Sandalath Drukorlat scowled. ‘She wondered why we’d waited so long.’
Withal grunted. ‘That woman, Sand . . .’
‘Yes.’ She paused just inside the doorway and glared at the three Nachts huddled beneath the window sill. Their long black, muscled arms were wrapped about one another, forming a clump of limbs and torsos from which three blunt heads made an uneven row, eyes thinned and darting with suspicion. ‘What’s with them?’
‘I think they’re coming with us,’ Withal replied. ‘Only, of course, they don’t know where we’re going.’
‘Tie them up. Lock them up—do something. Just keep them here, husband. They’re grotesque.’
‘They’re not my pets,’ he said.
She crossed her arms. ‘Really? Then why do they spend all their time under your feet?’
‘Honestly, I have no idea.’
‘Who do they belong to?’
He studied them for a long moment. Not one of the Nachts would meet his eyes. It was pathetic.
‘Withal.’
‘All right. I think they’re Mael’s pets.’
‘Mael!?’
‘Aye. I was praying to him, you see. And they showed up. On the island. Or maybe they showed up before I started praying—I can’t recall. But they got me off that island, and that was Mael’s doing.’
‘Then send them back to him!’
‘That doesn’t seem to be the way praying works, Sand.’
‘Mother bless us,’ she sighed, striding forward. ‘Pack up—we’re leaving tonight.’
‘tonight? It’ll be dark, Sand!’
She gave him the same glare she’d given Rind, Pule and Mape.
Dark, aye. Never mind.
The worst of it was, in turning away, he caught the looks of sympathy in the Nachts’ beady eyes, tracking him like mourners at a funeral.
Well, a man learns to take sympathy where he can get it.
‘If this is a new warren,’ whispered Grub, ‘then I think I’d rather we kept the old ones.’
Sinn was quiet, as she had been for most of what must have been an entire day, maybe longer, as they wandered this terrible world.
Windswept desert stretched out in all directions. The road they walked cut across it straight as a spear. Here and there, off to one side, they spied fields of stones that might have once been dwellings, and the remnants of sun-fired mud-brick pen or garden walls, but nothing grew here, nothing at all. The air was acrid, smelling of burning pitch—and that was not too surprising, as black pillars of smoke stalked the horizons.
On the road itself, constructed of crushed rock and, possibly, glass, they came upon scenes of devastation. Burnt-out hulks of carriages and wagons, scorched clothing and shattered furniture. Fire-blackened corpses, limbs curled like tree roots and hands like bird feet, mouths agape and hollow sockets staring at the empty sky. Twisted pieces of metal lay scattered about, none remotely identifiable to Grub.
Breathing made his throat sore, and the bitter chill of the morning had given way to blistering heat. Eyes stinging, feet dragging, he followed in Sinn’s wake until her shadow lengthened to a stretched-out shape painted in pitch, and to his eyes it was as if he was looking down upon the woman she would one day become. He realized that his fear of her was growing—and her silence was making it worse.
‘Will you now be mute to me as well?’ he asked her.
She glanced back over her shoulder. Momentarily.
It would soon grow cold again—he’d lost too much fluid to survive a night of shivering. ‘We need to camp, Sinn. Make a fire—’
She barked a laugh, but did not turn round. ‘Fire,’ she said. ‘Yes. Fire. Tell me, Grub, what do you believe in?’
‘What?’
‘Some things are more real than others. For everyone. Each one, different, always different. What’s the most real to you?’
‘We can’t survive this place, that’s what’s most real, Sinn. We need water. Food. Shelter.’
He saw her nod. ‘That’s what this warren is telling us, Grub. Just that. What you believe has to do with surviving. It doesn’t go any further, does it? What if I told you that it used to be that for almost everybody? Before the cities, before people invented being rich.’
‘Being rich? I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Before some people found other things to believe in. Before they made those things more real than anything else. Before they decided it was all right even to kill for them. Or enslave people. Or keep them stupid and poor.’ She shot him a look. ‘Did you know I had a Tanno tutor? A Spiritwalker.’
‘I don’t know anything about them. Seven Cities priests, right?’
‘He once told me that an untethered soul can drown in wisdom.’
‘What?’
‘Wisdom grows by stripping away beliefs, until the last tether is cut, and suddenly you float free. Only, because your eyes are wide open, you see right away that you can’t float in what you’re in. You can only sink. That’s why the meanest religions work so hard at keeping their followers ignorant. Knowledge is poison. Wisdom is depthless. Staying ignorant keeps you in the shallows. Every Tanno one day takes a final spiritwalk. They cut the last tether, and the soul can’t go back. When that happens, the other Tannos mourn, because they know that the spiritwalker has drowned.’
His mouth was too dry, his throat too sore, but even if that had been otherwise, he knew he would have nothing to say to any of that. He knew, after all, about his own ignorance.
‘Look around, Grub. See? There are no gifts here. Look at these stupid bodies and their stupid wagonloads of furniture. The last thing that was real for them, the only thing, was fire.’
His attention was drawn to a dust-cloud, rising in a slanted shroud of gold. Something was on a track that would converge with this road. A herd? An army?
‘Fire is not the gift you think it is, Grub.’
‘We’ll die tonight without it.’
‘We need to stay on this road.’
‘Why?’
‘To find out where it leads.’
‘We’ll die here, then.’
‘This land, Grub,’ she said, ‘has generous memories.’
The sun was low by the time the army arrived. Horse-drawn chariots and massive wagons burdened with plunder. The warriors were dark-skinned, tall and thin, bedecked in bronze armour. Grub thought there might be a thousand of them, maybe more. He saw spearmen, archers, and what must be the equivalent of heavy infantry, armed with sickle-bladed axes and short curved swords.
They cut across the track of the road as if blind to it, and as Grub stared he was startled to realize that the figures and their horses and chariots were vaguely transparent. They are ghosts. ‘These,’ he said to Sinn who stood beside him, ‘are this land’s memories?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can they see us?’
She pointed at one chariot that had thundered past only to turn round at the urging of the man behind the driver, and was now drawing up opposite them. ‘See him—he’s a priest. He can’t see us, but he senses us. Holiness isn’t always in a place, Grub. Sometimes it’s what’s passing through.’
He shivered, hugged himself. ‘Stop this, Sinn. We’re not gods.’
‘No, we’re not. We’re’—and she laughed—‘more like divine messengers.’
The priest had leapt down from the chariot—Grub could now see the old blood splashed across the spokes of the high wheels, and saw where blades were fitted in times of battle, projecting out from the hubs. A mass charge by such instruments of war would deliver terrible slaughter.
The hawk-faced man was edging closer, groping like a blind man.
Grub made to step back but Sinn caught him by the arm and held him fast.
‘Don’t,’ she murmured. ‘Let him touch the divine, Grub. Let him receive his gift of wisdom.’
The priest had raised his hands. Beyond, the entire army had halted, and Grub saw what must be a king or commander—perched on a huge, ornate c
hariot—drawing up to observe the strange antics of his priest.
‘We can give him no wisdom,’ Grub said. ‘Sinn—’
‘Don’t be a fool. Just stand here. Wait. We don’t have to do anything.’
Those two outstretched hands came closer. The palms were speckled with dried blood. There were, however, no calluses upon them. Grub hissed, ‘He is no warrior.’
‘No,’ Sinn agreed, ‘but he so likes the blood.’
The palms hovered, slipped forward, and unerringly settled upon their brows.
Grub saw the priest’s eyes widen, and he knew at once that the man was seeing through—through to this road and its litter of destruction—to an age either long before or yet to come: the age in which Grub and Sinn existed, solid and real.
The priest lurched back and howled.
Sinn’s laughter was harsh. ‘He saw what was real! He saw!’ She spun to face Grub, her eyes bright. ‘The future is a desert! And a road! And no end to the stupid wars, the insane slaughter—’ She whirled back and jabbed a finger at the wailing priest who was staggering back to his chariot. ‘He believed in the sun god! He believed in immortality—of glory, of wealth—golden fields, lush gardens, sweet rains and sweet rivers flowing without cease! He believed his people are—hah!—chosen! They all do, don’t you see? They do, we do, everyone does! See our gift, Grub? See what knowledge yields him? The sanctuary of ignorance—is shattered! Garden into wilderness, cast out into the seas of wisdom! Is not our message divine?’
Grub did not think he had any tears left in him. He was wrong.
The army and its priest and its king all fled, wild as the wind. But, before they did, slaves appeared and raised a cairn of stones. Which they then surrounded with offerings: jars of beer and wine and honey, dates, figs, loaves of bread and two throat-cut goats spilling blood into the sand.
The feast was ghostly, but Sinn assured Grub that it would sustain them. Divine gifts, she said, were not gifts at all. The receiver must pay for them.
‘And he has done that, has he not, Grub? Oh, he has done that.’
The Errant stepped into the vast, impossible chamber. Gone now the leisure of reminiscences, the satisfied stirring of brighter days long since withered colourless, almost dead. Knuckles trailed a step behind him, as befitted his role of old and his role to come.
She was awake, hunched over a scattering of bones. Trapped in games of chance and mischance, the brilliant, confounding offerings of Sechul Lath, Lord of the Hold of Chance—the Toppler, the Conniver, the Wastrel of Ruin. Too foolish to realize that she was challenging, in the Lord’s cast, the very laws of the universe which were, in truth, far less predictable than any mortal might believe.
The Errant walked up and with one boot kicked the ineffable pattern aside.
Her face stretched into a mask of rage. She reared, hands lifting—and then froze as she fixed her eyes upon the Errant.
‘Kilmandaros.’
He saw the flicker of fear in her gaze.
‘I have come,’ he said to her, ‘to speak of dragons.’
Chapter Eight
In my lifelong study of the scores of species of ants to be found in the tropical forests of Dal Hon, I am led to the conviction that all forms of life are engaged in a struggle to survive, and that within each species there exists a range of natural but variable proclivities, of physical condition and of behaviour, which in turn weighs for or against in the battle to survive and procreate. Further, it is my suspicion that in the act of procreation, such traits are passed on. By extension, one can see that ill traits reduce the likelihood of both survival and procreation. On the basis of these notions, I wish to propose to my fellow scholars at this noble gathering a law of survival that pertains to all forms of life. But before I do so, I must add one more caveat, drawn from the undeniable behavioural characteristics of, in my instance of speciality, ants. To whit, success of one form of life more often than not initiates devastating population collapse among competitors, and indeed, sometimes outright extinction. And that such annihilation of rivals may in fact be a defining feature of success.
Thus, my colleagues, I wish to propose a mode of operation among all forms of life, which I humbly call—in my four-volume treatise—‘The Betrayal of the Fittest’.
OBSESSIONAL SCROLLS
SIXTH DAY PROCEEDINGS
ADDRESS OF SKAVAT GILL
UNTA, MALAZAN EMPIRE, 1097 BURN’S SLEEP
As if riding a scent on the wind; or through the tremble in the ground underfoot; or perhaps the air itself carried alien thoughts, thoughts angry, malign—whatever the cause, the K’Chain Che’Malle knew they were now being hunted. They had no patience for Kalyth and her paltry pace, and it was Gunth Mach whose posture slowly shifted, spine drawing almost horizontal to the ground—as if in the course of a single morning some force reshaped her skeleton, muscles and joints—and before the sun stood high she had gathered up the Destriant and set her down behind the humped shoulder-blades, where the dorsal spikes had flattened and where the thick hide had formed something like a saddle seat. And Kalyth found herself riding a K’Chain Che’Malle, the sensation far more fluid than that she recalled of sitting on the back of a horse, so that it seemed they flowed over the broken scrubland, at a speed somewhere between a canter and a gallop. Gunth Mach made use of her forelimbs only as they skirted slopes or ascended the occasional low hill; mostly the scarred, scale-armoured arms remained drawn up like the pincers of a mantis.
The K’ell Hunters Rythok and Kor Thuran flanked her, with Sag’Churok almost a third of a league ahead—even from her vantage point atop Gunth Mach, Kalyth rarely caught sight of the huge creature, a speck of motion betrayed only by its shadow. All of the K’Chain Che’Malle now bore on their scaled hides the mottled hues of the ground and its scant plant cover.
And yet . . . and yet . . . they were afraid.
Not of those human warriors who pursued them—that was little more than an inconvenience, an obstacle to their mission. No, instead, the fear within these terrible demons was deeper, visceral. It rode out from Gunth’an Acyl, the Matron, in ice-laden ripples, crowding up against each and every one of her children. The pressure built, grinding, thunderous.
A war is coming. We all know this. But as to the face of this enemy, I alone am blind.
Destriant—what does it mean to be one? To these creatures? What faith am I supposed to shape? I have no history to draw from, no knowledge of K’Chain Che’Malle legends or myths—assuming they have any. Gunth’an Acyl has fixed her eyes upon humankind. She would pillage the beliefs of my kind.
She is indeed mad! I can give them nothing!
She would pluck not a single fragment from her own people. They were all dead, after all. Betrayed by their own faiths—that the rains would always come; that the land would ever provide; that children would be born and mothers and aunts would raise them; that there would be campfires and singing and dancing and loves and passions and laughter. All lies, delusions, false hopes—there was no point in stirring those ashes.
What else was left to her, then, to make this glorious new religion? When countless thousands of lizard eyes fixed unblinking on her, what could she offer them?
They had travelled east for the morning but were now angling southward once more, and Kalyth sensed a gradual slowing of pace, and as they slipped over a low rise she caught sight of Sag’Churok, stationary and apparently watching their approach.
Something had happened. Something had changed.
A gleam of weathered white—the trunk of a fallen tree?—amidst the low grasses directly ahead, and for the first time Kalyth was jolted as Gunth Mach leapt to one side to avoid it. As they passed the object, the Destriant saw that it was a long bone. Whatever it had belonged to, she realized, must have been enormous.
The other K’Chain Che’Malle were reacting in a like manner as each came upon another skeletal remnant, dancing away as if the splintered bones exuded some poison aura that assailed their senses. Kalyt
h saw that the K’ell’s flanks glistened, dripping with oil from their glands, and so she knew that they were all afflicted by an extremity of emotion—terror, rage? She had no means of reading such things.
Was this yet another killing field? She wasn’t sure, but something whispered to her that all of these broken bones belonged to a single, gargantuan beast. A dragon? Think of the Nests, the Rooted. Carved in the likeness of dragons . . . dawn’s breath, can this be the religion of the K’Chain Che’Malle? The worship of dragons?
It made a kind of sense—were these reptiles not physically similar to such mythical beasts? Though she had never seen a dragon, even among her own people there were legends, and in fact she recalled one tale told to her as a child—a fragmented, confused story, which made its recounting rare since it possessed little entertainment value. ‘Dragons swim the sky. Fangs slash and blood rains down. The dragons warred with one another, scores upon scores, and the earth below, and all things that dwelt upon it, could do naught but cower. The breath of the dragons made a conflagration of the sky . . .’
They arrived where waited Sag’Churok. As soon as Gunth Mach halted, Kalyth slipped down, her legs almost folding under her. Righting herself, she looked around.
Skull fragments. Massive fangs chipped and split. It was as if the creature had simply blown apart.
Kalyth looked upward and saw, directly overhead, a dark speck, wheeling, circling. He shows himself. This, here, this is important. She finally understood what had so agitated the K’Chain Che’Malle. Not fear. Not rage. Anticipation. They expect something from me.
She fought down a moment of panic. Mouth dry, feeling strangely displaced inside her own body, she wandered into the midst of the bone-field. There were gouges scored into the shattered plates of the dragon’s skull, the tracks of bites or talons. She found a dislodged tooth and pulled it up from its web of grasses, heavy as a club in her hands. Sun-bleached and polished on one side, pitted and stained amber on the other. She thought she might laugh—a part of her had never even believed in dragons.
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