A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

entity? When upright, it would have balanced
on two hugely muscled hind legs, reminiscent of that
of a shaba, the flightless bird found on the isles of the
Draconean Archipelago, yet in comparison much
larger here. The hip level of the fiend, when standing,
would have been at a man's eye level. Long-tailed,
the weight of the fiend's torso evenly balanced by
its hips, thrusting the long neck and head far forward,
the spine made horizontal. Two long forelimbs, thickly
bound in muscle and hardened scales providing
natural armour, ended, not in grasping talons or hands,
but enormous swords, iron-bladed, that seemed fused,
metal to bone, with the wrists. The head was snouted,
like that of a crocodile, such as those found in the
mud of the southern shoreline of the Bluerose Sea,
yet, again, here much larger. Desiccation had peeled
the lips back to reveal jagged rows of fangs, each
one dagger-long. The eyes, clouded with approaching
death, were nonetheless uncanny and alien to our senses.
    The Atri-Preda, bold as ever, strode forward to deliver
the fiend from its suffering, with a sword thrust into the
soft tissue of its throat. With this fatal wound, the fiend
loosed a death cry that struck us with pain, for the sound
it voiced was beyond our range of hearing, yet it burst
in our skulls with such ferocity that blood was driven
from our nostrils, eyes and ears.
    One other detail is worth noting, before I expound on
the extent of said injuries. The wounds visible upon
the fiend were most curious. Elongated, curving slashes,
perhaps from some form of tentacle, but a tentacle bearing
sharp teeth, whilst other wounds were shorter but deeper
in nature, invariably delivered to a region vital to
locomotion or other similar dispensation of limbs, severing
tendons and so forth . . .
    Factor Breneda Anict, Expedition into the Wildlands
Official Annals of Pufanan Ibyris
    He was not a man in bed. Oh, his parts functioned
well enough, but in every other way he was a child,
this Emperor of a Thousand Deaths. But worst of
all, Nisall decided, was what happened afterwards, as he fell
into that half-sleep, half-something else, limbs spasming,
endless words tumbling from him in a litany of pleading,
punctuated by despairing sobs that scraped the scented air
of the chamber. And before long, after she'd escaped the
bed itself, drawing a robe about her and taking position
near the painted scene in the false window, five paces
distant, she would watch him crawl down onto the floor
and make his way as if crippled from some spinal injury, the
ever-present sword trailing in one hand, across the room to
the corner, where he would spend the rest of the night,
curled up, locked in some eternal nightmare.
    A thousand deaths, lived through night upon night. A
thousand.
    An exaggeration, of course. A few hundred at most.
    Emperor Rhulad's torment was not the product of a
fevered imagination, nor born of a host of anxieties. What
haunted him were the truths of his past. She was able to
identify some of his mutterings, in particular the one that
dominated his nightmares, for she had been there. In the
throne room, witness to Rhulad's non-death, weeping there
on the floor all slick with his spilled blood, with a corpse on
his throne and Rhulad's own slayer lying half upright
against the dais – stolen away by poison.
    Hannan Mosag's pathetic slither towards that throne
had been halted by the demon that had appeared to collect
the body of Brys Beddict, and the almost indifferent sword
thrust that killed Rhulad as the apparition made its way
out.
    The Emperor's awakening shriek had turned her heart
into a frozen lump, a cry so brutally raw that she felt its fire
in her own throat.
    But it was what followed, a short time after his return,
that stalked Rhulad with a thousand dripping blades.
To die, only to return, is to never escape. Never escape
. . . anything .
    Wounds closing, he had lifted himself up, onto his hands
and knees, still gripping the cursed sword, the weapon that
would not let go. Weeping, drawing in ragged breaths, he
crawled towards the throne, sagging down once more when
he reached the dais.
    Nisall had stepped out from where she had hidden
moments earlier. Her mind was numb – the suicide of her
king – her lover – and the Eunuch, Nifadas – the shocks,
one upon another in this terrible throne room, the deaths,
tumbling like crowded gravestones in a flooded field.
Triban Gnol, ever the pragmatist, knelt before the new
Emperor,