The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (459 page)

They scattered—reluctantly—at the approach of something, someone, and Udinaas felt a warm, protective presence settle at his side.

Feather Witch. She was whole, her face luminous, her grey eyes quizzical as she studied him. ‘Son of Debt,' she said, then sighed. ‘They say you cut me free. Even as the Wyval tore into you. You cared nothing for
that
.' She studied him for a moment longer, then said, ‘Your love burns my eyes, Udinaas. What am I to do about this truth?'

He found he could speak. ‘Do nothing, Feather Witch. I know what is not to be. I would not surrender this burden.'

‘No. I see that.'

‘What has happened? Am I dying?'

‘You were. Uruth, wife to Tomad Sengar, came in answer to our…distress. She drew upon Kurald Emurlahn, and has driven the Wyval away. And now she works healing upon us both. We lie side by side, Udinaas, on the blood-soaked earth. Unconscious. She wonders at our reluctance to return.'

‘Reluctance?'

‘She finds she struggles to heal our wounds—I am resisting her, for us both.'

‘Why?'

‘Because I am troubled. Uruth senses nothing. Her power feels pure to her. Yet it is…stained.'

‘I do not understand. You said Kurald Emurlahn—'

‘Aye. But it has lost its purity. I do not know how, or what, but it has changed. Among all the Edur, it is
changed
.'

‘What are we to do?'

She sighed. ‘Return, now. Yield to her command. Offer our gratitude for her intervention, for the healing of our torn flesh. And in answer to the many questions she has, we can say little. It was confused. Battle with an unknown demon. Chaos. And of this conversation, Udinaas, we will say nothing. Do you understand?'

‘I do.'

She reached down and he felt her hand close about his—suddenly he was whole once more—and its warmth flowed through him.

He could hear his heart now, thundering in answer to that touch. And another heart, distant yet quickly closing, beating in time. But it was not hers, and Udinaas knew terror.

 

His mother stepped back, the knot of her brow beginning to unclench. ‘They approach,' she said.

Trull stared down at the two slaves. Udinaas, from his own household. And the other, one of Mayen's servants, the one they knew as Feather Witch for her divinatory powers. The blood still stained the puncture holes in their shirts, but the wounds themselves had closed. Another kind of blood was spilled across Udinaas's chest, gold and glistening still.

‘I should outlaw these castings,' Hannan Mosag growled. ‘Permitting Letherii sorcery in our midst is a dangerous indulgence.'

‘Yet there is value, High King,' Uruth said, and Trull could see that she was still troubled.

‘And that is, wife of Tomad?'

‘A clarion call, High King, which we would do well to heed.'

Hannan Mosag grimaced. ‘There is Wyval blood upon the man's shirt. Is he infected?'

‘Possibly,' Uruth conceded. ‘Much of that which passes for a soul in a Letherii is concealed from my arts, High King.'

‘A failing that plagues us all, Uruth,' the Warlock King said, granting her great honour by using her true name. ‘This one must be observed at all times,' he continued, eyes on Udinaas. ‘If there is Wyval blood within him, the truth shall be revealed eventually. To whom does he belong?'

Tomad Sengar cleared his throat. ‘He is mine, Warlock King.'

Hannan Mosag frowned, and Trull knew he was thinking of his dream, and of his decision to weave into its tale the Sengar family. There were few coincidences in the world. The Warlock King spoke in a harder voice. ‘This Feather Witch, she is Mayen's, yes? Tell me, Uruth, could you sense her power when you healed her?'

Trull's mother shook her head. ‘Unimpressive. Or…'

‘Or what?'

Uruth shrugged. ‘Or she hid it well, despite her wounds. And if that is the case, then her power surpasses mine.'

Impossible. She is Letherii. A slave and still a virgin
.

Hannan Mosag's grunt conveyed similar sentiments. ‘She was assailed by a Wyval, clearly a creature that proved far beyond her ability to control. No, the child stumbles. Poorly instructed, ignorant of the vastness of all with which she would play. See, she only now regains awareness.'

Feather Witch's eyes fluttered open, revealing little comprehension, and that quickly overwhelmed by animal terror.

Hannan Mosag sighed. ‘She will be of no use to us for a time. Leave them in the care of Uruth and the other wives.' He faced Tomad Sengar. ‘When Binadas returns…'

Tomad nodded.

Trull glanced over at Fear. Behind him knelt the slaves that had attended the casting, heads pressed to the earth and motionless, as they had been since Uruth's arrival. It seemed Fear's hard eyes were fixed upon something no-one else could see.

When Binadas returns…the sons of Tomad will set forth. Into the ice wastes
.

A sickly groan from Udinaas.

The Warlock King ignored it as he strode from the barn, his K'risnan flanking him, his shadow sentinel trailing a step behind. At the threshold, that monstrous wraith paused of its own accord, for a single glance back—though there was no way to tell upon whom it fixed its shapeless eyes.

Udinaas groaned a second time, and Trull saw the slave's limbs trembling.

At the threshold, the wraith was gone.

A glance back. In the misty haze far below and to the west glimmered the innermost extent of Reach Inlet, the sky's pallid reflection thorough in disguising that black, depthless water. On all other sides, apart from the stony trail directly behind Seren Pedac, reared jagged mountains, the snow-clad peaks gilt by a sun she could not see from where she stood at the south end of the saddle pass.

The wind rushing past her stank of ice, the winter's lingering breath of cold decay. She drew her furs tighter and swung round to gauge the progress of the train on the trail below.

Three solid-wheeled wagons, pitching and clanking. The swarming, bare-backed figures of the Nerek tribesmen as they flowed in groups around each wagon, the ones at the head straining on ropes, the ones at the rear advancing the stop-blocks to keep the awkward conveyances from rolling backward.

In those wagons, among other trade goods, were ninety ingots of iron, thirty to each wagon. Not the famed Letherii steel, of course, since sale of that beyond the
borders was forbidden, but of the next highest quality grade, carbon-tempered and virtually free of impurities. Each ingot was as long as Seren's arm, and twice as thick.

The air was bitter cold and thin. Yet those Nerek worked half naked, the sweat steaming from their slick skins. If a stop-block failed, the nearest tribesman would throw his own body beneath the wheel.

And for this, Buruk the Pale paid them two docks a day.

Seren Pedac was Buruk's Acquitor, granted passage into Edur lands, one of seven so sanctioned by the last treaty. No merchant could enter Edur territory unless guided by an Acquitor. The bidding for Seren Pedac and the six others had been high. And, for Seren, Buruk's had been highest of all, and now he owned her. Or, rather, he owned her services as guide and finder—a distinction of which he seemed increasingly unmindful.

But this was the contract's sixth year. Only four remaining.

Maybe
.

She turned once more, and studied the pass ahead. They were less than a hundred paces' worth of elevation from the treeline. Knee-high, centuries-old dwarf oaks and spruce flanked the uneven path. Mosses and lichens covered the enormous boulders that had been dragged down by the rivers of ice in ages past. Crusted patches of snow remained, clinging to shadowed places. Here the wind moved nothing, not the wiry spruce, not even the crooked, leafless branches of the oaks. Against such immovable stolidity, it could only howl.

The first wagon clattered onto level ground behind her, Nerek tongues shouting as it was quickly rolled ahead, past Seren Pedac, and anchored in place. The tribesmen then rushed back to help their fellows still on the ascent.

The squeal of a door, and Buruk the Pale clambered out from the lead wagon. He stood with his stance wide, as if struggling to regain the memory of balance, turning with a wince from the frigid wind, reaching up to keep his furlined cap on his head as he blinked over at Seren Pedac.

‘I shall etch this vision against the very bone of my skull, blessed Acquitor! There to join a host of others, of course. That umber cloak of fur, the stately, primeval grace as you stand there. The weathered majesty of your profile, so deftly etched by these wild heights.

‘You—Nerek! Find your foreman—we shall camp here. Meals must be prepared. Unload those bundles of wood in the third wagon. I want a fire, there, in the usual place. Be on with it!'

Seren Pedac set her pack down and made her way along the path. The wind quickly dragged Buruk's words away. Thirty paces on, she came to the first of the old shrines, a widening of the trail, where level stretches of scraped bedrock reached out to the sides and the walls of the flanking mountains had been cut sheer. On each flat, boulders had been positioned to form the full-sized outline of a ship, both prow and stern pointed and marked by upright menhirs. The prow stones had been carved into a likeness of the Edur god, Father Shadow, but the winds had ground the details away. Whatever had originally occupied these two flanking ships had long vanished, although the bedrock within was strangely stained.

The sheer walls of rock alone retained something of their ancient power. Smooth and black, they were translucent, in the manner of thin, smoky obsidian. And shapes moved behind them. As if the mountains had been hollowed out, and each panel was a kind of window, revealing a mysterious, eternal world within. A world oblivious of all that surrounded it, beyond its own borders of impenetrable stone, and of these strange panels, either blind or indifferent.

The translucent obsidian defied Seren's efforts to focus on the shapes moving on the other side, as it had the past score of times she had visited this site. But that very mystery was itself an irresistible lure, drawing her again and again.

Stepping carefully around the stern of the ship of boulders, she approached the eastern panel. She tugged the fur-lined glove from her right hand, reached and set it against the smooth stone. Warm, drinking the stiffness from her fingers, taking the ache from the joints. This was her secret, the healing powers she had discovered when she first touched the rock.

A lifetime in these hard lands stole suppleness from the body. Bones grew brittle, misshapen with pain. The endless hard rock underfoot soon sent shocks through the spine with each step taken. The Nerek, the tribe that, before kneeling to the Letherii king, had dwelt in the range's easternmost reach, believed that they were the children of a woman and a serpent, and that the serpent dwelt still within the body, that gently curved spine, the stacked knuckles reaching up to hide its head in the centre of the brain. But the mountains despised that serpent, desired only to drag it back to the ground, to return it once more to its belly, slithering in the cracks and coiled beneath rocks. And so, in the course of a life, the serpent was made to bow, to bend and twist.

Nerek buried their dead beneath flat stones.

At least, they used to, before the king's edict forced them to embrace the faith of the Holds.

Now they leave the bodies of their kin where they fall. Even unto abandoning their huts
. It had been years ago, but Seren Pedac remembered with painful clarity coming over a rise and looking upon the vast plateau where the Nerek dwelt. The villages had lost all distinction, merging together in chaotic, dispirited confusion. Every third or fourth hut had been left to ruin, makeshift sepulchres for kin that had died of disease, old age, or too much alcohol, white nectar or durhang. Children wandered untended, trailed by feral rock rats that now bred uncontrolled and had become too disease-ridden to eat.

The Nerek people were destroyed, and from that pit there would be no climbing out. Their homeland was an overgrown cemetery, and the Letherii cities promised only debt and dissolution. They were granted no sympathy. The Letherii way of life was hard, but it was the true way, the way of civilization. The proof was found in its thriving where other ways stumbled or remained weak and stilted.

The bitter wind could not reach Seren Pedac now. The stone's warmth flowed through her. Eyes closed, she leaned her forehead against its welcoming surface.

Who walks in there? Are they the ancestral Edur, as the Hiroth claim?
If so, then why could they see no more clearly than Seren herself? Vague shapes, passing to and fro, as lost as those Nerek children in their dying villages.

She had her own beliefs, and, though unpleasant, she held to them.
They are the sentinels of futility. Acquitors of the absurd. Reflections of ourselves forever trapped in aimless repetition. Forever indistinct, for that is all we can manage when we look upon ourselves, upon our lives. Sensations, memories and experiences, the fetid soil in which thoughts take root. Pale flowers beneath an empty sky
.

If she could, she would sink into this wall of stone. To walk for eternity among those formless shapes, looking out, perhaps, every now and then, and seeing not stunted trees, moss, lichen and the occasional passer-by. No, seeing only the wind. The ever howling wind.

 

She could hear him walking long before he came into the flickering circle of firelight. The sound of his footfalls awakened the Nerek as well, huddled beneath tattered furs in a rough half-circle at the edge of the light, and they swiftly rose and converged towards that steady beat.

Seren Pedac kept her gaze fixed on the flames, the riotous waste of wood that kept Buruk the Pale warm while he got steadily drunker on a mix of wine and white nectar, and fought against the tug at one corner of her mouth, that unbidden and unwelcome ironic curl that expressed bitter amusement at this impending conjoining of broken hearts.

Buruk the Pale carried with him secret instructions, a list long enough to fill an entire scroll, from other merchants, speculators and officials, including, she suspected, the Royal Household itself. And whatever those instructions entailed, their content was killing the man. He'd always liked his wine, but not with the seductive destroyer, white nectar, mixed in. That was this journey's new fuel for the ebbing fires of Buruk's soul, and it would drown him as surely as would the deep waters of Reach Inlet.

Four more years. Maybe
.

The Nerek were mobbing their visitor, scores of voices blending into an eerie murmur, like worshippers beseeching a particularly bemusing god, and though the event was hidden in the darkness beyond the fire, Seren Pedac could see it well enough in her imagination. He was trying, only his eyes revealing his unease at the endless embraces, seeking to answer each one with something—anything—that could not be mistaken for benediction. He was, he would want to say, not a man worthy of such reverence. He was, he would want to say, a sordid culmination of failures—just as they were. All of them lost, here in this cold-hearted world. He would want to say—but no, Hull Beddict never said anything. Not, in any case, things so boldly…vulnerable.

Buruk the Pale had lifted his head at the commotion, blinking blearily. ‘Who comes?'

‘Hull Beddict,' Seren Pedac answered.

The merchant licked his lips. ‘The old Sentinel?'

‘Yes. Although I advise you not to call him by that title. He returned the King's Reed long ago.'

‘And so betrayed the Letherii, aye.' Buruk laughed. ‘Poor, honourable fool. Honour demands dishonour, now that is amusing, isn't it? Ever seen a mountain of ice in the sea? Calving again and again beneath the endless gnawing teeth of salt water. Just so.' He tilted his bottle back, and Seren watched his throat bob.

‘Dishonour makes you thirsty, Buruk?'

He pulled the bottle down, glaring. Then a loose smile. ‘Parched, Acquitor. Like a drowning man who swallows air.'

‘Only it's not air, it's water.'

He shrugged. ‘A momentary surprise.'

‘Then you get over it.'

‘Aye. And in those last moments, the stars swim unseen currents.'

Hull Beddict had done as much as he could with the Nerek, and he stepped into the firelight. Almost as tall as an Edur. Swathed in the white fur of the north wolf, his long braided hair nearly as pale. The sun and high winds had darkened his visage to the hue of tanned hide. His eyes were bleached grey, and it seemed the man behind them was ever elsewhere. And, Seren Pedac well knew, that place was not home.

No, as lost as his flesh and bones, this body standing before us
. ‘Take some warmth, Hull Beddict,' she said.

He studied her in his distracted way—a seeming contradiction that only he could achieve.

Buruk the Pale laughed. ‘What's the point? It'll never reach him through those furs. Hungry, Beddict? Thirsty? I didn't think so. How about a woman? I could spare you one of my Nerek half-bloods—the darlings wait in my wagon.' He drank noisily from his bottle and held it out. ‘Some of this? Oh dear, he hides poorly his disgust.'

Eyes on the old Sentinel, Seren asked, ‘Have you come down the pass? Are the snows gone?'

Hull Beddict glanced over at the wagons. When he replied, the words came awkwardly, as if it had been some time since he last spoke. ‘Should do.'

‘Where are you going?'

He glanced at her once more. ‘With you.'

Seren's brows rose.

Laughing, Buruk the Pale waved expansively with his bottle—which was empty save for a last few scattering drops that hit the fire with a hiss. ‘Oh, welcome company indeed! By all means! The Nerek will be delighted.' He tottered upright, weaving perilously close to the fire, then, with a final wave, he stumbled towards his wagon.

Seren and Hull watched him leave, and Seren saw that the Nerek had returned to their sleeping places, but all sat awake, their eyes glittering with reflected flames as they watched the old Sentinel, who now stepped closer to the fire and slowly sat down. He held out battered hands to the heat.

They could be softer than they appeared, Seren recalled. The memory did little more than stir long-dead ashes, however, and she tipped another log into the hungry fire before them, watched the sparks leap into the darkness.

‘He intends to remain a guest of the Hiroth until the Great Meeting?'

She shot him a look, then shrugged. ‘I think so. Is that why you've decided to accompany us?'

‘It will not be like past treaties, this meeting,' he said. ‘The Edur are no longer divided. The Warlock King rules unchallenged.'

‘Everything's changed, yes.'

‘And so Diskanar sends Buruk the Pale.'

She snorted, kicked back into the flames an errant log that had rolled out. ‘A poor choice. I doubt he'll remain sober enough to manage much spying.'

‘Seven merchant houses and twenty-eight ships have descended upon the Calach beds,' Hull Beddict said, flexing his fingers.

‘I know.'

‘Diskanar's delegation will claim the hunting was unsanctioned. They will decry the slaughter. Then use it to argue that the old treaty is flawed, that it needs to be revised. For the lost seals, they will make a magnanimous gesture—by throwing gold at Hannan Mosag's feet.'