Dust of Dreams

by Erikson, Steven

  Frowning to hide his discomfiture, Urb followed Hellian’s swaying behind up the stairs. ‘Soldiers use whores all the time, Hellian—’

  ‘It’s their innocence, Urb, that a right an’ proper sergeant needs t’concern ’erself wiff.’

  ‘They’re grown men, Hellian—they ain’t so innocent—’

  ‘Who? I wuz talkin’ bout my corporal, bout Touchy Breffless. The way he’s always talking wi’imself no woman’s gong go near ’im. Bein’ insane ain’t a quality women look for, y’know. In their men, I mean.’ She waved vaguely at the door in front of her. ‘Which iz why they’s now tryin’ whores, an’ I ain’t gonna allow it.’ She tried a few times to grasp the latch, finally succeeded, and then twisted it in both directions, up and down, up and down. ‘Gor b’low! Who invented this piece a crud?’

  Urb reached past her and pushed open the door.

  Hellian stepped in, still trying to work the latch. ‘Don’t worry, Urb, I’ll get it right—jus’ watch an’ learn.’

  He edged past her and paused in the narrow hallway, impressed by the extraordinary wallpaper, which seemed to consist of gold leaf, poppy-red velvet and swaths of piebald rabbit skins all in a crazed pattern that unaccountably made him want to empty his coin purse. And the black wooden floor, polished and waxed until it seemed almost liquid, as if they were walking upon glass beneath which waited the torment of unending oblivion—he wondered if the whole thing weren’t ensorcelled.

  ‘Where you goin?’ Hellian demanded.

  ‘You opened the door,’ Urb said. ‘And asked me to take point.’

  ‘I did? I did? Take point—in a broffle?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Okay, then get your weapon out, Urb, in case we get jumped.’

  He hesitated, and then said, ‘I’m a fast draw, Hellian.’

  ‘Not what I seen,’ she said behind him.

  Confused, he paused again. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Meanin’ you need some lessons in cruption, I’d say.’ She straightened up, but that wasn’t so straight, since she used a wall to manage the posture. ‘Unless o’course it’s Squatdeath y’want. Not that you’d fit in my knickers, though. Hey, are these baby pelts?’

  ‘Rabbit. I ain’t interested in Skulldeath, Hellian. And no, I don’t want to wear your knickers—’

  ‘Listen you two—’ someone snapped from behind a door to one side, ‘quit that foreign jabbering and find a room!’

  Face darkening, Hellian reached for her sword, but the scabbard was empty. ‘Who stole—you, Urb, gimme your sword, damn you! Or bust down this door—yah, this one ’ere. Bust it down the middle. Use your head—smash it!’

  Instead of attempting any of that, Urb took Hellian’s arm and guided her farther down the corridor. ‘They’re not in that one,’ he said, ‘that man was speaking Letherii.’

  ‘That was Letherii? That foreign jabber? No wonder this city’s fulla ijits, talking like that.’

  Urb moved up alongside another door and leaned close to listen. He grunted. ‘Voices. Negotiating. This could be the one.’

  ‘Kick it down, bash it, find us a battering ram or a cusser or an angry Napan—’

  Urb flipped the latch and shoved the door back and then he stepped inside.

  Two corporals, mostly undressed, and two women, one stick thin, the other grossly fat, all staring at him with wide eyes. Urb pointed at Brethless and then at Touchy. ‘You two, get your clothes on. Your sergeant’s in the corridor—’

  ‘No I ain’t!’ and Hellian reeled into the room, eyes blazing. ‘He hired two of ’em! Cruption! Scat, hags, afore I cut my leg off!’

  The thin one spat something and suddenly had a knife in a hand, waving it threateningly as she advanced on Hellian. The fat prostitute picked up a chair and lumbered forward a step behind her.

  Urb chopped one hand down to crack on the knife-wielder’s wrist—sending the weapon clattering on the floor—and used his other to grasp the fat woman’s face and push her back. Squealing, the monstrous whore fell on to her ample backside—the room shook with the impact. Clutching her bruised forearm, the skinny one darted past and out the door, shrieking.

  The corporals were scrambling with their clothes, faces frantic with worry.

  ‘Get a refund!’ Hellian bellowed. ‘Those two should be paying you! Not t’other way round! Hey, who called in the army?’

  The army, as it turned out, was the establishment’s six pleasure guards, armed with clubs, but the fight in the room only turned nasty when the fat woman waded back in, chair swinging.

  Standing near the long table, Brys Beddict took a cautious sip of the foreign ale, bemused at the motley appearance of the reading’s participants, the last of whom arrived half-drunk with a skittish look to his eyes. An ex-priest of some sort, he surmised.

  They were a serious, peculiar lot, these Malazans. With a talent for combining offhand casual rapport with the grimmest of subject matter, a careless repose and loose discipline with savage professionalism. He was, he admitted, oddly charmed.

  At the same time, the Adjunct was somewhat more challenging in that respect. Tavore Paran seemed virtually devoid of social graces, despite her noble ancestry—which should have schooled her in basic decorum; as indeed her high military rank should have smoothed all the jagged edges of her nature. The Adjunct was awkward in command and clumsy in courtesy, as if consistently distracted by some insurmountable obstacle.

  Brys could imagine that such an obstacle might well be found in the unruliness of her legions. And yet her officers and soldiers displayed not a flicker of insubordination, not a single eye-roll behind her back, nor the glare of daggers cast sidelong. There was loyalty, yes, but it was strangely flavoured and Brys was still unable to determine its nature.

  Whatever the source of the Adjunct’s distraction, she was clearly finding no release from its strictures, and Brys thought that the burden was slowly overwhelming her.

  Most of the others were strangers to him, or at best vaguely familiar faces attesting to some past incidental encounter. He knew the High Mage, Ben Adaephon Delat, known to the other Malazans as Quick Ben—although to Brys that name seemed a version lacking in the respect a Ceda surely deserved. He knew Hedge and Fiddler as well, both of whom had been among the soldiers first into the palace.

  Others in the group startled him. Two children, a boy and a girl, and a Tiste Andii woman, mature in years and manner and clearly put out by her inclusion in this ragged assembly. All the rest, with the exception of the ex-priest, were officers or soldiers in the Adjunct’s army. Two gold-skinned, fair-haired marines—neither young—named Gesler and Stormy. A nondescript man named Bottle who couldn’t be much older than two decades; and Tavore’s aide, the startlingly beautiful, tattooed officer, Lostara Yil, who moved with a dancer’s grace and whose exotic features were only tempered by an air of ineffable sorrow.

  Soldiers lived difficult lives, Brys well knew. Friends lost in horrible, sudden ways. Scars hardening over the years, ambitions crushed and dreams set aside. The world of possibilities diminished and betrayals threatened from every shadow. A soldier must place his or her trust in the one who commands, and by extension in that which the commander serves in turn. In the case of these Bonehunters, Brys understood that they and their Adjunct had been betrayed by their empire’s ruler. They were adrift, and it was all Tavore could do to hold the army together: that they had launched an invasion of Lether was in itself extraordinary. Divisions and brigades—in his own kingdom’s history—had mutinied in response to commands nowhere near as extreme. For this reason alone, Brys held the Adjunct in true respect, and he was convinced that she possessed some hidden quality, a secret virtue, that her soldiers well recognized and responded to—and Brys wondered if he would come to see it for himself, perhaps this very night.

  Although he stood at ease, curious and moderately attentive, sipping his ale, he could well sense the burgeoning tension in the room. No one was happy, least of all the serg
eant who would awaken the cards—the poor man looked as bedraggled as a dog that had just swum the breadth of River Lether, his eyes red-shot and bleak, his face battered as if he had been in a brawl.

  The young soldier named Bottle was hovering close to Fiddler, and, employing—perhaps for Brys’s benefit—the trader tongue, he spoke to the sergeant in a low tone. ‘Time for a Rusty Gauntlet?’

  ‘What? A what?’

  ‘That drink you invented last reading—’

  ‘No, no alcohol. Not this time. Leave me alone. Until I’m ready.’

  ‘How will we know when you’re ready?’ Lostara Yil asked him.

  ‘Just sit down, in any order, Captain. You’ll know.’ He shot the Adjunct a beseeching look. ‘There’s too much power here. Way too much. I’ve no idea what I’ll bring down. This is a mistake.’

  Tavore’s pinched features somehow managed to tauten. ‘Sometimes, Sergeant, mistakes are necessary.’

  Hedge coughed abruptly, and then waved a hand. ‘Sorry, Adjunct, but you’re talking to a sapper there. Mistakes mean we turn into red mist. I take it you’re referring to other kinds, maybe? I hope?’

  The Adjunct swung to Gesler’s oversized companion. ‘Adjutant Stormy, how does one turn an ambush?’

  ‘I ain’t no adjutant any more,’ the bearded man growled.

  ‘Answer my question.’

  The huge man glared, then, seeing as it elicited no reaction whatsoever from the Adjunct, he grunted and then said, ‘You spring it and then charge ’em, hard and fast. Y’climb down the bastards’ throats.’

  ‘But first the ambush must be sprung.’

  ‘Unless y’can sniff ’em out beforehand, aye.’ His small eyes fixed on her. ‘We gonna sniff or charge tonight, Adjunct?’

  Tavore made no reply to that, facing the Tiste Andii woman instead. ‘Sandalath Drukorlat, please sit. I understand your reluctance—’

  ‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ Sandalath snapped.

  ‘History,’ muttered the ex-priest.

  A long moment of silence, and then the girl named Sinn giggled, and everyone jumped. Seeing this, Brys frowned. ‘Excuse me for interrupting, but is this the place for children?’

  Quick Ben snorted. ‘The girl’s a High Mage, Brys. And the boy’s … well, he’s different.’

  ‘Different?’

  ‘Touched,’ said Banaschar. ‘And not in a good way, either. Please, Adjunct, call it off. Send Fiddler back to the barracks. There’s too many here—the safest readings involve a few people, not a mob like this one. Your poor reader’s gonna start bleeding from the ears halfway through.’

  ‘He’s right,’ said Quick Ben, shifting uneasily in his chair. ‘Fid’s ugly enough without earrings of blood and whatnot.’

  The Adjunct faced Fiddler. ‘Sergeant, you know my desire in this—more than anyone else here, you also know my reasons. Speak now honestly, are you capable of this?’

  All eyes fixed on the sapper, and Brys could see how everyone—excepting perhaps Sinn—was silently imploring Fiddler to snap shut the lid on this dread box. Instead, he grimaced, staring at the floor, and said, ‘I can do it, Adjunct. That’s not the problem. It’s … unexpected guests.’

  Brys saw the ex-priest flinch at that, and a sudden, hot flood of alarm rose through the King’s Sword. He stepped forward—

  But the Deck was in Fiddler’s hands and he was standing at one end of the table—even though not everyone had taken seats—and three cards clattered and slid on the polished surface.

  The reading had begun.

  Standing in the gloom outside the building, the Errant staggered back, as if buffeted by invisible fists. He tasted blood in his mouth, and hissed in fury.

  In the main room of her small home, Seren Pedac’s eyes widened and then she shouted in alarm as Pinosel and Ursto Hoobutt ignited into flames where they sat—and she would have lunged forward if not for Bugg’s staying hand. A hand sheathed in sweat.

  ‘Do not move,’ the old man gasped. ‘Those fires burn nothing but them—’

  ‘Nothing but them? What does that mean?’

  It was clear that the two ancient gods had ceased being aware of their surroundings—she could see their eyes staring out through the blue flames, fixed upon nothing.

  ‘Their essence,’ Bugg whispered. ‘They are being devoured … by the power—the power awakened.’ He was trembling as if close to incapacitation, sweat streaming like oil down his face.

  Seren Pedac edged back and placed her hands upon her swollen belly. Her mouth was dry, her heart pounding hard. ‘Who assails them?’

  ‘They stand between your child and that power—as do I, Acquitor. We … we can withstand. We must—’

  ‘Who is doing this?’

  ‘Not malign—just vast. Abyss below, this is no ordinary caster of the Tiles!’ She sat, terrified now, her fear for her unborn son white-hot in her soul, and stared at Pinosel and Ursto Hoobutt—who burned and burned, and beneath the flames they were melting like wax.

  In a crowded room on the top floor of an inn, a flurry of once-dead beasts now scampered, snarled and snapped jaws. The black-furred rat, trailing entrails, had suddenly fallen upward to land on the ceiling, claws digging into the plaster, intestines dangling like tiny sausages in a smoke-house. The blue bat-turtle had bitten off the iguana’s tail and that creature escaped in a slithering dash and was now butting at the window’s shutters as if desperate to get out. The flicker bird, shedding oily feathers, flapped in frantic circles over the heads of everyone—none of whom had time to notice, as bottles smashed down, wine spilling like thinned blood, and the barely begun carving of riders on charging horses now writhed and reared on Crump’s lap, whilst he stared bug-eyed, mouth gaping—and moments later the first tiny horse dragged itself free and leapt down from the sapper’s thigh, wooden hoofs clopping across the floor, misshapen lump of rider waving a splinter.

  Bellowing, shouts, shrieks—Ebron vomited violently, and, ducking to avoid that gush, Limp slipped in a puddle of wine and shattered his left knee. He howled.

  Deadsmell started crawling for a corner. He saw Masan Gilani roll under the fancy bed as the flicker bird cracked headlong into a bedpost, exploding in a cloud of rank feathers.

  Smart woman. Now, if only there was room under there for me, too.

  In another section of the city, witnesses would swear in the Errant’s name, swear indeed on the Empty Throne and on the graves of loved ones, that two dragons burst from the heart of an inn, wreckage sailing out in a deadly rain of bricks, splinters, dust and fragments of sundered bodies that cascaded down into streets as far as fifty paces away—and even in the aftermath the next morning no other possible explanation sufficed to justify that shattered ruin of an entire building, from which no survivors were pulled.

  ______

  The entire room trembled, and even as Hellian drove her elbow into a bearded face and heard a satisfying crunch, the wall opposite her cracked like fine glass and then toppled into the room, burying the figures thrashing about in pointless clinches on the floor. Women screamed—well, the fat one did, and she was loud enough and repetitive enough in those shrieks to fill in for everyone else—all of whom were too busy scrabbling out from the wreckage.

  Hellian staggered back a step, and then, as the floor suddenly heaved, she found herself running although she could not be sure of her precise direction, but it seemed wise to find the door wherever that might be.

  When she found it, she frowned, since it was lying flat on the floor, and so she paused and stared down for a time.

  Until Urb stumbled into her. ‘Something just went up across the street!’ he gasped, spitting blood. ‘We got to get out of here—’

  ‘Where’s my corporal?’

  ‘Already down the stairs—let’s go!’But, no, it was time for a drink—

  ‘Hellian! Not now!’

  ‘Gare away! If not now, when?’

  ‘Spinner of Death, Knight of Shadow, Master of the Deck.’ Fiddl
er’s voice was a cold, almost inhuman growl. ‘Table holds them, but not the rest.’ And he started flinging cards, and each one he threw shot like a plate of iron to a lodestone, striking one person after another—hard against their chests, staggering them back a step, and with each impact—as Brys stared in horror—the victim was lifted off the floor, chair tumbling away, and slammed against the wall behind them no matter the distance.

  The collisions cracked bones. Backs of heads crunched bloodily on the walls.

  It was all happening too fast, with Fiddler standing as if in the heart of a maelstrom, solid as a deep-rooted tree.

  The first struck was the girl, Sinn. ‘Virgin of Death.’ As the card smacked into her chest it heaved her, limbs flailing, up to a section of wall just beneath the ceiling. The sound she made when she hit was sickening, and she went limp, hanging like a spiked rag doll.

  ‘Sceptre.’

  Grub shrieked, seeking to fling himself to one side, and the card deftly slid beneath him, fixing on to his chest and shoving him bodily across the floor, up against the wall just left of the door.

  Quick Ben’s expression was one of stunned disbelief as Fiddler’s third card slapped against his sternum. ‘Magus of Dark.’ He was thrown into the wall behind him with enough force to send cracks through the plaster and he hung there, motionless as a corpse on a spike.

  ‘Mason of Death.’ Hedge bleated and made the mistake of turning round. The card struck his back and hammered him face first into the wall, whereupon the card began pushing him upward, leaving a red streak below the unconscious man.

  The others followed, quick as a handful of flung stones. In each, the effect was the same. Violent impact, walls that shook. Sandalath Drukorlat, Queen of Dark. Lostara Yil, Champion of Life.

  ‘Obelisk.’ Bottle.

  Gesler, Orb.

  Stormy, Throne.

  And then Fiddler faced Brys. ‘King of Life.’