A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

damned thing. The only one.
    Blinking black tears from his eyes, Seerdomin went
down to meet her.
    Her howl of delight was a thing of horror.
    A soldier could discover, in one horrendous, crushing
moment, that everything that lay at the heart of duty was a
lie, a rotted, fetid mass, feeding like a cancer on all that the
soldier was; and that every virtue was rooted in someone
else's poison.
    Look to the poor fool at your side. Know well there's
another poor fool at your back. This is how far the world
shrinks down, when everything else melts in front of your
eyes – too compromised to sustain clear vision, the brutal,
uncluttered recognition of the lie.
    Torn loose from the Malazan Empire, from Onearm's
Host, the bedraggled clutch of survivors that was all that
remained of the Bridgeburners had dragged their sorry
backsides to Darujhistan. They found for themselves a cave
where they could hide, surrounded by a handful of familiar
faces, to remind them of what had pushed them each step
of the way, from the past to the present. And hoping it
would be enough to take them into the future, one hesitant,
wayward step at a time.
    Slash knives into the midst of that meagre, vulnerable
clutch, and it just falls apart.
    Mallet. Bluepearl.
    Like blindfolded goats dragged up to the altar stone.
    Not that goats needed blindfolds. It's just no fun looking
into a dying animal's eyes.
    Picker fell through darkness. Maybe she was flesh and
bone. Maybe she was nothing but a soul, torn loose and
now plummeting with naught but the weight of its own
regrets. But her arms scythed through bitter cold air, her
legs kicked out to find purchase where none existed. And
each breath was getting harder to snatch from that rushing
blast.
    In the dream-world every law could be twisted round,
bent, folded. And so, as she sensed the unseen ground fast
approaching, she spun herself upright and slowed, sudden
and yet smooth, and moments later she landed lightly on
uneven bedrock. Snail shells crunched underfoot; she
heard the faint snap of small rodent bones.
    Blinking, gasping one breath after another deep into
her lungs, she simply stood for a time, knees slightly flexed,
hands out to her sides.
    She could smell an animal stench, thick, as if she found
herself in a den in some hillside.
    The darkness slowly faded. She saw rock walls on which
scenes had been pecked, others painted in earthy hues. She
saw the half-shells of gourds crowding the rough floor on
both sides – she had landed upon a sort of path, reaching
ahead and behind, perhaps three paces wide. Before her,
six or seven paces away, it ended in a stone wall. Behind
her, the trail blended into darkness. She looked once more
at the objects cluttering the flanks. In each gourd there
was thick, dark liquid. She knew instinctively that it was
blood.
    The image etched into the wall in front, where the path
ended, now snared her attention, and slowly its details
began to resolve. A carriage or wagon, a swarm of vague
shapes all reaching up for it on both sides, with others
hinted at in its wake. A scene of frenzy and panic, the
figure sitting on the bench holding reins that seemed to
whip about – but no, her mind was playing tricks in this
faint light, and that sound, as of wheels slamming and
rocking and spinning over broken ground, was only her
lunging heart, the rush of blood in her ears.
    But Picker stared, transfixed.
    A soldier with nothing left to believe in is a terrible
thing to behold. When the blood on the hands is unjust
blood, the soul withers.
    Death becomes a lover, and that love leads to but one
place. Every time, but one place.
    Friends and family watch on, helpless. And in this tragic
scene, the liars, the cynical bearers of poison, they are
nowhere to be found.
    Endest Silann had once been a priest, a believer in forces
beyond the mortal realm; a believer in the benign regard
of ancestors, spirits, each one a moral lodestone that cut
through the dissembling, the evasions of responsibility,
the denials of culpability – a man of faith, yes, in the
traditional sense of the word. But these things no longer
found harbour in his soul. Ancestors dissolved into the
ground, leaving nothing but crumbling flecks of bone in
dark earth. Spirits offered no gifts and those still clinging
to life were bitter and savage, too often betrayed, too often
spat upon, to hold any love for anyone.
    He now believed that mortals were cursed. Some innate
proclivity led them again and again on the