A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 1

sweeping over the warriors crowding the slopes. The sorcery that battered at them was shunted aside, scattered by whatever force – Coltaine's soul? – now rose to join the birds.
    The cloud descended on Coltaine, swallowing him entire and covering the cross itself – at that distance they were to Duiker like flies swarming a piece of flesh.
    And when they rose, exploding skyward, the warleader of the Crow Clan was gone.
    Duiker staggered, leaned hard against the stone wall. Nether slipped down through his motionless arms, her blood-matted hair hiding her face as she curled around his feet.
    'I killed him,' Squint moaned. 'I killed Coltaine. Who took that man's life? A broken old soldier of the High Fist's army – he killed Coltaine ... Oh, Beru, have mercy on my soul...'
    Duiker wrapped the old man in his arms and held him fiercely. The bow clattered on the platform's wooden slats. The historian felt the man crumpling against him as if his bones had turned to dust, as if centuries stole into him with each ragged breath.
    Commander Blistig gripped the bowman by the back of the collar and yanked him upright. 'Before the day's through, you bastard,' he hissed, 'ten thousand soldiers will be voicing your name.' The words shook. 'Like a prayer, Squint, like a Hood-damned prayer.'
    The historian squeezed his eyes shut. It had become a day to hold in his arms broken figures.
    But who will hold me?
    Duiker opened his eyes, raised his head. High Fist Pormqual's mouth was moving, as if in a silent plea for forgiveness. Shock was written on the man's thin, oiled face and, as he met the historian's gaze, a flash of raw fear.
    Out on the barrow Korbolo Dom's army was stirring, like reeds in eddies, a restless, meaningless motion. The aftermath was now upon them. Voices rose, wordless cries, but they were too few to break the dreadful silence and its growing power.
    The crows were gone, the crossed spars of wood stood empty, rising above the masses with their blood-streaked shafts.
    Overhead, the sky had begun to die.
    Duiker's gaze returned to Pormqual. The High Fist seemed to shrink into Mallick Rel's shadow. He shook his head as if to deny the day.
    Thrice denied, High Fist.
    Coltaine is dead. They are all dead.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
    I saw the sun's bolt
arc an unerring path
to the man's forehead.
As it struck, the crows
converged like night
drawing breath.
    Dog Chain
Seglora
     
    Faint ripples licked the garbage-studded mud beneath the docks. Night insects danced just beyond the water's reach, and the bank itself seethed in the egg-laying frenzy of some kind of eels. In their thousands, black and gleaming, the small creatures writhed beneath the dancing insects. This silent breaching of the harbour's shore had for generations passed almost unnoticed by human eyes – a mercy granted only because the eels were wholly unpalatable.
    From the darkness beyond came the sound of cascading water. The ripples that reached shore from that commotion were larger, more agitated, the only indication that a stranger had arrived to disturb the scene.
    Kalam stumbled ashore, collapsing onto mud that swarmed beneath him. Warm blood still leaked between the fingers of his right hand where it pressed against the knife wound. The assassin wore no shirt, and his chain armour was even now settling somewhere in the mud bottom of Malaz Bay behind him, leaving him with only buckskin leggings and moccasins.
    In clambering out of the armour during his sudden plunge into the deep, he had been forced to pull off his belt and knife harness. In his desperate need to return to the surface, to draw air into his lungs, he'd let everything slip from his grasp.
    Leaving him now unarmed.
    Somewhere out in the bay a ship was being torn apart, the savage noises drifting across the water. Kalam wondered at that, but only briefly. He had other things on his mind.
    Faint nips told him that the eels were resenting his intrusion. Struggling to slow his breathing, he squirmed farther up the slimy bank. Broken crockery dug into his flesh as he made his way onto the first of the stone breakwaters. He rolled onto his back and stared up at the seaweed-bearded underside of the pier. A moment later he closed his eyes, began concentrating.
    The bleeding in his side slowed to a thin trickle, then ceased.
    A few minutes later he sat up and began pulling off the eels that clung like leeches, flinging them out into the darkness where he could hear the skittering of the