Bonehunters

by Steven Erikson

  ‘What in Hood’s name did you say to her?’

  Startled, Samar Dev looked over, to see the Taxilian arrive at her side. ‘Who? What? Oh, her.’

  ‘Be careful,’ the man said. He waved a filthy hand in front of his bruised, misshapen face. ‘See this? Feather Witch. I dare not fight back. I dare not even defend myself. See it in her eyes – I think she was beaten herself, when a child. That is how these things breed generation after generation.’

  ‘Yes,’ Samar said, surprised, ‘I believe you are right.’

  He managed something like a grin. ‘I was foolish enough to be captured, yes, but that does not make me always a fool.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Pilgrimage, of sorts. I paid for passage on a drake – back to Rutu Jelba – trying to flee the plague, and believe me, I paid a lot.’

  Samar Dev nodded. Drakes were Tanno pilgrim ships, heavy and stolid and safe against all but the fiercest storms, and on board there would be a Tanno Spiritwalker or at the very least a Tanno Mendicant. No plague could thrive on such a ship – it had been a clever gamble, and drakes were usually half-empty on their return journeys.

  ‘Dawn broke, a mere two days away from Rutu Jelba,’ the Taxilian continued, ‘and we were surrounded by foreign ships – this fleet. The Spiritwalker sought to communicate, then when it became evident that these Edur viewed us as a prize, to negotiate. Gods below, woman, the sorcery they unleashed upon him! Awful, it sickened the very air. He resisted – a lot longer than they expected, I’ve since learned – long enough to cause them considerable consternation – but he fell in the end, the poor bastard. The Edur chose one of us, me as it turned out, and cut open the others and flung them to the sharks. They needed a translator, you see.’

  ‘And what, if I may ask, is your profession?’

  ‘Architect, in Taxila. No, not famous. Struggling.’ He shrugged. ‘A struggle I would willingly embrace right now.’

  ‘You are working deceit when teaching Feather Witch.’

  He nodded.

  ‘She knows.’

  ‘Yes, but for the moment she can do nothing about it. This part of the fleet is resupplied – we’ll not be heading landward for some time, and as for Seven Cities ships to capture, well, the plague’s emptied the seas, hasn’t it? Besides, we will be sailing west. For now, I’m safe. And, unless Feather Witch is a lot smarter than I think she is, it will be a long time before she comes to comprehension.’

  ‘How are you managing it?’

  ‘I am teaching her four languages, all at once, and making no distinction among them, not even the rules or syntax. For each word I give her four in translation, then think up bizarre rules for selecting one over another given the context. She’s caught me out but once. So. Malazan, the Taxilii Scholar’s Dialect, the Ehrlii variant of the common tongue, and, from my grandfather’s sister, tribal Rangala.’

  ‘Rangala? I thought that was extinct.’

  ‘Not until she dies, and I’d swear that old hag’s going to live for ever.’

  ‘What is your name?’

  He shook his head. ‘There is power in names – no, I do not distrust you – it is these Tiste Edur. And Feather Witch – if she discovers my name—’

  ‘She can compel you. I understand. Well, in my mind I think of you as the Taxilian.’

  ‘That will suffice.’

  ‘I am Samar Dev, and the warrior I came with is Toblakai… Sha’ik’s Toblakai. He calls himself Karsa Orlong.’

  ‘You risk much, revealing your names—’

  ‘The risk belongs to Feather Witch. I surpass her in the old arts. As for Karsa, well, she is welcome to try.’ She glanced at him. ‘You said we were sailing west?’

  He nodded. ‘Hanradi Khalag commands just under half the fleet – the rest is somewhere east of here. They have both been sailing back and forth along this coast for some months, almost half a year, in fact. Like fisher fleets, but the catch they seek walks on two legs and wields a sword. Discovering remnant kin was unexpected, and the state those poor creatures were in simply enraged these Edur. I do not know where the two fleets intend to merge – somewhere west of Sepik, I think. Once that happens,’ he shrugged, ‘we set a course for their empire.’

  ‘And where is that?’

  Another shrug. ‘Far away, and beyond that, I can tell you nothing.’

  ‘Far away indeed. I have never heard of an empire of humans ruled by Tiste Edur. And yet, this Letherii language. As you noted it is somehow related to many of the languages here in Seven Cities, those that are but branches from the same tree, and that tree is the First Empire.’

  ‘Ah, that explains it, then, for I can mostly understand the Letherii, now. They use a different dialect when conversing with the Edur – a mix of the two. A trader tongue, and even there I begin to comprehend.’

  ‘I suggest you keep such knowledge to yourself, Taxilian.’

  ‘I will. Samar Dev, is your companion truly the same Toblakai as the one so named who guarded Sha’ik? It is said he killed two demons the night before she was slain, one of them with his bare hands.’

  ‘Until recently,’ Samar Dev said, ‘he carried with him the rotted heads of those demons. He gifted them to Boatfinder – to the Anibari shaman who accompanied us. The white fur Karsa wears is from a Soletaken. He killed a third demon just outside Ugarat, and chased off another in the Anibar forest. He singlehandedly killed a bhederin bull – and that I witnessed with my own eyes.’

  The Taxilian shook his head. ‘The Edur Emperor… he too is a demon. Every cruelty committed by these grey-skinned bastards, they claim is by their Emperor’s command. And so too this search for warriors. An emperor who invites his own death – how can this be?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. And not knowing is what frightens me the most. ‘As you say, it makes no sense.’

  ‘One thing is known,’ the man said. ‘Their Emperor has never been defeated. Else his rule would have ended. Perhaps indeed that tyrant is the greatest warrior of all. Perhaps there is no-one, no-one anywhere in this world, who can best him. Not even Toblakai.’

  She thought about that, as the huge Edur fleet, filling the seas around her, worked northward, the untamed wilds of the Olphara Peninsula a jagged line on the horizon to port. North, then west, into the Sepik Sea.

  Samar Dev slowly frowned. Oh, they have done this before. Sepik, the island kingdom, the vassal to the Malazan Empire. A peculiar, isolated people, with their two-tiered society. The indigenous tribe, subjugated and enslaved. Rulhun’tal ven’or – the Mudskins… ‘Taxilian, these Edur slaves below. Where did they find them?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ The bruised face twisted into a bitter smile. ‘They liberated them. The sweet lie of that word, Samar Dev. No, I will think no more on that.’

  You are lying to me, Taxilian, I think.

  There was a shout from the crow’s nest, picked up by sailors in the rigging and passed on below. Samar Dev saw heads turn, saw Tiste Edur appear and make their way astern.

  ‘Ships have been sighted in our wake,’ the Taxilian said.

  ‘The rest of the fleet?’

  ‘No.’ He lifted his head and continued listening as the lookout called down ever more details. ‘Foreigners. Lots of ships. Mostly transports – two-thirds transports, one-third dromon escort.’ He grunted. ‘The third time we’ve sighted them since I came on board. Sighted, then evaded, each time.’

  ‘Have you identified those foreigners for them, Taxilian?’

  He shook his head.

  The Malazan Imperial Fleet. Admiral Nok. It has to be. She saw a certain tension now among the Tiste Edur. ‘What is it? What are they so excited about?’

  ‘Those poor Malazans,’ the man said with a savage grin. It’s the positioning now, you see.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If they stay in our wake, if they keep sailing northward to skirt this peninsula, they are doomed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Becau
se now, Samar Dev, the rest of the Edur fleet – Tomad Sengar’s mass of warships – is behind the Malazans.’

  All at once, the cold wind seemed to cut through all of Samar Dev’s clothing. ‘They mean to attack them?’

  ‘They mean to annihilate them,’ the Taxilian said. ‘And I have seen Edur sorcery and I tell you this – the Malazan Empire is about to lose its entire Imperial Fleet. It will die. And with it, every damned man and woman on board.’ He leaned forward as if to spit, then, realizing the wind was in his face, he simply grinned all the harder. ‘Except, maybe, one or two… champions.’

  This was something new, Banaschar reflected as he hurried beneath sheets of rain towards Coop’s. He was being followed. Once, such a discovery would have set a fury alight inside him, and he would have made short work of the fool, then, after extracting the necessary details, even shorter work of whoever had hired that fool. But now, the best he could muster was a sour laugh under his breath. ‘Aye, Master (or Mistress), he wakes up in the afternoon, without fail, and after a sixth of a bell or so of coughing and scratching and clicking nits, he heads out, onto the street, and sets off, Mistress (or Master), for one of six or so disreputable establishments, and once ensconced among the regulars, he argues about the nature of religion – or is it taxation and the rise in port tithes? Or the sudden drop-off in the coraval schools off the Jakatakan shoals? Or the poor workmanship of that cobbler who’d sworn he could re-stitch that sole on this here left boot – what? True enough, Master (or Mistress), it’s all nefarious code, sure as I can slink wi’ the best slinkers, and I’m as near to crackin’ it as can be…’

  His lone source of entertainment these nights, these imagined conversations. Gods, now that is pathetic. Then again, pathos ever amuses me. And long before it could cease amusing him, he’d be drunk, and so went another passage of the sun and stars in that meaningless heaven overhead. Assuming it still existed – who could tell with this solid ceiling of grey that had settled on the island for almost a week now, with no sign of breaking? Much more of this rain and we’ll simply sink beneath the waves. Traders arriving from the mainland will circle and circle where Malaz Island used to be. Circle and circle, the pilots scratching their heads… There he went again, yet another conjured scene with its subtle weft of contempt for all things human – the sheer incompetence, stupidity, sloth and bad workmanship – look at this, after all, he limped like some one-footed shark baiter – the cobbler met him at the door barefooted – he should have started up with the suspicion thing about then. Don’t you think?

  ‘Well, Empress, it’s like this. The poor sod was half-Wickan, and he’d paid for that, thanks to your refusal to rein in the mobs. He’d been herded, oh Great One, with bricks and clubs, about as far as he could go without diving headfirst into the harbour. Lost all his cobbler tools and stuff-his livelihood, you see. And me, well, I am cursed with pity – aye, Empress, it’s not an affliction that plagues you much and all the good to you, I say, but where was I? Oh yes, racked with pity, prodded into mercy. Hood knows, the poor broken man needed that coin more than I did, if only to bury that little son of his he was still carrying round, aye, the one with the caved-in skull—’ No, stop this, Banaschar.

  Stop.

  Meaningless mind games, right? Devoid of significance. Nothing but self-indulgence, and for that vast audience out there – the whispering ghosts and their intimations, their suppositions and veiled insults and their so easily bored minds – that audience – they are my witnesses, yes, that sea of murky faces in the pit, for whom my desperate performance, ever seeking to reach out with a human touch, yields nothing but impatience and agitation, the restless waiting for the cue to laugh. Well enough, this oratory pageant served only himself, Banaschar knew, and all the rest was a lie.

  The child with the caved-in skull showed more than one face, tilted askew and flaccid in death. More than one, more than ten, more than ten thousand. Faces he could not afford to think about in his day-to-day, night-through-night stumble of existence. For they were as nails driven deep into the ground, pinning down whatever train he dragged in his wake, and with each forward step the resistance grew, the constriction round his neck stretching ever tighter – and no mortal could weather that – we choke on what we witness, we are strangled by headlong flight, that will not do, not do at all. Don’t mind me, dear Empress. I see how clean is your throne.

  Ah, here were the steps leading down. Coop’s dear old Hanged Man, the stone scaffold streaming with gritty tears underfoot and a challenge to odd-footed descent, the rickety uncertainty – was this truly nothing more than steps down into a tavern? Or now transformed, my temple of draughts, echoing to the vacuous moaning of my fellow-kind, oh, how welcome this embrace—

  He pushed through the doorway and paused in the gloom, just inside the dripping eaves, his feet planted in a puddle where the pavestones sagged, water running down him to add to its depth; and a half-dozen faces, pale and dirty as the moon after a dust storm, swung towards him… for but a moment, then away again.

  My adoring public. Yes, the tragic mummer has returned.

  And there, seated alone at a table, was a monstrosity of a man. Hunched over, tiny black eyes glittering beneath the shadow of a jutting brow. Hairy beyond reason. Twisted snarls exploding out from both ears, the ebon-hued curls wending down to merge with the vast gull’s nest that was his beard, which in turn engulfed his neck and continued downward, unabated, to what was visible of the mans bulging chest; and, too, climbed upward to fur his cheeks – conjoining on the way with the twin juts of nostril hairs, as if the man had thrust tiny uprooted trees up his nose – only to then merge uninterrupted with the sprung hemp ropes that were the man’s eyebrows, which in turn blended neatly into the appallingly low hairline that thoroughly disguised what had to be a meagre, sloping forehead. And, despite the man’s absurd age – rumoured age, actually, since no one knew for certain – that mass of hair was dyed squid-ink black.

  He was drinking red-vine tea, a local concoction sometimes used to kill ants.

  Banaschar made his way over and sat down opposite the man. ‘If I’d thought about it, I’d say I’ve been looking for you all this time, Master Sergeant Braven Tooth.’

  ‘But you ain’t much of a thinker, are you?’ The huge man did not bother looking up. ‘Can’t be, if you were looking for me. What you’re seeing here is an escape – no, outright flight – Hood knows who’s deciding these pathetic nitwits they keep sending me deserve the name of recruits. In the Malazan Army, by the Abyss! The world’s gone mad. Entirely mad.’

  ‘The gatekeeper,’ Banaschar said. ‘Top of the stairs, Mock’s Hold. The gate watchman, Braven Tooth, I assume you know him. Seems he’s been there as long as you’ve been training soldiers.’

  ‘There’s knowing and there’s knowing. That bell-backed old crab, now, let me tell you something about him. I could send legion after legion of my cuddly little recruits up them stairs, with every weapon at their disposal, and they’d never get past him. Why? I’ll tell you why. It ain’t that Lubben’s some champion or Mortal Sword or something. No, it’s that I got more brains lodged up my left nostril waitin’ for my finger than all my so-called recruits got put together.’

  ‘That doesn’t tell me anything about Lubben, Braven Tooth, only your opinion of your recruits, which it seems I already surmised.’

  ‘Just so,’ said the man, nodding.

  Banaschar rubbed at his face. ‘Lubben. Listen, I need to talk with someone, someone holed up in Mock’s. I send messages, they get into Lubben’s hands, and then… nothing.’

  ‘So who’s that you want to talk to?’

  ‘I’d rather not say.’

  ‘Oh, him.’

  ‘So, is Lubben dropping those messages down that slimy chute the effluence of which so decorously paints the cliff-side?’

  ‘Efflu-what? No. Tell you what, how about I head up there and take that You’d rather not say by the overlong out-of-style braid on top of his head and
give ’im a shake or three?’

  ‘I don’t see how that would help.’

  ‘Well, it’d cheer me up, not for any particular gripe, mind you, but just on principle. Maybe You’d rather not say’d rather not talk to you, have you thought of that? Or maybe you’d rather not.’

  ‘I have to talk to him.’

  ‘Important, huh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Imperial interest?’

  ‘No, at least I don’t think so.’

  ‘Tell you what, I’ll grab him by his cute braid and dangle him from the tower. You can signal from below. I swing him back and forth and it means he says “Sure, come on up, old friend”. And if I just drop ’im it means the other thing. That, or my hands got tired and maybe slipped.’

  ‘You’re not helpful at all, Braven Tooth.’

  ‘Wasn’t me sitting at your table, was you sitting at mine.’

  Banaschar leaned back, sighing. ‘Fine. Here, I’ll buy you some more tea—’

  ‘What, you trying to poison me now?’

  ‘All right, how about we share a pitcher of Malazan Dark?’

  The huge man leaned forward, meeting Banaschar’s eyes for the first time. ‘Better. Y’see, I’m in mourning.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The news from Y’Ghatan.’ He snorted. ‘It’s always the news from Y’Ghatan, ain’t it? Anyway, I’ve lost some friends.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘So, tonight,’ Braven Tooth said, ‘I plan on getting drunk. For them. I can’t cry unless I’m drunk, you see.’

  ‘So why the red-vine tea?’

  Braven Tooth looked up as someone arrived, and gave the man an ugly smile. ‘Ask Temper here. Why the red-vine tea, you old hunkered-down bastard?’

  ‘Plan on crying tonight, Braven Tooth?’

  The Master Sergeant nodded.

  Temper levered himself into a chair that creaked alarmingly beneath him. Red-shot eyes fixed on Banaschar. ‘Makes his tears the colour of blood. Story goes, he’s only done it once before, and that was when Dassem Ultor died.’

  Gods below, must I witness this tonight?