The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (118 page)

Felisin's hand stole into the sands beside the pallet and probed until it found the grip of the dagger. She willed calm into her own breathing, though she could do nothing to slow her hammering heart. He was asleep. He did not stir.

She slipped the blade free, shifting her grasp to angle the point inward. She drew a deep breath, held it.

His hand caught her wrist the instant she began her thrust. He rose fluidly, wrenching her arm around and twisting her until she rolled onto her stomach beneath him. His weight pinned her down.

Baudin squeezed her wrist until the dagger fell free. “You think I don't check my gear, lass?” he whispered. “You think you're a mystery to me? Who else would steal one of my throat-stickers?”

“You left Beneth to die.” She couldn't see his face, and was almost glad for that when he replied.

“No, lass. I killed the bastard myself. Snapped his neck like a reed. He deserved more pain, something slower, but there wasn't any time for that. He didn't deserve the mercy, but he got it.”

“Who
are
you?”

“Never done a man or a boy. But I'll pretend. I'm good at pretending.”

“I'll scream—”

“Heboric's sleep isn't the kind you can shake him out of. He dreams. He thrashes about. I've slapped him and he didn't stir. So scream away. What are screams anyway? Voicing your outrage—didn't think you were capable of outrage any more, Felisin.”

She felt the hopelessness flood through her body.
It's just more of the same. I can survive it, I can even enjoy it. If I try
.

Baudin rose from her. She writhed onto her back, stared at him. He'd collected the dagger and had backed to the entrance. He smiled. “Sorry if I disappointed you, but I wasn't in the mood.”

“Then why—”

“To see if you're still what you were.” He did not need to voice his conclusion. “Get some sleep, lass.”

Alone, Felisin curled up on the pallet, numbness filling her.
To see if you're still…yes, you still are. Baudin knew that already. He just wanted to show you to yourself, girl. You thought you were using him but he was using you. He knew what you planned. Think on that. Think on it long and hard
.

 

Hood came striding out of the waves, the reaper of carved-out souls. He'd waited long enough, his amusement at their suffering losing its flavor. Time had come for the Gates.

Feeling bleached and withered as the dead driftwood around her, Felisin sat facing the straits. Clouds flickered over the water, lightning danced to the rumbling beat of thunder. Spume rose fierce along the line of the reef, launching blue-white explosions into the darkness.

An hour earlier Heboric and Baudin had come back from their walk up the beach, dragging between them the prow of a shattered boat. It was old, but they'd talked about building a raft. The discussion had the sound of pointless musing—no one had the strength for such a task. They would start dying by dawn, and they all knew it.

Felisin realized that Baudin would be the last to die. Unless Heboric's god returned to scoop up his wayward child. Felisin finally began to believe she would be the first. No vengeance achieved. Not Baudin, not sister Tavore, not the entire Hood-warped Malazan Empire.

A strange wave of lightning leaped up beyond the breakers hammering the reef. It played out tumbling and pitching as if wrapped around an invisible log leagues long and thirty paces thick. The crackling spears struck the sheets of spume with a searing hiss. Thunder slapped the beach hard enough to shiver the sand. The lightning rolled on, straight toward them.

Heboric was suddenly at her side, his froglike face split wide in a grimace of fear. “That's sorcery, lass! Run!”

Her laugh was a harsh bark. She made no move. “It'll be quick, old man!”

Wind howled.

Heboric spun to face the approaching wave. He snarled a curse that was flung away by the growing roar, then interposed himself between Felisin and the sorcery. Baudin crouched down beside her, his face lit in a blue glow that intensified as the lightning reached the shore, then rolled up to them.

It shattered around Heboric as if he was a spire of rock. The old man staggered, his tattoos a tracery of fire that flared bright, then vanished.

The sorcery was gone. For all its threat, it swiftly died up and down the beach.

Heboric sagged, settling on his knees in the sand. “Not me,” he said in the sudden silence. “Otataral. Of course. Nothing to fear. Nothing at all.”

“There!” Baudin shouted.

A boat had somehow cleared the reef and now raced toward them, its lone sail aflame. Sorcery stabbed at the craft from all sides like vipers, then fell away as the boat neared shore. A moment later it scraped bottom and slid to a halt, canting to one side as it settled. Two figures were at the ratlines in an instant, cutting away the burning sail. The cloth swept down like a wing of flame, instantly doused as it struck the water. Two other men leaped down and waded onto shore.

“Which one's Duiker?” Felisin asked.

Heboric shook his head. “Neither, but the one on the left is a mage.”

“How can you tell?”

He made no reply.

The two men swiftly approached, both staggering in exhaustion. The mage, a small, red-faced man wearing a singed cape, was the first to speak—in Malazan. “Thank the gods! We need your help.”

Somewhere beyond the reef waited an unknown mage—a man unconnected to the rebellion, a stranger trapped within his own nightmare. As the vortex of a savage storm, he had risen from the deep on the second day out. Kulp had never before felt such unrestrained power. Its very wildness was all that saved them, as the madness that gripped the sorcerer tore and flayed his warren. There was no control, the warren's wounds gushed, the winds howled with the mage's own shrieks.

The
Ripath
was flung about like a piece of bark in a cascading mountain stream. At first Kulp countered with illusions—believing he and his companions were the object of the mage's wrath—but it quickly became apparent that the insane wielder was oblivious to them, fighting an altogether different war. Kulp contracted his own warren into a protective shell around
Ripath
, then, as Gesler and his crewmen struggled to keep the craft upright, he crouched down to withstand the onslaught.

The unleashed sorcery instinctively hunted them and no illusion could deceive something so thoroughly mindless. They became its lodestone, the attacks endless and wildly fluctuating in strength, battering Kulp relentlessly for two days and nights.

They were driven westward, toward the Otataral shores. The mage's power assailed that coastline, with little effect, and Kulp finally began to make sense of it—the mage's mind must have been destroyed by Otataral. Likely an escaped miner, a prisoner of war who had scaled the walls only to find he took his prison with him. Losing control of his warren, it had then taken control of him. It surged with power far beyond anything the mage himself had ever wielded.

The realization left Kulp horrified. The storm threatened to fling them onto that shore. Was the same fate awaiting him?

Gesler and his crew's skill was all that kept the
Ripath
from striking the reef. For eleven hours they managed to sail parallel to the razor-sharp rocks beneath the breakers.

On the third night Kulp sensed a change. The coastline on their right—which he had felt as an impenetrable wall of negation, the bloodless presence of Otataral—suddenly
…softened
. A power resided there, bruising the will of the magic-deadening ore, pushing it back on all sides.

There was a cut in the reef. It gave them, Kulp decided, their only chance. Rising from where he crouched amidships, he shouted to Gesler. The corporal grasped his meaning instantly, with desperate relief. They had been losing the struggle to exhaustion, to the overwhelming stress of watching sorcery speed toward them, only to wash over Kulp's protective magic—a protection they could see weakening with every pass.

Another attack came, even as they swept between the jagged breakers, sundering Kulp's resistance. Flame lit the storm-jib, the lines, the sail. Had any of the men been dry they would have become beacons of fire. As it was, the sorcery swept over them in a wave of hissing steam, then was gone, striking the shore and rolling up the beach until it fizzled out.

Kulp had half expected that the strangely blunted effect on this part of shore was in some way connected to the man he was sent to find, and so was not surprised to see three figures emerge from the gloom beyond the beach. Weary as he was, something about the way the three stood in relation to each other jangled alarms in his head. Circumstances had forced them together, and experience cared little for the bonds of friendship. Yet it was more than that.

The motionless ground beneath his feet was making him dizzy. When Kulp's weary gaze fell on the handless priest, a wave of relief washed through him, and there was nothing ironic in his call for help.

The ex-priest answered it with a dried-out laugh.

“Get them water,” the mage said to Gesler. The corporal pulled his eyes from Heboric with difficulty, then nodded and spun about. Truth had swung down to inspect
Ripath's
hull for damage, while Stormy sat perched on the prow, his crossbow cradled in his arms. The corporal shouted for one of the water casks. Truth clambered back into the boat to retrieve it.

“Where's Duiker?” Heboric asked.

Kulp frowned. “Not sure. We went our separate ways in a village north of Hissar. The Apocalypse—”

“We know. Dosin Pali was ablaze the night we escaped the pit.”

“Yeah, well.” Kulp studied the other two. The big man lacking an ear met his eyes coolly. Despite the ravages of deprivation evident in his bearing, there was a measure of self-control to him that made the mage uneasy. He was clearly more than the scarred dockyard thug he first took him for.

The young girl was no less disturbing, though in a way Kulp could not define. He sighed.
Worry about it later. Worry about everything later
.

Truth arrived with the water cask, Gesler a step behind him.

The three escapees converged on the young marine as he breached the cask, then held the tin cup that was tied to it and splashed it full of water.

“Go slow on that,” Kulp said. “Sips, not gulps.”

As he watched them drink, the mage sought out his warren. It felt slippery, elusive, yet he was able to take hold, stealing power to bolster his senses. When he looked again upon Heboric he almost shouted in surprise. The ex-priest's tattoos swarmed with a life of their own: flickering waves of power raced across his body and spun a handlike projection beyond the stump of his left wrist. That ghost-hand reached into a warren, was clenched as if gripping a tether. A wholly different power pulsed around his right stump, shot through with veins of green and Otataral red, as if two snakes writhed in mortal combat. The blunting effect arose exclusively from the green bands, radiating outward with what felt like conscious will. That it was strong enough to push back the effects of the Otataral was astonishing.

Denul healers often described diseases as waging war, with the flesh as the battleground, which their warren gave them sight to see. Kulp wondered if he wasn't seeing something similar.
But not a disease. A battle of warrens—Fener's own, linked by one ghostly hand, the other ensnared by Otataral, yet waxing nonetheless—a warren I can't recognize, a force alien to every sense I possess
. He blinked. Heboric was staring at him, a faint smile on his broad mouth.

“What in Hood's name has happened to you?” Kulp demanded.

The ex-priest shrugged. “I wish I knew.”

The three marines now approached Heboric. “I'm Gesler,” the corporal said in gruff deference. “We're all that's left of the Boar Cult.”

The old man's smile faded. “That would make three too many.” He turned away and strode off to retrieve a pair of backpacks.

Gesler stared after him, expressionless.

That man recovers damned quick
. The boy Truth had gasped at the harsh words of a man he took to be his god's priest. Kulp saw something crumbling into ruins behind the lad's light-blue eyes. Stormy revealed the dark clouds that likely gave reason to his name, but he laid a hand on Truth's shoulder a moment before facing the one-eared man.

“Your hands keep hovering over those hidden blades and I'm gonna get nervous,” he said in a low growl, shifting grip on his crossbow.

“That's Baudin,” the young woman said. “He murders people. Old women, rivals. You name them, he's got their blood on his hands. Isn't that right, Baudin?” Without awaiting a reply she went on, “I'm Felisin, House of Paran. Last in the line. But don't let any of that fool you.”

She did not elaborate.

Heboric returned with a pack slung over each forearm. He set them down, then moved close to Kulp. “We're in no shape to help you, but after crossing this damned desert the thought of death by drowning is oddly appealing.” He stared out over the thrashing waves. “What's out there?”