A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 2

little in this world that
much pleased him any more. Malazans. His failing body. The blind insanity of power so brutally evinced in the Whirlwind Goddess. In his mind, the world was plunging into chaos, and all that it had been – all that he had been – was trapped in the past.
    But the past was not dead. It merely slept. The perfect, measured resurrection of old patterns could achieve a rebirth. Not a rebirth such as had taken Sha'ik – that had been nothing more than the discarding of one, badly worn vessel for a new one not nearly so battered. No, the rebirth Febryl imagined was far more profound.
    He had once served the Holy Falah'd Enqura. The Holy City of Ugarat and its host of tributary cities had been in the midst of a renaissance. Eleven great schools of learning were thriving in Ugarat. Knowledge long lost was being rediscovered. The flower of a great civilization had turned to face the sun, had begun to open.
    The Mezla and their implacable legions had destroyed ... everything. Ugarat had fallen to Dassem Ultor. The schools were assailed by soldiers, only to discover, to their
fury, that their many riches and texts had, along with philosophers and academics, vanished. Enqura had well understood the Mezla thirst for knowledge, the Emperor's lust for foreign secrets, and the city's Holy Protector would give them nothing. Instead, he had commanded Febryl, a week before the arrival of the Malazan armies, to shut down the schools, to confiscate the hundred thousand scrolls and bound volumes, the ancient relics of the First Empire, and the teachers and scholars themselves. By the Protector's decree, Ugarat's coliseum became the site of a vast conflagration, as everything was burned, destroyed. The scholars were crucified – those that did not fling themselves on the pyre in a fit of madness and grief – and their bodies dumped into the pits containing the smashed relics just outside the city wall.
    Febryl had done as he had been commanded. His last gesture of loyalty, of pure, unsullied courage. The terrible act was necessary. Enqura's denial was perhaps the greatest defiance in the entire war. One for which the Holy Protector paid with his life, when the horror that was said to have struck Dassem Ultor upon hearing of the deed transformed into rage.
    Febryl's loss of faith had come in the interval, and it had left him a broken man. In following Enqura's commands, he had so outraged his mother and father – both learned nobles in their own right – that they had disowned him to his face. And Febryl had lost his mind that night, recovering his sanity with dawn staining the horizon, to find that he had murdered his parents. And their servants. That he had unleashed sorcery to flay the flesh from the guards. That such power had poured through him as to leave him old beyond his years, wrinkled and withered, his bones brittle and bent.
    The old man hobbling out through the city gate that day was beneath notice. Enqura searched for him, but Febryl succeeded in evading the Holy Protector, in leaving the man to his fate.
    Unforgivable.
    A hard word, a truth harder than stone. But Febryl was never able to decide to which crime it applied. Three betrayals, or two? Was the destruction of all that knowledge – the slaying of all those scholars and teachers – was it, as the Mezla and other Falad'han later pronounced – the foulest deed of all? Fouler even than the T'lan Imass rising to slaughter the citizens of Aren? So much so that Enqura's name has become a curse for Mezla and natives of Seven Cities alike? Three, not two?
    And the bitch knew. She knew his every secret. It had not been enough to change his name; not enough that he had the appearance of an old man, when the High Mage Iltara, most trusted servant to Enqura, had been young, tall and lusted after by both men and women? No, she had obliterated, seemingly effortlessly, his every barricade, and plundered the pits of his soul.
    Unforgivable.
    No possessor of his secrets could be permitted to live. He refused to be so ... vulnerable. To anyone. Even Sha'ik. Especially Sha'ik.
    And so she must be removed. Even if it means dealing with Mezla. He had no illusions about Korbolo Dom. The Napan's ambitions – no matter what claims he made at present – went far beyond this rebellion. No, his ambitions were imperial. Somewhere to the south, Mallick Rel, the Jhistal priest of Elder Mael, was trekking towards Aren, there to surrender himself. He would, in