The Malazan Empire Series: (Night of Knives, Return of the Crimson Guard, Stonewielder, Orb Sceptre Throne, Blood and Bone, Assail) (Novels of the Malazan Empire)

by Ian C. Esslemont

  Passing the last tables, he glimpsed a crowd of mangy looking fellows dressed in threadbare tunics and cloaks who struck him as nothing more than destitute street-sweepings. These men sat alongside others who suggested the cut of military service with their scars and heavier builds. An unusual crowd for Coop’s. But the old man, Rengel, had warned him to anticipate a night of strangeness.

  Someone had taken his regular bench along the rear wall. Considering how crowded the room was, Temper half-expected it, but couldn’t avoid feeling irritated. Couldn’t Coop have kept it for him? What did he pay rent to the damn brewer for anyway? That tiny cell upstairs? The wretched food?

  The man occupying his seat wore a leather vest over a padded linen shirt that hung in tatters down over the bench and leggings of iron-studded leather. Oiled leather wristlets half-covered forearms that bore a skein of scar tissue: puckered remnants of scoured flesh, thin pale crescents of bladed edge, and the angry pink mottling of healed burns. Head low to the table, he spoke to a companion shrouded in shadow.

  For a moment Temper hesitated. He considered addressing the man. Not that he expected to retrieve his seat, but to challenge him enough to better glimpse his features. The fellow’s face remained averted. Stiffly so, it seemed to Temper. Intangibly, the space between the two momentarily seemed to contract. Coop materialized, stepping through a rear narrow door. He scanned the room, hands tucked behind his leather apron. He waved towards a sole empty table and Temper ambled over; he’d just stood a half-day watch and was damned if he would stay on his feet a moment longer.

  Coop sat with him. ‘Sorry about that, Temp.’ He raised a decanter of peach brandy.

  Temper nodded. ‘Quite the crowd,’ he offered, but Coop simply poured. He shrugged and raised the tumbler for a toast.

  ‘To the Empire,’ said Coop, raising his own glass. ‘To the bottom of the sea,’ returned Temper, and downed the shot.

  Sucking his teeth, Coop pushed his seat back against the rear wall to better view the room. ‘Yes, a different bunch. But it’s just the one night y’know.’

  ‘A Shadow Moon.’

  Coop looked up. ‘Yeah, that’s it. First I’d heard of it though.’ He pulled a rag from behind his apron and used it to wipe his glistening forehead then his retreating, curled red hair.

  Temper slid a forearm onto the table, inclined his head to the room. ‘Rough looking…’

  Coop waved the suggestion aside. ‘A quiet bunch, considering all the young bloods. Nothing broken yet except the seals from two casks of stout.’ He chuckled knowingly.

  Temper sighed. In his eyes Coop’s main failing was his unflinching optimism. Coop’s steady supply of it would have made him suspect simple-mindedness had he not known otherwise. Perhaps, he thought, Coop was inclined to be hopeful, given all the coin passing his way.

  He considered dropping in on Seal later. Gods knew the young army medicer could probably use the company tonight. But the lad was likely already up to his elbows in his own medicine chest. Then he thought of something better and gestured Coop closer. ‘Haven’t seen Corinn around, have you?’

  The brewer cracked a broad smile and would’ve nudged Temper if his scowl didn’t promise a beating for it. His grin fell as he considered the question. ‘No, can’t say as I have. Sorry, Temp.’

  With a shrug, Temper sat back. ‘Thought she would’ve at least said goodbye.’

  ‘Same old Temp, always thinking the worst. I’ll have a mug of Dark sent your way.’ Standing, he slapped Temper’s shoulder.

  Temper waved Coop off and turned his chair to lean against the wall. Of the immediate tables, all crowded, only a couple of familiar faces stood out. They belonged to the two other men who rented rooms from Coop: Faro Balkat, a frail, dried old stick who swallowed Paralt water like it wasn’t the poison it was, and who rarely knew whether it was day or night; and Trenech. He was a giant of a fellow, as broad and seemingly bright as a bhederin, who did occasional bouncing and guard work for Coop in exchange for free beer.

  Though Coop had dismissed his sour predictions, and Temper didn’t want to admit it, he was afraid that maybe he’d seen the last of Corinn – that despite a tongue sharper than a Talian dagger. He’d met her… what… less than a month ago? And in that time he’d surprised himself by how much he’d come to look forward to hearing her recount legendary campaigns over wine. He tried to remember their last conversation: had he said something worse than his usual stupid hints? Too crass a joke regarding a couple of old war horses stabling together for warmth? Though they were both veterans and saw the world through the same cynical eyes, she treated him as if the mere pike-pusher he pretended to be. Maybe he was just daydreaming, but was it possible she saw more than that?

  Anji pushed through the servant’s door beside the table, slamming down a pewter mug of Malazan Dark as she passed. He offered her a wave; she rolled her eyes at the way the evening was shaping up. As she passed a nearby table a fellow grabbed at her ass. She swung round and dumped a tall mug of ale over his lap and had to be stopped from breaking the mug across his skull. From all around came hoots and cheers of delight.

  The outburst brought round the gaze of the fellow who’d claimed Temper’s seat. The burns on his forearms extended to his face, and in a flash Temper recognized the source: Imperial alchemical munitions. An incendiary, most likely.

  The toughs quieted under the man’s glare and this surprised Temper. Among the soldiers he’d known, such a look would have provoked a tossed stool or mug or whatever lay close to hand. He watched sidelong as the fellow turned back to his companions. The man gestured broadly, as if imitating a sword cut, and a tattoo flashed briefly beneath the short sleeve of his tunic. An arched bridge, a background of licking flames: the emblem of the Bridgeburners.

  Temper felt as if those flames had scorched his own heart. Halfway across the chamber sat a man he may have met in earlier days – a different life. The urge to flee made his arms twitch. He forced his head down, as if studying the depths of his drink. The odds were they’d never actually run into each other; he knew that. More, the Bridgeburner probably wouldn’t even notice him, and this would be nothing more than another heart-stopping brush with his past. He forced himself to take another drink. The warm Malazan Dark coated his throat. He almost laughed aloud at his nerves. Gods, man! A bare year out of action and behaving like a skittish colt!

  Barely raising his head, he viewed the smoky room. It was a chilly, rainy night; his favourite seat was occupied; his past grinned like a death’s head from the neighbouring table, and once more Corinn had stood him up after, of late, spending most evenings with him swapping tales and maybe getting a certain look in her eyes at the last. All in all, the evening called for a dignified retreat. A bottle of his homeland’s red wine waited tucked beneath his pallet for just such an ill-starred evening.

  Standing, he pushed back his chair. He felt as if every eye in the chamber were crawling over his back. He pulled open the servant’s door, ducked, and stepped into an antechamber that Coop had sketchily adapted to a storage room by the addition of a few shelves. The room was dark, cold, and cramped. Temper could touch both walls without stretching either arm. In the wall was a portal barely wide enough for his shoulders, though they were broader than most. It opened out onto circular stairs that led up to the kitchen and the rented rooms, as well as down to the lower cellars.

  He started up the steps, feeling at his back the steady draught of cold air that welled constantly out of the building’s depths. He wondered at the puzzle of a Bridge-burner being here on the island. Now that he was on his way to his room, he felt an urge to sit down with the man and spin yarns of the old days. But the stories of the wanderings of retired or discharged veterans usually proved sad or unremarkable. He could imagine the fate of such a soldier outside the Bridgeburner squads: no posting would have been desirable. Even the role of marine would have been confining and frustrating. Direct dismissal from service was preferable. And following that, aimless
drifting and befuddlement at civilian life.

  Temper could sympathize: when his own place in the ranks had been taken from him he’d experienced something much the same. He’d even presented himself with false papers to the local garrison in order to return to the only life he’d ever felt was his own.

  Yet there was more to this puzzle than just the one man. Passing the kitchens, Temper waved to Sallil, the cook, who nodded back, then returned to fanning himself at the rear door’s steep steps that led up into the alley. In the dark of the stairwell, Temper felt his way to the upper rooms, some rented by Anji and a few of her friends for occasional whoring, and one occupied by Coop himself. In the narrow hall it occurred to him that once before he’d seen a ragged gang of men such as the crowd below. They’d disembarked from a galley hailing from the island’s other settlement, Jakata, that had berthed overnight at the public wharves.

  Outside his door, he paused, the puzzle solved. Jakatan-registered vessels enjoyed one of the rare charters that allowed ‘interception’ of non-Imperial shipping off the coasts of Quon Tali. In short, the long tradition of piracy survived in Jakata. This man, an ex-Bridgeburner, would find himself quite at home among such a lawless bunch.

  They must have put in for the coming storm; no wonder they had posted two men to keep an eye out. There were probably merchant cartels represented here whose shipping had been liberated by these very same men.

  Temper took out the keys he kept on a leather thong around his neck. He was reasonably sure he’d threaded together the how and why of the crowd downstairs. Now he could drink his wine and pay them no further mind. What remained to be seen was whether anything would come of this Shadow Moon nonsense.

  CHAPTER II

  The fisherman set down the rind of bread and left his bowl of soup steaming on the table. He went to the window where a rag of cloth fluttered in a frigid south wind. From beside the fire, his wife turned towards him. ‘What is it, Toben?’

  He pushed aside the rag, stared to the south for a moment. When he turned back to her, his eyes were downcast. ‘I’ve got to go out, love.’

  ‘Now?’ She lowered the sweater she was mending to her lap.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘There’s no fish to be caught by the light of this moon.’

  ‘True enough – it draws other things.’

  ‘You’ve never had to go out any of the other times.’

  ‘No.’ He came to her, gently drew the sweater from her hands. ‘Things aren’t as they were before. They’re all out of balance.’

  She raised a hand; he took it and she grasped tightly. ‘Don’t go out,’ she whispered, fierce. ‘Please don’t. I dread it.’

  He bowed to kiss her eyes, each sightless, each staring. ‘Sorry, my chick. I must.’

  ‘Then you know you go with my love.’

  ‘Yes, dear one.’

  The fisherman drew on the sweater. He shovelled embers from the hearth into a brazier, then filled a short clay pipe and lit it with an ember from the fire.

  ‘Good-night, love.’ He smiled. ‘Sing for me, won’t you?’

  She raised a hand. ‘You know I do. Come back quickly.’

  ‘I will. Soon as I can.’

  She turned her head to listen to the door, heard the wind moaning through the rocks, the ocean heaving itself against the shore with slow, insistent pressure. The door latched shut. She lowered her head and folded her hands in her lap.

  The wind blew steady and chill. Clouds raced overhead – the leading banners of a solid front filling the entire south horizon. Beneath the silver eye of the newly risen moon nothing moved among the shacks perched on the barren southern shore of Malaz Isle except the fisherman picking his way down to the wave-pounded shingle. In the lashing wind his brazier flamed like a beacon. For a moment he stopped to listen; he thought he heard the hint of a hound’s bay caught on the wind. Squinting towards the south he grimaced: along the dark horizon of cloud and sea blue-green lights flashed like mast-fire. Lights that sailors claimed lured men to their doom.

  He found the surf had risen almost within reach of his beached skiff. He set the brazier into an iron stand at the middle thwart, put his shoulder to the bow, then jerked away as if stung: scaled ice covered the wood like a second skin. He mouthed a curse and laid a hand against the wood. The ice melted, beading to condensation over the age-polished wood and steaming into vapour the wind snatched away. Singing low under his breath, the fisherman shoved against the prow. The skiff skimmed over the stones and he pushed on, wading into the surf up to his thighs, then clambered in.

  While he pulled on the thick wood oars, he chanted a song that was old when men and women first set foot upon the island. The humped, time-worn bedrock hills shrank into the distance as if the raging wind itself had swept the island away.

  With one oar he turned the skiff, then edged around to face the stern, bow to the south. Between the skiff and Malaz, now a dark distant line at the north horizon, the sea rose in slow heavy swells as smooth as the island’s ancient hills. Hail lashed white-capped waves all around, yet none touched the fisherman’s grey hair as it tossed in the wind. Deep ocean surge, tall as any vessel, bore down on him, ice-webbed, frost and spume-topped. But they rolled under his bow as gently as a meadow slope while he crooned to the wind.

  Out of the south the storm-front advanced, thickening into a solid line of churning clouds. Driven snow and sleet melted to rain that dissipated long before reaching the skiff. Lightning crackled amid the clouds while beneath emerald and deepest blue flashed like wave-buoyed gemstones. The fisherman saw none of this; facing north, teeth clamped down on his pipe, he droned his chant while the wind snatched the words away.

  Kiska soon lost track of the fellow who had popped up so suddenly before her at the wharves. Again, she smelled the Warrens in that, and hoped the possibility of a tail never occurred to him. If it had, he’d be right behind her now, waiting, watching from a path in the Rashan Warren of Darkness or perhaps even Hood’s own demesnes, the Paths of the Dead. Though on a night like this accessing either of those seemed imprudent, even to her.

  The trail of her target and his guards led her inland through the warehouse district, continuing on into the poorest quarters of rag shops, bone renderers, money lenders, and tanneries. If her quarry kept on in this direction he would soon confront an even fouler neighbourhood, the Mouse – the filthiest, lowest, and most disease-infested locale in the city.

  At the first muddy lane bridged by plank walkways, her mark’s trail turned abruptly northward. Kiska was not surprised by the sudden change in direction; she imagined their disgust at the redolent sewage and rotting kitchen refuse awash in stagnant water that percolated from a nearby marsh. She could have pursued them easily enough through the maze of alleys, especially now, as many of the ways were nothing more than glutinous paths through the blackened wreckage left by last summer’s riots. But it was mainly because she’d grown up in this quarter, spent her life clawing out of it, that she was reluctant, always, to enter its ways again.

  The trail led on up a gentle grade leading to the wealthy merchant centre. It crossed market lanes and angled more or less straight north, up cobbled arcades past shop fronts, closed and shuttered now against the coming night. Through the cloth merchant district it continued on, climbing hills northwest into the Lightings, the old estate quarter. Most of the manor houses stood vacant behind tall gates. Now they served merely as provincial retreats for the aristocratic families that had transferred their interests north, across the Strait of Winds, to the Imperial court at Unta.

  The evening had cooled rapidly. A frigid wind from the south, out of the Sea of Storms, gusted down from the isle’s meagre headlands. The cloud cover remained unbroken, sweeping northward like driven smoke. Her heavy cloak billowed, snagging as she kept to the ivy-choked iron fences that lined the district’s boulevards.

  One edge of it remained tight against her side, however: the right side, held straight by the crossbow stock disgui
sed inside her cloak.

  Kiska paused in the shadow of an ancient pillar, a plinth for the marble statue of a Nacht, the fanged and winged creature said to have once inhabited the island. The streets were deserted. The last souls she’d seen, other than glimpses of her target and escort, were a few stragglers. Hunched under shawls and scarves, they’d hurried home as night lowered.

  Tonight. This night of all possible nights. Shadow Moon; All Souls’ Fest; the Night of Shadows. Its titles seemed endless. Kiska had grown up hearing all the old legends, tales so imaginative and fabulous she rolled her eyes whenever her mother dragged them out. That was until a few days ago, when she’d overheard that by some arcane and unspecified means a Shadow Moon was predicted for tonight. Since then she’d eavesdropped on talk that lingered around gruesome stories of monstrous hounds, vengeful shades, and that local haunt, the Dead-house. Any mention of those precincts brought wardings and whispered hints of even darker legends; tales of fiends so malevolent to have once inhabited it, as if borrowing something of its ancient brooding essence – Kellanved, Dancer, Surly, and the dark heart of the Empire to come.

  From the stories she’d overheard, it seemed to her that everyone had an ancestor or relative who’d disappeared during a Shadow Moon. As good a night as any, she figured cynically, to run out on a harridan wife or ne’er-do-well husband.

  Right now her own mother was no doubt barricaded in her room, eyes clenched shut, mouthing prayers to Chem – the old local sea cult – for the safety of her and her own. If she’d spoken to her within the last few days, she probably would have attempted to keep her indoors this night, just as Agayla had done during the riots of the Regent’s new laws. But she’d grown up ignoring her mother’s prohibitions on almost everything, so why heed them now? Especially when this was the first Shadow Moon in her lifetime.