A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 3

once before, and that was when Dassem Ultor died.'
    Gods below, must I witness this tonight?
    'It's what I get,' Braven Tooth muttered, head down once
more, 'for believin' everything I hear.'
    Banaschar frowned at the man opposite him. Now what
does that mean?
    The pitcher of ale arrived, as if conjured by their silent
desires, and Banaschar, relieved of further contemplation –
and every other demanding stricture of thought – settled
back, content to weather yet another night.
    'Aye, Master (or Mistress), he sat with them veterans, pretending
he belonged, but really he's just an imposter. Sat there
all night, until Coop had to carry him out. Where is he now?
Why, in his smelly, filthy room, dead to the world. Yes indeed,
Banaschar is dead to the world.'
     
    The rain descended in torrents, streaming over the battlements,
down along the blood-gutters, and the cloud
overhead had lowered in the past twenty heartbeats,
swallowing the top of the old tower. The window Pearl
looked through had once represented the pinnacle of island
technology, a fusing of sand to achieve a bubbled, mottled
but mostly transparent glass. Now, a century later, its
surface was patinated in rainbow patterns, and the world
beyond was patchy, like an incomplete mosaic, the tesserae
melting in some world-consuming fire. Although sight of
the flames eluded Pearl, he knew, with fearful certainty,
that they were there, and no amount of rain from the skies
could change that.
    It had been flames, after all, that had destroyed his
world. Flames that took her, the only woman he had ever
loved. And there had been no parting embrace, no words of
comfort and assurance exchanged. No, just that edgy dance
round each other, and neither he nor Lostara had seemed
capable of deciding whether that dance was desire or spite.
    Even here, behind this small window and the thick stone
walls, he could hear the battered, encrusted weather vane
somewhere overhead, creaking and squealing in the buffeting
gusts of wind assailing Mock's Hold. And he and
Lostara had been no different from that weather vane,
spinning, tossed this way and that, helpless victim to forces
ever beyond their control. Beyond, even, their comprehension.
And didn't that sound convincing? Hardly.
    The Adjunct had sent them on a quest, and when its
grisly end arrived, Pearl had realized that the entire journey
had been but a prelude – as far as his own life was concerned
– and that his own quest yet awaited him. Maybe it
had been simple enough – the object of his desire would
proclaim to his soul the consummation of that quest.
Maybe she had been what he sought. But Pearl was not
certain of that, not any more. Lostara Yil was dead, and that
which drove him, hounded him, was unabated. Was in fact
growing.
    Hood take this damned, foul city anyway. Why must
imperial events ever converge here? Because, he answered
himself, Genabackis had Pale. Korel had the Stormwall. Seven Cities has Y'Ghatan. In the heart of the Malazan
Empire, we have Malaz City. Where it began, so it returns,
again and again. And again. Festering sores that never heal, and
when the fever rises, the blood wells forth, sudden, a deluge.
    He imagined that blood sweeping over the city below,
climbing the cliff-side, lapping against the very stones of
Mock's Hold. Would it rise higher?
    'It is my dream,' said the man sitting cross-legged in the
room behind him.
    Pearl did not turn. 'What is?'
    'Not understanding this reluctance of yours, Claw.'
    'I assure you,' Pearl said, 'the nature of my report to the
Empress will upend this tidy cart of yours. I was there, I
saw—'
    'You saw what you wanted to see. No witness in truth but
myself, regarding the events now being revisited. Revised,
yes? As all events are, for such is the exercise of quillclawed
carrion who title themselves historians. Revisiting,
thirsting for a taste, just a taste, of what it is to know
trauma in one's quailing soul. Pronouncing with authority,
yes, on that in which the proclaimant in truth has no
authority. I alone survive as witness. I alone saw, breathed
the air, tasted the treachery.'
    Pearl would not turn to face the fat, unctuous man. He
dare not, lest his impulse overwhelm him – an impulse to
lift an arm, to flex the muscles of his wrist just so, and
launch a poison-sheathed quarrel into the flabby neck of
Mallick Rel, the Jhistal priest of Mael.
    He knew he would likely fail. He would be dead before
he finished raising that arm. This was Mallick