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 accepted 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 tried 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.
Ina considered denying it, or dismissing the situation as minor, but her duties as bodyguard demanded that she acknowledge her weakened state – and potential failure to serve adequately. She drew her fingers across her sweaty slick brow above her mask. ‘Yes, m’lady. I feel … quite unwell.’
‘Indeed …’ It appeared to Ina that the Enchantress was struggling with the concept of unwellness. ‘You are sick?’ she finally asked.
‘I do not know what it is, m’lady.’ She held out her painful hand. ‘Something in the river perhaps.’
T’riss halted. She cursed beneath her breath and Ina overheard terms that would make a labourer blush. ‘The river. Of course. My apologies, Ina. It is difficult for us … for me … to keep such things in mind.’
‘Such things?’ Ina echoed dully. She felt almost faint from the lancing agony now creeping up her arm.
The Enchantress took her good arm at the elbow. She scanned the dense undergrowth. ‘Now …’ she murmured as if preoccupied. ‘Who is closest?’ She pointed. ‘Ah! There. They will do nicely.’
It was becoming impossible for Ina to maintain her concentration. ‘I’m sorry, m’lady … but what are you pointing at?’
‘This is earlier than I had wanted, but it will have to do. Things never go quite the way one would prefer …’
‘I’m sorry, m’lady …?’
‘Shush.’
Ina flinched, clutching for her sword as the surroundings blurred. Was she passing out? Or had she? What had happened? One moment they were sunk within a dense fern meadow and now they stood in grounds dominated by giant trees, the under-canopy relatively clear. And the air felt closer, much more humid and hot. Or perhaps that was just her.
The Enchantress guided her by the arm and they came to the edge of a relatively fast-flowing stream. ‘We’ll wait here,’ she said.
‘Wait?’ Ina asked, dreamily. She fought now to remain conscious. Something was dulling her mind and it seemed to be deepening as the pain increased. ‘May I sit?’ she asked.
‘Of course,’ T’riss answered, sounding distant amid a roaring in Ina’s ears. ‘Not long now.’
*
Murk knew more trouble was headed their way when he spotted two scouts, Sweetly and Squint, slogging back up the stream. They conferred with Burastan who signed for a halt to the march. Then came what he knew would be coming: she waved him and Sour forward from where they walked alongside the litter.
‘What is it?’ he asked as they joined the scouts.
‘Two civilians ahead,’ Squint drawled, talking for Sweetly, as usual. ‘Non-locals.’
‘So?’
Squint shrugged. ‘They’re waitin’ there like we was a scheduled carriage ride or somethin’. One’s got the look of a mage.’ He paused, glancing to Sweetly who gave the ghost of a nod for him to continue. ‘Other’s masked – like a Seguleh.’
Murk felt his brows rising very high. ‘Really? That’s … really unusual.’
‘Not for this madhouse,’ Burastan muttered, half aside. She looked to Murk. ‘What do you sense?’
‘Nothing.’ He turned to Sour. ‘You?’ His p
artner was hunched, head down, shifting from foot to foot as if uneasy. ‘Well? Sour?’
He glanced up, startled. ‘Ah! I sense ’em. She’s not, ah, hostile.’
‘Didn’t say they was women,’ Squint said and he gave Sour a strong taste of his namesake.
Sour shrank beneath the glare. ‘Like I said. I sense ’em.’
Burastan shared Squint’s measuring glower for a time, then glanced back upstream to where Yusen followed with the main column. ‘All right. Let’s parley. See what they want. Sweetly, Squint, send your boys and girls wide in case there’s more of them.’ They nodded and slogged off. ‘You two, you’re with me.’ She started forward.
Murk followed behind. He shot angry glances to his partner who dragged along even more reluctantly than usual. ‘What’s with you?’ he whispered. ‘You were all happy to be sloshing through the water but now you look like you’re headed to a firing squad. Is there something you’re not telling me?’ He asked because he knew there damn well was.
Sour shook his head. Then he did something very strange: he pushed back his muddy slick hair and brushed away some of the twigs and leaves stuck to his arms and bulging pot-belly stomach. Murk eyed him up and down. What in the Abyss has got into the man?
They rounded a bend in the stream and there they were on one bank: a dumpy middle-aged woman in dirty robes and a lean swordswoman, sitting slumped, cradling her right arm, a half-mask on her face just like a Seguleh. Can’t be real, was Murk’s first thought.
Burastan signed a halt. ‘Who are you?’ she called.
‘I am Rissan, out of Tali,’ the middle-aged woman said in a calm clear voice. Sour, Murk noted, jumped at the name. ‘This is my companion, Ina, from Genabackis. She is ill and in need of healing. You would have my gratitude if you could see your way to curing her infection.’
Burastan grunted, unimpressed. She crossed her arms. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I could very well ask the same question of a Malazan patrol in the middle of Ardata’s territory, but I shall refrain.’
‘You haven’t answered my question.’
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