A Malazan Book of the Fallen Collection 4

he'd named Held in his arm, and
then he set out, hobbling on swollen feet, westward, into
the heart of the Elan.
    He did not need to look back to see that the others
were following. Those who could, did. The ribbers would
come for the rest. He'd not asked to be the head of the
snake. He'd not asked for anything, but he was the tallest
and might be he was the oldest. Might be he was thirteen,
could be he was fourteen.
    Behind him Badalle said,
    'And walks he starts
Out of that morning
With Held in his arms
And his ribby tail
It snakes out
Like a tongue
From the sun.
You need the longest
Tongue
When searching for
Water
Like the sun likes to do . . .'
    Badalle watched him for a time, watched as the others fell
into his wake. She would join the ribby snake soon enough.
She blew at the flies, but of course they came right back,
clustering round the sores puffing her lips, hopping up to
lick at the corners of her eyes. She had been a beauty once,
with these green eyes and her long fair hair like tresses of
gold. But beauty bought smiles for only so long. When the
larder gapes empty, beauty gets smudged. 'And the flies,' she
whispered, 'make patterns of suffering. And suffering is
ugly.'
    She watched Rutt. He was the head of the snake. He
was the fangs, too, but that last bit was for her alone, her
private joke.
    This snake had forgotten how to eat.
    She'd been among the ones who'd come up from the
south, from the husks of homes in Korbanse, Krosis and
Kanros. Even the isles of Otpelas. Some, like her, had
walked along the coast of the Pelasiar Sea, and then to the
western edge of Stet which had once been a great forest,
and there they found the wooden road, Stump Road they
sometimes called it. Trees cut on end to make flat circles,
pounded into rows that went on and on. Other children
then arrived from Stet itself, having walked the old stream
beds wending through the grey tangle of shattered tree-fall
and diseased shrubs. There were signs that Stet had once
been a forest to match its old name which was Forest Stet,
but Badalle was not entirely convinced – all she could see
was a gouged wasteland, ruined and ravaged. There were
no trees standing anywhere. They called it Stump Road,
but other times it was Forest Road, and that too was a
private joke.
    Of course, someone had needed lots of trees to make the
road, so maybe there really had once been a forest there.
But it was gone now.
    At the northern edge of Stet, facing out onto the Elan
Plain, they had come upon another column of children,
and a day later yet another one joined them, down from
the north, from Kolanse itself, and at the head of this one,
there had been Rutt, carrying Held. Tall, his shoulders,
elbows, knees and ankles were protruding and the skin
round them slack and stretched. He had large, luminous
eyes. He still had all his teeth, and when the morning
arrived, each morning, he was there, at the head. The
fangs, and the rest just followed.
    They all believed he knew where he was going, but they
didn't ask him since the belief was more important than
the truth, which was that he was just as lost as all the
rest.
    'All day Rutt holds Held
And keeps her
Wrapped
In his shadow.
It's hard
Not to love Rutt
But Held doesn't
And no-one loves Held
But Rutt'
    Visto had come from Okan. When the starvers and the
bone-skinned inquisitors marched on the city his mother
had sent him running, hand in hand with his sister, who
was two years older than he was, and they'd run down
streets between burning buildings and screams filled the
night and the starvers kicked in doors and dragged people
out and did terrible things to them, while the bone-skins
watched on and said it was necessary, everything here was
necessary.
    They'd pulled his sister out of his grip, and it was her
scream that still echoed in his skull. Each night since then,
he had ridden it on the road of sleep, from the moment his
exhaustion took him until the moment he awoke to the
dawn's pale face.
    He ran for what seemed forever, westward and away from
the starvers, eating what he could, savaged by thirst. And
when he'd outdistanced the starvers, the ribbers showed up,
huge packs of gaunt dogs with red-rimmed eyes and no fear
of anything. And then the Fathers, all wrapped in black,
who plunged into the ragged camps on the roads and stole
children away. Once he and a few others had come upon
one of their old night-holds and had seen for themselves
the small split bones mottled blue and grey in the coals