A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 2

narrowed suspiciously. He nudged his sergeant. 'Hey, Gesler, think we should have done that? Changed our names, I mean. This Strings here is Old Guard as sure as I'm a demon in my dear father's eye.'
    'Let the bastard keep whatever name he wants,' Gesler muttered. 'All right, squad, find some place to drop your stuff. The 6th should be showing up any time, and the lieutenant, too. Word is, we're all being mustered out to face the Adjunct's lizard eyes in a day or two.'
    The soldier Gesler had named Tavos Pond – a tall, dark, moustached man who was probably Korelri – spoke up. 'So we should polish our equipment, Sergeant?'
    'Polish whatever you like,' the man replied disinterestedly, 'just not in public. As for the Adjunct, if she can't handle a few scuffed up soldiers then she won't last long. It's a dusty world out there, and the sooner we blend in the better.'
    Strings sighed. He was feeling more confident already. He faced his own soldiers. 'Enough sitting on that straw. Start spreading it out to soak up this horse piss.' He faced Gesler again. 'A word with you in private?'
    The man nodded. 'Let's head back outside.'
    Moments later the two men stood on the cobbled courtyard of the estate that had once housed a well-off local merchant and was now the temporary bivouac for Ranal's squads. The lieutenant had taken the house proper for himself, leaving Strings wondering what the man did with all those empty rooms.
    They said nothing for a moment, then Strings grinned. 'I can picture Whiskeyjack's jaw dropping – the day I tell him you was my fellow sergeant in the new 8th Legion.'
    Gesler scowled. 'Whiskeyjack. He was busted down to sergeant before I was, the bastard. Mind you, I then made corporal, so I beat him after all.'
    'Except now you're a sergeant again. While Whiskeyjack's an outlaw. Try beating that.'
    'I just might,' Gesler muttered.
    'Got concerns about the Adjunct?' Strings quietly asked. The courtyard was empty, but even so ...
    'Met her, you know. Oh, she's as cold as Hood's forked tongue. She impounded my ship.'
    'You had a ship?'
    'By rights of salvage, aye. I was the one who brought Coltaine's wounded to Aren. And that's the thanks I get.'
    'You could always punch her in the face. That's what you usually end up doing to your superiors, sooner or later.'
    'I could at that. I'd have to get past Gamet, of course. The point I was making is this: she's never commanded anything more than a damned noble household, and here she's been handed three legions and told to reconquer an entire subcontinent.' He glanced sidelong at Strings. 'There wasn't many Falari made it into the Bridgeburners. Bad timing, I think, but there was one.'
    'Aye, and I'm him.'
    After a moment, Gesler grinned and held out his hand. 'Strings. Fiddler. Sure.'
    They clasped wrists. To Strings, the other man's hand and arm felt like solid stone.
    'There's an inn down the street,' Gesler continued. 'We need to swap stories, and I guarantee you, mine's got yours beat by far.'
    'Oh, Gesler,' Strings sighed, 'I think you're in for a surprise.'

CHAPTER SIX
    We came within sight of the island, close enough to gaze into the depths through the ancient cedars and firs. And it seemed there was motion within that gloom, as if the shadows of long dead and long fallen trees still remained, swaying and shifting on ghostly winds ...
    Quon Sea Charting Expedition of
1127 Burn's Sleep, Drift Avalii
    Hedoranas
     
    The journey home had been enough, if only to return one last time to the place of beginnings, to crumbled reminiscences amidst sea-thrust coral sands above the tide line, the handful of abandoned shacks battered by countless storms into withered skeletons of wood. Nets lay buried in glistening drifts blinding white in the harsh sunlight. And the track that had led down from the road, overgrown now with wind-twisted grasses ... no place from the past survived unchanged, and here, in this small fisher village on the coast of Itko Kan, Hood had walked with thorough and absolute deliberation, leaving not a single soul in his wake.
    Barring the one man who had now returned. And the daughter of that man, who had once been possessed by a god.
    And in the leaning shack that had once housed them both – its frond-woven roof long since stripped away – with
the broad, shallow-draught fisherboat close by now showing but a prow and a stern, the rest buried beneath the coral sand, the father had laid himself down and slept.
    Crokus had awakened to