The Malazan Empire

by Steven Erikson

  Buke paused for a long moment, watching until the man named Marble disappeared around a corner.

  The sound of fighting was on all sides, but getting no closer. Hours earlier, in the deep of the night when Buke had been helping people from the Camps and from Daru District’s tenements make their way to the Grey Swords’ places of mustering – from which they would be led to the hidden tunnel entrances – the Pannions had reached all the way to the street Buke had just walked. Somehow, Capustan’s motley collection of defenders had managed to drive them back. Bodies from both sides littered Kilsban Way.

  Buke pushed himself into motion once more, passing beneath the scorched lintel of the entrance with a firm conviction that he would never again leave Bauchelain and Korbal Broach’s estate. Even as his steps slowed to a sudden surge of self-preservation, he saw it was too late.

  Bauchelain stood in the courtyard. ‘Ah, my erstwhile employee. We’d wondered where you’d gone.’

  Buke ducked his head. ‘My apologies, sir. I’d delivered the tax exemption writ to the Daru civic authorities as requested—’

  ‘Excellent, and was our argument well received?’

  The old guard winced. ‘The event of siege, alas, offers no relief from property taxes, master. The monies are due. Fortunately, with the evacuation, there is no-one at Daru House to await their arrival.’

  ‘Yes, the evacuation. Tunnels. Very clever. We declined the offer, of course.’

  ‘Of course.’ Buke could no longer hold his gaze on the cobbles before him, and found his head turning, lifting slightly to take in the half-score Urdomen bodies lying bloodless, faces mottled black beneath their visors, on all sides.

  ‘A precipitous rush of these misguided soldiers,’ Bauchelain murmured. ‘Korbal was delighted, and makes preparations to recruit them.’

  ‘Recruit them, master? Oh, yes sir. Recruit them.’

  The necromancer cocked his head. ‘Odd, dear Emancipor Reese uttered those very words, in an identical tone, not half a bell ago.’

  ‘Indeed, master.’

  The two regarded each other for a brief span, then Bauchelain stroked his beard and turned away. ‘The Tenescowri are coming, did you know? Among them, Children of the Dead Seed. Extraordinary, these children. A dying man’s seed … Hmm. It’s said that the eldest among them now commands the entire peasant horde. I look forward to meeting him.’

  ‘Master? Uh, how, I mean—’

  Bauchelain smiled. ‘Korbal is most eager to conduct a thorough examination of this child named Anaster. What flavour is his biology? Even I wonder at this.’

  The fallen Urdomen lurched, twitched as one, hands clawing towards dropped weapons, helmed heads lifting.

  Buke stared in horror.

  ‘Ah, you now have guards to command, Buke. I suggest you have them position themselves at the entrance. And perhaps one to each of the four corner towers. Tireless defenders, the best kind, yes?’

  Emancipor Reese, clutching his mangy cat tight against his chest, stumbled out from the main house.

  Bauchelain and Buke watched as the old man rushed towards one of the now standing Urdomen. Reese came up to the hulking warrior, reached out and tugged frantically at the undead’s chain collar and the jerkin beneath it The old man’s hand reached down beneath both layers, down, down.

  Emancipor started gibbering. He pulled his hand clear, staggered back. ‘But – but—’ His lined, pebbled face swung to Bauchelain. ‘That … that man, Korbal – he has – he said – I saw! He has their hearts! He’s sewn them together, a bloody, throbbing mass on the kitchen table! But—’ He spun and thumped the Urdomen on the chest. ‘No wound!’

  Bauchelain raised one thin eyebrow. ‘Ah, well, with you and friend Buke here interfering with Korbal Broach’s normal nightly activities, my colleague was forced to modify his habits, his modus operandi, if you will. Now, you see, my friends, he has no need to leave his room in order to satisfy his needs of acquisition. None the less, it should be said, please desist in your misguided efforts.’ The necromancer’s flat grey eyes fixed on Buke. ‘And as for the priest Keruli’s peculiar sorcery now residing within you, unveil it not, dear servant. We dislike company when in our Soletaken forms.’

  Buke’s legs came close to giving out beneath him.

  ‘Emancipor,’ Bauchelain murmured, ‘do lend your shoulder to our guard.’

  The old man stepped close. His eyes were so wide that Buke could see white all around them. Sweat beaded his wrinkled face. ‘I told you it was madness!’ he hissed. ‘What did Keruli do to you? Damn you, Buke—’

  ‘Shut up, Mancy,’ Buke growled. ‘You knew they were Soletaken. Yet you said nothing – but Keruli knew as well.’

  Bauchelain strode towards the main house, humming under his breath.

  Buke twisted and gripped Emancipor’s tunic. ‘I can follow them now! Keruli’s gift. I can follow those two anywhere!’

  ‘They’ll kill you. They’ll swat you down, Buke. You Hood-damned idiot—’

  Buke managed a sickly grin. ‘Hood-damned? Oh yes, Mancy, we’re all that. Aren’t we just. Hood-damned, aye.’

  A distant, terrible roar interrupted them, a sound that shivered through the city, swept in from all sides.

  Emancipor paled. ‘The Tenescowri…’

  But Buke’s attention had been drawn to the main building’s square tower, to the open shutters of the top, third floor’s room. Where two rooks now perched. ‘Oh yes,’ he muttered, baring his teeth, ‘I see you. You’re going after him, aren’t you? That first child of the Dead Seed. Anaster. You’re going after him.’

  The rooks dropped from the ledge, wings spreading, swooped low over the compound, then, with heavy, audible flaps, lifted themselves clear of the compound wall. Flying southeast.

  Buke pushed Reese away. ‘I can follow them! Oh yes. Keruli’s sweet gift…’ My own Soletaken form, the shape of wings, the air sliding over and beneath me. Gods, the freedom! What I will … finds form—He felt his body veering, sweet warmth filling his limbs, the spice of his skin’s breath as it assumed a cloak of feathers. His body dwindling, changing shape. Heavy bones thinning, becoming lighter.

  Keruli’s sweet gift, more than he ever imagined. Flight! Away from what I was! From all that I had been! Burdens, vanishing! Oh, I can follow those two dread creatures, those winged nightmares. I can follow, and where they strain and lumber on the unseen currents in the sky, I twist, dart, race like lightning!

  Standing in the courtyard, Emancipor Reese watched through watering eyes Buke’s transformation. A blurring of the man, a drawing inward, the air filling with pungent spice. He watched as the sparrow hawk that had been Buke shot upward in a cavorting climbing spiral.

  ‘Aye,’ he muttered. ‘You can fly circles around them. But, dear Buke, when they decide to swat you down, it won’t be a duel on the wing. It’ll be sorcery. Those plodding rooks have no need for speed, no need for agility – and those gifts will avail you nothing when the time comes. Buke … you poor fool…’

  * * *

  High above Capustan, the sparrowhawk circled. The two rooks, Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, were far below yet perfectly visible to the raptor’s eyes. Flapping ponderously through wreaths of smoke, southeast, past the East Gate …

  The city still burned in places, thrusting columns of black smoke skyward. The sparrowhawk studied the siege from a point of view that the world’s generals would die for. Wheeling, circling, watching.

  The Tenescowri ringed the city in a thick, seething band. A third of a million, maybe more. Such a mass of people as Buke had never seen before. And the band had begun to constrict. A strangely colourless, writhing noose, drawing ever closer to the city’s feeble, crumbled walls and what seemed but a handful of defenders.

  There would be no stopping this assault. An army measured not by bravery, but by something far deadlier, something unopposable: hunger. An army that could not afford to break, that saw only wasting death in retreat.

  Capustan wa
s about to be devoured.

  The Pannion Seer is a monster in truth. A tyranny of need. And this will spread. Defeat him? You would have to kill every man, woman and child on this world who are bowed to hunger, everyone who faces starvation’s grisly grin. It has begun here, on Genabackis, but that is simply the heart. This tide will spread. It will infect every city, on every continent, it will devour empires and nations from within.

  I see you now, Seer. From this height. I understand what you are, and what you will become. We are lost. We are all truly lost.

  His thoughts were scattered by a virulent bloom of sorcery to the east. A knot of familiar magic swirled around a small section of the Tenescowri army. Black waves shot through with sickly purple streamed outward, cut down screaming peasants by the hundreds. Grey-streaming sorcery answered.

  The sparrowhawk’s eyes saw the twin corbies now, there, in the midst of the magical storm. Demons burst from torn portals on the plain, tore mayhem through the shrieking, flinching ranks. Sorcery lashed back, swarmed over the creatures.

  The two rooks swept down, converged on a figure sitting on a bucking roan horse. Waves of magic collided with a midnight flash, the concussion a thunder that reached up to where Buke circled.

  The sparrowhawk’s beak opened, loosing a piercing cry. The rooks had peeled away. Sorcery hammered them, battered them as they flapped in hasty retreat.

  The figure on the stamping horse was untouched. Surrounded by heaps of bodies, into which fellow Tenescowri now plunged. To feed.

  Buke screamed another triumphant cry, dipped his wings, plummeted earthward.

  He reached the estate’s courtyard well ahead of Bauchelain and Korbal Broach, spiralling, slowing, wings buffeting the air. To hover the briefest of moments, before sembling, returning to his human form.

  Emancipor Reese was nowhere to be seen. The undead Urdomen still stood in the positions where they had first arisen.

  Feeling heavy and awkward in his body, Buke turned to study them. ‘Six of you to the gate – you’ – he pointed – ‘and the ones directly behind you. And you, to the northwest tower.’ He continued directing the silent warriors, placing them as Bauchelain had suggested. As he barked the last order, twin shadows tracked weaving paths across the cobbles. The rooks landed in the courtyard. Their feathers were in tatters. Smoke rose from one of them.

  Buke watched the sembling, smiled at seeing, first Korbal Broach – his armour in shreds, rank tendrils of smoke wreathed around him – then Bauchelain, his pale face bruised along one side of his long jaw, blood crusting his moustache and staining his silver beard.

  Korbal Broach reached up to the collar of his cloak, his pudgy, soft hands trembling, fumbling at the clasp. The black leather fell to the ground. He began stamping on it to kill the last of its smouldering patches.

  Brushing dust from his arms, Bauchelain glanced over at Buke. ‘Patient of you, to await our return.’

  Wiping the smile from his lips, Buke shrugged. ‘You didn’t get him. What happened?’

  ‘It seems,’ the necromancer muttered, ‘we must needs refine our tactics.’

  The instinct of self-preservation vanished, then, as Buke softly laughed.

  Bauchelain froze. One eyebrow arched. Then he sighed. ‘Yes, well. Good day to you, too, Buke.’

  Buke watched him head inside.

  Korbal Broach continued stomping on his cloak long after the smouldering patches had been extinguished.

  Chapter Fifteen

  In my dreams I come face to face with myriad reflections of myself, all unknown and passing strange. They speak unending in languages not my own and walk with companions I have never met, in places my steps have never gone.

  In my dreams I walk worlds where forests crowd my knees and half the sky is walled ice. Dun herds flow like mud, vast floods tusked and horned surging over the plain, and lo, they are my memories, the migrations of my soul.

  IN THE TIME BEFORE NIGHT

  D’ARAYANS OF THE RHIVI

  Whiskeyjack rose in the saddle as his horse leapt over the spiny ridge of outcroppings cresting the hill. Hooves thumped as the creature resumed its gallop, crossing the mesa’s flat top, then slowing as the Malazan tautened the reins and settled back in the saddle. At a diminishing canter, he approached the summit’s far side, then drew up at its edge.

  A rumpled, boulder-strewn slope led down into a broad, dry riverbed. At its base two 2nd Army scouts sat on their horses, backs to Whiskeyjack. Before them, a dozen Rhivi were moving on foot through what seemed to be a field of bones.

  Huge bones.

  Clicking his mount into motion, Whiskeyjack slowly worked it down onto the ancient slide. His eyes held on the scatter of bones. Massive iron blades glinted there, as well as crumpled, oddly shaped armour and helmets. He saw long, reptilian jaws, rows of jagged teeth. Clinging to some of the shattered skeletons, the remnants of grey skin.

  Clearing the scree, Whiskeyjack rode up to the nearest scout.

  The man saluted. ‘Sir. The Rhivi are jabbering away – can’t quite follow what they’re talking about. Looks to have been about ten of the demons. Whatever tore into them was nasty. Might be the Rhivi have gleaned more, since they’re crawling around among the corpses.’

  Nodding, Whiskeyjack dismounted. ‘Keep an eye out,’ he said, though he knew the scouts were doing just that, but feeling the need to say something. The killing field exuded an air of dread, old yet new, and – even more alarming – it held the peculiar tension that immediately followed a battle. Thick silence, swirling as if not yet settled by the sounds of violence, as if somehow still trembling, still shivering …

  He approached the Rhivi and the sprawl of bones.

  The tribal scouts were indeed jabbering.

  ‘Dead wolves…’

  ‘Twice tracks, the touches heavy yet light, wider than my hand. Big.’

  ‘Big dead wolves.’

  ‘No blood, agreed? Barrow stench.’

  ‘Black stone dust. Sharp.’

  ‘Glittering beneath forearms – the skin…’

  ‘Black glass fragments.’

  ‘Obsidian. Far south…’

  ‘Southwest. Or far north, beyond Laederon Plateau.’

  ‘No, I see no red or brown. Laederon obsidian has wood-coloured veins. This is Morn.’

  ‘If of this world…’

  ‘The demons are here, are they not? Of this world. In this world.’

  ‘Barrow stench.’

  ‘Yet in the air, ice stench, tundra wind, the smell of frozen peat.’

  ‘The wake of the wolves, the killers—’

  Whiskeyjack growled, ‘Rhivi scouts, attend to me, please.’

  Heads lifted, faces turned. Silence.

  ‘I will hear your report, now. Which of you commands this troop?’

  Looks were exchanged, then one shrugged. ‘I can speak this Daru you use. Better than the others. So, for this that you ask, me.’

  ‘Very well. Proceed.’

  The young Rhivi swept back the braided strands of his grease-laden hair, then waved expansively at the bones around them. ‘Undead demons. Armoured, with swords instead of hands. Coming from the southeast, more east than south.’ He made an exaggerated frown. ‘Damaged. Pursued. Hunted. Fleeing. Driven like bhederin, this way and that, loping, silent followers four-legged and patient—’

  ‘Big undead wolves,’ Whiskeyjack cut in.

  ‘Twice as big as the native wolves of this plain. Yes.’ Then his expression cleared as if with revelation. ‘They are like the ghost-runners of our legends. When the eldest shouldermen or women dream their farthest dreams, the wolves are seen. Never close, always running, all ghostly except the one who leads, who seems as flesh and has eyes of life. To see them is great fortune, glad tiding, for there is joy in their running.’

  ‘Only they’re no longer running just in the dreams of your witches and warlocks,’ Whiskeyjack said. ‘And this run was far deadlier.’

  ‘Hunting. I said these wolve
s are like those in the dreams. I did not say they were those in the dreams.’ His expression went blank, his eyes the eyes of a cold killer. ‘Hunting. Driving their quarry, down to this, their trap. Then they destroyed them. A battle of undead. The demons are from barrows far to the south. The wolves are from the dust in the north winds of winter.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Whiskeyjack said. The Rhivi manner of narrative – the dramatic performance – had well conveyed the events this valley had witnessed.

  More riders were approaching from the main column, and he turned to watch them.

  Three. Korlat, Silverfox, and the Daru, Kruppe, the latter bobbing and weaving on his mule as it raced with stiff, short-legged urgency in the wake of the two horse-riding women. His cries of alarm echoed in the narrow valley.

  ‘Yes.’

  The commander swung round, eyes narrowing on the Rhivi scout-leader who, along with all his kin, was now studying the three riders. ‘Excuse me?’

  The Rhivi shrugged, expressionless, and said nothing.

  The scree of boulders had forced the newcomers to slow, except for Kruppe who was thrown forward then back on his saddle as the mule pitched headlong down the slope. Somehow the beast kept its footing, plummeting past a startled Korlat and a laughing Silverfox, then, reaching the flat, slowing its wild charge and trotting up to where Whiskeyjack stood, its head lifted proudly, ears up and forward-facing.

  Kruppe, on the other hand, remained hugging the animal’s neck, eyes squeezed shut, face crimson and streaming sweat. ‘Terror!’ he moaned. ‘Battle of wills, Kruppe has met his match in this brainless, delusional beast! Aye, he is defeated! Oh, spare me…’

  The mule halted.

  ‘You can climb off, now,’ Whiskeyjack said.

  Kruppe opened his eyes, looked around, then slowly sat straight He shakily withdrew a handkerchief. ‘Naturally. Having given the creature its head, Kruppe now reacquires the facility of his own.’ Pausing a moment to pat his brow and daub his face, he then wormed off the saddle and settled to the ground with a loud sigh. ‘Ah, here come Kruppe’s lazy dust-eaters. Delighted you could make it, dear ladies! A fine afternoon for a trot, yes?’