A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

so that I may live. Give me this moment, this
day, this season. I will follow the laws of my kind . . .'
    She remembered that one moment when she was a child,
and she remembered her sense of awe in witnessing the
crossing, in that force of nature, that imposition of will,
its profound implacability. She remembered, too, the terror
she had felt.
    Caribou are not just caribou. The crossing is not just this
crossing. The caribou are all life. The river is the passing
world. Life swims through, riding the current, swims, drowns,
triumphs. Life can ask questions. Life – some of it – can even
ask: how is it that I can ask anything at all? And: how is it
that I believe that answers answer anything worthwhile? What
value this exchange, this precious dialogue, when the truth is
unchanged, when some live for a time while others drown,
when in the next season there are new caribou while others are
for ever gone?
    The truth is unchanged.
    Each spring, in the time of crossing, the river is in flood.
Chaos swirls beneath the surface. It is the worst time.
    Watch us.
    The child had not wanted to see. The child had wailed
and fled inland. Brothers and sisters pursued, laughing
maybe, not understanding her fear, her despair. Someone
pursued, anyway. Laughing, unless it was the river that
laughed, and it was the herd of caribou that surged up
from the bank and lunged forward, driving the watchers to
scatter, shouting their surprise. Perhaps that was what had
made her run. She wasn't sure.
    The memory ended with her panic, her cries, her confusion.
    Lying on the cross-beam, the wood sweating beneath
her, Apsal'ara felt like that child once again. The season
was coming. The river awaited her, in fullest flood, and she
was but one among many, praying for fate's confusion.
    A hundred stones flung into a pond will shatter the
smooth surface, will launch a clash of ripples and waves
until the eye loses all sense of order in what it sees.
    And this discordant moment perturbs the self, awakens
unease in the spirit and leaves one restive. So it was that
morning in Darujhistan. Surfaces had been shattered.
People moved and every move betrayed agitation. People
spoke and they were abrupt in their speech and they
were short with others, strangers and dear ones alike.
    A squall of rumours rode the turgid currents, and some
held more truth than others, but all of them hinted of
something unpleasant, something unwelcome and disorderly.
Such sensibilities can grip a city and hold tight for
days, sometimes weeks, sometimes for ever. Such sensibilities
could spread like a plague to infect an entire nation,
an entire people, leaving them habituated in their anger,
perpetually belligerent, inclined to cruelty and miserly
with their compassion.
    Blood had been spilled in the night. More corpses than
usual had been found in the morning, a score or more
of them in the Estates District, delivering a thunderous
shock to the coddled highborn citizens in their walled
homes. Spurred by frantic demands for investigation, the
City Guard brought in court mages to conduct magical
examinations. Before long a new detail was whispered that
widened eyes, that made citizens gasp. Assassins! One and
all – the Guild has been devastated! And, following this, on
a few faces, a sly smile of pleasure – quickly hidden or saved
for private moments, since one could never be too careful.
Still, the evil killers had clearly taken on someone nastier
than them, and had paid for it with dozens of lives.
    Some then grew somewhat more thoughtful – oh, they
were rare enough to make one, well, depressed. None the
less, for these there followed a rather ominous question: precisely who is in this city who can with impunity cut down a
score of deadly assassins?
    As chaotic as that morning was, what with official
carriages and corpse-wagons rattling this way and that;
with squads of guards and crowds of gawping onlookers and
the hawkers who descended among them with sweetened
drinks and sticky candies and whatnot; with all this, none
made note of the closed, boarded-up K'rul's Bar with its
freshly washed walls and flushed gutters.
    It was just as well.
    *
    Krute of Talient stepped into his squalid room and saw
Rallick Nom slouched in a chair. Grunting, Krute walked
over to the niche that passed for a kitchen and set down the
burlap sack with its load of vegetables, fruit and wrapped fish.
    'Not seen you much of late,' he said.
    'It's a foolish war,' Rallick Nom said without looking