A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

edge, down
into the swirling sea of wax where every notion, every idea,
melted into one and none, into the scalding sludge that
drowned everyone no matter how clever, how wise, how poetic .
    What am I thinking of these days? Naught but the nonsense
of my wasted youth. 'Certainty scours, a world without wonder.'
Ah, then, perhaps those terse poets had stumbled on to
something after all. Is this what obsesses me now? A suspicion
that all the truths that matter lie somewhere in a soul's youth,
in those heady days when words and thoughts could still shine
– as if born from nothing solely for our personal edification.
    Generation upon generation, this does not change. Or so it
comforts us to believe. Yet I wonder, now, does that stretch of
delight grow shorter? Is it tightening, cursed into a new kind
of brevity, the one with ignorance preceding and cynicism
succeeding, each crowding the precious moment?
    What then the next generation? Starved of wonder, indifferent
to the reality or the unreality of the water flowing past,
caring only whether they might drift or drown. And then, alas,
losing the sense of difference between the two.
    There was no one, here in his modest chamber, to hear
his thoughts. No one, indeed, who even cared. Deeds must
tumble forward, lest all these witnesses grow bored and
restless. And if secrets dwelt in the lightless swirl of some
unseen, unimagined river, what matter when the effort to
delve deep was simply too much? No, better to . . . drift. But worries over the mere score of young Tiste Andii
growing now in Black Coral was wasted energy. He had no
wisdom to offer, even if any of them was inclined to listen,
which they weren't. The old possessed naught but the single
virtue of surviving, and when nothing changed, it was
indeed an empty virtue.
    He remembered the great river, its profound mystery
of existence. Dorssan Ryl, into which the sewers poured
the gritty, rain-diluted blood of the dead and dying. The
river, proclaiming its reality in a roar as the rain lashed
down in torrents, as clouds, groaning, fell like beasts on to
their knees, only to fold into the now-raging currents and
twist down into the black depths. All this, swallowed by
an illusion.
    There had been a woman, once, and yes, he might have
loved her. Like the hand plunged into the cool water, he
might have been brushed by this heady emotion, this
blood-whispered obsession that poets died for and over
which people murdered their dearest. And he recalled that
the last time he set eyes upon her, down beside Dorssan
Ryl, driven mad by Mother's abandonment (many were),
there was nothing he recognized in her eyes. To see, there
in a face he had known, had adored, that appalling absence
– she was gone, never to return.
    So I held her head under, watched those staring, uncomprehending
eyes grow ever wider, filling with blind panic – and
there! At the last moment, did I not see – a sudden light, a
sudden—
    Oh, this was a nightmare. He had done nothing, he had
been too much the coward. And he had watched her leave,
with all the others so struck by loss, as they set out on a
hopeless pilgrimage, a fatal search to find Her once again.
What a journey that must have been! Before the last crazed
one fell for the final time, punctuating a trail of corpses
leagues long. A crusade of the insane, wandering into the
nowhere.
    Kharkanas was virtually an empty city after they'd gone.
Anomander Rake's first lordship over echoing chambers,
empty houses. There would be many more.
    A calm, then, drifting on like flotsam in the stream, not
yet caught by the rushes, not yet so waterlogged that it vanished,
tumbled like a severed moon into the muddy bed. Of
course it couldn't last. One more betrayal was needed, to
shatter the world once and for all.
    The night just past Endest Silann, making his way to a
back storeroom on the upper level, came upon the Son of
Darkness in a corridor. Some human, thinking the deed
one of honour, had hung a series of ancient Andii tapestries
down both walls of the passage. Scenes of Kharkanas, and
one indeed showing Dorssan Ryl – although none would
know if not familiar with that particular vantage point,
for the river was but a dark slash, a talon curled round the
city's heart. There was no particular order, arrayed so in
ignorance, and to walk this corridor was to be struck by a
collage of images, distinct as memories not one tethered to
the next.
    Anomander Rake had been standing before one, his eyes
a deep