Assail

by Ian C. Esslemont

  ‘A gamble? What sort of gamble?’

  ‘Orosenn assures me that all the soil and dirt ’n’ such is going to be scraped up, so no point in burying a charge. But there’s rock crevices and cracks where the bedrock comes mounding up. They’re gonna look for some of those at our maximum range. Push a few munitions down there for a little extra oomph.’

  Jute snapped his gaze to where Lieutenant Jalaz and her team were disappearing into the banners of ground fog. ‘There’s no time for that!’

  Cartheron just brushed his fingers down his jaw. ‘It’s a good throw. Worth four chests.’

  Jute could not believe such callousness. ‘Four chests! What of nine people?’

  That must have stung, as the old commander’s gaze flicked to him and he grated, his voice tight: ‘Don’t lecture me, son. They’re good people doing what they do best, so leave them to it.’ He walked off, unsteady, looking bowed. Jute moved to follow, but Malle caught his arm.

  ‘Let him go. Do not add to his pain. Nine lives, you say? Well, what of all of us?’

  ‘But—’

  The hardened old woman stopped him with a look. ‘There will always be buts, captain. The important thing is that choices be made. Now comes the hard part.’

  ‘The hard part?’

  ‘Yes.’ Her gaze shifted to the north. ‘Now we wait.’

  The walls became crowded as the evening passed. Everyone wanted to watch; perhaps out of a kind of perverse fascination to see the end. Conversation was almost impossible: one had to press one’s mouth to anyone’s ear to be heard over groaning earth, the rumbling avalanche, and the growing thunderous grinding of tonnes upon tonnes of moiling rock and earth.

  To make it worse, it was now blowing snow. The fat flakes came out of the heights, driven by a cutting wind that only grew in intensity. Far to the east and west, all along the uplands as far as Jute could see, the thinning clouds hinted at a wall of white covering the heights – an unbroken sheath of snow that was utterly featureless except where tall ridges of black rock poked through like knife-edges.

  He scanned the curved rock before the fortress where it descended to the north; the bedrock carried only low brush and dwarf trees, but it combed downward into a forest of cedar, fir, and birch. Just at the fringe of these woods was where Giana and her team were supposed to be digging. He could see no sign of them, however.

  The vibration punishing everyone’s feet was becoming almost unbearable. One of the pounded dirt ramps collapsed into a heap of soil, it seemed soundlessly, as the cacophony of the leagues-wide avalanche grinding down upon them drowned everything out.

  Squinting into the blowing snow he could make out entire swaths of forest disappearing as if swept down by an invisible hand. The enormous blocks of the wall juddered and bounced as if toys. The last screen of trees between them and the avalanche fell towards them, their crowns swinging down as if bowing in farewell. Come on! he urged Giana. Run!

  Something appeared through the curtain of snow but it was not what Jute expected. To all appearances it looked like a flood of extremely muddy water creeping up the slope of the bedrock. Sticks and detritus roiled amid the froth of the approaching tide. It took him a moment to grasp that the sticks were in fact the stripped trunks of mature trees, and that the coming tide was a churned froth of mud, silts, soil, and sand, all being scooped downslope towards them in front of a solid wall of one of the ice-tongues. And before this flood emerged six figures, running pell-mell for the high land and the wall.

  Jute tottered and stumbled his way down the ramp to the gates, where a team of locals waited to swing closed the twin leaves. The figures, completely mud-covered, ran on while the very earth jumped and shuddered beneath them. Now Jute counted only four.

  The quartet came barrelling in, dripping, sheathed in mud and streaks of blood, and fall to the ground, panting and gasping. King Voti’s people pulled shut the leaves. Jute and a number of Malazans stooped to the four, rubbing away muck, pulling a shattered length of wood the size of a dagger from the arm of one of them. To Jute’s immense relief Lieutenant Jalaz emerged, bruised and bloodied, from the layers of clinging muck encasing another of them.

  ‘You fool!’ he growled, though of course she could not hear. She understood, however, and shrugged weakly. He waved for her to stay where she was and tottered up the ramp.

  What he found above reminded him of what Lady Orosenn had said about there being no escape. Entire forests of tangled trees were building up amid the coursing wash of suspended soil and earth that was passing to either side of the rise. Orothos, under directions from Cartheron, had his crews blasting these logjams to pieces. Meanwhile, the roiling mass of coming earth just kept mounting higher and higher. Of the township of Mantle there remained no trace. The effect of all this was as of the worst naval engagement Jute had ever endured. He ran to Lady Orosenn, motioned that he wished to speak. She lowered her head. ‘What are they doing?’ he yelled.

  She made a pushing gesture. ‘Moving it along.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We don’t want it to catch and heap up.’

  ‘Why are they firing into the mud?’

  ‘We don’t know when the ice will arrive,’ she called back. ‘I suspect the leading edge to be thin – under the muck at first.’

  After that, Jute was too hoarse to continue yelling so he merely nodded and allowed Lady Orosenn to return to studying the flow. He tried to imagine what it must be like on the shores of the Sea of Gold as all this earth and gravel and loose rock came thrusting out on to the mudflats, perhaps taking them with it. It suddenly occurred to him, horrifyingly: could the entire sea be erased? All that water heaved further south? How far away were the ships? Had they made it through the channel yet? He prayed to the gods that they had. If not, they were in for a memorable ride.

  One of the crews on the springals thrust their arms skyward, shouting soundlessly, and Jute scanned the base of the rise. Pulverized white flakes came floating down from an eruption. They momentarily painted white the foaming, shifting flow, only to be sucked beneath. Cartheron was gesturing, signing to the crews, who shifted their aim. He raised an open hand and the crews waited, hands at the releases.

  Why was he waiting, Jute wondered. Shouldn’t he be punishing the ice now that it had arrived? Perhaps he was waiting for the flow to thicken – no point in blasting the thinnest leading finger. Perhaps. Then he noticed that the commander’s gaze was fixed upon Lady Orosenn, who had a hand outstretched as if reaching for him.

  The walls rocked then, as in a true earthquake. Or perhaps a collision. Jute turned his head to the north, terrified of what he might see. There, what he’d taken earlier for a thick wall of falling snow revealed itself to be a steep upward-sweeping wing-like slope that went on and on, perhaps for leagues, up the entire lowest shoulder of the mountains: an ungraspable immensity of ice and weight and might all bearing down upon them like a war dromond striking a water beetle. He knew it to be a plain physical manifestation of ice and rock, but he couldn’t help also feeling a palpable sense of deliberate menace and ruthless will pointed directly at him – and he the size of a flea beneath it.

  Lady Orosenn snapped her hand down and Cartheron made a fist.

  All four siege weapons fired.

  The four cussors arced upwards, disappearing into the driving snow. Almost immediately spouts of smashed ice shot upwards, without any accompanying sound. Jute was appalled. The best we had. Like a child throwing a rock at a landslide. Cartheron signed to fire again. The four now simply kept firing and reloading, pounding that one same spot. Jute imagined that that must be where the cussors had been jammed down into cracks and crevices in the bedrock – if they hadn’t yet been plucked out.

  The eruptions came almost continuously now, in a constant shooting spray of pulverized ice that arced high into the blowing snow. Jute thought the pushing lip of the ice-tongue was climbing the hump of bedrock. Soon, he imagined, it would sweep them off like dust from a tabletop.
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br />   All four crews kept pounding, and it did seem to Jute that larger chunks of broken ice now flew with each eruption. He gripped the topmost stone of the wall before him, itself many hundreds of pounds of rock, and felt the immense power of the grinding advance transmitted to his bones through the juddering of the stone. Break, damn you! he exhorted the ice. Break!

  He’d seen towers brought down by one or two well-placed cussors. Entire harbour defences reduced to rubble with just a few casts. And now this man, Cartheron Crust, was pouring half the imperial arsenal of Moranth munitions into this unstoppable mountain of ice in a colossal contest of wills that would grind all else into dust.

  The stones of the wall jerked towards him then, knocking his hand aside as if it were alive and flinching. Ahead, through the curls and scarves of snow, a great fountain of white was burgeoning upwards like a dome swelling over a surfacing swimmer. Enormous shards of blue-white ice now arced skywards. They blossomed outwards in all directions. A roar washed over Mantle that overcame even the valley-wide growling of the ice.

  Smaller chunks fell all about him. They burst to shards against the wall. Some punched through the timbers of the catwalk. Nearby, a man fell as if mattocked, his head a shattered ruin. Jute ducked, arms over his head, and staggered down the ramp to take cover under the catwalk. Here, beneath his hand and his rump, the bedrock shook as if drummed. A deep wounded-animal sort of groan mounted into a high-pitched cracking. In his mind’s eye, he imagined the stupendous weight of the ice pulling it downslope to the east and to the west, naturally tugging in opposite directions. And so it would split – not of intent, but because the great ice-river merely wished to find the lowest level. He rose and clambered out to look. The ramp had been shaken to nothing more than a heap of dirt, and this he climbed to pull himself one-handed up on to the catwalk. The huge blocks of the wall were now misaligned and uneven in their course, and it seemed wondrous to Jute that the snow still fell as if nothing had happened. To the right and left coursed the dirty snow-blown river of ice, down to where the two arms came together again before sweeping out over the obliterated shore of the Sea of Gold.

  They sat atop a scoured-clean island of naked rock.

  He went to find Cartheron and spotted him collapsed against the wall, watched over by two of his crew. He was pale, squeezing his chest, his face clenched against pain. Jute knelt next to him. The roar of the creaking and groaning ice was still like a thunderstorm, and he had to yell to make himself heard. ‘Are you all right?’

  The old man laughed weakly. ‘When Lady Orosenn sewed me up she told me to avoid any stress.’

  ‘Good thing you’re taking it easy, then.’

  There was a tremor in the Malazan’s hands that he didn’t seem to notice. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘it’s the retired life for me.’

  Jute stood. ‘I’ll get Orosenn.’

  The old commander was too exhausted even to respond. Jute ran, searching for the sorceress. He found her at the extreme southern end of the catwalk close to the wall’s edge overlooking the cliff. She was watching the great tongue of ice where it crept out over the Sea of Gold.

  Gaining her attention, he put a hand to his mouth to shout: ‘Cartheron is in a bad way.’

  She nodded. ‘I’ve done what I can for him. It’s a miracle he’s still alive.’

  He gestured out towards the sea. ‘What can we do?’

  ‘We wait.’

  ‘Will it be like this for ever?’

  She bestowed the familiar affectionate smile upon him once more. ‘No, Jute of Delanss. This was a ferociously rapid invocation. It will fade faster than most. Perhaps a mere hundred years.’

  Oh. A mere hundred years. ‘So it is over,’ he breathed, immensely relieved.

  But the sorceress shook her head, her long black hair blowing like a veil. ‘No. This was only the opening salvo. The true confrontation is taking place high above. I wish I was there to add my voice.’

  ‘Add your voice?’

  ‘Against the rekindling of an ancient war. And I do not mean the animosity of the T’lan Imass for the Jaghut. There have been far older wars, Jute of Delanss. And there are some who never forget, nor forgive.’

  He not know what the sorceress meant; did not have her deeper vision of events. He only knew that a friend was in pain, so he gestured once more that they should help Cartheron and Orosenn nodded, squeezing his arm.

  CHAPTER XV

  THEY WERE ONLY a short distance up the wide sinuous serpent of ice when Kyle halted. Blustering snow obscured the distance. He could just make out tall spine-like ridges of iron-grey rock that rose as barriers far to the east and west.

  Fisher came to his side. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I can’t walk away.’

  ‘I told you – they’re safe. The farther from here the better.’

  But Kyle couldn’t shake the feeling that he was betraying the Losts. It felt wrong, just turning his back. Even if they didn’t want him to follow. ‘No. I have to go back.’

  Cal-Brinn joined them. ‘They’re closing. We must keep moving.’

  Kyle shook his refusal. ‘We should go back.’

  Cal-Brinn’s already wrinkled and burnished features creased further in a frown of consideration. After a moment, he dipped his head in assent. ‘It is early yet, but I was going to have to tell you that we of the Guard cannot continue in any case. There is something pushing against us, so I must send my people back to find Stalker and Badlands. Will you accept this?’

  Kyle clasped the amber stone at his neck. It was warm in his chilled hand. ‘I should go. They are my friends.’

  ‘Your loyalty is to be commended, but it is you our pursuers want, not us. And the Losts are our friends as well.’

  He released the stone – the numbness from the bitter cold had gone from his hand. ‘Very well. I just feel … that I have let them down.’

  Cal-Brinn inclined his head once more. ‘They would be angry if you showed up. Now, go.’ He motioned for Fisher to hurry him along, then turned to his company. ‘Jup, Leena, attend me!’

  The bard took Kyle’s arm and urged him onward. ‘You and I must speak for the Myrni and the Losts above,’ he said, his breath steaming.

  Kyle tried to bring his brows down to show his confusion, but his face was too numb. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean that any survivors will have been driven to the highlands, just like us. There will be a meeting of the families such as has never taken place.’ He waved to Jethiss, who waited ahead.

  Kyle glanced back, still reluctant to go. Cal-Brinn now walked alone, his hands clasped behind his back. His long coat of armour kicked up snow as he pushed through the drifts. ‘A meeting? What for?’

  ‘To decide what to do.’

  They caught up with Jethiss, who was carefully prodding the hidden ice with a broken branch he’d picked up when they had run across the dry stream bed. Kyle was grateful for this, as the great serpent of cerulean ice heaved and groaned as if in constant pain. Explosions of cracking ice would shudder beneath them, sounding up and down its length. The snowstorm and dark clouds obscured the way ahead, but it appeared to be steepening.

  Night gathered as they walked, but shifting curtains of lights provided some illumination. They seemed to wreathe the heights, and they reminded Kyle of similar veils he’d seen in Korel, above the Stormriders. He thought they were some sort of manifestation of the manipulations of energy, whatever the source. They tramped on; Jethiss showed no need or inclination to pause. Kyle glanced back often down the sweep of the great serpent behind. Once or twice, through the gusting snows, he thought he glimpsed slim dark figures arrayed across the ice, tatters of cloth whipping from their shoulders.

  They reached a plain of ice that lay like a plateau beneath a low bank of black clouds. Through gaps in the clouds he glimpsed a series of slim pinnacles, all bare ash-grey jagged rock: the peaks of this easterly range of the Salt Mountains. Then Fisher gestured ahead to where a group of dark dots marred the p
ristine silver expanse of blowing snow.

  As they neared, the group resolved into four individuals, one sitting cross-legged in the snow, the other three lined up before him. They were a martial group, tall, in leather armour. Closer now, Kyle noted how young the three were, and that the sitting one, an older fellow, was impaled upon a wicked-looking spear.

  Jethiss halted and Fisher stepped up to the fore. He raised his hand, calling: ‘Greetings! My name is Fisher and I speak for the Myrni. This is Jethiss, of the Tiste Andii. Kyle, who speaks for the Losts. And Cal-Brinn, of the mercenary company the Crimson Guard.’

  The middle lad raised his hand. Kyle saw fresh scarring where a thrust had taken his right eye. A thick bearskin cloak clasped by a large bronze brooch humped his shoulders. ‘Welcome. I am Orman. This is Keth and Kasson. We speak for the Sayers.’ The lad half turned to the silver-haired elder. ‘This is … was … Buri.’

  Fisher’s gaze, snapping to Kyle, was wide with wonder. ‘Buri in truth?’ he breathed, awed.

  ‘Indeed. It was he who summoned the ice-barrier anew.’

  ‘And who did this to him?’

  The lad’s jaws writhed with suppressed emotions. ‘I did,’ he finally ground out, his voice ragged.

  ‘And why?’ Fisher asked softly.

  ‘Because he asked that I do so – to seal the invocation.’

  Fisher was nodding. ‘I see. That must have been a … difficult … thing to do.’

  With his one good eye, Orman was studying Fisher. ‘You give the name Fisher – not the Fisher, the bard?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The Sayer was obviously quite impressed: he took a deep breath. ‘My father spoke of you. We are honoured.’

  Fisher inclined his head in recognition of the compliment. ‘Any others? The Heels? No Bains survived?’

  Orman shook his head, saying in a bitter tone: ‘The Bains are gone.’

  ‘Then we must decide upon our course of action.’

  The Sayer glanced back to exchange a look with his two fellows. ‘How so? It is over. We can reclaim our Holdings.’