‘Ever get hit on the head by a gritty sausage of scat? Well then, enough of that attitude, Shurq. We were as vicious as any rags-gang you ran with, let me tell you.’
‘All right, sorry. Have you warned the Malazans that Bolkando is seething and about to go up in their faces?’
‘They know. Their allies are in the midst of it right now, in fact.’
‘So what was that princess doing here in Letheras?’
Janath made a face. ‘As far as I can tell, annihilating rival spy networks—the ones Bugg left dangling out of indifference, I suppose.’
Shurq grunted. ‘Felash? She’s no killer.’
‘No, but I’d wager her handmaiden is.’
‘How old is this fourteenth daughter, anyway? Sixteen, seventeen—’
‘Fourteen, actually.’
‘Abyss below! I can’t say I’m looking forward to transporting that puffed-up pastry-mauler all the way to the Akrynnai Range.’
‘Just go light on ballast.’
Shurq’s eyes widened.
Janath scowled. ‘The pilot charts we possess indicate shallow reefs, Captain. What did you think I was referring to?’
‘No idea, Highness. Honest.’
Janath rose. ‘Let’s go pounce on the men in the garden, shall we?’
Departing the palace unseen was enabled by the Queen’s silent servants leading the two Bolkando women down a maze of unused corridors and passageways, until at last they were ushered out into the night through a recessed postern gate.
They walked to a nearby street and there awaited the modest carriage that would take them back to their rooms in a hostel of passing quality down near the harbourfront.
Felash held one hand in the air, fingers moving in slow, sinuous rhythm—an affectation of which she seemed entirely unaware. ‘A contract! Ridiculous!’
Her handmaiden said nothing.
‘Well,’ said Felash, ‘if the captain proves too troublesome—’ and into that uplifted hand snapped a wedge-bladed dagger, appearing so suddenly it might well have been conjured out of the thin night air.
‘Mistress,’ said the handmaiden in a low, smooth and stunningly beautiful voice, ‘that will not work.’
Felash frowned. ‘Oh, grow up, you silly girl. We can leave no trail—no evidence at all.’
‘I mean, mistress, that the captain cannot be killed, for I believe she is already dead.’
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Even so, mistress. Furthermore, she is enlivened by an ootooloo.’
‘Oh, now that’s interesting! And exciting!’ The dagger vanished as quickly as it had appeared. ‘Fix me a bowl, will you? I need to think.’
‘Here they come,’ murmured Bugg.
Tehol turned. ‘Ah, see how they’ve made up and everything. How sweet. My darlings, so refreshing this night air, don’t you think?’
‘I’m not your darling,’ said Shurq Elalle. ‘She is.’
‘And isn’t she just? Am I not the luckiest man alive?’
‘Errant knows, it’s not talent.’
‘Or looks,’ added Janath, observing her husband with gauging regard.
‘It was better,’ Tehol said to Bugg, ‘when they weren’t allies.’
‘Divide to conquer the divide, sire, that’s my motto.’
‘And a most curious one at that. Has it ever worked for you, Bugg?’
‘I’ll be sure to let you know as soon as it does.’
Thirty leagues north of Li Heng on the Quon Talian mainland was the village of Gethran, an unremarkable clump of middling drystone homes, workshops, a dilapidated church devoted to a handful of local spirits, a bar and a gaol blockhouse where the tax-collector lived in one of the cells and was in the habit of arresting himself when he got too drunk, which was just about every night.
Behind the squat temple with its thirty-two rooms was a tiered cemetery that matched the three most obvious levels of class in the village. The highest and furthest from the building was reserved for the wealthier families—the tradesfolk and skilled draft workers whose lineages could claim a presence in the town for more than three generations. Their graves were marked by ornate sepulchres, tombs constructed in the fashion of miniature temples, and the occasional tholos bricked tomb—a style of the region that reached back centuries.
The second level belonged to residents who were not particularly well-off, but generally solvent and upstanding. The burials here were naturally more modest, yet generally well maintained by relatives and offspring, characterized by flat-topped shrines and capped, stone-lined pits.
Closest to the temple, and level with its foundations, resided the dead in most need of spiritual protection and, perhaps, pity. The drunks, wastrels, addicts and criminals, their bodies stacked in elongated trenches with pits reopened in a migratory pattern, up and down the row, to allow sufficient time for the corpses to decompose before a new one was deposited.
A village no different from countless others scattered throughout the Malazan Empire. Entire lives spent in isolation from the affairs of imperial ambition, from the marching armies of conquest and magic-ravaged battles. Lives crowded with local dramas and every face a familiar one, every life known from blood-slick birth to blood-drained death.
Hounded by four older sisters, the grubby, half-wild boy who would one day be named Deadsmell was in the habit of hiding out with Old Scez, who might have been an uncle or maybe just one of his mother’s lovers before his father came back from the war. Scez was the village dresser of the dead, digger of the graves, and occasional mason for standing stones. With hands like dusty mallets, wrists as big around as a grown man’s calf, and a face that had been pushed hard to one side by a tumbling lintel stone decades back, he was not a man to draw admiring looks, but neither was he short of friends. Scez did right by the dead, after all. And he had something—every woman said as much—he had something, all right. A look in his eye that gave comfort, that promised more if more was needed. Yes, he was adored, and in the habit of making breakfasts for women all over the village, a detail young Deadsmell was slow to understand.
Naturally, a husband one day went and murdered Old Scez, and though the law said he was justified in doing it, well, that fool sickened and died a week later, and few came out to mourn the blue-faced, bloated corpse—by that time, Deadsmell had taken over as keeper of the dead, a seventeen-year-old lad everybody said never would have followed his own father—who was a lame ex-soldier who’d fought in the Quon Talian civil war but never talked about his experiences, even as he drank himself stupid with one red eye fixed on one of those trench graves behind the temple.
Young Deadsmell, who’d yet to find that name, had been pretty sure of his future once he had taken over Scez’s responsibilities. It was respectable enough, all things considered. A worthy profession, a worthy life.
In his nineteenth year, he was well settled into the half-sunken flat-roofed stone house just outside the cemetery—a house that Scez had built with his own hands—when word arrived that Hester Vill, the temple’s priest, had fallen with a stroke and was soon to enter the embrace of the spirits. It was long in coming. Hester was nearly a century old, after all, a frail thing who—it was said—had once been a hulk of a man. Boar tusks rode his ears, pierced through the lobes that had stretched over the decades until the curved yellow tusks rested on the man’s bony shoulders. Waves of fur tattoos framed Vill’s face—there had never been any doubt that Hester Vill was a priest of Fener; that he looked upon the local spirits with amused condescension, though he was ever proper in his observances on behalf of the villagers.
The priest’s approaching death was a momentous one for the village. The last acolyte had run off with a month’s worth of tithings a few years previously (Deadsmell remembered the little shit—he and Scez had once caught the brat pissing on a high-tier tomb—they’d beaten the boy and had taken pleasure in doing so). Once Vill was gone, the temple would stand abandoned, the spirits unappeased. Someone would have to be
found, perhaps even a stranger, a foreigner—word would have to be sent out that Gethran Village was in need.
It was the keeper’s task to sit with the one sliding into death, if no family was available, and so the young man had thrown on Old Scez’s Greyman’s cloak, and taken in one hand his wooden box of herbs, elixirs, knives and brain-scoop, and crossed the graveyard to the refectory attached to one side of the temple.
He could not recall the last time he’d visited Vill’s home, but what he found on this night was a chamber transformed. The lone centre hearth raged, casting bizarre, frightening shadows upon all the lime-coated walls—shadows that inscribed nothing visible in the room, but skeletal branches wavering as if rattled by fierce winter winds. Half-paralysed, Hester Vill had dragged himself into his house—refusing anyone else’s assistance—and Deadsmell found the old priest lying on the floor beside the cot. He’d not the strength to lift himself to his bed and had been there for most of a day.
Death waited in the hot, dry air, pulsed from the walls and swirled round the high flames. It was drawn close with every wheezing gasp from Vill’s wrinkled mouth, feebly pushed away again in shallow, whispery exhalations.
Deadsmell lifted the frail body to the bed, tugged the threadbare blanket over Vill’s emaciated form, and he then sat, sweating, feeling half-feverish, staring down at Vill’s face. The strike was drawn heavily across the left side of the priest’s visage, sagging the withered skin and ropy muscles beneath it, plucking at the lids of the eye.
Trickling water into Vill’s gaping mouth did not even trigger a reflex swallow, telling Deadsmell that very little time remained to the man.
The hearth’s fire did not abate, and after a time that detail reached through to Deadsmell and he turned to regard the stone-lined pit. He saw no wood at the roots of the flames. Not even glowing dusty coals or embers. Despite the raging heat, a chill crept through him.
Something had arrived, deep inside that conflagration. Was it Fener? He thought that it might be. Hester Vill had been a true priest, an honourable man—insofar as anyone knew—of course his god had come to collect his soul. This was the reward for a lifetime of service and sacrifice.
Of course, the very notion of reward was exclusively human in origin, bound inside precious beliefs in efforts noted, recognized, attributed value. That it was a language understood by the gods was not just given, but incumbent—why else kneel before them?
The god that reached out from the flames to take Vill’s breath, however, was not Fener. It was Hood, with taloned hands of dusty green and fingertips stained black with putrescence, and that reach seemed halfhearted, groping as if the Lord of the Slain was blind, reluctant, weary of this pathetic necessity.
Hood’s attention brushed Deadsmell’s mind, alien in every respect but a deep, almost shapeless sorrow rising like bitter mist from the god’s own soul—a sorrow that the young mortal recognized. It was the grief one felt, at times, for the dying when those doing the dying were unknown, were in effect strangers; when their fate was almost abstract. Impersonal grief, a ghost cloak one tried on only to stand motionless, pensive, trying to convince oneself of its weight, and how that weight—when it ceased being ghostly—might feel some time in the future. When death became personal, when one could not shrug out from beneath its weight. When grief ceased being an idea and became an entire world of suffocating darkness.
Cold, alien eyes fixed momentarily upon Deadsmell, and a voice drifted into his skull. ‘You thought they cared.’
‘But—he is Fener’s very own . . .’
‘There is no bargain when only one side pays attention. There is no contract when only one party sets a seal of blood. I am the harvester of the deluded, mortal.’
‘And this is why you grieve, isn’t it? I can feel it—your sorrow—’
‘So you can. Perhaps, then, you are one of my own.’
‘I dress the dead—’
‘Appeasing their delusions, yes. But that does not serve me. I say you are one of my own, but what does that mean? Do not ask me, mortal. I am not one to bargain with. I promise nothing but loss and failure, dust and hungry earth. You are one of my own. We begin a game, you and me. The game of evasion.’
‘I have seen death—it doesn’t haunt me.’
‘That is irrelevant. The game is this: steal their lives—snatch them away from my reach. Curse these hands you now see, the nails black with death’s touch. Spit into this lifeless breath of mine. Cheat me at every turn. Heed this truth: there is no other form of service as honest as the one I offer you. To do battle against me, you must acknowledge my power. Even as I acknowledge yours. You must respect the fact that I always win, that you cannot help but fail. In turn, I must give to you my respect. For your courage. For the stubborn refusal that is a mortal’s greatest strength.
‘For all that, mortal, give me a good game.’
‘And what do I get in return? Never mind respect, either. What do I get back?’
‘Only that which you find. Undeniable truths. Unwavering regard of the sorrows that plague a life. The sigh of acceptance. The end of fear.’
The end of fear. Even for such a young man, such an inexperienced man, Deadsmell understood the value of such a gift. The end of fear.
‘Do not be cruel with Hester Vill, I beg you.’
‘I am not one for wilful cruelty, mortal. Yet his soul will feel sorely abused, and for that I can do nothing.’
‘I understand. It is Fener who should be made to answer for that betrayal.’
He sensed wry amusement in Hood. ‘One day, even the gods will answer to death.’
Deadsmell blinked in the sudden gloom as the fire ebbed, flickered, vanished. He peered at Vill and saw that the old man breathed no more. His expression was frozen in a distraught, broken mask. Four black spots had burned his brow.
The world didn’t give much. And what it did give it usually took back way too soon. And the hands stung with absence, the eyes that looked out were as hollow as the places they found. Sunlight wept down through drifts of dust, and a man could sit waiting to see his god, when waiting was all he had left.
Deadsmell was kicking through his memories, a task best done in solitude. Drawn to this overgrown, abandoned ruin in the heart of Letheras, with its otherworldly insects, its gaping pits and its root-bound humps of rotted earth, he wandered as if lost. The Lord of Death was reaching into this world once again, swirling a finger through pools of mortal blood. But Deadsmell remained blind to the patterns so inscribed, this intricate elaboration on the old game.
He found that he feared for his god. For Hood, his foe, his friend. The only damned god he respected.
The necromancer’s game was one that others could not understand. To them it was the old rat dodging the barn cat, a one-sided hunt bound in mutual hatred. It was nothing like that, of course. Hood didn’t despise necromancers—the god knew that no one else truly understood him and his last-of-last worlds. Ducking the black touch, stealing back souls, mocking life with the animation of corpses—they were the vestments of true worship. Because true worship was, in its very essence, a game.
“ ‘There is no bargain when only one side pays attention.’ ”
Moments after voicing that quote, Deadsmell grunted in sour amusement. Too much irony in saying such a thing to ghosts, especially in a place so crowded with them as here, less than a dozen paces from the gate to the Azath House.
He had learned that Brys Beddict had been slain, once, only to be dragged back. A most bitter gift, it was a wonder the King’s brother hadn’t gone mad. When a soul leaves the path, a belated return has the fool stumbling again and again. Every step settling awkwardly, as if the imprint of one’s own foot no longer fit it, as if the soul no longer matched the vessel of its flesh and bone and was left jarred, displaced.
And now he had heard about a woman cursed undead. Ruthan Gudd had gone so far as to hint that he’d bedded the woman—and how sick was that? Deadsmell shook his head. As bad as sheep, c
ows, dogs, goats and fat bhokarala. No, even worse. And did she want the curse unravelled? No—at least with that he had to agree. It does no good to come back. One gets used to things staying the same, more used to that than how a living soul felt about its own sagging, decaying body. Besides, the dead never come back all the way. ‘It’s like knowing the secret to a trick, the wonder goes away. They’ve lost all the delusions that once comforted them.’
‘Deadsmell!’
He turned to see Bottle picking his way round the heaps and holes.
‘Heard you saying something—ghosts never got anything good to say, why bother talking with them?’
‘I wasn’t.’
The young mage reached him and then stood, staring at the old Jaghut tower. ‘Did you see the baggage train forming up outside the city? Gods, we’ve got enough stuff to handle an army five times our size.’
‘Maybe, maybe not.’
Bottle grunted. ‘That’s what Fiddler said.’
‘We’ll be marching into nowhere. Resupply will be hard to manage, maybe impossible.’
‘Into nowhere, that seems about right.’
Deadsmell pointed at the Azath House. ‘They went in there, I think.’
‘Sinn and Grub?’
‘Aye.’
‘Something snatch them?’
‘I don’t think so. I think they went through, the way Kellanved and Dancer learned how to do.’
‘Where?’
‘No idea, and no, I have no plans to follow them. We have to consider them lost. Permanently.’
Bottle glanced at him. ‘You throw that at the Adjunct yet?’
‘I did. She wasn’t happy.’
‘I bet she wasn’t.’ He scratched at the scraggy beard he seemed intent on growing. ‘So tell me why you think they went in there.’
Deadsmell grimaced. ‘I remember the day I left my home. A damned ram had got on to the roof of my house—the house I inherited, I mean. A big white bastard, eager to hump anything with legs. The look it gave me was empty and full, if you know what I mean—’