A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 3

'Hurlochel,' he said, 'attach
yourself as liaison to Commander Mathok. Commander,
you are now a Fist, and Hurlochel will require a written
compilation of your officers or potential officers. The
Malazan army employs mounted troops in units of fifty, a
hundred and three hundred. Adjust your command
structure accordingly.'
    'It shall be done, High Fist.'
    'Fist Rythe Bude, see the Host turned round. And Noto
Boil, find me Ormulogun.'
    'Again?' the healer asked.
    'Go.'
    Yes, again. I think I need a new card. I think I'll call it
Salvation. At the moment it is in the House of Chains' sphere
of influence. But something tells me it will claw free of that
eventually. Such a taint will not last. This card is an Unaligned.
In every sense of the word. Unaligned, and likely destined to be
the most dangerous force in the world.
    Damn, I wish I was more ruthless. That Sha'ik Reborn, and
all her twisted followers – I should ride up there and slaughter
them all – which is precisely what Mathok wanted me to do.
    To do what he himself couldn't – we're the same in that.
In our ... weakness.
    No wonder I already like the man.
     
    As Hurlochel led his horse alongside Mathok, back up
towards the desert warriors on the ridge, the outrider
glanced over at the new Fist. 'Sir, when you spoke of Sha'ik
Reborn, you said something ... about barely recognizing
her ...'
    'I did. She was one of Sha'ik's adopted daughters, in
Raraku. Of course, as Leoman and I well knew, even that one
was ... not as she seemed. Oh, chosen by the Whirlwind
Goddess, well enough, but she was not a child of the desert.'
    'She wasn't?'
    'No, she was Malazan.'
    'What?'
    The commander's companion grunted and spat. 'Mezla,
yes. And the Adjunct never knew – or so we heard. She cut
down a helmed, armoured woman. And then walked away.
The corpse then vanished. A Mezla killing a Mezla – oh
how the gods must have laughed ...'
    'Or,' said Hurlochel in a low voice, 'wept.' He thought to
ask more questions regarding this new Sha'ik Reborn, but a
succession of tragic images, variants on that fated duel at
Raraku, before the seas rose from the desert, raced through
his mind. And so he rode in silence up the slope, beside the
warriors, and before long was thoroughly consumed with
the necessities of reorganizing Mathok's horse-warriors.
    So preoccupied, he did not report his conversation to the
High Fist.
    Three leagues from the City of the Fallen, Paran turned
the Host away, and set them on their path for distant Aren.
The road that would take them from Seven Cities.
    Never to return.
     
    Saur Bathrada and Kholb Harat had walked into an upland
village four leagues inland from the harbour city of Sepik.
Leading twenty Edur warriors and forty Letherii marines,
they had gathered the enslaved degenerate mixed-bloods,
ritually freeing the uncomprehending primitives from their
symbolic chains, then chaining them in truth for the march
back to the city and the Edur ships. Following this, Saur
and Kholb had driven the Sepik humans into a sheep pen
where a bonfire was built. One by one, mothers were forced
to throw their babes and children into the roaring flames.
Those women were then raped and, finally, beheaded.
Husbands, brothers and fathers were made to watch. When
they alone remained alive, they were systematically dismembered
and left, armless and legless, to bleed out among
bleating, blood-splashed sheep.
    A scream had been birthed that day in the heart of
Ahlrada Ahn, and it had not ceased its desperate, terrible
cry. Rhulad's shadow covered the Tiste Edur, no matter how
distant that throne and the insane creature seated upon it.
And in that shadow roiled a nightmare from which there
could be no awakening.
    That scream was echoed in his memories of that day, the
shrieks wrung from the throats of burning children,
the writhing forms in their bundled flames, the fires
reflected on the impassive faces of Edur warriors. Even the
Letherii had turned away, overcome with horror. Would
that Ahlrada Ahn could have done the same, without
losing face. Instead he stood, one among the many, and
revealed nothing of what raged inside. Raged, breaking ...
everything. Within me, he told himself that night, back in
Sepik where the sounds of slaughter continued beyond the
room he had found, within me, nothing is left standing. On
that night, for the first time ever, he considered taking his
own life.
    A statement of weakness. The others would have seen it
in no other way – they could not