A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 3

compound.
More chaotic scurrying below, dust twisting in the sunspeared
air. Beyond the palace wall, the bleached rooftops
of Y'Ghatan, clothes drying in the sun, awnings rippling in
the wind, domes and the cylindrical, flat-topped storage
buildings called maethgara that housed in vast containers
the olive oil for which the city and its outlying groves were
renowned. In the very centre of the city rose the eightsided,
monstrously buttressed Temple of Scalissara, with its
inner dome a mottled hump of remnant gold-leaf and green
copper tiles liberally painted by bird droppings.
    Scalissara, Matron Goddess of Olives, the city's own,
cherished protector, now in abject disrepute. Too many
conquests she could not withstand, too many gates battered
down, walls pounded into rubble. While the city itself
seemed capable of ever rising again from the dust of
destruction, Scalissara had revealed a more finite number
of possible resurrections. And, following the last conquest,
she did not return to pre-eminence. Indeed, she did not
return at all.
    Now, the temple belonged to the Queen of Dreams.
    A foreign goddess. Corabb scowled. Well, maybe not
entirely foreign, but still ...
    The great statues of Scalissara that once rose from the
corners of the city's outer fortifications, marble arms plump
and fleshy, upraised, an uprooted olive tree in one hand, a
newborn babe in the other, the umbilical cord wrapped
snake-like up her forearm, then across and down, into her
womb – the statues were gone. Destroyed in the last conflagration.
Now, on three of the four corners, only the
pedestal remained, bare feet broken clean above the ankles,
and on the fourth even that was gone.
    In the days of her supremacy, every foundling child was
named after her if female, and, male or female, every abandoned
child was taken into the temple to be fed, raised and
schooled in the ways of the Cold Dream, a mysterious ritual
celebrating a kind of divided spirit or something – the
esoterica of cults were not among Corabb's intellectual
strengths, but Leoman had been one such foundling child,
and had spoken once or twice of such things, when
wine and durhang loosened his tongue. Desire and
necessity, the war within a mortal's spirit, this was at the
heart of the Cold Dream. Corabb did not understand much
of that. Leoman had lived but a few years under the
guidance of the temple's priestesses, before his wild
indulgences saw him expelled into the streets. And from the
streets, out into the Odhans, to live among the desert tribes,
and so to be forged by the sun and blowing sands of Raraku
into the greatest warrior Seven Cities had ever beheld. At
least in Corabb's lifetime. The Fala'dhan of the Holy Cities
possessed grand champions in their day, of course, but they
were not leaders, they had nothing of the wiles necessary for
command. Besides, Dassem Ultor and his First Sword had cut
them down, every one of them, and that was that.
    Leoman had sealed Y'Ghatan, imprisoning within its
new walls an emperor's ransom in olive oil. The maethgara
were filled to bursting and the merchants and their guilds
were shrieking their outrage, although less publicly since
Leoman, in a fit of irritation, had drowned seven representatives
in the Grand Maeth attached to the palace.
    Drowned them in their very own oil. Priests and witches
were now petitioning for beakers of that fell amber liquid.
    Dunsparrow had been given command of the city
garrison, a mob of drunken, lazy thugs. The first tour of the
barracks had revealed the military base as little more than
a raucous harem, thick with smoke and pool-eyed,
prepubescent boys and girls staggering about in a nightmare
world of sick abuse and slavery. Thirty officers were executed
that first day, the most senior one by Leoman's own hand.
The children had been gathered up and redistributed among
the temples of the city with the orders to heal the damage and
purge what was possible of their memories. The garrison
soldiers had been given the task of scouring clean every brick
and tile of the barracks, and Dunsparrow had then begun
drilling them to counter Malazan siege tactics, with which
she seemed suspiciously familiar.
    Corabb did not trust her. It was as simple as that. Why
would she choose to fight against her own people? Only a
criminal, an outlaw, would do that, and how trustworthy
was an outlaw? No, there were likely horrific murders and
betrayals crowding her sordid past, and now here she was,
spreading her legs beneath