A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 1

do.'
    'I will take them.'
    He was silent as he set down his pack, untied the flap and began removing items. Clothing, a scatter of a poor woman's rings, bracelets and earrings, a thin-bladed long-knife, its iron stained black except for the honed edge.
    'Her sword awaits us at the encampment,' Leoman said when he'd done. 'She wore the bracelets on her left wrist only, the rings on her left hand.' He gestured down at some leather straps. 'She wound these around her right wrist and forearm.' He paused, looked up at her with hard eyes. 'It were best you matched the attire. Precisely.'
    She smiled. 'To aid in the deceit, Leoman?'
    He dropped his gaze. 'There may well be some . . . resistance. The High Mages—'
    'Would bend the cause to their wills, create factions within the camp, then clash in a struggle to decide who will rule all. They have not yet done so, for they cannot determine if Sha'ik still lives. Yet they have prepared the ground.'
    'Seer—'
    'Ah, you accept that much at least.'
    He bowed. 'None could deny the power that has come to you, yet...'
    'Yet I did not myself open the Holy Book.'
    He met her eyes. 'You did not.'
    Felisin looked up. The Toblakai and Heboric stood a short distance away, watching, listening. 'What I shall open is not between those covers, but is within me. Now is not the time.' She faced Leoman again. 'You must trust in me.'
    The skin tightened around the desert warrior's eyes.
    'You never could easily yield that, could you, Leoman?'
    'Who speaks?'
    'We do.'
    He was silent.
    'Toblakai.'
    'Yes, Sha'ik Reborn?'
    'To a man who doubts you, you would use what?'
    'My sword,' he replied.
    Heboric snorted.
    Felisin swung to him. 'And you? What would you use?'
    'Nothing. I would be as I am, and if I prove worthy of trust, that man will come to it.'
    'Unless ... ?'
    He scowled. 'Unless that man cannot trust himself, Felisin.'
    She turned back to Leoman and waited.
    Heboric cleared his throat. 'You cannot command someone to have faith, lass. Obedience, yes, but not belief itself.'
    She said to Leoman, 'You've told me there is a man to the south. A man leading a battered remnant of an army and refugees numbering tens of thousands. They do as he bids, their trust is absolute – how has that man managed that?'
    Leoman shook his head.
    'Have you ever followed such a leader, Leoman?'
    'No.'
    'So you truly do not know.'
    'I do not know, Seer.'
    Dismissive of the eyes of three men, Felisin stripped down and attired herself in Sha'ik's clothing. She donned the stained silver jewellery with an odd sense of long familiarity, then tossed aside the rags she had been wearing earlier. She studied the desert basin for a long moment, then said, 'Come, the High Mages have begun to lose their patience.'
     
    'We're only a few days from Falar, according to the First Mate,' Kalam said. 'Everyone's talking about these tradewinds.'
    'I bet they are,' the captain growled, looking as if he'd swallowed something sour.
    The assassin refilled their tankards and leaned back. Whatever still afflicted the captain, keeping him to his cot for days now, went beyond the injuries he'd sustained at the hands of the bodyguard. Mind you, head wounds can get complicated. Even so . . . The captain trembled when he spoke, though his speech was in no way slurred or otherwise impaired. The struggle seemed to be in pushing the words out, in linking them into anything resembling a sentence. Yet in his eyes Kalam saw a mind no less sharp than it had been.
    The assassin was baffled, yet he felt, on some instinctive level, that his presence gave strength to the captain's efforts. 'Lookout sighted a ship in our wake just before sunset yesterday – a Malazan fast trader, he thinks. If it was, it must have passed us without lights or hail in the night. No sign of it this morning.'
    The captain grunted. 'Never made better time. Bet their eyes are wide, too, dropping headless cocks over the starboard side and into Bern's smiling maw at every blessed bell.'
    Kalam took a mouthful of watered wine, studying the captain over the tankard's dented rim. 'We lost the last two marines last night. Left me wondering about that ship's healer of yours.'
    'Been having a run of the Lord's push, he has. Not like him.'
    'Well, he's passed out on pirates' ale right now.'
    'Doesn't drink.'
    'He does now.'
    The look the captain gave him was like a bright, distant flare, a beacon warning of shoals ahead.
    'All's not well, I take it,' the assassin quietly