The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (768 page)

‘It used to be a prison, this island. Full of rapists and murderers.'
A sudden look into his eyes, as if seeking something, then she gave him a fleeting smile that was little more than a showing of teeth and said,
‘A good place for murder.'

Words that, millennia past, could have triggered a civil war or worse, the fury of Mother Dark herself. Words, then, that barely stirred the calm repose of Nimander's indifference.

‘You have hair, Nimander, the colour of—'
But the past was dead.
Drift Avalii. Our very own prison isle, where we learned about dying.

And the terrible price of following.

Where we learned that love does not belong in this world.

The pitched sweep of ice had gone through successive thaws and freezes until its surface was pocked and sculpted like the colourless bark of some vast toppled tree. The wind, alternating between warm and cold, moaned a chorus of forlorn voices through this muricated surface, and it seemed to Hedge that with each crunching stamp of his boot, a lone cry was silenced for ever. The thought left him feeling morose, and this motley scatter of refuse dotting the plain of ice and granulated snow only made things worse.

Detritus of Jaghut lives, slowly rising like stones in a farmer's field. Mundane objects to bear witness to an entire people – if only he could make sense of them, could somehow assemble together all these disparate pieces. Ghosts, he now believed, existed in a perpetually confused state, the way before them an endless vista strewn with meaningless dross – the truths of living were secrets, the physicality of facts for ever withheld. A ghost could reach but could not touch, could move this and that, but never be moved by them. Some essence of empathy had vanished – but no, empathy wasn't the right word. He could
feel
, after all. The way he used to, when he had been alive. Emotions swam waters both shallow and deep. Tactile empathy perhaps was closer to the sense he sought. The comfort of mutual resistance.

He had willed himself this shape, this body in which he now dwelt, walking heavily alongside the withered, animate carcass that was Emroth. And it seemed he could conjure a kind of physical continuity with everything around him – like the crunching of his feet – but he now wondered if that continuity was a delusion, as if in picking up this curved shell of some ancient broken pot just ahead of him he was not in truth picking up
its
ghost. But for that revelation his eyes were blind, the senses of touch and sound were deceits, and he was as lost as an echo.

They continued trudging across this plateau, beneath deep blue skies where stars glittered high in the vault directly overhead, a world of ice seemingly without end. The scree of garbage accompanied them on all sides. Fragments of cloth or clothing or perhaps tapestry, potsherds, eating utensils, arcane tools of wood or ground stone, the piece of a musical instrument that involved strings and raised finger-drums, the splintered leg of a wooden chair or stool. No weapons, not in days, and the one they had discovered early on – a spear shaft – had been Imass.

Jaghut had died on this ice. Slaughtered. Emroth had said as much. But there were no bodies, and there had been no explanation forthcoming from the T'lan Imass. Collected then, Hedge surmised, perhaps by a survivor. Did the Jaghut practise ritual interment? He had no idea. In all his travels, he could not once recall talk of a Jaghut tomb or burial ground. If they did such things, they kept them to themselves.

But when they died here, they had been on the run. Some of those swaths of material were from tents. Flesh and blood Imass did not pursue them – not across this lifeless ice. No, they must have been T'lan. Of the Ritual.
Like Emroth here.

‘So,' Hedge said, his own voice startlingly loud in his ears, ‘were you involved in this hunt, Emroth?'

‘I cannot be certain,' she replied after a long moment. ‘It is possible.'

‘One scene of slaughter looks pretty much the same as the next, right?'

‘Yes. That is true.'

Her agreement left him feeling even more depressed.

‘There is something ahead,' the T'lan Imass said. ‘We are, I believe, about to discover the answer to the mystery.'

‘What mystery?'

‘The absence of bodies.'

‘Oh, that mystery.'

Night came abruptly to this place, like the snuffing out of a candle. The sun, which circled just above the horizon through the day, would suddenly tumble, like a rolling ball, beneath the gleaming, blood-hued skyline. And the black sky would fill with stars that only faded with the coming of strangely coloured brushstrokes of light, spanning the vault, that hissed like sprinkled fragments of fine glass.

Hedge sensed that night was close, as the wind's pockets of warmth grew more infrequent, the ember cast to what he assumed was west deepening into a shade both lurid and baleful.

He could now see what had caught Emroth's attention. A hump on the plateau, ringed in dark objects. The shape rising from the centre of that hillock at first looked like a spar of ice, but as they neared, Hedge saw that its core was dark, and that darkness reached down to the ground.

The objects surrounding the rise were cloth-swaddled bodies, many of them pitifully small.

As the day's light suddenly dropped away, night announced on a gust of chill wind, Hedge and Emroth halted just before the hump.

The upthrust spar was in fact a throne of ice, and on it sat the frozen corpse of a male Jaghut. Mummified by cold and desiccating winds, it nevertheless presented an imposing if ghastly figure, a figure of domination, the head tilted slightly downward, as if surveying a ring of permanently supine subjects.

‘Death observing death,' Hedge muttered. ‘How damned appropriate. He collected the bodies, then sat down and just died with them. Gave up. No thoughts of vengeance, no dreams of resurrection. Here's your dread enemy, Emroth.'

‘More than you realize,' the T'lan Imass replied.

She moved on, edging round the edifice, her hide-wrapped feet plunging through the crust of brittle ice in small sparkling puffs of powdery snow.

Hedge stared up at the Jaghut on his half-melted throne.
All thrones should be made of ice, I think.

Sit on that numb arse, sinking down and down, with the puddle of dissolution getting ever wider around you. Sit, dear ruler, and tell me all your grand designs.

Of course, the throne wasn't the only thing falling apart up there. The Jaghut's green, leathery skin had sloughed away on the forehead, revealing sickly bone, almost luminescent in the gloom; and on the points of the shoulders the skin was frayed, with the polished knobs of the shoulder bones showing through. Similar gleams from the knuckles of both hands where they rested on the now-tilted arms of the chair.

Hedge's gaze returned to the face. Black, sunken pits for eyes, a nose broad and smashed flat, tusks of black silver.
I thought these things never quite died. Needed big rocks on them to keep them from getting back up. Or chopped to pieces and every piece planted under a boulder.

I didn't think they died this way at all.

He shook himself and set off after Emroth.

They would walk through the night. Camps, meals and sleeping were for still-breathing folk, after all.

‘Emroth!'

The head creaked round.

‘That damned thing back there's not still alive, is it?'

‘No. The spirit left.'

‘Just…left?'

‘Yes.'

‘Isn't that, uh, unusual?'

‘The Throne of Ice was dying. Is dying still. There was – is – nothing left to rule, ghost. Would you have him sit there for ever?' She did not seem inclined to await a reply, for she then said, ‘I have not been here before, Hedge of the Bridgeburners. For I would have known.'

‘Known what, Emroth?'

‘I have never before seen the true Throne of Ice, in the heart of the Hold. The very heart of the Jaghut realm.'

Hedge glanced back.
The true Throne of Ice?
‘Who – who was he, Emroth?'

But she did not give answer.

After a time, however, he thought he knew. Had always known.

He kicked aside a broken pot, watched it skid, roll, then wobble to a halt.
King on your melting throne, you drew a breath, then let it go. And…never again. Simple. Easy. When you are the last of your kind, and you release that last breath, then it is the breath of extinction.

And it rides the wind.

Every wind.

‘Emroth, there was a scholar in Malaz City – a miserable old bastard named Obo – who claimed he was witness to the death of a star. And when the charts were compared again, against the night sky, well, one light was gone.'

‘The stars have changed since my mortal life, ghost.'

‘Some have gone out?'

‘Yes.'

‘As in…
died
?'

‘The Bonecasters could not agree on this,' she said. ‘Another observation offered a different possibility. The stars are moving away from us, Hedge of the Bridgeburners. Perhaps those we no longer see have gone too far for our eyes.'

‘Obo's star was pretty bright – wouldn't it have faded first, over a long time, before going out?'

‘Perhaps both answers are true. Stars die. Stars move away.'

‘So, did that Jaghut die, or did he move away?'

‘Your question makes no sense.'

Really?
Hedge barked a laugh. ‘You're a damned bad liar, Emroth.'

‘This,' she said, ‘is not a perfect world.'

The swaths of colours sweeping overhead hissed softly, while around them the wind plucked at tufts of cloth and fur, moaning through miniature gullies and caverns of ice, and closer still, a sound shared by ghost and T'lan Imass, the crackling destruction of their footsteps across the plateau.

Onrack knelt beside the stream, plunging his hands into the icy water, then lifting them clear again to watch the runnels trickling down. The wonder had not left his dark brown eyes since his transformation, since the miracle of a life regained.

A man could have no heart if he felt nothing watching this rebirth, this innocent joy in a savage warrior who had been dead a hundred thousand years. He picked up polished stones as if they were treasure, ran blunt, calloused fingertips across swaths of lichen and moss, brought to his heavy lips a discarded antler to taste with his tongue, to draw in its burnt-hair scent. Walking through the thorny brush of some arctic rose, Onrack had then halted, with a cry of astonishment, upon seeing red scratches on his bowed shins.

The Imass was, Trull Sengar reminded himself yet again, nothing –
nothing
– like what he would have imagined him to be. Virtually hairless everywhere barring the brown, almost black mane sweeping down past his broad shoulders. In the days since they had come to this strange realm, a beard had begun, thin along Onrack's jawline and above his mouth, the bristles wide-spaced and black as a boar's; but not growing at all on the cheeks, or the neck. The features of the face were broad and flat, dominated by a flaring nose with a pronounced bridge, like a knuckle bone between the wide-spaced, deeply inset eyes. The heavy ridge over those eyes was made all the more robust by the sparseness of the eyebrows.

Although not particularly tall, Onrack nevertheless seemed huge. Ropy muscles bound to thick bone, the arms elongated, the hands wide but the fingers stubby. The legs were disproportionately short, bowed so that the knees were almost as far out to the sides as his hips. Yet Onrack moved with lithe stealth, furtive as prey, eyes flicking in every direction, head tilting, nostrils flaring as he picked up scents on the wind. Prey, yet now he needed to satisfy a prodigious appetite, and when Onrack hunted, it was with discipline, a single-mindedness that was fierce to witness.

This world was his, in every way. A blend of tundra to the north and a treeline in the south that reached up every now and then to the very shadow of the huge glaciers stretching down the valleys. The forest was a confused mix of deciduous and coniferous trees, broken with ravines and tumbled rocks, springs of clean water and boggy sinkholes. The branches swarmed with birds, their incessant chatter at times overwhelming all else.

Along the edges there were trails. Caribou moved haphazardly between forest and tundra in their grazing. Closer to the ice, on higher ground where bedrock was exposed, there were goat-like creatures, scampering up ledges to look back down on the two-legged strangers passing through their domain.

Onrack had disappeared into the forest again and again in the first week of their wandering. Each time he reappeared his toolkit had expanded. A wooden shaft, the point of which he hardened in the fire of their camp; vines and reeds from which he fashioned snares, and nets that he then attached to the other end of the spear, displaying impressive skill at trapping birds on the wing.

From the small mammals caught in his nightly snares he assembled skins and gut. With the stomachs and intestines of hares he made floats for the weighted nets he strung across streams, and from the grayling and sturgeon harvested he gathered numerous spines which he then used to sew together the hides, fashioning a bag. He collected charcoal and tree sap, lichens, mosses, tubers, feathers and small pouches of animal fat, all of which went into the hide bag.