The Malazan Empire

by Steven Erikson

  The dead city was two days behind them now, yet its ignorant complacency haunted him still, the ghosts and their insensate, repetitive lives measured out stride by stride again and again. Too many truths were revealed in that travail, and when it came to futility Heboric needed no reminders.

  Unseasonal clouds painted silver the sky, behind which the sun slid in its rut virtually unseen. Biting insects swarmed in the cooler air, danced in the muted light on the old traders’ road on which Heboric and his comrades travelled, rising up in clouds before them.

  The horses snorted to clear their nostrils, rippled the skin of their necks and flanks. Scillara worked through her impressive list of curses, fending off the insects with clouds of rustleaf smoke swirling about her head. Felisin Younger did much the same, but without the blue tirade. Cutter rode ahead, and so, Heboric realized, was both responsible for stirring the hordes and blessed by quickly passing through them.

  It seemed that Scillara too had noticed the same thing. ‘Why isn’t he back here? Then the bloodflies and chigger fleas would be chasing all of us, instead of this – this nightmare!’

  Heboric said nothing. Greyfrog was bounding along on the south side of the road, keeping pace. Unbroken scrubland stretched out beyond the demon, whilst to the north ran a ridge of hills – the tail end of the ancient mountain range that held the long-dead city.

  Icarium’s legacy. Like a god loosed and walking the land, Icarium left bloody footprints. Such creatures should be killed. Such creatures are an abomination. Whereas Fener – Fener had simply disappeared. Dragged as the Boar God had been into this realm, most of its power had been stripped away. To reveal itself would be to invite annihilation. There were hunters out there. I need to find a way, a way to send Fener back. And if Treach didn’t like it, too bad. The Boar and the Wolf could share the Throne of War. In fact, it made sense. There were always two sides in a war. Us and them, and neither can rightly be denied their faith. Yes, there was symmetry in such a notion. ‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘I have never believed in single answers, never believed in this…this divisive clash of singularity. Power may have ten thousand faces, but the look in the eyes of every one of them is the same.’ He glanced over to see Scillara and Felisin staring at him. ‘There’s no difference,’ he said, ‘between speaking aloud or in one’s own head – either way, no-one listens.’

  ‘Hard to listen,’ Scillara said, ‘when what you say makes no sense.’

  ‘Sense takes effort.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll tell you what makes sense, old man. Children are a woman’s curse. They start with weighing you down from the inside, then they weigh you down from the outside. For how long? No, not days, not months, not even years. Decades. Babies, better they were born with tails and four legs and eager to run away and crawl into some hole in the ground. Better they could fend for themselves the moment they scuttle free. Now, that would make sense.’

  ‘If that was the way it was,’ Felisin said, ‘then there’d be no need for families, for villages, for towns and cities. We’d all be living in the wilderness.’

  ‘Instead,’ Scillara said, ‘we live in a prison. Us women, anyway.’

  ‘It can’t be as bad as that,’ Felisin insisted.

  ‘Nothing can be done,’ Heboric said. ‘We each fall into our lives and that’s that. Some choices we make, but most are made for us.’

  ‘Well,’ Scillara retorted, ‘you would think that, wouldn’t you? But look at this stupid journey here, Heboric. True, at first we were just fleeing Raraku, that damned sea rising up out of the sands. Then it was that idiot priest of Shadow, and Cutter there, and suddenly we were following you – where? The island of Otataral. Why? Who knows, but it has something to do with those ghost hands of yours, something to do with you righting a wrong. And now I’m pregnant.’

  ‘How does that last detail fit?’ Felisin demanded, clearly exasperated.

  ‘It just does, and no, I’m not interested in explaining. Gods below, I’m choking on these damned bugs! Cutter! Get back here, you brainless oaf!’

  Heboric was amused by the stunned surprise in the young man’s face as he turned round at the shout.

  The Daru reined in and waited.

  By the time the others arrived, he was cursing and slapping at insects.

  ‘Now you know how we feel,’ Scillara snapped.

  ‘Then we should pick up our pace,’ Cutter said. ‘Is everyone all right with that? It’d be good for the horses, besides. They need some stretching out.’

  I think we all need that. ‘Set the pace, Cutter. I’m sure Greyfrog can keep up.’

  ‘He jumps with his mouth open,’ Scillara said.

  ‘Maybe we should all try that,’ Felisin suggested.

  ‘Hah! I’m full up enough as it is!’

  No god truly deserved its acolytes. It was an unequal relationship in every sense, Heboric told himself. Mortals could sacrifice their entire adult life in the pursuit of communion with their chosen god, and what was paid in return for such devotion? Not much at best; often, nothing at all. Was the faint touch from something, someone, far greater in power – was that enough?

  When I touched Fener…

  The Boar God would have been better served, he realized, with Heboric’s indifference. The thought cut into him like a saw-bladed, blunt knife – nothing smooth, nothing precise – and, as Cutter led them into a canter down the track, Heboric could only bare his teeth in a hard grimace against the spiritual pain.

  From which rose a susurration of voices, all begging him, pleading with him. For what he could not give. Was this how gods felt? Inundated with countless prayers, the seeking of blessing, the gift of redemption sought by myriad lost souls. So many that the god could only reel back, pummelled and stunned, and so answer every beseeching voice with nothing but silence.

  But redemption was not a gift. Redemption had to be earned.

  And so on we ride…

  Scillara drew up alongside Cutter. She studied him until he became aware of the attention and swung his head round.

  ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Who said anything was wrong?’

  ‘Well, it’s been a rather long list of complaints from you of late, Scillara.’

  ‘No, it’s been a short list. I just like repeating myself.’

  She watched him sigh, then he shrugged and said, ‘We’re maybe a week from the coast. I’m beginning to wonder if it was a good thing to take this overland route…through completely unpopulated areas. We’re always rationing our food and we’re all suffering from that, excepting maybe you and Greyfrog. And we’re growing increasingly paranoid, fleeing from every dust-trail and journey-house.’ He shook his head. ‘Nothing’s after us. We’re not being hunted. Nobody gives a damn what we’re up to or where we’re going.’

  ‘What if you’re wrong?’ Scillara asked. She looped the reins over the saddle horn and began repacking her pipe. His horse misstepped, momentarily jolting her. She winced. ‘Some advice for you, Cutter. If you ever get pregnant, don’t ride a horse.’

  ‘I’ll try to remember that,’ he said. ‘Anyway, you’re right. I might be wrong. But I don’t think I am. It’s not like we’ve set a torrid pace, so if hunters were after us, they’d have caught up long ago.’

  She had an obvious reply to that, but let it go. ‘Have you been looking around, Cutter? As we’ve travelled? All these weeks in this seeming wasteland?’

  ‘Only as much as I need to, why?’

  ‘Heboric’s chosen this path, but it’s not by accident. Sure, it’s a wasteland now, but it wasn’t always one. I’ve started noticing things, and not just the obvious ones like that ruined city we passed near. We’ve been on old roads – roads that were once bigger, level, often raised. Roads from a civilization that’s all gone now. And look at that stretch of ground over there,’ she pointed southward. ‘See the ripples? That’s furrowing, old, almost worn away, but when the light lengthens you can start to make it out. It was all once tilled. Fe
rtile. I’ve been seeing this for weeks, Cutter. Heboric’s track is taking us through the bones of a dead age. Why?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask him?’

  ‘I don’t want to.’

  ‘Well, since he’s right behind us, he’s probably listening right now, Scillara.’

  ‘I don’t care. I was asking you.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know why.’

  ‘I do,’ she said.

  ‘Oh. All right, then, why?’

  ‘Heboric likes his nightmares. That’s why.’

  Cutter met her eyes, then the Daru twisted in his saddle and looked back at Heboric.

  Who said nothing.

  ‘Death and dying,’ Scillara continued. ‘The way we suck the land dry. The way we squeeze all colour from every scene, even when that scene shows us paradise. And what we do to the land, we also do to each other. We cut each other down. Even Sha’ik’s camp had its tiers, its hierarchy, keeping people in their place.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me about that,’ Cutter said. ‘I lived under something similar, in Darujhistan.’

  ‘I wasn’t finished. It’s why Bidithal found followers for his cult. What gave it its strength was the injustice, the unfairness, and the way bastards always seemed to win. You see, Bidithal had been one of those bastards, once. Luxuriating in his power – then the Malazans arrived, and they tore it all apart, and Bidithal found himself on the run, just one more hare fleeing the wolves. For him, well, he wanted it back, all that power, and this new cult he created was for that purpose. The problem was, either he was lucky or a genius, because the idea behind his cult – not the vicious rituals he imposed, but the idea – it struck a nerve. It reached the dispossessed, and that was its brilliance—’

  ‘It wasn’t his idea,’ Heboric said behind them.

  ‘Then whose was it?’ Cutter asked.

  ‘It belongs to the Crippled God. The Chained One. A broken creature, betrayed, wounded, imperfect in the way of street beggars, abandoned urchins, the physically and the morally damaged. And the promise of something better, beyond death itself – the very paradise Scillara spoke of, but one we could not deface. In other words, the dream of a place immune to our natural excesses, to our own depravity, and accordingly, to exist within it is to divest oneself of all those excesses, all those depravities. You just have to die first.’

  ‘Do you feel fear, Heboric?’ Scillara asked. ‘You describe a very seductive faith.’

  ‘Yes, to both. If, however, its heart is in fact a lie, then we must make the truth a weapon, a weapon that, in the end, must reach for the Crippled God himself. To shy from that final act would be to leave unchallenged the greatest injustice of all, the most profound unfairness, and the deepest betrayal imaginable.’

  ‘If it’s a lie,’ Scillara said. ‘Is it? How do you know?’

  ‘Woman, if absolution is free, then all that we do here and now is meaningless.’

  ‘Well, maybe it is.’

  ‘Then it would not even be a question of justifying anything – justification itself would be irrelevant. You invite anarchy – you invite chaos itself.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, because there’s one force more powerful than all of that.’

  ‘Oh?’ Cutter asked. ‘What?’

  Scillara laughed. ‘What I was talking about earlier.’ She gestured once more at the ancient signs of tillage. ‘Look around, Cutter, look around.’

  Iskaral Pust plucked at the thick strands of web covering Mappo Runt’s massive chest. ‘Get rid of this! Before he wakes up, you damned hag. You and your damned moon – look, it’s going to rain. This is a desert – what’s it doing raining? It’s all your fault.’ He glanced up, smiling evilly. ‘She suspects nothing, the miserable cow. Oh I can’t wait.’ Straightening, he scurried back to the long bamboo stick he’d found – bamboo, for god’s sake – and resumed drilling the tiny fixing holes in the base.

  Twisted wire eyelets, bound at intervals with wet gut right up to the finely tapered end. A carved and polished wooden spool and half a league’s worth of Mogora hair, spun together and felted or something similar, strong enough to reel in anything, including a miserable cow flopping about in the shallows. True, he’d have to wait a year or two, until the little wriggling ones grew to a decent size. Maybe he’d add a few bigger ones – there were those giant catfish he’d seen in that flooded realm, the one with all the monsters padding the shorelines. Iskaral Pust shivered at the recollection, but a true lover of fishing would understand the lengths an aficionado would go to in the hunt for worthy spawn. Even the extreme necessity of killing demons and such. Granted, that particular sojourn had been a little hairy. But he’d come back with a string of beauties.

  As a child he’d wanted to learn the art of angling, but the women and elders in the tribe weren’t interested in that, no, just weirs and collecting pools and nets. That was harvesting, not fishing, but young Iskaral Pust, who’d once run away with a caravan and had seen the sights of Li Heng – for a day and a half, until his great-grandmother had come to retrieve him and drag him screaming like a gutted piglet back to the tribe – well, Iskaral Pust had discovered the perfect expression of creative predation, an expression which was – as everyone knew – the ideal manly endeavour.

  Soon, then, and he and his mule would have the ultimate excuse to leave the hoary temple of home. Going fishing, dear. Ah, how he longed to say those words.

  ‘You are an idiot,’ Mogora said.

  ‘A clever idiot, woman, and that’s a lot more cleverer than you.’ He paused, eyeing her, then said, ‘Now all I need to do is wait until she’s asleep, so I can cut off all her hair – she won’t notice, it’s not like we have silver mirrors hanging about, is it? I’ll mix it all up, the hair from her head, from her ears, from under her arms, from—’

  ‘You think I don’t know what you’re up to?’ Mogora asked, then cackled as only an old woman begotten of hyenas could. ‘You are not just an idiot. You’re also a fool. And deluded, and immature, and obsessive, and petty, spiteful, patronizing, condescending, defensive, aggressive, ignorant, wilful, inconsistent, contradictory, and you’re ugly as well.’

  ‘So what of it?’

  She gaped at him like a toothless spider. ‘You have a brain like pumice stone – throw stuff at it and it just sinks in! Disappears. Vanishes. Even when I piss on it, the piss just poofs! Gone! Oh how I hate you, husband. With all your obnoxious, smelly habits – gods, picking your nose for breakfast – I still get sick thinking about it – a sight I am cursed never to forget—’

  ‘Oh be quiet. There’s nutritious pollen entombed in snot, as everyone well knows—’

  A heavy sigh interrupted him, and both Dal Honese looked down at Mappo. Mogora scrabbled over and began stripping away the webs from the Trell’s seamed face.

  Iskaral Pust leaned closer. ‘What’s happened to his skin? It’s all lined and creased – what did you do to him, woman?’

  ‘The mark of spiders, Magi,’ she replied. ‘The price for healing.’

  ‘Every strand’s left a line!’

  ‘Well, he was no beauty to begin with.’

  A groan, then Mappo half-lifted a hand. It fell back and he groaned again.

  ‘He’s now got a spider’s brain, too,’ Iskaral predicted. ‘He’ll start spitting on his food – like you do, and you dare call picking my nose disgusting.’

  ‘No self-respecting creature does what you did this morning, Iskaral Pust. You won’t get no spiders picking their noses, will you? Ha, you know I’m right.’

  ‘No I don’t. I was just picturing a spider with eight legs up its nose, and that reminded me of you. You need a haircut, Mogora, and I’m just the man to do it.’

  ‘Come near me with intentions other than amorous and I’ll stick you.’

  ‘Amorous. What a horrible thought—’

  ‘What if I told you I was pregnant?’

  ‘I’d kill the mule.’

  She leapt at him.

  Squea
ling, then spitting and scratching, they rolled in the dust.

  The mule watched them with placid eyes.

  Crushed and scattered, the tiles that had once made the mosaic of Mappo Runt’s life were little more than faint glimmers, as if dispersed at the bottom of a deep well. Disparate fragments he could only observe, his awareness of their significance remote, and for a seemingly long time they had been retreating from him, as if he was slowly, inexorably floating towards some unknown surface.

  Until the silver threads arrived, descending like rain, sleeting through the thick, murky substance surrounding him. And he felt their touch, and then their weight, halting his upward progress, and, after a time of motionlessness, Mappo began sinking back down. Towards those broken pieces far below.

  Where pain awaited him. Not of the flesh – there was no flesh, not yet – this was a searing of the soul, the manifold wounds of betrayal, of failure, of self-recrimination, the very fists that had shattered all that he had been…before the fall.

  Yet still the threads drew the pieces together, unmindful of agony, ignoring his every screamed protest.

  He found himself standing amidst tall pillars of stone that had been antler-chiselled into tapering columns. Heavy wrought-iron clouds scudded over one half of the sky, a high wind spinning strands across the other half, filling a void – as if something had punched through from the heavens and the hole was slow in healing. The pillars, Mappo saw, rose on all sides, scores of them, forming some pattern indefinable from where he stood in their midst. They cast faint shadows across the battered ground, and his gaze was drawn to those shadows, blankly at first, then with growing realization. Shadows cast in impossible directions, forming a faint array, a web, reaching out on all sides.

  And, Mappo now understood, he stood at its very centre.

  A young woman stepped into view from behind one of the pillars. Long hair the colours of dying flames, eyes the hue of beaten gold, dressed in flowing black silks. ‘This,’ she said in the language of the Trell, ‘is long ago. Some memories are better left alone.’