A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 2

tower did not sway.
    Itkovian stood looking east, the wind whipping against his face. His body felt bloodless, strangely hot beneath the tattered armour. He knew that exhaustion was finally taking its toll. Flesh and bone had its limits. The defence of the dead prince in his Great Hall had been brutal and artless. Hallways and entrances had become abattoirs. The stench of slaughter remained like a new layer beneath his skin – even the wind could not strip it away.
    The battles at the coast and the landings were drawing to a grim close, a lone surviving scout had reported. The Betrullid had been broken, fleeing north along the coast, where the Shield Anvil well knew their horses would become mired in the salt marsh. The pursuing Barghast would make short work of them.
    The besiegers' camps had been shattered, as if a tornado had ripped through them. A few hundred Barghast – old women and men and children – wandered through the carnage, gathering the spoils amidst squalling seagulls.
    The East Watch redoubt, now a pile of rubble, barely rose above the carpet of bodies. Smoke drifted from it as if from a dying pyre.
    Itkovian had watched the Barghast clans push into the city, had seen the Pannion retreat become a rout in the streets below. The fighting had swiftly swept past the palace. A Seerdomin officer had managed to rally a rearguard in Jelarkan's Concourse, and that battle still raged on. But for the Pannions it was a withdrawing engagement. They were buying time for the exodus through what was left of the south and west gates.
    A few White Face scouts had ventured into the palace grounds, close enough to discern that defenders remained, but no official contact had been established.
    The recruit, Velbara, stood at Itkovian's side, a recruit no longer. Her training in weapons had been one of desperation. She'd not missed the foremost lesson – that of staying alive – that was the guiding force behind every skill she thereafter acquired in the heat of battle. As with all the other Capan newcomers to the company – who now made up most of the survivors under the Shield Anvil's command – she had earned her place as a soldier of the Grey Swords.
    Itkovian broke a long silence. 'We yield the Great Hall, now.'
    'Yes, sir.'
    'The honour of the prince has been reasserted. We must needs depart – there is unfinished business at the Thrall.'
    'Can we even yet reach it, sir? We shall need to find a Barghast warchief.'
    'We shall not be mistaken for the enemy, sir. Enough of our brothers and sisters lie dead in the city to make our colours well known. Also, given the pursuit has, apart from the concourse, driven the Pannions west onto the plain, we shall likely find our path unopposed.'
    'Yes, sir.'
    Itkovian fixed his attention one last time on the destroyed redoubt in the killing field to the east. Two Gidrath soldiers in the Great Hall below were from that foolhardy but noble defence, and one of them bore recent wounds that would most likely prove fatal. The other, a bull of a man who had knelt before Rath'Hood, seemed no longer able to sleep. In the four days and nights since retaking the Great Hall, he had but paced during his rest periods, oblivious of his surroundings. Pacing, muttering under his breath, his eyes darkly feverish in their intensity. He and his dying companion were, Itkovian suspected, the last Gidrath still alive outside the Thrall itself.
    A Gidrath sworn to Hood, yet he follows my command without hesitation. Simple expedience, one might reasonably conclude. Notions of rivalry dispensed with in the face of the present extremity. Yet. . . I find myself mistrusting my own explanations.
    Despite his exhaustion, the Shield Anvil had sensed a growing perturbation. Something had happened. Somewhere. And as if in response he'd felt his blood seem to drain from him, emptying his veins, hollowing his heart, vanishing through a wound he'd yet to find. Leaving him to feel . . . incomplete.
    As if I had surrendered my faith. But I have not. 'The void of lost faith is filled with your swollen self.' Words from a long-dead Destriant. One does not yield, one replaces. Faith with doubt, scepticism, denial. I have yielded nothing. I have no horde of words crowding my inner defences. Indeed, I am diminished into silence. Emptied ... as if awaiting renewal. . .
    He shook himself. 'This wind screams too loud in my ears,' he said, eyes still on the East Watch redoubt. 'Come, sir, we go below.'
     
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