The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen (937 page)

In the silence that followed that statement, Blend's mind was awhirl. ‘Then…'

‘She can't bear to come in here and see you the way you are. So pale. So weak.'

‘And that's what's keeping her from hunting the killers down? That's ridiculous. Tell her, from me, Scillara, that all this going soft shit is, um, unattractive. Tell her, if she's not ready to start talking vengeance, then she can forget about me. We've never run from anything in our lives, and as soon as I'm back on my feet, I plan on a rat hunt the likes of which the Guild has never seen.'

‘All right.'

‘Is this what all the arguing's about? Her and Antsy?'

A nod.

‘Find me a High Denul healer, will you? I'll pay whatever it takes.'

‘Fine. Now eat.'

 

The corpse still smelled of fermented peaches. Laid out on a long table in one of the back rooms, the Seguleh might have been sleeping one off, and Picker expected the ghastly warrior's serenely closed eyes to flicker open at any moment. The thought sent shivers through her and she glanced over once more at Duiker.

‘So, Historian, you've done some thinking on this, some jawing with that bard and that alchemist friend of yours. Tell us, what in Hood's name are all these pickled Seguleh doing in the cellar?'

Duiker frowned, rubbed at the back of his neck, and would not meet Picker's hard stare. ‘Baruk didn't take the news well. He seemed…upset. How many casks have you examined?'

‘There's twelve of the bastards, including this one. Three are women.'

Duiker nodded. ‘They can choose. Warriors or not. If not, they cannot be challenged. Seems to relate to infant mortality.'

Picker frowned. ‘What does?'

‘Denul and midwifery. If most children generally survive, then mothers don't need to birth eight or ten of them in the hopes that one or two make it—'

‘Well, that's the way it is everywhere.'

‘Of course,' Duiker continued as if he had not heard her statement, ‘some cultures have an overriding need to increase their population base. And this can impose strictures on women. There's a high attrition rate among the Seguleh. A duelling society by its very nature cuts down the survival rate once adulthood is reached. Young warriors in their prime – probably as deadly as a war, only this is a war that never ends. Still, there must be periods – cycles, perhaps – when young women are freed up to choose their own path.'

Picker's eyes settled on the corpse on the table while Duiker spoke. She tried to imagine such a society, wherein like bhederin cows all the women stood moaning as their tails were pushed to one side almost as soon as the latest calf had dropped out bleating on to the ground. It was madness. It was
unfair.
‘Good thing even Seguleh women wear masks,' she muttered.

‘Sorry, what?'

She scowled across at the historian. ‘Hides all the rage.'

‘Oh, well, I don't know that the non-warrior women do – it never occurred to me to ask. But I see your point.'

‘But is that enough?' she asked. ‘Do so many warriors kill each other that it's necessary to demand that of the women?'

Duiker glanced at her, then away again.

The bastard's hiding some suspicions.

‘I don't know, Picker. Could be. Their savagery is infamous.'

‘How long do you think these ones have been down there? In the cellar, I mean, in those casks?'

‘The seals are templar. Baruk suggests that the cult persisted, in some residual form, long after its presumed extinction.'

‘Decades? Centuries?'

He shrugged.

‘But what are they doing here in Darujhistan anyway? Those islands are right off the south end of the damned continent. Nearly a thousand leagues between them and this city.'

‘I don't know.'

Yeah, right.
Sighing, she turned away. ‘Seen Antsy?'

‘At the bar.'

‘Typical. Depleting our stock.'

‘Your indecision has left him despondent.'

‘Stuff that, Duiker,' she snapped, walking from the room, leaving him there with that damned corpse. It was a contest which of them was the least forthcoming, in any case, and she was tired of the duck and dodge. Yet, something in all of that had lodged in her the suspicion that the Guild contract out on them was connected, somehow, with this old temple and all its grisly secrets.
Find the connection, and maybe find the piece of shit who put the chop on us. Find him, or her, so I can shove a cusser up inside nice and deep.

Antsy was leaning on the bar, glowering at nothing in particular, at least until he found a perfect victim in Picker as she walked up. ‘Careful, woman,' he growled, ‘I ain't in the mood.'

‘Ain't in the mood for what?'

‘For anything.'

‘Except one thing.'

‘Anything you might try on me, is what I meant. As for the other thing, well, I've already decided to go it alone if I have to.'

‘So,' she leaned on the bar beside him, ‘what are you waiting for, then?'

‘Blend. Once she's back on her feet, Pick, she'll be hungry enough to take the fight to 'em.' He tugged on his moustache, then scowled at her. ‘It's you I can't figure.'

‘Antsy,' Picker said, sighing, ‘much as I'd love to murder every damned assassin in this city, and the Guild Master, too, they're not the source of the problem. Someone hired them, only we don't know who, and we don't know why. We've been through this before. We're back right where we started, in fact, only this time we're down two.' She found she was trembling, and was unable to meet Antsy's stare. ‘You know, I find myself wishing Ganoes Paran was here – if anybody could work out what's going on, it's the Captain.'

Antsy grunted. ‘Master of the Deck, aye.' He drank down the last of his drink and straightened. ‘Fine, let's go to the Finnest House, then – maybe he's in there, maybe he's not. Either way, it's doing something.'

‘And leave Blend here on her own?'

‘She's not alone. There's Duiker and Scillara. Not to mention that bard. There ain't nobody coming back to finish us, not in the daytime at least. We can be back before dusk, Pick.'

Still she hesitated.

Antsy stepped close. ‘Listen, I ain't so stupid, I know what's goin' on in your head. But us just sitting here is us waiting for their next move. You know the marine doctrine, Corporal. It ain't our job to react – it's our job to hit first and make
them
do the reacting. Twice now they hit us – they do it again and we're finished.'

Despite the alcoholic fumes drifting off the man, his blue eyes were hard and clear, and Picker knew he was right, and yet…she was afraid. And she knew he could see it, was struggling with it – badly – since fear was not something he'd expect from her.
Not ever. Gods, you've become an old woman, Pick. Frail and cowering.

They've killed your damned friends. They damn near killed your dearest love.

‘I doubt he's there,' she said. ‘Else he'd have been by. He's gone somewhere, Antsy. Might never be back and why would he? Wherever Paran's gone, he's probably busy – he's the type. Always in the middle of some damned thing.'

‘All right,' Antsy allowed. ‘Still, maybe there's some way we can, um, send him a message.'

Her brows rose. ‘Now that's an idea, Antsy. Glad one of us is thinking.'

‘Aye. Can we go now, then?'

 

They set out, making use of a side postern gate. Both wore cloaks, hiding armour and their swords, the weapons loose in their scabbards. Antsy also carried two sharpers, each in its own cloth sack, one knotted to his weapon harness and the other down at his belt. He could tug a grenado loose and fling it in its sack as one might throw a slingstone. It was his own invention, and he'd practised with a stone inside the sack, acquiring passable skill. Hood knew he was no sapper, but he was learning.

Nothing infuriated him more than losing a fight. True, they'd come out the other side, while pretty much all of the assassins had died, so it wasn't really a defeat, but it felt like one. Since retiring, his handful of Malazan companions had come to feel like family. Not in the way a squad did, since squads existed to fight, to kill, to wage war, and this made the tightness between the soldiers a strange one. Stained with brutality, with the extremes of behaviour that made every moment of life feel like a damned miracle. No, this family wasn't like that. They'd all calmed down some. Loosened up, left the nasty shit far behind. Or so they'd thought.

As he and Picker set out for Coll's estate and the wretched house behind its grounds, he tried to think back to when he'd had nothing to do with this kind of life, back to when he'd been a scrawny bow-legged runt in Falar. Bizarrely, his own mental image of his ten-year-old face retained the damned moustache and he was pretty sure he'd yet to grow one, but memories were messy things. Unreliable, maybe mostly lies, in fact. A scatter of images stitched together by invented shit, so that what had been in truth a time as chaotic as the present suddenly seemed like a narration, a story.

The mind in the present was ever eager to narrate its own past, each one its own historian, and since when were historians reliable on anything?
Aye, look at Duiker. He spun a fine tale, that one about Coltaine and the Chain of Dogs. Heartbreaking, but then those were always the best kind, since they made a person
feel
– when so much of living was avoiding feeling anything. But was any of it real? Aye, Coltaine got killed for real. The army got shattered just like he said. But any of the rest? All those details?

No way of ever knowing. And it don't really matter in the end, does it?

Just like our own tales. Who we were, what we did. The narration going on, until it stops. Sudden, like a caught breath that never again lets out.

End of story.

The child with the moustache was looking at him, there in his head. Scowling, suspicious, maybe disbelieving. ‘
You think you know me, old man? Not a chance. You don't know a thing and what you think you remember ain't got nothing to do with me. With how I'm thinking. With what I'm feeling. You're farther away than my own da, that miserable, bitter tyrant neither of us could ever figure out, not you, not me, not even him. Maybe he's not us, but then he's not him, either.

‘
Old man, you're as lost as I am and don't pretend no different. Lost in life…till death finds you
.'

Well, this was why he usually avoided thinking about his own past. Better left untouched, hidden away, locked up in a trunk and dropped over the side to sink down into the depths. Problem was, he was needing to dredge up some things all over again. Thinking like a soldier, for one. Finding that nasty edge again, the hard way of looking at things. The absence of hesitation.

Gallons of ale wasn't helping. Just fed his despondency, his sense of feeling too old, too old for all of it, now.

‘Gods below, Antsy, I can hear you grinding your teeth from over here. Whatever it is, looks like it's tasting awful.'

He squinted across at her. ‘Expect me to be skippin' a dance down this damned street? We're in more trouble than we've ever been, Pick.'

‘We've faced worse—'

‘No. Because when we faced worse we was ready for it. We was trained to deal with it. Grab it by the throat, choke the life from it.' He paused, and then spat on to the cobbles before adding, ‘I'm starting to realize what “retirement” really means. Everything we let go of, we're now scrabbling to get back, only it's outa reach.
It's fuckin' out of reach
.'

She said nothing, and that told Antsy she knew he was right; that she felt the same.

Scant comfort, this company.

They reached Coll's estate, went round towards the back wall. The journey from K'rul's Bar to here was already a blur in Antsy's mind, so unimportant as to be instantly worthless. He'd not registered a single figure amidst the crowds on the streets. Had they been tracked? Followed? Probably. ‘Hood's breath, Pick, I wasn't checkin' if we picked up a sniffin' dog. See what I mean?'

‘We did,' she replied. ‘Two of 'em. Lowlifes, not actual assassins, just their dogs, like you say. They're keeping their distance – probably warned right off us. I doubt they'll follow us into the wood.'

‘No,' Antsy agreed. ‘They'd smell ambush.'

‘Right, so never mind them.'

She led the way into the overgrown thicket behind the estate. The uneven forest floor was littered at the edges with rubbish, but this quickly dwindled as they pushed deeper into the shadowy, overgrown copse. Few people, it was obvious, wanted to set eyes on the Finnest House, to feel the chill of it looking right back at them. Attention from something as ghastly as that dark edifice was unwanted attention.

Thirty uneven strides in, they caught sight of the black half-stone half-wood walls, the wrinkled, scarred face of the house, shutters matted like rotted wicker, no light leaking through from anywhere. Vines snaked up the sides, sprawled out over the humped ground in the low-walled yard. The few trees in that yard were twisted and leafless, roots bared like bones.

‘More lumps than last time I was here,' Picker observed as they made their way towards the gate.

Antsy grunted. ‘No shortage of idiots tryin' t'get inside. Thinkin' they'll find treasure…'

‘Secret short cuts to power,' she added. ‘Magical items and crap.'

‘An' all they got was an early grave.' He hesitated at the gate and glanced at Picker. ‘Could be we end up the same way.'

‘Stay on the path, that's the trick. Follow me.'

He fell into step close behind her as she set out along the narrow, winding track of tilted pavestones. Too close, as he trod on her heel and almost made her stumble. She shot him a vicious look over one shoulder before continuing on.