A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 2

deliver. To you, brother.'
    'Do you see the need for this?'
    'We do.'
    'Do you understand the sacrifice I make, for you, for our people, for our future?'
    'We do.'
    'Yet, even as you searched, this man, our once-brother, spoke against me.'
    'He did.'
    'Worse, he spoke to defend the new enemies we had found.'
    'He did. He called them the Pure Kin, and said we should not kill them.'
    'And, had they been in truth Pure Kin, then . . .'
    'They would not have died so easily.'
    'Thus.'
    'He betrayed you, brother.'
    'He betrayed us all.'
    There was silence. Ah, now you would share out this crime of yours. And they hesitate.
    'He betrayed us all, did he not, brothers?'
    'Yes.' The word arrived rough, beneath the breath, mumbled – a chorus of dubious uncertainty.
    No-one spoke for a long moment, then, savage with barely bridled anger: 'Thus, brothers. And should we not heed this danger? This threat of betrayal, this poison, this plague that seeks to tear our family apart? Will it spread? Will we come here yet again? We must be vigilant, brothers. Within ourselves. With each other. Now, we have spoken of him. And now, he is gone.'
    'He is gone.'
    'He never existed.'
    'He never existed.'
    'Let us leave this place, then.'
    'Yes, let us leave.'
    Trull Sengar listened until he could no more hear their boots on the stones, nor feel the tremble of their dwindling steps. He was alone, unable to move, seeing only the mud-smeared stone at the base of the iron ring.
    The sea rustled the corpses along the shoreline. Crabs scuttled. Water continued to seep through the mortar, insinuate the Cyclopean wall with the voice of muttering ghosts, and flow down on the other side.
    Among his people, it was a long-known truth, perhaps the only truth, that Nature fought but one eternal war. One foe. That, further, to understand this was to understand the world. Every world.
    Nature has but one enemy.
    And that is imbalance.
    The wall held the sea.
    And there are two meanings to this. My brothers, can you not see the truth of that? Two meanings. The wall holds the sea.
    For now.
    This was a flood that would not be denied. The deluge had but just begun – something his brothers could not understand, would, perhaps, never understand.
    Drowning was common among his people. Drowning was not feared. And so, Trull Sengar would drown. Soon.
    And before long, he suspected, his entire people would join him.
    His brother had shattered the balance.
    And Nature shall not abide.

BOOK ONE

FACES IN THE ROCK
    The slower the river, the redder it runs.
    Nathii saying

CHAPTER ONE
    Children from a dark house
choose shadowed paths.
    Nathii folk saying
     
    The dog had savaged a woman, an old man and a child before the warriors drove it into an abandoned kiln at the edge of the village. The beast had never before displayed an uncertain loyalty. It had guarded the Uryd lands with fierce zeal, one with its kin in its harsh, but just, duties. There were no wounds on its body that might have festered and so allowed the spirit of madness into its veins. Nor was the dog possessed by the foaming sickness. Its position in the village pack had not been challenged. Indeed, there was nothing, nothing at all, to give cause to the sudden turn.
    The warriors pinned the animal to the rounded back wall of the clay kiln with spears, stabbing at the snapping, shrieking beast until it was dead. When they withdrew their spears they saw the shafts chewed and slick with spit and blood; they saw iron dented and scored.
    Madness, they knew, could remain hidden, buried far beneath the surface, a subtle flavour turning blood into something bitter. The shamans examined the three victims; two had already died of their wounds, but the child still clung to life.
    In solemn procession he was carried by his father to the Faces in the Rock, laid down in the glade before the
Seven Gods of the Teblor, and left there.
    He died a short while later. Alone in his pain before the hard visages carved into the cliff-face.
    This was not an unexpected fate. The child, after all, had been too young to pray.
    All of this, of course, happened centuries past.
    Long before the Seven Gods opened their eyes.
     
    Urugal the Woven's Year
1159 Burn's Sleep
    They were glorious tales. Farms in flames, children dragged behind horses for leagues. The trophies of that day, so long ago, cluttered the low walls of his grandfather's longhouse. Scarred skull-pates, frail-looking mandibles. Odd fragments of clothing made of