“Aye.”
He watched the captain set off back toward 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 trial. 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 hunger 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 color 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 traveling 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 toward 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 honor 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, including 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 eyes thin slashes, his nose a flattened spread of angles and crooks. Audaciously, he wore fragments of armor 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 crossbow 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 mustache.
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 minu
tes 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, flashburned 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 glare 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.”
“They feared each other almost as much as they feared the T’lan Imass, sir.”
Duiker glanced over at the Wickan youth. The lad was fast asleep. We’re doing a lot of that these days. Just dropping off. “How old?” he asked the corporal.
“Not sure. A hundred, two, maybe even three.”
“Not years.”
“No. Millennia.”
“So, this is where the Jaghut lived.”
“The first tower. From here, pushed back, then again, then again. The final stand—the last tower—is in the heart of the plain beyond the forest.”
“Pushed back,” the historian repeated.
List nodded. “Each siege lasted centuries, the losses among the T’lan Imass staggering. Jaghut were anything but wanderers. When they chose a place…” His voice fell off. He shrugged.
“Was this a typical war, Corporal?”
The young man hesitated, then shook his head. “A strange bond, unique among the Jaghut. When the mother was in peril, the children returned, joined the battle. Then the father. Things…escalated.”
Duiker nodded, looked around. “She must have been…special.”
Tight-lipped and pale, List pulled off his helm, ran a hand through his sweaty hair. “Aye,” he finally whispered.
“Is she your guide?”
“No. Her mate.”
Something made the historian turn, as if in answer to a barely felt shiver of air. North, through the trees, then above them. His mind struggled to encompass what he saw: a column, a spear lit gold, rising…rising.
“Hood’s breath!” List muttered. “What is that?”
A lone word thundered through Duiker, flooding his mind, driving out every thought, and he knew with utter certainty the truth of it, the single word that was answer to List’s question.
“Sha’ik.”
Kalam sat in his gloomy cabin, inundated with the sound of hammering waves and shrieking wind. Ragstopper shuddered with every remorseless crash of the raging seas, the room around the assassin pitching in, it seemed, a dozen directions at once.
Somewhere in their wake, a fast trader battled the same storm, and her presence—announced by the lookout only minutes before the green and strangely luminescent cloud rolled over them—gnawed at Kalam, refusing to go away. The same fast trader we’d seen before. Was the answer a simple one? While we squatted in that shithole of a home port, she’d been calmly shouldering the Imperial pier at Falar, no special rush in resupplying when you have a shore leave worth the name.
But that did not explain the host of other details that plagued the assassin—details that, each on their own, rang a minor note of discord, yet together they created a cacophony of alarm in Kalam. Blurred passages of time, perhaps born of the man’s driving aspiration to complete this voyage, at war with the interminable reality of day upon day, night upon night, the very sameness of such a journey.
But no, there’s more than just a conflict of perspective. The hour-glasses, the dwindled stores of food and fresh water, the captain’s tortured hints of a world amiss aboard this damned ship.
And that fast trader, it should have sailed past us long ago…
Salk Elan. A mage—he stinks of it. Yet a sorcerer who could twist an entire crew’s mind so thoroughly…that sorcerer would
have to be a High Mage. Not impossible. Just highly unlikely among Mebra’s covert circle of spies and agents.
There was no doubt in Kalam’s mind that Elan had woven about himself a web of deceit, inasmuch as it was in such a man’s nature to do so, whether necessary or not. Yet which strand should the assassin follow in his quest for the truth?
Time. How long has this journey been? Tradewinds where none should be, now a storm, driving us ever southeastward, a storm that had therefore not come from the ocean wastes—as the immutable laws of the sea would demand—but from the Falari Isles. In its dry season—a season of unbroken calm.
So, who plays with us here? And what role does Salk Elan have in this game, if any?
Growling, the assassin rose from his bunk, grabbing in mid-swing his satchel from its hook, then made his rocking way to the door.
The hold was like a siege tower under a ceaseless barrage of rocks. Mist filled the salty, close air and the keel was awash in shin-deep water. There was no one about, every hand committed to the daunting task of holding Ragstopper together. Kalam cleared a space and dragged a chest free. He rummaged in his satchel until his hand found and closed on a small, misshapen lump of stone. He drew it out and set it on the chest-top.
It did not roll off; indeed, it did not move at all.
The assassin unsheathed a dagger, reversed his grip, then drove the iron pommel down on the stone. It shattered. A gust of hot, dry air washed over Kalam. He crouched lower.
“Quick! Quick Ben, you bastard, now’s the time!”
No voice reached him through the storm’s incessant roar.
I’m beginning to hate mages. “Quick Ben, damn you!”
The air seemed to waver, like streams of heat rising from a desert floor. A familiar voice tickled the assassin’s ears. “Any idea the last time I’ve had a chance to sleep? It’s all gone to Hood’s shithole over here, Kalam—where are you and what do you want? And hurry up with it—this is killing me!”
“I thought you were my shaved knuckle in the hole, damn you!”
“You in Unta? The palace? I never figured—”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” the assassin cut in. “No, I’m not in the Hood-cursed palace, you idiot. I’m at sea—”
The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen Page 139