A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 1

mercy is that?
    'The horse's blood had burned black in its veins,' Lull said suddenly.
    Duiker nodded, not needing to ask which horse the captain meant. She carried them all, such a raging claim on her life force, it seared her from within. Such thoughts took him past words, into a place of raw pain.
    'It's said,' Lull went on, 'that their hands are stained black now. They are marked for ever more.'
    As am I. He thought of Nil and Nether, two children curled foetally beneath the hood of the wagon, there in the midst of their silent kin. The Wickans know that the gift of power is never free. They know enough not to envy the chosen among them, for power is never a game, nor are glittering standards raised to glory and wealth. They disguise nothing in trappings, and so we all see what we'd rather not, that power is cruel, hard as iron and bone, and it thrives on destruction.
    'I am falling into your silences, old man,' Lull said softly.
    Duiker could only nod again.
    'I find myself impatient for Korbolo Dom. For an end to this. I can no longer see what Coltaine sees, Historian.'
    'Can you not?' Duiker asked, meeting the man's eye. 'Are you certain that what he sees is different from what you see, Lull?'
    Dismay slowly settled on his twisted features.
    'I fear,' Duiker continued, 'that the Fist's silences no longer speak of victory.'
    'A match to your own growing silence, then.'
    The historian shrugged. An entire continent pursues us. We should not have lived this long. And I can take my thoughts no further than that, and am diminished by that truth. All those histories I've read . . . each an intellectual obsession with war, the endless redrawing of maps. Heroic charges and crushing defeats. We are all naught but twists of suffering in a river of pain. Hood's breath, old man, your words weary even yourself- why inflict them on others?
    'We need to stop thinking,' Lull said. 'We're well past that point. Now we simply exist. Look at those beasts over there. We're the same, you and I, the same as them. Struggling beneath the sun, pushed and ever pushed to our place of slaughter.'
    Duiker shook his head. 'It is our curse that we cannot know the bliss of being mindless, Captain. You'll find no salvation where you're looking, I'm afraid.'
    'Not interested in salvation,' Lull growled. 'Just a way to keep going.'
    They approached the captain's company. In the midst of the Seventh's infantry stood a knot of haphazardly armed and armoured men and women, perhaps fifty in all. Faces were turned expectantly towards Lull and Duiker.
    'Time to be a captain,' Lull muttered under his breath, his tone so dispirited that it stung the historian's heart.
    A waiting sergeant barked out a command to stand at attention and the motley gathering made a ragged but deter-mined effort to comply. Lull eyed them for a moment longer, then dismounted and approached.
    'Six months ago you knelt before purebloods,' the captain addressed them. 'You shied away your eyes and had the taste of dusty floors on your tongues. You exposed your backs to the whips and your world was high walls and foul hovels where you slept, where you loved, and gave birth to children who would face no better future. Six months ago I wouldn't have wasted a tin jakata on the lot of you.' He paused, nodding to his sergeant.
    Soldiers of the Seventh came forward, each carrying folded uniforms. Those uniforms were faded, stained and restitched where weapons had pierced the cloth. Resting atop each pressed bundle was an iron sigil. Duiker leaned forward on his saddle to examine one more closely. The medallion was perhaps four inches in diameter, a circlet of chain affixed to a replica Wickan dog-collar, and in the centre was a cattle-dog's head – not snarling, simply staring outward with hooded eyes.
    Something twisted inside the historian so that he barely managed to contain it.
    'Last night,' Captain Lull said, 'a representative of the Council of Nobles came to Coltaine. They were burdened with a chest of gold and silver jakatas. It seems the nobles have grown weary of cooking their own food, mending their own clothes ... wiping their own asses—'
    At another time such a comment would have triggered dark looks and low grumbling – just one more spit in the face to join a lifetime of others. Instead, the former servants laughed. The antics of when they were children. Children no more.
    Lull waited for the laughter to fall away. 'The Fist said nothing. The Fist turned his back on