The Malazan Empire

by Steven Erikson

He watched Temul and two riders cantering towards him. The Wickan leader reined in, shaking his head. ‘Nowhere to be found, Fist. It’s no surprise – but know this: we’ve had other desertions, and we’ve tracked them all down. The Adjunct has issued the command to kill the next ones on sight.’

  Keneb nodded, looked away.

  ‘From now on,’ Temul continued, ‘my Wickans will not accept counter-orders from Malazan officers.’

  The Fist’s head turned back and he stared at Temul. ‘Fist, your Wickans are Malazans.’

  The young warrior grimaced, then wheeled his horse. ‘They’re your problem now, Fist. Send out searchers if you like, but the Fourteenth won’t wait for them.’

  Even as he and his aides rode away, the horns sounded, and the army lurched into motion.

  Keneb rose in his saddle and looked around. The sun was down, now. Too dark to see much of anything. And somewhere out there were Captain Faradan Sort and Sinn. Two deserters. That damned captain. I thought she was…well, I didn’t think she’d do something like this.

  Y’Ghatan had broken people, broken them utterly – he did not think many would recover. Ever.

  The Fourteenth Army began its march, down the western road, towards the Sotka Fork, in its wake dust and ash, and a destroyed city.

  Her head was serpentine, the slitted, vertical eyes lurid green, and Balm watched her tongue slide in and out with fixed, morbid fascination. The wavy, ropy black tendrils of her hair writhed, and upon the end of each was a tiny human head, mouth open in piteous screams.

  Witch Eater, Thesorma Raadil, all bedecked in zebra skins, her four arms lifting this way and that, threatening with the four sacred weapons of the Dal Hon tribes. Bola, kout, hook-scythe and rock – he could never understand that: where were the more obvious ones? Knife? Spear? Bow? Who thought up these goddesses anyway? What mad, twisted, darkly amused mind conjured such monstrosities? Whoever it was – is – I hate him. Or her. Probably her. It’s always her. She’s a witch, isn’t she? No, Witch Eater. Likely a man, then, and one not mad or stupid after all. Someone has to eat all those witches.

  Yet she was advancing on him. Balm. A mediocre warlock – no, a lapsed warlock – just a soldier, now, in fact. A sergeant, but where in Hood’s name was his squad? The army? What was he doing on the savannah of his homeland? I ran from there, oh yes I did. Herd cattle? Hunt monstrous, vicious beasts and call it a fun pastime? Not for me. Oh no, not Balm. I’ve drunk enough bull blood to sprout horns, enough cow milk to grow udders – ‘so you, Witch Eater, get away from me!’

  She laughed, the sound a predictable hiss, and said, ‘I’m hungry for wayward warlocks—’

  ‘No! You eat witches! Not warlocks!’

  ‘Who said anything about eating?’

  Balm tried to get away, scrabbling, clawing, but there were rocks, rough walls, projections that snagged him. He was trapped. ‘I’m trapped!’

  ‘Get away from him, you rutting snake!’

  A voice of thunder. Well, minute thunder. Balm lifted his head, looked round. A huge beetle stood within arm’s reach – reared up on its hind legs, its wedge-shaped head would have been level with Balm’s knees, could he stand. So, huge in a relative sense. Imparala Ar, the Dung God – ‘Imparala! Save me!’

  ‘Fear not, mortal,’ the beetle said, antennae and limbs waving about. ‘She’ll not have you! No, I have need of you!’

  ‘You do? For what?’

  ‘To dig, my mortal friend. Through the vast dung of the world! Only your kind, human, with your clear vision, your endless appetite! You, conveyor of waste and maker of rubbish! Follow me, and we shall eat our way into the very Abyss itself!’

  ‘Gods, you stink!’

  ‘Never mind that, my friend – before too long you too—’

  ‘Leave him alone, the both of you!’ A third voice, shrill, descending from above and closing fast. ‘It’s the dead and dying who cry out the truth of things!’

  Balm looked up. Brithan Troop, the eleven-headed vulture goddess. ‘Oh, leave me alone! All of you!’

  From every side, now, a growing clamour of voices. Gods and goddesses, the whole Dal Honese menagerie of disgusting deities.

  Oh, why do we have so many of them?

  It was her sister, not her. She remembered, as clearly as if it had been yesterday, the night of lies that lumbered into the Itko Kanese village when the seas had been silent, empty, for too long. When hunger, no, starvation, had arrived, and all the civil, modern beliefs – the stately, just gods – were cast off once again. In the name of Awakening, the old grisly rites had returned.

  The fish had gone away. The seas were lifeless. Blood was needed, to stir the Awakening, to save them all.

  They’d taken her sister. Smiles was certain of it. Yet, here were the rough, salt-gnawed hands of the elders, carrying her drugged, insensate body down onto the wet sands – the tide drawn far back and waiting patiently for this warm gift – whilst she floated above herself, looking on in horror.

  All wrong. Not the way it had happened. They’d taken her twin sister – so much power in the Mirror Birth, after all, and so rare in the small village where she’d been born.

  Her sister. That was why she’d fled them all. Cursing every name, every face glimpsed that night. Running and running, all the way to the great city to the north – and, had she known what awaited her there…

  No, I’d do it again. I would. Those bastards. ‘For the lives of everyone else, child, give up your own. This is the cycle, this is life and death, and that eternal path lies in the blood. Give up your own life, for the lives of all of us.’

  Odd how those priests never volunteered themselves for that glorious gift. How they never insisted that they be the ones tied and weighted down to await the tide’s wash, and the crabs, the ever hungry crabs.

  And, if it was so damned blissful, why pour durhang oil down her throat, until her eyes were like black pearls and she couldn’t even walk, much less think? Still less comprehend what was happening, what they were planning to do to her?

  Drifting above the body of herself, Smiles sensed the old spirits drawing close, eager and gleeful. And, somewhere in the depths beyond the bay, waited the Eldest God. Mael himself, that feeder on misery, the cruel taker of life and hope.

  Rage rising within her, Smiles could feel her body straining at the numbing turgid chains – she would not lie unmoving, she would not smile up when her mother kissed her one last time. She would not blink dreamily when the warm water stole over her, into her.

  Hear me! All you cursed spirits, hear me! I defy you!

  Oh yes, flinch back! You know well enough to fear, because I swear this – I will take you all down with me. I will take you all into the Abyss, into the hands of the demons of chaos. It’s the cycle, you see. Order and chaos, a far older cycle than life and death, wouldn’t you agree?

  So, come closer, all of you.

  In the end, it was as she had known. They’d taken her sister, and she, well, let’s not be coy now, you delivered the last kiss, dear girl. And no durhang oil to soothe away the excuse, either.

  Running away never feels as fast, never as far, as it should.

  You could believe in whores. He had been born to a whore, a Seti girl of fourteen who’d been flung away by her parents – of course, she hadn’t been a whore then, but to keep her new son fed and clothed, well, it was the clearest course before her.

  And he had learned the ways of worship among whores, all those women knitted close to his mother, sharing fears and everything else that came with the profession. Their touch had been kindly and sincere, the language they knew best.

  A half-blood could call on no gods. A half-blood walked the gutter between two worlds, despised by both.

  Yet he had not been alone, and in many ways it was the half-bloods who held closest to the traditional ways of the Seti. The full-blood tribes had gone off to wars – all the young lance warriors and the women archers – beneath the standard of the Malazan Empire. When
they had returned, they were Seti no longer. They were Malazan.

  And so Koryk had been immersed in the old rituals – those that could be remembered – and they had been, he had known even then, godless and empty. Serving only the living, the half-blood kin around each of them.

  There was no shame in that.

  There had been a time, much later, when Koryk had come upon his own language, protecting the miserable lives of the women from whom he had first learned the art of empty worship. A mindful dialect, bound to no cause but that of the living, of familiar, ageing faces, of repaying the gifts the now unwanted once-whores had given him in his youth. And then watching them one by one die. Worn out, so scarred by so many brutal hands, the indifferent usage by the men and women of the city – who proclaimed the ecstasy of god-worship when it suited them, then defiled human flesh with the cold need of carnivores straddling a kill.

  Deep in the sleep of Carelbarra, the God Bringer, Koryk beheld no visitors. For him, there was naught but oblivion.

  As for the fetishes, well, they were for something else. Entirely something else.

  ‘Go on, mortal, pull it.’

  Crump glowered, first at Stump Flit, the Salamander God, Highest of High Marshals, then at the vast, gloomy swamp of Mott. What was he doing here? He didn’t want to be here. What if his brothers found him? ‘No.’

  ‘Go on, I know you want to. Take my tail, mortal, and watch me thrash about, a trapped god in your hands, it’s what you all do anyway. All of you.’

  ‘No. Go away. I don’t want to talk to you. Go away.’

  ‘Oh, poor Jamber Bole, all so alone, now. Unless your brothers find you, and then you’ll want me on your side, yes you will. If they find you, oh my, oh my.’

  ‘They won’t. They ain’t looking, neither.’

  ‘Yes they are, my foolish young friend—’

  ‘I ain’t your friend. Go away.’

  ‘They’re after you, Jamber Bole. Because of what you did—’

  ‘I didn’t do nothing!’

  ‘Grab my tail. Go on. Here, just reach out…’

  Jamber Bole, now known as Crump, sighed, reached out and closed his hand on the Salamander God’s tail.

  It bolted, and he was left holding the end of the tail in his hand.

  Stump Flit raced away, laughing and laughing.

  Good thing too, Crump reflected. It was the only joke it had.

  Corabb stood in the desert, and through the heat-haze someone was coming. A child. Sha’ik reborn, the seer had returned, to lead still more warriors to their deaths. He could not see her face yet – there was something wrong with his eyes. Burned, maybe. Scoured by blowing sand, he didn’t know, but to see was to feel pain. To see her was…terrible.

  No, Sha’ik, please. This must end, it must all end. We have had our fill of holy wars – how much blood can this sand absorb? When will your thirst end?

  She came closer. And the closer she drew to where he was standing, the more his eyes failed him, and when he heard her halt before him, Corabb Bhilan Thenu’alas was blind.

  Yet not deaf, as she whispered, ‘Help me.’

  ‘Open your eyes, friend.’

  But he didn’t want to. Everybody demanded decisions. From him, all the time, and he didn’t want to make any more. Never again. The way it was now was perfect. This slow sinking away, the whisperings that meant nothing, that weren’t even words. He desired nothing more, nothing else.

  ‘Wake up, Fiddler. One last time, so we can talk. We need to talk, friend.’

  All right. He opened his eyes, blinked to clear the mists – but they didn’t clear – in fact, the face looking down at him seemed to be made of those mists. ‘Hedge. What do you want?’

  The sapper grinned. ‘I bet you think you’re dead, don’t you? That you’re back with all your old buddies. A Bridgeburner, where the Bridgeburners never die. The deathless army – oh, we cheated Hood, didn’t we just. Hah! That’s what you’re thinking, yeah? Okay, then, so where’s Trotts? Where are all the others?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘I will. You ain’t dead. Not yet, maybe not for a while either. And that’s my point. That’s why I’m here. You need a kicking awake, Fid, else Hood’ll find you and you won’t see none of us ever again. The world’s been burned through, where you are right now. Burned through, realm after realm, warren after warren. It ain’t a place anybody can claim. Not for a long time. Dead, burned down straight to the Abyss.’

  ‘You’re a ghost, Hedge. What do you want with me? From me?’

  ‘You got to keep going, Fid. You got to take us with you, right to the end—’

  ‘What end?’

  ‘The end and that’s all I can say—’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘’Cause it ain’t happened yet, you idiot! How am I supposed to know? It’s the future and I can’t see no future. Gods, you’re so thick, Fid. You always were.’

  ‘Me? I didn’t blow myself up, Hedge.’

  ‘So? You’re lying on a bunch of urns and bleeding out – that’s better? Messing up all that sweet honey with your blood—’

  ‘What honey? What are you talking about?’

  ‘You better get going, you’re running outa time.’

  ‘Where are we?’

  ‘No place, and that’s the problem. Maybe Hood’ll find you, maybe no-one will. The ghosts of Y’Ghatan – they all burned. Into nothing. Destroyed, all those locked memories, thousands and thousands. Thousands of years…gone, now. You’ve no idea the loss…’

  ‘Be quiet. You’re sounding like a ghost.’

  ‘Time to wake up, Fid. Wake up, now. Go on…’

  Wildfires had torn across the grasslands, and Bottle found himself lying on blackened stubble. Nearby lay a charred carcass. Some kind of four-legged grass-eater – and around it had gathered a half-dozen human-like figures, fine-furred and naked. They held sharp-edged stones and were cutting into the burnt flesh.

  Two stood as sentinels, scanning the horizons. One of them was…her.

  My female. Heavy with child, so heavy now. She saw him and came over. He could not look away from her eyes, from that regal serenity in her gaze.

  There had been wild apes on Malaz Island once. He remembered, in Jakatakan, when he was maybe seven years old, seeing a cage in the market, the last island ape left, captured in the hardwood forests on the north coast. It had wandered down into a village, a young male seeking a mate – but there were no mates left. Half-starved and terrified, it had been cornered in a stable, clubbed unconscious, and now it crouched in a filthy bamboo cage at the dockside market in Jakatakan.

  The seven-year-old boy had stood before it, his eyes level with that black-furred, heavy-browed beast’s own eyes, and there had been a moment, a single moment, when their gazes locked. A single moment that broke Bottle’s heart. He’d seen misery, he’d seen awareness – the glint that knew itself, yet did not comprehend what it had done wrong, what had earned it the loss of its freedom. It could not have known, of course, that it was now alone in the world. The last of its kind. And that somehow, in some exclusively human way, that was its crime.

  Just as the child could not have known that the ape, too, was aged seven.

  Yet both saw, both knew in their souls – those darkly flickering shapings, not yet solidly formed – that, for this one time, they were each looking upon a brother.

  Breaking his heart.

  Breaking the ape’s heart, too – but maybe, he’d thought since, maybe he just needed to believe that, a kind of flagellation in recompense. For being the one outside the cage, for knowing that there was blood on the hands of himself and his kind.

  Bottle’s soul, broken away…and so freed, gifted or cursed with the ability to travel, to seek those duller life-sparks and to find that, in truth, they were not dull at all, that the failure in fully seeing belonged to himself.

  Compassion existed when and only when one could step outside oneself, to suddenly see the bars from inside the cage.r />
  Years later, Bottle had tracked down the fate of that last island ape. Purchased by a scholar who lived in a solitary tower on the wild, unsettled coast of Geni, where there dwelt, in the forests inland, bands of apes little different from the one he had seen; and he liked to believe, now, that that scholar’s heart had known compassion; and that those foreign apes had not rejected this strange, shy cousin. His hope: that there had been a reprieve, for that one, solitary life.

  His fear was that the creature’s wired skeleton stood in one of the tower’s dingy rooms, a trophy of uniqueness.

  Amidst the smell of ash and charred flesh, the female crouched down before him, reached out to brush hard finger pads across his forehead.

  Then that hand made a fist, lifting high, then flashing down—

  He flinched, eyes snapping open and seeing naught but darkness. Hard rims and shards digging into his back – the chamber, the honey, oh gods my head aches…Groaning, Bottle rolled over, the shard fragments cutting and crunching beneath him. He was in the room beyond the one containing the urns, although at least one had followed him to shatter on the cold stone floor. He groaned again. Smeared in sticky honey, aches all over him…but the burns, the pain – gone. He drew a deep breath, then coughed. The air was foul. He needed to get everyone going – he needed—

  ‘Bottle? That you?’

  Cuttle, lying nearby. ‘Aye,’ said Bottle. ‘That honey—’

  ‘Kicked hard, didn’t it just. I dreamed…a tiger, it had died – cut to pieces, in fact, by these giant undead lizards that ran on two feet. Died, yet ascended, only it was the death part it was telling me about. The dying part – I don’t understand. Treach had to die, I think, to arrive. The dying part was important – I’m sure of it, only…gods below, listen to me. This air’s rotten – we got to get moving.’

  Yes. But he’d lost the rat, he remembered that, he’d lost her. Filled with despair, Bottle sought out the creature—

  —and found her. Awakened by his touch, resisting not at all as he captured her soul once more, and, seeing through her eyes, he led the rat back into the room.