The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (298 page)

Water streamed down the jumbled, web-like framework, revealing the sundered nature of the street and houses above.

Senu in the lead, followed by Thurule then Mok, with Lady Envy last, the travellers climbed slowly, cautiously upward.

They eventually emerged through a warehouse-sized trap door that opened onto the pitched, main floor of one of the houses. The chamber was crowded along three of its four walls with burlap-wrapped supplies. Huge barrels had tumbled, rolled, and were now gathered at one end. To its right were double doors, now shattered open, no doubt by Baaljagg and Garath, revealing a cobbled street beyond.

The air was bitter cold.

‘It might be worthwhile,’ Mok said to Lady Envy, ‘to examine each of these houses, from level to level, to determine which is the most structurally sound and therefore inhabitable. There seem to be considerable stores remaining which we can exploit.’

‘Yes, yes,’ Lady Envy said distractedly. ‘I leave to you and your brothers such mundane necessities. The assumption that our journey has brought us to, however, rests in the untested belief that this contraption will perforce carry us north, across the entire breadth of Coral Bay, and hence to the city that is our goal. I, and I alone, it seems, must do the fretting on this particular issue.’

‘As you like, mistress.’

‘Watch yourself, Mok!’ she snapped.

He tilted his masked head in silent apology.

‘My servants forget themselves, it seems. Think on the capacity of my fullest irritation, you three. In the meantime, I shall idle on the city’s street, such as it is.’ With that, she pivoted and strode languidly towards the doorway.

Baaljagg and Garath stood three paces beyond, the rain striking their broad backs hard enough to mist with spray. Both animals faced a lone figure, standing in the gloom of the opposite house’s overhanging dormer.

For a moment, Lady Envy almost sighed, then the fact that she did not recognize the figure struck home. ‘Oh! And here I was about to say: dear Tool, you waited for us after all! But lo, you are not him, are you?’

The T’lan Imass before them was shorter, squatter than Tool. Three black-iron broadswords of unfamiliar style impaled this undead warrior’s broad, massive chest, two of them driven in from behind, the other from the T’lan Imass’s left. Broken ribs jutted through black, salt-rimed skin. The leather strapping of all three sword handles hung in rotted, unravelled strips from the grips’ wooden underplates. Wispy remnants of old sorcery flowed fitfully along the pitted blades.

The warrior’s features were extraordinarily heavy, the brow ridge a skinless shelf of bone, stained dark brown, the cheek bones swept out and high to frame flattened oval-shaped eye sockets. Cold-hammered copper fangs capped the undead’s upper canines. The T’lan Imass did not wear a helm. Long hair, bleached white, dangled to either side of the broad, chinless face, weighted at the ends with shark teeth.

A most dreadful, appalling apparition, Lady Envy reflected. ‘Have you a name, T’lan Imass?’ she asked.

‘I have heard the summons,’ the warrior said in a voice that was distinctly feminine. ‘It came from a place to match the direction I had already chosen. North. Not far, now. I shall attend the Second Gathering, and I shall address my Kin of the Ritual, and so tell them that I am Lanas Tog. Sent to bring word of the fates of the Ifayle T’lan Imass and of my own Kerluhm T’lan Imass.’

‘How fascinating,’ Lady Envy said. ‘And their fates are?’

‘I am the last of the Kerluhm. The Ifayle, who heeded our first summons, are all but destroyed. Those few that remain cannot extricate themselves from the conflict. I myself did not expect to survive the attempt. Yet I have.’

‘A horrific conflict indeed,’ Lady Envy quietly observed. ‘Where does it occur?’

‘The continent of Assail. Our losses: twenty-nine thousand eight hundred and fourteen Kerluhm. Twenty-two thousand two hundred Ifayle. Eight months of battle. We have lost this war.’

Lady Envy was silent for a long moment, then she said, ‘It seems you’ve finally found a Jaghut Tyrant who is more than your match, Lanas Tog.’

The T’lan Imass cocked her head. ‘Not Jaghut. Human.’

Book Four

Memories of Ice

First in, last out.

M
OTTO OF THE
B
RIDGEBURNERS

Chapter Twenty-One

Your friend’s face might prove the mask the daub found in subtle shift to alter the once familiar visage. Or the child who formed unseen in private darkness as you whiled oblivious to reveal cruel shock as a stone through a temple’s pane. To these there is no armour on the soul. And upon the mask is writ the bold word, echoed in the child’s eyes, a sudden stranger to all you have known. Such is betrayal.

D
EATH
V
IGIL OF
S
ORULAN

M
INIR
O
THAL

Captain Paran reined in his horse near the smoke-blackened rubble of the East Watch redoubt. He twisted in his saddle for a last look at Capustan’s battered walls. Jelarkan’s Palace reared tall and dark against the bright blue sky. Streaks of black paint etched the tower like cracks, a symbol of the city’s mourning for its lost prince. The next rain would see that paint washed away, leaving no sign. That structure, he had heard, never wore the mortal moment for very long.

The Bridgeburners were filing out through the East Gate.

First in, last out. They’re always mindful of such gestures.

Sergeant Antsy was in the lead, with Corporal Picker a step behind. The two looked to be arguing, which was nothing new. Behind them, the soldiers of the other seven squads had lost all cohesion; the company marched in no particular order. The captain wondered at that. He’d met the other sergeants and corporals, of course. He knew the names of every surviving Bridgeburner and knew their faces as well. None the less, there was something strangely ephemeral about them. His eyes narrowed as he watched them walk the road, veiled in dust, like figures in a sun-bleached, threadbare tapestry. The march of armies, he reflected, was timeless.

Horse hooves sounded to his right and he swung to see Silverfox ride up to halt at his side.

‘Better we’d stayed avoiding each other,’ Paran said, returning his gaze to the soldiers on the road below.

‘I’d not disagree,’ she said after a moment. ‘But something’s happened.’

‘I know.’

‘No, you don’t. What you no doubt refer to is not what I’m talking about, Captain. It’s my mother – she’s gone missing. Her and those two Daru who were caring for her. Somewhere in the city they turned their wagon, left the line. No-one seems to have seen a thing, though of course I cannot question an entire army—’

‘What of your T’lan Imass? Could they not find them easily enough?’

She frowned, said nothing.

Paran glanced at her. ‘They’re not happy with you, are they?’

‘That is not the problem. I have sent them and the T’lan Ay across the river.’

‘We’ve reliable means of reconnoitring already, Silverfox—’

‘Enough. I do not need to explain myself.’

‘Yet you’re asking for my help—’

‘No. I am asking if you knew anything about it. Those Daru had to have had assistance.’

‘Have you questioned Kruppe?’

‘He’s as startled and dismayed as I am, and I believe him.’

‘Well,’ Paran said, ‘people have a habit of underestimating Coll. He’s quite capable of pulling this off all on his own.’

‘You do not seem to realize the severity of what they’ve done. In kidnapping my mother—’

‘Hold on, Silverfox. You left your mother to their care. Left? No, too calm a word. Abandoned her. And I have no doubt at all that Coll and Murillio took the charge seriously, with all the compassion for the Mhybe you do not seem to possess. Consider the situation from their point of view. They’re taking care of her, day in and day out, watching her wither. They see the Mhybe’s daughter, but only from a distance. Ignoring her own mother. They decide that they have to find someone who is prepared to help the Mhybe. Or at the very least grant her a dignified end. Kidnapping is taking someone away from someone else. The Mhybe has been taken away, but from whom? No-one. No-one at all.’

Silverfox, her face pale, was slow to respond. When she did, it was in a rasp, ‘You have no idea what lies between us, Ganoes.’

‘And it seems you’ve no idea of how to forgive – not her, not yourself. Guilt has become a chasm—’

‘That is rich indeed, coming from you.’

His smile was tight. ‘I’ve done my climb down, Silverfox, and am now climbing up the other side. Things have changed for both of us.’

‘So you have turned your back on your avowed feelings for me.’

‘I love you still, but with your death I succumbed to a kind of infatuation. I convinced myself that what you and I had, so very briefly, was of far vaster and deeper import than it truly was. Of all the weapons we turn upon ourselves, guilt is the sharpest, Silverfox. It can carve one’s own past into unrecognizable shapes, false memories leading to beliefs that sow all kinds of obsessions.’

‘Delighted to have you clear the air so, Ganoes. Has it not occurred to you that clinical examination of oneself is yet another obsession? What you dissect has to be dead first – that’s the principle of dissection, after all.’

‘So my tutor explained,’ Paran replied, ‘all those years ago. But you miss a more subtle truth. I can examine myself, my every feeling, until the Abyss swallows the world, yet come no closer to mastery of those emotions within me. For they are not static things; nor are they immune to the outside world – to what others say, or don’t say. And so they are in constant flux.’

‘Extraordinary,’ she murmured. ‘Captain Ganoes Paran, the young master of self-control, the tyrant unto himself. You have indeed changed. So much so that I no longer recognize you.’

He studied her face, searching for a hint of the feelings behind those words. But she had closed herself to him. ‘Whereas,’ he said slowly, ‘I find you all too recognizable.’

‘Would you call that ironic? You see me as a woman you once loved, while I see you as a man I never knew.’

‘Too many tangled threads for irony, Silverfox.’

‘Perhaps pathos, then.’

He looked away. ‘We’ve wandered far from the subject. I am afraid I can tell you nothing of your mother’s fate. Yet I am confident, none the less, that Coll and Murillio will do all they can for her.’

‘Then you’re an even bigger fool than they are, Ganoes. By stealing her, they have sealed her doom.’

‘I didn’t know you for the melodramatic type.’

‘I am not—’

‘She is an old woman, an old,
dying
woman. Abyss take me, leave her alone—’

‘You are not listening!’ Silverfox hissed. ‘My mother is trapped in a nightmare – within her own mind, lost, terrified.
Hunted!
I have stayed closer to her than any of you realized. Far closer!’

‘Silverfox,’ Paran said quietly, ‘if she is within a nightmare, then her living has become a curse. The only true mercy is to see it ended, once and for all.’

‘No! She is my mother, damn you! And I
will not abandon her
!’

She wheeled her horse, drove her heels into its flanks.

Paran watched her ride off.
Silverfox, what machinations have you wrapped around your mother? What is it you seek for her? Would you not tell us, please, so that we are made to understand that what we all see as betrayal is in fact something else?

Is it something else?

And these machinations – whose? Not Tattersail, surely. No, this must be Nightchill. Oh, how you’ve closed yourself to me, now. When once you reached out, incessantly, relentlessly seeking to pry open my heart. It seems that what we shared, so long ago in Pale, is as nothing.

I begin to think, now, that it was far more important to me than it was to you. Tattersail … you were, after all, an older woman. You’d lived your share of loves and losses. On the other hand, I’d barely lived at all.

What was, then, is no more.

Flesh and blood Bonecaster, you’ve become colder than the T’lan Imass you now command.

I suppose, then, they have indeed found a worthy master.

Beru fend us all.

*   *   *

Of the thirty transport barges and floating bridges the Pannions had used to cross the Catlin River, only a third remained serviceable, the others having fallen prey to the overzealous White Face Barghast during the first day of battle. Companies from Caladan Brood’s collection of mercenaries had begun efforts at salvaging the wrecks with the intention of cobbling together a few more; while a lone serviceable floating bridge and the ten surviving barges already rode the lines across the river’s expanse, loaded with troops, mounts and supplies.

Itkovian watched them as he walked the shoreline. He’d left his horse on a nearby hillock where the grasses grew thick, and now wandered alone, with only the shift of pebbles underfoot and the soft rush of the river accompanying him. The wind was sweeping up the river’s mouth, a salt-laden breath from the sea beyond, so the sounds of the barges behind him – the winches, the lowing of yoked cattle, the shouts of drivers – did not reach him.

Glancing up, he saw a figure on the beach ahead, seated cross-legged and facing the scene of the crossing. Wild-haired, wearing a stained collection of rags, the man was busy painting on wood-backed muslin. Itkovian paused, watching the artist’s head bob up and down, the long-handled brush darting about in his hand, now hearing his mumbling conversation with himself.

Or, perhaps, not with himself. One of the skull-sized boulders near the artist moved suddenly, revealing itself to be a large, olive-green toad.

And it had just replied to the artist’s tirade, in a low, rumbling voice.

Itkovian approached.

The toad saw him first and said something in a language Itkovian did not understand.

The artist looked up, scowled. ‘Interruptions,’ he snapped in Daru, ‘are not welcome!’