The Crippled God (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #10)

by Steven Erikson

We are the dead thing in the womb of the world, and we and we alone light the darkness with fire. By that you will know us. By those flames alone, the earth shall tremble.

his Ethilian mace showing a face to each of the cardinal directions, as befitted the Witch’s gift from the sky.

‘I can’t do that, Draconus. But I’ll comb her hair.’ Which was what he had been doing when she’d finally come round. Lacking a comb, he’d been using a thorny twig, which probably wasn’t ideal, especially on her fine eyebrows, but they’d since taken care of the infections and she was looking almost normal again.

You empty the land. You break the earth and use it until it dies, and then your children starve. Do not blame me. Do not blame any of us for that.

The young were quick to adapt, he knew, but even then there were hurts that slipped through awareness leaving not a ripple, and they sank deep. And many years later, why, they’d shaped an entire life.

He felt hunched down inside himself, as if folding round an old wound, leaving his bones feeling frail, a cage that could crumple at the first hint of pressure.

‘IS IT AS I SEE?’ BRYS BEDDICT ASKED. ‘THE FATE OF THE WORLD IN THE hands of three women?’

My midwives tell me again and again that a woman’s spirit is stronger than a man’s.

They came from the sea. Isn’t that always the way?

‘The strangers from the sea had no such qualms, and when they cast down the rulers of Kolanse they did what they deemed necessary—’ ‘A cull,’ said the Adjunct, and that word seemed to take the life from Tavore’s eyes.

Sick and shaken as she had been, her hardest journey this day had been back through the Bonehunter camp. The soldiers, their faces, the low conversations and the occasional laugh – each and every scene, each and every sound, struck her heart like a dagger’s point. I am looking upon dead men, dead women. They don’t know it yet. They don’t know what’s awaiting them, what she means to do with them. Or maybe they do. Unwitnessed. I’ve heard about this, about what she told them. Unwitnessed…is what happens when nobody survives.

Wide-eyed stupid.’

Fiddler continued. ‘Those lizards took a nasty bite out of us. In fact, they pretty much did us in. Look around. We’re what’s left. The smoke over Pale’s thinning, and here we are.

Her horse was content, watered and fed enough to send the occasional stream down and plant an island or two in their wake. Happy horse, happy Masan Gilani.

As one, the undead warriors bowed to the captain. One spoke. ‘We greet you, Elder.’

But I miss the Bonehunters. I miss my miserable squad. I miss the damned Adjunct. We’re nothing but the sword in her hand, but we’re a comfortable grip. Use us, then. Just do it in style.

‘Will you all die in the name of love?’ The question seemed torn from something inside him. ‘If die we must, what better reason?’

The things said and the things not said. In the space in between, a thousand worlds. A thousand worlds.

She paused, eyes narrowing on Ruthan Gudd. ‘Why, Captain, you seem displeased. Good. Now, as to other matters that we should discuss, perhaps they can wait. There is one woman in this camp, however, who cannot. Dismissed.’

They will take from us all that we cradle in our arms and the burden yielded makes feathers of my hands, and the voices drifting down are all that we’re left with and shall for ever be enough

Your fists beat us senseless. Your fists explode with reasons. You beat us out of fear. Out of self-loathing. You beat us because it feels good, it feels good to pretend and to forget, and every time your fist comes down, you crush a little more guilt. In that old place where we once lived, you decried those who beat their children. Yet see what you have done to the world. You are all beaters of children.

‘No, Highness, I was never boy-thin, thank the Errant’s nudge.’ ‘Nor me. I have always been suspicious of grown men who seem to like that in their women. What’s wrong with little boys if they’re into pallid bony wraiths?’ ‘Perhaps it appeals to their protective natures, Highness.’ ‘Protecting is one thing, diddling is entirely another. Now, where was I? Oh yes, throwing you into the Hold of Ice. Best unsheathe at least a few of your weapons, dear. Who knows what you’ll land in.’ The handmaid drew her axes. ‘I am ready.’

Silchas Ruin could see, even from this distance, the long-shafted arrow buried in the figure’s forehead.

‘And then,’ Silchas Ruin whispered, ‘he stole my grief. And now, what is there, I wonder…what is there left to feel?’ ‘If I suggested “gratitude”, would that be insensitive?’

For we are all bound in stories, and as the years pile up they turn to stone, layer upon layer, building our lives.

‘I didn’t know we had any cheese left.’ Yedan plopped the last bit into his mouth, chewed a moment, swallowed and then said, ‘We don’t.’

‘Tell her,’ continued Yedan, his tone as steady as ever, ‘we will hold as long as we can. Tell her, Withal, that once more the Shake stand upon the Shore.’

Her face was tucked down, sunken cheeks pressed against the knees. As if in her last moments she sat, curled up, staring down at the stumps of her feet.

Did there not come to every child that moment when the mother, the father, loses that god-like status, that supreme competence in all things, when they are revealed to be as weak, as flawed and as lost as the child looking on?

Ahead, a line of horse soldiers across her path, silent and dark upon the plain. Dirty, limp banners, torn standards, helms above gaunt, withered faces. Her power hammered into them, crashed and broke apart like waves against a cliff. Olar Ethil felt her mind reeling back. She was stunned by the will of these revenants, these usurpers of the Throne of Death. As she staggered back, one guided his horse out from the line. The grey of his beard was spun iron, the cast of his eyes was stone. He reined in before her, leaned forward on his saddle. ‘You are treading foreign land, Bonecaster.’ ‘You dare challenge me?’ ‘Anywhere, any time.’ ‘He is mine!’ ‘Olar Ethil,’ he said, drawing his sword, ‘when you argue with death, you always lose.’ Shrieking her fury, she fled.

‘In service,’ Logros replied, ‘the T’lan Imass sanctify him—’ ‘You would make of him a god?’ ‘We are warriors. Our blessing shall—’ ‘Damn him for eternity!’ ‘Onos T’oolan, you are of no use to us.’ ‘Do you imagine’ – and he recalled the timbre of his voice, the seething outrage, and the horror of what Logros sought to do…to a mortal man, to a man destined to face his own death, and that is something we have never done, no, we ever ran from that moment of reckoning – Logros, the Lord of Death shall strike at the T’lan Imass, through him. Hood shall make him pay. For our crime, for our defiance – ‘Do you imagine,’ he’d said, ‘that your blessing could be anything but a curse? You would make him a god of sorrow, and failure, a god with a face doomed to weep, to twist in anguish—’ ‘Onos T’oolan, we cast you out.’ ‘I shall speak to Dassem Ultor—’ ‘You do not understand. It is too late.’ Too late.

The Adjunct Lorn had believed that it was the murder of the Emperor that had broken the human empire’s alliance with Logros T’lan Imass. She had been wrong. The spilled blood you should have heeded was Dassem Ultor’s, not Kellanved’s. And for all that neither man truly died, but only one bore the deadly kiss of Hood in all the days that followed. Only one stood before Hood himself, and learned of the terrible thing Logros had done to him. They said Hood was his patron god. They said he had avowed service to the Lord of Death. They said that Hood then betrayed him. They understood nothing. Dassem and his daughter, they were Hood’s knives, striking at us. What is it, to be the weapon of a god?

We are the T’lan Imass. We are the glory of immortality. When oblivion comes, I shall kiss it. And in my mind, I shall ride into the void on a river of tears. On a river of tears.

Tyranny was but a gleam in the eye back then, and each day the sun lifted to light a world of ignorance. How sweet must that have been.

Is that not a precious gift? Is that not the wonder of a child? The way they have of building their own worlds, of living in them, and finding joy in the living itself?

As he reached her, his desiccated hands caught her. He lifted her from her feet, and then, mouth stretching, he bit into the side of her face. The tusks drove up beneath her cheek bone, burst the eye on that side. In a welter of blood, he tore away half of her face, and then bit a second time, up under the orbitals, the tusks driving into her brain.

This place, it wants to kill me. I can feel it. Her skin was clammy and cool beneath her cloak. It wants inside. Eager as an infection. Who could have done this? Why? What terrible conflict led to this?

If despair has a ritual, it was spoken here.

Depending from a cross-bridge of iron, the cloth was a tattered rectangle of colourless wool – it was, in fact, a fair copy of Tehol’s blanket, almost to scale. And where one might expect some elegant or proud heraldic crest at centre, there was instead the new royal sigil of King Tehol the Only of Lether: a three-quarter-on rendition of his brother’s roof-top bed, and if one looked carefully one would see cowering beneath that bed a row of six plucked – but living – hens.

‘Oh, that’s all I ever hear from you, brother! “It’s not that way in the military, Tehol”, “The enlisted won’t go for that, Tehol”, “They don’t like pink, Tehol”. The pathetic conservatism of that hoary institution is, frankly, embarrassing.’

‘Brys, if an army must rally, one must presume it is in dire straits, yes? Well then, where better to hide than under the king’s bed?’ ‘With all the other chickens,’ added Bugg. ‘Well now, sire, that’s clever.’

Kuru Qan once told me that grieving had nothing to do with the ones gone, and everything to do with the ones left behind. We feel the absences in our life like open wounds, and they never really close, no matter how many years pass.’

Every time you needed something else, she gave you silence. Brys, you’ve said little to anyone for days. Don’t take on someone else’s wounds. Don’t.’

In speaking a god’s name, do we conjure it into being?

When you stood before the Adjunct, when you avowed service to her and her alone, it was the glory of that moment that so seduced you, wasn’t it? Madness!

‘Mortal Sword. Two sides of an argument can make the complicated seem simple, when it is anything but simple.

No weapon has ever bridged a divide, and once drawn, a sword can only cut.

‘What of me, Firehair?’ ‘Should the miraculous moment ever arrive when you can say something of value, Spax of the Gilk, be sure to leap right in.

I cannot help but wonder now if all that I thought I saw was nothing more than what I wanted to see.’

That which fades from the world? Its name is compassion. This is what she holds for the Fallen God. What she holds for us all.’