‘I returned to you, brother, when Fear and Binadas could not. To beg for your soul, your soul of old, Rhulad, for the child, the brother you had once been.’ He lowered the spear, leaned on it. ‘You drowned me, chained to stone, while the Rhulad I sought hid in the darkness of your mind. But he will hide no longer.’
From the gloom of the doors, the vague figure moved forward, and Rhulad on his throne saw himself. A youth, weaponless, unblooded, his skin free of coins, his skin smooth and clear.
‘We stand in the river of Sengar blood,’ Trull said. ‘And we wait for you.’
‘Stop!’ Rhulad shrieked. ‘Stop!’
‘Truth,’ said Udinaas, striding closer, ‘is remorseless, Master. Friend?’ The slave laughed. ‘You were never my friend, Rhulad. You held my life in your hand-either hand, the empty one or the one with the sword, makes no difference. My life was yours, and you thought I had opened my heart to you. Errant take me, why would I do that? Look at my face, Rhulad. This is a slave’s face. No more memorable than a clay mask. This flesh on my bones? It works limbs that are naught but tools. I held my hands in the sea, Rhulad, until all feeling went away. All life, gone. From my once-defiant grasp.’ Udinaas smiled. ‘And now, Rhulad Sengar, who is the slave?
‘I stand at the end of the chains. The end but one. One set of shackles. Here, do you see? I stand, and I wait for you.’
Nisall spoke, gliding forward naked, motion like a serpent’s in candle-light. ‘I spied on you, Rhulad. Found out your every secret and I have them with me now, like seeds in my womb, and soon my belly will swell, and the monsters will emerge, one after another. Spawn of your seed, Rhulad Sengar. Abominations one and all. And you imagined this to be love? I was your whore. The coin you dropped in my hand paid for my life, but it wasn’t enough.
‘I stand where you will never find me. I, Rhulad, do not wait for you.’
Remaining silent, then, at the last, his father, his mother.
He could remember when last he saw them, the day he had sent them to dwell chained in the belly of this city. Oh, that had been so clever, hadn’t it?
But moments earlier one of the Chancellor’s guards had begged audience. A terrible event to relate. The Letherii’s voice had quavered like a badly strung lyre. Tragedy. An error in rotation among the jailers, a week passing without anyone descending to their cells. No food, but, alas, plenty of water.
A rising flood, in fact.
‘My Emperor. They were drowned. The cells, chest-deep, sire. Their chains… not long enough. Not long enough. The palace weeps. The palace cries out. The entire empire, sire, hangs its head.
‘Chancellor Triban Gnol is stricken, sire. Taken to bed, unable to give voice to his grief.’
Rhulad could stare down at the trembling man, stare down, yes, with the blank regard of a man who has known death again and again, known past all feeling. And listen to these empty words, these proper expressions of horror and sorrow.
And in the Emperor’s mind there could be these words: I sent them down to be drowned. With not a single wager laid down.
The rising waters, this melting, this sinking palace. This Eternal Domicile. I have drowned my father. My mother. He could see those cells, the black flood, the gouges in the walls where they had clawed at the very ends of those chains. He could see it all.
And so they stood. Silent. Flesh rotted and bloated with gases, puddles of slime spreading round their white, wrinkled feet. A father on whose shoulders Rhulad had ridden, shrieking with laughter, a child atop his god as it ran down the strand with limitless power and strength, with the promise of surety like a gentle kiss on the child’s brow.
A mother-no, enough. I die and die. More deaths, yes, than anyone can imagine. 1 die and I die, and 1 die.
But where is my peace?
See what awaits me? See them!
Rhulad Sengar, Emperor of a Thousand Deaths, sat alone on his throne, dreaming peace. But even death could not offer that.
At that moment his brother, Trull’ Sengar, stood near Onrack, the emlava cubs squalling in the dirt behind them, and watched with wonder as Ben Adaephon Delat, a High Mage of the Malazan Empire, walked out across the shallow river. Unmindful of the glacial cold of that stream that threatened to leave numb his flesh, his bones, the very sentiments of his mind-nothing could deter him from this.
Upon seeing the lone figure appear from the brush on the other side, Quick Ben had halted. And, after a long moment, he had smiled, and under his breath he had said something like: ‘Where else but here? Who else but him?’ Then, with a laugh, the High Mage had set out.
To meet an old friend who himself strode without pause into that broad river.
Another Malazan.
Beside Trull, Onrack settled a hand on his shoulder and said, ‘You, my friend, weep too easily.’
‘I know,’ Trull sighed. ‘It’s because, well, it’s because I dream of such things. For myself; My brothers, my family. My people. The gifts of peace, Onrack-this is what breaks me, again and again.’
‘I think,’ said Onrack, ‘you evade a deeper truth.’
‘I do?’
‘Yes. There is one other, is there not? Not a brother, not kin, not even Tiste Edur. One who offers another kind of peace, for you, a new kind. And this is what you yearn for, and see the echo of, even in the meeting of two friends such as we witness here.
‘You weep when I speak of my ancient love.
‘You weep for this, Trull Sengar, because your love has not been answered, and there is no greater anguish than that.’
‘Please, friend. Enough. Look. I wonder what they are saying to each other?’
‘The river’s flow takes their words away, as it does us all.’ Onrack’s hand tightened on Trull’s shoulder. ‘Now, my friend, tell me of her.’
Trull Sengar wiped at his eyes, then he smiled. ‘There was, yes, a most beautiful woman…’
Book Four. Reaper’s Gale
I went in search of death
In the cast down wreckage
Of someone’s temple nave
I went in search among flowers
Nodding to the wind’s words
Of woeful tales of war
I went among the blood troughs
Behind the women’s tents
All the children that never were
And in the storm of ice and waves
I went in search of the drowned
Among bony shells and blunt worms
Where the grains swirled
Each and every one crying out its name its life its loss
I went on the current roads
That led me nowhere known
And in the still mists afield
Where light itself crept uncertain
I went in search of wise spirits
Moaning their truths in dark loam
But the moss was silent, too damp to remember my search
Finding at last where the reapers sow
Cutting stalks to take the season
I failed in my proud quest
To a scything flint blade
And lying asward lost to summer
Bared as its warm carapace
of youthful promise was sent away
into autumn’s reliquary sky
Until the bones of night
Were nails glittering in the cold
oblivion, and down the darkness
death came to find me
Chapter Nineteen
The great conspiracy among the kingdoms of Saphinand, Bolkando, Ak’ryn, and D’rhasilhani that culminated in the terrible Eastlands War was in numerous respects profoundly ironic. To begin with, there had been no conspiracy. This fraught political threat was in fact a falsehood, created and fomented by powerful economic interests in Lether; and more, it must be said, than just economic. Threat of a dread enemy permitted the imposition of strictures on the population of the empire that well served the brokers among the elite; and would no doubt have made them rich indeed if not for the coincidental financial collapse occurring at this most inopportune of moments in Letherii history. In any case, the border kingdoms and nations of the east could not but perceive the imminent threat, especially with the ongoing campaign against the Awl on the north plains. Thus a grand alliance was indeed created, and with the aforementioned foreign incentives, the war exploded across the entire eastern frontier.