The Malazan Empire

by Steven Erikson

  ‘That’s fucking—’

  ‘Enough, Cuttle!’ Fiddler snapped. To the runner he nodded and said, ‘How long?’

  A blank expression answered that question.

  Fiddler waved the idiot on, then turned once more to stare across at the Tiste Edur.

  ‘Damn him, Fid!’

  ‘Relax, Cuttle. We’ll set out when we have to, all right?’

  ‘Sergeant?’ Bottle was suddenly crawling out of the hole he’d dug, and there was a strained look on his face. ‘Something…something’s happening—’

  At that moment, from the ridge to the east, a blood-chilling sound – like ten thousand anchor chains ripping up from the ground, and there rose a virulent wall of swirling magic. Dark purple and shot through with crimson veins, black etchings like lightning darting along the crest as it rose, higher, yet higher—

  ‘Hood’s balls!’ Cuttle breathed, eyes wide.

  Fiddler simply stared. This was the sorcery they’d seen off the north coast of Seven Cities. Only, then they’d had Quick Ben with them. And Bottle had his – he reached out and pulled Bottle close. ‘Listen! Is she—’

  ‘No, Fid! Nowhere! She’s not been with me since we landed. I’m sorry—’

  Fiddler flung the man back down.

  The wall heaved itself still higher.

  The Tiste Edur along the western edge of the killing field were suddenly pulling back.

  Cuttle yelled, ‘We need to go now! Fiddler! Now!’

  Yet he could not move. Could not answer, no matter how the sapper railed at him. Could only stare, craning, ever upward. Too much magic. ‘Gods above,’ he muttered, ‘talk about overkill.’

  Run away from this? Not a chance.

  Cuttle dragged him round.

  Fiddler scowled and pushed the man back, hard enough to make the sapper stumble. ‘Fuck running, Cuttle! You think we can out-run that?’

  ‘But the Edur—’

  ‘It’s going to take them too – can’t you see that?’ It has to – no-one can control it once it’s released – no-one. ‘Those Hood-damned Edur have been set up, Cuttle!’ Oh yes, the Letherii wanted to get rid of their masters – they just didn’t want to do it with us as allies. No, they’ll do it their way and take out both enemies at the same damned time…

  Three hundred paces to the west, Hanradi stared up at that Letherii magic. And understood, all at once. He understood.

  ‘We have been betrayed,’ he said, as much to himself as to the warriors standing close by. ‘That ritual – it has been days in the making. Maybe weeks. Once unleashed…’ the devastation will stretch for leagues westward.

  What to do?

  Father Shadow, what to do? ‘Where are my K’risnan?’ he suddenly demanded, turning to his aides.

  Two Edur hobbled forward, their faces ashen.

  ‘Can you protect us?’

  Neither replied, and neither would meet Hanradi’s eyes.

  ‘Can you not call upon Hannan Mosag? Reach through to the Ceda, damn you!’

  ‘You do not understand!’ one of the once-young K’risnan shouted. ‘We are – all – we are all abandoned!’

  ‘But Kurald Emurlahn—’

  ‘Yes! Awake once more! But we cannot reach it! Nor can the Ceda!’

  ‘And what of that other power? The chaos?’

  ‘Gone! Fled!’

  Hanradi stared at the two warlocks. He drew his sword and lashed the blade across the nearest one’s face, the edge biting through bridge of nose and splitting both eyeballs. Shrieking, the figure reeled back, hands at his face. Hanradi stepped forward and drove his sword into the creature’s twisted chest, and the blood that gushed forth was almost black.

  Tugging the weapon free, Hanradi turned to the other one, who cowered back. ‘You warlocks,’ the once-king said in a grating voice, ‘are the cause of this. All of this.’ He took another step closer. ‘Would that you were Hannan Mosag crouched before me now—’

  ‘Wait!’ the K’risnan shrieked, suddenly pointing eastward. ‘Wait! One gives answer! One gives answer!’

  Hanradi turned, eyes focusing with some difficulty on the Malazans – so overwhelming was the wave of Letherii magic that a shadow had descended upon the entire killing field.

  Rising from that huddled mass of soldiers, a faint, luminous glow. Silver, vaguely pulsing.

  Hanradi’s laugh was harsh. ‘That pathetic thing is an answer?’ He half raised his sword.

  ‘No!’ the K’risnan cried. ‘Wait! Look, you stupid fool! Look!’

  And so he did, once again.

  And saw that dome of silver light burgeoning, spreading out to engulf the entire force – and it thickened, became opaque—

  The last K’risnan clutched at Hanradi’s arm. ‘Listen to me! Its power – Father Shadow! Its power!’

  ‘Can it hold?’ Hanradi demanded. ‘Can it hold against the Letherii?’

  He saw no answer in the K’risnan’s red-rimmed eyes.

  It cannot – look, still, it is tiny – against that ever-growing wave—

  But…it need be no larger than that, need it? It engulfs them all.

  ‘Sound the advance!’ he shouted. ‘At the double!’

  Wide eyes fixed on Hanradi, who pointed at that scintillating dome of ethereal power. ‘At the very least we can crouch in its shadow! Now, move forward! Everyone!’

  Beak, who had once possessed another name, a more boring name, had been playing in the dirt that afternoon, on the floor of the old barn where no-one went any more and that was far away from the rest of the buildings of the estate, far enough away to enable him to imagine he was alone in an abandoned world. A world without trouble.

  He was playing with the discarded lumps of wax he collected from the trash heap below the back wall of the main house. The heat of his hands could change their shape, like magic. He could mould faces from the pieces and build entire families like those families down in the village, where boys and girls his age worked alongside their parents and when not working played in the woods and were always laughing.

  This was where his brother found him. His brother with the sad face so unlike the wax ones he liked to make. He arrived carrying a coil of rope, and stood just inside the gaping entrance with its jammed-wide doors all overgrown.

  Beak, who had a more boring name back then, saw in his brother’s face a sudden distress, which then drained away and a faint smile took its place which was a relief since Beak always hated it when his brother went off somewhere to cry. Older brothers should never do that and if he was older, why, he’d never do that.

  His brother then walked towards him, and still half smiling he said, ‘I need you to leave, little one. Take your toys and leave here.’

  Beak stared with wide eyes. His brother never asked such things of him. His brother had always shared this barn. ‘Don’t you want to play with me?’

  ‘Not now,’ his brother replied, and Beak saw that his hands were trembling which meant there’d been trouble back at the estate. Trouble with Mother.

  ‘Playing will make you feel better,’ Beak said.

  ‘I know. But not now.’

  ‘Later?’ Beak began collecting his wax villagers.

  ‘We’ll see.’

  There were decisions that did not seem like decisions. And choices could just fall into place when nobody was really looking and that was how things were in childhood just as they were for adults. Wax villagers cradled in his arms, Beak set off, out the front and into the sunlight. Summer days were always wonderful – the sun was hot enough to make the villagers weep with joy, once he lined them up on the old border stone that meant nothing any more.

  The stone was about eighteen of Beak’s small paces away, toppled down at one corner of the track before it turned and sank down towards the bridge and the stream where minnows lived until it dried up and then they died because minnows could only breathe in water. He had just set his toys down in a row when he decided he needed to ask his brother something.

&nb
sp; Decisions and choices, falling.

  What was it he had wanted to ask? There was no memory of that. The memory of that was gone, melted down into nothing. It had been a very hot day.

  Reaching the entrance he saw his brother – who had been sitting with legs dangling from the loft’s edge – slide over to drop down onto the floor. But he didn’t drop all the way. The rope round his neck caught him instead.

  And then, his face turning dark as his eyes bulged and his tongue pushed out, his brother danced in the air, kicking through the shafts of dusty sunlight.

  Beak ran up to him – the game his brother had been playing with the rope had gone all wrong, and now his brother was choking. He threw his arms about his brother’s kicking legs and tried with all his might to hold him up.

  And there he stood, and perhaps he was screaming, but perhaps he wasn’t, because this was an abandoned place, too far away from anyone who might help.

  His brother tried to kick him away. His brother’s fists punched down on the top of Beak’s head, hard enough to hurt but not so much since those hands couldn’t but barely reach him, short as he was being still younger than his brother. So he just held on.

  Fire awoke in the muscles of his arms. In his shoulders. His neck. His legs shook beneath him, because he needed to stand on his toes – if he tried to move his arms further down to well below his brother’s knees, then his brother simply bent those knees and started choking again.

  Fire everywhere, fire right through Beak’s body.

  His legs were failing. His arms were failing. And as they failed his brother choked. Pee ran down to burn against Beak’s wrists and his face. The air was suddenly thick with worse smells and his brother never did things like this – all this mess, the terrible mistake with the rope.

  Beak could not hold on, and this was the problem with being a younger brother, with being as he was. And the kicking finally stilled, the muscles of his brother’s legs becoming soft, loose. Two fingertips from one of his brother’s hands lightly brushed Beak’s hair, but they only moved when Beak himself moved, so those fingers were as still as the legs.

  It was good that his brother wasn’t fighting any more. He must have loosened the rope from round his neck and was now just resting. And that was good because Beak was now on his knees, arms wrapped tight about his brother’s feet.

  And there he stayed.

  Until, three bells after dusk, one of the stable hands from the search party came into the barn with a lantern.

  By then, the sun’s heat earlier that afternoon had ruined all his villagers, had drawn down their faces into expressions of grief, and Beak did not come back to collect them up, did not reshape them into nicer faces. Those lumps remained on the border stone that meant nothing any more, sinking down in the day after day sun.

  After that last day with his brother, there was trouble aplenty in the household. But it did not last long, not long at all.

  He did not know why he was thinking about his brother now, as he set ablaze every candle within him to make the world bright and to save all his friends. And before long he no longer sensed anyone else, barring the faint smudges they had become. The captain, the Fist, all the soldiers who were his friends, he let his light unfold to embrace them all, to keep them safe from that frightening, dark magic so eager to rush down upon them.

  It had grown too powerful for those seven mages to contain. They had created something that would now destroy them, but Beak would not let it hurt his friends. And so he made his light burn yet brighter. He made of it a solid thing. Would it be enough? He did not know, but it had to be, for without friends there was nothing, no-one.

  Brighter, hotter, so hot the wax of the candles burst into clouds of droplets, flaring bright as the sun, one after another. And, when every coloured candle was lit, why, there was white.

  And yet more, for as each joined the torrent emanating from him, he felt in himself a cleansing, a scouring away, what priests called purification only they really knew nothing about purification because it had nothing to do with offerings of blood or coin and nothing to do with starving yourself and whipping your own back or endlessly chanting until the brain goes numb. Nothing like any of that. Purification, Beak now understood, was final.

  Everything glowed, as if lit from fires within. The once-black stubble of crops blazed back into fierce life. Stones shone like precious gems. Incandescence raged on all sides. Fiddler saw his soldiers and he could see through, in pulsing flashes, to their very bones, the organs huddled within their cages. He saw, along one entire side of Koryk, old fractures on the ribs, the left arm, the shoulder blade, the hip. He saw three knuckle-sized dents on Cuttle’s skull beneath the now translucent helm – a rap he had taken when still a babe, soft-boned and vulnerable. He saw the damage between Smiles’s legs from all the times she savaged herself. He saw in Corabb Bhilan Thenu’alas the coursing blood that held in it the power to destroy every cancer that struck him, and he was a man under siege from that disease, but it would never kill. Would not even sicken him.

  He saw in Bottle coruscating waves of raw power, a refulgence devoid of all control – but that would come. It will come.

  Corporal Tarr crouched down in the hole he’d dug, and the light emanating from him looked solid as iron.

  Among the others he saw more than any mortal would want to see, yet he could not close his eyes, could not look away.

  Gesler and Stormy were lit in gold fire. Even Stormy’s beard and hair – all spun gold now – a brutal beauty cascading round his face, and the damned fool was laughing.

  The world beyond had vanished behind an opaque, curved wall of silver fire. Vague shapes on the other side – yes, he’d seen the Tiste Edur approaching, seeking some kind of shelter.

  Fiddler found he was standing, facing that wall, and now he was walking forward. Because some things matter more than others. Stepping into that silver fire, feeling it lance through his entire body, neither hot nor cold, neither pain nor joy.

  He staggered suddenly, blinking, and not fifteen paces from him crouched hundreds of Tiste Edur. Waiting to die.

  Hanradi knelt with his gaze fixed on the sky, half of which had vanished behind a blackened wall of writhing madness. The crest had begun its toppling advance.

  Sudden motion drew his eyes down.

  To see a Malazan – now transformed into an apparition of white – beard, hair – the dangling finger bones were now polished, luminous, as was his armour, his weapons. Scoured, polished, even the leather of his harness looked new, supple.

  The Malazan met his gaze with silver eyes, then he lifted one perfect hand, and waved them all forward.

  Hanradi rose, flinging his sword aside.

  His warriors saw. His warriors did the same, and as they all moved forward, the dome of silver fire all at once rushed towards them.

  A piercing shriek and Hanradi turned to see his last K’risnan burst into flames – a single blinding instant, then the hapless warlock was simply ash, settling onto the ground—

  Beak was happy to save them. He had understood that old sergeant. The twisted mage, alas, could not embrace such purification. Too much of his soul had been surrendered. The others – oh, they were wounded, filled with bitterness that he needed to sweep away, and so he did.

  Nothing was difficult any more. Nothing—

  At that moment, the wave of Letherii magic descended.

  The Letherii commander could not see the killing field, could indeed see nothing but that swirling, burgeoning wall of eager sorcery. Its cruel hunger poured down in hissing clouds.

  When it heaved forward, all illusion of control vanished.

  The commander, with Sirryn Kanar cowering beside him, saw all seven of his mages plucked from the ground, dragged up into the air, into the wake of that charging wall. Screaming, flailing, then streaks of whipping blood as they were torn apart moments before vanishing into the dark storm.

  The sorcery lurched, then plunged down upon the killing field
.

  Detonation.

  Soldiers were thrown from their feet. Horses were flung onto their sides, riders tumbling or pinned as the terrified beasts rolled onto their backs. The entire ridge seemed to ripple, then buckle, and sudden slumping pulled soldiers from the edge, burying them in slides racing for the field below. Mouths were open, screams unleashed in seeming silence, the horror in so many eyes—

  The collapsing wave blew apart—

  Beak was driven down by the immense weight, the horrible hunger. Yet he would not retreat. Instead, he let the fire within him lash out, devouring every candle, igniting everything.

  His friends, yes, the only ones he had ever known.

  Survival, he realized, could only be found through purity. Of his love for them all – how so many of them had smiled at him, laughed with him. How hands clapped him on the shoulder and even, now and then, tousled his hair.

  He would have liked to see the captain one last time, and maybe even kiss her. On the cheek, although of course he would have liked something far more…brave. But he was Beak, after all, and he could hold on to but one thing at a time.

  Arms wrapped tight, even as the fire began to burn the muscles of his arms. His shoulders and neck. His legs.

  He could hold on, now, until they found him.

  Those fires were so hot, now, burning – but there was no pain. Pain had been scoured away, cleansed away. Oh, the weight was vast, getting heavier still, but he would not let go. Not of his brothers and his sisters, the ones he so loved.

  My friends.

  The Letherii sorcery broke, bursting into clouds of white fire that corkscrewed skyward before vanishing. Fragments crashed down to either side of the incandescent dome, ripped deep into the earth in black spewing clouds. And, everywhere, it died.

  The commander struggled back onto his feet, stared uncomprehending at the scene on the killing field.

  To either side his soldiers were stumbling upright once again. Runners appeared, one nearly colliding with him as he careened off a still-kneeling Sirryn Kanar, the woman trying to tell him something. Pointing southward.