A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

for a time.
    Who was on board? Well, Spite for certain. And, if he'd
any sense, Barathol. With smiling Chaur at his side, the
giant child with his childish love that would never know
betrayal, at least until the day, hopefully decades hence,
when the blacksmith bowed to old age and took to bed for
the last time. She could almost see him, his face, the deep
wrinkles, the dimming of his dark eyes, and all the losses
of his life falling away, veil by veil, until he ceased looking
outward entirely.
    Chaur would not understand. What he would feel would
crash blind as a boar in a thicket, crash right through him.
It would be a dreadful thing to witness, to see the poor
child tangled in the clutches of pain he could not understand,
and loss he could not fathom.
    Who would care for him then?
    And what of dear Scillara? Why was she not with them?
She wished she had an answer to that. But she had come
to certain truths about herself. Destined, she now believed,
to provide gentle comfort to souls in passing. A comforting
bridge, yes, to ease the loneliness of their journey.
    She seemed doomed ever to open her arms to the
wrong lover, to love fully yet never be so loved in return.
It made her pathetic stock in this retinue of squandered
opportunities that scrawled out the history of a clumsy
life.
    Could she live with that? Without plunging into self-pity?
Time would tell, she supposed.
    Scillara packed her pipe, struck sparks and drew deep.
    A sound behind her made her turn—
    As Barathol stepped close, one hand sliding up behind
her head, leaned forward and kissed her. A long, deep,
determined kiss. When he finally pulled away, she gasped.
Eyes wide, staring up into his own.
    He said, 'I am a blacksmith. If I need to forge chains to
keep you, I will.'
    She blinked, and then gave him a throaty laugh. 'Careful,
Barathol. Chains bind both ways.'
    His expression was grave. 'Can you live with that?'
    'Give me no choice.'
    Ride, my friends, the winds of love! There beside a belfry
where a man and a woman find each other, and out in the
taut billows of sails where another man stares westward and
dreams of sweet moonlight, a garden, a woman who is the
other half of his soul.
    Gentle gust through a door, sweet sigh, as a guard comes
home and is engulfed by his wife, who had suffered an
eternal night of fears, but she holds him now and all is well,
all is right, and children yell in excitement and dance in
the kitchen.
    The river of grief has swept through Darujhistan, and
morning waxes in its wake. There are lives to rebuild, so
many wounds to mend.
    A bag of coins thumps on to the tabletop before a
woman new to her blessed widowhood, and she feels as if
she has awakened from a nightmare of decades, and this is,
for her, a private kind of love, a moment for herself and no
one else.
    Picker strides into the bar and there waits Blend, tears
in her eyes, and Samar Dev watches from a table and she
smiles but that smile is wistful and she wonders what doors
wait for her, and which ones will prove unlocked, and what
might lie beyond.
    And in a temple, Iskaral Pust blots dry the ink and crows
over his literary genius. Mogora looks on with jaded eyes,
but is already dreaming of alliances with Sordiko Qualm.
    The bhokarala sit in a clump, exchanging wedding
gifts.
    Two estate guards, after a busy night, burst into a
brothel, only to find nobody there. Love will have to wait,
and is anyone really surprised at their ill luck?
At the threshold of a modest home and workshop,
Tiserra stands facing the two loves of her life. And, for the
briefest of moments, her imagination runs wild. She then
recovers herself and, in a light tone, asks, 'Breakfast?'
    Torvald is momentarily startled.
    Rallick just smiles.
    There is a round man, circumference unending, stepping
ever so daintily through rubble on his way back to the
Phoenix Inn. It will not do to be a stranger to sorrow, if
only to cast sharp the bright wonder of sweeter things.
And so, even as he mourns in his own fashion (with
cupcakes), so too he sighs wistfully. Love is a city, yes
indeed, a precious city, where a thousand thousand paths
wend through shadow and light, through air stale and air
redolent with blossoms, nose-wrinkling perfume and nose-wrinkling
dung, and there is gold dust in the sewage and
rebirth in the shedding of tears.
    And at last, we come to a small child, walking into a
duelling school, passing through gilded streams of sunlight,
and he halts ten paces from a woman sitting on