A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

better, although at times he wished he
didn't. The war ended because the Kechra's migration
reached the easternmost side of the Awl'dan, and then
continued onward. Granted, they had been badly mauled
by the belligerent ancestors of the Awl, yet, in truth, they
had been almost indifferent to them – an obstacle in their
path – and the death of so many of their own kind was but
one more ordeal in a history of fraught, tragic ordeals since
coming to this world.
    Kechra. K'Chain Che'Malle, the Firstborn of Dragons.
    There was, to Redmask's mind, nothing palatable or sustaining
about knowledge. As a young warrior, his world had
been a single knot on the rope of the Awl people, his own
deliberate binding to the long, worn history of bloodlines.
He had never imagined that there were so many other
ropes, so many intertwined threads; he had never before
comprehended how vast the net of existence, nor how
tangled it had become since the Night of Life – when all
that was living came into being, born of deceit and betrayal
and doomed to an eternity of struggle.
    And Redmask had come to understand struggle – there
in the startled eyes of the rodara, the timid fear of the
myrid; in the disbelief of a young warrior dying on stone
and wind-blown sand; in the staring comprehension of a
woman surrendering her life to the child she pushed out
from between her legs. He had seen elders, human and
beast, curl up to die; he had seen others fight for their last
breath with all the will they could muster. Yet in his heart,
he could find no reason, no reward waiting beyond that
eternal struggle.
    Even the spirit gods of his people battled, flailed, warred
with the weapons of faith, with intolerance and the sweet,
deadly waters of hate. No less confused and sordid than any
mortal.
    The Letherii wanted, and want invariably transformed
into a moral right to possess. Only fools believed such
things to be bloodless, either in intent or execution.
    Well, by the same argument – by its very fang and talon
– there existed a moral right to defy them. And in such a
battle, there would be no end until one side or the other
was obliterated. More likely, both sides were doomed to
suffer that fate. This final awareness is what came from too
much knowledge.
    Yet he would fight on.
    These plains he and his three young followers moved
through had once belonged to the Awl. Until the Letherii
expanded their notion of self-interest to include stealing
land and driving away its original inhabitants. Cairn
markers and totem stones had all been removed, the
boulders left in heaps; even the ring-stones that had once
anchored huts were gone. The grasses were overgrazed, and
here and there long rectangular sections had seen the earth
broken in anticipation of planting crops, fence posts
stacked nearby. But Redmask knew that this soil was poor,
quickly exhausted except in the old river valleys. The
Letherii might manage a generation or two before the topsoil
blew away. He had seen the results east of the
wastelands, in far Kolanse – an entire civilization tottering
on the edge of starvation as desert spread like plague.
    The blurred moon had lifted high in the star-spattered
night sky as they drew closer to the mass of rodara. There
was little point in going after the myrid – the beasts were
not swift runners over any reasonable distance – but as they
edged closer, Redmask could see the full extent of this
rodara herd. Twenty thousand head, perhaps even more.
    A large drover camp, lit by campfires, commanded a hilltop
to the north. Two permanent buildings of cut-log walls
and sod-capped roofs overlooked the shallow valley and the
herds – these would, Redmask knew, belong to the Factor's
foreman, forming the focus for the beginning of a true
settlement.
    Crouched in the grasses at the edge of a drainage gully
cutting through the valley side, the three young warriors on
his left, Redmask studied the Letherii for another twenty
heartbeats; then he gestured Masarch and the others back
into the gully itself.
    'This is madness,' the warrior named Theven whispered.
'There must be a hundred Letherii in that camp – and what
of the shepherds and their dogs? If the wind shifts . . .'
    'Quiet,' said Redmask. 'Leave the dogs and the shepherds
to me. As for the camp, well, they will soon be busy
enough. Return to the horses, mount up, and be ready to
flank and drive the herd when it arrives.'
    In the moon's pale light, Masarch's expression was nerve-twisted,
a