A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

into the air birds
from a nearby swath of knee-high trees, and as they raced
skyward they spun in a half-circle over the head of Onrack
the Broken. At their cries, at the swarm of tiny shadows
darting around him, the warrior looked up, then halted.
    Quick Ben saw Onrack's chest swell with an indrawn
breath that seemed without end.
    The head then tilted down once more.
    And the wizard stared into a face of smooth, wind-burnished
skin. Eyes of green glittered beneath the heavy
ridge of the brow. Twin streams of cold air then plumed
down from Onrack's broad, flattened, oft-broken nose.
    From Trull Sengar, 'Onrack? By the Sisters, Onrack!'
    The small eyes, buried in epicanthic folds, shifted. A low,
reverberating voice rumbled from the flesh and blood
warrior. 'Trull Sengar. Is this . . . is this mortality?'
    The Tiste Edur drew a step closer. 'You don't remember?
How it feels to be alive?'
    'I – I . . . yes.' A sudden look of wonder in that heavy,
broadly featured face. 'Yes.' Another deep breath, then a
gust that was nearly savage in its exultation. The strange
gaze fixed on Quick Ben once more. 'Wizard, is this
illusion? Dream? A journey of my spirit?'
    'I don't think so. I mean, I think it's real enough.'
    'Then . . . this realm. It is Tellann.'
    'Maybe. I'm not sure.'
    Trull Sengar was suddenly on his knees, and Quick Ben
saw tears streaming down the Tiste Edur's lean, dusky face.
    The burly, muscled warrior before them, still wearing the
rotted remnants of fur, slowly looked round at the withered
landscape of open tundra. 'Tellann,' he whispered.
' Tellann. '
    'When the world was young,' Redmask began, 'these plains
surrounding us were higher, closer to the sky. The earth was
as a thin hide, covering thick flesh that was nothing but
frozen wood and leaves. The rotted corpse of ancient
forests. Beneath summer sun, unseen rivers flowed through
that forest, between every twig, every crushed-down
branch. And with each summer, the sun's heat was greater,
the season longer, and the rivers flowed, draining the vast
buried forest. And so the plains descended, settled as the
dried-out forest crumbled to dust, and with the rains more
water would sink down, sweeping away that dust, southward,
northward, eastward, westward, following valleys,
rising to join streams. All directions, ever flowing away.'
    Masarch sat silent with the other warriors – a score or
more now, gathering to hear the ancient tale. None, however
– Masarch included – had heard it told in quite this
way, the words emerging from the red-scaled mask – from a
warrior who rarely spoke yet who spoke now with ease,
matching the cadence of elders with perfect precision.
    The K'Chain Che'Malle stood nearby, hulking and
motionless like a pair of grotesque statues. Yet Masarch
imagined that they were listening, even as he and his
companions were.
    'The land left the sky. The land settled onto stone, the
very bone of the world. In this manner, the land changed
to echo the cursed sorceries of the Shamans of the Antlers,
the ones who kneel among boulders, the worshippers of
stone, the weapon-makers.' He paused, then said, 'This was
no accident. What I have just described is but one truth.
There is another.' A longer hesitation, then a long, drawn-out
sigh. 'Shamans of the Antlers, gnarled as tree roots,
those few left, those few still haunting our dreams even as
they haunt this ancient plain. They hide in cracks in the
world's bone. Sometimes their bodies are all but gone, until
only their withered faces stare out from those cracks,
challenging eternity as befits their terrible curse.'
    Masarch was not alone in shivering in the pre-dawn
chill, at the images Redmask's words conjured. Every child
knew of those twisted, malevolent spirits, the husks of
shamans long, long dead, yet unable to truly die. Rolling
stones into strange patterns beneath star-strewn night skies,
chewing with their teeth the faces of boulders to make
frightening scenes that only appeared at dusk or dawn,
when the sun's light was newborn or fading into death –
and far more often the boulders were so angled that it was
at the moments of dusk that the deep magic was awakened,
the images rising into being from what had seemed random
pecules in the stone. Magic to murder the wind in that
place—
    'In the time before the plains descended, the shamans
and their dread followers made music at the sun's dying, on
the night of its shortest passage, and at other holy times
before the snows came.