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Shall I unleash my rage? No. After all, my rage is not enough. It never was.’
The Crippled God had fashioned a small tent around his place of chaining, the Jaghut saw with some amusement. Broken, shattered, oozing with wounds that never healed,
Gethol glanced around. ‘There is heat beneath me. We chained you to Burn’s flesh, anchored you to her bones – and you have poisoned her.’ ‘I have. A festering thorn in her side … that shall one day kill her. And with Burn’s death, this world shall die. Her heart cold, lifeless, will cease its life-giving bounty. These chains must be broken, Jaghut.’
‘Behold,’ the Crippled God whispered, ‘the House of Chains …’ The Jaghut’s lone functioning eye narrowed. ‘What – what have you done?’ ‘No longer an outsider, Gethol. I would … join the game. And look more carefully. The role of Herald is … vacant.’
Gethol, I have need of you. I embrace your … flaws. None among my House of Chains shall be whole, in flesh or in spirit.
‘How did you do that?’ Quick Ben whispered. Kruppe removed a mottled silk handkerchief from his sleeve and mopped his brow. ‘Warrens suddenly abound, licking the air with invisible flames, aaii! Kruppe withers beneath such scrutiny – mercy, Kruppe begs you, malicious mage!’
‘Quick Ben. Adaephon Delat, a middling wizard in the employ of one of the Seven Holy Protectors
Delat and eleven other mages made up the Protector’s cadre. Our besieging army’s own sorcerors were more than their match – Bellurdan, Nightchill, Tayschrenn, A’Karonys, Tesormalandis, Stumpy – a formidable gathering known for their brutal execution of the Emperor’s will.
Seventy soldiers rode at his back, a cobbled-together collection of marines, engineers, infantry and cavalry; each from squads that had effectively ceased to exist.
‘Kebharla, I think. She was more a scholar than a mage, a delver of mysteries.
‘The herbs in this tea will lessen the loss of water come the morrow,’ the Seven Cities native rumbled. ‘I’m lucky to have it – it’s rare and getting rarer. Makes your piss thick as soup, but short. You’ll still sweat, but you need that—’
Renisha, a sorceror of High Meanas; Keluger, a Septime Priest of D’riss, the Worm of Autumn; Narkal, the warrior-mage, sworn to Fener and aspirant to the god’s Mortal Sword; Ullan, the Soletaken priestess of Soliel.
Set’alahd Crool, a Jhag half-blood who’d once driven Dassem Ultor back a half-dozen steps in furious counterattack, his sword ablaze with the blessing of some unknown ascendant; Etra, a mistress of the Rashan warren; Birith’erah, mage of the Serc warren who could pull storms down from the sky; Gellid, witch of the Tennes warren …
The hunters were embraced in silence, now. Raraku’s silence. Tempered, honed, annealed under the sun. The horses beneath them were their match, lean and defiant, tireless and wild-eyed.
Whiskeyjack was slow to understand what he saw in Kalam’s face when the assassin looked upon him and his soldiers, slow to grasp that the killer’s narrowed eyes held disbelief, awe, and more than a little fear. Yet Kalam himself had changed. He’d not travelled far from the land he called home, yet an entire world had passed beneath him. Raraku had taken them all.
‘Adaephon Delat, a mage of Meanas,’ he said in a bone-dry rasp, his split lips twisting into a grin. ‘He was never much, sir. I doubt he’ll be able to muster a defence.’
‘There were eleven others in your company, wizard.’ Adaephon Delat shrugged. ‘I was the youngest – the healthiest – by far. Yet now, finally, even my body has given up. I can go no further.’ His dark eyes reached past Whiskeyjack. ‘Commander, your soldiers …’ ‘What of them?’ ‘They are more … and less. No longer what they once were. Raraku, sir, has burned the bridges of their pasts, one and all – it’s all gone.’ He met Whiskeyjack’s eyes in wonder. ‘And they are yours. Heart and soul. They are yours.’
Eleven mages. Once the first one revealed her arcane knowledge to you – knowledge she was unable to use – it was just a matter of bargaining. What choice did the others possess? Death by Raraku’s hand, or mine. Or … a kind of salvation. But was it, after all? Do their souls clamour within you, now, Adaephon Delat? Screaming to escape their new prison? But I am left wondering, none the less. This game – you and Kalam – to what end?’
He managed a strained smile. ‘The clamour has … subsided somewhat. Even the ghost of a life is better than Hood’s embrace, Commander. We’ve achieved a … balance, you could say.’
‘What we have become,’ Whiskeyjack said, ‘you have shared. You and Kalam.’ The wizard slowly nodded. ‘Hence this fateful meeting. Sir, Kalam and I, we’ll follow you, now. If you would have us.’ Whiskeyjack grunted. ‘The Emperor will take you from me.’ ‘Only if you tell him, Commander.’ ‘And Kalam?’ Whiskeyjack glanced back at the assassin. ‘The Claw will be … displeased,’ the man rumbled. Then he smiled. ‘Too bad for Surly.’
The first blood-letting engagement of the Bridgeburners was the retaking of G’danisban – a mage, an assassin, and seventy soldiers who swept into a rebel stronghold of four hundred desert warriors and crushed them in a single night.
At first, the Mhybe thought she was looking upon a collection of flint blades, resting on strangely wrought bangles seemingly of the same fractious material. Then her eyes narrowed.
‘Aye,’ Kruppe whispered. ‘Fashioned as if they were indeed flint. But no, they are copper. Cold-hammered, the ore gouged raw from veins in rock, flattened beneath pounding stones. Layer upon layer. Shaped, worked, to mirror a heritage.’ His small eyes lifted, met the Mhybe’s. ‘Kruppe sees the pain of your twisted bones, my dear, and he grieves. These copper objects are not tools, but ornaments, to be worn about the body – you will find the blades have clasps suitable for a hide thong. You will find wristlets and anklets, arm-torcs and … uh, necklets. There is efficacy in such items … to ease
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‘Jaghan.’ He set it down and picked up an anklet. ‘S’ren Tahl. And here, this small, childlike arrowhead … Manek, the Rhivi imp – a mocker, was he not? Kruppe feels an affinity with this trickster runt, Manek, oh yes. Manek, for all his games and deceits, has a vast heart, does he not? And here, this torc. Iruth, see its polish? The dawn’s glow, captured here, in this beaten metal—’
Armies possessed traditions, and these had less to do with discipline than with the fraught truths of the human spirit. Rituals at the beginning, shared among each and every recruit. And rituals at the end, a formal closure that was recognition – recognition in every way imaginable. They were necessary. Their gift was a kind of sanity, a means of coping. A soldier cannot be sent away without guidance, cannot be abandoned and left lost in something unrecognizable and indifferent to their lives. Remembrance and honouring the ineffable. Yet, when it’s done, what is the once-soldier? What does he
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The ground beneath him was clay, damp and clammy, the cold reaching through the wizard’s moccasins. Faint, colourless light bled down from a formless sky that seemed no higher than a ceiling. The haze filling the air felt oily, thick enough on either side to make the path seem like a tunnel. Quick
‘Slightly, aye, slightly. Squatter? No surprise, we never went hungry, for the sea provided. Yet more, Tartheno Toblakai were among us …’ ‘You were T’lan Imass! Hood’s breath! Then … you and your kin must have defied the Ritual—’ ‘Defied? No. We simply failed to arrive in time – our pursuit of the Jaghut had forced us to venture onto the seas, to dwell among ice-flows and on treeless islands. And in our isolation from kin, among the elder peoples – the Tartheno – we changed … when our distant kin did not.
Mortal, wherever land proved generous enough to grant us a birth, we buried our dugouts – for ever. From this was born the custom of the trees on our barrows – though none among my kind remembers. It has been so long …’
‘The Barghast refuse to change, the living think now as the living always did. Generation after generation. Our kind are dying out, mortal. We rot from within. For the ancestors are prevented from giving true guidance, prevented from maturing into their power – our power. To answer your question, mortal, I would save the living Barghast, if I could.’
‘The latter, mortal. The latter. And it must be earned. I wish for the chance. For all my people, I wish for the chance.’
Since her return from Callows, with Mok in tow and his mask sporting a crimson, thickly planted kiss – Hood’s breath, does the man even know? If I was Senu or Thurule, would I dare tell him?
‘What if the war’s ended? What next, for the T’lan Imass?’ He considered, then slowly said, ‘A second Ritual of Gathering?’ ‘Mhmm …’ ‘An end? An end to the T’lan Imass? Hood’s breath!’ ‘And not a single spirit waiting to embrace all those weary, so very weary souls …’ An end, an end. Gods, she might be right. He stared at Tool’s fur-clad back, and was almost overcome with a sense of loss. Vast, ineffable loss. ‘You might be wrong, Lady.’
we thrust to the heart … of a frozen, timeless soul.’ Her voice rising slightly, she added, ‘Or so we suspect, do we not, Onos T’oolan?’
Tool, that K’Chain Che’Malle was trying for all three of them at once. Stupid. Arrogant.’ The T’lan Imass cocked his head. ‘Arrogance. A vice of being undead, Toc the Younger.’
the transition from barren plain to green pastures and signs of human activity was something of a shock to Toc the Younger. He realized, with a dull and faint surge of unease, that he’d grown used to the solitude of the plain the Elin called Lamatath. Absence of people – those outside the group … strangers – had diminished what he now understood to be a constant tension in his life. Perhaps in all our lives. Unfamiliar faces, gauging regard, every sense heightened in an effort to read the unknown. The natural efforts of society. Do we all possess a wish to remain unseen, unnoticed? Is the
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The Malazan conjured in his mind an image of two masked, death-dealing ‘children,’ and a moment later his imagination was in full retreat. ‘Uh,’ he managed, ‘no. I mean, yes. Yes, I concur.’
The pyramidal shape continued down to ground level, the copper sheathing broken only by a dozen randomly placed skylights, each paned with slabs of thin rose quartzite. A narrow but high portal marked the entrance, framed by four massive cut-stones – a broad threshold underfoot, two tapering, flanking menhirs, and a single lintel stone overhead. The corridor beyond was three strides in length, revealing the breadth of the pyramid’s foundations.
Standing before another triangular doorway – this one directly opposite the entrance – stood a huge figure in arcane, black-wrought armour. A double-bladed, long-handled axe leaned on the door’s frame to his left. The warrior was bare-headed, his pate shaved, and his angular beardless face revealed old scars along his jawline and down the length of his nose.
Seerdomin are the Gifted among the Pannion Seer’s children. Warriors without parallel, yet learned as well.
Before they arrived a second four-legged shape emerged from a side passage beside the entrance, dark, mottled grey and black, and dwarfing Baaljagg. Coal-lit eyes set in a broad, blood-soaked head slowly fixed on Toc the Younger. Garath?
among all domesticated livestock only goats and horses could survive a return to the wild.
I was born on a ship, you know, and it was more than a few days before Toc the Elder stepped forward to acknowledge his fatherhood – my mother was Captain Cartheron Crust’s sister, you see, and Crust had a temper …’
Hetan’s face was smeared in ash, as was her brother Cafal’s. The mourning visage would remain for as long as they chose, and the Shield Anvil suspected he would not live to see its removal. Even sheathed in grey, there is a brutal beauty to this woman.
Hetan trembles. The Barghast spirits … tremble. They have been lost – made blind by the desecration. For so long … lost. Those holiest of remains … and the Barghast themselves were never certain – never certain that they were here, in this earth in this place, were never certain that they existed at all. The mortal remains of their spirit-gods. And Hetan is about to find them. Humbrall Taur’s long-held suspicion … Humbrall Taur’s audacious – no, outrageous – gambit.
‘Find me the bones of the Founding Families, daughter Hetan.’
Did you know of this news?’ ‘Trake’s death?’ The Destriant’s brows slowly rose, his eyes still on Rath’Fener. ‘Oh yes. My colleague travelled far to arrive at Fener’s cloven hooves. While I, sir, have never left that place.’
The subterranean chamber’s earthen floor was less than a man’s height beneath the crossbeams. Filling the space between the two levels was the wooden prow of an open, seafaring craft, twisted with age and perhaps the one-time weight of soil and rocks, black-pitched and artfully carved. From where Itkovian stood he could see a web-like span of branches reaching out to an outrigger.
And I knew – knew instantly, Gruntle, that nothing was getting past that wolf. It was standing guard … over me.’ ‘Some kind of servant of the Elder God?’ ‘No, he doesn’t have any servants. What he has is friends. I don’t know about you, but knowing that – realizing it as I did there with that giant wolf – well, a god that finds friends instead of mindless worshippers … dammit, I’m his, Gruntle, body and soul. And I’ll fight for him, because I know he’ll fight for me. Horrible Elder Gods, bah! I’ll take him over those snarling bickering fools with their temples and coffers and rituals any day.’
She strode to the door and pulled it open. ‘Local security measures – you can’t kick these doors in, they all open outward, and they’re built bigger than the inside frame. Smart, eh? The Grey Swords are expecting a house by house scrap once the walls fall – those Pannions are going to find the going messy.’
The main chamber ran the full width of the house; a series of alcoves – storage rooms and cell-like bedrooms – divided up the back wall, a central arched walkway bisecting it to lead into the courtyard garden beyond. Benches and trunks crowded one corner of the chamber. A central firepit and humped clay bread-oven was directly before them, radiating heat. The air was rich with the smell of baking
