Even as the import of her words sank in to Whiskeyjack, there came to him another realization. There is another enemy indeed, and from the looks on most of the faces around me – barring Dujek and, no doubt, my own – the revelation is not as surprising as it should be. True, we’d caught a hint, but we’d failed to make the connection. Brood, Korlat, Kallor – gods, even Kruppe and Artanthos! Remind me to avoid every damn one of them the next time I join a game of bones! He jerked his gaze back to Silverfox, was met with that sleepy, knowing regard.
No, that won’t work again. ‘Silverfox,’ he growled. ‘You spin a tale to sting sympathy from our hearts, yet it seems that your effort was misdirected, and so you end up undermining all you sought to achieve. If there is a deeper threat, a third hand, deftly manipulating both us and the Pannion Seer … will you and your T’lan Imass then focus your attention on that hand?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
He was surprised as her steady gaze wavered, then fell away. Her voice came out in a raw whisper. ‘Because, Whiskeyjack, you ask too much of us.’
No-one spoke.
Dread swept through Whiskeyjack. He swung about, locked gazes with Dujek, saw in the old man’s face a mirror to his own growing horror. Gods below, we are heading to our deaths. An unseen enemy – but one we’ve known about for a long time, one we knew was coming, sooner or later, one that – by the Abyss – makes the T’lan Imass recoil …
‘Such palpable distraughtness!’ Kruppe cried. ‘Distraughtness? Is there such a word? If not, then among Krappe’s countless talents we must add linguistic invention! My friends! Attend! Hark! Listen! Take heart, one and all, in the knowledge that Kruppe has placed himself, feet square and ample girth firm, in the path of said – yet unmentioned – formidable enemy of all existence! Sleep calm at night in this knowledge. Slumber as babes in your mother’s arms, as each of you once did – even Kallor, though the image shocks and dismays—’
‘Dammit!’ Caladan Brood roared, ‘what in Hood’s name are you talking about, little man? You claim to stand in the path of the Crippled God? By the Abyss, you are mad! If you do not,’ he continued in a low tone as he swung down from his horse, ‘give instant proof of your efficacy’ – he strode towards Kruppe, one hand reaching for the wrapped handle of his hammer – ‘I will not predict the extremity of my temper.’
‘I wouldn’t do that, Brood,’ Silverfox murmured.
The warlord twisted to face her, teeth bared. ‘You now extend your protection to this arrogant, fat toad?’
Her eyes widened and she looked to the Daru. ‘Kruppe, do you make such a request?’
‘Absurd! No offence, dear, in that expostulation, Kruppe sweetly assures you!’
Whiskeyjack stared, disbelieving, as the round little man in his food- and drink-stained clothes drew himself up as straight as he was able and fixed small, glittering eyes on Caladan Brood. ‘Threaten Kruppe of Darujhistan, will you? Demand an explanation, do you? Fondling that hammer, are you? Baring those fa—’
‘Silence!’ the warlord bellowed, struggling to control his anger.
Gods below, what is Kruppe up to?
‘Kruppe defies all threats! Kruppe sneers at whatever demonstration bristling warlord would attempt—’
The hammer was suddenly in Brood’s hands, a smudged blur as it swung through the air, a downward arc, to strike the earth almost at Kruppe’s feet.
The detonation threw horses down, sent Whiskeyjack and the others flying. A thunderous concussion cracked the air. The ground seemed to leap up to meet the Malazan commander, the impact like a fist when he struck, rolled, then tumbled his way down the boulder-strewn slope.
Above him, horses were screaming. A wind, hot, shrieking, shot dust and earth skyward.
The scree of boulders was moving beneath Whiskeyjack, flowing, sliding down into the valley at an ever quickening pace with a rumbling, growing roar. Rocks clanged against his armour, rapped into the helm on his head, leaving him stunned. He caught a flashing glimpse, through a jagged tear in the dustcloud, of the line of hills on the other side the valley. Impossibly, they were rising, fast, the bedrock splitting the grassy hide, loosing gouts of dust, rock-shards and smoke. Then the swarming dust swallowed the world around him. Boulders bounced over him, tumbling. Others struck him solid, painful blows that left him gasping, coughing, choking as he rolled.
Even now, the ground continued to heave beneath the sliding scree. Distant detonations shook the air, trembled through Whiskeyjack’s battered bones.
He came to a rest, half buried in gravel and rocks. Blinking, eyes burning, he saw before him the Rhivi scouts – dodging, leaping from the path of bounding boulders as if in some bizarre, deadly game. Beyond, black, steaming bedrock towered, the spine of a new mountain range, still growing, still rising, lifting and tilting the floor of the valley where the Malazan now lay. The sky behind it churned iron-grey with steam and smoke.
Hood take me … poor Kruppe … Groaning, Whiskeyjack twisted round as far as he could. He was covered in scrapes, could feel the tender birth of huge bruises beneath his dented, torn armour, but his bones were, amazingly, intact He strained his watering eyes to the hilltop behind him.
The scree was gone, leaving a gaping, raw cliff-face. Most of the mesa’s summit was simply no longer there, obliterated, leaving a small, flat-topped island … where Whiskeyjack now saw figures moving, rising. Horses scrambling upright. Faintly, came the brazen complaint of a mule.
To the north, cutting a path down along the side of a distant valley, then through distant hills, a narrow, steaming crack was visible, a fissure in the earth that seemed depthless.
Whiskeyjack painfully pulled himself clear of the rubble, slowly straightened.
He saw Caladan Brood, hammer hanging down from his hands, motionless … and standing before the warlord, on an island of his own, was Kruppe. Brushing dust from his clothes. The crack that had been born where the hammer had struck the earth, parted neatly around the short, fat Daru, joining again just behind him.
Whiskeyjack struggled to hold back a laugh, knowing how desperate, how jarring it would sound. So, we have seen Brood’s fury. And Kruppe, that preposterous little man, has stood it down. Well, if proof was ever needed that the Daru was not as he appeared to be … He then frowned. A demonstration indeed – directed towards whom, I wonder?
A cry of dismay cut through his thoughts.
Korlat. She faced north, her posture somehow contracted, drawn in on itself.
The fissure, Whiskeyjack now saw – all amusement gone – was filling with blood.
Fouled blood, rotten blood. Beru fend, the Sleeping Goddess … Burn sleeps the sleep of the dying, the poisoned. And this, he realized, was the day’s final, most terrible revelation. Diseased … the hidden hand of the Crippled God …
* * *
The Mhybe’s eyes snapped open. The wagon rocked and pitched. Thunder shook the ground. The shouts of Rhivi were on all sides, a wailing chorus of alarm and consternation. Her bones and muscles protested as she was thrown about in the cataclysm, but she would not cry out. She wanted only to hide.
The rumbling faded, replaced by the distant lowing of the bhederin and, closer by, the soft footpads of her kin as they rushed past the wagon. The herd was close to panic, and a stampede was imminent.
Bringing ruin to us all. Yet that would be a mercy. An end to the pain, to my nightmares …
In her dreams she was young once more, but those dreams held no joy. Strangers walked the tundra landscape where she invariably found herself. They approached. She fled. Darting like a snow hare. Running, always running.
Strangers. She did not know what they wanted, but they were seeking her – that much was clear. Tracking her, like hunters their quarry. To sleep was to awaken exhausted, limbs trembling, chest heaving with agonized breaths.
She had been saved from the Abyss, from those countless tattered souls lost in eternal, desperate hunger. Saved, by a dragon. To what end? Le
aving me in a place where I am hunted, pursued without surcease?
Time passed, punctuated by the herders’ calming words to the frightened bhederin. There would be no stampede after all. Rumbles still trembled through the earth, in diminishing ripples that grew ever farther apart.
The Mhybe moaned softly to herself as the wagon rocked once more, this time to the arrival of the two Daru, Coll and Murillio.
‘You’ve awakened,’ the councillor noted. ‘It’s no surprise.’
‘Leave me be,’ she said, drawing the hides around her shivering body and curling away from the two men. It’s so cold …
‘Any idea what’s happened up ahead?’ Murillio asked Coll.
‘Seems Brood lost his temper.’
‘Gods! With whom? Kallor? That bastard deserves—’
‘Not Kallor, friend,’ Coll growled. ‘Make another guess – shouldn’t take you long.’
Murillio groaned. ‘Kruppe.’
‘Hood knows he’s stretched the patience of all of us at one time or another … only none of us was capable of splitting apart half the world and throwing new mountains skyward.’
‘Did the little runt get himself killed? I can’t believe—’
‘Word is, he’s come out unscathed. Typically. Complaining of the dust. No-one else was injured, either, though the warlord himself almost got his head kicked in by an angry mule.’
‘Kruppe’s mule? The one that sleeps when it walks?’
‘Aye, the very one.’
Sleeps. Dreams of being a horse, no doubt. Magnificent, tall, fierce …
‘That beast is a strange one, indeed. Never seen a mule so … so watchful. Of everything. Queen of Dreams, that’s the oddest looking range of mountains I’ve ever seen!’
‘Aye, Murillio, it does look bigger than it really is. Twists the eye. A broken spine, like something you’d see at the very horizon, yet there it is, not half a league from us. Doesn’t bear thinking about, if you ask me…’
Nothing bears thinking about. Not mountains, not mules, not Brood’s temper. Souls crowd my daughter, there, within her. Two women, and a Thelomen named Skullcrusher. Two women and a man whom I’ve never met … yet I carried that child within me. I, a Rhivi, young, in the bloom of my life, drawn into a dream then the dream made real. Yet where, within my daughter, am I? Where is the blood, the heart, of the Rhivi?
She has nothing of me, nothing at all. Naught but a vessel in truth – that is all I was – a vessel to hold then birth into the world a stranger.
She has no reason to see me, to visit, to take my hand and offer me comfort. My purpose is done, over. And here I lie, a discarded thing. Forgotten. A mhybe.
A hand settled gently on her shoulder.
Murillio spoke. ‘I think she sleeps once more.’
‘For the best,’ Coll murmured.
‘I remember my own youth,’ the Daru went on in a quiet, introspective tone.
‘I remember your own youth, too, Murillio.’
‘Wild and wasteful—’
‘A different widow every night, as I recall.’
‘I was a lodestone indeed, and, you know, it was all so effortless—’
‘We’d noticed.’
The man sighed. ‘But no longer. I’ve aged, paid the price for my younger days—’
‘Nights, you mean.’
‘Whatever. New rivals have arrived. Young bloods. Marak of Paxto, tall and lithe and turning heads wherever he saunters. The smug bastard. Then there’s Perryl of M’necrae—’
‘Oh, really, Murillio, spare me all this.’
‘The point is, it was all a stretch of years. Full years. Pleasurable ones. And, for all that I’m on the wane, at least I can look back and recall my days – all right, my nights – of glory. But here, with this poor woman…’
‘Aye, I hear you. Ever notice those copper ornaments she’s wearing – there, you can see the pair on her wrist. Kruppe’s gifts, from Darujhistan.’
‘What about them?’
‘Well, as I was saying. Ever noticed them? It’s a strange thing. They get brighter, shinier, when she’s sleeping.’
‘Do they?’
‘I’d swear it on a stack of Kruppe’s handkerchiefs.’
‘How odd.’
‘They’re kind of dull right now, though…’
There was silence from the two men crouched above her. After a long moment the hand resting on her shoulder squeezed slightly.
‘Ah, my dear,’ Murillio whispered, ‘would that I could take back my words…’
Why? They were truth. Words from your heart, and it is a generous one for all your irresponsible youth. You’ve given voice to my curse. That changes nothing. Am I to be pitied? Only when I’m asleep, it seems. To my face, you say nothing, and consider your silence a kindness. But it mocks me, for it arrives as indifference.
And this silence of mine? To these two kind men looking down on me right now? Which of my countless flaws does this reveal?
Your pity, it seems, is no match for my own.
Her thoughts trailed away, then. The treeless, ochre wasteland of her dreamworld appeared. And she within it.
She began running.
* * *
Dujek flung his gauntlets against the tent wall as he entered, his face dark with fury.
Whiskeyjack unstoppered the jug of ale and filled the two goblets waiting on the small camp table before him. Both men were smeared in sweaty dust.
‘What madness is this?’ the High Fist rasped, pausing only long enough to snatch up one of the goblets before beginning to pace.
Whiskeyjack stretched his battered legs out, the chair creaking beneath him. He swallowed a long draught of ale, sighed and said, ‘Which madness are you referring to, Dujek?’
‘Aye, the list is getting damned long. The Crippled God! The ugliest legends belong to that broken bastard—’
‘Fisher Kel Tath’s poem on the Chaining—’
‘I’m not one for reading poetry, but Hood knows, I’ve heard bits of it spoken by tavern bards and the like. Fener’s balls, this isn’t the war I signed on to fight.’
Whiskeyjack’s eyes narrowed on the High Fist. ‘Then don’t.’
Dujek stopped pacing, faced his second. ‘Go on,’ he said after a moment.
‘Brood already knew,’ he replied with a shrug that made him wince. As did Korlat. ‘With him, you could reasonably include Anomander Rake. And Kallor – though I liked not the avid glint in that man’s eye. So, two ascendants and one would-be ascendant. The Crippled God is too powerful for people like you and me to deal with, High Fist. Leave it to them, and to the gods. Both Rake and Brood were there at the Chaining, after all.’
‘Meaning it’s their mess.’
‘Bluntly, yes it is.’
‘For which we’re all paying, and might well pay the ultimate price before too long. I’ll not see my army used as fodder in that particular game, Whiskeyjack. We were marching to crush the Pannion Domin, a mortal empire – as far as we could determine.’
‘Manipulation seems to be going on on both sides, Dujek.’
‘And I am to be comforted by that?’ The High Fist’s glare was fierce. He held it on his second for another moment, then quaffed his ale. He thrust the empty goblet out.
Whiskeyjack refilled it. ‘We’re hardly ones to complain of manipulation,’ he rumbled, ‘are we, friend?’
Dujek paused, then grunted.
Indeed. Calm yourself, High Fist. Think clear thoughts. ‘Besides,’ Whiskeyjack continued, ‘I have faith.’
‘In what?’ his commander snapped. ‘In whom? Pray, tell me!’
‘In a certain short, corpulent, odious little man—’
‘Kruppe! Have you lost your mind?’
Whiskeyjack smiled. ‘Old friend, look upon your own seething anger. Your rage at this sense of being manipulated. Used. Possibly deceived. Now consider how an ascendant like Caladan Brood would feel, upon the realization that he is being manipulated? Enough to shatter the c
ontrol of his temper? Enough to see him unlimber his hammer and seek to obliterate that smug, pompous puppet-master.’
Dujek stood unmoving for a long time, then a grin curved his lips. ‘In other words, he took Krupp seriously…’
‘Darujhistan,’ Whiskeyjack said. ‘Our grand failure. Through it all, I had the sense that someone, somewhere, was orchestrating the whole damned thing. Not Anomander Rake. Not the Cabal. Not Vorcan and her assassins. Someone else. Someone so cleverly hidden, so appallingly … capable … that we were helpless, utterly helpless.
‘And then, at the parley, we all discover who was responsible for Tattersail’s rebirth. As Silverfox, a child of a Rhivi woman, the seed planted and the birth managed within an unknown warren. The drawing together of threads – Nightchill, Bellurdan, Tattersail herself. And, it now appears, an Elder God, returned to the mortal realm. And, finally and most remarkably, the T’lan Imass. So, Tattersail, Nightchill and Bellurdan – all of the Malazan Empire – reborn to a Rhivi woman, of Brood’s army … with a parley looming, the potential of a grand alliance … how Hood-damned convenient that a child should so bridge the camps—’
‘Barring Kallor,’ Dujek pointed out.
Whiskeyjack slowly nodded. ‘And Kallor’s just been reminded of Brood’s power – hopefully sufficiently to keep him in line.’
‘Is that what all that was about?’
‘Maybe. He demanded a demonstration, did he not? What Kruppe manipulates is circumstance. Somehow. I don’t feel we are fated to dance as he wills. There is an Elder God behind the Daru, but even there, I think it’s more an alliance of … mutual benefit, almost between equals. A partnership, if you will. Now, I’ll grant you, all this is speculation on my part, but I’ll tell you this: I have been manipulated before, as have you. But this time it feels different. Less inimical. Dujek, I sense compassion this time.’
The Malazan Empire Page 213