The Malazan Empire

by Steven Erikson

  ‘Perhaps,’ Ventrala said, ‘Hannan Mosag presumed the Crippled God’s delight in discord was without restraint.’

  Silchas Ruin cocked his head. ‘What is your name, K’risnan?’

  Ventrala told him.

  ‘I will let you live,’ the Tiste Andii said, ‘so that you may deliver to Hannan Mosag my words. The Azath cursed me with visions, its own memories, and so I was witness to many events on this world and on others. Tell Hannan Mosag this: a god in pain is not the same as a god obsessed with evil. Your Warlock King’s obsessions are his own. It would seem, alas, that he is…confused. For that, I am merciful this night…and this night alone. Hereafter, should he resume his interference, he will know the extent of my displeasure.’

  ‘I shall convey your words with precision, Silchas Ruin.’

  ‘You should choose a better god to worship, Ventrala. Tortured spirits like company, even a god’s.’ He paused, then said, ‘Then again, perhaps it is the likes of you who have in turn shaped the Crippled God. Perhaps, without his broken, malformed worshippers, he would have healed long ago.’

  Soft rasping laughter from the wraith.

  Silchas Ruin walked back through the doorway. ‘I am conscripting some horses,’ he said without turning round.

  Moments later, the wraith slithered after him.

  The orthen, which had been clambering about in seemingly aimless motion, now began to withdraw from the chamber.

  Ventrala was alone once more. To the stairs, find the Atri-Preda – an escort, for the journey back to Letheras. And I will speak to Hannan Mosag. And I will tell him about death in the pass. I will tell him of a Soletaken Tiste Andii with two knife wounds in his back, wounds that will not heal. Yet…he forbears.

  Silchas Ruin knows more of the Crippled God than any of us, barring perhaps Rhulad. But he does not hate. No, he feels pity.

  Pity, even for me.

  Seren Pedac heard the horses first, hoofs thumping at the walk up the forested trail. The night sky above the fort was strangely black, opaque, as if from smoke – yet there was no glow from flames. They had heard the concussion, the destruction of at least one stone wall, and Kettle had yelped with laughter, a chilling, grotesque sound. Then, distant screams and, all too quickly thereafter, naught but silence.

  Silchas Ruin appeared, leading a dozen mounts, accompanied by sullen moaning from the scabbarded swords.

  ‘And how many of my kin did you slay this time?’ Fear Sengar asked.

  ‘Only those foolish enough to oppose me. This pursuit,’ he said, ‘it does not belong to your brother. It is the Warlock King’s. I believe we cannot doubt that he seeks what we seek. And now, Fear Sengar, the time has come to set our knives on the ground, the two of us. Perhaps Hannan Mosag’s desires are a match to yours, but I assure you, such desires cannot be reconciled with mine.’

  Seren Pedac felt a heaviness settle in the pit of her stomach. This had been a long time in coming, the one issue avoided again and again, ever excused to the demands of simple expediency. Fear Sengar could not win this battle – they all knew it. Did he intend to stand in Silchas Ruin’s way? One more Tiste Edur to cut down? ‘There is no compelling reason to broach this subject right now,’ she said. ‘Let’s just get on these horses and ride.’

  ‘No,’ Fear Sengar said, eyes fixed on the Tiste Andii’s. ‘Let it be now. Silchas Ruin, in my heart I accept the truth of Scabandari’s betrayal. You trusted him, and you suffered unimaginably in consequence. Yet how can we make reparation? We are not Soletaken. We are not ascendants. We are simply Tiste Edur, and so we fall like saplings before you and your swords. Tell me, how do we ease your thirst for vengeance?’

  ‘You do not, nor is my killing your kin in any way an answer to my need. Fear Sengar, you spoke of reparation. Is this your desire?’

  The Edur warrior was silent for a half-dozen heartbeats, then he said, ‘Scabandari brought us to this world.’

  ‘Yours was dying.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You may not be aware of this,’ Silchas Ruin continued, ‘but Bloodeye was partly responsible for the sundering of Shadow. Nonetheless, of greater relevance, to me, are the betrayals that came before that particular crime. Betrayals against my own kin – my brother, Andarist – which set such grief upon his soul that he was driven mad.’ He slowly cocked his head. ‘Did you imagine me naive in fashioning an alliance with Scabandari Bloodeye?’

  Udinaas barked a laugh. ‘Naive enough to turn your back on him.’

  Seren Pedac shut her eyes. Please, Indebted, just keep your mouth shut. Just this once.

  ‘You speak truth, Udinaas,’ Silchas Ruin replied after a moment. ‘I was exhausted, careless. I did not imagine he would be so…public. Yet, in retrospect, the betrayal had to be absolute – and that included the slaughter of my followers.’

  Fear Sengar said, ‘You intended to betray Scabandari, only he acted first. A true alliance of equals, then.’

  ‘I imagined you might see it that way,’ the Tiste Andii replied. ‘Understand me, Fear Sengar. I will not countenance freeing the soul of Scabandari Bloodeye. This world has enough reprehensible ascendants.’

  ‘Without Father Shadow,’ Fear said, ‘I cannot free Rhulad from the chains of the Crippled God.’

  ‘You could not, even with him.’

  ‘I do not believe you, Silchas Ruin. Scabandari was your match, after all. And I do not think the Crippled God hunts you in earnest. If it is indeed Hannan Mosag behind this endless pursuit, then the ones he seeks are myself and Udinaas. Not you. It is, perhaps, even possible that the Warlock King knows nothing of you – of who you are, beyond the mysterious White Crow.’

  ‘That does not appear to be the case, Fear Sengar.’

  The statement seemed to rock the Tiste Edur.

  Silchas Ruin continued, ‘Scabandari Bloodeye’s body was destroyed. Against me, now, he would be helpless. A soul without provenance is a vulnerable thing. Furthermore, it may be that his power is already being…used.’

  ‘By whom?’ Fear asked, almost whispering.

  The Tiste Andii shrugged. ‘It seems,’ he said with something close to indifference, ‘that your quest is without purpose. You cannot achieve what you seek. I will offer you this, Fear Sengar. The day I choose to move against the Crippled God, your brother shall find himself free, as will all the Tiste Edur. When that time comes, we can speak of reparation.’

  Fear Sengar stared at Silchas Ruin, then glanced, momentarily, at Seren Pedac. He drew a deep breath, then said, ‘Your offer…humbles me. Yet I could not imagine what the Tiste Edur could gift you in answer to such deliverance.’

  ‘Leave that to me,’ the Tiste Andii said.

  Seren Pedac sighed, then strode to the horses. ‘It’s almost dawn. We should ride until midday at least. Then we can sleep.’ She paused, looked once more over at Silchas Ruin. ‘You are confident we will not be pursued?’

  ‘I am, Acquitor.’

  ‘So, were there in truth wards awaiting us?’

  The Tiste Andii made no reply.

  As the Acquitor adjusted the saddle and stirrups on one of the horses to suit Kettle, Udinaas watched the young girl squatting on her haunches near the forest edge, playing with an orthen that did not seem in any way desperate to escape her attentions. The darkness had faded, the mists silver in the growing light.

  Wither appeared beside him, like a smear of reluctant night. ‘These scaled rats, Udinaas, came from the K’Chain Che’Malle world. There were larger ones, bred for food, but they were smart – smarter perhaps than they should have been. Started escaping their pens, vanishing into the mountains. It’s said there are some still left—’

  Udinaas grunted his derision. ‘It’s said? Been hanging round in bars, Wither?’

  ‘The terrible price of familiarity – you no longer respect me, Indebted. A most tragic error, for the knowledge I possess—’

  ‘Is like a curse of boredom,’ Udinaas said, pushing himself to his feet. ‘Look at her,
’ he said, nodding towards Kettle. ‘Tell me, do you believe in innocence? Never mind; I’m not that interested in your opinion. By and large, I don’t. Believe, that is. And yet, that child there…well, I am already grieving.’

  ‘Grieving what?’ Wither demanded.

  ‘Innocence, wraith. When we kill her.’

  Wither was, uncharacteristically, silent.

  Udinaas glanced down at the crouching shade, then sneered. ‘All your coveted knowledge…’

  Seventeen legends described the war against the scaled demons the Awl called the Kechra; of those, sixteen were of battles, terrible clashes that left the corpses of warriors scattered across the plains and hills of the Awl’dan. Less a true war than headlong flight, at least in the first years. The Kechra had come from the west, from lands that would one day belong to the empire of Lether but were then, all those countless centuries ago, little more than blasted wastes – fly-swarmed marshlands of peat and rotten ice. A ragged, battered horde, the Kechra had seen battle before, and it was held in some versions of those legends that the Kechra were themselves fleeing, fleeing a vast, devastating war that gave cause to their own desperation.

  In the face of annihilation, the Awl had learned how to fight such creatures. The tide was met, held, then turned.

  Or so the tales proclaimed, in ringing, stirring tones of triumph.

  Redmask knew better, although at times he wished he didn’t. The war ended because the Kechra’s migration reached the easternmost side of the Awl’dan, and then continued onward. Granted, they had been badly mauled by the belligerent ancestors of the Awl, yet, in truth, they had been almost indifferent to them – an obstacle in their path – and the death of so many of their own kind was but one more ordeal in a history of fraught, tragic ordeals since coming to this world.

  Kechra. K’Chain Che’Malle, the Firstborn of Dragons.

  There was, to Redmask’s mind, nothing palatable or sustaining about knowledge. As a young warrior, his world had been a single knot on the rope of the Awl people, his own deliberate binding to the long, worn history of bloodlines. He had never imagined that there were so many other ropes, so many intertwined threads; he had never before comprehended how vast the net of existence, nor how tangled it had become since the Night of Life – when all that was living came into being, born of deceit and betrayal and doomed to an eternity of struggle.

  And Redmask had come to understand struggle – there in the startled eyes of the rodara, the timid fear of the myrid; in the disbelief of a young warrior dying on stone and wind-blown sand; in the staring comprehension of a woman surrendering her life to the child she pushed out from between her legs. He had seen elders, human and beast, curl up to die; he had seen others fight for their last breath with all the will they could muster. Yet in his heart, he could find no reason, no reward waiting beyond that eternal struggle.

  Even the spirit gods of his people battled, flailed, warred with the weapons of faith, with intolerance and the sweet, deadly waters of hate. No less confused and sordid than any mortal.

  The Letherii wanted, and want invariably transformed into a moral right to possess. Only fools believed such things to be bloodless, either in intent or execution.

  Well, by the same argument – by its very fang and talon – there existed a moral right to defy them. And in such a battle, there would be no end until one side or the other was obliterated. More likely, both sides were doomed to suffer that fate. This final awareness is what came from too much knowledge.

  Yet he would fight on.

  These plains he and his three young followers moved through had once belonged to the Awl. Until the Letherii expanded their notion of self-interest to include stealing land and driving away its original inhabitants. Cairn markers and totem stones had all been removed, the boulders left in heaps; even the ring-stones that had once anchored huts were gone. The grasses were overgrazed, and here and there long rectangular sections had seen the earth broken in anticipation of planting crops, fence posts stacked nearby. But Redmask knew that this soil was poor, quickly exhausted except in the old river valleys. The Letherii might manage a generation or two before the top-soil blew away. He had seen the results east of the wastelands, in far Kolanse – an entire civilization tottering on the edge of starvation as desert spread like plague.

  The blurred moon had lifted high in the star-spattered night sky as they drew closer to the mass of rodara. There was little point in going after the myrid – the beasts were not swift runners over any reasonable distance – but as they edged closer, Redmask could see the full extent of this rodara herd. Twenty thousand head, perhaps even more.

  A large drover camp, lit by campfires, commanded a hilltop to the north. Two permanent buildings of cut-log walls and sod-capped roofs overlooked the shallow valley and the herds – these would, Redmask knew, belong to the Factor’s foreman, forming the focus for the beginning of a true settlement.

  Crouched in the grasses at the edge of a drainage gully cutting through the valley side, the three young warriors on his left, Redmask studied the Letherii for another twenty heartbeats; then he gestured Masarch and the others back into the gully itself.

  ‘This is madness,’ the warrior named Theven whispered. ‘There must be a hundred Letherii in that camp – and what of the shepherds and their dogs? If the wind shifts…’

  ‘Quiet,’ said Redmask. ‘Leave the dogs and the shepherds to me. As for the camp, well, they will soon be busy enough. Return to the horses, mount up, and be ready to flank and drive the herd when it arrives.’

  In the moon’s pale light, Masarch’s expression was nerve-twisted, a wild look in his eyes – he had not done well on his death night, but thus far he appeared more or less sane. Both Theven and Kraysos had, Redmask suspected, made use of bledden herb smuggled with them into their coffins, which they chewed to make themselves insensate, beyond such things as panic and convulsions. Perhaps that was just as well. But Masarch had possessed no bledden herb. And, as was common to people of open lands, confinement was worse than death, worse than anything one could imagine.

  Yet there was value in searing that transition into adulthood, rebirth that began with facing oneself, one’s own demonic haunts that came clambering into view in grisly succession, immune to every denial. With the scars born of that transition, a warrior would come to understand the truth of imagination: that it was a weapon the mind drew at every turn, yet as deadly to its wielder as to its conjured foes. Wisdom arrived as one’s skill with that weapon grew – we fight every battle with our imaginations: the battles within, the battles in the world beyond. This is the truth of command, and a warrior must learn command, of oneself and of others. It was possible that soldiers, such as the Letherii, experienced something similar in attaining rank, but Redmask was not sure of that.

  Glancing back, he saw that his followers had vanished into the darkness. Probably, he judged, now at their horses. Waiting with fast, shallow breaths drawn into suddenly tight lungs. Starting at soft noises, gripping their reins and weapons in sweat-layered hands.

  Redmask made a soft grunting sound and the dray, lying on its belly, edged closer. He settled a hand on its thick-furred neck, briefly, then drew it away. Together, the two set out, side by side, both low to the ground, towards the rodara herd.

  Abasard walked slowly along the edge of the sleeping herd to keep himself alert. His two favoured dogs trotted in his wake. Born and raised as an Indebted in Drene, the sixteen-year-old had not imagined a world such as this – the vast sky, sprawling darkness and countless stars at night, enormous and depthless at day; the way the land itself reached out impossible distances, until at times he could swear he saw a curvature to the world, as if it existed like an island in the sea of the Abyss. And so much life, in the grasses, in the sky. In the spring tiny flowers erupted from every hillside, with berries ripening in the valleys. All his life, until his family had accompanied the Factor’s foreman, he had lived with his father and mother, his brothers and sisters,
with his grandmother and two aunts – all crowded into a house little more than a shack, facing onto a rubbish-filled alley that stank of urine. The menagerie of his youth was made up of rats, blue-eyed mice, meers, cockroaches, scorpions and silverworms.

  But here, in this extraordinary place, he had discovered a new life. Winds that did not stink with rot and waste. And there was room, so much room. He had witnessed with his own eyes a return to health among the members of his family – his frail little sister now wiry and sun-darkened, ever grinning; his grandmother, whose cough had virtually vanished; his father, who stood taller now, no longer hunched beneath low-ceilinged shacks and worksheds. Only yesterday, Abasard had heard him laugh, for the very first time.

  Perhaps, the youth dared believe, once the land was broken and crops were planted, there would be the chance to work their way free of debt. Suddenly, all things seemed possible.

  His two dogs loped past him, vanished in the gloom ahead. A not unusual occurrence. They liked to chase jackrabbits, or low-flying rhinazan. He heard a brief commotion in the grasses just beyond a slight rise. Abasard adjusted his grip on the staff he carried, increased his pace – if the dogs had trapped and killed a jackrabbit, there would be extra meat in the stew tomorrow.

  Reaching the rise, he paused, searched the darkness below for his dogs. They were nowhere to be seen. Abasard frowned, then let out a low whistle, expecting at any moment to hear them trot back to him. Yet only silence answered his summons. Confused, he slowly dropped into a crouch.

  Ahead and to his right, a few hundred rodara shifted – awake and restless now.

  Something was wrong. Wolves? The Bluerose cavalry the foreman kept under contract had hunted the local ones down long ago. Even the coyotes had been driven away, as had the bears.

  Abasard crept forward, his mouth suddenly dry, his heart pounding hard in his chest.