The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (25 page)

A tremor ran through the young thief. What had he stumbled on? An assassin had almost skewered him, and then had himself been murdered. A Guild war? If so, it made the rooftops a risky place to be.

Warily, Crokus rose and looked about him.

A tile farther along the roof clattered down the sloped side. Crokus whirled to see the killer dashing toward him. One look at the two daggers flashing in the air and the thief darted to the roof’s edge and leaped out into darkness.

The building across from him was too distant, but Crokus had chosen his resting place on familiar territory. As he fell into the shadows he reached out grasping hands. The guidewire caught his arms near the elbows and he scrambled frantically for a secure grip, then hung dangling twenty feet above the alley.

While most of the clotheslines spanning the city’s streets were just thin, unreliable hemp, among them were wrapped wires. Placed by thieves generations past they were securely bolted to the walls. By day Monkey Road, as the thieves called it, looked no different from any other line, festooned with undergarments and sheets. With the sun’s setting, however, came its true purpose.

With hands burned raw Crokus made his way along the wire toward the far wall. He chanced to glance up then, and froze. On the roof’s edge before him stood a second hunter, taking careful aim with a heavy, antique crossbow.

Crokus let go of the wire. A quarrel whizzed directly above his head as he fell. From behind and below a window shattered. His drop was cut short by the first of a series of clotheslines, tugging his limbs and twitching him about before snapping. After what seemed an eternity of bone-wrenching jerks and the whip of cord slicing through his clothes and flaying his skin, Crokus struck the alley’s cobblestones, straight-legged and leaning far forward. His knees buckled. He dipped a shoulder enough to earn a slightly cushioned roll, brought up short when his head struck a wall.

Dazed and groaning, Crokus pushed himself upright. He looked up. Through vision blurred with pain he saw a figure descending in seeming slow-motion immediately overhead. The thief’s eyes widened.
Sorcery!

He turned and staggered dizzily before managing a limping run down the alleyway. He reached the corner and, briefly lit by gaslight, hurried across a wide street, then entered the mouth of another alley. Once in its shadow, Crokus stopped. Cautiously, he poked his head out from the wall’s edge for a look. A quarrel struck the brick beside his face. He jumped back into the alley, spun, and sprinted.

Above him Crokus heard the flapping of a cloak. A burning spasm in his left hip made him stumble. Another quarrel whipped past his shoulder and skidded on the cobblestones. The spasm passed as quickly as it had come and he staggered on. Ahead, at the alley-mouth, was the lit doorway of a tenement. An old woman sat on the stone steps puffing on a pipe. Her eyes glittered as she watched the thief approach. As Crokus bounded past her and up the steps she rapped the pipe against the sole of her shoe. Sparks rained on to the cobbles.

Crokus pushed open the door and plunged inside. He paused. A narrow, poorly lit hallway was before him, a staircase crowded with children at the far end. His eyes on the stairs, he jogged up the hall. From the curtained doorways on either side came a cacophony of noise: voices raised in argument, wailing babies, the clatter of cookware.

“Don’t you people ever sleep?” Crokus shouted as he ran. The children on the stairs scampered out of his way and he took the warped steps two at a time. On the top floor he stopped at a door a third of the way down the hall, this one solid oak. He pushed it open and entered the room within.

An old man sitting behind a massive desk looked up briefly from his work, then resumed his frantic scrawl on a sheet of crinkled parchment. “Evening, Crokus,” he said distractedly.

“And to you, Uncle,” Crokus gasped.

On Uncle Mammot’s shoulder squatted a small winged monkey, whose glittering, half-mad gaze followed the young thief’s dart across the room to the window opposite the door. Flinging open the shutters Crokus climbed up onto the sill. Below was a squalid, overgrown garden mostly lost in shadows. A lone, gnarled tree rose upward. He eyed the branches across from him, then gripped the window-frame and leaned back. He drew a deep breath, then propelled himself forward.

As he passed through the intervening gap he heard a surprised grunt come from directly above, then a wild scratching against stone. An instant later someone crashed down into the garden below. Cats shrieked and a voice groaned out a single pained curse.

Crokus clung to a bowing branch. He timed each bounce of the resilient wood then extended his legs as the branch pulled him up. His moccasins landed on a window-sill and held. Grunting, he swung himself onto it and let go of the branch. He punched at the wooden shutters. They sprang inward and Crokus followed head first, down onto the floor and rolling to his feet.

He heard movement from another room in the apartment. Scrambling to his feet, he bolted for the hallway door, flung it open and slipped out just as a hoarse voice shouted a curse behind him. Crokus ran to the far end of the passage, where a ladder led to a hatch on the ceiling.

Soon he was on the roof. He crouched in the darkness and tried to catch his breath. The burning sensation returned to his hip. He must have damaged something in his fall from the guidewire. He reached down to massage the spot and found his fingers pressing something hard, round, and hot.
The coin!
Crokus reached for it.

Just then he heard a sudden whistling sound, and chips of stone spattered him. Ducking, he saw a quarrel, its shaft split by the impact, bounce once on the rooftop then plummet over the edge, spinning wildly. A soft moan escaped his lips and he scrambled across the roof to the far side. Without pause he jumped. Ten feet down was an awning, sagged and stretched out of shape, on which he landed. The iron spars framing the canvas dipped but held. From there it was a quick climb down to the street.

Crokus jogged to the corner, where an old building squatted with yellow light bleeding through dirty windows. A wooden sign hung above the door, bearing the faded image of a bird dead on its back, feet jutting upward. The thief bounded up the steps and pushed open the door.

A rush of light and noise washed over him like balm. He slammed the door behind him and leaned against it. He closed his eyes, pulling the disguising cloth from his face and head, revealing shoulder-length black hair—now dripping with sweat—and regular features surrounding light blue eyes.

As he reached up to wipe his brow a mug was pushed into his hand. Crokus opened his eyes to see Sulty hurry by, carrying on one hand a tray loaded with pewter tankards. She glanced at him over her shoulder and grinned. “Rough night, Crokus?”

He stared at her, then said, “No, nothing special.” He raised the mug to his lips and drank deep.

______

Across the street from the ramshackle Phoenix Inn, a hunter stood at the roof’s edge and studied the door through which the thief had just passed. The crossbow lay cradled in its arms.

The second hunter arrived, sheathing two long-knives as it came alongside the first.

“What happened to you?” the first hunter asked quietly, in its native tongue.

“Had an argument with a cat.”

The two were silent for a moment, then the first hunter sighed worriedly. “All in all, too awry to be natural.”

The other agreed. “You felt the parting too, then.”

“An Ascendant . . . meddled. Too cautious to show itself fully, however.”

“Unfortunate. It’s been years since I last killed an Ascendant.”

They began to check their weapons. The first hunter loaded the crossbow and slipped four extra quarrels in its belt. The second hunter removed each long-knife and cleaned it carefully of sweat and grime.

They heard someone approach from behind, and turned to see their commander.

“He’s in the inn,” the second hunter said.

“We’ll leave no witnesses to this secret war with the Guild,” the first added.

The commander glanced at the door of the Phoenix Inn. Then, to the hunters, she said, “No. The wagging tongue of a witness might be useful to our efforts.”

“The runt had help,” the first hunter said meaningfully.

The commander shook her head. “We return to the fold.”

“Very well.”

The two hunters put away their weapons. The first glanced back at the inn and asked, “Who protected him, do you think?”

The second hunter snarled. “Someone with a sense of humor.”

There is a cabal breathing

deeper than the bellows

drawing up the emerald fires

beneath rain-glistened cobbles,

while you may hear the groaning

from the caverns below,

the whisper of sorcery

is less than the dying sigh

of a thief stumbling unwilling

into Darujhistan’s secret web . . .

C
ABAL
(
FRAGMENT
)
P
UDDLE
(
B
.1122?)

The splayed tip of her right wing brushed the scarred black rock as Crone climbed the whistling updrafts of Moon’s Spawn. From the pocked caves and starlit ledges her restless brothers and sisters called out to her as she passed. “
Do we fly?
” they asked. But Crone made no reply. Her glittering black eyes were fixed on heaven’s vault. Her enormous wings beat a thundering refrain of taut, unrelenting power. She had no time for the nervous cackling of the younglings; no time for answering their simplistic needs with the wisdom her thousands of years of life had earned her.

This night, Crone flew for her lord.

As she rose above the shattered peaks of the Moon’s crest a high wind swept her wings, rasping dry and cold along her oily feathers. Around her, thin wisps of shredded smoke rode the currents of night air like lost spirits. Crone circled once, her sharp gaze catching the glimmer of the few remaining fires among the crags below, then she dipped a wing and sailed out on the wind’s tide as it rolled northward to Lake Azur.

The featureless expanse of the Dwelling Plain was beneath her, the grass sweeping in gray waves unbroken by house or hill. Directly ahead lay the glittering jeweled cloak that was Darujhistan, casting into the sky a sapphire glow. As she neared the city her unnaturally acute vision detected, here and there among the estates crowding the upper tier, the aquamarine emanation of sorcery.

Crone cackled aloud. Magic was ambrosia to Great Ravens. They were drawn to it by the scent of blood and power, and within its aura their lifespans lengthened into centuries. Its musk had other effects as well. Crone cackled again. Her gaze fixed on one particular estate, around which glowed a profusion of protective sorcery. Her lord had imparted to her a thorough description of the magical signature she must find, and now she had found it. Crooking her wings, she sank gracefully toward the estate.

Inland from Gadrobi District’s harbor the land rose in four tiers climbing eastward. Ramped cobblestone streets, worn to a polished mosaic, marked Gadrobi District’s Trade Streets, five in all, which were the only routes through Marsh District and into the next tier, Lakefront District. Beyond Lakefront’s crooked aisles twelve wooden gates opened onto Daru District, and from Daru another twelve gates—these ones manned by the City Watch and barred by iron portcullis—connected the lower and upper cities.

On the fourth and highest tier brooded the estates of Darujhistan’s nobility as well as its publicly known sorcerers. At the intersection of Old King’s Walk and View Street rose a flat-topped hill on which sat Majesty Hall, where each day the
Council gathered. A narrow park encircled the hill, with sand-strewn pathways winding among centuries-old acacias. At the park’s entrance, near High Gallows Hill, stood a massive rough-hewn stone gate, the last-surviving remnant of the castle that once commanded Majesty Hill.

The days of kings had long since ended in Darujhistan. The gate, known as Despot’s Barbican, stood stark and unadorned, its lattice of cracks a fading script of past tyranny.

In the shadow of the Barbican’s single massive lintel stone stood two men. One, his shoulder against the pitted rock, wore a ringed hauberk and a boiled leather cap bearing the City Watch insignia. Scabbarded to his belt was a plain shortsword, its grip of wrapped leather worn smooth. A pike leaned against one shoulder. He was nearing the end of his midnight guard duty and patiently awaited the arrival of the man who would officially relieve him. The guard’s eyes flicked on occasion to the second man, with whom he had shared this place many another night over the past year. The glances he cast at the well-dressed gentleman were surreptitious, empty of expression.

As with every other time Councilman Turban Orr came to the gate at this dead hour of night, the nobleman had scarcely deemed the guard worthy of notice; nor had he ever given an indication that he recognized the guard as being the same man each time.

Turban Orr seemed a man short on patience, forever pacing and fretting, pausing every now and then to adjust his jeweled burgundy cloak. The councilman’s polished boots clicked as he paced, throwing a soft echo under the Barbican. From the shadow the guard’s gaze caught Orr’s gloved hand where it rested on the silver pommel of a duelling sword, noting the index finger tapping in time with the boot clicks.

At the early part of his watch, long before the arrival of the councilman, the guard would walk slowly around the Barbican, reaching out on occasion to touch the ancient, grim stonework. Six years’ worth of night watch at this gate had bred a close relationship between the man and the rough-cut basalt: he knew every crack, every chisel scar; he knew where the fittings had weakened, where time and the elements had squeezed mortar from between the stones then gnawed it to dust. And he also knew that its apparent weaknesses were but a deception. The Barbican, and all it stood for, patiently waited still, a specter of the past, hungry to be born yet again.