The vast springs of the carriage slammed down to absorb the thundering impact; then, as the enormous conveyance surged back up, Gruntle caught a momentary glimpse of one of the Bole brothers, his grip torn loose, wheeling through the grainy air. Arms scything, legs kicking, face wide with bemused surprise.

His tether snapped taut, and Gruntle saw that the idiot had tied it to one of his ankles. The man plunged down and out of sight.

The horses were screaming, manes whipping in their frantic heaves forward across stony, broken ground. Shadowy figures voiced muted cries as the beasts trampled them under hoof, and the carriage rocked sickeningly over bodies.

Someone was shrieking in his ear, and Gruntle twisted round on his perch on the carriage roof, to see the other Bole brother – Jula – tugging on the tether. A foot appeared – moccasin gone, long knobby toes splayed wide as if seeking a branch – and then the shin and lumpy knee. A moment later Amby reached up, found a handhold, and pulled himself back on to the roof. Wearing the strangest grin Gruntle had ever seen.

In the half-light the Trygalle carriage raced onward, plunging through seething masses of people. Even as they carved through like a ship cutting crazed seas, ragged, rotting arms reached up to the sides. Some caught hold only to have their arms torn from their sockets. Others were pulled off their feet, and these ones started climbing, seeking better purchase.

Upon which the primary function of the shareholders was made apparent. Sweetest Sufferance, the short, plump woman with the bright smile, was now snarling, wailing with a hatchet into an outreaching arm. Bones snapped like sticks and she shouted as she kicked into a leering desiccated face, hard enough to punch the head from the shoulders.

Damned corpses – they were riding through a sea of animated corpses, and it seemed that virtually every one of them wanted to book passage.

A large brutish shape reared up beside Gruntle. Barghast, hairy as an ape, filed blackened teeth revealed in a delighted grin.

Releasing one hand from the brass rung, Gruntle tugged loose one of his cutlasses, slashed the heavy blade into the corpse’s face. It reeled away, the bottom half of the grin suddenly gone. Twisting further round, Gruntle kicked the Barghast in the chest. The apparition fell back. A moment later someone else appeared, narrow-shouldered, the top of its head an elongated pate with a nest of mousy hair perched on the crown, a wizened face beneath it.

Gruntle kicked again.

The carriage pitched wildly as the huge wheels rolled over something big. Gruntle felt himself swinging out over the roof edge and he shouted in pain as his hand was wrenched where it gripped a rung. Clawed fingers scrabbled against his thighs and he kicked in growing panic. His heel struck something that didn’t yield and he used that purchase to launch himself back on to the roof.

On the opposite side, three dead men were now mauling Sweetest Sufferance, each one seemingly intent on some kind of rape. She twisted and writhed beneath them, chopping with her hatchets, biting at their withered hands and head-butting the ones that tried for a kiss. Reccanto Ilk then joined the fray, using a strange saw-toothed knife as he attacked various joints – shoulders, knees, elbows – and tossing the severed limbs over the side as he went.

Gruntle lifted himself on to his knees and glared out across the landscape. The masses of dead, he realized, were all moving in one direction, whilst the carriage cut obliquely into their path – and as the resistance before them built, figures converging like blood to a wound, forward momentum began inexorably to slow, the horses stamping high as they clambered over ever more undead.

Someone was shouting near the rear of the carriage, and Gruntle turned to see the woman named Faint leaning down over the side, yelling through the shuttered window.

Another heavy blow buffeted the carriage, and something demonic roared. Claws tore free a chunk of wood.

‘Get us out of here!’

Gruntle could not agree more, as the demon suddenly loomed into view, reptilian arms reaching for him.

Snarling, he leapt to his feet, both weapons now in hand.

An elongated, fanged face lunged at him, hissing.

Gruntle roared back – a deafening sound – cutlasses lashing out. Edges slammed into thick hide, sliced deep into lifeless flesh, down to the bones of the demon’s long neck.

He saw something like surprise flicker in the creature’s pitted eyes, and then the head and half of the neck fell away.

Two more savage chops sent its forearms spinning.

The body plunged back, and even as it did so smaller corpses were scrambling on to it, as if climbing a ladder.

He now heard a strange sound ahead, rhythmic, like the clashing of weapons against shield rims. But the sound was too loud for that, too overwhelming, unless – Gruntle straightened and faced forward.

An army indeed. Dead soldiers, moving in ranks, in squares and wedges, marching along with all the rest – and in numbers unimaginable. He stared, struggling to comprehend the vastness of the force. As far as he could see before them…Gods below, all of the dead, on the march – but where? To what war?

The scene suddenly blurred, dispersed in fragments. The carriage seemed to slump under him. Darkness swept in, a smell of the sea, the thrash of waves, sand sliding beneath the wheels. The carriage side nearest him lurched into the bole of a palm tree, sending down a rain of cusser-sized nuts that pounded along the roof before bounding away. The horses stumbled, slowing their wild plunge, and a moment later everything came to a sinking halt.

Looking up Gruntle saw stars in a gentle night sky.

Beneath him the carriage door creaked open, and someone clambered out to vomit on to the sands, coughing and spitting and cursing.

Master Quell.

Gruntle climbed down, using the spokes of the nearest wheel, and, his legs feeling shaky under him, made his way to the sorceror.

The man was still on his hands and knees, hacking out the last dregs of whatever had been in his stomach. ‘Oh,’ he gasped. ‘My aching head.’

Faint came up alongside Gruntle. She’d been wearing an iron skullcap but she’d lost it, and now her hair hung in matted strands, framing her round face. ‘I thought a damned tiger had landed on us,’ she said, ‘but it was you, putting the terror into a demon. So it’s true, those tattoos aren’t tattoos at all.’

Glanno Tarp had dropped down, dodging to avoid the snapping teeth of the nearest horses. ‘Did you see Amby Bole go flying? Gods, that was stupacular!’

Gruntle frowned. ‘Stu – what?’

‘Stupidly spectacular,’ explained Faint. ‘Or spectacularly stupid. Are you Soletaken?’

He glanced at her, then set off to explore.

A task quickly accomplished. They were on an island. A very small island, less than fifty paces across. The sand was crushed coral, gleaming silver in the starlight. Two palm trees rose from the centre. In the surrounding shallows, a thousand paces out, ribbons of reef ran entirely round the atoll, breaking the surface like the spine of a sea serpent. More islands were visible, few bigger than the one they were on, stretching out like the beads of a broken necklace, the nearest one perhaps three thousand paces distant.

As he returned he saw a corpse plummeting down from the carriage roof to thump in the sand. After a moment it sat up. ‘Oh,’ it said.

The Trell emerged from the carriage, followed by the swamp witch, Precious Thimble, who looked ghostly pale as she stumbled a few steps, then promptly sat down on the sand. Seeing Gruntle, Mappo walked over.

‘I gather,’ he said, ‘we encountered something unexpected in Hood’s realm.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ Gruntle replied. ‘It was my first visit.’

‘Unexpected?’ Faint snorted. ‘That was insane – all the dead in existence, on the march.’

‘Where to?’ Gruntle asked.

‘Maybe not to, maybe from.’

From? In retreat? Now that was an alarming notion. If the dead are on the run…

‘Used to be,’ Faint mused, ‘the realm of the dead was an easy ride. Peaceful. But in the last few years…something’s going on.’ She walked over to Master Quell. ‘So, if that’s not going to work, Quell, what now?’

The man, still on his hands and knees, looked up. ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’

‘What?’

‘We didn’t even reach the damned gate.’

‘But, then, what—’

‘There wasn’t any gate!’ the mage shrieked.

A long silence followed.

Nearby, the undead man was collecting seashells.

 

Jula Bole’s watery eyes fixed on Precious Thimble, dreamy with adoration. Seeing this, Amby did the same, trying to make his expression even more desirous, so that when she finally looked over she would see that he was the right one for her, the only one for her. As the moments stretched, the competition grew fierce.

His left leg still ached, from the hip right down to his toes, and he had only one moccasin, but at least the sand was warm so that wasn’t too bad.

Precious Thimble was in a meeting with Master Quell and that scary barbed man, and the hairy giant ogre named Mappo. These were the important people, he decided, and excepting Precious Thimble he wanted nothing to do with them. Standing too close to those folk was never healthy. Heads explode, hearts burst – he’d seen it with his own eyes, back when he was a runt (but not nearly as much of a runt as Jula) and the family had decided at last to fight the Malazans who were showing up in their swamp like poison mushrooms. Buna Bole had been running things back then, before he got eaten by a toad, but it was a fact that Buna’s next-to-closest brothers – the ones who wanted to get closer – all went and got themselves killed. Exploding heads. Bursting hearts. Boiling livers. It was the law of dodging, of course. Marshals and their sub-marshals were smart and smart meant fast, so when the arrows and quarrels and waves of magic flew, why, they dodged out of the way. Anybody round them, trying to be as smart but not smart at all and so just that much slower, well, they didn’t dodge quick enough.

Jula finally sighed, announcing his defeat, and looked over at Amby. ‘I can’t believe I saved you.’

‘I can’t neither. I wouldn’t of.’

‘That’s why I can’t believe that’s what I did. But then she’s seen how brave I am, how generous and selfless. She’s seen I’m better because she knows you wouldn’t have done it.’

‘Maybe I would’ve, and maybe she knows that, Jula. Besides, one of them sick smelly ones was trying to open the doors, and if it wasn’t for me he’d of got in – and that’s what she really saw.’

‘You didn’t scrape that one off on purpose.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because you butted him with your face, Amby.’

Amby tested his nose again and winced, and then he sneered. ‘She saw what she saw, and what she saw wasn’t you.’

‘She saw my hands, reaching down to drag you back up. She saw that.’

‘She didn’t. I made sure by covering them with, er, with my shirt.’

‘You lie.’

‘You lie.’

‘No, you.’

‘You!’

‘You can say what you like, Amby, whatever you like. It was me saving you.’

‘Pulling off my moccasin, you mean.’

‘That was an accident.’

‘Yeah, then where is it?’

‘Fell off the side.’

‘No it didn’t. I checked your bag, Jula. You wasn’t trying to save me at all, you was stealing my moccasin because it’s your favourite moccasin. I want it back.’

‘It’s against the law to look in someone else’s bag.’

‘Swamp law. Does this look like a swamp?’

‘That doesn’t matter. You broke the law. Anyway, what you found was my spare moccasin.’

‘Your one spare moccasin?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Then why was it full of my love notes?’

‘What love notes?’

‘The ones me and her been writing back and forth. The ones I hid in my moccasin. Those ones, Jula.’

‘What’s obvious now is just how many times you been breaking the law. Because you been hiding your love notes – which you write to yourself and nobody else – you been hiding them in my spare moccasin!’

‘Not that you’d ever look.’

‘But I might, if I knew about it.’

‘You didn’t though, did you? Besides, you don’t have a spare moccasin, because I stole it.’

‘And that’s why I stole it back!’

‘You can’t steal back what you didn’t know was stolen in the first place. That’s just stealing. And stealing’s against the law.’

‘Swamp law.’

‘Your bag is a swamp.’

‘Hahahahaha—’

And Amby grinned at his own joke, and then he too laughed. ‘Hahahahaha—’

 

Faint tugged the stopper free and took a swig, then handed the skin to Sweetest Sufferance. ‘Listen to those idiots,’ she said.

‘I don’t want to,’ Sweetest Sufferance replied. And then she shivered. ‘That was the first time, you know, them trying to get in my trousers like that.’

‘Cursed with rigor mortis, maybe.’

She snorted. ‘You kidding me? Whatever they had down there wasn’t even real, like maybe sticks tied on or something.’ She drank down some wine, then sighed and looked round. ‘Pretty.’

‘Our tiny piece of paradise.’

‘We can watch the sun come up, at least. That will be nice.’ She was quiet for a moment, before resuming, ‘When Reccanto showed up, I thought he was helping. But now I think he was just using the situation to get a few handfuls of his own.’

‘Are you surprised, Sweetie? He’s a man.’

‘With bad eyes.’

‘Bad eyes and bad hands.’

‘I might have to murder him.’

‘Hold on,’ said Faint, taking the skin back. ‘He did save you, cutting off arms and hands—’

‘Eliminating the competition.’

‘Defending your honour, Sweetie.’

‘If you say so.’

Faint replaced the stopper. ‘Gods below, Sweetie, what do you think we ran into back there?’

Sweetest Sufferance pursed her plump lips, long-lashed lids settling down over her eyes. ‘Back in One Eye Cat, when I was a child, I was taken to a Dawn of Flies – you know, those ceremonies from the Temple of Hood, when all the priests paint themselves in honey—’

‘In some places,’ cut in Faint, ‘they use blood.’

‘So I’ve heard. In One Eye Cat, it was honey, so that the flies stuck. Flies and wasps, actually. Anyway, I was with my grandfather, who’d been a soldier in the Revenants—’

‘Gods, it’s been a long time since I last heard them mentioned!’ Faint stared across at Sweetest Sufferance. ‘Is this true? Your grandfather was with the Revenants?’

‘So he always told it. When I was very young, I believed every word he said. When I was older, I didn’t believe any of it. And now I’m still older, I’ve gone back to believing him. Things in his house, the carved flagstones, the broken masks he had on the wall…yes, Faint, I believe he was at that.’

‘Commanded by a Seguleh—’

‘An outlawed Seguleh, yes. Anyway, it was my grandfather who took me to watch his old company’s patron temple and all the priests and priestesses doing their flies thing.’

‘Wait. The Revenants were supposed to have all disappeared – taken by Hood himself, to serve him in the realm of the dead. So what was your grandfather doing living in One Eye Cat?’

‘He lost his sword arm in a battle. He’d been left for dead, and by the time anyone found him it was too late for any serious healing. So they seared the stump and retired him out. Now, you going to let me tell my tale or not?’

‘Yes, fine. Sorry.’

‘He said the priests were getting it all wrong, with that honey. The flies and wasps weren’t the important thing in the ceremony. It was the blood – honey, but that symbolized blood. The Revenants – who were as good as Hood’s own warrior-priests, in the mortal world anyway – well, they were flagellants. Blood on the skin, life bled out to die on the skin – that was the important detail. It’s why Hood cherishes dead soldiers more than any other of the countless dead that stumble through the gate. The Merchants of Blood, the army that will fight on the hidden plain called Defiance Last.’ She paused, then licked her lips. ‘That’s what the Dawn of Flies is about. A final battle, the dead gathered, on a hidden plain called Defiance Last.’

‘So,’ said Faint, feeling chilled by Sweetest Sufferance’s story, ‘maybe that’s why Hood took the Revenants. Because that battle is coming.’

‘Give me some more of that,’ Sweetest Sufferance said, reaching for the wineskin.

 

Glanno Tarp nudged Reccanto Ilk. ‘See ’em? They’re talking about us. Well, me, mostly. It’s gonna happen, Ilk, sooner or later, it’s gonna happen.’

Reccanto Ilk squinted across at the man. ‘What, they gonna kill you in your sleep?’

‘Don’t be an idiot. One a them’s gonna ask me to forever-marry her.’

‘And then she’ll kill you in your sleep. And then we can all slice up your share.’

‘You think I didn’t see how you gropered Sweetie?’

‘How could you? You was driving!’

‘There ain’t nothing that I don’t see, Ilk. That’s what makes me such a goodiferous driver.’

‘She’s got the nicest handholds.’

‘Watch what you’re doing with my future foreverwife.’

‘Could be Faint you end up with, which means I can do what I like with Sweetie.’

Glanno Tarp loosed a loud belch. ‘We should make up something to eat. Breakfast, so when they’re finished jawbering over there we can up and get on our way.’

‘Wherever that is.’

‘Wherever don’t matter. Never has and never will.’

Reccanto Ilk grinned. ‘Right. It ain’t the destination that counts…’

And together they added, ‘It’s the journey!’

Faint and Sweetest Sufferance looked over, both scowling. ‘Not that again!’ Faint called. ‘Just stop it, you two! Stop it or we’ll kill you in your sleep!’

Reccanto Ilk nudged Glanno Tarp.

 

Mappo crouched, rocking on the balls of his broad feet, waiting for Master Quell to finish his muttered incantation against pain. He sympathized, since it was clear that the mage was suffering, his face pale and drawn, forehead slick with sweat, his hands trembling.

That anyone would choose such a profession, given the terrible cost, was a difficult notion to accept. Was coin worth this? He could not understand that sort of thinking.

What held real value in this world? In any world? Friendship, the gifts of love and compassion. The honour one accorded the life of another person. None of this could be bought with wealth. It seemed to him such a simple truth. Yet he knew that its very banality was fuel for sneering cynicism and mockery. Until such things were taken away, until the price of their loss came to be personal, in some terrible, devastating arrival into one’s life. Only at that moment of profound extremity did the contempt wash down from that truth, revealing it bare, undeniable.

All the truths that mattered were banal.

Yet here was another truth. He had paid for this journey. His coin bought this man’s pain. The exchange was imbalanced, and so Mappo grieved for Master Quell, and would not shy away from his own guilt. Honour meant, after all, a preparedness, a willingness to weigh and measure, to judge rightful balance with no hand tilting the scales.

And so, they all here were paying to serve Mappo’s need, this journey through warrens. Another burden he must accept. If he could.

The formidable warrior sitting beside him stirred then and said, ‘I think I see now why the Trygalle loses so many shareholders, Master Quell. By the Abyss, there must be warrens where one can journey through in peace?’

Master Quell rubbed at his face. ‘Realms resist, Gruntle. We are like a splash of water in hot oil. It’s all I can do to not…bounce us off. Mages can push themselves into their chosen warrens – it’s not easy, it’s a game of subtle persuasion most of the time. Or a modest assertion of will. You don’t want to blast a hole from one realm to the next, because that’s likely to go out of control. It can devour a mage in an instant.’ He looked up at them with bloodshot eyes. ‘We can’t do it that way.’ He waved a weak hand at the carriage behind him. ‘We arrive like an insult. We are an insult. Like a white-hot spear point, we punch through, race along our wild path, and all that we leave in our wake I need to make sure is, er, cauterized. Seared shut. Failing that, a rush of power explodes behind us, and that’s a wave no mortal can ride for long.’

Precious Thimble spoke from behind Mappo. ‘You must be High Mages, then, one and all.’

To her observation, Master Quell nodded. ‘I admit, it’s starting to trouble me, this way of travel. I think we’re scarring the whole damned universe. We’re making existence…bleed. Oh, just a seep here and there, amidst whatever throbs of pain reality might possess. In any case, that’s why there’s no peaceful path, Gruntle. Denizens in every realm are driven to annihilate us.’

‘You said we did not even reach Hood’s Gate,’ the barbed man said after a moment. ‘And yet…’

‘Aye.’ He spat on to the sand. ‘The dead sleep no more. What a damned mess.’

‘Find us the nearest land in our own world,’ said Mappo. ‘I will walk from there. Make my own way—’

‘We stay true to the contract, Trell. We’ll deliver you where you want to go—’

‘Not at the price of you and your companions possibly dying – I cannot accept that, Master Quell.’

‘We don’t do refunds.’

‘I do not ask for one.’

Master Quell rose shakily. ‘We’ll see after our next leg. For now, it’s time for breakfast. There’s nothing worse than heaving when there’s nothing in the gut to heave.’

Gruntle also straightened. ‘You have decided on a new path?’

Quell grimaced. ‘Look around, Gruntle. It’s been decided for us.’

Mappo rose and remained at Gruntle’s side as Quell staggered to his crew, who were gathered round a brazier they had dragged out from the belly of the carriage. The Trell squinted at the modest plot of land. ‘What did he mean?’ he asked.

Gruntle shrugged. When he smiled at Mappo his fangs gleamed. ‘Since I have to guess, Trell, I’d say we’re going for a swim.’

And Precious Thimble snorted. ‘Mael’s realm. And you two thought Hood was bad.’

 

When she was four years old, Precious Thimble was given a breathing tube and buried in peat, where she remained for two days and one night. She probably died. Most of them did, but the soul remained in the dead body, trapped by the peat and its dark, sorcerous qualities. This was how the old witches explained things. A child must be given into the peat, into that unholy union of earth and water, and the soul must be broken free of the flesh it dwelt within, for only then could that soul travel, only then could that soul wander free in the realm of dreams.

She had few memories of that time in the peat. Perhaps she screamed, sought to thrash in panic. The ropes that bound her, that would be used to pull her free at dusk of the second day, had left deep burns on her wrists and her neck, and these burns had not come from the gentle, measured pressure when the witches had drawn her back into the world. It was also whispered that sometimes the spirits that lurked in the peat sought to steal the child’s body, to make it a place of their own. And the witches who sat guarding the temporary grave told of times when the rope – its ends wrapped about their wrists – suddenly grew taut, and a battle would then begin, between the witches of the surface and the spirits of the deep. Sometimes, it was admitted, the witches lost, the ropes were gnawed unto breaking, and the child was pulled into the foul deep, emerging only once every year, on the Night of the Awakened. Children with blue-brown skin and hollowed-out eye sockets, with hair the colour of rust or blood, with long polished nails – walking the swamp and singing songs of the earth that could drive a mortal mad.

Had spirits come for her? The witches would not say. Were the burns on her skin the result of panic, or something else? She did not know.

Her memories of that time were few and visceral. The weight on her chest. The seeping cold. The taste of fetid water in her mouth, the stinging in her squeezed-shut eyes. And the sounds she could hear, terrible trickling sounds, like the rush of fluids in the veins of the earth. The thumps and crunches, the crackling approach of…things.

It was said there was no air in the peat. That not even her skin could breathe – and such breathing was necessary to all life. And so she must have died in truth.

Since then, at night when she slept, she could rise from her flesh, could hover, invisible, above her motionless body. And look down in admiration. She was beautiful indeed, as if something of the child she had been never aged, was immune to growing old. A quality that made men desperate to claim her, not as an equal, alas, but as a possession. And the older the man the greater the need.

When she had made this discovery, about herself and about the men who most desired her, she was disgusted. Why give this gorgeous body to such wrinkled, pathetic creatures? She would not. Ever. Yet she found it difficult to defend herself against such needy hunters of youth – oh, she could curse them into misery, she could poison them and see them die in great pain, but such things only led her to pity, the soft kind not the nasty kind, which made being cruel just that much harder.

She had found her solution in the two young Bole brothers. Barely out of their teens, neither one well suited to staying in the Mott Irregulars, for certain reasons over which she need not concern herself. And both of them gloriously in love with her.

It did not matter that they barely had a single brain between them. They were Boles, ferocious against mages and magic of any kind, and born with the salamander god’s gift of survival. They protected her in all the battles one could imagine, from out-and-out fighting to the devious predations of old men.

When she was done admiring her own body, she would float over to where they slept and look down upon their slack faces, on the gaping mouths from which snores groaned out in wheezing cadence, the threads of drool and the twitching eyelids. Her pups. Her guard dogs. Her deadly hounds.

Yet now, on this night with the tropical stars peering down, Precious Thimble felt a growing unease. This Trygalle venture she’d decided on – this whim – was proving far deadlier than she had expected. In fact, she’d almost lost one of them in Hood’s realm. And losing one of them would be…bad. It would free the other one to close in and that she didn’t want, not at all. And one guard dog wasn’t nearly as effective as two.

Maybe, just maybe, she’d gone too far this time.

 

Gruntle opened his eyes, and watched as the faintly glowing emanation floated over to hover above the sleeping forms of the Bole brothers, where it lingered for a time before returning to sink back down into the form of Precious Thimble.

From nearby he heard the Trell’s soft grunt, and then, ‘What game does she play at, I wonder…’

Gruntle thought to reply. Instead, sleep took him suddenly, pouncing, tumbling his mind away and down, spitting him out like a mangled rat into a damp glade of high grass. The sun blazed down like a god’s enraged eye. Feeling battered, misused, he rose on to all fours – a position that did not feel at all awkward, or strike him as unusual.

Solid jungle surrounded the clearing, from which came the sounds of countless birds, monkeys and insects – a cacophony so loud and insistent that a growl of irritation rose from deep in his throat.

All at once the nearest sounds ceased, a cocoon of silence broken only by the hum of bees and a pair of long-tailed hummingbirds dancing in front of an orchid – sprites that then raced off in a beating whirr of wings.

Gruntle felt his hackles rise, stiff and prickling on the back of his neck – too fierce for a human – and looking down he saw the sleek banded forelimbs of a tiger where his arms and hands should have been.

Another one of these damned dreams. Listen, Trake, if you want me to be just like you, stop playing these scenes for me. I’ll be a tiger if that’s what you want – just don’t confine it to my dreams. I wake up feeling clumsy and slow and I don’t like it. I wake up remembering nothing but freedom.

Something was approaching. Things…three, no, five. Not big, not dangerous. He slowly swung his head round, narrowing his gaze.

The creatures that came to the edge of the clearing were somewhere between apes and humans. Small as adolescents, lithe and sleek, with fine fur thickening at the armpits and crotch. The two males carried short curved batons of some sort, fire-hardened, with inset fangs from some large carnivore. The females wielded spears, one of them holding her spear in one hand and a broad flint axe head in the other, which she tossed into the clearing. The object landed with a thump, flattening the grasses, halfway between Gruntle and the band.

Gruntle realized, with a faint shock, that he knew the taste of these creatures – their hot flesh, their blood, the saltiness of their sweat. In this form, in this place and in this time, he had hunted them, had pulled them down, hearing their piteous cries as his jaws closed fatally round their necks.

This time, however, he was not hungry, and it seemed they knew it.

Awe flickered in their eyes, their mouths twisting into strange expressions, and all at once one of the women was speaking. The language trilled, punctuated by clicks and glottal stops.

And Gruntle understood her.

‘Beast of darkness and fire, hunter in dark and light, fur of night and motion in grasses, god who takes, see this our gift and spare us for we are weak and few and this land is not ours, this land is the journey for we dream of the shore, where food is plenty and the birds cry in the heat of the sun.’

Gruntle found himself sliding forward, silent as a thought, and he was life and power bound in a single breath. Forward, until the axe blade was at his taloned paws. Head lowering, nostrils flaring as he inhaled the scent of stone and sweat, the edges where old blood remained, where grasses had polished the flint, the urine that had been splashed upon it.

These creatures wanted to claim this glade for their own.

They were begging permission, and maybe something more. Something like…protection.

‘The leopard tracks us and challenges you,’ the woman sang, ‘but she will not cross your path. She will flee your scent for you are the master here, the god, the unchallenged hunter of the forest. Last night, she took my child – we have lost all our children. Perhaps we will be the last. Perhaps we will never find the shore again. But if our flesh must feed the hungry, then let it be you who grows strong with our blood.

‘Tonight, if you come to take one of us, take me. I am the eldest. I bear no more children. I am useless.’ She hunched down then, discarding her spear, and sank into the grasses, where she rolled on to her back, exposing her throat.

They were mad, Gruntle decided. Driven insane by the terrors of the jungle, where they were strangers, lost, seeking some distant coastline. And as they journeyed, every night delivered horror.

But this was a dream. From some ancient time. And even if he sought to guide them to the shore, he would awaken long before that journey was completed. Awaken, and so abandon them to their fates. And what if he grew hungry in this next moment? What if his instinct exploded within him, launching him at this hapless female, closing his jaws on her throat?

Was this where the notion of human sacrifice came from? When nature eyed them avid with hunger? When they had naught but sharpened sticks and a smouldering fire to protect them?

He would not kill them this night.

He would find something else to kill. Gruntle set off, into the jungle. A thousand scents filled him, a thousand muted noises whispered in the deep shadows. He carried his massive weight effortlessly, silent as he padded forward. Beneath the canopy the world was dusk and so it would ever remain, yet he saw everything, the flit of a green-winged mantis, the scuttle of woodlice in the humus, the gliding escape of a millipede. He slipped across the path of deer, saw where they had fed on dark-leaved shoots. He passed a rotted log that had been torn apart and pushed aside, the ground beneath ravaged by the questing snouts of boar.

Some time later, with night descending, he found the spoor he had been seeking. Acrid, pungent, both familiar and strange. It was sporadic, proof that the creature that left it was cautious, taking to the trees in its moments of rest.

A female.

He slowed his pace as he tracked the beast. All light was gone now, every colour shifted into hues of grey. If she discovered him she would flee. But then, the only beast that wouldn’t was the elephant, and he had no interest in hunting that wise leviathan with its foul sense of humour.

Edging forward, one soft step at a time, he came upon the place where she had made a kill. A wapiti, its panic a bitter breath in the air. The humus scuffed by its tiny hoofs, a smear of blood on curled black leaves. Halting, settling down, Gruntle lifted his gaze.

And found her. She had drawn her prey up on to a thick branch from which lianas depended in a cascade of night blossoms. The wapiti – or what remained of it – was draped across the bole, and she was lying along the branch’s length, lambent eyes fixed upon Gruntle.

This leopard was well suited to hunting at night – her coat was black on black, the spots barely discernible.

She regarded him without fear, and this gave Gruntle pause.

A voice then murmured in his skull, sweet and dark. ‘Go on your way, Lord. There is not enough to share…even if I so desired, which of course I do not.’

‘I have come for you,’ Gruntle replied.

Her eyes widened and he saw muscles coiling along her shoulders. ‘Do all beasts know riders, then?’

For a moment Gruntle did not comprehend her question, and then understanding arrived with sudden heat, sudden interest. ‘Has your soul travelled far, my lady?’

‘Through time. Through unknown distances. This is where my dreams take me every night. Ever hunting, ever tasting blood, ever shying from the path of the likes of you, Lord.’

‘I am summoned by prayer,’ Gruntle said, knowing even as he said it that it was the truth, that the half-human creatures he had left behind did indeed call upon him, as if to invite the killer answered some innate refusal of random chance. He was summoned to kill, he realized, to give proof to the notion of fate.

‘Curious idea, Lord.’

‘Spare them, Lady.’

‘Who?’

‘You know of whom I speak. In this time, there is but one creature that can voice prayers.’

He sensed wry amusement. ‘You are wrong in that. Although the others have no interest in imagining beasts as gods and goddesses.’

‘Others?’

‘Many nights away from this place, there are mountains, and in them can be found fastnesses where dwell the K’Chain Che’Malle. There is a vast river that runs to a warm ocean, and on its banks can be found the pit-cities of the Forkrul Assail. There are solitary towers where lone Jaghut live, waiting to die. There are the villages of the Tartheno Toblakai and their tundra-dwelling cousins, the Neph Trell.’

‘You know this world far better than I do, Lady.’

‘Do you still intend to kill me?’

‘Will you cease hunting the half-humans?’

‘As you like, but you must know, there are times when this beast has no rider. There are times too, I suspect, when the beast you now ride also hunts alone.’

‘I understand.’

She rose from her languid perch, and made her way down the trunk of the tree head first, landing lightly on the soft forest floor. ‘Why are they so important to you?’

‘I do not know. Perhaps I pity them.’

‘For our kind, Lord, there is no room for pity.’

‘I disagree. It is what we can give when we ride the souls of these beasts. Hood knows, it’s all we can give.’

‘Hood?’

‘The God of Death.’

‘You come from a strange world, I think.’

Now this was startling. Gruntle was silent for a long moment, and then he asked, ‘Where are you from, Lady?’

‘A city called New Morn.’

‘I know of a ruin named Morn.’

‘My city is no ruin.’

‘Perhaps you exist in a time before the coming of Hood.’

‘Perhaps.’ She stretched, the glow of her eyes thinning to slits. ‘I am leaving soon, Lord. If you are here when I do, the beast that remains will not take kindly to your presence.’

‘Oh? And would she be so foolish as to attack me?’

‘And die? No. But I would not curse her with terror.’

‘Ah, is that pity, then?’

‘No, it is love.’

Yes, he could see how one could come to love such magnificent animals, and find the riding of their souls a most precious gift. ‘I will go now, Lady. Do you think we will meet again?’

‘It does seem we share the night, Lord.’

She slipped away, and even Gruntle’s extraordinary vision failed him from tracking her beyond a few strides. He swung about and padded off in the opposite direction. Yes, he could feel his own grip here weakening, and soon he would return to his own world. That pallid, stale existence, where he lived as if half blind, half deaf, deadened and clumsy.

He allowed himself a deep cough of anger, silencing the unseen denizens on all sides.

Until some brave monkey, high overhead, flung a stick at him. The thump as it struck the ground near his left hind leg made him start and shy away.

From the darkness overhead he heard chittering laughter.

 

The storm of chaos cavorted into his vision, consuming half the sky with a swirling madness of lead, grainy black and blazing tendrils of argent. He could see the gust front tearing the ground up in a frenzied wall of dust, rocks and dirt, growing ever closer.

Imminent oblivion did not seem so bad, as far as Ditch was concerned. He was being dragged by the chain shackled to his right ankle. Most of his skin had been scraped away – the white bone and cartilage of his remaining elbow, studded with grit, was visible within haloes of red. His knees were larger versions, and the shackle was slowly carving through his ankle and foot bones. He wondered what would happen when that foot was finally torn off – how it would feel. He’d lie there, motionless at last, perhaps watching that shackle tumble and twist and stutter away. He’d be…free.

The torment of this existence should not include pain. That was unfair. Of course, most of that pain was fading now – he was too far gone to curl and flinch, to gasp and sob – but the memories remained, like fire in his skull.

Pulled onward over loose stones, their sharp edges rolling up his back, gouging new furrows through the pulped meat, knuckling against the base of his skull to tear away the last few snarls of hair and scalp. And as the chain snagged, only to give and twist him round, he stared again and again upon that storm in their wake.

Songs of suffering from the groaning wagon somewhere ahead, an unending chorus of misery ever drifting back.

Too bad, he reflected, that the huge demon had not found him in the moments following his collapse, had not lifted him to its shoulder – not that it could carry any more than it already had been carrying. But even if it had done little more than drag him to one side, then the edge of the wagon’s massive wheel would not have crushed his right arm and shoulder, grinding both into pulp until threads of gristle were all that held it to his body. After that, all hopes – faint as they had been – of rising again to add his strength to the procession had vanished. He had become yet one more dead weight, dragged in the wake, adding to the suffering of those who trudged on.

Nearby, almost parallel to him, a huge chain sheathed in moss ended in the remnants of a dragon. Wings like tattered sails, spars snapped and dangling, the mostly skinless head dragged behind a shredded neck. When he had first seen it he had been shocked, horrified. Now, each time it came into view, he felt a wave of dread. That such a creature should have failed was proof of the desperate extremity now plaguing them.

Anomander Rake had stopped killing. The legion was failing. Annihilation edged ever closer.

Life fears chaos. It was ever thus. We fear it more than anything else, because it is anathema. Order battles against dissolution. Order negotiates cooperation as a mechanism of survival, on every scale, from a patch of skin to an entire menagerie of interdependent creatures. That cooperation, of course, may not of essence be necessarily peaceful – a minute exchange of failures to ensure greater successes.

Yes, as I am dragged along here, at the very end of my existence, I begin to understand…

See me, see this gift of contemplation.

Rake, what have you done?

A calloused hand closed about his remaining arm, lifted him clear of the ground, and he was being carried forward, closer to that crawling wagon.

‘There is no point.’

‘That,’ replied a deep, measured voice, ‘is without relevance.’

‘I am not worth—’

‘Probably not, but I intend to find you room on that wagon.’

Ditch hacked a ragged laugh. ‘Just tear my foot off, good sir, and leave me.’

‘No. There may be need for you, mage.’

Need? Now that was an absurd thing to say. ‘Who are you?’

‘Draconus.’

Ditch laughed a second time. ‘I looked for you…seems centuries ago, now.’

‘Now you have found me.’

‘I thought you might know a way of escaping. Now, isn’t that funny? After all, if you had, you would not still be here, would you?’

‘That seems logical.’

An odd reply. ‘Draconus.’

‘What?’

‘Are you a logical man?’

‘Not in the least. Now, here we are.’

The sight that greeted Ditch as he was heaved round to face forward was, if anything, even more terrifying than anything else he had witnessed since arriving in the accursed realm of Dragnipur. A wall of bodies, projecting feet jammed amongst staring faces, the occasional arm hanging out, twitching, dripping sweat. Here a knee, there a shoulder. Tangles of sodden hair, fingers with dagger-long nails. Human, demon, Forkrul Assail, K’Chain Che’Malle, others of natures Ditch could not even identify. He saw one hand and forearm that appeared to be made entirely of metal, sockets and hinges and rods and a carapace of iron skin visible in mottled, pitted patches. Worst of all were the staring eyes, peering from faces that seemed to have surrendered every possible expression, leaving behind something slack and dull.

‘Make space up top!’ bellowed Draconus.

Cries of ‘No room!’ and ‘Nowhere left!’ greeted him.

Ignoring such protests, Draconus began climbing the wall of flesh. Faces twisted in rage and pain, eyes widened in affronted disbelief, hands clawed at him or beat him with fists, but the huge warrior was indifferent to all of it. Ditch could feel the man’s enormous strength, an implacable certainty to every movement that bespoke something unconquerable. He was awed into silence.

Higher they climbed, and shadows raced in crazed patterns now in the churning glare of the storm, as if the natural gloom of the world clung close to its surface, and here, high above it, the air was clearer, sharper.

The rocking crawl of the wagon below was felt now in the swaying of the wall near the top, a motion groaned out in the slick shifting of flesh and in a wavering song of dull, rhythmic moans and grunts. The wall finally sloped inward, and Ditch was tugged over hummocks of skin, the bodies so tight-packed that the surface beneath him seemed solid, an undulating landscape, sheathed in sweat and flecks of ash and grime. Most of those lying here had settled on their stomachs, as if to stare at the sky – that would vanish for ever as soon as the next body arrived – was too much to bear.

Draconus rolled him into a depression between two backs, one facing one way, the other in the opposite direction. A man, a woman – the sudden contact with the woman’s soft flesh as he was wedged against her startled an awakening in Ditch and he cursed.

‘Take what you can, mage,’ said Draconus.

Ditch heard him leaving.

He could make out distinct voices now, odd nearby sounds. Someone was scrabbling closer and Ditch felt a faint tug on his chain.

‘Almost off, then. Almost off.’

Ditch twisted round to see who had spoken.

A Tiste Andii. He was clearly blind, and both sockets bore the terrible scarring of burns – only deliberate torture could be that precise. His legs were gone, stumps visible just below his hips. He was dragging himself up alongside Ditch, and the mage saw that the creature held in one hand a long sharpened bone with a blackened point.

‘Plan on killing me?’ Ditch asked.

The Tiste Andii paused, lifted his head. Straggly black hair framed a narrow, hollowed-out face. ‘What sort of eyes do you have, friend?’

‘Working ones.’

A momentary smile, and then he squirmed closer.

Ditch managed to shift round so that his ruined shoulder and arm were beneath him, freeing his undamaged arm. ‘It’s crazy, but I still intend to defend myself. Though death – if it even exists here – would be a mercy.’

‘It doesn’t,’ replied the Tiste Andii. ‘I could stab you for the next thousand years and do nothing more than leave you full of holes. Full of holes.’ He paused and the smile flickered once more. ‘Yet I must stab you anyway, since you’ve made a mess of things. A mess, a mess, a mess.’

‘I have? Explain.’

‘There’s no point, unless you have eyes.’

‘I have them, you damned fool!’

‘But can they see?’

He caught the emphasis on the last word. Could he awaken magic here? Could he scrape something from his warren – enough to attenuate his vision? There was nothing to do but try. ‘Wait a moment,’ he said. Oh, the warren was there, yes, as impervious as a wall – yet he sensed something he had not expected. Cracks, fissures, things bleeding in, bleeding out.

The effects of chaos, he realized. Gods, it’s all breaking down! Would there be a time, he wondered – an instant, in the very moment that the storm finally struck them – when he would find his warren within reach? Could he escape before he was obliterated along with everyone and everything else?

‘How long, how long, how long?’ asked the Tiste Andii.

Ditch found he could indeed scrape a residue of power. A few words muttered under his breath, and all at once he saw what had been hidden before – he saw, yes, the flesh he was lying on.

A mass of tattoos blanketed every exposed patch of skin, lines and images crossing from one body to the next, yet nowhere could he see solid areas – all was made up of intricate, delicate traceries, patterns within patterns. He saw borders that dipped and twisted. He saw elongated figures with stretched faces and misshapen torsos. Not a single body atop this massive wagon had been exempted – barring Ditch’s own.

The Tiste Andii must have heard his gasp, for he laughed. ‘Imagine yourself hovering…oh, say fifteen man-heights overhead. Fifteen man-heights. Overhead, overhead. Hovering in the air, just beneath the ceiling of nothingness, the ceiling of nothingness. Looking down upon all this, all this, all this. Aye, it looks awry to you from where you crouch, but from up there, from up there, from up there – you will see no mounds of flesh, no knobs of skin-stretched bones – you’ll see no shadows at all – only the scene. The scene, yes, laid flat you’d swear. You’d swear it to every god and goddess you can think of. Flat! Laid flat, laid flat!’

Ditch struggled to comprehend what he was seeing – he did not dare attempt what the Tiste Andii had suggested, fearing the effort would drive him mad; no, he would not try to imagine himself plucked free of his flesh, his soul floating somewhere overhead. It was difficult enough to comprehend the obsession of this creation – a creation by a blind man. ‘You’ve been up here for a long time,’ Ditch finally said. ‘Avoiding getting buried.’

‘Yes and yes. I was among the first on the wagon. Among the first. Murdered by Draconus, because I sought to wrest Dragnipur from him – oh, Anomandaris Purake was not the first to try. I was. I was. I was. And if I had won the sword, why, my first victim would have been Anomandaris himself. Is that not a bitter joke, friend? It is, it is.’

‘But this’ – Ditch gestured with his one hand – ‘it has to be a recent effort—’

‘No, only the last layer, the last layer, the last layer.’

‘What – what do you use for ink?’

‘Clever question! From the wagon bloodwood, blackwood, the pitch and the pitch ever leaking out, ever sweating from the grain.’

‘Could I hover high up, as you say,’ asked Ditch, ‘what scene would I see?’

‘Wanderings, Holds, Houses, every god, every goddess, every spirit worth mentioning. Demon kings and demon queens. Dragons and Elders – oh, all there, all there. All there. Is this where you mean to stay, friend? Is this where you mean to stay?’

Ditch thought of this creature hunkered up against him, that bone needle pricking his skin. ‘No. I plan on crawling round, as much as I can, never stopping. Leave me out of your scene.’

‘You cannot do that! You will ruin everything!’

‘Imagine me invisible, then. Imagine I don’t even exist – I will stay out of your way.’

The sightless eyes were glistening and the Tiste Andii was shaking his head again and again.

‘You will not have me,’ Ditch said. ‘Besides, it will all be ending soon.’

‘Soon? How soon? How soon? How soon? How soon?’

‘The storm looks to be no more than a league behind us.’

‘If you will not join the scene,’ the Tiste Andii said, ‘I will push you off.’

‘Draconus might not like that.’

‘He will understand. He understands more than you, more than you, more and more and more than you!’

‘Just let me rest,’ said Ditch, ‘for a while. I will then climb back down. I don’t want to be up here when the end comes. I want to be standing. Facing the storm.’

‘Do you really imagine the ritual will awaken all at once? Do you do you do you? The flower opens soon, but the night is long, and it will take that long, that long. For the flower to open. Open in the moment before dawn. Open in the moment. Draconus chose you – a mage – for the nexus. I need the nexus. You are the nexus. Lie there, be quiet, don’t move.’

‘No.’

‘I cannot wait long, friend. Crawl about now if you like, but I cannot wait too long. A league away!’

‘What is your name?’ Ditch asked.

‘What matter any of that?’

‘For when I next speak to Draconus.’

‘He knows me.’

‘I don’t.’

‘I am Kadaspala, brother to Enesdia who was wife to Andarist.’

Andarist. That’s one name I recognize. ‘You wanted to murder the brother of your sister’s husband?’

‘I did. For what he did to them, what he did to them. For what he did to them!’

Ditch stared at the anguish in the man’s ravaged face. ‘Who blinded you, Kadaspala?’

‘It was a gift. A mercy. I did not comprehend the truth of that, not the real truth of it, the real truth. No. Besides, I thought my inner sight would be enough – to challenge Draconus. To steal Dragnipur. I was wrong, wrong. I was wrong. The truth is a gift, a mercy.’

‘Who blinded you?’

The Tiste Andii flinched, then seemed to curl into himself. Tears glistened in the pits of his sockets. ‘I blinded myself,’ Kadaspala whispered. ‘When I saw what he’d done. What he’d done. To his brother. To my sister. To my sister.’

Suddenly, Ditch did not want to ask any more questions of this man. He pushed himself from between the two bodies. ‘I am going to…explore.’

‘Come back, mage. Nexus. Come back. Come back.’

We’ll see.

With all this time to reflect on things, Apsal’ara concluded that her biggest mistake was not in finding her way into Moon’s Spawn. Nor in discovering the vaults and the heaps of magicked stones, ensorcelled weapons, armour, the blood-dipped idols and reliquaries from ten thousand extinct cults. No, her greatest error in judgement had been in trying to stab Anomander Rake in the back.

He’d been amused at finding her. He’d not spoken of executing her, or even chaining her in some deep crypt for all eternity. He’d simply asked her how she had managed to break in. Curiosity, more than a little wonder, perhaps even some admiration. And then she went and tried to kill him.

The damned sword had been out of its scabbard faster than an eye-blink, the deadly edge slicing across her belly even as she lunged with her obsidian dagger.

Such stupidity. But lessons only became lessons when one has reached the state of humility required to heed them. When one is past all the egotistical excuses and explanations flung up to fend off honest culpability. It was nature to attack first, abjuring all notions of guilt and shame. Lash out, white with rage, then strut away convinced of one’s own righteousness.

She had long since left such imbecilic posturing behind. A journey of enlightenment, and it had begun with her last mortal breath, as she found herself lying on the hard stone floor, looking up into the eyes of Anomander Rake, and seeing his dismay, his regret, his sorrow.

She could feel the growing heat of the storm, could feel its eternal hunger. Not long now, and then all her efforts would be for naught. The kinks of the chain finally showed some wear, but not enough, not nearly enough. She would be destroyed along with everyone else. She was not unique. She was, in fact, no different from every other idiot who’d tried to kill Rake, or Draconus.

The rain trickling down from the wagon bed was warmer than usual, foul with sweat, blood and worse. It streamed over her body. Her skin had been wet for so long it was coming away in ragged pieces, white with death, revealing raw red meat underneath. She was rotting.

The time was coming when she would have to drop down once more, emerge from under the wagon, and see for herself the arrival of oblivion. There would be no pity in its eyes – not that it had any – just the indifference that was the other face of the universe, the one all would have for ever turned away. The regard of chaos was the true source of terror – all the rest were but flavours, variations.

I was a child once. I am certain of it. A child. I have a memory, one memory of that time. On a barren bank of a broad river. The sky was blue perfection. The caribou were crossing the river, in their tens and tens of thousands.

I remember their up-thrust heads. I remember seeing the weaker ones crowded in, pushed down to vanish in the murky water. These carcasses would wash up down current, where the short-nosed bears and the wolves and eagles and ravens waited for them. But I stood with others. Father, mother, perhaps sisters and brothers – just others – my eyes on the vast herd.

Their seasonal migration, and this was but one of many places of crossing. The caribou often chose different paths. Still, the river had to be crossed, and the beasts would mill for half a morning on the bank, until they plunged into the current, until all at once they were flooding the river, a surging tide of hide and flesh, of breaths drawn in and gusted out.

Not even the beasts display eagerness when accosting the inevitable, when it seems numbers alone can possibly confuse fate, and so each life strives, strikes out into the icy flow. ‘Save me.’ That is what is written in their eyes. ‘Save me above all the others. Save me, so that I may live. Give me this moment, this day, this season. I will follow the laws of my kind…’

She remembered that one moment when she was a child, and she remembered her sense of awe in witnessing the crossing, in that force of nature, that imposition of will, its profound implacability. She remembered, too, the terror she had felt.

Caribou are not just caribou. The crossing is not just this crossing. The caribou are all life. The river is the passing world. Life swims through, riding the current, swims, drowns, triumphs. Life can ask questions. Life – some of it – can even ask: how is it that I can ask anything at all? And: how is it that I believe that answers answer anything worthwhile? What value this exchange, this precious dialogue, when the truth is unchanged, when some live for a time while others drown, when in the next season there are new caribou while others are for ever gone?

The truth is unchanged.

Each spring, in the time of crossing, the river is in flood. Chaos swirls beneath the surface. It is the worst time.

Watch us.

The child had not wanted to see. The child had wailed and fled inland. Brothers and sisters pursued, laughing maybe, not understanding her fear, her despair. Someone pursued, anyway. Laughing, unless it was the river that laughed, and it was the herd of caribou that surged up from the bank and lunged forward, driving the watchers to scatter, shouting their surprise. Perhaps that was what had made her run. She wasn’t sure.

The memory ended with her panic, her cries, her confusion.

Lying on the cross-beam, the wood sweating beneath her, Apsal’ara felt like that child once again. The season was coming. The river awaited her, in fullest flood, and she was but one among many, praying for fate’s confusion.

 

A hundred stones flung into a pond will shatter the smooth surface, will launch a clash of ripples and waves until the eye loses all sense of order in what it sees. And this discordant moment perturbs the self, awakens unease in the spirit and leaves one restive. So it was that morning in Darujhistan. Surfaces had been shattered. People moved and every move betrayed agitation. People spoke and they were abrupt in their speech and they were short with others, strangers and dear ones alike.

A squall of rumours rode the turgid currents, and some held more truth than others, but all of them hinted of something unpleasant, something unwelcome and disorderly. Such sensibilities can grip a city and hold tight for days, sometimes weeks, sometimes for ever. Such sensibilities could spread like a plague to infect an entire nation, an entire people, leaving them habituated in their anger, perpetually belligerent, inclined to cruelty and miserly with their compassion.

Blood had been spilled in the night. More corpses than usual had been found in the morning, a score or more of them in the Estates District, delivering a thunderous shock to the coddled highborn citizens in their walled homes. Spurred by frantic demands for investigation, the City Guard brought in court mages to conduct magical examinations. Before long a new detail was whispered that widened eyes, that made citizens gasp. Assassins! One and all – the Guild has been devastated! And, following this, on a few faces, a sly smile of pleasure – quickly hidden or saved for private moments, since one could never be too careful. Still, the evil killers had clearly taken on someone nastier than them, and had paid for it with dozens of lives.

Some then grew somewhat more thoughtful – oh, they were rare enough to make one, well, depressed. None the less, for these there followed a rather ominous question: precisely who is in this city who can with impunity cut down a score of deadly assassins?

As chaotic as that morning was, what with official carriages and corpse-wagons rattling this way and that; with squads of guards and crowds of gawping onlookers and the hawkers who descended among them with sweetened drinks and sticky candies and whatnot; with all this, none made note of the closed, boarded-up K’rul’s Bar with its freshly washed walls and flushed gutters.

It was just as well.

Krute of Talient stepped into his squalid room and saw Rallick Nom slouched in a chair. Grunting, Krute walked over to the niche that passed for a kitchen and set down the burlap sack with its load of vegetables, fruit and wrapped fish. ‘Not seen you much of late,’ he said.

‘It’s a foolish war,’ Rallick Nom said without looking up.

‘I’m sure Seba Krafar agrees with you this morning. They struck, in what they must have imagined was overwhelming force, only to get mauled. If this keeps up Seba will be Master in a Guild of one.’

‘You sound foul of mood, Krute. Why does it matter to you that Seba is making mistakes?’

‘Because I gave my life to the Guild, Rallick.’ Krute stood with a turnip in one hand. After a moment he flung it into the basket beside the cask of fresh water. ‘He’s single-handedly destroying it. True, he’ll be gone soon enough, but what will be left by then?’

Rallick rubbed at his face. ‘Everyone’s mood is sour these days, it seems.’

‘What are we waiting for?’

Krute could not long hold Rallick’s gaze when the assassin finally looked at him. There was something so…remorseless in those cold eyes, in that hard face that seemed carved to refute for ever the notion of a smile. A face that could not soften, could not relax into anything human. No wonder he’d been Vorcan’s favourite.

Krute fidgeted with the food he’d purchased. ‘You hungry?’ he asked.

‘What did you have in mind?’

‘Fish stew.’

‘In a few bells it’ll be hot enough outside to melt lead.’

‘That’s what I’m cooking, Rallick.’

Sighing, the assassin rose and stretched. ‘Think I’ll take a walk instead.’

‘As you like.’

At the door Rallick paused and glanced over, his expression suddenly wry. ‘It wears off, doesn’t it?’

Krute frowned. ‘What does?’

Rallick did not reply, and moments later he was gone, the door closing behind him.

‘What does?’ Did I have any reason there to be so obtuse? Must have, though I can’t think of one right now. Maybe just…instinctive. Yes, Rallick Nom, it wears off. Fast.

Things were easier before – should have recognized that back then. Should have liked things just fine. Should have stopped gnawing.

 

On her hands and knees, Thordy rubbed the ashes into the spaces between the set stones, into every crack and fissure, every groove scoring the vaguely flat surfaces. Tiny bits of bone rolled under her fingertips. No ash was perfect unless it came from nothing but wood, and this ash was made of more things than just wood. The dry season had, she hoped, finally arrived. Otherwise she might have to do this all over again, to keep the glyphs hidden, the pleasant, beautiful glyphs with all the promises they whispered to her.

She heard the back door swing open on its leather hinges and knew Gaz was standing on the threshold, eyes hooded, watching her. His fingerless hands twitching at the ends of his arms, the ridge of knuckles marred and bright red, teeth-cut and bone-gouged.

He killed people every night, she knew, to keep from killing her. She was, she knew, the cause of their deaths. Every one of them a substitute for what Gaz really wanted to do.

She heard him step outside.

Straightening, wiping the ash from her hands on her apron, she turned.

‘Breakfast leavings,’ he muttered.

‘What?’

‘The house is full of flies,’ he said, standing there as if struck rooted by the sunlight. Red-shot eyes wandered about the yard as if wanting to crawl out from his head and find shelter. Beneath that rock, or the bleached plank of grey wood, or under the pile of kitchen scraps.

‘You need a shave,’ she said. ‘Want me to heat the water?’

The haunted eyes flicked towards her – but there was nowhere to hide in that direction, so he looked away once more. ‘No, don’t touch me.’

She thought of holding the razor in her hand, settling its edge against his throat. Seeing the runnels winding down through the lathered soap, the throb of his pulse. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘the beard hides how thin you’ve become. In the face, anyway.’

His smile was a threat. ‘And you prefer that, wife?’

‘It’s just different, Gaz.’

‘You can’t prefer anything when you don’t care, right?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘You didn’t have to. Why’d you make that stone thing – right there on the best dirt?’

‘I just felt like it,’ she replied. ‘A place to sit and rest. Where I can keep an eye on all the vegetables.’

‘In case they run away?’

‘No. I just like looking at them, that’s all.’ They don’t ask questions. They don’t ask for much of anything at all. A few dribbles of water, maybe. A clear path to the sun, free of any weeds.

They don’t get suspicious. They don’t think about murdering me.

‘Have supper ready for dusk,’ Gaz said, lurching into motion.

She watched him leave. Gritty ash made black crescents of her fingernails, as if she had been rooting through the remnants of a pyre. Which was appropriate, because she had, but Gaz didn’t need to know things like that. He didn’t need to know anything at all.

Be a plant, Gaz. Worry about nothing. Until the harvest.

The ox was too stupid to worry. If not for a lifetime of back-breaking labour and casual abuse, the beast would be content, existence a smooth cycle to match the ease of day into night and night into day and on and on for ever. Feed and cud aplenty, water to drink and salt to lick, a plague to eradicate the world’s biting flies and ticks and fleas. If the ox could dream of paradise, it would be a simple dream and a simple paradise. To live simply was to evade the worries that came with complexity. This end was achieved at the expense, alas, of intelligence.

The drunks that staggered out of the taverns as the sun rose were in search of paradise and they had the sodden, besotted brains to prove it. Lying senseless in the durhang and d’bayang dens could be found others oozing down a similar path. The simplicity they would find was of course death, the threshold crossed almost without effort.

Unmindful (naturally) of any irony, the ox pulled a cart into an alley behind the dens where three emaciated servants brought out this night’s crop of wasted corpses. The carter, standing with a switch to one side, spat out a mouthful of rustleaf juice and silently gestured to another body lying in the gutter behind a back door. In for a sliver, in for a council. Grumbling, the three servants went over to this corpse and reached for limbs to lift it from the cobblestones. One then gasped and recoiled, and a moment later so too did the others.

The ox was not flicked into motion for some time thereafter, as humans rushed about, as more arrived. It could smell the death, but it was used to that. There was much confusion, yet the yoked beast remained an island of calm, enjoying the shade of the alley.

The city guardsman with the morning ache in his chest brushed a hand along the ox’s broad flank as he edged past. He crouched down to inspect the corpse.

Another one, this man beaten so badly he was barely recognizable as human. Not a single bone in his face was left unbroken. The eyes were pulped. Few teeth remained. The blows had continued, down to his crushed throat – which was the likely cause of death – and then his chest. Whatever weapon had been used left short, elongated patterns of mottled bruising. Just like all the others.

The guardsman rose and faced the three servants from the dens. ‘Was he a customer?’

Three blank faces regarded him, then one spoke, ‘How in Hood’s name can we tell? His damned face is gone!’

‘Clothing? Weight, height, hair colour – anyone in there last—’

‘Sir,’ cut in the man, ‘if he was a customer he was a new one – he’s got meat on his bones, see? And his clothes was clean. Well, before he spilled hisself.’

The guardsman had made the same observations. ‘Might he have been, then? A new customer?’

‘Ain’t been none in the last day or so. Some casuals, you know, the kind who can take it or leave it, but no, we don’t think we seen this one, by his clothes and hair and such.’

‘So what was he doing in this alley?’

No one had an answer.

Did the guardsman have enough to requisition a necromancer? Only if this man was well born. But the clothes aren’t that high-priced. More like merchant class, or some mid-level official. If so, then what was he doing here in the dregs of Gadrobi District? ‘He’s Daru,’ he mused.

‘We get ’em,’ said the loquacious servant, with a faint sneer. ‘We get Rhivi, we get Callowan, we get Barghast even.’

Yes, misery is egalitarian. ‘Into the cart, then, with the others.’

The servants set to work.

The guardsman watched. After a moment his gaze drifted to the carter. He studied the wizened face with its streaks of rustleaf juice running down the stubbled chin. ‘Got a loving woman back home?’

‘Eh?’

‘I imagine that ox is happy enough.’

‘Oh, aye, that it is, sir. All the flies, see, they prefer the big sacks.’

‘The what?’

The carter squinted at him, then stepped closer. ‘The bodies, sir. Big sacks, I call ’em. I done studies and lots of thinking, on important things. On life and stuff. What makes it work, what happens when it stops and all.’

‘Indeed. Well—’

‘Every body in existence, sir, is made up of the same stuff. So small you can’t see except with a special lens but I made me one a those. Tiny, that stuff. I call ’em bags. And inside each bag there’s a wallet, floating in the middle like. And I figure that in that wallet there’s notes.’

‘I’m sorry, did you say notes?’

A quick nod, a pause to send out a stream of brown juice. ‘With all the details of that body written on ’em. Whether it’s a dog or a cat or a green-banded nose-worm. Or a person. And things like hair colour and eye colour and other stuff – all written on those notes in that wallet in that bag. They’re instructions, you see, telling the bag what kind of bag it’s supposed to be. Some bags are liver bags, some are skin, some are brain, some are lungs. And it’s the mother and the father that sew up them bags, when they make themselves a baby. They sew ’em up, you see, with half and half, an’ that’s why brats share looks from both ma and da. Now this ’ere ox, it’s got bags too that look pretty much the same, so’s I been thinking of sewing its half with a human half – wouldn’t that be something?’

‘Something, good sir, likely to get you run out of the city – if you weren’t stoned to death first.’

The carter scowled. ‘That’s the probbem wi’ the world then, ain’t it? No sense of adventure!’

 

‘I have a very important meeting.’

Iskaral Pust, still wearing his most ingratiating smile, simply nodded.

Sordiko Qualm sighed. ‘It is official Temple business.’

He nodded again.

‘I do not desire an escort.’

‘You don’t need one, High Priestess,’ said Iskaral Pust. ‘You shall have me!’ And then he tilted his head and licked his lips. ‘Won’t she just! Hee hee! And she’ll see that with me she’ll have more than she ever believed possible! Why, I shall be a giant walking penis!’

‘You already are,’ said Sordiko Qualm.

‘Are? Are what, dearest? We should get going, lest we be late!’

‘Iskaral Pust, I don’t want you with me.’

‘You’re just saying that, but your eyes tell me different.’

‘What’s in my eyes,’ she replied, ‘could see me dangling on High Gallows. Assuming, of course, the entire city does not launch into a spontaneous celebration upon hearing of your painful death, and set me upon a throne of solid gold in acclamation.’

‘What is she going on about? No one knows I’m even here! And why would I want a gold throne? Why would she, when she can have me?’ He licked his lips again, and then revised his smile. ‘Lead on, my love. I promise to be most officious in this official meeting. After all, I am the Magus of the House of Shadow. Not a mere High Priest, but a Towering Priest! A Looming Priest! I shall venture no opinions of whatever, unless invited to, of course. No, I shall be stern and wise and leave all the jabbering to my sweet underling.’ He ducked and added, ‘With whom I shall be underlinging very shortly!’

Her hands twitched oddly, most fetchingly, in fact, and then surrender cascaded in her lovely eyes, thus providing Iskaral Pust with the perfect image to resurrect late at night under his blankets with Mogora snoring through all the spider balls filled with eggs lodged up her nose.

‘You will indeed be silent, Iskaral Pust. The one with whom I must speak does not tolerate fools, and I will make no effort to intercede should you prove fatally obnoxious.’ She paused and shook her head. ‘Then again, I cannot imagine you being anything but obnoxious. Perhaps I should retract my warning, in the hope that you will give such offence as to see you instantly obliterated. Whereupon I can then evict those foul bhokarala and your equally foul wife.’ Sudden surprise. ‘Listen to me! Those thoughts were meant to be private! Yours is a most execrable influence, Iskaral Pust.’

‘Soon we shall be as peas in a pod! Those spiny, sharp pods that stick to everything, especially crotch hair if one is forced to wee in the bushes.’ He reached out for her. ‘Hand in hand gliding down the streets!’

She seemed to recoil, but of course that was only his delicate and fragile self-esteem and its niggling worries, quickly buried beneath the plastering of yet another ingratiating smile on his face.

They escaped the temple through a little used side postern gate, slamming it shut just in time to avoid the squall of bhokarala excitedly pursuing them down the corridor.

Wretched sunshine in the streets, Sordiko Qualm seemingly indifferent to such atmospheric disregard – why, not a single cloud in sight! Worse than Seven Cities, with not a crevasse to be found anywhere.

Miserable crowds to thread through, a sea of ill-tempered faces snapping round at the gentle prod of his elbows and shoulders as he hurried to keep pace with the long-legged High Priestess. ‘Long legs, yes! Ooh. Ooh ooh ooh. Look at them scythe, see the waggle of those delicious—’

‘Quiet!’ she hissed over a shapely shoulder.

‘Shadowthrone understood. Yes he did. He saw the necessity of our meeting, her and me. The consummation of Shadow’s two most perfect mortals. The fated storybook love – the lovely innocent woman – but not too innocent, one hopes – and the stalwart man with his brave smile and warm thews. Er, brave thews and warm smile. Is “thews” even the right word? Muscled arms and such, anyway. Why, I am a mass of muscles, am I not? I can even make my ears flex, when the need presents itself – no point in showing off. She despises the strutting type, being delicate and all. And soon—’

‘Watch that damned elbow, runt!’

‘And soon the glory will be delivered unto us—’

‘—a damned apology!’

‘What?’

A hulking oaf of a man was forcing himself into Iskaral Pust’s path, his big flat face looking like something one found at the bottom of a nightsoil bucket. ‘I said I expect a damned apology, y’damned toad-faced ferret!’

Iskaral Pust snorted. ‘Oh, look, a hulking oaf of a man with a big flat face looking like something one finds at the bottom of a nightsoil bucket wants me to apologize! And I will, good sir, as soon as you apologize for your oafishness and your bucket-face – in fact, apologize for existing!’

The enormous apish hand that reached for his throat was so apish that it barely possessed a thumb, or so Iskaral Pust would later report to his wide-eyed murmuring audience of bhokarala.

Naturally, he ignored that hand and did some reaching out of his own, straight into the oaf’s crotch, where he squeezed and yanked back and forth and tugged and twisted, even as the brute folded up with a whimper and collapsed like a sack of melons on to the filthy cobbles, where he squirmed most pitifully.

Iskaral Pust stepped over him and hurried to catch up to Sordiko Qualm, who seemed to have increased her pace, her robes veritably flying out behind her.

‘The rudeness of some people!’ Iskaral Pust gasped.

They arrived at the gates of a modest estate close to Hinter’s Tower. The gates were locked and Sordiko Qualm tugged on a braided rope, triggering chiming from somewhere within.

They waited.

Chains rattled on the other side of the gates, and a moment later the solid doors creaked open, streams of rust drifting down from the hinges.

‘Not many visitors, I take it?’

‘From this moment on,’ said Sordiko Qualm, ‘you will be silent, Iskaral Pust.’

‘I will?’

‘You will.’

Whoever had opened the gates seemed to be hiding behind one of them, and the High Priestess strode in without any further ceremony. Iskaral Pust rushed in behind her to avoid being locked out, as both gates immediately began closing. As soon as he was clear he turned to upbraid the rude servant. And saw, working a lever to one side, a Seguleh.

‘Thank you, Thurule,’ said Sordiko. ‘Is the Lady in the garden?’

There was no reply.

The High Priestess nodded and walked on, along a winding path through an overgrown, weedy courtyard, its walls covered in wisteria in full bloom. Sordiko paused upon seeing a large snake coiled in the sun on the path, then edged carefully round it.

Iskaral crept after her, eyes on the nasty creature as it lifted its wedge-shaped head, tongue flicking out in curiosity or maybe hunger. He hissed at it as he passed and was pleased at its flinch.

The estate’s main house was small, elegant in a vaguely feminine way. Arched pathways went round it on both sides, vine-webbed tunnels blissfully draped in shadows. The High Priestess chose one and continued on towards the back.

As they drew closer they heard the murmur of voices.

The centre of the back garden was marked by a flagstone clearing in which stood a dozen full-sized bronze statues in a circle facing inward. Each statue wept water from its oddly shielded face down into the ringed trough it stood in, where water flowed ankle deep. The statues, Iskaral Pust saw with faint alarm as they drew closer, were of Seguleh, and the water that fell down did so from beneath masks sheathed in moss and verdigris. In the middle of the circle was a thin-legged, quaint table of copper and two chairs. In the chair facing them sat a man with long grey hair. There was blood-spatter on his plain shirt. A woman was seated with her back to them. Long, lustrous black hair shimmered, contrasting perfectly with the white linen of her blouse.

Upon seeing Sordiko Qualm and Iskaral Pust the man rose and bowed to his host. ‘Milady, until next time.’

A second, sketchier bow to the High Priestess and Iskaral, and then he was walking past.

Sordiko Qualm entered the circle and positioned herself to the right of the now vacated chair. To Iskaral Pust’s astonishment (and, a moment later, delight) she curtsied before her host. ‘Lady Envy.’

‘Do sit, my love,’ Lady Envy replied. Then, as Iskaral Pust hovered into view, seeing at last her exquisite face, so perfect a match to that lovely hair, and the poise of her, er, pose, there in that spindly chair with her legs crossed revealing the underside of one shapely thigh just begging for a caress, she scowled and said, ‘Perhaps I should get a sandbox installed for your foundling, High Priestess? Somewhere to play and soak up his drool.’

‘We would, alas, have to bury him in it.’

‘Interesting suggestion.’

Thurule then arrived with another chair. The similarity between him and the statues was somewhat disquieting, and Iskaral Pust shivered as he quickly bowed to Lady Envy then perched himself on the chair.

‘Her beauty challenges even that of the High Priestess! Why, imagine the two of them—’

‘Iskaral Pust!’ snapped Sordiko Qualm. ‘I did instruct you to be quiet, did I not?’

‘But I said nothing, my love! Nothing at all!’

‘I am not your love, nor will I ever be.’

He smiled, and then said, ‘I will play these two beauties off one another, driving both to spasms of jealousy with my charm, as it slides so easily from one to the other. Pluck here, brush there! Oh, this will be such a delight!’

‘I am of a mind to kill him,’ said Lady Envy to Sordiko Qualm.

‘Alas, he is the Magus of Shadow.’

‘You cannot be serious!’

‘Oh yes!’ cried Iskaral Pust. ‘She is! Furthermore, it is most propitious that I am here, for I know something you do not!’

‘Oh, goodness,’ sighed Lady Envy. ‘A beautiful morning thus shattered into ruin.’

‘Who was he?’ Iskaral demanded. ‘That man who was here? Who was he?’

‘Why should I tell you that?’

‘In exchange – you satisfy my curiosity and I yours – and so we shall satisfy each other and how do you like that, Sordiko Qualm? Hah!’

Lady Envy rubbed at her temples for a moment, as if overwhelmed, and then said, ‘That was the bard, Fisher kel Tath. A most unusual man. He…invites confession. There have been dire events in the city—’

‘None so dire as what I would tell you!’ said Iskaral Pust.

And now Sordiko was rubbing at her own brow.

‘It’s working!’

Lady Envy eyed him. ‘If I grant you this exchange, Magus, will you then restrain yourself, thus permitting the High Priestess and me to conduct our conversation?’

‘My restraint is guaranteed, Lady Envy. Of course, I make this promise only if you do the same.’

‘Whatever do you mean?’

‘Lady Envy, I arrived on a ship.’

‘What of it?’

‘A ship owned by a most delicious woman—’

‘Oh, not another one!’ moaned Sordiko Qualm.

‘The poor thing,’ said Lady Envy.

‘Hardly.’ Iskaral Pust leaned back in his chair, tilting it up on its legs so that his view could encompass both women. ‘How I dream of such moments as this! See how they hang on my every word! I have them, I have them!’

‘What is wrong with this man, High Priestess?’

‘I could not begin to tell you.’

Iskaral Pust examined his hands, his fingernails – but that made him slightly nauseous, since the bhokarala were in the habit of sucking on his fingertips when he slept at night, leaving them permanently wrinkled, mangled and decidedly unpleasant, so he looked away, casually, and found himself staring at Thurule, which wasn’t a good idea either, so, over there, at that flower – safe enough, he supposed – until it was time at last to meet Lady Envy’s extraordinary eyes. ‘Yes,’ he drawled, ‘I see the similarity at last, although you were the victor in the war of perfection. Not by much, but triumphant none the less and for that I can only applaud and admire and all that. In any case, resident even at this very moment, on the ship, in the harbour, is none other than your beloved sister, Spite!’

‘I thought so!’ Lady Envy was suddenly on her feet, trembling in her…excitement?

Iskaral Pust sniggered. ‘Yes, I play at this until they play no more, and all truths are revealed, as sensibilities are rocked back and forth, as shock thunders through the cosmos, as the shadows themselves explode into all existence! For am I not the Magus of Shadow? Oh, but I am, I am!’ He then leaned forward with an expression of gravid dismay. ‘Are you not delighted, Lady Envy? Shall I hasten to her to forward your invitation to visit this wondrous garden? Instruct me as your servant, please! Whatever you wish, I will do! Of course I won’t! I’ll do whatever I want to. Let her think otherwise – maybe it’ll bring some colour back to her face, maybe it’ll calm the storm in her eyes, maybe it’ll stop the water in this trough from boiling – impressive detail, by the way, now, what should I say next?’

Sordiko Qualm and Lady Envy never did get to their conversation that day.

 

Grainy-eyed and exhausted, Cutter went in search of somewhere to eat breakfast. Once his belly was full, he’d head back to the Phoenix Inn and collapse on his bed upstairs. This was the extent of his tactical prowess and even achieving that had been a struggle. He would be the last man to downplay the extraordinary variety of paths a life could take, and there were few blessings he could derive from having come full circle – from his journey and the changes wrought in himself between the Darujhistan of old and this new place – and yet the contrast with the fate that had taken Challice Vidikas had left him numbed, disorientated and feeling lost.

He found an empty table in the half-courtyard restaurant facing Borthen Park, an expensive establishment that reminded him he was fast running out of coin, and sat waiting for one of the servers to take note of him. The staff were Rhivi one and all, three young women dressed in some new obscure fashion characterized by long swishing skirts of linen streaked in indigo dye, and tight black leather vests with nothing underneath. Their hair was bound up in knotted braids, revealing bisected clam-shells stitched over their ears. While this latter affectation was quaint the most obvious undesirable effect was that twice one of the servers sauntered past him and did not hear his attempts to accost her. He resolved to stick out a leg the next time, then was shocked at such an ungracious impulse.

At last he caught the attention of one of them and she approached. ‘A pot of tea, please, and whatever you’re serving for breakfast.’

Seeing his modest attire, she glanced away as she asked, in a bored tone, ‘Fruit breakfast or meat breakfast? Eggs? Bread? Honey? What kind of tea – we have twenty-three varieties.’

He frowned up at her. ‘Er, you decide.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘What did you have this morning?’

‘Flatcakes, of course. What I always have.’

‘Do you serve those here?’

‘Of course not.’

‘What kind of tea did you drink?’

‘I didn’t. I drank beer.’

‘Rhivi custom?’

‘No,’ she replied, still looking away, ‘it’s my way of dealing with the excitement of my day.’

‘Gods below, just bring me something. Meat, bread, honey. No fancy rubbish with the tea, either.’

‘Fine,’ she snapped, flouncing off in a billow of skirts.

Cutter squeezed the bridge of his nose in an effort to fend off a burgeoning headache. He didn’t want to think about the night just past, the bell after bell spent in that graveyard, sitting on that stone bench with Challice all too close by his side. Seeing, as the dawn’s light grew, what the handful of years had done to her, the lines of weariness about her eyes, the lines bracketing her mouth, the maturity revealed in a growing heaviness, her curves more pronounced than they had once been. The child he had known was still there, he told himself, beneath all of that. In the occasional gesture, in the hint of a soft laugh at one point. No doubt she saw the same in him – the layers of hardness, the vestiges of loss and pain, the residues of living.

He was not the same man. She was not the same woman. Yet they had sat as if they had once known each other. As if they were old friends. Whatever childish hopes and vain ambitions had sparked the space between them years ago, they were deftly avoided, even as their currents coalesced into something romantic, something oddly nostalgic.

It had been the lively light ever growing in her eyes that most disturbed Cutter, especially since he had felt his own answering pleasure – in the hazy reminiscences they had played with, in the glow lifting between them on that bench that had nothing to do with the rising sun.

There was nothing right about any of this. She was married, after all. She was nobility – but no, that detail was without relevance, for what she had proposed had nothing to do with matters of propriety, was in no way intended to invite public scrutiny.

She is bored. She wants a lover. She wants what she could have had but didn’t take. A second chance, that’s what she wants.

Do second chances even exist?

This would be…sordid. Despicable. How could he even contemplate such a thing?

Maybe Apsalar saw all too well. Saw right into me, to the soul that was less than it should have been, to the will that was weak. I do not stand before a woman, do I? No, I fall into her arms. I change shape to fit each one, to make things snug, as if matching their dreams is the only path I know into their hearts.

Maybe she was right to walk away.

Was this all that Challice wanted? An amusing diversion to alleviate the drudgery of her comfortable life? He admitted to some suspicion that things were not that simple. There had been a darker current, as if to take him meant something more to Challice. Proof of her own descent, perhaps. Her own fall. Or something else, something even more pernicious.

The Rhivi server had brought him a pot of tea, a plate of fresh bread, a dipping jar of honey, and a bowl of diced fruit. He now stared at the array on the table in front of him, trying without success to recall the moment it had all arrived.

‘I need you,’ she had said, the words cutting through his exhaustion as the sky began to show its colour. ‘Crokus. Cutter. Whatever name you want. I knew it the moment I saw you. I had been walking, most of the night, just walking. I didn’t know it, but I was looking for someone. My life’s become a question that I thought no one could answer. Not my husband, not anyone. And then, there you were, standing in this cemetery, like a ghost.’

Oh, he knew about ghosts, the way they could haunt one day and night. The way they found places to hide in one’s own soul. Yes, he knew about ghosts. ‘Challice—’

‘You loved me once. But I was young. A fool. Now, I am neither young nor a fool. This time, I won’t turn away.’

‘Your husband—’

‘Doesn’t care what I do, or with whom I do it.’

‘Why did you marry him then?’

She had looked away, and it was some time before she replied. ‘When he saved my life, that night in the garden of Simtal’s estate, it was as if he then owned it. My life. He owned it because he saved it. He wasn’t alone in believing that, either. So did I. All at once, it was as if I no longer had any choice. He possessed my future, to do with as he pleased.’

‘Your father—’

‘Should have counselled me?’ She laughed, but it was a bitter laugh. ‘You didn’t see it, but I was spoiled. I was obnoxious, Crokus. Maybe he tried, I don’t really recall. But I think he was happy to see me go.’

No, this was not the Challice he had known.

‘House Vidikas owns an annexe, a small building down by the docks. It’s almost never used. There are two levels. On the main floor it’s just storage, filled with the shipwright’s leavings after the trader boat was finished. On the upper level is where the man lived while under contract. I’ve…seen it, and I have a key.’

Seen it? He wondered at her hesitation in that admission. But not for long. She’s used it before. She’s using it still. For trysts just like the one she’s talking about right now. Challice, why are you bothering with me?

At his hesitation she leaned closer, one hand on his arm. ‘We can just meet there, Crokus. To talk. A place where we can talk about anything, where there’s no chance of being seen. We can just talk.’

He knew, of course, that such a place was not for talking.

And, this evening, he would meet her there.

What was he—‘Ow!’

The server had just cuffed him in the side of the head. Astonished, he stared up at her.

‘If I go to all that work to make you a damned breakfast, you’d better eat it!’

‘Sorry! I was just thinking—’

‘It’s easier when you’re chewing. Now, don’t make me have to come back here.’

He glared at her as she walked away. If I was nobleborn she’d never have done that. He caught the eye of a man sitting at a nearby table.

‘You have a way with women, I see.’

‘Hah hah.’

 

Events and moments can deliver unexpected mercy, and though she did not know it, such mercy was granted to Scillara at that instant, for she was not thinking of Cutter. Instead, she was sitting beside the Malazan historian, Duiker, fighting an instinct to close her arms round him and so in some small measure ease his silent grief. All that held her back, she knew, was the fear that he would not welcome her sympathy. That, and the distinct possibility that she was misreading him.

To live a hard life was to make solid and impregnable every way in, until no openings remained and the soul hid in darkness, and no one else could hear its screams, its railing at injustice, its long, agonizing stretches of sadness. Hardness without created hardness within.

Sadness was, she well knew, not something that could be cured. It was not, in fact, a failing, not a flaw, not an illness of spirit. Sadness was never without reason, and to assert that it marked some kind of dysfunction did little more than prove ignorance or, worse, cowardly evasiveness in the one making the assertion. As if happiness was the only legitimate way of being. As if those failing at it needed to be locked away, made soporific with medications; as if the causes of sadness were merely traps and pitfalls in the proper climb to blissful contentment, things to be edged round or bridged, or leapt across on wings of false elation.

Scillara knew better. She had faced her own sadness often enough. Even when she discovered her first means of escaping it, in durhang, she’d known that such an escape was simply a flight from feelings that existed legitimately. She’d just been unable to permit herself any sympathy for such feelings, because to do so was to surrender to their truth.

Sadness belonged. As rightful as joy, love, grief and fear. All conditions of being.

Too often people mistook the sadness in others for self-pity, and in so doing revealed their own hardness of spirit, and more than a little malice.

The taproom stank of blood, shit, piss and vomit. Blend was recovering in her bedroom upstairs, as close to death as she’d ever been, but the worst was past, now. Barathol and Chaur had gone down to the cellars below to help Picker and Antsy bury the bodies of their comrades. The blacksmith’s grief at the death of his new friend, Mallet, was too raw for Scillara to face – he was in no way a hard man and this jarred her frail assembly of beliefs, for he should have been. Yet had she not seen the same breathless vulnerability when he’d struggled to bring Chaur back to life after the huge simpleton had drowned?

‘He is…’ Duiker began, and then frowned, ‘a remarkable man, I think.’

Scillara blinked. ‘Who?’

The historian shook his head, unwilling to meet her eyes. ‘I should be getting drunk.’

‘Never works,’ she said.

‘I know.’

They were silent again, moments stretching on.

We just stumbled into these people. A crazy contest at a restaurant. We were just getting to know them, to treasure each and every one of them.

Mallet was a healer. A Bridgeburner. In his eyes there had burned some kind of self-recrimination, a welter of guilt. A healer tortured by something he could not heal. A list of failures transformed into failings. Yet he had been a gentle man. That soft, oddly high voice – which they would never hear again.

For him, Barathol had wept.

Bluepearl was a mage. Amusingly awkward, kind of wide-eyed, which hardly fit all that he’d been through, because he too had been a Bridgeburner. Antsy had railed over the man’s corpse, a sergeant dressing down a soldier so incompetent as to be dead. Antsy had been offended, indignant, even as anguish glittered in his bright blue eyes. ‘You damned fool!’ he’d snarled. ‘You Hood-damned useless idiotic fool!’ When he’d made to kick the body Picker had roughly pulled him back, almost off his feet, and Antsy had lurched off to slam the toe of one boot into the planks of the counter.

They looked older now. Picker, Antsy. Wan and red-eyed, shoulders slumped, not bothering to rinse the dried blood from their faces, hands and forearms.

Duiker alone seemed unchanged, as if these last deaths had been little more than someone pissing into a wide, deep river. His sadness was an absolute thing, and he never came up for air. She wanted to take him in her arms and shake the life back into him. Yet she would not do that, for she knew such a gesture would be a selfish one, serving only her own needs. As much, perhaps, as her initial impulse to embrace him in sympathy.

Because she too felt like weeping. For having dragged the historian out into the city – away from what had happened here the past night. For having saved his life.

When they’d first arrived back; when they’d seen the bodies on the street; when they’d stepped inside to look upon the carnage, Duiker had shot her a single glance, and in that she had read clearly the thought behind it. See what you took me away from? A thought so far away from the sentiment of gratitude that it might as well be in another realm.

The truth was obvious. He would rather have been here. He would rather have died last night. Instead, interfering bitch that she was, Scillara had refused him that release. Had instead left him in this sad life that would not end. That glance had been harder, more stinging, than a savage slap in the face.

She should have gone below. Should be standing there in that narrow, cramped cellar, holding Chaur’s hand, listening to them all grieve, each in their own way. Antsy’s curses. Picker at his side, so close as to be leaning on him, but otherwise expressionless beyond the bleakness of her glazed stare. Barathol and his glistening beard, his puffy eyes, the knotted muscles ravaging his brow.

The door opened suddenly, sending a shaft of daylight through suspended dust, and in stepped the grey-haired bard.

She and Duiker watched as the man shut the door behind him and replaced the solid iron bar in its slots – how he had ended up with that bar in his hands was a mystery, yet neither Scillara nor the historian commented.

The man approached, and she saw that he too had not bothered to change his clothes, wearing the old blood with the same indifference she had seen in the others.

There’d been a half-dozen bodies, maybe more, at the stage. A passing observation from Blend implicated the bard in that slaughter, but Scillara had trouble believing that. This man was gaunt, old. Yet her eyes narrowed on the blood spatter on his shirt.

He sat down opposite them, met Duiker’s eyes, and said, ‘Whatever they have decided to do, Historian, they can count me in.’

‘So they did try for you, too,’ said Scillara.

He met her gaze. ‘Scillara, they attacked everyone in the room. They killed innocents.’

‘I don’t think they’ll do anything,’ said Duiker, ‘except sell up and leave.’

‘Ah,’ the bard said, then sighed. ‘No matter. I will not be entirely on my own in any case.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I called in an old favour, Historian. Normally, I am not one to get involved in…things.’

‘But you’re angry,’ Scillara observed, recognizing at last the odd flatness in the old man’s eyes, the flatness that came before – before cold killing. This poet has claws indeed. And now I look at him, he’s not as old as I thought he was.

‘I am, yes.’

From below there came a splintering crack followed by shouts of surprise. All three at the table swiftly rose. Duiker leading the way, they ran to the kitchen, then down the narrow stairs to the cellar. Torchlight wavered at the far end of the elongated storage room, casting wild shadows on a bizarre scene. Pungent fluid sloshed on the earthen floor, seeming reluctant to drain, and in a half-circle stood the two Malazans, Barathol and Chaur, all facing one side wall where a large cask had shattered.

Antsy, Scillara surmised, had just kicked it.

Splitting it open, in a cascade of pickling juice, revealing to them all the object that that liquid had so perfectly preserved.

Folded up with knees beneath chin, arms wrapped round the shins.

Still wearing a mask on which four linear, vertical barbs marked a row across the forehead.

The bard grunted. ‘I’d often wondered,’ he said under his breath, ‘where the old ones ended up.’

The fluids were now seeping into the floor, along the edges of the freshly dug mounds.

A hundred stones, a cavort of ripples, the city in its life which is one life which is countless lives. To ignore is to deny brotherhood, sisterhood, the commonality that, could it be freed, would make the world a place less cruel, less vicious. But who has time for that? Rush this way, plunge that way, evade every set of eyes, permit no recognition in any of the faces flashing past. The dance of trepidation is so very tiresome.

Hold this gaze, if you dare, in the tracking of these tremulous ripples, the lives, the lives! See Stonny Menackis, wrought with recrimination, savaged by guilt. She sleeps badly or not at all (who would risk peering into her dark bedroom at night, for fear of seeing the gleam of staring eyes?). She trembles, her nerves like strings of fire, whilst poor Murillio stands apart, desperate to comfort her, to force open all that had now closed between them.

And in the courtyard a mob of unattended young savages wail about with wooden swords and it’s a miracle no one’s yet lost an eye or dropped to the pavestones with a crushed trachea.

While, in a workroom not too far away, Tiserra sits at the potter’s wheel and stares into space as the lump of clay spins round and round to the rhythm of her pumping foot – struck frozen, shocked by the stunning realization of the sheer depth of her love for her husband. A love so fierce that she is terrified, comprehending at last the extent of her vulnerability.

The sense is a wonder. It is delicious and terrifying. It is ecstatic.

Smile with her. Oh, do smile with her!

Whilst at this very moment, the object of Tiserra’s devotion strides into the courtyard of the Varada estate, his new place of employment. His mind, which had been calm in the course of his walk from home, now stirs with faint unease. He had sent Scorch and Leff home, and he had stood at the gate watching them stumble off like undead, and this had made him think of moments of greatest danger – just before dawn was the moment to strike, if one intended such violence – but who would bother? What was this mysterious Lady Varada up to anyway?

A seat on the Council, true, but was that sufficient cause for assassination? And why was he thinking of such things at all? There’d been rumours – picked up at the drunk baker’s stall – that the night just past should have belonged to the Assassins’ Guild but had turned sour for the hired killers and oh, wasn’t that regrettable? A moment of silence then pass the dumplings, if you please.

Now he paused in the courtyard, seeing the latest employees, his peculiar charges, with their dubious pasts and potentially alarming motivations. Reunited, yes, with the castellan, with the infamous Studious Lock. Madrun and Lazan Door were tossing knuckles against the compound wall to his right. Technically, their shift was over, although Torvald Nom suspected that this game of theirs had been going on for some time. Another word of warning to them? No, his spirits were already plunging, as they were wont to do when he awakened to a sense that something was being pulled over him, that he was being connived around – as his mother used to say when with one foot she pinned young Torvald to the floor and stared down at him as he squirmed and thrashed (mostly an act, of course; she weighed about as much as a guard dog, without the bite). Connived around, dear boy, and when I get to the bottom of things and all the trouble’s on the table, why, who will I find hiding in the closet?

His sweet mother never quite mastered the extended metaphor, bless her.

Suddenly too despondent to so much as announce his arrival, Torvald Nom headed for his office, eager to climb over the desk and plant himself in the chair, where he could doze until the sounding of the lunch chime. At least the cooks she’d employed knew their business.

Leave him there, now, and ride one last ripple, out beyond the city, west along the lakeshore, out to a dusty, smoky pit where the less privileged laboured through their shortened lives to keep such creatures as Gorlas Vidikas and Humble Measure at the level of comfort and entitlement they held to be righteous. And, to be fair, they laboured as well to contribute to the general feeling of civilization, which is normally measured by technical wherewithal, a sense of progression and the notion of structural stability, little of which said labourers could themselves experience, save vicariously.

The child Harllo has been lashed ten times for being places he wasn’t supposed to be, and this punishment was fierce enough to leave him prostrate, lying on his stomach on his cot with thick unguents slowly melting into the wounds on his back.

Bainisk had received a whip to his left shoulder which would result in the third such scar for dereliction of his responsibilities as overseer in Chuffs, and he now came to sit beside Harllo, studying his young charge in a silence that stretched.

Until at last Harllo said, ‘I’m sorry, Bainisk—’

‘Never mind that. I just want to know what you were up to. I didn’t think you’d keep secrets from me, I really didn’t. Venaz is saying “I told you so”. He’s saying you’re no good, Mole, and that I should just push you on to the dredge crews.’

The young ones did not live long in the dredge crews. ‘Venaz wants to be your best mole again.’

‘I know that, only he’s grown too big.’

‘People like him never like people like me,’ Harllo said. This was not a whine, just an observation.

‘Because you’re smarter than he is and his being older means nothing, means it’s worse even, because in your head you’re already past him, past us all, maybe. Listen, Harllo, I seen ones like you before, coming in, going through. They get beaten down, beaten stupid. Or they end up getting killed. Maybe they try to run, maybe they stand up to the pit bosses over something. Your smartness is what’s going to ruin you, you understand?’

‘Yes, Bainisk. I’m sorry.’

‘Why’d you sneak back into the tunnels?’

He could tell him everything. At this moment, it seemed like the right thing to do. But Harllo no longer trusted himself with such feelings. Explaining was dangerous. It could get them all into even more trouble.

‘You was carrying bones,’ said Bainisk. ‘Those bones, they’re cursed.’

‘Why?’

‘They just are.’

‘But why, Bainisk?’

‘Because they were found where no bones belong, that’s why. So far down it’s impossible that anybody buried them – and besides, who’d bury dead animals? No, those bones, they’re from demons that live in the rock and in the dark. Right down with the roots of the earth. You don’t touch them, Harllo, and you never ever try putting them back.’

So this was what Bainisk suspected him of doing, then? ‘I was…I was scared,’ Harllo said. ‘It was as if we were disturbing graves or something. And that’s why there’ve been so many accidents lately—’

‘Them accidents are because the new boss is pushing us too hard, into the tunnels with the cracked ceilings and the bad air – the kind of air that makes you see things that ain’t real.’

‘I think maybe that’s what happened to me.’

‘Maybe, but,’ and he rose, ‘I don’t think so.’

He walked away then. Tomorrow, Harllo was expected to return to work. He was frightened of that, since his back hurt so, but he would do it, because it would make things easier for Bainisk who’d been punished when he shouldn’t have been. Harllo would work extra hard, no matter the pain and all; he would work extra hard so Bainisk would like him again.

Because, in this place, with no one liking you, there didn’t seem much point in going on.

Lying on his stomach, fresh into another year of life, Harllo felt no ripples reach him from the outside world. Instead, he felt alone. Maybe he’d lost a friend for ever and that felt bad, too. Maybe his only friend was a giant skeleton in the depths of the mines – who with new legs might have walked away, disappeared into the dark, and all Harllo had to remember him by was a handful of tools hidden beneath his cot.

For a child, thinking of the future was a difficult thing, since most thoughts of the future built on memories of the past, whether in continuation or serving as contrast, and a child held few memories of his or her past. The world was truncated forward and back. Measure it from his toes to the top of his head, tousle the mop of hair in passing, and when nothing else is possible, hope for the best.

 

In the faint phosphor glow streaking the rock, a T’lan Imass climbed to his feet and stood like someone who had forgotten how to walk. The thick, curved femurs of the emlava forced him into a half-lean, as if he was about to launch himself forward, and the ridged ball of the long bones, where it rested in the socket of each hip, made grinding sounds as he fought for balance.

Unfamiliar sorcery, this. He had observed how connecting tissue had re-knitted, poorly at first, to these alien bones, and he had come to understand that such details were a kind of conceit. The Ritual forced animation with scant subtlety, and whatever physical adjustments occurred proceeded at a snail’s pace, although their present incompleteness seemed to have no effect on his ability to settle his weight on these new legs, even to move them into his first lurching step, then his second.

The grinding sounds would fade in time, he thought, as ball and socket were worn into a match, although he suspected he would never stand as erect as he once had.

No matter. Dev’ad Anan Tol was mobile once more. And as he stood, a flood of memories rose within him in a dark tide.

Leading to that last moment, with the Jaghut Tyrant, Raest, standing before him, blood-smeared mace in one hand, as Dev’ad writhed on the stone floor, legs for ever shattered.

No, he had not been flung from a ledge. Sometimes, it was necessary to lie.

He wondered if the weapons he had forged, so long ago now, still remained hidden in their secret place. Not far. After a moment, the T’lan Imass set out. Feet scraping, his entire body pitching from side to side.

Raest’s unhuman face twisted indignant. Outraged. Slaves were ever slaves. None could rise to challenge the master. None could dare plot the master’s downfall, none could get as close as Dev’ad had done. Yes, an outrage, a crime against the laws of nature itself.

‘I break you, T’lan. I leave you here, in this pit of eternal darkness. To die. To rot. None shall know a word of your mad ambition. All knowledge of you shall fade, shall vanish. Nothing of you shall remain. Know this, could I keep you alive down here for ever, I would – and even that torture would not suffice. In my enforced indifference, T’lan, lies mercy.’

See me now. I have outlived you, Raest. And there, old friend, lies my mercy.

He came to the secret place, a deep crack in the wall, into which he reached. His hand closed about a heavy, rippled blade, and Dev’ad dragged the weapon out.

The T’lan knew stone, stone that was water and water that was stone. Iron belonged to the Jaghut.

He held up the sword he had made countless thousands of years ago. Yes, it had the form of flint, the ridges encircling every flake struck from the edge, the undulating modulations of parallel flaking and the twin flutes running the length to either side of a wavy dorsal spine. The antler base that formed the grip was now mineralized, a most comforting and pleasing weight.

The form of flint indeed. And yet this sword was made of iron, tempered in the holy fires of Tellann. Impervious to rust, to decay, the huge weapon was the hue of first night, the deep blue sky once the final light of the drowned sun had faded. In the moment of the stars’ birth, yes, that was the colour of this blade.

He leaned it point down against the wall and reached into the crack again, drawing out a matching knife – hefty as a shortsword. The hide sheaths had long since rotted to dust, but he would make new ones soon.

The Tyrant of old was gone. Somewhere close, then, waited an empty throne.

Waiting for Dev’ad Anan Tol. Who had once been crippled but was crippled no longer.

He raised both weapons high, the dagger in his right hand, the sword in his left. Slashes of first night, in the moment of the stars’ birth. Iron in the guise of stone, iron in the guise of stone that is water and water that is stone and stone that is iron. Jaghut tyranny in the hands of a T’lan Imass.

The gods are fools, alas, in believing every piece in the game is known. That the rules are fixed and accepted by all; that every wager is counted and marked, exposed and glittering on the table. The gods lay out their perfect paths to the perfect thrones, each one representing perfect power.

The gods are fools because it never occurs to them that not everyone uses paths.