A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 3

'Inverted in a
most unholy fashion, you might say. No, what I seek now is
to witness. Do you understand? To witness!' And with that
the girl spun round and sped off.
    Swearing, the cutter drove heels into his mount's flanks,
hard on the girl's trail.
     
    Paran rode at a canter down the main avenue that seemed
more a processional route into a necropolis than
G'danisban's central artery, until he saw ahead a mob of
figures fronted by a single man – in his hands a farmer's
scythe from which dangled a blood-crusted horse-tail. The
motley army – perhaps thirty or forty in all – looked as if
they had been recruited from a paupers' burial pit. Covered
in sores and weals, limbs twisted, faces slack, the eyes
glittering with madness. Some carried swords, others
butcher's cleavers and knives, or spears, shepherd's crooks
or stout branches. Most seemed barely able to stand.
    Such was not the case with their leader, the one the girl
had called Brokeface. The man's visage was indeed pinched
misshapen, flesh and bones folded in at right lower jaw,
then across the face, diagonally, to the right cheekbone. He
had been bitten, the captain realized, by a horse.
    ... your horse first. For he hates such creatures ...
    In that ruined face, the eyes, misaligned in the sunken
pits of their sockets, burned bright as they fixed on Paran's
own. Something like a smile appeared on the collapsed
cave of the man's mouth.
    'Her breath is not sweet enough for you? You are strong
to so resist her. She would know, first, who you are. Before,'
his smile twisted further, 'before we kill you.'
    'The Grey Goddess does not know who I am,' Paran said,
'for this reason. From her, I have turned away. From me she
can compel nothing.'
    Brokeface flinched. 'There is a beast ... in your eyes.
Reveal yourself, Malazan. You are not as the others.'
    'Tell her,' Paran said, 'I come to make an offering.'
    The head cocked to one side. 'You seek to appease the
Grey Goddess?'
    'In a manner of speaking. But I should tell you, we have
very little time.'
    'Very little? Why?'
    'Take me to her and I will explain. But quickly.'
    'She does not fear you.'
    'Good.'
    The man studied Paran for a moment longer, then he
gestured with his scythe. 'Follow, then.'
     
    There had been plenty of altars before which she had knelt
over the years, and from them, one and all, Torahaval Delat
had discovered something she now held to be true. All that
is worshipped is but a reflection of the worshipper. A single
god, no matter how benign, is tortured into a multitude of
masks, each shaped by the secret desires, hungers, fears and
joys of the individual mortal, who but plays a game of
obsequious approbation.
    Believers lunged into belief. The faithful drowned in
their faith.
    And there was another truth, one that seemed on the
surface to contradict the first one. The gentler and kinder
the god, the more harsh and cruel its worshippers, for they
hold to their conviction with taut certainty, febrile in its
extremity, and so cannot abide dissenters. They will
kill, they will torture, in that god's name. And see in themselves
no conflict, no matter how bloodstained their
hands.
    Torahaval's hands were bloodstained, figuratively now
but once most literally. Driven to fill some vast, empty
space in her soul, she had lunged, she had drowned; she had
looked for some external hand of salvation – seeking what
she could not find in herself. And, whether benign and
love-swollen or brutal and painful, every god's touch had
felt the same to her – barely sensed through the numbed
obsession that was her need.
    She had stumbled onto this present path the same way
she had stumbled onto so many others, yet this time, it
seemed there could be no going back. Every alternative,
every choice, had vanished before her eyes. The first
strands of the web had been spun more than fourteen
months ago, in her chosen home city Karashimesh, on the
shores of the inland Karas Sea – a web she had since, in a
kind of lustful wilfulness, allowed to close ever tighter.
    The sweet lure from the Grey Goddess, in spirit now the
poisoned lover of the Chained One – the seduction of the
flawed had proved so very inviting. And deadly. For us both. This was, she realized as she trailed Bridthok down the
Aisle of Glory leading to the transept, no more than
the spreading of legs before an inevitable, half-invited rape.
Regret would come later if at all.
    Perhaps, then, a most appropriate end.
    For this foolish woman, who never