A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

light did not reach, the banks high and steep
evincing the antiquity of this trail to the shore, roots reaching
down witch-braided, gnarled and dripping in the
clammy darkness. Stones snapping beneath hooves,
the gusts of breath from the horses, the muted crackle of
shifting armour. Dawn was still two bells away.
    Blind to the sea. The sea's thirst was ceaseless. The truth
of that could be seen in its endless gnawing of the shore,
could be heard in its hungry voice, could be found in the
bitter poison of its taste. The Shake knew that in the
beginning the world had been nothing but sea, and that in
the end it would be the same. The water rising, devouring
all, and this was an inexorable fate to which the Shake
were helpless witness.
    The shore's battle had ever been the battle of her people.
The Isle, which had once been sacred, had been desecrated,
made a fetid prison by the Letherii. Yet now it is freed once again. Too late. Generations past there had been land
bridges linking the many islands south of the Reach. Now
gone. The Isle itself rose from the sea with high cliffs,
everywhere but the single harbour now. Such was the dying
world.
    Often among the Shake there had been born demon-kissed
children. Some would be chosen by the coven and
taught the Old Ways; the rest would be flung from those
cliffs, down into the thirsty sea. Gift of mortal blood;
momentary, pathetic easing of its need.
    She had run, years ago, for a reason. The noble blood
within her had burned like poison, the barbaric legacy of
her people overwhelmed her with shame and guilt. With
the raw vigour of youth she had refused to accept the
barbaric brutality of her ancestors, refused to wallow in
the cloying, suffocating nihilism of a self-inflicted crime.
    All of the defiance within her was obliterated when she
had seen for herself the birth of a demon-kissed monstrosity
– the taloned hands and feet, the scaled, elongated face,
the blunt tail twitching like a headless worm, the eyes of
lurid green. If naught but the taloned hands and feet had
marked the demon's seed, the coven would have chosen
this newborn, for there was true power in demonic blood
when no more than a single drop trickled in the child's
veins. More than that, and the creation was an
abomination.
    Grotesque babes crawling in the muck of the sea's floor, claws gouging furrows in the dark, the sea's legion, the army awaiting us all.
    The seeds thrived in the foaming waves where they met
the land, generation upon generation. Flung high onto the
shore, they sank into the ground. Dwelling within living
creatures, prey and predator; bound inside plants; adhering
to the very blades of grass, the leaves of the trees – these
seeds could not be escaped: another bitter truth among the
Shake. When they found a woman's womb where a child
was already growing, the seed stole its fate. Seeking . . .
something, yet yielding naught but a shape that warred
with that of the human.
    The demons had been pure, once. Birthing their own
kind, a world of mothers and offspring. The seeds had dwelt
in the sea found in demonic wombs. Until the war that saw
the bellies of those mothers slit open, spilling what
belonged inside out into this world – the seeds even the sea
sought to reject. A war of slaughter – yet the demons had
found a way to survive, to this very day. In the swirling
spume of tidal pools, in the rush of tumbling, crashing
waves. Lost, yet not defeated. Gone, yet poised to return.
    Seeking the right mother.
    So the witches remained. Yan Tovis had believed the
coven obliterated, crushed into extinction – the Letherii
well knew that resistance to tyranny was nurtured in
schools of faith, espoused by old, bitter priests and priestesses,
by elders who would work through the foolish young
– use them like weapons, flung away when broken, melodramatically
mourned when destroyed. Priests and
priestesses whose version of faith justified the abuse of their
own followers.
    The birth of a priesthood, Yan Tovis now understood,
forced a hierarchy upon piety, as if the rules of servitude
were malleable, where such a scheme – shrouded in
mysterious knowledge and learning – conveyed upon the
life of a priest or priestess greater value and virtue than
those of the ignorant common folk.
    In her years of Letherii education, Yan Tovis had seen
how the arrival of shouldermen – of warlocks and witches
– was in truth a devolution among the Shake, a devolution
from truly knowing the god that was the