The Malazan Empire

by Steven Erikson

  ‘You must go to him,’ said the merchant. ‘We know where to find him, in Black Coral – I can lead you to him, Priestess. Together, we will demand his help – he was a Seerdomin, a chosen sword of the tyrant. He owes us! He owes us all!’

  ‘I have tried—’

  ‘I will help you,’ insisted the merchant. ‘I will show him our desire to mend our ways. To accord the Benighted the proper respect.’

  Others nodded, and the merchant took this in and went on, ‘We will help. All of us here, we will stand with you, Priestess. Once he is made to understand what is happening, once we confront him – there in that damned tavern with that damned Tiste Andii he games with – how can he turn away from us yet again?’

  But what of fairness? What of Seerdomin and his own wounds? See the zeal in your fellows – see it in yourself, then ask: where is my compassion when I stand before him, shouting my demands?

  Why will none of you defend yourselves?

  ‘Priestess!’

  ‘Very well.’ And she rose, drawing her woollen robe tight about herself. ‘Lead on, then, merchant, to where he may be found.’

  A man huddled against the counter, sneezing fiercely enough to loosen his teeth, and while this barrage went on none at the table attempted to speak. Hands reached for tankards, kelyk glistened on lips and eyes shone murky and fixed with intent upon the field of battle.

  Spinnock Durav waited for Seerdomin to make a move, to attempt something unexpected in the shoring up of his buckling defences – the man was always good for a surprise or two, a flash of tactical genius that could well halt Spinnock in his tracks, even make him stagger. And was this not the very heart of the contest, its bright hint of glory?

  The sneezing fit ended – something that, evidently, came of too much kelyk. A sudden flux of the sinuses, followed by an alarmingly dark discharge – he’d begun to see stains, on walls and pavestones and cobbles, all over the city now. This foreign drink was outselling even ale and wine. And among the drinkers there were now emerging abusers, stumbling glaze-eyed, mouths hanging, tongues like black worms. As yet, Spinnock had not seen such among the Tiste Andii, but perhaps it was only a matter of time.

  He sipped at his cup of wine, pleased to note that the trembling in his fingers had finally ceased. The eruption of power from Kurald Galain that had taken him so unawares had vanished, leaving little more than a vague unease that only slightly soured the taste of the wine. Strange disturbances these nights; who could say their portent?

  The High Priestess might have an idea or two, he suspected, although the punctuation of every statement from her never changed, now, did it? Half smiling, he sipped again at his drink.

  Seerdomin frowned and sat back. ‘This is an assault I cannot survive,’ he pronounced. ‘The Jester’s deceit was well played, Spinnock. There was no anticipating that.’

  ‘Truly?’ Spinnock asked. ‘With these allies here?’

  Seerdomin grimaced at the other two players, then grunted a sour laugh. ‘Ah, yes, I see your point. That kelyk takes their minds, I think.’

  ‘Sharpens, just so you know,’ said Garsten, licking his stained lips. ‘Although I’d swear, some nights it’s more potent than other times, wouldn’t you say so, Fuldit?’

  ‘Eh? Yah, s’pose so. When you gonna move den, Seerdomin? Eh? Resto, bring us another bottle!’

  ‘Perhaps,’ muttered Seerdomin, ‘it’s my mind that’s not sharp. I believe I must surrender.’

  Spinnock said nothing, although he was disappointed – no, he was shaken. He could see a decent counter, had been assuming his opponent had seen it immediately, but had been busy seeking something better, something wilder. Other nights, Seerdomin’s talent would burst through at moments like these – a fearless gambit that seemed to pivot the world on this very tabletop.

  Perhaps if I wait a little longer—

  ‘I yield,’ said Seerdomin.

  Words uttered, a crisis pronounced.

  ‘Resto, bring us a pitcher, if you’d be so—’ Seerdomin got no further. He seemed to jolt back into his chair, as if an invisible hand had just slammed into his chest. His eyes were on the tavern door.

  Spinnock twisted in his seat to see that strangers had arrived at the Scour. A young woman wearing a rough-woven russet robe, her hair cut short – shorter even than the High Priestess’s – yet the same midnight black. A pale face both soft and exquisite, eyes of deep brown, now searching through the gloom, finding at last the one she sought: Seerdomin. Behind her crowded others, all wearing little more than rags, their wan faces tight with something like panic.

  The woman in the lead walked over.

  Seerdomin sat like a man nailed to his chair. All colour had left his face a moment earlier, but now it was darkening, his eyes flaring with hard anger.

  ‘Benighted—’

  ‘This is my refuge,’ he said. ‘Leave. Now.’

  ‘We—’

  ‘“We”? Look at your followers, Priestess.’

  She turned, in time to see the last of them rush out of the tavern door.

  Seerdomin snorted.

  Impressively, the young woman held her ground. The robe fell open – lacking a belt – and Spinnock Durav judged she was barely adolescent. A priestess? Ah, the Great Barrow, the Redeemer. ‘Benighted,’ she resumed, in a voice that few would find hard to listen to, indeed, at length, ‘I am not here for myself. Those who were with me insisted, and even if their courage failed them at the end, this makes their need no less valid.’

  ‘They came with demands,’ Seerdomin said. ‘They have no right, and they realized the truth of that as soon as they saw me. You should now do the same, and leave as they have.’

  ‘I must try—’

  Seerdomin surged to his feet, suddenly enough to startle Garsten and Fuldit despite their addled senses, and both stared up wide-eyed and frightened.

  The priestess did not even flinch. ‘I must try,’ she repeated, ‘for their sake, and for my own. We are beset in the camp—’

  ‘No,’ cut in Seerdomin. ‘You have no right.’

  ‘Please, will you just listen?’

  The hard edge of those words clearly surprised Seerdomin. Garsten and Fuldit, collecting their tankards and bottles, quickly left the table.

  Spinnock Durav rose, bowed slightly to both, and made for the exit. As he passed Resto – who stood motionless with a pitcher in his hand – he said under his breath, ‘On my tab, please – this entire night. Seerdomin will have no thought of you when he leaves.’

  Resto blinked up at him, then nodded.

  In the darkness opposite the Scour’s door, Spinnock Durav waited. He had half expected to see the pilgrims waiting outside, but the street was empty – they had fled indeed, at a run, probably all the way back to the camp. There was little spine in the followers of the Redeemer.

  With at least one exception, he corrected himself as the priestess stepped outside.

  Even from ten paces away, he saw her sag slightly, as if finding herself on suddenly watery legs. Tugging the robe tight round herself, she set off, three, four strides, then slowed and finally halted to turn and face Spinnock Durav.

  Who came forward. ‘My pardon, Priestess,’ he said.

  ‘Your friend took that pitcher for himself,’ she said. ‘Expect a long night. If you have a care you can collect him in a few bells – I’d rather he not spend a senseless night lying on that filthy floor.’

  ‘I would have thought the possibility might please you,’ Spinnock said.

  She frowned. ‘No. He is the Benighted.’

  ‘And what does that mean?’

  She hesitated, then said, ‘Each day, until recently, he came to the Great Barrow and knelt before it. Not to pray, not to deliver a trinket.’

  Confused, Spinnock Durav asked, ‘What, then?’

  ‘He would rather that remain a secret, I suspect.’

  ‘Priestess, he is my friend. I see well his distress—’

  ‘And why does that both
er you so? More than a friend might feel – I can sense that. Most friends might offer sympathy, even more, but within them remains the stone thought that they are thankful that they themselves do not share their friend’s plight. But that is not within you, not with this Seerdomin. No,’ she drew a step closer, eyes searching, ‘he answers a need, and so wounded as he now is, you begin to bleed.’

  ‘Mother Dark, woman!’

  She retreated at his outburst and looked away. ‘I am sorry. Sir, the Benighted kneels before the Great Barrow and delivers unto the Redeemer the most precious gift of all. Company. Asking for nothing. He comes to relieve the Redeemer’s loneliness.’ She ran a hand back through her short hair. ‘I sought to tell him something, but he would not hear me.’

  ‘Can I—’

  ‘I doubt it. I tried to tell him what I am sensing from the Redeemer. Sir, your friend is missed.’ She sighed, turning away. ‘If all who worship did so without need. If all came to their saviour unmindful of that title and its burden, if they came as friends—’ she glanced back at him, ‘what would happen then, do you think? I wonder…’

  He watched her walk away, feeling humbled, too shaken to pursue, to root out the answers – the details – he needed most. To find out what he could do. For Seerdomin. For her.

  For her?

  Now, why should she matter? By the Abyss, what has she done to me?

  And how in the Mother’s name can Seerdomin resist her?

  How many women had there been? He had lost count. It would have been better, perhaps, if he’d at least once elected to share his gift of longevity. Better, yes, than watching those few who’d remained with him for any length of time lose all their beauty, surrendering their youth, until there was no choice but for Kallor to discard them, to lock them away, one by one, in some tower on some windswept knoll. What else could he have done? They hobbled into lives of misery, and that misery was an affront to his sensibilities. Too much bitterness, too much malice in those hot, ageing eyes ever fixing upon him. Did he not age as well? True, a year for them was but a heartbeat for Kallor, but see the lines of his face, see the slow wasting of muscle, the iron hue of his hair…

  It was not just a matter of choosing the slowest burning wood, after all, was it? And with that thought he kicked at the coals of the fire, watched sparks roil nightward. Sometimes, the urgent flames of the quick and the shortlived delivered their own kind of heat. Hard wood and slow burn, soft wood and smouldering reluctance before ashen collapse. Resinous wood and oh how she flared! Blinding, yes, a glory no man could turn from.

  Too bad he’d had to kill every child he begat. No doubt that left most of his wives and lovers somewhat disaffected. But he had not been so cruel as to hesitate, had he? No. Why, he’d tear those ghastly babes from their mothers’ arms not moments after they’d tumbled free of the womb, and was that not a true sign of mercy? No one grows attached to dead things, not even mothers.

  Attachments, yes, now they were indeed a waste of time and, more relevantly, a weakness. To rule an empire – to rule a hundred empires – one needed a certain objectivity. All was to be used, to be remade howsoever he pleased. Why, he had launched vast construction projects to glorify his rule, but few understood that it was not the completion that mattered, but the work itself and all that it implied – his command over their lives, their loyalty, their labour. Why, he could work them for decades, see generations of the fools pass one by one, all working each and every day of their lives, and still they did not understand what it meant for them to give to him – to Kallor – so many years of their mortal existence, so much of it, truly, that any rational soul would howl at the cruel injustice of such a life.

  This was, as far as he was concerned, the real mystery of civilization – and for all that he exploited it he was, by the end, no closer to understanding it. This willingness of otherwise intelligent (well, reasonably intelligent) people to parcel up and then bargain away appalling percentages of their very limited lives, all in service to someone else. And the rewards? Ah, some security, perhaps. The cement that is stability. A sound roof, something on the plate, the beloved offspring each one destined to repeat the whole travail. And was that an even exchange?

  It would not have been so, for him. He knew that, had known it from the very first. He would bargain away nothing of his life. He would serve no one, yield none of his labour to the edification and ever-expanding wealth of some fool who imagined that his or her own part of the bargain was profound in its generosity, was indeed the most precious of gifts. That to work for him or her was a privilege – gods! The conceit of that! The lie, so bristling and charged in its brazen display!

  Just how many rules of civil behaviour were designed to perpetuate such egregious schemes of power and control of the few over the many? Rules defended to the death (usually the death of the many, rarely that of the few) with laws and wars, with threats and brutal repression – ah, those were the days, were they not? How he had gloried in that outrage!

  He would never be one of the multitude. And he had proved it, again and again, and again. And he would continue to prove it.

  A crown was within reach. A kingship waited to be claimed. Mastery not over something as mundane as an empire – that game had grown stale long ago – but over a realm. An entity consisting of all the possible forces of existence. The power of earthly flesh, every element unbound, the coruscating will of belief, the skein of politics, religion, social accord, sensibilities, woven from the usual tragic roots of past ages golden and free of pain and new ages bright with absurd promise. While through it all fell the rains of oblivion, the cascading torrent of failure and death, suffering and misery, a god broken and for ever doomed to remain so – oh, Kallor knew he could usurp such a creature, leave it as powerless as his most abject subject.

  All – all of it – within his reach.

  He kicked again at the embers, the too-small branches that had made up this shortlived fire, saw countless twigs fall into white ash. A few picked bones were visible amidst the coals, all that remained of the pathetic creature he had devoured earlier this night.

  A smear of clouds cut a swath across the face of the stars and the dust-veiled moon had yet to rise. Somewhere out on the plain coyotes bickered with the night. He had found trader tracks this past day, angling northwest-southeast. Well-worn wagon ruts, the tramping of yoked oxen. Garbage strewn to either side. Rather disappointing, all things considered; he had grown used to solitude, where the only sign of human activity had been the occasional grassfire on the western horizon – plains nomads and their mysterious ways – something to do with the bhederin herds and the needs for various grasses, he suspected. If they spied him they wisely kept their distance. His passing through places had a way of agitating ancient spirits, a detail he had once found irritating enough to hunt the things down and kill them, but no longer. Let them whine and twitch, thrash and moan in the grip of timorous nightmares, and all that. Let their mortal children cower in the high grasses until he was well and gone.

  The High King had other concerns. And other matters with which he could occupy his mind.

  He sat straighter, every sense stung awake by a burgeoning of power to the north. Slowly rising to his feet, Kallor stared into the darkness. Yes, something foaming awake, what might it be? And…yes, another force, and that one he well recognized – Tiste Andii.

  Breath hissed between worn teeth. Of course, if he continued on this path he would have come full circle, back to that horrid place – what was its name? Yes, Coral. The whole mess with the Pannion Domin, oh, the stupidity! The pathetic, squalid idiocy of that day!

  Could this be those two accursed hunters? Had they somehow swept round him? Were they now striking south to finally face him? Well, he might welcome that. He’d killed his share of dragons, both pure and Soletaken. One at a time, of course. Two at once…that could be a challenge.

  For all this time, their pursuit had been a clumsy, witless thing. So easily fooled, led astray – he
could have ambushed them countless times, and perhaps he should have done just that. At the very least, he might have come to understand the source of their persistent – yes, pathological – relentlessness. Had he truly angered Rake that much? It seemed ridiculous. The Son of Darkness was not one to become so obsessed; indeed, none of the Tiste Andii were, and was that not their fundamental weakness? This failing of will?

  How had he so angered Korlat and Orfantal? Was it because he did not stay, did not elect to fight alongside all the doomed fools on that day? Let the Malazans bleed! They were our enemies! Let the T’lan Imass betray Silverfox – she deserved it!

  It was not our war, Brood. Not our war, Rake. Why didn’t you listen to me?

  Bah, come and face me, then, Korlat. Orfantal. Come, let us be done with this rubbish!

  The twin flaring of powers ebbed suddenly.

  Somewhere far to the east the coyotes resumed their frantic cries.

  He looked skyward, saw the gleam of the rising moon, its ravaged scowl of reflected sunlight and the blighted dust of its stirred slumber. Look at you. Your face is my face, let us be truthful about that. Beaten and boxed about, yet we climb upright time and again, to resume our trek.

  The sky cares nothing for you, dear one. The stars don’t even see you.

  But you will march on, because it is what you do.

  A final kick at the coals. Let the grasses burn to scar his wake, he cared not. No, he would not come full circle – he never did, which was what had kept him alive for this long. No point in changing anything, was there?