The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen

by Steven Erikson

  As if he has just clambered free of one of the barrows in this forest. But he is not…is not Edur.

  ‘A dragon,’ the apparition said in the language of the Tiste, ‘once dragged itself down this trail. No forest back then. Naught but devastation. Blood in the broken earth. The dragon,’ mortal, made this trail. Do you feel this? Beneath you, the scattering of memory that pushes the roots away, that bows the trees to either side. A dragon.’ The figure then turned, looked down the path behind it. ‘The Edur—he ran unseeing, unmindful. Kin of my betrayer. Yet…an innocent.’ He faced her once more. ‘But you, mortal, are not nearly so innocent, are you?’

  Taken aback, Seren said nothing.

  Behind her, Hull Beddict spoke. ‘Of what do you accuse her, ghost?’

  ‘A thousand. A thousand upon a thousand misdeeds. Her. You. Your kind. The gods are as nothing. Demons less than children. Every Ascendant an awkward mummer. Compared to you. Is it ever the way, I wonder? That depravity thrives in the folds of the flower, when its season has come. The secret seeds of decay hidden beneath the burgeoning glory. All of us, here in your wake, we are as nothing.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Hull demanded.

  The wraiths had slipped away, back among the trees. But a new tide had come to swarm about the ghost’s tattered boots. Mice, a seething mass pouring up the trail. Ankle deep, the first reached Seren’s feet, scampered round them. A grey and brown tide, mindless motion. A multitude of tiny selves, seized by some unknown and unknowable imperative. From here…to there.

  There was something terrible, horrifying, about them. Thousands, tens of thousands—the trail ahead, for as far as she could see, was covered with mice.

  ‘The land was shattered,’ the apparition said. ‘Not a tree left standing. Naught but corpses. And the tiny creatures that fed on them. Hood’s own legion. Death’s sordid tide, mortals, fur-backed and rising. It seems so…facile.’ The undead seemed to shake himself. ‘I want nothing from you. The journeys are all begun. Do you imagine that your path has never before known footfalls?’

  ‘We are not so blind as to believe that,’ Seren Pedac said. She struggled against kicking away the mice swarming around her ankles, fearing the descent into hysteria. ‘If you will not—or cannot—clear this trail, then we’ve little choice—’

  The apparition’s head tilted. ‘You would deliver countless small deaths? In the name of what? Convenience?’

  ‘I see no end to these creatures of yours, ghost.’

  ‘Mine? They are not mine, mortal. They simply belong to my time. To the age of their squalid supremacy on this land. A multitude of tyrants to rule over the ash and dust we left in our wake. They see in my spirit a promise.’

  ‘And,’ Hull growled, ‘are we meant to see the same?’

  The apparition had begun fading, colours bleeding away. ‘If it pleases you,’ came the faint, derisive reply. ‘Of course, it may be that the spirit they see is yours, not mine.’

  Then the ghost was gone.

  The mice began flowing out to the forest on either side of the trail, as if suddenly confused, blinded once more to whatever greater force had claimed them. They bled away into the mulch, the shadows and the rotted wood of fallen trees. One moment there, the next, gone.

  Seren swung to Buruk the Pale. ‘What did you mean when you said the tiles didn’t lie? Barrow and Root, those are tiles in the Hold of the Azath, are they not? You witnessed a casting before you began this journey. In Trate. Do you deny it?’

  He would not meet her eyes. His face was pale. ‘The Holds are awakening, Acquitor. All of them.’

  ‘Who was he, then?’ Hull Beddict asked.

  ‘I do not know.’ Abruptly Buruk scowled and turned away. ‘Does it matter? The mud stirs and things clamber free, that is all. The Seventh Closure draws near—but I fear it will be nothing like what all of us have been taught. The birth of empire, oh yes, but who shall rule it? The prophecy is perniciously vague. The trail has cleared—let us proceed.’

  He clambered back into his wagon.

  ‘Are we to make sense of that?’ Hull asked.

  Seren shrugged. ‘Prophecies are like the tiles themselves, Hull. See in them what you will.’ The aftermath of her terror was sour in her throat, and her limbs felt loose and weak. Suddenly weary, she unstrapped her helm and lifted it off. The fine rain was like ice on her brow. She closed her eyes.

  I can’t save him. I can’t save any of us.

  Hull Beddict spoke to the Nerek.

  Blinking her eyes open, Seren shook herself. She tied her helm to her pack.

  The journey resumed. Clattering, groaning wagons, the harsh breathing of the Nerek. Motionless air and the mist falling through it like the breath of an exhausted god.

  Two days. Then it is done.

  Thirty paces ahead, unseen by any of them, an owl sailed across the path, silent on its broad, dark wings. There was blood on its talons, blood around its beak.

  Sudden bounties were unquestioned. Extravagance unworthy of celebration. The hunter knew only hunting, and was indifferent to the fear of the prey. Indifferent, as well, to the white crow that sailed in its wake.

  A random twist of the wind drew the remnants of the pyre’s smoke into the village. It had burned for a day and a night, and Trull Sengar emerged from his father’s longhouse the following morning to find the mist drifting across the compound bitter with its taint.

  He regretted the new world he had found. Revelations could not be undone. And now he shared secrets and the truth was, he would rather have done without them. Once familiar faces had changed. What did they know? How vast and insidious this deceit? How many warriors had Hannan Mosag drawn into his ambitions? To what extent had the women organized against the Warlock King?

  No words on the subject had been exchanged among the brothers, not since that conversation in the pit, the stove-in dragon skull the only witness to what most would call treason. The preparations for the impending journey were under way. There would be no slaves accompanying them, after all. Hannan Mosag had sent wraiths ahead to the villages lying between here and the ice-fields, and so provisions would await them, mitigating the need for burdensome supplies, at least until the very end.

  A wagon drawn by a half-dozen slaves had trundled across the bridge, in its bed newly forged weapons. Iron-tipped spears stood upright in bound bundles. Copper sheathing protected the shafts for fully half their length. Cross-hilted swords were also visible, hand-and-a-half grips and boiled leather scabbards. Billhooks for unseating riders, sheaves of long arrows with leather fletching. Throwing axes, as favoured by the Arapay. Broad cutlasses in the Merude style.

  The forges hammered the din of war once more.

  Trull saw Fear and Rhulad stride up to the wagon, more slaves trailing them, and Fear began directing the storage of the weapons.

  Rhulad glanced over as Trull approached. ‘Have you need of more spears, brother?’ he asked.

  ‘No, Rhulad. I see Arapay and Merude weapons here—and Beneda and Den-Ratha—’

  ‘Every tribe, yes. So it is now among all the forges, in every village. A sharing of skills.’

  Trull glanced over at Fear. ‘Your thoughts on this, brother? Will you now be training the Hiroth warriors in new weapons?’

  ‘I have taught how to defend against them, Trull. It is the Warlock King’s intention to create a true army, such as those of the Letherii. This will involve specialist units.’ Fear studied Trull for a moment, before adding, ‘I am Weapons Master for the Hiroth, and now, at the Warlock King’s command, for all of the tribes.’

  ‘You are to lead this army?’

  ‘If war should come, yes, I will lead it into battle.’

  ‘Thus are the Sengar honoured,’ Rhulad said, his face expressionless, the tone without inflection.

  Thus are we rewarded.

  ‘Binadas returned at dawn,’ Fear said. ‘He will take this day in rest. Then we shall depart.’

  Trull nodded.

  ‘A
Letherii trader caravan is coming,’ Rhulad said. ‘Binadas met them on the trail. The Acquitor is Seren Pedac. And Hull Beddict is with them.’

  Hull Beddict, the Sentinel who betrayed the Nerek, the Tarthenal and the Faraed. What did he want? Not all Letherii were the same, Trull knew. Opposing views sang with the clash of swords. Betrayals abounded among the rapacious multitude in the vast cities and indeed, if rumours were true, in the palace of the king himself. The merchant was charged to deliver the words of whoever had bought him. Whilst Seren Pedac, in the profession of Acquitor, would neither speak her mind nor interfere with the aims of the others. He had not been in the village during her other visits, and so could judge no more than that. But Hull, the once Sentinel—it was said he was immune to corruption, such as only a man once betrayed could be.

  Trull was silent as he watched the slaves drag the weapon bundles from the cart bed and carry them off to the armoury.

  Even his brothers seemed…different somehow. As if shadows stretched taut between them, unseen by anyone else, and could make the wind drone with weighted trepidation. Darkness, then, in the blood of brothers. None of this served the journey about to begin. None of it.

  I was ever the worrier. I do not see too much, I see only the wrong things. And so the fault is mine, within me. I need to remain mindful of that. Such as with my assumptions about Rhulad and Mayen. Wrong things, wrong thoughts, they are the ones that seem to be…tireless…

  ‘Binadas says Buruk carries Letherii iron,’ Rhulad said, breaking Trull’s reverie. ‘That will prove useful. Dapple knows, the Letherii are truly fools—’

  ‘They are not,’ Fear said. ‘They are indifferent. They see no contradiction in selling us iron at one moment and waging war with us the next.’

  ‘Nor the harvesting of tusked seals,’ Trull added, nodding. ‘They are a nation of ten thousand grasping hands, and none can tell which ones are true, which ones belong to those in power.’

  ‘King Ezgara Diskanar is not like Hannan Mosag,’ Fear said. ‘He does not rule his people with absolute…’

  Trull glanced over as his brother’s voice trailed off.

  Fear swung away. ‘Mayen is guest tonight,’ he said. ‘Mother may request you partake in the supper preparations.’

  ‘And so we shall,’ Rhulad said, meeting Trull’s eyes a moment before fixing his attention once more on the slaves.

  Absolute power…no, we have undone that, haven’t we? And indeed, perhaps it never existed at all. The women, after all…

  The other slaves were busy in the longhouse, scurrying back and forth across the trusses as Udinaas entered and made his way to his sleeping pallet. He was to serve this night, and so was permitted a short period of rest beforehand. He saw Uruth standing near the central hearth but was able to slip past unnoticed in the confusion, just another slave in the gloom.

  Feather Witch’s assertions remained with him, tightening his every breath. Should the Edur discover the truth that coursed through his veins, they would kill him. He knew he must hide, only he did not know how.

  He settled onto his mat. The sounds and smells of the chambers beyond drifted over him. Lying back, he closed his eyes.

  This night he would be working alongside Feather Witch. She had visited him that one time, in his dream. Apart from that, he had had no occasion to speak with her. Nor, he suspected, was she likely to invite an exchange of words. Beyond the mundane impropriety established by their respective class, she had seen in him the blood of the Wyval—or so she had claimed in the dream. Unless that was not her at all. Nothing more than a conjuration from my own mind, a reshaping of dust. He would, if possible, speak to her, whether invited or not.

  Rugs had been dragged outside and laid across trestles. The thump of the clubs the slaves used to beat the dust from them was like distant, hollow thunder.

  A flitting thought, vague wondering where the shadow wraith had gone, then sleep took him.

  He was without form, an insubstantial binding of senses. In ice. A blue, murky world, smeared with streaks of green, the grit of dirt and sand, the smell of cold. Distant groaning sounds, solid rivers sliding against each other. Lenses of sunlight delivering heat into the depths, where it built until a thundering snap shook the world.

  Udinaas flowed through this frozen landscape, which to all eyes in the world beyond was locked motionless, timeless. And nothing of the pressures, the heaved weights and disparate forces, was revealed, until that final explosive moment when things broke.

  There were shapes in the ice. Bodies lifted from the ground far below and held in awkward poses. Fleshed, eyes half open. Blossoms of blood suspended in motionless clouds around Wounds. Flows of bile and waste. Udinaas found himself travelling through scenes of slaughter. Tiste Edur and darker-skinned kin. Enormous reptilian beasts, some with naught but blades for hands. In multitudes beyond counting.

  He came to a place where the reptilian bodies formed a near-solid mass. Flowing among them, he suddenly recoiled. A vertical stream of melt water rose through the ice before him, threading up and out from the heaped corpses. The water was pink, mud-streaked, pulsing as it climbed upward, as if driven by some deep, subterranean heart.

  And that water was poison.

  Udinaas found himself fleeing through the ice, clashing with corpses, rock-hard flesh. Then past, into fissure-twisted sweeps devoid of bodies. Down solid channels. Racing, ever faster, the gloom swallowing him.

  Massive brown-furred creatures, trapped standing upright, green plants in their mouths. Herds held suspended above black earth. Ivory tusks and glittering eyes. Tufts of uprooted grasses. Long shapes—wolves, steep-shouldered and grey—caught in the act of leaping, running alongside an enormous horned beast. This was yet another scene of slaughter, lives stolen in an instant of catastrophic alteration—the world flung onto its side, the rush of seas, breathless cold that cut through flesh down to bone.

  The world…the world itself betrays. Errant take us, how can this be?

  Udinaas had known many for whom certainty was a god, the only god, no matter the cast of its features. And he had seen the manner in which such belief made the world simple, where all was divisible by the sharp cleaving of cold judgement, after which no mending was possible. He had seen such certainty, yet had never shared it.

  But he had always believed the world itself was…unquestionable. Not static—never static—but capable of being understood. It was undoubtedly cruel at times, and deadly…but you could almost always see it coming. Creatures frozen in mid-leap. Frozen whilst standing, grasses hanging from their mouths. This was beyond comprehension. Sorcery. It must have been. Even then, the power seemed unimaginable, for it was a tenet that the world and all that lived on it possessed a natural resistance to magic. Self-evident, else mages and gods would have reshaped and probably destroyed the balance of all things long ago. Thus, the land would resist. The beasts that dwelt upon it would resist. The flow of air, the seep of water, the growing plants and the droning insects—all would resist.

  Yet they failed.

  Then, in the depths, a shape. Squatting on bedrock, a stone tower. A tall narrow slash suggested a doorway, and Udinaas found himself approaching it through solid ice.

  Into that black portal.

  Something shattered, and, suddenly corporeal, he stumbled onto his knees. The stone was cold enough to tear the skin from his knees and the palms of his hands. He staggered upright, and his shoulder struck something that tottered with the impact.

  The cold made the air brutal, blinding him, shocking his lungs. Through freezing tears he saw, amidst a faint blue glow, a tall figure. Skin like bleached vellum, limbs too long and angular with too many joints. Black, frosted eyes, an expression of faint surprise on its narrow, arched features. The clothes it wore consisted of a harness of leather straps and nothing more. It was unarmed. A man, but anything but a man.

  And then Udinaas saw, scattered on the floor around the figure, corpses twisted in death. Dark, greenish skin,
tusked. A man, a woman, two children. Their bodies had been broken, the ends of shattered bone jutting out from flesh. The way they lay suggested that the white-skinned man had been their killer.

  Udinaas was shivering uncontrollably. His hands and feet were numb. ‘Wither? Shadow wraith? Are you with me?’

  Silence.

  His heart began hammering hard in his chest. This did not feel like a dream. It was too real. He felt no dislocation, no whispering assurance of a body lying on its sleeping pallet in an Edur longhouse.

  He was here, and he was freezing to death.

  Here. In the depths of ice, this world of secrets where time has ceased.

  He turned and studied the doorway.

  And only then noticed the footprints impressed upon the frost-laden flagstones. Leading out. Bared feet, human, a child’s.

  There was no ice visible beyond the portal. Naught but opaque silver, as if a curtain had fallen across the entrance.

  Feeling ebbing from his limbs, Udinaas backtracked the footprints. To behind the standing figure. Where he saw, after a numbed moment, that the back of the man’s head had been stove in. Hair and skin still attached to the shattered plates of the skull that hung down on the neck. Something like a fist had reached into the figure’s head, tearing through the grey flesh of the brain.

  The break looked unaccountably recent.

  Tiny tracks indicated that the child had stood behind the figure—no, had appeared behind it, for there were no others to be found. Had appeared…to do what? Reach into a dead man’s skull? Yet the figure was as tall as an Edur. The child would have had to climb.

  His thoughts were slowing. There was a pleasurable languor to his contemplation of this horrid mystery. And he was growing sleepy. Which amused him. A dream that made him sleepy. A dream that will kill me. Would they find a frozen corpse on the sleeping pallet? Would it be taken as an omen?

  Oh well, follow the prints…into that silver world. What else could he do?