A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 3

tangled and snarled, rife with frustration, as if it
lived with the sole purpose of denying passage. The
bedrock was close to the surface, a battered purple and
black rock, shot through in places with long veins of
quartzite, yet its surface was bent, tilted and folded, forming
high-walled basins, sinkholes and ravines filled with exfoliated
slabs sheathed in slick, emerald-green moss.
Tree-falls crowded these depressions, the black spruce's
bark rough as sharkskin and the needleless, web-thick
branches harsh as claws and unyielding.
    Spears of sunlight reached down here and there, throwing
motes of intense colour into an otherwise gloomy,
cavernous world.
    Towards dusk, Boatfinder led them to a treacherous
scree, up which he scrambled. Karsa and Samar Dev, leading
their horses, found the climb perilous, every foothold
less certain than the last – moss giving way like rotted skin
to expose sharp-edged angular rock and deep holes, any one
of which could have snapped a horse-leg.
    Sodden with grimy sweat, scratched and scraped, Samar
Dev finally reached the summit, turning to guide her horse
the last few steps. Before them wound more or less flat
bedrock, grey with the skin of lichen. From modest
depressions here and there rose white and jack pines, the
occasional straggly oak, fringed in juniper and swaths of
blueberry and wintergreen bushes. Sparrow-sized dragonflies
darted through spinning clouds of smaller insects in
the fading sunlight.
    Boatfinder gestured northward. 'This path leads to a
lake. We camp there.'
    They set off.
    No higher ground was visible in any direction, and as the
elongated basolith twisted and turned, flanked every now
and then by slightly lower platforms and snags, Samar Dev
quickly realized how easy it would be to get lost in this wild
land. The path bifurcated ahead and, approaching the
junction, Boatfinder strode along the east edge, looking
down for a time, then chose the ridge on the right.
    Matching his route, Samar Dev glanced over the edge
and saw what he had been searching for, a sinuous line of
smallish boulders lying on a shelf of stone slightly below
them, the pattern creating something like a snake, the head
consisting of a wedge-shaped, flattened rock, while at the
other end the last stone of the tail was no bigger than her
thumbnail. Lichen covered the stones, bunching round
each one to suggest that the trail-marker was very old.
There was nothing obvious in the petroform that would
make the choice of routes clear, although the snake's head
was aligned in the direction they were walking.
    'Boatfinder,' she called out, 'how is it that you read this
serpent of boulders?'
    He glanced back at her. 'A snake is away from the heart.
A turtle is the heart's path.'
    'All right, then why aren't they on this higher ground, so
you don't have to look for them?'
    'When the black grain is carried south, we are burdened
– neither turtle nor snake must lose shape or pattern. We
run these stone roads. Burdened.'
    'Where do you take the harvest?'
    'To our gather camps on the plains. Each band. We
gather the harvest. Into one. And divide it, so that each
band has sufficient grain. Lakes and rivers and their shores
cannot be trusted. Some harvest yields true. Other harvest
yields weak. As water rises and as water falls. It is not the
same. The flat-rock seeks to be level, across all the world,
but it cannot, and so water rises and water falls. We do not
kneel before inequity, else we ourselves discard fairness and
knife finds knife.'
    'Old rules to deal with famine,' Samar said, nodding.
    'Rules in the frozen time.'
    Karsa Orlong looked at Samar Dev. 'What is this frozen
time, witch?'
    'The past, Teblor.'
    She watched his eyes narrow thoughtfully, then he
grunted and said, 'And the unfound time is the future,
meaning that now is the flowing time—'
    'Yes!' Boatfinder cried. 'You speak life's very secret!'
    Samar Dev pulled herself into the saddle – on this ridge
they could ride their horses – carefully. She watched Karsa
Orlong follow suit, as a strange stillness filled her being.
Born, she realized, of Boatfinder's words. 'Life's very secret.'
This flowing time not yet frozen and only now found out of the
unfound. 'Boatfinder, the Iron Prophet came to you long
ago – in the frozen time – yet he spoke to you of the
unfound time.'
    'Yes, you understand, witch. Iskar Jarak speaks but one
language, yet within it is each and all. He is the Iron
Prophet. The King.'
    'Your king,