Duiker frowned, rubbed at the back of his neck, and would not meet Picker’s hard stare. ‘Baruk didn’t take the news well. He seemed…upset. How many casks have you examined?’
‘There’s twelve of the bastards, including this one. Three are women.’
Duiker nodded. ‘They can choose. Warriors or not. If not, they cannot be challenged. Seems to relate to infant mortality.’
Picker frowned. ‘What does?’
‘Denul and midwifery. If most children generally survive, then mothers don’t need to birth eight or ten of them in the hopes that one or two make it—’
‘Well, that’s the way it is everywhere.’
‘Of course,’ Duiker continued as if he had not heard her statement, ‘some cultures have an overriding need to increase their population base. And this can impose strictures on women. There’s a high attrition rate among the Seguleh. A duelling society by its very nature cuts down the survival rate once adulthood is reached. Young warriors in their prime – probably as deadly as a war, only this is a war that never ends. Still, there must be periods – cycles, perhaps – when young women are freed up to choose their own path.’
Picker’s eyes settled on the corpse on the table while Duiker spoke. She tried to imagine such a society, wherein like bhederin cows all the women stood moaning as their tails were pushed to one side almost as soon as the latest calf had dropped out bleating on to the ground. It was madness. It was unfair. ‘Good thing even Seguleh women wear masks,’ she muttered.
‘Sorry, what?’
She scowled across at the historian. ‘Hides all the rage.’
‘Oh, well, I don’t know that the non-warrior women do – it never occurred to me to ask. But I see your point.’
‘But is that enough?’ she asked. ‘Do so many warriors kill each other that it’s necessary to demand that of the women?’
Duiker glanced at her, then away again.
The bastard’s hiding some suspicions.
‘I don’t know, Picker. Could be. Their savagery is infamous.’
‘How long do you think these ones have been down there? In the cellar, I mean, in those casks?’
‘The seals are templar. Baruk suggests that the cult persisted, in some residual form, long after its presumed extinction.’
‘Decades? Centuries?’
He shrugged.
‘But what are they doing here in Darujhistan anyway? Those islands are right off the south end of the damned continent. Nearly a thousand leagues between them and this city.’
‘I don’t know.’
Yeah, right. Sighing, she turned away. ‘Seen Antsy?’
‘At the bar.’
‘Typical. Depleting our stock.’
‘Your indecision has left him despondent.’
‘Stuff that, Duiker,’ she snapped, walking from the room, leaving him there with that damned corpse. It was a contest which of them was the least forthcoming, in any case, and she was tired of the duck and dodge. Yet, something in all of that had lodged in her the suspicion that the Guild contract out on them was connected, somehow, with this old temple and all its grisly secrets. Find the connection, and maybe find the piece of shit who put the chop on us. Find him, or her, so I can shove a cusser up inside nice and deep.
Antsy was leaning on the bar, glowering at nothing in particular, at least until he found a perfect victim in Picker as she walked up. ‘Careful, woman,’ he growled, ‘I ain’t in the mood.’
‘Ain’t in the mood for what?’
‘For anything.’
‘Except one thing.’
‘Anything you might try on me, is what I meant. As for the other thing, well, I’ve already decided to go it alone if I have to.’
‘So,’ she leaned on the bar beside him, ‘what are you waiting for, then?’
‘Blend. Once she’s back on her feet, Pick, she’ll be hungry enough to take the fight to ’em.’ He tugged on his moustache, then scowled at her. ‘It’s you I can’t figure.’
‘Antsy,’ Picker said, sighing, ‘much as I’d love to murder every damned assassin in this city, and the Guild Master, too, they’re not the source of the problem. Someone hired them, only we don’t know who, and we don’t know why. We’ve been through this before. We’re back right where we started, in fact, only this time we’re down two.’ She found she was trembling, and was unable to meet Antsy’s stare. ‘You know, I find myself wishing Ganoes Paran was here – if anybody could work out what’s going on, it’s the Captain.’
Antsy grunted. ‘Master of the Deck, aye.’ He drank down the last of his drink and straightened. ‘Fine, let’s go to the Finnest House, then – maybe he’s in there, maybe he’s not. Either way, it’s doing something.’
‘And leave Blend here on her own?’
‘She’s not alone. There’s Duiker and Scillara. Not to mention that bard. There ain’t nobody coming back to finish us, not in the daytime at least. We can be back before dusk, Pick.’
Still she hesitated.
Antsy stepped close. ‘Listen, I ain’t so stupid, I know what’s goin’ on in your head. But us just sitting here is us waiting for their next move. You know the marine doctrine, Corporal. It ain’t our job to react – it’s our job to hit first and make them do the reacting. Twice now they hit us – they do it again and we’re finished.’
Despite the alcoholic fumes drifting off the man, his blue eyes were hard and clear, and Picker knew he was right, and yet…she was afraid. And she knew he could see it, was struggling with it – badly – since fear was not something he’d expect from her. Not ever. Gods, you’ve become an old woman, Pick. Frail and cowering.
They’ve killed your damned friends. They damn near killed your dearest love.
‘I doubt he’s there,’ she said. ‘Else he’d have been by. He’s gone somewhere, Antsy. Might never be back and why would he? Wherever Paran’s gone, he’s probably busy – he’s the type. Always in the middle of some damned thing.’
‘All right,’ Antsy allowed. ‘Still, maybe there’s some way we can, um, send him a message.’
Her brows rose. ‘Now that’s an idea, Antsy. Glad one of us is thinking.’
‘Aye. Can we go now, then?’
They set out, making use of a side postern gate. Both wore cloaks, hiding armour and their swords, the weapons loose in their scabbards. Antsy also carried two sharpers, each in its own cloth sack, one knotted to his weapon harness and the other down at his belt. He could tug a grenado loose and fling it in its sack as one might throw a slingstone. It was his own invention, and he’d practised with a stone inside the sack, acquiring passable skill. Hood knew he was no sapper, but he was learning.
Nothing infuriated him more than losing a fight. True, they’d come out the other side, while pretty much all of the assassins had died, so it wasn’t really a defeat, but it felt like one. Since retiring, his handful of Malazan companions had come to feel like family. Not in the way a squad did, since squads existed to fight, to kill, to wage war, and this made the tightness between the soldiers a strange one. Stained with brutality, with the extremes of behaviour that made every moment of life feel like a damned miracle. No, this family wasn’t like that. They’d all calmed down some. Loosened up, left the nasty shit far behind. Or so they’d thought.
As he and Picker set out for Coll’s estate and the wretched house behind its grounds, he tried to think back to when he’d had nothing to do with this kind of life, back to when he’d been a scrawny bow-legged runt in Falar. Bizarrely, his own mental image of his ten-year-old face retained the damned moustache and he was pretty sure he’d yet to grow one, but memories were messy things. Unreliable, maybe mostly lies, in fact. A scatter of images stitched together by invented shit, so that what had been in truth a time as chaotic as the present suddenly seemed like a narration, a story.
The mind in the present was ever eager to narrate its own past, each one its own historian, and since when were historians reliable on anything? Aye, look at Duiker. He sp
un a fine tale, that one about Coltaine and the Chain of Dogs. Heartbreaking, but then those were always the best kind, since they made a person feel – when so much of living was avoiding feeling anything. But was any of it real? Aye, Coltaine got killed for real. The army got shattered just like he said. But any of the rest? All those details?
No way of ever knowing. And it don’t really matter in the end, does it?
Just like our own tales. Who we were, what we did. The narration going on, until it stops. Sudden, like a caught breath that never again lets out.
End of story.
The child with the moustache was looking at him, there in his head. Scowling, suspicious, maybe disbelieving. ‘You think you know me, old man? Not a chance. You don’t know a thing and what you think you remember ain’t got nothing to do with me. With how I’m thinking. With what I’m feeling. You’re farther away than my own da, that miserable, bitter tyrant neither of us could ever figure out, not you, not me, not even him. Maybe he’s not us, but then he’s not him, either.
‘Old man, you’re as lost as I am and don’t pretend no different. Lost in life…till death finds you.’
Well, this was why he usually avoided thinking about his own past. Better left untouched, hidden away, locked up in a trunk and dropped over the side to sink down into the depths. Problem was, he was needing to dredge up some things all over again. Thinking like a soldier, for one. Finding that nasty edge again, the hard way of looking at things. The absence of hesitation.
Gallons of ale wasn’t helping. Just fed his despondency, his sense of feeling too old, too old for all of it, now.
‘Gods below, Antsy, I can hear you grinding your teeth from over here. Whatever it is, looks like it’s tasting awful.’
He squinted across at her. ‘Expect me to be skippin’ a dance down this damned street? We’re in more trouble than we’ve ever been, Pick.’
‘We’ve faced worse—’
‘No. Because when we faced worse we was ready for it. We was trained to deal with it. Grab it by the throat, choke the life from it.’ He paused, and then spat on to the cobbles before adding, ‘I’m starting to realize what “retirement” really means. Everything we let go of, we’re now scrabbling to get back, only it’s outa reach. It’s fuckin’ out of reach.’
She said nothing, and that told Antsy she knew he was right; that she felt the same.
Scant comfort, this company.
They reached Coll’s estate, went round towards the back wall. The journey from K’rul’s Bar to here was already a blur in Antsy’s mind, so unimportant as to be instantly worthless. He’d not registered a single figure amidst the crowds on the streets. Had they been tracked? Followed? Probably. ‘Hood’s breath, Pick, I wasn’t checkin’ if we picked up a sniffin’ dog. See what I mean?’
‘We did,’ she replied. ‘Two of ’em. Lowlifes, not actual assassins, just their dogs, like you say. They’re keeping their distance – probably warned right off us. I doubt they’ll follow us into the wood.’
‘No,’ Antsy agreed. ‘They’d smell ambush.’
‘Right, so never mind them.’
She led the way into the overgrown thicket behind the estate. The uneven forest floor was littered at the edges with rubbish, but this quickly dwindled as they pushed deeper into the shadowy, overgrown copse. Few people, it was obvious, wanted to set eyes on the Finnest House, to feel the chill of it looking right back at them. Attention from something as ghastly as that dark edifice was unwanted attention.
Thirty uneven strides in, they caught sight of the black half-stone half-wood walls, the wrinkled, scarred face of the house, shutters matted like rotted wicker, no light leaking through from anywhere. Vines snaked up the sides, sprawled out over the humped ground in the low-walled yard. The few trees in that yard were twisted and leafless, roots bared like bones.
‘More lumps than last time I was here,’ Picker observed as they made their way towards the gate.
Antsy grunted. ‘No shortage of idiots tryin’ t’get inside. Thinkin’ they’ll find treasure…’
‘Secret short cuts to power,’ she added. ‘Magical items and crap.’
‘An’ all they got was an early grave.’ He hesitated at the gate and glanced at Picker. ‘Could be we end up the same way.’
‘Stay on the path, that’s the trick. Follow me.’
He fell into step close behind her as she set out along the narrow, winding track of tilted pavestones. Too close, as he trod on her heel and almost made her stumble. She shot him a vicious look over one shoulder before continuing on.
The sheer lack of anything untoward had Antsy’s nerves overwrought by the time they reached the door. He watched as Picker lifted a gloved hand, made a fist, hesitated, then thumped it hard against the black wood. The boom reverberated as if an abyss waited on the other side.
They waited. From here, all sounds of the city beyond this wood had vanished, as if the normal world had ceased to exist, or, perhaps, the endless rush of life out there held no relevance to what loomed before them now, this grotesque intrusion from another realm.
A dozen heartbeats. Picker made to pound once more on the door.
The clunk of a latch sounded dully through the thick wood, and a moment later the door creaked back.
Paran had spoken of the lich resident in the Finnest House, the blasted creature that had once been a Jaghut, but this was Antsy’s first sight of it. Tall (gods how he hated tall things), gaunt yet large-boned, adorned in a long ragged coat of black chain. Bared head with long colourless hair hanging down from patches – where the scalp was visible there was twisted scarring, and in one place something had punctured through the skull, and within the uneven hole left behind there was only darkness, as if the apparition’s brain had simply withered away. Tusks in a shattered face, the eyes shrunken back into shadows. All in all, Antsy was not inspired with confidence that this fell meeting would proceed in anything like a reasonable fashion.
‘Lord Raest,’ Picker said, bowing. ‘I am a friend of Ganoes Paran. If you recall, we met—’
‘I know who you are, Corporal Picker,’ the lich replied in a deep, resonant voice.
‘This is Sergeant Antsy—’
‘What do you want?’
‘We need to find Ganoes Paran—’
‘He is not here.’
‘We need to get a message to him.’
‘Why?’
Picker glanced at Antsy, then back up at Raest. ‘Well, it’s a complicated tale – can we come inside?’
Raest’s dead eyes held steady on her for a long moment, and then he asked, ‘Do you expect me to serve refreshments as well?’
‘Er, no, that won’t be necessary, Raest.’
The Jaghut stepped back.
Picker edged round him and halted a few steps in. Antsy pushed in behind her. They stood in a vaulted entryway, raw black stone underfoot. Opposite the front door there were twin doors and a narrow corridor off to the right and left. The air was dry and warm, smelling of freshly turned earth – reminding Antsy of the cellar beneath K’rul’s Bar.
‘Been digging graves?’ he asked, and then cursed himself, trying to ignore Picker’s wild stare.
Raest shut the door and faced them. ‘What manner of refreshments were you expecting, Sergeant Antsy? I am afraid I have nothing buried within the house. If you like, however—’
‘No that’s fine,’ Picker said hastily.
Antsy could only nod agreement. His mouth had dried up, tongue like a piece of leather gummed against the palate. And he needed to empty his bladder, but the thought of asking directions to the water closet was suddenly akin to demanding that the Jaghut hand over all his money or else.
Raest studied them in silence for a moment longer, and then said, ‘Follow me, if you must.’
The lich’s moccasin-wrapped feet made rasping sounds. Cloth rustled, the mail of the coat crackling, as Raest walked to the double doors and pushed them open.
Within was a main room bear
ing a stone fireplace directly opposite, wherein flames flickered cosily, and two deep, high-backed chairs to either side, sitting on a thick woven rug bearing arcane, geometric patterns barely visible in the general gloom. Large tapestries covered the walls to either side, one clearly Malazan in origin – probably Untan given the subject matter (some antiquated court event, significance long lost but no doubt relevant to House Paran); the other was local and depicted a scene from the Night of the Moon, when Moon’s Spawn had descended to brush the highest buildings in the city; when dragons warred in the night sky, and Raest himself had attempted his assault upon Darujhistan. The image focused on the dragons, one black and silver-maned, the other muted bronze or brown. Jaws and talons were locked upon one another as they fought in midair, with the backdrop the base of Moon’s Spawn and the silhouettes of rooftops and spires, all bordered in an intricate pattern of Great Ravens in flight.
‘That’s not bad,’ Picker muttered, eyeing the work.
Antsy grunted, not one to ponder too much on artwork beyond identifying whatever scene it happened to be recording. Personally, he could not imagine a more useless talent, and thanked the gods he’d never been cursed with such creative misery. Most of his own memories of great events he had witnessed employed stick figures, and that was good enough for him. It did not occur to him that this was at all unusual.
Raest gestured to the two chairs. ‘Sit down,’ he said, the tone only vaguely related to an invitation. When they had done so, both angling their chairs to face the Jaghut, he said, ‘Explain to me, if you will, how precisely you intend to send Ganoes Paran a message.’
‘We have no idea,’ Picker said, with a queasy smile. ‘We were hoping you might have some suggestions.’
‘I have many suggestions,’ Raest replied, ‘none of which are relevant to your request.’
Antsy slowly narrowed his eyes, but said nothing.
Picker opened her mouth a few times, breaking off a succession of possible responses, the repeated gaping reminding Antsy of netted fish on the deck of his da’s fisher boat. Unless I just made that up. All a lie, maybe. Maybe I seen a fish on some other deck. How can I be sure? How can—
The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen Page 768