Bonehunters

by Steven Erikson

  Another woman now sat on the edge of the pool. Fair-skinned, delicately featured, her long golden-hued hair drawn up and bound in an elaborate mass of braids. One hand was immersed in the pool, yet no ripples spanned outward. She was studying the water’s surface, and did not look up as the Malazan woman spoke.

  ‘Now what?’

  The man, two vicious-looking flails tucked in his belt, had the look of a desert warrior, his face dark and flat, the eyes slitted amidst webs of squint-lines. He was armoured as if for battle. At his companion’s question he fixed his gaze on the seated woman and said, ‘You were never clear on that, Queen of Dreams. The only part of this bargain I’m uneasy about.’

  ‘Too late for regrets,’ the seated woman murmured.

  Cutter stared at her anew. The Queen of Dreams. A goddess. It seemed that she too had no inkling that Cutter was somehow present, witnessing this scene. But this was her realm. How could that be?

  The man had scowled at the Queen’s mocking observation. ‘You seek my service. To do what? I am done leading armies, done with prophecies. Give me a task if you must, but make it straightforward. Someone to kill, someone to protect – no, not the latter – I am done with that, too.’

  ‘It is your… scepticism… I most value, Leoman of the Flails. I admit, however, to some disappointment. Your companion is not the one I anticipated.’

  The man named Leoman glanced over at the Malazan woman, but said nothing. Then, slowly, his eyes widened and he looked back at the goddess. ‘Corabb?’

  ‘Chosen by Oponn,’ the Queen of Dreams said. ‘Beloved of the Lady. His presence would have been useful…’ A faint frown, then a sigh, and still she would not look up as she said, ‘In his stead, I must countenance a mortal upon whom yet another god has cast an eye. To what end, I wonder? Will this god finally use her? In the manner that all gods do?’ She frowned, then said, ‘I do not refute this… alliance. I trust Hood understands this well enough. Even so, I see something unexpected stirring… in the depths of these waters. Dunsparrow, did you know you were marked? No, I gather you did not – you were but newborn when sanctified, after all. And then stolen away, from the temple, by your brother. Hood never forgave him for that, and took in the end a most satisfying vengeance, ever turning away a healer’s touch when nothing else was needed, when that touch could have changed the world, could have shattered an age-old curse.’ She paused for a moment, still staring down into the pool. ‘I believe Hood now regrets his decision – his lack of humility stings him yet again. Dunsparrow, with you, I suspect, he may seek restitution…’

  The Malazan woman was pale. ‘I had heard of my brother’s death,’ she said in a low voice. ‘But all death comes by Hood’s hand. I see no need for restitution in this.’

  ‘By Hood’s hand. True enough, and so too Hood chooses the time and the manner. Only on the rarest of occasions, however, does he manifestly intervene in a single mortal’s death. Consider his usual… involvement… as little more than withered fingers ensuring the seamless weave of life’s fabric, at least until the arrival of the knot.’

  Leoman spoke: ‘Ponder the delicacies of dogma some other time, you two. I already grow weary of this place. Send us somewhere, Queen, but first tell us what services you require.’

  She finally looked up, studied the desert warrior in silence for a half-dozen heartbeats, then said, ‘For now, I require from you… nothing.’

  There was silence then, and Cutter eventually realized that the two mortals were not moving. Not even the rise and fall of breath was visible. Frozen in place… just like me.

  The Queen of Dreams slowly turned her head, met Cutter’s eyes, and smiled.

  Sudden, spinning retreat – he awoke with a start, beneath threadbare blankets and a cross-beamed ceiling layered in the carcasses of sucked-dry insects. Yet that smile lingered, racing like scalded blood through him. She had known, of course she had known, had brought him there, to that moment, to witness. But why? Leoman of the Flails… the renegade commander from Sha’ik’s army, the one who had been pursued by the Adjunct Tavore’s army. Clearly he found a way to escape, but at a price. Maybe that was the lesson – never bargain with gods.

  A faint sound reached him. The wail of a babe, insistent, demanding.

  Then a closer noise, scuffling, and Cutter twisted his head round to see the curtain covering the doorway drawn back and a young, unfamiliar face staring in at him. The face quickly withdrew. Voices, heavy footsteps, then the curtain was thrown aside. A huge, midnight-skinned man strode in.

  Cutter stared at him. He looked… familiar, yet he knew he’d never before met this man.

  ‘Scillara is asking after you,’ the stranger said.

  ‘That child I’m hearing – hers?’

  ‘Yes, for the moment. How do you feel?’

  ‘Weak, but not as weak as before. Hungry, thirsty. Who are you?’

  ‘The local blacksmith. Barathol Mekhar.’

  Mekhar? ‘Kalam…’

  A grimace. ‘Cousin, distant. Mekhar refers to the tribe – it’s gone now, slaughtered by Falah’d Enezgura of Aren, during one of his westward conquests. Most of us survivors scattered far and wide.’ He shrugged, eyeing Cutter. ‘I’ll get you food and drink. If a Semk witch comes in here and tries to enlist you in her cause, tell her to get out.’

  ‘Cause? What cause?’

  ‘Your friend Scillara wants to leave the child here.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Does that surprise you?’

  He considered. ‘No, not really. She wasn’t herself back then, from what I understood. Back in Raraku. I expect she wants to leave all reminders far behind her.’

  Barathol snorted and turned back to the doorway. ‘What is it with all these refugees from Raraku, anyway? I’ll be back shortly, Cutter.’

  Mekhar. The Daru managed a smile. This one here looked big enough to pick up Kalam and fling him across a room. And, if Cutter had read the man’s expression aright, in that single unguarded moment when he’d said Kalam’s name, this Barathol was likely inclined to do just that, given the chance.

  Thank the gods I have no brothers or sisters… or cousins, for that matter.

  His smile suddenly faded. The blacksmith had mentioned Scillara, but no-one else. Cutter suspected it hadn’t been an oversight. Barathol didn’t seem the type who was careless with his words. Beru fend…

  L’oric stepped outside. His gaze worked its way down the squalid street, building to building, the decrepit remnants of what had once been a thriving community. Intent on its own destruction, even then, though no doubt few thought that way at the time. The forest must have seemed endless, or at least immortal, and so they had harvested with frenzied abandon. But now the trees were gone, and all those hoarded coins of profit had slipped away, leaving hands filled with nothing but sand. Most of the looters would have moved on, sought out some other stand of ancient trees, to persist in the addiction of momentary gain. Making one desert after another… until the deserts meet.

  He rubbed at his face, felt the grit of his stay here, raw as crushed glass on his cheeks. There were some rewards, at least, he told himself. A child was born. Greyfrog was at his side once more, and he had succeeded in saving Cutter’s life. And Barathol Mekhar, a name riding ten thousand curses… well, Barathol was nothing like L’oric had imagined him to be, given his crimes. Men like Korbolo Dom better fit his notions of a betrayer, or the twisted madness of someone like Bidithal. And yet Barathol, an officer in the Red Blades, had murdered the Fist of Aren. He’d been arrested and gaoled, stripped of his rank and beaten without mercy by his fellow Red Blades – the first and deepest stain upon their honour, fuelling their extreme acts of zealotry ever since.

  Barathol was to have been crucified on Aren Way. Instead, the city had risen in rebellion, slaughtering the Malazan garrison and driving the Red Blades from the city.

  And then the T’lan Imass had arrived, delivering the harsh, brutal lesson of imperial vengeance. And Barathol Mekha
r had been seen, by scores of witnesses, flinging open the north gate…

  But it is true. T’lan Imass need no opened gates…

  The question no-one had asked was: why would an officer of the Red Blades murder the city’s Fist?

  L’oric suspected Barathol was not one to give him the satisfaction of an answer. The man was well past defending himself, with words at any rate. The High Mage could see as much in the huge man’s dark eyes – he had long ago given up on humanity. And his own sense of his place in it. He was not driven to justify what he did; no sense of decency nor honour compelled the man to state his case. Only a soul that has surrendered utterly gives up on notions of redemption. Something had happened, once, that crushed Barathol’s faith, leaving unbarred the paths ol betrayal.

  Yet these local folk came close to outright worship in their regard for Barathol Mehkar, and it was this that L’oric could not understand. Even now, when they knew the truth, when they knew what their blacksmith had done years ago, they defied the High Mage’s expectations. He was baffled, left feeling strangely helpless.

  Then again, admit it, L’oric, you have never been able to gather followers, no matter how noble your cause. Oh, there were allies here, adding their voices to his own outrage at Scillara’s appalling indifference regarding her child, but he knew well enough that such unity was, in the end, transitory and ephemeral. They might all decry Scillara’s position, but they would do nothing about it; indeed, all but Nulliss had already come to accept the fact that the child was going to be passed into the hands of two women both named Jessa. There, problem solved. But in truth it is nothing but a crime accommodated.

  The demon Greyfrog ambled to his side and settled belly-down in the dust of the street. Four eyes blinking lazily, it offered nothing of its thoughts, yet an ineffable whisper of commiseration calmed L’oric’s inner tumult.

  The High Mage sighed. ‘I know, my friend. If I could but learn to simply pass through a place, to be wilfully unmindful of all offences against nature, both small and large. This comes, I suspect, of successive failures. In Raraku, in Kurald Liosan, with Felisin Younger, gods below, what a depressing list. And you, Greyfrog, I failed you as well…

  ‘Modest relevance,’ the demon said. ‘I would tell you a tale, brother. Early in the clan’s history, many centuries past, there arose, like a breath of gas from the deep, a new cult. Chosen as its representative god was the most remote, most distant of gods among the pantheon. A god that was, in truth, indifferent to the clans of my kind. A god that spoke naught to any mortal, that intervened never in mortal affairs. Morbid. The leaders of the cult proclaimed themselves the voice of that god. They wrote down laws, prohibitions, ascribances, propitiations, blasphemies, punishments for nonconformity, for dispute and derivations. This was but rumour, said details maintained in vague fugue, until such time as the cult achieved domination and with domination, absolute power.

  ‘Terrible enforcement, terrible crimes committed in the name of the silent god. Leaders came and went, each further twisting words already twisted by mundane ambition and the zeal for unity. Entire pools were poisoned. Others drained and the silts seeded with salt. Eggs were crushed. Mothers dismembered. And our people were plunged into a paradise of fear, the laws made manifest and spilled blood the tears of necessity. False regret with chilling gleam in the centre eye. No relief awaited, and each generation suffered more than the last.’

  L’oric studied the demon at his side. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Seven great warriors from seven clans set out to find the Silent God, set out to see for themselves if this god had indeed blessed all that had come to pass in its name.’

  ‘And did they find the silent god?’

  ‘Yes, and too, they found the reason for its silence. The god was dead. It had died with the first drop of blood spilled in its name.’

  ‘I see, and what is the relevance of this tale of yours, however modest?’

  ‘Perhaps this. The existence of many gods conveys true complexity of mortal life. Conversely, the assertion of but one god leads to a denial of complexity, and encourages the need to make the world simple. Not the fault of the god, but a crime committed by its believers.’

  ‘If a god does not like what is done in its name, then it should act.’

  ‘Yet, if each crime committed in its name weakens it… very soon, I think, it has no power left and so cannot act, and so, ultimately, it dies.’

  ‘You come from a strange world, Greyfrog.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I find your story most disturbing.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘We must undertake a long journey now, Greyfrog.’

  ‘I am ready, brother.’

  ‘In the world I know,’ L’oric said, ‘many gods feed on blood.’

  ‘As do many mortals.’

  The High Mage nodded. ‘Have you said your goodbyes Greyfrog?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Then let us leave this place.’

  Filiad appeared at the entrance to the smithy, catching Barathol’s attention. The blacksmith gave two more pumps of the bellows feeding the forge, then drew off his thick leather gloves and waved the youth over.

  ‘The High Mage,’ Filiad said, ‘he’s left. With that giant toad. I saw it, a hole opening in the air. Blinding yellow light poured from it, and they just disappeared inside it and then the hole was gone!’

  Barathol rummaged through a collection of black iron bars until he found one that looked right for the task he had in mind. He set it on the anvil. ‘Did he leave behind his horse?’

  ‘What? No, he led it by the reins.’

  ‘Too bad.’

  ‘What do we do now?’ Filiad asked.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Well, everything, I guess.’

  ‘Go home, Filiad.’

  ‘Really? Oh. All right. I guess. See you later, then.’

  ‘No doubt,’ Barathol said, drawing on the gloves once more.

  After Filiad left, the blacksmith took up the iron bar with a set of tongs and thrust the metal into the forge, pumping one-legged on the floor-bellows. Four months back, he had used the last of his stolen hoard of Aren coins on a huge shipment of charcoal; there was just enough left for this final task.

  T’lan Imass. Nothing but bone and leathery skin. Fast and deadly, masters of ambush. Barathol had been thinking for days now about the problem they represented, about devising a means of dealing with them. For he suspected he’d meet the bastards again.

  His axe was heavy enough to do damage, if he hit hard enough. Still, those stone swords were long, tapered to a point for thrusting. If they stayed outside his reach…

  To all of that, he thought he had found a solution.

  He pumped some more, until he was satisfied with the white-hot core in the heart of the forge, and watched as the bar of iron acquired a cherubic gleam.

  ‘We now follow the snake, which takes us to a gather camp on the shores of a black grain lake, beyond which we traverse flat-rock for two days, to another gather camp, the northernmost one, for all that lies beyond it is both flowing and unfound.’

  Samar Dev studied the elongated, sinuous line of boulders on the ledge of bedrock below and to their left. Skins of grey and green lichen, clumps of skeletal dusty green moss, studded with red flowers, surrounding each stone, and beyond that the deeper verdancy of another kind of moss, soft and sodden. On the path they walked the bedrock was scoured clean, the granite pink and raw, with layers falling away from edges in large, flat plates. Here and there, black lichen the texture of sharkskin spilled out from fissures and veins. She saw a deer antler lying discarded from some past rutting season, the tips of its tines gnawed by rodents, and was reminded how, in the natural world, nothing goes to waste.

  Dips in the high ground held stands of black spruce, as many dead as living, while in more exposed sections of the bedrock lowlying juniper formed knee-high islands spreading branches over the stone, each island bordered by shrubs
of blueberry and wintergeen. Jackpines stood as lone sentinels atop rises in the strangely folded, amorphous rock.

  Harsh and forbidding, this was a landscape that would never yield to human domination. It felt ancient in ways not matched by any place Samar Dev had seen before, not even by the wastelands of the Jhag Odhan. It was said that beneath every manner of surface on this world, whether sand or sea, floodplain or forest, there was solid rock, twisted and folded by unseen pressures. But here, all other possible surfaces had been scoured away, exposing the veined muscle itself.

  This land suited Karsa Orlong. A warrior scoured clean of all civil trappings, a thing of muscle and will and hidden pressures. While, in strange contrast, the Anibar, Boatfinder, seemed an interloper, almost a parasite, his every motion furtive and oddly guilt-laden. From this broken, rock-skinned place of trees and clearwater lakes, Boatfinder and his people took black grain and the skins of animals; they took birch bark and reeds for making baskets and nets. Not enough to scar this landscape, not enough to claim conquest.

  As for her, she found herself viewing her surroundings in terms of trees left unharvested, of lakes still rich with fish, of more efficient ways to gather the elongated, mud-coloured grains from the reed beds in the shallows – the so-called black grain that needed to be beaten free of the stalks, gathered in the hollow of the long, narrow-boats the Anibar used, beaten down with sticks amidst webs and spinning spiders and the buzz of tiger-flies. She could think only of resources and the best means of exploiting them. It felt less and less like a virtue with every passing day.

  They continued along the trail, Boatfinder in the lead, followed by Karsa who led his horse by the reins, leaving Samar Dev with a view of the animal’s rump and swishing tail. Her feet hurt, each step on the hard stone reverberating up into her spine – there had to be a way of padding such impacts, she told herself, perhaps some kind of multi-layering technology for boot soles – she would have to think on that. And these biting flies – Boatfinder had cut juniper branches, threading them through a headscarf so that the green stems dangled in front of his forehead and down the back of his neck. Presumably this worked, although the man looked ridiculous. She contemplated surrendering her vanity and following suit, but would hold out a while longer.