Dust of Dreams Read online

  The sorcery tautened, forcing Brys’s breath from his lungs. Darkness closed in round his vision until all he could see was the Errant’s face, a visage that had lost all grace as avid hunger twisted the features. He watched as the god lifted one hand and slowly clenched the fingers—and the pressure around Brys’s chest built until his ribs creaked.

  The new fist that arrived hammered like a maul against the side of the Errant’s head, snapping it far over. The gleaming eye seemed to wink out and the god crumpled, vanishing from Brys’s dwindling vision.

  All at once the coils weakened, and then frayed into dissolving threads.

  Brys drew a ragged, delicious breath of chill night air.

  He heard horse hoofs, a half dozen beasts, maybe more, approaching at a canter from up the street. Blinking sweat from his eyes, Brys rolled on to his stomach and then forced himself to his knees.

  A hand closed on his harness and lifted him to his feet.

  He found himself staring up at a Tarthenal—a familiar face, the heavy, robust features knotted absurdly into a fierce frown.

  ‘I got a question for you. It was for your brother and I was on my way but then I saw you.’

  The riders arrived, horses skidding on the dew-slick cobbles—a Malazan troop, Brys saw, weapons unsheathed. One of them, a dark-skinned woman, pointed with a sword. ‘He crawled into that alley—come on, let’s chop the bastard into stewing meat!’ She made to dismount and then seemed to sag and an instant later she collapsed on to the street, weapon clattering.

  Other soldiers dropped down from their mounts. Three of them converged on the unconscious woman, while the others fanned out and advanced into the alley.

  Brys was still having difficulty staying upright. He found himself leaning with one forearm against the Tarthenal. ‘Ublala Pung,’ he sighed, ‘thank you.’

  ‘I got a question.’

  Brys nodded. ‘All right, let’s hear it.’

  ‘But that’s the problem. I forgot what it was.’

  One of the Malazans crowded round the woman now straightened and faced them. ‘Sinter said there was trouble,’ he said in heavily accented trader tongue. ‘Said we needed to hurry—to here, to save someone.’

  ‘I believe,’ Brys said, ‘the danger has passed. Is she all right, sir?’

  ‘I’m a sergeant—people don’t “sir” me . . . sir. She’s just done in. Both her and her sister.’ He scowled. ‘But we’ll escort you just the same, sir—she’d never forgive us if something happened to you now. So, wherever you’re going . . .’

  The other soldiers emerged from the alley, and one said something in Malazan, although Brys needed no translation to understand that they’d found no one—the Errant’s survival instincts were ever strong, even when he’d been knocked silly by a Tarthenal’s fist.

  ‘It seems,’ Brys said, ‘I shall have an escort after all.’

  ‘It is not an offer you can refuse, sir,’ said the sergeant.

  Nor will I. Lesson learned, Adjunct.

  The soldiers were attempting to heave the woman named Sinter back into her saddle. Ublala Pung stepped up to them. ‘I will carry her,’ he said. ‘She’s pretty.’

  ‘Do as the Toblakai says,’ said the sergeant.

  ‘She’s pretty,’ Ublala Pung said again, as he took her limp form in his arms. ‘Pretty smelly, too, but that’s okay.’

  ‘Perimeter escort,’ snapped the sergeant, ‘crossbows cocked. Anybody steps out, nail ’em.’

  Brys prayed there would be no early risers between here and the palace. ‘Best we hurry,’ he ventured.

  On a rooftop not far away, Quick Ben sighed and then relaxed.

  ‘What was all that about?’ Hedge asked beside him.

  ‘Damned Toblakai . . . but that’s not the interesting bit, though, is it? No, it’s that Dal Honese woman. Well, that can all wait.’

  ‘You’re babbling, wizard.’

  Magus of Dark. Gods below.

  Alone in the cellar beneath the dormitories, Fiddler stared down at the card in his hand. The lacquered wood glistened, dripped as if slick with sweat. The smell rising from it was of humus, rich and dark, a scent of the raw earth.

  ‘Tartheno Toblakai,’ he whispered.

  Herald of Life.

  Well, just so.

  He set it down and then squinted at the second card he had withdrawn to close this dread night. Unaligned. Chain. Aye, we all know about those, my dear. Fret naught, it’s the price of living.

  Now, if only you weren’t so . . . strong. If only you were weaker. If only your chains didn’t reach right into the heart of the Bonehunters—if only I knew who was dragging who, why, I might have reason to hope.

  But he didn’t, and so there wasn’t.

  Chapter Four

  Behold these joyful devourers

  The land laid out skewered in silver

  Candlesticks of softest pewter

  Rolling the logs down cut on end

  To make roads through the forest

  That once was—before the logs

  (Were rolled down cut on end)—

  We called it stump road and we

  Called it forest road when

  Our imaginations starved

  You can make fans with ribs

  Of sheep and pouches for baubles

  By pounding flat the ears

  Of old women and old men—

  Older is best for the ear grows

  For ever it’s said, even when

  There’s not a scrap anywhere to eat

  So we carried our wealth

  In pendulum pouches wrinkled

  And hairy, diamonds and gems

  Enough to buy a forest or a road

  But maybe not both

  Enough even for slippers of

  Supplest skin feathered in down

  Like a baby’s cheek

  There is a secret we know

  When nothing else is left

  And the sky stops its tears

  A belly can bulge full

  On diamonds and gems

  And a forest can make a road

  Through what once was

  You just won’t find any shade

  PENDULUMS WERE ONCE TOYS

  BADALLE OF KORBANSE SNAKE

  T

  o journey into the other worlds, a shaman or witch of the Elan would ride the Spotted Horse. Seven herbs, softened with beeswax and rolled into a ball and then flattened into an oblong disc that was taken into the mouth and held between lip and gum. Coolness slowly numbing and saliva rising as if the throat was the mouth of a spring, a tingling sensation lifting to gather behind the eyes in coalescing colours and then, in a blinding flash, the veil between worlds vanished. Patterns swirled in the air; complex geometries played across the landscape—a landscape that could be the limitless wall of a hide tent, or the rolling plains of a cave wall where ran the beasts—until the heart-stains emerged, pulsing, blotting the scene in undulating rows, sweet as waves and tasting of mother’s milk.

  So arrived the Spotted Horse, a cascade of heart-stains rippling across the beast, down its long neck, sweeping along its withers, flowing like seed-heads from its mane and tail.

  Ride into the alien world. Ride among the ancestors and the not-yet-born, among the tall men with their eternally swollen members, the women with their forever-filled wombs. Through forests of black threads, the touch or brush of any one of them an invitation to endless torment, for this was the path of return for all life, and to be born was to pass through and find the soul’s fated thread—the tale of a future death that could not be escaped. To ride the other way, however, demanded a supple traverse, evading such threads, lest one’s own birth-fate become entangled, knotted, and so doom the soul to eternal prison, snared within the web of conflicted fates.

  Prophecies could be found among the black threads, but the world beyond that forest was the greatest gift. Timeless, home to all the souls that ever existed; this was where grief was shed, where sorrow dried up a
nd blew away like dust, where scars vanished. To journey into this realm was to be cleansed, made whole, purged of all regrets and dark desires.

  Riding the Spotted Horse and then returning was to be reborn, guiltless, guileless.

  Kalyth knew all this, but only second-hand. The riders among her people passed on the truths, generation upon generation. Any one of the seven herbs, if taken alone, would kill. The seven mixed in wrong proportions delivered madness. And, finally, only those chosen as worthy by the shamans and witches would ever know the gift of the journey.

  For one such as Kalyth, mired in the necessary mediocrity so vital to the maintenance of family, village and the Elan way of living, to take upon herself such a ritual—to even so much as taste the seven herbs—was a sentence to death and damnation.

  Of course, the Elan were gone. No more shamans or witches to be found. No families, no villages, no clans, no herds—every ring of tipi stones, spanning the rises tucked at the foot of yet higher hilltops, now marked the motionless remnant of a final camp, a camp never to be returned to, the stones destined to sink slowly where they lay, the lichen on their undersides dying, the grasses so indifferently crushed beneath them turning white as bone. Such boulder rings were now maps of extinction and death. They held no promises, only the sorrow of endings.

  She had suffered her own damnation, one devoid of any crime, any real culpability beyond her cowardly flight: her appalling abandonment of her family. There had been no shamans left to utter the curse, but that hardly mattered, did it?

  She sat, as the sun withered in the west and the grasses surrounding her grew wiry and grey, staring down at the disc lying in the palm of her hand.

  Elan magic. As foreign to her world now as the Che’Malle machines in Ampelas Rooted had been when she’d first set eyes upon them. To ride the Spotted Horse through the ashes of her people invited . . . what? She did not know, could not know. Would she find the spirits of her kin—would they truly look upon her with love and forgiveness? Was this her secret desire? Not a quest into the realms of prophecy seeking hidden knowledge; not searching for a Mortal Sword and a Shield Anvil for the K’Chain Che’Malle?

  Dire confusion—her motivations were suspect—hah, rotted through and through!

  And might there not be another kind of salvation she was seeking here? The invitation into madness, into death itself? Possibly.

  ‘Beware the leader who has nothing to lose.’

  Her people were proud of their wise sayings. And yet now, in their mortal silence, wisdom and pride proved a perfect match in value. Namely: worthless.

  The Che’Malle were camped—if one could call it that—behind the rise at her back. They had built a fire inviting Kalyth’s comfort, but this night she was not interested in comfort.

  The Shi’gal Assassin still circled high in the darkening sky above them—their nightly sentinel who never tired and never spoke and yet was known to all (she suspected) as their potential slayer, should they fail. Blessings of the spirits, that was a ghastly creature, a demon to beggar her worst nightmares. Oh, how it sailed the night winds, a cold-eyed raptor, a conjuration of singular purpose.

  Kalyth shivered. Then, squeezing shut her eyes as the sun’s sickle of fire dipped below the horizon, she slid the disc into her mouth.

  Stinging like a snake’s bite, and then numbness, spreading, spreading . . .

  ‘Never trust a leader who has nothing to lose.’

  At these muttered words from the human female, drifting over the hummock down to where stood the K’Chain Che’Malle, the K’ell Hunter Sag’Churok swung round his massive, scarred head. Over his eyes, three distinct lids blinked in succession, reawakening the camp’s reflected firelight in a wet gleam. The Matron’s daughter, Gunth Mach, seemed to flinch, but she remained closed to Sag’Churok’s tentative query.

  The other two K’ell Hunters, indifferent to anything the human might say, were half-crouched and facing away from the ring of stones that surrounded a half-dozen bricks of burning bhederin dung, away from the flames that could steal their night vision. The enormous cutlasses at the ends of their wrists rested point-down, their arms stretched out to the sides. By nature, K’ell disliked such menial tasks as sentry duty. They existed to pursue quarry, after all. But the Matron had elected to send them out without J’an Sentinels; further proof that in keeping all her guardians close, Gunth’an Acyl feared for her own life.

  Senior among these K’ell, Sag’Churok was Gunth Mach’s protector, and should the time come when the Destriant found a Mortal Sword and a Shield Anvil, then he would also assume the task of escorting them on the return to Acyl Nest.

  Errors in judgement plagued Ampelas Rooted. A flawed Matron produced flawed spawn. This was a known truth. It was not a thing that could be defeated or circumvented. The spawn must follow. Even so, Sag’Churok knew an abiding sense of failure, a dull, persistent anguish.

  Beware the leader . . .

  Yes. The one they had chosen, known as Redmask, had proved as flawed as any K’Chain Che’Malle of the Hive, and the cruel logic of that still stung. Perhaps the Matron was correct in electing a human to undertake the search this time.

  Visions bound with intent whispered through Sag’Churok. The Shi’gal Assassin, wheeling in the darkness far above them, had thrust a sending into the brain of the K’ell Hunter. Cold, rough-skinned, careless of the pain the sending delivered—indeed, it was of such power that Gunth Mach’s head snapped up, eyes fixing on Sag’Churok as ripples overflowed to brush her senses.

  Intruders in vast herd, countless fires.

  ‘Perhaps, then, among these ones?’ Sag’Churok sent in return.

  The one who leads is not for us.

  A bestial scent followed that statement, one that Sag’Churok recognized. Glands awakened beneath the heavy armoured scales along the K’ell’s spine, the first of the instinctive preparations for hunting, for battle, and as those scales seemed to lift and float on the thickening layer of oil, the innermost lids closed over his eyes, rising from below to entirely sheathe his vision. Boulders on a distant hill suddenly glowed, still bearing the heat of the sun. Small creatures moved in the grasses, revealed by their breaths, their rapidly beating hearts.

  K’ell Rythok and Kor Thuran both caught the bitter signature of the oil, and they straightened from their crouches, swinging free their swords.

  A final thought reached Sag’Churok. Too many to slay. Best avoid.

  ‘How do we avoid, Shi’gal Gu’Rull? Do they bestride our chosen path?’

  But the Assassin did not deem such questions worth an answer, and Sag’Churok felt the Shi’gal’s contempt.

  Gunth Mach sent her guardian a private thought. He wishes that we fail.

  ‘If he so hungers to slay, then why not these strangers?’

  It is not for me to say, she replied. Gu’Rull spoke not to me, after all, but to you. He would admit to nothing, but he holds you in respect. You have Hunted and like me you have borne wounds and tasted your own blood and in that taste we both saw our mortality. This, Gu’Rull shares with you, while Rythok and Kor Thuran do not.

  ‘And yet in his careless power his thoughts leak to you—’

  Does he know of my growth? I think not. Only you know the truth, Sag’Churok. To all others I reveal nothing. They believe me still little more than a drone, a promise, a possibility. I am close, first love, so very close.

  Yes, he had known, or thought he had. Now, shock threatened to reveal itself and the K’ell struggled to contain it. ‘Gunth’an Acyl?’

  She cannot see past her suffering.

  Sag’Churok was not certain of that, but he sent nothing. It was not for him to counsel Gunth Mach, after all. Also, the notion that the Shi’gal Assassin sought to share anything with him was troubling. The taste of mortality was the birth of weakness, after all.

  Rythok addressed him suddenly, gruffly pushing through his inner turmoil. ‘You waken to threat, yet we sense nothing. Even so, should we not quench this
useless fire?’

  Yes, Rythok. The Destriant sleeps and we have no need.

  ‘Do you hunt?’

  No. But we are not alone in this land—human herds move to the south.

  ‘Is this not what Acyl desires? Is this not what the Destriant must find?’

  Not these ones, Rythok. Yet, we shall pass through this herd . . . you will, I think, taste your own blood soon. You and Kor Thuran. Prepare yourselves.

  And, with faint dismay, Sag’Churok saw that they were pleased.

  The air thickened, clear as the humour of an eye, and all that Kalyth could see through it shimmered and shifted, swam and blurred. The sweep of stars flowed in discordant motion; the grasses of the undulating hills wavered, as if startled by wayward winds. Motes of detritus drifted about, shapeless and faintly pulsing crimson, some descending to roll across the ground, others wandering skyward as if on rising currents.

  Every place held every memory of what it had once been. A plain that had been the bottom of a lake, the floor of a shallow sea, the lightless depths of a vast ocean. A hill that had been the peak of a young mountain, one of a chain of islands, the jagged fang of the earth buried in glacial ice. Dust that had been plants, sand that had been stone, stains that had been bone and flesh. Most memories, Kalyth understood, remain hidden, unseen and beneath the regard of flickering life. Yet, once the eyes were awakened, every memory was then unveiled, a fragment here, a hint there, a host of truths whispering of eternity.

  Such knowledge could crush a soul with its immensity, or drown it beneath a deluge of unbearable futility. As soon as the distinction was made, that separation of self from all the rest, from the entire world beyond—its ceaseless measure of time, its whimsical game with change played out in slow siege and in sudden catastrophe—then the self became an orphan, bereft of all security, and face to face with a world now become at best a stranger, at worst an implacable, heartless foe.