‘I believe,’ Brys said, ‘the danger has passed. Is she all right, sir?’
‘I’m a sergeant—people don’t “sir” me … sir. She’s just done in. Both her and her sister.’ He scowled. ‘But we’ll escort you just the same, sir—she’d never forgive us if something happened to you now. So, wherever you’re going …’
The other soldiers emerged from the alley, and one said something in Malazan, although Brys needed no translation to understand that they’d found no one—the Errant’s survival instincts were ever strong, even when he’d been knocked silly by a Tarthenal’s fist.
‘It seems,’ Brys said, ‘I shall have an escort after all.’
‘It is not an offer you can refuse, sir,’ said the sergeant.
Nor will I. Lesson learned, Adjunct.
The soldiers were attempting to heave the woman named Sinter back into her saddle. Ublala Pung stepped up to them. ‘I will carry her,’ he said. ‘She’s pretty.’
‘Do as the Toblakai says,’ said the sergeant.
‘She’s pretty,’ Ublala Pung said again, as he took her limp form in his arms. ‘Pretty smelly, too, but that’s okay.’
‘Perimeter escort,’ snapped the sergeant, ‘crossbows cocked. Anybody steps out, nail ’em.’
Brys prayed there would be no early risers between here and the palace. ‘Best we hurry,’ he ventured.
On a rooftop not far away, Quick Ben sighed and then relaxed.
‘What was all that about?’ Hedge asked beside him.
‘Damned Toblakai … but that’s not the interesting bit, though, is it? No, it’s that Dal Honese woman. Well, that can all wait.’
‘You’re babbling, wizard.’
Magus of Dark. Gods below.
Alone in the cellar beneath the dormitories, Fiddler stared down at the card in his hand. The lacquered wood glistened, dripped as if slick with sweat. The smell rising from it was of humus, rich and dark, a scent of the raw earth.
‘Tartheno Toblakai,’ he whispered.
Herald of Life.
Well, just so.
He set it down and then squinted at the second card he had withdrawn to close this dread night. Unaligned. Chain. Aye, we all know about those, my dear. Fret naught, it’s the price of living.
Now, if only you weren’t so … strong. If only you were weaker. If only your chains didn’t reach right into the heart of the Bonehunters—if only I knew who was dragging who, why, I might have reason to hope.
But he didn’t, and so there wasn’t.
Chapter Four
Behold these joyful devourers
The land laid out skewered in silver
Candlesticks of softest pewter
Rolling the logs down cut on end
To make roads through the forest
That once was—before the logs
(Were rolled down cut on end)—
We called it stump road and we
Called it forest road when
Our imaginations starved
You can make fans with ribs
Of sheep and pouches for baubles
By pounding flat the ears
Of old women and old men—
Older is best for the ear grows
For ever it’s said, even when
There’s not a scrap anywhere to eat
So we carried our wealth
In pendulum pouches wrinkled
And hairy, diamonds and gems
Enough to buy a forest or a road
But maybe not both
Enough even for slippers of
Supplest skin feathered in down
Like a baby’s cheek
There is a secret we know
When nothing else is left
And the sky stops its tears
A belly can bulge full
On diamonds and gems
And a forest can make a road
Through what once was
You just won’t find any shade
PENDULUMS WERE ONCE TOYS
BADALLE OF KORBANSE SNAKE
T
o journey into the other worlds, a shaman or witch of the Elan would ride the Spotted Horse. Seven herbs, softened with beeswax and rolled into a ball and then flattened into an oblong disc that was taken into the mouth and held between lip and gum. Coolness slowly numbing and saliva rising as if the throat was the mouth of a spring, a tingling sensation lifting to gather behind the eyes in coalescing colours and then, in a blinding flash, the veil between worlds vanished. Patterns swirled in the air; complex geometries played across the landscape—a landscape that could be the limitless wall of a hide tent, or the rolling plains of a cave wall where ran the beasts—until the heart-stains emerged, pulsing, blotting the scene in undulating rows, sweet as waves and tasting of mother’s milk.
So arrived the Spotted Horse, a cascade of heart-stains rippling across the beast, down its long neck, sweeping along its withers, flowing like seed-heads from its mane and tail.
Ride into the alien world. Ride among the ancestors and the not-yet-born, among the tall men with their eternally swollen members, the women with their forever-filled wombs. Through forests of black threads, the touch or brush of any one of them an invitation to endless torment, for this was the path of return for all life, and to be born was to pass through and find the soul’s fated thread—the tale of a future death that could not be escaped. To ride the other way, however, demanded a supple traverse, evading such threads, lest one’s own birth-fate become entangled, knotted, and so doom the soul to eternal prison, snared within the web of conflicted fates.
Prophecies could be found among the black threads, but the world beyond that forest was the greatest gift. Timeless, home to all the souls that ever existed; this was where grief was shed, where sorrow dried up and blew away like dust, where scars vanished. To journey into this realm was to be cleansed, made whole, purged of all regrets and dark desires.
Riding the Spotted Horse and then returning was to be reborn, guiltless, guileless.
Kalyth knew all this, but only second-hand. The riders among her people passed on the truths, generation upon generation. Any one of the seven herbs, if taken alone, would kill. The seven mixed in wrong proportions delivered madness. And, finally, only those chosen as worthy by the shamans and witches would ever know the gift of the journey.
For one such as Kalyth, mired in the necessary mediocrity so vital to the maintenance of family, village and the Elan way of living, to take upon herself such a ritual—to even so much as taste the seven herbs—was a sentence to death and damnation.
Of course, the Elan were gone. No more shamans or witches to be found. No families, no villages, no clans, no herds—every ring of tipi stones, spanning the rises tucked at the foot of yet higher hilltops, now marked the motionless remnant of a final camp, a camp never to be returned to, the stones destined to sink slowly where they lay, the lichen on their undersides dying, the grasses so indifferently crushed beneath them turning white as bone. Such boulder rings were now maps of extinction and death. They held no promises, only the sorrow of endings.
She had suffered her own damnation, one devoid of any crime, any real culpability beyond her cowardly flight: her appalling abandonment of her family. There had been no shamans left to utter the curse, but that hardly mattered, did it?
She sat, as the sun withered in the west and the grasses surrounding her grew wiry and grey, staring down at the disc lying in the palm of her hand.
Elan magic. As foreign to her world now as the Che’Malle machines in Ampelas Rooted had been when she’d first set eyes upon them. To ride the Spotted Horse through the ashes of her people invited … what? She did not know, could not know. Would she find the spirits of her kin—would they truly look upon her with love and forgiveness? Was this her secret desire? Not a quest into the realms of prophecy seeking hidden knowledge; not searching for a Mortal Sword and a Shield Anvil for the K’Chain Che’Malle?
Dire confusion—her motivations were suspect—hah,
rotted through and through!
And might there not be another kind of salvation she was seeking here? The invitation into madness, into death itself? Possibly.
‘Beware the leader who has nothing to lose.’
Her people were proud of their wise sayings. And yet now, in their mortal silence, wisdom and pride proved a perfect match in value. Namely: worthless.
The Che’Malle were camped—if one could call it that—behind the rise at her back. They had built a fire inviting Kalyth’s comfort, but this night she was not interested in comfort.
The Shi’gal Assassin still circled high in the darkening sky above them—their nightly sentinel who never tired and never spoke and yet was known to all (she suspected) as their potential slayer, should they fail. Blessings of the spirits, that was a ghastly creature, a demon to beggar her worst nightmares. Oh, how it sailed the night winds, a cold-eyed raptor, a conjuration of singular purpose.
Kalyth shivered. Then, squeezing shut her eyes as the sun’s sickle of fire dipped below the horizon, she slid the disc into her mouth.
Stinging like a snake’s bite, and then numbness, spreading, spreading …
‘Never trust a leader who has nothing to lose.’
At these muttered words from the human female, drifting over the hummock down to where stood the K’Chain Che’Malle, the K’ell Hunter Sag’Churok swung round his massive, scarred head. Over his eyes, three distinct lids blinked in succession, reawakening the camp’s reflected firelight in a wet gleam. The Matron’s daughter, Gunth Mach, seemed to flinch, but she remained closed to Sag’Churok’s tentative query.
The other two K’ell Hunters, indifferent to anything the human might say, were half-crouched and facing away from the ring of stones that surrounded a half-dozen bricks of burning bhederin dung, away from the flames that could steal their night vision. The enormous cutlasses at the ends of their wrists rested point-down, their arms stretched out to the sides. By nature, K’ell disliked such menial tasks as sentry duty. They existed to pursue quarry, after all. But the Matron had elected to send them out without J’an Sentinels; further proof that in keeping all her guardians close, Gunth’an Acyl feared for her own life.
Senior among these K’ell, Sag’Churok was Gunth Mach’s protector, and should the time come when the Destriant found a Mortal Sword and a Shield Anvil, then he would also assume the task of escorting them on the return to Acyl Nest.
Errors in judgement plagued Ampelas Rooted. A flawed Matron produced flawed spawn. This was a known truth. It was not a thing that could be defeated or circumvented. The spawn must follow. Even so, Sag’Churok knew an abiding sense of failure, a dull, persistent anguish.
Beware the leader …
Yes. The one they had chosen, known as Redmask, had proved as flawed as any K’Chain Che’Malle of the Hive, and the cruel logic of that still stung. Perhaps the Matron was correct in electing a human to undertake the search this time.
Visions bound with intent whispered through Sag’Churok. The Shi’gal Assassin, wheeling in the darkness far above them, had thrust a sending into the brain of the K’ell Hunter. Cold, rough-skinned, careless of the pain the sending delivered—indeed, it was of such power that Gunth Mach’s head snapped up, eyes fixing on Sag’Churok as ripples overflowed to brush her senses.
Intruders in vast herd, countless fires.
‘Perhaps, then, among these ones?’ Sag’Churok sent in return.
The one who leads is not for us.
A bestial scent followed that statement, one that Sag’Churok recognized. Glands awakened beneath the heavy armoured scales along the K’ell’s spine, the first of the instinctive preparations for hunting, for battle, and as those scales seemed to lift and float on the thickening layer of oil, the innermost lids closed over his eyes, rising from below to entirely sheathe his vision. Boulders on a distant hill suddenly glowed, still bearing the heat of the sun. Small creatures moved in the grasses, revealed by their breaths, their rapidly beating hearts.
K’ell Rythok and Kor Thuran both caught the bitter signature of the oil, and they straightened from their crouches, swinging free their swords.
A final thought reached Sag’Churok. Too many to slay. Best avoid.
‘How do we avoid, Shi’gal Gu’Rull? Do they bestride our chosen path?’
But the Assassin did not deem such questions worth an answer, and Sag’Churok felt the Shi’gal’s contempt.
Gunth Mach sent her guardian a private thought. He wishes that we fail.
‘If he so hungers to slay, then why not these strangers?’
It is not for me to say, she replied. Gu’Rull spoke not to me, after all, but to you. He would admit to nothing, but he holds you in respect. You have Hunted and like me you have borne wounds and tasted your own blood and in that taste we both saw our mortality. This, Gu’Rull shares with you, while Rythok and Kor Thuran do not.
‘And yet in his careless power his thoughts leak to you—’
Does he know of my growth? I think not. Only you know the truth, Sag’Churok. To all others I reveal nothing. They believe me still little more than a drone, a promise, a possibility. I am close, first love, so very close.
Yes, he had known, or thought he had. Now, shock threatened to reveal itself and the K’ell struggled to contain it. ‘Gunth’an Acyl?’
She cannot see past her suffering.
Sag’Churok was not certain of that, but he sent nothing. It was not for him to counsel Gunth Mach, after all. Also, the notion that the Shi’gal Assassin sought to share anything with him was troubling. The taste of mortality was the birth of weakness, after all.
Rythok addressed him suddenly, gruffly pushing through his inner turmoil. ‘You waken to threat, yet we sense nothing. Even so, should we not quench this useless fire?’
Yes, Rythok. The Destriant sleeps and we have no need.
‘Do you hunt?’
No. But we are not alone in this land—human herds move to the south.
‘Is this not what Acyl desires? Is this not what the Destriant must find?’
Not these ones, Rythok. Yet, we shall pass through this herd … you will, I think, taste your own blood soon. You and Kor Thuran. Prepare yourselves.
And, with faint dismay, Sag’Churok saw that they were pleased.
The air thickened, clear as the humour of an eye, and all that Kalyth could see through it shimmered and shifted, swam and blurred. The sweep of stars flowed in discordant motion; the grasses of the undulating hills wavered, as if startled by wayward winds. Motes of detritus drifted about, shapeless and faintly pulsing crimson, some descending to roll across the ground, others wandering skyward as if on rising currents.
Every place held every memory of what it had once been. A plain that had been the bottom of a lake, the floor of a shallow sea, the lightless depths of a vast ocean. A hill that had been the peak of a young mountain, one of a chain of islands, the jagged fang of the earth buried in glacial ice. Dust that had been plants, sand that had been stone, stains that had been bone and flesh. Most memories, Kalyth understood, remain hidden, unseen and beneath the regard of flickering life. Yet, once the eyes were awakened, every memory was then unveiled, a fragment here, a hint there, a host of truths whispering of eternity.
Such knowledge could crush a soul with its immensity, or drown it beneath a deluge of unbearable futility. As soon as the distinction was made, that separation of self from all the rest, from the entire world beyond—its ceaseless measure of time, its whimsical game with change played out in slow siege and in sudden catastrophe—then the self became an orphan, bereft of all security, and face to face with a world now become at best a stranger, at worst an implacable, heartless foe.
In arrogance we orphan ourselves, and then rail at the awful solitude we find on the road to death.
But how could one step back into the world? How could one learn to swim such currents? In self-proclamation, the soul decided what it was that lay within in opposition to all that lay beyond. Inside
, outside, familiar, strange, that which is possessed, that which is coveted, all that is within grasp and all that is forever beyond reach. The distinction was a deep, vicious cut of a knife, severing tendons and muscles, arteries and nerves.
A knife?
No, that was the wrong weapon, a pathetic construct from her limited imagination. Indeed, the force that divided was something … other.
It was, she now believed, maybe even alive.
The multilayered vista before her was suddenly transformed. Grasses withered and blew away. High dunes of sand humped the horizon, and in a basin just ahead of her she saw a figure, its back to her as it knelt in the hard-edged shadow of a monolith of some sort. The stone—if that was what it was—was patinated with rust, the mottled stains looking raw, almost fresh against the green-black rock.
She found herself drawing closer. The figure was not simply kneeling in worship or obeisance, she realized. It was digging, hands thrust deep into the sands, almost up to the elbows.
He was an old man, his skin blue-black. Bald, the skin covering the skull scarred. If he heard her approaching, he gave no sign.
Was this some moment of the past? Millennia unfolding as all those layers fleeted away? Was she now witness to a memory of the Wastelands?
The monolith, Kalyth suddenly comprehended, was carved in the likeness of a finger. And the stone that she had first seen as green and black was growing translucent, serpentine green, revealing inner flaws and facets. She saw seams like veins of deep emerald, and masses that might be bone, the colour of true jade, deep within the edifice.
The old man—whose skin was not blue and black as she had first believed, but so thickly tattooed in swirling fur that nothing of its natural tone remained—now spoke, though he did not cease thrusting his hands into the sand at the base of the monolith. ‘There is a tribe in the Sanimon,’ he said, ‘that claims it was the first to master the forging of iron. They still make tools and weapons in the traditional manner—quenching blades in sand, just as I’m doing right now, do you see?’
Dust of Dreams Page 17