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

by Steven Erikson

‘And what if those conspirators comprise her entire command?’ Leoman shrugged, then began pouring tea. ‘Sha’ik has the Whirlwind, friend. To lead the armies? She has Mathok. And me. And L’oric will remain, that is certain. Seven take us, Korbolo Dom is a liability in any case.’

‘Toblakai has told Sha’ik nothing. Not him, nor Mathok, nor you, Leoman. This is your way of getting back into power. Crush a conspiracy and thereby eliminate all your rivals. And now, you invite me into the lie.’ ‘Not a great lie,’ Leoman replied. ‘Sha’ik has been informed that Bidithal hunts children once more…’

Bidithal had not always been a High Mage. Not in title in any case. In the Dhobri language, he had been known as Rashan’ais. The archpriest of the cult of Rashan, which had existed in Seven Cities long before the Throne of Shadow had been reoccupied.

it is the Meanas temples of Seven Cities that most closely mimic this ruin in architectural style…as if a direct descendant of this land’s earliest cults…

Within the Whirlwind, the cast-out Rashan’ais had found refuge. Further proof of his belief that the Whirlwind was but a fragment of a shattered warren, and that shattered warren was Shadow.

Huddled just outside the flap entrance was a sunburned, filthy figure, mumbling in some foreign language, face hidden beneath long greasy strands of brown hair. The figure had no hands and no feet, the stumps showing old scar tissue yet still suppurating a milky yellow discharge.

The man was using one of his wrist stumps to draw broad patterns in the thick dust, surrounding himself in linked chains, round and round, each pass obscuring what had been made before.

No effort had been made to clean the sprawling chamber within. Bricks and rubble lay scattered across a floor of sand, broken mortar and potsherds. A half-dozen pieces of furniture were positioned here and there in the cavernous space. There was a large, low bed, wood-slatted and layered in thin mattresses. Four folding merchant chairs of the local three-legged kind faced onto the bed in a ragged row, as if Bidithal was in the habit of addressing an audience of acolytes or students.

A torch, fixed to a spear that had been thrust upright, its base mounded with stones and rubble, stood slightly behind Bidithal’s left shoulder, casting the man’s own shadow onto the tent wall. A chill rippled through Heboric, for it seemed the High Mage was conversing in a language of gestures with his own shadow. Cast out in name only, perhaps. Still eager to play with Meanas.

‘Whatever you say, Ghost Hands. Hood knows, there are plenty of others—’ ‘All now under Sha’ik’s protection. Do you imagine she will permit such abuses from you?’ ‘You shall have to ask her that yourself,’ Bidithal replied. ‘Now leave me. You are guest no longer.’

I should warn you, however, this temple is newly resanctified. Take another step towards me, Ghost Hands, and you will see the power of that.’

The roots of Meanas are found in an elder warren! Once ruled by—’ he snapped his mouth shut, then smiled, revealing dark teeth. ‘Not for you. Oh no, not for you, ex-priest. There are purposes within the Whirlwind—your existence is tolerated but little more than that. Challenge me, Ghost Hands, and you will know holy wrath.’

Silgar was nowhere to be seen, yet he had completed an elaborate pattern in the dust around Heboric’s moccasins. Chains, surrounding a figure with stumps instead of hands…yet footed. The ex-priest scowled, kicking through the image as he set forth.

None of which explained the chill that clung to him as he walked beneath the searing sun.

The old scars of ligature damage made his ankles and wrists resemble segmented tree trunks, each pinched width encircling his limbs to remind him of those times, of every shackle that had snapped shut, every chain that had held him down.

The old Malazan with no hands and the shimmering, near solid tattoo had, despite his blindness, seen clearly enough, seen those trailing ghosts, the wind-moaning train of deaths that stalked him day and night now, loud enough in Toblakai’s mind to drown out the voice of Urugal, close enough to obscure his god’s stone visage behind veil after veil of mortal faces—each and every one twisted with the agony and fear that carved out the moment of dying.

The children among those victims—children in terms of recently birthed, as the lowlanders used the word—had not all fallen to the bloodwood sword of Karsa Orlong. They were, one and all, the progeny that would never be, the bloodlines severed in the trophy-cluttered cavern of the Teblor’s history.

Toblakai. A name of past glories, of a race of warriors who had stood alongside mortal Imass, alongside cold-miened J...

The Teblor were long fallen from Thelomen Toblakai. Mirrored reflections in flesh only. Kneeling like fools before seven blunt-featured faces carved into a cliffside. Valley dwellers, where every horizon was almost within reach. Victims of brutal ignorance—for which no-one else could be blamed—entwined with deceit, for which Karsa Orlong would seek a final accounting.

The rattle of chains was unceasing, the echoing cries of the slain endless. Even the mysterious but palpable power of Raraku offered no surcease—

He had knelt before Sha’ik Reborn, all those months ago. The young woman with the Malazan accent who’d stumbled into view half carrying her tattooed, handless pet. Knelt, not in servitude, not from resurrected faith, but in relief. Relief, that the waiting had ended, that he would be able to drag Leoman away from that place of failure and death.

Yet he could not deceive himself into believing that the new Chosen One was anything but a hapless victim that the insane Whirlwind Goddess had simply plucked from the wilderness, a mortal tool that would be used with merciless brutality.

The Chosen One was more like Toblakai than she imagined, or, rather, a younger Toblakai, a Teblor commanding slayers—an army of two with which to deliver mayhem.

Sha’ik Elder had been something else entirely.

And she had seen truths in Karsa’s soul, had warned him of the horrors to come—not in specific terms, for like all seers she had been cursed with ambiguity—but sufficient to awaken within Karsa a certain…watchfulness.

he did little else these days but watch. As the madness that was the soul of the Whirlwind Goddess seeped out like poison in the blood to infect every leader among the rebellion.

It is sanity itself that they are rebelling against. Order. Honourable conduct. ‘Rules of the common’, as Leoman called them,

I have never witnessed you actually partake of the drug. Only its apparent aftermath, the evidence scattered all about, and the descent into sleep that seems perfectly timed whenever you wish to close a conversation, end a certain discourse…

The Holy Desert possessed a gift, yet it was one that few had ever recognized, much less accepted. A gift that would arrive unseen, unnoticed at first, a gift too old to find shape in words, too formless to grasp in the hands as one would a sword.

And the desert in turn had reshaped Karsa, weathered his skin dark, stretched taut and lean his muscles, thinned his eyes to slits.

Shells that had turned hard as stone and would sing low and mournful in the wind—Leoman had presented him with a gift of these, a vest of hide on which such shells had been affixed, armour that moaned in the endless, ever-dry winds.

There were hidden springs in the wasteland, cairns and caves where an ancient sea-god had been worshipped.

using hollowed-out cedar trunks to hold their dead kin

The stumps of cleared forests,

trees that grew entirely underground, a mass of roots stretching out for leagues, from which the ironwood of Karsa’s new sword had been carved—his bloodsword having cracked long ago. Raraku had known Apocalypse first-hand, millennia past, and Toblakai wondered if it truly welcomed its return.

Sha’ik’s goddess stalked the desert, her mindless rage the shriek of unceasing wind along its borders, but Karsa wondered at the Whirlwind’s manifestation—just whose was it? Cold, disconnected rage, or a savage, unbridled argument?

‘The gift of the goddess…’ the smile grew strained, ‘offers only destruction.’ He glanced away, studied the nearby trees. ‘This grove will resist in the way of Raraku,’ he rumbled. ‘It is stone. And stone holds fast.’ ‘For a while,’ she muttered, her smile falling away. ‘But there remains that within me that urges…creation.’

‘Dryjhna was an author who, to be gracious, lived with malnourished talent. There are naught but bones in this tome, I am afraid. Obsessed with the taking of life, the annihilation of order. Yet not once does he offer anything in its stead. There is no rebirth among the ashes of his vision, and that saddens me. Does it sadden you, Toblakai?’ He stared down at her for a long moment, then said, ‘Come.’

She shot him a searching glance, then shivered slightly. ‘What power manifests here? It is not the Whirlwind’s—’ ‘No. Nor do I have a name for it. Perhaps the Holy Desert itself.’

the drive to create is something other, isn’t it? Have you an answer?’ He shrugged. ‘If one exists, it will only be found in the search—and searching is at creation’s heart, Chosen One.’ She stared at the statues once more. ‘And what are you searching for? With these…old friends?’ ‘I do not know. Yet.’ ‘Perhaps they will tell you, one day.’

He had always believed that Fener had taken his severed hands into keeping, to await the harsh justice that was the Tusked One’s right.

Fener had been dragged from his realm, left abandoned and trapped on this world. Heboric’s severed hands had found a new master, a master possessed of such immense power that it could war with otataral itself. Yet it did not belong. The giant of jade, Heboric now believed, was an intruder, sent here from another realm for some hidden purpose.

And, instead of completing that purpose, someone had imprisoned it.

There were no guards as such, for the goddess’s presence was palpable, a pressure in the chill air.

The palace was a maze of such insulating chambers, most of them empty of furniture, offering little in the way of distinguishing one from another. An assassin who proceeded this far, somehow avoiding the attention of the goddess, would quickly get lost. The approach to where Sha’ik resided followed its own torturous, winding route. Her chambers were not central, not at the heart of the palace as one might expect.

Sha’ik invariably positioned herself in that makeshift throne; nor would she leave it while her advisers were present, not even to peruse the yellowed maps the commanders were wont to lay out on the hide-covered floor. Apart from Felisin Younger, the Chosen One was the smallest person there. Heboric wondered if Sha’ik Elder had suffered similar insecurities. He doubted it.

half-blood Napan, Korbolo Dom, shaved hairless, his dusty blue skin latticed in scars. On his right, the High Mage Kamist Reloe, gaunt to the point of skeletal, his grey hair cut short to stubble, a tight-curled iron beard reaching up to prominent cheekbones above which glittered sunken eyes. On

Henaras, a witch from some desert tribe that had, for unknown reasons, banished her. Sorcery kept her youthful in appearance, the heavy languor in her dark eyes the product of diluted Tralb, a poison drawn from a local snake, which she imbibed to inure her against assassination. Beside her was Fayelle, an obese, perpetually nervous woman of whom Heboric knew little.

Febryl, the latter shapeless beneath an oversized silk telaba, its hood opened wide like the neck of a desert snake, tiny black eyes glittering out from its shadow. Beneath those eyes gle...

Mathok. Beloved of the desert tribes, the tall, black-skinned warrior possessed an inherent nobility, but it was the kind that seemed to irritate everyone around him, barring perhaps Leoman who appeared to be indifferent to the war chief’s grating personality.