A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

and a moment
later everything came to a sinking halt.
    Looking up Gruntle saw stars in a gentle night sky.
    Beneath him the carriage door creaked open, and someone
clambered out to vomit on to the sands, coughing and
spitting and cursing.
    Master Quell.
    Gruntle climbed down, using the spokes of the nearest
wheel, and, his legs feeling shaky under him, made his way
to the sorceror.
    The man was still on his hands and knees, hacking out
the last dregs of whatever had been in his stomach. 'Oh,' he
gasped. 'My aching head.'
    Faint came up alongside Gruntle. She'd been wearing
an iron skullcap but she'd lost it, and now her hair hung
in matted strands, framing her round face. 'I thought a
damned tiger had landed on us,' she said, 'but it was you,
putting the terror into a demon. So it's true, those tattoos
aren't tattoos at all.'
    Glanno Tarp had dropped down, dodging to avoid the
snapping teeth of the nearest horses. 'Did you see Amby
Bole go flying? Gods, that was stupacular!'
    Gruntle frowned. 'Stu – what?'
    'Stupidly spectacular,' explained Faint. 'Or spectacularly
stupid. Are you Soletaken?'
    He glanced at her, then set off to explore.
    A task quickly accomplished. They were on an island. A
very small island, less than fifty paces across. The sand was
crushed coral, gleaming silver in the starlight. Two palm
trees rose from the centre. In the surrounding shallows, a
thousand paces out, ribbons of reef ran entirely round the
atoll, breaking the surface like the spine of a sea serpent.
More islands were visible, few bigger than the one they
were on, stretching out like the beads of a broken necklace,
the nearest one perhaps three thousand paces distant.
    As he returned he saw a corpse plummeting down from
the carriage roof to thump in the sand. After a moment it
sat up. 'Oh,' it said.
    The Trell emerged from the carriage, followed by the
swamp witch, Precious Thimble, who looked ghostly pale
as she stumbled a few steps, then promptly sat down on the
sand. Seeing Gruntle, Mappo walked over.
    'I gather,' he said, 'we encountered something unexpected
in Hood's realm.'
    'I wouldn't know,' Gruntle replied. 'It was my first visit.'
    'Unexpected?' Faint snorted. 'That was insane – all the
dead in existence, on the march.'
    'Where to?' Gruntle asked.
    'Maybe not to, maybe from.'
    From? In retreat? Now that was an alarming notion. If
the dead are on the run . . .
    'Used to be,' Faint mused, 'the realm of the dead was an
easy ride. Peaceful. But in the last few years . . . something's
going on.' She walked over to Master Quell. 'So, if that's
not going to work, Quell, what now?'
    The man, still on his hands and knees, looked up. 'You
just don't get it, do you?'
    'What?'
    'We didn't even reach the damned gate.'
    'But, then, what—' 'There wasn't any gate!' the mage shrieked.
    A long silence followed.
    Nearby, the undead man was collecting seashells.
    Jula Bole's watery eyes fixed on Precious Thimble, dreamy
with adoration. Seeing this, Amby did the same, trying to
make his expression even more desirous, so that when she
finally looked over she would see that he was the right one
for her, the only one for her. As the moments stretched, the
competition grew fierce.
    His left leg still ached, from the hip right down to his
toes, and he had only one moccasin, but at least the sand
was warm so that wasn't too bad.
    Precious Thimble was in a meeting with Master Quell
and that scary barbed man, and the hairy giant ogre named
Mappo. These were the important people, he decided, and
excepting Precious Thimble he wanted nothing to do with
them. Standing too close to those folk was never healthy.
Heads explode, hearts burst – he'd seen it with his own
eyes, back when he was a runt (but not nearly as much of
a runt as Jula) and the family had decided at last to fight
the Malazans who were showing up in their swamp like
poison mushrooms. Buna Bole had been running things
back then, before he got eaten by a toad, but it was a
fact that Buna's next-to-closest brothers – the ones who
wanted to get closer – all went and got themselves killed.
Exploding heads. Bursting hearts. Boiling livers. It was the
law of dodging, of course. Marshals and their sub-marshals
were smart and smart meant fast, so when the arrows and
quarrels and waves of magic flew, why, they dodged out of
the way. Anybody round them, trying to be as smart but
not smart at all and so just that much slower, well, they
didn't dodge quick enough.
    Jula finally sighed,