A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 1

fourteen, the shape we're in.'
    'You seemed spry enough last night!' she snapped. 'Running off to collect Heboric. You don't seem as parched as us, either—'
    'I drink my own piss.'
    'You what?'
    He grunted. 'You heard me.'
    'Not a good enough answer,' she decided after thinking a moment. 'And don't tell me you're eating your own shit, too. It still wouldn't explain things. Have you made a pact with some god, Baudin?'
    'You think doing something like that's a simple task? Hey, Queen of Dreams, save me and I'll serve you. Tell me, how many of your prayers have been answered? Besides, I ain't got faith in anything but me.'
    'So you haven't given up yet?'
    She thought he wouldn't answer, but after a long minute in which she'd begun to sink into herself, he startled her awake with a blunt 'No.'
    He removed his pack, then skidded back down the slope. Something in the able economy of his movements filled her with sudden dread. Calls me plump, eyes me like a piece of flesh – not to use like Beneth did, but more as if he's eyeing his next meal. Heart hammering, she watched for the first move, a hungry flash in his small, bestial eyes.
    Instead he crouched down beside Heboric, pulling the unconscious man onto his back. He leaned close to listen for breath, then sat back, sighing.
    'He's dead?' Felisin asked. 'You do the skinning – I won't eat tattooed skin no matter how hungry I am.'
    Baudin glanced at her momentarily, but said nothing, returning to his examination of the ex-priest.
    'Tell me what you're doing,' she finally said.
    'He lives, and that alone may save us.' He paused. 'How far you fall, girl, matters nothing to me. Just keep your thoughts to yourself.'
    She watched him peel Heboric's rotting clothing away, revealing the astonishing weave of tattooing beneath. Baudin then moved to keep his own shadow behind him before bending close to study the dark patterning on the ex-priest's chest. He was looking for something.
    'A raised nape,' she said dully, 'the ends pulled down and almost touching, almost a circle. It surrounds a pair of tusks.'
    He stared, eyes narrowing.
    'Fener's own mark, the one that's sacred,' she said. 'It's what you're looking for, isn't it? He's excommunicated, yet Fener remains within him. That much is obvious by those living tattoos.'
    'And the mark?' he asked coolly. 'How did you come to know such things?'
    'A lie I spun for Beneth,' she explained as the man resumed his examination of the ex-priest's crowded flesh. 'I needed Heboric to support it. I needed details of the cult. He told me. You mean to call on the god.'
    'Found it,' he said.
    'Now what? How do you reach another man's god, Baudin? There's no keyhole in that mark, no sacred lock you can pick.'
    He jerked at that, his eyes glittering as they bore into her own.
    She didn't blink, revealed nothing.
    'How do you think he lost his hands?' Felisin asked innocently.
    'He was a thief, once.'
    'He was. But it was the excommunication that took them. There was a key, you see. The High Priest's warren to his god. Tattooed on the palm of his right hand. Held to the sacred mark – hand to chest, basically – as simple as a salute. I spent days healing from Beneth's beating, and Heboric talked. Told me so many things – I should have forgotten all of it, you know. Drinking durhang tea by the gallon, but that brew just dissolved the surface, that filter that says what's important, what isn't. His words poured in unobstructed, and stayed. You can't do it, Baudin.'
    He raised Heboric's right forearm, studied the glistening, flushed stump in the growing light.
    'You can never go back,' she said. 'The priesthood made sure of that. He isn't what he was, and that's that.'
    With a silent snarl Baudin pulled the forearm around to push the stump against the sacred mark.
    The air screamed. The sound battered them, flung them both down to scrabble, claw, mindlessly dig into the rock – away . . . away from the pain. Away! There was such agony in that shriek, it descended like fire, darkening the sky overhead, spreading hairline fissures through the bedrock, the cracks spreading outward from under Heboric's motionless body.
    Blood streaming from her ears, Felisin tried to crawl away, up the trembling slope. The fissures – Heboric's tattoos had blossomed out from his body, leapt the unfathomable distance from skin to stone – swept under her, turning the rock into something slick and greasy under her palms.
    Everything had begun to shake. Even the