A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

a
scabbarded slash.
    Blue seeped into the sky, shadows in retreat along the
slope. Gold painted the tops of the tree line where the road
slipped in. At the very edge, Anomander Rake paused,
turned about and raised one hand high.
    Endest Silann did the same, but the gesture was so weak
it made him gasp, and his arm faltered.
    And then the distant figure swung round.
    And vanished beneath the trees.

BOOK FOUR

TOLL THE HOUNDS
    Like broken slate
We take our hatred
And pile it high
Rolling with the hills
A ragged line to map
Our rise and fall
And I saw suffused
With the dawn
Crows aligned in rows
Along the crooked wall
Come to feed
    Bones lie scattered
At the stone's foot
The heaped ruin
Of past assaults
The crows face each way
To eye the pickings

On both sides
For all its weakness
The world cannot break
What we make
Of our hatred
    I watched the workers
Carry each grey rock
They laboured
Blind and stepped
Unerringly modest paths
Piece by sheared piece
They built a slaughter
Of innocent others
While muttering as they might
Of waves of weather
And goodly deeds
    We the Builders
Hanasp Tular

CHAPTER NINETEEN
    Pray you never hear an imprecise breath
Caught in its rough web
Every god turns away at the end
And not a whisper sounds
Do not waste a lifetime awaiting death
Caught in its rough web
It hovers in the next moment you must attend
As your last whisper sounds
Pray you never hear an imprecise breath
    Rough Web
Fisher
    The soul knows no greater anguish than to take a
breath that begins in love and ends with grief.
    Time unravels now. Event clashes upon event.
So much to recount, pray this sad-eyed round man does
not falter, does not grow too breathless. History has its
moments. To dwell within one is to understand nothing.
    We are rocked in the tumult, and the awareness of one's
own ignorance is a smothering cloak that proves poor
armour. You will flinch with the wounds. We shall all
flinch.
    As might a crow or an owl, or indeed a winged eel, hover
now a moment above this fair city, its smoke haze, the
scurrying figures in the streets and lanes, the impenetrable
dark cracks of narrow alleyways. Thieves' Road spreads a
tangled web between buildings. Animals bawl and wives
berate husbands and husbands bellow back, night buckets
gush from windows down into the guttered alleys and – in
some poorer areas of the Gadrobi District – into streets
where pedestrians duck and dodge in the morning ritual
of their treacherous journeys to work, or home. Clouds of
flies are stirred awake with the dawn's light. Pigeons revive
their hopeless struggle to walk straight lines. Rats creep
back into their closed-in refuges after yet another night of
seeing far too much. The night's damp smells are burned
off and new stinks arise in pungent vapours.
    And on the road, where it passes through the leper
colony west of the city, a weary ox and a tired old man
escort a burdened cart on which lies a canvas-wrapped
figure, worn riding boots visible.
    Ahead awaits Two-Ox Gate.
    Hover no longer. Plummet both wings and spirit down
to the buzzing flies, the animal heat sweet and acrid, the
musty closeness of the stained burlap. The old man pausing
to wipe sweat from his lined brow with its array of warts
and moles, and his knees ache and there is dull pain in his
chest.
    Of late, he has been carting corpses round day and night,
or so it seems. Each one made him feel older, and the glances
he has been casting at the ox are tainted with an irrational
dislike, wavering in its intensity, as if the beast was to blame
for . . . for something, though he knows not what.
    The two guards at the gate were leaning against a wall,
staying cool in the shade that would dwindle as the day
rolled on overhead. Upon seeing the jutting boots one of
the men stepped forward. 'Hold, there. You'll find plenty
of cemeteries and pits outside the walls – we don't need
more—'
    'A citizen of the city,' said the old man. 'Killt in a duel.
By Councillor Vidikas, who said to send him back to his
friends – the dead man's friends, I mean.'
    'Oh, right. On your way, then.'
    Crowded as a city can be, an ox drawing a corpse-laden
cart will find its path clear, for reasons involving a host of
instinctive aversions, few of which made much sense. To
see a dead body was to recoil, mind spinning a dust-devil of
thoughts – that is not me – see the difference between us? That
is not me, that is not me. No one I know, no one I have ever
known. That is not me . . . but . . . it could