A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 2

ivory and dhenrabi oil from their tundra homelands, and it seemed they had brought the chill winds with them ... or perhaps the unseemly weather that had come to these warm climes hinted of something darker. A Jaghut, hidden in some fasthold, stirring the cauldron of Omtose Phellack. Much more of this and the reefs would die, and with them all the creatures that depended on them.
    A breath of unease fluttered through the Onrack who was flesh and blood. But he had stepped aside. No longer a bonecaster for his clan – Absin Tholai was far superior in the hidden arts, after all, and more inclined to the hungry ambition necessary among those who followed the Path of Tellann. All too often, Onrack had found his mind drawn to other things.
    To raw beauty, such as he saw before him now. He was not one for fighting, for rituals of destruction. He was always reluctant to dance in the deeper recesses of the caves, where the drums pounded and the echoes rolled through flesh and bone as if one was lying in the path of a stampeding herd of ranag – a herd such as the one Onrack had blown onto the cave walls around them. His mouth bitter with spit, charcoal and ochre, the backs of his hands stained where they had blocked the spray from his lips, defining the shapes on the stone. Art was done in solitude, images fashioned without light, on unseen walls, when the
rest of the clan slept in the outer caverns. And it was a simple truth, that Onrack had grown skilled in the sorcery of paint out of that desire to be apart, to be alone.
    Among a people where solitude was as close to a crime as possible. Where to separate was to weaken. Where the very breaking of vision into its components – from seeing to observing, from resurrecting memory and reshaping it beyond the eye's reach, onto walls of stone – demanded a fine-edged, potentially deadly propensity.
    A poor bonecaster. Onrack, you were never what you were meant to be. And when you broke the unwritten covenant and painted a truthful image of a mortal Imass, when you trapped that lovely, dark woman in time, there in the cavern no-one was meant to find . . . ah, then you fell to the wrath of kin. Of Logros himself, and the First Sword.
    But he remembered the expression on the young face of Onos T'oolan, when he had first looked upon the painting of his sister. Wonder and awe, and a resurgence of an abiding love – Onrack was certain that he had seen such in the First Sword's face, was certain that others had, as well, though of course none spoke of it. The law had been broken, and would be answered with severity.
    He never knew if Kilava had herself gone to see the painting; had never known if she had been angered, or had seen sufficient to understand the blood of his own heart that had gone into that image.
    But that is the last memory I now come to.
    'Your silences,' Trull Sengar muttered, 'always send shivers through me, T'lan Imass.'
    'The night before the Ritual,' Onrack replied. 'Not far from this place where we now stand. I was to have been banished from my tribe. I had committed a crime to which there was no other answer. Instead, events eclipsed the clans. Four Jaghut tyrants had risen and had formed a compact. They sought to destroy this land – as indeed they have.'
    The Tiste Edur said nothing, perhaps wondering what,
precisely, had been destroyed. Along the river there were irrigation ditches, and strips of rich green crops awaiting the season's turn. Roads and farmsteads, the occasional temple, and only to the southwest, along that horizon, did the broken ridge of treeless bluffs mar the scene.
    'I was in the cavern – in the place of my crime,' Onrack continued after a moment. 'In darkness, of course. My last night, I'd thought, among my own kind. Though in truth I was already alone, driven from the camp to this final place of solitude. And then someone came. A touch. A body, warm. Soft beyond belief – no, not my wife, she had been among the first to shun me, for what I had done, for the betrayal it had meant. No, a woman unknown to me in the darkness ...'
    Was it her? I will never know. She was gone in the morning, gone from all of us, even as the Ritual was proclaimed and the clans gathered. She defied the call – no, more horrible yet, she had killed her own kin, all but Onos himself. He had managed to drive her off – the truest measure of his extraordinary martial prowess.
    Was it her? Was there blood unseen on her hands? That dried, crumbled powder I