The Malazan Empire

by Steven Erikson

  ‘Tell her,’ continued Yedan, his tone as steady as ever, ‘we will hold as long as we can. Tell her, Withal, that once more the Shake stand upon the Shore.’

  Spear points thrust out from the wound, a shivering, bristling horror – he could see figures, pushing, crowding, could almost hear their howls. Light spurted like ropes of gore. Light flooded out on to the strand, illuminating the crushed bones. Light lit faces beneath helms.

  Tiste Liosan. The Children of Father Light. A star is born in the dark, and the heavens are revealed to all.

  ‘Go, Withal. We are breached.’

  We can hold against nothing. We can only crumble, like sand before the devouring wave. Yedan calls to his officers, his officers rush and shout, ranks form up, these would-be soldiers struggle and steady themselves. The Shake – my Shake – stand pale, eyes wide, straining to see what’s happening at the breach, where the Letherii, dreaming of riches, meet the thrusting spears.

  Screams now rise from the wound. There are Tiste Liosan, their faces broken masks of fury, and all the madness of war is down there, at the breach. Life’s blood even now spilling down.

  We cannot hold. Look at my people, how their eyes track my brother now, but he’s only one man, and even he cannot defeat this enemy. Long ago, there were enough of us, enough to hold, enough to last and to die to save this realm. But no longer.

  Pully and Skwish loomed in front of her. They were shouting, screaming, but she was deaf to them. The clash of weapons grew desperate, like a thousand knives upon a single whetstone. But you are flesh, my brother. Not a whetstone. Flesh.

  ‘You must kneel!’

  Yan Tovis frowned at the young woman before her. ‘Is it blood you want?’

  Eyes widened.

  She held out her wrists. ‘This?’

  ‘You need to kneel before the Shore!’

  ‘No,’ she growled. ‘Not yet. Go away, I’m done with you. The islanders are fighting – go down to them, kneel yourselves. In the sand beside the wounded and the dying – both of you. Look in their faces, and tell them it was all worth it.’ Yan Tovis lunged forward, pushing them so that they staggered. ‘Go! Tell them!’

  You want me to kneel? To sanctify all of this? Shall I be yet one more ruler to urge my subjects to their deaths? Shall I stand tall and bold, shouting fierce promises of glory? How many lies can this scene withstand? Just how empty can words be?

  ‘Kneel,’ she whispered. ‘Yes. Everyone. Kneel.’

  Chapter Nine

  I am fallen prey

  There was a time

  When fangs sank deep

  My body dragged

  And flesh howled

  Fear’s face was cold

  With instinct’s need

  There was a time

  When strangers took me

  And the unfamiliar

  Whispered terror

  And the shock of desires

  We could not expect

  Lit eyes so like our own

  There was a time

  When a friend twisted

  Before my eyes

  And all my solid faiths

  Washed free underfoot

  Unknowing the world

  With new and cruel design

  There was a time

  When kin drew the knife

  To sever sacred law

  With red envy

  And red malice

  The horror visits

  The heart of home

  Do you see this journey?

  What began in shadows

  And dark distance

  Has drawn ever closer

  Now I am fallen prey

  To the demon in my soul

  And the face twisting

  Is my own

  Railing at failures

  Of flesh and bone

  The spirit withers

  And I fall prey

  We have listed

  A world of enemies

  And now we fall prey

  We fall prey

  Faces of Fear

  Fisher kel Tath

  BROKEN AT LAST, THE BODY SLUMPS AND THE SPIRIT PULLS FREE, THE spirit wings away in flight and the sound of its wings is a sigh.

  But this, he knew, was not always the case. There were times when the spirit staggered loose with a howl, as broken as the body left behind. Too long inside tortured flesh, too long a sordid lover of punishing pain.

  The sound of his horse’s hoofs was hollow, the creak of its tendons like the settling of an old, familiar chair, and he thought of a warm room, a place heady with memories threaded through with love and grief, with joy and suffering. But there was no pocket within him to hold tears, nothing he could squeeze in one fist just to feel the wet trickling down between his fingers. No gestures left to remind himself of who he had once been.

  He found her rotted corpse, huddled in the lee of a boulder. There were red glints in her hair, beneath wind-blown dust. Her face was tucked down, sunken cheeks pressed against the knees. As if in her last moments she sat, curled up, staring down at the stumps of her feet.

  It was all too far gone, he told himself. Even this felt mechanical, but disjointed, on the edge of failure; a measure of stumbling steps, like a man blind and lost, trying to find his way home. Dismounting, boots rocking as the bones inside them shifted and scraped, he walked to her, slowly sat down on the boulder, amidst the creaks of tendon, bone and armour.

  Broken-winged, the spirit had staggered from this place. Lost even to itself. How could he hope to track it? Leaning forward, he settled his face into his hands, and – though it made no difference – he closed his one eye.

  Who I am no longer matters. A chair, creaking. A small room, acrid with woodsmoke. Crows in the rafters – what mad woman would invite them into this place? The hunters have thundered past and the wolf no longer howls. She has no breath for such things, not now, not running as she must. Running – gods, running!

  She knows it’s no use. She knows they will corner her, spit her with spears. She knows all about hunting, and the kill, for these were the forces of law in her nature. So too, it seems, for the ones pursuing her.

  And the woman in the chair, her eyes are smarting, her vision blurs. The chimney needs cleaning, and besides, the wild is dead, for ever dead. And when next the hunters thunder past, their quarry will be on two legs, not four.

  Just so.

  Do you dream of me, old woman? Do you dream of a single eye, flaring in the night, one last look of the wild upon your face, your world? Gods below, I am tearing apart. I can feel it.

  The horns sound their triumph. Slain, the beast’s heart stills its mad race.

  In her creaking chair, the old woman reaches up one hand, and gouges out one of her eyes. It rests bloody in her palm while she gasps with pain. And then she lifts her head and fixes her one remaining eye upon him. ‘Even the blind know how to weep.’

  He shakes his head, not in denial, but because he does not understand.

  The old woman throws the eye into the fire. ‘To the wild, to the wild, all gone. Gone. Loose the wolf within you, Ghost. Loose the beast upon the trail, and one day you shall find her.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Smell that? Wax in the fire. Wax in the fire.’

  ‘What place is this?’

  ‘This?’ The chair creaks. She reaches up to her other eye. ‘Love lives here, Ghost. The Hold you have forgotten, the Hold you all yearn to find again. But you forget more than that.’ She pushed her nails into her other eye. ‘Where there is love, there is pain.’

  ‘No,’ he whispered, ‘there must be more to it than that.’ He lifted his head, and opened his eye. Wretched wasteland, a boulder, a huddled form. ‘But she threw it into the flames.’ Wax. Wax in the fire.

  Looking down, he studied the corpse beside him, and then he rocked to his feet, walked over to his lifeless horse, and pulled from the saddle a roll of sacking. Laying it out, he went back to her, lifted her gently from her snarled nest of greening
grasses. On to the cloth, drawing up the edges and binding them tight, and then gathering the sack and slinging it across the horse’s rump just behind the saddle, before climbing astride the motionless mount.

  Collecting up the reins, Toc closed his remaining eye.

  Then opened the missing one.

  The day’s light vanished abruptly, the mass of bruised clouds climbing, billowing outward. A savage gust of wind bowed back the trees lining the north ridge and a moment later rushed down the slope and up on to the road. Her horse shied and then quivered to the impact, and she hunched down over the saddle as the gale threatened to lift her from the animal’s back. Driving her heels into its flanks, she urged her mount onward.

  She was still half a day from the city – the warrens had a way of wandering, and gates could never be counted on, and this particular gate had opened a long, long way from where it had begun. Exhausted, filled with doubts and trepidation, she pushed on, her horse’s hoofs cracking sparks on the cobbles.

  Some things could haunt a soul; some things needed undoing. The toe of a boot searching ashes – but no, she’d gone beyond that. She was here, regrets like hounds at her heels.

  Thunder pounded; lightning flashed and sent jagged fissures of argent light splitting the black clouds. Somewhere behind her a strike detonated on the road and her horse stumbled. She steadied it with a firm rein. The gusts of wind felt like fists pummelling the left side of her face, and all down that side of her body. She swore, but could barely hear her own voice.

  The darkness had swallowed the world now and she rode half blind, trusting her mount to stay on the road. And still the rain held back – she could taste it on the air, bitter with the salt whipped up from the seas beyond the ridge.

  Her cloak pulled loose from the thigh strings and snapped out wild as a torn sail behind her. She shouted a curse as she was nearly yanked from the saddle. Teeth grinding, she forced her upper body forward once again, one hand holding tight on the hinged saddle horn.

  She’d ridden into the face of sandstorms – gods, she’d damned near spat into the face of the Whirlwind itself – but nothing like this. The air crackled, groaned. The road shook to the thunderous reverberations, like the hoofs of a god descending.

  Howling now, giving voice to her fury, she drove her horse into a churning gallop, and the beast’s breaths snorted like drums in the rain – but the air was charnel hot, tomb-dry – another blinding flash, another deafening detonation – her horse wavered and then, muscles bunching, bones straining, it regained its purchase on the road –

  – and someone was now riding beside her, on a huge, gaunt horse black as the sky overhead.

  She twisted round to glare at him. ‘This is you?’

  A flash of a grin, and then, ‘Sorry!’

  ‘When will it end?’

  ‘How should I know? When the damned gate closes!’

  He then added something more, but thunder smashed to splinters whatever he’d said, and she shook her head at him.

  He leaned closer, shouted, ‘It’s good to see you again!’

  ‘You idiot! Does he even know you’re here?’

  And to that question, his only answer was another grin.

  Where had he been? The man had ever infuriated her. And now here he was, at her side, reminding her of all the reasons she’d had the first time round for doing…for doing what she did. Growling another curse, she shot him a glare. ‘Will this get any worse?’

  ‘Only when we leave!’

  Gods below, the things I’ll do for love.

  ‘North,’ the withered hag had said, her bent and broken visage reminding Torrent of an uncle who’d taken a hoof to the side of his face, crushing jaws and cheekbone. For the rest of his days, he’d shown to the world the imprint of that hoof, and with a twisted, toothless grin, he’d laugh and say, ‘My best friend did this. What’s the world come to when you can’t even trust your best friends?’

  And if the horse had outlived him, if his wife had not wept at his byre as a widow should, instead standing dry-eyed and expressionless, if he’d not begun chasing little girls… Torrent shook his head. Any rider who called his horse his best friend already had a few stones knocked loose in his skull.

  For all that, Torrent found himself tending to his mount with a care bordering on obsession. And he grieved to see it suffer. Poor forage, not enough water, the absence of its own kind. Solitude weakened a horse’s spirit, for they were herd animals as much as humans were, and loneliness dulled the eye.

  ‘The desert glitters with death,’ continued Olar Ethil. ‘We must go round it. North.’

  Torrent glanced over at the children. Absi had ventured a few strides on to the plain, returning with a shard of crystal that painted prisms up his bared arm. He held up his trophy, waved it back and forth as if it was a sword, and then he laughed. The twins looked on, their wan faces empty of expression.

  He had no skills when it came to children. Redmask had set him to care for the Awl children, that day long ago, knowing well his awkwardness, his discomfort. Redmask had been punishing him for something – Torrent could no longer remember what, not that it mattered any more. From where he had been, he’d seen the fall of the great leader. From where he had been, he’d witnessed the death of Toc Anaster.

  It was a measure of human madness, he realized, that children should be made to see such things. The pain of the dying, the violence of the slayer, the cruelty of the victor. He wondered what the twins had seen, since that night of betrayal. Even Absi must bear scars, though he seemed oddly immune to long bouts of sorrow.

  No, none of this was right. But then, maybe it had never been right. Did there not come to every child that moment when the mother, the father, loses that god-like status, that supreme competence in all things, when they are revealed to be as weak, as flawed and as lost as the child looking on? How that moment crushes! All at once the world becomes a threatening place, and in the unknown waits all manner of danger, and the child wonders if there is any place left in which to hide, to find refuge.

  ‘North,’ said Olar Ethil again, and she set off, limping, pieces hanging from her battered form. The two skeletal lizards scampered into her wake – he’d wondered where they’d been, since it had been days since he’d last seen them, but now the damned things were back.

  Torrent turned from his horse and walked over to the children. ‘Absi and Stavi this time,’ he said. Stavi rose and took her brother’s hand – the one not gripping the shard – and led him over to the horse. She clambered into the saddle, and then reached down to Absi.

  Watching her lift the boy from the ground and set him down on the saddle in front of her reminded Torrent of how these children had changed. Wiry, all fat burned away, their skins darkened by the sun. A newly honed edge of competence.

  Redmask left me to guard the children. But they are gone, now. All of them. Gone. So I promised Setoc to ward these ones. So bold, that vow. And I don’t even like children. If I fail again, these three will die.

  Storii’s calloused hand slipped into his own. He looked down to meet her eyes, and what he saw in them made his stomach twist. No, I am not your unflawed protector, not your guardian god. No, do not look at me like that. ‘Let’s go,’ he said gruffly.

  She could feel her power growing, her senses reaching out through stony ground, along the sodden sands of buried streams. Again and again, she touched the signs of her chosen children, the Imass, and even those from the Eres’al – who dwelt in the times before the Imass. And she could hear the echoes of their voices, songs lost to ancient winds now, there on the banks of extinct rivers, in the lees of hills long since worn down and eaten away.

  The tools were crude, it was true, the stone of poor quality, but no matter. They had lived in this place; they had wandered these lands. And they shall do so once again. Onos T’oolan, you refuse to understand what I seek for you, for you and all your kin. Silverfox has led so many away, far beyond my reach, but First Sword, those who follow
you shall find salvation.

  Heed not the summons of the First Throne – she may be a child of the Emperor, she may even stand in the shadow of secrets – but her power over you is an illusion. What urges you to obey is the stain of Logros, the madness of his desperation. Yes, you knelt before the First Throne, there with all the others, but the Emperor is dead. The Emperor is dead!

  Listen to me, Onos T’oolan! Turn your people back – the path you are on shall see you all destroyed. Find me – let us end this war of wills. First Sword, see through my eyes – I have your son.

  I have your son.

  But still he pushed her away, still his own power seethed and roiled around him, raw with the force of Tellann. She sought to force her way through, but his strength defied her. You damned fool! I have your son!

  She snarled, paused to glare back at the humans trailing her. And what of your daughters, Onos? Shall I open their throats? Will that compel you? How dare you defy me! Answer me!

  Nothing but the moaning wind.

  Must I abandon them? Must I find you myself? Tell me, is your power sufficient to rebuff a dragon? I will come to you, First Sword, in the raging fire of Telas—

  ‘If you harm them, Olar Ethil, a thousand worlds of Telas fire shall not keep you safe from me.’

  She laughed. ‘Ah, now you speak.’

  ‘Do I?’

  The Bonecaster hissed in fury. ‘You? Begone, you one-eyed corpse! Go back to your pathetic army of worthless soldiers!’

  ‘Reach so with your powers, Olar Ethil, and there is no telling whom you might find. In fact, consider this a warning. You are far from alone in this land. There are wings in the darkness, and the morning frost holds in every droplet a thousand eyes. On the wind, scents and flavours, and the breath of ice—’

  ‘Oh, be quiet! I see what you’re doing! Do you imagine me unable to hide?’

  ‘You failed in hiding from me, a one-eyed corpse.’

  ‘The longer you linger,’ she said, ‘the more you lose of yourself. That is my warning to you. You fall away, Toc Anaster. Do you understand me? You fall away.’