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At Brood’s side strode Kallor, tall, gaunt and grey. His full-length surcoat of chain glittered in the morning’s diffuse light. A plain bastard sword hung from the iron rings of his harness, swinging in time with his heavy steps.
his longevity probably came from alchemies, and was anything but perfect, for his face and body were as ravaged as those of a mortal man who was nearing a century of life.
Kallor commanded no loyalty among the soldiers. Grudging respect was all the man achieved, and, the Mhybe suspected, all he ever had achieved, or ever would.
‘Who is he, daughter?’ the Mhybe asked. ‘A chimera, in truth.’
‘Pragmatic soldiers,’ the Mhybe said, ‘are the most frightening among the people whom I have known in my short life.’ Silverfox laughed low in her throat. ‘And you doubt your own wisdom, Mother …’
people plagued by indifference, an apathy that made even the efforts of civil discourse too much to contemplate. There were secret tragedies in the long, tortured past of the Tiste Andii. Wounds that would never heal. Even suffering, the Rhivi had come to realize, was capable of becoming a way of life.
Brood growled, ‘Do you still have that beak-strap, Hurlochel?’
Revelations could mean your death. And know this: you are not yet able to protect yourself. Nor can the Mhybe, whom I cherish and love, hope to defend you – hers is not a violent power. You will both need protectors, do you understand?’
‘It’s said they’re up from Elingarth – a decent complement: over seven thousand.
the council of High Priests has the backing of each temple’s private company of highly trained, well-equipped soldiers. That’s almost three thousand of the city’s most able fighters, whilst the prince himself has been left with dregs for his own Capanthall – which he’s prevented from expanding beyond two thousand by law.
the Mask Council has managed to invoke yet another law, preventing the Grey Swords from active engagement beyond the city walls, so the crossing will not be contested—’
‘Listen to him!’ The Mhybe nodded, understanding the Great Raven and experiencing her own amused disbelief. Dujek scowled down the length of the table at Crone. ‘You have a problem, bird?’ ‘You are the warlord’s match indeed! Word for word, you think aloud as he does! Oh, how can one not see the honed edge of poetry in your mutual war of the past twelve years?’
On the surface, we must be seen – the majority of your forces as well as mine, Onearm – to be marching overland, at a predictable pace. That will establish Septarch Kulpath’s timetable for the siege, for both him and us.
Tattersail’s … death … occurred within the sphere of the Tellann warren – as projected by a T’lan Imass—’ The Mhybe alone saw the standard-bearer Artanthos flinch. And what, sir, do you know of this? The question flitted briefly through her mind – conjecture and consideration were tasks too demanding to exercise.
Should Rake learn … protestations of innocence will avail us naught. We were there at the Chaining, were we not? Yet … aye, we were there at Fall itself! The Great Ravens were born like maggots in the flesh of the Fallen One and that, oh, that will damn us! But wait! Have we not been honourable guardians of the Crippled God’s magic? And were we not the ones who delivered to one and all the news of the Pannion Domin, the threat it represents?
‘The last Gathering,’ Silverfox replied, ‘was hundreds of thousands of years ago, at which was invoked the Ritual of Tellann – the binding of the Tellann warren to each and every Imass. The ritual made them immortal, High Fist. The life force of an entire people was bound in the name of a holy war destined to last for millennia—’
‘Against the Jaghut,’ Kallor rasped. His narrow, withered face twisted into a sneer behind the already-drying blood. ‘Apart from a handful of Tyrants, the Jaghut were pacifists. Their only crime was to exist—’
‘Do not hint at injustices, High King! I possess enough of Nightchill’s memories to recall the Imperial Warren – the place you once ruled, Kallor, before the Malazans made claim to it. You laid waste an entire realm – you stripped the life f...
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Memories spanning millennia on this world. So much that those people witnessed … the Fall of the Crippled God, the arrival of the Tiste Andii, the last flight of the Dragons into Starvald Demelain
Parts of him were torn away, falling like balls of fire to shatter entire lands. Pieces of his flesh and bone lay rotting yet clinging to a kind of life in their massive craters. From that flesh the Great Ravens were born, carrying with them fragments of the Crippled God’s power.
To attack a Great Raven with magic serves only to make the creature stronger, to bolster its immunity. Crone is the First Born. Rake believes the potential within her is … appalling, and so he keeps her and her ilk close.’
‘Commander, we sense Tattersail and Nightchill within the child – and she herself admits to these two – but now I wonder, where then is this Thelomen, Bellurdan?’
She fixed hard blue eyes on Gruntle.
Stonny’s fine green and black attire was covered in brown slime. Her thick black hair hung down over her face, dripping milky water.
The conflagration that had killed Buke’s wife, mother and four children had been particularly ugly. That Buke himself had been lying drunk and dead to the world in an alley not a hundred paces from the house hadn’t helped in the man’s recovery.
Alas, when sober — as he’s been ever since that night – Buke fights extremely well, and the ghosts of at least a dozen highwaymen would bitterly attest to that.
‘Only fools push!’ hissed the old woman from her cross-legged perch on a reed mat just within. ‘Scrapes my knee! Bruises and worse plague me when fools come to visit. Ah, I sniffed Raraku, didn’t I?’
The land shakes, mountains explode, hot rivers flow. These are natural things of a world whose soul is white hot. Bound to their own laws of cause and effect. The world is shaped like a beetle’s ball of dung, and it travels through a chilling void around the sun. The surface floats in pieces, on a sea of molten rock. Sometimes the pieces grind together. Sometimes they pull apart. Pulled and pushed by tides as the seas are pulled and pushed.’ ‘And where is the goddess in such a scheme?’ ‘She was the egg within the dung. Hatched long ago. Her mind rides the hidden rivers beneath our feet. She is
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The old woman shrugged. ‘By whatever paths we find.’
‘She demands nothing, what you do you do for yourselves. You work to earn sustenance. You fight to protect it or to gain more. You work to confound rivals. You fight from fear and hatred and spite and honour and loyalty and whatever other causes you might fashion. Yet, all that you do serves her … no matter what you do. Not simply benign, Adaephon Delat, but amoral. We can thrive, or we can destroy ourselves, it matters not to her – she will simply birth another brood and it begins again.’
‘You speak of the world as a physical thing, subject to natural laws. Is that all it is?’ ‘No, in the end the minds and senses of all that is alive define what is real – real for us, that is.’
‘Why does Burn sleep?’ ‘She sleeps … to dream.’ Quick Ben said nothing for a long time. When he finally looked into the old woman’s eyes he saw confirmation of his greatest fears. ‘She is sick,’ he said. The witch nodded. ‘Fevered.’ ‘And her dreams …’ ‘Delirium descends, lad. Dreams become nightmares.’ ‘I need to think of a way to excise that infection, because I don’t think Burn’s fever will be enough. If anything, that heat that’s meant to cleanse is achieving the opposite effect.’
One, however, snagged in his mind and stayed with him, at first meaningless, a curiosity and nothing more: she prefers the cold. Strange. Most old people like heat and plenty of it …
The victorious army was never meant to remain in place beyond the peacekeeping transition and handover to a firmly entrenched and fully functioning civil government in the Malazan style. Civic control was not a burden the army had been trained for – it was best achieved through bureaucratic manipulation of the conquered city’s economy.
Of the three, the captain knew Spindle the least. The short, bald man’s skills ranged from sorcery to sapping, or so he’d been told. His eternally sour disposition did not invite conversation, nor did the foul-smelling thigh-length black and grey hairshirt he wore – woven from his dead mother’s hair, if the rumour held any truth.
‘A real brew of powers over there, sir. Not just Brood and the Tiste Andii – I’m familiar with those. And Kallor’s, too, for that matter. No, there’s something else. Another presence. Old, yet new. Hints of T’lan Imass, maybe …’
panicked cat zigzagged around the snarling, snapping beasts. As one, the horses shied, ears flattening. In the drain gutter to their right the captain saw – with widening eyes – a score of rats scampering parallel to them.
‘We’re foot soldiers, sir,’ Mallet pointed out, with a dry grin. ‘In any case, I’ve seen him break up an enemy charge all by himself. Needless to say, he’s useful to have around
Paran had never before seen a cat run head first into a wall. The dull thud was followed by a crazed scraping of claws as the animal bounced away in stunned surprise. Its antics were enough to attract the attention of the two dogs. A moment later they set off after the cat. All three vanished down another alley.
Each neighbourhood they passed through rose in cacophony – the spitting of cats, the howling and barking of dogs and the braying of mules. Rats raced round the group on all sides, as mindless as lemmings.
where four figures waited in the darkness. And there stood the Rhivi child, a sunrise aura about her person, a penumbra of power that stirred the wilder blood that coursed within him.
‘Now, let us go down to meet Silverfox.’ ‘No.’ ‘Damn you, Paran,’ Whiskeyjack growled. ‘This is about more than just you and her all starry-eyed.
‘Very well, lead on.’ ‘It seems,’ Whiskeyjack said, striding to the edge of the barrow’s summit, ‘we will have to promote you to a rank equal to mine, Captain, if only to circumvent your confusion as to who commands who around here.’
‘Obviously, the whole damn thing’s been corrupted – probably never worked to start with—’ ‘It did! Me and Fid made damned sure—’ ‘But it was stolen before you could try it out for real, wasn’t it?’ ‘That doesn’t matter – I tell you—’ ‘Everybody shut up,’ Spindle said, slowly raising his head, his narrow forehead wrinkled in a frown as he scanned the tabletop. ‘Corrupted. You may have something there, Picker.’ He sniffed the air as if seeking a scent, then crouched down. ‘Yeah. Give me a hand, someone, with these here cots.’
If this new Unaligned plays true, then you could work out the new tensions, the new relationships, and once you know them—’ Spindle grinned. ‘We could run another game. Yeah—
Antsy’s heart damn near stopped when he lost his whole column. Your sergeant is probably gutting black-livered wood pigeons and whispering your name right now – who knows, your luck might change and a demon won’t hear him.’ Hedge scowled. ‘Ha ha.’ ‘I don’t think she’s kidding,’ Detoran said. ‘Fine,’ Hedge snapped. ‘I got a cusser waiting for it, and damned if I won’t make sure I take you all with me.’ ‘Team spirit,’ Trotts said, his smile broadening.
‘Think of the word “Finnest”. Its meaning, as the T’lan Imass know it, is “Hold of Ice”. Long ago, among the Elder races, a Hold was synonymous with a House in its meaning and common usage, and indeed, synonymous with Warren. Where resides a Jaghut’s wellspring of power? In a Finnest.’ She paused again, searching Paran’s eyes. ‘Tremorlor is Trellish for “House of Life”.’
‘The House of Shadow was once a Hold,’ Silverfox went on. ‘You can tell – it doesn’t share the hierarchical structure of the other Houses. It is bestial, a wilder place, and apart from the Hounds it knew no ruler for a long, long time.’
‘I have thought long and hard on this, Paran. Anomander Rake is Knight of the House of Dark,’ she said, ‘yet where is the House itself? Before all else there was Dark, the Mother who birthed all. So it must be an ancient place, a Hold, or perhaps something that came before Holds themselves. A focus for the gate into Kurald Galain … undiscovered, hidden, the First Wound, with a soul trapped in its maw, thus sealing it.’
‘A soul,’ Paran murmured, a chill clambering up his spine, ‘or a legion of souls …’
