Outside, the old man made some gesture and the crowd backed away. Bakune looked sharply at him; he wore only dirty trousers and jerkin, his grey hair hung stringy and bedraggled, yet his wiry limbs, dark as stained wood, held an obvious strength. A stone on a thong round his neck was the man’s only decoration other than the old branch he held as a staff. A thin cold rain had begun to fall that the old man ignored, though it chilled Bakune. ‘Do I know you?’ he asked, struck by a sudden vague recollection.
‘No, Assessor. You most certainly do not know me. This way…’
Surprised yells sounded up the mud path the way Bakune had come and the crowd parted there to reveal his two Watch guards, their cloaks pulled back from the shortswords hung at their sides.
‘Who are these?’ the old man asked.
Bakune sighed. Lady-damned fools! They’ll ruin everything! ‘Guards that the Watch captain insists follow me around.’
The old man’s dark eyes slid to Bakune; the indulgent, almost pitying smile returned. ‘Guards, Assessor? Or minders?’ He started off before Bakune could respond.
The path the old man followed was bewilderingly twisted, probably deliberately so. His two guards plodded along behind, hands at their belts. Each muddy trail they took between crowded shacks seemed identical to the last. Everyone ignored Bakune now, going about their daily business, carrying bundled firewood, earthenware pots of water. Women cooked over low smoky fires.
Then the old man stopped abruptly at a wattle and daub hut, no different from any other. He gestured within.
‘Thank you.’
He did not answer, only motioned inside once again.
Within, a family sat eating. Startled, Bakune nearly backed out until the woman present, mother Bakune assumed of the four wide-eyed children, pointed to a woven reed hanging farther within. Bowing, Bakune edged around the staring family and brushed the hanging aside. A thick cloud of smoke blinded him. He had entered what proved to be no more than a tiny nook, and he pressed a fold of his cloak over his nose and mouth. Eventually he made out a low shape hunched before some sort of altar cluttered with burned-down candle stubs, clay lamps, small rudely shaped statues, and stands of smouldering incense sticks.
‘Lithel Harldeth?’
The shape, which had been rocking gently from side to side and crooning to itself, stilled. The head rose, questing. ‘Who is there?’
‘Assessor Bakune. I am investigating the recent death of Sister Prudence. I’m told you knew her well.’
‘So, she is dead. We’ve been waiting many years.’ A gnarled hand went shakily to the altar, pointed to one crude statue. ‘Look here. The Great Mother Goddess. She has had countless names, though Lady is not one.’ The hand moved to another. ‘The Great Sky-Father this one is called, though Light is his aspect. Here, the Great Deceiver would push forward — not realizing that to succeed would spell his dissolution. Here, the Beast of War stirs again — what shall be the final shape of its rising? Here, the Dark Hoarder of Souls. He has my friend now — may both of them come to know peace. And here, the newcomer, the Broken God, watching and scheming from afar.’
Bakune recognized these ancient names and titles from his research into the indigenous peoples of the archipelago — all their old animistic spirits of earth, air, and night. All vaguely similar in character to the foreign Malazan faiths, of which, presumably, they were distant relatives. All the old pagan beliefs that had multiplied indiscriminately before the arrival of the Blessed Lady and the one true faith.
‘What would you call evil, Assessor?’ the old woman suddenly asked.
Bakune was rather startled by the question. Breathing in the heady, dizzying smoke he eased himself down to his knees. Vaguely, he wondered what drugs might be mixed in with the exotic woods and herbs being burned here. He’d already realized that he would get no straight answers from the crone, and could hardly press her. ‘I don’t know. The simple-minded would answer whatever is opposed to them. Whatever current enemy or rival they might face at the time. For my part I believe true evil lies in actions. In deliberate harmful acts.’
‘Spoken as a magistrate. And it must be said that there is some wisdom in your approach. However, can an act not be harmful in the immediate, yet beneficial in the long term? Could such an act be said to be evil?’
Bakune waved the choking coils of smoke from his face. The last thing he expected was to be challenged to a philosophical debate. ‘Again, I do not know. I suppose the harm would have to be weighed against the ultimate benefit accrued.’
The old woman turned her head to regard him directly. Her dirty hair hung like a veil before her face. ‘Exactly. It would have to be… assessed.’
Bakune suddenly felt stricken. ‘What are you getting at, Lithel?’
The woman turned away, rocking. ‘I have meditated long and hard on this vexing question, Assessor. There is really only a small set of final responses. My distillation is a refinement of one of them. True pure evil, Assessor, is waste. It is the blunting of potential, the cutting off of a person’s or a people’s promise, or options, for development. It is, emblematically, the death of a child.’ The old woman’s head sank. ‘Look then, Assessor, to the children.’
‘Lithel? Lithel?’
The old woman once more crooned to herself, and now Bakune could hear the ancient burnished pain in her moaning.
Outside, Bakune straightened, coughing. One of his guards offered a water skin and he took it with gratitude and washed out his mouth.
‘What did you hear?’ the old man asked.
‘Exactly what I did not want to hear.’
The old man’s smile climbed free of any reserve. ‘Good. We are done then. And Assessor…’
‘Yes?’
‘Do not return. Do not try to find this dwelling again. Because you never will.’
Bakune narrowed his gaze on the man. ‘You would threaten a magistrate?’
‘No threat. A fact.’
The guards snorted their disbelief. Bakune shrugged. His gaze caught the stone at the man’s neck. Engraved on it was a circle with a line across its middle like the line of a horizon. The very sigil scratched on the statue Lithel had named the Great Mother Goddess. Bakune motioned to the necklace. ‘The symbol of the old pagan Earth Mother.’
The old man’s hand went to the stone. ‘Yes. The old faith. I am of the Drenn.’
Bakune could not shake a feeling of familiarity. ‘I feel that we have met before.’
‘Perhaps briefly. Now, this way.’
The old man, who once gave his name to the Assessor as Gheven, stopped within the boundary of the shanty town and watched while the magistrate and his minders climbed to the west road. He was surprised, pleased and saddened all at once at having met him again. Surprised by the man’s resilience in keeping to his principles in the face of all that had confronted him for the length of his career; pleased to see him cleaving still to the path to justice — as he interpreted it at any rate — and saddened because he knew what all this would cost the man should he continue along the path as he, Gheven, hoped he would.
It was sad but necessary. Pain would be inflicted but was it not all to the greater good? A thorny question, that. One he did not feel qualified to settle.
Back in his office, Bakune settled into his chair and rested his head in his hands. His guards had drifted away once they’d reached the city centre and the blocks holding the mayoral palace and the courts. He didn’t know whether to be grateful for their dedication or to curse them for it. The old man’s insinuations had slid deep along the paths of his own suspicions. His secretaries appeared at his doorway, thick folders in their hands, but Bakune waved them off.
Rising, he crossed the office and locked the door. He went to a cabinet next to the desk and unlocked it. From the top shelf he pulled out a roll that he laid on his desk. He pulled the ribbon holding the cloth tight and unrolled it. It was a map of Banith that Bakune had ordered drafted years ago. On it, over the years, the Assessor had painstakingly painted in red dots the exact location of every murdered girl and boy he had personally visited, or that he could reliably place. The red dots lay in a thin spread throughout the city; no district was entirely free of their stain. The bright crimson, however, was thickest along the shore, where many bodies were dumped. But not evenly, not randomly. Over the years the marks clumped, observably so, into three main clusters. One to the west, one to the east, and one due south near the centre of the town’s waterfront. Leading more or less straight up from each cluster ran a main road into town. And if one traced each road one’s finger would end up right at the centre of town where lay the holy Cloister of Our Blessed Lady — near which, revealingly enough, not one bloody dot was to be found.