A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 3

woman,
riding clear of the column, urged her horse into a canter.
    'We'll rest for a while longer here,' Faradan Sort said,
'then resume our march.'
    'We could just wait,' Fiddler said.
    The captain shook her head, but offered no explanation.
     
    The sun settled on the horizon, bleeding red out to the
sides like blood beneath flayed skin. The sky overhead was
raucous with sound and motion as thousands of birds
winged southward. They were high up, mere black specks,
flying without formation, yet their cries reached down in a
chorus of terror.
    To the north, beyond the range of broken, lifeless hills
and steppe-land ribboned by seasonal run-off, the plain
descended to form a white-crusted salt marsh, beyond
which lay the sea. The marsh had once been a modest
plateau, subsiding over millennia as underground streams
and springs gnawed through the limestone. The caves,
once high and vast, were now crushed flat or partially
collapsed, and those cramped remnants were flooded or
packed with silts, sealing in darkness the walls and vaulted
ceilings crowded with paintings, and side chambers still
home to the fossilized bones of Imass.
    Surmounting this plateau there had been a walled settlement,
small and modest, a chaotic array of attached
residences that would have housed perhaps twenty families
at the height of its occupation. The defensive walls were
solid, with no gates, and for the dwellers within, ingress and
egress came via the rooftops and single-pole ladders.
    Yadeth Garath, the first human city, was now little more
than salt-rotted rubble swallowed in silts, buried deep and
unseen beneath the marsh. No history beyond the countless
derivations from its ancient name remained, and of the
lives and deaths and tales of all who had once lived there,
not even bones survived.
    Dejim Nebrahl recalled the fisher folk who had dwelt
upon its ruins, living in their squalid huts on stilts, plying
the waters in their round, hide boats, and walking the
raised wooden platforms that crossed the natural canals
wending through the swamp. They were not descendants of
Yadeth Garath. They knew nothing of what swirled
beneath the black silts, and this itself was an undeniable
truth, that memory withered and died in the end. There
was no single tree of life, no matter how unique and
primary this Yadeth Garath – no, there was a forest,
and time and again, a tree, its bole rotted through, toppled
to swiftly vanish in the airless muck.
    Dejim Nebrahl recalled those fisher folk, the way their
blood tasted of fish and molluscs, dull and turgid and
clouded with stupidity. If man and woman cannot – will
not – remember, then they deserved all that was delivered
upon them. Death, destruction and devastation. This was
no god's judgement – it was the world's, nature's own.
Exacted in that conspiracy of indifference that so terrified
and baffled humankind.
    Lands subside. Waters rush in. The rains come, then
never come. Forests die, rise again, then die once more.
Men and women huddle with their broods in dark rooms in
all their belated begging, and their eyes fill with dumb failure,
and now they are crumbled specks of grey and white in
black silt, motionless as the memory of stars in a long-dead
night sky.
    Exacting nature's judgement, such was Dejim Nebrahl's
purpose. For the forgetful, their very shadows stalk them.
For the forgetful, death ever arrives unexpectedly.
    The T'rolbarahl had returned to the site of Yadeth
Garath, as if drawn by some desperate instinct. Dejim
Nebrahl was starving. Since his clash with the mage near
the caravan, his wanderings had taken him through lands
foul with rotted death. Nothing but bloated, blackened
corpses, redolent with disease. Such things could not feed
him.
    The intelligence within the D'ivers had succumbed to
visceral urgency, a terrible geas that drove him onward on
the path of old memories, of places where he had once fed,
the blood hot and fresh pouring down his throats.
    Kanarbar Belid, now nothing but dust. Vithan Taur, the
great city in the cliff-face – now even the cliff was gone. A
swath of potsherds reduced to gravel was all that remained
of Minikenar, once a thriving city on the banks of a river
now extinct. The string of villages north of Minikenar
revealed no signs that they had ever existed. Dejim
Nebrahl had begun to doubt his own memories.
    Driven on, across the gnawed hills and into the fetid
marsh, seeking yet another village of fisher folk. But he had
been too thorough the last