Dust of Dreams

by Steven Erikson

  Jarabb was squinting. ‘That is Shelemasa, Warleader.’

  ‘Fine. Her husband and her sons—I’ll take them as slaves and then sell them to a D’ras. Bult’s broken nose, she needs better control of her warriors!’

  ‘They’re just following her lead,’ Jarabb said. ‘She’s worse than a rabid she-wolf.’

  ‘Stop chewing my ear,’ Gall said, wanting to pull a foot out of the stirrup and drive it into the man’s chest—too familiar of late, too smug, too many Hood-damned words and too many knowing looks. After Shelemasa was dealt with, he’d send the pup yelping and turn a blind eye to all the wounded looks sure to follow.

  Jarabb tried a smile which faltered as Gall’s scowl deepened. A moment later the young Tear Runner kicked his horse into motion and rode hard for the shouting, yipping raids.

  Above the sickly smears of smoke the sky was cloudless, a canopy of saturated blue and a baleful sun that seemed to boil in the sky. Flocks of long-tailed birds swooped and cut in erratic patterns, too terrified to land as Khundryl warriors swarmed the ground in all directions. Fat, finger-long locusts crawled through the ruined fields.

  The advance scout troop was returning from up the road, and Gall was pleased to see their disciplined, collected canter, lances shod and upright. Which officer was that one? Making out the leather-wound hoop dangling from the man’s weapon, he knew who it was. Vedith, who had crushed a town garrison early on in the campaign. Heavy losses to his raid, but then, hardly surprising. Young, in that stupid, foolhardy way, but worth taking note of—since he clearly had firm command of his warriors.

  A gesture while they were still some distance away halted all the riders behind Vedith, who then rode up to Gall and reined in. ‘Warleader. A Bolkando army awaits us, two leagues distant. Ten thousand, two full legions, with a supply camp crawling with three times that number. Every stand of trees within a league of them has been cut down. I’d wager they’ve been in place for three or four days.’

  ‘Stupid Bolkando. What value fielding an army that crawls like a bhederin with its legs cut off? We could dance round it and strike straight for the capital. I could drag that King off his throne and plant myself in it sloppy as a drunk, and that would be that.’ He snorted. ‘Generals and commanders understand nothing. They think a battle answers everything, like fists in an alley. Coltaine knew better—war is the means, not the end—the goal is not to wage slaughter—it is to achieve domination in the bargaining that follows.’

  Another scout was riding down from the north, her horse’s hoofs kicking up clods of dirt from the trampled plough-furrows. Hares scattered from her path as she cut through the trampled crops. Gall squinted at her for a moment, and then shifted round in his saddle to glare southward. Yes, there, another rider, in foaming gallop, shouting as he wove through Shelemasa’s whooping mob. The Warleader grunted.

  Vedith had taken note of both riders. ‘We are flanked,’ he said.

  ‘What of it?’ Gall asked, eyes narrowing once more on this young, clever warrior.

  The man shrugged. ‘Even should a fourth element march up our backsides, Warleader, we can slip through the gaps—they’re all on foot, after all.’

  ‘Like a slink between the claws of a hawk. But nothing here can even hope to pluck our tail. Vedith, I give you command of a thousand—yes, fifty raids. Take the north army—they’ll be on the march, dog-tired and choking on dust, likely in column. Give them no time. Sweep and cut, leave them in disarray, and then ride on to their baggage train. Take everything you can carry and burn the rest. Do not lose control of your warriors. Just cut off the enemy’s toes and leave them there, am I understood?’

  Grinning, Vedith nodded. ‘I would hear from that scout,’ he said after a moment.

  ‘Of course you would.’

  Gall saw that Jarabb had caught Shelemasa and both were now riding in the wake of the south scout. He spat to get the taste of the smoke out of his mouth. ‘Duiker’s eyes, what a sorry mess. No one ever learns, do they?’

  ‘Warleader?’

  ‘Would the Bolkando have been content if we had treated them as badly as they treated us? No. Of course not. So, how in their minds did they justify such abuse?’

  ‘They thought they could get away with it.’

  Gall nodded. ‘Do you see the flaw in that thinking, warrior?’

  ‘It’s not hard, Warleader.’

  ‘Have you noticed that it’s the ones who think themselves so very clever that are the stupidest of the lot?’ He tilted in his saddle and loosed a loud, gassy fart. ‘Gods below, the spices they use round here have raised a typhoon in my bowels.’

  The scout from the north arrived, the sweat on her face and forearms coated in dust. ‘Warleader!’

  Gall unslung his own waterskin and tossed it to her. ‘How many and how far away?’

  She paused to drink down a few mouthfuls, and then said above the heavy blows of her horse’s breath, ‘Perhaps two thousand, half of them levies, lightly armoured and ill-equipped. Two leagues away, in column on a too-narrow road.’

  ‘Baggage train?’

  She smiled through all the grit. ‘Not in the middle and not flanked, Warleader. The rearguard’s about three hundred, mixed infantry—looks like the ones with the worst blisters on their feet.’

  ‘And they saw you?’

  ‘No, Warleader, I don’t think so. Their mounted scouts clung close, on the flat farmland to either side of the track. They know there’s raids out in the countryside and don’t want to get stung.’

  ‘Very good. Change mounts and get yourself ready to lead Vedith and his wing to them.’

  Her dark eyes flicked to Vedith in open appraisal.

  ‘Something wrong?’ Gall asked.

  ‘No, Warleader.’

  ‘But he’s young, isn’t he?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘Dismissed,’ Gall said.

  The scout tossed the waterskin back and then rode off.

  Gall and Vedith now awaited the riders from the south.

  Vedith twisted to ease his back, and then said, ‘Warleader, who will lead the force against the southern jaw of this trap?’

  ‘Shelemasa.’

  Seeing the young warrior’s brows lift, Gall said, ‘She needs her chance to mend her reputation—or do you question my generosity?’

  ‘I would not think to do that—’

  ‘You should, Vedith. That’s what the Malazans have taught us, if they’ve taught us anything. A smith’s hammer in the hand, or a sword—it’s all business, and each and every one of us is in it. The side with the most people using their brains is the side that wins.’

  ‘Unless they are betrayed.’

  Gall grimaced. ‘Even then, Vedith, the crows—’

  ‘—give answer,’ Vedith finished. And both men made the gesture of the black wing, silently honouring Coltaine’s name, his deeds and his resolute stand against the worst that humans could do.

  A moment later, Gall swung his horse round to face the scout riding in from the south, and the two warriors pelting to catch up behind him. ‘Shit of the Foolish Dog, look at those two.’

  ‘Are you done with me, Warleader?’

  ‘Yes. Go collect your raids.’ And he leaned out one more time to make wind. ‘Gods below.’

  Still stinging from the Warleader’s tirade, Shelemasa rode hard at the head of her wing. Shouts from behind her measured out the raid sergeants struggling to collect their warriors as the ground grew ever more uneven. Deep furrows scarred the stony hills, and many of those hills had been gouged out—the Bolkando had been mining here, for what Shelemasa had no idea. They skirted steep-sided pits half-filled with tepid water mottled with algae blooms, narrow edges thick with reeds and rushes. Bucket winches slumped above overgrown trenches, their wooden frames grey and bowing and strangled in vines. Hummingbirds darted above the lush crimson flowers dangling from those vines, and everywhere iridescent six-winged insects spun and whirled.

  She hated this place.
The cruel colours made her think of poisons—after all, on the Khundryl Odhan it was the brightest snakes and lizards that were the deadliest. She had seen a jet-black, purple-eyed spider as big as her damned foot only the day before. It had been eating a hare. Nekeh had woken to find the skin of one leg, hip to ankle, completely peeled away by huge amber ants—she hadn’t felt a thing, and now she was raving with fever in the loot train. She’d heard that someone had smelled a flower only to have his nose rot off. No, they needed to be done with this, all of it. Marching with the Bonehunters was all very well, but the Adjunct wasn’t Coltaine, was she? She wasn’t Bult either, not even Duiker.

  Shelemasa had heard about the goring the marines had suffered during the invasion. Like a desert cat thrown into a pit of starving wolves, if the tales were accurate. It was no wonder they’d been squatting in the capital for so long. The Adjunct had Mincer’s luck, that she did, and Shelemasa wanted no part of it.

  They were coming up out of the mining works, and to the south the land levelled out in a floodplain, broken up by blockish stands of bamboo bordered by water-filled ditches and raised tracks. Beyond this ran another row of serried hills, these ones flat-topped and fortified by stone-walled redoubts. Between the fortifications a Bolkando army was forming up, but in obvious disorganization. They’d expected to be one of the trap’s jaws, arriving upon a battle already engaged, the Khundryl muzzle to muzzle with the main force. They’d been planning on driving into an exposed flank.

  For all that, she could see they’d be hard to dislodge from those hills, especially with the enfilading forts. Even worse, she was outnumbered by at least two to one.

  Shelemasa slowed her horse, and then reined in on the edge of the bamboo plantation. She waited for her officers to close on her.

  Jarabb—who had been verbally flayed almost as fiercely as Shelemasa—was the first to arrive. ‘Commander, we won’t knock them off that, will we?’

  Damned puffed-up messenger-boy. ‘When did you last ride to battle?’

  She saw him flinch.

  ‘If you were my son,’ she said, ‘I would’ve dragged you out of the women’s huts long ago. I’ve got no problem with you wearing whatever it is you wear under that armour, it’s the fact that Gall cast a soft eye on you, Jarabb, and that’s not served you well. We are at war, you simpering coodle-ape.’ She turned as her six sub-wing captains rode up. ‘Hanab,’ she called to one, a veteran warrior whose bronze helm was a stylized crow’s head, ‘tell me what you see?’

  ‘An old border is what I see,’ the man said. ‘But the forts got dismantled everywhere but on those tels there. So long as the army stays where they are, they’re stuck like a knuckle under a rug. All we need to do is keep them put.’

  Shelemasa looked to another captain, a tall, hunch-shouldered man with a vulpine face. ‘And how, Kastra, do we do that?’

  The man slowly blinked. ‘We scare them so badly the hills they’re on start running brown.’

  ‘Draw up the horse-archers,’ Shelemasa ordered. ‘On to the slopes. Start bristling the fools. We’ll spend the day harrying them and piling up wounded—until those forts are nothing more than hospitals. Come the night, we send raids into their baggage camps, and maybe a few to fire the forts since those roofs I see inside are thatched.’ She scanned her officers. ‘Is anyone here satisfied with just pinning the idiots in place?’

  Jarabb cleared his throat. ‘The Warleader wants the threat delayed long enough to stop being a threat, Commander.’

  ‘Half the army up there are levies,’ said Hanab. ‘Skirmishers. Deploying them against light cavalry would be suicide. Yet,’ he added with a sneer, ‘look at how they’re arrayed—five deep in front of the precious heavy infantry.’

  ‘To absorb our arrows, yes,’ Shelemasa said.

  Kastra snorted. ‘The heavies don’t want to dirty their pretty armour.’

  ‘Bloody those skirmishers enough and they’ll break,’ Hanab predicted. ‘Then we can chew and nip the heavies for as long as we like.’

  Shelemasa turned to regard Jarabb. ‘You stay at my side. When we return to the Warleader, you will be carrying the Bolkando commander’s head on your spear.’

  Jarabb managed a sickly smile.

  ‘Look down there,’ Hanab pointed.

  Sliming up from the ditch and on to the raised track was a yellow and black banded centipede, wide as a hand and as long as a sword. They watched it snake to the other side of the track and then vanish into the stand of bamboo.

  Shelemasa spat and then said, ‘Hood take this hole and shit in it.’ After a moment she added, ‘But only after we leave.’

  A thousand warriors at his back, and Vedith did not want to lose a single one of them. Memories of the garrison attack still dogged him. A triumphant victory, yes, but now he had but a handful of companions left with whom he’d shared it, every blistering moment—and even now, should he meet the eyes of one of those warriors, he would see in them the perfect reflection of his own faint disbelief, his own sense of guilt.

  The crows alone chose who lived and who fell. Prayers meant nothing, deeds and vows, honour and dignity, not one weighed more than a mote of dust on fate’s scales. He even had his doubts about courage. Friends had fallen, one moment in his life and the next out of it, reduced to what memories he could conjure, all the incidental moments that had held little meaning until now.

  Vedith didn’t know what to make of it. But he now knew one thing. The warrior’s life was in its essence a lonely one, and the loneliness only got worse, as one came to realize that it was best to hold back, to never draw too close to a companion. Yes, he would still give his life to save any one of them, whether he knew that warrior’s face or not, but he would also simply walk away should one fall. He would move on, and in his eyes the barest hint of lost worlds.

  A thousand warriors behind him. He would send them into battle, and some would die, and he hated that knowledge, he railed against it, but for all that he knew he would not hesitate. Among all warriors, the commander was the loneliest by far, and he could feel that isolation thickening around him, hard as armour, cold as iron.

  Gall. Adjunct Tavore. Coltaine of the Crow Clan. Even that Bolkando fool leading his or her unsuspecting column towards an afternoon of nightmarish horror. This is what we share. And it tastes bitter as blood on the tongue.

  He wondered if the Bolkando King now regretted inviting this war. He wondered if the bastard even cared that his subjects were dying. Or was it just the wound of lost revenues from wasted farms, devoured livestock and the stolen hoards of wealth that stung him now? And the next strangers to camp on his borders? Would he treat them any differently? Would his successor heed the lessons carved out here in bone and flesh?

  The Chain of Dogs had fallen at the foot of Aren. Pormqual’s ten thousand danced on trees. Leoman’s rebel army was destroyed at Y’Ghatan. It was clear—it could not be clearer—that for all there was to learn, no one ever bothered. Each new fool and tyrant to rise up from the mob simply set about repeating the whole fiasco, convinced that they were different, better, smarter. Until the earth drinks deep again.

  He could see the scout riding back towards him.

  It was about to begin. And, suddenly, each breath filling his lungs tasted sweeter than the last, and all that his eyes fixed upon seemed to throb with life. He looked upon things and thought that he had never before seen such colours, such textures—the world was made anew on all sides, but had he come too late to it? Only moments left to savour this gift of glory?

  The day’s end would answer that question.

  Vedith prepared to lead his first army into battle, and in that moment he hated Warleader Gall, who had forced this upon him. He did not want to command a thousand warriors. He did not want the weight of their gazes, the crushing awareness of their faith in him.

  He wished he had the courage to flee.

  But he did not.

  For Gall had chosen well.

  Parasols in their thousand
s, fan-wielding slaves in their tens of thousands, none of this could keep the sweat from the face of Chancellor Rava. He felt as if he was melting in the cauldron of history, one of his own making, alas, a realization that came to him again and again like a fresh heap of coals. He huddled shivering beneath sodden silks as the palanquin he was in tipped precipitously, the bearers struggling to descend this confounded goat track.

  Dust had seeped in to coat every surface, dulling all the ornate gilt edging and deadening the vibrant colours of the plush padding. Dust mingled with the taste of his own sweat in his mouth. He even pissed grit, and worse. ‘Not there, you stupid woman,’ he snapped.

  The D’rhasilhani slave flinched back, ducking her head.

  There would be no stirring awake down below, not today. He understood her desperation to please, and this knowledge made things all the more irritating. Whatever happened to proper, old-fashioned affection? But no, he’d done away with that long ago, as soon as he realized that, as much as he wanted it, he wasn’t prepared to repay it with all that was expected in such an arrangement. Things such as loyalty, consideration, generosity. Those vile details that comprised the pathetic stupidity called reciprocity. He so disliked the notion of expectations—not the ones he held of others doing as they were supposed to do, but the expectations those others shackled upon Rava. Appalling, the nerve of some people.

  The greatest skill one could achieve lay in evading such traps. He was Chancellor to the Realm, ostensibly in service to the King and (heavens forbid!) the Queen; but overriding even this, he stood to serve the kingdom itself, its myriad sources of wealth, prosperity and so on, not to mention its smelly, crab-faced masses of ignorant humanity. Of course, he knew that in truth such notions held all the gravity and import of a toddler’s birthday celebration, when all the effort going into it wouldn’t even be remembered by the child so indulged, and what of the mess afterward?