A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 1

or no, we can only take so much before we cross over... into something else. As if the world has shifted around us, though it's only our way of looking at it. A change of perspective, but there's no intelligence to it – you see but do not feel, or you weep yet look upon your own anguish as if from somewhere else, somewhere outside. It's not a place for answers, Lull, for every question has burned away. More human or less human – that's for you to decide.'
    'Surely it has been written of, by scholars, priests . . . philosophers?'
    Duiker smiled down at the dirt. 'Efforts have been made. But those who themselves have crossed that threshold ... well, they have few words to describe the place they've found, and little inclination to attempt to explain it. As I said, it's a place without intelligence, a place where thoughts wander, formless, unlinked. Lost.'
    'Lost,' the captain repeated. 'I am surely that.'
    'Yet you and I, Lull, we are lost late in our lives. Look upon the children, and despair.'
    'How to answer this? I must know, Duiker, else I go mad.'
    'Sleight of hand,' the historian said.
    'What?'
    'Think of the sorcery we've seen in our lives, the vast, unbridled, deadly power we've witnessed unleashed. Driven to awe and horror. Then think of a trickster – those you saw as a child – the games of illusion and artifice they could play out with their hands, and so bring wonder to your eyes.'
    The captain was silent, motionless. Then he rose. 'And there's my answer?'
    'It's the only one I can think of, friend. Sorry if it's not enough.'
    'No, old man, it's enough. It has to be, doesn't it?'
    'Aye, that it does.'
    'Sleight of hand.'
    The historian nodded. 'Ask for nothing more, for the world – this world – won't give it.'
    'But where will we find such a thing?'
    'Unexpected places,' Duiker replied, also rising. Somewhere ahead, shouts rose and the convoy resumed its climb once more. 'If you fight both tears and a smile, you'll have found one.'
    'Later, Historian.'
    'Aye.'
    He watched the captain set off back towards his company of soldiers, and wondered if all he'd said, all he'd offered to the man, was nothing but lies.
    The possibility returned to him now, hours later as he trudged along on the trail. One of those random, unattached thoughts that were coming to characterize the blasted scape of his mind. Returned, lingered a moment, then drifted away and was gone.
    The journey continued, beneath clouds of dust and a few remaining butterflies.
    Korbolo Dom pursued, sniping at the train's mangled tail, content to await better ground before another major engagement. Perhaps even he quailed at what Vathar Forest had begun to reveal.
    Among the tall cedars there were trees of some other species that had turned to stone. Gnarled and twisted, the petrified wood embraced objects that were themselves fossilized – the trees held offerings and had, long ago, grown around them. Duiker well recalled the last time he had seen such things, in what had been a holy place in the heart of an oasis, just north of Hissar. That site had revealed ram's horns locked in the wrapped crooks of branches, and there were plenty of those here as well, although they were the least disquieting of Vathar's offerings.
    T'lan Imass. No room for doubt – their undead faces stare out at us, from all sides, skulls and withered faces peering out from wreaths of crystallized bark, the dark pits of their eyes tracking our passage. This is a burial ground, not of the flesh-and-blood forebears of the T'lan Imass, but of the deathless creatures themselves.
    List's visions of ancient war – we see here its aftermath. Crumpled platforms were visible as well, stone latticework perched amidst branches that had once grown around them, closing up the assembled bones like the fingers of stone hands.
    At the war's end, the survivors came here, carrying those comrades too shattered to continue, and made of this forest their eternal home. The souls of the T'lan Imass cannot join Hood, cannot even flee their prisons of bone and withered flesh. One does not bury such things – that sentence of earthen darkness offers no peace. Instead, let those remnants look out from their perches upon one another, upon the rare mortal passages on this trail. . .
    Corporal List saw far too clearly, his visions delivering him deep into a history better left lost. Knowledge had beaten him down – as it does us all, when delivered in too great a measure. Yet I hunger