The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (48 page)

The wizard’s smile was strained. “Tell me about it. But right now the more confusion and chaos the better.”

“And if Tayschrenn catches wind?”

Quick Ben’s smile broadened. “Then we’re dead all that much sooner. So it goes.”

Kalam barked a short, humorless laugh. “So it goes.”

The wizard cocked his head. “The sun’s past the horizon. Time to start.”

“You want me out of here?” Kalam asked.

Quick Ben shook his head. “No, I want you right where you are for this one. If I don’t come back, take my body and burn it down to ash. Scatter the ash to the four winds, and curse my name with all your heart.”

Kalam was silent. Then he asked, in a growl, “How long do I wait?”

“Dawn,” Quick Ben replied. “You understand I would only ask this of my closest friend.”

“I understand. Now, get on with it, dammit.”

Quick Ben gestured. A ring of fire sprang from the earth, surrounding the wizard. He closed his eyes.

To Kalam, his friend seemed to deflate slightly, as if something essential to life had disappeared. Quick Ben’s neck creaked as his chin sank down to his chest, his shoulders slumped, and a long breath escaped with a slow hiss. The ring of fire flared, then dimmed to a lapping glimmer on the earth.

Kalam shifted position, stretching out his legs and crossing his arms. In the gathering silence, he waited.

A pale Murillio returned to the table and sat down. “Someone’s disposing of the body,” he said, then shook his head. “Whoever killed Chert was a professional with a real nasty streak. Right through the eye—”

“Enough!” Kruppe cried out, raising his hands. “Kruppe happens to be eating, dear Murillio, and Kruppe also happens to have a delicate stomach.”

“Chert was a fool,” Murillio continued, ignoring Kruppe, “but hardly the type to attract such viciousness.”

Crokus said nothing. He’d seen the blood on that dark-haired woman’s dagger.

“Who can say?” Kruppe waggled his eyebrows. “Perhaps he was witness to some horrific horror. Perhaps he was stamped out as a man crushes a cute mouse underfoot.”

Crokus glanced around. His eyes returned to the woman standing with Meese at the bar. Dressed in leather armor with a plain dueling sword strapped to her hip, she reminded him of the time he’d watched, as a young boy, a troop of mercenaries ride through the city. They had been the Crimson Guard, he recalled: five hundred men and women without a shiny buckle among them.

His gaze remained on the woman. Like a mercenary, a killer for whom killing had long since lost its horror. What had Chert done to earn a knife in the eye?

Crokus looked away, in time to see Rallick Nom enter the bar. The assassin approached the table, seemingly unconscious of the locals moving from his path.

Coll intercepted him before he reached the table. The burly man slapped Rallick’s back and leaned drunkenly against him. “Nom, you old bastard!”

Rallick threw an arm around Coll’s round shoulders and together they came to the table.

Kruppe looked up. “Ho, my dear comrades! Kruppe invites you to join our familiar gathering.” Waving his arms at the two empty chairs, he rocked back in his seat. “To bring you up to date on our dramatic doings, the lad Crokus has
been staring dreamily into space while Murillio and Kruppe have discussed the latest natterings of the street rats.”

Coll remained standing, weaving unsteadily, a frown knitting his brows. Rallick sat down and reached for the pitcher of beer. “What natterings are those?” the assassin asked casually.

“The rumor that we’re now allied with Moon’s Spawn,” Murillio said.

“Nonsense, of course,” Kruppe said. “Have you seen anything to suggest such a thing?”

Murillio grinned. “The Moon hasn’t moved away, has it? Not only that, there’s that Council tent stationed directly under it.”

Crokus spoke up. “I heard from Uncle Mammot that the councilmen haven’t had any luck getting a message to whoever’s in Moon’s Spawn.”

“Typical,” Murillio commented, his eyes narrowing briefly on Rallick.

“Who lives in there?” Crokus asked.

Coll tottered and threw both hands down on the table to steady himself. He thrust his red face at Crokus and bellowed, “Five black dragons!”

Within the Warren of Chaos, Quick Ben knew of the innumerable shifting pathways that led to doors. Though he called them doors they were in fact barriers created where Warrens touched, a calcretion of energy as solid as basalt. Chaos touched on all realms with gnarled fingertips bleeding power, the doors hardened wounds in the flesh of other worlds, other avenues of magic.

The wizard had focused his talents on such doors. While within the Warren of Chaos, he had learned the ways of shaping their energy. He’d found means of altering the barriers, of sensing what lay beyond them. Each Warren of magic possessed a smell, each realm a texture, and though the pathways he took were never the same as those he’d taken before, he had mastered the means of finding those he sought.

He traveled now down one of those paths, a track of nothingness enclosed by the Warren’s own accretions, twisting and fraught with contradictions. On one trail he’d will himself forward yet find himself moving back; he’d come to a sharp right turn, followed by another, then another, then yet another—all in the same direction.

He knew it was the power of his mind that opened the pathways, but they had their own laws—or perhaps they were his, yet unknown to him. Whatever the source of the shaping, it was madness defined.

He came at last to the door he sought. The barrier showed as nothing more than a dull, slate-gray stone. Hovering before it, Quick Ben whispered a command, and his spirit took the form of his own body. He stood a moment, mastering the disconnected tremble of his ghost-body, then stepped forward and laid hands on the door.

Its edges were hard and warm. Toward the center it grew hot and soft to the touch. The surface slowly lost its opaqueness beneath the wizard’s hands, becoming glassy like obsidian. Quick Ben closed his eyes.

He’d never before sought to pass through such a door. He was not even certain that it was possible. And if he survived into the beyond, was there any way to return? Past the mechanics of the one thing loomed his final, most difficult worry: he was about to attempt entry into a realm where he wasn’t welcome.

Quick Ben opened his eyes. “I am direction,” he said quietly. He leaned against the barrier. “I am the power of will in a place that respects this, and only this.” He leaned harder. “I am the Warren’s touch. To chaos nothing is immune, nowhere is immune.” He felt the door begin to yield. He lashed out one hand behind him, fending off a growing pressure. “Only I shall pass!” he hissed. Abruptly, with a strange thumping sound, he slipped through, energy flaring around his body.

The wizard staggered over rough, parched earth. He regained his balance and looked around. He stood on a barren plain, the horizon off to his left humped with low hills. Overhead spanned a sky the color of quicksilver, a scatter of long, stringy clouds moving in unison and black as ink directly above.

Quick Ben sat down, folding his legs and clasping his hands in his lap. “Shadowthrone,” he said, “Lord of Shadows, I am come to your realm. Will you receive my presence as befits a peaceful visitor?”

From the hills came an answer: the howling of Hounds.

Walk with me

on Thieves’ Road

hear its song

underfoot

how clear its

tone in misstep

as it sings

you in two

A
PSALAR’S
C
ANT
D
RISBIN
(
B
. 1135)

Kneading his brow, Kruppe sat reading in Mammot’s study.

     . . . and in the Calling Down to earth the God was Crippled, and so Chained in its place. In the Calling Down many lands were sundered by the God’s Fists, and things were born and things were released. Chained and Crippled was this God

Kruppe glanced up from the ancient tome and rolled his eyes. “Brevity, Kruppe prays for brevity!” He returned to the faded handwritten script.

and it bred caution in the unveiling of its powers. The Crippled God bred caution but not well enough, for the powers of the earth came to it in the end. Chained was the Crippled God, and so Chained was it destroyed. And upon this barren plain that imprisoned the Crippled God many gathered to the deed. Hood, gray wanderer of Death, was among the gathering, as was Dessembrae, then Hood’s Warrior—though it was here and in this time that Dessembrae shattered the bonds Hood held upon him. Also among the gathering were

Kruppe groaned and flipped pages. The list seemed interminable, absurdly long. From this account he half expected to see his grandmother’s name among those listed. Finally, after three pages, he found the names he sought.

and among those that came from the vaulted heavens of silver, the Tiste Andii, dwellers of Darkness in the Place before Light, Black Dragons numbering five, and in their league sailed red-winged Silanah, said to dwell among the Tiste Andii in their Fang of Darkness descending from the vaulted heavens of silver

Kruppe nodded, muttering to himself. A descending Fang of Darkness—Moon’s Spawn? Home to five Black Dragons and one Red Dragon? He shivered. How had Coll come upon this? True, the man hadn’t always been a drunken lout, but even his past station, lofty as it was, hadn’t been the scholarly kind.

Who, then, had spoken through the old man’s wine-stained mouth?

“That,” Kruppe sighed to himself, “shall have to wait its answer. The significance, however, of Coll’s bellowed claim lies in its evident truth, and as to how it pertains to the present situation.” He closed the book and rose to his feet. Behind him he heard footsteps.

“I’ve brought you herbal tea,” the old man said, as he entered the closet-sized room. “Has
Alladart’s Realm Compendium
been beneficial, Kruppe?”

“Beneficial indeed,” Kruppe said, gratefully accepting the earthenware mug.
“Kruppe has learned the value of modern language. Such long-lipped dribbles common to those ancient scholars are a curse Kruppe is thankful to find extinct in our time.”

“Ah, ha,” the old man said, coughing slightly and looking away. “Well, do you mind if I ask what you were seeking?”

Kruppe glanced up, the corners of his eyes crinkling slightly. “Not at all, Mammot. I thought to find mention of my grandmother’s name.”

Mammot frowned, then nodded. “I see. Well, I’ll not inquire as to your luck, then.”

“Please, do not,” Kruppe said, eyes widening. “Luck is such a dreadful companion these days, with all awry as all happens to be. But thank you for understanding Kruppe’s need for circumspection.”

“Not at all,” Mammot said, waving one hand. “I didn’t mean to—well, yes, I did. Curiosity, you understand. The intellectual kind.”

Kruppe smiled beatifically and sipped tea.

“Well,” Mammot said, “shall we return to the common room, then, and find respite before the hearth?”

They strode into the other chamber. Once seated, Kruppe stretched out his legs and leaned back. “How has your writing been coming along?” he asked.

“Slow,” Mammot answered, “as one would expect, of course.”

It seemed Mammot was working up to something, and so Kruppe waited, idly wiggling his toes. A minute passed, then the old man cleared his throat and spoke. “Kruppe, have you seen much of my dear nephew lately?”

Kruppe raised his eyebrows. “Long ago,” he said, “Kruppe made a promise to a man, the man being a concerned uncle to a young boy who found the streets an exciting playground. Aye, the lad dreamed of sword-fights and dark deeds committed in alleys on behalf of princesses in disguise, or some such thing—”

Mammot was nodding, his eyes closed.

“—and to such promises Kruppe has availed of himself thoroughly, for he, too, loved the boy. And as with any endeavor, survival is measured in ability, and so did Kruppe take the lad under his silken wing, with some success, yes?”

Mammot smiled, still nodding.

“And so, to answer the uncle’s question. Indeed Kruppe has seen the lad.”

Mammot leaned forward and fixed Kruppe with an intense gaze. “Have you seen anything odd in his actions? I mean, has he asked you any strange questions, made any requests?”

Kruppe’s eyes narrowed. He paused to drink. “Bluntly, yes. For one, he sought the return of a fine cache of jewelry he acquired recently, for personal reasons—as he said. Personal reasons. Kruppe wondered then and wonders now, but the lad’s seeming sincerity, nay, focused intensity, struck Kruppe as laudable.”

“Agreed! Would you believe Crokus has now expressed an interest in formal education? I can’t understand it. The boy’s positively obsessed about something.”

“Perhaps, then, Kruppe should piece this together.”

“Thank you,” Mammot said, relieved. “I would know where all this is coming
from. So much ambition all at once, I fear it may soon burn itself out. If we can nourish it, however . . .”

“By all means,” Kruppe said. “There is more to life than petty thievery, after all.”

Mammot grinned. “Why, Kruppe, I’m surprised to hear that coming from you.”

“Such comments are better left between you and Kruppe. In any case, I believe Murillio knows something of all this. He intimated as much this evening while we dined at the Phoenix Inn.”

Mammot asked, “Is Murillio well?”

Kruppe smiled. “The net about the lad remains intact,” he said. “For one, Rallick Nom has taken the responsibility seriously indeed. Mayhap he sees something of his own lost youth in Crokus. In truth, Rallick is a man whose true nature escapes Kruppe. Fiercely loyal for certain, and one who, as you well know, honors his debts with such vigor as to humble those around him. Excepting Kruppe, naturally. Yet is it blood that travels his veins? One must wonder, at times.”

A distant look had entered Mammot’s face.

Kruppe tensed. The air smelled of magic. He leaned forward and studied the old man seated across from him. Someone was communicating with Mammot, and the Warren that now pulsed in the room was familiar to Kruppe.