By the Abyss, such crushing weight!
The Errant drew a deep breath of the stale, dead air. Then another.
And sensed, not far away, the faint whisper of power. Residual, so meagre as to be meaningless, yet it started the god’s heart pounding hard in his chest. The sanctification remained. No desecration, making what he sought that much simpler. Relieved at the thought of being quickly done with this ghastly place, the Errant set out towards that power.
The altar was beneath a mass of rubble, the limestone wreckage so packed down that it must have come from a collapsing ceiling, the huge weight slamming down hard enough to shatter the stones of the floor beneath that runnelled block of sacred stone. Even better. And…yes, bone dry. He could murmur a thousand nudges into that surrounding matrix. Ten thousand.
Edging closer, the Errant reached down and settled one hand on the altar. He could not feel those runnels, could not feel the water-worn basalt, could not feel the deep-cut channels that had once vented living blood into the salty streams filling the runnels. Ah, we were thirsty in those days, weren’t we?
He awakened his own power – as much as she would give him, and for this task it was more than enough.
The Errant began weaving a ritual.
Advocate Sleem was a tall, thin man. Covering most of his forehead and spreading down onto his left cheek, reaching the line of the jaw, was a skin ailment that created a cracked scale pattern reminiscent of the bellies of newly hatched alligators. There were ointments that could heal this condition, but it was clear that the legendary advocate of Letherii law in fact cultivated this reptilian dermatosis, which so cleverly complemented both his reputation and his cold, lifeless eyes.
He stood now in Bugg’s office, hunched at the shoulders as if to make himself even narrower, and the high collar of his dark green cloak flared out like a snake’s hood behind his elongated, small-eared and hairless head. His regard was languid in that lifeless way of his as he studied Bugg. ‘Did I hear you correctly?’ the advocate asked in a voice that he tried hard to make sibilant, but which instead came out awkward and wavering. The effect, Bugg realized with a faint start, precisely matched what he would imagine a snake would sound like with words emerging from a lipless mouth. Although, he added to himself, the specific question hardly seemed one he would expect a snake to utter. Snakes don’t ask for clarification.
Do they?
‘You wear a most odd expression,’ Sleem said after a moment. ‘Did my inability to understand you leave you confused, Master Bugg?’
‘Did you truly misunderstand?’
‘That is why I sought reiteration.’
‘Ah. Well, what did you think you heard?’
The eyes blinked. ‘Have we truly uttered all these words to return to my original query?’
‘I invite you to use some more, Sleem.’
‘Rather than simply repeating yourself.’
‘I hate repeating myself.’
Advocate Sleem, Bugg knew, despised discombobulation, although that was in all probability not even a word.
‘Master Bugg, as you know, I despise discombobulation.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘You should be, since I charge by the word.’
‘Both our words, or just yours?’
‘It is a little late to ask that now, isn’t it?’ Sleem’s folded hands did something sinuous and vaguely disreputable. ‘You have instructed me, if I understand you correctly – and correct me if I am in error – you have instructed me, then, to approach your financier to request yet another loan with the stated intention to use it to pay a portion of the interest on the previous loan, which if I recall accurately, and I do, was intended to address in part the interest on yet another loan. This leads me to wonder, since I am not your only advocate, just how many loans you have arranged to pay interest on yet other loans?’
‘Well, that was expensive.’
‘I become loquacious when I get nervous, Master Bugg.’
‘Dealing with you gets more costly when you’re nervous? That, Sleem, is really quite clever.’
‘Yes, I am. Will you now answer my question?’
‘Since you insist. There are perhaps forty loans outstanding with respect to addressing interest payments on still other loans.’
The advocate licked suitably dry lips. ‘It was reasons of courtesy and respect, Master Bugg – and, I now see, certain misapprehensions as to your solvency – that encouraged me to refrain from asking for payment up front – for my services, that is, which have been substantial. Although not as substantial, proportionately, as I was led to believe.’
‘I don’t recall leading you into any such assumptions, Sleem.’
‘Of course you don’t. They were assumptions.’
‘As an advocate, you might have been expected to make very few assumptions indeed. About anything.’
‘Permit me to be blunt, Master Bugg. Where in this financial scheme of yours is the money you owe me?’
‘Nowhere as of yet, Sleem. Perhaps we should arrange another loan.’
‘This is most distressing.’
‘I am sure it is, but how do you think I feel?’
‘I am resisting asking myself that question, because I fear the answer will be something like: “He feels fine.” Now, were I to cling with great faith to those particular assumptions we spoke of earlier, I would now insist that this next loan be devoted exclusively to addressing my fees. No matter what lies I deliver to your financier. Which returns us, alas, to my original utterance, which was voiced in a tone of abject disbelief. You see, your financiers’ present state of panic is what has brought me here, for they have reached a level of harassment of my office with respect to you, Master Bugg, that has reached absurd proportions. I have had to hire bodyguards, in fact – at your expense. Dare I ask you then, how much money is in your possession?’
‘Right now?’
‘Yes.’
Bugg drew out his tattered leather purse, prised it open and peered inside. Then he looked up. ‘Two docks.’
‘I see. Surely you exaggerate.’
‘Well, I cut a sliver off one of them, to pay for a haircut.’
‘You have no hair.’
‘That’s why it was just a sliver. Nose hairs. Ear hairs, a trim of the eyebrows. It’s important to be presentable.’
‘At your Drowning?’
Bugg laughed. ‘That would be fun.’ Then he grew sober and leaned forward across his desk. ‘You don’t think it will come to that, surely. As your client, I expect a most diligent defence at my trial.’
‘As your advocate, Master Bugg, I will be first in line demanding your blood.’
‘Oh, that’s not very loyal of you.’
‘You have not paid for my loyalty.’
‘But loyalty is not something one pays for, Advocate Sleem.’
‘Had I known that delusions accompanied your now-apparent incompetence, Master Bugg, I would never have agreed to represent you in any matter whatsoever.’
Bugg leaned back. ‘That makes no sense,’ he said. ‘As Tehol Beddict has observed on countless occasions, delusions lie at the very heart of our economic system. Indenture as ethical virtue. Pieces of otherwise useless metal – beyond decoration – as wealth. Servitude as freedom. Debt as ownership. And so on.’
‘Ah, but those stated delusions are essential to my well-being, Master Bugg. Without them my profession would not exist. All of civilization is, in essence, a collection of contracts. Why, the very nature of society is founded upon mutually agreed measures of value.’ He stopped then, and slowly shook his head – a motion alarmingly sinuous. ‘Why am I even discussing this with you? You are clearly insane, and your insanity is about to trigger an avalanche of financial devastation.’
‘I don’t see why, Master Sleem. Unless, of course, your faith in the notion of social contract is nothing more than cynical self-interest.’
‘Of course it is, you fool!’
So
much for awkward sibilance.
Sleem’s fingers wriggled like snared, blind and groping worms. ‘Without cynicism,’ he said in a strangled voice, ‘one becomes the system’s victim rather than its master, and I am too clever to be a victim!’
‘Which you must prove to yourself repeatedly in the measuring by your wealth, your ease of life, of the necessary contrast with the victims – a contrast that you must surround yourself with at every moment, as represented by your material excesses.’
‘Wordy, Master Bugg. Smug ostentation will suffice.’
‘Brevity from you, Advocate Sleem?’
‘You get what you pay for.’
‘By that token,’ Bugg observed, ‘I am surprised you’re saying anything at all.’
‘What follows is my gift. I will set forth immediately to inform your financiers that you are in fact broke, and I will in turn offer my services in the feeding frenzy over your material assets.’
‘Generous of you.’
Sleem’s lips disappeared into a bony grimace. One eye twitched. The worms at the ends of his hands had gone white and deathly. ‘In the meantime, I will take those two docks.’
‘Not quite two.’
‘Nonetheless.’
‘I can owe you that missing sliver.’
‘Be certain that I will have it, eventually.’
‘All right.’ Bugg reached into the purse and fished out the two coins. ‘This is a loan, yes?’
‘Against my fees?’
‘Naturally.’
‘I sense you are no longer playing the game, Master Bugg.’
‘Which game would that be?’
‘The one where winners win and losers lose.’
‘Oh, that game. No, I suppose not. Assuming, of course, I ever did.’
‘I have a sudden suspicion – this very real truth behind all the rumours of impending market collapse – it is all your doing, isn’t it?’
‘Hardly. Countless winners jumped in, I assure you. Believing, naturally, that they would win in the end. That’s how these things work. Until they stop working.’ Bugg snapped his fingers. ‘Poof!’
‘Without those contracts, Master Bugg, there will be chaos.’
‘You mean the winners will panic and the losers will launch themselves into their own feeding frenzy. Yes. Chaos.’
‘You are truly insane.’
‘No, just tired. I’ve looked into the eyes of too many losers, Sleem. Far too many.’
‘And your answer is to make losers of us all. To level the playing field? But it won’t do that, you know. You must know that, Bugg. It won’t. Instead, the thugs will find the top of every heap, and instead of debt you will have true slavery; instead of contracts you will have tyranny.’
‘All the masks torn off, yes.’
‘Where is the virtue in that?’
The Elder God shrugged. ‘The perils of unfettered expansion, Advocate Sleem, are revealed in the dust and ashes left behind. Assume the species’ immortality since it suits the game. Every game. But that assumption will not save you in the end. No, in fact, it will probably kill you. That one self-serving, pious, pretentious, arrogant assumption.’
‘The bitter old man speaks.’
‘You have no idea.’
‘Would that I carried a knife. For I would kill you with it, here and now.’
‘Yes. The game always ends at some point, doesn’t it?’
‘And you dare call me the cynical one.’
‘Your cynicism lies in your willing abuse of others to consolidate your superiority over them. My cynicism is in regard to humanity’s wilful blindness with respect to its own extinction.’
‘Without that wilful blindness there is naught but despair.’
‘Oh, I am not that cynical. In fact, I do not agree at all. Maybe when the wilful blindness runs its inevitable course, there will be born wilful wisdom, the revelation of seeing things as they are.’
‘Things? To which things are you referring, old man?’
‘Why, that everything of true value is, in fact, free.’
Sleem placed the coins in his own bulging purse and walked to the door. ‘A very quaint notion. Alas, I will not wish you a good day.’
‘Don’t bother.’
Sleem turned at the hard edge in Bugg’s voice. His brows lifted in curiosity.
Bugg smiled. ‘The sentiment wouldn’t be free now, would it?’
‘No, it would not.’
As soon as the hapless advocate was gone, Bugg rose. Well, it’s begun. Almost to the day when Tehol said it would. The man’s uncanny. And maybe in that, there lies some hope for humanity. All those things that cannot be measured, cannot be quantified in any way at all.
Maybe.
Bugg would have to disappear now. Lest he get torn limb from limb by a murder of advocates, never mind the financiers. And that would be a most unpleasant experience. But first, he needed to warn Tehol.
The Elder God glanced around his office with something like affectionate regret, almost nostalgia. It had been fun, after all. This game. Like most games. He wondered why Tehol had stopped short the first time. But no, perhaps that wasn’t at all baffling. Come face to face with a brutal truth – with any brutal truth – and it was understandable to back away.
As Sleem said, there is no value in despair.
But plenty of despair in value, once the illusion is revealed. Ah, I am indeed tired.
He set out from his office, to which he would never return.
‘How can there be only four hens left? Yes, Ublala Pung, I am looking directly at you.’
‘For the Errant’s sake,’ Janath sighed, ‘leave the poor man alone. What did you expect to happen, Tehol? They’re hens that no longer lay eggs, making them as scrawny and dry and useless as the gaggle of matronly scholars at my old school. What Ublala did was an act of profound bravery.’
‘Eat my hens? Raw?’
‘At least he plucked their feathers.’
‘Were they dead by that point?’
‘Let’s not discuss those particular details, Tehol. Everyone is permitted one mistake.’
‘My poor pets,’ Tehol moaned, eyeing Ublala Pung’s overstuffed pillow at one end of the reed mat that served as the half-blood Tarthenal’s bed.
‘They were not pets.’
He fixed a narrow gaze on his ex-tutor. ‘I seem to recall you going on and on about the terrors of pragmatism, all through history. Yet what do I now hear from you, Janath? “They were not pets.” A declarative statement uttered in most pragmatic tones. Why, as if by words alone you could cleanse what must have been an incident of brutal avian murder.’
‘Ublala Pung has more stomachs than both you and me combined. They need filling, Tehol.’
‘Oh?’ He placed his hands on his hips – actually to make certain that the pin was holding the blanket in place, recalling with another pang his most public display a week past. ‘Oh?’ he asked again, and then added, ‘And what, precisely and pragmatically, was wrong with my famous Grit Soup?’
‘It was gritty.’
‘Hinting of most subtle flavours as can only be cultivated from diligent collection of floor scrapings, especially a floor pranced upon by hungry hens.’
She stared up at him. ‘You are not serious, are you? That really was grit from the floor? This floor?’
‘Hardly reason for such a shocked expression, Janath. Of course,’ he threw in offhandedly as he walked over to stand next to the blood-splotched pillow, ‘creative cuisine demands a certain delicacy of the palate, a culture of appreciation—’ He kicked at the pillow and it squawked.
Tehol spun round and glared at Ublala Pung, who sat, back to a wall, and now hung his head.
‘I was saving one for later,’ the giant mumbled.
‘Plucked or unplucked?’
‘Well, it’s in there to stay warm.’
Tehol looked over at Janath and nodded, ‘See? Do you see, Janath? Finally see?’
‘See what?’
Her brows lifted. ‘Well, that scene last week really scarred you, didn’t it?’
‘Don’t be absurd, Janath.’
Ublala had stuck out his tongue – a huge, pebbled slab of meat – and was trying to study it, his eyes crossing with the effort.
‘What are you doing now?’ Tehol demanded.
The tongue retreated and Ublala blinked a few times to right his eyes. ‘Got cut by a beak,’ he said.
‘You ate their beaks?’
‘Easier to start with the head. They ain’t so restless with no heads.’
‘Really?’
Ublala Pung nodded.
‘And I suppose you consider that merciful?’
‘What?’
‘Of course not,’ Tehol snapped. ‘It’s just pragmatic. “Oh, I’m being eaten. But that’s all right. I have no head!”’
Ublala frowned at him. ‘Nobody’s eating you, Tehol. And your head’s still there – I can see it.’
‘I was speaking for the hens.’
‘But they don’t speak Letherii.’
‘You are not eating my last four hens.’
‘What about the one in the pillow, Tehol? Do you want it back? Its feathers might grow back, though it might catch a cold or something. I can give it back if you like.’
‘Generous of you, Ublala, but no. Put it out of its misery, but mind the beak. In the meantime, however, I think you need to get yourself organized – you were supposed to leave days ago, after all, weren’t you?’
The Complete Malazan Book of the Fallen Page 654
