waits still. Waits as Leoman waits. Felisin, hinge of the world.

  A smile cracked her features.

  She rocked to distant cries, the ancient echoes of sudden, soul-jarring deaths—they seemed so far away now. Kulp, devoured beneath a seething mound of rats. Gnawed bones and a shock of white hair streaked red. Baudin, burned in a fire of his own making—oh, the irony of that, he lived by his own rule and died with that same godless claim. Even as he gave up his life for someone else. Still, he’d say he made his vow freely.

  These are the things that bring stillness.

  Deaths that had already withdrawn, far down the endless, dusty track; too distant to make their demands heard or felt. Grief rapes the mind, and I know all about rape. It’s a question of acquiescence. So I shall feel nothing. No rape, no grief.

  Stones grated beside her. Heboric. She knew the feeling of his presence and had no need to look up. The one-time priest of Fener was muttering under his breath. Then he fell silent, as if steeling himself to reach into her silence. Rape. A moment later he spoke, “They want to get moving, lass. They’re both far gone. The oasis—Sha’ik’s encampment—is a long walk. There’s water to be found on the way, but little in the way of food. The Toblakai will hunt, but game’s gone very scarce—the Soletaken and D’ivers, I gather. In any case, whether you open the Book or not, we have to move.”

  She said nothing, continued rocking.

  Heboric cleared his throat. “For all I rage against their mad, fevered notions, and counsel most strongly against your accepting them…we need these two, and the oasis. They know Raraku—better than anyone else. If we’re to have any chance of surviving…”

  Surviving.

  “I’ll grant you,” Heboric went on after a moment, “I’ve acquired…senses…that make my blindness less of a liability. And these hands of mine, reborn…Nonetheless, Felisin, I’m not enough to guard you. And besides, there is no guarantee that these two will let us walk away from them, if you understand my meaning.”

&n
bsp; Surviving.

  “Wake up, lass! You’ve got some decisions to make.”

  “Sha’ik drew her blade against the Empire,” she said, eyes still on the dusty ground.

  “A foolish gesture—”

  “Sha’ik would face the Empress, would send the Imperial armies into a blood-filled Abyss.”

  “History recounts similar rebellions, lass, and the tale is an endless echo. Glorious ideals lend a vigor of health to Hood’s bleached grin, but it’s naught but a glamor, and righteousness—”

  “Who cares about what’s righteous, old man? The Empress must needs answer Sha’ik’s challenge.”

  “Aye.”

  “And shall despatch an army from Quon Tali.”

  “Likely already on the way.”

  “And,” Felisin continued, feeling a cold breath touch her flesh, “who commands this army?”

  She heard him draw a sharp breath of his own and felt him flinch back.

  “Lass—”

  She snapped out a hand as if batting away a wasp, and rose to her feet. She turned to find Leoman staring at her, his sun-scoured face striking her suddenly as Raraku’s own. Harder than Beneth’s, without any of the affectations. Sharper than Baudin, oh, there’s wit there, in those cold, dark eyes. “To Sha’ik’s encampment,” she said.

  He glanced down at the Book, then back to her.

  Felisin raised an eyebrow. “Would you rather walk through a storm? Let the goddess wait a little longer before renewing her fury, Leoman.”

  She saw him reappraise her, a glimmer of uncertainty newly arriving in his eyes, and was pleased. After a moment, he bowed his head.

  “Felisin,” Heboric hissed, “have you any idea—”

  “Better than you, old man. Now keep quiet.”

  “Perhaps we should part ways now—”

  She swung to him. “No. I think I shall have need for you, Heboric.”

  He gave her a bitter smile. “As your conscience, lass? I’m a poor choice.”

  Yes, you are, and all the better for that.