A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

swelling.
    Two wolves were on her trail. She did not know how
she knew this, but she did. Two wolves. God and Goddess
of War, the Wolves of Winter. They scented her as they
would a rival – but she was no ascendant, and certainly no
goddess. She had worn torcs once, sworn to Treach, and
this now marked her.
    War could not exist without rivals, without enemies,
and this was as true in the immortal realm as it was in the
mortal one. The pantheon ever reflects the nature of its
countless aspects. The facets deliver unerring truths. In
winter, war was the lifeless chill of dead flesh. In summer,
war rotted in fetid, flyblown clouds. In autumn, the battlefield
was strewn with the dead. In spring, war arose anew in
the same fields, the seeds well nurtured in rich soil.
    She fought through a dark forest of black spruce and
firs. Her fingers dropped off one by one. She stumbled on
stumps. The winter assailed her, the winter was her enemy,
and the wolves drew ever closer.
    Through a mountain pass, then; brief flashes of awareness
and each time they arrived, lifting her out of oblivion, she
found the landscape transformed. Heaped boulders, eskers,
ragged peaks towering overhead. A tortured, twisted trail,
suddenly pitching sharply downward, stunted pines and
oaks to either side. Bestial howls voicing their rage high
above, far behind her now.
    A valley below, verdant and rank, a jungle nestled impossibly
close to the high ranges and the whipping snow-sprayed
winds – or perhaps she had traversed continents.
Her hands were whole, her bare feet sinking into warm, wet
loam. Insects spun and whirred about her.
    From the thicket came an animal cough, a cat's heavy
growl.
    And another hunter had found her.
    She hurried on, as if some other place awaited her, a
sanctuary, a cave that she could enter, to emerge upon
some other side, reborn. And now she saw, rising haphazardly
from the moss and humus and mounds of rotted
trunks, swords, blades encrusted, cross-hilts bedecked in
moss, pommels green with verdigris. Swords of all styles,
all so corroded and rusted that they would be useless as
weapons.
    She heard the cat's cough again, closer this time.
    Panic flitted through her.
    She found a clearing of high swaying grasses, a sea of
emerald green that she plunged into, pushing her way
across.
    Something thrashed into her wake, a swift, deadly rush.
    She screamed, fell to the ground.
    Snapping, barking voices surrounded her, answered by
a snarl from somewhere close behind her. Picker rolled on
to her back. Human-like figures crowded her, baring their
teeth and making stabbing gestures with fire-hardened
spears towards a leopard crouched down not three paces
from where she was lying. The beast's ears were flattened
back, its eyes blazing. Then, in a flash, it was gone.
    Picker pushed herself to her feet, and found that she
towered over these people, and yet they were one and
all adults – even through the fine pelt of hair covering
them she could see that. Five females, four males, and the
females were the more robust among them, with wide hips
and deep ribcages.
    Luminous brown eyes fixed upon her with something
like worship, and then the spears were brought round and
she was being prodded along, on to a trail cutting across
the path she had been taking. So much for worship. Those
spears threatened, and she saw something black smeared
on the points. I'm a prisoner. Terrific.
    They hurried down the trail, a trail never meant for one
as tall as Picker, and she found branches scraping across
her face again and again. Before long they reached another
clearing, this one at the foot of a cliff. A wide, low rock
shelf projected over a sloping cave-mouth from which
drifted woodsmoke. Two ancients were squatting at the
entrance, both women, with a gaggle of children staring
out behind them.
    There was none of the expected squealing excitement
from the children – indeed, no sounds were uttered at all,
and Picker felt a sudden suspicion: these creatures were not
the masters of their domain. No, they behaved as would
prey. She saw stones to either side of the cave, heaped up to
be used to make a barricade come the dusk.
    Her captors drove her into the cave. She was forced to
bend over to keep from scraping her head on the pitched,
blackened ceiling. The children fled to either side. Beyond
the flickering light from the lone hearth the cave continued
on into darkness. Coughing in the smoke, she stumbled
forward, round the fire, and into the