The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (170 page)

Finally, we come to you, L'oric, my only true mystery. Your sorcerous arts are formidable, particularly in weaving an impervious barrier about you. The cast of your mind is unknown to me, even the breadth and depth of your loyalty. And though you seem faithless, I have found you the most reliable. For you are a pragmatist, L'oric. Like Leoman. Yet I am ever on your scales, my every decision, my every word. So, judge me now, High Mage, and decide
.

He dropped to one knee, bowed his head.

Felisin smiled.
Half-measured. Very pragmatic, L'oric. I have missed you
.

She saw his wry answering smile there in the shadows cast by his hood.

Finished with the three men, Felisin's attention returned to the crowd awaiting her next pronouncement. Silence gripped the air.
What is left?
“We must march, my children. Yet that alone is not enough. We must
announce
what we are about to do, for all to see.”

The goddess was ready.

Felisin
—Sha'ik Reborn—
raised her arms.

The golden dust twisted above her, corkscrewed into a column. It grew. The spout of raging wind and dust burgeoned, climbed skyward, drawing in the desert's gilded cloak, the breath clearing the vast dome on all sides, revealing a blue expanse that had not been seen for months.

And still the column grew, surging higher, ever higher.

The Whirlwind was naught but preparation for this. This, the raising of Dryjhna's standard, the spear that is the Apocalypse. A standard to tower over an entire continent, seen by all. Now, at last, the war begins. My war
.

Her head tilted back, she let her sorcerous vision feast on what was rising to the very edge of heaven's canopy.
Dear sister, see what you've made
.

 

The crossbow jolted in Fiddler's hands. A gout of fire bloomed in the heaving mass of rats, blackening and roasting scores of the creatures.

From point, the sapper had become rearguard, as the group retreated from Gryllen's nightmare pursuit. “The D'ivers has stolen powerful lives,” said Apsalar, and Mappo, struggling to pull Icarium back, had nodded. “Gryllen has never before shown such…capacity…”

Capacity. Fiddler grunted, chewing at the word. The last time he'd seen this D'ivers, the rats had been present in their hundreds. Now they were in their thousands, perhaps tens of thousands—he could only guess at their numbers.

The Hound Gear had rejoined them and now led their retreat down side tracks and narrow tunnels. They were seeking to circle around Gryllen—they could do naught else.

Until Icarium loses control, and gods, he's close. Far too close
.

The sapper reached into his munitions, his fingers touching his last cusser, then brushing past, finding instead another flamer. No time to affix it to a quarrel, and he was running out of those anyway. The swarm's lead creatures, scampering toward him, were no more than half a dozen paces away. Fiddler's heart stuttered in his chest
—Have I let them get too close this time? Hood's breath!
He flung the grenado.

Roast rat
.

Heaving bodies swallowed the liquid fire, rolled and tumbled toward him.

The sapper wheeled and ran.

He nearly plunged into Shan's blood-smeared jaws. Wailing, Fiddler dodged, spun, went sprawling among boots and moccasins. The group had come to a halt. He scrambled upright. “We got to run!”

“Where?” The question came from Crokus, in a dry, heavy tone.

They were at a bend in the path, and at both ends swarmed a solid wall of rats.

Four Hounds attacked the far mob, only Shan remaining with the group—taking the place of Blind, perilously close to Icarium.

With a shriek of rage the Jhag threw Mappo from his shoulders with a seemingly effortless shrug. The Trell staggered, lost his balance and struck the root floor with a rattling thud.

“Everybody down!” Fiddler screamed, his hand blindly reaching into the munitions bag, closing on that large, smooth object within.

Keening, Icarium drew his sword. Wood snapped and recoiled in answer. The iron sky blushed crimson, began twisting into a vortex directly above them. Sap sprayed from the walls like sleet, spattering everyone.

Shan attacked Icarium but was batted aside, sent flying, the Jhag barely noticing.

Fiddler stared at Icarium a moment longer; then, pulling his cusser free, the sapper wheeled around and threw it at the D'ivers.

But it was not a cusser.

Eyes wide, Fiddler stared as the conch shell struck the root floor and shattered like glass.

He heard a savage crack behind him, but had no time to give it thought, and all further sounds vanished as a whispering voice rose from the ruined shell
—a Tano Spiritwalker's gift—
whispering that soon filled the air, a song of bones, finding muscle as it swept outward.

The heaving mass of rats on both sides sought to retreat, but there was nowhere to flee—the sound enveloped all. The creatures began crumpling, the flesh withering, leaving only fur and bones. The song took that flesh, and so grew.

Gryllen's thousand-voiced scream was an anguished explosion of pain and terror. And it, too, was swallowed, devoured.

Fiddler clapped his hands to his ears as the song resonated within, insistent, a voice anything but human, anything but mortal. He twisted away, fell to his knees. His wide eyes stared, barely registering what he saw before him.

His companions were down, curling around themselves. The Hounds cowered, the massive beasts trembling, ears flat. Mappo crouched over the prone, motionless form of Icarium. In the Trell's hands was his bone club, the flat side of the head spattered with fresh blood and snagged strands of long reddish hair. Mappo finally dropped the weapon and slapped his hands over his ears.

Gods, this will kill us all—stop! Stop, dammit!

He realized he was going mad, his vision betraying him, for he now saw a wall, a wall of water, sleet gray and webbed with foam, rushing upon them down the path, building higher, escaping the root-walls and tumbling outward. And he found he could see into the wall now, as if it had turned to liquid glass. Wreckage, foundation stones softened by algae, the rotting remains of sunken ships, encrusted, shapeless hunks of oxidized metal, bones, skulls, casks and bronze-bound chests, splintered masts and fittings—the submerged memory of countless civilizations, an avalanche of tragic events, dissolution and decay.

The wave buried them, drove them all down with its immense weight, its relentless force.

Then was gone, leaving them dry as dust.

Silence filled the air, slowly broken by harsh gasps, bestial whimpers, the muted rustling of clothing and weapons.

Fiddler lifted his head, pushing himself to his hands and knees. Ghostly remnants of that flood seemed to stain him through and through, permeating him with ineffable sorrow.

Protective sorcery?

The Spiritwalker had smiled.
Of a sort
.

And I'd planned on selling the damned thing in G'danisban. My last cusser was a damned conch shell—I never checked, not once. Hood's breath!

He was slow to sense a new tension rising in the air. The sapper looked up. Mappo had retrieved his club and now stood over Icarium's unconscious form. Around him ranged the Hounds. Raised hackles on all sides.

Fiddler scrabbled for his crossbow. “Iskaral Pust! Call off those Hounds, damn you!”

“The bargain! The Azath will take him!” the High Priest gasped, still staggering about in the stunned aftermath of the Tano's sorcery. “Now's the time!”

“No,” growled the Trell.

Fiddler hesitated.
The deal, Mappo. Icarium made his wishes plain…
“Call them off, Pust,” he said, moving toward the nervous stand-off. He plunged one hand into his munition bag and swung the leather sack around until he clutched it against his stomach. “Got one last cusser, and those Hounds could be made of solid marble, it won't save 'em when I fall down on what I'm holding here.”

“Damned sappers! Who invented them? Madness!”

Fiddler grinned. “Who invented them? Why, Kellanved, who else—who Ascended to become your god, Pust. I'd have thought you'd appreciate the irony, High Priest.”

“The bargain—”

“Will wait a while longer. Mappo, how hard did you hit him? How long will he be out?”

“As long as I wish, friend.”

Friend, and in that word: “thank you.”

“All right then. Call the mutts off, Pust. Let's get to the House.”

The High Priest ceased his circling stagger; he paused, slowly weaving back and forth. Glancing over at Apsalar, he offered her a wide grin.

“As the soldier says,” she said.

The grin vanished. “The youth of today knows no loyalty. A shame, not at all how things used to be. Wouldn't you agree, Servant?”

Apsalar's father grimaced. “You heard her.”

“Far too permissive, letting her get her way so. You've spoiled her, man! Betrayed by my own generation, alas! What next?”

“What's next is, we get going,” Fiddler said.

“And it won't be much farther,” Crokus said. He pointed down the path. “There. I see the House. I see Tremorlor.”

The sapper watched Mappo sling his weapon over a shoulder, then gently lift Icarium. The Jhag hung limply within those massive arms. The scene was touched with such gentle caring that Fiddler had to look away.

In the local Can'eld dialect, it would come to be called Mesh'arn tho'ledann: the Day of Pure Blood. The River Vathar's mouth gushed blood and corpses into Dojal Hading Sea for close to a week after the slaughter, a tide that deepened from red to black amidst pallid, bloated bodies. To the fisherfolk plying those waters, that time was called the Season of Sharks, and more than one net was cut away before a ghastly harvest was pulled aboard.

Horror knew no sides, played no favorites. It spread like a stain outward, from tribe to tribe, from one city to the next. And from that revulsion was born fear among the natives of Seven Cities. A Malazan fleet was on its way, commanded by a woman hard as iron. What happened at Vathar Crossing was a whetstone to hone her deadly edge.

Yet, Korbolo Dom was anything but finished.

The cedar forest south of the river rose on tiered steps of limestone, the trader track crazed with switchbacks and steep, difficult slopes. And the deeper into the wood the depleted train went, the more ancient, the more uncanny it became.

Duiker led his mare by the reins, stumbling as rocks turned underfoot. Alongside him clattered a wagon, sagging with wounded soldiers. Corporal List sat on the buckboard, his switch snapping the dusty, sweat-runnelled backs of the pair of oxen laboring at their yokes.

The losses at Vathar Crossing were a numb litany in the historian's mind. Over twenty thousand refugees, a disproportionate number of children among them. Less than five hundred able fighters remained in the Foolish Dog Clan, and the other two clans were almost as badly mauled. Seven hundred soldiers of the Seventh were dead, wounded or lost. A scant dozen engineers remained on their feet, and but a score of marines. Three noble families had been lost—an unacceptable attrition, this latter count, as far as the Council was concerned.

And Sormo E'nath. Within the one man, eight elder warlocks, a loss of not just power, but knowledge, experience and wisdom. A blow that had driven the Wickans to their knees.

Earlier that day, at a time when the train had ground to a temporary halt, Captain Lull had joined the historian to share some rations. Few words passed between them to start, as if the events at Vathar Crossing were something not to be talked about, even as they spread like a plague through every thought and echoed ghostlike behind every scene around them, every sound that rose from the camp.

Lull slowly put away the remnants of their meal. Then he paused, and Duiker saw the man studying his own hands, which had begun trembling. The historian looked away, surprised at the sudden shame that swept through him. He saw List, wrapped in sleep on the buckboard, trapped within his prison of dreams.
I could in mercy awaken the lad, yet the power for knowledge has mastered me. Cruelty comes easy these days
.

The captain sighed after a moment, hastily completing the task. “Do you find the need to answer all this, Historian?” he asked. “All those tomes you've read, those other thoughts from other men, other women. Other times. How does a mortal make answer to what his or her kind are capable of? Does each of us, soldier or no, reach a point when all that we've seen, survived, changes us inside? Irrevocably changes us. What do we become, then? Less human, or
more
human? Human enough, or too human?”

Duiker was silent for a long minute, his eyes on the rock-studded dirt that surrounded the boulder upon which he sat. Then he cleared his throat. “Each of us has his own threshold, friend. Soldier or no, we can only take so much before we cross over…into something else. As if the world has shifted around us, though it's only our way of looking at it. A change of perspective, but there's no intelligence to it—you see but do not feel, or you weep yet look upon your own anguish as if from somewhere else, somewhere outside. It's not a place for answers, Lull, for every question has burned away. More human or less human—that's for you to decide.”

“Surely it has been written of, by scholars, priests…philosophers?”

Duiker smiled down at the dirt. “Efforts have been made. But those who themselves have crossed that threshold…well, they have few words to describe the place they've found, and little inclination to attempt to explain it. As I said, it's a place without intelligence, a place where thoughts wander, formless, unlinked. Lost.”

“Lost,” the captain repeated. “I am surely that.”

“Yet you and I, Lull, we are lost late in our lives. Look upon the children, and despair.”

“How to answer this? I must know, Duiker, else I go mad.”

“Sleight of hand,” the historian said.

“What?”

“Think of the sorcery we've seen in our lives, the vast, unbridled, deadly power we've witnessed unleashed. Driven to awe and horror. Then think of a trickster—those you saw as a child—the games of illusion and artifice they could play out with their hands, and so bring wonder to your eyes.”

The captain was silent, motionless. Then he rose. “And there's my answer?”

“It's the only one I can think of, friend. Sorry if it's not enough.”

“No, old man, it's enough. It has to be, doesn't it?”

“Aye, that it does.”

“Sleight of hand.”

The historian nodded. “Ask for nothing more, for the world—this world—won't give it.”

“But where will we find such a thing?”

“Unexpected places,” Duiker replied, also rising. Somewhere ahead, shouts rose and the convoy resumed its climb once more. “If you fight both tears and a smile, you'll have found one.”

“Later, Historian.”

“Aye.”

He watched the captain set off back toward his company of soldiers, and wondered if all he'd said, all he'd offered to the man, was nothing but lies.

The possibility returned to him now, hours later as he trudged along on the trial. One of those random, unattached thoughts that were coming to characterize the blasted scape of his mind. Returned, lingered a moment, then drifted away and was gone.

The journey continued, beneath clouds of dust and a few remaining butterflies.

Korbolo Dom pursued, sniping at the train's mangled tail, content to await better ground before another major engagement. Perhaps even he quailed at what Vathar Forest had begun to reveal.

Among the tall cedars there were trees of some other species that had turned to stone. Gnarled and twisted, the petrified wood embraced objects that were themselves fossilized—the trees held offerings and had, long ago, grown around them. Duiker well recalled the last time he had seen such things, in what had been a holy place in the heart of an oasis, just north of Hissar. That site had revealed ram's horns locked in the wrapped crooks of branches, and there were plenty of those here as well, although they were the least disquieting of Vathar's offerings.

T'lan Imass. No room for doubt—their undead faces stare out at us, from all sides, skulls and withered faces peering out from wreaths of crystallized bark, the dark pits of their eyes tracking our passage. This is a burial ground, not of the flesh-and-blood forebears of the T'lan Imass, but of the deathless creatures themselves
.

List's visions of ancient war—we see here its aftermath
. Crumpled platforms were visible as well, stone latticework perched amidst branches that had once grown around them, closing up the assembled bones like the fingers of stone hands.

At the war's end, the survivors came here, carrying those comrades too shattered to continue, and made of this forest their eternal home. The souls of the T'lan Imass cannot join Hood, cannot even flee their prisons of bone and withered flesh. One does not bury such things—that sentence of earthen darkness offers no peace. Instead, let those remnants look out from their perches upon one another, upon the rare mortal passages on this trail…

Corporal List saw far too clearly, his visions delivering him deep into a history better left lost. Knowledge had beaten him down
—as it does us all, when delivered in too great a measure. Yet I hunger still
.

Cairns had begun appearing, heaps of boulders surmounted with totemic skulls.
Not barrows
, List had said.
Sites of engagement, the various clans, wherever the Jaghut turned from flight and lashed out
.

The day was drawing to a close when they reached the final height, a broad, jumbled basolith that seemed to have shed its limestone coat, the exposed bedrock deeply hued the color of wine. Flat, treeless stretches were crowded with boulders set out in spirals, ellipses and corridors. Cedars were replaced by pines, and the number of petrified trees diminished.

Duiker and List had been traveling in the last third of the column, the wounded shielded by a battered rearguard of infantry. Once the last of the wagons and the few livestock that remained cleared the slope and made level ground, the footmen quickly gained the ridge, squads scattering to various vantage points and potential strongholds commanding the approach.

List halted his wagon and set the brake, then rose from the buckboard, stretched and looked down at Duiker with haunted eyes.

“Better lines of sight up here, anyway,” the historian offered.

“Always has been,” the corporal said. “If we make for the head of the column, we'll come to the first of them.”

“The first of what?”

The blood leaving the lad's face bespoke another vision flooding his mind, a world and a time seen through unhuman eyes. After a moment he shuddered, wiping sweat from his face. “I'll show you.”

They moved through the quiet press in silence. The efforts at making camp they saw on all sides looked wooden, refugees and soldiers alike moving as automatons. No one bothered attempting to erect tents; they simply laid out their bedrolls on the flat rock. Children sat unmoving, watching with the eyes of old men and women.

The Wickan camps were no better. There was no escape from what had been, from the images and remembered scenes that rose again and again, remorselessly, before the mind's eye. Every frail, mundane gesture of normal life had shattered beneath the weight of knowledge.

Yet there was anger, white hot and buried deep, out of sight, as if mantled in peat. It had become the last fuel with any potency.
And so we move on, day after day, fighting every battle—those inside and those without—with an unyielding ferocity and determination. We are all in that place where Lull now lives, a place stripped of rational thought, trapped in a world without cohesion
.

Arriving at the vanguard, they came upon a scene. Coltaine, Bult and Captain Lull were present, and facing them in a ragged line ten paces away were the last of the Engineers.

The Fist turned as Duiker and List approached. “Ah, this is well. I would have you witness this, Historian.”

“What have I missed?”

Bult grinned. “Nothing; we've just managed the prodigious task of assembling the sappers—you'd think battles with Kamist Reloe were tactical nightmares. Anyway, here they are, looking like they're waiting to be ambushed, or worse.”

“And are they, Uncle?”

The commander's grin broadened. “Maybe.”

Coltaine now stepped toward the assembled soldiers. “Symbols of bravery and gestures of recognition can only ring hollow—this I know, yet what else is left to me? Three clan leaders have come to me, each begging to approach you men and women with an offer of formal adoption to their clan. Perhaps you are unaware of what such unprecedented requests reveal…or perhaps, judging by your expressions, you know. I felt need to answer on your behalf, for I know more of you soldiers than do most Wickans, including those clan leaders, and they have each humbly withdrawn their requests.”

He was silent for a long moment.

“Nonetheless,” Coltaine finally continued, “I would have you know, they meant to honor you.”

Ah, Coltaine, even you do not understand these soldiers well enough. Those scowls you see arrayed before you certainly look like disapproval, disgust even, but then, when have you ever seen them smile?

“So, I am left with the traditions of the Malazan Empire. There were enough witnesses at the Crossing to weave in detail the tapestry of your deeds, and among all of you, including your fallen comrades, the natural leadership of one was noted again and again. Without it, the day would have been truly lost.”

The sappers did not move, their scowls if anything deeper, more fierce.

Coltaine moved to stand before one man. Duiker recalled him well—a squat, hairless, immeasurably ugly sapper, his eyes thin slashes, his nose a flattened spread of angles and crooks. Audaciously, he wore fragments of armor that Duiker recognized as taken from a commander of the Apocalypse, though the helm tied to his belt was something that could have adorned an antique shop in Darujhistan. Another object that hung from his belt was difficult to identify, and it was a moment before the historian realized he was looking at the battered remnant of a shield: two reinforced grips behind a mangled plate-sized flap of bronze. A large, blackened crossbow hung from one shoulder, so covered and entwined with twigs, branches and other camouflage as to make it seem the man carried a bush.

“I believe the time has come,” Coltaine said, “for a promotion. You are now a sergeant, soldier.”

The man said nothing, his eyes narrowing to the thinnest of slits.

“I think a salute would be appropriate,” Bult growled.

One of the other sappers cleared his throat and nervously yanked at his mustache.

Captain Lull rounded on the man. “Got something to say about this, soldier?”

“Not much,” the man muttered.

“Out with it.”

The soldier shrugged. “Well, only…he was a captain not two minutes ago, sir. The Fist's just demoted him. That's Captain Mincer, sir. Commands the Engineers. Or did.”

Mincer finally spoke. “And since I'm now a sergeant, I suggest the captaincy go to this soldier.” He reached out and grabbed the woman beside him by the ear to drag her close. “What used to be
my
sergeant. Name's Bungle.”