He sat back, hands on thighs, panting. This entire mound … a heap of unsuspecting victims … a feast for the white flowers …
A phrase came to him then. A mysterious reference from one of the expedition accounts: the White Plague.
He jerked to his feet and the move raised a cloud of the golden pollen that watered his eyes and convulsed him in a fit of coughing. Straightening, wiping the streaming tears, he studied his smeared yellowed hands and sleeves with wonder. And yet I live … His Thaumaturg treatments, of course. Years of small dosings against countless poisons and drugs. His many wards and protections. The surgeries and complete mastery of his metabolism. Somewhere in all that resided the inoculation against these spores or fungus.
Still coughing, he headed down the hillside. Here he found the body of one of the advance scouting parties. The man lay outstretched. Had fallen running, or perhaps staggering. He’d been headed back to the main column. Golan knelt next to the body. The last to fall, perhaps: running to bring the news. Already a dusting of tiny white blossoms covered the corpse, leather armour and all.
Imagine if they’d marched on through. Countless hundreds falling before realization struck. Perhaps a good thousand or more lost here alone. He headed back to the column, rubbing a thumb over the short beard now covering his chin. What were they heading into? This was just the first of who knew how many deadly turns and traps. Was this to be one enormous killing ground?
Short of the jungle’s verge he halted. There in the shade awaited U-Pre, his guards, and several of the Isturé. ‘Come no further!’ he called. He summoned his power. Blue flame burst to life all about him. Golan scorched himself until the pain made him flinch and the mage-fire flickered away. He brushed the burnt stubble from his head and cheeks then slapped the blackened threads and ash from his robes.
This done, he joined U-Pre. The second in command respectfully proffered the baton in both hands. ‘What now?’ he asked.
Golan negligently took the baton then inclined his head back to the clearing. ‘Burn it all …’
* * *
It might be an island they walked; Mara wasn’t certain. In any case, the priest of the Shattered God led them along a coastline of black volcanic rock where young translucent green plants clung to crevasses and depressions. Each appeared suddenly before Mara like an emerald emerging from gritty stone. A rough iron-blue sea pounded the shore in white crests and spray. The sky held drifting tatters of dark clouds, as of the slow angry dispersal of a storm.
Petal brought up the rear. Though distant, she could still hear his wet gasping breaths and wheezing. The man was not one for long hikes. Skinner walked with the priest; or rather, the priest capered alongside their commander. The bent rat-like fellow urged him on, beckoning and waving his arms, hopping and jumping in his unnerving demented gait.
These errands, or missions, or favours, call them what you will, taken up at the behest of the Crippled God, troubled her. What need had her commander for this position, King of the House of Chains? Its benefits, if any, seemed dubious at best. Was it protection he sought? A safeguard against powerful enemies? The time for any such patronage was now past. Surely, it would be their enemies who needed protection now. Surely it was time he set aside this unseemly role of errand boy. She could see how it galled him. What was the man waiting for?
If he would not rouse himself to end this relationship then perhaps the onus would fall upon her to act on his behalf. It would be for his own good – and she could imagine that he would most likely not take it well.
As they neared a tall headland of spray-soaked rock, Mara granted that he had moved against Ardata … eventually. Just as he had moved against K’azz. It seemed his nature not to endure standing next to power – when he himself could hold it. As before, then, she would have to give him more time and hold fast to the proof that, so far at least, he’d always followed his nature.
Musing, she came abreast of Skinner and their antic priest guide where the rock spit ended, offering a view of a lagoon and a distant line of reef. There, hung up on the far coral rocks, a bizarre vision presented itself. Mara had the impression of a mass of shattered ship hulls and broad raft-like platforms all jumbled and smashed together. The entire collection appeared as large as the tumbled remains of a broken fortress.
‘What’s this?’ she asked the priest.
The man licked his lips, twitching and shuddering as if in the grip of an ague. ‘You have heard of the Meckros, yes?’
She raised her chin in acknowledgement. ‘Ah.’
‘A fragment of one of their great floating cities. Washed up here on this desolate shore. Within is what we seek.’
Yes. The Meckros. Seafolk. Worshippers of the ancient sea-god. Mechanicians and artificers of renown. Somewhere on this wreck lay a fragment of the Shattered God? Doubtful. More likely it resided now on the bottom of the sea. She motioned to Skinner. ‘This is a waste of time. Let us return.’
‘We will investigate.’
Mara let out a heavy breath.
‘Can you get us out there?’ he asked her.
‘No.’
‘Petal?’
‘I regret not,’ he answered, short of breath.
Skinner drew off his blackened full helm, tucked it under an arm, and mussed his great mass of sweaty burnt-blond hair. ‘Well, no matter.’ He gestured to the rocky shore where bleached logs and other wrack lay in great jumbled heaps. ‘There’s plenty of wood. We’ll build a raft.’
Mara looked to the sky. Oh, unreliable gods! Must they?
Skinner did all the work. The priest tried to help; he scampered about fumbling with the logs and generally getting underfoot. Her commander impatiently thrust the man away from time to time, dunking him in the wash once. She and Petal sat among the rocks, watching: she, hunched, arms tucked into her layered robes; he, legs out, back to a rock, pulling on his prominent lower lip.
‘I do not like this,’ he opined after eyeing the wreckage for the majority of the afternoon.
‘Oh? What’s possibly not to like?
He shifted his gaze, shaded and guarded beneath the shelf of his deep wide brow, to her. ‘You are making unhelpful caustic observations at my expense?’
‘At all our expense, Petal.’
‘This is true. I sense a danger out there amid those ruins.’
‘A shard is there.’
‘This is also true.’
‘What can you do about it?’
‘Myself? Not much, I am thinking. Though I shall remain as readied as possible.’
Her gaze found Skinner standing in thigh-high water, still in his armour, lashing the scavenged driftwood together. ‘Why are we here, Petal?’ she asked, then, remembering the man’s obtuse pedantic nature, she added, ‘Here, collecting these pieces?’
He clasped his thick fingers across one knee. ‘Well, it has occurred to me that with every shard or fragment returned to the Shattered God, he is strengthened. And therefore his enemies, our enemies, are correspondingly hampered.’
Mara nodded thoughtfully to herself. Well, there is that …
Let us hope that every piece we’ve retrieved so far translates into many more dead Malazans …
She blinked, seeing Skinner watching them; he snapped an impatient wave. Stirring, she muttered aside to Petal: ‘I do believe he’s done.’
‘At last. It certainly took long enough.’
Mara clambered down to examine the lashed logs and timber planks. ‘This will just fall to pieces.’
‘Then hang on to a piece and kick,’ Skinner answered, completely untroubled.
‘My robes will get wet.’
‘Then take them off.’
‘Fine!’
Before stepping into the water she pulled her robes over her head and heaped all but one aside on a dry rock. This left her in nothing more than a loincloth wrap and a thin silk shirt. She folded the one robe to hold above her head. When she climbed aboard the assemblage of logs Petal’s wide jowls took on a
flush of deep crimson and he turned away. The priest, on the other hand, displayed no shame in looking her up and down. His stained tongue emerged to wet his lips and his loincloth wrap bulged, straining. These two reactions to her Dal Hon beauty she knew well, and so she ignored them both. Skinner, however, acted as if nothing had changed and this irked her more than she’d imagined it would.
Damn you, man! Perhaps it is true, as they say, that only the prospect of power will get you out of that armour. Always, it seemed, there’d been someone else. First Shimmer held his eye – perhaps not incidentally as she was a rival lieutenant of the Guard. Then Ardata. And now … plain power itself? She knew how to counter the first two – but this last? How does one compete against a fascination such as that? The truth is one cannot. It seemed long-nurtured hopes were no closer to their realization. Despite her support in the coup against Ardata, her unquestioning loyalty during the attempted usurpation of the Guard, and now her continued faithfulness.
Crouched on the logs, the waves slapping coldly against her bare thighs, the equally chilling suspicion came to her that perhaps it was this very dog-like obedience that brought its only due reward in his eyes: contempt.
Her hands pressed to her thighs clenched into fists.
The sheltered waters of the lagoon allowed them to paddle out to the reef where ocean breakers pounded their spray far into the air. The jagged canted fragments of the Meckros city reared above in cliffs of timber. Wreckage littered the exposed coral rocks: tatters of sun-faded cloth, broken furniture, clothes reduced to rags. Heavier objects cluttered the sands of the lagoon: broken pots, chains, and general household goods such as utensils, plates and candlesticks. Mixed among this corroding metal lay the bones of the Meckros citizens. Mara noted the sleek silhouettes of sharks drifting past beneath them.
‘Where do we start?’ she called to Skinner over the crash of the waves.
By way of answer he turned to the priest, who pointed up. Mara grunted her understanding. Skinner kicked the raft along while he searched for an easy route up into the wreck. Soon they came to a broken hull that offered entrance. Skinner climbed up. The priest motioned for Mara to go ahead of him, his gaze fixed on her naked flank. She cuffed him forward. Petal came last. This vessel appeared to have been used as a granary. Shattered amphorae had spilled their cargo of precious grain in great heaps. Damp and rotting, it was now a banquet for insects and mice. A ladder led up to a deck of living quarters where hammocks hung empty. Chests of personal goods lay overturned, their contents of clothes and knives and cheap trinkets everywhere. Whatever it had been had happened quickly: no time to pack at all. A storm? Perhaps a typhoon? Certainly not pirates, anyway. Above decks rigging hung from broken spars and masts in a nearly impenetrable maze.
Skinner turned to the priest who scanned the wreckage, then pointed to one side. Mara took the opportunity to throw on her one robe and tie it off at a shoulder. She pushed back her mass of hair. Petal cleared his throat in a signal for attention. She and Skinner turned quickly; the mage indicated a heap at the gunwale. It was a desiccated corpse. Some ferocious blow had slain the Meckros citizen. The wound had shattered the bones of the forearm and swung on, cleaving ribs to sever the spine. Few men could have delivered such a blow. The viscera were gone now, a feast for seabirds, but the sinew and dried muscle of the carcass remained, heaving with maggots.
Mara straightened from her examination of the corpse. So, not just a natural disaster …
She and Petal shared a significant look and both readied their Warrens. Skinner rested a hand on his sword grip. The priest scampered out on to the broken slats of some sort of platform that crossed to the next vessel. Here gnawed human bones and the stains of spilled fluids offered further testimony to the violence that had taken the city. Skinner knelt to pick up a bone that he examined before holding it out to Mara: it was the upper portion of a femur, still bearing a mess of sinew. Something had crushed the bone, splitting it. Something possessing extraordinarily strong jaws. It reminded her of a large predator or scavenger such as a Dal Hon plains hyena or a Fenn mountain bear. Yet out here away from the shore?
The priest led them on, scampering over fallen rigging and splintered timber. The light of the day waned, but slowly, lingering in a long twilight tinged by green from the arc of the lurid glowing Banner, the Visitor, foretelling whatever apocalypse one preferred. Considering the nature of their own errands, it was now hard for her to continue to dismiss these dire predictions as nonsense.
As she climbed over the ruins of the Meckros city – just the first of many calamities to come? – she wondered whether it was their own actions that were in fact calling the Banner down upon them. After all, it was said that the Shattered God had fallen from the sky ages ago, drawn down by humanity’s hubris and blindness. Could they not be somehow contributing to a second Great Destruction and the annihilation that was said to have followed?
She paused on a canted platform of decking. In fact, why should I believe I would even survive such a world-shattering impact and conflagration? Disavowed or no?
Petal arrived at her side, panting, his shirt stained dark with sweat. ‘You are troubled?’ he asked, studying her.
‘Yes. I am quite troubled …’
‘I feel it too. Many eyes upon us. But I cannot get a grip upon them – their minds are strange.’
‘Tell Skinner.’
‘Very good.’ The big fellow moved on awkwardly, using handholds to steady himself.
Mara watched him go without really seeing him. Could their actions be ensuring this Banner’s impact? Could she be complicit in a second Great Fall?
And why by all the gods had she not considered this before?
She realized she’d fallen behind and hurried to catch up.
She found Skinner confronting a cringing anxious priest: the man was wringing his hands and peering about for escape like a cornered dog. ‘What’s going on?’ she asked Petal.
Skinner raised an armoured finger. ‘This man has been leading us in circles for hours.’
‘It’s moved, I tell you!’ the priest shrieked. ‘It’s moving.’ He thrust out a hand. ‘It’s behind us now!’
‘Moving …’ Skinner mused within his helm. He swung a gauntleted hand, smashing the priest to the decking. ‘You fool! You’ve allowed it to lead us exactly where it wants us!’ The priest lay mewling, wiping at the blood streaming from his squashed nose. Skinner’s blade slid soundlessly from its wood sheath.
Mara and Petal put their backs to his, forming a rough triangle.
‘How many?’ Skinner asked Petal.
‘Many.’
‘Mara?’
‘What can I do on this unsure footing? Everything’s split already!’
Their commander growled his displeasure. ‘Well … let us see what we’ve walked into.’
Mara eyed the surrounding canted huts, heaps of fallen equipment, and platforms and decks all of differing levels and angles. From among this maze shapes emerged. The deepening purple of twilight lent them an even greater horror. Malformed humans they were; shambling, so distorted as to be near caricatures of the human form. Many possessed huge curving crab-like claws as long as swords and now she understood the many cracked bones scattered across the wreckage. ‘What are they …?’ she breathed, speaking her thoughts aloud.
‘The influence of the shard, no doubt,’ Petal answered, as literal-minded as ever.
‘Can you affect them?’
‘Barely, I suspect.’
Damn. I dare not let loose myself – this wreckage would fly apart beneath us.
The creatures shambled forward and she saw now that she was wrong in her first suspicion that these were the poor unfortunates of the Meckros city now transformed by the Crippled God’s contamination into monstrosities of claw and shell carapace. No human form could endure such fundamental deformities. Six limbs? Backward-bending joints? Gaping mouths full of worm-like appendages? Surely these must be local denizens of the reef, crab, l
obster, prawn and other crustaceans, warped now into mockeries of the human form. Such a conceit must have amused the Shattered God – what mattered the shape of the flesh when all was alien and strange?
It also explained why Petal’s Mockra-based magics would have so little effect: these minds were not human to be clouded, confused or broken.
The creatures were however still flesh and blood, and Mara gestured, drawing as lightly as she could upon D’riss. A bare few of them staggered backwards. The priest, she noted peripherally, was nowhere to be seen.
Skinner stepped up. His mottled black and magenta blade blurred. Limbs fell away in gushes of clear fluids. Carapaces sheared off, cut through entirely. The mob of anatomical impossibilities swerved before him and she and Petal ducked away to give him room to lay about himself fully. She climbed up what might have once been a deckhouse while Petal heaved himself into the rigging of a tilted mast.
Skinner wrought havoc among the creatures but more and more came dragging themselves up, many still wet from the lagoon. Enormous crab claws grated across his glistening scaled coat, unable to catch any purchase or penetrate its invested metal. A great pincer as hefty as a bastard sword closed on the man’s thigh and he snarled his agony, slicing through the shell exoskeleton. The jagged-toothed pincer fell away as it too was not powerful enough to break through Ardata’s sorceries. Yet Skinner limped now, the leg perhaps numb.
A sharp whistle sounded, cracking like a whip across the decking. It was followed by a strange series of poppings and cracklings. The creatures all backed away. Some new figure came pushing its way through the monstrosities. So strange was this thing that it took some time for Mara to understand just what she was looking at. It was a jerking, walking mechanism of rusted metal bands and wire. Its creaking and whirring reached her like the sounds water clocks and other such automata make as they run and turn. Yet this was not the most eerie thing about this manifestation: what was ghastly was the fact that it wore over its metal torso, like a cape or a robe, the flayed skin of a human being. And stuck on a metal rod jutting above the body lolled a rotting severed head.
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