Bonehunters

by Steven Erikson

  Lieutenant Pores reined in before Faradan Sort. ‘Captain—’

  ‘We need water,’ she said, the words barely making it out between chapped, cracked and blistered lips.

  Gods, they look awful. Pores wheeled his horse round, nearly slipping off the animal’s back in the process. Righting himself, he rode back towards the camp.

  As Keneb and Temul reached the main track, thirty paces from the command tent, they saw the Adjunct appear, and, a moment later, Blistig, and then T’amber. Soldiers were shouting something as yet incomprehensible from the eastern end of the camp.

  The Adjunct turned towards her two approaching Fists. ‘It seems my horse has gone missing.’

  Keneb’s brows rose. ‘Thus the alarms? Adjunct—’

  ‘No, Keneb. A troop has been spotted on the east road.’

  ‘A troop? We’re being attacked?’

  ‘I do not think so. Well, accompany me, then. It seems we shall have to walk. And this will permit you, Fist Keneb, to explain the fiasco that occurred regarding the boarding of your company.’

  ‘Adjunct?’

  ‘I find your sudden incompetence unconvincing.’

  He glanced across at her. There was the hint of an emotion, there on that plain, drawn visage. A hint, no more, not enough that he could identify it. ‘Grub,’ he said.

  The Adjunct’s brows rose. ‘I believe you will need to elaborate on that, Fist Keneb.’

  ‘He said we should take an extra day boarding, Adjunct.’

  ‘And this child’s advice, a barely literate, half-wild child at that, is sufficient justification for you to confound your Adjunct’s instructions?’

  ‘Not normally, no,’ Keneb replied. ‘It’s difficult to explain… but he knows things. Things he shouldn’t, I mean. He knew we were sailing west, for example. He knew our planned ports of call—’

  ‘Hiding behind the command tent,’ Blistig said.

  ‘Have you ever seen the boy hide, Blistig? Ever?’

  The man scowled. ‘Must be he’s good at it, then.’

  ‘Adjunct, Grub said we needed to delay one day – or we would all die. At sea. I am beginning to believe—’

  She held up a gloved hand, the gesture sharp enough to silence him, and he saw that her eyes were narrowed now, fixed on what was ahead—

  A rider, bareback, coming at full gallop.

  ‘That’s Kindly’s lieutenant,’ Blistig said.

  When it became obvious that the man had no intention of slowing down, nor of changing course, everyone quickly moved to the sides of the road.

  The lieutenant sketched a hasty salute, barely seen through the dust, as he plunged past, shouting something like: ‘They need water!’

  ‘And,’ Blistig added, waving at clouds of dust as they all set out again, ‘that was your horse, Adjunct.’

  Keneb looked down the road, blinking to get the grit from his eyes. Figures wavered into view. Indistinct… no, that was Faradan Sort… wasn’t it?

  ‘Your deserter is returning,’ Blistig said. ‘Stupid of her, really, since desertion is punishable by execution. But who are those people behind her? What are they carrying?’

  The Adjunct halted suddenly, the motion almost a stagger.

  Quick Ben. Kalam. More faces, covered in dust, so white they looked like ghosts – and so they are. What else could they be? Fiddler. Gesler, Lostara Yil, Stormy – Keneb saw one familiar, impossible face after another. Sun-ravaged, stumbling, like creatures trapped in delirium. And in their arms, children, dull-eyed, shrunken…

  The boy knows things… Grub…

  And there he stood, flanked by his ecstatic dogs, talking, it seemed, with Sinn.

  Sinn, we’d thought her mad with grief – she’d lost a brother, after all… lost, and now found again.

  But Faradan Sort had suspected, rightly, that something else had possessed Sinn. A suspicion strong enough to drive her into desertion.

  Gods, we gave up too easily – but no – the city, the firestorm – we waited for days, waited until the whole damned ruin had cooled. We picked through the ashes. No-one could have lived through that.

  The troop arrived to where the Adjunct stood.

  Captain Faradan Sort straightened with only a slight waver, then saluted, fist to left side of her chest. ‘Adjunct,’ she rasped, ‘I have taken the liberty of reforming the squads, pending approval—’

  ‘That approval is Fist Keneb’s responsibility,’ the Adjunct said, her voice strangely flat. ‘Captain, I did not expect to see you again.’

  A nod. ‘I understand the necessities of maintaining military discipline, Adjunct. And so, I now surrender myself to you. I ask, however, that leniency be granted Sinn – her youth, her state of mind at the time…’

  Horses from up the road. Lieutenant Pores returning, more riders behind him. Bladders filled with water, swinging and bouncing like huge udders. The other riders – healers, one and all, including the Wickans Nil and Nether. Keneb stared at their expressions of growing disbelief as they drew closer.

  Fiddler had come forward, a scrawny child sleeping or unconscious in his arms. ‘Adjunct,’ he said through cracked lips, ‘without the captain, digging with her own hands, not one of us trapped under that damned city would have ever left it. We’d be mouldering bones right now.’ He stepped closer, but his effort at lowering his voice to a whisper failed, as Keneb heard him say, ‘Adjunct, you hang the captain for desertion and you better get a lot more nooses, ’cause we’ll leave this miserable world when she does.’

  ‘Sergeant,’ the Adjunct said, seemingly unperturbed, ‘am I to understand that you and those squads behind you burrowed beneath Y’Ghatan in the midst of the firestorm, somehow managing not to get cooked in the process, and then dug your way clear?’

  Fiddler turned his head and spat blood, then he smiled a chilling, ghastly smile, the flaking lips splitting in twin rows of red, glistening fissures. ‘Aye,’ he said in a rasp, ‘we went hunting… through the bones of the damned city. And then, with the captain’s help, we crawled outa that grave.’

  The Adjunct’s gaze left the ragged man, travelled slowly, along the line, the gaunt faces, the deathly eyes staring out from dust-caked faces, the naked, blistered skin. ‘Bonehunters in truth, then.’ She paused, as Pores led his healers forward with their waterskins, then said, ‘Welcome back, soldiers.’

  Book Four

  The Bonehunters

  Who will deny that it is our nature to believe the very worst in our fellow kind? Even as cults rose and indeed coalesced into a patronomic worship – not just of Coltaine, the Winged One, the Black Feather, but too of the Chain of Dogs itself – throughout Seven Cities, with shrines seeming to grow from the very wastes along that ill-fated trail, shrines in propitiation to one dead hero after another: Bult, Lull, Mincer, Sormo E’nath, even Baria and Mesker Setral of the Red Blades; and to the Foolish Dog clan, the Weasel clan and of course the Crow and the Seventh Army itself; while at Gelor Ridge, in an ancient monastery overlooking the old battle site, a new cult centred on horses was born – even as this vast fever of veneration gripped Seven Cities, so certain agents in the heart of the Malazan Empire set loose, among the commonry, tales purporting the very opposite: that Coltaine had betrayed the empire; that he had been a renegade, secretly allied with Sha’ik.

  After all, had the countless refugees simply stayed in their cities, accepting the rebellion’s dominion; had they not been dragged out by Coltaine and his bloodthirsty Wickans; and had the Seventh’s Mage Cadre leader, Kulp, not so mysteriously disappeared, thus leaving the Malazan Army vulnerable to the sorcerous machinations and indeed manipulations of the Wickan witches and warlocks – had not all this occurred, there would have been no slaughter, no terrible ordeal of crossing half a continent exposed to every predating half-wild tribe in the wastes. And, most heinous of all, Coltaine had then, in league with the traitorous Imperial Historian, Duiker, connived to effect the subsequent betrayal and annihilation of the Aren Army, led by the
naïve High Fist Pormqual who was the first victim of that dread betrayal. Why else, after all, would those very rebels of Seven Cities take to the worship of such figures, if not seeing in Coltaine and the rest heroic allies…

  … In any case, whether officially approved or otherwise, the persecution of Wickans within the empire flared hot and all-consuming, given such ample fuel…

  The Year of Ten Thousand Lies

  Kayessan

  Chapter Seventeen

  What is there left to understand? Choice is an illusion. Freedom is conceit. The hands that reach out to guide your every step, your every thought, come not from the gods, for they are no less deluded than we – no, my friends, those hands come to each of us… from each of us.

  You may believe that civilization deafens us with tens of thousands of voices, but listen well to that clamour, for with each renewed burst so disparate and myriad, an ancient force awakens, drawing each noise ever closer, until the chorus forms but two sides, each battling the other. The bloody lines are drawn, fought in the turning away of faces, in the stoppering of ears, the cold denial, and all discourse, at the last, is revealed as futile and worthless.

  Will you yet hold, my friends, to the faith that change is within our grasp? That will and reason shall overcome the will of denial?

  There is nothing left to understand. This mad whirlpool holds us all in a grasp that cannot be broken; and you with your spears and battle-masks; you with your tears and soft touch; you with the sardonic grin behind which screams fear and self-hatred; even you who stand aside in silent witness to our catastrophe of dissolution, too numb to act – it is all one. You are all one. We are all one.

  So now come closer, my friends, and see in this modest cart before you my most precious wares. Elixir of Oblivion, Tincture of Frenzied Dancing, and here, my favourite, Unguent of Male Prowess Unending, where I guarantee your soldier will remain standing through battle after battle…

  Hawker’s Harangue,

  Recounted By Vaylan Winder,

  Malaz City, the year the city overflowed with sewage

  (1123 Burn’s Sleep)

  *

  Rivulets of water, reeking of urine, trickled down the steps leading to Coop’s Hanged Man Inn, one of the score of disreputable taverns in the Docks Quarter of Malaz City that Banaschar, once a priest of D’rek, was now in the habit of frequenting. Whatever details had once existed in his mind to distinguish one such place from another had since faded, the dyke of his resolve rotted through by frustration and a growing panic, poisonous enough to immobilize him – in spirit if not in flesh. And the ensuing deluge was surprisingly comforting, even as the waters rose ever higher.

  Little different, he observed as he negotiated the treacherous, mould-slimed steps, from this cursed rain, or so the long-time locals called it, despite the clear sky overhead. Mostly rain comes down, they said, but occasionally it comes up, seeping through the crumbling cobbles of the quarter, transforming such beneath-ground establishments as Coop’s into a swampy quagmire, the entrance guarded by a whining cloud of mosquitoes, and the stench of overflowed sewers wafting about so thick the old-timers announce its arrival as they would an actual person miserably named Stink – greeted if not welcomed into already sordid company.

  And most sordid was Banaschar’s company these days. Veterans who avoided sobriety as if it was a curse; whores who’d long since hawked their hearts of gold – if they’d ever had them in the first place; scrawny youths with a host of appropriately modest ambitions – meanest thug in this skein of fetid streets and alleys; master thief of those few belongings the poor possessed; nastiest backstabber with at least fifty knots on their wrist strings, each knot honouring someone foolish enough to trust them; and of course the usual assortment of bodyguards and muscle whose brains had been deprived of air at some point in their lives; smugglers and would-be smugglers, informants and the imperial spies to whom they informed, spies spying on the spies, hawkers of innumerable substances, users of selfsame substances on their way to the oblivion of the Abyss; and here and there, people for whom no category was possible, since they gave away nothing of their lives, their histories, their secrets.

  In a way, Banaschar was one such person, on his better days. Other times, such as this one, he could make no claim to possible – if improbable – grandiosity. This afternoon, then, he had come early to Coop’s, with the aim of stretching the night ahead as far as he could, well lubricated of course, which would in turn achieve an overlong and hopefully entirely blissful period of unconsciousness in one of the lice-infested rat-traps above the tavern.

  It would be easy, he reflected as he ducked through the doorway and paused just within, blinking in the gloom, easy to think of clamour as a single entity, one sporting countless mouths, and to reckon the din as meaningless as the rush of brown water from a sewer pipe. Yet Banaschar had come to a new appreciation of the vagaries of the noise erupting from human throats. Most spoke to keep from thinking, but others spoke as if casting lifelines even as they drowned in whatever despairing recognition they had arrived at – perhaps during some unwelcome pause, filled with the horror of silence. A few others fit neither category. These were the ones who used the clamour surrounding them as a barrier, creating in its midst a place in which to hide, mute and indifferent, fending off the outside world.

  More often than not, Banaschar – who had once been a priest, who had once immersed himself within a drone of voices singing the cadence of prayer and chant – sought out such denizens for the dubious pleasure of their company.

  Through the haze of durhang and rustleaf smoke, the acrid black-tail swirls from the lamp wicks, and something that might have been mist gathered just beneath the ceiling, he saw, hunched in a booth along the back wall, a familiar figure. Familiar in the sense that Banaschar had more than a few times shared a table with the man, although Banaschar was ignorant of virtually everything about him, including his given name, knowing him only as Foreigner.

  A foreigner in truth, who spoke Malazan with an accent Banaschar did not recognize – in itself curious since the ex-priest’s travels had been extensive, from Korel to Theft to Mare in the south; from Nathilog to Callows on Genabackis in the east; and, northward, from Falar to Aren to Yath Alban. And in those travels he had met other travellers, hailing from places Banaschar could not even find on any temple map. Nemil, Perish, Shal-Morzinn, Elingarth, Torment, Jacuruku and Stratem. Yet this man whom he now approached, weaving and pushing through the afternoon crowd of sailors and the local murder of veterans, this man had an accent unlike any Banaschar had ever heard.

  Yet the truth of things was never as interesting as the mystery preceding the revelation, and Banaschar had come to appreciate his own ignorance. In other matters, after all, he knew far too much – and what had that availed him?

  Sliding onto the greasy bench opposite the huge foreigner, the ex-priest released the clasp on his tattered cloak and shrugged free from its folds – once, long ago it seemed now, such lack of consideration for the unsightly creases that would result would have horrified him – but he had done his share since of sleeping in that cloak, senseless on a vomit-spattered floor and, twice, on the cobbles of an alley – correct comportment, alas, had ceased being a moral necessity.

  He leaned back now, the rough cloth bunching behind him, as one of Coop’s serving wenches arrived with a tankard of Coop’s own Leech Swill, a weak, gassy ale that had acquired its name in an appropriately literal fashion. Warranting the now customary affectation of a one-eyed squint into the brass-hued brew before the first mouthful.

  The foreigner had glanced up once, upon Banaschar’s arrival, punctuating the gesture with a sardonic half-grin before returning his attention to the fired-clay mug of wine in his hands.

  ‘Oh, Jakatakan grapes are all very well,’ the ex-priest said, ‘it’s the local water that turns that wine you like so much into snake’s piss.’

  ‘Aye, bad hangovers,’ Foreigner said.

  ‘And t
hat is desirable?’

  ‘Aye, it is. Wakes me up again and again through the night, almost every bell, with a pounding skull and a bladder ready to explode – but if I didn’t wake up that bladder would explode. See?’

  Banaschar nodded, glanced round. ‘More heads than usual for an afternoon.’

  ‘You only think that because you ain’t been here roun’ this time lately. Three transports and an escort come in three nights past, from Korel.’

  The ex-priest studied the other customers a little more carefully this time. ‘They talking much?’

  ‘Sounds it to me.’

  ‘About the campaign down there?’

  Foreigner shrugged. ‘Go ask ’em if you like.’

  ‘No. Too much effort. The bad thing about asking questions—’

  ‘Is gettin’ answers, aye – you’ve said that before.’

  ‘That is another bad thing – the way we all end up saying the same things over and over again.’

  ‘That’s you, not me. And, you’re gettin’ worse.’

  Banaschar swallowed two mouthfuls, then wiped his lips with the back of his hand. ‘Worse. Yes indeed.’

  ‘Never good,’ Foreigner observed, ‘seeing a man in a hurry.’

  ‘It’s a race,’ Banaschar said. ‘Do I reach the edge and plunge over or does my salvation arrive in time? Lay down a few coins on the outcome – I’d suggest the former but that’s just between you and me.’

  The huge man – who rarely met anyone’s eyes while talking, and whose massive hands and wrists were scarred and puckered with weals – shook his head and said, ‘If that salvation’s a woman, only a fool would wager agin me.’

  Banaschar grimaced and lifted his tankard. ‘A fine idea. Let’s toast all the lost loves in the world, friend. What happened to yours or is that too personal a question for this dubious relationship of ours?’

  ‘You jumped on the wrong stone,’ the man said. ‘My love ain’t lost, an’ maybe some days I’d think of swapping places wi’ you, but not today. Not yesterday neither, nor the day afore that. Come to think of it—’