The Bonehunters

by Steven Erikson

  'Damned fools. Forgive me—'

  A bitter smile from Temul as he shook his head. 'No need for that. They are fools, and even had I wisdom, I would fail in its sharing.'

  From the remnants of the camp behind them, cattle-dogs began howling. Both men turned in surprise. Keneb glanced over at Temul. 'What is it? Why—'

  'I don't know.'

  They set off, back towards the camp.

  ****

  Lieutenant Pores watched Bent race up the track, skirls of dust rising in the dog's wake. He caught a momentary glimpse of wild half-mad eyes above that mangled snout, then the beast was past. So only now we find out that they're terrified of water. Well, good. We can leave the ugly things behind. He squinted towards the file of Wickans and Seti overseeing the loading of their scrawny horses — not many of those animals would survive this journey, he suspected, which made them valuable sources of meat. Anything to liven up the deck-wash and bilge-crud sailors call food. Oh, those horse-warriors might complain, but that wouldn't keep them from lining up with their bowls when the bell tolled.

  Kindly had made sure the Adjunct knew, in torrid detail, his displeasure with Fist Keneb's incompetence. There was no question of Kindly lacking courage, or at least raging megalomania. But this time, dammit, the old bastard had had a point. An entire day and half a night had been wasted by Keneb. A Hood-damned kit inspection, pre­sented squad by squad — and right in the middle of boarding assembly — gods, the chaos that ensued. 'Has Keneb lost his mind?' Oh yes, Kindly's first question to the Adjunct, and something in her answering scowl told Pores that the miserable woman had known nothing about any of it, and clearly could not comprehend why Keneb would have ordered such a thing.

  Well, no surprise, that, with her moping around in her damned tent doing who knew what with that cold beauty T'amber. Even the Admiral's frustration had been obvious. Word was going through the ranks that Tavore was likely in line for demotion — Y'Ghatan could have been handled better. Every damned soldier turned out to be a tactical genius when it came to that, and more than once Pores had bitten out a chunk of soldier meat for some treasonous comment. It didn't matter that Nok and Tavore were feuding; it didn't matter that Tene Baralta was a seething cauldron of sedition among the officers; it didn't even matter that Pores himself was undecided whether the Adjunct could have done better at Y'Ghatan — the rumours alone were as poisonous as any plague the Grey Goddess could spit out.

  He was both looking forward to and dreading boarding the transports, and the long, tedious journey ahead. Bored soldiers were worse than woodworm in the keel — or so the sailors kept saying, as they cast jaded eyes on the dusty, swearing men and women who ascended the ramps only to fall silent, huddling like shorn sheep in the raft-like scuttles as the heave and haul chant rang out over the choppy water. Worse still, seas and oceans were nasty things. Soldiers would face death with nary a blink if they knew they could fight back, maybe even fight their way out of it, but the sea was immune to swinging swords, whistling arrows and shield-walls. And Hood knows, we've been swallowing that lumpy helpless thing enough as it is.

  Damned cattle-dogs were all letting loose now.

  Now what? Unsure of his own reasons, Pores set off in the direction Bent had gone. East on the track, past the command tent, then the inner ring of pickets, and out towards the latrine trenches — and the lieutenant saw the racing figures of a dozen or so cattle-dogs, their mottled, tanned shapes converging, then circling with wild barking — and on the road, the subjects of their excitement, a troop approaching on foot.

  So who in the Queen's name are they? The outriders were all in — he was sure of that — he'd seen the Seti practising heaving their guts up on the ramps — they got seasick stand­ing in a puddle. And the Wickans had already surrendered their mounts to the harried transport crews.

  Pores glanced round, saw a soldier leading three horses towards the strand. 'Hey! Hold up there.' He walked over. Give me one of those.'

  'They ain't saddled, sir.'

  'Really? How can you tell?'

  The man started pointing at the horse's back—

  'Idiot,' Pores said, 'give me those reins, no, those ones.'

  'That's the Adjunct's—'

  'Thought I recognized it.' He pulled the beast away then vaulted onto its back. Then set off onto the road. The foundling, Grub, was walking out from the camp, at one ankle that yipping mutt that looked like what a cow would regurgitate after eating a mohair rug. Ignoring them, Pores angled his mount eastward, and kicked it into a canter.

  He could already put a name to the one in the lead: Captain Faradan Sort. And there was that High Mage, Quick Ben, and that scary assassin Kalam, and — gods below, but they're all — no, they weren't. Marines! Damned marines!

  He heard shouts from the camp behind him now, an alarm being raised outside the command tent.

  Pores could not believe his own eyes. Survivors — from the firestorm — that was impossible. Granted, they look rough, half-dead in fact. Like Hood used 'em to clean out his hoary ears. There's Lostara Yil — well, she ain't as bad as the rest—

  Lieutenant Pores reined in before Faradan Sort. 'Captain—'

  'We need water,' she said, the words barely making it out between chapped, cracked and blistered lips.

  Gods, they look awful. Pores wheeled his horse round, nearly slipping off the animal's back in the process. Righting himself, he rode back towards the camp.

  ****

  As Keneb and Temul reached the main track, thirty paces from the command tent, they saw the Adjunct appear, and, a moment later, Blistig, and then T'amber. Soldiers were shouting something as yet incomprehensible from the eastern end of the camp.

  The Adjunct turned towards her two approaching Fists. 'It seems my horse has gone missing.'

  Keneb's brows rose. 'Thus the alarms? Adjunct—'

  'No, Keneb. A troop has been spotted on the east road.'

  'A troop? We're being attacked?'

  'I do not think so. Well, accompany me, then. It seems we shall have to walk. And this will permit you, Fist Keneb, to explain the fiasco that occurred regarding the boarding of your company.'

  'Adjunct?'

  'I find your sudden incompetence unconvincing.'

  He glanced across at her. There was the hint of an emotion, there on that plain, drawn visage. A hint, no more, not enough that he could identify it. 'Grub,' he said.

  The Adjunct's brows rose. 'I believe you will need to elaborate on that, Fist Keneb.'

  'He said we should take an extra day boarding, Adjunct.'

  'And this child's advice, a barely literate, half-wild child at that, is sufficient justification for you to confound your Adjunct's instructions?'

  'Not normally, no,' Keneb replied. 'It's difficult to explain... but he knows things. Things he shouldn't, I mean. He knew we were sailing west, for example. He knew our planned ports of call—'

  'Hiding behind the command tent,' Blistig said.

  'Have you ever seen the boy hide, Blistig? Ever?'

  The man scowled. 'Must be he's good at it, then.'

  'Adjunct, Grub said we needed to delay one day — or we would all die. At sea. I am beginning to believe—'

  She held up a gloved hand, the gesture sharp enough to silence him, and he saw that her eyes were narrowed now, fixed on what was ahead—

  A rider, bareback, coming at full gallop.

  'That's Kindly's lieutenant,' Blistig said.

  When it became obvious that the man had no intention of slowing down, nor of changing course, everyone quickly moved to the sides of the road.

  The lieutenant sketched a hasty salute, barely seen through the dust, as he plunged past, shouting something like: 'They need water!'

  'And,' Blistig added, waving at clouds of dust as they all set out again, 'that was your horse, Adjunct.'

  Keneb looked down the road, blinking to get the grit from his eyes. Figures wavered into view. Indistinct... no, that was Faradan Sort... wasn't it?


  'Your deserter is returning,' Blistig said. 'Stupid of her, really, since desertion is punishable by execution. But who are those people behind her? What are they carrying?'

  The Adjunct halted suddenly, the motion almost a stagger.

  Quick Ben. Kalam. More faces, covered in dust, so white they looked like ghosts — and so they are. What else could they be? Fiddler. Gesler, Lostara Yil, Stormy — Keneb saw one familiar, impossible face after another. Sun-ravaged, stumbling, like creatures trapped in delirium. And in their arms, children, dull-eyed, shrunken...

  The boy knows things... Grub...

  And there he stood, flanked by his ecstatic dogs, talking, it seemed, with Sinn.

  Sinn, we'd thought her mad with grief — she'd lost a brother, after all... lost, and now found again.

  But Faradan Sort had suspected, rightly, that something else had possessed Sinn. A suspicion strong enough to drive her into desertion.

  Gods, we gave up too easily — but no — the city, the firestorm — we waited for days, waited until the whole damned ruin had cooled. We picked through the ashes. No-one could have lived through that.

  The troop arrived to where the Adjunct stood.

  Captain Faradan Sort straightened with only a slight waver, then saluted, fist to left side of her chest. 'Adjunct,' she rasped, 'I have taken the liberty of re-forming the squads, pending approval—'

  'That approval is Fist Keneb's responsibility,' the Adjunct said, her voice strangely flat. 'Captain, I did not expect to see you again.'

  A nod. 'I understand the necessities of maintaining military discipline, Adjunct. And so, I now surrender myself to you. I ask, however, that leniency be granted Sinn — her youth, her state of mind at the time...'

  Horses from up the road. Lieutenant Pores returning, more riders behind him. Bladders filled with water, swinging and bouncing like huge udders. The other riders — healers, one and all, including the Wickans Nil and Nether. Keneb stared at their expressions of growing dis­belief as they drew closer.

  Fiddler had come forward, a scrawny child sleeping or unconscious in his arms. 'Adjunct,' he said through cracked lips, 'without the captain, digging with her own hands, not one of us trapped under that damned city would have ever left it. We'd be mouldering bones right now.' He stepped closer, but his effort at lowering his voice to a whisper failed, as Keneb heard him say, 'Adjunct, you hang the captain for desertion and you better get a lot more nooses, 'cause we'll leave this miserable world when she does.'

  'Sergeant,' the Adjunct said, seemingly unperturbed, 'am I to understand that you and those squads behind you burrowed beneath Y'Ghatan in the midst of the firestorm, somehow managing not to get cooked in the process, and then dug your way clear?'

  Fiddler turned his head and spat blood, then he smiled a chilling, ghastly smile, the flaking lips splitting in twin rows of red, glistening fissures. 'Aye,' he said in a rasp, 'we went hunting... through the bones of the damned city. And then, with the captain's help, we crawled outa that grave.'

  The Adjunct's gaze left the ragged man, travelled slowly, along the line, the gaunt faces, the deathly eyes staring out from dust-caked faces, the naked, blistered skin. 'Bonehunters in truth, then.' She paused, as Pores led his healers forward with their waterskins, then said, 'Welcome back, soldiers.'

  Book Four

  The Bonehunters

  Who will deny that it is our nature to believe the very worst in our fellow kind? Even as cults rose and indeed coalesced into a patronomic worship — not just of Coltaine, the Winged One, the Black Feather, but too of the Chain of Dogs itself — throughout Seven Cities, with shrines seeming to grow from the very wastes along that ill-fated trail, shrines in propitiation to one dead hero after another: Bult, Lull, Mincer, Sormo E'nath, even Baria and Mesker Setral of the Red Blades; and to the Foolish Dog clan, the Weasel clan and of course the Crow and the Seventh Army itself; while at Gelor Ridge, in an ancient monastery overlooking the old battle site, a new cult centred on horses was born — even as this vast fever of veneration gripped Seven Cities, so certain agents in the heart of the Malazan Empire set loose, among the commonry, tales purporting the very opposite: that Coltaine had betrayed the empire; that he had been a renegade, secretly allied with Sha'ik. After all, had the countless refugees simply stayed in their cities, accepting the rebellion's dominion; had they not been dragged out by Coltaine and his bloodthirsty Wickans; and had the Seventh's Mage Cadre leader, Kulp, not so mysteriously disappeared, thus leaving the Malazan Army vulnerable to the sorcerous machinations and indeed manipulations of the Wickan witches and warlocks — had not all this occurred, there would have been no slaughter, no terrible ordeal of crossing half a continent exposed to every predating half-wild tribe in the wastes. And, most heinous of all, Coltaine had then, in league with the traitorous Imperial Historian, Duiker, connived to effect the subsequent betrayal and annihilation of the Aren Army, led by the naïve High Fist Pormqual who was the first victim of that dread betrayal. Why else, after all, would those very rebels of Seven Cities take to the worship of such figures, if not seeing in Coltaine and the rest heroic allies...

  ... In any case, whether officially approved or otherwise, the persecution of Wickans within the empire flared hot and all-consuming, given such ample fuel...

  The Year of Ten Thousand Lies, Kayessan

  Chapter Seventeen

  What is there left to understand? Choice is an illusion. Freedom is conceit. The hands that reach out to guide your every step, your every thought, come not from the gods, for they are no less deluded than we — no, my friends, those hands come to each of us... from each of us.

  You may believe that civilization deafens us with tens of thousands of voices, but listen well to that clamour, for with each renewed burst so disparate and myriad, an ancient force awakens, drawing each noise ever closer, until the chorus forms but two sides, each battling the other. The bloody lines are drawn, fought in the turning away of faces, in the stoppering of ears, the cold denial, and all discourse, at the last, is revealed as futile and worthless.

  Will you yet hold, my friends, to the faith that change is within our grasp? That will and reason shall overcome the will of denial?

  There is nothing left to understand. This mad whirlpool holds us all in a grasp that cannot be broken; and you with your spears and battle-masks; you with your tears and soft touch; you with the sardonic grin behind which screams fear and self-hatred; even you who stand aside in silent witness to our catastrophe of dissolution, too numb to act — it is all one. You are all one. We are all one.

  So now come closer, my friends, and see in this modest cart before you my most precious wares. Elixir of Oblivion, Tincture of Frenzied Dancing, and here, my favourite, Unguent of Male Prowess Unending, where I guarantee your soldier will remain standing through battle after battle...

  Hawker's Harangue, recounted by Vaylan Winder, Malaz City, the year the city overflowed with sewage (1123 Burn's Sleep)

  Rivulets of water, reeking of urine, trickled down the steps leading to Coop's Hanged Man Inn, one of the score of disreputable taverns in the Docks Quarter of Malaz City that Banaschar, once a priest of D'rek, was now in the habit of frequenting. Whatever details had once existed in his mind to distinguish one such place from another had since faded, the dyke of his resolve rotted through by frustration and a growing panic, poison­ous enough to immobilize him — in spirit if not in flesh. And the ensuing deluge was surprisingly comforting, even as the waters rose ever higher.

  Little different, he observed as he negotiated the treacherous, mould-slimed steps, from this cursed rain, or so the long-time locals called it, despite the clear sky over­head. Mostly rain comes down, they said, but occasionally it comes up, seeping through the crumbling cobbles of the quarter, transforming such beneath-ground establishments as Coop's into a swampy quagmire, the entrance guarded by a whining cloud of mosquitoes, and the stench of over­flowed sewers wafting about so thick the old-timers announce its arrival as
they would an actual person miserably named Stink — greeted if not welcomed into already sordid company.

  And most sordid was Banaschar's company these days. Veterans who avoided sobriety as if it was a curse; whores who'd long since hawked their hearts of gold — if they'd ever had them in the first place; scrawny youths with a host of appropriately modest ambitions — meanest thug in this skein of fetid streets and alleys; master thief of those few belongings the poor possessed; nastiest backstabber with at least fifty knots on their wrist strings, each knot honouring someone foolish enough to trust them; and of course the usual assortment of bodyguards and muscle whose brains had been deprived of air at some point in their lives; smugglers and would-be smugglers, informants and the imperial spies to whom they informed, spies spying on the spies, hawkers of innumerable substances, users of selfsame substances on their way to the oblivion of the Abyss; and here and there, people for whom no category was possible, since they gave away nothing of their lives, their histories, their secrets.

  In a way, Banaschar was one such person, on his better days. Other times, such as this one, he could make no claim to possible — if improbable — grandiosity. This afternoon, then, he had come early to Coop's, with the aim of stretch­ing the night ahead as far as he could, well lubricated of course, which would in turn achieve an overlong and hope­fully entirely blissful period of unconsciousness in one of the lice-infested rat-traps above the tavern.

  It would be easy, he reflected as he ducked through the doorway and paused just within, blinking in the gloom, easy to think of clamour as a single entity, one sporting countless mouths, and to reckon the din as meaningless as the rush of brown water from a sewer pipe. Yet Banaschar had come to a new appreciation of the vagaries of the noise erupting from human throats. Most spoke to keep from thinking, but others spoke as if casting lifelines even as they drowned in whatever despairing recognition they had arrived at — perhaps during some unwelcome pause, filled with the horror of silence. A few othets fit neither category. These were the ones who used the clamour surrounding them as a barrier, creating in its midst a place in which to hide, mute and indifferent, fending off the outside world.