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

  When Toru woke him for his watch the rains had long ceased. Fat drops now pattered down from the canopy as heavy as slingstones. He lowered himself to the stone lip of the small shrine’s entrance and wrapped his robes about himself for warmth. He sat hunched, watching the glittering wet wall of foliage. The cry of a hunting cat sounded through the night. Then the ghosts came.

  They arrived as a file of youths escorted by a priest in rags. They chivvied along a goat with them. The priest and many of the youths, male and female, carried suppurating sores on their limbs, faces and necks. Pon-lor recognized the symptoms of the Weeping Pestilence as recorded in Thaumaturg histories. It had struck centuries before. Named ‘Weeping’, it was thought, for the obvious reference to the constant drainage of the sores that erupted everywhere, and for the pain and misery it inflicted upon the entire society. Weeping indeed.

  Yet these ghastly wounds and scars were not the only marks they carried. The youths were emaciated, little more than walking skeletons. The priest’s ragged feathered robe hung from him loose and soiled. Pon-lor recognized the starvation – and desperation – that accompanied plague and the breakdown of social order.

  ‘Great Queen,’ the priest announced, falling to his knees, ‘we beg for your pity.’ He gestured curtly to the children, who knelt as well. The youngest held a crude twine rope tied about the goat’s neck. ‘Spare our village. Turn your hand of condemnation from us and our devotion will be without end.’ He waved the goat forward and the child, a boy of no more than perhaps five years, pulled it to the fore. It bleated, nervous and unhappy.

  ‘Please accept this offering and smile upon us, great Queen! Protect us. Turn aside your Avenger.’

  The priest drew a curved blade and rested a hand upon the goat’s side.

  Pon-lor jerked then, muffling a cry, as the blade flashed and sank into the chest of the boy.

  Toru leaped up drawing his sword at once. ‘What?’ he demanded, bleary, half-awake.

  Pon-lor could not take his eyes from the horrifying tableau. He swallowed the acid in his throat and managed to answer, his voice thick, ‘Nothing. A shadow. Just a shadow.’

  Toru grunted, a touch irritated, and lay down once more.

  The boy had clasped the priest’s wrist. His expression was one of startled surprise and hurt. The priest now hugged the child and, weeping silently, gently lowered him to the ground.

  The eldest youth present, a girl, held out a bowl to the priest. The children all gathered round, eager, their lean faces full of hunger.

  Pon-lor found himself slowly rising, a formless revulsion choking him, backing away. His gorge rose in his throat, his heart clenched so tight it could not beat, yet he could not pull his gaze away. Ancient Demon-King forgive them … not even you …

  To his relief, the priest yanked the blade free to slash the goat’s throat. The girl held the bowl to the neck while blood pumped and jetted, darkening her hands. The children pressed close, cupping their hands and hungrily licking. Meanwhile, the corpse of the boy lay unremarked as if forgotten.

  Pon-lor forced his eyes aside and wiped a cold wetness from his cheeks.

  Chopping sounded and Pon-lor glanced back to see the priest using a stone hatchet to cut the goat’s head free. This he set among the stones exactly where a bleached fleshless skull now rested. The youths picked up the goat carcass and hurried off with it. The priest reverently gathered up the boy. Turning, he gave one last bow to the shrine, and backed away into a screen of shimmering trees that no longer existed, a sort of orchard, well tended and maintained.

  Pon-lor watched the phantoms slip away then sat without moving, hugging himself, hands inside his robes for warmth. Never, even in the most rabid denunciations of the Queen of Monsters, was there any hint of human sacrifice. Could his forebears have been so ignorant of the degenerate practices hidden away here within this green abyss? Yet the priest had been weeping, a man close to breaking. All of them sick and starving. Histories told of plague sweeping though the jungles generations ago. Could it have been this appalling? Blind desperation. He had witnessed a people driven to the edge and it felt as if a hot knife had carved out his heart.

  He hugged himself tighter and leaned forward to rest his sweaty brow against his knees.

  The next thing he knew stirrings from behind woke him and he turned to see Toru searching among their meagre supplies. He cleared his throat. ‘Have we anything?’

  ‘Little enough,’ the man grunted. He lowered a pouch. ‘Magister, for a time I kept an eye on you. You … saw something in the night?’

  Pon-lor struggled to rise on legs numb and stiff. ‘A tragedy, Toru. I was allowed – or cursed with – a vision of tragedy.’

  The guard said nothing, merely handed over a few scraps of dried meat and a knot of stale rice wrapped in leaves. After this brief meal, Pon-lor taking tiny bites and chewing as long as possible, they took sips from the one remaining skin of water and resumed their march.

  Toru led. He returned to the animal path. It was so well-trodden that it curved along as naked red-tinted dirt weaving between the thick hard-barked roots. Yet they met no animals. Pon-lor imagined their clumsy tramping must be driving them away.

  Towards midmorning, the unseen sun’s heat driving straight down upon their heads, Toru, a good few paces ahead, disappeared amid a great crashing of dry branches followed by a gasped cry of agony. Pon-lor charged forward to find a shallow pit. Toru had managed to turn slightly as he fell and he lay on sharpened stakes impaled through his side along his torso and legs. Pon-lor threw himself flat and reached out to the man. ‘Take my hand!’

  The guard struggled to speak but only coughed up a great gout of blood that exploded across his face and chest. He pointed, his lips working. A scuff sounded next to Pon-lor and something cracked on his skull. Flashes of light exploded in his vision and all went to dark.

  * * *

  Stinging awoke him. Sharp stinging impacts across his face. He opened his eyes just in time to see a woman slap him once more. He sat propped up against a tree, his hands tied behind his back, a gag across his mouth. The woman who peered down at him with open hate and a touch of fear was the ugliest he had ever seen. Pox scars from a savage encounter with that illness gouged her cheeks and brow, and a cleft lip, a harelip, pulled her mouth into a permanent open twist. That she was quite young only made the disfigurements all the more painful to see. Straightening, she kicked him in the crotch, doubling him over, hardly able to breathe.

  ‘He’s awake!’ she yelled.

  Pon-lor merely thanked the gods he hadn’t vomited from the pain. He would have asphyxiated behind the gag. Blinking the tears from his eyes he saw someone new crouched on his haunches beside him. Looking up, his eyes met the grinning familiar features of their erstwhile guide, Jak.

  The youth was squatting with his hands hanging loose before his knees. He cocked his head, making a show of looking Pon-lor up and down. ‘You don’t look so good right now, mister rich pretty brat. You know, you should be more careful wandering around the woods when you got no idea what you’re doing.’

  He leaned forward to push a stiffened finger into Pon-lor’s side. The mage yelled behind his gag.

  ‘Yeah. I knew Loor tagged you good there. Damned Thaumaturgs. What in the Abyss does it take to kill you?’

  Another youth came shambling up, skinny and awkward. This one wore oversized blood-spattered armour of banded hauberk, helm, and greaves that Pon-lor recognized: Toru’s. ‘We should just kill ’im,’ he whined. ‘They’re dangerous—’

  ‘Course he’s dangerous,’ Jak sneered. ‘He’d be worthless otherwise, wouldn’t he? Just like you,’ and he slapped the youth’s side. Unnoticed by the crouching Jak, anger suffused the lad’s narrow face but was quickly hidden behind a morose dejection. The lad shuffled away. ‘Find the damned witch’s trail, Thet!’ Jak shouted after him.

  Pon-lor relaxed his tight shoulders, unclenched his fisted hands and eased back against the trunk. He was suddenly
glad he’d delayed unleashing his own outrage against these ragtag castoffs – for that was what he recognized them as: squatters, runaways, or outright criminal exiles from the eastern villages. So far he’d counted eleven in the group.

  Then it struck him and he laughed as loud as he could behind the lashings of cloth tied across his mouth. Of course! Too rich! Oh, so very rich!

  Jak rose, uneasy. ‘What’s so funny?’

  Pon-lor snorted. Kenjak Ashevajak – the Bandit Lord! Ha!

  ‘What!’ Jak demanded, kicking him.

  ‘Hanthet Hord,’ Pon-lor mouthed behind his gag. And he laughed anew, more at himself than at this skinny young man quivering in rage before him.

  Jak’s face darkened as understanding came and he lashed out again, connecting with the side of Pon-lor’s head and sending him down. Po-lor, however, continued to laugh even with his face pressed into the dirt. ‘Watch him, Myint,’ the youth snarled and marched off.

  Hands none too gently yanked Pon-lor upright. The woman regarded him closely. This near, her scarred battleground face was even more of a horror. Could have had that cured at the capital, Pon-lor thought. Not something to mention, though. Her sharp deep eyes studied him and he saw a keen intelligence behind them. Dangerous, this one.

  ‘I don’t think we need you,’ she murmured, intimate and low. ‘And I know one way to kill you.’ She drew a wide scimitar blade from her side and pressed its finely honed edge to his neck. ‘Stories are this is one sure way. Want to find out?’

  He edged his head in a sideways negative. She nodded. ‘For now. Remember, I’ll be behind you all the way…’ She pushed him with the point to start him walking. ‘Let’s go.’

  Pon-lor cooperated, falling into line among the ‘bandits’ as they started off. At first he’d been astounded that Jak had let him live, but now he thought he had an idea of the Bandit Lord’s plans. No doubt he intended to collect a rich ransom for handing over a living Thaumaturg to the Queen of the Witches. This on top of the reward he expected for the yakshaka, should he manage to intercept the witch escorting it now, and present it as his own prize.

  Good, then, that the cretin should lead him to his own goal. He’d thought little of his own chances of tracking her down; all his hopes had rested on Toru and Lo-sen. Many would perhaps not believe that a powerful theurgist mage should find himself lost in the jungle. But this was far from their training and expertise, as the ease of his capture had shown. The common villagers would never have dared the attempt, such was the dread of the Thaumaturg name. Yet Pon-lor did not think that these dregs and misfits – bandits! – understood this at all. They’d merely acted out of an assured confidence in their own mastery of this environment – an obviously justified assumption. And in his own concomitant helplessness – an unjustified assumption. Just as misguided as their quaint belief that merely by binding his hands and gagging him they’d rendered him powerless.

  For the moment he saw no reason to demonstrate the error of their thinking. Especially when they were leading him to the suborned yakshaka and its captor. Once they had accomplished that unintended service he would regain control of the yakshaka, or, failing that, destroy it, and deal with this Night-Queen’s spy. Then he would allow himself the indulgence of meting out punishment for the loss of his command. In that strict order.

  Until then, he would endure these indignities and petty insults. But later these bandits would all writhe in indescribable agony. He would see to it.

  * * *

  Osserc did not sleep. But he did dream. Waking dreams they were. Almost indistinguishable from mundane seated reality. They came and went like flitting scraps of shadow or idle thoughts passing before his gaze to disappear as if mere blurs against the rippled glazing of this murky window here in the Azath construct on Malaz Isle, which the locals named the Dead House.

  Across the table of rough-hewn wooden slats covered in wax dribbles and cluttered by bottles and dusty glasses of all styles and fashions, the Jaghut Gothos was, in contrast, solid and unrelentingly permanent. The soft glow of his golden irises varied faintly as the entity blinked, occasionally. His head was sunk leaving his long iron-grey hair to hang as a ragged curtain. Gnarled hands, all swollen joints and misaligned fingers ending in yellowed talon-like nails, rested motionless upon the table’s slats. Even his breathing barely registered as the slightest rise and fall of his solid wide shoulders. Osserc vaguely wondered if breathing were even necessary for such a one as this.

  Clamping his jaws tighter, he now reluctantly slid his gaze to the third party at their table. Its head was of roughly the same size and hairiness as a coconut. A Nacht it was, a strange monkey-like creature said to have once been native to this island. It sat so short its chin barely cleared the height of the table. It was asleep, or pretending to be, its coconut head nested in its arms. Yet this was only its appearance; the thing was far from any sort of natural animal. He suspected it to be a demon, though of what sort he had no idea. Clearly, it served this house – that is, was a chosen servant of the Azath. Similar to the guardians who sometimes manifested to defend the houses.

  The creature’s knobby head popped up as if it were preternaturally aware of his quiet regard. Its tiny black eyes blinked sleepily then sharpened. It raised a hand to brush the hairs over its wide mouth as if in profound thoughtfulness.

  Osserc let out a loud grating exhalation.

  The creature nodded as if in agreement and then switched to pulling on the scraggly hairs of its chin as if stroking a goatee.

  He dragged his gaze away to rest upon the grimed and leaded window glazing. Why did the Azath always torment him so? Was this merely a symptom of its alien character? But all that was mere distraction – and perhaps that was all it was in truth. Distraction.

  Through the filthy rippled glazing it was impossible to tell if it were day or night over the modest port city of Malaz.

  Was this perhaps a comment on how the Azath saw the world? Through a distorting lens?

  Osserc sensed beyond the isle, to the south, the potent wintry heartbeat of power that was the brooding presence of the entities known as the Stormriders. Entities of utter frigid ice and rime. His gaze shifted to study anew the Jaghut opposite. A connection? Many postulated as much.

  And truly alien. Not unlike the Azath as well. Anastomotic? Perhaps.

  Yet none of these lines of inquiry tugged at him. Distraction. It was all mere distraction from the path he ought to be pursuing. He shut his eyes to rest them for a moment and when he opened them once more he found his gaze had returned to the warped opaque glass of the window.

  So. Eyes looking outward are blind.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ came the dry croaked voice of Gothos. It startled Osserc, so long had it been since either of them had spoken. Steeling himself, he turned to meet the bright amber churning of the Jaghut’s eyes. He could not help but flinch slightly from the unyielding demands of that gaze.

  ‘I am thinking that you are irrelevant. That this creature is irrelevant. Even this construct. All are mere irrelevancies and distraction from where I ought to be looking.’

  Gothos raised a jagged fragment of blue glass from the table and held it to one eye. ‘Memories are not the truth of the past. We sculpt them to suit our images of our present selves. And, in any case, the truth of then is not the truth of now.’

  Osserc snorted his scorn, but within he felt something he had not known for ages untold – a profound unnerving, as if something he’d thought utterly unshakable had just revealed an empty gulf beneath. ‘You surprise me, Gothos. I thought you of all beings would argue for timeless enduring truths. Bedrock absolutes.’

  ‘Exactly. You thought.’

  He made a conscious effort to move his gaze away as if disinterested. ‘You will hear no admissions from me. No confessions.’

  The Jaghut scowled his profound distaste. ‘Of course not. I would be the last to want such mush and mawkishness. Which is perhaps precisely why I am here. As you say – I a
m irrelevant.’

  As none other possibly could be.

  So be it. Osserc closed his eyes. The memory of a flash of an indescribable brilliance seemed to blind him then. Ancient ones, such power! Such astounding potency. A young man’s voice echoed in his thoughts. A scream of anguish. Father!

  His eyes fluttered open and for an instant his heart and limbs trembled in memory of that fright. He clenched his jaws and shifted in his seat. ‘I have guarded the wellspring of Thyrllan from all who sought to exploit it. Kept it apart. Walled it off at costs few could imagine.’

  He turned his gaze on Gothos as if accusing, attempting to lance into those pits of argent. ‘Who would dare ask more of me?’ Yet he found within those pits no opponent, no challenge or quarrel. The flat steady gaze seemed to deflect his accusation upon himself.

  ‘Who indeed,’ the Jaghut said, a lip curling from one thrusting tusk.

  Or so Osserc thought he said. Perhaps he imagined it. He was, after all, still within the Azath House. It, or they, set the rules here.

  Irrelevant. Once more I shy away from the gulf. I am like prey caught fascinated by the predator’s gaze. Terrified and circling, yet unable to break away. I could if I wish merely walk out that door – yet what of all that I have struggled to understand, to achieve? Final answers ungrasped? If there are any to grasp. Perhaps there are none.

  Then at least I would possess that knowledge.

  So be it. He sat at the table as if relaxed, his legs crossed, hands one over the other upon one knee. Yet he felt those hands tighten to clamps on his leg. ‘I have asked nothing of others that I have not demanded of myself,’ he began, then immediately wished he hadn’t and clenched his lips. Too much of a damned justification. Why the urge to explain to this one? Especially when this entity had nothing but contempt for explanations or justifications. To this one they were all no better than self-serving pleas and apologies.

  As they are to me as well …

  Yet Gothos refrained from heaping scorn on that statement. Instead, he edged his head to peer through his ragged curtain of hair and his cracked lips drew back even further from his tusks in a merciless smile as if reading those very thoughts. ‘Exactly, Osserc. You have asked nothing of others. And so … by your own admission…’ Osserc’s hands clenched painfully upon his leg ‘… you have asked nothing of yourself.’