‘But I want it.’
He grunted something that might have been a shy sort of gratitude. ‘Well.’ He invited her forward. ‘Let’s see how our friend fared.’
He helped her up the great tilted base with its torn roots like severed arms reaching to the sky. Together they walked the length of the trunk. It lay as a clear easy path through the crushed tangle. Close to where the crown had snapped away they found the beast. It lay next to the slim bole, one arm beneath it, blinking up at them. ‘Shouldn’t go throwing trees at people,’ it croaked.
‘What do you know?’ Saeng demanded.
It tugged on its arm. ‘Ah, well. Nothing, really. Serves me right. Just what the seers among us sense. A terrifying thing is coming. And you may play a part.’
She knelt to better peer down at it. ‘What is your name?’
‘My name? Varakapi.’
‘And what is this terrifying thing?’
‘Saeng…’ Hanu murmured, calling her attention.
‘This thing?’ the creature answered. A fresh grin grew, pulling its black lips away from its prominent fangs. ‘Why, that most terrifying thing of all. Change, of course.’
‘Saeng…’ Hanu urged anew.
She straightened. ‘What?’ He lifted his armoured chin ahead. She turned to squint into the deepening honey gloom of dusk. The fall of the giant tualang had parted a swath of the jungle and now she could glimpse a section of the river. There, in the far distance, a bizarre feature seemed to overtop its flat course. It took some time for her to understand what she was looking at as she’d never before seen one of its type. It appeared to be an enormous bridge.
She glanced down to ask Varakapi of it but snapped her mouth shut. He was gone. She snorted her grudging half-admiration. Cunning beast. Yet not truly a beast. A man-ape, child of the jungle, ward of the Queen of Witches, Ardata.
* * *
It was long after dusk when they reached the structure. Saeng was in an awful mood. The last stretch had been the worst she’d experienced yet: low-lying swampy ground plagued by biting insects. She was filthy with sweat and reeking mud. And the evening downpour was gathering in rumblings and distant flashes of lightning. The wide causeway that led to the bridge emerged from the muck as if from the sea. Saeng imagined the river must have flooded countless times, or shifted its course, since the edifice was built. Indeed, huge jungle emergents crowned the causeway. They had pushed aside its cyclopean blocks the way a child might knock over toys. The river coursed ahead, silent and dark.
‘We may just make it…’ Hanu murmured.
‘Not tonight. Not in the dark.’
He glittered now in the night. The rain had cleaned the dust and mud from his inlay mosaic of semi-precious stones. Sapphire, emerald and gold flashed keenly as he moved. He gestured aside. ‘Perhaps there is cover from the rain below.’
‘And beasts.’
‘Nothing you cannot handle, Saeng.’
She followed, wishing she shared his confidence in her abilities. There was cover where the wide arch of the stone bridge cleared the shore, but there was also thick clammy mud that weighted her sandals. Hanu led her to a modest hump where the mud had dried to a hardened cracked surface. She spread her thick sleeping blanket and sat, tucking her legs beneath her.
‘I will try to find dry wood,’ Hanu said and pushed off through the tall stands of grass and cattails.
Once Hanu had been gone for a time the dead came.
Saeng turned her face away; she did not want to deal with them now. Their endless demands and neediness. Who would have imagined that the dead should be so needy? But they were. They did not know the meaning of the word surcease. Which was probably why they wandered, ever searching – searching for something they would not even recognize should they find it.
They watched her silently from among the brush. On all sides their sad liquid eyes implored her. Girls mostly here. Young women. ‘What do you want?’ she hissed, keeping her gaze lowered.
‘Help us,’ they whispered in her thoughts, pleading.
‘How?’
‘Help us.’
The barest hint of their longing and profound grief touched her then and she felt tears mark their hot descent down her cheeks. ‘Go away. I cannot help you.’
‘Help us.’ Something disturbed them then and they retreated into the gloom. Their fading was like a heartbreaking sigh in the night. Hanu emerged from the dry brush to set down an armload of driftwood. He started preparing a fire.
After the blaze came alight, he sat back to regard the surroundings. ‘This is a sad place,’ he said.
‘Yes. The misery here is so strong even you can sense it, Hanu.’ She edged closer to the fire to dry her skirts. ‘It seems that for many centuries this bridge has been a favourite site for suicides. Both voluntary and involuntary. Young girls mostly.’
‘Involuntary?’
‘Yes. Pregnant, or lovesick, or just plain despairing, they drowned themselves here. Or were drowned.’ She rubbed at her neck. ‘I can feel them, Hanu,’ she said, her voice growing ever more faint. ‘Hundreds of hands at my throat, choking. I am peering up through the water at the faces of brothers and fathers, some rapists, some not. I know that later I will be blamed for my own death. But the most tragic thing is, Hanu, that even now, I still love my family. Even as they—’
‘Saeng!’ Hanu exclaimed, horrorstruck. ‘Do not torture yourself. There is nothing you can do.’
‘They seem to think there is.’
‘Well … they are mistaken.’
Saeng didn’t know if they were or not – no doubt they pleaded for help from everyone who could sense them. She lay on her side and pulled her legs up close to her chest, tucking in her skirts around them, and stared into the dancing flames of the fire. Something ought to be done. She just had no idea what.
Hanu straightened and turned to face away from the fire.
‘You still will not sleep?’
‘No. I will keep watch. The … treatments … and conditioning leave me able to answer that need while remaining awake.’
‘I see.’ She wanted to say she was sorry, but worried that perhaps she shouldn’t. After all, this was how he was now and nothing could be done.
* * *
With the dawn they ate a very meagre meal of a few remaining scraps of dried fish, the last of their rice and foraged overripe fruit. Then they walked round to climb up on to the broad course of the stone bridge. Saeng had no idea how old it was but was certain her people could never have raised such an immense edifice. It was ancient, then, and cyclopean. Like a mountain of stone laid across the river. Yet some sort of equally vast trauma appeared to have assaulted it. Wide columns and plinths to either side lay fallen or sheared, broken ages ago. The arches no longer ran true, but had been pushed to the side as if a giant had heaved against them. From the silts of the flood plain a massive stone face stared at the sky, its eyes now clumps of grasses, its lips buried in the mud. Cruel, that face appeared to her. Or perhaps merely unfathomable. Saeng brushed at the eternal clouds of insects that surrounded her, while shimmering dragonflies darted about partaking of the massed offering.
Hanu stilled. A man stood awaiting them in the middle of the bridge. With a hand at his back, Saeng urged him onward.
‘Greetings,’ the man welcomed them, bowing. He was old, dressed in rags that might have once been robes of some kind. His wild hair was a halo about his sun- and wind-darkened wrinkled features and his eyes and grin had a touched, manic look to them. ‘Please, accompany me. We get so few visitors. It is an honour! Please,’ and he gestured, inviting.
In answer Hanu drew his yataghan and pressed its honed point to the man’s bony chest. ‘Hanu!’ Saeng cried.
‘He is one of them.’
‘Thaumaturg?’
The old man nodded jerkily, grinning his antic manic grin. ‘Yes, yes. Such things cannot be hidden from our very own servants, yes? Yes, once. Now I am not. I fled them – but I could not escape
them. Yes? You know what I mean. Follow me!’ And he turned abruptly, heading off with a quick shuffling gait.
‘He is mad,’ Hanu whispered.
Saeng merely arched a brow. ‘What makes you say that?’
‘No – I am certain. It is one of the curses the Thaumaturgs level against any among their number who disagree, foment trouble, or desert the common orthodoxy.’
Following along, Saeng answered, ‘Wouldn’t it be easier just to kill them?’
Hanu’s armoured boots scraped over the huge paving stones. He walked with his hands clasped at his back. ‘No. You miss the point entirely – which is to your credit. You do not understand cruelty. The Thaumaturgs value their thinking minds above all else. To have that torn from you is punishment indeed. Also, keeping such unfortunates about is most instructional to the rest of the rank and file, yes?’
Saeng shuddered. ‘You are right. I do not understand the regimen of cruelty.’
‘For that I am glad.’
The madman waved them on, grinning like a child on his birthday. ‘Come, come. Follow my lead.’ He sidled up close to Saeng and lowered his voice as if conferring a secret: ‘Though in truth you cannot, as I think differently now and see things which my blinkered brethren are incapable of.’
Saeng nodded her guarded agreement. ‘Of that I have no doubt.’
‘Exactly! And so I must thank them. The method of instruction may be vindictive and inexcusable but in this case it has led to enlightenment.’ He opened his hands as if to express the obviousness of it. ‘You see?
‘Yes. I … see.’
‘Excellent! It is a shame, really. I am suffused with pity for my brothers and sisters who can only writhe like blind worms in the mud while I now soar among boundless vistas.’
‘Where are you taking us?’ Ahead winds shivered the massed emerald jungle canopy. A storm of crimson and gold flower petals came showering down in the gusts like swirling flocks of birds. Hanu brushed them from his shoulders. The priest held out his cupped hands to gather a few stray petals.
‘Tears of Himatan,’ he said, offering them to Saeng.
‘Pardon?’
‘Flower petals. This is what they are. Tears of Himatan.’
Saeng hadn’t heard that old superstition since she sat listening to ghost stories as a child. A stray thought – a touch mocking – moved her to ask, ‘And what does Himatan weep for?’
‘For her children.’
That answer made her shiver and the small hairs of her arms and neck actually stirred. Mad, she told herself. The man is mad.
Once they were clear of the far end of the cyclopean bridge the forest engulfed them once more and Saeng felt chilled to be among the gloom and dappled shadows. She missed the clean heat of the sun and the woods that had seemed so full of life next to the river – so many new bird calls. One possessed a piercing rising and falling whistle that made her jump each time it let loose.
Carefully, Hanu gestured aside. Two children, a boy and a girl, had emerged from the dense brush. Seeing them just after the madman’s odd pronouncement unnerved Saeng even further. They wore only the very traditional, even outmoded now, loin wrap. Their hair also had been prepared in the old style that one only hears of in the folk tales: the head shaved but for a single small tightly braided queue hanging on one side. Each held out a circlet woven of pink and orange flower blossoms.
‘Please, take them,’ the Thaumaturg said.
Saeng felt positively alarmed now, but offered the children a smile then bent low. The girl slipped her lei over her head. Hanu merely peered down at the boy. Saeng gestured for him to comply. His stance betraying a sigh, her brother took the lei and slipped it over his helm.
‘Now you are our honoured guests,’ the mage announced. ‘Come. A banquet is being prepared. A momentous event is to come. Sit, rest, enjoy.’
The children led them off the raised causeway into the dense jungle. If there was a path here Saeng could see no sign of it. Then she smelled the familiar homey scent of wood smoke and cooking – or thought she did. Perhaps it was merely the memory of such things that had come to mind. Ahead rose the peaks of some ten or twelve huts standing tall on their poles, as in the traditional construction. The children ran ahead, scattering chickens. Pigs, captured wild ones, rooted under the huts. Each was secured by a rope of woven twine.
‘Come, come,’ the mage urged and he motioned to a hut where the villagers were gathering. The men and women all looked as if they had been taken straight from some old story from her childhood: hair brush-cut severely short, both men and women, and all in plain blue-dyed shirts. Each bowed to Saeng and Hanu, who answered. They motioned to the main hut’s short set of stairs, inviting them in.
Here Saeng paused. So far she had been willing to go along with whatever emerged from the jungle. Some encounters seemed more or less random – such as their meeting with Varakapi – which could have occurred at any day or time. But other meetings seemed fated, or unavoidable. As if they’d been arranged by someone or something. What, or who, that might be Saeng had no idea, though she had her suspicions. The encounter with the man-leopard Citravaghra had possessed that flavour. And she felt it here again, as well. She was inclined to cooperate in that she sensed nothing malign in the attention. Yet it was of course disturbing that she could not yet understand – nor yet know even whether she was capable of understanding.
And as the demented Thaumaturg was a demonstration: some lessons can be most harrowing indeed.
And so she mounted the stairs and took her place on the mats arranged in a broad oval. The mage sat on her right while Hanu took her left. Children came bearing banana leaves, which they laid before each person at the banquet. Then came rice steaming in wide clay pots. Saeng sampled the rice and the stewed meats and spiced vegetable dishes before her but tasted none of it. Flowers adorned every selection. Indeed, a few of the dishes mainly comprised edible flowers. And blossoms adorned every child and adult present.
Outside night fell quickly and torches on poles were lit against the dark. The bright jade glow of the Omen had been haunting the west and now with the darkness it came to dominate the night far more brightly than any full moon. Saeng squinted at one of the open windows, troubled. The Banner, or Scimitar, seemed unaccountably intense this evening. She raised a hand to the west. ‘What do you call that light?’
The Thaumaturg’s manic features turned down and he sighed heavily, as if suddenly overcome by an unbearable sadness. ‘That is the coming judgement of the High King, Kallor. This night it shall fall.’
Saeng dropped the ball of rice she had gathered in her hand. The room darkened as her vision closed to a tight tunnel and a roaring swelled in her hearing as if the descending Omen itself were crashing in upon her. She lowered her head, blinking, and forced the air deep within her chest.
‘Saeng?’ Hanu enquired from her side. She raised a hand to reassure him. Now she knew why the food tasted of nothing and why the smells seemed only remembered. All were ghosts. The people. The children. Even the village itself. Gone, long gone. Wiped from the earth.
She took a long slow breath to calm the fluttering in her chest then shot a glance to the mage. ‘When?’
He raised his head to the west. ‘Soon,’ he sighed. ‘Any moment now.’
Saeng was appalled. She swept a hand over the banquet. ‘Then why this? Why not flee now?’
‘There is no time. And nowhere to go. What I argued against has come to pass.’
‘Then … why…’ Again she gestured helplessly to the gathered bounty.
The madman smiled his understanding. ‘We celebrate the High King. Under him we have known centuries of peace and we honour him now. It is our way of saying farewell.’
Saeng could only blink at the mage. ‘You … honour Kallor?’
Now he studied her as if she were the touched one. ‘Of course.’
She turned from the madman. ‘Hanu,’ she began, uncertain how to convey this.
‘Yes
?’
‘This insane Thaumaturg says—’
A blazing emerald light pierced the hut and Saeng broke off to cover her gaze. All stood to face the west, hands and arms shading their gazes. A pillar of green light now dominated the western horizon only to fade to nothing even as Saeng glimpsed it. All was complete silence, for the jungle had stilled in every direction. Eerie it was, the unnatural quiet. Saeng blinked, blinded, as after staring at the fire at night.
‘Now it comes,’ the Thaumaturg breathed into the silence.
Saeng turned on the man. ‘Tell me what to do! What must I do to avert this?’
‘I do not know what you must do, High Priestess. I can only say that you must not despair. What rises must fall only to rise again. What has gone shall come again. It is the way of the world.’
The surrounding treetops now stirred and groaned in a rising wind and Saeng knew that what was on its way was far more than a strong wind. She took hold of the man’s tattered shirt front. ‘What does this mean? Platitudes? I asked you to help me, damn you!’
‘Saeng?’ Hanu asked again. ‘What is going on?’
The man’s gaze was fixed far beyond her. ‘Yea,’ he murmured, ‘those who reach for fire shall be destroyed by fire. For she is the Destroyer and the Creator and in her dance are we revealed.’
‘What? Babbling…’ Saeng’s attention shifted to the west where a moaning now climbed to a roar as of continuous thunder. Around her parents held children, faces pressed to faces; loved ones hugged, crying and rocking. Then a wall of churning and billowing darkness hammered through the jungle verge, obliterating it, and Saeng screamed.
* * *
Mara fell into thin ochre-red muddy soil and rotting leaf matter. Convulsing, she dry-heaved, her body attempting to rid itself of any possible ingested toxins, yet her stomach was empty and so only sticky acid bile burned on her tongue. She spat and gagged.
Birdsong assaulted her ears, along with the whirring and buzzing of countless insects, including the startlingly loud cicadas, which she found particularly maddening. Lurching to her feet she staggered, hands mimicking strangulation. ‘Where is he!’ she slurred and spat, wiping her mouth. ‘I’ll fucking kill him.’ In the distance, through the fronds and tree trunks, she glimpsed Thaumaturg soldiery marching single file. Labourers passed, bent almost horizontal beneath the tump-lines of enormous loads.
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 301
