A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 3

existence of many gods conveys true
complexity of mortal life. Conversely, the assertion of but one
god leads to a denial of complexity, and encourages the need to
make the world simple. Not the fault of the god, but a crime
committed by its believers.'
    'If a god does not like what is done in its name, then it
should act.'
    'Yet, if each crime committed in its name weakens it ... very
soon, I think, it has no power left and so cannot act, and so,
ultimately, it dies.'
    'You come from a strange world, Greyfrog.'
    'Yes.'
    'I find your story most disturbing.'
    'Yes.'
    'We must undertake a long journey now, Greyfrog.'
    'I am ready, brother.'
    'In the world I know,' L'oric said, 'many gods feed on
blood.'
    'As do many mortals:
    The High Mage nodded. 'Have you said your goodbyes,
Greyfrog?'
    'I have.'
    'Then let us leave this place.'
     
    Filiad appeared at the entrance to the smithy, catching
Barathol's attention. The blacksmith gave two more pumps
of the bellows feeding the forge, then drew off his thick
leather gloves and waved the youth over.
    'The High Mage,' Filiad said, 'he's left. With that giant
toad. I saw it, a hole opening in the air. Blinding yellow
light poured from it, and they just disappeared inside it and
then the hole was gone!'
    Barathol rummaged through a collection of black iron
bars until he found one that looked right for the task he
had in mind. He set it on the anvil. 'Did he leave behind
his horse?'
    'What? No, he led it by the reins.'
    'Too bad.'
    'What do we do now?' Filiad asked.
    'About what?'
    'Well, everything, I guess.'
    'Go home, Filiad.'
    'Really? Oh. All right. I guess. See you later, then.'
    'No doubt,' Barathol said, drawing on the gloves once
more.
    After Filiad left, the blacksmith took up the iron bar
with a set of tongs and thrust the metal into the forge,
pumping one-legged on the floor-bellows. Four months
back, he had used the last of his stolen hoard of Aren coins
on a huge shipment of charcoal; there was just enough left
for this final task.
    T'lan Imass. Nothing but bone and leathery skin. Fast
and deadly, masters of ambush. Barathol had been thinking
for days now about the problem they represented, about
devising a means of dealing with them. For he suspected
he'd meet the bastards again.
    His axe was heavy enough to do damage, if he hit hard
enough. Still, those stone swords were long, tapered to a
point for thrusting. If they stayed outside his reach ...
    To all of that, he thought he had found a solution.
    He pumped some more, until he was satisfied with the
white-hot core in the heart of the forge, and watched as the
bar of iron acquired a cherubic gleam.
     
    'We now follow the snake, which takes us to a gather camp
on the shores of a black grain lake, beyond which we
traverse flat-rock for two days, to another gather camp, the
northernmost one, for all that lies beyond it is both flowing
and unfound.'
    Samar Dev studied the elongated, sinuous line of
boulders on the ledge of bedrock below and to their left.
Skins of grey and green lichen, clumps of skeletal dusty
green moss, studded with red flowers, surrounding each
stone, and beyond that the deeper verdancy of another
kind of moss, soft and sodden. On the path they walked the
bedrock was scoured clean, the granite pink and raw, with
layers falling away from edges in large, flat plates. Here and
there, black lichen the texture of sharkskin spilled out from
fissures and veins. She saw a deer antler lying discarded
from some past rutting season, the tips of its tines gnawed
by rodents, and was reminded how, in the natural world,
nothing goes to waste.
    Dips in the high ground held stands of black spruce, as
many dead as living, while in more exposed sections of the
bedrock low-lying juniper formed knee-high islands
spreading branches over the stone, each island bordered by
shrubs of blueberry and wintergeen. Jackpines stood as lone
sentinels atop rises in the strangely folded, amorphous rock.
    Harsh and forbidding, this was a landscape that would
never yield to human domination. It felt ancient in ways
not matched by any place Samar Dev had seen before, not
even by the wastelands of the Jhag Odhan. It was said that
beneath every manner of surface on this world, whether
sand or sea, floodplain or forest, there was solid rock,
twisted and folded by unseen pressures. But here, all other
possible surfaces had been scoured away, exposing the
veined muscle itself.
    This land suited Karsa Orlong. A warrior scoured clean
of