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)

by Ian C. Esslemont

  ‘Regarding what?’ he asked, and applauded himself for the casual steadiness of his voice.

  Her brows wrinkled prettily as she eyed him sidelong. How beautiful you appear, my princess – even here surrounded by death.

  ‘I’ve had no time. He has been watching me. I have suspicions…’ she shook her head and dabbed her sleeve to her sweaty lips, ‘but you will think me mad…’

  I, too, have my suspicions, my princess of death. Their remaining troops waited for orders a respectful distance away. Jatal noted that every one of them was a member of her picked Vehajarwi bodyguard. Ahh, my princess … So this is how it is to be?

  Up the hall, the iron-grey figure of the Warleader paused. He glanced back over his shoulder. ‘You are coming?’ Andanii flinched, her mouth clamping shut. She motioned her bodyguard to fall in line.

  How meekly she follows this man! His merest gesture is her command!

  Andanii … I do not understand you at all.

  He searched her face as if he could read some hint of the workings of her mind there; she answered with a discouraging curt jerk of her head as if to demand silence.

  So be it, my princess. Silence it shall be.

  Their route brought them up a hall lined by narrow cells. Most held the slumped figure of a Thaumaturg, in robes that were once white but now bore the broad stains of spilled blood. They appeared to have been felled while in meditation. When the Warleader reached the end of the hall a metallic note rang out, clear and throbbing. It sounded like a struck bell. Its reverberations hung in the air as if suspended. The tone strengthened with each pulse. It stabbed at Jatal’s ears. The Warleader paused. He cocked his head as if puzzled.

  Andanii said something but Jatal heard nothing of it over the throbbing of the bell. A hand took hold of Jatal’s arm. He glanced round and was horrified to see a female Thaumaturg in her bloodstained robes. Whether she was dead or yet alive it was impossible to tell. One-handed, he ran the woman through. Despite the sword thrust through her stomach she held on. Her face betrayed nothing; just an inhuman curiosity, as if everything was a surprise to her.

  From every cell up and down the hall the fallen bodies now emerged and closed upon them. The Warleader contemptuously batted one down. It slowly climbed to its feet again. The bodyguard strove to cut them down, but the narrow confines of the hall limited their swordplay. Most switched to their heavy fighting dirks and thrust at faces and chests.

  It became obvious that even the worst slashing or head wound did nothing to slow the creatures. Jatal saw one of Andanii’s bodyguards push a dirk blade through one eye and into the brain behind yet the creature continued to grip the man’s arm. It carried the hilted weapon in its eye as no more than some sort of grisly decoration.

  Yet he sheathed his own sword and also frantically drew a fighting knife. Next to him, one of the things had hold of both arms of a bodyguard. It drew the man close while at the same time throwing open its mouth to an unnatural degree. Out poured a vomited torrent of ghastly steaming fluids straight on to the guard’s face and neck to run down his front over and beneath his armour. The man howled and writhed in the creature’s grip.

  Jatal stared, gagging and sickened, yet also mesmerized by the appalling sight. The man’s flesh smoked where the greenish-black muck had sprayed. It dripped and ran as if melting, falling away. White bone appeared beneath the mess at jaw and collarbone. The man threw back his head in a shriek of utter insane agony. His neck burst in a spray of blood as the flesh of the throat was eaten through, collapsing. The head fell backwards at an impossible angle, half decapitated. The corpse would have fallen but for the support of the creature’s grip. It bent forward now, mouth open, and took a great bite from the tangle of wet ligaments and sinew at the angle of shoulder and ruined neck.

  All this Jatal witnessed in a frantic instant while fending off the swipes and searching hands of the creatures surrounding him. Now he turned to the one that had hold of his arm. It was all he could do to resist screaming his own mindless panic at the thought of what awaited him. His gorge rose in unspeakable terror and anticipation. An idea came to him and he threw down his knife to take hold of the grip of his sword once more and yank it free. Up and down the hall the men of the bodyguard were falling beneath the grasping hands of the Thaumaturg-warped creatures. Ahead, the Warleader appeared to be hacking his way free. Andanii, he saw, was close behind.

  Desperate with disgust and terror, he swung at the creature’s wrist. It parted from the arm – though the hand yet maintained its grip on his bicep. Jatal pressed forward. Every hand that reached for him he swung at, leaving blunt waving stumps behind.

  Ahead, the Warleader had hacked his way clear to reach a set of stairs leading down. He spared one brief glance backwards; his dead ashen-hued eyes seemed to grant his followers nothing – not even a common humanity. He turned his back and continued on, abandoning them. Close behind, dodging and ducking, leaving scraps of her robes in clenched waving hands, Andanii also made the stairs. She too paused to glance back, all the while bending and stringing her longbow. Her gaze briefly brushed Jatal’s only to flick down to where the Warleader had disappeared. She followed the man at a run.

  In that brief contact, Jatal thought he read a desperate agony mixed with a ferocious ruthless resolve. So it was done. The coward! Relying on others to do what she couldn’t face herself. She would discard him to follow the foreigner!

  Her actions so shocked Jatal that he fell backwards into the arms of one of the creatures. It moved to wrap its limbs around him but he managed to bring his blade up inside the hug and hack through the wrists to duck free.

  I will have her head!

  His rage saw him through: kicking the creatures down, decapitating in wild swings, not caring who was near, stepping and slipping on the fallen. His onslaught opened up a route that five of Andanii’s bodyguards followed to reach the stairs. Here he paused, his chest heaving in his ecstasy of near blind rage and terror, until he saw that the surviving fiends were still following.

  He pointed his sword and gasped, his voice almost completely gone, ‘This way…’

  * * *

  They entered a maze of subterranean tunnels, just as at Isana Pura, yet even more terrifying and grotesque. They passed what were perhaps a series of operating chambers. On stone slabs lay the current victims of experimentation: a female cleanly flensed of all skin; the twined ropy muscles and gleaming bone of her frame perfectly revealed as if she were an anatomical sculpture. Here, one of the bodyguards came close, a lantern held high, and they all jerked as her bared lidless eyes shifted towards the light. Her throat moved, her naked jaws working. But as she had no cheeks, her words came out as gurglings and hissings.

  Snarling his horror and disgust, the guard swung his blade to decapitate her. Yet he failed. His sword jammed in her neck – perhaps her ligaments and bones had been hardened for preservation – in any case, he yanked but could not free the blade. She rose then, swiftly, and her fingers, all sinew, bone and long, curved, yellowed nails, found his face to gouge and dig in.

  He howled, abandoning the sword to grasp her hands. Everyone hacked at the thing. They finally managed to dismember it but not before the guard had fallen, his face and throat a bloody torn ruin. Jatal picked up the lantern where it had rolled aside, luckily not extinguishing. ‘Do not touch anything!’ he snarled, and limped onward.

  They passed a chamber where rank after rank of small short figures, children in Thaumaturg robes, sat as if in meditation. They faced away towards the far wall. Jatal stepped into the room, raising the lantern high. ‘Flee, all of you,’ he called. ‘The shaduwam are here.’

  Heads turned. Some forty pale faces regarded him silently. Jatal’s vision darkened in abhorrence; the eyes and mouth of each child had been sewn shut.

  Behind him, the guards cursed softly and gagged. Jatal pushed them back as he retreated from the room. He lowered the lantern and the heads calmly turned away as the children – children! Was that
what they were? – returned to their meditation. Jatal stood in the hall, unsteady on his feet. His heart hammered and his throat was as dry as kiln-heated sand yet it burned with suppressed acid bile.

  A madhouse! Inhuman!

  All Jatal wanted now was escape. He urged the men onward. Was this why the Thaumaturgs offered no resistance? They no longer thought like humans, no longer shared common human values and fears? Were no longer even human? Perhaps they considered them no more a threat than an ant or a lizard? Who could know? None of this seemed remotely sane.

  Unfortunately, the path led downward. They descended narrow slick stone stairs. At the bottom they found a heavy iron gate that had been smashed aside. Beyond lay a large chamber with halls leading off into utter darkness. Jatal raised the lantern; the stairs descended into dark water that covered the floor. It stank like a sewer and gnawed, half-skeletal corpses floated about, both Thaumaturg and shaduwam. He had no idea of the water’s depth, or what it might contain. The lantern’s weak light just brushed a distant figure somehow raised above the surface of the pool – a figure that wore the remains of tattered white robes over gleaming armour.

  The guards surged forward. They descended the stairs into the water up to their waists. Jatal followed, holding the lantern high. They pushed their way through the water. The sloshing and splashing echoed about the chamber and halls to return loud and distorted.

  It was Andanii; she had pulled herself on to, or been laid upon, a stone slab similar to the other operating platforms they’d seen everywhere. She bled from numerous wounds – what looked like vicious bites that had gouged rounded chunks from her flesh.

  ‘Princess!’ the men called, outraged, choked with tears. Their voices seemed to rouse her; she stirred, her limbs shifting. Jatal pressed forward. She has earned this! Why then am I terrified for her?

  ‘Andanii,’ he whispered, his face almost pressed to hers. Blood smeared her mouth and chin.

  She shook her head, mumbled something.

  ‘What? What is it?’ Say it, something in him urged her. Say it was all a mistake!

  ‘… no … trap…’ she gurgled in a mouthful of blood.

  Jatal set down the lantern to scoop her up in his arms. ‘Ware! Trap!’

  The remaining four of Andanii’s bodyguard spread out, surrounding them. One picked up the lantern to hold it high. ‘There!’ he called, pointing his sword. Hunched shapes came lurching their way up the halls. They appeared naked, hairless, with long ropy arms ending in great taloned hands.

  The group retreated to the stairs. Water surged, rising and splashing as a number of the creatures straightened from the murky waves to block their path. Closer now, Jatal could see that they were of basic human stock. No real monsters here – the true monsters are the Thaumaturgs.

  Yet things had been done to them. Thaumaturg experimentation. Their heads were narrower than any skull ought to be, the flat eyes devoid of emotion or intelligence; Jatal read in their opalescent depths hunger only – no recognition of a common humanity. Their mouths hung open to make room for teeth that stood out as sharpened and serrated weapons. Jatal did not think that they could close their mouths even should they try. They raised their clawed hands and made blood-chilling noises all the more horrific for sounding almost like words.

  ‘Keep going!’ Jatal urged. ‘Make for the stairs!’

  The group charged. Swords slashed and the creatures fell. Yet more of them surged from behind, falling upon the guards and dragging them down below the water to disappear. Jatal rushed for the stairs. He shouldered his way through the melee. The man holding the lantern fell, his scream ending in a mouthful of the foul water. The light snuffed out, hissing.

  Jatal blundered on, reaching the stairs and finding the opening by slamming an elbow into its stone lip. He charged up without pause. He leaned against a wall to support himself and when that wall ended in an opening he tumbled into a side chamber, crashing into furniture that broke beneath him. Yet he managed to keep Andanii out of the way, cushioning her with his own body. He laid her down and bent over her. In the absolute dark he remembered his waist pouch and a nub of candle that he kept there. He found it and the small tinderbox. He set the box on the cold stone floor, opened it, and set to striking into it. The flashing sparks each revealed the room for an instant, leaving lingering after-images of a broken frail desk, of walls dark with painted frescoes.

  The tinder lit and he gently blew. He used it to light the thin wick. The candle caught, filling the room with a light that was incredibly bright to his starved eyes. He took Andanii’s head on to his lap. ‘Andanii – my princess … can you hear me?’

  The eyelids fluttered. A smile came to the lips – followed by a wash of blood that spilled down her chin. As awareness rose within her, the smile twisted into a panicked grimace and her hands fought him then clenched his arms. ‘Flee…’ she breathed.

  All anger was gone from him now. All resentment. He thought he understood her at last. She’d had ambition and the ruthlessness to chase it. In short … he’d cursed her for doing nothing more than acting like a man. Acting as any of his brothers would have done. For acting as he could not bring himself to do.

  ‘I understand,’ he whispered to her tenderly. ‘You made your choices. Why should I be resentful? You acted in the best interests of your people.’

  She smiled now, almost wistfully. ‘You understand … do you?’ She gripped him tighter, convulsing. ‘Jatal – my prince … promise me this … Promise!’

  He ducked his head. Tears fell from his eyes to wash the blood from her cheek. ‘I promise.’

  She nodded, easing her arms. ‘Good … Go. Flee. Return to the tents of the Adwami. Read your books. Write your poetry. And try … try to forgive me…’

  ‘Forgive! Andanii … You are my life!’ But she did not answer. Her head eased to one side.

  Jatal pressed his own hot face to her cooling cheek and wept.

  How long he crouched there, trembling and weeping, he knew not. At length, he gently set her head down on the cold stone and rose. He picked up the tiny stub of candle. Its weak light barely illuminated the room yet he could make out a painting of a dark throne and a seated figure. Its face had been chiselled from the stone – deliberately disfigured. He was hardly conscious of his surroundings as he staggered into the hall.

  What followed struck him as a carnival of horrors. Nightmare images came and went as he stumbled through room after room. Which were real, and which he imagined, he did not know. At one point he lurched into a horde of the black-robed children all gathered around a corpse, feeding. As one they raised their pale faces to him, their mouths bright crimson.

  But no … their mouths had been sewn closed …

  At some point later he faced a lone Thaumaturg in an empty hallway. Half the man’s head was gone, smashed in by a brutal blow. Yet awareness and intelligence filled the remaining eye. This wandering eye found him, and winked. ‘Where does life end?’ the man asked, his voice listless and dull. ‘With the mind or with the heart?’

  Then the mage stiffened. The single eye widened; awareness of some secret known only to him dilated the pupil. The mouth opened as if he would speak but only fouled fluids poured out in a thick dark red sheen. He toppled – but not before the ghost of a sad smile touched those painted lips. Behind stood the begrimed and blood-smeared figure of a shaduwam. He held out his hand to show something to Jatal. It was a lump of muscle; a heart still quivering.

  The shaduwam raised it to his mouth and took a great bite. Swallowing, he licked his lips. All the while his eyes gripped Jatal’s numbed gaze, eyes like black subterranean pools. ‘That is where we differed,’ he explained. ‘They say the mind. We say the heart.’

  Everything came crashing down upon Jatal at that moment and he staggered against a wall. His stomach heaved and he vomited up what little remained. He felt as if he were sinking into that abyssal underground pool of icy water, drowning. He tried to speak but nothing came. The darkness swa
llowed him.

  * * *

  Roaring woke him. A distant constant roar as of a storm, or a herd of horses running. He raised his head, blinking. He sat beneath a smoke-filled night sky. The moon, which had been waxing, shone a watery silver light that was occluded by the burgeoning Visitor whose jade glare nearly flickered, so near did it loom. He was among a crowd of men and women: a mix of Adwami troopers, Thaumaturg acolytes and civilian peasants. Even one or two of the foreign mercenaries sat with them, their heads hanging. Everyone bore wounds, from sword strikes to beatings. All were disarmed.

  They were crowded together in one of the stone courtyards of the Thaumaturgs’ Inner City. Shaduwam priests carrying clubs and staves guarded them. Now and then, two of the Agon priests came to collect one of the captives and drag him or her up the stairs and into what Jatal presumed was a temple or cloister. What went on within, he did not have to imagine.

  Dully, he noticed that the roaring came from without – from beyond the tall walls of the Inner City where plumes of smoke coiled all about. The noise resolved into the sound of a city that has roused itself like a kicked beast. It struck him that even an anthill would rally to defend itself when disturbed. He hoped that Pinal had had the sense to pull the Hafinaj from the engagement. Yet he registered the concern distantly, and hazily.

  Nothing, it seemed, troubled him at all at this moment. Not even his impending death at the hands of these betraying defilers. The only thing able to raise a slight crease in his brows was the utter stupid waste of it all. What could the damned Warleader hope to gain from all this? He could not possibly hope to rule here. Nor among the Adwami. What was his purpose – beyond the sowing of chaos and destruction? No doubt such was the goal of the shaduwam: the eradication of their rivals. But what of this old traitor general – if that was what he was. Mere vengeance? All this blood merely to wipe out the sting of some thwarted or blocked ambition? The idea that this was all his own life – and the lives of all those who had fallen around him – was worth just made him tired. In fact, everything made him tired now. Every breath. The idea of continuing to live through the next moment utterly exhausted him.