‘Where’s Goss?’ Yana asked Pyke.
‘Up top.’
‘Okay.’ To everyone: ‘Stow your gear and head up top to keep this area clear.’
Suth pulled off his armour and hung it but Len took it down and handed it back. ‘Clean, repair, and oil it.’
‘I have nothing to use.’
‘I do.’
‘Thank you.’
The old saboteur waved that aside and headed back out to the companionway. Suth followed. He had to hunch almost double to manage the cramped quarters. They found the deck crammed with soldiers. So thick was the press that the sailors found it almost impossible to do their tasks. There was little work for them, however, as departure was delayed and delayed and then delayed some more. It was the night tide before any of the vessels began making their slow, awkward way out of the bay.
Suth and Dim sat with Len, their armour across their laps, as the man educated them in the care of their newfound riches. Half the time, though, Suth listened to the rumours circulating around them. They were headed north to Seven Cities to consolidate its pacification. To north Genabackis to relieve the 5th. East, to central Genabackis to occupy some rich city called Darujhistan. Or on to south Genabackis to initiate a new front.
Finally Suth asked Len, ‘Where are we headed?’
The veteran just frowned over the leathers he was sewing. ‘Doesn’t matter. Everywhere’s the same for us.’
Suth understood the cold reasoning behind that, yet this was a good deal farther than he’d ever imagined his vow to join the Malazans would take him. ‘Where do you think we’re headed?’
Len looked up, squinted into the clouded eastern night sky. ‘Well, it sounds to me like all this speculation on where we might be headed is shying scared from one of the possibilities. The one no one wants to consider.’
‘Which is what, old timer?’ a nearby soldier asked, and he raised a hand to silence his companions.
Len shrugged. ‘That we’re headed south, to Korel lands.’
‘That’s just so much horseshit!’ the soldier yelled. Everyone began talking at once. Suth watched, amazed, as this version became the new rumour, to spread like ripples over the crowded deck, outward to the rear and to the front, raising shouts of alarm and even horror as it went.
‘Go to Hood, old man!’ shouted the soldier who’d asked for Len’s opinion in the first place.
Len merely offered Suth a knowing grin. ‘See how you should always keep your mouth shut? People only want to hear what they want to hear.’
Suth agreed. It had also occurred to him that all the speculation involving Genabackis and some city named Darujhistan seemed to be where the speakers wanted to go more than where they thought they might be going. Everyone wanted to head to overseas postings in Genabackis, or even Seven Cities.
His own personal philosophy on life told him that, therefore, that was exactly where they were not headed. This name, Korel, he’d heard once or twice before. It was always mentioned more as a curse than anything. It was considered the very worst, the ugliest of all the holdings of the far-flung Malazan Empire. Well, he’d joined to be tested, and it looked as though he might be headed into one of the sternest trials of his life. That was good. It would be a waste of his time otherwise.
The street orphans were out playing on the courtyard across the way from the temple. Ella squatted on the threshold, preparing the midday meal while keeping one affectionate eye on them. She could hardly believe that just a few years ago she ran with her own gang of urchins. She saw hardly any of them any more. The Watch beat Harl to death as a probable thief. Peek disappeared entirely; and the pimps took Tillin. That would have been her fate had she not started listening to the priest.
It was here she had run when the trolling party had come for her: hired thugs on a sweep for young girls and boys to feed the brothels and slave markets all across the archipelago. And it was on this threshold that the priest faced them. One unarmed man against seven armed, and they backed down. She pounded the pestle and shook her head. The priest. She still could not understand him. He was like nothing from her experience as a child, abandoned to fend for herself on the streets of Banith. An extremely narrow education, she could admit. A school of casual violence, constant hunger, exploitation, and rape.
Yet not once had the priest indulged in similar practices — the stronger exacting what they wished from the weaker, including sexual gratification. Not that the man was a eunuch. It seemed that he simply refused to accept all the old, traditional ways of doing things. ‘Haven’t got us very far, have they?’ he once told her.
Giggling brought her attention back to her surroundings. A crowd of dirty grinning faces in a half-circle before her. ‘Lunch time, is it?’ Obeying the rules of the street, the feral children said nothing lest they misstep and lose their chance for a meal. They grinned instead, as if happy, and ‘made cute’ as they used to call it in her time. But in their too-bright shining eyes she saw the merciless torment of constant nagging hunger. She reached to the basket at her side, folded back the cloth across it, and distributed the small flatbreads she’d baked earlier that day. Laughing, they snatched their prizes and ran, shoving everything into their mouths before anyone, or anything, could steal it from them.
One young girl remained. Her clothes were finer than the rest, though just as torn and grimed. The bread remained in one hand. She watched Ella with large dark eyes, curiously calm and solemn. Ella returned to preparing the priest’s meal. ‘What is it, child?’ she asked.
‘Is this the house of the foreign holy man?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is it true that he eats babies?’
She stopped her pounding. ‘What?’
‘That’s what everyone says.’
Ella rocked back on her haunches, eyed the crowded square, the small day-market, the touts and hawkers jostling pilgrims just off the boats as they milled, organizing a procession to the Cloister. ‘So that’s what they say…’ she breathed.
‘Yes. They say that at night he changes into a beast and steals babies from houses and eats their hearts.’
‘What do you think?’ Ella asked, strangely unnerved by the child’s grisly imagination.
The girl pushed her tangled hair from her pale brow. Very pale — not of Fist? Fathered by a Malazan occupier perhaps? As she suspected she had been herself? The girl cocked her head, thinking. ‘Oh, I don’t think he does any of those things. I think he’s much more dangerous than that.’
Ella stared anew at this strange child. What an odd thing to say. But the child just smiled, her eyes almost mocking, and twirling a pinch of hair in her fingers, ‘making cute’, she wandered off. Watching her go, Ella was struck most not by the child’s precocious self-possession, her assured manner, or what she’d said. Rather, it was the fact that of the pack of hungry street urchins careering around her, most by far bigger and older, not one attempted to snatch the bread held so casually in one small hand.
Later she was arranging the sauce and boiled fish on a platter for the priest when everything changed out among the crowd in the square. A child of these streets, and sensitive to their moods, she stilled as well. The urchins were gone, as were the older idlers; the shouting of the merchants had quietened, as had the general talk. In the hush Ella heard the approach of a measured tramp of boots. A Malazan patrol.