A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 2

swear it.' He gestured and a warren opened. Without a last glance – lest the vision break his heart – he stepped within, and was gone.
     
    A hand shook his shoulder incessantly. Quick Ben opened his eyes.
    'Damn you, mage,' Picker hissed. 'It's almost dawn – we have to fly.'
    Groaning, the wizard unfolded his legs, wincing with every move, then let the corporal help him upright.
    'Did you get it back?' she demanded as she half carried him to the waiting quorl.
    'Get what back?'
    'That pebble.'
    'No. We're in trouble, Picker—'
    'We're always in trouble—'
    'No, I mean all of us.' He dug in his heels, stared at her. ' All of us .'
    Whatever she saw in his expression left her shaken. 'All right. But right now we've got to get moving.'
    'Aye. You'd better strap me in – I won't be able to stay awake.'
    They came to the quorl. The Moranth seated in the forward chitinous saddle swung its helmed head to regard them in silence.
    'Queen of Dreams,' Picker muttered as she wrapped the leather harness around Quick Ben's limbs. 'I ain't never seen you this scared, Wizard. You got me ready to piss ice-cubes.'
    They were the last words of the night that Quick Ben remembered, but remember them he did.
     
    Ganoes Paran was plagued by images of drowning, but not in water. Drowning in darkness. Disorientated, thrashing in panic in an unknown and unknowable place. Whenever he closed his eyes, vertigo seized him, knots tightening in his gut, and it was as if he'd been stripped down to a child once again. Terrified, uncomprehending, his soul twisting with pain.
    The captain left the barricade at the Divide, where the day's last traders were still struggling through the press of Malazan guards, soldiers and clerics. He'd done as Dujek had commanded, setting up his encampment across the throat of the pass. Taxation and wagon searches had yielded a substantial haul, although, as the news spread, the takings were diminishing. It was a fine balance, keeping the tax at a level that the merchants could stomach, and allowing enough contraband through lest the chokehold turn to strangulation and travel between Darujhistan and Pale dried up entirely. Paran was managing, but just barely. Yet it was the least of his difficulties.
    Since the debacle at Darujhistan, the captain had been feeling adrift, tossed this way and that by the chaotic transformation of Dujek and his renegade army. The Malazans' anchor had been cut away. Support structures had collapsed. The burden upon the officer corps had grown overwhelming. Almost ten thousand soldiers had suddenly acquired an almost childlike need for reassurance.
    And reassurance was something Paran was unable to give. If anything, the turmoil within him had deepened. Threads of bestial blood coursed his veins. Fragmented memories – few of them his own – and strange, unearthly visions plagued his nights. Daylight hours passed in a confused haze. Endless problems of materiel and logistics to deal with, the turgid needs of management pushed again and again through the rising flood of physical maladies now besetting him.
    He'd been feeling ill for weeks, and Paran had his suspicions as to the source. The blood of the Hound of Shadow. A creature that plunged into Dark's own realm . . . yet can I be sure of this? The emotions frothing this crest . . . more like a child's. A child's...
    He pushed the thought away once more, knowing full well it would soon return – even as the pain in his stomach flared once again – and, with another glance up to where Trotts held sentinel position, continued making his way up the hillside.
    The pain of illness had changed him – he could see that within himself, conjured as an image, a scene both peculiar and poignant. He felt as if his own soul had been reduced into something piteous – a bedraggled, sweat-smeared rat, trapped within a rock-fall, twisting and squirming through cracks in a desperate search for a place where the pressure – the vast, shifting weight – relented. A space in which to breathe. And the pain all around me, those sharp stones, are settling, still settling, the spaces between them vanishing . . . darkness rising like water ...
    Whatever triumphs had been achieved in Darujhistan now seemed trivial to Paran. Saving a city, saving the lives of Whiskeyjack and his squad, the shattering of Laseen's plans, they had one and all crumbled into ash in the captain's mind.
    He was not as he had been, and this new shaping was not to his