The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (72 page)

“Oh, there’ll be city soldiers there as well. But none of them is a Barghast.” Whiskeyjack smiled cynically. “Titillation factor, Adjunct. It’s what makes the nobility drool. Look there, a big tattooed barbarian glowering down at them. Exciting, yes?” He shrugged. “It’s a risk, but one worth taking. Unless, of course, you have a better idea, Adjunct?”

She heard the challenge in his tone. Had she thought about it, she would have
realized long before now that her title and power would not intimidate this man. He’d stood at Dassem Ultor’s side, arguing tactics with the Sword of the Empire in the midst of battle. And it seemed that demotion to sergeant had failed to break this man—that much she’d gathered from the Bridgeburners’ reputation at Pale. He would not hesitate to challenge her every command if he found reason to do so. “Your plan is sound,” she said. “Tell me the name of this estate.”

“Some woman named Lady Simtal. I don’t know the family name, but everybody seems to know her. Said to be a real looker, with influence in the Council.”

“Very well,” Lorn said, adjusting her cloak. “I’ll return in two hours, Sergeant. There are other matters I must attend to. Be certain that all is ready—detonation procedures included. If you don’t get hired, we’ll have to find another way of being at that fête.” She strode to the door.

“Adjunct?”

She turned.

Whiskeyjack walked to the back wall and pulled aside a tattered hanging. “This tunnel emerges into another house. From it you can enter the Daru District.”

“Unnecessary.” Lorn was irritated by his condescending tone.

As soon as she was gone Quick Ben scrambled from the tunnel. “Dammit, Sergeant,” he muttered. “You almost had her walking in on me!”

“No chance,” Whiskeyjack observed. “In fact, I made certain she wouldn’t use it. Anything from Kalam?”

Quick Ben paced the small room. “Not yet. But he’s about to run out of patience.” He turned to the sergeant. “So? Do you think she was fooled?”

“Fooled?” Whiskeyjack laughed. “She was reeling.”

“Paran said she was going to drop something off,” Quick Ben said. “Did she?”

“Not yet.”

“It’s getting tight, Sergeant. Damn tight.”

The other door opened and Trotts entered, his filed teeth exposed in something between a smile and a grimace.

“Success?” Whiskeyjack asked.

Trotts nodded.

As the afternoon waned Crokus and Apsalar waited atop the tower’s platform. Every now and then they peered over the edge to watch the festivities. There was a taste of mania among the crowds below, as if they danced on the rim of desperation. In spite of the season’s rejoicing, the shadow of the Malazan Empire hung over all. Indeed, with Moon’s Spawn immediately to the south, Darujhistan’s place between the two forces was obvious to everyone.

“Somehow,” Crokus muttered, as he watched the crowds moving down the streets like churning rivers, “Darujhistan seems smaller. Almost insignificant.”

“It looks huge to me,” Apsalar said. “It’s one of the biggest cities I’ve ever seen,” she said. “As big as Unta, I think.”

He stared at her. She’d been saying strange things lately, which did not seem right coming from a fishergirl from a small coastal village. “Unta. That’s the Empire capital, isn’t it?”

She frowned, which made her look older. “Yes. Only I’ve never been there.”

“Well, how could you know how big it is, then?”

“I’m not sure, Crokus.”

Possession, Coll had said. Two sets of memory warred in the woman, and the war was getting worse. He wondered if Mammot had shown up yet. For a moment he came near to regretting their escape from Meese and Irilta. But then his thoughts turned to what was to come. He sat down on the platform and propped himself against the low wall. He stared at the assassin’s body across from him. The blood that had been spilled had blackened under the hot sun. A trail of droplets crossed the floor to the stairs. Clearly, this assassin’s killer had himself been wounded. Yet Crokus did not feel in danger, up here, although he wasn’t sure why.

For an abandoned belfry tower, this place had witnessed a lot of drama lately.

“Are we waiting for night?” Apsalar asked.

Crokus nodded.

“Then we find this Challice?”

“That’s right. The D’Arles will be at Lady Simtal’s Fête, I’m sure of it. The estate has an enormous garden, almost a forest. It goes right up to the back wall. Getting in should be easy.”

“Won’t you be noticed once you join the guests, though?”

“I’ll be dressed as a thief. Everybody will be wearing costumes. Besides, there’ll be hundreds of people there. It might take an hour or two, but I’ll find her.”

“And then?”

“I’ll think of something,” Crokus said.

Apsalar stretched out her legs on the paving stones and crossed her arms. “And I’m supposed to hide in the bushes, huh?”

He shrugged. “Maybe Uncle Mammot will be there,” he said. “Then everything will be all right.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s what Coll said,” Crokus shot back, exasperated. Was he supposed to tell her she’d been possessed for who knew how long? “We’ll work out a way to get you home,” he explained. “That’s what you want, right?”

She nodded slowly, as if no longer certain of that. “I miss my father,” she said.

To Crokus, Apsalar sounded as though she was trying to convince herself. He’d looked at her when they’d arrived, thinking, Why not? And he had to admit to himself now that her company wasn’t bad. Except for all the questions, of course. Mind, what if he’d been in her situation, waking up thousands of leagues from home? It’d be terrifying. Would he have held up as well as she seemed to be doing?

“I’m feeling all right,” she said, watching him. “It’s as if something inside is keeping things together. I can’t explain it any better, but it’s like a smooth, black
stone. Solid and warm, and whenever I start getting scared it takes me inside. And then everything’s fine again.” She added, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to push you away.”

“Never mind,” he said.

Within the shadows of the stairwell, Serrat studied the two figures out on the platform. Enough was enough. She’d opened her Kurald Galain Warren into a defensive layering of wards around her. No more of these invisible enemies. If they wanted her, they’d have to show themselves. And then she’d kill them. And as for the Coin Bearer and the girl, where could they hope to escape to, up here on this tower?

She unsheathed her daggers and prepared for her attack. A dozen wards protected her back, all along the staircase. An approach from there was impossible.

Two sharp points touched her flesh, one under her chin and the other beneath her left shoulder blade. The Tiste Andii froze. And then she heard a voice close to her ear—a voice she recognized.

“Give Rake this warning, Serrat. He’ll only get one, and the same for you. The Coin Bearer shall not be harmed. The games are done. Try this again and you’ll die.”

“You bastard!” she exploded. “My lord’s anger—”

“Will be in vain. We both know who sends this message, don’t we? And, as Rake well knows, he’s not as far away as he once was.” The point beneath her chin moved away to allow her to nod, then returned. “Good. Deliver the message, then, and hope we don’t meet again.”

“This will not be forgotten,” Serrat promised, shaking with rage.

A low chuckle answered her. “Compliments of the Prince, Serrat. Take it up with our mutual friend.”

The daggers left her flesh. Serrat exhaled a long breath, then sheathed her weapons. She snapped a Kurald Galain spell and vanished.

Crokus jumped at a faint plopping sound from the stairwell. He laid his hands on his knives, tensing.

“What’s wrong?” Apsalar said.

“Shhh. Wait.” He felt his heart pound hard against his chest. “I’m ducking at shadows,” he said, sitting back. “Well, we’re off soon, anyway.”

It was an age of wind, sweeping across the grass plains beneath a pewter sky, a wind whose thirst assailed all life, mindless, unrelenting like a beast that did not know itself.

Struggling in his mother’s wake, it was Raest’s first lesson in power. In the hunt for domination that would shape his life, he saw the many ways of the wind—its subtle sculpting of stone over hundreds and then thousands of years,
and its raging gales that flattened forests—and found closest to his heart the violent power of the wind’s banshee fury.

Raest’s mother had been the first to flee his deliberate shaping of power. She’d denied him to his face, proclaiming the Sundering of Blood and thus cutting him free. That the ritual had broken her he disregarded. It was unimportant. He who would dominate must learn early that those resisting his command should be destroyed. Failure was her price, not his.

While the Jaghut feared community, pronouncing society to be the birthplace of tyranny—of the flesh and the spirit—and citing their own bloody history as proof, Raest discovered a hunger for it. The power he commanded insisted upon subjects. Strength was ever relative, and he could not dominate without the company of the dominated.

At first he sought to subjugate other Jaghut, but more often than not they either escaped him or he was forced to kill them. Such contests held only momentary satisfaction. Raest gathered beasts around him, bending nature to his will. But nature withered and died in bondage, and so found an escape he could not control. In his anger he laid waste to the land, driving into extinction countless species. The earth resisted him, and its power was immense. Yet it was directionless and could not overwhelm Raest in its ageless tide. His was a focused power, precise in its destruction and pervasive in its effect.

Then into his path came the first of the Imass, creatures who struggled against his will, defying slavery and yet living on. Creatures of boundless, pitiful hope. For Raest, he had found in them the glory of domination, for with each Imass that broke he took another. Their link with nature was minimal, for the Imass themselves played the game of tyranny over their lands. They could not defeat him.

He fashioned an empire of sorts, bereft of cities yet plagued with the endless dramas of society, its pathetic victories and inevitable failures. The community of enslaved Imass thrived in this quagmire of pettiness. They even managed to convince themselves that they possessed freedom, a will of their own that could shape destiny. They elected champions. They tore down their champions once failure draped its shroud over them. They ran in endless circles and called it growth, emergence, knowledge. While over them all, a presence invisible to their eyes, Raest flexed his will. His greatest joy came when his slaves proclaimed him god—though they knew him not—and constructed temples to serve him and organized priesthoods whose activities mimicked Raest’s tyranny with such cosmic irony that the Jaghut could only shake his head.

It should have been an empire to last for millennia, and its day of dying should have been by his own hand, when he at last tired of it. Raest had never imagined that other Jaghut would find his activities abhorrent, that they would risk themselves and their own power on behalf of these short-lived, small-minded Imass. Yet what astonished Raest more than anything else was that when the Jaghut came they came in numbers, in community. A community whose sole purpose of existence was to destroy his empire, to imprison him.

He had been unprepared.

The lesson was learned, and no matter what the world had become since that time, Raest was ready for it. His limbs creaked at first, throbbing with dull aches bridged by sharp pangs. The effort of digging himself from the frozen earth had incapacitated him for a time, but finally he felt ready to walk the tunnel that opened out into a new land.

Preparation. Already he’d initiated his first moves. He sensed that others had come to him, had freed the path of Omtose Phellack wards and seals. Perhaps his worshipers remained, fanatics who had sought his release for generations, and even now awaited him beyond the barrow.

The missing Finnest would be his first priority. Much of his power had been stored within the seed, stripped from him and stored there by the Jaghut betrayers. It had not been carried far, and there was nothing that could prevent his recovering it. Omtose Phellack no longer existed in the land above—he could feel its absence like an airless void. Nothing could oppose him now.

Preparation. Raest’s withered, cracked face twisted into a savage grin, his lower tusks splitting desiccated skin. The powerful must gather other power, subjugate it to their own will, then direct it unerringly. His moves had already begun.

He sloshed through the slush now covering the barrow’s muddy floor. Before him rose the slanted wall that marked the tomb’s barrier. Beyond the limestreaked earth waited a world to be enslaved. Raest gestured and the barrier exploded outward. Bright sunlight flared in the clouds of steam rolling around him, and he felt waves of cold, ancient air sweeping past him.

The Jaghut Tyrant walked into the light.

The Great Raven Crone rode the hot streams of wind high above the Gadrobi Hills. The burst of power that launched tons of earth and rocks a hundred feet into the sky elicited a cackle from her. She dipped a wing, eyes on the white pillar of steam, and banked toward it.

This, she laughed to herself, should prove interesting.

A wash of air pounded down on to her. Shrieking her outrage, Crone twisted and slid along the shunting wind. Massive shadows flowed over her. Her anger was swept away on a surge of excitement. Head craning, she beat the air with her wings and climbed again. In matters such as these, a proper point of view was essential. Crone climbed higher still, then cocked her head and looked down. By the light of the sun scales flashed iridescent from five ridged backs, but of the five one shone like fire. Sorcerous power bled in ripples from the web of their spread wings. The dragons sailed silent over the landscape, closing on the billowing dust-cloud above the Jaghut tomb. Crone’s black eyes fixed on the dragon that blazed red.

“Silanah!”
she screamed, laughing.
“Dragnipurake t’na Draconiaes! Eleint, eleint!”
The day of the Tiste Andii had come.