The Bonehunters

by Steven Erikson

She was remembering things. Finally, after all this time. Her mother, camp follower, spreading her legs for the Ashok Regiment before it was sent to Genabackis. After it had left, she just went and died, as if without those soldiers she could only breathe out, never again in — and it was what you drew in that gave you life. So, just like that. Dead. Her offspring was left to fare for itself, alone, uncared for, unloved.

  Mad priests and sick cults and, for the girl born of the mother, a new camp to follow. Every path of independence was but a dead-end side-track off that more deeply rutted road, the one that ran from parent to child — this much was clear to her now.

  Then Heboric, Destriant of Treach, had dragged her away — before she found herself breathing ever out — but no, before him, there had been Bidithal and his numbing gifts, his whispered assurances of mortal suffering being naught more than a layered chrysalis, and upon death the glory would break loose, unfolding its iridescent wings. Paradise. Oh, that had been a seductive promise, and her drown­ing soul had clung to the solace of its plunging weight as she sank deathward. She had once dreamed of wounding young, wide-eyed acolytes, of taking the knife in her own hands and cutting away all pleasure. Misery loves — needs — company; there is nothing altruistic in sharing. Self-interest feeds on malice and all else falls to the wayside.

  She had seen too much in her short life to believe any­one professing otherwise. Bidithal's love of pain had fed his need to deliver numbness. The numbness within him made him capable of delivering pain. And the broken god he claimed to worship — well, the Crippled One knew he would never have to account for his lies, his false promises. He sought out lives in abeyance, and with their death he was free to discard those whose lives he had used up. This was, she realized, exquisite enslavement: a faith whose central tenet was unprovable. There would be no killing this faith. The Crippled God would find a multitude of mortal voices to proclaim his empty promises, and within the arbitrary strictures of his cult, evil and desecration could burgeon unchecked.

  A faith predicated on pain and guilt could proclaim no moral purity. A faith rooted in blood and suffering—

  'We are the fallen,' Heboric said suddenly.

  Sneering, Scillara pushed more rustleaf into the bowl of her pipe and drew hard. 'A priest of war would say that, wouldn't he? But what of the great glory found in brutal slaughter, old man? Or have you no belief in the necessity of balance?'

  'Balance? An illusion. Like trying to focus on a single mote of light and seeing naught of the stream and the world that stream reveals. All is in motion, all is in flux.'

  'Like these damned flies,' Scillara muttered.

  Cutter, riding directly ahead, glanced back at her. 'I was wondering about that,' he said. 'Carrion flies — are we head­ing towards a site of battle, do you think? Heboric?'

  He shook his head, amber eyes seeming to flare in the afternoon light. 'I sense nothing of that. The land ahead is as you see it.'

  They were approaching a broad basin, dotted with a few tufts of dead, yellow reeds. The ground itself was almost white, cracked like a broken mosaic. Some larger mounds were visible here and there, constructed, it seemed, of sticks and reeds. Reaching the edge, they drew to a halt.

  Fish bones lay in a heaped carpet along the fringe of the dead marsh's shoreline, blown there by the winds. On one of the closer mounds they could see bird bones and the remnants of eggshells. These wetlands had died suddenly, in the season of nesting.

  Flies swarmed the basin, swirling about in droning clouds.

  'Gods below,' Felisin said, 'do we have to cross this?'

  'Shouldn't be too bad,' Heboric said. 'It's not far across. It'd be dark long before we finish if we try to go round this. Besides,' he waved at the buzzing flies, 'we haven't even started to cross yet they've found us, and skirting the basin won't escape them. At least they're not the biting kind.'

  'Let's just get this over with,' Scillara said.

  Greyfrog bounded down into the basin, as if to blaze a trail with his opened mouth and snapping tongue.

  Cutter nudged his horse into a trot, then, as flies swarmed him, a canter.

  The others followed.

  ****

  Flies alighting like madness on his skin. Heboric squinted as countless hard, frenzied bodies collided with his face. The very sunlight had dimmed amidst this chaotic cloud. Trapped in his sleeves, inside his threadbare leggings and down the back of his neck — he gritted his teeth, resolving to weather this minor irritation.

  Balance. Scillara's words disturbed him for some reason — no, perhaps not her words, but the sentiment they revealed. Once an acolyte, now rejecting all forms of faith — some­thing he himself had done, and, despite Treach's intervention, still sought to achieve. After all, the gods of war needed no servants beyond the illimitable legions they always had and always would possess.

  Destriant, what lies beneath this name? Harvester of souls, possessing the power — and the right — to slay in a god's name. To slay, to heal, to deliver justice. But justice in whose eyes? I cannot take a life. Not any more. Never again. You chose wrong, Treach.

  All these dead, these ghosts...

  The world was harsh enough — it did not need him and his kind. There was no end to the fools eager to lead others into battle, to exult in mayhem and leave behind a turgid, sobbing wake of misery and suffering and grief.

  He'd had enough.

  Deliverance was all he desired now, his only motive for staying alive, for dragging these innocents with him to a blasted, wasted island that had been scraped clean of all life by warring gods. Oh, they did not need him.

  Faith and zeal for retribution lay at the heart of the true armies, the fanatics and their malicious, cruel certainties. Breeding like fly-blow in every community. But worthy tears come from courage, not cowardice, and those armies, they are filled with cowards.

  Horses carrying them from the basin, the flies spinning and swirling in mindless pursuit.

  Onto a track emerging from the old shoreline beside the remnants of a dock and mooring poles. Deep ruts climbing a higher beach ridge, from the age when the swamp had been a lake, the ruts cut ragged by the claws of rainwater that found no refuge in roots — because the verdancy of centuries past was gone, cut away, devoured.

  We leave naught but desert in our wake.

  Surmounting the crest, where the road levelled out and wound drunkenly across a plain flanked by limestone hills, and in the distance, a third of a league away directly east, a small, decrepit hamlet. Outbuildings with empty corrals and paddocks. To one side of the road, near the hamlet's edge, a half-hundred or more heaped tree-trunks, the wood grey as stone where fires had not charred it — but it seemed that even in death, this wood defied efforts at its destruction.

  Heboric understood that obdurate defiance. Yes, make yourself useless to humankind. Only thus will you survive, even when what survives of you is naught but your bones. Deliver your message, dear wood, to our eternally blind eyes.

  Greyfrog had dropped back and now leapt ten paces to Cutter's right. It seemed even the demon had reached its stomach's limit of flies, for its broad mouth was shut, the second lids of its eyes, milky white, closed until the barest slits were visible. And the huge creature was very nearly black with those crawling insects.

  As was Cutter's youthful back before him. As was the horse the Daru rode. And, to all sides, the ground seethed, glittering and rabid with motion.

  So many flies.

  So many...

  'Something to show you, now...'

  Like a savage beast suddenly awakened, Heboric straightened in his saddle—

  ****

  Scillara's mount cantered a stride behind the Destriant's, a little to the old man's left, whilst in her wake rode Felisin. She cursed in growing alarm as the flies gathered round the riders like midnight, devouring all light, the buzzing cadence seeming to whisper words that crawled into her mind on ten thousand legs. She fought back a scream—

  As her hors
e shrieked in mortal pain, dust swirling and spinning beneath it, dust rising and finding shape.

  A terrible, wet, grating sound, then something long and sharp punched up between her mount's shoulder-blades, blood gouting thick and bright from the wound. The horse staggered, forelegs buckling, then collapsed, the motion flinging Scillara from the saddle—

  She found herself rolling on a carpet of crushed insects, the hoofs of Heboric's horse pounding down around her as the creature shrilled in agony, pitching to the left — something snarling, a barbed flash of skin, feline and fluid, leaping from the dying horse's back—

  And figures, emerging as if from nowhere amidst spinning dust, blades of flint flashing — a bestial scream — blood slapping the ground beside her in a thick sheet, instantly blackened by flies — the blades chopping, cutting, slashing into flesh — a piercing shriek, rising in a con­flagration of pain and rage — something thudded against her as Scillara sought to rise on her hands and knees, and she looked over. An arm, tattooed in a tiger-stripe pattern, sliced clean midway between elbow and shoulder, the hand, a flash of fitful, dying green beneath swarming flies.

  She staggered upright, stabbing pain in her belly, choking as insects crowded into her mouth with her in­voluntary gasp.

  A figure stepped near her, long stone sword dripping, desiccated skull-face swinging in her direction, and that sword casually reached out, slid like fire into Scillara's chest, ragged edge scoring above her top rib, beneath the clavicle, then punching out her back, just above the scapula.

  Scillara sagged, felt herself sliding from that weapon as she fell down onto her back.

  The apparition vanished within the cloud of flies once more.

  She could hear nothing but buzzing, could see nothing but a chaotic, glittering clump swelling above the wound in her chest, through which blood leaked — as if the flies had become a fist, squeezing her heart. Squeezing...

  ****

  Cutter had had no time to react. The bite of sudden sand and dust, then his horse's head was simply gone, ropes of blood skirling down as if pursuing its flight. Down beneath the front hoofs, that stumbled, then gave way as the de­capitated beast collapsed.

  Cutter managed to roll free, gaining his feet within a maelstrom of flies.

  Someone loomed up beside him and he spun, one knife free and slashing across in an effort to block a broad, hook-bladed scimitar of rippled flint. The weapons collided, and that sword swept through Cutter's knife, the strength behind the blow unstoppable—

  He watched it tear into his belly, watched it rip its way free, and then his bowels tumbled into view.

  Reaching down to catch them with both hands, Cutter sank as all life left his legs. He stared down at the flopping mess he held, disbelieving, then landed on one side, curl­ing round the terrible, horrifying damage done to him.

  He heard nothing. Nothing but his own breathing, and the cavorting flies, now closing in as if they had known all along that this was going to happen.

  ****

  The attacker had risen from the very dust, on the right side of Greyfrog. Savage agony as a huge chalcedony longsword cut through the demon's forelimb, severing it clean in a gush of green blood. A second cut sliced through the back leg on the same side, and the demon struck the ground, kicking helplessly with its remaining limbs.

  Grainy with flies and thundering pain — a momentary scene played out before the demon's eyes. Broad, bestial, clad in furs, a creature of little more than skin and bone, stepping placidly over Greyfrog's back leg, which was lying five paces distant, kicking all by itself. Stepping into the black cloud.

  Dismay. I can hop no more.

  ****

  Even as he had leapt from the back of his horse, two flint swords had caught him, one slashing through muscle and bone, severing an arm, the other thrusting point first into, then through, his chest. Heboric, throat filled with animal snarls, twisted in mid-air in a desperate effort to pull him­self free of the impaling weapon. Yet it followed, tearing downward — snapping ribs, cleaving through lung, then liver — and finally ripping out from his side in an explosion of bone shards, meat and blood.

  The Destriant's mouth filled with hot liquid, spraying as he struck the ground, rolled, then came to a stop.

  Both T'lan Imass walked to where he lay sprawled in the dust, stone weapons slick with gore.

  Heboric stared up at those empty, lifeless eyes, watched as the tattered, desiccated warriors stabbed down, rippled points punching into his body again and again. He watched as one flashed towards his face, then shot down into his neck—

  Voices, beseeching, a distant chorus of dismay and despair — he could reach them no longer — those lost souls in their jade-swallowed torment, growing fainter, farther and farther away — I told you, look not to me, poor creatures. Do you see, finally, how easy it was to fail you?

  I have heard the dead, but I could not serve them. Just as I have lived, yet created nothing.

  He remembered clearly now, in a single dread moment that seemed unending, timeless, a thousand images — so many pointless acts, empty deeds, so many faces — all those for whom he did nothing. Baudin, Kulp, Felisin Paran, L'oric, Scillara... Wandering lost in this foreign land, this tired desert and the dust of gardens filling brutal, sun-scorched air — better had he died in the otataral mines of Skullcup. Then, there would have been no betrayals. Fener would hold his throne. The despair of the souls in their vast jade prisons, spinning unchecked through the Abyss, that terrible despair — it could have remained unheard, un­witnessed, and so there would have been no false promises of salvation.

  Baudin would not have been so slowed down in his flight with Felisin Paran — oh, I have done nothing worthwhile in this all too-long life. These ghost hands, they have proved the illusion of their touch — no benediction, no salvation, not for anyone they dared touch. And these reborn eyes, with all their feline acuity, they fade now into their senseless stare, a look every hunter yearns for in the eyes of their fallen foe.

  So many warriors, great heroes — in their own eyes at least — so many had set off in pursuit of the giant tiger that was Treach — knowing nothing of the beast's true identity. Seeking to defeat him, to stand over his stilled corpse, and look down into his blank eyes, yearning to capture some­thing, anything, of majesty and exaltation and take it within themselves.

  But truths are never found when the one seeking them is lost, spiritually, morally. And nobility and glory cannot be stolen, cannot be earned in the violent rape of a life. Gods, such pathetic, flailing, brutally stupid conceit... it was good, then, that Treach killed every damned one of them. Dispassionately. Ah, such a telling message in that.

  Yet he knew. The T'lan Imass who had killed him cared nothing for all of that. They had acted out of exigency. Perhaps somewhere in their ancient memories, of the time when they were mortal, they too had sought to steal what they themselves could never possess. But such pointless pursuits no longer mattered to them.

  Heboric would be no trophy.

  And that was well.

  And in this final failure, it seemed there would be no other survivors, and in some ways that was well, too. Appropriate. So much for glory found within his final thoughts.

  And is that not fitting? In this last thought, I fail even myself.

  He found himself reaching... for something. Reaching, but nothing answered his touch. Nothing at all.

  Book Three

  Shadows of the King

  Who can say where divides truth and the host of desires that, together, give shape to memories? There are deep folds in every legend, and the visible, outward pattern presents a false unity of form and intention. We distort with deliberate purpose; we confine vast meaning into the strictures of imagined necessity. In this lies both failing and gift, for in the surrender of truth we fashion, rightly or wrongly, universal significance. Specific gives way to general; detail gives way to grandiose form, and in the telling we are exalted beyond our mundane selves. We are
, in truth, bound into greater humanity by this skein of words...

  Introduction to Among the Consigned, Heboric

  Chapter Twelve

  'He spoke of those who would fall, and in his cold eyes stood naked the truth that it was we of whom he spoke. Words of broken reeds and covenants of despair, of surrender given as gifts and slaughter in the name of salvation. He spoke of the spilling of war, and he told us to flee into unknown lands, so that we might be spared the spoiling of our lives...'

  Words of the Iron Prophet Iskar Jarak, The Anibar (the Wickerfolk)

  One moment the shadows between the trees were empty, the next moment that Samar Dev glanced up, her breath caught upon seeing figures. On all sides where the sunlit clearing was clawed back by the tangle of black spruce, ferns and ivy, stood savages... 'Karsa Orlong,' she whispered, 'we have visitors...'

  The Teblor, his hands red with gore, cut away another slice of flesh from the dead bhederin's flank, then looked up. After a moment he grunted, then returned to his butchering.

  They were edging forward, emerging from the gloom. Small, wiry, wearing tanned hides, strips of fur bound round their upper arms, their skin the colour of bog water, stitched with ritual scarring on exposed chests and shoulders. On their faces grey paint or wood ash covered their lower jaws and above the lips, like beards. Elongated circles of icy blue and grey surrounded their dark eyes. Carrying spears, axes at hide belts along with an assortment of knives, they were bedecked in ornaments of cold-hammered copper that seemed shaped to mimic the phases of the moon; and on one man was a necklace made from the vertebrae of some large fish, and descending from it was a gold-ringed, black copper disc, representing, she sur­mised, a total eclipse. This man, evidently a leader of some kind, stepped forward. Three strides, eyes on an unmindful Karsa Orlong, out into the sunlight, where he slowly knelt.

  Samar now saw that he held something in his hands. 'Karsa, pay attention. What you do now will determine whether we pass through their land peaceably or ducking spears from the shadows.'