The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (448 page)

So long as Lostara stayed put, they might well salvage something out of all this.

He came to the edge and paused, studying the pit where he'd left her. No movement. She was either staying low or had left. He padded forward.

I despise nights like these. Nothing goes as planned—

Something hard struck him in the side of his head. Stunned, he fell and lay unmoving, his face pressed against the cold, gritty ground.

A voice rumbled above him. ‘That was for Malaz City. Even so, you still owe me one.'

‘After Henaras?' Pearl mumbled, his words puffing up tiny clouds of dust. ‘You should be owing me one.'

‘Her? Not worth counting.'

Something thumped heavily to the ground beside Pearl. That then groaned.

‘All right,' the Claw sighed—
more dust, a miniature Whirlwind
—‘I owe you one, then.'

‘Glad we're agreed. Now, make some more noises. Your lass over there's bound to take a look…eventually.'

Pearl listened to the footfalls pad away. Two sets.
The wizard was in no mood to talk, I suppose.

To me, that is.

I believe I am sorely humbled.

Beside him, the trussed shape groaned again.

Despite himself, Pearl smiled.

To the east, the sky paled.

And this night was done.

The whirlwind goddess had once been a raging storm of wind and sand. A wall surrounding the young woman who had once been Felisin of House Paran, and who had become Sha'ik, Chosen One and supreme ruler of the Army of the Apocalypse.

Felisin had been her mother's name. She had then made it her adopted daughter's name. Yet she herself had lost it. Occasionally, however, in the deepest hours of night, in the heart of an impenetrable silence of her own making, she caught a glimpse of that girl. As she once had been, the smeared reflection from a polished mirror. Round-cheeked and flushed, a wide smile and bright eyes. A child with a brother who adored her, who would toss her about on one knee as if it was a bucking horse, and her squeals of fear and delight would fill the chamber.

Her mother had been gifted with visions. This was well known. A respected truth. And that mother's youngest daughter had dreamed that one day she too would find that talent within her.

But that gift only came with the goddess, with this spiteful, horrific creature whose soul was far more parched and withered than any desert. And the visions that assailed Sha'ik were murky, fraught things. They were, she had come to realize, not born of any talent or gift. They were the conjurings of fear.

A goddess's fear.

And now the Whirlwind Wall had closed, retracted, had drawn in from the outside world to rage beneath Sha'ik's sun-darkened skin, along her veins and arteries, careening wild and deafening in her mind.

Oh, there was power there. Bitter with age, bilious with malice. And whatever fuelled it bore the sour taste of betrayal. A heart-piercing, very personal betrayal. Something that should have healed, that should have numbed beneath thick, tough scar tissue. Spiteful pleasure had kept the wound open, had fed its festering heat, until hate was all that was left. Hate for…someone, a hate so ancient it no longer possessed a face.

In moments of cold reason, Sha'ik saw it for what it was. Insane, raised to such
extremity that she understood that whatever had been the crime against the goddess, whatever the source of the betrayal, it had not earned such a brutal reaction. The proportions had
begun
wrong. From the very start. Leading her to suspect that the proclivity for madness had already existed, dark flaws marring the soul that would one day claw its way into ascendancy.

Step by step, we walk the most horrendous paths. Stride tottering along the edge of an unsuspected abyss. Companions see nothing amiss. The world seems a normal place. Step by step, no different from anyone else—not from the outside. Not even from the inside. Apart from that tautness, that whisper of panic. The vague confusion that threatens your balance.

Felisin, who was Sha'ik, had come to comprehend this.

For she had walked that same path.

Hatred, sweet as nectar.

I have walked into the abyss.

I am as mad as that goddess. And this is why she chose me, for we are kindred souls…

Then what is this ledge to which I still cling so desperately? Why do I persist in my belief that I can save myself? That I can return…find once more the place where madness cannot be found, where confusion does not exist.

The place…of childhood.

She stood in the main chamber, the chair that would be a throne behind her, its cushions cool, its armrests dry. She stood, imprisoned in a stranger's armour. She could almost feel the goddess reaching out to engulf her on all sides—not a mother's embrace, no, nothing like that at all. This one would suffocate her utterly, would drown out all light, every glimmer of self-awareness.

Her ego is armoured in hatred. She cannot look in, she can barely see out. Her walk is a shamble, cramped and stiff, a song of rusty fittings and creaking straps. Her teeth gleam in the shadows, but it is a rictus grin.

Felisin Paran, hold up this mirror at your peril.

Outside stole the first light of dawn.

And Sha'ik reached for her helm.

 

L'oric could just make out the Dogslayer positions at the tops of the cobbled ramps. There was no movement over there in the grey light of dawn. It was strange, but not surprising. The night just done would make even the hardest soldier hesitant to raise a gaze skyward, to straighten from a place of hiding to begin the mundane tasks that marked the start of a new day.

Even so, there was something strange about those trenches.

He strode along the ridge towards the hilltop where Sha'ik had established her forward post to observe the battle to come. The High Mage ached in every bone. His muscles shouted pain with every step he took.

He prayed she was there.

Prayed the goddess would deign to hear his words, his warning, and, finally, his offer.

All hovered on the cusp. Darkness had been defeated…somehow. He wondered at that, but not for long—there was no time for such idle musings. This tortured fragment of Kurald Emurlahn was awakening, and the goddess was about to arrive, to claim it for herself. To fashion a throne.
To devour Raraku.

Ghosts still swirled in the shadows, warriors and soldiers from scores of long-dead civilizations. Wielding strange weapons, their bodies hidden beneath strange armour, their faces mercifully covered by ornate visors. They were singing, although that Tanno song had grown pensive, mournful, sighing soft as the wind. It had begun to rise and fall, a sussuration that chilled L'oric.

Who will they fight for? Why are they here at all? What do they want?

The song belonged to the Bridgeburners. Yet it seemed the Holy Desert itself had claimed it, had taken that multitude of ethereal voices for itself. And every soul that had fallen in battle in the desert's immense history was now gathered in this place.

The cusp.

He came to the base of the trail leading up to Sha'ik's hill. There were desert warriors huddled here and there, wrapped in their ochre telabas, spears thrust upright, iron points glistening with dew as the sun's fire broke on the east horizon. Companies of Mathok's light cavalry were forming up on the flats to L'oric's right. The horses were jittery, the rows shifting uneven and restless. The High Mage could not see Mathok anywhere among them—nor, he realized with a chill, could he see the standards of the warleader's own tribe.

He heard horses approach from behind and turned to see Leoman, one of his officers, and Toblakai riding up towards him.

The Toblakai's horse was a Jhag, L'oric saw, huge and magnificent in its primal savagery, loping collected and perfectly proportionate to the giant astride its shoulders.

And that giant was a mess. Preternatural healing had yet to fully repair the terrible wounds on him. His hands were a crimson ruin. One leg had been chewed by vicious, oversized jaws.

Toblakai and his horse were dragging a pair of objects that bounced and rolled on the ends of chains, and L'oric's eyes went wide upon seeing what they were.

He's killed the Deragoth. He's taken their heads.

‘L'oric!' Leoman rasped as he drew rein before him. ‘Is she above?'

‘I don't know, Leoman of the Flails.'

All three dismounted, and L'oric saw Toblakai favouring his mangled leg.
A hound's jaws did that.
And then he saw the stone sword on the giant's back.
Ah, he is indeed the one, then. I think the Crippled God has made a terrible mistake…

Gods, he killed the Deragoth.

‘Where is Febryl hiding?' Leoman asked as the four of them began the ascent.

Toblakai answered. ‘Dead. I forgot to tell you some things. I killed him. And I killed Bidithal. I would have killed Ghost Hands and Korbolo Dom, but I could not find them.'

L'oric rubbed a hand across his brow, and it came away wet and oily. Yet he could still see his breath.

Toblakai went on, inexorably. ‘And when I went into Korbolo's tent, I found Kamist Reloe. He'd been assassinated. So had Henaras.'

L'oric shook himself and said to Leoman, ‘Did you receive Sha'ik's last commands? Shouldn't you be with the Dogslayers?'

The warrior grunted. ‘Probably. We've just come from there.'

‘They're all dead,' Toblakai said. ‘Slaughtered in the night. The ghosts of Raraku were busy—though none dared oppose me.' He barked a laugh. ‘As Ghost Hands could tell you, I have ghosts of my own.'

L'oric stumbled on the trail. He reached up and gripped Leoman's arm.

‘Slaughtered?
All of them?
'

‘Yes, High Mage. I'm surprised you didn't know. We still have the desert warriors. We can still win this, just not here and not now. Thus, we need to convince Sha'ik to leave—'

‘That won't be possible,' L'oric cut in. ‘The goddess is coming, is almost here. It's too late for that, Leoman. Moments from being too late for everything—'

They clambered over the crest.

And there stood Sha'ik.

Helmed and armoured, her back to them as she stared southward.

L'oric wanted to cry out. For he saw what his companions could not see.
I'm not in time. Oh, gods below
—And then he leapt forward, his warren's portal flaring around him—and was gone.

 

The goddess had not lost her memories. Indeed, rage had carved their likenesses, every detail, as mockingly solid and real-seeming as those carved trees in the forest of stone. And she could caress them, crooning her hatred like a lover's song, lingering with a touch promising murder, though the one who had wronged her was, if not dead, then in a place that no longer mattered.

The hate was all that mattered now. Her fury at his weaknesses. Oh, others in the tribe played those games often enough. Bodies slipped through the furs from hut to hut when the stars fell into their summer alignment, and she herself had more than once spread her legs to another woman's husband, or an eager, clumsy youth.

But her heart had been given to the one man with whom she lived. That law was sacrosanct.

Oh, but he'd been
so
sensitive. His hands following his eyes in the fashioning of forbidden images of that other woman, there in the hidden places. He'd used those hands to close about his own heart, to give it to another—without a thought as to who had once held it for herself.

Another, who would not even give her heart in return—she had seen to that, with vicious words and challenging accusations. Enough to encourage the others to banish her for ever.

But not before the bitch killed all but one of her kin.

Foolish, stupid man, to have given his love to that woman.

Her rage had not died with the Ritual, had not died when she herself—too
shattered to walk—had been severed from the Vow and left in a place of eternal darkness. And every curious spirit that had heard her weeping, that had drawn close in sympathy—well, they had fed her hungers, and she had taken their powers. Layer upon layer. For they too had been foolish and stupid, wayward and inclined to squander those powers on meaningless things. But she had a purpose.

The children swarmed the surface of the world. And who was their mother? None other than the bitch who had been banished.

And their father?

Oh yes, she went to him. On that last night. She did. He reeked of her when they dragged him into the light the following morning. Reeked of her. The truth was there in his eyes.

A look she would—could—never forget.

Vengeance was a beast long straining at its chains. Vengeance was all she had ever wanted.

Vengeance was about to be unleashed.

And even Raraku could not stop it. The children would die.

The children will die. I will cleanse the world of their beget, the proud-eyed vermin born, one and all, of that single mother. Of course she could not join the Ritual. A new world waited within her.

And now, at last, I shall rise again. Clothed in the flesh of one such child, I shall kill that world.

She could see the path opening, the way ahead clear and inviting. A tunnel walled in spinning, writhing shadows.

It would be good to walk again.

To feel warm flesh and the heat of blood.

To taste water. Food.

To breathe.

To kill.

 

Unmindful and unhearing, Sha'ik made her way down the slope. The basin awaited her, that field of battle. She saw Malazan scouts on the ridge opposite, one riding back to the encampment, the others simply watching.

It was understood, then. As she had known it would be.

Vague, distant shouts behind her. She smiled.
Of course, in the end, it is the two warriors who first found me. I was foolish to have doubted them. And I know, either one would stand in my stead.

But they cannot.

This fight belongs to me. And the goddess.

 

‘Enter.'

Captain Keneb paused for a moment, seeking to collect himself, then he strode into the command tent.

She was donning her armour. A mundane task that would have been easier with a servant at hand, but that, of course, was not Tavore's way.

Although, perhaps, that was not quite the truth. ‘Adjunct.'

‘What is it, Captain?'

‘I have just come from the Fist's tent. A cutter and a healer were summoned at once, but it was far too late. Adjunct Tavore, Gamet died last night. A blood vessel burst in his brain—the cutter believes it was a clot, and that it was born the night he was thrown from his horse. I am…sorry.'

A pallor had come to her drawn, plain face. He saw her hand reach down to steady herself against the table edge. ‘Dead?'

‘In his sleep.'

She turned away, stared down at the accoutrements littering the table. ‘Thank you, Captain. Leave me now, and have T'amber—'

There was a commotion outside, then a Wickan youth pushed in. ‘Adjunct! Sha'ik has walked down into the basin! She challenges you!'