The Malazan Empire

by Steven Erikson

  Light glows through shutters and bubbled glass windows, but never mind the light and all peaceful slumber and discourse and all the rest such illumination might reveal! Dull and witless the expectations so quickly and predictably surrendered!

  A woman in whose soul burned freedom black and blazing arches her back as only the second man in her life slides deep into her and something ignites in her mind – Gorlas ever used his fingers in this place, after all, and fingers cannot match – gods below!

  But leave that now – truly, imagination suffices to make eloquent all the clumsy shifting about and strange sounds and the fumbling for this and that, and then that – no more! Out into the true darkness, yes, to the fingerless man stalking his next victim.

  To a new estate and Captain Torvald Nom of the House Guard, moments from leaving for the night with all security in the so-capable hands of Scorch and Leff (yes, he worked hard on that), who pauses to watch a black two-person carriage trundle into the courtyard, and whose eyes thin to verymost slits of suspicion and curiosity and a niggling feeling of…something, as a cloaked, hooded figure steps into view and slides like a bad thought up the stairs and into the main house. Who… ponder no longer, Torvald Nom! On your way, yes, back home to your loving and suitably impressed wife. Think of nothing but that and that alone and be on your way!

  A guard with occasional chest pains is questioning patrons of a bar, seeking witnesses who might have seen someone set out to follow that local man into the alley in order to beat him to death and would no one step forward on behalf of that hapless victim? Might do, aye, if’n any of us liked him, y’see…

  In a crypt (irrationally well lit, of course) sits a man plotting the downfall of the city, starting with a handful of Malazans, and he sits most contented in the absence of shadows or any other ambivalence imposed upon reality.

  Out in Chuffs, as moles sleep in their tiny cots, Bainisk sits down beside Harllo’s bed to hear more stories about Darujhistan, for Bainisk was born in Chuffs and has never left it, you see, and his eyes glow as Harllo whispers about riches and all sorts of wonderful foods and great monuments and statues and blue fire everywhere and before long both are asleep, Harllo in his lumpy bed and Bainisk on the floor beside it, and across the way Venaz sees this and sneers to display his hatred of both Bainisk and Bainisk’s new favourite when Venaz used to be his best, but Bainisk was a betrayer, a liar and worse and someday Harllo would pay for that—

  Because Harllo was right. He was a boy who drew bullies like a lodestone and this was a cruel fact and his kind were legion and it was a godly blessing how so many survived and grew up to wreak vengeance upon all those people not as smart as they were, but even that is a bitter reward and never quite as satisfying as it might be.

  Back to Darujhistan, with relief, as a Great Raven launches herself skyward from the tower of Baruk’s estate, watched with evil satisfaction by a squat, overweight demon staring out from a spark-spitting chimney mouth.

  And this was a night like any other, a skein of expectations and anticipations, revelations and perturbations. Look around. Look around! On all sides, day and night, light and dark! Every step taken with the firm resolve to believe in the solid ground awaiting it. Every step, one after another, again and again, and no perilous ledge yawns ahead, oh no.

  Step and step, now, step and step—

  Chapter Ten

  Will you come and tell me when the music ends

  When the musicians are swallowed in flames

  Every instrument blackening and crumbling to ash

  When the dancers stumble and sprawl their diseased limbs

  rotting off and twitching the skin sloughing away

  Will you come and tell me when the music ends

  When the stars we pushed into the sky loose their roars

  And the clouds we built into visible rage do now explode

  When the bright princes of privilege march past with dead smiles

  falling from their faces a host of deceiving masks

  Will you come and tell me when the music ends

  When reason sinks into the morass of superstition

  Waging a war of ten thousand armies stung to the lash

  When we stop looking up even as we begin our mad running

  into stupidity’s nothingness with heavenly choirs screaming

  Will you come and tell me when the music ends

  When the musicians are no more than black grinning sticks

  Every instrument wailing its frantic death cry down the road

  When the ones left standing have had their mouths cut off

  leaving holes from which a charnel wind eternally blows

  Will you come and tell me when the music ends

  The fire is eating my breath and agony fills this song

  When my fingers crack on the strings and fall from my hands

  And this dance twists every muscle like burning rope

  while your laughter follows down my crumpling corpse

  Won’t you come and tell me when the music ends

  When I can leap away and face one god or a thousand

  Or nothing at all into this blessed bliss of oblivion

  When I can prise open this box and release cruel and bitter fury

  at all the mad fools crowding the door in panicked flight

  Watch me and watch me with eyes wide and shocked

  With disbelief with horror with indignant umbrage to upbraid

  And the shouted Nays are like drumbeats announcing a truth

  The music ends my friends, my vile, despicable friends, and

  see me –

  see me slam the door slam it hard – in all your faces!

  The Music Ends

  Fisher kel Tath

  His boots crunched on water-worn stones slick with mist as he made his way to the water’s edge. The steep slopes of the surrounding mountainsides were verdant, thick rainforest, crimson-barked trees towering high, beards of moss hanging from toppled trunks.

  Endest Silann leaned on his stolid walking stick, the muscles of his legs trembling. He looked round as he slowly regained his breath. It was chilly, the sun’s arc just slipping past the western peaks, and shadow swallowed the river valley.

  Black water rushed by and he felt its cold – no need to squat down, no need to slide a hand into the tugging current. This dark river was, he could see now, nothing like Dorssan Ryl. How could he have expected otherwise? The new is ever but a mangled echo of the old and whatever whispers of similarity one imagined do naught but sting with pain, leaving one blistered with loss. Oh, he had been a fool, to have journeyed all this way. Seeking what? Even that he could not answer.

  No, perhaps he could. Escape. Brief, yes, but escape none the less. The coward flees, knowing he must return, wishing that the return journey might kill him, take his life as it did the old everywhere. But listen! You can shape your soul – make it a bucket, a leaking one that you carry about. Or your soul can be a rope, thick and twisted, refusing to break even as it buckles to one knot after another. Choose your image, Endest Silann. You are here, you’ve made it this far, haven’t you? And as he told you…not much farther to go. Not much farther at all.

  He smelled woodsmoke.

  Startled, alarmed, he turned away from the rush of the river. Faced upstream whence came the late afternoon breeze. There, in distant gloom, the muted glow of a campfire.

  Ah, no escape after all. He’d wanted solitude, face to face with intractable, indifferent nature. He’d wanted to feel…irrelevant. He’d wanted the wildness to punch him senseless, leave him humiliated, reduced to a wretch. Oh, he had wanted plenty, hadn’t he?

  With a sour grunt, Endest Silann began walking upstream. At the very least, the fire would warm his hands.

  Thirty paces away, he could see the lone figure facing the smoky flames. Huge, round-shouldered, seated on a fallen log. And Endest Silann smiled in recognition.

  Two trout speared on skewers cooked above the fire. A pot of si
mmering tea sat with one blackened shoulder banked in coals. Two tin cups warmed on the flat rock making up one side of the hearth.

  Another log waited opposite the one on which sat the warlord, Caladan Brood, who slowly twisted round to watch Endest Silann approach. The broad, oddly bestial face split into a wry smile. ‘Of all the guests I imagined this night, old friend, you did not come to mind. Forgive me. You took your time since beginning your descent into this valley, but for that I will happily make allowances – but do not complain if the fish is overcooked.’

  ‘Complaints are far away and will remain so, Caladan. You have awakened my appetite – for food, drink and, most of all, company.’

  ‘Then sit, make yourself comfortable.’

  ‘So you did indeed disband your army after the siege,’ said Endest Silann, making his way over to settle himself down. ‘There were rumours. Of course, my master said nothing.’

  ‘See me now,’ said the warlord, ‘commanding an army of wet stones, and yes, it proves far less troublesome than the last one. Finally, I can sleep soundly at night. Although, matching wits with these trout has challenged me mightily. There, take one of those plates, and here – beware the bones, though,’ he added as he set a fish on the plate.

  ‘Alone here, Caladan Brood – it makes me wonder if you are hiding.’

  ‘It may be that I am, Endest Silann. Unfortunately, hiding never works.’

  ‘No, it never does.’

  Neither spoke for a time as they ate their supper. The trout was indeed overdone but Endest Silann said nothing, for it was delicious none the less.

  If Anomander Rake was a mystery shrouded in darkness, then Caladan Brood was one clothed in geniality. Spare with words, he nevertheless could make virtually anyone feel welcome and, indeed, appreciated. Or rather, he could when the pressures of command weren’t crouched on his shoulders like a damned mountain. This night, then, Endest Silann well understood, was a gift, all the more precious in that it was wholly unexpected.

  When the meal was done, night’s arrival closed out the world beyond the fire’s light. The rush of the river was a voice, a presence. Water flowed indifferent to the heave and plunge of the sun, the shrouded moon and the slow spin of the stars. The sound reached them in a song without words, and all effort to grasp its meaning was hopeless, for, like the water itself, one could not grasp hold of sound. The flow was ceaseless and immeasurable and just as stillness did not in fact exist, so neither did true, absolute silence.

  ‘Why are you here?’ Endest Silann asked after a time.

  ‘I wish I could answer you, old friend, and Burn knows the desire to ease the burden is almost overwhelming.’

  ‘You are assuming, Caladan, that I am ignorant of what awaits us.’

  ‘No, I do not do that – after all, you have sought a pilgrimage, out to this river – and among the Tiste Andii, this place has proved a mysterious lure. Yet you ask why I am here, and so your knowledge must be…incomplete. Endest Silann, I cannot say more. I cannot help you.’

  The old Tiste Andii looked away, off into the dark where the river sang to the night. So, others had come here, then. Some instinctive need drawing them, yes, to the ghost of Dorssan Ryl. He wondered if they had felt the same disappointment as he had upon seeing these black (but not black enough) waters. It is not the same. Nothing ever is, beginning with ourselves. ‘I do not,’ he said, ‘believe much in forgiveness.’

  ‘What of restitution?’

  The question stunned him, stole his breath. The river rushed with the sound of ten thousand voices and those cries filled his head, spread into his chest to grip his heart. Cold pooled in his gut. By the Abyss…such…ambition. He felt the icy trickle of tears on his fire-warmed cheeks. ‘I will do all I can.’

  ‘He knows that,’ Caladan Brood said with such compassion that Endest Silann almost cried out. ‘You might not believe this now,’ the huge warrior continued, ‘but you will find this pilgrimage worthwhile. A remembrance to give strength when you need it most.’

  No, he did not believe that now, and could not imagine ever believing it. Even so…the ambition. So appalling, so breathtaking.

  Caladan Brood poured the tea and set a cup into Endest’s hands. The tin shot heat into his chilled fingers. The warlord was standing beside him now.

  ‘Listen to the river, Endest Silann. Such a peaceful sound…’

  But in the ancient Tiste Andii’s mind that sound was a wailing chorus, an overwhelming flood of loss and despair. The ghost of Dorssan Ryl? No, this was where that long dead river emptied out, feeding the midnight madness of its history into a torrent where it swirled with a thousand other currents. Endless variations on the same bitter flavour.

  And as he stared into the flames he saw once more the city dying in a conflagration. Kharkanas beneath the raging sky. Blinding ash like sand in the eyes, smoke like poison in the lungs. Mother Darkness in her fury, denying her children, turning away as they died and died. And died.

  Listen to the river. Remember the voices.

  Wait, as does the warlord here. Wait, to see what comes.

  The smell of the smoke remained long after the fire was done. They rode in on to charred ground and blackened wreckage. Collapsed, crumbled inward, the enormous carriage still reared like a malignant smoking pyre in the centre of stained earth. Detritus was scattered about to mark the disintegration of the community. Yet, although the scene was one of slaughter, there were no bodies. Trails set off in all directions, some broader than others.

  Samar Dev studied the scene for a time, then watched as Traveller dismounted to walk over to the edge of the camp, where he began examining some of the tracks leading away. He was an odd man, she decided. Quiet, self-contained, a man used to being alone, yet beneath it all was a current of…yes, mayhem. As if it was his own solitude that kept the world safe.

  Once, long ago now, she had found herself in the company of another warrior equally familiar with that concept. But there the similarity ended. Karsa Orlong, notwithstanding that first journey into the besieged fortress outside Ugarat, thrived on an audience. Witness, he would say, in full expectation of just that. He wanted his every deed observed, as if each set of eyes existed solely to mark Karsa Orlong, and the minds behind them served, to the exclusion of all else, to recount to all what he had done, what he had said, what he had begun and what he had ended. He makes us his history. Every witness contributes to the narrative – the life, the deeds of Toblakai – a narrative to which we are, each of us, bound.

  Chains and shackles snaked out from the burned carriage. Empty, of course. And yet, despite this, Samar Dev understood that the survivors of this place remained slaves. Chained to Karsa Orlong, their liberator, chained to yet another grim episode in his history. He gives us freedom and enslaves us all. Oh, now there is irony. All the sweeter for that he does not mean to, no, the very opposite each and every time. The damned fool.

  ‘Many took horses, loaded down with loot,’ Traveller said, returning to his mount. ‘One trail heads north, the least marked – I believe it belongs to your friend.’

  My friend.

  ‘He is not far ahead of us now, and still on foot. We should catch up to him today.’

  She nodded.

  Traveller studied her for a moment. He then swung himself on to his horse and collected the reins. ‘Samar Dev, I cannot work out what happened here.’

  ‘He did,’ she replied. ‘He happened here.’

  ‘He killed no one. From what you have told me, well, I thought to find something else. It is as if he simply walked up to them and said, “It’s over”.’ He frowned across at her. ‘How can that be?’

  She shook her head.

  He grunted, guiding his horse round. ‘The scourge of the Skathandi has ended.’

  ‘It has.’

  ‘My fear of your companion has…deepened. I am ever more reluctant to find him.’

  ‘But that will not stop you, will it? If he carries the Emperor’s Sword…’

/>   He did not reply. He didn’t need to.

  They set out at the canter. Northward.

  The wind cut across from the west, sun-warmed and dry. The few clouds scudding past overhead were thin and shredded. Ravens or hawks circled, wheeling specks, and Samar Dev thought of flies buzzing the corpse of the earth.

  She spat to clear away the taste of woodsmoke.

  A short time later they came upon a small camp. Three men, two pregnant women. The fear in their eyes warred with abject resignation as Samar Dev and Traveller came up and reined in. The men had not sought to flee, proof of the rarest kind of courage – the women were too burdened to run, so the men had stayed and if that meant death, then so be it.

  Details like these ever humbled Samar Dev.

  ‘You are following the Toblakai,’ Traveller said, dismounting. They stared, saying nothing. Traveller half turned and gestured for Samar Dev. Curious, she slipped down.

  ‘Can you see to the health of the women?’ he asked her in a low voice.

  ‘All right,’ she said, then watched as the Dal Honese warrior led the three men off to one side. Bemused, Samar Dev approached the women. Both, she saw, were far along in their pregnancies, and then she noted that both seemed…not quite human. Furtive eyes the hue of tawny grasses, a kind of animal wariness along with the resignation she had noted earlier, but now she understood it as the fatalism of the victim, the hunted, the prey. Yes, she could imagine seeing such eyes in the antelope with the leopard’s jaws closed on its throat. The image left her feeling rattled.

  ‘I am a witch,’ she said. ‘Shoulder Woman.’

  Both remained sitting. They stared in silence.

  She edged closer and crouched down opposite them. They bore features both human and animal, as if they represented some alternative version of human beings. Dark-skinned, slope-browed, with broad mouths full-lipped and probably – when not taut with anxiety – unusually expressive. Both looked well fed, essentially healthy. Both emanated that strange completeness that only pregnant women possessed. When everything outward faced inward. In a less generous moment she might call it smugness but this was not such a moment. Besides, there was in those auras something animal that made it all seem proper, natural, as if this was exclusively and precisely what women were for.