The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (467 page)

Among them, Trull knew, the memorization of every battle the Edur ever fought. He then wondered why that thought had come to him, in answer to Fear's words. What hidden linkages was his own mind seeking to reveal, and why was he unable to discern them?

They continued on, avoiding pools of moonlight unbroken by shadows. ‘Tomad forbade us this journey,' Trull said after a time.

‘In matters of sorcery,' Fear said, ‘Uruth is superior to Tomad.'

‘And this is a matter of sorcery?'

Rhulad snorted behind Trull. ‘You stood with us in the Warlock King's longboat.'

‘I did,' agreed Trull. ‘Fear, would Hannan Mosag approve of what we do, of what Uruth commands of us?'

Fear said nothing.

‘You,' Rhulad said, ‘are too filled with doubt, brother. It binds you in place—'

‘I watched you walk the path to the chosen cemetery, Rhulad. After Dusk's departure and before the moon's rise.'

If Fear reacted to this, his back did not reveal it, nor did his steps falter on the trail.

‘What of it?' Rhulad asked, his tone too loose, too casual.

‘My words, brother, are not to be answered with flippancy.'

‘I knew that Fear was busy overseeing the return of weapons to the armoury,' Rhulad said. ‘And I sensed a malevolence prowling the darkness. And so I stood in hidden vigil over his betrothed, who was alone in the cemetery. I may be unblooded, brother, but I am not without courage. I know you believe that inexperience is the soil in which thrive the roots of false courage. But I am not false, no matter what you think. For me, inexperience is unbroken soil, not yet ready for roots. I stood in my brother's place.'

‘Malevolence in the night, Rhulad? Whose?'

‘I could not be certain. But I felt it.'

‘Fear,' Trull said, ‘have you no questions for Rhulad on this matter?'

‘No,' Fear replied drily. ‘There is no need for that…when you are around.'

Trull clamped his mouth shut, thankful that the night obscured the flush on his face.

There was silence for some time after that.

The trail began climbing, winding among outcrops of lichen-skinned granite. They climbed over fallen trees here and there, scrambled up steep slides. The
moon's light grew diffuse, and Trull sensed it was near dawn by the time they reached the highest point of the trail.

The path now took them inland—eastward—along a ridge of toppled trees and broken boulders. Water trapped in depressions in the bedrock formed impenetrable black pools that spread across the trail. The sky began to lighten overhead.

Fear then led them off the path, north, across tumbled scree and among the twisted trees. A short while later Kaschan Trench was before them.

A vast gorge, like a knife's puncturing wound in the bedrock, its sides sheer and streaming with water, it ran in a jagged line, beginning beneath Hasana Inlet half a day to the west, and finally vanishing into the bedrock more than a day's travel to the east: They were at its widest point, two hundred or so paces across, the landscape opposite slightly higher but otherwise identical—scattered boulders looking as if they had been pushed up from the gorge and mangled trees that seemed sickened by some unseen breath from the depths.

Fear unclasped his cloak, dropped his pack and walked over to a misshapen mound of stones. He cleared away dead branches and Trull saw that the stones were a cairn of some sort. Fear removed the capstone, and reached down into the hollow beneath. He lifted clear a coil of knotted rope.

‘Remove your cloak and your weapons,' he said as he carried the coil to the edge.

He found one end and tied his pack, cloak, sword and spear to it. Trull and Rhulad came close with their own gear and all was bound to the rope. Fear then began lowering it over the side.

‘Trull, take this other end and lead it to a place of shadow. A place where the shadow will not retreat before the sun as the day passes.'

He picked up the rope end and walked to a large, tilted boulder. When he fed the end into the shadows at its base he felt countless hands grasp it. Trull stepped back. The rope was now taut.

Returning to the edge, he saw that Fear had already begun his descent. Rhulad stood staring down.

‘We're to wait until he reaches the bottom,' Rhulad said. ‘He will tug thrice upon the rope. He asked that I go next.'

‘Very well.'

‘She has the sweetest lips,' Rhulad murmured, then looked up and met Trull's eyes. ‘Is that what you want me to say? To give proof to your suspicions?'

‘I have many suspicions, brother,' Trull replied. ‘We have sun-scorched thoughts, we have dark-swallowed thoughts. But it is the shadow thoughts that move with stealth, creeping to the very edge of the rival realms—if only to see what there is to be seen.'

‘And if they see nothing?'

‘They never see nothing, Rhulad.'

‘Then illusions? What if they see only what their imagination conjures? False games of light? Shapes in the darkness? Is this not how suspicion becomes a poison? But a poison like white nectar, every taste leaving you thirsting for more.'

Trull was silent for a long moment. Then he said, ‘Fear spoke to me not long ago. Of how one is perceived, rather than how one truly is. How the power of the
former can overwhelm that of the latter. How, indeed, perception shapes truth like waves on stone.'

‘What would you ask of me, Trull?'

He faced Rhulad directly. ‘Cease your strutting before Mayen.'

A strange smile, then, ‘Very well, brother.'

Trull's eyes widened slightly.

The rope snapped three times.

‘My turn,' Rhulad said. He grasped hold of the rope and was quickly gone from sight.

The knots of these words were anything but loose.
Trull drew a deep breath, let it out slowly, wondering at that smile. The peculiarity of it. A smile that might have been pain, a smile born of hurt.

Then he turned upon himself and studied what he was feeling. Difficult to find, to recognize, but…
Father Shadow forgive me. I feel…sullied.

The three tugs startled him.

Trull took the heavy rope in his hands, feeling the sheath of beeswax rubbed into the fibres to keep them from rotting. Without the knots for foot- and hand-holds, the descent would be treacherous indeed. He walked out over the edge, facing inward, then leaned back and began making his way down.

Glittering streams ran down the raw stone before him. Red-stained calcretions limned the surface here and there. Flea-like insects skipped across the surface. The scrapes left by the passage of Rhulad and Fear glistened in the fading light, ragged furrows wounding all that clung to the rock.

Knot to knot, he went down the rope, the darkness deepening around him. The air grew cool and damp, then cold. Then his feet struck mossy boulders, and hands reached out to steady him.

His eyes struggled to make out the forms of his brothers. ‘We should have brought a lantern.'

‘There is light from the Stone Bowl,' Fear said. ‘An Elder Warren. Kaschan.'

‘That warren is dead,' Trull said. ‘Destroyed by Father Shadow's own hand.'

‘Its children are dead, brother, but the sorcery lingers. Have your eyes adjusted? Can you see the ground before you?'

A tumble of boulders and the glitter of flowing water between them. ‘I can.'

‘Then follow me.'

They made their way out from the wall. Footing was treacherous, forcing them to proceed slowly. Dead branches festooned with mushrooms and moss. Trull saw a pallid, hairless rodent of some kind slip into a crack between two rocks, tail slithering in its wake. ‘This is the Betrayer's realm,' he said.

Fear grunted. ‘More than you know, brother.'

‘Something lies ahead,' Rhulad said in a whisper.

Vast, towering shapes. Standing stones, devoid of lichen or moss, the surface strangely textured, made, Trull realized as they drew closer, to resemble the bark of the Blackwood. Thick roots coiled out from the base of each obelisk, spreading out to entwine with those of the stones to each side. Beyond, the ground fell away in a broad depression, from which light leaked like mist.

Fear led them between the standing stones and they halted at the pit's edge.

The roots writhed downward, and woven in their midst were bones. Thousands upon thousands. Trull saw Kaschan, the feared ancient enemies of the Edur, reptilian snouts and gleaming fangs. And bones that clearly belonged to the Tiste. Among them, finely curved wing-bones from Wyval, and, at the very base, the massive skull of an Eleint, the broad, flat bone of its forehead crushed inward, as if by the blow of a gigantic, gauntleted fist.

Leafless scrub had grown up from the chaotic mat on the slopes, the branches and twigs grey and clenching. Then the breath hissed between Trull's teeth. The scrub was stone, growing not in the manner of crystal, but of living wood.

‘Kaschan sorcery,' Fear said after a time, ‘is born of sounds our ears cannot hear, formed into words that loosen the bindings that hold all matter together, that hold it to the ground. Sounds that bend and stretch light, as a tidal inflow up a river is drawn apart at the moment of turning. With this sorcery, they fashioned fortresses of stone that rode the sky like clouds. With this sorcery, they turned Darkness in upon itself with a hunger none who came too close could defy, an all-devouring hunger that fed first and foremost upon itself.' His voice was strangely muted as he spoke. ‘Kaschan sorcery was sent into the warren of Mother Dark, like a plague. Thus was sealed the gate from Kurald Galain to every other realm. Thus was Mother Dark driven into the very core of the Abyss, witness to an endless swirl of light surrounding her—all that she would one day devour, until the last speck of matter vanishes into her. Annihilating Mother Dark. Thus the Kaschan, who are long dead, set upon Mother Dark a ritual that will end in her murder. When all Light is gone. When there is naught to cast Shadow, and so Shadow too is doomed to die.

‘When Scabandari Bloodeye discovered what they had done, it was too late. The end, the
death
of the Abyss, cannot be averted. The journey of all that exists repeats on every scale, brothers. From those realms too small for us to see, to the Abyss itself. The Kaschan locked all things into mortality, into the relentless plunge towards extinction. This was their vengeance. An act born, perhaps, of despair. Or the fiercest hatred imaginable. Witness to their own extinction, they forced all else to share that fate.'

His brothers were silent. The dull echoes of Fear's last words faded away.

Then Rhulad grunted. ‘I see no signs of this final convergence, Fear.'

‘A distant death, aye. More distant than one could imagine. Yet it will come.'

‘And what is that to us?'

‘The Tiste Invasions drove the Kaschan to their last act. Father Shadow earned the enmity of every Elder god, of every ascendant. Because of the Kaschan ritual, the eternal game among Dark, Light and Shadow would one day end. And with it, all of existence.' He faced his brothers. ‘I tell you this secret knowledge so that you will better understand what happened here, what was done. And why Hannan Mosag speaks of enemies far beyond the mortal Letherii.'

The first glimmerings of realization whispered through Trull. He dragged his gaze from Fear's dark, haunted eyes, and looked down into the pit. To the very base, to the skull of that slain dragon. ‘They killed him.'

‘They destroyed his corporeal body, yes. And imprisoned his soul.'

‘Scabandari Bloodeye,' Rhulad said, shaking his head as if to deny all that he saw. ‘He cannot be dead. That skull is not—'

‘It is,' Fear said. ‘They killed our god.'

‘Who?' Trull demanded.

‘All of them. Elder gods. And Eleint. The Elder gods loosed the blood in their veins. The dragons spawned a child of indescribable terror, to seek out and hunt down Scabandari Bloodeye. Father Shadow was brought down. An Elder god named Kilmandaros shattered his skull. They then made for Bloodeye's spirit a prison of eternal pain, of agony beyond measure, to last until the Abyss itself is devoured.

‘Hannan Mosag means to avenge our god.'

Trull frowned. ‘The Elder gods are gone, Fear. As are the Eleint. Hannan Mosag commands six tribes of Tiste Edur and a fragmented warren.'

‘Four hundred and twenty-odd thousand Edur,' Rhulad said. ‘And, for all our endless explorations, we have found no kin among the fragments of Kurald Emurlahn. Fear, Hannan Mosag sees through stained thoughts. It is one thing to challenge Letherii hegemony with summoned demons and, if necessary, iron blades. Are we now to wage war against every god in this world?'

Fear slowly nodded. ‘You are here,' he told them, ‘and you have been told what is known. Not to see you bend to one knee and praise the Warlock King's name. He seeks power, brothers. He
needs
power, and he cares nothing for its provenance, nor its taint.'

‘Your words are treasonous,' Rhulad said, and Trull heard a strange delight in his brother's voice.

‘Are they?' Fear asked. ‘Hannan Mosag has charged us to undertake a perilous journey. To receive for him a gift. To then deliver it into his hands. A gift, brothers, from whom?'

‘We cannot deny him,' Trull said. ‘He will simply choose others to go in our stead. And we will face banishment, or worse.'

‘Of course we shall not deny him, Trull. But we must not journey like blind old men.'

‘What of Binadas?' Rhulad asked. ‘What does he know of this?'

‘Everything,' Fear replied. ‘More, perhaps, than Uruth herself.'

Trull stared down once more at the mouldy dragon skull at the bottom of the pit. ‘How are you certain that is Scabandari Bloodeye?'

‘Because it was the widows who brought him here. The knowledge was passed down every generation among the women.'

‘And Hannan Mosag?'