The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (1191 page)

Equity narrowed her attention on the other woman in the group. She snorted. ‘It is said the Realm of Death is sundered. Do your kind now plague the world?'

‘I carry no plague,' the woman replied.

The Forkrul Assail frowned. Was she a simpleton? Often, she well knew, the brain decayed irreparably in such creatures.

The man standing beside the undead woman was now staring at her with his one working eye. ‘Did she say y'got the plague, Cap'n?'

‘No, Pretty, she said you're an idiot. Now be quiet – better yet, gather up the crew, now that they've scattered every which way, and detail a burial party, and all that other stuff. Go on.'

‘Aye, Cap'n.' Then he hesitated, and said in a hoarse whisper that all could hear, ‘It's just, this one, she looks like she's got a plague, don't she? All white and all those veins on her arms, and—'

‘Go, Kaban. Now.'

Nodding, the man limped off.

Equity watched the woman who'd attacked her set about retrieving her weapons.

‘Inquisitor,' said the sorceress, ‘we have no interest in suffering your…adjudication. Indeed, we proclaim you our enemy.'

‘Is blind hatred your only recourse?' Equity demanded. ‘You name me “Inquisitor”, telling me that you know certain details of local significance. Yet that title is a presumption. You assume that all Forkrul Assail are Inquisitors, and this is ignorant. Indeed, most of the Inquisitors we set upon the peoples of this land were Watered – as much human blood in their veins as Assail. We discovered a rather sweet irony in observing their zeal, by the way.'

‘Nevertheless,' the sorceress retorted, even as she made imperative gestures towards her servant, ‘we must view you as our enemy.'

‘You still do not understand, do you? Your enemies are the Elders among the Pures, who seek the utter destruction of you and your kind, not just on this continent, but across the entire world.'

‘I am sure you understood why we might object to such desires,' the sorceress said, and now her servant arrived, delivering into the young woman's plump hand a clay pipe. She puffed for a moment, and then continued, ‘And while you appear to be suggesting that you do not share the zeal of your Elder Pures, I cannot help but wonder what has brought you here, to me.'

‘You have bargained with the Jaghut,' said Equity.

‘They share our aversion to your notions of justice.'

Frowning, Equity said, ‘I cannot understand what value the Jaghut see in you, a silly little girl playing at deadly magics, and beside you a lifeless abomination harbouring a parasite.' She fixed her gaze upon the servant. ‘Is there a glamour about this one? If so, it is too subtle for me. Tell me, Sorceress, is she Jaghut?'

‘My handmaid? Goodness, no!'

Equity's eyes settled upon the ship in the bay. ‘Is he there?'

‘Who?'

‘Your ally – I would speak to him. Or her.'

Smoke billowed and streamed. ‘I'm sorry, what ally?'

‘Where hides the Jaghut?' Equity demanded.

‘Ah, I see. You misapprehend. I struck no bargain with any particular Jaghut. I merely sacrificed some blood for the privilege of Omtose Phellack—'

The undead captain turned on the sorceress. ‘You did what? Errant's nudge – that storm! You can't—'

‘Necessity, Captain Elalle. Now please, cogitate in silence for the moment, will you?'

‘I am astonished,' admitted Equity. ‘I did not imagine you to be so…thick.'

‘Thorns and rocks—'

‘You cannot bargain with Omtose Phellack – you are not Jaghut. No, you need a blessing, or personal intervention, and this is as true of a mortal as it is of an Elder God. That ship is Jaghut – its kind has not sailed the seas of this world for millennia. Where has it come from?'

‘From the realm of Omtose Phellack itself,' said the sorceress.

‘No, that is not possible. Unless a Jaghut has journeyed into the warren – but no, there is naught but ice – yonder ship was built in this world. Do you see now why this makes no sense?'

‘Not just ice, apparently.'

‘You have seen Omtose Phellack?'

‘My handmaid,' said the sorceress. ‘It was she who journeyed through the gate. It was she who entered Omtose Phellack and returned with the ship.'

Equity studied the woman with the bruised eyes. ‘Describe the place where you were, please.'

‘Enlighten her,' ordered the sorceress when the handmaid hesitated.

A shrug, and then, ‘Forest. Demons. Ravines. Vicious apes.'

‘You did not journey to Omtose Phellack,' Equity pronounced. ‘The gate opened upon another realm, a different warren.'

‘That cannot be,' objected the sorceress. ‘My ritual fed on the power of Omtose Phellack.'

‘Enough of all this,' drawled the captain, crossing her arms. ‘This Forkrul Assail has come here to negotiate. She seeks to betray her Elders. Obviously, she's come looking for allies, though why she would seek us out remains something of a mystery, since she clearly knew nothing about your making use of Omtose Phellack, Princess. So, unless your skills in sorcery are such that even the gods tremble, I admit to having some trouble understanding what she wants from us.'

Equity sighed. ‘We felt the touch of an Elder Warren, but could not determine which one.'

‘Then it was the Elder Pures who dispatched you?'

‘No, those who remain close to the Spire are mostly blind to distant powers. When I spoke of “we” I meant myself and my comrades; we have journeyed many times well beyond the influence of the power emanating from the Spire, else we would not have detected these…intrusions.'

‘And now you want to forge some kind of alliance,' said the captain.

‘You seek the Spire, and that which lies upon its altar—'

‘Not precisely,' interjected the sorceress, pausing to pull hard on her pipe before adding, ‘we seek to prevent whatever it is you're all planning.'

‘And how do you expect to do that?'

‘I believe the term you have already used will suffice: allies.'

‘If you – and your allies – would have any hope of succeeding, you will need our help.'

‘And if we do not trust you?' the captain asked.

‘This is proving a waste of time,' said Equity. ‘I will speak to the Jaghut now.'

‘There isn't one,' said the sorceress, behind a veil of smoke.

‘Then he or she is hiding even from you. Open the gate, Princess – the one you used for your servant. The presence is very close – I can feel it. I felt it when you unleashed Omtose Phellack against me. Open the gate, and let us all see who has come among us.'

Hissing, the sorceress held out her pipe. The handmaid took it. ‘Very well. It will be a feeble gate; indeed, I might well fail—'

‘It won't.'

The sorceress walked a short distance away, her rounded hips swaying. She lifted her hands, fingers moving as if plucking invisible strings.

Bitter cold flooded out, the sand crackling as if lit by lightning, and the gate that erupted was massive, yawning, towering. Through the billowing icy air flowed out a sweeter, rank smell. The smell of death.

A figure stood on the threshold of the gate. Tall, hunched, a withered, lifeless face of greenish grey, yellowed tusks thrusting up from the lower jaw. Pitted eyes regarded them from beneath a tattered woollen cowl.

The power cascading from this apparition sent Equity stumbling back.
Abyss! A Jaghut, yes, but not just any Jaghut! Calm – can you hear me? Through this howl? Can you hear me? An ally stands before me – an ally of ancient – so ancient – power! This one could have been an Elder God. This one could have been…anything!
Gasping, fighting to keep from falling to one knee, from bowing before this terrible creature, Equity forced herself to lift her gaze, to meet the empty hollows of his eyes.

‘I know you,' she said. ‘You are Hood.'

The Jaghut stepped forward, the gate swirling closed behind him. Hood paused, regarding each witness in turn, and then walked towards Equity.

‘
They made you their king
,' she whispered. ‘They who followed no one chose to follow
you
. They who refused every war fought
your
war. And what you did then – what you did—'

As he reached her, his desiccated hands caught her. He lifted her from her feet, and then, mouth stretching, he bit into the side of her face. The tusks drove up beneath her cheek bone, burst the eye on that side. In a welter of blood, he tore away half of her face, and then bit a second time, up under the orbitals, the tusks driving into her brain.

Equity hung in his grip, feeling her life drain away. Her head felt strangely unbalanced. She seemed to be weeping from only one eye, and from her throat no words were possible.
I once dreamed of peace. As a child, I dreamed of—

 

Shurq Elalle stared in horror as the Jaghut flung the corpse away. From his gore-drenched mouth fell fragments of scalp and skull.

Then Hood faced them, and in a dry, toneless voice he said, ‘I have never much liked Forkrul Assail.'

No one spoke. Felash stood trembling, her face pale as death itself. Beside her, the handmaid had set her hands upon the axes at her belt, but seemed unable to move beyond that futile, diffident gesture.

Shurq Elalle gathered herself, and said, ‘You have a singular way of ending a discussion, Jaghut.'

The empty pits seemed to find her, somehow, and Hood said, ‘We have no need of allies. Besides, I recently learned a lesson in brevity, Shurq Elalle, which I have taken to heart.'

‘A lesson? Really?
Who taught you that?
'

The Jaghut looked away, across the water. ‘Ah, my Death Ship. I admit, it was a quaint affectation. Nonetheless, one cannot help but admire its lines.'

Princess Felash, Fourteenth Daughter of Bolkando, fell to her knees and was sick in the sand.

THE EDGE OF THE GLASS DESERT WAS A BROKEN LINE OF CRYSTALS AND
boulders, for all the world like an ancient shoreline. Aranict could not pull her gaze from it. She sat slumped in the saddle of her wearily plodding horse, a hood drawn over against the blistering sun, off to one side of the main column. Prince Brys rode somewhere ahead, near the vanguard, leaving her alone.

The desert's vast, flat stretch was blinding, the glare painful and strangely discordant, as if she was witnessing an ongoing crime, the raw lacerations of a curse upon the land itself. Stones melted to glass, shards of crystal jutting like spears, others that grew like bushes, every branch and twig glittering as if made of ice.

Rolled up against the verge there were bones, heaped like driftwood. Most were shattered, reduced to splinters, as if whatever had befallen the land had taken in a massive fist each creature and crushed the life from it – it felt like a deliberate act, an exercise in unbelievable malice. She thought she could still taste the evil, could still feel its rotted breath on the wind.

Waves of nausea spread out from her stomach again and again, slow as a creeping tide, and when it washed its way back, when it retreated, it left a residue in her own bones.
This place, it wants to kill me. I can feel it.
Her skin was clammy and cool beneath her cloak.
It wants inside. Eager as an infection. Who could have done this? Why? What terrible conflict led to this?

She imagined that if she listened carefully enough, if all the sounds of thousands of soldiers marching and hundreds of wagons rolling were to suddenly fall away, if even the wind moaned into silence, she might hear still the droning words of the ritual that had ignited the fires, creating the desecrating cruelty that would become the Glass Desert.

This is what despair leads to, the kind of despair that steals light from the world, that mocks life's own struggle to exist, to persist. Denying our desire to heal, to mend all that we break. Refusing hope itself.

If despair has a ritual, it was spoken here.

Riding this close to the glistening edge, to the banks of bones and cracked boulders, she felt as if she was taking it inside herself, as if deadly crystals had begun growing within her, whispering awake in the echoes of ancient words.
When all you are is made wrong. This is how it feels.

Brys Beddict's army was many days behind the other two, for the prince had made certain he was the last to leave the Bonehunters. They had marched with them to the desert's very edge. Eight days through an increasingly parched and forbidding land. She wondered if he'd been hoping to change the Adjunct's mind, to convince her of the madness of her determination to cross the Glass Desert. Or perhaps he had been considering accompanying that doomed force. For the first time since they had become lovers, Brys had closed himself to her.
And not just me. To everyone.

And on the day we parted from them, he stood near Tavore, but he said nothing. Nor as we all watched the Bonehunters form up and set out, crossing that ghastly midden of crystals and bones, into the harsh glare beyond; we all watched, and not one of us – not one in the entire mass of soldiers – had a thing to say.

When the last burdened wagon rocked over the berm, and the last of the dust swirled away in the Malazans' wake; when the column wavered and smeared in the fierce glare and rising heat, Brys had turned to face her.

The look in his face shocked her, cut through her every defence. Whatever he had thought to do to dissuade the Adjunct, the moment had passed. No, a thousand moments. Eight days' worth, and not one grasped, not one taken in hand like a weapon. The brittle wall of silence had defeated him, defeated them all. That look…

Helpless. Filled with… Abyss below, filled with despair.

She was a singular woman, was Tavore Paran. They could all see that. They had all witnessed the terrible majesty of her will.

And her soldiers followed – that had been for Aranict the hardest thing to witness. The squads fell in, the companies formed up, and as they marched past Prince Brys they offered him a sharp, perfect salute.
As if on a parade ground. Eyes hidden in the shadow of their helms, that closed fist on the chest, expressions chiselled from stone – gods, I will never forget that, any of it. Those faces. Horrifying in their emptiness. Those soldiers: veterans of something far beyond battles, far beyond shields locked and swords bared, beyond even the screams of dying comrades and the desolation of loss.

Veterans of a lifetime of impossible decisions, of all that is unbearable and all that is without reconciliation.

Brys Beddict rode to the head of the column then, to lead his soldiers south, along the very edge of the Glass Desert. It was clear that as soon as they reached its southernmost end, he would swing the army eastward, and the pace would become savage. They were a week or more behind the Perish and the Evertine Legion.

Aranict lit another stick of rustleaf. Her neck ached, as she found it impossible to face forward, to look ahead. The Glass Desert held her.

They're out there. Do they reel beneath its onslaught? Has its madness infected them? Are they even now killing each other, frenzied with fever? It has been three days. They might already be dead, every one of them. More bones to crush, to push towards the shoreline – the only retreat left to them.
She looked again at the bleached splinters.
Did you all try to cross the desert?

The very notion chilled her. Shivering beneath her cloak, she forced her gaze away from the horror on her left, only to see its mangled verge stretching ahead, southward alongside the column, until the two seemed to merge in the hazy distance.

Brys, my love, from all of us what will you now forge? We Letherii have known too many defeats of late. And we tasted our own blood yet again, against the Nah'ruk. Not so bitter that time, for we saved the Bonehunters. Still, we pale beside our allies. In their shadow we are diminished.

And yet…they saluted us.

She could not get that moment out of her mind. The faces haunted her and she feared they would do so for the rest of her life.

Whose army are they? These Bonehunters. What is their cause? And the strength within them, where does it come from? Is it held in the soul of the Adjunct? No – at least, I don't think so. Oh, she is the focus for them all, but they have no love for her. They see her, if at all, as no different from a mountain, a column of storm clouds, a bitter grey sea – they see her as part of the natural world, a thing to be borne, to be weathered.

I saw in their faces the erosion of her will, and they bore it. They bore it as they did all else. These Malazans, they shame the gods themselves.

 

‘Coming up on us fast, Highness, out of the northwest.'

Brys nodded. ‘Draw in the flying wing, Preda. I will take out our standard-bearer and my Atri-Ceda – when you see us ride out from the column, fall the wing in behind us.'

‘Yes, Highness.'

Brys listened to the Preda dispatching riders, one out to the flanking wing of light cavalry, another to retrieve Aranict from down the column. The standard-bearer rode up beside the prince, his face pale and drawn. ‘No need for alarm, soldier,' Brys said to the young man. ‘This shall be a meeting of allies.'

‘But…lizards, sir!'

‘K'Chain Che'Malle. Not Short-Tails – I am sure you have heard, the army now approaching us subsequently defeated the Nah'ruk.'

The young man nodded, nervously licking his lips.

Brys studied him. ‘Soldier, our clash with the Nah'ruk – was that your first taste of battle?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘You bore this standard?'

‘No, sir. Well, I was the third to take it up that day, and by then we were in full retreat—'

‘Withdrawal,' Brys corrected. ‘Trust me, a full retreat is a far messier thing than what we managed.'

‘Yes, sir.'

Brys glanced up at the standard and fought down a groan, reminded once again of his brother's perverse humour.
Not a legion's standard. No, the Imperial Standard, no less.
Depending from a cross-bridge of iron, the cloth was a tattered rectangle of colourless wool – it was, in fact, a fair copy of Tehol's blanket, almost to scale. And where one might expect some elegant or proud heraldic crest at centre, there was instead the new royal sigil of King Tehol the Only of Lether: a three-quarter-on rendition of his brother's roof-top bed, and if one looked carefully one would see cowering beneath that bed a row of six plucked – but living – hens. Eyeing it, Brys recalled his meeting with Tehol upon the unveiling.

‘You would have our armies fight under that?'

‘Well,
I
did. The bed, I mean. And so did the chickens – can you imagine the extent of their holy dread, knowing that God wanted to cook them? All right, not
their
god, not precisely. Though we cannot actually be sure of that, can we? Bugg, are you worshipped by hens and cocks?'

‘Not both at the same time, sire.'

‘Thank you. Most enlightening.'

‘My very reason to exist, sire. You are welcome.'

‘Tehol—'

‘Yes, Brys?'

‘I understand your notion that dignity cannot be found in the…er, material – not a throne, not a crown, not even a fine estate or whatnot – but when it comes to the military—'

‘Oh, that's all I ever hear from you, brother! “It's not that way in the military, Tehol”, “The enlisted won't go for that, Tehol”, “They don't like pink, Tehol”. The pathetic conservatism of that hoary institution is, frankly, embarrassing.'

‘I don't recall any mention of pink, sire.'

‘There wasn't, Bugg. I was being illustrative.'

‘What kind of illustration did you have in mind? Shall I summon the court artist again?'

‘Abyss no! After that debacle with my wife and that pretty guard—'

‘Ex-guard, sire.'

‘Really? By whose order? I demand to know!'

‘Your wife, the queen, sire.'

‘That interfering cow…oh, don't look at me like that, beloved – I was but referring to you in your official capacity. Thus, while I rail at the queen, my love for my beautiful wife remains in its usual beaming manner for ever untarnished—'

‘Too bad the same cannot be said for that poor young woman, husband.'

‘I never tarnished her – not once!'

‘Tehol, have you
seen
that damned painting?'

‘Only once, dearest, since you went and burned the only copy. And – that's right, you look well at this wagging finger – that artist has been depressed ever since—'

‘More like running scared,' suggested Bugg.

‘Tehol, about this Imperial Standard—'

‘Not again, Brys. I thought we were past all that. It's lovely and most apt—'

‘But who will rally under it?'

‘Brys, if an army must rally, one must presume it is in dire straits, yes? Well then, where better to hide than under the king's bed?'

‘With all the other chickens,' added Bugg. ‘Well now, sire, that's clever.'

‘Hold on,' said the queen, ‘What did you mean by “the only
copy”
?'

‘Brys! Rally the troops!'

Sweating under the bright sun, the king's brother snorted – but how he missed those days now. The chaotic palace of King Tehol seemed very far away. He squinted up at the standard, and smiled.