‘Hood was here,’ he whispered.
‘Aye, I can well see that-’
‘No, you don’t understand.’ He reached out to the corpse, his hand closing into a fist above its broad chest, then punched down.
The body was simply a shell. It collapsed with a dusty crunch beneath the blow.
He glared back at her. ‘Hood was here. The god himself, Lostara. Came to take this man-not just his soul, but also the flesh-all that had been infected by the warren of fire-the warren of light, to be more precise. Gods, what I would do for a Deck of Dragons right now. There’s been a change in Hood’s… household.’
‘And what is the significance of all this?’ she asked. ‘I thought we were looking for Felisin.’
‘You’re not thinking, lass. Remember Stormy’s tale. And Truth’s. Felisin, Heboric, Kulp and Baudin. We found what was left of Kulp back at Gryllen’s wagon. And this’-his gesture was fierce-‘is Baudin. The damned Talon-though the proof’s not around his neck, alas. Remember their strange skin? Gesler, Stormy, Truth? The same thing happened to Baudin, here.’
‘You called it an infection.’
‘Well, I don’t know what it is. That warren changed them. There’s no telling in what way.’
‘So, we’re left with Felisin and Heboric Light Touch.’
He nodded.
‘Then I feel I should tell you something,’ Lostara continued. ‘It may not be relevant…’
‘Go on, lass.’
She turned to face the hills to the southwest. ‘When we trailed that agent of Sha’ik’s… into those hills-’
‘Kalam Mekhar.’
‘Aye. And we ambushed Sha’ik up at the old temple at the summit-on the trail leading into Raraku-’
‘As you have described.’
She ignored his impatience. ‘We would have seen all this. Thus, the events we’ve just stumbled upon here occurred after our ambush.’
‘Well, yes.’
She sighed and crossed her arms. ‘Felisin and Heboric are with the army of the Apocalpyse, Pearl. In Raraku.’
‘What makes you so certain?’
She shrugged. ‘Where else would they be? Think, man. Felisin’s hatred of the Malazan Empire must be all-consuming. Nor would Heboric hold much love for the empire that imprisoned and condemned him. They were desperate, after Gryllen’s attack. After Baudin and Kulp died. Desperate, and probably hurting.’
He slowly nodded, straightened from his crouch beside the corpse. ‘One thing you’ve never explained to me, Lostara. Why did your ambush fail?’
‘It didn’t. We killed Sha’ik-I would swear to it. A quarrel in the forehead. We could not recover the body because of her guards, who proved too much for our company. We killed her, Pearl.’
‘Then who in Hood’s name is commanding the Apocalypse?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Can you show me this place of ambush?’
‘In the morning, aye. I can take you right there.’ He simply stared at her, even as the sphere of light above them began to waver, then finally vanished with a faint sigh.
His memories had awakened. What had lain within the T’lan Imass, layered, indurated by the countless centuries, was a landscape Onrack could read once more. And so, what he saw before him now… gone were the mesas on the horizon, the wind-sculpted towers of sandstone, the sweeps of windblown sand and white ribbons of ground coral. Gone the gorges, arroyos and dead riverbeds, the planted fields and irrigation ditches. Even the city to the north, on the horizon’s very edge, clinging like a tumour to the vast winding river, became insubstantial, ephemeral to his mind’s eye.
And all that he now saw was as it had been… so very long ago.
The inland sea’s cloudy waves, rolling like the promise of eternity, along a shoreline of gravel that stretched north, unbroken all the way to the mountains that would one day be called the Thalas, and south, down to encompass the remnant now known as the Clatar Sea. Coral reefs revealed their sharkskin spines a sixth of a league beyond the beach, over which wheeled seagulls and long-beaked birds long since extinct.
There were figures walking along the strand. Renig Obar’s clan, come to trade whale ivory and dhenrabi oil from their tundra homelands, and it seemed they had brought the chill winds with them… or perhaps the unseemly weather that had come to these warm climes hinted of something darker. A Jaghut, hidden in some fasthold, stirring the cauldron of Omtose Phellack. Much more of this and the reefs would die, and with them all the creatures that depended on them.
A breath of unease fluttered through the Onrack who was flesh and blood. But he had stepped aside. No longer a bonecaster for his clan-Absin Tholai was far superior in the hidden arts, after all, and more inclined to the hungry ambition necessary among those who followed the Path of Tellann. All too often, Onrack had found his mind drawn to other things.
To raw beauty, such as he saw before him now. He was not one for fighting, for rituals of destruction. He was always reluctant to dance in the deeper recesses of the caves, where the drums pounded and the echoes rolled through flesh and bone as if one was lying in the path of a stampeding herd of ranag-a herd such as the one Onrack had blown onto the cave walls around them. His mouth bitter with spit, charcoal and ochre, the backs of his hands stained where they had blocked the spray from his lips, defining the shapes on the stone. Art was done in solitude, images fashioned without light, on unseen walls, when the rest of the clan slept in the outer caverns. And it was a simple truth, that Onrack had grown skilled in the sorcery of paint out of that desire to be apart, to be alone.
Among a people where solitude was as close to a crime as possible. Where to separate was to weaken. Where the very breaking of vision into its components-from seeing to observing, from resurrecting memory and reshaping it beyond the eye’s reach, onto walls of stone-demanded a fine-edged, potentially deadly propensity.
A poor bonecaster. Onrack, you were never what you were meant to be. And when you broke the unwritten covenant and painted a truthful image of a mortal Imass, when you trapped that lovely, dark woman in time, there in the cavern no-one was meant to find… ah, then you fell to the wrath of kin. Of Logros himself, and the First Sword.
But he remembered the expression on the young face of Onos T’oolan, when he had first looked upon the painting of his sister. Wonder and awe, and a resurgence of an abiding love-Onrack was certain that he had seen such in the First Sword’s face, was certain that others had, as well, though of course none spoke of it. The law had been broken, and would be answered with severity.
He never knew if Kilava had herself gone to see the painting; had never known if she had been angered, or had seen sufficient to understand the blood of his own heart that had gone into that image.
But that is the last memory I now come to.
‘Your silences,’ Trull Sengar muttered, ‘always send shivers through me, T’lan Imass.’
‘The night before the Ritual,’ Onrack replied. ‘Not far from this place where we now stand. I was to have been banished from my tribe. I had committed a crime to which there was no other answer. Instead, events eclipsed the clans. Four Jaghut tyrants had risen and had formed a compact. They sought to destroy this land-as indeed they have.’
The Tiste Edur said nothing, perhaps wondering what, precisely, had been destroyed. Along the river there were irrigation ditches, and strips of rich green crops awaiting the season’s turn. Roads and farmsteads, the occasional temple, and only to the southwest, along that horizon, did the broken ridge of treeless bluffs mar the scene.
‘I was in the cavern-in the place of my crime,’ Onrack continued after a moment. ‘In darkness, of course. My last night, I’d thought, among my own kind. Though in truth I was already alone, driven from the camp to this final place of solitude. And then someone came. A touch. A body, warm. Soft beyond belief-no, not my wife, she had been among the first to shun me, for what I had done, for the betrayal it had meant. No, a woman unknown to me in the darkness…’