The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen

by Steven Erikson

  ‘Where’s the wagoner, then? The load crew?’

  Flashwit laughed an ugly laugh.

  Mosel shrugged again, then gestured further down the ditch. Four figures, bound and gagged, were lying motionless in the yellow grass.

  The two squads of sergeants Sobelone and Tugg were gathered round a wrestling match between, Bottle saw as he pushed his way in for a better look, Saltlick and Shortnose. Coins were being flung down, puffing the dust of the road, as the two heavy infantrymen strained and heaved in a knot of arm and leg holds. Saltlick’s massive, round face was visible, red, sweaty and streaked with dust, the expression fixed in its usual cow-like, uninterested incomprehensibility. He blinked slowly, and seemed to be concentrating on chewing something.

  Bottle nudged Toles, the soldier on his right. ‘What are they fighting over?’

  Toles looked down on Bottle, his thin, pallid face twitching. ‘It’s very simple. Two squads, marching in step, one behind the other, then the other in front of the one that had been in front beforehand, proving the mythical camaraderie to be no more than some epic instigator of bad poetry and bawdy songs designed to appease lowbrows, in short, a lie. Culminating at the last in this disreputable display of animal instincts—’

  ‘Saltlick bit Shortnose’s ear off,’ cut in Corporal Reem, standing on Bottle’s left.

  ‘Oh. Is that what he’s chewing?’

  ‘Yeah. Taking his time with it, too.’

  ‘Do Tugg and Sobelone know about the captain’s meeting?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘So, Shortnose who got his nose tip cut off now has only one ear, too.’

  ‘Yeah. He’ll do anything to spite his face.’

  ‘Is he the one who got married last week?’

  ‘Yeah, to Hanno there. She’s the one betting against him. Anyway, from what I hear, it ain’t his face that she adores, if you know what I mean.’

  Bottle caught sight of a low hill on the north side of the road on which stood a score of twisted, hunched guldindha trees. ‘Is that the old cemetery?’

  ‘Looks like it, why?’

  Without answering, Bottle pushed his way back through the crowd and set off for the burial ground. He found Sergeant Balm in a looter’s pit, face streaked with ash, making a strange monotonous nasal groaning sound as he danced in tight circles.

  ‘Sergeant, captain wants a meeting—’

  ‘Shut up, I’m busy.’

  ‘Dusk, in the sheep pen—’

  ‘Interrupt a Dal Honese death dirge and you’ll know a thousand thousand lifetimes of curses, your bloodlines for ever. Hairy old women will steal your children and your children’s children and chop them up and cook them with vegetables and tubers and a few precious threads of saffron—’

  ‘I’m done, Sergeant. Orders delivered. Goodbye.’

  ‘—and Dal Honese warlocks wearing snake girdles will lie with your woman and she’ll birth venomous worms all covered in curly black hair—’

  ‘Keep it up, Sergeant, and I’ll make a doll of you—’

  Balm leapt from the pit, eyes suddenly wide. ‘You evil man! Get away from me! I never done nothing to you!’ He spun about and ran away, gazelle-skins flapping.

  Bottle turned and began the long walk back to the camp.

  He found Strings assembling his crossbow, Cuttle watching with avid interest. A crate of Moranth munitions was to one side, the lid pried loose and the grenados lying like turtle eggs in nests of padding. The others of the squad were sitting some distance away, looking nervous.

  The sergeant glanced up. ‘Bottle, you found them all?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Good. So, how are the other squads holding up?’

  ‘Just fine,’ Bottle replied. He regarded the others on the far side of the hearth. ‘What’s the point?’ he asked. ‘If that box goes up, it’ll knock down Y’Ghatan’s wall from here, and you and most of this army will be red hail.’

  Sudden sheepish expressions. Grunting, Koryk rose, deliberately casual. ‘I was already sitting here,’ he said. ‘Then Tarr and Smiles crawled over to huddle in my shadow.’

  ‘The man lies,’ Smiles said. ‘Besides, Bottle, why did you volunteer to go wandering with the captain’s orders?’

  ‘Because I’m not stupid.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Tarr said. ‘Well, you’re back now, aren’t you?’

  ‘I thought they’d be finished by now.’ He waved a fly away that had been buzzing in front of his face, then walked over to sit downwind of the hearth. ‘So, Sergeant, what do you figure the captain’s got to say?’

  ‘Sappers and shields,’ Cuttle said in a growl.

  ‘Shields?’

  ‘Aye. We scurry in hunched low and the rest of you shield us from all the arrows and rocks until we’re done planting the mines, then whoever’s left runs back out, as fast as they can and it won’t be fast enough.’

  ‘A one-way trip, then.’

  Cuttle grinned.

  ‘It’ll be more elaborate than that,’ Strings said. ‘I hope.’

  ‘She goes straight in, that’s what she does.’

  ‘Maybe, Cuttle. Maybe not. She wants most of her army still breathing when the dust’s settled.’

  ‘Minus a few hundred sappers.’

  ‘We’re getting rare enough as it is,’ Strings said. ‘She won’t want to waste us.’

  ‘That’d be a first for the Malazan Empire.’

  The sergeant looked over at Cuttle. ‘Tell you what, why don’t I just kill you now and be done with it?’

  ‘Forget it. I want to take the rest of you sorry humpers with me.’

  Nearby, Sergeant Gesler and his squad had appeared and were making their camp. Corporal Stormy, Bottle noted, wasn’t with them. Gesler strode over. ‘Fid.’

  ‘Kalam and Quick back, too?’

  ‘No, they went on, with Stormy.’

  ‘On? Where?’

  Gesler crouched opposite Strings. ‘Let’s just say I’m actually glad to see your ugly face, Fid. Maybe they’ll make it back, maybe they won’t. I’ll tell you about it later. Spent the morning with the Adjunct. She had lots of questions.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘About the stuff I’ll tell you about later. So we’ve got a new captain.’

  ‘Faradan Sort.’

  ‘Korelri?’

  Strings nodded. ‘Stood the Wall, we think.’

  ‘So she can probably take a punch.’

  ‘Then punch back, aye.’

  ‘Well that’s just great.’

  ‘She wants all the sergeants for a meeting tonight.’

  ‘I think I’ll go back and answer a few more of the Adjunct’s questions.’

  ‘You can’t avoid meeting her for ever, Gesler.’

  ‘Oh yeah? Watch me. So, where did they move Captain Kindly to?’

  Strings shrugged. ‘To some company that needs pulling into shape, I’d imagine.’

  ‘And we don’t?’

  ‘Harder terrifying us than most in this army, Gesler. I think he’d already given up on us, in any case. I’m not sorry to see the miserable bastard on his way. This meeting tonight will likely be about what we’ll be doing in the siege. Either that or she just wants to waste our time with some inspiring tirade.’

  ‘For the glory of the empire,’ Gesler said, grimacing.

  ‘For vengeance,’ Koryk said from where he sat tying fetishes onto his baldric.

  ‘Vengeance is glorious, so long as it’s us delivering it, soldier.’

  ‘No it’s not,’ said Strings. ‘It’s sordid, no matter how you look at it.’

  ‘Ease up, Fid. I was only half serious. You’re so tense you’d think we was heading into a siege or something. Anyway, why ain’t there a few hands of Claw to do the dirty work? You know, infiltrate the city and the palace and stick a knife in Leoman and be done with it. Why do we have to get messed up with a real fight? What kind of empire are we, these days?’

  No-one spoke for a time. Bottle watched his sergea
nt. Strings was testing the pull on the crossbow, but Bottle could see that he was thinking.

  Cuttle said, ‘Laseen’s pulled ’em in. Close and tight.’

  The regard Gesler fixed on the sapper was level, gauging. ‘That the rumour, Cuttle?’

  ‘One of ’em. What do I know? Maybe she caught something on the wind.’

  ‘You certainly have,’ Strings muttered as he examined the case of quarrels.

  ‘Only that the few veteran companies still on Quon Tali were ordered to Unta and Malaz City.’

  Strings finally looked up. ‘Malaz City? Why there?’

  ‘The rumour weren’t that specific, Sergeant. Just the where, not the why. Anyway, there’s something going on.’

  ‘Where’d you catch all this?’ Gesler asked.

  ‘That new sergeant, Hellian, from Kartool.’

  ‘The drunk one?’

  ‘That’s her.’

  ‘Surprised she noticed anything,’ Strings observed. ‘What got her shipped out here?’

  ‘That she won’t talk about. In the wrong place at the wrong time, I figure, from the way her face twists all sour on the subject. Anyway, she went to Malaz City first, then joined up with the transports at Nap, then on to Unta. She never seems so drunk she can’t keep her eyes open.’

  ‘You trying to get your hand on her thigh, Cuttle?’

  ‘A bit too young for me, Fid, but a man could do worse.’

  ‘A bleary-eyed wife,’ Smiles said with a snort. ‘That’s probably the best you could manage, Cuttle.’

  ‘When I was a lad,’ the sapper said, reaching out to collect a grenado – a sharper, Bottle noted with alarm as Cuttle began tossing it up in the air and catching it one-handed – ‘every time I said something disrespectful of my betters, my father’d take me out back and slap me half-unconscious. Something tells me, Smiles, your da was way too indulgent when it came to his little girl.’

  ‘You just try it, Cuttle, and I’ll stick a knife in your eye.’

  ‘If I was your da, Smiles, I’d have long ago killed myself.’

  She went pale at that, although no-one else seemed to notice, since their eyes were following the grenado up and down.

  ‘Put it away,’ Strings said.

  An ironic lifting of the brows, then, smiling, Cuttle returned the sharper to the crate. ‘Anyway, it looks like Hellian’s got a capable corporal, which tells me she’d held onto good judgement, despite drinking brandy like water.’

  Bottle rose. ‘Actually, I forgot about her. Where are they camped, Cuttle?’

  ‘Near the rum wagon. But she already knows about the meeting.’

  Bottle glanced over at the crate of munitions. ‘Oh. Well, I’m going for a walk in the desert.’

  ‘Don’t stray too far,’ the sergeant said, ‘could be some of Leoman’s warriors out there.’

  ‘Right.’

  A short while later he came within sight of the intended meeting place. Just beyond the collapsed building was an overgrown rubbish heap, misshapen with tufts of yellow grass sprouting from the barrow-sized mound. There was no-one in sight. Bottle made his way towards the midden, the sounds of the encampment dwindling behind him. It was late afternoon but the wind remained hot as the breath of a furnace.

  Chiselled wall and foundation stones, shattered idols, lengths of splintered wood, animal bones and broken pottery. Bottle clambered up the side, noting the most recent leavings – Malazan-style pottery, black-glazed, squat, fragmented images of the most common motifs: Dassem Ultor’s death outside Y’Ghatan, the Empress on her throne, the First Heroes and the Quon pantheon. The local style, Bottle had seen from the villages they had passed through, was much more elegant, elongated with cream or white glazing on the necks and rims and faded red on the body, adorned with full-toned and realistic images. Bottle paused at seeing one such shard, a body-piece, on which had been painted the Chain of Dogs. He picked it up, wiped dust from the illustrated scene. Part of Coltaine was visible, affixed to the cross of wood, overhead a wild flurry of black crows. Beneath him, dead Wickans and Malazans, and a cattle-dog impaled on a spear. A chill whispered along his spine and he let the shard drop.

  Atop the mound, he stood for a time, studying the sprawl of the Malazan army along the road and spilling out to the sides. The occasional rider wending through carrying messages and reports; carrion birds, capemoths and rhizan wheeling overhead like swarming flies.

  He so disliked omens.

  Drawing off his helm, Bottle wiped sweat from his brow and turned to face the odhan to the south. Once fertile, perhaps, but now a wasteland. Worth fighting for? No, but then, there wasn’t much that was. The soldier at your side, maybe – he’d been told that enough times, by old veterans with nothing left but that dubious companionship. Such bonds could only be born of desperation, a closing in of the spirit, down to a manageable but pitiful area containing things and people one could care about. For the rest, pure indifference, twisting on occasion into viciousness.

  Gods, what am I doing here?

  Stumbling into ways of living didn’t seem a worthy path to take. Barring Cuttle and the sergeant, the squad was made up of people no different from Bottle. Young, eager for a place to stand that didn’t feel so isolated and lonely, or filling oneself with bravado to mask the fragile self hiding within. But all that was no surprise. Youth was headlong, even when it felt static, stagnant and stifling. It liked its emotions extreme, doused in fiery spices, enough to burn the throat and set flame to the heart. The future was not consciously rushed into – it was just the place you suddenly ended up in, battered and weary and wondering how in Hood’s name you got there. Well. He could see that. He didn’t need the echoes of his grandmother’s ceaseless advice whispering through his thoughts.

  Assuming, of course, that voice belonged to his grandmother. He had begun to suspect otherwise.

  Bottle crossed the heap, moved down onto the south side. At the base here the desiccated ground was pitted, revealing much older leavings of rubbish – red-glazed sherds with faded images of chariots and stilted figures wearing ornate headdresses and wielding strange hook-bladed weapons. The massive olive-oil jars common to this region retained these old forms, clinging to a mostly forgotten antiquity as if the now lost golden age was any different from the present one.

  His grandmother’s observations, those ones. She’d had nothing good to say about the Malazan Empire, but even less about the Untan Confederacy, the Li Heng League and all the other despotic rulers of the pre-empire days on Quon Tali. She had been a child through all the Itko Kan–Cawn Por wars, the Seti Tide, the Wickan migrations, the Quon attempt at hegemony. All blood and stupidity, she used to say. All prod and pull. The old with their ambitions and the young with their eager mindless zeal. At least the Emperor put an end to all that – a knife in the back for those grey tyrants and distant wars for the young zealots. It ain’t right but nothing ever is. Ain’t right, as I said, but better than worst, and I remember the worst.

  Now here he was, in the midst of one of those distant wars. Yet there had been no zeal in his motivations. No, something far more pathetic. Boredom was a poor reason to do anything. Better to hold high some raging brand of righteousness, no matter how misguided and lacking in subtlety.

  Cuttle talks of vengeance. But he makes his trying to feed us something too obvious, and we’re not swelling with rage like we’re supposed to. He couldn’t be sure of it, but this army felt lost. At its very core was an empty place, waiting to be filled, and Bottle feared it would wait for ever.

  He settled down onto the ground, began a silent series of summonings. Before long, a handful of lizards scampered across the dusty earth towards him. Two rhizan settled down onto his right thigh, their wings falling still. An arch spider, big as a horse’s hoof and the colour of green glass, leapt from a nearby rock and landed light as a feather on his left knee. He studied his array of companions and decided they would do. Gestures, the stroke of fingers, silent commands, and the motley servants
hurried off, making one and all towards the sheep pen where the captain would address the sergeants.

  It paid to know just how wide Hood’s Gate was going to be come the assault.

  And then something else was on its way.

  Sudden sweat on Bottle’s skin.

  She appeared from the heat haze, moving like an animal – prey, not predator, in her every careful, watchful motion – fine-furred, deep brown, a face far more human than ape, filled with expression – or at least its potential, for the look she fixed upon him now was singular in its curiosity. As tall as Bottle, lean but heavy-breasted, belly distended. Skittish, she edged closer.

  She is not real. A manifestation, a conjuration. A memory sprung from the dust of this land.

  He watched her crouch to collect a handful of sand, then fling it at him, voicing a loud barking grunt. The sand fell short, a few pebbles bouncing off his boots.

  Or maybe I am the conjured, not her. In her eyes the wonder of coming face to face with a god, or a demon. He looked past her, and saw the vista of a savannah, thick with grasses, stands of trees and wildlife. Nothing like it should have been, only what it once was, long ago. Oh, spirits, why won’t you leave me alone?

  She had been following. Following them all. The entire army. She could smell it, see the signs of its passing, maybe even hear the distant clack of metal and wooden wheels punching down the sides of stones in the road as they rocked along. Driven on by fear and fascination, she had followed, not understanding how the future could echo back to her world, her time. Not understanding? Well, he couldn’t either. As if all is present, as if every moment co-exists. And here we two are, face to face, both too ignorant to partition our faith, our way of seeing the world – and so we see them all, all at once, and if we’re not careful it will drive us mad.

  But there was no turning back. Simply because back did not exist.

  He remained seated and she came closer, chattering now in some strange glottal tongue filled with clicks and stops. She gestured at her own belly, ran an index figure along it as if drawing a shape on the downy, paler pelt.

  Bottle nodded. Yes, you carry a child. I understand that much. Still, what is that to me?