The Malazan Empire

by Steven Erikson

  ‘What saved it?’

  ‘Two things. Exhaustion—oh, well, three things, now that I think on it. Exhaustion. Another was the ugly fact that even free stuff isn’t for free. And finally, apart from imminent starvation, there were all those squalling babies showing up nine months later—a population explosion, in fact.’

  Bottle was frowning. ‘Sinter, you could have just said “no”, you know. It’s not the first time I’ve heard that word.’

  ‘I gave up the Dal Honese life, Bottle, when I joined the Malazan marines.’

  ‘Are you deliberately trying to confuse me?’

  ‘No. Just saying that I’m being tugged two ways—I already got a man chasing me, but he’s a bad swimmer and who knows which barge he’s on right now. And I don’t think I made any special promises. But then, back at the stern—where all the fun is—there’s this soldier, a heavy, who looks like a marble statue—you know, the ones that show up at low tide off the Kanese coast. Like a god, but without all the seaweed—’

  ‘All right, Sergeant, I see where you’re going, or going back to, I mean. I’m no match for that, and if he’s offering—’

  ‘He is, but then, a drum with him might complicate things. I mean, I might get possessive.’

  ‘But that’s not likely with me.’

  ‘Just my thinking.’

  Bottle eyed the dark waters roiling past below, wondering how fast he’d sink, and how long it took to drown when one wasn’t fighting it.

  ‘Oh,’ she murmured, ‘I guess that was a rather deflating invitation, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Well put, Sergeant.’

  ‘Okay, there’s more.’

  ‘More of what?’ He could always open his wrists before plunging in. Cut down on the panic and such.

  ‘I got senses about things, and sometimes people, too. Feelings. Curiosity. And I’ve learned it pays to follow up on that when I can. So, with you, I’m thinking it’s worth my while to get to know you better. Because you’re more than you first seem, and that’s why Fid’s not talking.’

  ‘Very generous, Sergeant. Tell you what, how about we share a meal or two over the next few days, and leave it at that. At least for now.’

  ‘I’ve made a mess of this, haven’t I? All right, we’ve got lots of time. See you later, Bottle.’

  Paralt poison, maybe a vial’s worth, and then a knife to the heart to go with the slitted wrists, and then the drop over the side. Drowning? Nothing to it. He listened to the boots clump off, wondering if she’d pause at some point to wipe off what was left of him from her soles.

  Some women were just out of reach. It was a fact. There were ones a man could get to, and then others he could only look at. And they in turn could do the calculations in the span of the barest flutter of an eye—walk up or walk over, or, if need be, run away from.

  Apes did the same damned thing. And monkeys and parrots and flare snakes: the world was nothing but matches and mismatches, posturing and poses, the endless weighing of fitness. It’s a wonder the useless ones among us ever breed at all.

  A roofed enclosure provided accommodation for the Adjunct and her staff of one, Lostara Yil, as well as her dubious guest, the once-priest Banaschar. Screened from the insects, cool in the heat of the day and warm at night when the mists lifted from the water. One room functioned as a mobile headquarters, although in truth there was little need for administration whilst the army traversed the river. The single table bore the tacked maps—sketchy as they were—for the Wastelands and a few scraps marking out the scattered territories of Kolanse. These latter ones were renditions of coastlines for the most part, pilot surveys made in the interests of trade. The vast gap in knowledge lay between the Wastelands and those distant coasts.

  Banaschar made a point of studying the maps when no one else was in the room. He wasn’t interested in company, and conversations simply left him weary, often despondent. He could see the Adjunct’s growing impatience, the flicker in her eyes that might be desperation. She was in a hurry, and Banaschar thought he knew why, but sympathy was too rich a sentiment to muster, even for her and the Bonehunters who blindly followed her. Lostara Yil was perhaps more interesting. Certainly physically, not that he had any chance there. But it was the haunted shadow in her face that drew him to her, the stains of old guilt, the bitter flavours of regret and grievous loss. Such desires, of course, brought him face to face with his own perversions, his attraction to dissolution, the allure of the fallen. He would then tell himself that there was value in self-recognition. The challenge then was in measuring that value. A stack of gold coins? Three stacks? A handful of gems? A dusty burlap sack filled with dung? Value indeed, these unblinking eyes and their not-too-steady regard.

  Fortunately, Lostara had little interest in him, relegating his hidden hungers to harmless imaginings, where the illusions served to gloss over the wretched realities. Dissolution palled in the details, even as blazing health and vigour could not but make a realist—like him—choke on irony. Death, after all, played against the odds with a cheating hand. It was a serious struggle to find righteous moralities in who lived and who died. He often thought of the bottle he reached for, and told himself: Well, at least I know what will kill me. What about that paragon of perfect living, cut down by a mole on his back he couldn’t even see? What about the glorious young giant who trips on his own sword in his first battle, bleeding out from a cut artery still thirty paces from the enemy? The idiot who falls down the stairs? Odds, don’t talk to me about odds—take a good look at the Hounds’ Toll if you don’t believe me.

  Still, she wasn’t eager for his company so that conversation would have to wait. Her aversion was disappointing and somewhat baffling. He was educated, wasn’t he? And erudite, when sober and sometimes even when not sober. As capable of a good laugh as any defrocked priest with no future. And as for his own dissolution, well, he wasn’t so far along as to have lost the roguish qualities that accompanied that dissolution, was he?

  He could walk the decks, he supposed, but then he would have no choice but to let the miasma of the living swirl over him with all the rank insistence that too many sweaty, unwashed bodies could achieve. Not to mention the snatches of miserable conversation assailing him as he threaded through the prostrate, steaming forms—nothing was uglier, in fact, than soldiers at rest. Nothing was more insipid, more degenerate, or more honest. Who needed reminding that most people were either stupid, lazy or both?

  No, ever since the sudden disappearance of Telorast and Curdle—almost a month ago, now—he was better off with these maps, especially the blank places that so beckoned him. They should be feeding his imagination, even his sense of wonder, but that wasn’t why they so obsessed him. The unmarked spans of parchment and hide were like empty promises. The end of questions, the failure of the pursuit of knowledge. They were like forgotten dreams, ambitions abandoned to the pyres so long ago not a single fleck of ash remained.

  He so wanted such blank spaces, spreading through the maps of his own history, the maps pinned to that curling table of bone that was the inside of his skull, the cave walls of his soul. Here be thy failures. Of resonance and mystery and truth. Here be the mountains vanishing in the mists, never to return. Here be the rivers sinking into the sands, and these are the sands that never rest. And the sky that looks down and sees nothing. Here, aye, is the world behind me, for I was never much of a map-maker, never much the surveyor of deeds.

  Bleach out the faces, scour away the lives, scrape down the betrayals. Soak these maps until all the inks blur and float and wash away.

  It is the task of priests to offer absolution, after all. And I shall begin by absolving myself.

  It’s the lure, you see, of dissolution.

  And so he studied the maps, all those empty spaces.

  The river was a promise. That it could take the knife from Lostara’s hand. A glimmering flash and gone, for ever gone. The silts could then swallow everything up, making preservation and rot one and the same. The wei
ght of the weapon would defy the current—that was the important thing, the way it would refuse to be carried along. Some things could do that. Some things possessed the necessary weight to acquire a will of their own.

  She could follow the knife into the stream, but she knew she’d be tugged and pulled, spun and rolled onward, because no one was a knife, no one could stay in one place, no matter how hard they tried.

  Lately, she had been thinking about the Red Blades, the faces and the life she had once known. It was clear to her now that what was past had stopped moving, but the sense of distance ever growing behind her was proving an illusion. Eddies drew her back, and all those mired memories waited to catch her like hidden snags.

  A knife in hand, then, was sound wisdom. Best not surrender it to these troubled waters.

  The Red Blades. She wondered if that elite company of fanatics still served the Empress. Who would have taken command? Well, there were plenty, enough of them to make the accession a bloody one. Had she been there, she too would have made a try. A knife in hand, then, was an answer to many things. The Adjunct’s irritation with it bordered on obsession, but she didn’t understand. A weapon needs to be maintained, after all. Honed, oiled, sliding quickly from the sheath. With that knife, Lostara could cut herself loose whenever she liked.

  A little earlier, she had sat at the evening meal with Tavore, a ritual of theirs since leaving Letheras. Food and wine and not much in the way of conversation. Every effort Lostara made to draw the Adjunct out, to come to know her better—on a more personal level—had failed. For a long time, Lostara had concluded that the woman in command of the Bonehunters was simply incapable of revealing her vulnerable side. A flaw in her personality, as impossible to reject or change as the colour of one’s eyes. But Lostara was coming to believe that Tavore was afflicted with something else. She behaved as would a widow, the kind that then made mourning a way of life, a ritualized assembly of habits. The light of day had become a thing to turn away from. A gesture of invitation was answered with muttered regrets. And the sorrowing mask never left her face.

  A widow should not be commanding an army, and the thought of Adjunct Tavore leading that army into a war left Lostara both disturbed and frightened. To wear the mask of the widow was to reject life itself, scattering ashes into one’s own path ahead, making the future as grey as the past. It was as if a pyre awaited them all, and at the moment of standing on the threshold of those murderous flames, she saw Tavore Paran stride forward, bold and resolute. And the army at her back would simply follow.

  Two people seated across from one another, silent and trapped inside the world of their unspoken, private thoughts. The waters never blended, and the currents of the other were for ever strange and forbidding. There was no comfort in these suppers. They were, in fact, excruciating.

  She quickly made her escape. Each night, retreating to the silk-walled chamber that was her bedroom. Where she sharpened and oiled her knife to drive away the red stain. Solitude could be an unwelcome place, but even the unwelcome could become habit.

  Lostara had heard Banaschar’s footsteps as he headed for his temple of maps. They were steady this night, those footsteps, which meant he was more or less sober. Not often the case, alas, which was too bad—or perhaps not. Sometimes—his clear, sober times—the bleak horror in his eyes could overwhelm. What had it been like, worshipping the Worm of Autumn, that pale bitch of decay? It would take a particular person to be drawn to such a thing. One for whom abject terror meant facing the nightmare. Or, conversely, one who hungered for what could not be avoided, the breaking down of flesh and dreams, the knowledge of the multitude of carrion eaters that waited for him at life’s end.

  But the Worm had cast him out. She had embraced all her other lovers, but not Banaschar. What did that mean to the man? The eaters would have to wait. The nightmare was not yet ready to meet his eyes. Obeisance to the inevitable was denied. Go away.

  So, he would begin the rotting from the inside out. Spilling libations to drown the altar of his own soul. It was not desecration, it was worship.

  The knife-edge went snick against the whetstone, steady as a heartbeat, each side in counter-beat as she flipped the blade in perfect rhythm. Snick snick snick . . .

  Here in this cloth house, the others had their rituals. While she—she had her tasks of maintenance and preparedness. As befitted a soldier.

  Stormy sat, back against the stepped rail that served as the barge’s gunwale, positioned just so. Opposite, the jade slashes loomed in the south sky, fierce and ominous, and to his eyes it seemed the heavens were coming for him, a personal and most private vendetta. He tried to think of a guilt worthy of the magnitude. That pouch of coins he’d once lifted from a drunk noble in Falar? He’d been able to buy a decent knife with that. How old had he been? Ten? Twelve?

  Maybe that passed-out woman he’d groped? That friend of his aunt’s, easily twice his age—her tits had felt huge in his hands, heavy and wayward, and she’d moaned when he pinched her nipples, legs shifting and opening up—and what would a fifteen-year-old boy do with that? Well, the obvious, he supposed. In went his finger, and then a few more.

  At some point she’d opened her eyes, frowned up at him, as if trying to place him. And then she’d sighed, the way a mother sighed when a wide-eyed son pressed her with awkward questions. And she took hold of that hand with all its probing fingers—he’d expected her to pull him out. Instead, she pushed the whole hand inside. He didn’t even think that was possible.

  Drunk women still held a certain fascination for Stormy, but he never went after them, in case he heard that sigh again, the one that could turn him back into a nervous, lip-licking fifteen-year-old. Guilt, aye, it was a terrible thing. The world tilted, came back, eager to crush him flat. Because doing something wrong pushed it the other way, didn’t it? Keep pushing until you lose your footing and then wait for the sudden shadow, the huge thing blotting out the sky. Splat was another word for justice, as far as he was concerned. When it all comes back, aye.

  He’d thrown his sister into a pond, once. But then, she’d been doing that to him for years, until that day when he realized he was bigger and stronger than she was. She’d hissed and spat her way back out, a look of outrage on her face. Recalling that, Stormy smiled. Justice by his own hand—no reason for feeling guilty about that one.

  He’d killed plenty of people, of course, but only because they’d been trying to kill him and would have done just that if he’d let them. So that didn’t count. It was the soldier’s pact, after all, and for all the right decisions that kept one alive, a thousand things one could do nothing about could take a fool down. The enemy wasn’t just the one in front of you—it was the uncertain ground underfoot, the stray arrow, the flash of blinding sunlight, the gust of grit in the eye, the sudden muscle cramp or the snapped blade. A soldier fought against a world of enemies each and every time, and walking free of that was a glory to make the gods jealous. Maybe the guilt showed up, but that was later, like an aftertaste when you can’t even remember the taste itself. It was thin, not quite real, and to chew on it too long was just self-indulgence, as bad as probing a loose tooth.

  He glared at the southern night sky. This celestial arbiter was indifferent to everything but the punishment it would deliver. Cut sharp as a gem, five jade swords were swinging down.

  Of course they weren’t all aiming at him. It just felt that way, on this steamy night with the river full of glinting eyes from those damned crocodiles—and they wanted him too. He’d heard from the barge hands about how they’d tip a boat if they could and then swarm the hapless victims, tearing them to pieces. He shivered.

  ‘There’s a glamour about you, Adjutant.’

  Stormy looked up. ‘I’m a corporal, High Mage.’

  ‘And I’m a squad mage, aye.’

  ‘You was a squad mage, just like I was maybe once an Adjutant, but now you’re a High Mage and I’m a corporal.’

  Quick Ben shrugged beneath his rain-c
ape, which he’d drawn tight. ‘At first I thought it was just the Slashes, giving you that glow. But then, I saw how it flickered—like flames under your skin, Stormy.’

  ‘You’re seeing things. Go scare someone else.’

  ‘Where’s Gesler?’

  ‘How should I know? On some other barge.’

  ‘Fires are burning on the Wastelands.’

  Stormy started, scowled up at Quick Ben. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What was that you were saying? About fires?’

  ‘The ones under your skin?’

  ‘No, the Wastelands.’

  ‘No idea, Adjutant.’ Quick Ben turned away, strangely ghostly, and then wandered off.

  Stormy stared after him, chewing at his lower lip, and from the whiskers there he tasted bits of stew. His stomach rumbled.

  They weren’t on any official list, which meant no ink-stained clerk had a chance to break them up for this voyage. Sergeant Sunrise thrice-blessed the Errant for that. He lounged on a mass of spare bedrolls, feeling half-drunk with all this freedom. And the camaraderie. He already loved all the soldiers in this company, and the thought that it was a continuation of a famous Malazan company made him proud and eager to prove himself, and he knew he wasn’t alone in that.

  Dead Hedge was the perfect commander, as far as he was concerned. A man brimming with enthusiasm and boundless energy. Happy to be back, Sunrise surmised. From that dead place where the dead went after they were dead. It had been a long walk, or so Hedge had said when he’d been cajoling them all on the long march to the river. ‘You think this is bad? Try walking on a plain of bones that stretches to the damned horizon! Try being chased by Deragoth’—whatever they were, they sounded bad—‘and stalked by an evil T’lan Imass!’ Sunrise wasn’t sure what T’lan Imass were either, but Hedge had said they were evil so he was glad never to have met one.

  ‘Death, dear soldiers, is just another warren. Any of you know what a warren is? . . . Gods, you might as well be living in mud huts! A warren, friends, is like a row of jugs on a shelf behind the bar. Pick one, pull the stopper, and drink. That’s what mages do. Drink too much and it kills you. But just enough and you can use it to do magic. It’s fuel, but each jug is different—tastes different, does different magic. Now, there’s a few out there, like our High Mage, who can drink from ’em all, but that’s because he’s insane.’