The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (1146 page)

When kin attacked, he did not resist—
the more dead and dying wyval, the better.

But he felt himself being torn apart. He felt his mind shredding away. He could not do much more of this. Yet Bottle did not relent.

Tarr stumbled into a knot of marines. Glared round. ‘Limp—where’s your—’

‘Dead,’ Limp said. ‘Just me an’ Crump—’

‘Ruffle?’

The round-faced woman shook her head. ‘Got separated. Saw Skim die, that’s all—’

‘So what are you doing sitting here? On your feet, marine—those heavies are dying where they stand. And we’re going to join them. You, Reliko! Pull Vastly on his feet there—you’re all coming with me!’

Silent, without a single word of protest, the marines clambered to their feet. They were bleeding. They were exhausted.

They gathered up their weapons, and, Tarr in the lead, set out for the trench.

Nearby, Urb plucked away the shattered fragments of his shield. Hellian crouched beside him, breathing hard, her face streaked with blood and puke, with more of both drenching her chest. She’d said she didn’t know whose blood it was. Glancing at her, he saw her hard eyes, her hard expression. Other soldiers were drawn up behind them.

Urb turned. ‘We do what Tarr says, soldiers. Back into it. Now.’

Hellian almost pushed past him on the way to the trench.

Henar Vygulf reined in beneath the hill—he could see fallen horses and sprawled, scorched bodies where the Adjunct’s command post had been. He slipped down from his horse, drew his two swords and jogged up the slope.

Reaching the summit, he saw four Nah’ruk arriving on the opposite ridge.

Lostara Yil and the Adjunct were lying almost side by side. Likely dead, but he needed to make sure. If he could.

He charged forward.

The clash of iron woke her. Blinking, Lostara stared into the sky, trying to recall what had happened. Her head ached and she could feel dried blood crusting her nostrils, crackling in her ears. She turned her head, saw the Adjunct lying beside her.

Chest slowly rising and falling.

Ah, good.

Someone grunted as if in pain.

She sat up. In time to see Henar Vygulf stagger back, blood spraying from a chest wound. Three Nah’ruk closed.

Henar fell on to his back almost at Lostara’s feet.

She rose, drawing her blades.

He saw her, and the anguish in his eyes took her breath away.

‘I’m sorry—’

‘You’re going to live,’ she told him, stepping past. ‘Prop yourself up, man—that’s an order!’

He managed to lift himself on one elbow. ‘Captain—’

She glanced at the Nah’ruk. Almost upon her, slowed by wounds. Behind them, a dozen more appeared. ‘Just remember, Henar, I don’t do this for just anybody!’

‘Do what?’

She stepped forward, blades lifting. ‘
Dance.
’

The old forms returned, as if they had but been awaiting her, awaiting this one moment when at last she awoke—possibly one last time—no matter.
For you, Henar. For you.

The Shadow Dance belonged to this.

Here.

Now.

Henar watched her, and his eyes slowly widened.

______

A league to the southeast, Kisswhere dragged herself from her fallen horse. A badger burrow, the den mouth of a fox, something. Her horse thrashed, front legs shattered, its screams shrill in the air.

Kisswhere’s left leg was bent in four places. The stub of bone thrust through her leggings. She drew a knife and twisted round to study the horse, eyes fixing on a pulsing artery in its neck.

Didn’t matter. They were all dead. Even if she could have reached the Mortal Sword and that mad red-haired Queen, it wouldn’t have mattered.

She glanced up. The sky was flesh, and that flesh was rotting before her eyes.

Sinter. Badan.

Bonehunters—Adjunct, are you happy? You killed them all.

You killed us all.

Nom Kala stood with the others, a silent mass of warriors who had forgotten what it was to live, as the wind pulled at rotted furs, strips of hide and dry tangles of hair. Dull, pitted weapons hung like afterthoughts from twisted hands. Air pitched into the bowls of eye sockets and moaned back out. They could be statues, gnawed by age, withering where they stood facing the endless winds, the senseless rains, the pointless waves of heat and cold.

There was nothing useful in this, and she knew she was not alone in her disquiet. Onos T’oolan, the First Sword, crouched down on one knee ten paces ahead of them, hands wrapped round the grip of his flint sword, the weapon’s point buried in the stony ground. His head was lowered, as if he made obeisance before a master, but this master was invisible, little more than a smear of obligations swept aside, but the stain of what had been held him in place—a stain only Onos T’oolan could see. He had not moved in some time.

Patience was no trial, but she could sense the chaos in her kin, the pitch and cant of terrible desires, the rocking rebuffs of vengeance waiting. It was only a matter of time before the first of them broke away, defying this servitude, this claim of righteous command. He would not reach for them. He had yet to do so, why imagine he would change—

The First Sword rose, faced them. ‘I am Onos T’oolan. I am the First Sword of Tellann. I reject your need.’

The wind moaned on, like the flow of sorrow.

‘You shall, however, bow to mine.’

She felt buffeted by those words.
This is what it means, then, to yield before a First Sword. We cannot deny him, cannot defy him.
She could feel his will, closing like a fist about her.
We had our chance—before this. We could have drifted away. He gave us that.
But not one T’lan Imass had done any such thing.
Instead, we fell inside ourselves, ever deeper, that endless eating and spitting out and eating all we spat out—this is the seductive sustenance of hatred and spite, of rage and vengeance.

He could have led us off a cliff and we would not have noticed.

The three Orshayn bonecasters stepped forward. Ulag Togtil spoke. ‘First Sword, we await your command.’

Onos T’oolan slowly faced south, where the sky above the horizon seemed to boil like pitch. And then he swung north, where a distant cloud caught the sun’s dying light. ‘We go no farther,’ the First Sword said. ‘We shall be dust.’

And what of our dark dreams, First Sword?

Such was his power that he heard her thought and so turned to her. ‘Nom Kala, hold fast to your dreams. There will be an answer. T’lan Imass, we are upon a time of killing.’

The statues shifted. Some straightened. Some hunched down as if beneath terrible burdens. The statues—
my kin. My sisters, my brothers. There are none to look upon us now, none to see us, none to wonder at who we once were, at who
shaped us with such . . . loving hands.
As she watched, they began, one by one, falling into dust.

None to witness. Dust of dreams, dust of all that we never achieved. Dust of what we might have been and what we cannot help but be.

Statues are never mute. Their silence is a roar of words. Will you hear? Will you listen?

She was the last, alone with Onos T’oolan himself.

‘You possess no rage, Nom Kala.’

‘No, First Sword, I do not.’

‘What might you find to serve in its place?’

‘I do not know. The humans defeated us. They were better than we were, it is as simple as that. I feel only grief, First Sword.’

‘And is there no anger in grief, Nom Kala?’

Yes. It may be that there is. But if I must search for it—

‘There is time,’ said Onos T’oolan.

She bowed to him, and released herself.

Onos T’oolan watched as Nom Kala fell in a gusting cloud. In his mind a figure was approaching, hands held out as if beseeching. He knew that harrowed face, that lone glittering eye. What could he say to this stranger he had once known? He too was a stranger, after all. Yes, they had once known each other.
But now look at us, both so intimate with dust.

Nom Kala’s anguish returned to him. Her thoughts had bled with dread power—she was young. She was, he realized, what the Imass might have become, had the Ritual not taken them, had it not stolen their future.
A future of pathos. Sordid surrender. The loss of dignity, a slow, slow death.

No, Toc the Younger. I give you nothing but silence. And its torrid roar.

Will you hear? Will you listen?

Any of you?

She had dwelt like a parasite deep in its entrails. She had seen, all around her, the broken remnants of some long abandoned promise, the broken clutter, the spilled fluids. But there had been heat, and a pulsing presence as if the very stone was alive—she should have understood the significance of such things, but her mind had been wallowing in its own darkness, a lifeless place of pointless regrets.

Standing not six paces from the two gold-skinned foreigners, she had turned and, like them, looked with wonder, disbelieving.

Ampelas Rooted.

Ampelas Uprooted.
The entire city, its massive, mountainous bulk, filled the northern sky. Its underside was a forest of twisted metal roots, from which drained rainbow rain as if even in pain it could bleed nothing but gifts. Yet, Kalyth could see its agony. It was canted to one side. It was surrounded by smoke
and dust. Fissures rose from its base, like the broken knuckles of a god only moments from once again hammering the earth.

She could feel . . . something, a bristling core of will knotted in breathless pain. The Matron’s? Could it be anyone else? Her blood flowed through the rock. Her lungs howled, winds shrieking between caverns. Her sweat glistened and ran like tears. She bled in a thousand places, bones splintering to vast, ever growing pressures.

The Matron, yes, but . . . there was no mind left inside that nightmare of oozing flesh.

Uprooted
, this long-dead thing.
Uprooted
, a thousand upon a thousand generations of belief, faith, the solid iron of once immutable laws.

She defies every truth. She wills life into a corpse, and now it staggers across the sky.

‘A sky keep,’ said the one named Gesler. ‘Moon’s Spawn—’

‘But this one is bigger,’ said Stormy, clawing at his beard. ‘If Tayschrenn could see this—’

‘If Rake had been commanding one of these—’

Stormy grunted. ‘Aye. He’d have flattened the High Mage like a cockroach under a thumb. And then he’d have done the same to the whole Hood-damned Malazan Empire.’

‘But look,’ said Gesler. ‘It’s in rough shape—not as ugly as Rake’s rock, but it looks like it could come down at any time.’

Kalyth could now see the Furies marching beneath the Dragon Tower—
the sky keep, yes, that is well named.
Ve’Gath Soldiers in their thousands. K’ell Hunters well in advance of the legions and ranging out to the sides in looser formations. Behind the ranks of the Furies, drones struggled to pull enormous wagons groaning beneath towering loads.

‘Look at the big ones,’ Gesler said. ‘The heavies—gods below, one of those could rip a Kenyll’rah demon in half.’

Kalyth spoke. ‘Mortal Sword, they are Ve’Gath, the soldiers of the K’Chain Che’Malle. No Matron has ever birthed so many. A hundred was deemed sufficient. Gunth’an Acyl has birthed more than fifteen thousand.’

The man’s amber eyes fixed on her. ‘If Matrons could do that, why didn’t they? They could be ruling this world right now.’

‘There was terrible . . . pain.’ She hesitated, and then said. ‘Sanity was lost.’

‘Soldiers like those,’ Stormy muttered, ‘what ruler needs to be sane?’

Kalyth grimaced. These two men were irreverent. They seemed to be fearless.
They are the ones. But nothing insisted I must like them, or even understand them. No, they frighten me as much as the K’Chain Che’Malle do.
‘She is dying.’

Gesler rubbed at his face. ‘No heir?’