A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 1

his head to one side and regarded her. 'Because, Adjunct, it is futile.'
    'Let's get going, Tool. We're wasting time.'
    'Yes, Adjunct.'
    She climbed into the saddle, wondering how the Imass had meant that.

BOOK FOUR

ASSASSINS
    I dreamed a coin
with shifting face –
so many youthful visages
so many costly dreams,
and it rolled and rang
'round the gilded rim
of a chalice made for gems
    Life of Dreams
Ilbares the Hag

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    The night held close
as I wandered
my spirit unfooted
to either earth or stone
unravelled from tree
undriven by iron nail
but like the night itself
a thing of air
stripped of light
so I came upon them,
those masons who cut and carved
stone in the night
sighting by stars and battered hand.
'What of the sun?' asked I of them.
'Is not its cloak of revelation
the warmth of reason
in your shaping?'
And one among them answered,
'No soul can withstand
the sun's bones of light
and reason dims
when darkness falls –
so we shape barrows in the night
for you and your kin.'
'Forgive my interruption, then,' said I.
'The dead never interrupt,' said the mason,
'they but arrive.'
    Pauper's Stone
Darujhistan
     
    'Yet another night, yet another dream,' Kruppe moaned, 'with naught but a scant fire to keep this wanderer company.' He held his hands over the flickering, undying hearth that had been stoked by an Elder God. It seemed an odd gift, but he sensed a significance to it. 'Kruppe would understand this meaning, for rare and unwelcome is this frustration.'
    The landscape around him was barren; even the ploughed earth was gone, with no sign of habitation in sight. He squatted by the lone fire in a tundra wasteland, and the air had the breath of rotting ice. To the north and to the east the horizon gleamed green, almost luminescent though no moon had risen to challenge the stars. Kruppe had never before seen such a thing, yet it was an image fashioned within his mind. 'Disturbing, indeed, proclaims Kruppe. Are these visions of instinct, then, unfurled in this dream for a purpose? Kruppe knows not, and would return to his warm bed this instant, were the choice his.'
    He stared about at the lichen- and moss-covered ground, frowning at the strange bright colours born there. He'd heard tales of Redspire Plain, that land far to the north, beyond the Laederon Plateau. Is this what tundra looked like? He'd always pictured a bleak, colourless world. 'Yet peruse these stars overhead. They glisten with a youthful energy, nay, sparkle as if amused by the one who contemplates them. While the earth itself hints of vast blushes of red, orange and lavender.'
    Kruppe rose as low thunder reached him from the west. In the distance moved a massive herd of brown-furred beasts. The steam of their breath gusted silver in the air above and behind them as they ran, turning as one this way and that but ever at a distance. He watched them for some time. When they came closest to him he saw the reddish streaks in their fur, and their horns, sweeping down then up and out. The land shook with their passage.
    'Such is the life in this world, Kruppe wonders. Has he travelled back, then, to the very beginning of things?'
    'You have,' said a deep voice behind him.
    Kruppe turned. 'Ah, come to share my fire, of course.' He saw before him a squat figure, covered in the tanned hides of deer or some such similar animal. Antlers stretched out from a flat skull-cap on the man's head, grey and covered in fuzzy skin. Kruppe bowed. 'You see before you Kruppe, of Darujhistan.'
    'I am Pran Chole of Cannig Tol's Clan among the Kron Tlan.' Pran stepped close and crouched before the fire. 'I am also the White Fox, Kruppe, wise in the ways of ice.' He glanced at Kruppe and smiled.
    Pran's face was wide, the bones pronounced beneath smooth," gold skin. His eyes were barely visible between tight lids, but what Kruppe saw of them was a startling amber in colour. Pran reached out long, supple hands over the fire. 'Fire is life, and life is fire. The age of ice passes, Kruppe. Long have we lived here, hunting the great herds, gathering to war with the Jaghut in the southlands, birthing and dying with the ebb and flow of the frozen rivers.'
    'Kruppe has travelled far, then.'
    'To the beginning and to the end. My kind give way to your kind, Kruppe, though the wars do not cease. What we shall give to you is freedom from such wars. The Jaghut dwindle, ever retreat into forbidding places. The Forkrul Assail have vanished, though we never found need to fight