The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen

by Steven Erikson

  ‘You had choices, Cutter,’ she said. ‘More choices than I ever had.’

  ‘You could have told Gorlas no when he sought your hand in marriage.’

  ‘Really? Now that reveals one thing in you that’s not changed – your naïveté.’

  He shrugged. ‘If you say so. What next, Challice?’

  His sudden, seemingly effortless dismissal of the argument took her breath away. It doesn’t matter to him. None of it. Not how I feel, not how I see him. ‘I need to think,’ she said, inwardly flailing.

  He nodded as if unsurprised.

  ‘Tomorrow evening,’ she said, ‘we should meet again.’

  A half-grin as he asked, ‘To talk?’

  ‘Among other things.’

  ‘All right, Challice.’

  Some thoughts, possessing a frightening kind of self-awareness, knew to hide deep beneath others, riding unseen the same currents, where they could grow unchallenged, unexposed by any horrified recognition. One could always sense them, of course, but that was not the same as slashing through all the obfuscation, revealing them bared to the harsh light and so seeing them wither into dust. The mind ran its own shell-game, ever amused at its own sleight of hand misdirection – in truth, this was how one tended to live, from moment to moment, with the endless exchange of denials and deference and quick winks in the mirror, even as inner proclamations and avowals thundered with false willpower and posturing conviction.

  Does this lead one into unease?

  Challice Vidikas hurried home, nevertheless taking a circuitous route as now and then whispers of paranoia rose in faint swells to the surface of her thoughts.

  She was thinking of Cutter, this man who had once been Crokus. She was thinking of the significance in the new name, the new man she had found. She was thinking, also (there, beneath the surface), of what to do with him.

  Gorlas would find out, sooner or later. He might confront her, he might not. She might discover that he knew only by arriving one afternoon at the loft in the annexe, and finding Cutter’s hacked, lifeless corpse awaiting her on the bed.

  She knew she was trapped – in ways a free man like Cutter could never comprehend. She knew, as well, that the ways out were limited, each one chained to sacrifices, losses, abandonments, and some…despicable. Yes, that was the only word for them.

  Despicable. She tasted the word anew, there in her mind. Contemplated whether she was in fact capable of living with such a penance. But why would I? What would I need to see done, to make me see myself in that way?

  How many lives am I willing to destroy, in order to be free?

  The question itself was despicable, the stem to freedom’s blessed flower – to grasp hold was to feel the stab of countless thorns.

  Yet she held tight now, riding the pain, feeling the slick blood welling up, running down. She held tight, to feel, to taste, to know what was coming…if…if I decide to accept this.

  She could wait for Gorlas to act. Or she could strike first.

  A corpse lying on the bed. A mangled rose lying on the floor.

  Cutter was not Crokus – she could see that, yes, very clearly. Cutter was…dangerous. She recalled the scars, the old knife wounds, sword wounds even, perhaps. Others that might have been left by the punch of arrows or crossbolts. He had fought, he had taken lives – she was certain of it.

  Not the boy he’d once been. But this man he now is…can he be used? Would he even blink if I so asked?

  Should I ask? Soon? Tomorrow?

  Thus exposed, one must recoil indeed, but these were deep-run thoughts, nowhere near the surface. They were free to flow, free to swirl round unseen, as if detached from all reality. But they weren’t, were they? Detached from all reality.

  Oh, no, they were not.

  Does this lead one into unease?

  On a surge of immense satisfaction, Barathol Mekhar’s rather large fist smashed into the man’s face, sending him flying back through the doorway of the smithy. He stepped out after him, shaking the stinging pain from his hand. ‘I will be pleased to pay the Guild’s annual fees, sir,’ he said, ‘when the Guild decides to accept my membership. As for demanding coin while denying my right to run my business, well, you have just had my first instalment.’

  A smashed nose, blood pouring forth, eyes staring up from a puffiness burgeoning to swallow up his features, the Guild agent managed a feeble nod.

  ‘You are welcome,’ Barathol continued, ‘to come back next week for the next one, and by all means bring a few dozen of your associates – I expect I’ll be in an even more generous mood by then.’

  A crowd had gathered to watch, but the blacksmith was disinclined to pay them any attention. He rather wanted word to get out, in fact, although from what he’d gathered his particular feud was already a sizzling topic of conversation, and no doubt his words just spoken would be quoted and misquoted swift as a plague on the hot winds.

  Turning about, he walked back into his shop.

  Chaur stood near the back door, wearing his heavy apron with its spatter of burn holes revealing the thick weave of aesgir grass insulation beneath the leather – the only plant known that did not burn, even when flung into a raging fire. Oversized gloves of the same manufacture covered his hands and forearms, and he was holding tongs that gripped a fast-cooling curl of bronze. Chaur’s eyes were bright and he was smiling.

  ‘Best get that back into the forge,’ Barathol said.

  As expected, business was slow. A campaign had begun, fomented by the Guild, that clearly involved the threat of a blacklist that could – and would – spread to other guilds in the city. Barathol’s customers could find themselves unable to purchase things they needed from a host of other professions, and that of course would prove devastating. And as for Barathol’s own material requirements, most doors had already begun closing in his face. He was forced to seek out alternatives in the black market, never a secure option.

  As his friend Mallet had predicted, Malazans resident in the city had been indifferent to all such extortions and warnings against taking Barathol’s custom. There was, evidently, something in their nature that resisted the notion of threats, and in fact being told they could not do something simply raised their hackles and set alight a stubborn fire in their eyes. That such a response could prove a curse had been driven home with the slaughter at K’rul’s – and the grief that followed remained deeply embedded in Barathol, producing within him a dark, cold rage. Unfortunately for the latest agent from the Guild of Blacksmiths, something of that fury had transferred itself into Barathol’s instinctive reaction to the man’s demand for coin.

  Even so, he had not come to Darujhistan to make enemies. Yet now he found himself in a war. Perhaps more than one at that. No wonder, then, his foul mood.

  He made his way into the work yard, where the heat from the two stoked forges rolled over him in a savage wave. His battle axe needed a new edge, and it might do to fashion a new sword – something he could actually wear in public.

  Barathol’s new life in Darujhistan was proving anything but peaceful.

  Bellam Nom was, in Murillio’s estimation, the only student of the duelling school worthy of the role. Fifteen years of age, still struggling with the awkwardness of his most recent growth spurt, he approached his studies with surprising determination. Even more astonishing, the lad actually wanted to be here.

  In the prolonged absence of Stonny Menackis’s attention, it had fallen to Murillio to assume most of the school’s responsibilities, and he was finding this very distant relation of Rallick (and Torvald) in every respect a Nom, which alone encouraged a level of instruction far beyond what he gave the others. The young man stood before him sheathed in sweat, as the last of the class hurried out through the compound gate, the echoes of their voices quickly fading, and Murillio sensed that Bellam was far from satisfied with the torturously slow pace of the day’s session.

  ‘Master,’ he now said, ‘I have heard of an exercise involving suspended rings. To
achieve the perfect lunge, piercing the hole and making no contact with the ring itself—’

  Murillio snorted. ‘Yes. Useful if you happen to be in a travelling fair or a circus. Oh, for certain, Bellam, point control is essential in fencing with the rapier – I wouldn’t suggest otherwise. But as an exercise, I am afraid its value is limited.’

  ‘Why?’

  Murillio eyed the young man for a moment, and then sighed. ‘Very well. The exercise requires too many constraints, few of which ever occur in the course of a real fight. You achieve point control – useful point control, I mean – when it’s made integral to other exercises. When it’s combined with footwork, distance, timing and the full range of defence and offence demanded when facing a real, living opponent. Spearing rings is all very impressive, but the form of concentration it demands is fundamentally different from the concentration necessary in a duel. In any case, you can spend the next two months mastering the art of spearing a ring, or two months mastering the art of staying alive against a skilled enemy, and not just staying alive, but presenting a true threat to that enemy, in turn.’ He shrugged. ‘Your choice, of course.’

  Bellam Nom grinned suddenly and Murillio saw at once how much he looked like his oh-so-distant cousin. ‘I still might try it – in my own time, of course.’

  ‘Tell you what,’ Murillio said. ‘Master spearing a suspended ring at the close of a mistimed lunge, an off-balance recovery to your unarmed side, two desperate parries, a toe-stab to your opponent’s lead foot to keep him or her from closing, and a frantic stop-thrust in the midst of a back-pedalling retreat. Do that, and I will give you my second best rapier.’

  ‘How long do I have?’

  ‘As long as you like, Bellam.’

  ‘Extra time with an instructor,’ said a voice from the shaded colonnade to one side, ‘is not free.’

  Murillio turned and bowed to Stonny Menackis. ‘Mistress, we were but conversing—’

  ‘You were giving advice,’ she cut in, ‘and presenting this student with a challenge. The first point qualifies as instruction. The second is an implicit agreement to extracurricular efforts on your part at some time in the future.’

  Bellam’s grin had broadened. ‘My father, Mistress, will not hesitate to meet any extra expense, I assure you.’

  She snorted, stepping out from the gloom. ‘Any?’

  ‘Within reason, yes.’

  She looked terrible. Worn, old, her clothes dishevelled. If Murillio had not known better, he would judge her as being hungover, a condition of temporary, infrequent sobriety to mark an alcoholic slide into fatal oblivion. Yet he knew she was afflicted with something far more tragic. Guilt and shame, self-hatred and grief. The son she didn’t want had been taken from her – to imagine that such a thing could leave her indifferent was not to understand anything at all.

  Murillio said to Bellam, ‘You’d best go now.’

  They watched him walk away.

  ‘Look at him,’ Stonny muttered as he reached the gate, ‘all elbows and knees.’

  ‘That’ll pass,’ he said.

  ‘A stage, is it?’

  ‘Yes.’ And of course he knew this particular game, the way she spoke of Harllo by not speaking of him, of the life that might await him, or the future taken away from him, stolen by her cruel denial. She would inflict this on herself again and again, at every opportunity. Seemingly innocent observations, each one a masochistic flagellation. For this to work, she required someone like Murillio, who would stand and listen and speak and pretend that all this was normal – the back and forth and give and take, the blood pooling round her boots. She had trapped him in this role – using the fact of his adoration, his love for her – and he was no longer certain that his love could survive such abuse.

  The world is small. And getting smaller.

  He had walked the pauper pits south of the city, just outside the wall between the two main trader gates. He had looked upon scores of recent unclaimed dead. It was, in fact, becoming something of a ritual for him, and though he had only second-hand descriptions of Harllo, he did his best, since no one who knew the boy would accompany him. Not Stonny, not Myrla nor Bedek. On occasion, Murillio had been forced to descend into one of the pits to make closer examination of some small body, a soft, lime-dusted face, eyes lidded shut as if in sleep or, on occasion, scrunched in some last moment of pain, and these mute, motionless faces now paraded in his dreams at night, a procession of such sorrow that he awoke with tears streaming from his eyes.

  He told Stonny none of this. He’d said nothing of how his and Kruppe’s enquiries among the sailors and fisherfolk had failed to find any evidence of someone press-ganging a five-year-old boy. And that every other possible trail thus far had turned up nothing, not even a hint or remote possibility, leaving at last the grim likelihood of some fell mishap, unreported, uninvestigated – just another dead child abandoned long before death’s arrival, known only in the records of found corpses as the ‘twice-dead’.

  ‘I am thinking of signing over my stakes in this school,’ Stonny now said. ‘To you.’

  Startled, he turned to stare at her. ‘I won’t accept.’

  ‘Then you’d be a fool – as if I didn’t already know that. You’re better suited. You’re a better teacher. I barely managed any interest in this from the very start – it was always the coin – and now I find I could not care less. About the school, the students – even promising ones like Nom there. I don’t care about anything, in fact.’

  Including you, Murillio. Yes, he heard that unspoken addition without the need for her to actually say it aloud. Well, she would of course want to push him away. Much as she needed him to play those self-wounding games with her, she needed even more the solitude necessary for complete self-destruction. Isolation was more than a simple defence mechanism; it also served to prepare one for more severe punishments, possibly culminating in suicide. On another level, she would view her desire to drive him off as an act of mercy on her part. But that was a most irritating form of self-pity.

  He had given his heart to the wrong woman. Timing, Bellam Nom, is everything. With sword in hand.

  With love in hand.

  Oh, well. I’d figured it out with a rapier, at least.

  ‘Don’t make that decision just yet,’ he said. ‘I have one more thing I can try.’ It won’t be pleasant, but you don’t need to know that.

  Stonny simply turned away. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow, then.’

  Many adults, in the indurated immobility of years, acquire a fear of places they have never been, even as they long for something different in their lives, something new. But this new thing is a world of the fantastical, formless in answer to vague longings, and is as much defined by absence as presence. It is a conjuration of emotions and wishful imaginings, which may or may not possess a specific geography. Achieving such a place demands a succession of breaks with one’s present situation, always a traumatic endeavour, and upon completion, why, sudden comes the fear.

  Some do not choose the changes in their lives. Some changes no one in their right mind would ever choose. In K’rul’s Bar, a once-soldier of the Malazan Empire stands tottering over the unconscious form of her lover, whilst behind her paces Antsy, muttering self-recriminations under his breath, interrupted every now and then with a stream of curses in a half-dozen languages.

  Blend understood all that had motivated Picker to attempt what she had done. This did little to assuage her fury. The very same High Denul healer who had just attended to her had set to a thorough examination of Picker as soon as Antsy had returned with his charge lying in the bed of a hired oxcart, only to pronounce that there was nothing to be done. Either Picker would awaken or she wouldn’t. Her spirit had been torn loose and now wandered lost.

  The healer had left. In the main room below, Duiker and Scillara sat in the company of ghosts and not much else.

  Although still weak, Blend set out to collect her weapons and armour. Antsy followed her into the corrido
r.

  ‘What’re you planning?’ he demanded, almost on her heels as she went into her own room.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she replied, laying out her chain hauberk on the bed, then pulling off her shirt to find the padded undergarment.

  Antsy’s eyes bugged slightly as he stared at her breasts, the faint bulge of her belly, the sweet—

  Blend tugged on the quilted shirt and then returned to the hauberk. ‘You’ll need to wrap me,’ she said.

  ‘Huh? Oh, aye. Right. But what about me?’

  She regarded him for a moment. ‘You want to help?’

  He half snarled in reply.

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Go find a couple of crossbows and plenty of quarrels. You’re going to cover me, for as long as that’s possible. We don’t walk together.’

  ‘Aye, Blend.’

  She worked the hauberk over her head and pushed her arms through the heavy sleeves.

  Antsy went to the equipment trunk at the foot of the bed and began rummaging through its contents, looking for the swaths of black cloth to bind the armour close and noiseless about Blend’s body. ‘Gods below, woman, what do you need all these clothes for?’

  ‘Banquets and soirées, of course.’

  ‘You ain’t never been to one in your life, woman.’