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

  Finally Suth asked Len, ‘Where are we headed?’

  The veteran just frowned over the leathers he was sewing. ‘Doesn’t matter. Everywhere’s the same for us.’

  Suth understood the cold reasoning behind that, yet this was a good deal farther than he’d ever imagined his vow to join the Malazans would take him. ‘Where do you think we’re headed?’

  Len looked up, squinted into the clouded eastern night sky. ‘Well, it sounds to me like all this speculation on where we might be headed is shying scared from one of the possibilities. The one no one wants to consider.’

  ‘Which is what, old timer?’ a nearby soldier asked, and he raised a hand to silence his companions.

  Len shrugged. ‘That we’re headed south, to Korel lands.’

  ‘That’s just so much horseshit!’ the soldier yelled. Everyone began talking at once. Suth watched, amazed, as this version became the new rumour, to spread like ripples over the crowded deck, outward to the rear and to the front, raising shouts of alarm and even horror as it went.

  ‘Go to Hood, old man!’ shouted the soldier who’d asked for Len’s opinion in the first place.

  Len merely offered Suth a knowing grin. ‘See how you should always keep your mouth shut? People only want to hear what they want to hear.’

  Suth agreed. It had also occurred to him that all the speculation involving Genabackis and some city named Darujhistan seemed to be where the speakers wanted to go more than where they thought they might be going. Everyone wanted to head to overseas postings in Genabackis, or even Seven Cities.

  His own personal philosophy on life told him that, therefore, that was exactly where they were not headed. This name, Korel, he’d heard once or twice before. It was always mentioned more as a curse than anything. It was considered the very worst, the ugliest of all the holdings of the far-flung Malazan Empire. Well, he’d joined to be tested, and it looked as though he might be headed into one of the sternest trials of his life. That was good. It would be a waste of his time otherwise.

  The street orphans were out playing on the courtyard across the way from the temple. Ella squatted on the threshold, preparing the midday meal while keeping one affectionate eye on them. She could hardly believe that just a few years ago she ran with her own gang of urchins. She saw hardly any of them any more. The Watch beat Harl to death as a probable thief. Peek disappeared entirely; and the pimps took Tillin. That would have been her fate had she not started listening to the priest.

  It was here she had run when the trolling party had come for her: hired thugs on a sweep for young girls and boys to feed the brothels and slave markets all across the archipelago. And it was on this threshold that the priest faced them. One unarmed man against seven armed, and they backed down. She pounded the pestle and shook her head. The priest. She still could not understand him. He was like nothing from her experience as a child, abandoned to fend for herself on the streets of Banith. An extremely narrow education, she could admit. A school of casual violence, constant hunger, exploitation, and rape.

  Yet not once had the priest indulged in similar practices – the stronger exacting what they wished from the weaker, including sexual gratification. Not that the man was a eunuch. It seemed that he simply refused to accept all the old, traditional ways of doing things. ‘Haven’t got us very far, have they?’ he once told her.

  Giggling brought her attention back to her surroundings. A crowd of dirty grinning faces in a half-circle before her. ‘Lunch time, is it?’ Obeying the rules of the street, the feral children said nothing lest they misstep and lose their chance for a meal. They grinned instead, as if happy, and ‘made cute’ as they used to call it in her time. But in their too-bright shining eyes she saw the merciless torment of constant nagging hunger. She reached to the basket at her side, folded back the cloth across it, and distributed the small flatbreads she’d baked earlier that day. Laughing, they snatched their prizes and ran, shoving everything into their mouths before anyone, or anything, could steal it from them.

  One young girl remained. Her clothes were finer than the rest, though just as torn and grimed. The bread remained in one hand. She watched Ella with large dark eyes, curiously calm and solemn. Ella returned to preparing the priest’s meal. ‘What is it, child?’ she asked.

  ‘Is this the house of the foreign holy man?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it true that he eats babies?’

  She stopped her pounding. ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what everyone says.’

  Ella rocked back on her haunches, eyed the crowded square, the small day-market, the touts and hawkers jostling pilgrims just off the boats as they milled, organizing a procession to the Cloister. ‘So that’s what they say …’ she breathed.

  ‘Yes. They say that at night he changes into a beast and steals babies from houses and eats their hearts.’

  ‘What do you think?’ Ella asked, strangely unnerved by the child’s grisly imagination.

  The girl pushed her tangled hair from her pale brow. Very pale – not of Fist? Fathered by a Malazan occupier perhaps? As she suspected she had been herself? The girl cocked her head, thinking. ‘Oh, I don’t think he does any of those things. I think he’s much more dangerous than that.’

  Ella stared anew at this strange child. What an odd thing to say. But the child just smiled, her eyes almost mocking, and twirling a pinch of hair in her fingers, ‘making cute’, she wandered off. Watching her go, Ella was struck most not by the child’s precocious self-possession, her assured manner, or what she’d said. Rather, it was the fact that of the pack of hungry street urchins careering around her, most by far bigger and older, not one attempted to snatch the bread held so casually in one small hand.

  Later she was arranging the sauce and boiled fish on a platter for the priest when everything changed out among the crowd in the square. A child of these streets, and sensitive to their moods, she stilled as well. The urchins were gone, as were the older idlers; the shouting of the merchants had quietened, as had the general talk. In the hush Ella heard the approach of a measured tramp of boots. A Malazan patrol.

  Even the pilgrims paused in their reverences, hands raised in supplication to the towers of the Cloister. The column entered the square from a side street, marched across the broad open expanse. All eyes followed its progress. A standard preceded them, a black cloth bearing the Imperial sceptre. Their surcoats were a dark grey edged in blood red. As the column tramped past the front of the temple a detachment separated and halted. It was led by a figure familiar to all those of the Banith waterfront, Sergeant Billouth, main extortionist and strong arm of the local commander, Captain Karien’el.

  ‘The priest here?’ Billouth demanded in accented Roolian.

  She bowed. ‘I’ll see …’

  ‘Yes?’ It was the priest in the doorway, a robe open to his waist showing his thick chest and bulging stomach, both covered in a thick pelt of bristle-like hair and the blue curls of tattooing. Ella looked away; she’d glimpsed before that the marks extended well beyond his face, but never guessed they descended quite so far. ‘What is it?’

  ‘We’re looking for a man,’ Billouth said, and he crossed his arms over his studded leather hauberk, a pleased smile growing on his lips. ‘A criminal fugitive. A thief. Big fellow. Said to hang out in the neighbourhood. ’ He leaned forward, lowering his voice. ‘Know anything that could help us?’

  The priest’s expression didn’t change. ‘No.’

  Ella lowered her gaze.

  ‘Really? You wouldn’t be withholding information, would you? Because when we catch this fellow and squeeze him … Well, that would be bad news for you.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  Billouth ran the back of a hand over his unshaven jowls. ‘If you say so. But I think we’ll be talking again real soon,’ and he winked. Straightening, the sergeant raised his voice. ‘Thank you very much for all the information, Priest. A lot of locals will end up dancing on th
e Stormwall thanks to you.’

  Ella gaped. But he’d said nothing!

  Billouth waved the detachment onward, saluted the priest.

  Bastard, the priest mouthed.

  Ella stood watching the Malazans march away, their wicked grins at the trouble they’d stirred up, hating them. The priest took the tray from her. ‘Thank you, Ella.’

  ‘They want you gone.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why don’t they just … you know …’

  ‘Get rid of me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  His wide frog mouth twisted up. ‘They’ve tried. A number of times. Right now it’s an uneasy truce.’ He shrugged. ‘But why should they bother when they can get the locals to do it for them?’ He ducked inside.

  Ella gasped, seeing it now. She followed him inside. ‘Rumours! They’re spreading rumours about you!’

  ‘Yes. Them and someone else. The priests at the Cloister, I imagine.’ He sat cross-legged on a mat to eat.

  ‘But why should they do that?’

  He shrugged again. ‘They’re on top and I’m an unknown to them. Any possible change is a threat to their position. So their reaction is to suppress.’

  Ella rounded on the entrance as if she would march out to confront them all. ‘But why? You let the homeless kids sleep here. You give shelter and food to the debtors.’

  ‘And I extort money and sex for the privilege, yes?’

  She lowered her gaze, feeling her own face heat. ‘I’d heard that one too.’

  He nodded thoughtfully, chewing. ‘They might even believe it, seeing as in their hearts they know that’s what they’d do in my place. But that’s not what I’m here for.’

  Surprising herself, she asked in a small voice, ‘What are you here for?’

  Still nodding, he spoke, his gaze lowered to his food. ‘I’ve seen religion from the top and from the bottom, Ella. I’ve been intimate with faith all my life. And it occurs to me that the transfixion of ecstasy, the transporting feeling of being one with a god, is the same everywhere. It matters not what image or idol is bowed to or hangs on the wall, be it the cowled figure of Hood, or a severed bull’s head. It’s all the same because the sensation, the feeling, is the same as it comes from within all of us. From inside. Not without.’ He looked up, his gaze narrowed. ‘That’s the important point. It is a natural innate emotion, a human quality, that can be exploited. That’s why I’m here.’

  At some point Ella had clasped a hand to her throat as if to assure herself that she could still breathe. Taking that deep breath, she bowed to the priest and left the empty room for the cool outside. In the small front court she forced her chest to relax, drawing deep the refreshing air to stop her head from spinning. That eerie child was right. This man was somehow much more dangerous than anyone could possibly suspect.

  And the question for her was, dare she follow? She saw how till now her life had been nothing more than a mad scramble to fill her stomach, avoid danger, find shelter. Now something more had been shown her; so much that she’d never even suspected existed in the world. She felt as if she’d been granted a glimpse of something terrifyingly huge, yet also awe-inspiring, impossibly grand. Oddly enough she felt humility in the glimpsing of it rather than the puffed-up self-importance she’d met in those claiming to be filled with the spirit of the gods. Was this sensation what the priest meant? If so, she knew immediately she would follow without hesitation. It felt right. Which, she supposed, was its strength, and its danger.

  Ivanr spotted the mounted column when it entered the north cleft of the valley his fields overlooked. He could run, he supposed, abandon his home and all he’d worked so hard to build these last few years. But something prevented him. A kind of obtuse stubbornness that asserted itself always at the most inconvenient of times. Besides, there was a chance that they weren’t after him anyway. So it was that the column of Jourilan cavalry encircled him while he leaned on his hoe amid his field of beans.

  Its captain drew off his helmet and the felt cap he wore beneath, then pushed back his matted sweaty hair. He inclined his head in greeting. ‘Ivanr of Antr. We arrest you in the name of the Jourilan Emperor. Will you come peaceably, or must we subdue you?’

  He peered around at the encircling cavalry. Twelve armed men. Quite the compliment. He shaded his gaze to study the captain. ‘And the charge?’

  Within his cuirass of banded iron the captain offered a shrug of complete indifference. ‘You have been denounced for aiding and abetting the heretic cultists.’

  Ivanr nodded, accepting what he knew to have been inevitable. Eventually, he knew, word would have reached the Emperor’s secret police, or the Lady’s priesthood, that he looked the other way while refugees and travellers drank from his well and slept in the lean-to shelters he’d erected in his fields. They’d probably tortured it out of one they’d caught. ‘And should I cooperate? What then?’

  ‘You will be tried.’

  So. A show trial. A very public demonstration that no one was above the law, not even disgraced past grand champions. At the moment, though, he faced twelve armed men and the capital was a long way off. Anything could happen in the intervening time. He dropped his hoe. ‘I’ll make no trouble.’

  ‘A wise decision, Ivanr.’ The captain motioned to his men. Two dismounted. One took a rope from his saddle. They approached carefully. Ivanr held out his fists together. They bound him at the wrists.

  The leather of his saddle creaking, the captain turned to study the surrounding valley slopes. He replaced his helmet. ‘They said you’d lost your fire, Ivanr. That you’d sworn some kind of vow never to take another life. But I couldn’t believe it – I’d seen you fight, after all.’ The trooper tied the rope to his cantle, remounted. The captain shook his head. ‘Hard to believe you’re the same man I saw that afternoon out on the sands, taking on all corners. You were untouchable then.’ He regarded Ivanr for some time from beneath the lip of his helmet, his heavy gaze almost regretful. ‘Better, I think, had you died then.’

  He motioned to a nearby tree, bare-limbed, black and grey. ‘That one will do.’

  The troop kneed their mounts. The rope snaked taut then yanked Ivanr forward. ‘Captain! You mentioned something about a trial?’

  The captain looked back. He reached a gloved hand into a pannier and pulled out a rolled scroll. ‘Didn’t I mention it had already occurred? You were found guilty, by the way. We’re here to fulfil the sentence.’

  This, Ivanr told himself acidly, he should have seen coming as well. As the captain said – he was definitely losing his edge. Well, the captain had had his little surprise. Now it was time for his, and quickly. Jogging, he twisted his wrists, testing the rope, and found they’d bound him no more thoroughly than they would have any other prisoner, which was a mistake. Grunting with the effort, and the accompanying pain, he twisted his arms around the binding at the wrists until the rope snapped. Two long paces brought him level with the trooper leading him. Taking a grip on the saddle he pulled himself up to kick the startled man from his seat. He felt ribs snap beneath his heel.

  Shouts of alarm all round. The mounts milled, kicking and nervous. ‘Just kill him!’ the captain shouted, disgusted.

  Ivanr yanked a levelled spear from one trooper, swung it to slap the rump of a mount that reared, startled, dumping its rider. Ducking under another spear, he jabbed with the butt to knock the breath from a fourth rider, and very possibly rupturing internal organs. The captain charged past, swinging his blade. Ivanr blocked with the spear haft, twisting to whip the iron shank beneath the blade across the back of the man’s neck, pitching him on to his horse’s neck where he hung, seemingly unconscious. Ivanr swung again, knocking aside a number of thrusts, took hold of another spear to yank its wielder backwards off his mount, pulling himself from his feet in the process. That may have saved his life as the blades of two passing troopers hissed over him.

  He picked up another fallen spear, kicked a groggy trooper to keep him down. The ne
xt two riders he unhorsed with his spear, leaving four to mill about him, swinging. If they’d simply dismounted and surrounded him he knew he’d have faced far worse odds. As it was, they’d given up the main advantage of the mounted troop’s charge. Now they merely impeded one another on their horses. They cut down at him while he ducked and thrust. Kicked-up red dust coated everyone. It stuck in Ivanr’s throat and stung his eyes. Dodging, keeping them in each other’s way, he thrust and jabbed them from their mounts one by one until the dust drifted aside and the last of the riderless horses ran off. Only he was left upright. He kicked two who looked to be rousing then found the captain where he’d fallen from his mount. He pulled the man’s helmet off and cuffed a cheek.

  ‘Captain?’

  The man’s eyelids fluttered. He groaned, wincing. Dirt smeared the side of his face from his fall. The eyes found their focus. ‘I thought you’d sworn some kind of vow,’ he said, accusing.

  ‘I swore that I’d never kill again – not that I wouldn’t fight. I think you’ll find that none of your men are dead. Though a few might die if you don’t get them attention soon. I suggest back the way you came, to the village of Doun-el. I believe there’s a priest there.’

  ‘You mean I should do that rather than track you.’

  ‘It’s up to you.’ Ivanr yanked off the man’s weapon belt. ‘Now I’m going to teach you the proper way to tie someone up.’

  ‘We will track you,’ the captain swore while Ivanr turned him over and pulled his hands behind his back. ‘Others will be sent. Killers, the Emperor’s executioners.’

  ‘They are all welcome to try to follow me. Now, must I gag you?’

  The captain’s sullen silence told Ivanr that the fellow was smarter than his performance to this point had indicated. He bound the rest of the men – they’d get free soon enough by helping one another. After this he gently gathered up the reins of the nearest horse and mounted. Swinging south, he snatched up the reins of a second for a spare mount, and headed off. He knew he ought to prepare more carefully, take the time to rifle all their packs and gear, but they were struggling and he didn’t know how much more punishment the poor fellows could take.