The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (267 page)

A flood of bile and blood slicked the back of his saddle. The figure slid away.

He snapped a command and the horse ducked its head. Itkovian swung his weapon in a sweeping, horizontal slash. Cutting, glancing contact stuttered its entire path. His mount pivoted and the Shield Anvil reversed the slash. Spun again, and Itkovian whipped the sword again.

Man and beast turned in a full circle in this fashion, a circle delivering dreadful wounds. Through the blistering heat beneath his visored helm, Itkovian gained a fragmented collection of the scene on all sides.

There would be no rising from his Grey Swords. Not this time. Indeed, he could not see a single familiar surcoat. The Tenescowri closed on the Shield Anvil from all sides, a man’s height’s worth of bodies under their feet. And somewhere beneath that heaving surface, were Itkovian’s soldiers. Buried alive, buried dying, buried dead.

He and his horse were all that remained, the focus of hundreds upon hundreds of avid, desperate eyes.

Captured pikes were being passed forward to those peasants nearest him. In moments, those long-handled weapons would begin jabbing in on all sides. Against this, neither Itkovian’s nor his horse’s armour would be sufficient.

Twin Tusks, I am yours. To this, the last moment.

‘Break!’

His warhorse was waiting for that command The beast surged forward. Hooves, chest and shoulders battered through the press. Itkovian carved his blade down on both sides. Figures reeled, parted, disappeared beneath the churning hooves. Pikes slashed out at him, skittered along armour and shield. The ones to his right he batted aside with his sword.

Something punched into the small of his back, snapping the links of his chain, twisting and gouging through leather and felt padding. Agony lanced through Itkovian as the jagged point drove through skin and grated against his lowest rib close to the spine.

At the same moment his horse screamed as it stumbled onto the point of another pike, the iron head plunging deep into the right side of its chest. The animal lurched to the left, staggering, head dipping, jaws snapping at the shaft.

Someone leapt onto Itkovian’s shield, swung over it a woodsman’s hatchet. The wedged blade buried itself deep between his left shoulder and neck, where it jammed.

The Shield Anvil jabbed the point of his sword into the peasant’s face. The blade carved into one cheek, exited out through the other. Itkovian twisted the blade, his own visored face inches from his victim’s as his sword destroyed her youthful visage. Gurgling, she toppled back.

He could feel the weight of the pike, its head still buried in his back, heard it clatter along his horse’s rump-armour as the beast slewed and pitched.

A fishmonger’s knife found the unprotected underside of his left knee, searing up into the joint. Itkovian chopped weakly down with the lower edge of his shield, barely sufficient to push the attacker away. The thin blade snapped, the six inches remaining in his knee grinding and slicing through tendon and cartilage. Blood filled the space between his calf and the felt padding sheathing it.

The Shield Anvil felt no pain. Brutal clarity commanded his thoughts. His god was with him, now, at this final moment. With him, and with the brave, indomitable warhorse beneath him.

The beast’s sideways lurch ceased as the animal – pike plucked free – righted itself despite the blood that now gushed down its chest. The animal leapt forward, crushing bodies under it, kicked and clawed and clambered its way towards what seemed – impossibly to Itkovian’s eyes – a cleared avenue, a place where only motionless bodies awaited.

The Shield Anvil, comprehending at last what he was seeing, renewed his efforts. The enemy was melting away, on all sides. Screams and the clash of iron echoed wildly in Itkovian’s helmet.

A moment later and the horse stumbled clear, hooves lashing out as it reared – not in rage this time, but in triumph.

Pain arrived as Itkovian sagged onto the animal’s armoured neck. Pain like nothing he had known before. The pike remained embedded in his back, the broken knife-blade in the heart of his left knee, the hatchet buried in the shattered remains of his collar bone. Jaws clenched, he managed to quell his mount’s pitching about, succeeded in pivoting the animal round, to face, once more, the cemetery.

Disbelieving, he saw his Grey Swords carving their way free of the bodies that had buried them, rising as if from a barrow of corpses, silent as ghosts, their movements jerky as if they were clawing their way awake after a horrifying nightmare. Only a dozen were visible, yet that was twelve more than the Shield Anvil had thought possible.

Boots thumped up to Itkovian. Blinking gritty sweat from his eyes, he tried to focus on the figures closing in around him.

Grey Swords. Battered and stained surcoats, the young, pale faces of Capan recruits.

Then, on a horse to match Itkovian’s own, the Mortal Sword. Brukhalian, black-armoured, his black hair a wild, blood-matted mane, Fener’s holy sword in one huge, gauntleted hand.

He’d raised his visor. Dark eyes were fixed on the Shield Anvil.

‘Apologies, sir,’ Brukhalian rumbled as he drew rein beside him. ‘For our tardiness.’

Behind the Mortal Sword, Itkovian now saw Karnadas, hurrying forward. His face, drawn and pale as a corpse’s, was nevertheless beautiful to the Shield Anvil’s eyes.

‘Destriant!’ he gasped, weaving on his saddle. ‘My horse, sir … my soldiers…’

‘Fener is with me, sir,’ Karnadas replied in a trembling voice. ‘And so shall I answer you.’

The world darkened then. Itkovian felt the sudden tug of hands beneath him, as if he had fallen into their embrace. Pondering that, his thoughts drifted –
my horse … my soldiers
– then closed into oblivion.

*   *   *

They battered down the flimsy shutters, pushed in through the rooms above the ground floor. They slithered through the tunnel of packed bodies that had once been stairwells. Gruntle’s iron fangs were blunt, nicked and gouged. They had become ragged clubs in his hands. He commanded the main hallway and was slowly, methodically creating barricades of cooling flesh and broken bone.

No weariness weighed down his arms or dulled his acuity. His breathing remained steady, only slightly deeper than usual. His forearms showed a strange pattern of blood stains, barbed and striped, the blood blackening and seeming to seep into his skin. He was indifferent to it.

There were Seerdomin, scattered here and there within the human tide of Tenescowri. Probably pulled along without volition. Gruntle cut down peasants in order to close with them. It was his only desire. To close with them. To kill them. The rest was chaff, irritating, getting in the way. Impediments to what he wanted.

Had he seen his own face, he would barely recognize it. Blackened stripes spread away from his eyes and bearded cheeks. Tawny amber streaked the beard itself. His eyes were the colour of sun-withered prairie grass.

His militia was a hundred strong now, silent figures who were as extensions of his will. Unquestioning, looking upon him with awe. Their faces shone when he settled his gaze on them. He did not wonder at that, either, did not realize that the illumination he saw was reflected, that they but mirrored the pale, yet strangely tropical emanation of his eyes.

Gruntle was satisfied. He was answering all that had been visited upon Stonny – she now fought alongside his second-in-command, that small, wiry Lestari soldier, holding the tenement block’s rear stairwell. They’d met but once since withdrawing to this building hours earlier. And it had shaken him, jarred him in a deep place within himself, and it was as if he had been shocked awake – as if all this time his soul had been hunkered down within him, hidden, silent, whilst an unknown, implacable force now ruled his limbs, rode the blood that pumped through him. She was broken still, the bravado torn away to reveal a human visage, painfully vulnerable, profoundly wounded in its heart.

The recognition had triggered a resurgence of cold desire within Gruntle. She was the debt he had only begun to pay. And whatever had rattled her upon their meeting once more, well, no doubt she had somehow comprehended his desire’s bared fangs and unsheathed claws. A reasonable reaction, only troubling insofar as it deserved to be.

The decrepit, ancient Daru tenement now housed a storm of death, whipping winds of rage, terror and agony twisting and churning through every hallway, in every room no matter how small. It flowed vicious and without surcease. It matched, in every detail, the world of Gruntle’s mind, the world within the confines of his skull.

There existed no contradictions between the reality of the outer world and that of his inner landscape. This truth beggared comprehension. It could only be grasped instinctively, a visceral understanding glimpsed by less than a handful of Gruntle’s followers, the Lestari lieutenant among them.

He knew he had entered a place devoid of sanity. Knew, somehow, that he and the rest of the militia now existed more within the mind of Gruntle than they did in the real world. They fought with skills they had never before possessed. They did not tire. They did not shout, scream, or even so much as bark commands or rallying cries. There was no need for rallying cries – no-one broke, no-one was routed. Those that died fell where they had stood, silent as automatons.

Hallways were chest deep in bodies on the ground floor. Some rooms could not even be entered. Blood ran through these presses like a crimson river running beneath the surface of the land, seeping amidst hidden gravel lenses, pockets of sand, buried boulders – seeped, here in this dread building, around bone and meat and armour and boots and sandals and weapons and helms. Reeking like a sewer, thick as the flow in a surgeon’s trench.

The attackers finally staggered back, withdrew down almost-blocked stairwells, clawed out of the windows. Thousands more waited outside, but the retreat clogged the approaches. A moment of peace settled within the building.

Light-headed and weaving as he clambered his way up the main hallway, the Lestari lieutenant found Gruntle. His master’s striped arms glistened, the blades of his cutlasses were yellowed white – fangs in truth, now – and he swung a savagely feline visage to the Lestari.

‘We surrender this floor, now,’ Gruntle said, shaking the blood from his blades.

The hacked remains of Seerdomin surrounded the caravan captain. Armoured warriors literally chopped to pieces.

The lieutenant nodded. ‘We’re out of room to manoeuvre.’

Gruntle shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘We’ve two more floors above us. Then the roof.’

Their eyes locked for a long moment, and the lieutenant was both chilled and warmed by what he saw within the vertical slits of Gruntle’s pupils.
A man to fear … a man to follow … a man to love.
‘You are Trake’s Mortal Sword,’ he said.

The huge Daru frowned. ‘Stonny Menackis.’

‘She bears but minor injuries, Captain, and has moved up to the next landing.’

‘Good.’

Weighed down with sacks of food and drink, the militia was converging, the command to do so unspoken, as it had been unspoken every time the gathering occurred. More than twenty had fallen in this last engagement, the Lestari saw.
We lose this many with each floor. By the time we reach the roof there’ll be but a score of us. Well, that should be more than enough, to hold a single trapdoor. Hold it until the Abyss of Final Night.

The silent followers were collecting serviceable weapons, scraps of armour – mostly from the Seerdomin. The Lestari watched with dull eyes a Capan woman pick up a gauntleted hand, severed raggedly at the wrist by one of Gruntle’s cutlasses, and calmly pull the hand from the scaled glove, which she then donned.

Gruntle stepped over bodies on his way to the stairwell.

It was time to retreat to the next level, time to take command of the outer-lying rooms with their feebly shuttered windows, and the back stairs and the central stairs.
Time to jam yet more souls down Hood’s clogged, choking throat.

At the stairs, Gruntle clashed his cutlasses.

Outside, a resurging tide of noise …

*   *   *

Brukhalian sat astride his huge, lathered warhorse, watching as the Destriant’s cutters dragged a barely breathing Itkovian into a nearby building that would serve, for the next bell or two, as a triage. Karnadas himself, drawing once more on his fevered Warren of Denul, had quelled the flow of blood from the chest of the Shield Anvil’s horse.

The surviving Grey Swords at the cemetery were being helped clear by the Mortal Sword’s own companies. There were wounds to be tended to there as well, but those that were fatal had already proved so. Corpses were being pulled away in a frantic search for more survivors.

The cutters carrying Itkovian now faced the task of removing buried iron from the Shield Anvil, weapons that had, by virtue of remaining embedded, in all likelihood saved the man’s life. And Karnadas would be on hand for that surgery, to quench the blood that would gush from each wound as the iron was drawn free.

Brukhalian’s flat, hard eyes followed the Destriant as the old man stumbled after his cutters. Karnadas had gone too far, pulled too much from his warren, too much and too often. His body had begun its irreversible surrender. Bruises marked the joints of his arms, the elbows, the wrists, the fingers. Within him, his veins and arteries were becoming as cheesecloth, and the seepage of blood into muscle and cavity would only grow more profound. Denul’s flow was disintegrating all that it flowed through – the body of the priest himself.

He would be, Brukhalian knew, dead before dawn.

Yet, before then, Itkovian would be healed, brutally mended without regard to the mental trauma that accompanied all wounds. The Shield Anvil would assume command once again, but not as the man he had been.

The Mortal Sword was a hard man. The fate of his friends was a knowledge bereft of emotion. It was as it had to be.

He straightened on his saddle, scanned the area to gauge the situation. The attack upon the barracks had been repelled. The Tenescowri had broken on all sides, and none still standing remained within sight. This was not the case elsewhere, Brukhalian well knew. The Grey Swords had been virtually obliterated as an organized army. No doubt pockets of resistance remained, but they would be few and far between. To all intents and purposes, Capustan had fallen.