These were, he decided, glorious times indeed.
BOOK THREE - TO DIE IN THE NOW
Push it on to the next moment
Don’t think now, save it
For later when thinking will show
Its useless face
When it’s too late and worry is wasted
In the rush for cover
Push it past into that pocket
So that it relents its gnawing presence
And nothing is worth doing
In pointless grace
When all the valid suppositions
Smother your cries
Push it over into the deep hole
You don’t want to know
In case it breaks and makes you feel
Cruel reminders
When all you could have done is now past
No don’t bother
Push it well into the corner
It’s no use, so spare me the grief
You didn’t like the cost so bright, so high
The bloodiest cut
When all you sought was sweet pleasure
To the end of your days
Push it on until it pushes back
Shout your shock, shout it
You never imagined you never knew what
Turning away would do
Now wail out your dread in waves of disbelief
It’s done it’s dead
Push your way to the front
Clawing the eyes of screaming kin
No legacy awaits your shining children
It’s killed, killed
Gone the future all to feed some holy glory
The world is over. Over.
Siban’s Dying Confession
Siban of Aren
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
We watched him approach from a league away
Staggering beneath the weight of all he held
In his arms
We thought he wore a crown but when he came near
The circlet was revealed as the skin of a serpent
Biting its tail
We laughed and shared the carafe when he fell
Cheering as he climbed back upright
In pleasing charm
We slowed into silence when he arrived
And saw for ourselves the burden he carried
Kept from harm
We held stern in the face of his relieved smile
And he said this fresh young world he had found
Was now ours
We looked on as if we were grand gods
Contemplating a host of undeserved gifts
Drawing knives
Bold with pride we cut free bloodied slices
Shared out this bright dripping bounty
And ate our fill
We saw him weep then when nothing was left
Backing away with eyes of pain and dismay
Arms falling
But wolves will make of any world a carcass
We simply replied with our natures revealed
In all innocence
We proclaimed with zeal our humble purity
Though now he turned away and did not hear
As the taste soured
And the betrayal of poison crept into our limbs
We watched him walk away now a league maybe more
His lonely march
His mourning departure from our kindness
His happy annihilation of our mindless selves
Snake-bit unto death
The Last Days of Our Inheritance
Fisher kel Tath
The vast springs of the carriage slammed down to absorb the thundering impact; then, as the enormous conveyance surged back up, Gruntle caught a momentary glimpse of one of the Bole brothers, his grip torn loose, wheeling through the grainy air. Arms scything, legs kicking, face wide with bemused surprise.
His tether snapped taut, and Gruntle saw that the idiot had tied it to one of his ankles. The man plunged down and out of sight.
The horses were screaming, manes whipping in their frantic heaves forward across stony, broken ground. Shadowy figures voiced muted cries as the beasts trampled them under hoof, and the carriage rocked sickeningly over bodies.
Someone was shrieking in his ear, and Gruntle twisted round on his perch on the carriage roof, to see the other Bole brother – Jula – tugging on the tether. A foot appeared – moccasin gone, long knobby toes splayed wide as if seeking a branch – and then the shin and lumpy knee. A moment later Amby reached up, found a handhold, and pulled himself back on to the roof. Wearing the strangest grin Gruntle had ever seen.
In the half-light the Trygalle carriage raced onward, plunging through seething masses of people. Even as they carved through like a ship cutting crazed seas, ragged, rotting arms reached up to the sides. Some caught hold only to have their arms torn from their sockets. Others were pulled off their feet, and these ones started climbing, seeking better purchase.
Upon which the primary function of the shareholders was made apparent. Sweetest Sufferance, the short, plump woman with the bright smile, was now snarling, wailing with a hatchet into an outreaching arm. Bones snapped like sticks and she shouted as she kicked into a leering desiccated face, hard enough to punch the head from the shoulders.
Damned corpses – they were riding through a sea of animated corpses, and it seemed that virtually every one of them wanted to book passage.
A large brutish shape reared up beside Gruntle. Barghast, hairy as an ape, filed blackened teeth revealed in a delighted grin.
Releasing one hand from the brass rung, Gruntle tugged loose one of his cutlasses, slashed the heavy blade into the corpse’s face. It reeled away, the bottom half of the grin suddenly gone. Twisting further round, Gruntle kicked the Barghast in the chest. The apparition fell back. A moment later someone else appeared, narrow-shouldered, the top of its head an elongated pate with a nest of mousy hair perched on the crown, a wizened face beneath it.
Gruntle kicked again.
The carriage pitched wildly as the huge wheels rolled over something big. Gruntle felt himself swinging out over the roof edge and he shouted in pain as his hand was wrenched where it gripped a rung. Clawed fingers scrabbled against his thighs and he kicked in growing panic. His heel struck something that didn’t yield and he used that purchase to launch himself back on to the roof.
On the opposite side, three dead men were now mauling Sweetest Sufferance, each one seemingly intent on some kind of rape. She twisted and writhed beneath them, chopping with her hatchets, biting at their withered hands and head-butting the ones that tried for a kiss. Reccanto Ilk then joined the fray, using a strange saw-toothed knife as he attacked various joints – shoulders, knees, elbows – and tossing the severed limbs over the side as he went.
Gruntle lifted himself on to his knees and glared out across the landscape. The masses of dead, he realized, were all moving in one direction, whilst the carriage cut obliquely into their path – and as the resistance before them built, figures converging like blood to a wound, forward momentum began inexorably to slow, the horses stamping high as they clambered over ever more undead.
Someone was shouting near the rear of the carriage, and Gruntle turned to see the woman named Faint leaning down over the side, yelling through the shuttered window.
Another heavy blow buffeted the carriage, and something demonic roared. Claws tore free a chunk of wood.
‘Get us out of here!’
Gruntle could not agree more, as the demon suddenly loomed into view, reptilian arms reaching for him.
Snarling, he leapt to his feet, both weapons now in hand.
An elongated, fanged face lunged at him, hissing.
Gruntle roared back – a deafening sound – cutlasses lashing out. Edges slammed into thick hide, sliced deep into lifeless flesh, down to the bones of the demon’s long neck.
He saw something like surprise flicker in the creature’s pitted eyes, and then the head and half of the neck fell away.
Two
more savage chops sent its forearms spinning.
The body plunged back, and even as it did so smaller corpses were scrambling on to it, as if climbing a ladder.
He now heard a strange sound ahead, rhythmic, like the clashing of weapons against shield rims. But the sound was too loud for that, too overwhelming, unless – Gruntle straightened and faced forward.
An army indeed. Dead soldiers, moving in ranks, in squares and wedges, marching along with all the rest – and in numbers unimaginable. He stared, struggling to comprehend the vastness of the force. As far as he could see before them . . . Gods below, all of the dead, on the march – but where? To what war?
The scene suddenly blurred, dispersed in fragments. The carriage seemed to slump under him. Darkness swept in, a smell of the sea, the thrash of waves, sand sliding beneath the wheels. The carriage side nearest him lurched into the bole of a palm tree, sending down a rain of cusser-sized nuts that pounded along the roof before bounding away. The horses stumbled, slowing their wild plunge, and a moment later everything came to a sinking halt.
Looking up Gruntle saw stars in a gentle night sky.
Beneath him the carriage door creaked open, and someone clambered out to vomit on to the sands, coughing and spitting and cursing.
Master Quell.
Gruntle climbed down, using the spokes of the nearest wheel, and, his legs feeling shaky under him, made his way to the sorceror.
The man was still on his hands and knees, hacking out the last dregs of whatever had been in his stomach. ‘Oh,’ he gasped. ‘My aching head.’
Faint came up alongside Gruntle. She’d been wearing an iron skullcap but she’d lost it, and now her hair hung in matted strands, framing her round face. ‘I thought a damned tiger had landed on us,’ she said, ‘but it was you, putting the terror into a demon. So it’s true, those tattoos aren’t tattoos at all.’
Glanno Tarp had dropped down, dodging to avoid the snapping teeth of the nearest horses. ‘Did you see Amby Bole go flying? Gods, that was stupacular!’
Gruntle frowned. ‘Stu – what?’
‘Stupidly spectacular,’ explained Faint. ‘Or spectacularly stupid. Are you Soletaken?’
He glanced at her, then set off to explore.
A task quickly accomplished. They were on an island. A very small island, less than fifty paces across. The sand was crushed coral, gleaming silver in the starlight. Two palm trees rose from the centre. In the surrounding shallows, a thousand paces out, ribbons of reef ran entirely round the atoll, breaking the surface like the spine of a sea serpent. More islands were visible, few bigger than the one they were on, stretching out like the beads of a broken necklace, the nearest one perhaps three thousand paces distant.
As he returned he saw a corpse plummeting down from the carriage roof to thump in the sand. After a moment it sat up. ‘Oh,’ it said.
The Trell emerged from the carriage, followed by the swamp witch, Precious Thimble, who looked ghostly pale as she stumbled a few steps, then promptly sat down on the sand. Seeing Gruntle, Mappo walked over.
‘I gather,’ he said, ‘we encountered something unexpected in Hood’s realm.’
‘I wouldn’t know,’ Gruntle replied. ‘It was my first visit.’
‘Unexpected?’ Faint snorted. ‘That was insane – all the dead in existence, on the march.’
‘Where to?’ Gruntle asked.
‘Maybe not to, maybe from.’
From? In retreat? Now that was an alarming notion. If the dead are on the run . . .
‘Used to be,’ Faint mused, ‘the realm of the dead was an easy ride. Peaceful. But in the last few years . . . something’s going on.’ She walked over to Master Quell. ‘So, if that’s not going to work, Quell, what now?’
The man, still on his hands and knees, looked up. ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’
‘What?’
‘We didn’t even reach the damned gate.’
‘But, then, what—’ ‘There wasn’t any gate!’ the mage shrieked.
A long silence followed.
Nearby, the undead man was collecting seashells.
Jula Bole’s watery eyes fixed on Precious Thimble, dreamy with adoration. Seeing this, Amby did the same, trying to make his expression even more desirous, so that when she finally looked over she would see that he was the right one for her, the only one for her. As the moments stretched, the competition grew fierce.
His left leg still ached, from the hip right down to his toes, and he had only one moccasin, but at least the sand was warm so that wasn’t too bad.
Precious Thimble was in a meeting with Master Quell and that scary barbed man, and the hairy giant ogre named Mappo. These were the important people, he decided, and excepting Precious Thimble he wanted nothing to do with them. Standing too close to those folk was never healthy. Heads explode, hearts burst – he’d seen it with his own eyes, back when he was a runt (but not nearly as much of a runt as Jula) and the family had decided at last to fight the Malazans who were showing up in their swamp like poison mushrooms. Buna Bole had been running things back then, before he got eaten by a toad, but it was a fact that Buna’s next-to-closest brothers – the ones who wanted to get closer – all went and got themselves killed. Exploding heads. Bursting hearts. Boiling livers. It was the law of dodging, of course. Marshals and their sub-marshals were smart and smart meant fast, so when the arrows and quarrels and waves of magic flew, why, they dodged out of the way. Anybody round them, trying to be as smart but not smart at all and so just that much slower, well, they didn’t dodge quick enough.
Jula finally sighed, announcing his defeat, and looked over at Amby. ‘I can’t believe I saved you.’
‘I can’t neither. I wouldn’t of.’
‘That’s why I can’t believe that’s what I did. But then she’s seen how brave I am, how generous and selfless. She’s seen I’m better because she knows you wouldn’t have done it.’
‘Maybe I would’ve, and maybe she knows that, Jula. Besides, one of them sick smelly ones was trying to open the doors, and if it wasn’t for me he’d of got in – and that’s what she really saw.’
‘You didn’t scrape that one off on purpose.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Because you butted him with your face, Amby.’
Amby tested his nose again and winced, and then he sneered. ‘She saw what she saw, and what she saw wasn’t you.’
‘She saw my hands, reaching down to drag you back up. She saw that.’
‘She didn’t. I made sure by covering them with, er, with my shirt.’
‘You lie.’
‘You lie.’
‘No, you.’
‘You!’
‘You can say what you like, Amby, whatever you like. It was me saving you.’
‘Pulling off my moccasin, you mean.’
‘That was an accident.’
‘Yeah, then where is it?’
‘Fell off the side.’
‘No it didn’t. I checked your bag, Jula. You wasn’t trying to save me at all, you was stealing my moccasin because it’s your favourite moccasin. I want it back.’
‘It’s against the law to look in someone else’s bag.’
‘Swamp law. Does this look like a swamp?’
‘That doesn’t matter. You broke the law. Anyway, what you found was my spare moccasin.’
‘Your one spare moccasin?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Then why was it full of my love notes?’
‘What love notes?’
‘The ones me and her been writing back and forth. The ones I hid in my moccasin. Those ones, Jula.’
‘What’s obvious now is just how many times you been breaking the law. Because you been hiding your love notes – which you write to yourself and nobody else – you been hiding them in my spare moccasin!’
‘Not that you’d ever look.’
‘But I might, if I knew about it.’
‘You didn’t though, did you? Beside
s, you don’t have a spare moccasin, because I stole it.’
‘And that’s why I stole it back!’
‘You can’t steal back what you didn’t know was stolen in the first place. That’s just stealing. And stealing’s against the law.’
‘Swamp law.’
‘Your bag is a swamp.’
‘Hahahahaha—’
And Amby grinned at his own joke, and then he too laughed. ‘Hahahahaha—’
Faint tugged the stopper free and took a swig, then handed the skin to Sweetest Sufferance. ‘Listen to those idiots,’ she said.
‘I don’t want to,’ Sweetest Sufferance replied. And then she shivered. ‘That was the first time, you know, them trying to get in my trousers like that.’
‘Cursed with rigor mortis, maybe.’
She snorted. ‘You kidding me? Whatever they had down there wasn’t even real, like maybe sticks tied on or something.’ She drank down some wine, then sighed and looked round. ‘Pretty.’
‘Our tiny piece of paradise.’
‘We can watch the sun come up, at least. That will be nice.’ She was quiet for a moment, before resuming, ‘When Reccanto showed up, I thought he was helping. But now I think he was just using the situation to get a few handfuls of his own.’
‘Are you surprised, Sweetie? He’s a man.’
‘With bad eyes.’
‘Bad eyes and bad hands.’
‘I might have to murder him.’
‘Hold on,’ said Faint, taking the skin back. ‘He did save you, cutting off arms and hands—’
‘Eliminating the competition.’
‘Defending your honour, Sweetie.’
‘If you say so.’
Faint replaced the stopper. ‘Gods below, Sweetie, what do you think we ran into back there?’
Sweetest Sufferance pursed her plump lips, long-lashed lids settling down over her eyes. ‘Back in One Eye Cat, when I was a child, I was taken to a Dawn of Flies – you know, those ceremonies from the Temple of Hood, when all the priests paint themselves in honey—’
‘In some places,’ cut in Faint, ‘they use blood.’
‘So I’ve heard. In One Eye Cat, it was honey, so that the flies stuck. Flies and wasps, actually. Anyway, I was with my grandfather, who’d been a soldier in the Revenants—’
Toll the Hounds Page 61
