Too much. No heart could withstand such visions.
Setoc tugged at his arms, fought to keep his hands from his face. ‘We must keep going! The wolves—’
‘Hood take the wolves!’
‘But he won’t, you fool! He won’t—but someone will! We must hurry, Cafal—’
His hand lashed out, caught her flush on the side of her head. The way her neck twisted round as she fell horrified him. Crying out, he crawled to her.
The wolves were ghosts no longer. Blood clouded his eyes, dripped down in a mockery of tears. ‘Setoc!’ She was still a child, still so young, so thin—
The wolves howled, a chorus that deafened him, that drove him face-first into the frozen dirt. Gods, my head! Stop! Stop, I beg you! If he screamed, he could not hear it. The beasts surged on all sides, closing in and in—they wanted him.
They wanted his blood.
From somewhere sounded a hunter’s horn.
Cafal leapt to his feet and ran. Ran from the world.
When her sister passed the wailing boy over, Stavi clutched him to her chest. Storii moved past her as they emerged from the fissure, grasping handfuls of tawny grasses to pull her way up the slope. This range of broken hills was narrow, an island of scoured limestone, and beyond it the land levelled out, flat, with nowhere to hide. She struggled up the tattered slope, gasping, the boy beating at her face with his tiny fists.
They were going to die. She knew that now. Their life in all its loose joy, its perfect security, was suddenly gone. She longed for yesterday, she longed for the solid presence that was her adopted father. Once more the sight of his face, a face wide and weathered, with every feature exaggerated, oversized, his soft eyes that had only ever looked upon his children with love—against the twins, it had seemed anger was impossible. Even disapproval wavered in a heartbeat. They had worked him like river clay, but they had known that beneath that clay there was a thing of iron, a thing of great power. He was a truth, resolute, unbreakable. They worked him because they knew that truth.
Where was he now? What had happened to their mother? Why was Sathand Gril hunting them? Why was he going to kill them?
Storii ran ahead, darting like a hare seeking cover, but there was none to be found. Ghoulish light painted the plain as the Slashes etched the night. A cruel wind cut into their faces, and the mass of storm clouds blotted out the north sky. The sight of her sister’s panic was like a knife in Stavi’s chest—the world was as broken as the hills behind them, as broken as the vicious look in Sathand’s eyes. She could have dropped that rock on his skull—she should have—but the thought of hurting him that much had horrified her. A part of her had wanted to believe that if she could manage to break his shoulder, he would give up, he would return to the camp. She knew now, bleak with despair, that such faith—that all of this could be so easily righted—was ridiculous. Her error in judgement was going to see them all killed.
Hearing Sathand climb out of the fissure, Stavi cried out, running as fast as her legs could carry her. All at once the boy she held went quiet, and his arms wrapped tight round her neck, hands clutching her hair.
He understood as well. Motionless as a doe in the grasses not ten paces from a hunting cat, his eyes wide, his breath panting and hot against the side of her neck.
Tears streamed down her cheeks—he clutched her in the belief that she could protect him, that she could defend his life. But she knew she couldn’t. She wasn’t old enough. She wasn’t fierce enough.
She saw Storii look back over a shoulder, saw her falter—
Sathand’s heavy footfalls were closing fast.
‘Go!’ Stavi shrieked at her sister. ‘Just go!’
Instead, Storii bent down, scooped up a rock, and then sprinted back towards them.
Fierce sister, brave sister. You fool.
They would die together then.
Stavi stumbled, fell to her knees, skinning them on the grasses. The burning pain loosed more tears, and everything blurred. The boy kicked himself free—now he would run, fast as his short legs could take him—
Instead, he stood and faced the charging warrior. The man was not a stranger, was he? No, he was kin. And in the shadow of a kinsman there was safety.
Stavi whispered, ‘Not this time.’
Sathand readied the knife in his hand, slowing now that the chase had come to an end—nowhere for them to go, was there?
His shoulder throbbed, and sharp bolts of pain shot out from his collar bone—he couldn’t even lift that arm—she’d broken it.
But the warrior’s rage was fading. They did not choose their parents—who does? They’re just . . . unlucky. But that is the way of the world. Spawn of rulers inherit more than power—they inherit what happens when that power collapses. When a night of blood is unleashed, and ambition floods black as locust ink.
He saw the stone gripped by one of the girls and nodded, pleased with her defiance. Only half her blood was Barghast, but it had awakened for this. He would have to take her down first.
‘What has happened?’ asked the girl standing beside the boy. ‘Sathand?’
He bared his teeth. The right words now could take the fight out of them. ‘You are orphans,’ he said. ‘Your par—’
The stone was a blur, catching him a glancing blow above his left eye. He cursed in pain and surprise, and then shook his head. Blood ran down into the eye, blinding it. ‘Spirits haunt you!’ He laughed. ‘I’ve taken fewer wounds in battle! But . . . one eye is enough. One working arm, too.’ Sathand edged forward.
The boy’s eyes were wide, uncomprehending. He suddenly smiled and held out his arms.
Sathand faltered. Yes, I’ve taken you up and swung you in the air. I’ve tickled you until you shrieked. But that is done now. He lifted the knife.
The twins stared, unmoving. Would they protect the boy? He suspected they would. With teeth and nails, they would.
We are as we are. ‘I am proud of you,’ he said. ‘Proud of you all. But this must be.’
The boy cried out as if in joy.
Something slammed into his back. He staggered. The knife fell from his hand. Sathand frowned down at it. Why would he drop his weapon? Why was his strength draining away? On his knees, his lone eye finding the boy’s, level at last. No, he’s not looking at me. He’s looking past me. Confusion, a roar of something rushing deep in his skull. The warrior twisted round.
The second arrow took him in the forehead, dead centre, punching through the bone and ploughing into the brain.
He never saw where it came from.
Stavi sank down on watery legs. Her sister ran to their brother and snatched him up. He yelped in delight.
In the greenish gloom, she could see the silhouette of a warrior astride a horse, sixty or more paces away. Something in that seemed unreal, and she struggled to track it down, and then gasped. That arrow. Sathand was turning round—in motion—and yet . . . sixty paces away! In this wind! Her gaze fell to Sathand’s corpse. She squinted at that arrow. I’ve seen the like before. I’ve—Stavi moaned and crawled forward until she could close a hand about the arrow’s shaft. ‘Father made this.’
The rider was closing at a loose canter.
Behind Stavi, her sister said, ‘That’s not Father.’
‘No—but look at the arrows!’
Storii set the boy down once more. ‘I see them. I see them, Stavi.’
As the warrior drew closer, they could see that something was wrong with him—and with his horse. The beast was too gaunt, its hide worn away in patches, its long, stained teeth gleaming, the holes of its eyes lightless, lifeless.
The rider was no better. But he held a horn bow, and within a saddle quiver a dozen or so of Onos Toolan’s arrows were visible. A cowl was draped over the warrior’s head, hiding what was left of his face and seemingly impervious to the gale. He let his horse slow to a walk, and then halted it ten paces away with a twitch of the reins.
He seemed to study them, and Stavi caught an instan
t’s blurred spark of a single eye. ‘The boy, yes,’ he said in Daru—but it was Daru with a Malazan accent. ‘But not you two.’
A chill crept over Stavi, and she felt her twin’s hand slip into hers.
‘That,’ he said after a moment, ‘perhaps came out wrong. What I meant was, I see him in the boy, but not in you two.’
‘You knew him,’ Storii accused. She pointed at the quiver. ‘He made those! You stole them!’
‘He made them, yes, as a gift to me. But that was long ago. Before you were born.’
‘Toc the Younger,’ whispered Stavi.
‘He spoke of me?’
That this warrior was undead did not matter. Both girls rushed forward, one to either side, to hug his withered thighs. At their touch, he might have flinched, but then he reached out with his hands. Hesitated, only to settle them on the heads of the girls.
As they wept in relief.
The son of Onos Toolan had not moved, but he watched, and he was still smiling.
Setoc’s eyes fluttered open. The instant she moved her head, blinding agony lanced through her skull. She groaned. The night was luminous, the familiar green tinge of her own world. She could feel the wolves, no longer as solid beasts surrounding her, but as ghosts once more. Ephemeral, hovering, pensive.
A cold wind was blowing, lightning flashing to the north. Shivering, nauseated, Setoc forced herself on to her knees. The dark plain spun round her. She tried to recall what had happened. Had she fallen?
‘Cafal?’
As if in answer thunder rumbled.
Blinking, she sat back on her haunches, looked round through bleared eyes. She found herself in the centre of a ring of half-buried boulders, the jade glow from the south adding a green hint to their silvery sheen. Whatever patterns had been carved upon them had long since weathered away to the barest of indentations. But there was power here. Old. As old as anything on this plain. Whispering sorrow to the empty land as the wind curled between the bleached humps.
The wolf ghosts slowly circled, as if drawn inward to this ring of stones and its mournful dirge.
There was no sign of Cafal. Had he been lost in the realm of the Beast Hold? If so, then he was lost for ever, falling back and back through the centuries, into times so ancient not a single human walked the world, where no blood-line was drawn to divide the hunter from the hunted—animals all. He would fall victim eventually, prey to some sharp-eyed predator. His death would be a lonely one, so lonely she suspected he would welcome it.
Even the will of the wolves in their hundreds of thousands could barely brush the immensity of the lost Hold’s power.
She huddled against the cold and the ache in her head.
The rain arrived with the rage of hornets.
Whipped by the wind and lashed by the rain, Cafal reached the edge of the encampment. Hearth-fires flared and dipped beneath the deluge, but even in the fitful light he could see huddled crowds and the smaller makeshift camps of the Barahn clustered round the edges. Figures hurried between the rows, hunched against the weather. He could see pickets here and there, haphazardly arranged with some of the posts abandoned.
When lightning lit the scene it seemed to seethe before his eyes.
Somewhere in there was his sister. Being used again and again. Warriors he had known all his life were pushing bloody paths into her, eager to join in the breaking of this once proud, beautiful and powerful woman. Cafal and Tool had spoken often of outlawing the tradition of hobbling, but too many resisted the casting away of traditions, even those as vicious as this one.
He could not change what had happened, all the damage already done, but he could steal her away, he could save her the months, even years, of horror that awaited her.
Cafal crouched, studying the Barghast camp.
Swathed in furs, Balamit made her way back to her yurt. Such a night! Too many years bowing to that bitch, too many years stepping from her path, eyes downcast as was demanded by Hetan’s position as wife to the Warleader. Well, the whore was paying the soul’s coin for that now, wasn’t she?
Balamit ran through her mind once more the fateful moment when Hega’s hatchet descended. The way Hetan’s whole body contorted in pain and shock, the deafening shriek cutting like a knife in the air. Some people lived as if privilege was something they were born to, as if everyone else was a lesser being, as if their domination was a natural truth. Well, there were other truths in nature, weren’t there? The gathering of the pack could bring down the fiercest wolf.
Balamit grinned as the rain spat icy against her face. Not just a pack, but a thousand of her kind! The pushed-down, the murky shapes that made up the common crowd, the ignored subjects of contempt. No, this was a worldly lesson, was it not? And, sweetest truth of all, we are far from finished.
Maral Eb was a fool, just another one of those superior bastards who thought their damned farts could buy a crown. Bakal was a much better choice—a Senan for one, and the Barahn were no match for her tribe—to think they could just step into the stirrup, when they’d not even had a hand in killing Onos Toolan, why, it was—
A huge shape stepped out from between two tarp-covered dung-piles, bulled into her hard enough to make her stagger. The figure reached out to right her even as she hissed a curse, and then the hand clutched tighter and snatched her close. A knife-blade sank between her ribs, the point slicing her heart in half.
Blinking in the sudden darkness, Balamit’s legs gave out beneath her, and she fell to the mud.
Her killer left her there without a backward glance.
Jayviss finally rose from her place close to the fire, as the flames had at last guttered out beneath the rain. Her bones ached terribly when the weather turned cold, and the injustice of that galled her. She was barely into her fifth decade, after all—but now that she was among the powerful, she could demand a ritual of healing to scour clean the rot in her joints, and she would have to pay nothing, nothing at all.
Sekara had promised. And Sekara knew the importance of favouring her allies.
Life would be good once again, as it had been in her youth. She could take as many men as she wanted. She could take for herself the finest furs to stay warm at night. She might even buy a D’ras slave or two, to work oils into her skin and make her supple once more. She’d heard they could take away stretch marks and make sagging breasts taut. They could smooth the wrinkles from her face, even the deep bird-track between her brows, where had gathered a lifetime of injustice and anger.
Seeing the last of the coals blacken at her feet, she turned away.
Two warriors stood before her. Barahn—one of them Kashat, Maral Eb’s brother. The other warrior she did not recognize.
‘What do you want?’ Jayviss demanded in sudden fear.
‘Just this,’ Kashat said, and he lashed out.
She caught the gleam of an etched blade. A sting against her throat, and suddenly heat poured down the front of her chest.
The ache in her bones vanished, and after a time the knot in her brow slowly relaxed, making her face, as the rain kissed it, almost young again.
Little Yedin crouched beside the body of Hega, staring at the pool of blood that still steamed even as raindrops pounded its surface. The nightmare would not end, and she could still feel the heat of the iron paddle she’d used to cauterize Hetan’s feet. It pulsed like fever up her arms, but could not reach the sickly chill wrapped about her heart.
So terrible a thing, and Hega had made her do it, because Hega had a way of making people do things, especially young people. She’d show them the dangerous thing in her eyes and nothing more would be needed. But Hetan had never been mean, had never been anything but nice, gentle, always ready with a wink. And Stavi and Storii, too. Always making Yedin laugh, the acts they put on, all their crazy ideas and plans.
The world ahead was suddenly dark, unknowable. And look here, someone had gone and killed Hega. The dangerous thing in her eyes hadn’t been enough, but then, what was?
; What those men did to Hetan—
A hand grabbed the back of her collar and she was lifted from the ground.
A stranger’s face stared at her own.
From one side another voice spoke, ‘She won’t remember much of this, Sagal.’
‘One of Hega’s imps.’
‘Even so—’
Sagal set her down and she tottered on wobbly legs. He put his huge hands against the sides of her head. Their eyes met and Yedin saw a darkness come to life there, a dangerous thing—
Sagal snapped her neck, dropped the body on to Hega’s. ‘Find Befka. One more to go this night. For you.’
‘What of Sekara and Stolmen?’
Sagal grinned. ‘Kashat and me—we’re saving the best for last. Now go, Corit.’
The warrior nodded. ‘And then I get my turn with Hetan.’
‘She’s worth it, the way she squirms in the mud.’
Once Strahl had left, Bakal sat alone in his yurt. His wife would not return this night, he knew, and he admitted he would be not too upset if she did not return at all. Amazing, that surprises could come to a marriage after so many years. The skein of rules was torn apart this night, strands winging on the black wind. A thousand possibilities awakened in people’s souls. Long-buried feuds clawed up out of the ground and knives dripped. A warrior could look into a friend’s eyes and see a stranger, could look into a mate’s eyes and see the flare of wicked desires.
She wanted another man but Bakal was in the way. That man wanted her in turn, but his wife was in the way. Bakal’s wife had stood before him, a half-smile playing on her face, a living thing pleased to deliver pain—if pain was possible, which he’d found, to his own bemusement, it was not. The moment she’d realized that, her visage had transformed into hatred.
When she left, she was holding her knife. Between her and her new lover, a woman would die tonight.
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