The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (807 page)

They needed an end to this, and soon. The supply train out of Drene had been disrupted, the cause unknown. Bivatt had this day despatched a hundred Bluerose lancers onto their back-trail, seeking out those burdened wagons and their escort. Food shortage was imminent and no army, no matter how loyal and well trained, would fight on an empty stomach. Of course, bounteous feasts were just ahead – the herds of rodara and myrid. Battle needed to be joined. Redmask and his Awl needed to be destroyed.

A cloud scudded into their path with sleeting rain. Surprisingly cold for this late in the season. Brohl Handar and his Tiste Edur rode on, silent – this was not the rain of their homeland, nothing soft, gentle with mists. Here, the water lanced down, hard, and left one drenched in a score of heartbeats.
We are truly strangers here.

But in that we are not alone.

They were finding odd cairns, bearing ghastly faces painted in white, and in the cracks and fissures of those tumuli there were peculiar offerings – tufts of wolf fur, teeth, the tusks from some unknown beast and antlers bearing rows of pecules and grooves. None of this was Awl – even the Awl scouts among Bivatt's army had never before seen the like.

Some wandering people from the eastern wastelands, perhaps, yet when Brohl had suggested that, the Atri-Preda had simply shaken her head.
She knows something. Another damned secret.

They rode out of the rain, into steaming hot sunlight, the rich smell of soaked lichen and moss.

The broad swath of churned ground was on their right. To draw any closer was to catch the stench of manure and human faeces, a smell he had come to associate with desperation.
We fight our wars and leave in our wake the redolent reek of suffering and misery. These plains are vast, are they not? What terrible cost would we face if we just left each other alone? An end to this squabble over land – Father Shadow knows, no-one really owns it. The game of possession belongs to us, not to the rocks and earth, the grasses and the creatures walking the surface in their fraught struggle to survive.

A bolt of lightning descends. A wild bhederin is struck and nearly explodes, as if life itself is too much to bear.

The world is harsh enough. It does not need our deliberate cruelties. Our celebration of viciousness.

His scout was returning at the gallop. Brohl Handar raised a hand to halt his troop.

The young warrior reined in with impressive grace. ‘Overseer, they are on Q'uson Tapi. They did not go round it, sir – we have them!'

Q'uson Tapi, a name that was found only on the oldest Letherii maps; the words themselves were so archaic that even their meaning was unknown. The bed of a dead inland sea or vast salt lake. Flat, not a single rise or feature spanning leagues – or so the maps indicated. ‘How far ahead is this Q'uson Tapi?'

The scout studied the sky, eyes narrowing on the sun to the west. ‘We can reach it before dusk,' he said.

‘And the Awl?'

‘They were less than a league out from the old shoreline, Overseer. Where they go, there is no forage – the herds are doomed, as are the Awl themselves.'

‘Has the rain reached Q'uson Tapi?'

‘Not yet, but it will, and those clays will turn into slime – the great wagons will be useless against us.'

As will cavalry on both sides, I would wager.

‘Ride back to the column,' Brohl Handar told the scout, ‘and report to the Atri-Preda. We will await her at the old shoreline.'

A Letherii salute – yes, the younger Edur had taken quickly to such things – and the scout nudged his horse into motion.

Redmask, what have you done now?

 

Atri-Preda Bivatt had tried, for most of the day, to convince herself that what she had seen had been conjured from an exhausted, overwrought mind, the proclivity of the eye to find shapes in nothing, all in gleeful service to a trembling imagination. With dawn's light barely a hint in the air she had walked out, alone, to stand before a cairn – these strange constructions they now came across as they pushed ever further east. Demonic faces in white on the flatter sides of the huge boulders. Votive offerings on niches and between the roughly stacked stones.

They had pried apart one such cairn two days earlier, finding at its core…very little. A single flat stone on which rested a splintered fragment of weathered wood – seemingly accidental, but Bivatt knew differently. She could recall, long ago on the north shores, on a day of fierce seas crashing that coast, a row of war canoes, their prows dismantled – and the wood, the wood was as this, here in the centre of a cairn on the Awl'dan.

Standing before this new cairn, with dawn attempting to crawl skyward as grey sheets of rain hammered down, she had happened to glance up. And saw – a darker grey, manshaped yet huge, twenty, thirty paces away. Solitary, motionless, watching her. The blood in her veins lost all heat and all at once the rain was as cold as those thrashing seas on the north coast years past.

A gust of wind, momentarily making the wall of water opaque, and when it had passed, the figure was gone.

Alas, the chill would not leave her, the sense of gauging, almost unhuman regard.

A ghost. A shape cast by her mind, a trick of the rain and wind and dawn's uncertain birth.
But no, he was there. Watching. The maker of the cairns.

Redmask. Myself. The Awl and the Letherii and Tiste Edur, here we duel on this plain. Assuming we are alone in this deadly game. Witnessed by naught but carrion birds, coyotes and the antelope grazing on the valley floors that watch us pass by day after day.

But we are not alone.

The thought frightened her, in a deep, childlike way – the fear born in a mind too young to cast anything away, be it dreams, nightmares, terrors or dread of all that was for ever unknowable. She felt no different now.

There were thousands. There must have been. How, then, could they hide? How could they have hidden for so long, all this time, invisible to us, invisible to the Awl?

Unless Redmask knows. And now, working in league with the strangers from the sea, they prepare an ambush. Our annihilation.

She was right to be frightened.

There would be one more battle. Neither side had anything left for more than that. And, barring more appalling displays of murderous skill from the mage-killer, Letherii sorcery would achieve victory. Brohl Handar's scout had returned with the stunning news that Redmask had led his people out onto Q'uson Tapi, and there would be no negation of magic on the flat floor of a dead sea.
Redmask forces the issue. Once we clash on Q'uson Tapi, our fates will be decided. No more fleeing, no more ambushes – even those Kechra will have nowhere to hide.

Errant, heed me please. If you are indeed the god of the Letherii, deliver no surprises on that day. Please. Give us victory.

The column marched on, towards the ancient shore of a dead sea. Clouds were gathering on the horizon ahead. Rain was thrashing down on that salt-crusted bed of clay and silt. They would fight in a quagmire, where cavalry was useless, where no horse would be quick enough to outrun a wave of deadly magic. Where warriors and soldiers would lock weapons and die where they stood, until one side stood alone, triumphant.

Soon now, they would have done with it. Done with it all.

 

Since noon Redmask had driven his people hard, out onto the seabed, racing ahead of the rain-clouds. A league, then two, beneath searing sun and air growing febrile with the coming storm. He had then called a halt, but the activity did not cease, and Toc Anaster had watched, bemused at first and then in growing wonder and, finally, admiration, as the Awl warriors set down weapons, divested themselves of their armour, and joined with the elders and every other non-combatant in pulling free from the wagons the tents and every stretch of hide they could find.

And the wagons themselves were taken apart, broken down until virtually nothing remained but the huge wheels and their axles, which were then used to transport the planks of wood. Hide and canvas were stretched out, pegged down, the stakes driven flush with the ground itself. Wooden walkways were constructed, each leading back to a single, centrally positioned wagon-bed that had been left intact and raised on legs of bundled spear-shafts to create a platform.

The canvas and hides stretched in rows, with squares behind each row, linked by flattened wicker walls that had been used for hut-frames. But no-one would sleep under cover this night. No, all that took shape here served but one purpose – the coming battle.
The final battle.

Redmask intended a defence. He invited Bivatt and her army to close with him, and to do so the Letherii and the Tiste Edur would need to march across open ground – Toc sat astride his horse, watching the frenzied preparations and occasionally glancing northwestward, to those closing stormclouds – open ground, then, that would be a sea of mud.

She might decide to wait.
I would, if I were her.
Wait until the rains had passed, until the ground hardened once again. But Toc suspected that she would not exercise such restraint. Redmask was trapped, true, but the Awl had their herds – thousands of beasts most of whom were now being slaughtered – so, Redmask could wait, his warriors well fed, whilst Bivatt and her army faced the threat of real starvation. She would need all that butchered meat, but to get to it she had to go through the Awl; she had to destroy her hated enemy.

Besides, she might be less dismayed than Redmask would think, come the day of battle. She has her mages, after all.
Not as many as before, true, but still posing a significant threat – sufficient to win the day, in fact.

Redmask would have his warriors standing on those islands of dry ground. But such positions – with reserves on the squares behind them – offered no avenue of retreat. A final battle, then, the fates decided one way or the other. Was this what Redmask had planned?
Hardly. Praedegar was a disaster.

Torrent rode up. No mask of paint again, a swath of red hives spanning his forehead. ‘The sea will live once more,' he said.

‘Hardly,' Toc replied.

‘The Letherii will drown nonetheless.'

‘Those tarps, Torrent, will not stay dry for long. And then there are the mages.'

‘Redmask has his Guardians for those cowards.'

‘Cowards?' Toc asked, amused. ‘Because they wield sorcery instead of swords?'

‘And hide behind rows of soldiers, yes. They care nothing for glory. For honour.'

‘True: the only thing they care about is winning. Leaving them free to talk about honour and glory afterwards. The chief spoil of the victors, that privilege.'

‘You speak like one of them, Mezla. That is why I do not trust you, and so I will remain at your side during the battle.'

‘My heart goes out to you – I am tasked with guarding the children, after all. We'll be nowhere close to the fighting.'
Until the fighting comes to us, which it will.

‘I shall find my glory in slitting your miserable throat, Mezla, the moment you turn to run. I see the weakness in your soul; I have seen it all along. You are broken. You should have died with your soldiers.'

‘Probably. At least then I'd be spared the judgements of someone with barely a whisker on his spotty chin. Have you even lain with a woman yet, Torrent?'

The young warrior glowered for a moment, then slowly nodded. ‘It is said you are quick with your barbed arrows, Mezla.'

‘A metaphor, Torrent? I'm surprised at this turn to the poetic.'

‘You have not listened to our songs, have you? You have made yourself deaf to the beauty of the Awl, and in your deafness you have blinded that last eye left to you. We are an ancient people, Mezla.'

‘Deaf, blind, too bad I'm not yet mute.'

‘You will be when I slit your throat.'

Well, Toc conceded, he had a point there.

 

Redmask had waited for this a long time. And no old man of the Renfayar with his damned secrets would stand poised to shatter everything. No, with his own hands Redmask had taken care of that, and he could still see in his mind that elder's face, the bulging eyes, vessels bursting, the jutting tongue as the lined face turned blue, then a deathly shade of grey above his squeezing hands. That throat had been as nothing, thin as a reed, the cartilage crumpling like a papyrus scroll in his grip. And he had found himself unable to let go, long after the fool was dead.

Too many memories of his childhood had slithered into his hands, transforming his fingers into coiling serpents that seemed not satisfied with lifeless flesh in their grip, but sought that touch of cold that came long after the soul's flight. Of course, there had been more to it than that. The elder had imagined himself Redmask's master, his overseer to use the Letherii word, standing at the war leader's shoulder, ever ready to draw breath and loose words that held terrible truths, truths that would destroy Redmask, would destroy any chance he had of leading the Awl to victory.

Yet now the time drew near. He would see Bivatt's head on a spear. He would see mud and Letherii and Tiste Edur corpses in their thousands. Crows wheeling overhead, voicing delighted cries. And he would stand on the wooden platform, witness to it all. To his scaled Guardians, who had found him, had chosen him, rending mages limb from limb, scything through enemy lines—

And the face of the elder rose once more in his mind. He had revelled in that vision, at first, but now it had begun to haunt him. A face to greet his dreams; a face hinted at in every smear of stormcloud, the bruised grey and blue hues cold as iron filling the sky. He had thought himself rid of that fool and his cruel secrets, in that weighing look – like a father's regard on a wayward son, as if nothing the child did could be good enough, could be
Awl
in the ways of the people as they had been and would always be.