A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 3

and seeing naught of the stream and the
world that stream reveals. All is in motion, all is in flux.'
    'Like these damned flies,' Scillara muttered.
    Cutter, riding directly ahead, glanced back at her. 'I was
wondering about that,' he said. 'Carrion flies – are we heading
towards a site of battle, do you think? Heboric?'
    He shook his head, amber eyes seeming to flare in the
afternoon light. 'I sense nothing of that. The land ahead is
as you see it.'
    They were approaching a broad basin, dotted with a few
tufts of dead, yellow reeds. The ground itself was almost
white, cracked like a broken mosaic. Some larger mounds
were visible here and there, constructed, it seemed, of
sticks and reeds. Reaching the edge, they drew to a halt.
    Fish bones lay in a heaped carpet along the fringe of the
dead marsh's shoreline, blown there by the winds. On one
of the closer mounds they could see bird bones and the
remnants of eggshells. These wetlands had died suddenly,
in the season of nesting.
    Flies swarmed the basin, swirling about in droning
clouds.
    'Gods below,' Felisin said, 'do we have to cross this?'
    'Shouldn't be too bad,' Heboric said. 'It's not far across.
It'd be dark long before we finish if we try to go round this.
Besides,' he waved at the buzzing flies, 'we haven't even
started to cross yet they've found us, and skirting the basin
won't escape them. At least they're not the biting kind.'
    'Let's just get this over with,' Scillara said.
    Greyfrog bounded down into the basin, as if to blaze a
trail with his opened mouth and snapping tongue.
    Cutter nudged his horse into a trot, then, as flies
swarmed him, a canter.
    The others followed.
     
    Flies alighting like madness on his skin. Heboric squinted
as countless hard, frenzied bodies collided with his face.
The very sunlight had dimmed amidst this chaotic cloud.
Trapped in his sleeves, inside his threadbare leggings and
down the back of his neck – he gritted his teeth, resolving
to weather this minor irritation.
    Balance. Scillara's words disturbed him for some reason –
no, perhaps not her words, but the sentiment they revealed.
Once an acolyte, now rejecting all forms of faith – something
he himself had done, and, despite Treach's
intervention, still sought to achieve. After all, the gods of
war needed no servants beyond the illimitable legions they
always had and always would possess.
    Destriant, what lies beneath this name? Harvester of souls,
possessing the power – and the right – to slay in a god's name.
To slay, to heal, to deliver justice. But justice in whose eyes? I
cannot take a life. Not any more. Never again. You chose
wrong, Treach.
    All these dead, these ghosts ...
    The world was harsh enough – it did not need him and
his kind. There was no end to the fools eager to lead others
into battle, to exult in mayhem and leave behind a turgid,
sobbing wake of misery and suffering and grief.
    He'd had enough.
    Deliverance was all he desired now, his only motive for
staying alive, for dragging these innocents with him to a
blasted, wasted island that had been scraped clean of all life
by warring gods. Oh, they did not need him.
    Faith and zeal for retribution lay at the heart of the true
armies, the fanatics and their malicious, cruel certainties.
Breeding like fly-blow in every community. But worthy tears
come from courage, not cowardice, and those armies, they are
filled with cowards.
    Horses carrying them from the basin, the flies spinning
and swirling in mindless pursuit.
    Onto a track emerging from the old shoreline beside the
remnants of a dock and mooring poles. Deep ruts climbing
a higher beach ridge, from the age when the swamp had
been a lake, the ruts cut ragged by the claws of rainwater
that found no refuge in roots – because the verdancy of
centuries past was gone, cut away, devoured.
    We leave naught but desert in our wake.
    Surmounting the crest, where the road levelled out and
wound drunkenly across a plain flanked by limestone hills,
and in the distance, a third of a league away directly east, a
small, decrepit hamlet. Outbuildings with empty corrals
and paddocks. To one side of the road, near the hamlet's
edge, a half-hundred or more heaped tree-trunks, the wood
grey as stone where fires had not charred it – but it seemed
that even in death, this wood defied efforts at its
destruction.
    Heboric understood that obdurate defiance. Yes, make
yourself useless to humankind. Only thus will you survive, even
when what survives of you