When he would not raise his own hand she took it and pressed an object into it. Her hand was a fraction the size of his, yet far harder. As sharp and unyielding as stone slivers. She walked away, the long tatters of her robes dragged behind through the stalks. Ivanr opened his hand. A square-cut iron nail like a sword in miniature, with a lace of leather drawn through the small loop that was the grip and pommel. The symbol of the cult of Dessembrae.
Word of the heresy of polytheism had come north down the mountain foothills only a few years ago. It had been twice that time since Ivanr had refused the Call and thrown down his swords in the dust of the training grounds at Abor. They’d imprisoned him, beaten him almost to his death, cursed him as half-breed Thel scum – not that his background had mattered while his sword served. But they would not kill him; not great Ivanr whom they had lauded as the greatest Jourilan champion in living memory.
And so it was that he had found himself blinking in the unfamiliar bright sunlight with only the rags about his loins to his name. The guards who had prodded him from the wagon threw a skin of water at his feet and told him that if he returned to the city he’d be killed out of hand. The wounds on his lashed back split open as he knelt to pick up the water.
He had walked south. At first he thought he’d simply keep walking until his feet brought him to the vast glacier wilderness held in abeyance by the Iceback range. Where he would no doubt have perished. But when he reached the foothills he came across many more of his kind, clustered in small family camps around smoking firepits, digging the earth beside the road. Some purebred, some mixed – remnants, those bearing the mark of the prior inhabitants of the land. Some markedly tall, like himself, others broad and low to the ground. The Thoul-Alai, or variously ‘Thel’ or ‘Thoul’, as the invaders had parsed. And so he decided that here was perhaps where he belonged. He selected a section of a hardscrabble unfavourable hillside, and planted.
The local ranchers who raised a breed of cattle called Baranal thought him mad and regularly ran their beasts through his field. His fellow Thel also thought him touched; none of them farmed. But it seemed to him that a society reliant on a way of life no longer viable, namely hunting and gathering, really ought to adapt. He judged farming a reasonable substitution.
Then word came of this new cult. Blasphemous! They deny the Goddess! They speak against the Stormwall! This priestess who led them was a witch who enslaved men with sex. They held orgies at which babies were murdered and eaten.
It seemed strange to him that everyone should be so ready to believe that a cult that preached nonviolence should also be murdering babies. But from what he’d seen in life there was much insanity surrounding religion.
Then the first of the prisoner gangs came shuffling along the road that ran through the valley beneath his hillside. A corpse suspended from a gibbet swung at the head of the column. After working the day with his back pointedly turned to the valley, Ivanr finally threw aside his digging tools and walked down to where the Jourilan captors had staked the chain gang. An officer of the detachment came out to meet him, flanked by troopers.
‘These are the heretics?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ The officer watched him narrowly; Ivanr saw many of his brother and sister Thel among the shackled prisoners. None raised their heads.
‘They are for Abor?’
‘Yes.’
‘Execution?’
‘Yes.’
‘The usual? Stoning? Crushing? Public garrotting and impalement? Or just plain crucifixion? Violent ends for people who swear to nonviolence.’
The Jourilan officer’s gaze hardened even further. ‘Is that an objection?’
‘Just an observation.’
The officer motioned him off. ‘Then observe from far away.’
A month later Ivanr was sitting in front of his sod-roofed hut sharpening his tools when a file of dusty beggars approached. An old man led them, of pure Jourilan invader stock, haggard and unwashed, but holding his head high and walking with a firm stride, planting a walking staff strongly before him. He stopped his band of followers a discreet distance off then stepped up and leaned on the staff.
‘Spare a drink of water for those who thirst, stranger?’
Ivanr set down his sharpening stone. He scanned the horizon for any Jourilan patrol. Saw none. ‘Aye.’ He carried out a small keg of captured rainwater and a tarred leather cup. The old man bowed, took a small sip, then handed on the keg to his band. The entire time, the dark eyes slitted in his sun-burned, lined face did not leave Ivanr’s.
‘You are from the south?’ Ivanr asked.
‘Aye.’
‘You carry word of this new faith?’
The cracked and bloodied lips climbed with faint humour. ‘We follow the Priestess and bring the word of her teachings. Word of the new faith revealed to her. A faith that embraces life. Rejects death.’
‘You reject death?’
‘We accept it. And thereby deny it any power over us.’
‘And you are headed north?’
‘Yes. To Pon-Ruo.’
‘I think you’ll find what you deny waiting for you there.’
Again, the half-smile. ‘Death awaits us all. The question, then, really should be how to live.’
‘You mean survive?’
‘No – how to live one’s life. Harming others is no way to honour life.’
Ivanr, who up until then had merely been amusing himself, shivered at those words. The old pilgrim did not seem to notice; he gestured to Ivanr’s fields. ‘Farming honours life.’
Ivanr waved the man off. ‘Take the water and go.’ He walked away.
‘You cannot hide from life,’ the old man called after him. ‘You harm yourself and give power to that from which you turn.’
‘Go!’
The old man bowed. ‘We honour you for your gift.’
Just go, damn you!
Of all the places to die in Banith, Bakune believed that this was very probably the ugliest. He could almost smell the madness that must have driven the old woman to her death here in this dead-end alley. What he could not avoid smelling was the stale sweat, the animal fear, and the dried piss.
She’d been a nun in attendance at Our Lady the Saviour Cloister and Hospice. That much the Watch had ascertained. A woman gone mad to end her life in a frothing twisted heap at the back of a garbage-strewn alley, fingers bloody and torn where she’d clawed at the stone walls.
And he’d almost missed this one.
The Watch hardly bothered to call him in any more. Just another corpse. The Assessor came, poked about, asked his obtuse questions, then went back to frown and potter over his reports. What was the use? For his part, Bakune saw that while the Watch respected his judgements from the bench, all the same they wished he’d just stay in his chambers. After all these years it was becoming, well, an embarrassment.
But there was something different about this one. What was a nun of the temple doing outside in the middle of the night? How had she gotten out without anyone noticing? And why? Why lose herself in this warren of alleys? Lunacy, he supposed, was the easy answer.
But too glib for his liking. The temple revealed little of the finer points of its faith, let alone its inner workings. How could this embarrassment have escaped its self-policing? No doubt the madwoman had been under virtual house arrest for some time now, perhaps locked in an ascetic’s cell. A visit to the cloisters might just be in order.
He straightened from the stiffened corpse to find that his escort, two soldiers of the Watch, had retreated to the mouth of this ratrun of an alley, where it met a slightly larger and less choked back way. Sighing, Bakune stepped over the rotting garbage and dumped nightsoil to join them.
‘A right reek,’ the moustached one offered – as close to an apology as any of the street-level patrolmen might offer him.
‘I want to talk to the Abbot.’
The two shared a flicked glance, and in that quick exchange Bakune was chagrined to read the
true bankruptcy of his influence and reputation: babysitting the Assessor while he pottered among alleyways was one thing, allowing him to pester the Abbot of the Cloister of Our Lady was another altogether.
He was chagrined, yes, but not surprised. The City Watch valued action and quick results. To him, the blunt brutal truncheons at their sides were fitting weapons for the blunt and brutal instruments of state that carried them. ‘You need not accompany me.’
Again the flicked glance. ‘No, Assessor,’ the less dull-looking of the two drawled. ‘It’s our job.’
‘Very good. Let’s hope the Abbot is available on such short notice.’
The Cloister of the Blessed Lady was the third most revered holy site on the island of Fist, after the caves of the Ascetics near Thol, and the Tabernacle of Our Lady at Paliss. Neither Mare nor Skolati possessed any such sites worthy of pilgrimage. The Cloister was raised around the very bare rock where it was said the Lady herself shed blood on her holy mission to forestall the sea-borne enemy.
Bakune headed to the pilgrim route that twisted its way from the waterfront docks to the Cloister’s double copper doors. The cacophony reached him first. Touts and hawkers bawled to catch the attention of the penitents as they tramped the ancient path that climbed the hillside to those beaten-panelled doors. Bakune, followed by his guards, joined the file. Shop fronts, stalls, and modest laid carpets lined the narrow Way of Obtestation. Each displayed a seemingly infinite array of charms, blessed bracelets, healing stones, bones of this or that monk or nun or saint, swatches of cloth taken from the backs of noted devouts who passed away in frenzied rapture – anything and everything, in short, that might tempt pilgrims come to enhance their spiritual purification.
He brushed aside sticks thrust at him laced with charms like small forests of beading. ‘Cure the ague, rot, and the clouding blindness!’ a tout yelled. A flask hanging from a tall stave was swung at him. ‘Blessed waters from the Cloister’s fount! All-healing!’ He knew that to be truly efficacious such waters must be taken from their source, but first-time pilgrims knew no better.
A grimed street urchin yanked at his robes. ‘Inspect the holy virgins?’ The leer was startling on a face so young. One of the guards sent the boy on with a kick.
Bakune could only shake his head; it had been a long time since he’d made his own obligatory visitations, but he did not remember the whole thing being so, well, seamy. He paused to turn, and, brushed by the shoulders of those who passed, heads lowered in contemplation, looked back the length of this arc of the Way, taking in not only the hawkers and purveyors of religious goods, legitimate or not, but the food sellers, the inns, the stablers, all the many services the enterprising citizens of Banith provided the steady year-round stream of visitors. In this unimportant seaside town it was frankly the one and only going business. To threaten the flow would be to threaten the city’s very lifeblood, and Bakune felt a cold chill creep upon him in the face of so visceral a reaffirmation of what he’d always appreciated intellectually.
His escort drew up short, eyed him quizzically then exchanged bored glances. Turning back without comment, he waved them on.
Near the Cloister the press thinned. Here high-priced shops behind narrow doorways catered to the wealthier pilgrims – merchants themselves, perhaps, or the wives of highly ranked civil servants from Dourkan or Jourilan. Here also patrolled Guardians of the Faith in their dark severe robes, armed with iron-heeled staves. The order had begun as a militant cadre of the faith in response to the Malazan invasions. It was charged with the duty to protect the pilgrims, and the faith itself, from backsliding and corruption. In Bakune’s eyes it was the worst of the innovations brought about by the pressure of foreign occupation – perhaps because the order was a sort of rival religious police adjudicating what was permitted behaviour and what was not, and perhaps because it saw itself as above the earthly laws represented locally by none other than himself.
As he came to the tall double doors of the Cloister grounds, the sight of so many of the Guardians loitering about brought to Bakune’s mind that during his entire approach he had not seen one trooper of their erstwhile occupiers, the Malazans. Politic, that: keeping away from the pilgrimage route where tempers might flare.
Two Guardians stepped forward to bar the open doorway. ‘What business in the Cloister?’ one demanded.
He cocked a brow; since when had they begun interrogating visitors? ‘My business is my own. By what right do you ask?’
The man bristled, clenching his stave tight. ‘By right of faith.’ He eyed Bakune up and down, taking in his dark cloak, cloth trousers, brocaded satin vest, and clean linen shirt. ‘You are no pilgrim. What is your business?’
‘I’m dying of the bloody-lung.’
The Guardian flinched, but recovered, raising his chin. ‘That is not a matter for jest. Men and women are dying of that very affliction in the Hospice, praying for Our Lady’s blessing and her healing waters even as you make light of it.’
Bakune was impressed by the speed with which the man had charged the high moral summit, though the move was by far too naked and bold. Bludgeons. Like his own guards, even now dragging themselves up the cobbled way, these too were yet mere blunt instruments.
Sighing his irritation, he pulled off one moleskin glove and extended his hand. ‘Assessor Bakune. I am come to see the Abbot.’
The Guardian frowned over the ring of office. Belatedly, Bakune realized that he might as well have thrust a live polecat at the man for all he understood of the significance of the seal of a magistrate of the state. Yet a survivor’s instinct told the man that perhaps there may be something to all this and he nodded, grudgingly, and stepped aside. That, or the overdue arrival of Bakune’s two guards of the Watch, both licking grease from their fingers.
Bakune entered beneath the wooden vaulted ceiling of the tunnel that led to the grounds. The other Guardian, perhaps the brighter of the two, had run ahead to bring word of his arrival. Past the tunnel, shaded colonnaded walks beckoned to the right and left, while ahead lay the gravel paths of the manicured gardens and walks of Blessed Contemplation. Beyond, to the right, rose the three storeys of the wooden Hospice of Our Lady, largest of such installations in all Fist, eclipsed only by that servicing the veteran Chosen of Korel. To the left, over the tops of the hedges and ornamental trees, reared the tall spires of the rambling Cloister itself. A city within a city, complete with its own schools, administration, kitchens and bakery, nunnery, library, orphanage, even the Hospice to shelter its aged and dying brothers and sisters.
Bakune chose to wait outside. He drew off his other glove to better appreciate the blossoms of the late-blooming winter-lace, whose tiny white flowers were considered melancholy as their appearance signalled the coming of winter. He appreciated their delicate scent. His guards sprawled on a bench and eyed the more hale inmates of the Hospice shuffling back and forth on their constitutional walks. Eventually, as Bakune knew he must, if only for the sake of form, came Abbot Starvann Arl, trailed by a gaggle of his higher functionaries and staff.
They embraced as the equals they were – at least in principle. Starvann, head of the Cloister, with authority over all matters of faith locally, answerable only to the Prioress herself at the capital, Paliss. And Bakune, Assessor and magistrate, the highest local legal authority, answerable only to the High Assessor at the same city. Yet what a difference; Bakune was rendered a bare grudging sort of assistance from the City Watch while Starvann commanded all the staff of the Cloister, numbering perhaps more than a thousand – plus the authority of the order of the Guardians of the Faith themselves. Yes, Bakune reflected tartly, equal in principle only.
‘Bakune! Good to see you. We meet too rarely. How gracious of you to visit us.’ The Abbot captured Bakune’s hands in a surprisingly bone-hard grip. Then the smile behind his thick beard faded and his startling pale eyes clouded over. ‘I know why you have come,’ he said sadly.
Bakune raised a quizzical brow. ‘You do?’
Starvann gave the Assessor’s hands one last painful squeeze before releasing them. ‘Sister Prudence. Word came to me only this morning. ’ He pressed a hand to Bakune’s back and gently but firmly urged him on. ‘Come, let us walk the grounds … forgive me, but I find it refreshing.’
‘Certainly.’ Bakune allowed himself to be steered on to a path between low evergreen shrubs. The Abbot clasped his hands behind his back. His plain dark robes brushed the gravel as he walked. His dress was appropriately severe and august, his only ornament a diadem suspended from his neck in the starburst sigil of the faith of the Blessed Lady.
‘She is dead, then?’ he asked, head lowered.
‘Yes.’
‘Then she has at last found peace with Our Lady.’
‘Yes. Did you say Sister … Prudence?’
The head rose, and the long grey hair blew in the mild breeze. ‘The name she chose when she joined the order as a child.’
‘Ah, I see. May I ask—’
‘How I knew she had passed on?’
Bakune cleared his throat, had to narrow his gaze in the light of the man’s unearthly pale eyes. ‘Well … yes.’
The gentle smile returned and the Abbot squeezed his shoulder. Bakune knew he should be reassured by the smile and flattered by the personal attention, but somehow he was not. The suspicious adjudicator’s voice that spoke to him when in the magistrate’s chair murmured now: Why should he bother?
We’ve met before. It is merely professional courtesy.
And you feel gratitude for this condescension, do you not?
And he wondered in his most ruthless self-analysis: was this jealousy?
Bakune glanced behind and had to strangle an urge to laugh. The Abbot’s entire entourage was now bunched up behind his two ambling guards, one of whom was exploring the cavity of a nostril.
The Malazan Empire Series: (Night of Knives, Return of the Crimson Guard, Stonewielder, Orb Sceptre Throne, Blood and Bone, Assail) (Novels of the Malazan Empire) Page 121
