A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

sucked in with desperate gasps.
    Down onto his hands and knees. On the rocky ground,
lichen and mosses. On either side, a thinly spread forest in
miniature – he saw oaks, spruce, alder, old and twisted and
none higher than his hip. Dun-hued birds flitted among
small green leaves. Midges closed in, sought to alight – but
he was a ghost here, an apparition – thus far. But this is where we must go.
    The wizard slowly lifted his head, then climbed to his
feet.
    He stood in a shallow, broad valley, the dwarf forest
covering the basin behind him and climbing the slopes on
all sides, strangely park-like in the generous spacing of the
trees. And they swarmed with birds. From somewhere
nearby came the sound of trickling water. Overhead,
dragonflies with wingspans to match that of crows darted in
their uncanny precision, feeding on midges. Beyond this
feeding frenzy the sky was cerulean, almost purple near the
horizons. Tatters of elongated clouds ran in high ribbons,
like the froth of frozen waves on some celestial shore.
    Primordial beauty – tundra's edge. Gods, I hate tundra. But so be it, as kings and queens say when it's all swirled down the piss-hole. Nothing to be done for it. Here we must come .
    Trull Sengar started at the sudden coughing – Quick Ben
had reappeared, half bent over, tears streaming from his
eyes and something like smoke drifting from his entire
body. He hacked, then spat and slowly straightened.
    Grinning.
    The proprietor of the Harridict Tavern was a man under
siege. An affliction that had reached beyond months and
into years. His establishment, once devoted to serving the
island prison's guards, had since been usurped along with
the rest of the port town following the prisoners' rebellion.
Chaos now ruled, ageing honest folk beyond their years.
But the money was good.
    He had taken to joining Captain Shurq Elalle and
Skorgen Kaban the Pretty at their preferred table in the
corner during lulls in the mayhem, when the serving
wenches and scull-boys rushed about with more purpose
than panic, dull exhaustion replacing abject terror in their
glazed eyes – and all seemed, for the moment, right and
proper.
    There was a certain calm with this here captain – a pirate if the Errant pisses straight and he ain't missed yet – and a
marked elegance and civility to her manner that told the
proprietor that she had stolen not just coins from the highborn
but culture as well, which marked her as a smart, sharp
woman.
    He believed he was falling in love, hopeless as that was.
Stress of the profession and too much sampling of inland
ales had left him – in his honest, not unreasonably harsh
judgement – a physical wreck to match his moral lassitude
which on good days he called his business acumen. Protruding belly round as a stew pot and damned near as
greasy. Bulbous nose – one up on Skorgen there – with
burst veins, hair-sprouting blackheads and swirling bristles
that reached down from the nostrils to entwine with his
moustache – once a fashion among hirsute men but no
more, alas. Watery close-set eyes, the whites so long yellow
he was no longer sure they hadn't always been that colour.
A few front teeth were left, four in all, one up top, three
below. Better than his wife, then, who'd lost her last two
stumbling into a wall while draining an ale casket – the
brass spigot knocking the twin tombstones clean out of
their sockets, and if she hadn't then choked on the damned
things she'd still be with him, bless her. Times she was sober
she'd work like a horse and bite just as hard and both
talents did her well working the tables.
    But life was lonely these days, wasn't it just, then in
saunters this glorious, sultry pirate captain. A whole sight
better than those foreigners, walking in and out of the
Brullyg Shake's Palace as if it was their ancestral home,
then spending their nights here, hunched down at the
games table – the biggest table in the whole damned
tavern, if you mind, with a single jug of ale to last the entire
night no matter how many of them crowded round their
strange, foreign, seemingly endless game.
    Oh, he'd demanded a cut as was his right and they paid
over peaceably enough – even though he could make no
sense of the rules of play. And how those peculiar
rectangular coins went back and forth! But the tavern's
take wasn't worth it. A regular game of Bale's Scoop on any
given night would yield twice as much for the house. And
the ale quaffed – a player didn't need a sharp