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

by Steven Erikson

stealth, tracking, the laying of ambushes, the setting of traps for game both two-and four-legged, riding, scaling walls, freezing in place, knife throwing and countless other weapon skills, the weapons themselves donated by the warren’s mad rulers—half of them cursed or haunted or fashioned for entirely unhuman hands. The children took to such training with frightening zeal, and the gleam of pride in Minala’s eyes left the assassin…chilled.

He turned to see a tall, hooded and cloaked figure standing a few paces away, flanked by two Hounds. Cotillion, and his favoured two, Rood and Blind.

The god was silent for a long moment. ‘I have often wondered,’ he finally said, ‘why it is that you, an assassin, offer no obeisance to your patron.’ Kalam’s brows rose. ‘Since when have you expected it? Hood take us, Cotillion, if it was fanatical worshippers you hungered for, you should never have looked to assassins. By our very natures, we’re antithetical to the notion of subservience

‘I have certain tasks before me,’ the god continued, ‘that will consume much of my time for the near future. Whilst at the same time, certain other…activities…must be undertaken. It is one thing to find a loyal subject, but another entirely to find one conveniently positioned, as it were, to be of practical use—’ Kalam barked a laugh. ‘You went fishing for faithful servants and found your subjects wanting.’ ‘We could argue interpretation all day,’ Cotillion drawled.

‘Is your claim—yours and Shadowthrone’s—being contested?’ ‘Difficult to answer,’ Cotillion murmured. ‘There have been…trembles. Agitation…’ ‘As you said, the Hounds are troubled.’ ‘They are indeed.’ ‘You wish to know more of your potential enemy.’ ‘We would.’ Kalam studied the gate, the swirling shadows at its threshold. ‘Where would you have me begin?’ ‘A confluence to your own desires, I suspect.’ The assassin glanced at the god, then slowly nodded.

Cutter’s own experience here in the Malazan Empire was, he well knew, twisted and incomplete. A single vicious night in Malaz City, followed by three tense days in Kan that closed with yet more assassinations.

Feeling vulnerable was not a weakness he shared with Apsalar. She seemed possessed of absolute calm, an ease, no matter where she was—the confidence of the god who once possessed her had left something of a permanent imprint on her soul. Not just confidence. He thought once more of the night she had killed the man in Kan. Deadly skills, and the icy precision necessary when using them. And, he recalled with a shiver, many of the god’s own memories remained with her, reaching back to when the god had been a mortal man, had been Dancer.

Among those, the night of the assassinations—when the woman who would become Empress had struck down the Emperor…and Dancer. She had revealed that much, at least, a revelation devoid of feeling, of sentiment, delivered as casually as a comment about the weather.

Shall I bless them for you, Cutter?’ ‘If the blessing is without magic,’ the Daru replied. ‘You desire no sorcerous investment?’ ‘No.’ ‘Ah. You would follow Rallick Nom’s path.’ Cutter’s eyes narrowed. Oh, yes, he would recall him. When he saw through Sorry’s eyes, at the Phoenix Inn, perhaps.

Shall we begin things on a proper footing? Reciprocity, Cutter. A relationship of mutual exchanges, yes?’ ‘Would that you had offered the same to Apsalar.’ Then he clamped his jaw shut. But Cotillion simply sighed. ‘Would that I had. Consider this new tact the consequence of difficult lessons.’

‘Necessities,’ the god said quietly. ‘Games are played, and what may appear precipitous might well be little more than a feint. Or perhaps it was the city itself, Darujhistan, that would serve our purposes better if it remained free, independent. There are layers of meaning behind every gesture, every gambit. I will not explain myself any further than that, Cutter.’ ‘Do—do you regret what you did?’ ‘You are indeed fearless, aren’t you? Regret? Yes. Many, many regrets. One day, perhaps, you will see for yourself that regrets are as nothing. The value lies in how they are answered.’

‘I have one more request,’ Cutter said, facing the god again. ‘This task you shall set me on—if I am assailed during it, can I call upon Blind?’ ‘The Hound?’ The astonishment was clear in Cotillion’s voice. ‘Aye,’ Cutter replied, his gaze now on the huge beast. ‘Her attention…comforts me.’ ‘That makes you rarer than you could imagine, mortal. Very well. If the need is dire, call upon her and she will come.’

Kurald Emurlahn, fragmented or otherwise, was not amenable to the T’lan Imass. Without a Bonecaster beside him, Onrack could not extend his Tellann powers, could not reach out to his kin, could not inform them that he had survived.

Dissolution was the only escape possible from this eternal ritual,

There was always something else to see,

Most things he stumbled upon usually had to be killed. Occasionally in self-defence, but often simply due to an immediate and probably mutual loathing. He had long since ceased questioning why this should be so.

He began walking, hide-wrapped feet scuffing as he dragged them forward, the point of the sword inscribing a desultory furrow in the dried clay as it trailed from his left hand. Clumps of mud clung to his ragged hide shirt and the leather straps of his weapon harness. Silty, soupy water had seeped into the various gashes and punctures on his body and now leaked in trickling runnels with every heavy step he took. He had possessed a helm once, an impressive trophy from his youth, but it had been shattered at the final battle against the Jaghut family in the Jhag Odhan. A single crossways blow that had also shorn away a fifth of his skull, parietal and temporal, on the right side.

This fragment of the long-fractured Tiste Edur warren was by far the largest he had come across, larger even than the one that surrounded Tremorlor, the Azath Odhanhouse. And this one had known a period of stability, sufficient for civilizations to arise, for savants of sorcery to begin unravelling the powers of Kurald Emurlahn, although those inhabitants had not been Tiste Edur. Idly, Onrack wondered if the renegade T’lan Imass he and his kin pursued had somehow triggered the wound that had resulted in the flooding of this world.

Mundane senses had for the most part withered along with flesh. Through the shadowed orbits of his eyes, for example, the world was a complex collage of dull colours, heat and cold and often measured by an unerring sensitivity to motion. Spoken words swirled in mercurial clouds of breath—if the speaker lived, that is. If not, then it was the sound itself that was detectable, shivering its way through the air. Onrack sensed sound as much by sight as by hearing.

The stench of Kurald Emurlahn was overpowering, faintly visible like a pool enclosing the supine figure, its surface rippling as if beneath a steady but thin rain. A deep ragged scar marred the prisoner’s broad brow beneath a hairless pate, the wound glowing with sorcery. There had been a metal tongue to hold down the man’s tongue, but that had dislodged, as had the straps wound round the figure’s head. Slate-grey eyes stared up, unblinking, at the T’lan Imass.

I would not deceive you.’ Now, Onrack was truly curious. ‘Why would you not deceive me?’ ‘For the very cause that has seen me Shorn,’ the Edur replied. ‘I am plagued by the need to be truthful.’ ‘That is a dreadful curse,’ the T’lan Imass said. ‘Yes.’ Onrack lifted his sword. ‘In this case, I admit to possessing a curse of my own. Curiosity.’ ‘I weep for you.’ ‘I see no tears.’ ‘In my heart, T’lan Imass.’

The slaying triggered a frenzy among the others. Skin split, sleek four-limbed bodies tore their way free. Broad, needle-fanged heads swung towards the undead warrior in their midst, tiny eyes glistening. Loud hisses from all sides. The beasts moved on squat, muscular legs, three-toed feet thickly padded and clawed. Their tails were short, extending in a vertical fin back up their spines.

He fell backward, letting the animal drag him down. Then he dissolved into dust. And rose five paces away to resume his killing, wading among the hissing survivors. A few moments later they were all dead.

Prior to that, your people fled from us at first sight. Apart from those who travelled the oceans with the Thelomen Toblakai, that is. Those ones fought us. For centuries, before we drove them from the seas.’ ‘The Tiste Edur were in my world,’ Onrack said as he drew out his spark stones, ‘just after the coming of the Tiste Andii. Once numerous, leaving signs of passage in the snow, on the beaches, in deep forests.’

‘We came here—to this place—from Mother Dark, whose children had banished us. We did not think they would pursue, but they did. And upon the shattering of this warren, we fled yet again—to your world, Onrack. Where we thrived…’ ‘Until your enemies found you once more.’

‘There are your kind, Onrack, among the Tiste Edur. In league with our new purpose.’ ‘And what is this purpose, Trull Sengar?’ The man looked away, closed his eyes. ‘Terrible, Onrack. A terrible purpose.’

‘Here, in the Nascent, the ancient twin hearts of Kurald Emurlahn live on.

‘The Nascent required…cleansing,’

‘How long had you been chained?’ The man shrugged. ‘Long, I suppose. The sorcery within the Shorning was designed to prolong suffering. Your sword severed its power, and now the mundane requirements of the flesh return.’

The overcast was shredding apart, vanishing before their very eyes. Onrack studied the blazing orbs once more. ‘There has been no night,’ he said. ‘Not in the summer, no. The winters, it’s said, are another matter. At the same time, with the deluge I suspect it is fruitless to predict what will come. Personally, I have no wish to find out.’

Onrack returned his sword to its loop in the shoulder harness. Though the warrior was judged tall among his own kind, the Tiste Edur was taller, by almost the length of a forearm.

There was, Onrack realized, a strange regularity to the hills ahead. There were seven in all, arrayed in what seemed a straight line, each of equal height though uniquely misshapen. The storm clouds were piling well behind them, corkscrewing in bulging columns skyward above an enormous range of mountains.

The hills were not hills at all. They were edifices, massive and hulking, constructed from a smooth black stone, seemingly each a single piece. Twenty or more man-lengths high. Dog-like beasts, broad-skulled and small-eared, thickly muscled, heads lowered towards the two travellers and the distant wall behind them, the vast pits of their eyes faintly gleaming a deep, translucent amber.

‘There will be a gate,’ Trull Sengar persisted behind him. ‘A means of leaving this world. Why do you hesitate, T’lan Imass?’ ‘I hesitate in the face of what you cannot see,’ Onrack replied. ‘There are seven, yes. But two of them are…alive.’ He hesitated, then added, ‘And this is one of them.’

The old man who had come to be known as Ghost Hands slowly clambered his way up the slope. His ageing skin was deep bronze, his tattooed, blunt and wide face as creased as a wind-clawed boulder.

‘The sundering of an ancient warren scattered fragments throughout the realms. The Whirlwind Goddess possesses power, but it was not her own, not at first. Just one more fragment, wandering lost and in pain. What was the goddess, I wonder, when she first stumbled onto the Whirlwind? Some desert tribe’s minor deity, I suspect. A spirit of the summer wind, protector of some whirlpool spring, possibly. One among many, without question. Of course, once she made that fragment her own, it did not take long for her to destroy her old rivals, to assert complete, ruthless domination over the Holy Desert.’

She walked at his side, back down the slope, between the two vast kraals which were empty at the moment—the goats and sheep driven to the pastures east of the ruins for the day.

They passed through a wide breach in the dead city’s wall, intersecting one of the main avenues that led to the jumble of sprawling, massive buildings of which only foundations and half-walls remained, that had come to be called the Circle of Temples.

Adobe huts, yurts and hide tents fashioned a modern c...

The army’s camp followers were equally disparate, a bizarre self-contained tribe that seemed to wander a nomadic round within the makeshift city, driven to move at the behest of hidden vagaries no doubt political in nature. At the moment, some unseen defeat had them more furtive than usual—old whores leading scores of mostly naked, thin children, weapon smiths and tack menders and cooks and latrine diggers, widows and wives and a few husbands and fewer still fathers and mothers…threads linked most of them to the warriors in Sha’ik’s army, but they were tenuous at best, easily severed, often tangled into a web of adultery and bastardy.

The city was a microcosm of Seven Cities, in Heboric’s opinion. Proof of all the ills the Malazan Empire had set out to cure as conquerors then occupiers. There seemed few virtues to the freedoms to which the ex-priest had been witness, here in this place. Yet he suspected he was alone in his traitorous thoughts.

There had once numbered among these people abandoned children, but Sha’ik had seen to an end to that. Beginning with Felisin, she had adopted them all—her private retinue, the Whirlwind cult’s own acolytes. By Heboric’s last cursory measure, a week past, they had numbered over three thousand, in ages ranging from newly weaned to Felisin’s age—close to Sha’ik’s own, true age. To all of them, she was Mother. It had not been a popular gesture. The pimps had lost their lambs.

In the centre of the Circle of Temples was a broad, octagonal pit, sunk deep into the layered limestone, its floor never touched by the sun, cleared out now of its resident snakes, scorpions and spiders and reoccupied by Leoman of the Flails.

the reborn Sha’ik had delved deep into the man’s soul, and found it empty, bereft of faith, by some flaw of nature inclined to disavow all forms of certainty. The new Chosen One had decided she c...

While Toblakai remained as Sha’ik’s personal guardian, the giant with the shattered tattoo on his face had not relinquished his friendship with Leoman and was often in the man’s sour company.

Old spirits wandered this pit, trapped for eternity by its high, sheer walls. Heboric hated this place, with all its spectral laminations of failure, of worlds long extinct.

‘Bidithal, the High Mage? What “old ways”?’ ‘His ways with children, Heboric. Girls. His unpleasant…hungers. Sha’ik is not all-knowing, alas. Oh, she knows Bidithal’s old predilections—she experienced them firsthand when she was Sha’ik Elder, after all. But there are close to a hundred thousand people in this city, now. A few children vanishing every week…easily passing virtually unnoticed. Mathok’s people, however, are by nature watchful.’

‘We share a certain loyalty, friend,’ he murmured, ‘the three of us here. With a certain child.’

Felisin is Sha’ik’s chosen heir—we can all see that, yes? Bidithal believes she must be shaped in a manner identical to her mother—when her mother was Sha’ik Elder, that is. The child must follow the mother’s path, Bidithal believes. As the mother was broken inside, so too must the child be broken inside.’ Cold horror filled Heboric at Leoman’s words. He snapped a glare at Toblakai. ‘Sha’ik must be told of this!’ ‘She has,’ Leoman said. ‘But she needs Bidithal, if only to balance the schemes of Febryl and L’oric. The three despise each other, naturally. She has been told, Ghost Hands, and so she tasks us three in turn to be…watchful.’

Febryl schemes betrayal, friend. Who are his co-conspirators? Unknown. Not L’oric, that’s for certain—L’oric is by far the most cunning of the three, and so not a fool by any measure. Yet Febryl needs allies among the powerful. Is Korbolo Dom in league with the bastard? We don’t know. Kamist Reloe? His two lieutenant mages, Henaras and Fayelle? Even if they all were, Febryl would still need Bidithal—either to stand aside and do nothing, or to join.’