The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (916 page)

‘Dear sir, you are engaged in an illegal activity—'

‘Illegal? That is a reach, I'm sure. Now, before you send your thugs on a rampage of destruction, might I point out that the valves are not only open but the threads have been cut. In other words, for now, the flow of gas from the chambers beneath this structure cannot be stopped. Any sort of damage will result in, well, a ball of fire, probably of sufficient size to incinerate a sizeable area of the district.' He paused, then added, ‘Such wilful destruction on your part will be viewed by most as, um, illegal. Now, you won't face any charges since you will be dead, but the Guild that hired you will face dire retribution. The fines alone will bankrupt it.'

The woman's smile was long gone by now. ‘Oh, aren't you the clever one. Since we cannot discourage you by dismantling your shop, we have no choice then but to focus our attention on yourselves.'

Barathol walked to the kneading counter and reached into a leather satchel, withdrawing a large round ball of fired clay. He faced the woman and her mob, saw a few expressions drain of blood, and was pleased. ‘Yes, a Moranth grenado. Cusser, the Malazans call this one. Threaten me or my companion here, and I will be delighted to commit suicide – after all, what have we to lose that you would not happily take from us, given the chance?'

‘You have lost your mind.'

‘You are welcome to that opinion. Now, the question is, have you?'

She hesitated, then snarled and spun on her heel. Waving her crew to follow her, out she went.

Sighing, Barathol returned the cusser to the satchel. ‘
In every thirteenth crate of twelve cussers each
,' Mallet had told him, ‘
there is a thirteenth cusser. Empty. Why? Who knows? The Moranth are strange folk
.'

‘It worked this time,' he said to Chaur, ‘but I doubt it will last. So, the first order of business is to outfit you. Armour, weapons.'

Chaur stared at him as if uncomprehending.

‘Remember the smell of blood, Chaur? Corpses, the dead and dismembered?'

Sudden brightening of expression, and Chaur nodded vigorously.

Sighing again, Barathol said, ‘Let's climb out over the back wall and find us that beer.'

He took the satchel with him.

 

Elsewhere in the city, as the tenth bell of the night sounded, a fingerless man set out for a new tavern, murder on his mind. His wife went out to her garden to kneel on stone, which she polished using oiled sand and a thick pad of leather.

A buxom, curvaceous woman – who drew admiring regard along with curdling spite depending on gender and gender preference – walked with one rounded arm hooked in the rather thinner seamed arm of a Malazan historian, who bore an expression wavering between disbelief and dismay. They strolled as lovers would, and since they were not lovers, the historian's bemusement only grew.

In the High Markets of the Estates District, south of the gallows, sauntered Lady Challice. Bored, stung with longing and possibly despoiled (in her own mind) beyond all hope of redemption, she perused the host of objects and items, none of which were truly needed, and watched as women just like her (though most were trailed by servants who carried whatever was purchased) picked through the expensive and often finely made rubbish eager as jackdaws (and as mindless? Ah, beware cruel assumptions!), and she saw herself as so very different from them. So…changed.

Not three hundred paces away from Lady Challice, wandering unmindful of where his steps took him, was Cutter, who had once been a thief named Crokus Younghand, who had once stolen something he shouldn't have, and, finding that he could not truly give it back, had then confused guilt and sympathy with the bliss of adoration (such errors are common), only to be released in the end by a young woman's open contempt for his heartfelt, honest admissions.

Well, times and people change, don't they just.

On a rooftop half a city away, Rallick Nom stood looking out upon the choppy sea of blue lights, at his side Krute of Talient, and they had much to discuss and this meant, given Rallick Nom's taciturnity, a long session indeed.

Krute had too much to say. Rallick weighed every morsel he fed back, not out of distrust, simply habit.

In a duelling school, long after the last of the young students had toddled out, Murillio sat under moonlight with Stonny Menackis as, weeping, she unburdened herself to this veritable stranger – which perhaps is what made it all so easy – but Stonny had no experience with a man such as Murillio, who understood what it was to listen, to bestow rapt, thorough and most genuine attention solely upon one woman, to draw all of her essence – so pouring out – into his own being, as might a hummingbird drink nectar, or a bat a cow's ankle blood (although this analogy ill serves the tender moment).

And so between them unseen vapours waft, animal and undeniable, and so much seeps into flesh and bone and self that stunning recognition comes – when it comes – like the unlocking of a door once thought sealed for ever more.

She wept and she wept often, and each time it was somehow easier, somehow more natural, more comfortable and acceptable, no different, truly, from the soft stroke of his fingers through her short hair, the way the tips brushed her cheek to smooth away the tears – and oh, who then could be surprised by all this?

To the present, then, as the blurred moon, now risen, squints down upon three dozen figures gathering on a rooftop. Exchanging hand signals and muttering instructions and advice. Checking weapons. Three dozen, for the targets were tough, mean veterans with foreign ways. And the assault to come, well, it would be brutal, unsubtle, and, without doubt, thorough.

 

The usual crowd in K'rul's Bar, a dozen or so denizens choosing to be unmindful of the temple that once was – these quarried stone walls, stained with smoke and mute repositories for human voices generation upon generation, from droning chants and choral music to the howl of drunken laughter and the squeals of pinched women, these walls, then, thick and solid, ever hold to indifference in the face of drama.

Lives play out, lives parcel out portions framed by stone and wood, by tile and rafter, and all of these insensate forms have, in their time, tasted blood.

The vast, low-ceilinged main taproom with its sunken floor was once a transept or perhaps a congregation area. The narrow corridor between inset pillars along the back was once a colonnade bearing niches on which, long ago, stood funerary urns containing the charred, ashen remains of High Priests and Priestesses. The kitchen and the three storerooms behind it had once supplied sustenance to monks and the sanctioned blade-wielders, scribes and acolytes. Now they fed patrons, staff and owners.

Up the steep, saddled, stone steps to the landing on the upper floor, from which ran passages with sharply angled ceilings, three sides of a square with the fourth interrupted by the front façade of the building. Eight cell-like rooms fed off each of these passages, those on the back side projecting inward (supported by the pillars of the main floor colonnade) while the two to either side had their rooms against the building's outer walls (thus providing windows).

The cells looking out on to the taproom had had inside walls knocked out, so that eight rooms were now three rooms, constituting the offices. The interior windows were now shuttered – no glass or skin – and Picker was in the habit of throwing them wide open when she sat at her desk, giving her a clear view of the front third of the taproom, including the entranceway.

On this night, there were few guests resident in the inn's rooms. Barathol and Chaur had not yet returned. Scillara had taken Duiker into the Daru District. The bard was on the low dais in the taproom, plunking some airy, despondent melody that few of the twenty or so patrons listened to with anything approaching attention. A stranger from Pale had taken a corner room on the northeast corner and had retired early after a meagre meal and a single pint of Gredfallan ale.

Picker could see Blend at her station beside the front door, sunk in shadows as she sat, legs outstretched, her hands cradling a mug of hot cider – bizarre tastes, that woman, since it was sultry and steamy this night. People entering rarely even noticed her, marching right past without a glance down. Blend's talent, aye, and who could say if it was natural or something else.

Antsy was yelling in the kitchen. He'd gone in there to calm down the two cooks – who despised each other – and it turned out as it usually did, with Antsy at war with everyone, including the scullions and the rats cowering beneath the counter. In a short while utensils would start flying and Picker would have to drag herself down there.

Bluepearl was…somewhere. It was his habit to wander off, exploring the darker crooks and crannies of the old temple.

A night, then, no different from any other.

 

Bluepearl found himself in the cellar. Funny how often that happened. He had dragged out the fourth dusty cask from the crawlspace behind the wooden shelves. The first three he had sampled earlier in the week. Two had been vinegar, from which he could manage only a few swallows at a time. The other had been something thick and tarry, smelling of cedar or perhaps pine sap – in any case, he'd done little more than dip a finger in, finding the taste even fouler than the smell.

This time, however, he felt lucky. Broaching the cask, he bent close and tried a few tentative sniffs. Ale? Beer? But of course, neither lasted, did they? Yet this cask bore the sigil of the temple on the thick red wax coating the lid. He sniffed again. Definitely yeasty, but fresh, which meant…sorcery. He sniffed a third time.

He'd danced with all kinds of magic as a squad mage in the Bridgeburners. Aye, he had so many stories that even that sour-faced bard upstairs would gape in wonder just to hear half of them. Why, he'd ducked and rolled under the nastiest kinds, the sorceries that ripped flesh from bones, that boiled the blood, that made a man's balls swell up big as melons – oh, that time had been before he'd joined, hadn't it? Yah, the witch and the witch's daughter – never mind. What he was was an old hand.

And this stuff – Bluepearl dipped a finger in and then poked it into his mouth – oh, it was magic indeed. Something elder, hinting of blood (aye, he'd tasted the like before).

‘Is that you, Brother Cuven?'

He twisted round and scowled at the ghost whose head and shoulders lifted into view through the floor. ‘Do I look like Brother Cuven? You're dead, long dead. It's all gone, you hear? So why don't you go and do the same?'

‘I smelled the blade,' murmured the ghost, beginning to sink back down. ‘I smelled it…'

No, Bluepearl decided, it probably wasn't a good thing to be drinking this stuff. Not before some kind of analysis was made. Could be Mallet might help on that. Now, had he messed it up by opening the cask? Probably it would go bad now. So, he'd better take it upstairs.

Sighing, Bluepearl replaced the wooden stopper and picked up the cask.

 

In the corner room on the second level, the stranger who'd booked the room for this night finished digging out the last of the bars on the window. He then doused the lantern and moved across to the hallway door, where he crouched down, listening.

From the window behind him the first of the assassins climbed in.

 

Blend, her eyes half closed, watched as five men came in, moving in a half-drunken clump and arguing loudly about the latest jump in the price of bread, slurred statements punctuated by shoves and buffets, and wasn't it a wonder, Blend reflected as they staggered into the taproom, how people could complain about very nearly anything as if their lives depended on it.

These ones she didn't know, meaning they'd probably spied the torchlit sign on their way back from some other place, deciding that this drunk wasn't drunk enough, and she noted that they were better dressed than most – nobles, most likely, with all the usual bluster and airs of invincibility and all that. Well, they'd be spending coin here and that was what counted.

She took another sip of cider.

Antsy had his shortsword out as he crept towards the back of the smallest of the three storerooms. That damned two-headed rat was back. Sure, nobody else believed him except maybe the cooks now since they'd both seen the horrid thing, but the only way to prove it to the others was to kill the bugger and then show it to everyone.

They could then pickle it in a giant jar and make of it a curio for the bar. It would be sure to pull 'em in. Two-headed rat caught in the kitchen of K'rul's Bar! Come see!

Oh, hold on…was that the best kind of advertising? He'd have to ask Picker about that.

First, of course, he needed to kill the thing.

He crept closer, eyes fixed on the dark gap behind the last crate to the left.

Kill the thing, aye. Just don't chop either head off.

 

Eleven figures crowded the corner room on the upper floor. Three held daggers, including the man crouched at the door. Four cradled crossbows, quarrels set. The last four – big men all – wielded swords and bucklers, and beneath their loose shirts there was fine chain.