House of Chains

by Steven Erikson

  ‘Bottle.’

  ‘Who was your drill sergeant?’ he demanded to the four recruits.

  Koryk leaned back as he replied, ‘Braven Tooth—’

  ‘Braven Tooth! That bastard’s still alive?’

  ‘It was hard to tell at times,’ Smiles muttered.

  ‘Until his temper snapped,’ Koryk added. ‘Just ask Corporal Tarr there. Braven Tooth spent near two bells pounding on him with a mace. Couldn’t get past the shield.’

  Strings glared at his new corporal. ‘Where’d you learn that skill?’

  The man shrugged. ‘Don’t know. Don’t like getting hit.’

  ‘Well, do you ever counter-attack?’

  Tarr frowned. ‘Sure. When they’re tired.’

  Strings was silent for a long moment. Braven Tooth—he was dumbfounded. The bastard was grizzled back when . . . when the whole naming thing began. It had been Braven who’d started it. Braven who’d named most of the Bridgeburners. Whiskeyjack. Trotts, Mallet, Hedge, Blend, Picker, Toes . . . Fiddler himself had avoided a new name through his basic training; it had been Whiskeyjack who’d named him, on that first ride through Raraku. He shook his head, glanced sidelong at Tarr. ‘You should be a heavy infantryman, Corporal, with a talent like that. The marines are supposed to be fast, nimble—avoiding the toe-to-toe whenever possible or, if there’s no choice, making it quick.’

  ‘I’m good with a crossbow,’ Tarr said, shrugging.

  ‘And a fast loader,’ Koryk added. ‘It was that that made Braven decide to make him a marine.’

  Smiles spoke. ‘So who named Braven Tooth, Sergeant?’

  I did, after the bastard left one of his in my shoulder the night of the brawl. The brawl we all later denied happening. Gods, so many years ago, now . . . ‘I have no idea,’ he said. He shifted his attention back to the man named Bottle. ‘Where’s your sword, soldier?’

  ‘I don’t use one.’

  ‘Well, what do you use?’

  The man shrugged. ‘This and that.’

  ‘Well, Bottle, someday I’d like to hear how you got through basic training without picking up a weapon—no, not now. Not tomorrow either, not even next week. For now, tell me what I should be using you for.’

  ‘Scouting. Quiet work.’

  ‘As in sneaking up behind someone. What do you do then? Tap him on the shoulder? Never mind.’ This man smells like a mage to me, only he doesn’t want to advertise it. Fine, be that way, we’ll twist it out of you sooner or later.

  ‘I do the same kind of work,’ Smiles said. She settled a forefinger on the pommel of one of the two thin-bladed knives at her belt. ‘But I finish things with these.’

  ‘So there’s only two soldiers in this outfit who can actually fight toe-to-toe?’

  ‘You said one more’s coming,’ Koryk pointed out.

  ‘We can all handle crossbows,’ Smiles added. ‘Except for Bottle.’

  They heard voices from outside the commandeered stables, then figures appeared in the doorway, six in all, burdened with equipment. A deep voice called, ‘You put the latrine trench outside the barracks, for Hood’s sake! Bastards don’t teach ya anything these days?’

  ‘Compliments of Lieutenant Ranal,’ Strings said.

  The soldier who’d spoken was in the lead as the squad approached. ‘Right. Met him.’

  Aye, nothing more need be said on that. ‘I’m Sergeant Strings—we’re the 4th.’

  ‘Well hey,’ a second soldier said, grinning through his bushy red beard, ‘someone can count after all. These marines are full of surprises.’

  ‘Fifth,’ the first soldier said. There was a strange, burnished cast to the man’s skin, making Strings doubt his initial guess that he was Falari. Then he noted an identical sheen to the red-bearded soldier, as well as on a much younger man. ‘I’m Gesler,’ the first soldier added. ‘Temporarily sergeant of this next-to-useless squad.’

  The red-bearded man dropped his pack to the floor. ‘We was coastal guards, me and Gesler and Truth. I’m Stormy. But Coltaine made us marines—’

  ‘Not Coltaine,’ Gesler corrected. ‘Captain Lull, it was, Queen harbour his poor soul.’

  Strings simply stared at the two men.

  Stormy scowled. ‘Got a problem with us?’ he demanded, face darkening.

  ‘Adjutant Stormy,’ Strings muttered. ‘Captain Gesler. Hood’s rattling bones—’

  ‘We ain’t none of those things any more,’ Gesler said. ‘Like I said, I’m now a sergeant, and Stormy’s my corporal. And the rest here . . . there’s Truth, Tavos Pond, Sands and Pella. Truth’s been with us since Hissar and Pella was a camp guard at the otataral mines—only a handful survived the uprising there, from what I gather.’

  ‘Strings, is it?’ Stormy’s small eyes had narrowed suspiciously. He nudged his sergeant. ‘Hey, Gesler, think we should have done that? Changed our names, I mean. This Strings here is Old Guard as sure as I’m a demon in my dear father’s eye.’

  ‘Let the bastard keep whatever name he wants,’ Gesler muttered. ‘All right, squad, find some place to drop your stuff. The 6th should be showing up any time, and the lieutenant, too. Word is, we’re all being mustered out to face the Adjunct’s lizard eyes in a day or two.’

  The soldier Gesler had named Tavos Pond—a tall, dark, moustached man who was probably Korelri—spoke up. ‘So we should polish our equipment, Sergeant?’

  ‘Polish whatever you like,’ the man replied disinterestedly, ‘just not in public. As for the Adjunct, if she can’t handle a few scuffed up soldiers then she won’t last long. It’s a dusty world out there, and the sooner we blend in the better.’

  Strings sighed. He was feeling more confident already. He faced his own soldiers. ‘Enough sitting on that straw. Start spreading it out to soak up this horse piss.’ He faced Gesler again. ‘A word with you in private?’

  The man nodded. ‘Let’s head back outside.’

  Moments later the two men stood on the cobbled courtyard of the estate that had once housed a well-off local merchant and was now the temporary bivouac for Ranal’s squads. The lieutenant had taken the house proper for himself, leaving Strings wondering what the man did with all those empty rooms.

  They said nothing for a moment, then Strings grinned. ‘I can picture Whiskeyjack’s jaw dropping—the day I tell him you was my fellow sergeant in the new 8th Legion.’

  Gesler scowled. ‘Whiskeyjack. He was busted down to sergeant before I was, the bastard. Mind you, I then made corporal, so I beat him after all.’

  ‘Except now you’re a sergeant again. While Whiskeyjack’s an outlaw. Try beating that.’

  ‘I just might,’ Gesler muttered.

  ‘Got concerns about the Adjunct?’ Strings quietly asked. The courtyard was empty, but even so . . .

  ‘Met her, you know. Oh, she’s as cold as Hood’s forked tongue. She impounded my ship.’

  ‘You had a ship?’

  ‘By rights of salvage, aye. I was the one who brought Coltaine’s wounded to Aren. And that’s the thanks I get.’

  ‘You could always punch her in the face. That’s what you usually end up doing to your superiors, sooner or later.’

  ‘I could at that. I’d have to get past Gamet, of course. The point I was making is this: she’s never commanded anything more than a damned noble household, and here she’s been handed three legions and told to reconquer an entire subcontinent.’ He glanced sidelong at Strings. ‘There wasn’t many Falari made it into the Bridgeburners. Bad timing, I think, but there was one.’

  ‘Aye, and I’m him.’

  After a moment, Gesler grinned and held out his hand. ‘Strings. Fiddler. Sure.’

  They clasped wrists. To Strings, the other man’s hand and arm felt like solid stone.

  ‘There’s an inn down the street,’ Gesler continued. ‘We need to swap stories, and I guarantee you, mine’s got yours beat by far.’

  ‘Oh, Gesler,’ Strings sighed, ‘I think you’re in for a surprise.’

  C
hapter Six

  We came within sight of the island, close enough to gaze into the depths through the ancient cedars and firs. And it seemed there was motion within that gloom, as if the shadows of long dead and long fallen trees still remained, swaying and shifting on ghostly winds . . .

  Quon Sea Charting Expedition Of Drift Avalii

  Hedoranas

  THE JOURNEY HOME HAD BEEN ENOUGH, IF ONLY TO RETURN ONE last time to the place of beginnings, to crumbled reminiscences amidst sea-thrust coral sands above the tide line, the handful of abandoned shacks battered by countless storms into withered skeletons of wood. Nets lay buried in glistening drifts blinding white in the harsh sunlight. And the track that had led down from the road, overgrown now with wind-twisted grasses . . . no place from the past survived unchanged, and here, in this small fisher village on the coast of Itko Kan, Hood had walked with thorough and absolute deliberation, leaving not a single soul in his wake.

  Barring the one man who had now returned. And the daughter of that man, who had once been possessed by a god.

  And in the leaning shack that had once housed them both—its frond-woven roof long since stripped away—with the broad, shallow-draught fisherboat close by now showing but a prow and a stern, the rest buried beneath the coral sand, the father had laid himself down and slept.

  Crokus had awakened to soft weeping. Sitting up, he had seen Apsalar kneeling beside the still form of her father. There were plenty of footprints on the floor of the shack from the previous evening’s random explorations, but Crokus noted one set in particular, prints large and far apart yet far too lightly pressed into the damp sand. A silent arrival in the night just past, crossing the single chamber to stand square-footed beside Rellock. Where it had gone after that left no markings in the sand.

  A shiver rippled through the Daru. It was one thing for an old man to die in his sleep, but it was another for Hood himself—or one of his minions—to physically arrive to collect the man’s soul.

  Apsalar’s grief was quiet, barely heard above the hiss of waves on the beach, the faint whistle of the wind through the warped slats in the shack’s walls. She knelt with bowed head, face hidden beneath her long black hair that hung so appropriately like a shawl. Her hands were closed around her father’s right hand.

  Crokus made no move towards her. In the months of their travelling together, he had come, perversely, to know her less and less. Her soul’s depths had become unfathomable, and whatever lay at its heart was otherworldly and . . . not quite human.

  The god that had possessed her—Cotillion, the Rope, Patron of Assassins within the House of Shadow—had been a mortal man, once, the one known as Dancer who had stood at the Emperor’s side, who had purportedly shared Kellanved’s fate at Laseen’s hands. Of course, neither had died in truth. Instead, they had ascended. Crokus had no idea how such a thing could come to be. Ascendancy was but one of the countless mysteries of the world, a world where uncertainty ruled all—god and mortal alike—and its rules were impenetrable. But, it seemed to him, to ascend was also to surrender. Embracing what to all intents and purposes could be called immortality, was, he had begun to believe, presaged by a turning away. Was it not a mortal’s fate—fate, he knew, was the wrong word, but he could think of no other—was it not a mortal’s fate, then, to embrace life itself, as one would a lover? Life, with all its fraught, momentary fragility.

  And could life not be called a mortal’s first lover? A lover whose embrace was then rejected in that fiery crucible of ascendancy?

  Crokus wondered how far she had gone down that path—for it was a path she was surely on, this beautiful woman no older than him, who moved in appalling silence, with a killer’s terrible grace, this temptress of death.

  The more remote she grew, the more Crokus felt himself drawn forward, to that edge within her. The lure to plunge into that darkness was at times overwhelming, could, at a moment’s thought, turn frantic the beat of his heart and fierce the fire of the blood in his veins. What made the silent invitation so terrifying to him was the seeming indifference with which she offered it to him.

  As if the attraction itself was . . . self-evident. Not worth even acknowledging. Did Apsalar want him to walk at her side on this path to ascendancy—if that was what it was? Was it Crokus she wanted, or simply . . . somebody, anybody?

  The truth was this: he had grown afraid to look into her eyes. He rose from his bedroll and quietly made his way outside. There were fisherboats out on the shoals, white sails taut like enormous shark fins plying the sea beyond the breakers. The Hounds had once torn through this area of the coast, leaving naught but corpses, but people had returned—there if not here. Or perhaps they had been returned, forcibly. The land itself had no difficulty absorbing spilled blood; its thirst was indiscriminate, true to the nature of land everywhere.

  Crokus crouched down and collected a handful of white sand. He studied the coral pebbles as they slipped down between his fingers. The land does its own dying, after all. And yet, these are truths we would escape, should we proceed down this path. I wonder, does fear of dying lie at the root of ascendancy?

  If so, then he would never make it, for, somewhere in all that had occurred, all that he had survived in coming to this place, Crokus had lost that fear.

  He sat down, resting his back against the trunk of a massive cedar that had been thrown up onto this beach—roots and all—and drew out his knives. He practised a sequenced shift of grips, each hand reversing the pattern of the other, and stared down until the weapons—and his fingers—became little more than blurs of motion. Then he lifted his head and studied the sea, its rolling breakers in the distance, the triangular sails skidding along beyond the white line of foam. He made the sequence in his right hand random. Then did the same for his left. Thirty paces down the beach waited their single-masted runner, its magenta sail reefed, its hull’s blue, gold and red paint faint stains in the sunlight. A Korelri craft, paid in debt to a local bookmaker in Kan—for an alley in Kan had been the place where Shadowthrone had sent them, not to the road above the village as he had promised.

  The bookmaker had paid the debt in turn to Apsalar and Crokus for a single night’s work that had proved, for Crokus, brutally horrifying. It was one thing to practise passes with the blades, to master the deadly dance against ghosts of the imagination, but he had killed two men that night. Granted, they were murderers, in the employ of a man who was making a career out of extortion and terror. Apsalar had shown no compunction in cutting his throat, no qualms at the spray of blood that spotted her gloved hands and forearms.

  There had been a local with them, to witness the veracity of the night’s work. In the aftermath, as he stood in the doorway and stared down at the three corpses, he’d lifted his head and met Crokus’s eyes. Whatever he saw in them had drained the blood from the man’s face.

  By morning Crokus had acquired a new name. Cutter.

  At first he had rejected it. The local had misread all that had been revealed behind the Daru’s eyes that night. Nothing fierce. The barrier of shock, fast crumbling to self-condemnation. Murdering killers was still murder, the act like the closing of shackles between them all, joining a line of infinite length, one killer to the next, a procession from which there was no escape. His mind had recoiled from the name, recoiled from all that it signified.

  But that had proved a short-lived rectitude. The two murderers had died indeed—at the hands of the man named Cutter. Not Crokus, not the Daru youth, the cutpurse—who had vanished. Vanished, probably never to be seen again.

  The delusion held a certain comfort, as cavernous at its core as Apsalar’s embrace at night, but welcome all the same.

  Cutter would walk her path.

  Aye, the Emperor had Dancer, yes? A companion, for a companion was what was needed. Is needed. Now, she has Cutter. Cutter of the Knives, who dances in his chains as if they were weightless threads. Cutter, who, unlike poor Crokus, knows his place, knows his singular task—to guard her back, to
match her cold precision in the deadly arts.

  And therein resided the final truth. Anyone could become a killer. Anyone at all.

  She stepped out of the shack, wan but dry-eyed.

  He sheathed his knives in a single, fluid motion, rose to his feet and faced her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘What now?’

  Broken pillars of mortared stone jutted from the undulating vista. Among the half-dozen or so within sight, only two rose as tall as a man, and none stood straight. The plain’s strange, colourless grasses gathered in tufts around their bases, snarled and oily in the grey, grainy air.

  As Kalam rode into their midst, the muted thunder of his horse’s hoofs seemed to bounce back across his path, the echoes multiplying until he felt as if he was riding at the head of a mounted army. He slowed his charger’s canter, finally reining in beside one of the battered columns.

  These silent sentinels felt like an intrusion on the solitude he had been seeking. He leaned in his saddle to study the one nearest him. It looked old, old in the way of so many things within the Warren of Shadow, forlorn with an air of abandonment, defying any chance he might have of discerning its function. There were no intervening ruins, no foundation walls, no cellar pits or other angular pocks in the ground. Each pillar stood alone, unaligned.

  His examination settled on a rusted ring set into the stone near the base, from which depended a chain of seized links vanishing into the tufts of grass. After a moment, Kalam dismounted. He crouched down, reaching out to close his hand on the chain. A slight upward tug. The desiccated hand and forearm of some hapless creature lifted from the grasses. Dagger-length talons, four fingers and two thumbs.

  The rest of the prisoner had succumbed to the roots, was half buried beneath dun-coloured, sandy soil. Pallid yellow hair was entwined among the grass blades.

  The hand suddenly twitched.

  Disgusted, Kalam released the chain. The arm dropped back to the ground. A faint, subterranean keening sound rose from the base of the pillar.

  Straightening, the assassin returned to his horse.