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

  Cull waved the back of his hand at the outline. ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘You must deal with them!’

  ‘Certainly.’

  As they walked on, Kyle following Cull who did not slow, the last thing the shade said was a murmured, ‘We are ashamed.’

  Kyle decided not to ask what all that had been about.

  They only stopped when Cull led him to what was an obvious campsite, complete with a lean-to of cut boughs and a ring of stones. The big fellow set to cutting wood with his bearded axe. Kyle followed his lead by gathering more wood. It was dark when Cull got the fire going by taking out a tinderbox and striking flint to iron over a bed of dried moss.

  Once the fire was sure, the big fellow sat back. Overhead, the aurora was out in wide draping bands of green and yellow frilled in pink.

  ‘That was ancestor,’ Cull said, throwing another stick on to the fire and raising a great gust of sparks that flew up into the night. Kyle watched them rise on and on, as if they would join the aurora itself. He decided that Cull was talking about the shade. ‘Tell me to kill all trespassers.’ He poked a thin stick into the fire then pointed it at him. ‘Like you.’

  ‘Thank you for not killing me.’

  The giant frowned at the glowing tip of the stick. ‘I have enough killing. Besides,’ he shrugged, ‘too many come.’ He eased himself back against a log. ‘Too many to kill.’

  ‘They are coming for the gold.’

  The fellow swished the glowing tip through the air, making circles and snake-like lines. He seemed delighted by the designs. ‘Yes, the gold.’

  ‘Why don’t you just let them take it?’

  ‘Gold in the land. They take the land.’

  He felt like a fool. ‘Yes. Sorry.’

  ‘I’m sorry for them.’

  Kyle shook his head in amazement. ‘They are running you from your land and you are sorry for them?’

  Cull continued swishing the stick. ‘Gold least important thing in land.’

  ‘Really? Then what is the most important?’

  The fellow thought about this for a time. Frowning, he peered about at their forested surroundings, his brows crimping. Finally, a big infectious grin split his lips, and he offered, ‘Life.’

  Kyle thought that a strange answer but decided he wouldn’t argue with his host. They slept then. For a time the blazing banners of the aurora kept him awake. It reminded him of Korel and the lights that glowed above the Strait of Storms. But they had been far fainter, more diffuse. Here they appeared so bright and low he thought he could pinch them between his fingers.

  Over the next three days of climbing snow-patched slopes, Kyle decided that his host was very strange indeed. The man didn’t seem to think the way he did. At times he seemed a child in a giant’s body; at other times he was just plain odd. When Kyle remarked on the great rush of run-off streaming down the rock faces and the gathering summer, the man answered: ‘Sun not the enemy. Time the enemy.’

  Another day Kyle found him standing very still and solemn as he appeared to be doing nothing more than studying the mossy forest floor. He stood with him for a time, but soon became bored and moved off to sit and rest for the unannounced, extended stop. Cull woke him with a gentle touch. Kyle started up, peered back to where the man had stood for so long. ‘What is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Powerful ancestor fall there long ago,’ Cull answered, and started off.

  Curious, Kyle crossed to the spot, which appeared no different from any other patch of needle-strewn ground. Then he noticed how the dirt was darker here, far wetter than the surrounding earth. He knelt and brushed aside the leaf bracken and litter. Something gleamed amid the dirt. He dug deeper into the dark wet humus. A layer of it came away in a swathe. Below gleamed a black smooth face of buried ice. Kyle flinched backward in shock and surprise. His hand throbbed, numb yet tingling. How like the Stormriders – but different. Theirs had been an alien cold, seemingly anathema to flesh and blood as he knew it. This was not so alien. Frigid, yes, but somehow far more comprehensible. Like … well, like a snow-capped mountain peak: formidable and inhospitable, but also majestic and awe-inspiring at the same time.

  ‘Little brother,’ Cull called, sounding far away.

  Kyle shook his head and blinked to clear his vision, as if emerging from a dream. ‘Yes, sorry. Coming.’

  Towards late afternoon, they exited the forest to push through the tall weeds and saplings of what had once been cleared land. Fields, Kyle decided, now abandoned – or neglected – to fall back to the forest from where they’d been taken. The fields climbed a rising slope that allowed a magnificent view of the haze-shrouded lowlands.

  Cull led him to the burnt ruin of what once must have been a very long hall. Only the butt-ends of its huge logs had escaped the fire, many as broad in girth as a large shield. Its fieldstone foundation lay as a mute line of rock among the weeds. The Iceblood waved to the fallen shell. ‘Behold, Greathall.’

  Kyle did not reply at once. He took a wondering breath. ‘Very … impressive…’

  Studying the wreckage, Cull nodded his solemn agreement. ‘Yes. Very impressive.’ He motioned Kyle onward. ‘Come. We find wife.’ He led the way round the ruins to the rear. Here was the much more modest structure of a cabin of smaller logs, chinked, with a sod roof. Smoke curled from a roof-hole.

  ‘Ho! Wife!’ Cull boomed out.

  A crash such as a dropped plate or bowl sounded from within. The door of adzed planks was thrust open. A woman of a scale to match Cull emerged, towering and broad, bearing an even greater tangle of wild unkempt auburn hair. She wore a tanned leather jerkin, trousers and moccasins, and a knife the size of a shortsword was sheathed at her side.

  ‘You!’ she called, glaring.

  Cull raised his hands defensively. ‘Now, now…’

  She started for him, a hand raised as if to clout him on the head. Cull backed away. Spying Kyle, the woman halted, surprised. ‘Who is this?’

  ‘He—’

  ‘A lowlander? You bring a lowlander here!’

  ‘I—’

  ‘Are you an even greater fool than everyone knows?’

  ‘We—’

  She turned on Kyle. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Ah, Kyle, ma’am. I don’t have to stay. I could just—’

  ‘Shut up.’ She thrust a finger at Cull. ‘Find the cows. They’ve wandered off again.’

  Cull bowed low. ‘Yes, my chick.’ He headed off.

  ‘Why did you bring him?’ she called after him.

  ‘Because he is Lost!’ Cull shouted back, and laughed. He continued on, chortling to himself as he went.

  The Iceblood woman now cast her sceptical eye to Kyle. ‘What did my fool of a husband mean, lost?’

  Kyle cleared his throat. ‘Stalker and his brothers, ma’am. We were in the same mercenary outfit years ago. He made me a Lost.’

  The woman grunted at this, eyed him up and down. ‘Hmph. I see it now. So, Stalker made you a Lost, did he?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Well, then. Better make yourself useful.’ She pointed to the trees behind the cabin. ‘There’s a cache back there. We might have a smoked haunch or two left. Bring one in.’

  Kyle inclined his head. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Name’s Yullveig.’

  He nodded again, ‘Yullveig.’

  It took him some time to find the cache. It was a hut very high up in a tree. All the lower branches had been cut away. The ladder that led up to it consisted of staves of wood lashed to the trunk. They were fixed very far apart. After thrusting the haunch of venison into a burlap sack the only way he could manage the descent was to tie the sack to his belt.

  He returned to the cabin and knocked on the timber jamb. Yullveig invited him in. The little furniture within – a table, chairs of lashed wood, and a bed – were all on a scale that made him feel an infant. It didn’t help that when she urged him to sit his feet barely touched the dirt floor.

  ‘I must
apologize for Cull,’ she said as she minded the pot simmering over the stone hearth. The steam wafting from it smelled of parsnips.

  ‘Apologize? For what?’

  The answer brought a small smile to her otherwise severe lips. ‘He fell climbing a cliff when he was a child.’ She tapped her head. ‘Never been the same since.’

  ‘Ah. I see.’

  ‘But he has a good heart,’ she said, adding, ‘Too good, his brothers said.’

  Kyle peered about the rather cramped cabin. ‘There are just the two of you?’

  ‘A son and a daughter. Baran and Erta.’ She started slicing the haunch. ‘Cull left with two sons and returned with one. Not that I am complaining. He left at my urging.’ She pointed the knife at the remains of the Greathall. ‘In his absence the hall was burned and everyone killed by lowland raiders. Just the four of us now.’

  ‘Yet Cull won’t kill the trespassers.’

  ‘No. He says death does not erase death.’ She cast him a significant glance. ‘A view not popular here among the Holdings, you can imagine. Our son did not understand. Damned him as touched. He’s off fighting now and Erta with him. Defending the Holding.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  Her gaze snapped to him. ‘Sorry? Why?’

  ‘That he did not understand your husband’s choice. I do.’

  She nodded as she trimmed. ‘Yes. I see it in you. The blood-price.’

  ‘Blood-price? I owe no blood-price.’

  The woman snorted, almost derisive. ‘You lowlanders and your fixation upon vengeance, vendetta, honour and debts owed.’ She waved the carving knife. ‘That is the cheapest and simplest of blood-prices. It is self-aggrandizing. Self-righteous. And self-defeating. No, I speak of the only real cost of blood that matters – the price it exacts from the one who spills it. I see that within you and I respect it.’

  ‘Yet there are those who think nothing of spilling blood.’

  She nodded. ‘There will always be such. They are the enemies of order among people. They must prove their worthiness to enter into any accord. And if they fail…’ she shrugged, ‘someone must take it upon themselves to drive the dogs off.’

  ‘I think there are many dogs braying at the borders of your Holding, Yullveig.’

  She laughed aloud at that. ‘I think you are right.’ She set a wooden bowl before him. It contained a splash of the boiled parsnips, slices of venison, and a portion of heavy dark bread.

  ‘Should we not wait for Cull?’

  ‘No. There is no telling when he might return – if at all. He comes and goes of his own pleasing. I am used to it. Indeed, it would gall me to have him here underfoot at all times.’

  Kyle could not restrain himself any longer. He was famished, and tucked into the offering as if he were one of those exiled dogs himself. She watched him for a time, clearly taking pleasure from his appetite.

  ‘You wish to try to find Stalker Lost, yes?’

  Kyle nodded, his mouth full.

  Yullveig thought about this while she cleared up. ‘It will be difficult,’ she began, after a long silence. ‘The Losts are far to the east. You must cross all the surviving Holdings to reach them. You will probably be killed out of hand.’ She crossed her arms and stared down at him. ‘I suggest you return to the lowlands and journey east from there.’

  Kyle could not keep from shaking his head. After coming all this way? ‘That will not be so easy either.’

  ‘Less dangerous than the Holdings, I think.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Yullveig did not argue the point further. ‘Sleep here tonight. Rest. Tomorrow I will escort you to the edge of the Holdings. You can make your way from there.’

  ‘Well … thank you, Yullveig. I am grateful for your kindness.’ A thought occurred and he ventured a question. ‘Did you say surviving Holdings?’

  ‘Yes. Far more existed once. Larger Holdings covered the south. They extended down all the way to what you call the Bone Peninsula and the Dread Sea. I and my daughter Erta are from one such. The Fanyar, we were named. Gone now with the retreat of the cold and ice. Cull took us in when others would not.’

  ‘I am sorry, Yullveig. I did not know.’

  She shrugged again. ‘Few do in this day and age.’

  Kyle did not know what to say after that. Yullveig went to the rear of the cabin. ‘We have a few hides and blankets. You can sleep by the hearth.’

  ‘My thanks.’

  ‘Save your thanks till the morning – the nights are very cold up here.’

  Kyle did not doubt her. And true enough, no matter how closely he crowded the stones of the hearth, no warmth seemed to reach him through the frigid bite of the night air.

  * * *

  In the morning, Yullveig had no hot tea or drink to offer. She handed over slices of the smoked venison wrapped in burlap, then collected an immense spear from next to the door and headed out. Kyle followed. They spoke little the entire time; Yullveig proved a far more sombre guide than her voluble husband. She struck a south-east route and four days’ hard journeying brought them to a stretch of forest that betrayed patches of recent clearing.

  ‘Homesteaders,’ she explained.

  Kyle listened but heard no reports of further chopping, nor voices calling out. He wondered if Baran and Erta had been through recently.

  ‘You are on your own from here, cousin. Give our regards to the Losts.’

  ‘I shall. Give my thanks to Cull, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes. Fare you well. Oh,’ she gestured to his side, ‘I’d cover a weapon such as that if I were you.’

  ‘Ah – yes. I usually do. Goodbye.’

  Yullveig turned and jogged off. She disappeared in what seemed an instant among the dark trunks of the spruce and pine. He thought there must be some sort of magic in how these Icebloods came and went so quietly and suddenly here within their Holdings.

  He did indeed wrap the sword in leather before heading into the clearing. But he kept it at his side in case he had call to use it. He travelled easily down among the foothills; parties crossed his path now and then, but none challenged or harassed him. He supposed he looked too much like what he was: just another ragged fortune-hunter.

  He met more and more gold-chasers the further he went. They were a friendly lot away from the actual bearing fields and stream beds. Some invited him to join them at their fires. They told tall tales of the difficulties of their passages north, and of the hard knocks and precious few rewards since. Every day Kyle listened for the mention of a fierce warrior-woman, a Shieldmaiden – for most of the men and women he met hailed from nearby Genabackis, and would know her as such.

  The trails that had been newly tramped out of the wilderness led him down to the shores of the Sea of Gold, and a rambling tent city its fortune-hunter founders named, ironically perhaps, Wrongway.

  At a tent-tavern, he heard that a band of Malazan marauders had attacked and half burned the place to the ground. After this, the thug who ran the town, one Lying Gell, died of a mysterious knife-thrust and most of the gold-hunters decamped to join the crowd pressing the siege of the last independent local settlement, Mantle. The prospect of loot on hand, it seemed, was preferable to trying to track it down and dig it up. Kyle reflected that an invasion of fortune-hunters had now made the transition into a plain invasion. Inevitable, he supposed, when these rootless blades appeared to outnumber the locals by far.

  ‘Who are the leaders?’ he asked the crowded table.

  It turned out the captains were from all over, though none were Malazan, given the recent attack – which everyone seemed to regard as some sort of betrayal. A betrayal of what, Kyle couldn’t quite understand. There was a Lether captain who called himself Marshal Teal; a number of ex-ship’s captains who’d kept their crews together, and a Genabackan troop pulled together by a woman who’d actually served in the north, under the Warlord Caladan Brood.

  ‘This woman,’ Kyle asked, ‘what’s her name?’

  The fortune-hunters glanc
ed to one another, uncertain. One fellow spoke up. ‘Don’t know her name,’ he offered. ‘Only know what they call her.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘They call her the Shieldmaiden.’

  And Kyle sat back, sipping his drink of watered ale. Lyan. Served under Brood? Neglected to mention that … But then, she knew he’d served with the Malazans, didn’t she?

  He stood from the table.

  ‘Headed out?’ someone asked.

  Kyle finished his drink and saluted the table. ‘Yes. Going to join up.’

  * * *

  The seventh day after they entered the Sea of Dread, a long low vessel came storming out of the west to intercept them. The Crimson Guard led the convoy of twelve in their captured local raider ship, which Captain Ghelath insisted on rechristening Mael’s Forbearance.

  The strange vessel was long and sleek, and moved with extraordinary speed – all the more astonishingly as she showed no sail nor sweeps. Like a shot arrow, it darted straight for the Forbearance and pulled up alongside, slowing to match the ponderous pace of the sweeps that pulled the Forbearance along, as there was no wind to speak of.

  A lone figure straightened from the deck. It was a thin old man, mostly bald, wrapped in a ragged cloak. ‘Permission to come aboard,’ he called up in a reedy voice.

  Gwynn, next to Shimmer, muttered: ‘That vessel is soaked in magery.’

  ‘Raise your Warren,’ she answered, and signed likewise to Petal and Blues.

  A rope ladder was lowered. The foreign vessel manoeuvred alongside. The old man climbed aboard – quite vigorously for such an ancient. K’azz came forward to meet him. The fellow scanned the deck with eyes tiny and dark, like deep wells.

  ‘What can we do for you?’ K’azz asked.

  ‘You can surrender this vessel and all those behind to us.’

  ‘I’m sorry…’ K’azz began.

  The old man snapped up a wizened hand. ‘Do not argue. And do not resist. We will destroy—’ The fellow stopped himself, his gaze narrowing. He murmured, ‘Wait a moment…’

  Someone very big and sturdy brushed past Shimmer: Bars pushing his way forward. ‘Just a minute,’ he called.