‘Ah, that most important way.’ Ammanas was silent for a moment, then he asked, ‘Will you pursue this?’
‘I see little choice. The Talon is up to something. We need to stop them—’
‘No, friend. We need to ensure that they fail. Have you found a…trail?’
‘More than that. I’ve realized who is masterminding the whole thing.’
Shadowthrone’s hooded head cocked slightly. ‘And that is where Cutter and Apsalar are going now?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are they sufficient?’
Cotillion shook his head. ‘I have other agents available. But I would Apsalar be relatively close, in case something goes wrong.’
Ammanas nodded. ‘So, where?’
‘Raraku.’
Though he could not see it, Cotillion knew that his companion’s face was splitting into a broad grin. ‘Ah, dear Rope, time’s come, I think, that I should tell you more of my own endeavours…’
‘The diamonds I gave Kalam? I’d wondered about those.’
Ammanas gestured at Hawl’s corpse. ‘Let us take her home—our home, that is. And then we must speak…at length.’
Cotillion nodded.
‘Besides,’ Shadowthrone added as he straightened, ‘Traveller being so close by makes me nervous.’
A moment later, the glade was empty, barring a few sourceless shadows that swiftly dwindled into nothing.
Cutter reached the sandstone shoreline. Four runners had been pulled up on the flat, grainy shelf of rock. Anchored in the bay beyond were two large dromons, both badly damaged.
Around the runners gear lay scattered, and two huge trees had been felled and dragged close—probably intended to replace the snapped masts. Barrels containing salted fish had been broached, while other casks stood in a row nearby, refilled with fresh water.
Cutter set Apsalar down, then approached one of the runners. They were about fifteen paces from bow to stern, broad of beam with an unstepped mast and side-mounted steering oar. There were two oarlocks to a side. The gunnels were crowded with riotous carvings.
A sudden coughing fit from Apsalar swung him round.
She bolted upright, spat to clear her throat, then wrapped her arms about herself as shivering racked through her.
Cutter quickly returned to her side.
‘D-Darist?’
‘Dead. But so are all the Edur. There was one among the Malazans…’
‘The one of power. I felt him. Such…anger!’
Cutter went over to the nearest water cask, found a ladle. He dipped it full and walked back. ‘He called himself Traveller.’
‘I know him,’ she whispered, then shuddered. ‘Not my memories. Dancer’s. Dancer knew him. Knew him well. They were…three. It was never just the two of them—did you know that? Never just Dancer and Kellanved. No, he was there. Almost from the very beginning. Before Tayschrenn, before Dujek, before even Surly.’
‘Well, it makes no difference now, Apsalar,’ Cutter said. ‘We need to leave this damned island—Traveller can have it, as far as I’m concerned. Are you recovered enough to help me get one of these runners into the water? We’ve a bounty in supplies, too—’
‘Where are we going?’
He hesitated.
Her dark eyes flattened. ‘Cotillion.’
‘Another task for us, aye.’
‘Do not walk this path, Crokus.’
He scowled. ‘I thought you’d appreciate the company.’ He offered her the ladle.
She studied him for a long moment, then slowly accepted it.
‘Pan’potsun Hills.’
‘I know,’ Lostara drawled.
Pearl smiled. ‘Of course you would. And now, at last, you discover the reason I asked you along—’
‘Wait a minute. You couldn’t have known where this trail would lead—’
‘Well, true, but I have faith in blind nature’s penchant for cycles. In any case, is there a buried city nearby?’
‘Nearby? You mean, apart from the one we’re standing on?’ She was pleased to see his jaw drop. ‘What did you think all these flat-topped hills were, Claw?’
He loosened his cloak. ‘Then again, this place will suit just fine.’
‘For what?’
He cast her a sardonic glance. ‘Well, dear, a ritual. We need to find a trail, a sorcerous one, and it’s old. Did you imagine we would just wander directionless through this wasteland in the hopes of finding something?’
‘Odd, I thought that was what we’ve been doing for days.’
‘Just getting some distance between us and that damned Imass head,’ he replied, walking over to a flat stretch of stone, where he began kicking it clear of rubble. ‘I could feel its unhuman eyes on us all the way across that valley.’
‘Him and the vultures, aye.’ She tilted her head back and studied the cloudless sky. ‘Still with us, in fact. Those damned birds. Not surprising. We’re almost out of water, with even less food. In a day or two we’ll be in serious trouble.’
‘I will leave such mundane worries with you, Lostara.’
‘Meaning, if all else fails, you can always kill and eat me, right? But what if I decide to kill you first? Obsessed as I am with mundane worries.’
The Claw settled down into a crosslegged position. ‘It’s become much cooler here, don’t you think? A localized phenomenon, I suspect. Although I would imagine that some measure of success in the ritual I am about to enact should warm things up somewhat.’
‘If only the excitement of disbelief,’ Lostara muttered, walking over to the edge of the tel and looking southwestward to where the red wall of the Whirlwind cut a curving slash across the desert. Behind her, she heard muted words, spoken in some language unknown to her. Probably gibberish. I’ve seen enough mages at work to know they don’t need words…not unless they’re performing. Pearl was probably doing just that. He was one for poses, even while affecting indifference to his audience of one. A man seeking his name in tomes of history. Some crucial role upon which the fate of the empire pivots.
She turned as he slapped dust from hands, and saw him rising, a troubled frown on his all-too-handsome face.
‘That didn’t take long,’ she said.
‘No.’ Even he sounded surprised. ‘I was fortunate indeed. A local earth spirit was killed…close by. By a confluence of dire fates, an incidental casualty. Its ghost lingers, like a child seeking lost parents, and so would speak to any and every stranger who happens by, provided that stranger is prepared to listen.’
Lostara grunted. ‘All right, and what did it have to say?’
‘A terrible incident—well, the terrible incident, the one that killed the spirit—the details of which lead me to conclude there is some connec—’
‘Good,’ she interrupted. ‘Lead on, we’re wasting time.’
He fell silent, giving her a wounded look that might well have been sincere. I asked the question, I should at least let him answer it.
A gesture, and he was making his way down the tel’s steep, stepped side.
She shouldered her pack and followed.
Reaching the base, the Claw led her around its flank and directly southward across a stony flat. The sunlight bounced from its bleached surface with a fierce, blinding glare. Barring a few ants scurrying underfoot, there was no sign of life on this withered stretch of ground. Small stones lay in elongated clusters here and there, as if describing the shorelines of a dying lake, a lake that had dwindled into a scatter of pools, leaving nothing but crusted salt.
They walked on through the afternoon, until a ridge of hills became visible to the southwest, with another massive mesa rising to its left. The flat began to form a discernible basin that seemed to continue on between the two formations. With dusk only moments away, they reached the even base of that descent, the mesa looming on their left, the broken hill ahead and to their right.
Towards the centre of this flat lay the wreckage of a trader’s wagon, surrounded by scorched ground where w
hite ashes spun in small vortices that seemed incapable of going anywhere.
Pearl leading, they strode into the strange burned circle.
The ashes were filled with tiny bones, burned white and grey by some intense heat, crunching underfoot. Bemused, Lostara crouched down to study them. ‘Birds?’ she wondered aloud.
Pearl’s gaze was on the wagon or, perhaps, something just beyond it. At her question he shook his head. ‘No, lass. Rats.’
She saw a tiny skull lying at her feet, confirming his words. ‘There are rats of a sort, in the rocky areas—’
He glanced over at her. ‘These are—were—D’ivers. A particularly unpleasant individual named Gryllen.’
‘He was slain here?’
‘I don’t think so. Badly hurt, perhaps.’ Pearl walked over to a larger heap of ash, and squatted to sweep it away.
Lostara approached.
He was uncovering a corpse, nothing but bones—and those bones were all terribly gnawed.
‘Poor bastard.’
Pearl said nothing. He reached down into the collapsed skeleton and lifted into view a small chunk of metal. ‘Melted,’ he muttered after a moment, ‘but I’d say it’s a Malazan sigil. Mage cadre.’
There were four additional heaps similar to that which had hidden the chewed bones. Lostara walked to the nearest one and began kicking the ash away.
‘This one’s whole!’ she hissed, seeing fire-blackened flesh.
Pearl came over. Together, they brushed the corpse clear from the hips upward. Its clothing had been mostly burned off, and fire had raced across the skin but had seemed incapable of doing much more than scorch the surface.
As the Claw swept the last of the ash from the corpse’s face, its eyes opened.
Cursing, Lostara leapt back, one hand sweeping her sword free of its scabbard.
‘It’s all right,’ Pearl said, ‘this thing isn’t going anywhere, lass.’
Behind the corpse’s wrinkled, collapsed lids, there were only gaping pits. Its lips had peeled back with desiccation, leaving it with a ghastly, blackened grin.
‘What remains?’ Pearl asked it. ‘Can you still speak?’
Faint sounds rasped from it, forcing Pearl to lean closer.
‘What did it say?’ Lostara demanded.
The Claw glanced back at her. ‘He said, “I am named Clam, and I died a terrible death.’”
‘No argument there—’
‘And then he became an undead porter.’
‘For Gryllen?’
‘Aye.’
She sheathed her tulwar. ‘That seems a singularly unpleasant profession following death.’
Pearl’s brows rose, then he smiled. ‘Alas, we won’t get much more from dear old Clam. Nor the others. The sorcery holding them animate fades. Meaning Gryllen is either dead or a long way away. In any case, recall the warren of fire—it was unleashed here, in a strange manner. And it left us a trail.’
‘It’s too dark, Pearl. We should camp.’
‘Here?’
She reconsidered, then scowled in the gloom. ‘Perhaps not, but none the less I am weary, and if we’re looking for signs, we’ll need daylight in any case.’
Pearl strode from the circle of ash. A gesture and a sphere of light slowly formed in the air above him. ‘The trail does not lead far, I believe. One last task, Lostara. Then we can find somewhere to camp.’
‘Oh, very well. Lead on, Pearl.’
Whatever signs he followed, they were not visible to Lostara. Even stranger, it seemed to be a weaving, wandering one, a detail that had the Claw frowning, his steps hesitant, cautious. Before too long, he was barely moving at all, edging forward by the smallest increments. And she saw that his face was beaded with sweat.
She bit back on her questions, but slowly drew her sword once more.
Then, finally, they came to another corpse.
The breath whooshed from Pearl, and he sank down to his knees in front of the large, burned body.
She waited until his breathing slowed, then cleared her throat and said, ‘What just happened, Pearl?’
‘Hood was here,’ he whispered.
‘Aye, I can well see that—’
‘No, you don’t understand.’ He reached out to the corpse, his hand closing into a fist above its broad chest, then punched down.
The body was simply a shell. It collapsed with a dusty crunch beneath the blow.
He glared back at her. ‘Hood was here. The god himself, Lostara. Came to take this man—not just his soul, but also the flesh—all that had been infected by the warren of fire—the warren of light, to be more precise. Gods, what I would do for a Deck of Dragons right now. There’s been a change in Hood’s…household.’
‘And what is the significance of all this?’ she asked. ‘I thought we were looking for Felisin.’
‘You’re not thinking, lass. Remember Stormy’s tale. And Truth’s. Felisin, Heboric, Kulp and Baudin. We found what was left of Kulp back at Gryllen’s wagon. And this’—his gesture was fierce—‘is Baudin. The damned Talon—though the proof’s not around his neck, alas. Remember their strange skin? Gesler, Stormy, Truth? The same thing happened to Baudin, here.’
‘You called it an infection.’
‘Well, I don’t know what it is. That warren changed them. There’s no telling in what way.’
‘So, we’re left with Felisin and Heboric Light Touch.’
He nodded.
‘Then I feel I should tell you something,’ Lostara continued. ‘It may not be relevant…’
‘Go on, lass.’
She turned to face the hills to the southwest. ‘When we trailed that agent of Sha’ik’s…into those hills—’
‘Kalam Mekhar.’
‘Aye. And we ambushed Sha’ik up at the old temple at the summit—on the trail leading into Raraku—’
‘As you have described.’
She ignored his impatience. ‘We would have seen all this. Thus, the events we’ve just stumbled upon here occurred after our ambush.’
‘Well, yes.’
She sighed and crossed her arms. ‘Felisin and Heboric are with the army of the Apocalpyse, Pearl. In Raraku.’
‘What makes you so certain?’
She shrugged. ‘Where else would they be? Think, man. Felisin’s hatred of the Malazan Empire must be all-consuming. Nor would Heboric hold much love for the empire that imprisoned and condemned him. They were desperate, after Gryllen’s attack. After Baudin and Kulp died. Desperate, and probably hurting.’
He slowly nodded, straightened from his crouch beside the corpse. ‘One thing you’ve never explained to me, Lostara. Why did your ambush fail?’
‘It didn’t. We killed Sha’ik—I would swear to it. A quarrel in the forehead. We could not recover the body because of her guards, who proved too much for our company. We killed her, Pearl.’
‘Then who in Hood’s name is commanding the Apocalypse?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Can you show me this place of ambush?’
‘In the morning, aye. I can take you right there.’
He simply stared at her, even as the sphere of light above them began to waver, then finally vanished with a faint sigh.
His memories had awakened. What had lain within the T’lan Imass, layered, indurated by the countless centuries, was a landscape Onrack could read once more. And so, what he saw before him now…gone were the mesas on the horizon, the wind-sculpted towers of sandstone, the sweeps of windblown sand and white ribbons of ground coral. Gone the gorges, arroyos and dead riverbeds, the planted fields and irrigation ditches. Even the city to the north, on the horizon’s very edge, clinging like a tumour to the vast winding river, became insubstantial, ephemeral to his mind’s eye.
And all that he now saw was as it had been…so very long ago.
The inland sea’s cloudy waves, rolling like the promise of eternity, along a shoreline of gravel that stretched north, unbroken all the way to the mountains that would one day b
e called the Thalas, and south, down to encompass the remnant now known as the Clatar Sea. Coral reefs revealed their sharkskin spines a sixth of a league beyond the beach, over which wheeled seagulls and long-beaked birds long since extinct.
There were figures walking along the strand. Renig Obar’s clan, come to trade whale ivory and dhenrabi oil from their tundra homelands, and it seemed they had brought the chill winds with them…or perhaps the unseemly weather that had come to these warm climes hinted of something darker. A Jaghut, hidden in some fasthold, stirring the cauldron of Omtose Phellack. Much more of this and the reefs would die, and with them all the creatures that depended on them.
A breath of unease fluttered through the Onrack who was flesh and blood. But he had stepped aside. No longer a bonecaster for his clan—Absin Tholai was far superior in the hidden arts, after all, and more inclined to the hungry ambition necessary among those who followed the Path of Tellann. All too often, Onrack had found his mind drawn to other things.
To raw beauty, such as he saw before him now. He was not one for fighting, for rituals of destruction. He was always reluctant to dance in the deeper recesses of the caves, where the drums pounded and the echoes rolled through flesh and bone as if one was lying in the path of a stampeding herd of ranag—a herd such as the one Onrack had blown onto the cave walls around them. His mouth bitter with spit, charcoal and ochre, the backs of his hands stained where they had blocked the spray from his lips, defining the shapes on the stone. Art was done in solitude, images fashioned without light, on unseen walls, when the rest of the clan slept in the outer caverns. And it was a simple truth, that Onrack had grown skilled in the sorcery of paint out of that desire to be apart, to be alone.
Among a people where solitude was as close to a crime as possible. Where to separate was to weaken. Where the very breaking of vision into its components—from seeing to observing, from resurrecting memory and reshaping it beyond the eye’s reach, onto walls of stone—demanded a fine-edged, potentially deadly propensity.
A poor bonecaster. Onrack, you were never what you were meant to be. And when you broke the unwritten covenant and painted a truthful image of a mortal Imass, when you trapped that lovely, dark woman in time, there in the cavern no-one was meant to find…ah, then you fell to the wrath of kin. Of Logros himself, and the First Sword.
The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen Page 334