A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 1

buzzes, were evening the score. Faintly, beyond the cries of carrion birds, came the wail of men, women and children dying beneath the sword.
    'Sounds like the Empress is keeping her word with the Moranth,' Quick Ben said quietly. 'An hour of slaughter. I didn't think Dujek—'
    'Dujek knows his orders,' Whiskeyjack cut in. 'And there's a High Mage taloned on his shoulder.'
    'An hour,' Kalam repeated. "Then we clean up the mess.'
    'Not our squad,' Whiskeyjack said. 'We've received new orders.'
    The two men stared at their sergeant.
    'And you still need convincing?' Quick Ben demanded. 'They're driving us into the ground. They mean to—'
    'Enough!' Whiskeyjack barked. 'Not now. Kalam, find Fiddler. We need resupply from the Moranth. Round up the rest, Quick, and take Sorry with you. Join me outside the High Fist's tent in an hour.'
    'And you?' Quick Ben asked. 'What are you going to do?'
    The sergeant heard an ill-concealed yearning in the wizard's voice. The man needed a direction, or maybe confirmation that they were doing the right thing. A little late for that. Even so, Whiskeyjack felt a pang of regret – he couldn't give what Quick Ben wanted the most. He couldn't tell him that things would turn out for the best. He sank down on his haunches, his eyes on Pale. 'What am I going to do? I'm going to do some thinking, Quick Ben. I've been listening to you and Kalam, to Mallet and Fiddler, even Trotts has been jawing in my ear. Well, now it's my turn. So leave me be, Wizard, and take that damn girl with you.'
    Quick Ben flinched, seeming to withdraw. Something in Whiskeyjack's words had made him very unhappy – or maybe everything.
    The sergeant was too tired to worry about it. He had their new assignment to think over. Had he been a religious man, Whiskeyjack would have let blood in Hood's Bowl, calling upon the shades of his ancestors. As much as he hated to admit it, he shared the feeling among his squad: someone in the Empire wanted the Bridgeburners dead.
    Pale was behind them now, the nightmare nothing but the taste of ashes in his mouth. Ahead lay their next destination: the legendary city of Darujhistan. Whiskeyjack had a premonition that a new nightmare was about to begin.
     
    Down in the camp just beyond the last crest of denuded hills, horse-drawn carts loaded with wounded soldiers crowded the narrow aisles between the tent rows. All the precise order of the Malazan encampment had disintegrated, and the air was febrile with soldiers screaming their pain, giving voice to horror.
    Tattersail threaded her way around the dazed survivors, stepping across puddles of blood in the wagon-ruts, her eyes lingering on an obscene pile of amputated limbs outside the cutter tents. From the massive sprawl of the camp followers' slum of tents and shelters came a wailing dirge – a broken chorus of thousands of voices, the sound a chilling reminder that war was always a thing of grief.
    In some military headquarters back in the Empire's capital of Unta, three thousand leagues distant, an anonymous aide would paint a red stroke across the 2nd Army on the active list, and then write in fine script beside it: Pale, late winter, the 1163rd Year of Burn's Sleep. Thus would the death of nine thousand men and women be noted. And then forgotten.
    Tattersail grimaced. Some of us won't forget. The Bridgeburners harboured some frightening suspicions. The thought of challenging Tayschrenn in a direct confrontation appealed to her sense of outrage and – if the High Mage had killed Calot – her feeling of betrayal. But she knew that her emotions had a way of running away with her. A sorcery duel with the Empire's High Mage would buy her a quick passage to Hood's Gate. Self-righteous wrath had planted more corpses in the ground than an empire could lay claim to, and as Calot used to say: Shake your fist all you want but dead is dead.
    She'd witnessed all too many scenes of death since she'd first joined the ranks of the Malazan Empire, but at least they couldn't be laid squarely at her feet. That was the difference, and it had been enough for a long time. Not as 1 once was. I've spent twenty years washing the blood from my hands. Right now, however, the scene that rose again and again behind her eyes was the empty armour on the hilltop, and it gnawed at her heart. Those men and women had been running to her, looking for protection against the horrors of the plain below. It had been a desperate act, a fatal one, but she understood