A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

breaks.
    The Dying God, Nimander now believed, was a child.
    The mad priests poured him full, knowing the vessel
leaked, and then drank of that puerile seepage. Because he
was a child, the Dying God's thirst and need were without
end, never satiated.
    As they journeyed along the road, ever westward, they
found themselves between planted fields. Here the scarecrows
were truly dead, used up. Withered, webbed in black
scraps of cloth, stiffly rocking in the wind. Poured out,
these lives, and Nimander now saw these fields as bizarre
cemeteries, where some local aberration of belief insisted
that the dead be staked upright, that they ever stand ready
for whatever may come.
    Watchers of this road and all the fools who travelled it.
    Once, on Drift Avalii, almost a year before the first
attacks, two half-dead Dal Honese had washed up on the
rocky coast. They had been paddling to the island of Geni,
for reasons unexplained, in an ancient dugout. Both were
naked, as they had used up every scrap of cloth from their
garments to stuff into the cracks in the hull – too many
cracks, it turned out, and the beleaguered craft eventually
sank, forcing the two men to swim.
    The Lord's nudge brought them to Drift Avalii, and
somehow they avoided the murderous reefs and rocks girdling
the island.
    Dwellers in the dark jungles of their homeland, they
were from a tribe obsessed with its own ancestors. The
dead were not buried. The dead were made part of the
mud walls of the village's huts. When one in a family died,
a new room would be begun, at first nothing but a single
wall projecting outward. And in that wall was the corpse,
clay-filled eye sockets, nose, ears, mouth. Clay like a new
skin upon face, limbs, torso. Upright, in cavorting poses
as if frozen in a dance. Two more kin needed to die before
the room was complete and ready to be roofed with palm
fronds and the like.
    Some houses were big as castles, sprawled out at ground
level in a maze of chambers, hundreds of them dark and
airless. In this way, the dead never left. They remained,
witnessing all, eternal in judgement – this pressure, said
the two refugees, could drive one insane, and often did.
    The jungle resisted farming. Its soil disliked taming. The
huge trees were impervious to fire and could turn the edge
of an iron axe. Villages were growing too massive, devouring
land, while every cleared area around them was exhausted.
Rival tribes suffered the same, and before too long wars
were unleashed. The dead ancestors demanded vengeance
for transgressions. Murdered kin – whose bodies had been
stolen and so could not be properly taken care of – represented
an open wound, a crime that needed answering.
    Blood back and forth, said the two refugees. Blood back
and forth, that is all. And when the enemy began destroying
villages, burning them to the ground . . .
    No answer to the madness but flight.
    Nimander thought about all this as he led his mare by the
reins along the dusty road. He had no ancestors to haunt
him, no ancestors to demand that he do this and that, that
he behave in this way but not in that way. Perhaps this was
freedom, but it left him feeling strangely . . . lost.
    The two Dal Honese had built a new boat and paddled
away – not back home, but to some unknown place, a place
devoid of unblinking ghosts staring out from every wall.
    Rocking sounds came from the wagon and he turned
to see Kallor swinging down on the near side, pausing
to adjust his cloak of chain, then walking until he was
alongside Nimander.
    'Interesting use of corpses,' he said.
    'What use would that be?' Skintick asked with a glance
back towards them.
    'To frighten the crows? Not that any right-minded crow
would look twice at those foul plants – they're not even
native to this world, after all.'
    Nimander saw Skintick's brows rise. 'They aren't?'
    Kallor scratched at his beard and, since it seemed he
wasn't in any hurry to reply, Skintick faced forward once
more.
    'Saemankelyk,' said Nimander. 'The Dying God . . . who
will be found in Bastion.'
    The grey-haired warrior grunted. 'Nothing changes.'
    'Of course it changes,' Skintick retorted without turning
round. 'It keeps getting worse.'
    'That is an illusion,' Kallor replied. 'You Tiste Andii
should know that. Your sense of things getting worse comes
from growing older. You see more, and what you see wars
with your memories of how things used to be.'
    'Rubbish. Old farts like you say that because it suits you.
You hope it freezes us