Deadhouse Gates (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #2)

by Steven Erikson

‘You would make Sha’ik your enemy?’ Mappo asked. The lead wolf cocked its head. The name means nothing to me. The two travellers watched as the wolves padded off, vanishing once again into a gloom of sorcery. Mappo showed his teeth, then sighed, and Icarium nodded, giving voice to their shared thought. ‘It will, soon.’

‘We approach comprehension.’ Three words evoking terror within Mappo. He felt like a hare in a master archer’s sights, each direction of flight so hopeless as to leave him frozen in place. He stood at the side of powers that staggered his mind, power past and powers present. The Nameless Ones, with their charges and hints and visions, their cowled purposes and shrouded desires. Creatures of fraught antiquity, if the Trellish legends held any glimmer of truth. And Icarium, oh, dear friend, I can tell you nothing. My curse is silence to your every question, and the hand I offer as a brother will lead you only into deceit. In love’s name, I do this, at my own cost … and such a cost.

There’s a sweet promise to giving up, but realizing that demands a journey. One of spirit. You can’t walk to Hood’s Gate, you find it before you when the fog clears.

The historian, now witness, stumbling in the illusion that he will survive. Long enough to set the details down on parchment in the frail belief that truth is a worthwhile cause. That the tale will become a lesson heeded. Frail belief? Outright lie, a delusion of the worst sort. The lesson of history is that no-one learns.

Children were dying. He’d crouched, one hand on a mother’s shoulder, and watched with her as life ebbed from the baby in her arms. Like the light of an oil lamp, dimming, dimming, winking out. The moment when the struggle’s already lost, surrendered, and the tiny heart slows in its own realization, then stops in mute wonder. And never stirs again. It was then that pain filled the vast caverns within the living, destroying all it touched with its rage at inequity.

What did that bastard call himself? The High King? Kallor … the High King without a kingdom. Thousands of years old, if legends speak true, perhaps tens of thousands. He claimed to have once commanded empires, each one making the Malazan Empire no larger than a province. He then claimed to have destroyed them by his own hand, destroyed them utterly. Kallor boasted he had made worlds lifeless … And this man now stands as Caladan Brood’s second in command. And when I left, Dujek, the Bridgeburners and the reformed Fifth Army were about to seek an alliance with Brood. Whiskeyjack … Quick Ben … keep your heads low, friends. There’s a madman in your midst …

We do naught but scratch the world, frail and fraught. Every vast drama of civilizations, of peoples with their certainties and gestures, means nothing, affects nothing. Life crawls on, ever on. She wondered if the gift of revelation – of discovering the meaning underlying humanity – offered nothing more than a devastating sense of futility. It’s the ignorant who find a cause and cling to it, for within that is the illusion of significance. Faith, a king, queen or Emperor, or vengeance … all the bastion of fools.

If the Chain of Dogs has a face, it is Lull’s.

Grief rapes the mind, and I know all about rape. It’s a question of acquiescence. So I shall feel nothing. No rape, no grief.

‘Tortured spirits writhe in this bastard’s shadow – every man, woman and child that he’s killed. Tell me, Toblakai, did those children beg to live? Did they weep, cry out for their mothers?’ ‘No more than grown men did,’ the giant said, yet Felisin saw that he had paled, though she sensed that it was not his killing of children that bothered him. No, there was something else in what Heboric had said. Tortured spirits. He’s haunted by the ghosts of those he’s slain. Forgive me, Toblakai, if I spare you no pity.

‘Aye, Icarium. Such are memories in full flood. We are not simple creatures. You dream that with memories will come knowledge, and from knowledge, understanding. But for every answer you find, a thousand new questions arise. All that we were has led us to where we are, but tells us little of where we’re going. Memories are a weight you can never shrug off.’

Tremorlor’s gnarled gaol of roots held demons, ancient Ascendants and such a host of alien creatures that the sapper was left trembling in the realization of his insignificance and that of all his kind. Humans were but one tiny, frail leaf on a tree too massive even to comprehend. The shock of that unmanned him, mocking his audacity with an endless echo of ages and realms trapped within this mad, riotous prison.

‘Pogroms need no reason, sir, none that can weather challenge, in any case. Difference in kind is the first recognition, the only one needed, in fact. Land, domination, pre-emptive attacks – all just excuses, mundane justifications that do nothing but disguise the simple distinction. They are not us. We are not them.’

Five thousand soldiers will give their lives for it. But is this some kind of romantic foolishness – do I yearn for recognition among these simple soldiers? Is any soldier truly simple – simple in the sense of having a spare, pragmatic way of seeing the world and his place in it? And does such a view preclude the profound awareness I now believe exists in these battered, footsore men and women?

The worlds live on, beyond us, countless unravelling tales.

We are all lone souls. It pays to know humility, lest the delusion of control, of mastery, overwhelms. And indeed, we seem a species prone to that delusion, again and ever again …

The Jaghut ghost … why do I think of him now? Of that eternity of grief? What is he to me? What is anyone or anything to me, now? I await Hood’s Gate at last – the time for memories, for regrets and comprehensions is past. You must see that now, old man. Your nameless marine awaits you, and Bult and Corporal List, and Lull and Sulwar and Mincer. Kulp and Heboric, too, most likely. You leave a place of strangers now, and go to a place of companions, of friends. So claim the priests of Hood. It’s the last gift. I am done with this world, for I am alone in it. Alone. A ghostly, tusked face rose before his mind’s eye, and though he had never before seen it, he knew that the Jaghut had found him. The gravest compassion filled that creature’s unhuman eyes, a compassion that Duiker could not understand. Why grieve, Jaghut? I shall not haunt eternity as you have done. I shall not return to this place, nor suffer again the losses a mortal suffers in life, and in living. Hood is about to bless me, Jaghut – no need to grieve … Those thoughts echoed only a moment longer, as the Jaghut’s ravaged face faded and darkness closed in around the historian, closed in until it swallowed him. And with it, awareness ceased.