The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen

by Steven Erikson

  There was some difficulty in prying the long-knives from Kalam’s hands. The separation revealed that the grips had somehow scorched the assassin’s palms and fingerpads.

  ‘Cold,’ Ebron muttered, ‘that’s what did that. Burned by cold. What did you say that thing looked like?’

  Kalam, huddled in blankets, looked up. ‘Like something that should have been dead a long time ago, Mage. Tell me, how much do you know of B’ridys—this fortress?’

  ‘Probably less than you,’ Ebron replied. ‘I was born in Karakarang. It was a monastery, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Aye. One of the oldest cults, long extinct.’ A squad healer crouched beside him and began applying a numbing salve to the assassin’s hands. Kalam leaned his head against the wall and sighed. ‘Have you heard of the Nameless Ones?’

  Ebron snorted. ‘I said Karakarang, didn’t I? The Tanno cult claims a direct descent from the cult of the Nameless Ones. The Spiritwalkers say their powers, of song and the like, arose from the original patterns that the Nameless Ones fashioned in their rituals—those patterns supposedly crisscross this entire subcontinent, and their power remains to this day. Are you saying this monastery belonged to the Nameless Ones? Yes, of course you are. But they weren’t demons, were they—’

  ‘No, but they were in the habit of chaining them. The one in the pool is probably displeased with its last encounter, but not as displeased as you might think.’

  Ebron frowned, then paled. ‘The blood—if anyone drinks water tainted with that…’

  Kalam nodded. ‘The demon takes that person’s soul…and makes the exchange. Freedom.’

  ‘Not just people, either!’ Ebron hissed. ‘Animals, birds—insects! Anything!’

  ‘No, I think it will have to be big—bigger than a bird or insect. And when it does escape—’

  ‘It’ll come looking for you,’ the mage whispered. He suddenly wheeled to Cord. ‘We have to get out of here. Now! Better still—’

  ‘Aye,’ Kalam growled, ‘get as far away from me as you can. Listen—the Empress has sent her new Adjunct, with an army—there will be a battle, in Raraku. The Adjunct has little more than recruits. She could do with your company, even as beaten up as it is—’

  ‘They march from Aren?’

  Kalam nodded. ‘And have likely already started. That gives you maybe a month…of staying alive and out of trouble—’

  ‘We can manage,’ Cord grated.

  Kalam glanced over at Sinn. ‘Be careful, lass.’

  ‘I will. I think I’ll miss you, Kalam.’

  The assassin spoke to Cord. ‘Leave me my supplies. I will rest here a while longer. So we don’t cross paths, I will be heading due west from here, skirting the north edge of the Whirlwind…for a time. Eventually, I will try to breach it, and make my way into Raraku itself.’

  ‘Lady’s luck to you,’ Cord replied, then he gestured. ‘Everyone else, let’s go.’ At the stairway, the sergeant glanced back at the assassin. ‘That demon…did it get the captain and the lieutenant, do you think?’

  ‘No. It said otherwise.’

  ‘It spoke to you?’

  ‘In my mind, aye. But it was a short conversation.’

  Cord grinned. ‘Something tells me, with you, they’re all short.’

  A moment later and Kalam was alone, still racked with waves of uncontrollable shivering. Thankfully, the soldiers had left a couple of torches. It was too bad, he reflected, that the azalan demon had vanished. Seriously too bad.

  It was dusk when the assassin emerged from the narrow fissure in the rock, opposite the cliff, that was the monastery’s secret escape route. The timing was anything but pleasant. The demon might already be free, might already be hunting him—in whatever form fate had gifted it. The night ahead did not promise to be agreeable.

  The signs of the company’s egress were evident on the dusty ground in front of the fissure, and Kalam noted that they had set off southward, preceding him by four or more hours. Satisfied, he shouldered his pack and, skirting the outcropping that was the fortress, headed west.

  Wild bhok’arala kept pace with him for a time, scampering along the rocks and voicing their strangely mournful hooting calls as night gathered. Stars appeared overhead through a blurry film of dust, dulling the desert’s ambient silver glow to something more like smudged iron. Kalam made his way slowly, avoiding rises where he would be visible along a skyline.

  He froze at a distant scream to the north. An enkar’al. Rare, but mundane enough. Unless the damned thing recently landed to drink from a pool of bloody water. The bhok’arala had scattered at that cry, and were nowhere to be seen. There was no wind that Kalam could detect, but he knew that sound carried far on nights like these, and, worse, the huge winged reptiles could detect motion from high above…and the assassin would make a good meal.

  Cursing to himself, Kalam faced south, to where the Whirlwind’s solid wall of whirling sand rose, three and a half, maybe four thousand paces distant. He tightened the straps of his pack, then gingerly reached for his knives. The effects of the salve were fading, twin throbbing pulses of pain slowly rising. He had donned his fingerless gloves and gauntlets—risking the danger of infection—but even these barriers did little to lessen the searing pain as he closed his hands on the weapons and tugged them loose.

  Then he set off down the slope, moving as quickly as he dared. A hundred heartbeats later he reached the blistered pan of Raraku’s basin. The Whirlwind was a muted roar ahead, steadily drawing a flow of cool air towards it. He fixed his gaze on that distant, murky wall, then began jogging.

  Five hundred paces. The pack’s straps were abraiding the telaba on his shoulders, wearing through to the lightweight chain beneath. His supplies were slowing him down, but without them, he knew, he was as good as dead here in Raraku. He listened to his breathing grow harsher.

  A thousand paces. Blisters had broken on his palms, soaking the insides of his gauntlets, making the grips of the long-knives slippery, uncertain. He was drawing in great lungfuls of night air now, a burning sensation settling into his thighs and calves.

  Two thousand paces left, in so far as he could judge. The roar was fierce, and sheets of sand whipped around him from behind. He could feel the rage of the goddess in the air.

  Fifteen hundred remaining—

  A sudden hush—as if he’d entered a cave—then he was cartwheeling through the air, the contents of his pack loose and spinning away from the shredded remains on his back. Filling his ears, the echoes of a sound—a bone-jarring impact—that he had not even heard. Then he struck the ground and rolled, knives flying from his hands. His back and shoulders were sodden, covered in warm blood, his chain armour shredded by the enkar’al’s talons.

  A mocking blow, for all the damage inflicted. The creature could more easily have ripped his head off.

  And now a familiar voice entered his skull, ‘Aye, I could have killed you outright, but this pleases me more. Run, mortal, to that saving wall of sand.’

  ‘I freed you,’ Kalam growled, spitting out blood and grit. ‘And this is your gratitude?’

  ‘You delivered pain. Unacceptable. I am not one to feel pain. I only deliver it.’

  ‘Well,’ the assassin grated as he slowly rose to his hands and knees, ‘it comforts me to know in these, my last moments, that you’ll not live long in this new world with that attitude. I’ll wait for you other side of Hood’s gate, Demon.’

  Enormous talons snapped around him, their tips punching through chain—one in his lower back, three others in his abdomen—and he was lifted from the ground.

  Then flung through the air once more. This time he descended from a distance of at least three times his own height, and when he struck blackness exploded in his mind.

  Consciousness returned, and he found himself lying sprawled on the cracked pan, the ground directly beneath him muddy with his own blood. The stars were swimming wildly overhead, and he was unable to move. A deep thrumming reverberation rang in the back of h
is skull, coming up from his spine.

  ‘Ah, awake once more. Good. Shall we resume this game?’

  ‘As you like, Demon. Alas, I’m no longer much of a plaything. You broke my back.’

  ‘Your error was in landing head first, mortal.’

  ‘My apologies.’ But the numbness was fading—he could feel a tingling sensation, spreading out through his limbs. ‘Come down and finish it, Demon.’

  He felt the ground shake as the enkar’al settled on the ground somewhere to his left. Heavy thumping steps as the creature approached. ‘Tell me your name, mortal. It is the least I can do, to know the name of my first kill after so many thousands of years.’

  ‘Kalam Mekhar.’

  ‘And what kind of creature are you? You resemble Imass…’

  ‘Ah, so you were imprisoned long before the Nameless Ones, then.’

  ‘I know nothing of Nameless Ones, Kalam Mekhar.’

  He could sense the enkar’al at his side now, a massive, looming presence, though the assassin kept his eyes shut. Then he felt its carnivore’s breath gust down on him, and knew the reptile’s jaws were opening wide.

  Kalam rolled over and drove his right fist down into the creature’s throat.

  Then released the handful of blood-soaked sand, gravel and rocks it had held.

  And drove the dagger in his other hand deep between its breast bones.

  The huge head jerked back, and the assassin rolled in the opposite direction, then regained his feet. The motion took all feeling from his legs and he toppled to the ground once more—but in the interval he had seen one of his long-knives, lying point embedded in the ground about fifteen paces distant.

  The enkar’al was thrashing about now, choking, talons ripping into the bleached earth in its frenzied panic.

  Sensation ebbed back into his legs, and Kalam began dragging himself across the parched ground. Towards the long-knife. The serpent blade, I think. How appropriate.

  Everything shuddered and the assassin twisted around to see that the creature had leapt, landing splay-legged directly behind him—where he had been a moment ago. Blood was weeping from its cold eyes, which flashed in recognition—before panic overwhelmed them once more. Blood and gritty froth shot out from between its serrated jaws.

  He resumed dragging himself forward, and was finally able to draw his legs up and manage a crawl.

  Then the knife was in his right hand. Kalam slowly turned about, his head swimming, and began crawling back. ‘I have something for you,’ he gasped. ‘An old friend, come to say hello.’

  The enkar’al heaved and landed heavily on its side, snapping the bones of one of its wings in the process. Tail lashing, legs kicking, talons spasming open and shut, head thumping repeatedly against the ground.

  ‘Remember my name, Demon,’ Kalam continued, crawling up to the beast’s head. He drew his knees under him, then raised the knife in both hands. The point hovered over the writhing neck, rose and fell until in time with its motion. ‘Kalam Mekhar…the one who stuck in your throat.’ He drove the knife down, punching through the thick pebbled skin, and the blood of a severed jugular sprayed outward.

  Kalam reeled back, barely in time to avoid the deadly fount, and dropped into another roll.

  Three times over, to end finally on his back once more. Paralysis stealing through him once again.

  He stared upward at the spinning stars…until the darkness devoured them.

  In the ancient fortress that had once functioned as a monastery for the Nameless Ones, but had been old even then—its makers long forgotten—there was only darkness. On its lowermost level there was a single chamber, its floor rifted above a rushing underground river.

  In the icy depths, chained by Elder sorcery to the bedrock, lay a massive, armoured warrior. Thelomen Toblakai, pure of blood, that had known the curse of demonic possession, a possession that had devoured its own sense of self—the noble warrior had ceased to exist long, long ago.

  Yet now, the body writhed in its magical chains. The demon was gone, fled with the outpouring of blood—blood that should never have existed, given the decayed state of the creature, yet existed it had, and the river had swept it to freedom. To a distant waterhole, where a bull enkar’al—a beast in its prime—had been crouching to drink.

  The enkar’al had been alone for some time—not even the spoor of others of its kind could be found anywhere nearby. Though it had not sensed the passage of time, decades had in fact passed since it last encountered its own kind. Indeed, it had been fated—given a normal course of life—to never again mate. With its death, the extinction of the enkar’al anywhere east of the Jhag Odhan would have been complete.

  But now its soul raged in a strange, gelid body—no wings, no thundering hearts, no prey-laden scent to draw from the desert’s night air. Something held it down, and imprisonment was proving a swift path to mindless madness.

  Far above, the fortress was silent and dark. The air was motionless once more, barring the faint sighs from draughts that flowed in from the outer chambers.

  Rage and terror. Unanswered, except by the promise of eternity.

  Or so it would have remained.

  Had the Beast Thrones stayed unoccupied.

  Had not the reawakened wolf gods known an urgent need…for a champion.

  Their presence reached into the creature’s soul, calmed it with visions of a world where there were enkar’al in the muddy skies, where bull males locked jaws in the fierce heat of the breeding season, the females banking in circles far above. Visions that brought peace to the ensnared soul—though with it came a deep sorrow, for the body that now clothed it was…wrong.

  A time of service, then. The reward—to rejoin its kin in the skies of another realm.

  Beasts were not strangers to hope, nor unmindful of such things as rewards.

  Besides, this champion would taste blood…and soon.

  For the moment, however, there was a skein of sorcerous bindings to unravel…

  Limbs stiff as death. But the heart laboured on.

  A shadow slipping over Kalam’s face awakened him. He opened his eyes.

  The wrinkled visage of an old man hovered above him, swimming behind waves of heat. Dal Honese, hairless, jutting ears, his expression twisted into a scowl. ‘I was looking for you!’ he accused, in Malazan. ‘Where have you been? What are you doing lying out here? Don’t you know it’s hot?’

  Kalam closed his eyes again. ‘Looking for me?’ He shook his head. ‘No-one’s looking for me,’ he continued, forcing his eyes open once more despite the glare lancing up from the ground around the two men. ‘Well, not any more, that is—’

  ‘Idiot. Heat-addled fool. Stupid—but maybe I should be crooning, encouraging even? Will that deceive him? Likely. A change in tactics, yes. You! Did you kill this enkar’al? Impressive! Wondrous! But it stinks. Nothing worse than a rotting enkar’al, except for the fact that you’ve fouled yourself. Lucky for you your urinating friend found me, then led me here. Oh, and it’s marked the enkar’al, too—what a stench! Sizzling hide! Anyway, it’ll carry you. Yes, back to my haunted abode—’

  ‘Who in Hood’s name are you?’ Kalam demanded, struggling to rise. Though the paralysis was gone, he was crusted in dried blood, the puncture wounds burning like coals, his every bone feeling brittle.

  ‘Me? You do not know? You do not recognize the very famosity exuding from me? Famosity? There must be such a word. I used it! The act of being famous. Of course. Most devoted servant of Shadow! Highest Archpriest Iskaral Pust! God to the bhok’arala, bane of spiders, Master Deceiver of all the world’s Soletaken and D’ivers! And now, your saviour! Provided you have something for me, that is, something to deliver. A bone whistle? A small bag, perchance? Given to you in a shadowy realm, by an even shadowier god? A bag, you fool, filled with dusky diamonds?’

  ‘You’re the one, are you?’ Kalam groaned. ‘The gods help us. Aye, I have the diamonds—’ He tried to sit up, reaching for the pouch tucked under
his belt—and caught a momentary glimpse of the azalan demon, flowing amidst shadows behind the priest, until oblivion found him.

  When he awoke once more he was lying on a raised stone platform that suspiciously resembled an altar. Oil lamps flickered from ledges on the walls. The room was small, the air acrid.

  Healing salves had been applied—and likely sorcery as well—leaving him feeling refreshed, though his joints remained stiff, as if he had not moved for some time. His clothing had been removed, a thin blanket stiff with grime laid over him. His throat ached with a raging thirst.

  The assassin slowly sat up, looking down at the purple weals where the enkar’al’s talons had plunged, then almost jumped at a scurrying sound across the floor—a bhok’aral, casting a single, absurdly guilty, glance over a knobby shoulder a moment before darting out through the doorway.

  A dusty jug of water and a clay cup lay on a reed mat on the stone floor. Flinging the blanket aside, Kalam moved towards it.

  A bloom of shadows in one corner of the chamber caught his attention as he poured a cup, so he was not surprised to see Iskaral Pust standing there when the shadows faded.

  The priest was hunched down, looking nervously at the doorway, then tiptoeing up to the assassin. ‘All better now, yes?’

  ‘Is there need to whisper?’ Kalam asked.

  The man flinched. ‘Quiet! My wife!’

  ‘Is she sleeping?’

  Iskaral Pust’s small face was so like a bhok’aral’s that the assassin was wondering at the man’s bloodlines—no, Kalam, don’t be ridiculous—‘Sleeping?’ the priest sputtered. ‘She never sleeps! No, you fool, she hunts!’

  ‘Hunts? What does she hunt?’

  ‘Not what. Who. She hunts for me, of course.’ His eyes glittered as he stared at Kalam. ‘But has she found me? No! We’ve not seen each other for months! Hee hee!’ He jutted his head closer. ‘It’s a perfect marriage. I’ve never been happier. You should try it.’