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

  Throughout, Skinner remained standing, apparently calmly awaiting the monster that was Rutana. Twin growths as large as sails now rose from either side of the creature’s neck. They flushed and pulsed with blood. Skinner raised the bastard sword in a two-handed ready stance.

  The head darted down, lunging. Skinner leaped aside. The slit mouth gaped as wide as any city gate. It hammered into the loose ground, sending Mara flying. The head twisted, gulping and flailing like a dog worrying a bone. Cascades of dirt and rock flew over Mara. She drove it aside with bursts of power. Through the clouds of dust and flying brush she glimpsed Skinner in his glittering black mail. The beast’s roar of rage stabbed Mara’s skull like a spike.

  Rain now came hammering down, settling the dust and dirt. It pattered like war drums on the wide leaves. Mara climbed to her feet, panting. Her Warren shimmered in the air about her. The creature reared once again and Mara glimpsed blood running down its clear pallid side. It twisted for Skinner, darting and lunging. Something came flailing from the jungle towards Mara. Tree trunks flew, cut off at the base, as a long low streak hammered her to tumble among fallen stones. She lay dazed.

  Roaring shook her from the muted noises and blurred shapes in her vision. She flailed to sit up. Rain still poured down, now even harder, in dense sheets that wavered like hangings. The entire nightmare scene glowed in the jade illumination where a gap in the cloud cover allowed the Visitor’s alien light to stream through.

  The creature, Rutana, still stalked Skinner. Its blunt forelimbs pawed at the rise while its head stood taller than the tumbled stones; the trees that once topped the hillock now lay trampled like so much rubbish beneath its feet. Somewhere Skinner must still stand as the beast sought him, roaring its shrieking bellow that shook the rain.

  Swordcuts marred Rutana’s chest, forelimbs and mouth, two-handed slices that would have severed a man in two yet only served to irritate this eldritch creature. How could she possibly be slain? Skinner had fought heroically, but surely there could be but one outcome.

  The evening’s downpour was passing, the cloud cover breaking up. Starlight shone down upon the wreckage. Rutana glowed a brilliant ghostly white in the cold harsh light. Her twin tall frills blazed, pulsing with blood as if they were aflame. A cut on one sprayed blood with every beat of the creature’s heart.

  Rutana’s wide spatulate head snapped round and Mara stood to look: Skinner had emerged to stand in the clear. He held his sword close to side. What was this? Surrender? An attempt at parley? She will not pause. Indeed, Rutana writhed her long torso across the broken trunks and tumbled stone blocks after him like a lizard chasing a meal. Her eyes blazed carmine into the night as if lit from within. Her head arched back, mouth opening, hissing like a waterfall. Still Skinner did not move. Dive! Mara urged. Can’t you see she will take you?

  The head snapped down, the mouth ploughing the ground to send up a great wash of stones and sand. Then it rose, gulping, the gullet working. Of Skinner there remained no sign. Mara stared, searching. He must have leaped. He must have. It was a trap – a ruse to draw her in for a thrust. It must have been. Yet still he did not show himself. And Rutana now slowly waddled away to return to the jungle. Her paws pushed awkwardly at the wet mud as she levered her immense bulk off the slope to enter the trees.

  Mara stood for some time searching the hillside. Her Warren faded as her concentration fell away. Her robes pulled at her, sodden and heavy. Raindrops still fell on to her nose and cheeks. At least she believed the drops to be rain. Footsteps came sliding heavily towards her and she turned, wooden, not even lifting her arms. It was Petal. His shirt, vest and trousers hung just as wet as her robes. He carefully edged his way down to stand next to her.

  ‘I am sorry, Mara,’ he offered.

  ‘This cannot be. How could … It’s not true.’

  ‘Ardata’s gift could be no defence against that.’

  ‘Shut up, Petal,’ she said wearily. ‘He stepped out deliberately. He saw he couldn’t…’ She trailed off. Something was happening far off in the depths of the trees.

  Some distance off, Rutana’s grating thunderous shriek sounded once more. A new note seemed to have entered it: alarm and pain. Mara’s gaze flew to Petal, eager and hopeful. The big mage just pulled at his lower lip, his expression doubtful.

  Further bellows sounded, each more panicked and ragged with agony than the one before. Mara now nodded to herself. She drew her robes tighter against the night’s cold. ‘Get a fire going,’ she told Petal.

  ‘Why is it always—’

  ‘Do it. Now. He’ll need to warm up.’

  ‘We don’t know…’

  She waved him off. ‘Go.’

  The mage looked at her for a time while her gaze searched the jungle’s edge. He drew a great heaving sigh that raised and dropped his layered shirts and vest like a vast tent. Then he went to collect dry wood.

  * * *

  The fire had been roaring for some time before he appeared. It was long past the midnight. Mara sat with her knees drawn tight to her chest, as close to the heat as she dared. Steam rose from her robes as they dried. She knew she would stink of smoke but she hated wearing damp clothes. Petal sat farther back; he had his Warren raised as he guarded them.

  The fire drew him as she knew it would. He came striding out of the utter darkness of the night and for a moment it appeared to her as if the night itself clung to his glimmering black mail. So must the Suzerain of Night have appeared, she thought, almost awed.

  Closer, he looked quite haggard: gore and dried fluids smeared him. His helm was gone, his hair plastered and filmed in mucus. Crowding the fire, he held out his gauntleted hands to warm them. In his right fist was the broken grip and hilts of Black’s two-handed bastard sword.

  ‘You broke the blade,’ Mara observed.

  ‘He’ll be angry,’ Petal added.

  ‘I’ll buy him a new one,’ Skinner answered, his voice a croak, and he threw it down and started awkwardly pulling off the gauntlets. Mara quickly rose to help. Petal sat watching them. His lips drew tight and he threw more broken branches on to the fire.

  The next morning Mara awoke after dawn as the light found her face. Smoke from the smouldering fire trailed almost straight up into a clear sky still painted pink and orange. Mist cloaked the jungle verge. She sat up to find Petal sitting still where he’d been when she’d fallen asleep. Skinner lay in his armour curled close to the fire.

  ‘You stood watch?’ she asked, surprised.

  He nodded. ‘The fire may have drawn others.’

  ‘They are quite dispirited, I should think.’

  He stood, suddenly, alarming Mara who turned, her Warren snapping high. A single bedraggled figure came clambering among the fallen tree trunks and scattered stone blocks. He moved in a curious hopping and twitching manner that she knew all too well. ‘Gods, no. Not him.’

  ‘It would seem impossible to escape the fellow,’ Petal observed as if fascinated.

  ‘King in Chains indeed!’ the priest called as he neared, cackling. He rubbed his hands together, laughing anew. He still wore only his dirty loincloth. His hair was a rat’s nest, only now patchy as if it were falling out in tufts.

  Good gods. The man has mange! And gods know what else …

  He came to the fire and warmed himself, twitching and flinching in an odd dance. It might have been a trick of the firelight, but Mara thought she saw things writhing and snaking beneath his flesh. ‘Another shard will soon be vulnerable,’ he announced. ‘We must be ready to move.’

  ‘Where?’ Petal asked.

  ‘Far off. On another continent. But no matter. Our lord will send us.’

  No, your lord, Mara silently corrected.

  ‘You said King in Chains,’ Petal observed from where he sat. ‘Surely you mean King of Chains?’

  ‘Not at all,’ the little man said in his taut, nervous delivery. ‘Not by any measure.’ He gestured to Skinner where he lay insensate with exhaustion. ‘When he acc
epted the role he doubled his chains though he knows it not.’

  ‘Doubled them?’ Mara asked, alarmed.

  The man now peered about, frowning. ‘Where are your soldiers? We will need soldiers. There will be much fighting this time.’ He turned on Petal, demanded, ‘Where are they?’

  The mage pointed aside with the stick he was using to poke the ground. ‘Headed east.’

  ‘East!’ the priest squawked. He hopped from bare filthy foot to foot. ‘This is not good. We must go. Catch them. Be ready for our lord’s call.’

  Petal lumbered to his feet, stretched his back. Peering down, he regarded the prone form of Skinner for a time. ‘You can wake him,’ he told the priest.

  * * *

  It was becoming ever more difficult for Pon-lor to walk. He had selected a stick that he leaned upon with each step. Everything was now blurry to his vision. Sweat dripped from his nose, coursed down his chest and back beneath his filthy shirt. He knew he’d been missing some sort of nutrients, or had been systematically poisoning himself with what he ate. As to progress … he had no idea where he was headed.

  He raised a hand to his eyes: the flesh held a yellowed hue; the hand shook, palsied. Fever and infection. Twin illnesses his training could not address. So, the Himatan shall claim me after all. I shall be taken in by the soil and drawn up to add to the sum total mass of trees and plants.

  Yet he laboured on, for he was Thaumaturg, master of this house of bones and the muscle and sinew that moved it to his will. He blinked now at his surroundings: he seemed to have stumbled into some sort of concourse, road or processional way. The great stone heads that dotted the jungle lined it. Some had sunk to their stern glaring eyes. Others had been entirely overgrown by moss and tangles of roots and vines until only the corner of one disapproving carved mouth was visible.

  He continued on and it struck him that the ground was very flat here, the heads widely dispersed, and he wondered whether he had found the site of an ancient settlement or ceremonial centre. Why should these peoples have built tall towers or walls if they had no use for them? It struck him that it was an innate bias of those who valued such architecture to impose these expectations upon others. Why should extensive architectural achievements be the guiding measure of a culture’s or society’s greatness? Surely there must be other such measures – an infinity of them.

  Pon-lor paused to wipe a soaked sleeve across his slick face. The questions one might ask of these mute stone witnesses were more a measure of one’s own preoccupations and values than those of the interrogated.

  A flight of tall white birds burst skyward from nearby. Their shadows rippled over him and he paused, peering up. The ground shook. He tottered, nearly falling, braced himself against one of the cyclopean stone heads.

  Then a great grinding and scraping of rock over rock echoed from all about. Trees atop a nearby head groaned, tilting, to fall with ground-shuddering crashes. The statue beneath his hand moved in a juddering grinding of granite. He backed away, stunned, peering up.

  As he watched, the carved eyelids rose, revealing the carved orbs of eyes complete with pupil and iris.

  I am mad with fever.

  Then the stone lips parted, scraping, and a voice boomed forth making him clap his hands to his ears in agony.

  ‘He is returned,’ the voice announced. ‘Praise to his name. The High King returneth.’

  Pon-lor spun as if to see the man behind him. The jungle blurred, whirling, and he nearly fell.

  ‘All hail Kallor, High King. May his rule endure the ages.’

  The stone mouth stilled. The sightless eyes ground closed.

  Pon-lor wiped a hand down his face. Had he imagined that? Yet that name – that forbidden name! Kallor. Ancient ruler, so some sources hinted, of all these lands of which Ardata’s demesnes had been but a mere distant corner. Over the intervening centuries the jungle appeared to have engulfed everything.

  Wood snapped explosively overhead and he glanced up, flinching, to catch a glimpse of a tree looming directly over him. Then came a blow, and darkness.

  * * *

  He awakened to tears dropping onto his face. It was night, pitch black, and the tears were warm rain. Something was crushing down upon him – the limbs of some giant held him like a smothering blanket. He wiggled free.

  Something was wrong with his body. He was having trouble standing and seeing. Everything seemed jagged and misaligned in his vision. He raised a hand and gently probed his head. Sizzling agony erupted as his hand encountered wetness and a hard edge of bone like the sharp rim of a cracked pot.

  My head is a broken jar. Is all that I am spilling out?

  He made an effort to straighten. He tried to run his hands down his sodden robes but found that he could not raise his right arm. Yet am I not Thaumaturg? Am I not trained to set aside the demands of the body and carry on? Starving, diseased, or broken … it matters not. The flesh obeys the will. Thus it has always been.

  He urged his foot forward in a shuffling, dragging step. Then the other.

  She was right. The witch had it right all along. He was coming and they would be driven to panic. Only one thing could forestall him. That one thing they had tried in their utter desperation to rid themselves of him more than an age ago.

  He raised his face to the driving fat drops of rain, saw there behind passing cloud cover the lurking emerald banner that was the Stranger.

  And there is their ammunition.

  They will call it down as they did before and it will break the world.

  Like a cracked pot.

  He must let her know that she was right. He shuffled on.

  At some point the rain had stopped and the sun had risen and now he found he walked a wide grassy field flanked by woods. But this jungle was not the untamed wilderness of Himatan. It was a cultured forest of alternating trees planted or selected to grow in ordered ranks. Beneath and between grew bushes, brush and rows of mixed plants.

  Somehow he knew that each of these plants, trees included, provided food or other resources, and all with enough regularity and bounty to sustain a sizeable population. All without agriculture as he understood it. Children ran by squealing and chasing one another. They wore only simple loin wraps, their heads were shaved, and they waved to him as they ran. He tried to speak but found he could only mumble. Some of the children carried baskets and long poles with hooks at their ends. As he passed they offered mangoes, star fruit, citrus, and many other fruits he could not name.

  Breaking up the leagues of orchards were long reservoirs that served fields bearing the stubble of rice harvesting. This strange dreamland appeared to be a prosperous, peaceful region. And here and there, dotting the side of the track he walked, stood the cyclopean heads all bearing the carved imprint of the same face, ever watchful, ever present. The face of Kallor, the High King.

  So this was a dream of the Kallorian Empire – one of humanity’s first. Brought low by hubris and insane lust for power. Or so the legends would have it. It was perhaps a drifting memory of the place. A memory snagged by the crack in his head.

  The day waned, darkening quickly into a swift nightfall. He passed huts now. Simple affairs of bamboo and leaves standing on poles. Yet all was quiet. The children had disappeared. He crossed close to the open front of one such hut and there within he glimpsed the family asleep. The children and parents lay all sprawled together across the floor. Something dark dripped from the threshold in a steady stream.

  Pon-lor tottered away; his head hurt. Further men, women and children lay about the village. In their discoloured faces and strained gasping expressions he recognized the symptoms of a common ingested poison, one easy to prepare.

  A lone figure, an old man, emerged from one hut. He started towards him. He carried a gourd before him in both hands. In his tear-stained cheeks and wide staring eyes Pon-lor read desolation.

  ‘They must not take him,’ the old man told him, pleading. ‘Why must they do this thing?’

  He tr
ied to speak but his tongue would not move.

  The old man dropped the gourd, clasped a hand at his throat. ‘I volunteered to be the one,’ he explained, weeping. ‘I would not lay this terrible burden upon anyone else.’ He fell to his knees, peered up at Pon-lor through tears. ‘We would not live … He is ours…’ He swayed, convulsing, gasping for breath.

  Pon-lor watched, knowing the poison’s mounting grasp of the man’s body. He saw the panic as the diaphragm muscles seized. The man, or ghost, or delusion, toppled then to lie immobile. Pon-lor shuffled on. All this was long gone. Ashes. Ages gone. High above, the Visitor arced like a flaming brand tossed by the gods.

  One soon to fall.

  Ahead, the gouged track shot arrow-straight like a line worked into the ground in an immense league-spanning earthwork. The way seemed to point to some sort of convergence of paths far beyond what he could immediately see. Yet converge they did.

  He would trace it just as he would the crack in his head.

  * * *

  Two days after falling into the river Ina felt very weak. So weak in fact that she had a difficult time keeping up with T’riss – who set a very slow pace indeed. Her wounded hand blazed with pain. Her nerves there felt as if they were on fire. Yet the grass cuts did not appear infected.

  She walked with T’riss, saying nothing, though drops of sweat ran from behind her mask and her breaths came tight and short with suppressed pain. So gripped was she on the need to contain the agony that it was some time before she noticed that T’riss was speaking to her.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ she gasped, flinching her surprise.

  The Enchantress regarded her steadily as they walked. She brushed aside the broad heavy fronds of a giant fern. ‘Are you unwell?’ she finally enquired, as if suggesting something utterly alien.