A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 2

– became little more than blurs of motion. Then he lifted his head and studied the sea, its rolling breakers in the distance, the triangular sails skidding along beyond the white line of foam. He made the sequence in his right hand random. Then did the same for his left.
    Thirty paces down the beach waited their single-masted runner, its magenta sail reefed, its hull's blue, gold and red paint faint stains in the sunlight. A Korelri craft, paid in debt to a local bookmaker in Kan – for an alley in Kan had been the place where Shadowthrone had sent them, not to the road above the village as he had promised.
    The bookmaker had paid the debt in turn to Apsalar and Crokus for a single night's work that had proved, for Crokus, brutally horrifying. It was one thing to practise passes with the blades, to master the deadly dance against ghosts of the imagination, but he had killed two men that night. Granted, they were murderers, in the employ of a man who was making a career out of extortion and terror. Apsalar had shown no compunction in cutting his throat, no qualms at the spray of blood that spotted her gloved hands and forearms.
    There had been a local with them, to witness the veracity of the night's work. In the aftermath, as he stood
in the doorway and stared down at the three corpses, he'd lifted his head and met Crokus's eyes. Whatever he saw in them had drained the blood from the man's face.
    By morning Crokus had acquired a new name. Cutter.
    At first he had rejected it. The local had misread all that had been revealed behind the Daru's eyes that night. Nothing fierce. The barrier of shock, fast crumbling to self-condemnation. Murdering killers was still murder, the act like the closing of shackles between them all, joining a line of infinite length, one killer to the next, a procession from which there was no escape. His mind had recoiled from the name, recoiled from all that it signified.
    But that had proved a short-lived rectitude. The two murderers had died indeed – at the hands of the man named Cutter. Not Crokus, not the Daru youth, the cut-purse – who had vanished. Vanished, probably never to be seen again.
    The delusion held a certain comfort, as cavernous at its core as Apsalar's embrace at night, but welcome all the same.
    Cutter would walk her path.
    Aye, the Emperor had Dancer, yes? A companion, for a companion was what was needed. Is needed. Now, she has Cutter. Cutter of the Knives, who dances in his chains as if they were weightless threads. Cutter, who, unlike poor Crokus, knows his place, knows his singular task – to guard her back, to match her cold precision in the deadly arts.
    And therein resided the final truth. Anyone could become a killer. Anyone at all.
    She stepped out of the shack, wan but dry-eyed.
    He sheathed his knives in a single, fluid motion, rose to his feet and faced her.
    'Yes,' she said. 'What now?'
     
    Broken pillars of mortared stone jutted from the undulating vista. Among the half-dozen or so within sight, only two rose as tall as a man, and none stood straight. The plain's
strange, colourless grasses gathered in tufts around their bases, snarled and oily in the grey, grainy air.
    As Kalam rode into their midst, the muted thunder of his horse's hoofs seemed to bounce back across his path, the echoes multiplying until he felt as if he was riding at the head of a mounted army. He slowed his charger's canter, finally reining in beside one of the battered columns.
    These silent sentinels felt like an intrusion on the solitude he had been seeking. He leaned in his saddle to study the one nearest him. It looked old, old in the way of so many things within the Warren of Shadow, forlorn with an air of abandonment, defying any chance he might have of discerning its function. There were no intervening ruins, no foundation walls, no cellar pits or other angular pocks in the ground. Each pillar stood alone, unaligned.
    His examination settled on a rusted ring set into the stone near the base, from which depended a chain of seized links vanishing into the tufts of grass. After a moment, Kalam dismounted. He crouched down, reaching out to close his hand on the chain. A slight upward tug. The desiccated hand and forearm of some hapless creature lifted from the grasses. Dagger-length talons, four fingers and two thumbs.
    The rest of the prisoner had succumbed to the roots, was half buried beneath dun-coloured, sandy soil. Pallid yellow hair was entwined among the grass