The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (1037 page)

Hiding from me, whoever—whatever—you are, is a childish game. An unworthy game. Face your child. Face all your children. Show me the veracity of your right to cast judgement upon me.

Do this, and I will accept you.

Remain hidden, even as you consign my soul to suffering, and I will hunt you down.

I will hunt you down.

The ramp climbed until it reached a broad, low-ceilinged chamber.

Crowded with reptilian corpses. Rotting, reeking, in pools of thick ichor and rank blood. Twenty, perhaps more.

K’Chain Che’Malle. The makers of this city.

Each one throat-cut. Executed like goats on an altar.

Beyond them, a spiralling ramp climbed steeply upward. No one said a thing as they picked careful, independent paths through the slaughter. Taxilian in the lead, they began the ascent.

The ghost watched as Breath paused to bend down and run a finger through decaying blood. She slipped that finger into her mouth, and smiled.

I heard a story

Of a river

Which is where water flows over the ground

   glistening in the sun

It’s a legend

And untrue

In the story the water is clear and that’s

   why it’s untrue

We all know

Water Is the colour

Of blood

People make up legends

To teach lessons

So I think The story is about us

About a river of blood

And one day

We’ll run clear

O
F A
R
IVER
B
ADALLE

The errant walked the flooded tunnel, remembering the bodies that had once drifted there, shifting like logs, flesh turning to jelly. Now on occasion, in pushing a foot forward, he kicked aside unseen bones. Darkness promised no solitude, no true abandonment, no final resting place. Darkness was nothing more than a home for the forgotten. Which was why sarcophagi had lids and crypts were sealed under stone and barrows beneath heaped earth. Darkness was the vision behind shuttered eyes, little more than the dismissal of light when details ceased to be relevant.

He could find such a world. All he needed to do was close his one remaining eye. It should work. He did not understand why it didn’t. The water, bitter cold, lapped round his thighs. He welcomed its gift of numbness. The air was foul, but he was used to that. There should be nothing to hold him here, chaining him to this moment.

Events were unfolding, so many events, and not all of them shifting to his touch, twisting to his will. Anger was giving way to fear. He had sought out the altar Feather Witch had consecrated in his name. He had expected to find her soul,
her fleshless will curling in sinew currents round the submerged rubble, but there had been nothing, no one. Where had she gone?

He could still feel her hair beneath his hand, the muted struggles as some remnant of her sanity groped for air, for one more moment of life. His palm tingled with the echo of her faint convulsions beginning in that moment when she surrendered and filled her lungs with water, once, twice, like a newborn trying out the gifts of an unknown world, only to retreat, fade away, and slide like an eel back into the darkness, where the first thing forgotten was oneself.

This should not be haunting him. His act had been one of mercy. Gangrenous, insane, she’d had little time left. It had been the gentlest of nudges, not at all motivated by vengeance or disgust. Still, she might well have cursed him in that last exhaled, soured breath.

Her soul should be swimming these black waters. But the Errant knew that he had been alone. The altar chamber had offered him little more than desolation.

Wading, the tunnel’s slimy floor descending with each step, his feet suddenly lost all grip and the water rose yet higher, past his chest, closing over his shoulders and lapping at his throat. The top of his head brushed the gritty stone of the tunnel’s ceiling, and then he was under, blinking the sting from his eye.

He pushed onward through the murk, until the water turned salty, and light, reflecting down from a vague surface fathoms overhead, flashed like dulled, smeared memories of lightning. He could feel the heavy tugs of wayward currents and he knew that a storm did indeed rage, there upon the ceiling of this world, but it could do little to him down here. Scraping through thick mud, he walked the ocean floor.

Nothing decayed in this place, and all that had not been crushed to dust by the immense pressures now lay scattered beneath monochrome draperies of silt, like furniture in a vast, abandoned room. Everything about this realm invited horror. Time lost its way here, wandering until the ceaseless rain of detritus weighed it down, brought it to its knees, and then buried it. Anything—anyone—could fall to the same fate. The danger, the risk, was very real. No creature of sentience could withstand this place for long. Futility delivered its crushing symphony and the dread music was eternal.

He found himself walking down the length of a vast skeleton, jagged uneven ribs rising like the columns of a colonnade to either side, a roofless temple sagging under its own senseless burden. He passed the snaking line of boulders that was the immense creature’s spine. Four scapulae formed broad concave platforms just ahead, from which bizarre long bones radiated out like toppled pillars. He could just make out, in the gloom, the massive crown of the back of the monster’s skull. Here, then, awaited another kind of temple. Precious store of self, a space insisting on its occupation, an existence that demanded acknowledgement of its own presence.

The Errant sympathized with the notion. Such delicate conceits assembled the bones of the soul, after all. He moved past the last of the scapulae, noting the effect of some crushing, no doubt crippling impact. The bone looked like a giant broken plate.

Coming alongside the skull, he saw that the cave of its nearest orbital socket
was shattered, above and behind an elongated, partly collapsed snout crowded with serrated teeth. The Elder God paused and studied that damage for some time. He could not imagine what this beast had been; he suspected it was a child of these deep currents, a swimmer through ancient ages, entirely uncomprehending that its time was past. He wondered if mercy had delivered that death blow.

Ah, but he could not fight his own nature, could he? Most of his nudges were fatal ones, after all. The impetus might find many justifications, and clearly mercy numbered among them. This was, he told himself, a momentary obsession. The feel of her hair under his hand . . . a lapse of conscience, then, this tremor of remorse. It would pass.

He pushed on, knowing that at last, he’d found the right trail.

There were places that could only be found by invitation, by the fickle generosity of the forces that gave them shape, that made them what they were. Such barriers defied the hungers and needs of most seekers. But he had learned the secret paths long, long ago. He required no invitations, and no force could stand in the way of his hunger.

The dull gleam of the light in the tower reached him before he could make out anything else, and he flinched at seeing that single mocking eye floating in the gloom. Currents swept fiercely around him as he drew closer, buffeting his body as if desperate to turn him aside. Silts swirled up, seeking to blind him. But he fixed his gaze on that fitful glow, and before long he could make out the squat, blockish house, the black, gnarled branches of the trees in the yard, and then the low stone wall.

Dunes of silt were heaped up against the tower side of the Azath. The mounds in the yard were sculpted, half-devoured, exposing the roots of the leaning trees. As the Errant stepped on to the snaking flagstones of the path, he could see bones scattered out from those sundered barrows. Yes, they had escaped their prisons at long last, but death had arrived first.

Patience was the curse of longevity. It could lure its ageless victim into somnolence, until flesh itself rotted off, and the skull rolled free.

He reached the door. Pushed it open.

The currents within the narrow entranceway swept over him warm as tears. As the portal closed behind him, the Errant gestured. A moment later he was standing on dry stone. Hovering faint on the air around him was the smell of wood-smoke. A wavering globe of lantern light approached from the corridor beyond.

The threadbare figure that stepped into view sent a pang through the Errant. Memories murky as the sea-bottom spun up to momentarily blind him. The gaunt Forkrul Assail was hunched at the shoulders, as if every proof of justice had bowed him down, left him broken. His pallid face was a mass of wrinkles, like crushed leather. Tortured eyes fixed on the Errant for a moment, and then the Assail turned away. ‘Fire and wine await us, Errastas—come, you know the way.’

They walked through the double doors at the conjunction of the corridors, into the dry heat of the hearth room. The Assail gestured at a sideboard as he hobbled to one of the chairs flanking the fireplace. Ignoring the invitation to drink—for the moment—the Errant walked to the other chair and settled into it.

They sat facing one another.

‘You have suffered some,’ said the Assail, ‘since I last saw you, Errastas.’

‘Laughter from the Abyss, Setch, have you seen yourself lately?’

‘The forgotten must never complain.’ He’d found a crystal goblet and he now held it up and studied the flickering flames trapped in the amber wine. ‘When I look at myself, I see . . . embers. They dim, they die. It is,’ he added, ‘well.’ And he drank.

The Errant bared his teeth. ‘Pathetic. Your hiding is at an end, Knuckles.’

Sechul Lath smiled at the old title, but it was a bitter smile. ‘Our time is past.’

‘It was, yes. But now it shall be reborn.’

Sechul shook his head. ‘You were right to surrender the first time—’

‘That was no surrender! I was driven out!’

‘You were forced to relinquish all that you no longer deserved.’ The haunted eyes lifted to trap the Errant’s glare. ‘Why the resentment?’

‘We were allies!’

‘So we were.’

‘We shall be again, Knuckles. You were the Elder God who stood closest to my throne—’

‘Your Empty Throne, yes.’

‘A battle is coming—listen to me! We can cast aside all these pathetic new gods. We can drown them in blood!’ The Errant leaned forward. ‘Do you fear that it will be you and me alone against them? I assure you, old friend, we shall not be alone.’ He settled back once more, stared into the fire. ‘Your mortal kin have found new power, made new alliances.’

Knuckles snorted. ‘You would trust to the peace and justice of the Forkrul Assail? After all they once did to you?’

‘I trust the necessity they have recognized.’

‘Errastas, my time is at an end.’ He made a rippling gesture with his fingers. ‘I leave it to the Twins.’ He smiled. ‘They were my finest cast.’

‘I refuse to accept that. You will not stand aside in what is to come. I have forgotten nothing. Remember the power we once wielded?’

‘I remember—why do you think I’m here?’

‘I want that power again. I will have it.’

‘Why?’ Knuckles asked softly. ‘What is it you seek?’

‘Everything that I have lost!’

‘Ah, old friend, then you do not remember everything.’

‘No?’

‘No. You have forgotten why you lost it in the first place.’

A long moment of silence.

The Errant rose and went over to pour himself a goblet of wine. He returned and stood looking down upon his fellow Elder God. ‘I am not here,’ he said, ‘for you alone.’

Knuckles winced.

‘I intend, as well, to summon the Clan of Elders—all who have survived. I am Master of the Tiles. They cannot deny me.’

‘No,’ Knuckles muttered, ‘that we cannot do.’

‘Where is she?’

‘Sleeping.’

The Errant grimaced. ‘I already knew that, Setch.’

‘Sit down, Errastas. For now, please. Let us just . . . sit here. Let us drink in remembrance of friendship. And innocence.’

‘When our goblets are empty, Knuckles.’

He closed his eyes and nodded. ‘So be it.’

‘It pains me to see you so,’ the Errant said as he sat back down. ‘We shall return you to what you once were.’

‘Dear Errastas, have you not learned? Time cares nothing for our wants, and no god that has ever existed can be as cruel as time.’

The Errant half-closed his remaining eye. ‘Wait until you see the world I shall make, Setch. Once more, you shall stand beside the Empty Throne. Once more, you shall know the pleasure of mischance, striking down hopeful mortals one by one.’

‘I do remember,’ Knuckles murmured, ‘how they railed at misfortune.’

‘And sought to appease ill fate with ever more blood. Upon the altars. Upon the fields of battle.’

‘And in the dark bargains of the soul.’

The Errant nodded. Pleased. Relieved. Yes, he could wait for this time, this brief healing span. It served and served well.

He could grant her a few more moments of rest.

‘So tell me,’ ventured Knuckles, ‘the tale.’

‘What tale?’