A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 2

ever walk in your shadow.'
    Kalam struggled to keep the grin from his face as he collected the weapons. 'And with you, sir.' And so they will, friend. Far closer than you might want.
    He walked a short distance down the market street, then paused to adjust the clasps of the weapon harness. The previous owner had not Kalam's bulk. Then again, few did. When he was done he slipped into the harness, then drew
his telaba's overcloak around once more. The heavier weapon jutted from under his left arm.
    The assassin continued on through G'danisban's mostly empty streets. Two long-knives, both Wickan. The same owner? Unknown. They were complementary in one sense, true, yet the difference in weight would challenge anyone who sought to fight using both at the same time.
    In a Fenn's hand, the heavier weapon would be little more than a dirk. The design was clearly Wickan, meaning the investment had been a favour, or in payment. Can I think of a Wickan who might have earned that? Well, Coltaine – but he carried a single long-knife, unpatterned. Now, if only I knew more about that damned Thelomen Toblakai...
    Of course, the High Mage named Bellurdan Skullcrusher was dead.
    Cycles indeed. And now this House of Chains. The damned Crippled God —
    You damned fool, Cotillion. You were there at the last Chaining, weren't you? You should have stuck a knife in the bastard right there and then.
    Now, I wonder, was Bellurdan there as well?
    Oh, damn, I forgot to ask what happened to that Pardu ghost-slayer ...
     
    The road that wound southwest out of G'danisban had been worn down to the underlying cobbles. Clearly, the siege had gone on so long that the small city that fed it was growing gaunt. The besieged were probably faring worse. B'ridys had been carved into a cliffside, a long-standing tradition in the odhans surrounding the Holy Desert. There was no formal, constructed approach – not even steps, nor handholds, cut into the stone – and the tunnels behind the fortifications reached deep. Within those tunnels, springs supplied water. Kalam had only seen B'ridys from the outside, long abandoned by its original inhabitants, suggesting that the springs had dried up. And while such strongholds contained vast storage chambers, there was little chance
that the Malazans who'd fled to it had found those chambers supplied.
    The poor bastards were probably starving.
    Kalam walked the road in the gathering dusk. He saw no-one else on the track, and suspected that the supply trains would not set out from G'danisban until the fall of night, to spare their draught animals the heat. Already, the road had begun its climb, twisting onto the sides of the hills.
    The assassin had left his horse with Cotillion in the Shadow Realm. For the tasks ahead, stealth, not speed, would prove his greatest challenge. Besides, Raraku was hard on horses. Most of the outlying sources of water would have been long since fouled, in anticipation of the Adjunct's army. He knew of a few secret ones, however, which would of necessity have been kept untainted.
    This land, Kalam realized, was in itself a land under siege – and the enemy had yet to arrive. Sha'ik had drawn the Whirlwind close, a tactic that suggested to the assassin a certain element of fear. Unless, of course, Sha'ik was deliberately playing against expectations. Perhaps she simply sought to draw Tavore into a trap, into Raraku, where her power was strongest, where her forces knew the land whilst the enemy did not.
    But there's at least one man in Tavore's army who knows Raraku. And he'd damn well better speak up when the time comes.
    Night had arrived, stars glittering overhead. Kalam pressed on. Burdened beneath a pack heavy with food and waterskins, he continued to sweat as the air chilled. Reaching the summit of yet another hill, he discerned the glow of the besiegers' camp beneath the ragged horizon's silhouette. From the cliffside itself there was no light at all.
    He continued on.
     
    It was midmorning before he arrived at the camp. Tents, wagons, stone-ringed firepits, arrayed haphazardly in a
rough semicircle before the rearing cliff-face with its smoke-blackened fortress. Heaps of rubbish surrounded the area, latrine pits overflowing and reeking in the heat. As he made his way down the track, Kalam studied the situation. He judged that there were about five hundred besiegers, many of them – given their uniforms – originally part of Malazan garrisons, but of local blood. There had