A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

old
woman, Pick. Frail and cowering.
    They've killed your damned friends. They damn near killed
your dearest love.
    'I doubt he's there,' she said. 'Else he'd have been by.
He's gone somewhere, Antsy. Might never be back and why
would he? Wherever Paran's gone, he's probably busy – he's
the type. Always in the middle of some damned thing.'
    'All right,' Antsy allowed. 'Still, maybe there's some way
we can, um, send him a message.'
    Her brows rose. 'Now that's an idea, Antsy. Glad one of
us is thinking.'
    'Aye. Can we go now, then?'
    They set out, making use of a side postern gate. Both wore
cloaks, hiding armour and their swords, the weapons loose
in their scabbards. Antsy also carried two sharpers, each in
its own cloth sack, one knotted to his weapon harness and
the other down at his belt. He could tug a grenado loose
and fling it in its sack as one might throw a slingstone.
It was his own invention, and he'd practised with a stone
inside the sack, acquiring passable skill. Hood knew he was
no sapper, but he was learning.
    Nothing infuriated him more than losing a fight. True,
they'd come out the other side, while pretty much all of
the assassins had died, so it wasn't really a defeat, but it felt
like one. Since retiring, his handful of Malazan companions
had come to feel like family. Not in the way a squad
did, since squads existed to fight, to kill, to wage war, and
this made the tightness between the soldiers a strange one.
Stained with brutality, with the extremes of behaviour that
made every moment of life feel like a damned miracle. No,
this family wasn't like that. They'd all calmed down some.
Loosened up, left the nasty shit far behind. Or so they'd
thought.
    As he and Picker set out for Coll's estate and the
wretched house behind its grounds, he tried to think back
to when he'd had nothing to do with this kind of life, back
to when he'd been a scrawny bow-legged runt in Falar.
Bizarrely, his own mental image of his ten-year-old face
retained the damned moustache and he was pretty sure
he'd yet to grow one, but memories were messy things.
Unreliable, maybe mostly lies, in fact. A scatter of images
stitched together by invented shit, so that what had been
in truth a time as chaotic as the present suddenly seemed
like a narration, a story.
    The mind in the present was ever eager to narrate its
own past, each one its own historian, and since when were
historians reliable on anything? Aye, look at Duiker. He spun a fine tale, that one about Coltaine and the Chain of
Dogs. Heartbreaking, but then those were always the best kind,
since they made a person feel – when so much of living was
avoiding feeling anything. But was any of it real? Aye, Coltaine
got killed for real. The army got shattered just like he said. But
any of the rest? All those details?
    No way of ever knowing. And it don't really matter in the
end, does it?
    Just like our own tales. Who we were, what we did. The
narration going on, until it stops. Sudden, like a caught breath
that never again lets out.
    End of story.
    The child with the moustache was looking at him, there
in his head. Scowling, suspicious, maybe disbelieving. 'You
think you know me, old man? Not a chance. You don't know a
thing and what you think you remember ain't got nothing to do
with me. With how I'm thinking. With what I'm feeling. You're
farther away than my own da, that miserable, bitter tyrant
neither of us could ever figure out, not you, not me, not even
him. Maybe he's not us, but then he's not him, either.
    'Old man, you're as lost as I am and don't pretend no
different. Lost in life . . . till death finds you.'
    Well, this was why he usually avoided thinking about
his own past. Better left untouched, hidden away, locked
up in a trunk and dropped over the side to sink down into
the depths. Problem was, he was needing to dredge up
some things all over again. Thinking like a soldier, for one.
Finding that nasty edge again, the hard way of looking at
things. The absence of hesitation.
    Gallons of ale wasn't helping. Just fed his despondency,
his sense of feeling too old, too old for all of it, now.
    'Gods below, Antsy, I can hear you grinding your teeth
from over here. Whatever it is, looks like it's tasting awful.'
    He squinted across at her. 'Expect me to be skippin' a
dance down this damned street? We're in more trouble than
we've ever been, Pick.'
    'We've faced worse—'
    'No. Because when we faced worse we was ready for it.
We was trained to deal with it. Grab