‘I see. Of course, this sparring of his has now put him at a great disadvantage.’
Orbyn nodded as he poured his cup full. ‘Yes, with Brohl nowhere in sight, the blame for last night’s riot rests exclusively with the Factor. There will be repercussions, no doubt?’
‘Truthfinder, that riot is not yet over. It will continue into this night, where it will boil out from the slums with still greater force and ferocity. There will be more assaults on Letur’s estate, and before long on all of his properties and holdings throughout Drene, and those he will not be able to protect. The barracks will be under siege. There will be looting. There will be slaughter.’
Orbyn was leaning forward, rubbing at his oily brow. ‘So it is true, then. Financial collapse.’
‘The empire reels. The Liberty Consign is mortally wounded. When the people learn that there have been other riots, in city after city—’
‘The Tiste Edur will be stirred awake.’
‘Yes.’
Orbyn’s eyes fixed on Venitt Sathad’s. ‘There are rumours of war in the west.’
‘West? What do you mean?’
‘An invasion from the sea, that seems to be focused on the Tiste Edur themselves. Punitive, in the wake of the fleets. A distant empire that did not take kindly to the murder of its citizens. And now, reports of the Bolkando and their allies, massing along the border.’
A tight smile from Venitt Sathad. ‘The alliance we forged.’
‘Indeed. Another of Letur Anict’s brilliant schemes gone awry.’
‘Hardly his exclusively, Orbyn. Your Patriotists were essential participants in that propaganda.’
‘I wish I could deny that. And so we come to that single word, the one that filled my mind in the place of “honour”. I find you here, in Drene. Venitt Sathad, understand me. I know what you do for your master, and I know just how well you do it. I know what even Karos Invictad does not – nor have I any interest in enlightening him. Regarding you, sir.’
‘You wish to speak for yourself, now? Rather than the Patriotists?’
‘To stay alive, yes.’
‘Then the word is indeed not honour.’
Orbyn Truthfinder, the most feared man in Drene, drained his cup of wine. He leaned back. ‘You sit here, amidst carnage. People hurry past and they see you, and though you are, in features and in stature, barely worth noting, notice you they do. And a chill grips their hearts, and they do not know why. But I do.’
‘You comprehend, then, that I must pay Letur Anict a visit.’
‘Yes, and I wish you well in that.’
‘Unfortunately, Orbyn, we find ourselves in a moment of crisis. In the absence of Overseer Brohl Handar, it falls to Letur Anict to restore order. Yes, he may well fail, but he must be given the opportunity to succeed. For the sake of the empire, Orbyn, I expect you and your agents to assist the Factor in every way possible.’
‘Of course. But I have lost thirty-one agents since yesterday. And those among them who had families…well, no-one was spared retribution.’
‘It is a sad truth, Orbyn, that all who have been rewarded by tyranny must eventually share an identical fate.’
‘You sound almost satisfied, Venitt.’
The Indebted servant of Rautos Hivanar permitted a faint smile to reach his lips as he reached for his cup of wine.
Orbyn’s expression flattened. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘you do not believe a mob is capable of justice?’
‘They have been rather restrained, thus far.’
‘You cannot be serious.’
‘Orbyn, not one Tiste Edur has been touched.’
‘Because the rioters are not fools. Who dares face Edur sorcery? It was the very inactivity of the local Edur that incited the mobs to ever more vicious extremes – and I assure you, Letur Anict is well aware of that fact.’
‘Ah, so he would blame the Tiste Edur for this mess. How convenient.’
‘I am not here to defend the Factor, Venitt Sathad.’
‘No, you are here to bargain for your life.’
‘I will of course assist Letur Anict in restoring order. But I am not confident that he will succeed, and I will not throw away my people.’
‘Actually, you will do just that.’
Orbyn’s eyes widened. Sweat was now trickling down his face. His clothes were sticking patchily to the folds of fat beneath.
‘Truthfinder,’ Venitt Sathad continued, ‘the Patriotists have outlived their usefulness, barring one last, most noble sacrifice. As the focus of the people’s rage. I understand there is a Drene custom, something to do with the season of storms, and the making of seaweed fisher folk – life-sized dolls with shells for eyes, dressed in old clothes and the like. Sent out to mark the season’s birth, I believe, in small boats. An offering to the sealords of old – for the storms to drown. Quaint and unsurprisingly bloodthirsty, as most old customs are. The Patriotists, Orbyn, must become Drene’s seaweed fisher folk. We are in a season of storms, and sacrifices are necessary.’
Truthfinder licked his lips. ‘And what of me?’ he asked in a whisper.
‘Ah, that particular session of bargaining is not yet complete.’
‘I see.’
‘I hope so.’
‘Venitt Sathad, my agents – there are wives, husbands, children—’
‘Yes, I am sure there are. Just as there were wives, husbands and children of all those you happily arrested, tortured and murdered all in the name of personal financial gain. The people, Orbyn, do understand redressing an imbalance.’
‘This is as Rautos Hivanar demands—’
‘My master leaves the specifics to me. He respects my record of…efficiency. While the authority he represents no doubt bolsters compliance, I rarely make overt use of it. By that I mean I rarely find the need. You said you know me, Truthfinder, did you not?’
‘I know you, Venitt Sathad, for the man who found Gerun Eberict’s murderer and sent that half-blood away with a chest full of coins. I know you for the killer of a hundred men and women at virtually every level of society, and, no matter how well protected, they die, and you emerge unscathed, your identity unknown—’
‘Except, it seems, to you.’
‘I stumbled onto your secret life, Venitt Sathad, many years ago. And I have followed your career, not just within the empire, but in the many consulates and embassies where your…skills…were needed. To advance Letherii interests. I am a great admirer, Venitt Sathad.’
‘Yet now you seek to cast in the coin of your knowledge in order to purchase your life. Do you not comprehend the risk?’
‘What choice do I have? By telling you all I know, I am also telling you I have no illusions – I know why you are here, and what you need to do; indeed, my only surprise is that it has taken Rautos Hivanar so long to finally send you. In fact, it might be you have arrived too late, Venitt Sathad.’
To that, Venitt slowly nodded. Orbyn Truthfinder was a dangerous man. Yet, for the moment, still useful. As, alas, was Letur Anict. But such things were measured day by day, at times moment by moment. Too late. You fool, Orbyn, even you have no real idea just how true that statement is – too late.
Tehol Beddict played a small game, once, to see how it would work out. But this time – with that damned manservant of his – he has played a game on a scale almost beyond comprehension.
And I am Venitt Sathad. Indebted, born of Indebted, most skilled slave and assassin of Rautos Hivanar, and you, Tehol Beddict – and you, Bugg – need never fear me.
Take the bastards down. Every damned one of them. Take them all down.
It seemed Orbyn Truthfinder saw something in his expression then that drained all colour from the man’s round, sweat-streamed face.
Venitt Sathad was amused. Orbyn, have you found a truth?
Scattered to either side of the dark storm front, grey clouds skidded across the sky, dragging slanting sheets of rain. The plains were greening along hillsides and in the troughs of valleys, a mottled pat
chwork of lichen, mosses and matted grasses. On the summit of a nearby hill was the carcass of a wild bhederin, hastily butchered after dying to a lightning strike. The beast’s legs were sticking up into the air and on one hoof was perched a storm-bedraggled crow. Eviscerated entrails stretched out and down the slope facing Brohl Handar and his troop as they rode past.
The Awl were on the run. Warriors who had died of their wounds were left under heaps of stones, and they were as road-markers for the fleeing tribe, although in truth unnecessary since with the rains the trail was a broad swath of churned ground. In many ways, this uncharacteristic carelessness worried the Overseer, but perhaps it was as Bivatt had said: the unseasonal bank of storms that had rolled across the plains in the past three days had caught Redmask unprepared – there could be no hiding the passage of thousands of warriors, their families, and the herds that moved with them. That, and the bloody, disastrous battle at Praedegar had shown Redmask to be fallible; indeed, it was quite possible that the masked war leader was now struggling with incipient mutiny among his people.
They needed an end to this, and soon. The supply train out of Drene had been disrupted, the cause unknown. Bivatt had this day despatched a hundred Bluerose lancers onto their back-trail, seeking out those burdened wagons and their escort. Food shortage was imminent and no army, no matter how loyal and well trained, would fight on an empty stomach. Of course, bounteous feasts were just ahead – the herds of rodara and myrid. Battle needed to be joined. Redmask and his Awl needed to be destroyed.
A cloud scudded into their path with sleeting rain. Surprisingly cold for this late in the season. Brohl Handar and his Tiste Edur rode on, silent – this was not the rain of their homeland, nothing soft, gentle with mists. Here, the water lanced down, hard, and left one drenched in a score of heartbeats. We are truly strangers here.
But in that we are not alone.
They were finding odd cairns, bearing ghastly faces painted in white, and in the cracks and fissures of those tumuli there were peculiar offerings – tufts of wolf fur, teeth, the tusks from some unknown beast and antlers bearing rows of pecules and grooves. None of this was Awl – even the Awl scouts among Bivatt’s army had never before seen the like.
Some wandering people from the eastern wastelands, perhaps, yet when Brohl had suggested that, the Atri-Preda had simply shaken her head. She knows something. Another damned secret.
They rode out of the rain, into steaming hot sunlight, the rich smell of soaked lichen and moss.
The broad swath of churned ground was on their right. To draw any closer was to catch the stench of manure and human faeces, a smell he had come to associate with desperation. We fight our wars and leave in our wake the redolent reek of suffering and misery. These plains are vast, are they not? What terrible cost would we face if we just left each other alone? An end to this squabble over land – Father Shadow knows, no-one really owns it. The game of possession belongs to us, not to the rocks and earth, the grasses and the creatures walking the surface in their fraught struggle to survive.
A bolt of lightning descends. A wild bhederin is struck and nearly explodes, as if life itself is too much to bear.
The world is harsh enough. It does not need our deliberate cruelties. Our celebration of viciousness.
His scout was returning at the gallop. Brohl Handar raised a hand to halt his troop.
The young warrior reined in with impressive grace. ‘Overseer, they are on Q’uson Tapi. They did not go round it, sir – we have them!’
Q’uson Tapi, a name that was found only on the oldest Letherii maps; the words themselves were so archaic that even their meaning was unknown. The bed of a dead inland sea or vast salt lake. Flat, not a single rise or feature spanning leagues – or so the maps indicated. ‘How far ahead is this Q’uson Tapi?’
The scout studied the sky, eyes narrowing on the sun to the west. ‘We can reach it before dusk,’ he said.
‘And the Awl?’
‘They were less than a league out from the old shoreline, Overseer. Where they go, there is no forage – the herds are doomed, as are the Awl themselves.’
‘Has the rain reached Q’uson Tapi?’
‘Not yet, but it will, and those clays will turn into slime – the great wagons will be useless against us.’
As will cavalry on both sides, I would wager.
‘Ride back to the column,’ Brohl Handar told the scout, ‘and report to the Atri-Preda. We will await her at the old shoreline.’
A Letherii salute – yes, the younger Edur had taken quickly to such things – and the scout nudged his horse into motion.
Redmask, what have you done now?
Atri-Preda Bivatt had tried, for most of the day, to convince herself that what she had seen had been conjured from an exhausted, overwrought mind, the proclivity of the eye to find shapes in nothing, all in gleeful service to a trembling imagination. With dawn’s light barely a hint in the air she had walked out, alone, to stand before a cairn – these strange constructions they now came across as they pushed ever further east. Demonic faces in white on the flatter sides of the huge boulders. Votive offerings on niches and between the roughly stacked stones.
They had pried apart one such cairn two days earlier, finding at its core…very little. A single flat stone on which rested a splintered fragment of weathered wood – seemingly accidental, but Bivatt knew differently. She could recall, long ago on the north shores, on a day of fierce seas crashing that coast, a row of war canoes, their prows dismantled – and the wood, the wood was as this, here in the centre of a cairn on the Awl’dan.
Standing before this new cairn, with dawn attempting to crawl skyward as grey sheets of rain hammered down, she had happened to glance up. And saw – a darker grey, manshaped yet huge, twenty, thirty paces away. Solitary, motionless, watching her. The blood in her veins lost all heat and all at once the rain was as cold as those thrashing seas on the north coast years past.
A gust of wind, momentarily making the wall of water opaque, and when it had passed, the figure was gone.
Alas, the chill would not leave her, the sense of gauging, almost unhuman regard.
A ghost. A shape cast by her mind, a trick of the rain and wind and dawn’s uncertain birth. But no, he was there. Watching. The maker of the cairns.
Redmask. Myself. The Awl and the Letherii and Tiste Edur, here we duel on this plain. Assuming we are alone in this deadly game. Witnessed by naught but carrion birds, coyotes and the antelope grazing on the valley floors that watch us pass by day after day.
But we are not alone.
The thought frightened her, in a deep, childlike way – the fear born in a mind too young to cast anything away, be it dreams, nightmares, terrors or dread of all that was for ever unknowable. She felt no different now.
There were thousands. There must have been. How, then, could they hide? How could they have hidden for so long, all this time, invisible to us, invisible to the Awl?
Unless Redmask knows. And now, working in league with the strangers from the sea, they prepare an ambush. Our annihilation.
She was right to be frightened.
There would be one more battle. Neither side had anything left for more than that. And, barring more appalling displays of murderous skill from the mage-killer, Letherii sorcery would achieve victory. Brohl Handar’s scout had returned with the stunning news that Redmask had led his people out onto Q’uson Tapi, and there would be no negation of magic on the flat floor of a dead sea. Redmask forces the issue. Once we clash on Q’uson Tapi, our fates will be decided. No more fleeing, no more ambushes – even those Kechra will have nowhere to hide.
Errant, heed me please. If you are indeed the god of the Letherii, deliver no surprises on that day. Please. Give us victory.
The column marched on, towards the ancient shore of a dead sea. Clouds were gathering on the horizon ahead. Rain was thrashing down on that salt-crusted bed of clay and silt. They would fight in a quagmire, where cavalry was useless, wh
ere no horse would be quick enough to outrun a wave of deadly magic. Where warriors and soldiers would lock weapons and die where they stood, until one side stood alone, triumphant.
Soon now, they would have done with it. Done with it all.
Since noon Redmask had driven his people hard, out onto the seabed, racing ahead of the rain-clouds. A league, then two, beneath searing sun and air growing febrile with the coming storm. He had then called a halt, but the activity did not cease, and Toc Anaster had watched, bemused at first and then in growing wonder and, finally, admiration, as the Awl warriors set down weapons, divested themselves of their armour, and joined with the elders and every other non-combatant in pulling free from the wagons the tents and every stretch of hide they could find.
And the wagons themselves were taken apart, broken down until virtually nothing remained but the huge wheels and their axles, which were then used to transport the planks of wood. Hide and canvas were stretched out, pegged down, the stakes driven flush with the ground itself. Wooden walkways were constructed, each leading back to a single, centrally positioned wagon-bed that had been left intact and raised on legs of bundled spear-shafts to create a platform.
The canvas and hides stretched in rows, with squares behind each row, linked by flattened wicker walls that had been used for hut-frames. But no-one would sleep under cover this night. No, all that took shape here served but one purpose – the coming battle. The final battle.
Redmask intended a defence. He invited Bivatt and her army to close with him, and to do so the Letherii and the Tiste Edur would need to march across open ground – Toc sat astride his horse, watching the frenzied preparations and occasionally glancing northwestward, to those closing stormclouds – open ground, then, that would be a sea of mud.
She might decide to wait. I would, if I were her. Wait until the rains had passed, until the ground hardened once again. But Toc suspected that she would not exercise such restraint. Redmask was trapped, true, but the Awl had their herds – thousands of beasts most of whom were now being slaughtered – so, Redmask could wait, his warriors well fed, whilst Bivatt and her army faced the threat of real starvation. She would need all that butchered meat, but to get to it she had to go through the Awl; she had to destroy her hated enemy.
The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen Page 659