House of Chains (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #4)

by Steven Erikson

Thom Tissy, was squat, with a face that might be handsome to a female toad, his cheeks pocked and the backs of his hands covered in warts. He was, the others saw when he removed his helm, virtually hairless.

The ground seemed to tremble with the woman’s approach. She was Napan and Strings wondered if she knew she was female. The muscles of her arms were larger than his thighs. She had cut all her hair off, her round face devoid of ornament barring a bronze nose-ring. Yet her eyes were startlingly beautiful, emerald green. ‘Have you heard of another heavy, Flashwit? Neffarias Bredd?’

Mosel, Sobelone and Tugg could have been siblings. They all hailed from Malaz City, typical of the mixed breed prevalent on the island, and the air of threat around them had less to do with size than attitude. Sobelone was the oldest of the three, a severe-looking woman with streaks of grey in her shoulder-length black hair, her eyes the colour of the sky. Mosel was lean, the epicanthic folds of his eyes marking Kanese blood somewhere in his family line. His hair was braided and cut finger-length in the fashion of Jakatakan pirates. Tugg was the biggest of the three, armed with a short single-bladed axe. The shield strapped on his back was enormous, hardwood, sheathed in tin and rimmed in bronze.

There was a moment of awkward silence, then Tugg spoke, his voice thin, emerging from, Strings suspected, a damaged larynx.

His soldiers, Cuttle included, were gathered around Bottle, who sat cross-legged and seemed to be playing with twigs and sticks. Strings halted in his tracks, an uncanny chill creeping through him. Gods below, for a moment there I thought I was seeing Quick Ben, with Whiskeyjack’s squad crowding round some damned risky ritual…

‘Grandmother,’ he muttered. ‘She was a witch?’ ‘More or less. So was my mother.’ ‘And your father? What was he?’ ‘Don’t know. There were rumours…’ He ducked his head, clearly uncomfortable.

For that figure you’ve made, try the Patron of Assassins.’ Bottle flinched. ‘The Rope? That’s too, uh, close…’ ‘What do you mean by that?’ Smiles demanded. ‘You said you knew Meanas. And now it turns out you know Hood, too. And witchery. I’m starting to think you’re just making it all up.’

Strings reached out and picked up the doll. Then he set it back down…on the other side of the Whirlwind Wall. ‘Try it now.’

‘It’s not moving. The doll. I can feel the Rope…close, way too close. There’s power, pouring into or maybe out of that doll, only it’s not moving—’ ‘You’re right,’ Strings said, a grin slowly spreading across his features. ‘It’s not moving. But its shadow is…’

‘So, who is he? The Rope himself?’ ‘No,’ Bottle answered. ‘No, I’m sure of that.’ Saying nothing, Strings strode from the circle. No, not the Rope. Someone even better, as far as I am concerned. As far as every Malazan is concerned, for that matter. He’s here. And he’s on the other side of the Whirlwind Wall. And I know precisely who he’s sharpened his knives for.

Do you like shiny things? I do, even though they hurt my eyes. Maybe it’s because they hurt my eyes. What do you think?’

‘Father thinks the same. You think about things there’s no point in thinking about. It makes no difference. But I know why you do.’ ‘You do?’ The lad nodded. ‘The same reason I like shiny things.

‘She withdrew!’ Nil shouted, stumbling forward. ‘Our path is clear!’ Tavore threw up a hand to halt the Wickan. ‘In answer to my sword, Warlock? Or is this some strategic ploy?’ ‘Both, I think. She would not willingly take such a wounding, I think. Now, she will rely upon her mortal army.’

Keneb’s a damned good captain. Now, there’s a nobleborn in that role, replacing him. The man’s a damned fool. So long as he was under Keneb’s heel he wasn’t a problem.

But the officer corps the Adjunct had to draw from was filled with nobleborn—the whole system was its own private enterprise, exclusionary and corrupt. Despite the Cull, it persists, right here in this army.’ ‘Besides,’ Gamet nodded, ‘those sergeants are most useful right where they are.’ ‘Aye. So cease your selfish sulking, old man, and step back in line.’ The back of Gamet’s gloved hand struck Blistig’s face hard enough to break his nose and send him pitching backward off the rump of his horse.

‘Just a hunch, Gesler. I get those sometimes. They’ve been infiltrated. That’s what I saw from Bottle’s divination. The night before the battle, that oasis will get hairy. Wish I could be there to see it. Damn, wish I could be there to help.’

The man then turned to Gesler. ‘And he says you and your corporal, Stormy, are Old Guard. Underage marines serving Dassem Ultor, or maybe Cartheron Crust or his brother Urko. That you were the ones who brought that old Quon dromon into Aren Harbour with all the wounded from the Chain of Dogs. And you, Borduke, you once threw a nobleborn officer off a cliff, near Karashimesh, only they couldn’t prove it, of course.’

We speak of those we have exiled, yet not to warn—as Monok Ochem claims. No, nothing so noble. We speak of them in reaffirmation of our judgement. But it is our intransigence that finds itself fighting the fiercest war—with time itself, with the changing world around us.

A modest victory…but if I feed it, my own eager delight is answered, until this entire plain is aflame, then the forest, then the world itself. Thus, an assertion of wisdom here…in the quenching of these flames once this meat is cooked. After all, igniting this entire world will also kill everything in it, if not in flames then in subsequent starvation.

It is far too easy to be blindsided in this seemingly empty and lifeless desert.’ ‘As we’ve already discovered.’ He frowned, then sighed. ‘I regret that you view…things that way, and can only conclude that you derive a peculiar satisfaction from discord, and when it does not exist—or, rather, has no reason to exist—you seek to invent it.’

She donned the gauntlets, then, with a grunt, lifted the man and settled him over one shoulder.

To remain innocent is to twist beneath invisible and unfathomable forces all your life, until one day you realize that you no longer recognize yourself, and it comes to you that innocence was a curse that had shackled you, stunted you, defeated your every expression of living.’

Her head snapped round, and she stared into his face, seeing it fully, she realized, for the first time. The lines bracketing the calm, soft eyes, the even features, the strange hatch pattern of scars beneath his right eye. ‘Pleased,’ she whispered, studying him. ‘Why?’ ‘Because,’ he answered with a faint smile, ‘I like the lad, too.’ ‘How brave do you think I am?’ ‘As brave as is necessary.’ ‘Again.’ ‘Aye. Again.’ ‘You don’t seem much like a god at all, Cotillion.’ ‘I’m not a god in the traditional fashion, I am a patron. Patrons have responsibilities. Granted, I rarely have the opportunity to exercise them.’

His smile broadened, and it was a lovely smile.

Otataral, it seemed, did not go well with Moranth munitions, particularly burners and flamers. Or, to put it another way, it doesn’t like getting hot.

Before the Imass, there was another people, older, wilder. They dwelt where it was warm, and they were tall, their dark skins covered in fine hair. These we knew as the Eres.

‘Its verges, occasionally, but more often the surrounding savannas. They worked in stone, but with less skill than us.’

‘All Eres were bonecasters, Trull Sengar. For they were the first to carry the spark of awareness, the first so gifted by the spirits.’

‘The Eres did not fashion holy sites of their own,’ Monok Ochem said, ‘but they understood that there were places where death gathered, where life was naught but memories, drifting lost and bemused. And, to such places, they would often bring their own dead. Power gathers in layers—this is the birthplace of the sacred.’

Their power comes, as Monok Ochem said, from layers. Stone shaped into tools and weapons. Air shaped by throats. Minds that discovered, faint as flickering fires in the sky, the recognition of oblivion, of an end…to life, to love. Eyes that witnessed the struggle to survive, and saw with wonder its inevitable failure. To know and to understand that we must all die, Trull Sengar, is not to worship death. To know and to understand is itself magic, for it made us stand tall.’ ‘It

We are the first lawbreakers, and that we have survived this long is fit punishment. And so, it remains our hope that the Summoner will grant us absolution.’

The warrior turned, in time to see a figure standing a dozen paces away. Tall, lithely muscled, with a fine umber-hued pelt and long, shaggy hair reaching down past the shoulders. A woman. Her breasts were large and pendulous, her hips wide and full. Prominent, flaring cheekbones, a broad, full-lipped mouth. All this registered in an instant, even as the woman’s dark brown eyes, shadowed beneath a solid brow, scanned across the three T’lan Imass before fixing on Trull Sengar. She took a step towards the Tiste Edur, the movement graceful as a deer’s

Onrack looked for Trull Sengar, found the Tiste Edur lying prone on the damp rock a half-dozen paces away. The T’lan Imass approached. The mortal was unconscious. There was blood smearing his lap, pooling beneath his crotch, and Onrack could see it cooling, suggesting that it did not belong to Trull Sengar, but to the Eres woman who had…taken his seed. His first seed. But there had been nothing to her appearance suggesting virginity. Her breasts had swollen with milk in the past; her nipples had known the pressure of a pup’s hunger. The blood, then, made no sense.

And saw the fresh wound of scarification beneath his belly button. Three parallel cuts, drawn across diagonally, and the stained imprints of three more—likely those the woman had cut across her own belly—running in the opposite direction.

There is, of course, no empirical means of determining whether the attribution of meaning—the power inherent in making symbols of the inanimate—was causative, in essence the creative force behind the Eres’al;

In either case, what cannot be refuted is the rarely acknowledged but formidable power that exists like subterranean layers in notable features of the land; nor that such power is manifested with subtle yet profound efficacy, even so much as to twist the stride of gods—indeed, occasionally sufficient to bring them down with finality…

Convey to your officers, please, the following. Units may appear during the battle on the morrow which you will not recognize. They may seek orders, and you are to give them as if they were under your command.’

The headache was not fading, and the song itself seemed to have poisoned his veins, a music of flesh and bone that hinted of madness. Leave me in peace, damn you. I am naught but a soldier. A soldier…

The song had burgeoned sudden and fierce in his skull, flowing through his limbs like fire. A hand gripped his shoulder, and he felt a sorcerous questing seep into his veins, tentatively at first, then flinching away entirely, only to return with more force—and with it, a spreading silence. Blissful peace, cool and calm.

The hand fixed onto his shoulder was Bottle’s, and the lad’s face was pale, beaded with sweat. Their eyes locked, then Bottle nodded and slowly withdrew his hand. ‘Can you hear me, Sergeant?’ ‘Faint, as if you were thirty paces away.’ ‘Is the pain gone?’ ‘Aye—what did you do?’ Bottle glanced away. Strings frowned, then said, ‘Everyone else, back to work. Stay here, Bottle.’

‘This place is…complicated,’ Bottle sighed. He reached down and picked up a large, disc-shaped rock. ‘Eres’al,’ he said. ‘A hand-axe—the basin down there’s littered with them. Smoothed by the lake that once filled it. Took days to make one of these, then they didn’t even use them—they just flung them into the lake. Makes no sense, does it? Why make a tool then not use it?’ Strings stared at the mage. ‘What are you talking about, Bottle? Who are the Eres’al?’

My grandmother spoke of the Eres. The Dwellers who lived in the time before the Imass, the first makers of tools, the first shapers of their world.’ He shook his head, fought down a shiver. ‘I never expected to meet one—it was there, she was there, in that song within you.’ ‘And she told you about these tools?’ ‘Not directly. More like I shared it—well, her mind. She was the one who gifted you the silence. It wasn’t me—I don’t have that power—but I asked, and she showed mercy. At least’—he glanced at Strings—‘I gather it was a mercy.’

‘No. All I wanted to do was get out of there—out of that blood—’ ‘My blood.’ ‘Well, most of it’s your blood, Sergeant.’ ‘And the rest?’ ‘Belongs to that song. The, uh, Bridgeburners’ song.’ Strings closed his eyes, settled his head against the boulder behind him. Kimloc, that damned Tanno Spiritwalker in Ehrlitan. I said no, but he did it anyway. He stole my story—not just mine, but the Bridgeburners’—and he made of it a song. The bastard’s gone and given us back to Raraku…

Twenty paces away the shaman wheeled round and screamed, ‘They are here! The dogs, Leoman! The dogs! The Wickan dogs!’

The path was blocked. A dead horse and, just beyond it, a corpse. Heart thudding, Corabb slipped down from his mount and moved cautiously forward. Leoman’s messenger, the one he had sent as soon as the troop had arrived. A crossbow quarrel had taken him on the temple, punching through bone then exploding out messily the other side.

But Raraku does not belong to you, dear Dryjhna, no matter how ferocious your claims. I see that now. This desert is holy unto itself. And now it rails—feel it, goddess! It rails! Against one and all.

Sha’ik then gasped, as the goddess within her flinched back—as if stung—and loosed a shriek that filled her skull. For Raraku was answering the summons, a multitude of voices, rising in song, rising with raw, implacable desire—the sound, Sha’ik realized, of countless souls straining against the chains that bound them.

Chains of shadow. Chains like roots. From this torn, alien fragment of warren. This piece of shadow, that has risen to bind their souls and so feeds upon the life-force.

‘Begone, wraiths,’ a voice hissed from a half-dozen paces away. ‘Too late for that, assassin,’ murmured the figure above Heboric. ‘Besides, we’ve only just arrived.’ ‘In the name of Hood, Hoarder of Souls, I banish you from this realm.’ A soft laugh answered the killer’s command. ‘Kneel before Hood, do you? Oh yes, I felt the power in your words. Alas, Hood’s out of his depth on this one. Ain’t that right, lass?’

The design allowed her to cinch the straps herself, and moments later she picked up the sword and slid it into its scabbard, then drew the heavy belt about her waist, setting the hooks that held it to the cuirass so that its weight did not drag at her hips.