Orb Sceptre Throne

by Ian Cameron Esslemont

  The cloaked figure raised a hand, gesturing, and Aman bowed again. ‘Yes. Spread out. Guard all approaches. Let none interfere.’

  Ebbin was left alone with the creature. What had they named it? Father? In truth? Perhaps the title was merely honorific. Now would it do it? Take him? His knees lost their strength and he fell to the ground. Gods! Why this agonizing delay? Won’t it just end things?

  Standing above him the creature held out its right hand, pointed to Ebbin’s. Mystified, Ebbin looked at his own right hand. It was fisted, the knuckles white with pressure. When did … His breath caught. He remembered the tomb. He remembered reaching …

  Oh no. Please, no …

  Something was in his fist. It was hard and round. Ebbin’s heart lurched, skipping and tripping, refusing to beat.

  Oh no. Oh no, no. Please no.

  He held out his hand. It was oddly numb, as if it were someone else’s. He unclenched his fingers and there on his palm rested the gleaming white pearl from the last niche of the sepulchre. Moonlight shone from it like molten silver.

  Please! I beg of you … do not make me do what I think you will demand. Please! Spare me!

  The creature raised its head to the night sky, and for an instant Ebbin had the dizzying sense that the moon was no longer in the sky but on the mask before him.

  A pale circle. A pearl … of course! It was so obvious. He would have to warn everyone! He—

  The creature raised a hand above that smiling uplifted mouth. The fingers were pinched together as if holding some delicacy, a grape or a sweet, then opened there above the mouth. The moon lowered to regard him. Its enigmatic smile was now one of triumph.

  Oh no.

  *

  At Lady Varada’s estate its two remaining guards, Madrun and Lazan Door, were engaged in their timeless ritual of tossing dice against a wall when one bone die refused to stop spinning. Both watched it, wonder-struck, as it turned and turned before them.

  Then screaming erupted from the estate. They ran for the main hall. Here they found the castellan, Studlock, in his layered cloths as if wrapped in rags, blocking the way down to the rooms below. The continuous howling was not just one of fear. It sounded as if a woman was having her hands and feet sawn off.

  Studlock raised open hands. ‘M’lady gave commands not to be disturbed.’

  The two guards peered in past the castellan. ‘Would you listen!’ said Madrun. ‘Someone’s got her.’

  ‘Not at all,’ soothed Studlock. ‘M’lady is experiencing an illness. Nothing more. You may characterize it as something like withdrawal. I will prepare suitable medicines this moment – if I have your word not to go below! M’lady values her privacy.’

  Madrun and Lazan winced at a particularly terrifying scream. ‘But …’

  Studlock shook a crooked finger. ‘Your devotion is commendable, I assure you. However, all is in hand. Oil of d’bayang, I believe, is called for. And alcohol. A great deal of alcohol.’ The castellan shuddered within his strips of cloth. ‘Though how anyone could consume such poison is beyond me.’

  Lazan stroked his face and jerked as if surprised when his fingers touched his flesh. He tapped his partner on the shoulder and the two reluctantly withdrew.

  Behind them the tormented howling continued throughout the night.

  *

  In the deepest donjon beneath his estate High Alchemist Baruk knelt before a large diagram cut into the stone floor and inscribed in poured bronze, silver and iron. In one hand he held out a smoking taper with which he drew symbols in the air, while with the other he flicked drops of blood from a cut across the meat of his thumb.

  In mid-ceremony the locked, warded and sealed iron-bound door to the chamber crashed open and a gust of wind blew out the taper and brushed aside the intricate forest of symbols lingering in the air.

  Baruk’s shoulders fell. ‘Blast.’

  He lunged for the middle of the concentric rings of wards but something seemed to yank on his feet and he fell short. His arms, which crossed the rings of engraved metal, burst into flames. The robes fell to ash, revealing black armoured limbs twisted in sinew. His hands glowed, smoking, becoming toughened claws. The yanking continued. He scrabbled at the stone floor, gouging the rock and the metal bands.

  ‘No!’

  He flew backwards, stopped only by his clawed hands grasping the stone door jamb. He hung there, snarling, while the stone fractured and ground beneath his amber talons. The stones exploded in an eruption of dust and shards and he was whipped away up the hall to disappear.

  *

  Rallick entered the Phoenix Inn to find the common room uncharacteristically subdued. The crowd was quiet, the talk a low murmur, tense and guarded. He nodded to Scurve, the barkeeper, as he crossed to the back. Here Kruppe sat at his usual table. A dusty dark bottle stood before him, unopened. Rallick pulled up a chair and sat, noted the two glasses.

  ‘What are you celebrating?’

  The fat man roused himself, blinking as if returning from some trance. ‘I? Celebrating? Neither. I invite you to join me in giving witness. We shall drink to the inevitable. The unavoidable. The relentless turning of the celestial globes in which all that was before shall be again. As it must.’ He took up the bottle and began picking at its seal.

  ‘What are you going on about?’

  Tongue pressed firmly between his teeth, Kruppe answered, ‘Nothing. And everything. Chance versus inevitability. How those two war. Their eternal battle is what we call our lives, my friend! Which shall win? We shall see … as we saw before.’

  For a time Rallick watched his friend wrestling with the bottle, then, sighing his impatience, snatched it from him and began picking with his knife at the tar-like substance hardened around the neck. ‘What drink is this?’ he asked. ‘I’ve not seen the like. Is it foreign? Malazan?’

  ‘No. No foreign distillation is that. It is sadly entirely of our own making. And very sour it is too. It was set aside long ago for just this foreseen occasion.’

  ‘And the occasion?’ Rallick managed to remove the last of the old wax.

  Kruppe reached for the bottle but Rallick jammed his blade into the cork and twisted. The fat man winced, yanking back his hand. He studied his fingertips as if burned. ‘Nothing important,’ he murmured. ‘Everything is connected to everything else. Nothing is of more significance than any other thing.’

  Twisting and twisting, Rallick drew out the cork. He handed back the bottle. Kruppe took it, gingerly.

  ‘So we’re celebrating nothing?’ Rallick said, arching a brow.

  Kruppe raised the bottle. ‘You are most correct. This is nothing to celebrate.’ He tilted the bottle to pour. Nothing appeared. He tilted the bottle even further. Still nothing emerged. He held the bottle upside down over the glass, shook it, and not one drop fell. Rallick took it from him and held it up to one eye. He handed it back.

  ‘Empty. Empty as death’s mercy. What kind of joke is this, Kruppe?’

  Kruppe frowned at the bottle. ‘An entirely surprising one, I assure you, dear friend.’

  Rallick raised a hand to Jess. ‘If you’re too tight-fisted to spring for a bottle you just have to say so, Kruppe. No need for cheap conjuror’s tricks.’

  The squat man suddenly grinned like a cherub, his cheeks bunching. He raised a finger. ‘Ahh! Now I have the way of it. The bottle was not empty at all!’

  Rallick grimaced his incomprehension. ‘What?’

  ‘No. Not at all, dear friend. What you must consider, my dear Rallick, was that perhaps it was never full to begin with!’

  Rallick just signalled all the more impatiently for Jess.

  *

  In the slums west of Maiten the old woman sat slouched in the dirt before her shack and inhaled savagely on a clay pipe. The embers blazed, threatening to ignite the tangled nest of hair that hung down over her face. She sucked again, gasping, her face reddening, and held the smoke far down in her lungs, her eyes watering, before releasing the cloud in a fit of co
ughing. She wiped her wet lips with a dirty sleeve and staggered uncertainly to her feet.

  ‘Now is the time,’ she murmured to no one. ‘Now it is.’ She reached for the open doorway to her shack, tottering. She managed to hook a hand on either side of the ramshackle wattle-and-daub edge to heave herself inside, then fell, fighting down vomit.

  She felt about in the dirt until one hand found a bag, which she clutched to herself and curled around, sometimes giggling and sometimes weeping. The weeping became a sad song crooned hoarsely in a language none around her understood. She lay cradling the bag for some time.

  *

  Atop Despot’s Barbican, Aman, Taya and the shade of Hinter made their way through the maze of ruined foundations to return to their master’s side. Aman fell to his knees in obeisance, saying, ‘Yes, Father?’

  Hinter bowed, as did Taya. Her eyes shone with wild exhilaration as she peered up at the masked figure. She noted the body of the scholar lying nearby and kicked it. The man grunted, stirring. ‘This one lives?’ she asked aloud.

  The masked creature gestured. Aman grunted his understanding. ‘He will speak the Father’s will.’

  The girl sneered. ‘This one? Him? He is nothing.’

  ‘Exactly,’ Hinter said. ‘A slave. He will never be a threat.’

  ‘And speaking of slaves!’ Aman suddenly crowed, peering down the hill.

  Among the ruins some thing was clawing its way to them. Blackened, smoking, it made its agonized crippled slither all the way up to the mud-smeared edge of the masked creature’s cloak. There it lay, face pressed to the dirt. Aman cackled his enjoyment of the sight. Hinter merely shook his head. Taya’s face lit up with avid glee. She knelt to prod the sizzling body, raw and crimson where cracks revealed deeper flesh. ‘Is this … her?’

  ‘No,’ said Hinter. ‘It is Barukanal.’

  The grin inverted to a pout. She searched the hillside. ‘No others?’

  ‘They appear to have eluded the Call,’ Hinter mused, thoughtful. ‘For the moment.’

  Taya straightened from the smoking body. ‘What is to become of him then?’

  ‘He is to be punished,’ came a new voice and the three turned to regard Scholar Ebbin, who was now sitting up, a hand over his stomach, the other over his mouth, horrified shock on his face.

  After a moment of silence, the city eerily still beneath them, Taya cleared her throat. ‘So,’ she asked Aman, ‘is that it? Is it done?’

  ‘It has merely begun,’ Hinter said. And he pointed an ethereal arm to the sky.

  Taya looked up and her face lit with child-like pleasure. ‘Ohhh … Beautiful!’

  *

  At first Jan thought he dreamt. A voice was calling him. Distant at first, it seemed faint, gentle even. He saw his old master, the last First, sitting cross-legged before him. On his face was not the pale oval mask of all other Seguleh, painted or not. Instead he wore coarse wood, unpolished and gouged, worn to remind its bearer of the imperfection and shame of his people.

  As always, the dark sharp eyes behind the mask studied and weighed him. Then, alarmingly, the mask tilted downwards as if in apology. I am so sorry, the wiry old man seemed to say.

  Then the image exploded into smoke and a far more distant figure now stood in the darkness, cloaked, tall and commanding. Upon his face was not the child’s crude wooden mask, but a beaten golden oval that shone cold and bright, like the moon. And in his dream Jan bowed to the mask.

  Yet it was not the bended knee and lowered head of devotion freely given to his old master. In his dream Jan was sickened to find that he had no choice.

  He awoke, his body shivering in a cold sweat. A light tap at his door sounded again. He reached out and drew on his mask. Rising, he picked up the sword that lay next to his bedding and crossed to the door. A servant was waiting, head lowered.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘The Third and Fourth await without, sir. And … others.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Jan slid the door shut and threw on a shirt, trousers and sash. He went to the front. There in the night, their servants holding torches aloft, waited his fellows of the Ten, the ruling Eldrii. They bowed.

  ‘You felt it?’ Jan asked.

  Six masks inclined their assent.

  Jan answered their bow. ‘We are called, my friends. As was promised us so long ago. Ready the ships.’

  And they bowed once more.

  CHAPTER IV

  And he who knew many conflicts

  spoke these words:

  Where have the swordsmen gone?

  Where is the gold giver?

  Where are the feasts of the hall?

  Alas for the bright dome!

  Alas for the fallen splendour!

  Now that time has passed away,

  dark buried in night,

  as if it had never been!

  Where lay the servants,

  wound round with wards?

  Brought low by warriors

  and their cruel spears.

  Now storms beat

  at rocky cliffs,

  the bones of the earth

  harbingers of storm.

  All is strife and trouble

  in earthly kingdoms.

  Here men are fleeting.

  Here honour is fleeting.

  All the foundation of the world

  turns to waste!

  Song of the Exiles

  Cant

  ANTSY SPENT THE night on the common room dirt floor. Malakai paid for that and a room for Orchid. Money, it seemed, wasn’t an issue for the man. She woke him up in the morning bleary-eyed and hung over; he’d brooded far too long into the night over far too many earthenware bottles of cheap Confederation beer. That the ale went on to Malakai’s bill made the drinking all the easier, and his funk all the greater. His friend Jallin made no reappearance and Antsy decided that maybe he’d seen the last of that skinny thief.

  Malakai brought down six fat skins of sweet water, two bulging panniers and a coil of braided jute rope, and piled the lot beside Antsy and Orchid. Antsy took the majority of the waterskins, the rope, and one pannier to balance his own. He wondered resentfully whether the man had taken them on merely to serve as porters. Malakai wore his thick dirty cloak once more, but now, in his black waist sash and on two shoulder baldrics, he carried as many knives as you could collect from shaking down an entire bourse of Darujhistani toughs. Each was shoved into a tight leather sheath so it wouldn’t fall out or rattle. The man caught Antsy eyeing the hardware and smiled, waving a leather-gloved hand. ‘For show,’ he said.

  Orchid took the second pannier. She too was unable to look away from all the pig-stickers. Malakai led the way, and though Antsy listened he didn’t hear the faintest rattle or tap. The man still moved as silently as a shade. Antsy shivered, reminded of certain assassin-types he’d served beside over the years; then he shrugged and thumped along behind: better with him than against him. Leaving the inn he winced as the bright morning glare stabbed his eyes.

  The day’s fee-collecting had already begun. They entered the crowd, but unlike yesterday, when Antsy had had to push his way through the press, it parted before them as if everyone sensed that something was up. The faces he passed betrayed hostility, curiosity, resentment, and even smug smiles as if some knew what waited out at the Spawns – and it wasn’t pretty.

  Malakai handled the transaction. Antsy experienced a moment of light-headed avarice when the man tipped a stream of cut rubies on to the tabletop. Whatever this man was after out at the Spawns, riches could not be it. He probably already possessed enough to purchase a title in Darujhistan. Free Cities Confederation troops escorted them to the launch.

  ‘So you made it safe and sound, I see,’ a voice greeted Antsy when he jumped up and swung his legs into the tall boat. Malakai, already within, turned to the voice, his eyes narrowing dangerously. There, ensconced at the stern, sat the young Darujhistani nobleman from the Island Inn who’d probably saved Antsy’s neck.

&nb
sp; Antsy touched Malakai’s arm. ‘It’s okay. I met him here.’ Malakai just turned away to occupy the prow.

  Antsy leaned over the side to help Orchid up. She tried to clasp his hand but he avoided that to show her the wrist grip. He hauled but barely raised her; the girl was surprisingly heavy. Must be her damned height.

  ‘Wait,’ said the young sword who had moved next to him. He jumped over the side and knelt before Orchid. ‘You may stand on me, m’lady.’

  Orchid stared at his bent back as if it were some sort of cruel trick – that he would tumble her into the surf or move aside at the last instant. ‘Go ahead, lass,’ Antsy growled. ‘Give the damned fool your boot.’

  She planted one muddy shoe on his back and, steadied by Antsy, swung the other over the side. Looking rather embarrassed, she sat down among their equipment. Antsy helped the nobleman back up. ‘Thanks,’ he told him. ‘And thanks again.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you,’ Orchid added, her flushed face turned aside.

  ‘It was nothing,’ and the young man bowed.

  ‘Anyone else!’ a guard bellowed from the beach. ‘Anyone else for today?’

  ‘So, what’s your name?’ Antsy asked.

  The lad bowed again, brushed back his long brown hair. ‘Corien. Corien Lim. Honoured, sir.’

  Antsy cocked a brow. ‘Honoured? What in the Abyss for?’ He touched his neck. ‘It’s me who’s grateful.’

  The lad smiled. ‘Honoured to meet a veteran. I am a great admirer of your, ah, military organization.’