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The gift, the creature saw at last, was a true one. Nothing else could explain what it discovered in the mortal man’s face. A mirrored spirit, in every detail. This was an opportunity that could not be refused. Still the wolf hesitated. Until an ancient memory rose before its mind’s eye. An image, frozen, faded with the erosion of time. Sufficient to close the spiral. And then it was done.
Fire and pain, the death of an eye, the kiss that left a savagely disfiguring scar on what had been a young, reputedly handsome face.
His gaze was pulled back to the reddish welt in the sky beyond the tower. Yes, it pulsed, as regular as a heart.
The north slope of the central barrow was marred by a deep pit, its edges ragged and glistening. A tumble of cut stone – still showing the stains of red paint – crowded the base.
The crater, he slowly realized, was not the work of looters. Whatever had made it had pushed up from the tomb, violently.
Forty paces from the tower he almost stumbled over a corpse.
‘Can you at least stand up when you’re talking to me.’
She was tall, slim, wearing a flowing white telaba such as were worn by highborn women of Seven Cities. Her black hair was long and straight.
At a dozen paces the wolfish dog loped forward, tail wagging as it came up to the T’lan Imass.
‘I was considering,’ Tool replied slowly. ‘This beast is an ay, and thus has little interest in bones. Ay prefer flesh, still warm if possible.’
Toc grunted. ‘I see.’ ‘Humour,’ Tool said after a moment.
a leather-armoured masked figure appeared in the gaping doorway.
Lady Envy scowled at Senu. ‘Behave yourself, young man!’ She waved him into the room beyond. Senu seemed to flinch at the gesture. An itch spasmed across Toc’s scar. He scratched it vigorously, breathing a soft curse.
Where Senu’s enamelled face-covering was crowded with dark-stained patterns,
the third mask bore naught but twin slashes, one on each gleaming white cheek.
‘What have you learned,’ Tool said, addressing her, ‘of the Rent?’ Cup in hand, she faced him. ‘Ah, you cut to the quick in all matters, I see. It has been bridged. By a mortal soul. As I am sure you are aware. The focus of my studies, however, has been on the identity of the warren itself. It is unlike any other. The portal seems almost … mechanical.’
They are all empty, and have been for some time. Decades.’ Tool’s head tilted with a soft creak. ‘Only decades?’ ‘Unpleasant detail, indeed. I believe the Matron experienced considerable difficulty in extricating herself, then spent still further time in recovering from her ordeal, before releasing her children.
She and her brood made further efforts in the buried city to the northwest, though incomplete, as if the results proved unsatisfactory. They then appear to have departed the area entirely.’ She paused, then added, ‘It may be relevant that the Matron was the original soul sealing the Rent. Another hapless creature resides there now, we must presume.’
‘I find impertinence disgustingly unattractive,’ she snapped. ‘Whatever happened to your affable equanimity, Toc the Younger?’
He wondered at his sudden impulse to fling himself down at her feet, begging forgiveness. Shrugging the absurd notion off, he said, ‘Badly stung, I think.’
Her expression softened to something doe-like. The irrational desire returned. Toc scratched his scar, looked away. ‘I did not intend to sting you—’ Right, and the Queen of Dream...
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They were each in turn wrapped within a cloth woven from Treach’s own moult-hair – for nine days and ten nights—’
Quick Ben accessed his warrens – he could only manage seven at any one time though he possessed more. Power rippled through him in waves. He did so with reluctance – to unveil simultaneously nearly all he possessed filled him with a delicious whisper of omnipotence. Yet he knew that sensation for the dangerous, potentially fatal illusion it was.
Quick Ben rose to his hands and knees. Blood dripped from his soul’s torn flesh – his clothes were naught but strips – but he was alive. He looked up.
Ganoes Paran was plagued by images of drowning, but not in water. Drowning in darkness. Disorientated, thrashing in panic in an unknown and unknowable place.
The burden upon the officer corps had grown overwhelming. Almost ten thousand soldiers had suddenly acquired an almost childlike need for reassurance.
Threads of bestial blood coursed his veins. Fragmented memories – few of them his own – and strange, unearthly visions plagued his nights. Daylight hours passed in a confused haze. Endless problems of matériel and logistics to deal with, the turgid needs of management pushed again and again through the rising flood of physical maladies now besetting him.
He was not as he had been, and this new shaping was not to his liking.
Pain darkened the world. Pain dislocated. Turned one’s own flesh and bones into a stranger’s house, from which no escape seemed possible.
Paran is experiencing something parallel to crippled god.
and when the sun sets and the wind cools, the sweat on my face dries, and darkness comes – and I drink its air as if it was the sweetest water. Gods, what does that mean?
He bent over as yet another knot of burning pain seized his stomach. No, think not of the empire! Think not of Laseen’s cull! Trust in Tavore, Ganoes Paran – your sister will salvage the House. Better than you might have managed. Far better. Trust in your sister …
Ahh, the pain! A child screaming in darkness, a Hound howling lost in sorrow. A soul nailed to the heart of a wound … and I think myself alone! Gods, I wish I were!
Her mother had been a reader of bones, gifted with the ability to hold the people’s entire repository of memories – every lineage, reaching back to the Dying Spirit’s Tear. And her father had held the Spear of War, first against the White Face Barghast, then against the Malazan Empire.
An untethered vessel, a vessel in which to place two shattered souls – one beyond death and the other held back from death through ancient sorceries, two identities braided together – a vessel that would be used to feed the unnatural child thus created.
she smiles all unknowing of the price her existence, her growth, demands of me.
black-skinned woman arrived to stand beside the Rhivi. The newcomer’s angled eyes held on the child playing on the hillside. The prairie wind sent strands of long black hair over her face. Fine, scaled armour glinted from beneath her black-dyed, rawhide shirt.
‘She was created within the influence of a T’lan Imass – its timeless warren became the binding threads, and were so woven by an Imass bonecaster – a bonecaster of flesh and blood, Korlat. This child belongs to the T’lan Imass. She may well be clothed in the flesh of a Rhivi, and she may well contain the souls of two Malazan mages, but she is now a Soletaken, and more – a Bonecaster. And even these truths but brush the edges of what she will become. Tell me, what need have the immortal T’lan Imass for a flesh and blood Bonecaster?’
Here we three stand, for all to see – a child of ten or eleven years, a woman of youthful visage with unhuman eyes, and a bent old woman – and it is, in every detail, an illusion, for what lies within us is reversed. I am the child. The Tiste Andii has known thousands of years of life, and the girl … hundreds of thousands.
‘There was once a sacred trust here – between these hills and spirits of the Rhivi. It is now broken. The spirits were naught but untethered vessels of loss and pain. The hills will not heal.’
Spirits are born of spilled blood, after all. And without propitiation, they often twist into inimical forces, plagued by nightmare visions and filled with spite. Is it only the Rhivi who know these truths?
‘They feel betrayed,’ Silverfox said beside her. ‘I will answer them, Mother.’ She reached out to take the Mhybe’s hand as they walked. ‘This is a time for memories. Ancient memories, and recent memories …’
Among all who possess memories, whether an individual or a people, life’s lessons are ever the same lessons.’
She shrugged. ‘In all that is to come, think on forgiveness. Hold to it, but know too that it must not always be freely given.’ Silverfox swung her sleepy gaze to Korlat and the dark eyes suddenly hardened. ‘Sometimes forgiveness must be denied.’
He was thin, of average height, wearing plain armour and an undecorated standard-issue shortsword strapped to his belt. His narrow, hatchet face was beardless, displaying a lifetime of battle scars.
At Dujek’s left side rode another officer, grey-bearded and solidly built. A visored helm with a chain camail disguised much of his features, but the Mhybe sensed in him an immeasurable strength of will.
To the renegade High Fist’s right sat a young man, evidently an aide of some sort. He was nondescript, yet she saw that his eyes roved ceaselessly, taking in details of all that he saw. It was this man who held the outlawry pennon in one leather-gloved hand.
‘I would like him for an uncle.’ The two women looked down at her in surprise. ‘An uncle?’ the Mhybe asked. The girl nodded. ‘You can trust him.
The Moranth – he laughs inside. Always laughs, and no-one knows this. Not a cruel laugh, but one filled with sorrow.
And the one with the banner …’ Silverfox frowned. ‘I am uncertain of him. I think I always have been …’
There was Barghast blood in Caladan Brood, reflected in his tall, hulking form and his wide, flat face; and something else besides, something not quite human.
