A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

interior monologue ceased abruptly as she heard the
faint scuff of someone approaching. Lifting her head was a
struggle, but Janath Anar managed, just as the chamber's
heavy door creaked open and light flooded in from a
lantern – dull and low yet blinding her nonetheless.
    Tanal Yathvanar stepped into view – it would be none
other but him, she knew – and a moment later he spoke. 'I
pray you've yet to drive yourself mad.'
    Through cracked, blistered lips, she smiled, then said in
a croaking voice, 'Lectures. I am halfway into the term.
Early history. Mad? Oh yes, without question.'
    She heard him come closer. 'I have been gone from you
too long – you are suffering. That was careless of me.'
    'Careless is keeping me alive, you miserable little
wretch,' she said.
    'Ah, perhaps I deserved that. Come, you must drink.'
    'What if I refuse?'
    'Then, with your inevitable death, you are defeated. By
me. Are you sure you want that, Scholar?'
    'You urge me to stubborn resistance. I understand. The
sadist needs his victim alive, after all. For as long as
humanly possible.'
    'Dehydration is a most unpleasant way to die, Janath
Anar.'
    He lifted the spigot of a waterskin to her mouth. She
drank.
    'Not too quickly,' Tanal said, stepping back. 'You will just
make yourself sick. Which wouldn't, I see, be the first time
for you.'
    'When you see maggots crawl out of your own wastes,
Yathvanar . . . Next time,' she added, 'take your damned
candle with you.'
    'If I do that,' he replied, 'you will go blind—'
    'And that matters?'
    He stepped close once again and poured more water into
her mouth.
    Then he set about washing her down. Sores had opened
where stomach fluids had burned desiccated skin, and, he
could see, she had been pulling on her bindings, seeking to
squeeze her hands through the shackles. 'You are looking
much worse for wear,' he said as he dabbed ointment on the
wounds. 'You cannot get your hands through, Janath—'
    'Panic cares nothing for what can and can't be done,
Tanal Yathvanar. One day you will discover that. There was
a priest once, in the second century, who created a cult
founded on the premise that every victim tallied in one's
mortal life awaits that one beyond death. From the slightest
of wounds to the most grievous, every victim preceding you
into death . . . waits . For you.
    'A mortal conducts spiritual economics in his or her life,
amassing credit and debt. Tell me, Patriotist, how indebted
are you by now? How vast the imbalance between good
deeds and your endless acts of malice?'
    'A bizarre, insane cult,' he muttered, moving away. 'No
wonder it failed.'
    'In this empire, yes, it's no wonder at all. The priest was
set upon in the street and torn limb from limb. Still, it's said
adherents remain, among the defeated peoples – the
Tarthenal, the Fent and Nerek, the victims, as it were, of
Letherii cruelty – and before those people virtually disappeared
from the city, there were rumours that the cult
was reviving.'
    Tanal Yathvanar sneered. 'The ones who fail ever need a
crutch, a justification – they fashion virtue out of misery.
Karos Invictad has identified that weakness, in one of his
treatises—'
    Janath's laugh broke into ragged coughing. When she
recovered, she spat and said, 'Karos Invictad. Do you know
why he so despises academics? He is a failed one himself.'
She bared her stained teeth. 'He calls them treatises, does
he? Errant fend, how pathetic. Karos Invictad couldn't
fashion a decent argument, much less a treatise.'
    'You are wrong in that, woman,' Tanal said. 'He has even
explained why he did so poorly as a young scholar – oh yes,
he would not refute your assessment of his career as a
student. Driven by emotions, back then. Incapable of a
cogent position, leaving him rife with anger – but at himself,
at his own failings. But, years later, he learned that all
emotion had to be scoured from him; only then would his
inner vision become clear.'
    'Ah, he needed wounding, then. What was it? A betrayal
of sorts, I expect. Some woman? A protégé, a patron? Does
it even matter? Karos Invictad makes sense to me, now.
Why he is what he has become.' She laughed again, this
time without coughing, then said, 'Delicious irony. Karos
Invictad became a victim .'
    'Don't be—'
    'A victim, Yathvanar! And he didn't like it, oh no, not
at all. It hurt – the world hurt him, so now he's hurting it
back. And yet, he has still to even the score. But you see,
he never will, because in his mind,